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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/a-city-born-of-fire).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 83 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, I think this is a first for us, because this is the first time where not only are we not in the same space, but we are not even in our usual home cities. We are both on the road.

**Craig:** We’re both on the road. This is a road game for both of us. We are in, I believe, the first and second great cities of this United States.

**John:** They’re pretty amazing cities. You’re in New York City, right?

**Craig:** Yes ma’am.

**John:** I’m in Chicago.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And I’m here in Chicago. We’re doing Big Fish. I don’t even know why you’re in New York. You’re just seeing musicals? What are you doing?

**Craig:** You know, took a little short, short three/four day jaunt out here just to see some friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time. This is my hometown. And, also, yeah, I did want to see a couple of show and I’m visiting Scott Frank on the set of his new movie that he wrote and is directing called A Walk Among the Tombstones.

**John:** Very exciting. Tonight is also a special podcast because it’s the second ever podcast in which we’ve had a special guest here with us. Our special guest today is Derek Haas who is the screenwriter, along with his writing partner Michael Brandt, of movies like Wanted and 3:10 to Yuma. He co-created Chicago Fire. And also is a novelist. He has a book out right now called The Right Hand. Derek Haas, welcome to our podcast.

**Derek Haas:** I am thrilled to be here as a giant fan of this podcast. It is fun to watch the sausage get made.

**John:** So, I want to talk about Chicago Fire. I want to talk about screenwriting. I want to talk about book writing. We have a couple of things that were already on our agenda before you agreed this morning to be on our podcast, so you can join on these topics as well, all right?

**Craig:** No!

**John:** First off I want to talk about some comments that Amy Pascal made at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center about sort of responsibility in terms of using gay slurs in movies.

Second, I want to talk about refrigerator logic. Refrigerator logic is something we hear a lot in terms of movies and TV shows. I have sort of a special case with Big Fish that we’re doing right now called “balcony logic” that I want to talk through.

And then we’ll talk special stuff with our special guest, because we have a person here who has done movies, and now television, and writes books. And so I want to talk about the differences between those.

So, let’s get started. First off, Craig, you had emailed me this last week about it was a Deadline Hollywood article recapping what Amy Pascal said. It was the March 21 LA Gay & Lesbian Center Fundraiser. And it was actually a pretty long speech, but one of the things she said — the quote that started getting excepted — was, “How about next time when any of us are reading a script and it says words like ‘fag,’ or ‘faggot,’ or ‘homo,’ or ‘dyke,’ take out a pencil and just cross it out.” That was sort of the excerpted quote.

And so it raised the issue of responsibility and to what degree are filmmakers, writers, studios responsible for the kinds of words we’re using in our work. And since you highlighted, Craig, what are you thinking?

**Craig:** This is what she said that I thought was right. She said, look, there are a lot of moments in movies where gay or lesbian characters, or transsexual characters, or transgender characters are either a joke, or are pathological and are a punch line. And that words like “fag” are essentially a joke of weakness, and that’s true. That has been the case for a long, long time.

So, on the one hand, I think she’s right to say that joke should end. Now, is it the bravest stance to make now? No, because it’s not as funny anymore. The thing about comedy is that things stop being funny at some point.

When Don Rickles used to go out and make fun of people’s race in a way that was off, it was funny then. It’s less so funny now. Whereas somehow Lisa Lampanelli manages to still make it kind of funny because it’s almost like it’s meta, like I’m making fun of racism while I am racist. So, funny is funny, not funny is not funny. And just simply saying “fag,” that joke is done. It’s just not funny anymore.

But there is a question that I want to put back to you, because one of the things I thought was odd was that she was also calling out movies in which characters are gay but tragic in some way, and she was sort of saying, “And that’s no good either.” But, I don’t know, my thing is tragic characters are why we make movies. They’re interesting.

So, she was singling out Brokeback Mountain, The Talented Mr. Ripley, My Own Private Idaho. Some of these movies were made by gay people, like for instance My Own Private Idaho. And I’m not sure that we should be replacing casual homophobia and gay as silly and funny in a pejorative with an over-fastidiousness so that gay characters have to somehow be saintly. I don’t know if it’s worse, but it’s certainly no more desirable to me.

**John:** I would agree with you on many of your points. The challenge becomes how do you represent a group of people who historically have been sort of either underrepresented or poorly represented on screen without sort of deifying them in a way that doesn’t feel good and appropriate.

So, as a gay person, I guess I’m allowed to say all those words, but I get really uncomfortable seeing any of those words in our media. I don’t like to see them in movies. I certainly don’t like to see them on television. I get a little bit frustrated, but obviously any Deadline Hollywood comments section is going to be a disaster anyway.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. For sure.

**John:** So, you don’t want to sort of go there for your insights into humanity, but I get frustrated with the cries of like, “Oh, this is censorship,” or “This is ridiculous,” or “It’s not reflecting reality,” where it’s like, well, no. If someone raises a challenge saying let’s not use these words because they’re really stupid words that aren’t helpful in how we’re going to portray — how we’re going to make our movies — that’s not censorship. That’s someone saying like let’s not use those words. And it’s not government coming in and saying you cannot use those words anymore.

Derek, you’re making a TV show right now. You couldn’t use any of those words in your TV show.

**Derek:** No, we couldn’t. But I do get uncomfortable with the notion that something needs to be crossed out of the script when it’s really — it’s not the author making a statement as much as it is sometimes a character that makes a statement. And you want to show a guy as a villain, or a guy as an idiot, or uneducated, and through the course of history you have the bad guy kick a dog, or you have the bad guy do something, you know, a bully to a student.

And to just say unilaterally we’re not going to do that anymore because somebody might get offended, I get worried about that kind of stuff. I remember I wrote in a book once that the train station in Naples was a toilet in a bathroom town, and I got an email from someone from Naples. And it said, “How could you say this about my city?”

And I said, “I didn’t say this about your city, this character said it in the book.” And it was that character’s point of view. It wasn’t my point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the one area where we just have to make sure that our scruples don’t impact what we do. The job of Hollywood isn’t to create some sort of Disneyland of happiness where bad things don’t happen. Quite the opposite. Drama relies on bad things. Drama relies on bad people. And even if you’re not talking about villains, even if you’re talking about a hero, a lot of times drama relies on complicated human beings, anti-heroes sometimes who are difficult people.

And we are fascinated by that. We’re fascinated by the audacious. So, the one thing that she said though that I thought was correct, and this is hard, I think, for a lot of writers in particular is that sexuality and sexual orientation specifically doesn’t need to be some sort of defining characteristic. It doesn’t have to metastasize to become the point of that character.

Frankly, it was the two I guess you’d say lead characters in Go that were the first gay characters I saw who were gay incidental to everything about what they were doing, which was — and no surprise that it took a gay man to write those characters initially, I think. I mean, I’m sure there were characters before that, John, but those were the first ones I saw on screen where it was like, well that’s — in fact, it was so unique that I remember thinking, “Huh, it’s almost like a twist,” you know, that they were gay. And who cares?

So, I would love to see, I think as we as a society become so unconcerned with it, it’s almost like this latest thing over marriage and everything, everything that’s going on right now is the last gasp of an old way of thinking that we will all be so bored with sexual orientation as we ought to be that we’ll start to see this more and more as being gay will be right up there with wearing glasses, or being bald.

So, that was a good thing to sort of call out.

**John:** Stepping back from the gay conversation specifically and turn to what words we use, I know I’ve hit this, and I suspect both of you have encountered this at some point. If you have a character say “retarded” anymore, you will get an incredible outpouring of criticism for any character saying “retarded” anymore. It’s become one of those incredibly loaded words, to the degree where like even if, “A descent is retarded by air resistance,” I will get people saying, “You can’t use that word, ‘retarded.'” It’s like, no, that’s actually what it means; it means to be slowed down.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s like there was a city councilman near Oakland who got in trouble, or it was an official who lost his job because he used the word “niggardly,” which is from a Swedish rude word that just means stingy. Oh, god.

**John:** Yeah, I’m very mindful that we have to be careful that we don’t set such fences around certain words that we can’t even have the characters say them anymore. That’s obviously a huge concern. And so it’s become to the point where like I don’t want to enter that fight anymore, so I won’t have a character say that word anymore. I don’t know that I’m making the world a better or a worse place for not using the word anymore; I just know I don’t want to deal with those conversations anymore, so I will find a way around that.

I don’t think that’s good for writing. I don’t think it’s good for — it’s just good for my choices in terms of what I’m going to spend my time fighting.

**Craig:** I don’t mind taking that fight. We’ll talk about, you know, I’m having my little Broadway week and just saw Book of Mormon. And even though it wasn’t news to me because I’ve listened to the soundtrack so many times, that’s a show that doesn’t shy away from words that otherwise people tell you you can’t use.

And I think we should not deprive ourselves of the right to be audacious, or to be transgressive. And so I’m willing to fight. I’m willing to fight as long as I feel like it is audacious. There’s nothing audacious about a gay slur anymore. It’s just old and boring.

**John:** And lazy.

The next topic I want to get to is refrigerator logic. And so refrigerator logic is one of those tropes that you can see if you go to tvtropes.com you will see all the tropes that you sort of see in TV shows and movies again, and again, and again. And one of them is refrigerator logic. And that is the idea that something will make sense as you’re sort of watching it, and then later on, like a half an hour after the show has ended and you’re at your refrigerator, staring at your refrigerator, you go, “Wait, how could you have gotten from Melbourne to Los Angeles in half an hour?”

It’s the logic that makes sense while you’re watching it an then actually sort of falls apart while you’re looking into your refrigerator. And so I looked up sort of the history of it, and apparently it comes from what Hitchcock calls an “Icebox Scene.” And an icebox scene is something that after the fact you realize like didn’t actually make sense, but it worked in the course of the story at the time.

A weird thing that I am encountering right now as we’re doing Big Fish, and so we’re in our last week of tech rehearsal, and actually by the time this podcast airs, Tuesday is our opening day, so I will be a puddle of anxiety on the floor.

**Derek:** I’m going that night. Take that, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Derek Haas gets to go there. Our first performance. One of the fascinating things I’m encountering right now is we’ve been though the show so many times and I’ve described it on the podcast before that it’s like a combination of production and post-production where every day you’re making new stuff, but you’re also just going back over the same thing again, again, and again. It’s like you’re looking at the Avid except it’s live people in front of you and you’re sort of moving around and making little tiny cuts.

But one of the things we’re encountering this last week is the difference between being in a rehearsal studio and watching something, and being like back in the audience, or in this case being on the balcony watching something, there are moments that make perfect sense when you’re ten feet away that make much less sense when you’re 50 feet away. And sometimes you have to change something because it doesn’t make sense from 50 feet away. So, I’m calling it balcony logic.

And it’s just such a different thing that we encounter in movies or TV because in movies or TV we cut to the close up or we add a loop line to make something clear. And here you have to make sure like is it clear what that prop that person is holding from a distance is? Is it clear that he is talking about his father who is that person over there? Do I need to change that pronoun back to “my father” so we clear up who he’s really referring to, because if you can’t really see who he’s pointing to or who he’s nodding his head to, that it’s the same character.

It’s been really fascinating to bump in to. And so I wanted to have a little conversation about refrigerator logic and those little things that you don’t necessarily notice when you’re writing on the page, that make perfect sense on the page, but are different in real life. And, Derek, maybe you can start with this, because you must encounter this all the time shooting episode after episode of your TV show.

**Derek:** Yeah, now with TV the thing that I wasn’t ready for, because this is our first year to ever do it, and we’re about to shoot our 22nd episode, so now I feel like an old hat — a year later. But how rapid the process is, and therefore how rapid the notes are, and how you’ll have to get a network and a studio’s notes with only a couple of days to spare before we’re going to go shoot this thing.

And what I’ve really tried to do in this refrigerator logic scenario is try to maintain the idea that I don’t care if the dumbest person doesn’t get what’s going on. And I think a lot of times the notes will default to, “Well, I understand what this is, but I’m not sure the dumbest person in America is going to understand what this is, so you guys need to put in a loop line that says he’s his brother.”

And one of the big fights that we’ll have is we’ll say, “We don’t care.” If the dumbest person doesn’t get it, that doesn’t matter to me. I want the smart people to be serviced in this idea. So, you’re always walking a thin line.

**John:** Well, I want to distinguish a little between you’re talking notes that somebody gives about this moment, like the smartest person in the room, there’s a line in The Nines saying, “I didn’t think we were making it for dumb people.”

**Derek:** Right.

**John:** And that’s very much the case. And looping is often kind of there for the dumb people, like someone might not get it. Or the argument that TV is sort of like radio with pictures and you should be able to understand it even if you’re in the other room making an omelet.

One of the things that I think has been great about TV over the last decade is we’ve gotten away from that. And so you really do actually have to watch the show in order to understand stuff and it’s more sophisticated.

**Derek:** Yeah, that’s what I was going to say. We always resort to the “no one in the world is going to think that.” That’s what we’ll say back to the studio. “No one in the world is going to wonder whether or not he’s his brother. So, we’re just going to keep it as it is,” which is never a good thing when you get to that point.

**Craig:** Well, you know, there’s this book called Everything Bad is Good for You. And one of the theories is that the narrative of television and movies has become so much more complicated that it is good for your brain to keep track of it all.

You look at a show like Game of Thrones, and you find yourself actually doing the math as required at the speed it is required. If you were to actually sit down and write the names of every character on that show that you’ve been following, or The Wire, or The Sopranos, you would be shocked at how many storylines you can keep a track of.

And there’s two issues going on here. One is the teaching to the slowest kid in the room theory, because yes, it is very frustrating for dummies to not know what’s going on. It is also frustrating for plugged in audience members to feel like they’re being spoon fed stuff. There’s nothing worse than a character on screen telling you something you already know.

So, who are you pitching the movie towards? And that’s something that you have to figure out. There’s this other thing going on which is actual logic problems in a narrative. When we’re writing things, sometimes we want to do something. He’s here and we really — we know that what this movie needs is for him to be over here in the next scene doing this. The problem is it doesn’t make sense. It would be dramatically satisfying, if only it made sense. So, you have to figure out how to make sense of it, or not.

And now here’s the tricky part, because movies unlike stage, which is unfolding in real time, movies are elliptic –they’re dream like. And you can play around with things. And there are times when, frankly, you can just get away with it. It’s a saccade basically, and they won’t notice, or they don’t care. Then there are other times they will notice and they do care and you have to figure out the difference. You have to have a sense of what the difference is.

In general I find that screenwriters are far more — far more — interested and capable of logic than directors. I find that a lot of directors just think that if you just keep moving the pace, energy, vision, and sound will make the rest of it not quite as important. And sometimes I find myself arguing for logic, because I just feel like, “Well, but that just…”

And I’m kind of curious what you guys have to say about this. I don’t get into fights about much, but I will plant my flag if something is just incorrect. If it’s illogical to the point where anybody at home would say, “This movie didn’t need to happen because of that.” I just don’t want these fatal flaws in there. And I lose sometimes. I lose big.

**John:** I think the dream logic thing is a crucial argument because what you’re saying is you don’t want there to be such a fundamental flaw that pierces the little bubble of dream that you’ve created in the movie.

If it sticks out so much that you cannot continue to suspend disbelief in the movie, because like, “well that’s actually impossible,” then that’s going to be a huge problem. And other things you are willing to sort of let slide because within the course of the world it could possibly be true. So, a small example would be like your character is capable of flying a helicopter. It’s like, well, you haven’t set up that he can fly a helicopter, it may be a stretch.

But if the character is like an adventurous type of person it’s like, okay, you believe he can fly a helicopter. But if that suburban house mom is flying a helicopter, you’re not going to accept that. And it’s now going to be like the refrigerator that you’re going to have the question, “No way is that soccer mom flying a helicopter. I know a helicopter is too difficult to fly.”

**Derek:** But you as the writer, you have such an opportunity to go back and put in what you need to put in to make that scene in the second act, or the third act, work. So, a lot of times you’re such a slave to your outline that you think, “Oh well, I didn’t set up that she could fly a helicopter, so therefore no wonder the director is bumping on page 60 when I have her flying a helicopter.”

But you as the writer can go back in to page 12 and make it so that she has an army background, and you might not have known this but before she was a housewife she was a spy. Whatever you need to do to fix the logic, it doesn’t matter what you had in your outline; if you want somebody to get from point A to point B as Craig described, and it doesn’t make sense on page 60, well that’s usually a page 12 problem.

**Craig:** But, I’ll say though that sometimes the fixes are so awful because you’re attempting to fix logic, and you’re fixing it, but in doing so all you’re really doing is introducing a logic fix. And my favorite example is in Batman & Robin, which we all remember fondly; they wanted Mr. Freeze to be looking for a cure for his wife. His wife had a fatal disease called McGregor Syndrome. Terrible name.

**Derek:** Okay. Okay.

**Craig:** And she was going to die, so he froze her. And everything he’s doing is to find a cure for McGregor Syndrome so that he can thaw her out, give her the cure, and get his wife back. Okay. Fine.

They wanted very much to put Batman on some sort of ticking clock disease-wise to tie him into that whole story. So, they decided let’s give him McGregor Syndrome. The problem is, of course, if you give Batman McGregor Syndrome, he’s going to die, too, because there’s no cure. Ah ha!

Okay, so what should we do? We need to have a situation where they can be a cure for Batman for McGregor Syndrome but there can’t be a cure for Mrs. Freeze, because you know, it’s not going to happen.

**Derek:** “You’re a popsicle.”

**Craig:** “Everybody chill.” Now, it may have been Alfred that had McGregor Syndrome. Regardless, here was their logic fix: There’s a McGregor Syndrome Stage 1, and a McGregor Syndrome Stage 2. And Mrs. Freeze has McGregor Syndrome Stage 2.

Now, I’m sorry, but that just stinks. It’s so stinks. It stinks on ice!

**John:** Yeah. That’s story shoe leather. You’ve introduced a whole other sort of journey that we have to go on to accommodate one very small thing. But, Derek, you write books, and so I would say some of the stuff that we’re talking about here, it could be frustrating and challenging because we’re doing it in a very time-based sort of medium is much simpler to do in a novel. Is that correct?

**Derek:** Yeah, well, there’s no deadline. The deadline is of your making. I do remember in the first book that I wrote, The Silver Bear, I needed the main character to find this guy he hadn’t seen in 20 years. And when I got to that point in the book I went back into the earlier part of the book and I put in basically a mistake that the guy had said when they first met that would give away where his hometown was.

And it was one of those things where I didn’t — you know, refrigerator logic, I didn’t have an answer, and it would have taken me, you know, I would have had to manufacture a chapter of how to hunt this guy down, or I could back in and put a sentence in earlier that made it seem like, oh wow, he planned this all the way from the beginning, but, I didn’t…

**John:** I would just say like in a book you have abilities to do things we just can’t do in film and TV. Like in film and TV we’re limited to what you can see and what you can hear. You have introspection in ways that are just completely different.

**Derek:** Good point.

**John:** And so if you want to say that this guy can fly a helicopter, one sentence.

**Derek:** Exactly.

**John:** “Back when he learned to fly a helicopter in,” whatever, could do it, like in a clause you could take care of that problem. It doesn’t have to be a scene. It doesn’t have to be a line of dialogue. It’s actually just part of the book’s [power].

**Derek:** Craig, I have a question for you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Derek:** How many years of doing this podcast did it take to get to a Batman & Robin example?

**Craig:** The entire length of it. So, however long we’ve been doing it we are now at T-minus zero, finally.

**Derek:** Okay, perfect.

**John:** The podcast officially began today with our Batman & Robin thing.

So, refrigerator logic, I want to go back to that definition. So, it’s the kind of thing which you’re willing to let pass as you encounter it in a story. And it’s only afterwards, like, “Huh? Okay.” So, one of the classic examples is Sydney Bristow in Alias, like somehow she’s able to get form place to place just sort of magically teleport. Like whatever plane/flight she’s taking are happening faster than the speed of light because she’s able to get around and stuff.

But you just sort of accept it because that’s sort of the thrill of the show.

**Derek:** They do those in the spy movies all the time, be it Bourne or in Bond where we want to see an awesome action sequence, but we don’t really want to see how this guy packed his luggage and got on the plane to Belize, and then went through the airport customs…

**Craig:** Right.

**Derek:** And then somehow he’s got his gun still. We don’t want to think about those things, so audiences have accepted that they can just show up.

**John:** And travel has sort of gotten cut out of movies almost all together, which is mostly a good thing. The old movies you used to see them packing their bags, and go to the airport, and fly the plane. We needed to have all of that stuff to fill in there.

But I think excerpting all those sequences, we’ve also sort of accepted the idea that it takes any time to go any place, which can be a little bit frustrating.

**Craig:** We also don’t watch anyone eat anymore. And we’ve never watched anyone go to the bathroom.

**Derek:** That’s why Pulp Fiction, that was such a great shocking scene showing Travolta sitting on the toilet reading a book.

**Craig:** Yeah. Right.

**Derek:** And that’s a good thing to your listeners from a screenwriting standpoint is, okay, if no one is showing us how somebody gets on an airplane anymore, well show us an interesting one, because that’s going to cut through the clutter of what everybody else is reading.

**John:** And the second topic, sort of the derivative topic, is balcony logic, which is really that thing where if you aren’t clear what somebody is doing you can sometimes just stop paying attention. If you sort of get off the train a little bit, like you don’t know what somebody is taking about, you don’t know who they’re talking about, you can just sort of slide off the train. And that’s something that we would usually do in post-production.

It’s like you’re watching a scene and it’s like, “I don’t remember — I can’t actually focus on what they’re talking about. I can’t see what that is — can you give me a close up of that thing?” We don’t have any close ups in theater, so it’s been really interesting to have to sometimes create the close up, either by re-referencing something, or literally just changing a prop, like, “That key is too small, I can’t see it from the balcony. We need a bigger key.”

**Craig:** We need a giant key!

**John:** Literally, the key now, the key to the city of Ashton is pretty damn big now. That’s the way it needs to be so you can actually see it in the back row.

**Craig:** There is…no, go ahead.

**John:** No, you go, Craig.

**Craig:** Well, there’s this other thing, there’s another phrase that’s also tangentially related to all of this called “pie talk.” And I don’t know if Gore Verbinski coined it or not, but I heard it first from Ted Elliott who heard it from Gore Verbinski. Pie talk is this: You see the movie, and then you go out to dinner with your friends and you have pie, and you start to talk about the movie over pie because there’s something you’re still trying to figure out.

And the difference between refrigerator logic, which is a “wait a second, that doesn’t make any sense,” and pie talk is “the movie does make sense, but they’ve left out certain things.” You can therefore retroactively explain it if you talk about it, because all the things are there for you to piece the mystery together, but they haven’t necessarily spelled it all out, so it’s not inconsistent; it’s just incomplete.

And I kind of like that idea.

**John:** There is a related concept to refrigerator logic called “refrigerator horror,” which is sort of as the story is finished, and you watched the story and enjoyed the story for what it was, that if you actually think about the repercussions of what it actually means for the world, it’s like, “Oh my god, that world is horrifying. That person’s father is dead forever!”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, you recognize that all the stuff that is not sort of part of the story but as a natural consequence to the story that would happen can often be just kind of terrible. You watch people survive the story, but the world is irrevocably awful.

**Craig:** My favorite of those, and it’s not even the world, it’s just about one person. And I love Titanic. I love the movie. And she has this amazing romance on the ship with Jack and then he dies. And she goes on and lives this wonderful long life with her husband, and we see pictures of them going all over the world. I mean, whoever this man was, he was with this woman for 70 years, you know? [laughs] And then he died.

And she takes this little trip on the boat, drops the thing in the water, dies, and spends the rest of eternity with Leonardo DiCaprio. And where is this guy? He’s just like, “What?! I was faithful to you. I supported you. I loved you. We made vows to each other! And I’m alone for eternity, and you’re with a guy you knew for a day.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s not fair.

**Derek:** I always think about that kid in The Sixth Sense. He’s like, you know, he finally solves the mystery, or Bruce Willis find out, “Oh, I’m a ghost,” it’s cool. And then I just think about this poor kid who has to walk around town seeing ghosts…

**John:** The whole rest of his life.

**Derek:** …the whole rest of his life.

**Craig:** They addressed it a little bit because it seems like now he’s friends with all the ghosts, and he’s like, “Hey!” He’s like, you know, the guy who’s walking through a party like, “What’s up, Jimmy?”

**Derek:** Yeah, until the next one comes by with a severed head.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you know, it’s like, “I get it.” [laughs] He gets it.

**Derek:** [laughs] This podcast is making me hungry.

**John:** Mm, food.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** We’re in Chicago, home of great pizza. So, where should we get pizza here?

**Derek:** We went to Pizzeria Uno yesterday, and I know it’s a tourist trap, but man that pizza is good.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. This is disgusting to me.

**Derek:** Pizano’s is the best.

**Craig:** Chicago is the home of no-good pizza. Chicago pizza is…oh, maybe now some people will write in and be upset. Tough. Chicago pizza is disgusting. It’s not pizza at all. New York pizza is pizza. That’s it. Period. The end. I don’t care wherever you go.

Chicago makes me so angry, because they are so proud of their terrible pizza. Just don’t be proud of it. Just say, “Oh, we have pizza.” Like Los Angeles has pizza, they’re not proud of it. They’re like, “Yeah, I know. Okay, it’s whatever. Do you want it or not?”

**John:** Craig, you’ll be happy to know that we went to California Pizza Kitchen yesterday with the kid, just so she could have sort of her normal thing.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** We didn’t even do pizza. She had like the terrible macaroni and cheese.

**Craig:** Fine.

**John:** We’re doing it right and wrong, just the way you like it.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Derek, because we have you here, we need to take advantage of the sort of special opportunity you give us. So, why did you do a TV show after never doing a TV show? How has it been? What’s the difference? Should people write TV shows? Should Craig and I stop trying to make movies and just make TV shows? Tell us the secrets.

**Derek:** We got lucky because Dick Wolf basically called us and said, “I’ve already set up a show at NBC this year, and basically all I have is it’s going to be about firemen. And we want you guys to do it.” So, we talked to NBC. We said we don’t know anything about firemen, but we should set it in Chicago because the city is born out of fire. It’s got such a rich fire history, so put us on a plane and let us meet firemen and get to know Chicago.

And so we came here and we spent three weeks riding around, doing 24 hour shifts with firemen. And we realized, “Oh, there’s a great opportunity for a show here in the vein of ER or Hill Street Blues, that doesn’t have quite the cynicism that Rescue Me had.”

And so we have been loving it. This is our first year to do it. All of the adages are true about that the writer is the boss and the writer is the king in TV, whereas in a movie you’re servicing the director. In television the directors are servicing you. And the speed from which it happens in that Michael and I will write a scene on a Wednesday, that they’ll shoot on Thursday, that will literally be on air the next Wednesday — it’s incredible.

I didn’t realize we could reshoot as much as we have, or fit in an extra — you know, if we see something in a cut and we’re a week away from shooting and we realize, like you said, your balcony logic, we realize, “Well nobody is going to realize he’s holding a key.” Well, we can quickly insert a shot of a key. And that’s something when we made and independent movie we just couldn’t do. You know, once we were done we were done. There was no redeeming it at that point.

And so the speed and the amount of words that I’ve had of mine on a screen in this year, it’s made it really worth it. And we have a great cast and crew. So, I’m just ecstatic about the whole experience.

**John:** I was nervous when you set up the show because I had not had a good experience working with Dick Wolf; you had a much better experience. I’m so happy that you’ve had a good experience working with him. But the reason why I thought you would do great at TV is you are incredibly prolific. So for people who don’t know, I mean, Derek writes a ton of movies, but independently of all that he also writes his books.

And so somehow you’re able to just keep generating words and the tap never seems to stop. And that’s what you need for TV.

**Derek:** We got lucky because we hired one of our best friends, Matt Olmstead, who had done four years show-running NYPD Blue and then four years of Prison Break, and then did the show Breakout Kings, and he just happened to be available at the same time as our show got picked up. So, we talked to Dick, and we got Matt. And Matt, Michael, and I have pretty much show-run the show for a year.

And we have a staff with five other writers and they’re great. But, yeah, the sheer amount of — the volume of which you have to… — We got 24 episodes, which usually you start with 13 and then you get a back nine, and then they want us to do two more. And I cannot believe how much work it is to do. Every eight days we’re shooting a new movie basically. And we have an awesome producer. And definitely the Dick Wolf machine helped because he’s done so much television that he already has the post in place, and the casting in place, and all of those kinds of things.

So, some of the things that you’d have to stress over, we didn’t have to stress over. But, yeah, it’s a lot of work, but I love it.

**John:** Talk us through the process in terms of from conception of an episode, to the writing, to the shooting, to the post. What is that process? And so how much time is in the room together? Who’s leading the room? How does that all work?

**Derek:** Yeah, we don’t have a room in the traditional sense of like a comedy room where you’re in there and everybody is spitballing jokes. We pretty much broke out the first 13 episodes all in a week or week and a half based on stories of us all — we brought all the writers to Chicago. They all rode around with paramedics and with firemen. And so we just put all of those stories up on the board and looked at our characters and said, “Okay, here’s 13 episodes, here’s 10 characters; how can they all interrelate?”

Once we had those, we assigned episodes to writers. And so Michael and I said, “Okay, we’ll do the second one, we’ll do the seventh one, we’ll do the 13th one.” And then other writers took other episodes. And then we turn in outlines just like you would in a movie. And then we work off of the outline.

**John:** How long is an outline for your shows?

**Derek:** The outline is usually like eight or nine pages. But, you know, a script is only 50 pages. So, it’s pretty much everything but the dialogue.

**John:** And are you four acts or five act?

**Derek:** We’re five acts. Yeah, a teaser and five acts.

**John:** Teaser plus five acts. So, in your outline you’re really writing towards — you’re figuring out what those act breaks are first, and then you’re figuring out how you’re going to get through your episode that way?

**Derek:** That’s exactly right. In fact, that was a new skill that I had to learn which was writing a wave towards an act break, or towards a commercial, where you really want them to come back on the other side of the commercial. So, you can’t just write a scene that isn’t going to have some sort of cliffhanger, or at least new information, something that teases somebody to come back to.

And those are all like ten page bites; ten pages worth of new scenes and then a commercial. Ten pages of new scenes and a commercial.

**Craig:** I have a question for you. This is the part of television that fascinates me, I guess, from an operational point of view. You’re a writer. You and Michael write movies. And then one day you find yourself not only writing a television show, but the boss of other people writing that television show that your name is on.

**Derek:** Right.

**Craig:** What is it like to be the boss of other writers? And I guess follow up question inherent to that: Does it make you like or hate writers? [laughs] I’m just kind of curious. Or both?

**Derek:** It was hard for me, at first, because I’d get really frustrated when somebody who had a long resume or had come in highly recommended and then just had basic screenwriting flaws, or just really generic, stiff writing. And so I’d get really down or disappointed and think, “Now I’ve got to spend a week fixing this,” where I was supposed to be working on my own thing.

But then at the same time you do have the victories where somebody will turn in a script and you’ll be like, “Oh my god, this is amazing. Why didn’t I think of this? Wow, they hit it out of the park.” And so they’re fun. I mean, it’s hard in a lot of ways, but when somebody achieves it’s exciting and when somebody fails it’s disappointing, so it’s like anything else.

**Craig:** It seems like it would have the potential to make you a better writer on your own, just because you’re seeing reflected back at you a kind of writing, and a kind of writing behavior that you don’t like, and a kind of writing and a kind of writing behavior you do.

**Derek:** Yeah. You spend a lot more time with other people’s processes. And anytime you can do that is a good thing, I think.

**John:** But one of the challenges, like everything you’re shooting, maybe it’s the second draft, maybe it’s been through it twice, but there’s never that time of like sit back, reflect, and then come back to it a month later. You don’t have that time. Ideally you want to finish a draft of a script, and set it in a drawer and not look at it, and then pull it back out. That does not exist in television. It has to be — the first time you write a scene you have to be able to shoot that scene immediately. Like you might go back and retouch it, but often you’re never going to retouch that scene.

**Derek:** Yeah. There’s no time for saying, “Okay, we’ll figure this out a month from now.” So, it behooves you to bring your A-game on the first draft. Whereas a lot of times I think screenwriters can get lazy and screenwriters, or movie writers, can say, “All right, I’m going to spend two month on this outline, otherwise it’s not real writing. And, boy, you don’t have that luxury.

**John:** So, how much of the planning for an episode has to — do you have to keep in mind what your schedule is going to be, what your locations are going to be? You have to plan for a certain amount of this episode needs to take place in locations that you already own and control, and a certain amount of time — you’ll be in for a certain amount of days, and you’ll be out for a certain amount of days. Is that your show?

**Derek:** They told us that at the beginning it was going to be that, but we haven’t found that to be the case.

**John:** You just had so much money and so much…

**Derek:** [laughs] We just write it. And I got to say, one of the fun things about doing a show about firemen in a city like Chicago is anywhere you point the camera in Chicago is architecturally stunning. There’s a lake. There’s a river. There’s all sorts of things to have fun with. So, almost as a challenge to ourselves we try to set things — I’ll write in “top of the Willis Tower, they’re having a scene on the observation deck,” thinking there’s no way they’re going to get this, and then they do.

And we have a great producer, John Roman, and great locations guy. And I’m always amazed at what we end up getting and what we don’t. And, yes, they’ll occasionally come back to us and say, “Hey, this scene takes place outside the firehouse. Can we set it inside the kitchen because we’re already going to fill out a day there?” And we’ll say, you know, “Oh, well let us look at it. Let us rearrange it.”

But sometimes we’ll insist and we’ll say, “No, this needs to be outside.”

**Craig:** I love that you guys are doing this primarily because it’s great security for me. I’ve always said if I have friends who need to create 22 episodes, or whatever it is, 26, whatever, some…

**Derek:** 24, yeah.

**Craig:** 24 episodes of television a year, year after year, because this show is going to be on for a long time; it’s a hit. That if I should hit the skids in movies, I know where I can go. At least I can get a paycheck, I could show up. I mean, other writers will be like, “Ugh, he’s just here because he’s friends with Derek.” Yeah…

**Derek:** “This is ridiculous.”

**John:** “Nepotism.”

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right.

**Derek:** You two are two of the most successful writers in the world. Ridiculous.

**Craig:** Right now.

**Derek:** Ridiculous.

**Craig:** Right now! But who knows, in three years it all dries up, and I’m just there, and I’m saying stuff like, “Um, Derek, what if, um, what if Mouch, um…”

**Derek:** Craig, you have Hangover money. I’m learning about TV money. None of this compares to Broadway money. None of this compares to Broadway money.

**Craig:** I disagree. Like a hit TV show is… — Well, I guess a massive Broadway hit, like I hear that Wicked money is pretty amazing.

**John:** Wicked money is pretty good. The one thing that is different in Broadway is that I will own copyright on Big Fish, which is just kind of ridiculous. And so I’ve described it in a post that it’s like you’re making — a TV show is like a sprint. Each episode is a sprint. Making a movie is a marathon. Making a Broadway show is like a migration, where we’re here in Chicago. The whole circus comes to Chicago. We spend months making it here in Chicago, and then we’ll move to New York. And then we will move to other places. And that’s a strange thing.

So, the rest of my life will be rewriting this show.

**Derek:** Awesome.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, you saw two shows just today, or the last few days. Tell us what you saw.

**Craig:** So, yesterday I saw Hands on a Hard Body, the musical.

**John:** Which sounds so pornographic and dirty, but it’s not at all.

**Craig:** But it’s not at all.

**Derek:** That’s based on that documentary that Matthew McConaughey did?

**Craig:** Did Matthew McConaughey do it?

**Derek:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Really? I didn’t know. Well, I guess it makes sense.

**Derek:** He produced it.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s from Longview, which is his hometown. It was a documentary I think back in ’94. And I remember actually watching it on HBO because I saw the title come up. I’m like where is there bad HBO porn on at two in the afternoon? That just seems weird.

And, in fact, it’s a documentary, not at all pornographic, but a real life contest in small town Texas where eight or ten people basically put their hands on a truck, a hard body truck, and they have to keep their hands on it, and the last person standing wins the truck.

And the documentary became a very fascinating insight into the strength of personal conviction, religion, the question of why we’re doing something. It was existential. It was just a really cool documentary.

And now flash forward, it’s a musical. To be honest with you, I did not love the musical. There were some great performances. Hunter Foster plays a terrific villain. He has a great 11 o’clock song that, to me, was the highlight of the show. He was really, really good. And there’s a woman named — I don’t know if I’m pronouncing her name right — it’s Keala Settle, who plays this religious woman and she has this amazing number right before intermission that was spectacular.

But then, oh, then the show blows it and it’s sort of something you can’t really recover from. So, it’s this incredible, wonderful, up-tempo song, I think it’s called Feel the Joy. It’s a cappella; the whole group gets into it. And you’re just happy.

And then they immediately follow — they don’t even let it end. They immediately follow it with this really super downer song about this soldier who’s back from Iraq. And it’s just the song doesn’t work. And you’ve just lost all energy.

**John:** Was her big number, that was the act out? And the first number in the second act was this downer song?

**Craig:** No, no. That would have been okay. No. It was right before the end of the first act. She does her big number. And then they tack another one on. And the other one is a huge downer. And then they go to intermission. And I just wanted to grab the people making the show and say, “Cut that song!” Maybe cut the character.

Because here’s the thing: There are too many characters in the show. So, I believe when you watch a musical, to enjoy the drama of the characters I feel like there should be two, three, four people that you truly understand and care about. And then you have comic relief, and you have villains, and you have whatever. But this show is demanding you to care about eight or nine people, and they’re giving all of them equal weight. And everyone is equally, therefore, thin. So, it was tough to care.

There was also a couple — I thought they made some mistakes. They were trying to make the show about, I think, a little bit too political, rather than about sort of the personal things involved in hanging on to this truck. It became sort of a — there was a little too much “times are hard; we’re desperate for a truck.”

There was one bizarre song where the cast sang and lamented the disappearance of mom and pop stores which have been replaced by big box stores, which I just thought like, well, are we just going down a list of things that we complain about at Whole Foods now?

So, that didn’t quite work. But the one thing I’ve got to give a ton of credit to is it’s a very sparse production. It’s one set that does not change. And there’s a truck in the middle of it. And the truck is kind of the star of the show. It’s on some sort of moving platform that they disguise beautifully behind the wheels. And the characters are constantly turning and moving the truck onstage. The wheels don’t move; the truck is just sort of spinning and turning and moving around.

And they’re on it, and they’re in it, and they’re around it. And it’s very well choreographed. Music was by Trey Anastasio, I think, is his name, the guy from Phish.

**Derek:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** And so it’s not typical show tune stuff. It’s very rockabilly, bluesy.

**Derek:** Does the truck have its own song?

**Craig:** Believe me, that would have been awesome. It didn’t. I think there was only really two good songs. That’s the other issue. A lot of the songs just melodically were okay. Two of them were very good. I don’t know if the show will make it or not. Also strange: It jumped from La Jolla to Broadway.

**John:** That’s actually not uncommon. It’s a classic sort of try out city for productions. I think Jersey Boys was originally La Jolla. So, there’s a track record for that working sometimes.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m not sure it worked here. But, Hunter Foster, who is Sutton Foster’s brother, was great. Keala Settle was great. And also a woman named Allison Case, I thought, did a great job.

Then today I saw Book of Mormon and, well, that’s a classic. [laughs] They just do everything right. Everything.

**John:** I don’t think Book of Mormon is going to make it.

**Craig:** [laughs].

**John:** It rides a little bit of heat. But, no, it’s not going to make it.

So, Book of Mormon is also here in Chicago. Usually a show will do really well on Broadway, like Book of Mormon is doing, of course, very much on Broadway. And eventually there will be a national tour. It will like land at certain cities for a certain number of weeks. But I don’t know how many tours are sort of going on constantly, and some of them are just sitting down for a long time. Chicago seems kind of open-ended. It’s crazy.

And the great, but sort of frustrating thing about Book of Mormon is — so we’re at the Oriental Theater in Downtown Chicago which is a beautiful giant theater. But on the side of our theater there are three big billboards for The Book of Mormon. I’m like, that’s our theater! Get off our theater!

And then our box office is Broadway Chicago, so we share it with all of the other shows. And so I’ll see like people lining up to buy ticket, and I’m like, “Yay, they’re buying Big Fish.” And it’s like, “No, they could be buying Book of Mormon as well.” So, it seems wrong.

**Derek:** It’s nice for those guys to finally get a hit and maybe have some money.

**John:** I feel so good for them. I’ve told you my story about Matt and Trey, haven’t I?

**Derek:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** On the podcast? So, way back when in Los Angeles, it was my first year of Stark, and we were out at a bar called Three of Clubs, which still exists as Three of Clubs. It’s in Hollywood. It’s a dive.

And I was out there with some friends and I got introduced to this guy who was from Boulder, which is where I’m from, and he’s a writer. And so I’m talking to him for awhile. And it’s like, oh, what are you working on? “We’re trying to make this video for this guy at MTV, like this Christmas card thing.”

I’m like, I feel really bad for him, because he’s clearly struggling. He’s sort of like me; he’s sleeping on the floor. And so at the end of the night I was like, “Oh, it was good to meet you, Troy.”

He’s like, “No, it’s Trey.”

I’m like, the only reason I know it was Trey Parker is because I said his name wrong. So, of course that video was South Park, the original thing, and it’s gone reasonably well for him.

**Craig:** It’s gone okay. It’s gone okay.

**Derek:** He’s done all right.

**John:** But, Book of Mormon is just so fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, everything about it is terrific. And, again, to loop back to our first discussion about Amy Pascal’s comments, it’s incredibly audacious. They don’t care. They absolutely go for it. They put this show on and there were so blissfully unconcerned about language, about potential accusations of racism, or anti-religiousness, or pro-religiousness, or anything. They were just like, “Screw you, this is what we’re doing. We don’t care. We are completely confident in every move.”

The songs are spectacular. There’s not one bad song. In fact, every single song is great. And I was — even though this is not the complete original cast, Nikki James, who is Nabulungi, the female star of the show, is still there on Broadway. She was amazing. I mean, she is so talented. And Lewis Cleale, who originated the kind of Mormon boss, and Joseph Smith as well — he’s still there.

And Matt Doyle and Jon Bass are the new guys. They did a great job. I just, yeah, it’s a great show. It’s going to be running forever.

**John:** Yeah, the secret behind Book of Mormon, I think, is that like South Park it does filthy things but is incredibly sweet about it. And so you have these — everyone in the show is actually really sweet and nice, and no one is sort of mean-spirited. Terrible things happen because of misunderstandings and horrible things are said. It’s just…

**Craig:** Yeah, but it’s sweet. And, you know, my favorite moment in the show, it’s a tiny little moment, but it explains why, for instance, the actual Mormon Church doesn’t seem to mind that this play is out there, which is actually the coolest thing about Mormons. Period.

In the song All American Prophet, Elder Price, who is the star of the show, is telling the story of how the Mormon religion came to be. And as he tells it, part of the joke is this is ridiculous. And Joseph Smith receives the Golden Plates from the Angel Moroni, and the angel says, “But, don’t show the plates to anyone. Even though if you don’t show them no one will believe you. Just translate the plates and write them down on regular paper, even though people won’t believe in you. That’s sort of what God is going for.”

And you’re meant to laugh at how stupid this is. And then later in the song Joseph Smith, they get to the part where Joseph Smith is shot by an angry mob. And as he’s dying he looks up and he says, “God, why have you forsaken me? You never let me show the plates to anybody. They have no reason to believe it; they’ll just have to believe it just cause.”

And then he goes, “Oh, I guess that’s what you were going for.” And it’s this really nice, sweet, kind of like, “Oh, I think I’m starting to understand the point of faith even though it’s challenging and a little crazy.”

The show is full of really smart moments like that that manage to balance the sacrilege of it all with the point, which is that forget the details. If the message helps somebody here in a positive way, maybe we can extend that.

Now, of course, there is a dark side to all of these things. And Turn It Off is a great song about how hard it is to be gay and a Mormon. Terrific stuff. It’s great.

**John:** Very, very good.

Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week? Or, are those your One Cool Things?

**Craig:** No, I do have a One Cool Thing. I have One Awesome, Awesome, Amazing Thing this week. But do want to go first because yours can’t possibly be as cool as this.

**John:** And, Derek, I didn’t even warn you.

**Derek:** I didn’t know.

**John:** You could think of one while I tell you my One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is actually how we’re recording this podcast here today is that, so we are on one microphone that we’re sharing between us, and I was trying to figure out how we would both have headsets. And it’s like, oh my god, I’m going to need to find a Radio Shack that’s open on Easter so we can split the headphone output jack.

It turns out a little Googling that even on any Macintosh, any modern Macintosh, you can actually set up a special mini-controller output thing, so you create a special mini group for multi-output.

So, you can use it for plugging two people’s headphones into different jacks. In this case I’m connected to the microphones. He’s connected directly into the little MacBook. And it’s actually very useful and potentially very useful for situations where you need to send to multiple speakers at once or you need to do some other strange things.

So, you can use it for multi-output, multi-input. So, I will put a link to the article I found which was hugely helpful and saved me an hour’s worth of time and purchased it at Radio Shack to make this possible.

So, a fun little thing that I Googled and will help you out if you have to do what we’re doing which is to share a microphone.

**Craig:** Excellent. I did not know that. I’m going to read that link. That sounds useful.

So, here’s my Cool Thing that started off as a terrible thing. Last week my dog got hit by a car.

**John:** Oh my god, Craig. I’m so sorry.

**Derek:** I was reading about this.

**Craig:** Yeah, now here’s the deal. If this had happened, I think, ten years ago, she would have just been dead. So, she was hit by a car and here’s what happened to her:

She had a fractured pelvis, she had a concussion, she had internal bleeding, she had a broken rib, and most dangerously, her lungs were very, very bruised and they were punctured. And when your lung is punctured, what happens is you get something called a pneumothorax.

So, okay, let me just step back for a second. And you know I love medicine, so I was reading this like medicine.

**John:** Yeah, you’re Dr. Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Dr. Craig Mazin. The doctor’s in.

So, lungs are just sponges that expand with air and then contract and air goes out. As they expand with air, if there’s a puncture the air will, of course, start to leak out. So, you can be breathing, okay, fine, but the air continues to leak out. The chest cavity is closed. It is rigid specifically so the lungs to work. If it were flabby the lungs wouldn’t work because there would be nothing to expand against.

But, pneumothorax means the air is starting to leak out of the lung and slowly build up in the rib cage. As it builds up, what happens? It begins to compress down on the lungs, which cannot expand, and so you can’t breathe. It’s a very dangerous condition.

So, here’s my Cool Thing. Well, first of all Dr. Kym Mitchell at the Montrose Animal Hospital was awesome. She sort of did like an immediate, okay, you’re not going to die in the next five minutes. But, there is a place in Glendale called Animal Specialty Group. And we’re lucky because, you know, I live in La Cañada which is pretty close to Glendale. This is maybe ten minutes away.

It is the animal hospital where they bring animals from the LA Zoo. It is the — I don’t know what you call it — the Cedar Sinai for animals. And they took my dog and they saved her life. And I have to say what they had to do was remarkable. They had to put in a chest tube and they had to give her a blood transfusion. It was ridiculous. [laughs] You don’t even want to know. It was crazy.

I mean, again, ten years ago she wouldn’t have made it anyway. Forty years ago, somebody would have just put a pillow over her head or shot her, like Old Yeller, but they saved my dog.

And all I can say is to those guys: You are the coolest guys there at the Animal Specialty Group. They did an amazing job. She came home today. She was hit by a car on Wednesday, I believe, and she’s back home today totally fine.

**Derek:** I love that when you describe the doctors, I know as a kid growing up in Dallas and being like, “This is the guy who performs the knee operations on the Dallas Cowboys.” You know, like, “Oh, they must be the best.” And you’re like, “These guys are the ones who do the LA Zoo.” [laughs]

**Craig:** The LA Zoo! I mean, doesn’t that tell you something? You’re like, “Oh, well what are we going to do? The gazelle is vomiting. Um, I don’t know, there’s a guy down the street.” No. You go to ASG.

**Derek:** ASG.

**Craig:** That’s where you go. They are the best. 24 hours. Seven days a week. They actually — at one point they said, “Listen,” because the truth is when we brought her in they were like, I said to my — because my vet, Kym Mitchell, she came with us. And she looked shaken up. And I was like, “So, what are the odds here?” And she’s like, “She’s really hurt.”

And I was like, “Okay, so 50/50?” And she looked at me and went, “Um, yeah.” [laughs] Which means 10/90 kind of. You know? So, I was like, okay, this isn’t going to go well.

I mean, I had to tell my kids, like, there is a pretty good chance, you know, that she’s not going to make it. But they said, “Listen, um, if this chest tube thing doesn’t work and the puncture isn’t healing on its own, there’s a chance that we might have to put her on a ventilator, and even then that might not work. And that comes with its own complications, but we have to sort of talk to you about it beforehand. And you have to come here and sign papers if we’re going to do it because it’s so expensive.” And when they told me what it was I was like, oh my god.

And it actually was a great moment for me as a man, because I was like, yes, absolutely we’ll do that. And I didn’t have to do it, so it’s like a great Seinfeld episode where I should get credit for something that I just didn’t want to do but I said I would do, because oh my god, it would have been so expensive. [laughs]

But, we got our dog back. So, thank you, ASG. You are this week’s One Super Cool Thing.

**John:** Cool. Derek, did you think of something?

**Derek:** I did. There is a movie with Chris O’Donnell and Arnold Schwarzenegger called Batman & Robin. It’s my One Cool… — No, I’m just kidding.

**John:** One COOL thing.

**Craig:** It’s so COOL.

**Derek:** In Chicago there is something that you can get that you always think, I don’t really need this City Pass, but the City Pass, which gets you five museums and you get to walk right in and cut the line, is the greatest tourism thing you can get.

I took my kids to the Science and Industry Museum yesterday. Cut all the way to the front of the line. Took my kids to the aquarium, cut to the front of the line. Took my kids today to the Field Museum. And, again, get a City Pass when you come to Chicago and have a great time. It’s a great tourism town.

**Craig:** Awesome. And, this is a fact, although Chicago has terrible pizza, it is a great place to be in a fire because super handsome dudes come with their muscles.

**Derek:** It’s true.

**Craig:** And their perfect hair. And they’re like, “Ma’am, don’t worry, Ma’am, I’ve got you.”

**John:** Yes.

**Derek:** It’s true. The true CFD guys are an inspiration, really the inspiration for this show.

**Craig:** And handsome.

**Derek:** And handsome.

**John:** And handsome.

Derek Haas, thank you so much for being our second ever live in-studio guest. We’ve had, you know, Aline came twice, but you’re a friend who now gets to be part of the show.

**Derek:** I am thrilled. Thank you for having me.

**John:** And you’re the first genuine surprise to Craig Mazin.

**Derek:** That was hilarious.

**John:** So, I want to keep introducing new people from his life.

**Craig:** Well, I’m just glad that it was somebody good, because what if you had saddled us with an idiot?

**John:** I can think of a few writers that would be just amazing people to have on this show because you would have a tremendously good time with them.

**Craig:** Mm…

**John:** You’re thinking exactly the same person I am.

**Craig:** Hmm…

**John:** It would be amazing to have him here.

**Craig:** So much fun.

**John:** Oh, so good. And he’s an Academy member.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Derek:** Thanks for having me.

**John:** Have a great week. And we’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** See you later guys.

**John:** Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.

**Derek:** Thank you. Bye.

LINKS:

* [Derek Haas](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0351929/) on IMDb
* [Chicago Fire](http://www.nbc.com/chicago-fire/) on NBC
* [Popcorn Fiction](http://www.mulhollandbooks.com/popcornfiction/index.html)
* [The Right Hand](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0316198463/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* Deadline’s coverage of [Amy Pascal’s speech](http://www.deadline.com/2013/03/amy-pascal-asks-hollywood-to-eliminate-gay-slurs-stereotypes-from-movies/) at the LA Gay & Lesbian Center gala
* [Fridge Logic](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic) on TV Tropes
* [Hands on a Hard Body](http://www.handsonahardbody.com/) and [The Book of Mormon](http://www.bookofmormonbroadway.com/home.php) on Broadway
* Lifehacker Australia on [using multiple audio inputs and outputs in OSX](http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2012/08/how-to-use-multiple-audio-inputs-and-outputs-in-mac-os-x/)
* The life-saving [Animal Specialty Group](http://www.asgvets.com/)
* [Chicago City Pass](http://www.citypass.com/chicago) is worthwhile
* OUTRO: [I’m on Fire](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvksSDzslCw) acoustic cover by ilikegtar

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/god-doesnt-need-addresses).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 82, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you’re sick. I’m so sorry to hear that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think it’s terrible. You know, there’s two kinds of viruses you get. There’s the kind that starts with sore throat, and that’s always the worst one. And this one, I just am kind of stuffy and headachy and I want to sleep — just sleep — that’s all I want I do.

**John:** I’m sorry, Craig.

We’re shooting — not shooting — we’re making Big Fish, the Broadway musical, and we are in Downtown Chicago. I am in the Oriental Theater lobby as we speak. I’m upstairs near the balcony in this one little door that I thought no one would go in or out of, except that people keep walking in and out. So, we’ll have guests in this podcast as they walk past me.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, this part of the process, I think you might be interested in and some listeners might be interested, is completely different than anything you actually sort of do in movie land. This is called “tech.” And what it is is we’ve already rehearsed everything in a room, a rehearsal hall, with sort of like minimal props and stuff. This is putting it on the real stage and you do all the lights and you do all the sound effects, and the projections. And it’s incredibly tedious. It’s sort of all of the tedium of production in a movie, plus post-production at the same time, because you’re doing small color changes in lights.

It’s exhausting. It’s great. It’s wonderful. But it’s great.

And one of the things I was always curious about is, like, how do you work in a theater? Because theaters are designed for looking at things, for like people sitting in wheelchairs to be in the audience, but how do you actually work in the space? And I felt like, do they take out all the seats, or what do they do?

The answer is they take these giant boards and tabletops essentially and put them over the rows of seats that are angled in a certain way so it creates a flat surface. And because that’s at such a high height, they take these padded boards that go on the arm rests of the chairs, and that’s what you sit on. So, you use the same space, but just completely differently.

**Craig:** What are they doing there in that space?

**John:** So, it looks like NASA control, because you have these giant monitors at the different stations for the people who are doing the automation, sort of like how things move in and out, how the sets move. You have another station which is designed for all the sound effects. You have another station which is for the music department. I’m at this table with the swings who are all the people who can fill in all the individual spots, so they have to watch every footstep and be able to step in on any place.

Another person is doing the projections. And then upstairs in this balcony where I’m doing this stuff they are handling lighting things. So, it’s very complicated. And we sort of have this policy of not taking photos inside the theater so we don’t spoil any set stuff, but it really genuinely does look like NASA. Like you could launch some sort of craft from here.

**Craig:** Well, you should take pictures. I mean, you’re privileged.

**John:** I am sort of privileged, but at the same time I don’t want to set a bad example. Because I’m a good boy, Craig; I think we’ve established I’m a good boy.

**Craig:** I know. I would break that rule. Do it!

**John:** You would break that rule. I’ve taken some photos, I just haven’t tweeted them.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** So, maybe I’ll send you a photo if you promise not to send it out.

**Craig:** I promise not to send it out.

**John:** But, anyway, Chicago has been great. And so thank you Chicago for being so nice and wonderful. It’s really cold, but the people are warm.

**Craig:** That’s a lovely sentiment that has never been expressed more than 14 million times.

**John:** That’s the hope.

Today on the podcast we are going to focus on some Three Page Challenges. We have always a big giant stack of them, a folder of them, I don’t know how Stuart actually organizes them, but he gets a bunch of them every day. And he reads them all and he sorts them into special little piles. And so we asked Stuart to give us some samples of what he’s read.

So, for listeners who are new to the podcast, we do this thing called Three Page Challenge which we invite or listeners to send in the first three pages of their screenplay or their teleplay, but it’s usually a screenplay. And we will read them and offer some feedback on them. And our listeners can also read these samples if they’d like to. So, if you go to johnaugust.com/podcast you can download these PDFs that these people have bravely and generously agreed to share so we may all learn by their example.

So, we have four of them today. And I just read them. I actually had to run to the theater partly because I left my microphone here, but partly because I don’t have a printer in my room so I had to be here in the theater. So, I’ve just now read them. They’re all very fresh in my head. Craig, do you have any preference on which one you want to start with?

**Craig:** No, no. Do you want me to just start? I can just start and I can do a summary of this first one?

**John:** Oh my god, I would so love a summary.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I’ll do all the summaries if you want.

**John:** Oh my god. It’s like living in the future. I love it. Thank you, Craig, please do.

**Craig:** All right. So, this first Three Page Challenge is from Justin Adams. And it begins with a couple of quotes, one about the person who green lighted the Aztek, that’s a General Motors VP quoting about the Aztec and how he would fire anybody willing to admit that they green lit it. And then a quick review quote from a Car Talk listener that runs down — that just insults the Aztek.

And then we fade in on — we’re in Michigan. We’re in a two-bedroom ranch. Bit of a monotonous suburb. And we find it is morning time: Coffee makers and clothes and so forth. And we find Matt Carver, he’s 46, he’s praying, and then he kisses his wife and heads off to the GM truck and bus plant.

He’s sitting in his truck with his friend, Wayne. And the two of them are drinking beer. And they’re talking about Matt’s son, who seems like a smart kid, unlike Matt, I guess, is the joke. And then a whistle blows basically. They all get out in the rain. All these guys are getting out in the rain heading towards the factory and they start talking a little bit about sports. And then we’re done.

**John:** Yes. So, a lot of things to talk about here. First off, I would say let’s talk about starting with quotes. Because quotes are a nice way to sort of set up the idea of what your script is about, or sort of what the themes in your script is going to be about. So, most scripts shouldn’t have them, but I kind of like these quotes.

And it was interesting that it took longer for you to summarize what the quotes were, more than the actual quotes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I should have just read them.

**John:** Here are the quotes:

“We’d fire the guy who green lighted the Aztek if we could find anyone willing to admit it.” That’s Bob Lutz, Global VP for Product Development at General Motors

The second super is, “It looks the way Montezuma’s revenge feels,” a Car Talk Listener, 2005.

So, I like those as framing devices. I would generally not put them on the first page of the script. I would put them on a page between the cover page and the first page of your script, which is just kind of like a dedication kind of page; sort of sets the stage for things. But, for the Three Page Challenge I think it’s great and fine that they’re here because it helps set the stage.

It made me — it put me in a “Made for HBO” movie kind of world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not a bad thing. Or, something that Steven Soderbergh would direct. That kind of thing is how I was feeling about it.

I liked some of the writing. I liked sort of — yes, it’s kind of cliché to start with, like, “now we start in the morning, and the light is dawn and we’re at a place and things get started.” But, some of the writing was nice. Things like, you know, “More jeans, more undershirts, more underwear, all stacked up in columns, separated by painter’s tape.” That was specific. I liked the use of short repetitive phrases to sort of establish regularity. Kind of a nice thing.

“A coffee maker pops and sputters on a faded linoleum countertop.” Yeah, I get that.

“A Stanley thermos and two quarters sit nearby. The shower stops. The coffee maker beeps.” So, these are small little images that give you a sense of what this daily life is. Now, is it a daily life that is probably kind of familiar? Sure, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing to start your story in a familiar way so you can have some sort of surprise later on.

Craig, what were you thinking as you started reading this?

**Craig:** You know, the painting of the pre-wake up section was fine. It’s the sort of thing people will scan past. I forced myself to read it. But, you know, there was a little over-description here. For instance, “We pan left and look down the endless asphalt street. It is lined with hundreds of identical brick ranches and an occasional functioning streetlight.”

I’m not sure how we’re going to know that some of the streetlights are not functioning and how far are we looking that we could see that many street lights and so forth? I mean, I guess I see what he means is that he meant some of them are on, some of them are off.

It’s fine. I don’t necessarily need to know that. Just because, you know, these pages are precious, these early pages. They’re just so precious. This time is required to do a lot.

So, you know, it’s fine to have a little bit of that, but then we also have two sections where we’re looking at folded clothes. I’m not sure we need two folded clothes sections. The shower, and the coffee, and then the shower stops, and the coffee maker beeps. There was just a lot there to read. It was all well written, but maybe thin it out just a touch to get to what we care about, what the reader is going to care about, which is our hero.

**John:** Back at page one: “EXT. TWO BEDROOM RANCH – 4:30AM.” So, that 4:30AM is written in sort of where we usually see day or night. And that’s fine. You can do that. It’s absolutely valid to stick a time in there if it’s useful.

I would like to make the argument for if you kept that as “DAY” or “DAWN” or “PRE-DAWN” and we can lose that whole “PAN LEFT and look down the endless asphalt street,” and if you actually used that as a super, if you said like, “4:30AM,” that puts us in a frame of mind like this is something that’s… — There’s a reason why you’re watching this day.

And hopefully there is a reason why. Even though the setup is so generic and we sort of are used to it, there’s a reason why we’re watching this day. And so the 4:30AM puts us in that frame of mind, like, okay, here we are right now in this moment.

Because of the layout of this page, because we had those two super quotes, it feels read to have an extra super. But if those two super quotes were on a previous page, then like that’s the first thing we’re sticking on the screen with specific information; that would have a little bit more weight.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah, also 4:30AM tells us that this person wakes up very, very early. If we don’t see an indication of time, for instance even if it’s just the clock in a kitchen, or on the coffee maker, we don’t know if it’s 8:30AM on a wintery day, or it’s just the low light. Knowing that this person wakes up that early is information we probably, I think, our author — Justin — wants us to know. So, that’s a good point.

There’s a moment where he stands up, and this is one of those things that I don’t personally like in scripts. “He stands up. His joints CRACK. He’s an attractive man who, at 46, still doesn’t know it.” That’s impossible for anyone to portray. It’s impossible to convey through film. The fact that he’s attractive but still doesn’t know it is not anything we could ever possibly know. So, why say it?

**John:** Yeah. I think people put that descriptor in because they sort of want an attractive actor to think that, “Oh, this is a part for me.” It feels appealing to an actor’s vanity and their sort of false humility. But, it’s actually not a very useful thing. So, if you’re going to use half of a sentence for something, pick a better half sentence.

**Craig:** And it’s not even that it’s taking up space. Things like that tend to annoy me because it’s cheating. You’re attempting to put a little spin there that will not be available to any actor or director. And I know also that part of it is like, “Well, everybody writes attractive person, or good looking, or beautiful because all actors are,” generally, unless you’re casting against that. And so you want to be clever, put a spin on it. But, you could just as easily say, “He’s an attractive man. He was once a gorgeous man but time and sun have taken their toll.” Just things that we can see.

You know, he kisses his wife on the back of her head. “‘I got you babe.’ Walks away. The camera lingers.” That’s okay. You know, that line may not even be necessary. It may be later, but that’s fine.

And then we get to this scene in the parking lot. Now, what did you think about this?

**John:** It went on for a long time about sort of minimal chitchat. And so here’s the thing is that you’re establishing the normalcy of the day or sort of what happens. If it’s just sort of walla walla, let’s get out of the walla walla a little bit faster, because it just felt like we were sitting for a long time and I just can’t believe that this is actually going to be important information because they’re talking about uniforms, and schmucks on the field. Well, they’re talking about sports. And so you might as well just put up — it’s like the lorem ipsum kind of dialogue of let’s talk about sports. It felt like filler to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, there’s two interesting things that come out of this. One is — well, first of all, I guess he’s picked up Wayne, his buddy, so he’s driven him there and that’s fine. There are two interesting things that come out of this. One is that these guys are drinking before working.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is a great little touch. I wasn’t quite sure how he opened his window and tossed the empty back into the cab, because I was trying to do the geography of that. He’s in a truck. And if you open your window, how do you toss it into the back? You’ve got to kind of like curveball it into the back. I didn’t quite understand. I mean, maybe there’s a window in between?

Anyway…

**John:** Yeah, I think he’s talking about the back window in the cab of the pickup truck. That slides.

**Craig:** Oh, it slides?

**John:** It can slide.

**Craig:** Okay, so he slides it and tosses it into the back. It’s just a little weird, but that’s fine.

**John:** The fact that it stopped you is a problem.

**Craig:** But it clanged against dozens of empties, so hopefully these guys haven’t drank dozens of beers this very morning and these are old ones. And I think that that was a good touch.

Frankly, I would save that for the last thing. A couple of guys drinking a beer a piece in the car before they go into work is interesting. Then I think you actually get a laugh and an “Oh!” if you end the scene with them tossing it into the back and realizing, “My god, there’s dozens of empties back there. This is what they do every morning.” That’s a great little button for the scene.

The other piece of information that comes out is that Matt’s son has gotten a job, and it’s a real job programming ECMs. I don’t know what an ECM is. But, he’s programming it and apparently that’s impressive, so the son is sort of doing better than the dad.

I don’t generally like things like this:

“My boy starts today.”
“Luke?”
“Yeah. Up at the country club.”

I would never say that to you. If you said to me, “Oh, my daughter is going to pre-school today,” I wouldn’t just immediately say her name. [laughs] And, also, it’s such a strange first line. “My boy starts today.” You know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, that was a little clumsy. But, they have a little joke. I do agree that we could cut the entire discussion of what I assume is a discussion of the Detroit Lions. It’s three-quarters of a page that you just don’t need. I would end with the reveal of the beer cans and then a great image of all these guys emerging from their trucks in unison, in the rain, covering their heads with the Free Press, heading towards this factory that’s about to make the world’s ugliest car.

**John:** Yeah. I did like that image a lot. The newspapers over their heads, I think, will be a nice thing.

So, I would say I’m optimistic about the idea. I think that Justin can write. I think there are some things that can be tweaked and improved. Just make sure your spending your words the best you possibly can. But, I was excited to see it. Well done, Justin.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really. This is good. I think this could be a really cool script. And everything we’re saying here I think is the sort of — I see things like this in scripts I write and then change. And I see things like this in scripts that friends of mine write and change. These are not “Oh my god, was it this?” errors. They’re very common.

One little tiny formatting thing: Your page numbers are not in Courier. They’re in a different font, which it’s not the end of the world or anything, it’s just jarring because the numbers seem like they belong in a different script.

**John:** I would also say the numbers are also at the bottom of the page which is bizarre.

**Craig:** Yes. They’re supposed to be at the top right. That’s where they belong on screenplays. Bottom middle is for term papers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right, so…

**John:** Next up, what do you have?

**Craig:** I’ve got The Answerer, written by Ben W. And that’s such a great — I love the title, The Answerer. And I also love that it was written by Ben W. Everything is mysterious about this title page.

**John:** It reminds me a little bit of The Rural Juror, which if you watch 30 Rock you would know is a recurring joke that Jenna Maroney, the Jane Krakowski character on 30 Rock, was in a John Grisham knock-off called The Rural Juror.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] And eventually she sings a song about it which is just the best.

**Craig:** The Rural Juror. That’s perfect. So, this is The Answerer, written by Ben W.

We begin, “INT. FUNTIME TOYS BUILDING – ELEVENTH FLOOR… efficiently-sized offices, all polished mahogany and frosted glass.” And we land on the Product Assessment Division. And this is a very kind of almost robotic sort of office. Lots of buzzing, and rattling, and dinging. And we land in Nicholas Snellard’s office. Snellard is 40 and balding. And he sits at his tidy desk.

And he looks at a toy assessment form, one of those exploded-view diagrams with technical detail, but he seems to understand it perfectly. And all of this is related to a little tin toy, a monkey in a clown suit on a unicycle. And Snellard has this sort of review quality checklist. And he checks everything, winds the toy up.

The toy remarkably — is amazing — it juggles. The monkey can kind of ride on a unicycle and juggle two little balls. And when it ends the monkey stops, but one of the little balls dingles away onto the floor.

— That’s my word, “Dingle.”

**John:** I was going to say, dingles is an impressive word.

**Craig:** Yes. It dingles away on the floor. He is considering whether or not to reject or allow this. When he gets a new thing that comes through his pneumatic tube, or his dumbwaiter, and it’s The Answerer, Executive Desktop Edition. And it’s basically just a Y, and you have a little ball that says yes or no. You write a question down, you put it in the ball, and you drop it in and it ends as yes or no.

So, the first question he writes is, “Does this thing work?” And it comes down yes. So, then he changes it to, “Does this thing not work?” And it lands on no. Huh, very good.

And he’s about to approve it when he realized that his ink has no pad. — I’m sorry, his pad has no ink. And the last shot is he sees “a framed wedding photo sitting in the drawer of his desk, a young Snellard with a pretty bride, both in horn rimmed glasses.”

So, John, what did you think of The Answerer?

**John:** This read to me like a short film. It read to me like a clever little snapshot. People may not appreciate if they’re not actually reading the page, there’s no dialogue in any of this. This is all just a series of images, and I thought honestly kind of nicely done images. It was very, very full. I mean, it was kind of a slog to read through some of it, although I will say breaking it, Ben W., you did a nice job of breaking it down into little snippets so that I was never too intimidated to read the next bit of the script.

So, it either felt like the start of a short film, or it felt like the start of Up, where it’s just like one sort of montage that was going to initiate a bigger, different kind of movie, that there’s some sort of bigger adventure that’s going to happen, but this was just the setup for something else.

But I enjoyed it. I sort of enjoy that sort of like clockwork Coen brothers setup of things. I mean, it’s a heavily stylized world. And even without seeing the outside of this office you got a sense of what this would be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked it. I mean, before I talk about the way that the writing was done here, let me just talk about the idea. Because this is something — I have to confess — I suspect that this movie is one in which this person realizes that The Answerer actually works. That any question he writes that’s a yes or no question, he’s going to get a true answer to, including, you know, “Does this woman love me?” “Does she not love me?” And so it’s this kind of high concept supernatural comedy idea. I actually had — I was going to write a short story to for Derek’s site that was very similar, but it wasn’t a device. It was that somebody would call in the middle of the night and basically say, “I’ll answer any question you have.” And the answer always turned out to be right. And what do you do with certainty?

It’s a really good theme. I like the idea, obviously, because I’ve been thinking about something similar. I know at this point Ben W. is like, oh god, “Oh god, he’s stealing my…!” I’m not going to steal your idea.

So, I’m kind of curious to see how this would turn out given that both the concept is very high and the world is also quite a bit pushed. But that’s okay. I mean, that’s the choice here.

I actually thought this was very well written. The little drama of the tin toy monkey was fascinating to me, actually, that it worked. And I really like that Ben W. has a sense of where the drama is in this little thing. That the monkey surprises us with how complicated it is. Even when it stops a little kickstand comes out. So, my god, this thing is almost perfect. And then it’s just slightly imperfect. And that, I suspect, is going to be a nice little metaphor for Mr. Snellard’s life. Mr. Snellard is the monkey who is almost perfect.

All of that stuff is great. That’s very intentional writing. Good stuff here. The movie already feels incredibly antiseptic, which could be wonderful, could be oppressive, I don’t know.

The only thing I wish were different were the framed wedding photo sitting in the drawer, which is a very kind of stock way of introducing the notion of a loved one who is no longer there.

But that aside, I thought this was fascinating. This is the kind of writing that is so consistent to itself and so very much a product of control that I don’t want to nitpick at any of it. I would rather Ben just keep going. I’m sure he has an entire script. But this was very good. This was one of my favorite Three pages.

And in particular I also liked the way that Ben is not afraid to play around with formatting in a way that you don’t even notice. So, he’s going to center things like “THE ANSWERER – Executive Desktop Edition” is centered. The questions that he’s filling out he tabs in, as well as step one.

When he says, “Does this thing not work,” he’s going to add “not” in with a carrot. and Ben even did that. And stuff like that is just so — it’s so nice to read when it’s done right and when it’s part of the intention. So, this may be my favorite Three Page yet.

**John:** I think one of the reasons why you really liked this is because it’s actually set in Courier Prime.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** As far as I know it’s the first of the Three Page samples I’ve seen that is set in Courier Prime. And what gave it away is on page two, the “but he is essentially juggling. While riding a unicycle.” And see how it goes into italics?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Those are true Courier Prime italics. And one of the giveaways that that is really our italics is they look better, but also the lower case A in Courier Prime has no ascender on it. It’s round.

**Craig:** Should I ask what an ascender is?

**John:** You know how a printed A often has a little sort of hat on it? So it’s a bowl and it has a hat on it? It has no hat.

**Craig:** It has no hat. Now, why shouldn’t it have a hat? Because the other ones have a hat.

**John:** It doesn’t have to have a hat. I mean, if you wrote an A you wouldn’t write a hat on it.

**Craig:** Yeah, but if the A that’s not italicized has a hat, shouldn’t it be consistent?

**John:** Italics are often either a more casual or a sort of script version of the type face. And that’s what we’re really doing with Courier Prime is that we modeled it after italic faces on typewriters, which there were italic typewriters for a period of time. And they were designed for writing correspondence, like writing to your loved ones. So, they were sort of more gentle and that’s sort of how we…where we pulled the forms.

**Craig:** Well, this is a cool script. I would want to read the rest of this script.

**John:** I would want to read it, too. Yet, again, a weird situation where, again, the page numbers are not in Courier Prime, they’re not in a Courier typeface, for some reason I can’t parse. And I like having a period after the page number. It’s just kind of conventional.

**Craig:** Yes. As do I as well. But, yeah, this would be fun for me to read.

Hey, Ben, send me the script. I want to read it. Can we do that?

**John:** Oh my god! Yeah, you can totally do that. So, Ben, if you’re listening, send it in.

**Craig:** Just don’t sue me or anything dumb.

**John:** Yeah, don’t do that.

**Craig:** Come on, Ben. But I really think is very cool. I want to read the script. Good job, Ben. You’re the first person who made me want to read a script.

**John:** My god.

**Craig:** My god. All right. Next up. We’re flying through this.

**John:** Two choices. Who is it going to be?

**Craig:** I’m going to go with Abigail Blackmore.

**John:** I was going to say so, too.

**Craig:** Abigail Blackmore. I assume that that is our author and not the title of the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, we begin at the First Baptist Church in Allen, Texas, and services have just completed. The congregation is streaming out. Marvin and Patty Feeney, middle-aged couple, are shaking hands with the pastor. He asks after their son, Dex. Patty says, “He’s studying for college entries.”

Well, we cut to Tracy’s basement. At the same time Dex is actually having sex with Tracy. The two of them actually have rough sex. He’s choking her during it. And then when it’s done she crosses off the words Rough Play on a page and next up is Anal Sex. So, they’re making their way through a list.

We then go to the Feeney house in the morning, next morning. Marvin is saying grace. Patty is asking Dexter, her son, about the college applications. She’s found a bunch of college rejections in his room and he has an argument with her about basically the fact that he was waiting to get an acceptance and then he would surprise her with it.

So, that’s Abigail Blackmore’s Three pages. John, take it away.

**John:** So, it’s a classic sort of — almost kind of like a record scratch. You have one setup and then you go to exactly the opposite of it. So, it’s like, “Boy is it cold in here,” and then you cut to something blazingly hot. It’s that kind of joke where we start in sort of a religious context. And he’s studying for college entries and then he’s having passionate love with this woman.

I liked that it got really dirty really fast. I always enjoy that in a script.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I just like that it got nice and filthy. It was broad in a way that wasn’t — I wasn’t encouraged by how broad it got so quickly though. And when we got back to the normal family and sort of the around the breakfast table, I was a little bit nervous about sort of how stuff was going to proceed. Because it went from the churchy speed, to let’s have hard core sex, back to churchy table scene, without a sense of sort of why it was fun to be placing those against each other, or why it was going to original to be placing those things next to each other.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Yeah. I agree with you.

The beginning of this has a little bit of the same problem we saw in our first three pages where, “My son started today.” “Luke?” You know, same thing here:

“Wonderful sermon, Pastor.”

“Patty, Marvin. How’s Dex? Not seen him in church lately.”

So, first of all, he’s a pastor. They just said something nice to him. I would imagine, “Thank you,” would be the normal thing a pastor would say. Not to simply announce their names to us and then immediately ask after the son. It’s just too jammed in. It just feel unnatural.

**John:** Also unnatural is, “He’s studying for college entries.” I don’t know what that sentence really means.

**Craig:** Yeah. What does that mean?

**John:** How do you study for college entries? “He’s getting ready for college,” maybe.

**Craig:** Well, “college entries,” even that is a weird phrase.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And also, he’s not, because he’s been applying, he’s got rejection letters, so what is there to study for? We’re already beyond that.

So, that was a bit clumsy. The sex scene I liked. I thought there was interesting touches. In the room the wall is covered with posters of dead movie stars. I thought that was really funny. And it’s the kind of thing that a lot of people wouldn’t even get, you know, but many people would in that quick moment.

The sex itself was very sort of, you know, you can see HBO’s Girls starting to infect things, not necessarily in a bad way, but apparently two people screwing isn’t enough anymore. You know, they have to go even further. And that’s fine. There’s something modern about it.

It was a little weird. I don’t’ know if I believe it necessarily. I don’t know if I believe this woman.

**John:** It reminded me a little bit more of Showtime’s Shameless.

**Craig:** Mm, I’ve never watched Shameless, but is that sort of the vibe?

**John:** That’s the vibe I sort of got out of that. I forget that you don’t watch any television at all.

**Craig:** I don’t, I know, and I should because our friend Nancy Pimental is the head writer on Shameless. But, I think that the — it’s pushed, you know, so tonally the notion that they’re going to work their way through sexual, I don’t know, like a hit list of sexual practices. It felt, I don’t know, I don’t believe it really happens. There is something funny about “Next up, ‘ANAL SEX’.” And then “Tracy, croaky, ‘Wednesday’s anal.'”That’s a very funny line. Plus, she’s croaky because he was choking her. I mean, I you know, it was funny. I thought it was really well done.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’s cool, you know, I liked that.

The Marvin and Patty scene, this however, I got a little whiplash. So, there’s this very cool scene in Tracy’s basement. But then back at home with his mom and his dad, it felt a little like I was just watching a summer stock production of a parents and generation gap drama. Where, you know, I just — it was boring. I don’t know what else to say. I’ve seen it, you know.

**John:** Someone on Twitter this morning mentioned that like there should be some sort of drinking game every time we mention specificity, but I think specificity is the problem I’m having here is that the parents feel very generically, oh, they’re churchy Baptist people.

And if they’re going to be important characters, give them something specific that is not just template stock character churchy Baptist people. And you can say, like, “Oh, but we’re only on page two.” But we’re on page two, so give us some sense of what’s unique and special about this family versus any other sort of family, because you were very specific on the sex scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, and it was pointed. So, make everyone else in the world at least as interesting if they’re going to be a crucial part of your script.

**Craig:** Yeah. It almost feels like the sex scene was written by a different person, because the sex scene was visual. It wasn’t overly dialogued. And then when we get back to the kitchen, it’s just people talking. I mean, she tries to touch his hair. He flinches at her reach. There’s the hair cutting thing. Look, all of the stuff where he’s a child, but they don’t get that he’s really grown up. But he’s lying to them.

I don’t know. It was sort of boring. I don’t feel like a kid that’s doing what he’s doing with Tracy really gives a damn about what his parents feel, you know. I don’t know. There’s just something so whiplashy tonally about this stuff. But, I really liked the Tracy’s Basement scene.

**John:** I did, too.

I want to talk about the Tracy’s Basement scene, though. Page two:

So, that’s the button on a scene. That’s the, like, okay, the scene is over. It’s like he’s walking out the door. I feel like that scene is probably stronger without the button.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** And so if you say that croaky for, so, “Wednesday’s Anal,” that’s…

**Craig:** That’s the end. There isn’t an editor in the world who would not cut the rest of the scene. I think, you know, if you really wanted to show the idea that he had to leave through the window, what I would do is:

You know what I mean? Like it’s a new thing. But you wouldn’t have just him climbing out from interior.

**John:** And I just want to talk also on page two, Dex, and Patty, and Marvin are all capitalized again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s not a common style in screenplays these days. And it went through a phase where probably it was more common. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** Also, if you have — personally I wouldn’t capitalize the word “Grace” for the prayer. But if you feel the need to out of some sort of religious deference, be aware that people are going to think it’s a name, especially when you have all these other names. It seemed a little odd to me.

The prayer itself, too. I just want to say this feels very clumsy to me. “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for this good food and for our continued good health.” So, there’s two goods, but fine, it’s grace. “And please spare a thought for the Winchester family at 1216.” What?! You know, god doesn’t need addresses. That just felt like either you were trying to be cute and it just didn’t work, or it’s just stilted, you know. I wonder if the Winchester family is Tracy.

Oh, no, she’s Tracy Keach, so it’s not. I don’t know. So, Tracy Keach, huh? It’s like Stacy Keach, the actor.

Regardless, anyway, it’s weird. I just feel like two different people are writing this script. And I like the writer that wrote Tracy’s Basement.

**John:** I would also say that if you’re going to keep that prayer, a good time to introduce that prayer would be over Craig Mazin’s climbing out the window. Because that’s a great pre-lap.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Because we know what a prayer sounds like. If we start hearing that before we actually see the people doing it, it’s a great way to save yourself some time. You can establish the neighborhood a little bit if you wanted to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That can be a useful thing to do.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Okay, so, a mixed bag there, but, nice to see some good.

And last we have something from Ed Stahr. S-T-A-H-R. Star! And it’s The New Normal, “Pilot.” So, this would be a pilot for a show called The New Normal that’s not the actual show The New Normal that’s on TV.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s have a little sidebar conversation before we even start.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because I was like, “Wait, whoa! Someone’s giving us a pilot for a show that’s on TV.” [laughs]

**John:** So, it sucks when someone takes your title, but it happens all the time. And if you’re sending something out to somebody and it has the same title as something that’s on the air, or is a movie that currently exists, that’s going to be really confusing.

So, the fact that their thing already exists and yours is a script, sorry, you’re going to need to pick a new title for your show or for your movie. That’s just the breaks.

Also, at the bottom of this page Ed has his WGA registration number. You don’t need it. No one cares. He also has Copyright 2011. Well, you know what? It’s already copyrighted because you wrote it. And Copyright 2011 tells me that this has been sitting on a shelf or in a drawer for awhile.

So, these are not useful things to be putting on your script.

It is accepted practice to — something that’s old that you’re sending out again, and you do want to put a date on it, put it on the bottom right hand side, and fake it. Just change two things in the script so that it’s a new script and put a newer date on it. That’s my advice.

**Craig:** Right. That’s great advice. This sort of bric-a-brac, yeah, first of all you’ve got to change the title. No question. I guess in TV it’s okay to call a pilot, “Pilot?”

**John:** It’s actually common practice.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** The joke in one of the TV pilots that I did that we actually produced was the pilot was actually about the death of a pilot, so it was just kind of fun that the pilot was about a dead pilot.

**Craig:** [laughs] I like that. And did it become a dead pilot? No, it didn’t become a dead pilot.

**John:** Everything dies eventually.

**Craig:** Everything dies.

**John:** You know Lost? Lost died. Hugely successful, and then it died.

**Craig:** This is why drama is interesting. Death.

And, yeah, we don’t need this WGA bric-a-brac. We don’t need Copyright 2011. It just makes you sound like somebody that’s going to sue somebody.

So, let’s do a quick summary here of The New Normal Pilot. Stan Dobbs, a 37 year old man, is sipping coffee from a travel mug in his kitchen. Steps out of his wife’s way. She’s Jen Dobbs, 35. And she’s bringing a skillet of scrambled eggs to the breakfast table.

We meet the kids, Chelsea, 4, cute, and Peyton, 14, a little too much makeup. Pierced ears. And the kids are asking daddy Stan to stay with them, but he has to go to work. And Peyton is annoyed by this. And she thinks it’s because it’s more important than they are. And she, in a teenage way, takes her plate of eggs to her room. “I’m going to eat in my room.”

Stan tells his wife he has to go to work. She says don’t work too hard. But then we reveal that he’s in his car. He’s got a laptop, and documents, and notebook, and he’s leaving a message with someone about trying to get a job. And clearly he’s been out of work for a bit and he’s been lying.

He’s now in a playground, alone, eating a hot dog. Back in the car, he’s talking to a credit card rep about the fact that his payment is late. And while he’s talking to her about the fact that he owes money, his wife calls in and asks if he could pick up dinner on the way home. He hopes that maybe there could be something in the freezer but she says no. She’s been going all day. Obviously she has no idea that they are in financial bad straits.

So, John, let’s discuss The New Normal Pilot.

**John:** Let us. I think we have to start with the first paragraph. So, I’m going to read the first paragraph but it may not give you the sort of full impression as to why it’s a challenging paragraph.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** STAN DOBBS (37, with greying well groomed hair, a hint of a gut and business clothes) takes a sip of coffee from a travel mug, then steps of out JEN DOBBS’s way…

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Sorry, I already messed up.

**Craig:** You’re already making it better than it is.

**John:** …steps of out JEN DOBBS’s (35, attractive, with a pony-tail and sweat pants) way as she carries a steaming skillet of scrambled eggs to the breakfast table.

So, that was five lines, and there are so many dependent clauses in here that you can so easily get confused.

**Craig:** It’s a jungle. It’s a jungle.

**John:** It’s a jungle.

So, here’s the actual action that’s happening? Stan Dobbs get out of his wife’s way while she has a skillet of eggs. That’s what happens in the actual thing. But, here’s all the information that’s being crammed into this paragraph: He’s 37, he has well-groomed gray hair, a bit of a gut, and business clothes.

What are business clothes? Is it a suit? I don’t know.

**Craig:** I guess?

**John:** Jen Dobbs is…

**Craig:** Wait, wait, you forgot. He is sipping coffee from a travel mug.

**John:** Oh, I forgot. I was just going to talk about the descriptors, but sure. The actual action is he is sipping coffee, getting out of her way while she has a skillet full of scrambled eggs. Those are the actual actions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But Jen, she doesn’t just have this, because she has to be something, and so in the parenthesis she is 35, attractive, with a pony-tail and sweatpants. That’s just…it’s just too much.

Here’s the information you could stick in here: Stan Dobbs, 37. You can give us the rest of him in the next paragraph. You can give more information about in the next paragraph if you want to. Jen Dobbs, 35, fine. And then you can actually maybe follow the action that’s happening in that paragraph. The action isn’t interesting at all. It’s not a great first way to start your story.

**Craig:** No, no. Let’s really talk…

Okay, first of all, the first paragraph as John described is tortured writing. It’s nearly impossible to read. It required three passes through for me to understand what the hell was going on.

That aside, here’s the real crime of this first paragraph: It’s static for the actors. We’re opening on people standing and then a woman moves across another person to bring eggs to a table. In and of itself it just feels like it opens on people standing and a woman walking.

So, if Stan enters and he walks through, grabs coffee, she’s dishing out eggs, the kids are doing whatever it is, but somehow we’re just opening on a man standing, sipping coffee from a travel mug. And then getting out of somebody’s way as she carries a steaming skillet of scramble eggs to the breakfast table. How tiny is the set that he needs to move out of the way, that she can’t take the eggs to the table?

So, we start off really clumsily.

**John:** Let’s play with this and say like well what if that was really the intent, is that he is a man who is frozen, like deer in the headlights kind of frozen, and she has to say, “Stan, move.” That’s a completely different thing.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** But then you’re starting on in the image of one person and you’re giving his description, and he’s just zoned out in his own space. And then she has to sort of get his attention to get around him.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s meaningful. That’s the purpose to why you’re doing that.

**Craig:** And, I would push that a little bit so that he moves to maybe get out — she tells him to move, he tries to move, and now he’s in his daughter’s way, and now he’s in the other daughter’s way, and he doesn’t know where to put anything. And he’s about to put his coffee down and somebody else puts something down in its place.

If you want to create the intention of somebody who’s out of place or in the way, that would be great. If you want to create the intention that this is somebody who is stuck and can’t move, that’s fine, too. But this is just — I think you’re just trying to set a domestic scene and there’s no value here. Sweatpants is one word. Not “sweat pants.” Yeah.

And these parenthesis is no way to do this. Break this paragraph up. This is not a good opening.

**John:** It’s not a good opening. The next real paragraph: “CHELSEY (4, cute, with a pony-tail and wearing pajamas)…”

“Pajama-wearing CHELSEY” would be a way to sort of establish that she’s in pajamas and she’s four. Don’t stick those giant parenthetical things in there because we lose track of what the actual purpose of the sentence was.

**Craig:** Yeah…

**John:** It’s just trapped in this parenthetical clause.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, “Chelsea, 4, pajamas.” That’s what I would do. I mean, you’re telling me a four-year-old little girl on TV is cute. Really? Oh, okay, because that’s a change of pace from all the ugly four-year-olds they put in television shows.

**John:** [laughs] I really want someone to write that. “The ugliest four-year-old you’ve ever seen.”

**Craig:** I would. I know.

**John:** And then I want to go to the casting call for that one. Which parents are bringing their kids in for like the ugly role?

**Craig:** Can I tell you, it’s so funny you bring that up. You know, there are oftentimes when you have to write characters — the point is that they’re ugly. And I always do think about these casting calls where people are like, “Oh, finally. Finally! This is perfect.” Or their agent calls, “Have I got something for you! I’ve got it. They need an ugly person. They need somebody who’s atrocious.”

You know, you’ve seen Cry-Baby, right, the John Waters’ movie?

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** I love Cry-Baby. I just think it’s such an underrated film. And Hatchet-Face. I just love that the woman’s name is Hatchet-Face because she’s so ugly. And they found a spectacularly, I mean, obviously they made her uglier in the movie than she really is in real life. But she’s got an odd face. And I love how she’s like, “Yeah, that’s right.”

Oh, it’s so cool. I just love that. Anyway…

**John:** Let’s continue. Let’s flip the pages because I think there’s a useful thing on the next one. Well, first off, in Stan’s car: “…documents line the dashboard and envelopes ret in his lap.”

Okay, this script has been around since 2011 and on page two you didn’t catch a typo. That’s not showing a lot of attention to detail. And I also want to talk about — this could be kind of useful — phone conversations. Because this script tries to have it both ways. General rule: Either we hear both sides of phone calls or we hear one side of phone calls. Both are okay. We can do it. But originally the first call that we’re on with Stan, we only hear his side.

**Craig:** I think he’s leaving a message in that first one.

**John:** Well, I didn’t read it clearly. So, I apologize.

**Craig:** But there’s no way to know that he’s leaving a message exactly, which is an issue. If the intention is that you want him leaving a message, we should hear the beep so that we aren’t confused.

**John:** But I will apologize, because I should have — once you get to the end of the thing you realize that it is that, but general rule, I would say, either we hear both sides or we hear one side. Don’t cheat.

Or, a phone can be put on speaker so we deliberately know that you’re hearing both sides because it’s actually happening in the space, but if we have both the character’s point of view of sound and the scene’s point of view of the sound, you have to be consistent throughout your movie with that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Before I get to Mr. Streebig here, I just want to say that this initial conversation around the eggs is not good. He is heading out to work. The four-year-old cute girl is saying, “Stay daddy.” Well, that makes sense. My daughter still says that to me and she’s eight.

“Daddy has to go to work Chelsey.” “Why?” And then Peyton, the 14-year-old says, “Because it’s more important than you are.” This is faux teen outrage. Teenagers are going to get angry about all sorts of stuff. They can’t get angry about their dad going to work. That’s just bizarre. They have to go to school anyway. I don’t…it just doesn’t…I mean, even if it’s a Saturday or whatever, I mean, if the point is that it’s Saturday, then say that. But, I just — that just is fake, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s fake. And there’s no real reaction to it. And then Jen’s description, you know, “Daddy goes to work so that we can have money.” You know, the whole thing seems really weird like we’re explaining this weird notion of work. Yeah.

**John:** I want to stop sort of picking on the script because I didn’t think these pages really worked. But I want to sort of speculate on intention behind it. Because, in calling this The New Normal, and it sets up with this idea of this unemployed guy, I’m trying to figure out where I think it’s going as a pilot. What is the TV show here?

It’s a family drama. It starts out with an unemployed guy. Maybe he gets some sort of minimum wage job? Or the wife goes back to work? But that doesn’t particularly…

**Craig:** I was thinking that maybe it was just that he was going to admit to her that he’s been out of work and he’s having trouble finding work. And they’re going to have to deal with the fact that they’re going on welfare, or food stamps, or whatever is sort of changing their lifestyle to become financially-challenged people.

**John:** Because it’s a pilot, I’m trying to figure out what the arc of the show is. Where does the show go and what is the show week-to-week. And, yeah, it’s only three pages in. I get that. But, I was trying to visualize what that was going to be.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not sure. It is hard to tell obviously from three pages. We can’t really fault Ed for that. But, I guess the only other bit of advice I would have for you is it’s okay for people to use contractions when they speak.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** “This is Stan Dobbs. I am calling to follow up on the interview I had with you. It has been three weeks.”

**John:** American speakers will contract almost everything there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everything. “I am asking you to waive the fee and move my bill date.” It’s all very strange.

Ed, I think that this needs a lot of work. I’m not quite sure what to say. I don’t mean to be super mean about it, but this level of writing, this quality of writing is not going to get you work. So, I’m hoping that since this was written in 2011 that your skills have developed since then. And I would urge you just to read some pilots of shows that you really love and take a look at how they’re doing things, because I don’t think you’re quite there yet.

And that was the last one of our group.

**John:** I want to thank all four of our Three Page Challenge submitters, because that was very cool and brave of you to share what you did and let us talk about it and tell you the things that we thought were fantastic and the things that could be even better.

Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week? I know you’re sick, so I don’t want to push you too hard.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, you know, I often don’t have one when I’m feeling well, so I do. It’s so narrow and so I’ll be very fast about it.

But, for those people who have Teslas, there is this wonderful site called the Tesla Motors Forum where Tesla owners help each other figure things out. It’s the coolest site And I had like a little tiny issue with the charger for my car, and there’s a guy on there who is an amazing electrician. He goes by FlasherZ. I don’t know what his real name is. But he helped me and problem solved.

I like when there’s a little community dedicated to one tiny little thing, but everybody is really passionate and helps each other. So, thank you Telsa Motors Forum for existing. And thank you, FlasherZ.

**John:** Cool. My One Cool Thing is a book I’m reading right now on the Kindle. It’s called Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Victor Mayer-Schonberger and Kenneth Cukier.

What I like about it, a couple things. It talks about — I think you had even brought this up in an early podcast, like Google Flu that actually tracks sort of flu outbreaks based on like how people are searching for things. So, just like the CDC collects data on how the flu is spreading, Google collects data and they can often figure out faster than the CDC where the flu outbreak is happening and sort of what people are doing based on how people are searching for it.

The argument and the central premise behind Big Data, the book, is that simply by being able to look at huge quantities of data we’re able to find things that we wouldn’t otherwise find, because we’re always — classically we’ve always been sampling. We’re taking little slices of data and trying to generalize out based on that because all we could process was the small little things. Now you just take all the data and crunch it, and smush it up, and you don’t look for perfect data. You just look for the most data possible.

When you’re looking at little samples, you’re always looking for causes. Causation is sort of what the goal is. Here you can just look for correlations. So, Google doesn’t even necessarily know why these things tend to — these search patterns tend to — indicate that flu is happening there. They just know that it does. And so sometimes you don’t actually need to look for causation. You’re just looking for correlation. And that’s really fascinating.

So, I feel like many of our nerdier listeners will enjoy this book. It’s a good, simple, fun read. And then thing I appreciate kind of more than anything else is they use data as a singular and they don’t try to say “these data,” which “these data” just drives me crazy.

**Craig:** Yes. Or resort to “datum.”

**John:** So, you may feel free to disagree with me. It’s one of those where I take great umbrage at, is that people try to make English be Latin exactly, and it just isn’t. So, if you want to disagree with me you’re welcome to. I have a whole blog post about it.

**Craig:** We should link to — I’ll send Stuart the link — there’s this great Mitchell & Webb sketch that has a terrific ending that is specifically about this whole Latin/English thing. It’s one of my favorite sketches. I’ll send it to Stuart so he can link it up.

**John:** Fantastic. Well, Craig, I don’t know, but I feel like maybe you started feeling a little bit better over the course of the podcast. I felt some strength returning. So, I hope by next week you are at 100,000%.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? I think Ben W.’s script kind of gave me a little kick…

**John:** A shot in the arm?

**Craig:** …a little kick in my step. A little shot in the arm, yeah.

**John:** Well, you are a robot, so maybe it turned a little [crosstalk] in your heart.

**Craig:** I’m not the robot and you know it. [laughs] You know it. Somebody was talking on Twitter if Scriptnotes were a movie, here’s what the movie would be: A robot befriends a human boy with emotional problems. That’s what our movie is.

**John:** [laughs] It will be like that Frank Langella movie where he has like the robot assistant that people talked about for awhile and then it just went away.

**Craig:** I know! It was a great trailer. I never saw the movie. I feel bad. I should go see it.

**John:** Robot & Frank.

**Craig:** Robot & Frank. There you go.

**John:** I haven’t watched it. Craig, feel better, have a great week, and I will talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Talk to you next week, John. Bye.

LINKS:

* How to [submit your three pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three pages by [Justin Adams](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JustinAdams.pdf)
* Three pages by [Ben W.](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BenW.pdf)
* Three pages by [Abigail Blackmore](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AbigailBlackmore.pdf)
* Three pages by [Ed Stahr](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/EdStahr.pdf)
* The [Tesla Motors Forum](http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/forumdisplay.php/47-Tesla-Motors-Forum) and the very helpful [FlasherZ](http://www.teslamotorsclub.com/member.php/9819-FlasherZ)
* [Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544002695/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger & Kenneth Cukier
* Mitchell & Webb’s [Grammar Nazi](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IvWoQplqXQ) sketch
* OUTRO: [Fell on Your Head](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7QiR2Go0Lg) by Francis and the Lights from Robot & Frank