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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/first-sale-and-funny-on-the-page).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Mmm…my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 84 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Oh, recovering. I got sick again.

**John:** Oh no, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, enough already with this. But much better now. Feeling good. I think I’ll be less phlegmy in this podcast. And recuperating from, you know, traveling with… — You ever have that thing where you’re descending on a plane but your ears are all stuffed up?

**John:** It’s the absolute worst.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. And you feel like something inside of you is dying.

**John:** Yeah. It reminds me of the classic scene in Star Trek II where they’re putting the little bugs inside, is it Chekov’s ears?

**Craig:** It is. It goes inside Chekov’s ear. And it is a scene that I have tortured my sister with for… — I mean, when did that movie come out? 1981?

**John:** Sounds right.

**Craig:** So, I’ve been torturing her with that for 32 years.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just so awesome. What a weird Jungian nightmare that they just sort of uncovered.

**John:** Yeah. I think anything going into your eyes, or honestly, the knife going across somebody’s eye is the thing that I just can’t possibly stand.

**Craig:** You know, but the knife going across somebody’s eye, like, Un Chien Adalou did that very famous thing, it’s so ridiculous that I don’t even like, eh. Because there’s a lot of stuff that they do in movies where you’re like, “Oh god, that would really, really hurt.” But there’s something about a thing crawling into your ear. It’s an opening you already have, so they’re not cutting you. And then it’s going in you and staying in there.

**John:** We’ve already lost half of our listeners by disturbing imagery.

**Craig:** But we may have picked up some new ones.

**John:** Ah! Maybe so. Well, hopefully they’ll enjoy listening to our topics for today which include the First-Sale Doctrine, which is a big copyright concept that has important ramifications for people who make movies and people who like to watch movies.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Second, I want to talk about what’s funny on the page versus what’s funny on screen.

**Craig:** Hmm, like I know?

**John:** Yeah, I think you can answer a couple of those questions.

**Craig:** I have no clue.

**John:** And a couple of other just random listener questions that have been in the mail bag that I think we can tackle today.

**Craig:** Great. Before we do that, real quickly, how’s everything going over there?

**John:** Things are going really well. So, I’m in Chicago right now. This was our first week of previews for Big Fish. And it was terrifying but really, really good. Everything kind of came together. And our Tuesday night went terrific. And our Wednesday night really well. And Thursday night was even better. So, it’s really been amazing.

The strange thing is we go through this tech rehearsal where you’re trying to put all the pieces together and you’re never quite sure what the whole show looks like. And it was literally not until we started on Tuesday night that it was like I thought we could get through the whole show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And people cheered at the right things, and laughed at the right things, and it was great. That said, you still keep doing work. And so we are performing every night but we have rehearsals starting at noon. So, basically 11am we meet with the creators and talk about sort of what we want to try to fix. And then you’re scrambling from noon to five to make changes, to make cuts, to change lines, to move stuff around.

And then everyone has to go have dinner and come back and put on the show with those changes in it.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, it’s been amazing. But, I’ve said before, it’s like production and post-production at the same time. This is like being at the Avid but the people are actually in front of you and you’re trying to make this thing happen. And every night there’s — you don’t know what’s going to happen because it’s actually live in front of you. So, the second or third night one of the lack scrims didn’t come up in time. Last night we had one of our actresses get sick during the show.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** Like she got food poisoning during the show. A swing had to go in. And our swings are brilliant, so Cynthia stepped up and did the job. So, that’s remarkable and that’s been fun to watch and experience.

**Craig:** Wow. Yeah, it’s funny, I have a friend who has been in musical theater for a long time, and while I don’t think she ever quite made it to Broadway she did a lot of Off-Broadway stuff and a lot of theater out here, like Santa Barbara and stuff like that. And we went to go see her in Peter Pan and she told us that the night before she had food poisoning and actually puked, I think puked on stage, [laughs], which I think is amazing.

And the great part about it is that it’s Peter Pan, so there’s all these kids in the audience. And they’re just like, “Why is Peter Pan throwing up?”

**John:** Yeah. Hopefully she wasn’t like in the aerial sequence of Peter Pan when the vomit happened.

**Craig:** God, you know, if she had been. “Unforgettable,” says the Santa Barbara News.

**John:** And one of the most remarkable things about Big Fish here in Chicago is a bunch of people from our podcast and from the blog have come to see the show. And so I had an open invitation, like if you’re coming to see the show send me your dates, and your times, and your seat numbers and I’ll try to come visit you. So, I’ve sort of done that Where’s Waldo thing of trying to find people in the balcony. And that’s worked only okay.

It’s actually much more difficult to find people up there than I thought it would be. I really needed Nima and Ryan to like make me an app to find people, but it’s been challenging.

**Craig:** Well, why don’t you just tell them when they see you to hold up something?

**John:** Yes. I’ve asked them just to grab me if they see me because I’m pretty identifiable. And so many people have grabbed me and said hello and they’ve enjoyed the show. And it’s been remarkable for them to come. So, I look forward to shaking more hands as we go through our five weeks here in Chicago.

**Craig:** Great. Awesome.

**John:** Let’s get started. First off, the First-Sale Doctrine, which is this legal concept that exists in US Copyright Law, but I think probably other countries’ copyright laws as well. What First-Sale Doctrine means is that if you make something that is subject to copyright, so let’s say you make a movie or a song, or a book is a good easy example.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s say you created a book. You have the exclusive right to distribute that book. That’s one of your rights in copyright. What First-Sale Doctrine holds is that once you’ve sold that book to somebody, they can go off and resell that book again. And that’s why we have used book stores. That’s why we have libraries to some degree. It’s an important thing that’s one of the important tenets of US Copyright Law.

So, these last couple weeks, two big cases came up that challenged our conceptions of First-Sale Doctrine. And I thought they were important to talk about because they have big implications, not only if you are making movies, but if you are watching movies.

**Craig:** Right. I think one of them definitely has implications for the movie business. Maybe more so than the other.

**John:** Great. I’ll be curious which one you think is more important.

So, the first one that came up, the ruling came back, it was a Supreme Court Case called Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. And so here’s the situation that happened in that, and this was actually a book situation. It was a textbook situation, like literally it was about textbooks.

Somebody from Thailand came to the US to study and found that the textbooks were incredibly expensive. But they found that, “Oh, wow, if I actually bought those same textbooks back in Thailand, they’re much, much, much cheaper.” So, not only did he buy the books in Thailand for himself, he started bringing in those books from Thailand and selling them in the United States to help pay for his college education.

John Wiley & Sons, which was the publisher, said, “No, no, no. You can’t do that.” And they sued him. They won at a lower court, but the Supreme Court overruled that 6-3 and overturned that decision, and ruled that First-Sale Doctrine holds true even if the books were purchased in Thailand or outside the US, that concept still holds true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that’s a fascinating issue because a lot of times we want to discriminate on price based on different markets. And so from a movie perspective, a lot of times we may say like, “Okay, we’re going to price this movie at this price in Asia, but it’s a higher price in the United States.”

**Craig:** Yes. And if we were still living in DVD culture I would say this would be definitely — this is an issue. Because first, I think the notion is that the First-Sale Doctrine is kind of a US thing. I mean, our copyright laws are different from other countries in a number of ways.

So, okay, First-Sale says you’re the copyright holder and the reason that the word “copyright” is copyright is because that’s the biggest right of all, to make copies. You’re the only person that can make copies of your work. You’re the only person that can distribute your work.

However, you get the right of the first sale. You don’t get the right of the second, third, and fourth sale. Once you sell it to somebody they can sell that discrete copy to someone else — as you said, used book store. The same goes for textbooks.

What this case seemed to be about was basically, look, Thailand maybe doesn’t have the doctrine of first-sale, or even if it did it’s a different doctrine of first-sale because it’s a different country. So, if you go and you sell intellectual property in somebody else’s jurisdiction, with somebody else’s copyright laws, and they take that and they come back to the United States, does the Doctrine of First Sale somehow magically appear all of a sudden, even if it wasn’t purchased originally in a place where Doctrine of First-Sale exists?

And the Supreme Court said: Yeah, it does. If were still living in a world of DVDs, and the studios were selling DVDs here for $20, and overseas for $5, then it would make total sense to just start buying your DVDs overseas and then selling them here. The whole point, this guy didn’t just buy a textbook in Thailand, bring it over, and then sell it to somebody. Nobody bothers with that. He was running a business. He was basically arbitraging the difference between the textbook prices of the same textbooks, reselling them and keeping the profit.

So, you could say, “All right, I’m going to buy 100,000 copies of Transformers in India where it costs $2.00 and sell them over here for $8.00, which is still cheaper than the US price and make a lot of money.” True, that there’s this whole DVD region thing that makes it a little more difficult to do, but really that’s not as big of a deal for us right now in the movie business because we are increasingly out of the physical object business, which is why this next case was so, so important.

**John:** Yes. So, the second case is Capitol Records vs. ReDigi. I think they call it ReDigi. And what ReDigi does is it says, “Okay, you have bought these mp3 files on iTunes or through some other store. We will let you resell that mp3 to somebody else who might want it. And in selling it we will delete it off your computer and put it on their computer.”

And ReDigi was the company that was serving as this broker. It was doing this work of moving your mp3 to the other person’s computer, the buyer’s computer.

This is much more sort of obviously troubling for people who are making digital goods, such as digital movies or songs that are mp3 files. The studios really did not want this to happen. It was Capitol Records in this case who came in.

So, it was a lower court decision, but this lower court said that ReDigi’s business model, their plan of doing this, was not realistic. Was a violation of the First-Sale Doctrine. Wasn’t covered by First-Sale Doctrine.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** And I do like that the judge in the case actually cited Star Trek’s Transporters and Willy Wonka’s Wonkavision. And so as a writer of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I love that he cited Wonkavision.

**Craig:** He did cite Wonkavision.

There’s a lot going on in this case and it’s not final obviously. I have a feeling that this one will be appealed and maybe make its way to the Supremes as well. But, it was an encouraging decision for us.

So, the crux of it is this: You buy a digital file from the copyright owner. And the question is how does the First-Sale Doctrine apply to you? Okay, they made the first sale to you; how do you then resell this? And really the truth is you can’t. And the reason you can’t is because the First-Sale Doctrine doesn’t say you can make a copy of what you’ve bought and sell the copy. It says you have to sell that thing you bought. So, because copyright is exclusive to the copyright owner — only they can make copies — unless they’ve licensed you some limited ability to make copies for personal use, which they can do.

So, how do you sell a digital file you have purchased without making a copy? So, ReDigi’s argument was, “Easy. We just take it from you and move it over to here. And we make sure that you’ve deleted it.” But, the judge rightly is pointing out, “Well, that’s still a copy.” Once you transmit the file to another space, you’re copying it. The fact that you are copying the book and then burning the other book behind it doesn’t mean you haven’t made a copy.

The truth is there is nothing that discrete about these digital files. The only real way to resell digital files, I think, and still be consistent with the First-Sale Doctrine is to sell them with your hard drive to someone. But barring that, you have made a copy. Furthermore, it’s really impossible for any business to ensure that they’re not making a copy, because the only way I, as ReDigi, can ensure that I’m not making an illegal copy when I accept your file from you is to make sure that you haven’t already duplicated your file on your end.

And that, of course, is where the opportunity for abuse is and it would be abused. Why wouldn’t any starving college student want to sell his entire music library knowing full well it’s copied, [laughs], and it isn’t going anyway? It’s sort of an obvious one.

Now, here’s what I think is interesting about this: When, I would say about two or three years ago, the movie industry got together and was trying to figure out how are we going to sell movies digitally, away from physical objects, and I suspect one of the things they were wrestling with was this very question, even though it hadn’t occurred to a lot of us. If they do sell things that are re-sellable, it’s not good for them.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, what his all points to ultimately, I think, and the way around this mess for the movie business, and the music business, too, is that ultimately we’re never going to own any of these copies ever. We’re never going to have them. We are going to have to own access because if I’m the movie studio, here’s what I know: The person at home wants to watch the movie when they want to watch it. And they’re happy to pay to watch the movie. I do not want them to have a copy of the movie for so many reasons. So, I stream it to them.

I stream it to them and what they’re paying for is access to that stream. And on their end it ought to be no different than popping in a DVD. Now, that’s going to require infrastructure improvements to download speeds and all the rest of it, but that’s ultimately where it has to go.

**John:** I would agree with you. I also feel like this coming generation is sort of used to this “assetlessness.” It’s been interesting even just me living in like two corporate apartments over the last two months, I’ve kind of come to treasure the fact that I don’t actually have anything I need to own. Like I don’t have any printed books here. I don’t have any DVDs here. I don’t even know if I have a DVD player in the room, because if I want to watch Game of Thrones I just pull it up on my iPad and connect it to my Apple TV. I don’t want to have to own those physical things if I don’t have to own those physical things. And not owning those physical things is wonderful.

The problem comes when I don’t have an internet connection. That breaks down. And that is a huge flaw in this.

So, just so we can talk it out better, I’d like to try adopt the opposite point of view so I can see like these are the real problems with what you’re describing and sort of what the issues here.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, I will now be the counter voice here.

**Craig:** You’ll be the “copy-fighter.”

**John:** I’ll be copy-fighter. So, here is the challenge. What you are doing by saying that you cannot transport this material from one person to another person is you’re essentially going back to the dark ages where things were written on scrolls, and like only certain people had access to certain things. Because what you’re saying is like only — you can’t ever own anything, that you can only license something. Then you’re controlling who can have access to anything that you don’t want them to have access to.

So, right now it’s the corporation saying, “Oh, we don’t want to license that movie in certain countries.” But then you’re denying everyone in that country the ability to experience that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or even to import that movie, or to find a physical copy. We’re saying that 100 years from now there may not be a physical copy that somebody could use in a library. You might say that a copyright extension is a whole separate other issue, but it’s sort of meaningless to say, “Oh, it will become in the public domain eventually,” if there’s never an ownable copy up until that point.

**Craig:** My response would be this. I think that there’s a reasonable case to be made that there ought to be full and open access to these things, and I don’t know how you legislate this. Because ultimately, well, maybe not. I mean, look, the copyright owner has the right to distribute, which also includes the right to not distribute. I don’t have to sell my novel in Wisconsin.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No publisher is required to sell a novel in Wisconsin, nor is any publisher required to translate the book, nor is any publisher required to sell it in any particular country. So, I would say that that’s actually not that different than it is now. The only difference is that you can’t — we’ve effectively barred those people from any kind of re-buying of that.

And, all I can say is, again, I tend to side with the rights of the content creators. I also feel like in general the marketplace tends to solve this problem. The whole point of making movies for these companies is to have people watch them and pay for them. So, I have a feeling that they would be all for open access as long as it didn’t feel like they were letting the foxes in the henhouse.

As far as libraries, I think their day is coming to a close. And I love libraries, but they are not going to be — libraries will ultimately not exist. I don’t think it’s going to happen.

**John:** So, let’s go to books, although of course you can apply it to movies as well. If libraries cease to exist, if you are a person who doesn’t have the economic means to get that book, to purchase that book, to purchase whatever the license is to read that book, then you have no access to that book. And that is a potentially huge problem for not only the educational system but sort of our system of culture.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there will ultimately become some sort of virtual library. And I don’t think that we’re going to live in a time 30 years from now where access to the internet will be seen as the privileged outcome of owning a device. I think at some point it’s going to — for instance, telephones.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** — were just given to people, you know, the impoverished got telephones. At some point they were like, “Everybody needs a phone. You’re going to have to have a phone. And they’re so cheap and here’s a phone. And here’s a connection.” And everybody that uses — even to this day — when you pay your bill, part of your bill is a tax for people who are poor and can’t afford a phone.

And I think that’s where it’s going to go. I think ultimately everybody will be connected. I think there will be literally hobos in the street with tablets.

And there will be some sort of access to free material through there in some form or another.

**John:** All right. Let’s go back to our core demographic here of writers and screenwriters. How do these issues affect screenwriters, people who are making movies?

**Craig:** Well, the biggest way is that by shooting down the ReDigi model we’re essentially protecting our residual base. So, we get paid when the studios get paid. Our residuals for reuse, our percentage of their gross for reuse, and in a ReDigi world where people can just sell each other these copies over, and over, and over, there’s just little incentive for them to buy the premium copy from the studio, which means we just don’t see the revenue.

It’s a little bit like eBay. You know, eBay is an enormous underground market. It’s a huge flea market of resale and the manufacturers get nothing of that resale. And that’s fine. I mean, people are selling objects and that’s the deal with objects.

For us, however, it would decimate what is already a wobbly system and what is already a system that has been knocked down so severely since the fall of the DVD. And by extension, continues to put pressure on screenwriting as a viable career.

Forget the average person, since it’s never been a viable career for the average person. It wouldn’t even be a viable career for the average screenwriter today. And that’s the scary part. So, that’s where the rubber hits the road for me.

**John:** Yeah. I would say going back to the Wiley decision, the ability to bring in things from other places, I’m glad it sort of ended up where it ended up. I feel like if we are not able to import things from other places, to see them, to experience them, then all the Japanese anime that you might want to go see could become locked off to you.

So, I think it’s important to be able to have access to — to bring stuff in from other places — or sometimes things that you would want to have a copy of that is just not available in the US market. And so I think it’s generally a helpful thing for people who want to see movies, that you can bring stuff in from other places.

**Craig:** Well, that decision didn’t really say that you could now do that. What it said is you can now do that and then resell it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is a different deal. I mean, any of us can go online right now and buy a textbook from Thailand. It was just that this guy was pretty enterprising about it.

**John:** Yeah. But I respect the business model, and you see it more in big cities, but like the place that just sells the stuff that they brought in from Asia. And that can be kind of great. And I think it’s good that you can actually get some of those physical things from other places, copyrighted works.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And I would worry that had this decision done the other way you could see many more barriers put up to being able to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, you know, for the textbook industry and for the — let’s just say the widget industry where people are selling physical objects, sorry, physical manifestations of intellectual property like books, and CDs, and DVDs, and works of art, this is a little bit of a challenge because they do price things for their marketplace.

I mean, yeah, obviously we pay more here in the United States for the same thing than they do in the developing world. And while we could stop and say, “Well, wait a second. That means we’re getting ripped off.” Uh, yeah, I guess we’re getting ripped off, but then again we have a lot more money than those people do and we’re willing to pay for it here. And, so, that’s that.

**John:** A couple reasons I think for the price discrimination. First off, we have more money, so therefore they can just afford to charge more for it. Second off, I mean, the reverse of that is they don’t have the money in those other markets, so if you price certain things, not only can no one buy it but you’re incentivizing piracy. Essentially like you’re trying to compete with free, or nearly free.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, there’s a little part of me that gets annoyed when I see, okay, well, if you can price it for that in Thailand, and still make money, because I know for sure you’re not pricing it below your cost, then you’re just up-charging me a massive amount for the privilege of having enough money to pay for it.

But, then again, I think, okay, but they sort of average it all out. And there’s like a medium price. The thing is, what do they do about — it does make a challenge for them because they can’t… — The only reason they can charge $5.00 in Thailand is because they charge $25.00 here. If the average is, you know, whatever, is $15.00, well, we’ll all buy them for $15.00 merrily, but they can’t in Thailand. So, what happens then? You know?

**John:** I suspect that the real costs are considerably different based on just the market. So, you know, a lot of the costs that we’re associating with our movies is all the — it’s the store, it’s the shipping, and all the other stuff, which might be quite a bit lower in other markets.

**Craig:** Yeah. But like for instance textbook publishing, I mean, look, I don’t know, but I suspect that most of the books that we buy here are actually assembled and published overseas.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, it’s just that, you know, and yeah, maybe we’re spending a little bit extra for the — you know, because they have to ship the books over, but not that much more. We’re getting gouged. We know we are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so I’m kind of… — In a weird way, who this ends up hurting are the people getting the lower prices. Their prices will go up and that hurts them more than our prices coming down, if this becomes like a huge thing. We’ll see if it does.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Let’s move onto our next topic which his about comedy. So, a completely different thing. This is a question that actually starts with Joe D. who wrote in to ask.

**Craig:** Where is Joe D. from, by the way?

**John:** He didn’t say.

**Craig:** Oh, because that sounds like a New York guy to me.

**John:** Joe D.!

**Craig:** Hey, Joe D.!

**John:** So, yes, if you’re writing in with a question, and I should stop and say that if you have questions that you want me and Craig to talk about, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And so a big list of questions comes in, and I cull them, and Stuart culls them, and eventually we answer the ones we think are interesting.

So, Joe D. wrote in to ask: “When writing a comedy script do you think there is a one-to-one correlation between funny on screen versus funny on paper? Meaning, should a laugh out loud moment seen on the screen be equally laugh out loud moment on paper? In your experience, has this rung true? At what point does a smile on paper become a chuckle or a laugh?”

**Craig:** There is not a one-to-one relationship at all.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** Not even close. You know, there are books that have made me laugh wildly, but if you were to shoot them they wouldn’t work at all. I mean, prose designed to make you laugh is very different than prose designed to be produced and make you laugh. It’s just a different thing.

Similarly, the same goes for situations that you’re describing. Knowing what to write to turn into something that makes people laugh, that’s why there are so few people that write comedy in movies. It’s not easy. And it’s an art. You know, it is an art in and of itself. It’s a strange debased, silly art, but it is an art.

And there are very few times where I’ve… — You know, sometimes I’ll write a line and I think, “That’s gonna work.” And it does work. And I think, “Okay, so there you go. That was a one-to-one moment, you know.”

**John:** But, I mean, that’s not quite what he’s phrasing. Like how often do you actually laugh when you read a script? For me it’s almost never.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** I mean, I’ve read very funny scripts that become very funny movies, but they’re not funny when you’re reading them on the page because they’re funny because you’re visualizing, like, “Oh, this is how it’s going to work.” And you can tell that, “I think that’s going to be funny,” but you have no idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You aren’t laughing as you’re sitting there with the script on your iPad in front of you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t remember reading any script that made me laugh through it. And, frankly, if I did I would be suspicious that something was weird, because it was designed to do the wrong thing.

Sometimes producers or executives will say, “I laughed out loud when I read this,” or “I laughed out loud when I read that,” and I’ll think, okay, yeah, you’re probably lying. You know the way people say LOL but they never really LOL?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think it’s that. But, no, there’s not a one-to-one thing. Comedy is about performance. You’ve probably heard the old saying about timing. So much of comedy is about timing. So much of comedy is about staging. So much of comedy is about editing, or more specifically the lack thereof. And you simply can’t get that from the page. So, comedy writers are basically putting down a chemical formula and then you’re mixing the chemicals in front of the camera on the day.

So, no. No one-to-one relationship with there.

**John:** That said, that’s not to give a carte blanche to not try to be funny on the page. And so I’ll definitely notice that as you refine your work you’ll be taking out certain words, or trying to put back certain words so that it will read funnier, and so that you will give the actor a plan for like how that line can actually be funny.

And I’m sure we’ve both had situations where an actor just doesn’t understand how to make that line funny, or they’re trying to change something that is actually cutting into how that thing should be funny.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** A classic example is an actor will change the tense in a sentence. They think, “Oh, it doesn’t really matter,” but it actually makes it not funny because of how they’ve changed the tense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or, it’s a misdirect. So, one of the lines in Big Fish that every time I watch the show I have like my little scribbly piece of paper and I take notes on what things are. And because I know every line of the show, if a line isn’t delivered right I can make a note and we can give that line reading back.

One of the things that’s happened a couple of times is exactly that. A very specific thing — in this case it was a joke where if you say, “Luckily, years earlier I had been bitten the Chucalabra snake of Tanzania.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** “Luckily, years earlier,” it’s important that it be that way. Because we say “luckily years before I had been bitten by the Chucalabra snake. “The years before, before I had been bitten,” it becomes a separate clause that makes it not funny. So, earlier versus before is actually a very important thing.

**Craig:** You are hitting on something interesting and sometimes I seethe quietly over this, because comedy requires a certain mastery of grammar. There is a reason why things are funny in their order with specific words. You can look at two versions of a joke where it’s slightly different, and one is clearly funnier than the other. And you could spend all day talking about why, but really nobody has the time for that. Either you know or you don’t.

And the people who write comedy routinely tend to know. And the people who don’t, don’t. And it actually requires quite a bit of intelligence. And just instinct. And that’s why… –What’s so great about comedy, too, is that unlike drama, which I think drama is always about representations of tragedy. There can be new comedy invented. Comedy actually can just come out of nowhere — and suddenly there’s a new comedy that didn’t exist before it.

And those people and their instincts are incredible. But it is so instinctive and so scientific. And, frankly, it’s OCD. Comedy is OCD. If you’re not OCD about the language that you’re using, comedy may not be your thing.

**John:** Yeah. One other thing I want to make clear, when I say like it’s not necessarily funny on the page, that’s a different conversation that voice. And I remember when we had Aline on the show we talked about voice. And the successful writers, the ones you can tell like, “Oh, this person is going to succeed,” a lot of times it’s because they have a voice. And many times it’s a funny voice.

And so the good comedy scripts tend to be funny even in the places that aren’t necessarily jokes. It’s just enjoyable to read in the right ways and it has a sense of humor to itself that’s not just scene, scene, scene, line, line, line.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a hard thing to describe. But even not just what the characters are saying but the way that the script actually feels on the page is funny, or it is just the way it should be.

And so even if people aren’t laughing out loud, they’re going to the next page because they’re hearing a voice. And they’re having confidence that this person knows what they’re doing.

**Craig:** And there are writers who are really funny and write really funny stuff. They don’t have necessarily a great mind for structure. They don’t necessarily have a great mind for theme. They don’t necessarily have a great mind for drama. They’re just funny.

A lot of times those writers end up having incredible careers working on hysterically funny television shows, because television shows do rely less on a kind of self-encapsulated structure. I mean, there’s a structure to each show, of course, and there’s a room full of people to kind of help you get there. But a movie is a self-encapsulated structure. It’s its own thing that begins and ends. Permanently.

So, a lot of times they do that. But then there are a lot of writers who also work in movies who really do come on to projects to make them funnier. They’re not there necessarily to write something that is comedically dramatic or dramatically comedic.

**John:** Yeah. And there are cases where like you just literally need a laugh here. And so that’s where a writer who’s good at figuring out what could be funny in that moment can be really valuable.

You and I have both been on comedy panels, roundtables on movies that are about to go into production. And those are not ideal situations for figuring out the big funny of a movie, but they can be useful for figuring out those little surgical moments of like how do we get a laugh here that can propel us into the next moment.

**Craig:** And it’s funny because you’ll have a lot of people in a room — we do this all the time — where we go through a screenplay that’s about to go into production looking for opportunities for jokes. And all of these really funny people, I mean, I’ve done these things with Patton Oswalt, and Dana Gould, and big comedy writers, Lennon and Garant, and we all go around the table and we do this stuff. And at the end of the day on a movie if two jokes come out of that whole thing and end up in the movie, that’s a good day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s really hard to just sort of come in and throw stuff into a movie that would actually work in that moment, in that tone, is doable, consistent with the characters, translates from what was funny in the room to funny on screen. It’s just a whole different thing.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes those sessions can help get the other writers, or the writers who are working on it longer term, or if it’s a writer-director, can get them in a good spirit to be thinking for other things, thinking of other moments that can help. So, that can be useful.

And, honestly, if those two jokes end up in the movie but they also end up in the trailer, then you’ve just made things…

**Craig:** Big time.

**John:** Big time. It’s been completely worth everyone’s time to go do that.

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

**John:** Our next question comes from Michael who asks — again, I don’t have locations on people. Tell us where you’re from. We’d love to know where you’re from. Michael asks: “It seems like you get a lot of things done with screenplays, musicals, the website, podcast, apps, games, etc. Do you have any tips on time management and self-actualization?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, this is all about you, because I really only get one thing done.

**John:** [laughs] What I liked about this question is that the actual question is like time management and self-actualization, and weirdly I think those things have been bundled together in a way in the last couple years that’s not necessarily healthy or productive.

So, time management is basically, you know, getting the stuff done in your day that you can get done and not being so stressed out about it. And that’s good. And so I do have some things to say about that.

Self-actualization is really a different thing. And self-actualization is sort of feeling good about who you are and what you’re doing and sort of how life works. And overtime management is probably bad for your self-actualization. You’re like a machine who gets stuff done, but isn’t anything other than a machine who gets things done.

So, I think it’s just weird that we packed those two ideas together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For time management, when I’m back in my normal Los Angeles I have pretty good stuff and I can actually churn through a lot of things. Since I’ve been doing the show, it’s all gone out the window. So, I’ve barely my OmniFocus which is where I store all that stuff. I’m late for everything. Stuart, god bless him, sort of keeps his master list of who’s coming to what show of Big Fish every night so I can try to find those people. But then I forget to print it out. I forget that people travel cross-country to see the show.

So, I don’t have like a perfect system for this.

**Craig:** You’re a bastard.

**John:** I’m a terrible, terrible person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Like literally in the lobby, I just happened to be in the lobby and three people I knew sort of separately came up and said like, “Oh, John, thank you for meeting.” I’m like, “Yes, I planned…” No. I didn’t plan to be here at all. I just happened to see you.

**Craig:** You’re such a bastard because even the lies you successfully told to hide your bastardy have been undone right here.

**John:** Right on the show.

There are general theories on time management. One is that you should focus on whatever the most important thing is and get the most important thing done, to the exclusion of all other stuff. And that’s sort of been how I’ve treated Big Fish this time is that there’s a lot of other stuff in my life, work stuff in my life, that needs some attention that I just can’t give it.

So, I’ve been sort of stalling on phone calls, or just not engaging on stuff because I can’t I have to sort of devote every brain cell to this.

But, in my normal life I will sort of — I’ll look for what the easy things are and just knock out a bunch of easy things. And I think that sometimes people, and I’m definitely one of them, get sort of paralyzed because they know that the big thing is too hard to do. So, the trick is to break it down into smaller steps and just get those little smaller steps done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** In terms of writing, sometimes there’s that scene that I just don’t want to do that. And so, like, well don’t write that scene. Write the other scenes that are around that scene that are simple that you can do right now.

**Craig:** A lot of times when I don’t want to write that scene I have to confront the fact that something’s wrong with the scene. [laughs] That’s usually the big thing. But I have to say that my approach to scheduling stuff, writing, this, you know, I do a lot of charity work in my town, I do work with the WGA, I’ve got a family — that’s a big one. We’ve often talked about our kids are killing us.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I have come to accept in a self-actualized way, I think, that I have a method that is methodless, and that through various impulses — guilt, desire, whatever they are, shame, happiness, excitement — the things that I want to get done get done. And what I would say to you out there is if you’re having trouble with these things, there’s no problem whatsoever with looking for help. Maybe there’s a system out there that you would find services what you want. Just make it what you want.

Don’t follow some plan, some artificial plan, to your nature. Because that’s not going to work, either. And you’re absolutely right. It is going to get in the way of you just being a happy person. Productivity is not the same thing as happiness.

Productivity in something that makes you happy is the same as happiness. And we can always get better at things. If it excites you, it’s a good thing. If it exhausts you, it’s a bad thing.

**John:** Yes. That’s definitely been my theory with sort of the app stuff I’ve done and sort of Highland has shipped, and Bronson, and the other things. I did it because it was really interesting to me. And so I have no trouble sort of spending a lot of time on things that are actually fascinating to me and exploring how to do that.

And so the musical was a brand new thing, and it was terrifying, and it was fascinating to do it. It’s exhausting right now, but I recognize that I’m sort of through the sloggy/exhaustion part of it. But I also get to see it every night, and that’s a remarkable, amazing thing.

So, I will say that sometimes — here are the two sides of it. The bright shiny things are always going to be bright, and shiny, and attractive. And sometimes you just have to go chase them because they’re what you sort of want to do. And sometimes you’re going to be in the third draft of something that is just a slog. And it’s recognizing that it’s a slog because it’s a slog. But then you’re going to get through it and you will finish it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t be a child. There is delayed gratification. We all have the experience of not wanting to work out, and then working out, and then feeling great that we worked out. So, writing is no different sometimes. Sometimes writing is awesome and it’s fun. Sometimes it’s working out. But then when it’s done you feel great.

**John:** Craig, I think we’ve talked about the marshmallow test on the podcast, because you as a psychology major must be familiar with the marshmallow test. Have you seen this?

**Craig:** Maybe not under that name. Is it the kids who are given the marshmallows and told to wait and they get more marshmallows. Is that the one?

**John:** Exactly. The classic setup is that you have a young kid who is presented with like a marshmallow on a plate. And the tester says, “If you can wait, I’ll be back in a few minutes. And if you can wait, I’ll give you a second marshmallow.” So, basically they time the kid, like how long it takes the kid to not just eat the first marshmallow and delay gratification in order to get two marshmallows.

And I’ve always been the kids who like I could probably wait there a day to get that marshmallow.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it is interesting because they find that some kids are just better at it than others. That there is a kind of innate capacity for delayed gratification.

For some people it seems that gratification is only gratifying if it’s immediate. Those people do tend to become drunks. But, [laughs], or substance abusers, or sex addicts. They are also sometimes the most fascinating people in the world.

Writing, unfortunately, is not for people who find gratification only in the moment. It is not an impulsive person’s task.

**John:** I would say sketch writing might be, writing for like a Jimmy Fallon. That could be that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that might be so. Writing for stuff that’s immediate like that, sure, like a daily variety show where every night it’s a new thing and you just burst it out. Absolutely. Yeah. I can see that. That is fun. That is as close to standup comedy as writing gets probably.

But writing anything long form — writing anything that’s not being shot that day requires a sense of delayed gratification. Screenwriting requires a sense of delayed gratification that is monastic…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …in its requirements. You need to be willing to not only write for a very long time to reach the gratification of finishing; you need to be aware that you haven’t finished at all and that you may have another six months, another year, another lifetime ahead of you on that movie. Or it may never gratify in the end ultimately which is the movie experience.

So, those of us who screen-write, yeah, we’re waiting for the second marshmallow.

**John:** I have a theory that perhaps the ability to delay gratification is partly the ability to visualize an alternate future. So, it’s the ability to see a future in which you had waited and this is the result of having waited. Because that’s really what you’re talking about is being able to picture yourself as the person who got the two marshmallows because you waited.

And a lot of the projects I’ve been involved with, it’s knowing that, okay, it’s going to go through all these different steps, but this is what it’s going to look like at the end. And both the movies I’ve written and now the show, and even the apps I’ve done, it’s being able to see like, “Okay, this is what it looks like at the end.” And because I can see what it looks like at the end I am willing to go through all of the stuff that gets you to that place.

**Craig:** Well, that’s an expected confluence for somebody who writes because, after all, writing is imagining stuff and being excited about what you imagine. So, it seems like that would go hand in hand.

There’s an interesting experiment that — a little game that they play. And so you at home can play along with us. I want you to take out a piece of paper, or if you’re in your car just imagine this. You’re going to draw three circles on the paper. The first circle represents how important the past is to you. The second one represents how important the present is to you. and the third one represents how important the future is to you.

And by important I mean to say how much of your thoughts and your mind are occupied by these things — the past, the present, and the future. And, you know, for me, when I did it was sort like a very small circle, pinpoint, huge circle. [laughs] Because, you know, I really don’t think about the past that much at all. I just don’t. I’m not one to go roll over things. If anything, it’s all very dream like behind me. The moment to me right now is the moment right now. But it’s hard for me to access. I’m constantly thinking about tomorrow. I’m constantly thinking about the future.

**John:** Yeah. I would wonder whether that’s necessarily the healthiest balance. I agree that the past is maybe not as instructive and people tend to dwell too far in the past. And therefore we have terrible world situations.

But what’s interesting about the future, and if I could improve one thing about myself, and find myself doing it, I would say I clock it that I’m doing it, is I will visualize the future and I will visualize conversations — hypothetical conversations with people that are not productive. I will visualize, like, “I’ll say this, and then they’ll say that, and then I’ll say this, and I’ll do that. And you know what? That’s not going to really work out so well.”

**Craig:** [laughs] No. No, no, it’s true. I have occasionally caught myself in loops like that. I remember when I was on the board of directors of the Writers Guild, after the first few meetings it became clear to me that the nature of those board meetings was endless talking.

And it was frustrating talking because, frankly, so much of it was just wrong. You know, it was just sitting in a room listening to people say things that were wrong. And saying them with conviction. And when you hear people saying wrong things with conviction, something happens inside of you that is — well, maybe something happens inside of me. It was terrifying. [laughs]

And I would find myself sometimes at night playing out conversations in my head in which I attempted to make them see why they were wrong. And it never worked. Ever. It is, in fact, a waste of time.

But, it may also be neural flotsam and jetsam that is unavoidable to those of us who write because that is precisely the mechanism we use when we’re creating characters and writing dialogue.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** So, it’s hard to make that muscle stop being a muscle.

**John:** Yes. But I think it is important to recognize that writing yourself into imaginary fights with people is not maybe necessarily the healthiest thing to be doing.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, I’m recognizing when I do it and hopefully not doing it as long as I’ve done it.

**Craig:** How many fights have we had in your head?

**John:** I don’t know that we’ve had that many fights. Maybe two.

**Craig:** [laughs].

**John:** And I’ll tell you, one of the fights I had in my head was over a script of mine that you read. And in a lovely way you were trying to talk about some aspect of it, but you said it did not hit my ears especially well.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m sorry.

**John:** And so therefore I started having the very unproductive conversation with you, the imaginary conversation in my head. How about you? How many fights have you had with me?

**Craig:** None. [laughs] Because, well, and I’m sorry. You know, that’s why I hate reading people’s scripts and talking about it because then I think like, “How can I say something here and not upset them if there’s something that I feel is wrong, or incorrect, or I don’t like.” And I don’t want to be pedantic about it.

But then there’s always the risk that that will happen. And it’s certainly not intentional.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.

**John:** Oh, no, it’s fine. And people who are working on Big Fish know that I have about — you can sort of watch me and know sort of like where my meter is at. Because I can start crying at about 15 seconds at any given point. It’s been a very sort of stressful time. But it’s gotten to the point where it’s just like it’s almost kind of funny because it’s like I don’t have — I’m aware of it, and so it’s not so terrible.

**Craig:** I didn’t make you cry?

**John:** Oh, you didn’t make me cry at all. Not at all.

**Craig:** Because I thought that script was good. I really liked it.

**John:** Well thank you. Thank you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, any thoughts I had were just — they were probably, you know, if you heard anything strange in my voice it was probably that I was encountering things that I had done in the past and paid terrible prices for. And maybe there was memories of old mistakes that may not necessarily have translated to your script, but maybe that was what it was.

**John:** I want to thank you for that.

Let us wrap up with our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** But now I’m going to have a fight in my head with you later though.

**John:** Oh, good. See? “How dare he be so sensitive about that thing? And how dare he call me out on a podcast about it?” That’s really what you’re fight is going to be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think the more, frankly, the more you do that to me the better the podcast gets.

**John:** [laughs] Because it’s really the podcast where I knock Craig Mazin down a little bit.

**Craig:** But the best podcast. I wish every podcast were me defending myself. It’s my natural position.

**John:** Good! Yes. I very much enjoyed our Veronica Mars podcast for that reason, because we genuinely did disagree.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And I didn’t have to just take the opposite point of view.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing this week which is actually courtesy of two members of our cast. Alex Brightman and Cary Tedder. And this is a recurring joke in the dressing rooms. It’s Carl Lewis “sings” The National Anthem at an NBA game. You may have seen this. This is from a long time ago.

**Craig:** Seen it! Seen it!

**John:** It’s really just amazing. So, it’s not a surprise — he does a terrible job. And there’s moments in it that are just brilliant. Because he recognizes, like, oh, this is not going well, so he says, “Uh-oh.” That uh-oh is great.

**Craig:** I know. That’s my favorite.

**John:** And so we’ve had some uh-oh moments in Big Fish. And nothing has gone horribly awry, but there are cats that have fallen out of trees when they weren’t supposed to. So, there have been some uh-oh moments, shot guns that are broken. And so “Uh-oh” has become sort of a recurring thing. So, I will include a link to it in the show notes. It’s only 30 seconds long, so it’s not going to take up a lot of your time.

What I think is fascinating about it is it’s not just to make fun of Carl Lewis, or not even to make fun of him. He’s given us a great illustration of why our National Anthem is so problematic. And I think some guidelines on sort of if you do need to sing The National Anthem, here is my personal piece of advice: You need to recognize that our National Anthem can only be sung if you start at near the very bottom of your singing register.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, National Anthem, the third note is the lowest note in the whole song.

**Craig:** “Say.”

**John:** Yeah. So, [sings] “Oh, say…” You have to figure out — well, that was a terrible one — but you have to figure out where your lowest note is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The lowest note that you can sing well should be the “Say.” And then you have a chance, just a small chance, of being able to get through the song.

**Craig:** Basically you’re going from “Say” to “Glare.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the range of the song. And it’s a long range. And it is very difficult.

**John:** And if you don’t think about it ahead of time you’re going to make a natural assumption for most songs that you sing, which is that the first note is going to be somewhere in the middle of where that song is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that holds true for America the Beautiful. It holds true for Happy Birthday. Through most of the normal songs you sing. It’s just a fluke song. It requires far too much of a range.

So, figuring out this piece of my own, everyone is like, “Well, someone else must have given some good advice on how to sing the national anthem.” So, I’ll also include a link to this ten-point guideline for how to sing The National Anthem without embarrassing yourself. The zero point on that is never sing The National Anthem.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** You basically can’t win with The National Anthem, unless you’re Whitney Houston, or Zooey Deschanel did a great job, too.

**Craig:** Lots of people can sing The National Anthem. And I actually like singing The National Anthem. You just have to know — you have to know that you can do it. The only way to sing The National Anthem is to sing it confidently, because the whole point is it’s a song about confidence. It’s a song about victory.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** And you cannot be confident if you, while you’re singing or thinking, “I wonder if I’ll hit the word Glare.” Maybe not. [laughs] You know?

**John:** One piece of advice in this blog post, and then I’ll stop talking about The National Anthem, is don’t look at a printed copy of it. Instead, listen to the song and handwrite out all the words so that they make sense to you. So, you can detect the through line of the story and that will keep you from messing up the “rockets’ red glare” and a couple couplets that always get messed up when people try to sing it.

**Craig:** [sings] “Bunch of bombs in the air.” You gotta put Leslie Nielsen’s version as Enrico Palazzo is the greatest version of The National Anthem ever.

**John:** I’ll have Stuart find that and link to it.

**Craig:** “Bunch of bombs in the air” is the greatest. You want to talk about one-to-one writing funny and being funny — “Bunch of bombs in the air.” That’s just amazing. Yeah.

**John:** Craig, do you have one this week?

**Craig:** I do. Yes. This is a Cool Thing that a lot of people already know is cool, but perhaps you don’t out there, and it’s the video game BioShock Infinite.

**John:** People love it.

**Craig:** People love it. I love video games. I loved the first BioShock a whole big ton. I’ve really enjoyed the second BioShock as well. This one sort of takes it to another level. So, BioShock, the series created and masterminded by a guy name Ken Levine who’s super duper smart. Interestingly, started his career — attempted to start his carrier as a screenwriter, and didn’t happen for him.

So, then he went out east to New York to become a playwright. Didn’t happen for him either. He is, however, I would argue the preeminent video game writer of our generation. No question he is actually. I mean, you could argue maybe that the Houser Brothers who do the Grand Theft Auto games are up there, too. But, frankly, I think Ken Levine is in a class all of his own.

The game is easily the most fascinating world conceived for those of us with a brain in the video game genre. It is remarkable. It is incredibly literate. It is incredibly literate almost to a fault. I will say — so I’ll give a little spoiler alert here — I’m not giving away the ending at all. I’m simply talking about the nature of the ending.

The nature of the ending is presented in such a curious way and is so much about you figuring out. I mean, there’s that metric of how much do I tell you, how much do I let you figure out. So, okay, I need you to know that Bruce Willis is really dead. So, I’m going to let you figure it out by showing the breath and then showing little flashbacks from the movie and then you’ll get it.

I’m not going to just have somebody announce, “He’s dead!” Well, end of BioShock Infinite, I think, errs a little too far in the “you figure it out — here, we’ve told you everything you need to know.” I couldn’t actually quite understand all of the intricacies of it until I went online and had people sort of explain it in depth, which reminded me a bit of the second Matrix film.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which had that scene with the architect, which if you understand, is amazing. What he’s saying is amazing. And what they are presenting there is amazing. It’s just that nobody understood it, so it doesn’t matter. You don’t get credit for it. So, I think that the end of BioShock Infinite got a little too that way for me. But, now that I understand it, it’s pretty awesome. I just wish that it had been presented sort of in the way that Ken Levine presented the big twist inside of BioShock the first, which was done flawlessly and hits you like a ton of bricks.

And not only — that may be the greatest twist in video game history because not only did it create a twist in the story, but it created a twist for you as the player. You realized you hadn’t been playing the way you thought you had been playing, which was wild.

So, anyway, BioShock Infinite is a game worth playing if you are a writer, if you are intellectual, if you are fascinated by the connection between humanity and the crimes of humanity. So, that’s my big Cool Thing of the week.

**John:** Wonderful. I’m looking forward to that when I get back to Los Angeles. I will barricade myself and play some of that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun podcast. Our standard boilerplate here at the end. Anything we talked about on the show today you can find at johnaugust.com/podcast, along with back episodes. If you like our show, it helps us if you give us a rating in iTunes so other people can find us. We are just Scriptnotes on iTunes.

If you have a question for us you can write at ask@johnaugust.com. Even better, you can go to johnaugust.com/podcast and there is a little thing, a link, that shows how to send a question in and the things we will talk about and the things we won’t talk about.

For example, we’d love if you’d put your location so we know where you’re writing from.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I am @johnaugust on Twitter. You are @clmazin?

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And thank you, Craig, again for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next week.

**John:** All right. Bye.

LINKS:

* [First-sale doctrine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine) on Wikipedia
* [Reselling Digital Goods Is Copyright Infringement, Judge Rules](http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/04/reselling-digital-goods/) from Wired
* [Capitol Records LLC vs ReDigi Inc.](http://www.scribd.com/doc/133451611/Redigi-Capitol)
* New York times on [the ReDigi ruling](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/redigi-loses-suit-over-reselling-of-digital-music.html?\_r=0)
* [Carl Lewis “sings” The Star-Spangled Banner](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJLvCM4j2mg)
* Jonas Maxwell’s [tips for singing the national anthem](http://www.jonasmaxwell.com/pages/index.cfm?pg=298)
* [BioShock Infinite](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003O6E6NE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon.com
* How to [ask a question](http://johnaugust.com/ask-a-question)
* OUTRO: Leslie Nielsen (as Enrico Palazzo) [sings the national anthem](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73ZsDdK0sTI)

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