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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/writing-effective-transitions).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 89, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, we have actual news this week, exciting events that we can talk about finally.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we’ve really been struggling making stuff up on the fly, but now we can talk about things that are real.

**John:** Things that are real, including a long-promised and wished and hoped for live event in Los Angeles. Not just one, but two.

**Craig:** Two!

**John:** There will be two live Scriptnotes this summer in Los Angeles. The first of which will be Saturday, June 29th, at 10am, at the Writers Guild Theater in Beverly Hills. It’s part of a larger event that the Writers Guild Foundation is throwing. Tickets are not yet available, but they will be available soon, and there will be a link when those are available.

But, if you are in Los Angeles and would like to come to that you can mark it on your calendar and make sure you don’t have any other plans for 10am on Saturday, June 29th.

**Craig:** I can’t wait to get a look at our listenership.

**John:** Yes!

**Craig:** I want to see what they look like. I want to get an eyeful of these people.

**John:** So, to date we’ve only done one live event and that was in Austin. And that was at the Austin Film Festival. So, it was already the people who we were seeing every day at the Driskill Hotel. So, this is a chance to see our Los Angeles fan base, including people who I do see at like Trader Joe’s, or at the Nobu restaurant. But this is a chance to see them all together to see us on one stage. It’s going to be exciting.

That is the first of two events. The second event will be Sunday, July 28, at the evening, probably a 7:30 show. That’s going to be at the Pickford Center in Hollywood, which is part of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s their big complex on Vine. And we’re going to be having the theater there to celebrate our 100th episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Woo! That’s going to be fun.

**John:** That’s going to be fun, in quotes. So, that’s one where we’ll be actually selling tickets sort of separately. It will be our own thing. And that will be a celebration of 100 episodes of you and I talking at each other over Skype.

**Craig:** And when we say we’re selling tickets, are we making money off of this?

**John:** I don’t think we’re making any money off of this.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** So, I’m sorry, Craig. You won’t be able to raise some money for your electronic cigarette habit.

**Craig:** Hmmm, maybe we could do a Kickstarter for that. [laughs]

**John:** That’s what we need to do. But there may be something you could take home with you after the event, and that’s still in discussion. So, the elves are busy working on those things.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Yeah. So anyway, those are the two dates for the summer. We can’t sell you a ticket right now, or send you to a link, but you can mark them on your calendars. So, the first is Saturday, June 29th, 10am. The second will be Sunday, July 28th, in the evening, probably a 7pm or 7:30 pm. Those are two chances to come see us and come to a taping of our show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, there’s one other chance. If you are in Los Angeles tomorrow night I will be hosting an event at The Academy, which you are all welcome to come. Tickets are $5. This is storytelling in a digital age. It is me hosting a big panel of screenwriters and editors and DPs talking about the challenges and possibilities of making movies in the age of technology that is quickly advancing. So, we will have amazing guests like Mark Boal, and Damon Lindelof, Maryann Brandon, William Goldenberg, Mary Jo Markey, Dylan Tichenor, and also some DPs who I can’t announce yet, but by the time this airs people will know who they are.

So, it should be a really fun time. We’re showing clips. There will be clips from Zero Dark Thirty, from Argo, from Star Trek. There’s an amazing clip from Star Trek which I got to see, which everyone will get to see before the movie even comes out. So, come to that event tomorrow if you would like to.

**Craig:** And you’re the perfect host for that.

**John:** Well, thank you. I hope it will be a good, fun time. I love technology. I love making movies. I love talking to people. So, hopefully it will be a good, fun time.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But now you’ve jinxed me, and I will just completely stumble and fall.

**Craig:** There’s no way you could blow it.

**John:** Thank you. I will find a way to blow it.

**Craig:** Certainly you’ll enunciate every word and no one will ever turn to somebody in the crowd and say, “What did he just say?”

**John:** “What did he say? What was that? What did he say?”

There’s a pre-reception for like press and with wine, so I’m having to very carefully moderate my alcohol consumption before I start. Because, one glass of wine I’m better than normal. Two glasses of wine, you don’t want me on stage.

**Craig:** It’s so funny you mention that, because I brought up before my favorite British comedians, Mitchell and Webb. And they have this amazing — so here’s another link — an amazing sketch whereby we find out that the world is run by this Illuminati group and their entire philosophy is based on the fact that anywhere between one and two glasses of wine makes you a super human.

But if you have less than one glass of wine you’re just a loser. And if you have more than 1.5 glasses of wine you’re an idiot. [laughs] So, you have to have exactly 1.5 glasses. It’s pretty smart.

**John:** I will confess that there have been times over our 89 episodes that we’ve recorded of the show that we’ve done it late at night, so I’ve already had my one glass of wine at dinner, and it’s just vastly easier with one glass of wine in me.

**Craig:** I walk around naturally with one glass of wine in me. I don’t drink the wine, it’s just I think I live on a level of one glass of wine.

**John:** That’s nice. It’s three in the afternoon as we’re recording this, so I have no wine in me. But, if we lived in a different era, if we lived in a Mad Men era, I’d have two martinis in me already. And maybe that would be much, much better.

**Craig:** That’s right. But you’d be married to a woman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Bummer.

**John:** There’s pros and cons. [laughs]

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs] Up and downs.

**John:** I would have the two martinis because I was married to a woman.

**Craig:** I know, exactly. And then you’d just stare at her, “Ugh.” And she would cry, “Why?”

**John:** “Why doesn’t he touch me the way I want to be touched?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Stupid.

**John:** Today on the agenda we have three things to talk about.

First we want to talk about this $23 million lawsuit filed by two of the writers from G.I Joe.

Second, we’re going to talk about shots that we need to stop putting in movies. So, it’s sort of a corollary to our Cut it Out things, but these are visual things that are in movies that we just need to stop putting in movies.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And, finally, a topic that you suggested was transitions. And I think that will be very useful for us to talk through. The craft of transitioning from one scene to the next.

**Craig:** Great. Big show.

**John:** Big show. Craig, let’s start by talking about G.I. Joe. So, this was a piece of news that came out this last week, I think. Maybe it will be next week by the time this show airs. Two of the writers from the original G.I. Joe movie, the one that came out — I don’t know — eight years ago? Whenever.

**Craig:** Well, no, not eight years ago. I think it was like 2009 or something.

**John:** Well, everything happens…

**Craig:** 2009. Yeah. 2009.

**John:** 2009. Because it happened sort of during the strike. It was shot during the strike.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It happened during that time. So, David Elliot & Paul Lovett, who are two of the writers credited on that movie, filed a $23 million lawsuit against the makers of the sequel movie, the one that just came out. And it’s interesting for a whole host of reasons. There have been lawsuits filed over movies over people who claim, “Well, I should get credit for writing that movie,” or, “they took my ideas before.”

This is a very unique case in the sense of these aren’t just two guys off the street. These guys wrote the first movie. And they’re arguing here that much of the second movie was work that they actually did and stuff that they had pitched. And raises a whole host of interesting issues, not only for this one lawsuit, but potentially this is the case that you and I have talked about for a long time that could change a bit of how we handle paper in Hollywood.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. Exactly right. This is the proverbial time bomb that I’ve been going on and on about for a long time. And kind of ironically as part of our little CPSW stuff, our Committee for the Professional Status of Screenwriters, a few of us have gone to studios to talk to the people who run the studios to say, “Look, here are some practices that we think aren’t very good. They’re not productive. They’re hurting writers. We should stop them.”

And you can imagine what they are. Let’s try and have more two-step deals. Let’s try and pay writers on time. Let’s stop asking them to write stuff in order to get jobs. And on that point, I have said repeatedly — including to the folks at Paramount — this is going to blow up in your face. There are divisions of lawyers at these studios who are obsessed with making sure that they own the copyright on every single thing that goes in and out of the gate.

And then you have these other people working there, whether they’re studio executives or producers, who very cavalierly demand that writers write stuff before they get hired and then they don’t get hired. Well, they don’t own that stuff. And if it should happen to turn up in a movie, uh-oh, right?

So, let’s talk a little bit about the details here, because there are some things that I want to be clear about. First of all, it is tempting to side with the writers always the second you hear something like this. But, please always remember that there are other writers on the other side of this issue, namely Reese & Wernick, who wrote — or are credited with writing, and I assume did write — the actual sequel that it is currently being litigated.

I happen to know Rhett & Paul and they’re great guys. And there’s no chance in the world that they would actively rip somebody off. That’s just not possible. So, the question then is, okay, did these guys who wrote stuff down and handed it to the producers in the company, and who then did not get the job, did their material by way of producers repeating things back and so forth sort of contaminate the pool of ideas that were given to Rhett & Paul?

And, again, personally, there’s just no way that Rhett & Paul stole anything.

One thing that is concerning for me about this when you look at David Elliot & Paul Lovett’s case is that the Writers Guild determined that they weren’t participating writers on the project. And that doesn’t bode well for them, because the Writers Guild does take a look at material and say, “Okay, well, this person wasn’t hired, but if they wrote on it they are a participating writer.” And somebody looked at that material over there and said, “We don’t think you wrote on this movie.”

**John:** So, clarify this for me, because this is something I could not see from the material that I read through. In the pre-arbitration hearing, or was there a pre-arbitration hearing that established that they were not part of this group of writers?

**Craig:** Yeah, it appears so. Yes. So, what happens is, let’s say you write a script and you’re not hired by a studio. It’s a spec script, or spec material, anything really. You’re not hired. And then you see the script that arises when the credits are being determined and you say, “Oh my god, there’s a whole bunch of stuff that I wrote that’s in this script. And I should be a participating writer. I should be able to get credit on this if I deserve it.”

The Writers Guild will do what they call a participating writer investigation where the material is read by a writer at the Guild, and that writer’s simple determination is, “Yeah, this person’s material actually is evident in the screenplay,” or, “No, this person’s material is not. They shouldn’t be a participating writer.” All you need really is a couple of lines, frankly, that are sort of word for word, or like a very specific kind of scene or moment, or something like that, I would imagine.

I’ve never done one of those myself, but point being these guys were not awarded participating writer status. So, that certainly call their claim into question. We can’t — we don’t know. We don’t know all the details. All we know is what the court is going to decide, or what a settlement determines, and certainly a court doesn’t care what the WGA thinks.

But what does matter ultimately in the end is that the studios have to really now take a very strong look at who is asking for written material, because at this point if they don’t issue a blanket policy that they can’t accept written material from writers trying to get jobs, they’re nuts.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s do step away from the details of this specific case, because I don’t know these writers at all and I don’t know the specifics beyond what I read. And so if people are curious about the specifics, there are PDFs up that show not only the lawsuit as it was filed but also attached are the emails that were sent through describing in detail what these writers had pitched. And so that’s one thread to look through if people are curious about that.

But, I do think the general topic of prewriting, which is basically this is stuff that you are writing before you’ve gotten the job, and maybe you’re writing that for yourself, but the minute you hand that over to somebody, you are creating written material that could potentially become part of the movie, and that is hugely troubling for the studio, and for the writers, and for the producers.

And let’s also take a look that this is G.I. Joe. So, this is a preexisting property. When you come into this property, they did not create these characters, so these are preexisting characters. So, they can show that they created the situations in which these characters are doing things, but they didn’t come in from scratch writing brand new characters, which is also a complication in this situation. But, very, very common for the situations where there are a bunch of writers going up for a job.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And when people are asking you to come in and pitch a take they are saying, “Okay, we have this material, we have this book, we have this preexisting property. Let’s redo The Addams Family. Well, how would you do the Addams Family?” Well, if you’re going to do The Addams Family you’re going to look at, well, this is The Addams Family. These are who the characters are. And so anything you’re pitching is going to be using those characters in a specific way.

And if you create, you know, you may be writing stuff for yourself, but if you hand over that written material, that’s the problem. And let’s talk about why you would hand over that stuff. Because here’s what happens when I’m in a meeting. They’ll say, “We love that. That was fantastic. Do you have something I could have so I can pitch this to my boss?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s invariably sort of how they phrase it, because you are talking to some lower level creative executive who has to then go turn around and pitch your take to his or her boss. And they’ll say, “Can I have something to refer back to?”

And from my earliest jobs I’ve sometimes done that. I’ve given that paper over. And that’s not a good choice for the writer, and it’s certainly not a good choice for the studio.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a mess. And I don’t really know any way around it other than the studio saying, “We’re not doing that anymore.” Because if you were to say, “Well, why don’t we do this: everybody who comes in, you want to give us some material, that’s fine, but we’re going to pay you for it. So, we have a new deal. We’re going to pay you $5,000 for it. Everybody who comes in.”

Well, that’s great for the writers. They get five grand. And great for the studio. They’re covered on all that material. They own it lock, stock, and barrel. But, the problem then is when you get to your credit arbitration you have about 40 guys all with pieces of a story. And the poor guy who actually wrote the movie is like, “What?! Who am I sharing story with? Which one of the guys that didn’t get the job am I sharing story with?”

It gets crazy. The fact is studios cannot per the terms of our collective bargaining agreement insist that there be written material as a condition of employment. They are forbidden to do that. And they do it all the time. So, that has to stop.

And then as far as the writers go, writers can offer that material. I think, frankly, the studio is going to have to say no. “If I want you to pitch this idea to my boss, I’m taking you to my boss and you’re going to pitch it.” Because once it’s written down on paper it exists and they’ve accepted it.

**John:** So, let me back you up one step. You said that the studio cannot require writers to do this prewriting as a condition of their employment, but they could pay them for exactly what you’re describing. They could pay them for a treatment.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, in television that’s common. And I have to say like television has somewhat solved this problem to some degree. Granted, you’re not bringing in a bunch of people to pitch on one particular project so often, but in television you do get paid for those steps along the way. You get paid for those outlines. You get paid for those things, or at least they’re considered part of your overall employment. So, basically upon giving your pitch, part of your deal is that you’re going to be writing this material and you’re going to be working through these drafts of stuff before you actually get to your script.

And that may just be a way that smart studios may want to proceed is that they’ll hire you to certain steps and then pull triggers to get you to the next step. And that may be a way to cover themselves.

**Craig:** Well, I’ve always been in favor of that. I believe that’s a great part of the process, and it used to be a formal part of the screenwriting process and it sort of went away.

The major difference between television and film I think in this area is that most television projects are generated by the writer. So, the writer comes in. They say, “Look, here’s the idea. Here’s the world I want to do,” and they say, “Great. Let’s start developing it. Here’s some money, write a treatment, do all these steps.”

In features, so often they’re coming to you and saying, “We have something we want to do. Five, six, seven of you come in and wow us,” whether it’s a sequel, or a book, or a remake. And in those situations they very typically engage in the sweepstakes pitching stuff where a lot of writers are coming in.

And those situations in particular are the most treacherous for the studio to accept written material for. And yet that’s the situation in which they are most likely to accept written material because the writers are all competing with each other and basically racing to the bottom of the barrel in terms of working for nothing.

**John:** Yes. And it’s very unlikely that if you had seven people come in and pitch their takes, there would be great similarities between those seven takes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s talk Charlie’s Angels, or whatever. If you were coming in to pitch Charlie’s Angels, well, you know there’s going to be three Angels. You know they’re going to have different types. And so you’re going to probably find there’s going to be some overlap of who those types of women are.

There’s going to be a nature of who is the Bosley type character? What is his function? What is the plot of this big movie? And so the movie version of Charlie’s Angels, well, it’s pretty natural that someone is going to try to kill Charlie. That’s kind of an obvious idea because it’s a movie idea.

So, those kinds of things are going to happen a lot. The idea that there’s going to be an old Angel that comes back — which is what we did in the sequel — who is the villain, that’s kind of an obvious idea. And yet, if you were to sort of track through and say like these things are all similar, and this must have influenced this, well, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it influenced. It just means that like that’s the kind of idea you have for the movie version of this property.

**Craig:** That’s right. And unfortunately the rules of these things are fairly dumb. They very dumbly look at chronology and little else. And the assumption is, okay, if it came first, everybody else looked at it and saw it, and if it’s the same thing then you must have taken it. And that’s just not true. You’re absolutely right. Frankly, so much of our film language is influenced not by writers that precede us on a project but by movies that precede all of us and oftentimes are berths.

So, it was a former Angel that came back. Well, you know, we’ve seen that in other movies. That’s sort of a time tested thing of the former ally coming back now as an enemy to write a wrong. Bond has done that at least, what, three times?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So, that’s not what makes, frankly, the movie interesting. You know what I mean? And there are movies where the characters, the tone, the action is the fun stuff, and the intricacies of the plotting is not. That’s not the point. And frankly G.I. Joe 2, I’m guessing, is probably in that category.

And how many different ways can you do a sequel based on a cartoon property like that, a toy? You could easily see three or four writers coming up with very similar stories. And then it’s just about the execution, tone, and all the rest.

**John:** Agreed. You and I have both been part of lawsuits where someone has come in to sue and say like, “Well, I wrote this script first. And this script existed afterwards. And clearly it must have influenced. We can’t prove that you read this script, but clearly this must have influenced it. Because who else could have the idea of doing a script like this?”

And that’s the most maddening kind of thing at all. Who would have the idea of doing a movie about bowling? Well, everyone had the idea. And so my defense in those situations, which I’ve never actually used legally, but I think my sort of emotional defense is that if I can show any other script that existed about bowling before your script, then you have no case. Because therefore you must have stolen that idea from somebody else before.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Prior Art as sort of the defense against those kind of copyrights.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. But, you know, look, there are crazy people who are crazy. There are narcissistic people who are narcissistic. And self-delusional people. That’s always the case. This is not what’s going on here. I mean, in truth, we are dealing with two professional writers who had a very privileged relationship with the people that they’re suing. And that has to give everyone cause for concern. It certainly gives me cause for concern.

And, listen, if these guys have a case, and they were infringed upon, I wish them nothing but the best of luck in this, you know. I feel bad for Rhett & Paul, because you don’t want this hanging over your head as writers.

I just feel like the larger answer for the studios has to be that they just can’t get involved in this stuff anymore. If their lawyers knew the way that the producing world in general was behaving, they would lose their minds. They would.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. I’m sort of on the side of all the writers in the situation. And I’m not rooting for or against anybody. I’m more rooting for the case changing something, because I feel like this is the kind of lawsuit that you and I have been taking about for years. That someone who has — not just some Joe off the street — but someone who actually has a career is going to step up and say, “This is what happened.” And people are going to have to acknowledge the reality behind it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Let’s move on and talk about, this was a list that I found today, or actually I think Stuart actually found this list and passed it on to me, so thank you, Stuart, for finding it. It’s from a blog called Reverse Shot. And it’s a list of sort of visual clichés.

In a previous podcast you and I did this thing called Cut it Out, which is like things we see way too often in scripts, or just tropes that need to stop being used in screenplays because they’re clammy. They’re just not original anymore.

**Craig:** Although, literally, I think people called out three that I’ve used recently. [laughs]

**John:** Which is fine.

**Craig:** So, I don’t think those count.

**John:** No, they’re not clammy then.

This was a list of sort of visual equivalents of that. And so it’s things that you see, that wouldn’t necessarily show up in a script, but then you see them in movies and you’re like, “You know what? Let’s stop doing that because we’ve seen that shot way too many times.”

So, I thought we’d take some turns reading through this and discussing some of our favorites.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So, I loved the first one on this list which is moving clouds that are sped up.

**Craig:** Yeah, Koyaanisqatsi time-lapse.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. So, time-lapse is lovely and great, but we’ve seen those moving clouds a lot. And so maybe we could do something else rather than those moving clouds.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, sometimes when they’re part of something else that’s going on, I’m okay with it. If it’s just the clouds and that standard shot then it is pretty boring.

**John:** It’s pretty boring.

**Craig:** Yeah. The next one is we’re in a long shot and a guy is really far away and walking toward the camera and you’re thinking, “Oh, I’m going to have to watch him walk the whole way.” And it turns out, yeah, you are going to have to watch him walk the whole way.

Does that happen? [laughs]

**John:** It does happen. And it happens a lot over opening credits where we see somebody walking, and walking, and like the credits are just showing up on the screen. And like, oh my god, I’m going to have to watch this person the entire time?

**Craig:** It’s kind of an indie vibe sort of thing?

**John:** It’s sort of an indie vibe thing. Sometimes it’s a walk and talk where literally the camera is stationary and it’s a walk and talk towards the camera. And every once and awhile that will work just great. But, man, it just drives me crazy because I start to notice that, wow, we’re just going to stay in this shot for forever.

It has to be a really fascinating moment for me to want to stay in there and not really notice that we’re staying in this moment. A Steadicam can be the same kind of situation. Like, if I notice that you’re Steadicam shot has gone on for two minutes I’m going to just start looking for the cut and I’ll stop paying attention to the scene.

**Craig:** Unless it’s Goodfellas.

**John:** Unless it’s Goodfellas. But Goodfellas, it’s just such a good shot that it’s amazing, but how often is it really going to be that shot?

**Craig:** Are you Martin Scorsese?

**John:** Yeah. I mean, Joe Wright does it a lot, too. And I got fatigued by Joe Wright doing it.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Third one. An alienated teen or adolescent girl in the passenger side of a car driving down the highway, window rolled down, her hand swaying in the wind as it zips down a road to who knows where.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve seen that a lot folks. I mean, if she has something in her hand that she lets go, that’s also a cliché.

**Craig:** [laughs] Top down. Feeling youthful. Yeah, we’ve seen it.

This one’s pretty great. Overhead shot of protagonist in the rain, arms spread, just letting the downpour come. Yeah. That is really baroque.

**John:** Yeah. So, Shawshank Redemption is sort of the classic version of that, but like in Shawshank Redemption he just did crawl through a sewer tunnel. So, you give him, like he kind of wants the shower. But we need to stop doing that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because people don’t do that.

**John:** People don’t really do that. People really don’t want to be in the rain overall. In movies they seem to kind of love it, but whenever it’s raining I’m kind of like how fast can I get out of the rain.

**Craig:** I mean, maybe you like the rain, but then you don’t put your arms out and look up at the sky and go, “Yay!”

**John:** Yeah, because it’s not comfortable.

**Craig:** It’s not!

**John:** Rain hitting your eyes is not good.

**Craig:** It’s weird. That’s how turkeys drown.

**John:** Number five. So it’s a side angle, above-boob shower shot of women cleaning themselves after the previous events. So, it could be like a terrible date, or something awful happened, but it’s that sort of frantic scrubbing. Also in the bathroom here, things like shots are into the mirror, people washing their faces and looking up to examine their wet face in the mirror with their mouth open.

Yeah, people looking at themselves in mirrors is happening a little too much in movies overall, but that washing and then looking at yourself in the mirror, that’s just a kind of cliché.

**Craig:** Yeah, washing and looking at yourself in the mirror, I do feel like I can make a list of 20 movies that do that.

**John:** Not so good.

**Craig:** Good point. Next one we have is protagonist on mass transit, looking pensive. Everyone else also looking miserable. And maybe layered with some “melancholic electronica.”

**John:** Yeah, the point being, so you’re on mass transit. So, you don’t have a car, I guess. But just being miserable on a train is just, well, yeah, people are miserable on trains.

**Craig:** Don’t you get it man, we’re all alone. Together.

**John:** That’s what it means. Yeah. We’re all alone together. And everyone has got their headphones on. It’s meant to be a great, big point. No, not so much really. I think if you’re going to put somebody on a train, we should know the reason why they’re on that train. Something should happen that they’re on that train. Because if it’s just them going to work, then it’s just kind of a stock shot of people going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re sad on a train.

**John:** They’re sad on a train.

Next up, this would be a Mexican, or Sicilian, or Indian, or Iranian child running through the streets without a care in the world, smiling and laughing, running right by a mother who hardly notices them, so busy she is hanging laundry.

I do see that a lot. It’s sort of like a third world/happy children/mom is doing laundry.

**Craig:** Tired mom.

**John:** Tired mom.

**Craig:** Happy kids/tired mom. Yeah, I guess that, generally speaking the running, laughing children is annoying to me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You know, what is that? Is that a game? The run and laugh game? I don’t know that game.

**John:** Yeah, what are they doing? They’re running and laughing because they can. Maybe they have a stick in their hand and they’re running it across the fence.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And laughing. And, yeah, no, no.

**John:** Stop.

**Craig:** Cut it out.

Guy goes to open a safe, or refrigerator, or something like that and BOOM, all of a sudden we’re shooting from inside out that thing, looking out at them.

Yeah, that’s even cliché for bad commercials.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, the beer ads, you know.

**John:** It goes back to point of view. It’s like, so why are we inside the refrigerator? Is there a really good reason why we’re inside the refrigerator? I mean, is there an important story point happening in the refrigerator? Or are you just doing it so you can do it? And if you’re just doing it so you can do it, that’s probably not the best choice.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Worst choices would be sort of like shooting up from the sink’s point of view, or something. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Unmotivated camera work. Just, why?

**John:** Next up. Epiphanies while jogging. So, often it’s like the big tracking shot, the gliding tracking shot. Then we pull up short while they suddenly have a revelation.

Yeah, you know, you can have good ideas while jogging. Things can happen. You can be interrupted from your jogging by something. But, if you suddenly stop short, and often the music will tell you that you had an epiphany. It’s like you’re responding to the score rather than actually to an event that happened.

**Craig:** It totally agree. There is this very famous moment from Good Times where the dad dies. He dies because John Amos wanted too much money. I think that was the actor’s name, John Amos. So, Norman Lear was like, “Eh, now you’re dead.”

And Esther Rolle, I believe, is the woman who played his wife. And they go through this whole episode where he’s dead, and the funeral and everything, and she’s kind of like keeping it together in this amazing way. And then at the very end she’s alone in her kitchen, she’s just cleaning up. And she just takes a dish and then she suddenly smashes it into the ground. She says, “Damn, damn, damn!” And it’s awesome.

And it’s awesome because she didn’t need to go jogging. There was no music. [laughs] It was absolutely quiet. And for sitcoms to be absolutely quiet it is very eerie. And you suddenly feel like, oh my god, I’m watching a reality show, because nothing is happening at all. They’re wasting broadcast time watching a woman literally clean for 20 seconds.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. And you don’t have to go in the rain, or jogging, or punch a punching bag to suddenly realize something important. “Damn, damn, damn!”

**John:** “Damn!”

You’re up.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Well, “Damn, damn…” I’ll just keep doing it. So good. That show is so good.

So, in documentaries, stock footage of 1950s appliance ads and educational reels for a goofy, eerie conformism effect. That is super, duper clammy. You know, the whole point is that the ’50s were terrible, and robotic, and nobody was free, and everybody was just a cog in a huge machine, when that’s not at all true; it’s just the style of making those movies of the time.

**John:** I also have a hunch that a lot of times the reason why we see them in documentaries is those are free to license. And so it’s a simple, easy thing to stick in there. And because we’ve seen them so much in documentaries it becomes sort of default, like, “Oh, we should cut to that.”

**Craig:** I mean, I think that there’s probably stuff from the ’60s and ’70s you could license as well with like that wah-wah-wah. Like, you know, when we were kids, remember those film strips? And they were always like wonka-wonka with the crazy Wah-wah pedal.

But, I think the point is like, “Ha, ha, ha, stupid ’50s people.” And you know, I’m sorry, they were just in a war. Lay off. There’s nothing wrong… — So, I’m sorry, they all worked in a factory and they all look clean. Oh, whoop-de-do.

**John:** It’s a terrible thing for that. Related in documentaries is that when you hold on a shot just slightly too long after someone said something ridiculous.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You get that. It’s just like leaving tails on something to sort of makes somebody look like an idiot.

**Craig:** I know. And you know what? It kind of bums me out. I happen to love Penn & Teller’s Bullshit! I don’t know if you ever watched that show on Showtime. It’s really good. They’re so smart. They’re so good. And they do such a great job of being skeptics, and certainly I am one of them.

But one thing they do that bums me out is that. They’re always having people say things, or responding, or saying a line, or responding to a question, and then they just hold on them pointlessly to make them look dumb. And that in and of itself is bullshit.

**John:** Yeah. Because really the reason why there’s that silence is because you haven’t said the next thing, and you’re creating that space for them to look stupid.

**Craig:** Right. Like there could be somebody talking on the other side of that, and they’re just listening. But if you take that audio out, then it just looks like they’re dummies that say a line and then suddenly turn off like robots running low on battery.

**John:** Yeah, it’s not good.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** This is an obvious cliché, but when something is blowing up behind somebody and they don’t look back or acknowledge it blowing up.

**Craig:** “Damn, damn, damn!”

**John:** [laughs] Uh, yeah. It’s been such an acknowledged cliché that to do it now it sort of has to be sort of, you have to do something special with it because we’ve just seen it way too much — the being cool while something is blowing up behind you.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, that’s ridiculous.

**John:** That’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** Old-timey camera flashbulb close-up opening a shot. Often in slow-mo so you can see the scorching filament. And this is, yeah, with that sound that goes, [camera flash sound effect]. Yeah. That should stop.

**John:** Yeah. And actually that’s a perfect opportunity for us to transition to our third topic today which is about transitions. Because that is an example of a transition.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s sort of a hacky transition. But, it’s a transition that somebody probably wrote in there. Okay, maybe it was written into the script, or maybe it was a thing that was done on set with the anticipation of like, well, this will be our transition to get us into a new moment. A sudden flash of light that will carry us into a new world.

So, let’s talk about transitions because it’s an important part of screenwriting that we really haven’t touched on so much over our 88 episodes.

**Craig:** Well, one thing that we should probably say right off the bat is that there are people out there in the screenwriting advice world who spread this nonsense that writers shouldn’t direct on the page. “Don’t tell the director what to do.”

Oh, please! We’re not selling screenplays to directors. Directors aren’t hiring us to write. We’re writing screenplays for people to read so that they can see a movie. And part of our intention when we write screenplays is to show what the movie should look like. The director doesn’t have to do what you say on the page. But, you know what? I find that they tend to appreciate that you’ve written with transitions in mind because it’s really important to them. And, frankly, if you don’t write with transitions in mind, some directors aren’t going to notice and they’re just going to shoot what you wrote and then it won’t connect.

Transitions are a super important part of moving from one scene to the next so you don’t feel like you’re just dragging your feet through a swamp of story, but rather being propelled forward through it.

**John:** So, let’s clarify some terms. There’s two things we mean when we talk about transitions. And one is literally just the all uppercase on the right hand margin of the page, CUT TO, or TRANSITION TO, or FADE TO, or CROSS-FADE TO. That is the element of transition. That is a physical thing that exists in the syntax of screenwriting.

And we’re only kind of half talking about that. That’s a way of indicating that you are moving to something new. Most modern screenplays don’t use CUT TOs after every scene. That’s a thing that you were sort of originally taught to do. And you can sort of tell first time screenwriters because they will always say CUT TO.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In most cases you won’t really use a CUT TO. In personal life, I only use CUT TO if I have to really show that it’s a hard cut from something to another thing, to really show that I’m breaking time and space to go to this next thing.

Usually you won’t do that. Usually what you’ll do is you want a scene to flow into the next scene. And that’s really what I think we should talk about today is how do you get that feeling of we’re in this scene, and now we’re moving into the next scene, and there’s a reason why we left that scene at this moment, or we’re coming into this scene at this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this is a very kind of nuts and bolts craft thing. There are techniques. I mean, I wrote down a few techniques which I will run through. And you tell me what you think.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** The first and the easiest one is size. A size transition is to go from a very tight shot to a super wide shot, or to go from a very wide shot to a super close shot. Sometimes you can even be in a medium shot where two people are talking, and then the next thing you see is a close-up of a watch, and then we’re into a scene where somebody is checking the time.

So, just using the juxtaposition of size in and of itself helps feel like things are happening and they’re connected.

**John:** So, let’s talk about what it actually looks like on the page, because you’re not describing every shot in a movie obviously. But, if you were in a dialogue situation where it was two characters talking, and they’d been talking for awhile, the assumption is that you’re going to get into some fairly close coverage there. So, if it’s just about those two people, then if your next shot is described as a giant panorama of something, something, something, that is a big size transition.

Similarly, if you were to cut to the close-up of the watch, or some fine little detailed thing, then we’d say like, okay, that’s a huge size transition. Even if you’re not describing what that shot was on the outside, we have a sense of relative scale there. You don’t have to necessarily draw our attention to it, because we’ll notice that something different has happened.

**Craig:** It will help your reader see your movie instead of read it. I mean, it’s just real simple things like that.

Another simple one is music or sound. There’s nothing wrong with calling out a piece of music. It doesn’t have to even be a specific song. You may just say, okay, like we’re looking at two cops and they’re in the break room. They’re chitchatting. And then over the sound of hip-hop we are…and now we’re South Central, LA. Rolling down Crenshaw. Just to kind of help the reader understand there’s a connection here.

Similarly, you can use sounds. Two people are talking quietly about what needs to happen, and then the next thing we hear is a siren. And, by the way, you can pre-lap that audio, or you can have it just be a hard cut. But something that jolts us. In a weird way, the funny thing about transitions is they’re almost anti-transitional at times. It’s not about… — Because the point is you want people to understand I’m in a new place at a new time. And if it all just flows together like mush, it’s almost too transitional.

**John:** Absolutely. There are time where we want that really smooth legato sort of flow from one thing to the next thing. And there are times where you want big, giant, abrupt things, like that cliché flashbulb, to tell us we are at a new place at a new time, and brand new information can be coming your way.

**Craig:** Exactly. One cool thing you can do, I wouldn’t overdo it, but it’s fun here and there, is what I call misdirect transitions. So, a guy says, “They’ll never see us coming,” and he’s got a gun. And we go to a close-up, bullets going into the gun. Pull back to reveal, interior, it’s another character loading a gun.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Little tricks, basically.

**John:** Yeah, and again, that’s a thing where if you did that three times in a movie, you’d be golden. If you did that ten times in a movie, we would want to strangle you.

**Craig:** Probably. Unless it was just like everything was so clever and it’s kind of like a, I don’t know, like a Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels kind of movie or something.

**John:** Yeah, I was going to say sort of the Asian action films might do that more often. So, yeah, if that’s your style then it’s going to work, but otherwise it’s going to probably feel too much.

A similar related thing is Archer does these amazing transitions from scene to scene where a character will — they’ll pre-lap the character — they will pull a line of dialogue up above the cut that seems to be about the scene that you’re in, but it’s actually about a completely different moment that’s happening on the other side of the scene.

It’s very clever how they do it. And that’s a way of misdirecting you sort of comedically from what you thought you were talking about to something completely different.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And there is a general kind of, I suppose the most conventional transition is the pre-lapped audio. So, two people say, “Well, that didn’t go very well.” The next shot is a courthouse. And over the courthouse we see, “Everyone please come to order.” It’s the most standard kind of TVish thing. But, it helps you move at least inside and outside in ways that are not so clunky.

Another sort of tricky dialogue method is the question-and-answer transition.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Or, someone will say, “Someone isn’t telling us the truth.” And the next shot is a woman smiling. [laughs] You know? It’s just little, it doesn’t even have to be a dialogue answer in other words. But just the transition itself is giving us information.

**John:** That’s very much a TV procedural kind of thing. That’s a thing you would see in Law & Order where the “We need to find a witness who can…” and then the next shot is going to be the witness who can do that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or like this is the question we need to have answered. So you ask a question on one side of the cut and you come to a possible answer on the other side of the cut.

**Craig:** Right. Right. “Does anyone know where Luke is?” Cut. A guy on a boat. Drunk. You know?

**John:** In a very general sense, what you’re trying to do as you end a scene is you’re trying to put the reader’s head, and really the viewer’s head, in a place where they have a certain image in their head. And so when you come to the far side of that cut, that is changed or that is addressed in some meaningful way.

So, thematic cuts are another common way of doing this. A classic is sort of Lawrence of Arabia, the match that transitions to the sunset. That is a fire. There’s fire on both sides of the cut. So, you’re thinking fire, and then you see this giant image of a fiery sun. That is a natural transition.

Sometimes you’ll do that with imagery. Sometimes you’ll do that with a word that matches. Sometimes you’ll do it with a question that needs to be answered on the far side. Those are natural ways to sort of get people across the bridge there.

**Craig:** Yeah. The ones we’ve gone through here are very rudimentary. And they’re generic because we’re discussing them in generic terms. Find your own and find ones that are meaningful to you and your story. But really do make sure as you’re writing that you’re not just bone-on-bone here. That there is something that helps more us through, little tiny things.

It makes an enormous difference. It really, really does. And, frankly, it puts you in greater control over the movie that will eventually exist.

**John:** I would agree.

Another thing I would stress is that you probably want to save your powder a bit, and use those big transitional moments for big transitional moments. So, don’t paint a big giant landscape of something if it’s not an important moment that we’re going to, something new. Don’t always give us those big transitions. Some things should be sort of straight simple cuts, where we’re just getting from one thing to the next, so that when we do the bigger thing we as the reader will notice, “Okay, something big and different has changed here.”

When you’re reading through scripts, after awhile, well, the first couple scripts you read, you probably read every word because it’s all a new form to you. But after you’ve read like 30 scripts, you recognize that you stop actually reading the INT/EXT lines basically. They sort of just skip past you. And you can sometimes jump back at them if you’re curious, but you’re really just sort of looking for the flow of things.

And so most times you’re just jumping over that; you don’t really kind of know or care where you are. So, even though we tell people to be very specific in those things and give us those details, a lot of times people aren’t going to read those. They’re just going to read the first line of action that happens after the scene header, if you’re lucky.

So, save those bigger moments for the bigger moments that you really want that reader to stop, and slow down, and pay attention to the fact that we are in a new place, a new time, this is a new section of the movie.

**Craig:** Well said. Well said.

**John:** Great. Craig, are you ready for some One Cool Things?

**Craig:** I have Two Cool Things.

**John:** I have Six Cool Things.

**Craig:** I have Twelve Cool Things.

**John:** It’s going to be an arms race. You go first.

**Craig:** Okay, well one is fast and one is a little longer, but they’re both sort of linked together by charity and the notion of charity.

The first Cool Thing is that, and I had no idea this was going on, but studios are —

I read this in the LA Times. This was forwarded to me by Todd Amorde at the Writers Guild. Studios are donating their old sets to Habitat for Humanity. And Habitat for Humanity actually, they’re not using the sets to build houses, because sets are not built for people to live in, but what they do is they sell a lot of the stuff that they get to people, and then they collect the money and they use that help build homes for people.

And , in fact, The Hangover Part III sent over a whole big bunch of stuff to them, ten truckloads of stuff, [laughs], to Habitat for Humanity. And there is an interesting — there is a scene that happens in the movie in a cellar basement, and the walls were this kind of cool faux brick, rocky wall kind of stuff. And I remember thinking, “Oh, that looks real.”

**John:** It’s actually just foam, right? It’s painted foam?

**Craig:** It’s kind of painted foam. And somebody bought that stuff. [laughs] “Habitat received about 60 sheets of faux brick wall used for a wine cellar set in The Hangover Part III. One customer bought 40 sheets for $25 each to use in a custom-made space.” Now, I may not want to go to that spa, that might be weird, but I think that’s cool. So, well done — Sony, I think, kicked this thing off. But, they’re all doing it now. That’s really, really great.

I never really thought, oh, where did all that stuff go?

The other thing is a repeat of something that we helped promote last year, and that’s Joe Nienalt who is a screenwriter is once again dong the fundraising for the Heart Walk 2013/2014. Last year they raised almost $45,000. And they are looking to do it again.

And they are doing their same campaign. And the way it works — listen up people who say, “No one will read my script. No one is going to read my script!” Well, shut it. Here’s the story:

Daniel Vang is a manager at Benderspink. They are a real, legitimate production management company, unlike some of the people cited in your average Brooks Barnes article. [laughs] Is that his name, Brooks Barnes?

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Brooks Barnes. Eh. I tried to forget his name.

Anyway, they’re real producers. They’re real managers. Daniel Vang is an actual human being who reads things and is involved in this business. If you donate $25, Daniel will read the first ten pages of your script. If you donate $50, he will read the first 50 pages. If it’s great, he’ll keep going.

If you donate $100, he will read your entire script. $100 and a guy at Hollywood will read your script. Not a guru. An actual guy. And here’s the best part: He doesn’t pocket the money! It goes to charity. It goes to the American Heart Association.

So, we’re going to put the link on John’s website, so you can go there and take advantage of this. And stop whining. “No one will read my script!” Save a life. Do something positive for once!

**John:** Absolutely. The angry man is yelling at you to do something positive.

**Craig:** Do it! [laughs] Stupid idiot!

**John:** [laughs] No, it sounds very good. And so last year a lot of people did take advantage of that, obviously. And I think it’s a great opportunity for people to get their scripts read.

**Craig:** For sure. Do it.

What about you? What’s your One Cool Thing? Couldn’t be cooler than saving lives, but okay.

**John:** So, for the last 12 years, 13 years, I’ve had an assistant. And so I’ve had a string of assistants who have all gone on to do really, really well. And I got to thinking about them over this time that I was in Chicago because Stuart — poor Stuart who edits this show, god bless Stuart — was here sort of alone, keeping the home fires burning. And working on his own crafts and projects.

But this summer was actually a very eventual summer for many of my former assistant, so I thought I would actually sort of go back through my last six assistants — my only six assistants — and just sort of track their progress.

**Craig:** This honestly is an amazing thing.

**John:** [laughs] So, Stuart is my current assistant. And Stuart keeps all the stuff running here. So, god bless Stuart.

My assistant before him was Matt Byrne. Matt Byrne is working on Scandal now. And when he started working on Scandal it was like, oh, that show, is it going to last? Is it going to work? The ratings were dicey. Now the ratings are really, really good. I think it’s the top drama running right now.

Matt was just — so he’s a staff writer on Scandal. And he was just today in a podcast for Scandal. So, I will put a link to the podcast in which Matt talks about his role in Scandal.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It’s been fascinating to watch Matt sort of become a big TV writer, which is fantastic.

Chad Creasey and his wife Dara Creasey, Chad was my assistant before Matt, they are writers on Mistresses which is a show that airs on ABC this summer. It’s very exciting for them.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Dana Fox, who is a friend of the show, Dana ran the show Ben and Kate. She has written a gazillion movies. But this last week she got named Hollywood Reporter’s Comedy Class of 2013.

**Craig:** Nice!

**John:** For all of her rewriting.

**Craig:** And she is a member of The Fempire.

**John:** She is a member of The Fempire.

**Craig:** She is a Femporer.

**John:** Yes. With Diablo Cody and the other very talented women who write movies and television shows.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant before Dana…

**Craig:** The king of them all.

**John:** The king of them all. Well, he got engaged which is why I’m so personally happy for him, but he also has a movie coming out this summer called We’re the Millers.

**Craig:** Wait a second — he got engaged just recently?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No way. I thought…okay. So, I’m so traditional. I was at his house, I met his — now — his fiancé. I thought, oh, I guessed he’s married. Stupid me. Wasn’t even engaged.

**John:** No. So, we’re very happy that he got engaged. And we’re very happy he has a movie coming out this summer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great guy. Great guy.

**John:** Great guy. And, so back to my very first assistant who predated Rawson by only like two days, but Sean Smith had a baby.

**Craig:** Hooray! Congratulations Sean.

**John:** Sean Smith, who is a television writer, who created the TV show Greek, just had a baby. So, yay!

**Craig:** Nice. So he made life.

**John:** He made life. Other people made television shows, but he made life.

**Craig:** Now, you’ve got to be leaving out one assistant who is like, eh, he’s in his mom’s basement.

**John:** I’ve had essentially really no dud assistants. The only people who I’m sort of leaving out are people who like filled in for a week at a time, but those are not the real assistant people.

**Craig:** So, Stuart, I assume, sits there thinking, “Soon it will be my time.”

**John:** Soon it will be Stuart’s time.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It was tough while I was in Chicago because I didn’t have — for the first time I didn’t have an assistant. I didn’t have like a full time person who was my person. So, I ended up drafting in some people from the music department. And there was an observer from the Director’s Choreographers Guild who was there, who ended up sort of de facto becoming my assistant because there were things that I needed someone to do. So, Amber Mak, I thank you very much for that.

But, it was weird sort of just being solo for a time, and having to figure out how to get this thing to print. So, I’m very grateful to be back with an assistant.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds wonderful. I have assistants — I underutilize them. I tend to do everything myself. Sometimes I forget that there is somebody who can do it.

**John:** Honestly, the last ten years have been a process of gradually recognizing that certain jobs are better performed by somebody who is not me. And so with an assistant, and then with Ryan Nelson who does all the digital stuff for us. I was recognizing that people have skills that they’re better at.

And when directing a movie I’ve had to definitely step back and recognize that I have an idea of how to light a scene, but I should never be anywhere near a light. I shouldn’t really edit. I sort of know how to edit, but I really shouldn’t edit. These are things that people are going to be better at than I am. And it’s not about humbling, it’s empowering when you realize that someone else can do that job.

**Craig:** When you’re directing, also, your personal life needs to be attended to. I mean, you suddenly are like a baby.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Somebody has to put food in your mouth for you.

**John:** Yeah. Someone has to like literally bring food and say, “Eat this food,” because otherwise you will not eat that food.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** It’s a good thing.

So, listeners, if there is anything that we talked about on today’s show that you would like to find a link for, well, you can find links at johnaugust.com/podcast. And so all the previous episodes will be there as well, but on this episode you will see links to things like the Heart Walk. What was the thing called? The Heart Walk?

**Craig:** Yeah. The Heart Walk.

**John:** Heart Walk. See things to the podcast that Matt is featured in. You’ll see stuff for this lawsuit.

**Craig:** And the sketch for between one and two glasses of wine. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. We’ll have Stuart find that and put that as well.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** If you like the show, you can subscribe to us in iTunes. That helps other people find us. You can leave us a comment there. I was looking at comments today. People leave really nice comments for us.

**Craig:** I got to go. I haven’t been back in a long time. I tend to spend my time on the internet just reading the terrible things people say.

Some guy out of nowhere the other day, some guy sends me a tweet. I just love these people. They’re like, “You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to send a guy a tweet telling him he’s not funny. That’ll be fun.”

**John:** That’ll be good.

**Craig:** Why don’t I do that? Let me start a fight.

**John:** Yeah. That will make everyone’s day better if you say that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Right.

Oh, well, okay. All right, fine, I guess I’m not funny. But you didn’t make me any funnier. You didn’t make me less funny. I’m as you found me.

What’s wrong with people?

**John:** I don’t know what’s wrong with people.

**Craig:** What is the story?

**John:** So, Craig, I would like to propose — and we haven’t talked about this — so I’m going to propose it here on the air. I would like to propose for next week, perhaps, that if people have a question that’s not about screenwriting, but about like their personal life, or other advice, they send in that question.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** Because I feel like we talk a lot about sort of screenwriting here, but we have a lot of listeners who are not screenwriting people. And we have a lot of opinions.

**Craig:** We do. And we’re so wise!

**John:** So, next week let’s have an episode that’s just entirely off-topic.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Where we just talk about what should, you know, really anything is fair game. And so obviously we’ll pick which questions we’re going to actually answer.

**Craig:** Sex.

**John:** But I’d like a very wide, I’m going to cast a very wide net here.

**Craig:** Sex.

**John:** So, anything you would like us to answer, we’ll happily try to answer on the podcast next week.

**Craig:** Sex.

**John:** Sex. I’m happy to talk about sex. It can be our first sort of mature-rated thing. I’m happy to talk about sex.

**Craig:** I think this is a great idea. More than anything, because I’m kind of fascinated to see what you think about some of these things?

**John:** I’m happy to talk about it.

**Craig:** I feel like the two of us are so different but we’re so similar. We have different styles.

**John:** We are really different about a lot of stuff.

**Craig:** We are. But I feel like we always end up in the same place.

**John:** I think it’s largely because I create a very open space where I allow you to be over on the edge of crazy.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I say like, well, it’s fine that you’re on the precipice of crazy. Here’s the other side of that line.

**Craig:** I get it. I get it. You’re just humoring me. That’s cool, too. I think it’s going to be a great show.

**John:** [laughs] I think it should be a good, fun show. So, we’ll encourage people to send in any question you want to ask about anything. You can send those questions to ask@johnaugust.com. You can also tweet us if it’s something short, but why don’t you just send us a longer thing and we’ll read it on the air?

**Craig:** “Dude, you’re not funny.”

**John:** Yeah. That’s always a good thing to say.

**Craig:** “Be funnier.”

**John:** “Be funnier.”

**Craig:** Okay! All right, Twitter. I’ll get on that.

**John:** That’s going to be good. Last thing, so if you want to see me tomorrow night at The Academy, there should still be tickets left. I don’t know, we’re recording this on a Friday, so who knows. But they tell us that even if it is sold out, they always have a line. And people who are in line almost always get in.

So, if you want to come see us tomorrow at 7:30 — me tomorrow at 7:30 at The Academy — you can come to that. And you can mark your calendars for — god, I’m going to forget the days — June 29th and July 28th for live podcasts.

[Sirens in background.]

**Craig:** Nice. Look, the sirens are coming. The sirens are coming to tell us it’s over.

**John:** This is the end of the episode.

**Craig:** This is it.

**John:** So, Craig, thanks for a good podcast and I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [Turning the Page: Storytelling in the Digital Age](http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2013/05/turning-page.html) at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater
* [The Inebriati](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIv96reVlAE) from That Mitchell and Webb Look
* [Paramount & MGM Sued By ‘G.I. Joe’ Writers](http://www.deadline.com/2013/05/paramount-mgm-sued-by-g-i-joe-writers-for-23m/) and [the complaint](http://www-deadline-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/G.-I.-Joe-Complaint__130506233913.pdf) from Deadline
* [Twenty Shots to Be Henceforth Retired from Film Vocabulary](http://www.reverseshot.com/article/20_shots_be_henceforth_retired_film_vocabulary) on Reverse Shot
* The Los Angeles Times on [Studios donating film set materials to Habitat for Humanity](http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/08/business/la-fi-ct-onlocation-habitat-20130508)
* Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang’s [will-read-your-script fundraiser](http://heartwalk.kintera.org/faf/donorReg/donorPledge.asp?ievent=1044247&supid=227801200) for the American Heart Association
* Listen to [Scandal Revealed episode 221](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/scandal-revealed/id566120824) featuring Matt Byrne
* Chad & Dara Creasey are on [Mistresses](http://beta.abc.go.com/shows/mistresses) on ABC
* [The Hollywood Reporter Comedy Class of 2013](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/john-hamburg-dana-fox-449162)’s writeup on Dana Fox (and John Hamburg)
* Rawson Thurber’s [We’re the Millers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We’re_the_Millers) on Wikipedia
* New dad [Sean Smith](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1091301/) on IMDb
* [Email us](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question) or Tweet [John](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) and [Craig](https://twitter.com/clmazin) your questions on anything
* OUTRO: Cyndi Lauper’s [Girls Just Want to Have Fun covered by Busby Marou](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJeYmzDTGqE)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/ugly-children-and-cigarettes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 88 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, we have a very big show today and we’re already getting a late start, so I thought we’d just dive right in. Is that okay?

**Craig:** Boom. Dive. Go.

**John:** Boom. Three things I want to do today. I want to talk about this New York Times article that everybody tweeted me this morning, because I think it was just designed to provoke outrage…

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** …umbrage from screenwriters. We will answer some questions that have been stacking up in the mailbox. And we will look at three Three Page Challenge entries from our listeners.

**Craig:** Great. Oh my god, so much. Let’s go.

**John:** So much.

The only bit of housekeeping I need to do is that on May 15 of this year I will be hosting a panel for the Academy with some nice screenwriters and other film professionals including Damon Lindelof and Mark Boal. We’re going to be talking about the impact of technology on filmmaking. And it is a $5 panel, so come see us at the Academy Theater if you want to. That is on May 15.

And there will be a link in our show notes for how to come see that panel if you’d like to come see it. So, please come.

**Craig:** Nifty. Good group.

**John:** Yay. Let us start with this article that everybody tweeted me this morning. It’s an article by Brooks Barnes in the New York Times and it is about a man…

**Craig:** Vinny Bruzzese.

**John:** Vinny Bruzzese, who is, “‘The reigning mad scientist of Hollywood,’ in the words of one studio customer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Yes. What Mr. Bruzzese does is he provides notes for filmmakers — really studios — on screenplays they are considering going into production. And he’s looking at them from the perspective of here is the data of a whole bunch of other movies and these are concerns about the script based on genre, based on specifics in the actual script and giving them suggestions on how to improve the screenplay based on the data that he has. So, for this knowledge he may charge $20,000 for this consultation which results in, I think, a meeting and also 20 or 30 pages of notes.

The article ran this morning and I think it’s interesting to talk about both from the perspective of what this guy is doing, but also to talk about from the perspective of entertainment journalism, because I think there are concerns I have about both areas.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, where should we start? Should we start with the article or start with what this guy is doing?

**Craig:** I mean, why don’t we start with the article because that will probably go faster and then we can did into Mr. Bruzzese.

**John:** Great. So, this article is written by Brooks Barnes, and I met Brooks when he first started working for the New York Times and he does a lot of these kinds of articles which is talking about the nature of the film industry.

And I was about halfway through the article when I scrolled back to the top thinking, “I bet Brooks Barnes wrote this,” and I was right.

Here’s what tipped me off that I thought it was a Brooks Barnes article, because he used the word “script doctors” in a way that’s actually not the way you use the word script doctors. He meant script doctors in the way talking about like a script consultant, which is what Vinny Bruzzese is.

But Vinny Bruzzese is not a script doctor. A script doctor is a screenwriter who comes in to fix a problem in a script. So, at times in my career I am a script doctor. That’s not what this guy actually is or what he’s doing.

The other concern I had sort of overall was that no one was on the record. Other than this guy, Vinny Bruzzese, and one screenwriter who was horrified, nobody was actually named by name in the article, which I think was really telling.

Now, at the end of the article Brooks Barnes talks about his theory on why people don’t want to go on the record, they don’t want to offend people. But I think it’s just really telling that nobody wants to actually talk about this by name because it doesn’t seem like a good useful thing that’s going to track well into the future. And nobody wants to be able to be Googled that they contributed to this practice or behavior in the industry.

**Craig:** Brooks Barnes…you know, I teed off on this guy years ago because he wrote an article — I think it was about residuals and he simply did not understand how they work.

Brooks Barnes tends to approach Hollywood the way that an anthropologist sometimes approaches some local tribe that they’re just encountering, describing it as if they’re alien life forms. This guy needs to just stop writing about Hollywood because he doesn’t really understand it. He doesn’t really get it. And the people he’s talking to, frankly, it’s like, you know, some of these people that he’s quoting, you know…Scott Steindorff? Okay.

I mean, is Scott Steindorff really representative of people that are actually holding Hollywood up with their hands? Not really.

**John:** I will actually amend my earlier statement, because Mark Gill is also mentioned by name, and Mark Gill is a person whose name you will see in actual trades and is actually making movies. Mark Gills is president of Millennium Films.

**Craig:** Yeah, but he’s president of Millennium which is just… — I’m sorry, I guess this will disqualify me from working for Millennium. They stink! That’s a bad company.

**John:** Millennium is a genre filmmaker that does a very specific kind of movie.

**Craig:** Well, they also do a very specific kind of thing where they treat writers poorly, I have to say, in my opinion. I think they treat writers poorly. We’ve seen this before from there where, you know, there was a whole thing recently where they had been asking writers to write stuff on spec for them in order to get a job, at least that’s how I recall it.

I just think that…I’m going to get sued now by Millennium films. Oh, whatever. What am I going to do? This is my opinion. My opinion is that they stink!

**John:** Yes. Now, let’s bridge a little bit into the actual work that Mr. Bruzzese is doing. So, basically they are providing this advice and in the article says, “But you can ignore the advice at your peril, according to one production executive. In analyzing the script for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer…Vampire Hunter…”

So, this is the example they’re actual citing. It’s the only movie that I think they’re actually talking about by name. “The company worked on behalf of the film and the production company supplied 20th Century Fox with notes. The movie flopped. Mr. Bruzzese declined to comment.”

So, the one movie you’re going to hold up as like, “Oh, this is the movie we worked on,” was Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Slayer? Hunter. God, I keep saying Slayer.

**Craig:** I know. I like it.

**John:** Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. This is the movie that you’re going to hold up as like, “Oh, this is one we did notes for, and they didn’t take all our notes, and that’s why it flopped.” Really? Really? That’s why it flopped?

**Craig:** Well, now let’s get into this dude. So, can I just say first of all I kind of love some parts of him. So, first of all, I love that he’s Vinny Bruzzese because, you know, I’m from Staten Island and there’s a lot of Vinny Bruzzeses. And he seems like a cool guy actually in that regard.

I love that he drinks Diet Coke and Diet Dr. Pepper and smokes Camels all at the same time. I mean, the guy is cool. And I will also say this much about this guy: I love how totally upfront he is about how he’s trying to make money. And I have to say one of the things that drives me nuts about the cottage industry of these awful so-called script consultants — or people that Brooks Barnes bizarrely calls script doctors incorrectly — is that they’re always couching what they do in some sort of altruistic, artistic form.

And this guy is the opposite. And I love that he’s literally like, “Yeah, you know, basically I got into this to make money. And I really like making money. And I also am providing the service to studio executives so that they can cover their ass in case of a failure.” He literally says that.

**John:** He does actually say that. I do totally respect that.

**Craig:** I think that’s so great.

**John:** And so I will also defend him to some degree in the sense of using data to look at which movies should get made, because there is some value to that. And if you step back, studios have been doing this for a long time because there is actual Data-data that you can look at. You can look at what movies you’ve made. You can look at what movies have grossed. You can look at what dates you release them. You can look at what actors were in those movies and what other actors were in those movies with them.

There is a whole big giant set of data that you could look at that can be invaluable for determining, like, do I green light this movie? Do I not green light this movie? That is valid. And that is especially valid when you’re looking at, like, how will you be able to market this movie?

The challenge is that’s actually objective data. When you’re looking at a screenplay there’s almost nothing objective you can say in there. And one of the examples they cite quite early on in the article which I found just the best, and worst, and most telling was he talks about movies about demons and horror movies.

So, it says, “‘Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,’ Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. ‘If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.'”

What is that? So, you’ve created a distinction between summoned demons and targeting demons, which I’ve never even considered. I don’t think any writer has really ever considered. You’re saying, “Well that’s the difference between why this movie does a certain amount of box office, and this one does a different kind of amount of box office.”

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Yeah. So, with data, when you have enough data you can look for correlations and you don’t necessary need to say that that’s the cause of why this thing was what it was, but if you’re just making arbitrary distinctions you’re just cherry-picking little things in whatever movies were hits and whatever movies were not hits. And you’re using that to defend what really your decisions are. And that’s not actually using data. That’s just manipulating things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s take the demon example, because it’s so bizarre. First of all, it’s pretty rare for marketing to specify whether someone has been targeted by a demon or has summoned a demon. So, right off the bat people don’t read the script for opening weekend. I’m not sure how anybody would know that for opening weekend.

But, let me give a counter example, and this is where this guy kind of, you know, look, you made your bed, let’s sleep in it. There’s a Ouija Board in The Exorcist. She uses a Ouija Board to talk to Captain Howdy. I’m pretty sure that’s in there. I’ll have to check and make sure, but either way there’s some kind of implication that she has summoned Captain Howdy. It’s just dumb.

Look, the thing about this guy is he’s not the villain here. What he’s really doing is basically hustling and giving notes on stuff. If his theory is that people like some things more than others…duh. Right? Okay?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If his theory is that, I don’t know, let’s go out on a limb here. I’m going to crunch some quick data here using my statistics program. In romantic comedies, people like it when the couple ends up together. Duh! Okay. We all know. We get it. We got it, okay? That’s called giving notes and that’s what studios always do. They’ve always done that. And we as writers have always tried to write towards an audience, but also sometimes challenge an audience, maybe turn things on their head a little bit.

The villain here are the people hiring this guy! Because it used to be — it used to be — that people in Hollywood who gave notes, while maybe not the smartest people all the time, had the courage of their convictions. That’s why they had a job. What the hell is their job if they’re hiring this guy to do exactly what they’re supposed to do? And the data doesn’t mean a damn thing. We all know that. The data…Fight Club.

Let me back up for a second. One thing that this kind of stuff will never account for are the Black Swans. You’re familiar with the whole Black Swan theory?

**John:** Absolutely. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I think, is his name.

**Craig:** I believe that’s correct.

**John:** And so his theory is that — a gross simplification of his theory — that there are going to be events or things that happen that are so outside of your expectation that you can consider them Black Swans. And those events you can’t fully prepare for but in a weird way you have to be ready for the fact that because you can’t prepare for them you have to prepare for them.

**Craig:** And also that when Black Swans occur they tend to have very large impacts, because the world is set up in such a way that we expect things. And when the unexpected happens it is either very, very good, or very, very bad.

In Hollywood, I think what we find is that there are a lot of Black Swans that in retrospect we look back as White Swans because so many White Swans follow them.

So, Star Wars is a Black Swan. Nobody thought Star Wars was going to work. Nobody. Fox literally let Lucas put his own money into it and gave him merchandising, because they didn’t — I mean, everybody thought the thing was going to be a disaster. And, frankly, based on the early screenplays and ideas it probably was going to be a disaster.

And, by the way, it may even be a Black Swan within the world of George Lucas. It may have been that Lucas just fluked himself into Star Wars and really Lucas is far more Howard the Duck than he is… — I don’t know. I mean, he did a good job on American Graffiti. But I guess the point is those are the things that make Hollywood Hollywood.

If you want to be in a business that follows various predictable patterns in order to grind out predictable income, what the hell are you doing in Hollywood anyway? The whole point is to chase things that are surprises. Isn’t that the point?

I mean, yeah, of course, you want to make Avengers, go for it, make Avengers. And when that works you can point to how it basically fit everybody’s expected pattern. Except take three steps back and then say, well then why didn’t the Hulk make all that money? And why didn’t the Bryan Singer Superman make all that money? And why didn’t, you know, they’re on their 12th iteration of Iron Man, it’s still working great, but when they hit the fourth Batman back in the ’90s it didn’t work great.

Nobody knows. And you can come up with all this nonsense, but the truth of the matter is what this guy is peddling is nothing special at all except comfort.

**John:** Yeah. He’s peddling comfort. I mean, he’s doing that retroactive pattern fitting to say, “This is the reason why these were successful, therefore we’re going to take this pattern and template and apply it to these future things. Oh, but never mind the things that don’t fit that template because those were flukes or we’re going to find somebody to explain why they do fit the pattern magically.”

What I will say is especially telling is that nowhere in this whole article does it talk about the quality of the actual product. And in a weird way I’d argue that the quality of the product is largely irrelevant to sort of how well it does. It’s not completely relevant, but it’s not the most important factor in how well it does. So, his notes and his opinion on what movies you make and how you make those movies is about the screenplay and it’s about sort of the actual movie you’re going to make.

But, the movie you made has very little impact on the actual opening weekend. The opening weekend is the biggest predictor of how much a movie is going to make. And nothing that they’re doing here is going to bump that needle for what that opening weekend is.

**Craig:** It’s right.

**John:** Your opening weekend is determined on somewhat the movie that you made, somewhat to a large degree the stars you have in it, to a huge degree the weekend that you’re choosing to open, the competition around that weekend.

So, all of these factors have nothing to do with this 20-page report that you pay $20,000 for. And it’s maddening to think that it’s going to all come down to these formulas.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And I have to say that his whole, that Brooks kind of skews this article and Bruzzese feeds into it, to suggest that the only people — the ONLY people that don’t like this are the writers. We’re the only ones.

I don’t care. Let me tell you something. If I’m working for somebody and they want to give this guy $20,000 to write up a bunch of notes, great. I’ll read them. If they’re good, I’ll do them. I have no problem with that. I mean, the fact that Mr. Bruzzese bills himself as a distant relative of Einstein, notwithstanding, if he writes good notes, terrific.

It’s just that what he’s trying to do is this game that I’ve been watching. He’s formalizing a game that I’ve been watching and experiencing for nearly twenty years now. And that is the game of, “My opinion is not an opinion; my opinion is a fact.” That’s the game people play.

When I’m sitting in a room with people and they’re like, “I think it should be like this.” Really? Because I think it should be like this. “No, no, no, it can’t be like this. It has to be like this because of this, this, and this. It’s a fact.”

No it’s not. Your opinion is not a fact. Nobody’s opinion about any screenplay is a fact. Ever. I can’t take it! That’s got to stop.

And all this guy is doing is dressing up opinion as fact so that these executives who don’t have either the courage of their convictions or convictions at all can present them to the writers as fact. But, look, if you can come up with all the pieces, do it! Go, spend another ten grand, maybe he can actually give you the demon movie that will do the best. But, until you can do that you have to acknowledge that there is an enormous ghost in the machine over which you have no control.

And, frankly, that’s what we do. So, I don’t mind that this guy is doing this. I applaud any hustler. I am so sad that people are lining up to play his three-card monte though. That is…oh god.

**John:** I wonder how many people are actually lining up to play his three-card monte, though. Because if you look at it, like no one else went on the record. No one else said that they were actually talking to him. So, my concern sort of from the journalistic perspective is it feels like a terrific press release for this guy. And in some ways selling the controversy is a way to sort of get more people talking about him and talking about this idea and this service that he’s providing when there may actually be nothing to it. There may not have even been sizzle before this article ran yesterday.

I don’t know. I mean, there’s a photo of them in a nice-looking office where he’s talking to some young woman who is a development executive there. Great, but I don’t know that there is anything to this at all.

**Craig:** We don’t even know that that’s his office.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t know where he is. But I just think, I mean, I don’t know. Maybe I’m just not plugged in enough, but for instance it says, “Major film financiers and advisers like Houlihan Lokey confirm…,” who?

**John:** Who is Houlihan Lokey?

**Craig:** Houlihan Lokey doesn’t even sound like a real name. Is that a person or…?

**John:** It’s an amazing name, though. I love it.

**Craig:** It is a pretty good name, like Houlihan Lokey. Houlihan Lokey is like the old drunk in the saloon who ends up killing everyone because he’s still really, really good with a six-shooter.

**John:** Yeah. He’s notorious.

**Craig:** “Who did this? Houlihan Lokey! Ugh.”

I don’t know how that would be analyzed by Mr. Bruzzese’s spreadsheets, but all I can say is my reaction is not… — In the end he tries to, I love it when people do this, they try and basically pre-but you, you know, so in a rebuttal but a prebuttal he says, “All screenwriters think their babies are beautiful. I’m here to tell it like it is. Some babies are ugly.”

No shit. I mean, like do you really think that we’re all so stupid and narcissistic that we think that all of our scripts are beautiful? No. No!

Go ahead, ask how many screenwriters after their first draft, okay, you have a choice: you can get notes and we can work on this, or we will turn around and shoot this exactly the way it is and put you name on it and we can’t change a word. How many screenwriters are going to go, “Um, uh…”

**John:** Yeah. You want that chance.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. Of course. So, no, we don’t think that all of our babies are beautiful. And, no, we don’t have a problem with notes and we don’t have a problem with anyone’s notes.

Compare this, by the way, to Lindsay Doran’s terrific talk about joy where she says, “Look, movies that end on joy really please audiences.” That’s a very dramatic statement. It is not specific. It doesn’t say, “You cannot summon demons.” You know why, because it is talking about an audience experience. It’s not talking about a story point.

She, unlike Mr. Bruzzese has made movies. She has actually sat and worked with writers. She understands how to talk to us. This guy understands how to talk to executives, who don’t make movies.

**John:** So, let’s talk about that specific example and Lindsay Doran’s perspective on it, and his perspective on it. He would come to saying like, “Well, the data says that moviegoers don’t like movies with summoned demons, they prefer the other kind of demon.” But he might have ten points of data. That’s not actually meaningful data.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So he’s only looking at correlation. Lindsay Doran can come to it with that same note, but she could say, “Here is why I think that’s not going to work, because in this situation it’s going to track through this way, and we as the audience feel this way about the characters at the end because of the nature of what happened with that demon situation.”

That is a meaningful note that you can actually think about and use and implement throughout your script. His saying like, “Don’t summon the demon, don’t use a Ouija Board,” that’s not…

**Craig:** Because it’s a fact. And by the way, all we’re doing now is just waiting for the movies that contradict those facts because that’s the business we’re in. We’re in the business of surprises and subversions of expectations. It’s constantly changing. There are movies that come out that don’t do any business in the theater at all and then in home video become phenomenon.

Look at Austin Powers. I think made $40 million in theaters and then was just enormous at home. Office Space. Nothing. Enormous at home.

Who knows? I have a movie coming out where we decapitate a giraffe, how does that work out on a spreadsheet?

And I’ve watch this with comedy testing all the time. Inevitably the highest testing joke is also the worst testing joke. But, you know, this is the same old snake oil as always, and shame on anyone who is so bad at their job — it’s your job. And you have to hire somebody else to do it for you? That’s embarrassing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why don’t you just quit at that point. Why don’t the people who employ you just fire you and hire this guy instead? What do we need you for, to write a check to this guy? Oh my god. This guy is fine. I love this guy. Good for him. Way to go, Vinny.

**John:** Let’s answer some questions.

**Craig:** You got it.

**John:** So, Jill writes in to ask, “A friend of mine wrote a pilot for a web series and decided to get some of our smarter writer friends together to punch it up. That’s when I realized I have no idea how to run a punch-up session. Can you give us some tips and tricks?”

So, Jill is talking about an informal punch-up session. Sometimes on a big movie, you and I have both been in these situations where it’s a WGA movie, and so therefore there are kind of rules about how you do it. So, you are bringing in people for a day, you’re paying them for a day, and you’re sitting around a table. We all sign these contracts saying that we know what we’re doing. And eventually we have to sign another form saying we’re not going to try and get credit on it.

That’s not what we’re talking about here. She’s just doing a little web series. So, let’s give some suggestions on the smaller version of what she should do.

**Craig:** Well, I have done these before. And the basic rule of thumb is if you’re running the session you should try and participate very little. Your job really is to kind of move people through the script. So, you’re sort of saying, “Okay, let’s just start,” usually you’ll say, “Here are some general areas where we’d love to punch up. Here is our kind of thing we’re looking for, some specific questions, but really more than anything, let’s just go through the script page-by-page and pitch out some thoughts as you have them. So, let’s just start. Let’s just start with page one. Anybody have any thoughts on page one?”

So, you can do a little preliminary “let’s just talk about the big issues,” if anybody has any big story issues, if you want. But then just go, page one, and then people start pitching and you’re like, great, great. And just be encouraging and you’ll find that some people are really good at it. Some people are terrible at it.

As the person running the session you have to kind of rescue and be kind to the people who are floundering because you don’t want to be mean. You don’t want the room to turn on somebody because they may have one joke that works, and it may be the best joke ever. So, you just don’t want to kill them. And just keep things going and keep things light. And just keep moving through pages.

You will find, inevitably, that most of what people have to pitch are on the first 30 pages or so. The last 20 pages everybody gets really quiet because they either stopped reading or it’s action and climax and it’s not joke time.

**John:** Yeah. I would say if you have the opportunity to do a reading of it right beforehand, that’s helpful, so it’s fresh in everyone’s head. Just read through what’s actually on the page so everyone agrees that they read the same thing together, that’s really helpful before you start flipping pages. You won’t always have that chance, but it’s great if you can do that.

I’d say provide plenty of food, a lot of carbs, to keep people going.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Pizza is always good. Be genuinely thankful for everyone who is there.

Inevitably in any group situation someone will probably kind of dominate the conversation, and maybe that’s a really good smart person who is actually really funny and that’s great, but if it’s the wrong person then you have to sort of do some judo to sort of get the other people talking a little bit more.

If you can get Nick Kroll to come to your punch-up session, he’s really good.

**Craig:** Nick’s funny, yeah.

**John:** So, that’s a good, funny thing, too. But have fun with it. And always ask the questions, like the what-if questions, and try and never shut down an idea because like, “Oh, that’s going to be impossible based on what everything else is.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t shut down now. Just sort of improve rules of like, “Yes, and?” And just keep rolling because even if it is not an idea that is implementable right then, right there, you may find a way the next day, like, “Oh, I know how to do that kind of thing,” or that sparks something that’s really good.

So, take notes for yourself about not even what they’re talking about right there but what it inspires for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you have a producing partner or somebody that’s there with you, don’t worry and think that they’re going to somehow think that you can do something you can’t do, and vice versa. For those of you who produce don’t think that this is the time to jump in and say that’s not possible.

The two of you, knowing the script and the situation better than anybody, will have the exact same reactions afterwards. “Okay, well, we can’t do that, we can’t do that, we can do this, we can do this. What about this? What about this?”

So, just keep it light. Keep it moving. Don’t freak out. And, also, just be aware that when there’s a ton of stuff that people are going to be like, “That is so funny,” and in your mind you’re like, “And will never be in this movie because it’s totally off-tone or it’s going to stop the movie dead.” That’s okay. Just keep that to yourself. That is, 95% of stuff that gets a room laugh in these things — unusable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can think of one guy in particular who is awesome at these things and I never once have gotten anything usable from him. [laughs] But he’s fun to have. And he keeps the room laughing which in and of itself has great value.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But, you will find some… — And you know, the fact is there will be all these little dramas that occur, usually little soap operas that happen at these things. People get jealous, they get weird, they get quiet, they get too talky. Sometimes they go after each other as part of like the comedy sport. Just, you know, you be mommy or daddy and just gently encourage everybody to stay on target.

**John:** Yeah. Next question. Matt in Orlando, Florida asks, “When you look at the pilot script for Modern Family you’ll notice the character introductions are done in list form directly under the title page before the actual script begins. It seems like a great way to save space, especially in a sitcom script where you have a lot of characters to introduce and a limited amount of time to do so. Is this common?”

The answer is, yes, it is common. That is a very standard sitcom format. And so I encourage all writers no matter what genres you’d like to work in to take a look at the different formats for how things are done. And in sitcoms, yes, it’s common to do that kind of character introduction, a page of these are the characters who are the regulars and these are characters who are unique to this show. And that’s a standard way of showing stuff in sitcom land.

Even a single camera comedy like Modern Family will often do this.

**Craig:** I take your word for it.

**John:** Yeah. But don’t do it in a screenplay.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** No one ever wants to see that in a screenplay. Don’t ever…don’t do that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a sitcom thing. And that’s why it’s important that if you’re writing a spec episode of Modern Family, which is probably not the right one to do because that’s an older show, but if you’re writing a spec episode of whatever great new sitcom, find an episode that’s a common — actually just mimic their formatting exactly because that’s what people want to see, that you know what you’re doing.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, I just have to interrupt because I just remembered one thing also that makes me angry about Brooks Barnes. [laughs]

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Can I say it? God, so, in the beginning of his article he makes this really weird analogy to what Vinny Bruzzese is doing to what Facebook and Netflix do by analyzing the way people use their websites. They’re so not analogous…

**John:** [laughs] Not even remotely.

**Craig:** …in any way, shape, or form. They have nothing to do with each other. It’s just a totally different business, purpose, and point. Brooks needs to stop writing about Hollywood. Okay, sorry. Back to the questions.

I get nuts. I get nuts!

**John:** I know. I mean, it could have been the whole episode but it came up very late and so I thought we’d…

**Craig:** I know. We have so much to today. It’s a very busy show.

**John:** Heather in Dahlonega, Georgia writes, “Can you tell me why so many movies starting big names are going straight to DVD? I recently watched one on Netflix streaming called Fire with Fire starring Bruce Willis, Rosario Dawson, Josh Duhamel, Vincent D’Onofrio, and Julian McMahon, and Red Lights with Cillian Murphy, Sigourney Weaver, and Robert De Niro.

“In the past a cast like this would garner a theatrical release, or if the movie just wasn’t good enough the actors wouldn’t have signed onto it in the first place. What’s going on with these movies?”

**Craig:** Ah-ha! Typically when a movie ends up going direct to video like that, and Netflix, however you want to describe direct-to-video these days, it is because the movie just didn’t turn out very well. Actors sign up for movies because they think the movie will be good. Sometimes, though, that just doesn’t happen. You know? Sometimes the movie doesn’t come out well.

And basically if it’s an independent movie — and these are almost always the case — if there is independent financing the idea is “let’s find a distributor.” And nobody wants to distribute it because distribution comes with great costs. There’s typically the cost of marketing, the number one, plus also making the prints, putting it in theaters and so forth.

And if they can’t find enough theaters interested and they can’t justify the marketing budget based on what they perceive to be the interest in the film based on test screenings and so forth, they have no choice. They have to cut their losses while they can.

**John:** Absolutely. So, back in the day when Variety was a print publication I would get, I always loved once or twice a year AFM would come up, and AFM — American Film Market — and, I guess, maybe it was twice a year. I always got confused about it. But, there would be this thing out in Santa Monica where these foreign distributors and foreign filmmakers would come in and they’d show the packages of movies that they were going to get made.

And so in Variety they would have these mockup one sheets of all these movies. And it was like you’d never heard of these movies. And sometimes they were movies that were going to go into production, sometimes they were movies that were already done. You’re like, “Really? This movie exists in some way?”

And that’s sort of what some of these things are. Like I suspect Fire with Fire was that situation where someone raised the money to make this movie, foreign financing/other financing, they were able to make this movie with the hopes of selling it to a major distributor because it was going to be so good and everyone was going to love it. And often that just didn’t happen.

I’ll also say that, you look at Nicholas Cage as sort of the classic example of this, like who’s in a lot of movies, and you can’t believe he’s in so many movies. Some of those actors, they’re meaningful overseas in ways that they’re not meaningful here. And so even if it doesn’t have a theatrical release in the US, it may have a theatrical release overseas.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Or home video may be enough overseas that it is worth it to make the movie with them.

**Craig:** I think that’s what — I remember the same thing at the same time, flipping through Variety as a twenty-something and going, “What is this AFM and what are these movies?” I remember the one that made me laugh the most was, it was shortly after RoboCop, somebody made a movie called Cyborg Cop. This is obviously just RoboCop. But it was like a flea market of movies, and that’s exactly what was going on.

Basically they were selling them to foreign distributors and then here in the US they would either get no distribution or direct-to-video. So, that’s what’s going on there.

**John:** That’s fine. And, you could say like, “Well, why would anybody be in these movies?” Well, they got paid to be in the movie. It may be the kind of role that they really wanted to try to do. And sometimes those movies are giant, great, big hits.

And so things like the Jason Statham movies, like The Transporter, that was probably that kind of movie and it actually took off well enough that it sort of established him as a bit of a star. So, sometimes those movies that seem like they come from a major distributor, they really were pickups and they were bought by some distributor here and it always seemed like they were a Columbia movie but they weren’t.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s look at some Three Page Challenges. So, while we open these up I will give you sort of the backstory on these. If you are new to the podcast, every couple weeks we invite listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay and Craig and I will read it, and take a look at it, and share it on the podcast so people can listen to our critiques but also read the pages themselves and see if they agree with what we said.

If you have a screenplay that you want us to take a look at the first three pages, and only the first three pages, you can send it to us at the website. The link for it is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and we will maybe take a look at it.

Stuart reads through all of them, all the ones who come in with the proper boilerplate language on it. And Craig and I get a small sampling of them. And Stuart sent us three today. Which of the three should we start with?

**Craig:** You know, I’m just ready to do any of them. And if you want me to summarize one, let me know. You know, I’m back to being your apprentice. Dad’s back.

**John:** [laughs] Let’s start with Sue Morris’s script. We don’t have a title for this. I can do the summary on this one if you want to do the next one.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So, we start, we fade in on the nib of a quill pen, it’s moving in small, neat strokes on the paper. And there’s a super with text over it. We are in England, Christmas, 1126. So, we see a young woman giving birth. She has given birth to a baby girl. Next, we see at the Palace of Westminster we see two, we see Sir Thomas and Sir John, both knights, talking about the fact that she’s just given birth to a daughter and that daughters can still be useful.

Next scene we meet King Henry in his late 50s. He says that, “It has been six years since the death of our beloved son and heir, William, in that great tragedy which took the lives of so many sons and daughters.” He says that the next heir will be his daughter, Matilda, will be his successor.

Actually, no, “My daughter Matilda, widow of the Holy Roman Emperor, will be my successor, to rule over the lands on both sides of the sea.”

Some raised eyebrows but no one questions it. So, there’s obviously some sort of court intrigue happening there. More discussion, as we wrap up page three, more discussion about sort of what this means, and then we jump forward at the end of page three to a hunting lodge near Normandy and the king has died. And that’s where we’re at at the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Craig Mazin, talk to me about these pages.

**Craig:** I feel like I’ve read this kind of thing many, many times. I’ve seen a lot of spec scripts that are medieval dramas. More than you would imagine, actually. There’s quite a few of them out there.

This scene where the child is born I feel literally like it just gets repeated over, and over, and over. There is always the woman on the straw mattress and there is always the screaming and the blood and there’s always the midwife. I guess that’s how children were born back then. And no one ever wants a daughter; everybody always wants a son.

I got a little confused by the fact that King Henry is the king, but there was a boy who was the Holy Roman Emperor. Maybe I just don’t know the difference between the two, but I thought that once Charlemagne became the Holy Roman Emperor he was the king? I don’t know. I guess it’s two different things.

I didn’t really love the fact that we cut away from this to show the drowning. It just seemed a little strange.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To have a flashback there on page two of a character we’ve never met. It felt very TV. And maybe this is TV. I don’t know. It feels very TV to me.

And then there’s just like sort of generally generic court murmuring. “So the King’s nephew precedes the King’s bastard.”

“You should know our man by now. Always determined to be the first.” You know, like political intrigue and stuff. It’s all fine, I mean, it’s written fine. I have no problem with the writing. I just feel like hopefully something crazy happens after this because otherwise, you know, been there.

**John:** Yeah. I was lacking point of view on this. I didn’t see what was going to be special about this versus The Tudors or sort of every other kind of big medieval drama. And, so, let’s start from the very top.

We see this quill pen writing. Okay, that’s a little cliché, but fine; quill pens can write, that’s great. But then there is a super. It’s listed as a super, but I can’t believe anyone would read this much onscreen. Here’s the text of the super: ‘If on the death of a baron or other of my men a surviving daughter is the heir, I will give her [in marriage] with her land following the advice of my barons.’ Clause in the coronation charter of Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, 1100 AD.

That’s a lot to throw at me to read. And it’s not especially clear writing. That’s a hard, hard sentence to pierce. So, that’s throwing up a bit of a wall to me at the start.

Then we get to the actual birth stuff, and while it’s a kind of cliché scene I thought it was actually nicely written. Those are nice short lines breaking the action down.

**Craig:** Yes. I agree.

**John:** Two paragraph little chunks. I get it. I love it.

When we get to the Palace of Westminster we meet Sir Thomas and Sir John. Sir Thomas I’m told is in his early 20s. Sir John I get no information about. And if you’re just going to call them Sir Thomas and Sir John I have no way of really keeping them apart or separate. So, why am I watching these two people and what’s really going on?

I also got confused because, here’s the description of Sir Thomas and sort of what he’s doing:

Bright, cold sunlight. Leather boots crunch on frosted grass as SIR THOMAS (early 20s) strides across to meet the newly arrived MESSENGER dismounting from his horse. They confer briefly, breath condensing in the chill air.

Sir Thomas spins on his heel and strides back, towards a fellow knight, SIR JOHN. Sir Thomas says, “Another daughter.”

What was weird to me is like I think we were supposed to be in a really wide shot so therefore we weren’t hearing what the messenger was saying, but if you’re going to have people confer and we don’t hear it, kind of say that we don’t hear it, because otherwise that dialogue we’re going to assume is somehow between the people who — I just confused where we were at in the scene and whether that messenger was still there.

**Craig:** Let me also mention: a knight doesn’t walk across the lawn to go talk to a messenger; the messenger walks across the lawn to him. Much more interesting. I mean, these things are all about power, and rank, and privilege, and all the rest of it, so much more interesting to follow some exhausted courier to walk over to a guy and whisper something in his ear.

**John:** Exactly. So, if you’re going to have a similar situation, if you keep Sir Thomas on his horse or whatever, the messenger comes over with him, and then they pull back to reveal that Sir John is watching this from a distance and not able to hear what’s going on. That may be more interesting. That, again, suggests some cinematography here that’s happening.

With King Henry on page two, “King Henry may not be the largest man there, but by God he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS, the great Anglo-Norman nobles, all feel it.” Wow. That’s a lot. That’s a lot of clauses to throw at me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, “He’s not the largest man there,” but he is the King. It was just a weird sentence to me. It didn’t help me understand the power dynamic of that moment as much as it probably could.

**Craig:** And it is, I mean, “But by God, he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS,” so he owns them too. “The great Anglo-Norman nobles all feel it.” Oh, I see what’s she’s saying. You know, that’s that kind of tortured writing, the tortured sentence structure.

Also, his first line, I don’t, “My lords, it is time.” Eh.

**John:** Eh. Yeah. It’s cliché.

So, here’s a problem with those clauses there. “But by God he owns this place, and the assembled BARONS, the great Anglo-Norman nobles all feel lit.” The “and the assembled barons,” does he own the barons? He owns this place and the barons? What? Huh?

So, it could read either way. It’s actually sort of interesting both ways. It’s actually probably more interesting if he believes he owns the barons.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then I agree with you, there’s a flashback on page two which is like, oh my god, I don’t know who anybody is and we’re already getting a flashback to somebody who dies and therefore is not going to be part of our show. So, that’s…

**Craig:** We just don’t care.

**John:** These are all issues. And then we jump again at the end of page three and at that point we may be ready to actually start the story and so that jump may feel great if we hadn’t jumped around in time on page two.

**Craig:** And if the idea here is that these two guys, Stephen, late 20s, the golden boy of Henry’s court, and Robert, Earl of Gloucester, a decade older than Stephen, are going to be competing with each other for the favor of this newly minted widowed queen, I’m suspecting as much.

Then, that’s the perspective we want to play here. That’s what we want to do. And it certainly can’t be manifested by a weird shoulder scuffle fight. “A few moments of shoulder-barging and scuffling between the two men. They glare at each other.” That just seems comedic. And I don’t think that this is supposed to be comedic. I mean, that’s just funny to me in a bad way.

**John:** Yeah. I would say I hadn’t guessed that Stephen and Robert would be the focus of things. If they are the focus of things I want to see them on page one or page two, rather than page three. And, honestly, we could get them there just by cutting out some stuff that I didn’t think we needed in page one or page two.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Agreed. Not bad, Sue. Not bad.

**John:** Not bad at all. And, you know, everything on there was nicely written. I didn’t have any sort of issues with sort of how you were describing things on the page. It felt professional. It just felt like something I had seen before too much.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Next let’s do Robin Peters. The Gaffer. Do you want to do the summary here?

**Craig:** Sure. Okay, so we begin at a fancy restaurant, and we’re in England, where Simon page, in his 20s, is proposing to his girlfriend, Trudy, and he’s given her a small diamond ring. And she doesn’t feel that it’s big enough and basically says I can’t, “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with a market trader.” So, she’s unhappy with his status in life.

Next, we’re in Simon’s office, sort of, and someone is congratulating him and they don’t even know his name.

Now we’re in a park and she’s very happy because I guess she’s heard that he’s gotten a promotion but he tells her the catch is it’s in Texas. So, he’s been promoted but he has to go to Texas. And she basically says, “I’m leaving you because that’s not good enough.” She hands him his ring back. He begs for her to come back. She does not. And he chucks the ring away, hitting a duck.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, my first concern here is specificity. And that’s a word we use too much on the podcast, but I think it’s actually really important for here.

We start, “EXT. NORTHERN ENGLISH CITY — NIGHT.” Uh, just tell us the city.

**Craig:** Right. Manchester takes fewer letters than Northern English City.

**John:** “Lights flicker against the night sky.” Yeah, but maybe you could think of something more specific. Maybe you could just paint our world a little bit more specifically because I have a hard time clicking in because I just don’t feel like you know what these things are. And I lack confidence because you don’t seem confident in your choices here so far.

We’re “INT. FANCY RESTAURANT.” Okay. I mean, if you don’t want to give the name of the restaurant, that’s great, but just paint our world a little bit in that first line here.

Simon and Trudy, okay, proposals are an interesting thing, or diamond rings are a thing we’ve seen a lot at the start of things, but it’s a natural way to start something, but that scene never really quite clicked. I wasn’t sure at the end of that first scene how I was supposed to feel about things.

Then we jump to the next “OPEN PLAN OFFICE,” again, really generic, before we start this next thing. Every place we go to is just the most basic description of what it could possibly be. And I just don’t feel — I never click in because I don’t know what I’m supposed to be looking for.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this is a comedy. And I don’t know if Robin is English or not, but it certainly reads English. The problem is that it’s not very funny. And it’s not very funny, I think, in part because the characters are so broadly and thinly drawn.

You’re absolutely right about all the specificity. And there’s also a kind of TV-ish quality to it, for instance, starting with the first line of dialogue on an establishing shot that’s rather boring, and then coming inside and moving through diners. You might as well have a waiter carrying a tray through. It’s all very kind of cliché and generic.

Bu the biggest issue is, if I can summarize, Simon is basically a schmo and Trudy is a gold-digger, mean lady. I don’t know why these two are together at all. I don’t believe, frankly, that they are together. I don’t believe that anybody talks like Simon. When she finally breaks up with him, because she doesn’t want to go to Texas, he keeps begging after her and I hate him for it. And she’s acting in a way that’s just sort of broadly sociopathic in a mean girl way which I kind of just don’t believe.

I’ll give Robin credit for getting the plot out on page two. Englishman is going to be a fish out of water in Texas, I presume. That’s fine, but I don’t know anything about his job. I don’t really know why market trader is better or worse than “junior” — “They could use a junior in Texas.” I’m not sure what that means.

His office was very odd. Talk about generic: INT. OPEN PLAN OFFICE — DAY. Simon exits a room into a gleaming corporate open plan office, reeking of wealth. A SUIT comes up to him.

Well, let’s count the genericisms here: Open plan office. Room. Reeking of Wealth — gold? A suit. I don’t understand what’s happening. Frankly, this would be a much more interesting scene if it were one scene and it started with a guy proposing to a woman and she was super happy because he was giving her everything she wanted and he’s telling her that he knows that she was waiting for this promotion because she knows, I mean, explain it in terms that women — so women watching this don’t feel like you hate women. She really wanted to make sure that she was supported and secure in her life because of how she grew up, whatever it is. And he says, “But the only thing is we’re…” And as part of the surprise, because he knows this is the big pitch. It’s not the ring is the big pitch. The big pitch is, “Texas.”

And off of her face the next shot you see is him at the airport alone. And, you know, the airport lady is like, “And you are traveling alone?” “Yup.”

Just there’s so much… — Be more interesting about this. This is just not interesting to me.

**John:** Well, also what you described in that take of a scene is you were giving a moment where he could actually be funny.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Because none of these scenes that he’s actually funny now does he have the capability of really being funny, because he’s just reacting to other people.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so in either his trying to sell this idea to her, what’s his motivation? What is he attempting to do? And you need to give him something to attempt to do. So, either he’s attempting to get her on board with this idea of moving to Texas, or, alternately, we can see that whatever that room he came out of, well what happened in that room? Was he like making a pitch for himself and trying to stand up for himself about why he should get a promotion, and then he gets Texas out of it, which is not what he wanted, but it’s something new — that’s a moment where you can see him actually driving something.

I would also back up one step, because when I talk about sort of Northern English City, you know, working on a musical for the last 10 weeks I’m very keenly aware of you kind of need the “This is our world” song before you get to the “I want” song. And I didn’t get either of those so far.

And it’s fine, if the first three pages were really just like a “This is our world” song, that’s great. And you can setup this is the nature of the universe that we’re in. That can be wonderful.

And then by letting us see that guy in his world, then we can see the decision of what is it he wants. What is it he’s trying to do? And I wasn’t — none of those gears were sort of clicking in on these first three pages for me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed. If it is, in fact, going to turn into a fish out of water comedy, we do need to see the fish in water. And we need to know what that means. And it can’t just be simply one shot of him at a park, which we describe as “Park,” kicking a stone around like a football, and then mentioning a local fast food joint. It’s just not enough.

Yeah. I think that this needs a little bit more remedial work and study to make… — And you’ve got to be careful about these jokes like, she says, “I don’t mean to be heartless, but I can’t spend the rest of my life with a market trader, can I?”

“Yeah, of course. Sorry, which bit of that wasn’t heartless?”

Well, okay, if you know it’s heartless, why are you still there? She’s heartless. What is going on here? And the issue with this, yes, we know people in real life who are pathetic doormats, but we don’t root for them in movies. We need to see some spark of something with this guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s why so typically people will find if the movie starts with a breakup they find their mate in bed with someone else because we understand that they were deceived. But this guy — she is such an open book, I really hate this guy for not getting it.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right, our final Three Page Challenge of the day comes from Kevin Pinkerton.

**Craig:** Pinkerton.

**John:** It’s called The Morning Briefing. And I will attempt to give a summary here.

So, we start on the Pentagon Basement Corridor.

**Craig:** Wait, did you say Pentag-AN.

**John:** Pentag-ON.

**Craig:** Pentagon. You said Pentigan.

**John:** I did say Pentagan. That doesn’t make any sense at all. I rhymed it with Alyson Hannigan and Bennigan’s.

**Craig:** [laughs] Bennigan’s. Exactly. Or it’s like Houlihan O’Reilly, or that guy, one of the biggest financiers in Hollywood? What was his name? Houlihan Lokey or something?

**John:** Yeah, something like that.

**Craig:** That’s great. Pentagan!

**John:** So, we’re at the Pentagon Basement Corridor, and the president is walking next to a Special Forces Sergeant. They’re appearing and disappearing into pools of light. The president wipes his forehead with a red, white, and blue handkerchief.

They come to an unmarked door. The president says, “Let’s get this over with.”

Inside is a chamber. It’s sort of dark and ominous inside. And, in fact, on a low circular dais is a creature, a giant creature — looks like it’s made of rotted meat in over-muscled humanoid form. There are also children on bleachers who are chained there watching, and terrified.

The president expects this creature to be there, and the president says, “Begin.” The creature gives the president advice about what’s happening in the future. And so tells him to, “Deploy the ships to Bosporus. Acquiescence is certain.”

The president asks about press reaction. So, basically this monstrous creature is an advisor who has some ability to see into the future. And so at the end the president thanks him to some degree, but also says, the creature is hungry, and the president agrees, okay, well, you can eat the children. And then the president leaves and we hear in the background the sounds of the children being eaten by this monstrous creature.

**Craig:** I love this.

**John:** I loved it, too.

**Craig:** I loved it.

**John:** And let’s talk about reasons why we love this.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, just from a craft point of view, it’s really well written. At first I was nervous because on the first page it seems like, oh no, this is just a bad version of a Roland Emmerich movie, because they’re doing that thing where they walk down the hall, “lit overhead by a row of dim bulbs.” And I’m like, dim bulbs?

He’s got a red, white, and blue handkerchief which feels like…

**John:** Yeah. I flagged that, too. I was like, oh, no, no, no, that’s cheesy, but then I was like, no, it’s deliberately cheesy.

**Craig:** Deliberate, exactly. It’s deliberate, which is great, because it’s a choice, and it’s a smart choice given what we’re about to see. And then we go into this room, and again, I’ve seen this room in the basement of the White House before, so everything just feels like, oh god, I’ve seen it…and then there’s like an alien there. Oh no, but then there’s these kids. And I’m like, well, what the hell is that about?

A dozen children, and I love how unapologetic Kevin is here — he doesn’t pull a punch at all. “a DOZEN CHILDREN, ages five to seven,” [laughs], the cutest age, “wide-eyed and weeping in horror at the thing before them, as they sit gagged and chained to their seats.” Brilliant. I love how audacious this guy is.

And then the president snaps his finger at the creature and one word, “Begin.” So, you know, here’s just so you guys playing at home, the home game, what I love about this line, it’s the first line of dialogue, or rather the second line, and it is, “Begin.” And what that line tells us is this has happened before. In fact, this is so frequent that the president is actually annoyed. It’s like, “I don’t have time, let’s go, begin.”

That is such a great tonal shift, because we’ve been set up to believe that this is like so horrifying, like the way in Independence Day they visit that alien that they’ve captured and it’s like so super serious. This guy is like, “Begin, let’s go.”

And the creature delivers these predictions. And the funny thing about the predictions, even though it’s not done funny funny, is that they’re so mundane. “Press reaction?”

“Acceptable.” [laughs] It made me laugh. “On the crux of the Senate standoff, the weak vote…” The creature is like a Beltway insider at this point, which is so great. He even gives a weather prediction.

**John:** Yeah, so the creature says, “Thunderstorms in the D.C. Metro area. Hail.”

**Craig:** Hail!

**John:** “But I’ve scheduled a speech.”

“I have seen the storm. It is already cut on the lathe of time. What more? Enough.”

**Craig:** On the lathe of time! I know. The creature is like, “Get out, I’ve given you…stop questioning me.” And the president is trying to figure out exactly, like his concern isn’t about the world, or any of that stuff, his issue is he’s got a speech and it’s supposed to hail. [laughs] It’s like, “Are you telling me? I just want to be clear.” And then he’s like, “Back to the Russians.”

Creature: Tired.

“I just want to be clue, the carriers, the Russians won’t be –”

Creature: Hungry.

And the president is like, “Eh.”

**John:** So, let’s talk, I do have a little bit of some criticisms here. On page one, “THE PRESIDENT walks beside a SPECIAL FORCES SERGEANT.” Well, how are we going to know he’s the president? We’re not necessarily going to know he’s the president. So, you’re telling us he’s the president. I’m not sure we’re going to necessarily get that originally. And it’s very important that we know that he’s the president.

So, you may want to throw in a, “Mr. President,” like he comes out of the elevator, “Mr. President,” just let us know. Because it’s much funnier if we know from the first frame that he’s the president.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The overall more general concern: this was a tremendous little sketch, a little moment. There’s nothing there that leads me to believe that this is a good sustainable idea over the course of a full-length movie, but I kind of don’t care, because I’ve enjoyed reading these three pages so much that I want to read the next pages.

And that’s, there’s a lot to be said for that. Kevin had a perspective, and a voice, and it was enjoyable to read. And these are — it felt confident. And, god, just give me some confidence…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** …and I will just keep reading.

**Craig:** Such a great point. I mean, he is totally in control of this. And he is unapologetic, and specific, and frankly, there’s just a lot of craft. I really like the way the dialogue flows. There’s a great rhythm to it. And we cannot teach that to anybody. There’s just a really smart rhythm to it. I can tell you that Kevin is a funny guy. He’s a very funny writer. I thought it was really good.

And I think, if I were to predict what this kind of movie is, it feels a little bit like those early — you ever see the early Peter Jackson.

**John:** Oh yeah, early Peter Jackson.

**Craig:** Just like over-the-top comedy/horror/grotesque/funny, obviously satirical. I think it’s really cool. And I think Kevin did a great job.

**John:** I think so, too. It reminds me of sort of mid-era Whedon or sort of like the Buffy and Angel sort of at their peak. This would be like the cold teaser opening to something and you’d meet, like the new villain of the season would be the president and he would have this monster. And that would be the villain for the season, or half the season.

It felt great and solid that way.

**Craig:** Yeah, very cool.

**John:** Nicely done, Kevin. And nicely done, Stuart, for picking that sample for us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s so nice to leave on a high note.

**Craig:** On a high note. Left on a high note. Well, well done Kevin Pinkerton.

**John:** I have a Cool Thing this week. My Cool Thing is actually, this is going to sound really self-indulgent, but it’s a book that I’m featured in. It’s a book called The FilmCraft Book of Screenwriting. And, as we’ve talked about on the show, I don’t like most books on screenwriting. And what’s nice about this book is it’s just a bunch of interviews with a bunch of screenwriters. And so there’s me, there’s Billy Ray, there’s Whit Stillman, there’s Mark Baumbach, Guillermo Arriaga.

It’s a really nicely put together, really pretty, pretty book that this British publisher put together. It’s $20 and it’s actually kind of great. And so I have an interview in there where I’m talking about sort of different movies I’ve worked on and sort of process, but everyone else is really fascinating and great, too.

And so if you’re looking for a book on screenwriting, or want to give a gift of a book on screenwriting, I think it’s actually a really well put together book. So, edited and written together by Tim Grierson. And there will be a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Oh, I also have to say, it also has the most misleading cover in the history of any book you’ve ever seen. So, the cover is Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett in Bed from Benjamin Button. And it’s this incredibly sexy shot. And it says Screenwriting over the top of it. [laughs] It’s like there is nothing sexy at all about screenwriting.

And so this was waiting for me when I got back from Chicago. I opened the envelope and I’m like, what the hell is this? And I had no idea that I was featured in it. Then I found it inside and it was good.

**Craig:** Nice. I’m cool-less this week. But it’s such a big podcast.

**John:** It was a big podcast.

**Craig:** Maybe my Cool Thing this week is Vinny Bruzzese.

**John:** It’s a great name.

**Craig:** Vinny. I love…Vinny is like, “You know what? I’m busy. I’m smoking. I love Diet Dr. Pepper, but sometimes I also like Diet Coke.”

**John:** Yeah. Mix them together it’s good.

**Craig:** Boom. “Open, hey, genie, I want both. Give me both. Open them both! And Camels.”

I don’t know why I imagine Vinny yelling at genie.

**John:** Because he probably does.

**Craig:** He might.

**John:** He might.

**Craig:** But he may be a very soft-spoken guy. The point is, I love him. I love this guy.

**John:** I love him, too.

**Craig:** He’s cool.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. If you have questions about anything we’ve talked about, including how to submit Three Page Challenge samples, or this book I just hyped, or any of the Three Page entries that we talked about today, you can find them all at johnaugust.com/podcast.

This was Episode 88, but there’s 87 episodes before this if you want to go back through and look at them.

If you are not subscribing to us in iTunes you probably should, because that way we know that you’re subscribing in iTunes and other people can find us. So, look us up on iTunes at Scriptnotes.

And we will be back next week. And next week I think we’re going to have exciting news about our 100th episode live show.

**Craig:** Very excited.

**John:** Which could be very exciting, because we got a great email today. So, I think that could work out nicely.

**Craig:** It could. Could!

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. And welcome home.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [Turning the Page: Storytelling in the Digital Age](http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2013/05/turning-page.html) at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater
* [Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/06/business/media/solving-equation-of-a-hit-film-script-with-data.html?hp&_r=0) by Brooks Barnes
* Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s [Black swan theory](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory) on Wikipedia
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script format](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* Three Pages by [Sue Morris](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SueMorris.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Robin Peters](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/RobinPeters.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Kevin Pinkerton](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KevinPinkerton.pdf)
* [FilmCraft Screenwriting](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0240824865/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Tim Grierson on Amazon
* OUTRO: Thompson Twins’ [Doctor Doctor covered by Danny McEvoy](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpHAgyUKn-0)