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

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 80, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Episode 80! That’s just a lot of episodes.

**Craig:** A lot of talking. I don’t know about you; I was sure that by episode 5 it would just be awkward silences punctuated by an occasional cough.

**John:** I would say actually the early episodes had the biggest number of awkward silences because it took awhile — I think, honestly, especially for me — to find a rhythm for us talking. But, we’ve made it to 80, so if we made it 80, I think there’s a very good chance that we’ll make it to 100. And we need to start thinking about what we’re going to do for our hundredth episode.

**Craig:** So funny that you bring that up. Because I was in the car the other day, pondering this very topic. And you and I had talked about maybe doing a live podcast here in Los Angeles. Hopefully you’ll be back by then. It’s 20 weeks from now.

**John:** Yes. It is this summer. So, actually in our staff meeting — I have staff meetings now.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** Yeah, I know. I don’t want to blow your mind, but with Stuart and Ryan, there’s actually enough stuff that we actually have a weekly staff meeting. And even while I’ve been here in New York we do staff meetings via iChat or Skype or whatever.

And we were talking about it in the staff meeting, and so I asked Siri, “Siri, what is 20 weeks from today?” And she told me it was this summer, like July 23 or something, which is a time that I’m going to be in Los Angeles. So, yes, I think we should do a hundredth episode live. I’m going to say it right here on the air: I think we need to do a live episode.

**Craig:** I think so, too. And it’s going to be a celebration. We finally get to look upon all of the dorky faces of the people that listen to us. They can look upon our dorky faces. It will be a massive dork out.

**John:** Listeners should know that we are starting to talk with venues and finding a good place for us to do this, preferably a place where people could actually drink alcohol if they chose to drink alcohol and make a little party out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah! It will be the best podcast ever.

**John:** Best podcast, by far.

Now, Craig, I am still in New York, but tomorrow I’m so excited because I get to fly home for just a long weekend, which is so blessed. Because, I don’t know if you know this about me, but I get really, really homesick. It’s just one of my things — I get really homesick.

And I was describing to a friend that I think homesickness is actually not something that you accumulate. It’s like you have a reservoir of non-homesickness, and it depletes. And eventually it just runs dry and then you’re just insanely homesick.

**Craig:** When you say homesick, homesick for Los Angeles or homesick for your family?

**John:** Homesick for my family. I miss Los Angeles, but I really miss my family. And seeing them on the computer is just not the same.

**Craig:** It’s not. I am with you 100%. And we’ll sort of actually talk about a related topic shortly in this whole — you know, we moved to Los Angeles to be in the movie business, and then they keep sending us places. And, of course, you’ve made a choice to do this other business that is naturally somewhere else. But, it’s very hard for me to be away from my family.

Two weeks, I start to go a little crazy. I don’t know what your threshold is.

**John:** Yeah. Two weeks is where it really kicked in for me.

**Craig:** Plus, also, I mean, I don’t know if you get these calls. There’s the, “You have to talk to your son,” call. And so then you’re doing this parenting and you can already detect the resentment that you’re not there from your spouse. “Why did you leave me to deal with this?” [laughs] No good comes of it. None.

**John:** So, hopefully the only good thing that will come of this long protracted period is Big Fish, which is actually about a father’s issues with his child, and all of those sorts of family issues. So, hopefully that will be the good thing that does come out of this protracted time. And today we were actually staging through the end of the show which is one of the weepiest things I’ve ever encountered in my life.

And so I’ve spent the last two days crying, which is not helping to stop up that homesickness thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I get to get on a plane and go home tomorrow and I’m so excited.

**Craig:** Well, I’m very glad. One of the cruel ironies of our business is that — any storytelling business — is that the theme of the father who does not spend enough time with his wife, husband, or children crops up constantly. And all of those stories are put together and produced by people who are not spending time with their spouses or their children while they do it.

**John:** Indeed. And one of the things that I mentioned on Twitter this week is I get to show this Big Fish finally to people in Chicago. And I asked people like, “Hey, do you want to come see this thing I’ve been working on?” And people said yes. And I asked, again, like, “If I could get you a special discount promo code so that you could come to those first early performances, would you come?” And people said yes enthusiastically.

So, I have good news. People can actually come see this show of fathers on the road, and sons, and dysfunction, and come see me in Chicago because I would love to see you. And I would feel less homesick if I knew that my listeners were out there in the audience.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So, here’s the actual deal. There will be a link at the show notes at johnaugust.com. But, it’s honesty simpler if I just tell you to Google “Ticketmaster Big Fish.” The first thing that’s going to come up is tickets for Big Fish in Chicago.

So, here’s the deal I made with producers. The first four previews, which is a Tuesday through Friday, April 2 through April 5 at 7pm, if you use the promo code “Script” as you’re checking out, you can get tickets for $30 rather than $100.

**Craig:** Whoa! Nice.

**John:** It’s $70 off. So, that’s pretty great just for being a Scriptnotes listener. So, if you would like to come join me in Chicago to see Big Fish, I would love to see you. I genuinely honestly would love to see you. I’m going to be there at least through opening. If you do come, whether you’re coming on those first four days and you’re using special promo codes, or if you’re just coming some other time, or group tickets, or whatever, if you know you’re coming to the show and you want to tell me that you’re coming to the show, just send me a tweet @johnaugust and let me know what show you’re coming to, what seat you’re in.

And if the world isn’t crashing down and I’m not needed to do something to fix something, I’ll come say hi because I’m just going to be in Chicago and I’ll just come say hi.

**Craig:** And that is priceless.

**John:** That’s the kind of personal service you’re not going to get from, I don’t know, the Nerdist Writers Podcast.

**Craig:** Or any podcast, let’s face it.

**John:** Let’s face it. So, anyway, if you want to come join me in Chicago, it’s an open invitation to listeners. And to you, Craig, if you find yourself in Chicago. Derek Haas is going to be there. Derek has to come see Big Fish.

**Craig:** I know. He’s shooting his wonderful show Chicago Fire there. You know, I ran into your producer, Dan Jinks — your wonderful producer Dan Jinks — at a party a couple weeks ago. And he also extended a lovely invitation to me. And I would love to go. I just don’t know how I’m going to get away to Chicago at that time. But, I will try.

I know that in the back of my mind what I know is that it’s going to be successful, it’s going to be on Broadway no matter what. So, I’m going to see it.

It’s interesting — it’s a challenge — I mean, I actually can see you running into it. We’re in the movie business, we’re in the television business. We never have to worry about people seeing it. You know, it’s like just go down the street, you’ll see it. Or, walk into the room and you’ll see it. But this is tough. It’s like a destination entertainment thing. And so I have to plan it.

**John:** One of the things I’ve noticed this week is I was trying to describe the process to people who come from the movie business. And it’s like we’re in preproduction, production, and post all simultaneously on the same thing. And so we’re in preproduction in the sense that we’re using temporary props and we’re sort of blocking things and getting things to work, but we’re also in production because we really are finishing up numbers and literally getting every foot stepped down to exactly where it is.

But this last week we started doing the orchestrations. And so it was very much like the experience of like film spotting, where you’re trying to figure out where the music is going to go, or like color timing. You’re doing these really technical things.

And when we get to Chicago, it gets even more technical because there’s like lighting and tech and all that stuff. And, so, it’s a whole new world for me, but it’s also all these things happen simultaneously.

What’s most honestly genuinely terrifying to me is all of the variables that I can’t control, which is literally like that tech thing that doesn’t work right. Or, the audience is live there in the theater. And so what happens when that guy has the heart attack, or just weird stuff happens?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s exciting, but it’s also just terrifying to me. Because the worst thing that can happen when we have a movie released is like, oh well, a print can break. But then they fix the print and they just keep going. It’s not, you know… — Things are finished in a way that they can just never be finished in theater. And it’s lovely but also frightening to me.

**Craig:** There’s also this other thing that I think about with live theater and that is film, when it’s finished, that is the film that every single person who sees the movie will experience. But every night is a different performance. Every night, sometimes the performers will have a great night. Sometimes one of them will be off. One of them is sick. That whole thing is just fascinating to me.

You know, every time you invite somebody to see a show you must be wondering in the back of your head, “I hope tonight will be a good version of the show.” Crazy.

**John:** Yeah. So, for every role in Big Fish we have understudies and we also have the swings. And their responsibility is to be able to fill in for these certain tracks of roles. And so if that person is out, this person can slide in, and there’s this whole logic math problem about, like, how you can cover every role in the show so that the curtain can go up?

So, as I’m watching the show with the people who I’m expecting to be there, also in the wings — and sometimes swapping-in in front of me — are swings who are going to take over for that part. Or, we’re also teaching the understudies every line so that they can do the show. It’s just a completely different thing that doesn’t exist in the movie business.

**Craig:** Wow. I love it.

**John:** Great. So, let’s get to our real business today which is I wanted to talk first off about the challenges of the visual effects industry. And Rhythm & Hues, which is going bankrupt, so we’re going to talk through that. I also want to talk about some reader questions because we’ve gotten a whole bunch and it’s been a long time since we’ve gone through the viewer mailbag. So, this time we’re going to actually share it a little bit and you’ll read some questions so it’s not just me…

**Craig:** I feel like you have an illness and you’re not telling me. And so you’re like a dad that runs a store and you keep giving your son more and more responsibility. And he’s so excited, but other people are sort of nodding sadly at him, like, “Yeah, it’s good that you know how to do the cash register now.”

And I think, “Well, it is good, of course. I’m a big boy.” And then I hear you coughing and I don’t get it.

**John:** I cough a little bit, and there’s a little blood in my handkerchief?

**Craig:** Yeah. The little blood in your handkerchief and you pat me on the shoulder and say, “You’re going to do fine.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I will do fine.” And the old lady that does the books is crying and everything is so confusing to me. But, I feel like a big boy.

**John:** Yeah. I saw Cat on a Hot Tin Roof last night, and Big Daddy, that’s the state he’s sort of in. It’s sort of the opposite — everyone knows that Big Daddy is dying, and big daddy doesn’t know that he’s dying, so everyone is treating him strangely and he catches wind of, “That’s right, I’m dying.”

But, let’s get started. Let’s start with visual effects, because I sort of saw during the Oscars there was controversy over Life of Pi and the guy accepting the award for the visual effects of Life of Pi got cut off during that time. And it started this sort of firestorm. And I’ve noticed people’s twitter badges were green suddenly. And I’m like, “Wait, is it Iran again?” I didn’t know sort of what was going on.

And I saw the YouTube video, it went kind of viral, of what big movies that you have seen would look like without visual effects, and of course they look terrible.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I want to talk through that because the issues are actually really complicated. And it’s not a thing you can sort of boil down to one thing, but it’s difficult to make a living as a visual effects artist for certain reasons. It’s difficult for an American company to stay in business. And all the stuff that’s happening in visual effects could happen in other parts of the industry, including what writers do.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a tough situation. Let’s just wind back to the Oscars. The gentleman who was part of the team that won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, his speech was too long, and they — I thought it was very funny that the play-off music this time was the theme from Jaws. I thought that was hysterical. But, he got cut off just as he was about to talk about the loss — or potential loss — of this company Rhythm and Hues which has been around forever. Well, at least as long as I’ve been in the business.

And they recently filed for bankruptcy and they’re in real trouble. And this is one of the A-list top visual effects houses. First, I just want to say any controversy about the fact that the guy got cut off is ridiculous. Everybody who goes to the Oscars is told you have this much time. So, if it’s really important for you to make a statement about Rhythm and Hues, you know, plan and time your speech — just a thought — because frankly it’s kind of obnoxious to go over time. I really do think so.

Okay, that aside, here’s what’s going on: Rhythm and Hues is a visual effects house. So, movies and television shows, when they do visual effects shooting the production itself doesn’t complete the work. 9 times out of 10 what we’re talking about is green screen stuff. Green screen has become the most common visual effect, maybe I guess second only to like wire removal and stuff like that. These are somewhat simple things, except that they’re not simple. And the take time to do right.

And so outside companies like Rhythm and Hues do all of that work. Some of it is rote and some of it is not at all rote. When you talk about creating visual effects, for instance the Tiger in Life of Pi, that’s a big deal. Now you’re talking about true artistry; you’re not talking about rote work.

What’s happened to the visual effects industry, just as it has happened to general production, is that movie studios and other visual effects supervisors have basically been outsourcing it to overseas because it’s cheaper. And when we say overseas I think people immediately jump to the notion of a sweatshop full of kids in China that are painting out wires.

But it’s actually — Canada is a huge problem for us here in the United States in that regard. And the way it works is pretty simple. There are two ways that we get outbid by international companies. Their labor tends to be cheaper. And they offer tax incentives. And the tax incentives come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but it’s always some version of this: If you hire people here in Canada they get a salary here in Canada. Part of their salary, of course, goes to tax here in Canada. We will collect that tax and we will not keep that tax. We will send it back to you in the form of a rebate. So, you get to write that part off of your overall bill.

And even though we’re not as a state profiting off of the work through taxes, the fact that these people are being employed, they’ll spend money and it will help improve the economy. That’s the whole theory.

**John:** Let me pause right there. Because what you’re generally saying about tax incentives also applies to actual feature production or to television production. That’s one of the draws. That’s one of the reasons why you shoot shows in certain parts of Canada, or you shoot in certain states is because either that state or the country provides tax incentives that makes it really attractive to shoot in New Mexico, or Michigan, or…

**Craig:** Atlanta.

**John:** …whatever the state is that has that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, Georgia is a big one now.

**John:** Georgia is a big one. And so that happens in movies and television overall, but there’s also some special things that are kind of unique about the visual effects situation, which is that because it’s not right during the middle of production, it’s this thing that goes on afterwards, different companies are bidding against each other to try to do the visual effects for this project. And some companies have the advantage of the tax rebates. Some of them have other advantages of being overseas. And it’s a crazy situation of a race for the bottom to see who can submit the lowest price to do that work.

**Craig:** Everybody is racing to the bottom. The companies are racing to the bottom. And curiously the people who are providing these tax benefits and lower labor costs are also racing to the bottom.

And this is the trick: Nobody seems to really be sure if these tax rebates are actually beneficial to the people that offer them. It does seem that certain states try them and then go, “Whoa, we lost money.” And then they stop them. And, of course, you always have an issue with the quality of the labor you’re getting.

Let’s pick a state. North Dakota could suddenly decide we’re going to have the best rebates in the business. But, are there crews there? Because that’s part of the deal; you’ve got to hire local crews, otherwise it makes no sense for North Dakota.

So, we’re dealing with the stuff. Here’s where it gets rough — really rough — with visual effects. When we’re talking about the artistry that we think of, the creation of that tiger, the movement of the tiger, the installation of emotion into the eyes, these things that truly are amazing — we think of highly talented visual artists who combine technology and craft to create something wonderful on screen.

But then there are times when the visual effects are a man in a car parked in front of a green screen, and somebody goes and shoots plates, and then they comp the plates behind that man. But the man has long hair, and so fifty people in South Korea spend a week going frame by frame roto’ing individual hairs against the plates.

And, frankly, that’s not artistry. That is labor. I mean, there’s some craft to it, but it’s the kind of thing where suddenly companies are like, “I could do that for $8,000 in a week, or I could spend $30,000 here. I think I should probably spend the $8,000, because the work ultimately will be similar enough.

Those are the choices that are being made. And it’s tough because, you know, I want all movies to be made in Southern California, frankly, and I want all production to be here. I don’t want to go anywhere. I’m frustrated from a writing point of view that when I write movies half the time they tell me, “And it will be shot in Georgia.” Then everything looks like it’s in Georgia all of a sudden. It’s a bummer.

Identity Thief is a road trip that takes place entirely in the state of Georgia. It makes me nuts. You know? I had this whole nice road trip planned out state by state with a map that went from Boston to Portland. That was the first thing that got torn up. I had to argue so that it wouldn’t be just Miami to Atlanta which is a four-hour drive.

**John:** Yeah. A four-hour drive that has to take the entire movie.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I share your frustration here. So, let’s talk about this situation in visual effects and how it applies to things that are listeners may be doing, which is screenwriting.

We talked about the difference between artistry and craft. And one of the lucky things about screenwriters, at least as its perceived right now, is it is still falling in the artistry camp, and that it’s a — what I can write is going to be different than what you can write, which is what that third person is going to be able to write.

So, there’s some unique special benefit to hiring this person versus hiring that person, which is not applicable to this wire removal technician versus that wire removal technician. That’s very much you are doing one specific kind of job. The same way like I think back to the old Disney, they’re painting in the cells. There was a person who had to draw everything. That was remarkable artistry. The person who was painting in the in-between cells, that took real talent, but it wasn’t the artistry in the same way that the other jobs were.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, right now we cannot be replaced by international labor. We can’t — they could hire Canadian writers to do things, but they’re not finding the quality of Canadian writers that can do what we can do. So, for now that’s really good.

What can happen even in the absence of that though is a race to the bottom. And what keeps us from hitting all the way to the bottom is scale, is that we are organized as a labor union, and because of that no writer is able to say, “Well, I’ll do it for less than that amount of money.” That’s one of the lucky things we have for feature films in the US right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that is why the things that worry me the most from a writing standpoint are any of the cultural shifts that threaten that. For instance, we talk a lot about the toxic combination of one-step drafts and producer-steps and free drafts. Because, what happens is — and I’ve said this directly to the heads of two studios now — if you’re paying somebody $1 million for a single draft, and you’re not happy and you want four more weeks of work, eh, what am I going to do, stamp my feet here? Okay.

If you’re paying somebody scale for one step, or close to scale for one step, and then you ask them for another four weeks of work, you’ve obliterated scale. Now it’s half scale. And the more that that becomes entrenched, the more that ground beneath us loosens. If we lose scale, everybody suffers and it truly is a race to the bottom. The one thing I know about screenwriting is there are, I’m going to guess, 500,000 people in the United States alone that would like to be professional screenwriters. And if you said, “Warner Bros. will hire you to write a screenplay for $5,000,” 490,000 of them would say, “Great!” Possibly all of them would say great.

And that’s super bad. Super bad for the professional status of screenwriters and it injures the value of what we do. Not super bad that people want to do it, but the potential for that is super bad, that the economics would shift on us like that.

So, the Writers Guild, for all the stuff that they panic over, that’s really the only thing they should be panicking over in features as far as I’m concerned. So much more than over residual formulas or anything like that. It is protecting our scale.

**John:** The other way in which our scale can be threatened is by reclassifying the job that we normally would do in features, or in television, as a different kind of job that doesn’t need to be covered. And that’s one of the things were always eternally vigilant that writing sort of a proposal or a treatment, that they’re not going to ask you to do other kind of work that’s actually really functionally a screenwriter’s work and not pay you screenwriter money for that.

So, not just extra drafts, but like saying, “Oh, you’re writing this for our digital division. It is a promo thing for this,” and trying to find a way to create things that don’t have to fall under the WGA auspices.

**Craig:** Yeah. And something funny — television and screenwriting developed along two different tracks. And it’s kind of fascinating to see how they divided.

In television, what they did with writers was they said basically, “Look, we’re going to pay all of you roughly scale for things. We’ll even base your residuals on minimums. But what we’ll also do for those of you who are the primary writers of shows, the creators, the showrunners, we’ll make you producers. We’ll pay you all the money that you would expect to be paid as a producer. You won’t pay dues on that,” which is great for them, “and also we will give you access to the big prize which is sharing in the true profits, not the fake profits, but the true profits of the work.”

So, somebody like Chuck Lorre who creates hit television shows is worth more than any screenwriter will ever be. Period. The end. He makes more in a month than any screenwriter probably makes in 10 years.

Now, on the other side you have screenwriters who at the highest levels get paid so much more for a script than any television writer does, but don’t have any access to that big profit number. And, frankly, that’s why success in television has always been so much brighter and sparklier, but success in screenwriting seems to be a little bit more accessible in some way.

Now, if they successfully erode scale for screenwriters, the way that they have successfully eroded scale for visual effects, we lose the only good part of being screenwriters. [laughs] And then we got nothing. And that’s scary.

**John:** The other danger is to look at — and so far Netflix seems to be a largely good thing in terms of creating more opportunities for more people, but if a Netflix-like model of you’re doing a show for Netflix, or you’re doing a show for Amazon that is not sort of a networky kind of show, it’s not even a cable show, when you’re in that Wild West territory you could theoretically be writing something that sort of feels like a television show but they don’t have to pay you any of the money that they would normally have to pay you for a television show.

And, if that model were to really take off then that could sort of explode what we are counting on for getting paid in television. So, that’s the other thing to always be truly vigilant about. I’m genuinely optimistic about Netflix or Amazon or the other people who are trying to do television-like things. I’m just worried that their business model isn’t going to include paying writers.

**Craig:** I am genuinely pessimistic. I think that the instinct of any new business arriving into the content creation industry is to not get hung on the hook that the studios are “hung on,” which is to pay this kind of scale and residuals and all the rest of it.

When the Writers Guild…uh…umbrage…umbrage is coming. It’s been awhile. It’s been awhile, John, so let me just uncork for a second here: One thing that makes me nuts about the Writers Guild is that in its anti-corporate zeal, and I get it, I get it that the Writers Guild does not like these companies. The companies negotiate with them every three years and they stick it to them. And the companies do stuff that’s just wrong.

And so the Writers Guild gets angry, angry, angry. And then you combine that with the fact that the constituency of the Writers Guild tends to be very liberal and progressive and very anti-corporatistic, and I understand that, too. What that creates unfortunately is this knee jerk reaction that anybody who is going to hurt the companies is our friend. No!

This is ridiculous. That is such a mistake. To look at these guys out there like Google and say, “Well, we should help Google compete with these companies because then we’ll have another buyer. And that will stick it to the man and make more money for us.” No! No. No, no, no.

It will be a race to the bottom. When these companies come in, they will dig out that floor. They will try and go below it. I guarantee it. I guarantee it. Look at the way they run their business. Look how they pay their coders. Open your eyes. I love saying stuff like “open your eyes,” because now I sound like a lunatic, but that’s okay.

I’m a pretty sober person, normally, but now I’m saying, “Open your eyes.” And once they do that, these competitors that we are cheerleading, “Come on in, come on in,” well, then the studios will go, “Well, now we’ve got to compete with these guys.” Generally speaking, I would say 7 times out of 10 the Writers Guild ends up shooting itself in the foot. I’m just going to ballpark it at 70%. Whatever the name is for the rule of unintended consequences — I don’t know if there’s a Moore’s Law type of name for it — they should chisel into the concrete facade of that building so that everyone who works there and sets the policy at that place has to read it every day when they arrive.

**John:** In no way trying to diminish your umbrage or actually re-stoke the fires of umbrage, but what I will say is that the ground is changing regardless. So, no matter what the Writers Guild were to try to do, that kind of stuff is going to change. And Netflixy business models will kick in. And so while I agree that we don’t want to sort of burn the house down just to burn the house down, we have to recognize that this stuff is going to happen and try to be as smart as we can about shifting our strategies to deal with how this is going to be.

Because our current business model probably can’t be directly applied to it. It’s just a different thing. And we need to figure out how to do that.

**Craig:** You’re right. And I guess my point is that we should, as much as it pains us, just to look at the person that keeps poking us in the eye and say, “You may be the best friend I have. Maybe we should consider it.” Because, the people that keep poking us in our eye aren’t slapping us in the face, and there are a bunch of face-slappers out there waiting.

And I would encourage as best as we can as an organization — I would encourage the health of these five companies because they pay us the most.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say the other people, we can’t even go on strike against them.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** We can’t go on strike against YouTube.

**Craig:** Oh, they would love that.

**John:** They would love that.

**Craig:** Oh, please, “Good, go on strike.” Yeah, what do they care? Do you know how many unions there are at Google? Zero. They don’t have unions. They don’t believe in it.

Have you noticed that Pixar is non-union? That’s the culture up there. They don’t believe in it. Period. The end. Umbrage.

**John:** Done. Let’s get to some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, we have a bunch, and it’s been awhile since we’ve done this, so let me start with the first one. This is from Alexander in Los Angeles. And I’m going to start and stop because there’s a few things along the way.

“Way back in 2008 I wrote into the blog at johnaugust.com to ask for some advice on taking phone meetings, back when I was a fledgling writer living outside of Los Angeles. Since then I landed a manager from my Nicholl placement and relocated to LA, writing, shooting, and networking as much as possible.”

Well, congratulations Alexander. Good for you.

“Over the past few months a spec script of mine started getting some traction. I had a shop around agreement with a pair of well respected producers.”

And I’m going to pause here and define a shop around agreement. What does that mean to you?

**Craig:** You know, I think it means basically that you’re giving the producers the exclusive right to take it to places. It’s kind of an option, isn’t it the same thing?

**John:** Yeah. It’s kind of like a handshake option. It’s like, “Yeah, you control it, at least for these places.” And it’s pretty common with specs where if you were officially sort of going out on the town you might say like, “Okay, Producer X, you can have it for Paramount, and you have it for these certain places where I know you have relationships and that’s great.”

And so when Go went out as a spec we assigned it to certain places and Paul Rosenberg who ended up taking it to Banner, that was one of the few places that we sort of gave it to him, but he had a shopping agreement that he could take it there.

A shop around agreement could also mean like for a certain period of time it’s okay to expose it to certain places, just sort of negotiate it on the fly as it came out.

So, he had a shop around agreement with a pair of well respected producers. “And we were going after directors. One director in particular really connected with the material and he flew in from Europe to discuss his vision for the story and necessary rewrites to shoot in his home country. And now, after meeting with the producers and the director, a studio exec is interested in the project, which is awesome. But, there’s a downside.

“The studio exec doesn’t feel the script is quite in the right place. The director is flying back to LA for a week so we can all sit down and discuss what needs to happen to the script for the studio to take the next step. In short, I’m kind of freaking out. Basically I’ve been told to come into the room and just ‘be brilliant.’ And this particular exec I’m pitching to is notorious for having a huge slate of projects in development, with his attention constantly divided between all of them. So, there’s that. No big deal.

“Any advice you guys would like to share with me and your other listeners in this situation?”

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I have a bit of advice. When people tell you in advance of a meeting that you have to achieve a certain thing specifically like that, “be brilliant,” “impress this person,” “make them feel this,” “do this,” please tell yourself that they don’t know what they’re talking about, because they don’t know what they’re talking about. Because the truth is nobody — there is no magic formula. There’s no “be brilliant.” There’s none of that.

Half the time they are trying to control something they have no control over. And the currency of people who don’t create things is to appear in control. That’s their currency, to appear as if they have some sort of knowledge or inside track on the future, which of course, they do not.

Agencies are famous for this. “Nobody’s buying this kind of thing,” until they do and, okay. “Be brilliant in the room.” They don’t even know what that means. I don’t know what it means. Go into the room and be confident and present yourself and be a grownup and listen and see if you have a connection with the person.

**John:** I would say that “be brilliant” is a useful codeword sometimes to say, “This is a really flexible situation and we just kind of don’t know how this is going to go, so you need to be ready to go in a lot of different directions.” And it may be worth having some pre-meeting to talk about what are the range of flexibilities you’re willing to talk about for this movie or for this take or how you’re going to do it. And who’s going to be responsible for following the lead of the exec if the exec starts to go in a certain direction.

I can recall some of my earlier meetings where I went in and I pitched one executive on a project I really wanted. I’d already met with the producer. We went in there. And he was sort of notoriously sort of hard to please and hard to sort of peg down. But, I went into the room and he showed me like, “Oh here, I’ve got to show you this.” And he showed me this trailer for this movie that he had coming out. He’s like, “That’s coming out the same weekend as your movie Go. We’re going to crush you.”

And I’m like, “Well, that seems like a great movie, and this is getting off to a really terrific start.” That’s a brilliant way to start a meeting.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I mean…

**John:** When they say “be brilliant,” it’s basically like be ready to be quick on your feet and negotiate some difficult turns there, but since you already have a director on board, make sure that there’s a range of options that you’re all willing to go to or talk about. Or, have language that you’ve already figured out in terms of, “Yeah, we’ll think about that.”

**Craig:** Yeah, but here’s my problem: That’s always the case. You should always be brilliant. Sure, it’s like this advice is along the lines of “be good and achieve your goal.” It’s not advice. And all it really serves to do is freak you out, which mission accomplished, apparently.

And the worst possible outcome is that you cease to be your natural self and attempt to orchestrate this meeting towards some sort of synthetic brilliance. And I guess really I just want you to calm down. There’s a part of the script that you love that is worth protecting. And if the vibe in the room is we-would-all-like-to-bargain-that-away, and you don’t want to bargain it away, don’t.

Hard advice to swallow, but don’t. On the other hand, be open to the thought that perhaps there is another way that you could succeed at and also be pleased with. Always be on the lookout for somebody else’s suggestion that could turn into something that you would not only be able to do, but would do so well that that would be the new thing you want to protect.

But, just take a breath and relax. In the end these people are just people. This man who’s very, very powerful is meeting with you because he needs movies. So, you have a power, too. Be aware of it. Be humble. Be nice. Be charming. Be confident. Look him in the eye. Remember, nobody wants to hire somebody that seems sweaty, shaky, and scared. They want to hire somebody who seems confident, in control, and pleasant to work with. The rest is up to you.

**John:** So, one last bit of advice I can offer in terms of being brilliant is sometimes if you need to stall or think through something, because sometimes they’ll make a suggestion and you have to sort of ripple through your head all the stuff that it’s going to do to your script if they actually were to take this thing, and sometimes you just need some time.

Two options. First off is to ask sort of a clarifying question. A question that sort of seems like I really am listening to what you’re saying and here is a smart, clarifying question that will buy me another 30 seconds so I can think of a better answer for that.

The second thing to do is to talk about what’s important to you. And phrase what’s important to you in what’s obviously very important to them. And so I will do this in meetings where what’s important to me is that we can really track this character through from the start and what the character wants and walks into, and it sounds really obvious and sort of pedantic, but you’re making it clear to the person you’re talking with that your priorities are also their priorities.

And if you can be smart and specific about it, you can at least sort of get them on the same way. It’s like sort of mimicking somebody’s body language. You’re saying back to them the things that they are saying to you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the last bit of advice I’ll impart to you — because that’s excellent advice — is to talk about the movie as much as possible as opposed to the script. They’re not thinking about a script. They can’t sell tickets to a script. So, talk about the movie. And when they talk about things, and when you talk about things, never get trapped in the position of defending a printed document. Always defend the movie. Talk about the audience.

It will put you in the same goal state as these people in the room.

**John:** Definitely. So, why don’t you take our next question?

**Craig:** Yeah, very good. Dad, are you okay? Are you okay, dad?

**John:** [laughs] I’m doing just fine. I just want to make sure that — I think you’re ready now. And so I think…

**Craig:** Gee, thanks Dad.

**John:** You’ve learned how to do a lot of things, and I’ve taught you how to load the gun, and we talked about some reasons why you might need to fire the gun, but many reasons not to fire the gun.

**Craig:** [laughs] Why is mama crying? Okay. Gosh, dad’s cough is getting worse. I hope he’ll be okay.

All right, this is from Nick from Long Island. [New York accent] Hey, Nick, how you doing?

“The script I’m writing deals with a kid hanging with rock bands backstage during a festival. He attaches himself to one band throughout. The kid also lingers around with three other bands who have lines but are few and far between. Currently I have the band members’ names such as Beating Hearts Number 1, Beating Hearts Number 2, etc, and the Uninspired Number 1, the Uninspired Number 2.” I assume those are the names of the different bands.

“I know it is best to not give true names to these characters, 12 of them in total, so there isn’t an overload of names to remember. I was considering writing each band name and a trait to go with it, for instance, Beating Hearts Number 1 (Mohawk); Beating Hearts Number 2 (Grumpy), and so on.

“I would like the band name to stick in order to group certain characters together, but I’d also like to differentiate them in some form rather than using a bland Number 1, Number 2 type setup up.” John, how would you address this conundrum?

**John:** Nick is definitely thinking along the right lines. If you can possibly avoid it — which really honestly you can always avoid it — don’t do Number 1 and Number 2, because it doesn’t help anything or anybody. Some sort of descriptor to go with these minor characters is really helpful, so some adjective that separates this person out from every other person in the script.

The parenthesis is going to get really tiring, to sort of like say like Band Name (Grumpy), but if the band were The Dwarves, for example, then like Grumpy Dwarf, Tall Dwarf. Then that would be a natural way to do it. I think two-word descriptor names for these kinds of characters are fantastic.

Most of my scripts have a couple characters who are just like Hot-Blooded Shotgun Toter. And that tells you everything you need to know about that character. And next time you see that person come back in the script, well it’s funny, because like, “Oh, I remember that from before.” And so it gives you a visual. You don’t have to do anymore work on it. So, that’s my suggestion for band members.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right in line with what I’m going to say. I will, however, caution you that when it comes time to make your movie, the first thing that the producer is going to do is come back to you and say, “Uh, is there any way we could not have 12 people say one line a piece?” Because every time someone opens their mouth on screen they cost more.

And if they are not key characters in the movie, then ideally you’d be able to get away with maybe, say there’s the Bleeding Hearts band, maybe it’s just the guitarist that does the talking and the other guys are just sitting around. Is that possible? So, really think about: is there a way for me to consolidate some of these things down, not only for looking at it to production, but just for the reader so that they’re not constantly trying to… — Every time you introduce a character, subconsciously or not, the reader will attempt to visualize that person in their head. And that’s actual mental exercise. And you’re just going to tire people out by the 12th person.

And when you have 12 such individuals in a compact temporal space, the trick of Grumpy, Sneezy, Dopey, etc, is going to start to wear thin. It’s actually going to get annoying.

One thing you can do is just use the natural discrimination that exists here, and that is to just go by instrument. If it’s really just one line, Beating Hearts Guitarist, “Who is this kid?” would be fine. It depends on the context and if they really are so specific in their characterization then I think you definitely want to think about limiting how many of them are actually talking.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve talked before in a podcast about when you have groups of people. And there’s a certain number of people in a scene that just becomes too many to really handle. I think we do sort of like a mental tally of like who’s spoken, who hasn’t spoken. And you can do that a little bit on the page, but when you actually see it on the screen it’s like, oh my god, there’s just too many people who could potentially speak.

So, I think Nick’s instinct was right to try to keep the bands lumped together. But your instinct is probably more helpful in that if there are a couple of funny things to say, make sure it’s the same person in that band saying them each time so that’s the actual mouthpiece of that band and that that’s the only person we have to sort of put any mental energy into following and tracking through the scene and from scene to scene.

**Craig:** There you go. All right, next question.

**John:** Next up, Gabe. I’ll start with this because it’s my turn.

“The good news, I just got a short film accepted to play at the Aspen Film Festival.” Yay, Gabe. “The bad news: I have been asked to provide a short bio. I’ve had to write bios for myself before. I’ve always leaned towards being funny or absurd, not taking myself seriously. I can’t bring myself to do that again. But writing a straight bio about one’s self feels icky, like being a door-to-door salesman. What have you guys done in the past?”

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. I have to congratulate you, Gabe, on feeling icky about it. It’s a sign that you are a normal human who isn’t a sociopath. Sometimes I come across these Wikipedia entries or IMDb bio entries that are so clearly written by the person and they’re the most grandiose, epic, multi-paragraph pans to their amazingness, and that is icky to read.

Yeah, it does feel icky. I generally recommend however that you just bite the icky bullet and do it, because funny bios are never funny. I have never laughed at a funny bio. Frankly, they themselves feel a little icky because it’s like, “Look, I’m too cool to be just normal.” Just write a real short simple sweet bio and be done with it. That’s my advice.

**John:** So, I agree with you. And I actually just went through this again because I had to do my Playbill bio. For Playbill, which will come when you sit down with your seat for Big Fish, I had to write the little bio for that. So, this is what I wrote, and I decided not to go funny. So:

John August (book) received a 2004 BAFTA nomination for his screenplay for Big Fish. His other credits include Go, Titan A.E., Charlie’s Angels, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, Corpse Bride, The Nines, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, for which he received a 2006 Grammy nomination for lyrics. His most recent film is the Oscar-nominated Frankenweenie, for which he wrote the screenplay and lyrics. He is a graduate of Drake University and USC’s School of Cinematic Arts. On Twitter @johnaugust.

So, they gave me a certain number of words that I was allowed to use to fit in, and I had to decide, you know, am I going to thank god? Am I going to thank Mike? Who am I going to thank? Am I going to dedicate this to my father? And I decided to go sort of straight with it, but also it’s definitely a bio written for a theater listing rather than something else. And so I lead with BAFTA nomination for Big Fish because that’s what we’re sitting down to do.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the show.

**John:** I put the Grammy nomination, which I wouldn’t normally do, but just to tell people like I’m not kind of new to music and stuff like that. I put in Frankenweenie because it’s recent.

So, I would say, in general I’ve kept like a bio, a relatively well updated bio that’s always sort of sitting in Dropbox which I can sort of throw at places, but I kind of always have to keep redoing it.

The same way like if you had a resume, like if you were in a kind of job that has a resume, you don’t send the same resume out to different people. You should always kind of customize that resume for what the situation is.

**Craig:** Agreed. Yeah. I mean, I have a bio that the PR firm that I’ve used a couple times has put together for me. And then I tweak it depending on what’s happened. So, for instance, Identity Thief came out, it’s a big hit, that goes in the bio.

But, what I liked about your bio was that it was short, sweet, dispassionate. It’s just facts. “Just the facts, ma’am,” you know?

**John:** Yeah. A great bio, depending on what the audience is for, it can feel good that it sounds like it was written by somebody else rather than written by you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, if you’re doing a bio that’s going to be intended for like a workshop or for like, you know, into the Sundance Film Festival, like not the festival part but for like the labs where you’re going to be seeing these people, that’s a great time to be like a little funny or be a little more personal or get into that kind of stuff.

If it’s just sort of going out into the world in a general sense, you have to think about, like, this is a person who’s sitting down in a theater seat reading this — what do they want to see?

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

All right, well, next question is from Gustavo in Jersey City. [Jersey accent] Yah, I got all my guys back home writing in. They got questions. No problem, Gustavo. I got ya.

[laughs] This is how we talk.

**John:** Evidently this is how you talk.

**Craig:** This is how you talk if you’re in…

**John:** If the podcast were this way every week, I would — there wouldn’t be a podcast.

**Craig:** You would end yourself?

**John:** Or I would find some sort of filter that would make your voice not be that.

**Craig:** [New Jersey accent] Hey, come on, John, it’s a good question here. Come on, I’m talking. [laughs] It’s the worst. This is how I grew up on Staten Island. Oh, hey, where you going? All right, Gustavo, here we go.

“I’m finally taking the leap and working on my first screenplay after years of working as a musician. My question is, would you be able to describe the key differences between the ‘inciting incident’ and the alleged,” I’m adding the word alleged, “plot point one. What considerations should you make for each? How dramatic should the inciting incident be versus PP1? I’m starting off with outlining but I’m finding conflicting definitions on line of what each should do for the story.”

**John:** So, this is — I included this question because it’s a very classic sort of like, “I’m just now for the first time approaching screenwriting, and I’m hitting this term and I don’t know what it means and I’m paralyzed by not knowing what this term means, these terms mean.”

I don’t know what “plot point one” means. I think it means different things in different people’s schemas. Inciting incident is a thing that you will hear talked about, a lot, and so it’s worth knowing what people are talking about when they say inciting incident.

Inciting incident is what’s beginning the plot of this movie. Like, without this inciting incident we would not be watching this movie happening here with these characters right now. So, the inciting incident is how we’re starting off our story, not just like how we’re meeting our characters, but what is the fuse that has been lit that is beginning our story.

But things like plot point one, or plot point two, or plot point 17, those are schemas that different people have different ways of doing it, so I wouldn’t freak out over that at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, I mean inciting incident — the idea is the first few pages of your screenplay you’re presenting a character and she’s in her life, and here is what her life is like. And then something happens. And that something is going to change her life.

It doesn’t mean that it’s now Act 2; it just means suddenly a thing happens. This whole “plot point one,” “pinch point,” blah, blah, blah, you’ve been suckered like so many before you into thinking that there is a calculator through which you can run ideas and out comes a screenplay and you just simply calculate your way to success. There is no faster, easier, simpler way to arrive at failure then attempting to calculate the process of screenwriting.

The books that have been written are being written by people who have failed at screenwriting, possibly because they were over calculating, and now they offer you the gift of the very process that failed them. I am not a fan of this nonsense.

There is nothing that these people can teach you that you can’t learn yourself by watching movies, reading screenplays of those movies, reading screenplays by professionals, and then writing, and writing, and writing. Simply, the rigidity that they prescribe is seductive. Of course it’s seductive.

What is more horrifying than the threat of a million choices? And which one should I choose? Well, that’s life, buddy. That’s screenwriting, Gustavo, unfortunately. So, put the books down. Chill out about the terminology. You’re not fitting your story into any box at all. You’re going to write from your heart and you’re going to learn from the structure that has been provided to you by the movies you love and the screenwriters and the scripts that you love, as simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. I’m wondering if we can boil it down to the minimum number of terms you actually need to know about structure, just in terms of what you will hear when you are working in the industry. So, inciting incident is one of those things that I think it’s worth knowing what people are talking about with that, because you’re going to hear that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re going to hear first act, second act, third act. Here’s all it means is the beginning part, sort of the beginning 30 pages, the second act is all of the middle 60 pages kind of. The last act is the last 30 pages kind of, so, in a 120 page screenplay.

That’s worth knowing what people are talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know climax.

**John:** But the danger with something like a climax is you’re going to think like, “Oh, that has to happen on a certain page.” No. I mean, a climax, you’re talking about a sequence that goes up to and reaches its most biggest dramatic point, that’s important to know that that kind of thing happens, but it doesn’t happen on a specific page.

**Craig:** Watch movies, Gustavo. I’m telling you, it’s all there. They are flimflamming you, buddy. They’re flimflamming you.

**John:** Next question comes from Kate in Los Angeles.

“My writing partner and I are writing a script centering around a brother and sister duo. Do we need to make one of them the clear protagonist, or is it all right for both of them to be the hero?”

So, heroes and protagonists. It’s a classic conversation. Craig, what’s your opinion here?

**Craig:** One of them is the protagonist. The idea of the protagonist, traditionally, is that our capacity for drama as humans and such that we prefer — we prefer — that once character is the focus of internal change. One character is going to have an epiphany and a catharsis and a transformation.

But, another character with them can be instrumental to that. Another character with them can change, also. Another character can change in such a way that changes the protagonist.

I mean, there are a lot of movies where we think the hero is one person, but it’s another. It seems like the hero of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies is Johnny Depp, is Captain Jack Sparrow. He’s the one we come to watch. He occupies space in the movie. But, the protagonist, for instance, in the first film is Keira Knightley’s character. She’s the one who changes.

The protagonist sometimes isn’t the biggest one, or the most heroic one, but they’re just the one that changes. So, think about it that way. And just remember, we will be trying to — we will be connecting with somebody’s change. And if two people are changing we want to know which one is primarily changing.

It’s just sort of ingrained in the way we experience story.

**John:** In the show notes I’ll put a link to an old post of mine about heroes and protagonists. And we always think of them as the same person, but they aren’t necessarily the same person. Sometimes the hero of the story, the guy where it’s like, “Oh, it’s about him,” isn’t really the protagonist. It’s not the person who changes in the course of the story.

Examples being, in my Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Willy Wonka is the protagonist. You actually see he has an arc that he goes through in the whole movie. And Charlie, who it seems like, oh, well he’s the guy it’s about. It’s the guy whose name is in the title. He is the antagonist. He is the one who is causing the change. He is the person who does that.

In terms of dual protagonist, it does happen. Big Fish is a dual protagonist story, but the protagonist structure is happening in sort of different spaces. You have Will, the son, is a protagonist who is going on this journey to figure out who his father was and understand this change. And so he’s a changed character over the course of it. We’re following Edward Bloom’s entire life, and he is a very classic sort of Joseph Campbell kind of hero mythology protagonist change, complete with like denial of the call to adventure. He does all that sort of great Joseph Campbell stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that does happen. There are situations like that. But if it’s like a brother and a sister duo, if it’s a You Can Count on Me, which was a brother/sister duo, that’s not that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And they both could change, but You Can Count on Me, she is the protagonist, he is the antagonist who has arrived to change her life.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. I think some people might think that in Identity Thief Melissa McCarthy is the protagonist because she seems to change, and she does, but Jason Bateman’s character is the actual protagonist. That’s the one who has to actually learn a lesson about his life in a way that she learns a lesson, but our emotional connection is to his life.

It’s a very… — You just have to know this stuff when you’re doing it, and you have to figure it out, but you can’t divide your attention. You have to actually — you have to know.

The audience, by the way, doesn’t need to… — You ask most people on the street who’s the protagonist of Pirates and they’ll tell you it’s Captain Jack Sparrow. No problem. Didn’t seem to diminish their enjoyment of the film. You need to know, though.

**John:** You’re next.

**Craig:** Oh, god, this is so good. We’ve got Dave in Columbia, Maryland. I have no accent for you.

“Is it okay to give captions in titles explaining quick blubs for historical context so the audience isn’t lost? I know I should try and get those kinds of things in dialogue while trying to avoid being on the nose, but that can be really difficult sometimes.”

Captions and titles. Quick blurbs for historical context?

**John:** Rarely are they good and appropriate. Where I will say, like sometimes you need to place a certain year, or you need to say like, “Near Lexington,” or you need to establish where we are in the world. So, a caption can sometimes be useful. And like in the Bourne movies you’ll see like where we are in the world and sort of like 16 hours later. There’s a certain style of movie in which it can be completely appropriate.

But I’d be really careful because nobody goes to movies to read. You have to find ways to tell your story visually so that the audience doesn’t need to know that information.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can situate time and place, essentially slug line information anywhere you want in a movie, just as long as tonally it seems acceptable. The one place in a movie where you are allowed to put a pamphlet on screen is the very, very beginning. Star Wars seemed to get away with it just fine.

You can open up and people… — The first ten minutes of a movie-going experience I call “grace period” because the audience is completely open and accepting. They haven’t gotten grumpy yet. But, hopefully they don’t get grumpy at all during your movie, but they’re willing to sort of go along with your little adventure here for five or ten minutes on faith alone.

And so you can do it right off the top if you want — still a little risky — but at no point else in a movie would I ever try and pull that number on anyone.

**John:** Agreed. And if you’re going to do something with captions or titles or I would say you need to do that really close to the start. You can’t be like halfway through a movie and suddenly then be throwing up those little tag things, because that was not the contract you made with your audience. First, I agree, that grace period. You’re sort of establishing what the contract is between the movie and the audience. And like as long as you’re consistent with your audience, they are going to have faith in you. But if you start just wildly changing things, they may decide that you’re not honoring your contract and they will get up and leave the room.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Next question comes from Matt in Boston.

“I recently received coverage upon submitting a feature script to a screenwriting contest. The script contains three fairly explicit sex scenes.”

**Craig:** Oh yeah!

**John:** Oh yeah!

“It was mostly favorable feedback, but one critique the reader had was that the explicit nature of the descriptions of the sex scenes may be a turnoff to actors, investors, agents, and producers. He said that if I could tone down the sex the script would be more readily accepted by readers. Though the sex scenes are admittedly rather explicit in nature, they are not gratuitous and they are important to the story and in developing the characters involved.

“How can a writer go about portraying a heavily erotic sexual encounter without scaring off potential investors or talent? Would including a note at the beginning of the scene help?”

Craig?

**Craig:** Well, obviously we don’t have the pages so I don’t know quite how explicit this is. I would caution any writer to overreact to one reader’s comment. The fact of the matter is that the only person whose scruples matter here is the person who will potentially purchase this script and produce the movie, not this one reader.

In general, I tend to believe that it’s the scripts that do stick out and make themselves known unapologetically that attract attention. You say here, kind of nicely for us, because this would be what I would say — this is what I would ask — that they are not gratuitous and they are important to the story and in developing the characters involved.

That’s it. You’re done. You don’t need to do anything now. No notes. No apologies. That’s the script you wrote. And if somebody out there is squeamish about the sex then it’s not for them. But it’s sort of a strange thing. the stereotype is the producer that wants more boobs, so I think that you can just go ahead and just in your mind silently and politely thank this reader for their opinion, but you believe in what you wrote.

**John:** I agree with you. There’s two things I would say.

First off, sex scenes are like fight scenes in that you don’t want to describe blow-by-blow [sighs] what’s happening.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** But, you want to give a sense of what’s important about the scene and what’s different about sort of other scenes like it we might have seen.

One of my favorite sex scenes in any movie is in the first Terminator, which is just a great movie for so many reasons. But I remember seeing that sex scene and thinking like, “Man, I want to have sex. That looks great!” And so if you look at the actual description of it, it’s there, but it’s not like gratuitous, but it’s clearly what needs to happen in that scene. And if that’s what you’re doing on the page, that’s fantastic.

Second off I would say about sexual content in movies overall is if it’s honest, and if it’s interesting, keep it. I mean, don’t run away from it just because R movies right now tend to be less sexy. Well, maybe yours will stand out because it actually has some sex in it. It can be a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. In general keep this in mind: Things that are noticeable in scripts, that are not run-of-the-mill, that are maybe towards the edges, the boundaries of extreme, there are certain types of people who just react to that stuff by saying, “Oh, well, I noticed it therefore maybe tone it down.” Their instinct is to tone everything down.

I will tell you that the audience’s instinct is for everything to be toned up. They don’t want the soft-edged movie. They want something that is interesting to them. Quentin Tarantino’s entire career is a testament to this. He continues to defy our own expectations of what we will laugh at, what we will be entertained by.

And more importantly, the people who say yes are attracted to things that are out of the ordinary. The people who say no, yeah, of course, they’re like, “Why don’t you put it more in a box so it’s safe for me to say yes to?” That’s why they don’t run studios. That’s why they don’t direct movies. That’s why they don’t write movies.

So, don’t be afraid to break a few dishes while you’re writing a script.

**John:** I agree with you fully.

Let’s let that be the end of our questions and let’s do our One Cool Things, okay?

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is really simple. And it’s this great little Tumblr called Unfinished Scripts. — Wow, that’s a hard thing for me to say. — It’s this great little Tumblr called Unfinished Scripts, which is basically screenshots of somebody who is writing these scenes that inevitably go horribly, horribly awry.

And what I like about it is, first off, it’s very screenwriter-oriented. But I love that Tumblr and Twitter to some degree — eh, both Twitter and Tumblr — have created this thing where there is sort of like an imaginary user. And so by seeing a collection of tweets or posts you’re sort of like getting the idea of who this person is, this imaginary character who would actually write all of these things.

So, I love that that exists in our culture. And I really liked Unfinished Scripts as an example of that.

**Craig:** Sounds cool. I will check that out for sure.

I have for all of you today a pretty cool thing that’s a little bit of a game. It’s a lot a bit of a game, but it is also connected to my favorite little thing which is the brain.

So, at MIT there is a specific department called the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. And they’re dealing with this problem of trying to map the connections between all of the neurons in the retina, and I actually spent an entire year in college just learning how vision works from literally photon all the way to our sort of conscious understanding of sight.

So, I’m fascinated by all of this. They have this — this is an area where one technology has outstripped another. They have the technology now to map, I think they’re using rat retinas actually for now, they can map all of this stuff. But it still requires computational power to figure out what’s connected to what, because it’s all in slices and it’s basically a game to figure out, okay, is this thing connected to that, or connected to this? And once they essentially color in all the connections so that this chunk over here is the same color as this chunk, and is continuous, then they’ll actually have a complete map of all of the connections of the retina, which is pretty amazing.

How do you do this? Well, the geniuses over there at MIT, and this is sponsored by the National Institute of Health, have created a game. And they had this brilliant idea that we’ll just put this game online and people can play it. And it’s basically a coloring game. And the way it’s set up is that the game is smart enough to tell you if what you’ve colored in does make sense as a connection or doesn’t. So, you’re basically doing the hard work of just filling in these connections. And the more you play, the higher your points or whatever, but you’re also helping the medical community map the retina!

It’s fascinating. And so I played the game for awhile. It’s incredibly calming. It’s super Zen. And if you want to play, obviously it’s free, it’s web-based. It works particularly well with the Chrome browser on either PC or Mac. And it’s called EyeWire. And so you can sign up for a free account and play the game yourself at eyewire.org.

And know that for once in your miserable little lives you are not wasting time playing a game, you’re actually helping advance the cause of neuroscience.

**John:** Great. So, Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast. I never actually talk about our outro music, and I usually just pick outro music after the episode is done and I just pick something that seems relevant to what we talked about. But this week I actually know what the outro music is. It is Andrew Lippa’s overture to Big Fish, which you can actually hear in person in Chicago if you choose to come.

And, again, if you want to come see me and the show in Chicago, starting April 2, we will be there. And Ticketmaster, Big Fish.

And, Craig, thank you so much.

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

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [Big Fish in Chicago](http://www.ticketmaster.com/Big-Fish-Chicago-tickets/artist/1781632?tm_link=seo_bc_name) at Ticketmaster
* [Green Scream: The Decay of the Hollywood Special Effects Industry](http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/oscars-vfx-protest/)
* [How to handle a phone meeting](http://johnaugust.com/2008/how-to-handle-a-phone-meeting)
* [Unfinished Scripts](https://twitter.com/UnfinishedS)
* [What’s the difference between Hero, Main Character and Protagonist?](http://johnaugust.com/2005/whats-the-difference-between-hero-main-character-and-protagonist) on johnaugust.com
* Play [EyeWire](http://eyewire.org/) and help map the brain
* OUTRO: Big Fish prologue by Andrew Lippa

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/rigorous-structured-daydreaming).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, episode 79, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, how often in your daily life does somebody say, “Oh, I listen to your show,” or, “I like your podcast.” Does that happen to you very much?

**Craig:** It’s been happening more and more. In fact, I was at Paramount a couple of weeks ago for a meeting and they didn’t have my pass to get on the lot. And they send you to a little security hut. And in the security hut I had to give the guy my name. And there was a woman there who was also a security guard. And she said, “Oh, you do that podcast. I listen to the podcast.” And then we talked about the podcast.

It seems like it happens three times a week now.

**John:** That’s great. I’ve been in New York, so it doesn’t happen to me quite as often in New York because it’s not a film town, but weirdly in the cast of Big Fish no one seems to listen to the podcast in the actual cast, but two people have friends or loved ones who listen to it.

So, Kate Baldwin, who is a part of our cast, her husband listens to the show. So, I am going to embarrass him publicly by mentioning him, calling him out. And also Bobby Steggert has a friend who listens to the show. So, that’s just odd, because these aren’t film people. But they do listen to the show, or they know people who listen to the show which is just odd, and strange, and small town-ish.

**Craig:** It is. It is strange. And it occurred to me that you and I have been screenwriting for many, many, many years. And this is sort of the screenwriter’s lament: The second we do something that is vaguely peripherally performance-oriented, suddenly we are noticed and we get attention. It’s just one of those things. There’s nothing like being onscreen or on the air. There’s no substitute, if your goal is to be noticed or recognized in any way — and mine is not, I don’t think yours is either.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** But it is an interesting sociological observation.

**John:** Yes. So, today Craig I thought we would take a look at this old post of mine that suddenly got a lot of attention, it got on Reddit this last week for kind of no good reason, but it kind of had relevant stuff that we should talk about on the podcast anyway.

And then we would do some Three Page Challenges because we hadn’t done those for awhile.

**Craig:** Yes. I’m excited. And I’m prepared.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** I even have One Cool Thing today.

**John:** Oh my gosh, you are just so prepared!

**Craig:** Yeah, well, ever since you embarrassed me.

**John:** Yeah. That’s nice. Embarrassment is actually a good motivational tool. It’s not really a carrot or a stick; it’s its own kind of third thing.

**Craig:** It is. And I am particularly susceptible to shame.

**John:** Oh, good. See, we’ve learned so much already in the podcast.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Now, we’ll start with this post that I did which actually was way back in 2007. I wrote this post called How to Write a Scene, which was a post on johnaugust.com, and it was just 11 little steps of, like, these are things you need to be thinking about when you’re writing a scene.

And so it was sitting up there for a good long time. And this last week a guy named Ryan Rivard made a little graphic version of it, basically made the list and sort of nicely types up the list. And it just sort of got kind of weirdly viral. He passed it around and linked it to me on Twitter. And I said, “Oh, that’s nice,” I linked it back out. And then last night it showed up on Reddit on the front page.

And so our music coordinator from Big Fish emailed me, said like, “Hey, you’re on the front page of Reddit,” which is just really strange.

And so if you read through the comments on Reddit they’re kind of maddening because it’s a lot of people who are sort of writing in with like their reactions to the graphic version of it rather than the full version of it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, Reddit is definitely chaotic.

**John:** Yes. But you sort of embrace the chaos of that. And some people did link to the actual real post. And so I wanted to get back to the actual post. And so if you are going to read along at home with us there will be a link to this on the show notes at johnaugust.com.

So, this is the post. And I asked sort of 11 questions. And I thought we would talk through it and see what you agree with, what you don’t agree with, and sort of elaborate more fully.

**Craig:** Let me give you a preview: There won’t be much fighting today.

**John:** Okay. It’s not going to be one of those cantankerous ones?

**Craig:** No. There is almost no umbrage to be detected.

**John:** Great. But we could maybe push further. Maybe even find a 12th or a 13th point.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** The first questions I always ask is what needs to happen in this scene. And this is deliberately a reaction against sort of the classic advice which is always to be thinking about what does the character want, what does the character need. To me character want and character need are hugely important, but they’re hugely important in like the macro sense.

They’re important in the what is the actual goal of the story, but when it comes down to the individual scene I find that it’s not a very useful question to be asking because, well, you could say that that character wants to get this piece of information out of somebody. Well, yes, that’s sort of the point of what you’re actually going to do in a scene, but if you want to say that character wants recognition, or that character wants love from her father, that’s not going to be an achievable thing within that scene.

**Craig:** Right. Very true. We had said a few podcasts ago that one way of thinking about the scene that’s about to follow is not “and then” but “so then.” The scene must be required or it will be lifted out of the movie for sure.

One thing that I do when I outline, you know, I have my card that says “What happens in the scene?” and then I do a card next to it that says “Why it’s happening?”And if you can’t explain why it needs to be there in the story then maybe the stuff that’s happening in that scene is unnecessary or should be folded into another scene. Nothing wrong with a combo.

**John:** Well, that anticipates point two on my list which is the question, what’s the worst that could happen if this scene were omitted? And that’s really the point of your second card is that if you can’t say clearly and definitely, “This is why this scene must be in the film,” then that scene probably won’t be in that film. If you’ve actually gotten some movies made you’ll recognize that. A scene could be perfectly lovely, but if it’s not advancing your story in a way that needs to happen, or it isn’t integral to the point of the story, it’s not going to last in your movie.

And so if you have things that are funny, or great, or meaningful, or emotional, make sure those are happening in a scene that actually has to be in your movie. Because if you look at director’s commentaries or like DVD versions of movies that have deleted scenes, you’ll say like, “Oh, that’s a fascinating scene,” but you’ll also usually say, “I can totally see why they deleted it because it wasn’t integral to the story.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I was talking to a friend a couple of months ago. He showed me an early cut of a movie that he had made. And there was one scene that I thought should just come out because it was doing precisely what we’re talking about, not moving the ball forward.

And he said, “Well, you know, that’s a good point. And the good news is that we could lift it right out and nothing would change.” And I said, “Ah-ha! That, my friend, is not a happy accident. That is probably why you should lift it out.” If you can, and nothing is disrupted around it, well, we have point two of your excellent list.

**John:** Great. I want to sort of go back to both of these points and look at them together, because in looking at what needs to happen in the scene, sometimes you will have an outline. And sometimes you’ll be able to look at your outline and say, okay, this is the two-sentence version of what needs to happen in this scene.

But a lot of times I find writers are approaching the scene with a bunch of ideas, it’s sort of like a bucket of, like, “These are the kind of cool things that could happen in this thing,” or “I just get the characters talking and I sort of listen.” Okay, that can be a good way to hear characters’ voices. That’s generally not a good way to get the actual purpose of the scene achieved. Like, a scene tends to be as short as it possibly can be to achieve its goal. And if you just get stuff started you’re unlikely to come out with a really meaningful scene.

So, you have to look at like why is this scene here. Because sometimes I’ve — this is my own personal introspection — but sometimes I’ve written some really nice scenes that are just really nice scenes that don’t actually achieve the purpose I need to achieve and I’ve wasted two hours of my time.

**Craig:** And as screenwriters we have to be not only aware of this in the work that we do, but also aware of it when other people are making suggestions for the work we do. Directors, in particular, can be susceptible to places, actions, scenarios, “cool stuff.” And they want you to put it in.

And you must always remember that simply because somebody thinks it’s cool and wants you to put it in doesn’t mean it ought to be there. So, you have a choice of either saying, “No, and here’s why, but,” or, seeing if you can put something like that in and repurpose another purpose from another scene. But to just shove stuff in… — And sometimes we’re the only people in the room that get that. And so, don’t worry about that; just know that you’re right.

**John:** Yeah. I think I’ve told this story on the podcast before, and in no way am I trying to libel McG who I do deeply adore, although you’ll understand my frustrations as I tell you the story.

McG directed the two Charlie’s Angels movies. And I described our relationship as being like together we are trying to bake a cake. And he would keep saying, “No, no, more sugar, more sugar, more sugar.” It was like, “McG, I have to add some flour. It’s going to fall apart.”

“No, more sugar, more sugar.” And the minute I would turn my back to grab a bowl he would dump more sugar into it. And that was the frustration of like I know the things I need to actually put in this in order for it to do its goal which is to bake properly in the oven. And too much sugar and it just doesn’t actually work.

Some people like things really, really sweet and that kind of break their teeth. That was a point of frustration at times.

**Craig:** But also the inspiration for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

**John:** Exactly, in some ways.

Point three: Who needs to be in the scene? This is a fundamental question, but I often find people aren’t asking the question when they’re starting the scene. A lot of times they’ll say, “Well, here’s the characters I have, so let me put them in the scene.” And so you’ll end up with like five characters in the scene and you recognize like, “Oh, you know what? This character didn’t actually say anything in this scene, or in the scene before, but we’ve established them in the world so therefore they need to be there.”

I call this the Kal Penn problem because in Superman Returns, Kal Penn is a whole bunch of scenes but doesn’t actually have anything to say or do. And he becomes this weird extra in these scenes.

So, look at who absolutely has to be in the scene, who can do meaningful things in the scene, and if you can possibly help it don’t put anyone else in the scene who doesn’t need to be there unless they are genuinely background — they’re there to make the world complete in that they are lovely set dressing but they are not actually characters.

**Craig:** Great, great point. And it’s okay if you have a character that you’re “stuck with” because they’re very important for a scene here and a scene 12 scenes later, and they’re on a trip. But, give them one thing. Give them a line. Have them drop something. Have them mess something up. Have them make an interesting point. Sometimes the silent person can surprise us by the fact that they’ve been silent. Use that.

I mean, Zach Galifianakis, his favorite kind of scene is the scene where he has one line. And he’s just quiet, and sitting back, and then suddenly, boom, three-pointer, and then right back to the background. Nothing wrong with that. And in the emotional space of experiencing the movie, those little moments sometimes seem to expand in our minds more than just the word count involved.

So, don’t neglect those characters.

**John:** I will say that there might be times where structurally some character needs to be along on some part of the journey, but there may be a reason why you don’t want them part of the scene. And by asking the question and thinking about the question, and getting to this next question of where the scene could take place, you can sometimes separate them off or get them out of that tent so you can have the characters who actually have something meaningful to do in that conversation have their privacy and have their moment just to themselves.

So, you don’t feel like it’s… — Two people can play ping pong. Three people playing ping pong is always going to be weird. And the more people you add in, the harder it is to have any scene have a shape to it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ll give you an example. In the Hangover II there’s a scene toward the end of the movie where Stu, Ed Helms’s character, has given up. And he’s given up even on the idea of being married. And he’s tossed his passport into the Chao Phraya River. And he’s basically saying, “I deserve my fate.” And this is a scene really between him and Bradley Cooper. But, of course, Zach is there.

Well, we just gave Zach something to do, and it was funny. Because here are these two guys dealing with this terrible existential crisis and Zach is merrily eating ice cream and playing Ms. Packman. And it was great. It was a little character moment for him.

So, yeah, go ahead, separate them off. Give them a little tiny piece of something to do. The audience gets it, as long as it seems natural that they wouldn’t be involved in the conversation.

**John:** So, we anticipated this question, but where could the scene take place? And so often you’ll see things that are written towards generic locations just because like, well, they would be in their house because that’s where this would take place, or it would be at a police station, or it would be in a parking garage. And those are almost never the right choices. They are exactly the kind of places we see in movies all the time.

A lot of times you’ll see television shows and they are written towards those locations because those are their sets, those are their standing places where they need to be. But there is no reason why your movie, especially if it’s a spec where it has nothing to do with anything else in the world, it doesn’t have to take place in those boring environments. So, look for what are the interesting locations you could set these stories.

I’ve told this on the podcast before, but one of the directors I’ve worked with, she does not want to see any set twice. And one of her rules is that once something has cleared the stage she doesn’t want to see it again, and she doesn’t want to come back to those places, because subconsciously we think, “Well, we’re back where we were before.” And rarely do you really want to go back to the place you were before. You want to keep moving forward.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly true. And I’m a big believer in specificity in all things. If you are not specific in your location, well, fellow screenwriter, somebody will be specific on your behalf. But you name is on the script. And while we don’t always get our way, it would be a shame if you didn’t try and get your way. So, be specific.

**John:** Yeah. If something needs to take place in an office, like it genuinely is a business kind of thing that needs to take place in an office, throw us a line or two of color that make this office specific and different from any other office. If it’s a bank, do something with the bank that it’s a different kind of bank than just the generic sort of Savings & Loan kind of thing that we see so often in films.

It doesn’t have to be sort of magical, it doesn’t have to the fanciest richest bank of all time. It just needs to feel like it’s one place in one time. And it’s not just a slug line with no color to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Question five is probably the most controversial thing in the short version of the list, which is what is the most surprising thing that could happen in this scene? And by this I mean as you start to write the scene, take a second and think, “Okay, I have my outline. I think I know what is supposed to happen in this scene, but let’s step back and say what wouldn’t I expect as a person watching this movie to happen at this moment?”

Answering these other questions — who is in the scene, where it’s taking place — is there something that is genuinely surprising? Because so often I will read scripts where almost everything that happens in a script is exactly what I would anticipate is going to happen in this script, be it a drama, be it a comedy, be it a horror movie. I’ve seen it before. It’s the same pieces, just assembled in a slightly different way.

If there’s something you can genuinely surprise me with, I’m going to be excited and keep reading. Not every surprise is a good surprise, but there should be a couple of real genuine surprises in your film. And always look as you’re starting a scene — could this be that surprising scene?

**Craig:** And obviously there are big surprises that we do in movies, twists and turns and dramatic reversals. But there are also those little tiny, tiny surprises. Nobody expects someone to lean in for a kiss in a romantic moment and knock a drink over. Always look to subvert what is “supposed to happen.”

That is the number one thing, when people say things like, “Well, the scene could just be a little more fun, or a little more interesting,” they never know what they’re asking for. But what they’re asking for is to be surprised, in little tiny ways and big ways.

**John:** So, as you’re doing that last sort of check before you really start writing, think about what do you have in your arsenal. What came before? What’s coming up? And what is in that little space that’s right there that would throw you off your game if it were to happen? And this could be that scene.

Most things won’t be that scene, so I think the danger with this surprise question is you think, well, every scene has to be completely brand new and original and like nothing you’ve ever seen before. Your readers would stop trusting you if every scene goes in completely bizarre different directions that they don’t know what’s going next.

Readers have a sense of expectation. They’ve followed you in this journey and you’re asking them to trust you on this journey. So, you want most of the times the things that happen in a scene should be the kinds of things that the reader would expect could happen in it. But every once in a while you subvert that expectation. It’s the same way that jokes are funny because you build a set of expectations and then every once and awhile you pull out the rug and surpass your expectations.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there’s this great moment in Due Date where Robert Downey, Jr. on the heels of Zach’s character talking about his late father tells the story of how his father walked out on him. And he never heard from him again. And Zach just laughs in his face and says, “Oh my god. That sounds ridiculous. My dad would have never done that. My dad loved me.” [laughs] And it’s not at all what’s supposed to happen.

And frankly if you look at that scene on a card, there’s no surprise to that scene.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** It’s a very typical dramatic scene where somebody is giving an emotional backstory. But it’s a surprise in how it was executed. And so that’s what we mean by these little micro surprises. They don’t throw you off your story. They don’t knock you out of the formula of your narrative. But they do keep the moments fresh and interesting.

**John:** Yeah. And in that case it was a major character who was doing something you weren’t expecting. But sometimes it can be that minor character, that day player who is basically the cashier. And so we sort of know how the cashier transaction is supposed to work, but if that cashier just suddenly clocked you in the face, that would be surprising. And that’s the kind of jolt that could work in some movies.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Next question is, is this a long scene or a short scene? And this is a trap that I know I have fallen into a lot where I will write like the two page scene of something and realize, like, “Oh man — that really shouldn’t be two pages. That should be three-eighths at the most. It’s really meant to be a transitional moment to take us from this thing to that thing.” And I’ve made a meal out of something that was supposed to just be an appetizer.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I guess this… — All of these go really to the question of preparation. When you sit down to write your scene, do you know what you’re doing or not? So many of these come back to that basic question. I’m not one of these people that sits and just starts typing and where will I go and where will the muse take me. Be prepared.

Some scenes should be short and punchy. And some scenes deserve breadth because what’s happening in them wants to be elongated. You have to know, dramatically speaking, if what is happening wants to be elongated, or wants to be staccato.

**John:** Yeah. And there may be a reason why that certain card on your big corkboard, it’s written as one card, like it’s one scene. But it’s really part of a sequence. Or like you’re going through a series of spaces to achieve this thing. It’s a walk through a restaurant, and a park — it’s a conversation that’s happening in different places, so it’s not all one block of conversation.

Just expect that it’s not going to necessarily be a two page scene, a two page scene, a one page scene, a two page scene. There are going to be a lot of little chunks. And every once and awhile you will get that bigger thing and people will be excited, like, “Oh, we’re actually staying in this moment for a good long time.” And then it’s worth it because you do it. But, you have to anticipate that from the start.

And I will back track a little bit. You said you’re not a person who sits down and just starts writing and sees where the muse takes you. I think that sitting down and writing can be very helpful early on in the process where you kind of don’t know who the characters are. You don’t know what the characters’ voices are, and so I’ll often just like start the characters talking and just listen to them for awhile. But that’s not the finished scene. That’s just sort of work for myself.

Sometimes I’ll except little bits of that or I’ll find little things that are funny from there, but that’s not the actual scene itself.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct.

**John:** Seventh step for me is to brainstorm three different ways it could begin. And the reason why I say three different ways is that so often you will just go with like your first instinct, and your first instinct may not be a great instinct. It may be sort of a very safe common instinct. Sort of the “walking through a door” kind of instinct.

Look for ways to start the scene that isn’t the most obvious way. A lot of times you’re looking for what is the first line that somebody says in a scene and that’s the first way you’re going to start it. But sometimes it’s a reveal. Sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes there is a different way to begin that. And it’s worth pausing for a minute or two to think of different ways you could start the scene.

**Craig:** I have a — I don’t know if you’d call this an additional, but it’s whatever number you’re up to, part B, or part A — and that is to think transitionally, always. Because, again, if you don’t come up with the transitions somebody will volunteer and do it for you.

So, when I’m planning a scene, usually the day before I’ve planned the transition out of one and into the other, which is a great way of thinking about how to start the scene because it’s intentional and it’s editorial and it will help all parties involved.

So, when I’m working on the scene today I probably know from yesterday how it should start. When I figure out how it should end I start thinking about the next scene and how that one should start.

And in this way, hopefully, you create a sense of seamlessness throughout. So, excellent advice to think about beginnings. And I would just add: Think about them transitionally.

**John:** Now, I often write out of sequence, so I will write just a given scene devoid of knowing exactly how the previous scene started, or how the next scene would go.

But, if I’m writing that scene independently, I’m really thinking about how I’m getting into the scene and thinking about how I’m getting out of the scene, and what works best for that scene. By the time I’m writing the scenes that surround it I’ll some idea of — I’ll know sort of what it’s going to go into, and so it will influence the scenes around it.

So, even if you’re writing out of sequence, it’s good to think about how you might get into that and how you might get out of it when you actually get those other scenes written.

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. Just know that that’s part of your job.

**John:** And be aware of how you’re doing it in other scenes, because you don’t want to do every scene the same way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t want to always just come in in the middle of a conversation. Sometimes you really do need to walk somebody through the door. Other times you’re going to want to start on an image and go shot by shot. A lot of times scenes are going to be scenes that don’t have any dialogue, where you’re just watching something happen. And be mindful of how you’re doing your scenes and how to vary them so it doesn’t feel the same.

**Craig:** Yeah. Variety is key. There are very simple stock transitions that aren’t to be avoided because they’re common; sometimes they’re exactly what’s needed. Sometimes you just need a shot of a car driving down the road and then we’re inside the car. That’s okay.

But think in terms of audio and visual. Sometimes you can do an audio transition. Sometimes you want the transition to be visual. Sometimes you want it to be a little tricky and a little clever. Sometimes you don’t. Think about big. Think about small. Think about how your scene ends. Does it end small? Try and start the next one big. Scene ends big, start the next one small. Little tricks.

**John:** And big and small, sometimes that means visually, but sometimes it means big sound, little sound. Sometimes that transition is the chime of an open car door, and like that’s the reveal that’s getting us into this next thing. So, be thinking in more than just one sense.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Step eight for me is to play it on the big screen in my head. And I stress the big scene. Literally, you close your eyes. You sort of see what it is that the scene is that you’re trying to write. And sort of visualize what it’s going to look like on a screen.

Sometimes I feel like I’m in that space and I’m just looking around. I’m sitting in the room with the character. Sometimes I’m watching it sort of on a flat screen. But the important part is I’m just watching it sort of happen. And I don’t sort of force it to happen in any specific way. But I’m sort of observing it. It’s loose blocking in a way of like these are the kinds of things that are going to happen in the scene. This is what is going to be talked about. And you just let it loop.

And for me I just let it loop, and loop, and loop until I can start to hear what the characters are saying, if it starts to be, like, okay we’d start here, we’d go to here. These are the things that would happen. And you’re seeing a sort of rough version of it playing in your head.

Do you loop? Is that a way you tend to approach a scene? Or you just start writing on the screen itself?

**Craig:** No, I absolutely do what you do. It is a form of daydreaming. If you’re not fond of or good at daydreaming, find another thing to do. Because that’s what’s screenwriting is. It’s rigorous, structured daydreaming.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so because it’s so important to write visually, you know my whole shower fetish. So, I get in the shower and I start thinking about the scene and I start absolutely building it and watching it in my head. And when you start to watch the scene in your head it forces you to account for things that I think you wouldn’t otherwise account for.

Like what does the room look like, and smell like, and is it bright, is it dark, is it cramped, is it smoky, is it noisy? All the things that you can use inside of a scene are suddenly available to you by requirement because you’re watching it.

So, I don’t know how else you could do it.

**John:** There have been a couple times where I’ve really been slammed on getting something done, and in television especially where it literally was sort of brute force. Like, okay, I sort of know where this is going and I would jam it through. There are times where it’s the one-eighth of a page where you’re literally walking somebody through a room, or it’s just really quick, sort of mechanical writing.

But for any scene that actually has meat and substance to it, where characters are going to be talking, and something is going to happen in this scene that’s going to transform the story, you owe it to everybody to really loop that scene and really get the best version of it playing in your head.

And it doesn’t need to be perfect, and I won’t know every line of dialogue, and I won’t know exactly what it is, but I’ll get to a point where it’s like, “Okay, I can see it, I can see it.” And I get to the next step which is what I’ll call the Scribble Version, where I just make sure to get it down on paper or on screen in just the worst possible form as quickly as possible, just notes for myself so I can remember what it was, and so I can recreate that looped version and I want forget it when I start writing the real scene.

**Craig:** I do that, too. Sometimes after the shower I will go to my computer and type an email to myself that’s just the dialogue, because I know what the dialogue is connected to. The dialogue helps me — that essentially is the spine that I will reconnect all the visuals and the transitions and everything to. But that’s the stuff that’s so wordy it needs to be memorialized or I’m going to forget, particularly if I really like the way I said some line or another.

And then I’ll send that to myself, and that’s basically my cheat sheet for the day’s work.

**John:** Yeah. So, that scribble version — I should stress — it shouldn’t be perfect. And even if you’re writing dialogue, it won’t be the best dialogue. It won’t be perfect dialogue. There is probably some stuff in there that you love, but it’s not going to be perfect, it’s just going to be enough to let you know how you’re getting through the scene. And then when it comes time to write the real scene you will do the laborious exacting X-ACTO Knife work of getting all those words to fit together just right. And figuring out like that tense is tipping this off. You will do all that precise detailing.

But the scribble version is just meant to be scribbling. It’s not meant to be the final version of the scene. And the few times where I’ve tried to make that scribble thing too perfect, I’ve ended up forgetting what my intention was when I started writing it down.

**Craig:** Yup. Exactly.

**John:** In writing the full scene, use your notes. I find as I’m going from the scribble version to the real version, sometimes I will have a better idea. And that’s great, that’s fine. If in writing the more precise version of the dialogue you recognize like, “Oh you know, there’s actually a better opportunity for what I could do in the scene, or a different way I could do it.”

Take advantage of that. Just like you shouldn’t feel lockstep bound to your outline, don’t feel lockstep bound to your scribble version. Just write the best possible scene you could write.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know the first version is not going to make it anyway. It’s funny. I play this little game with myself every time I see one of my scripts turned into a movie. And it’s called the What Words Survived Game.

And the idea is you will write tens of thousands of words. And you will revise, and revise, and revise. Which ones will make it? [laughs] So few as it turns out take the journey all the way from beginning to end. So few.

So, know that and accept it. And suddenly, ah, isn’t that freeing to know from the start that it’s okay that 80% or 90% of the words you’re writing today that you are appropriately fussing over, they’re not your last shot.

**John:** I want to stress that “appropriately fussing,” because it doesn’t mean that they’re not important. They’re incredibly, insanely important. They need to be ready to be shot tomorrow.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** But…

**Craig:** They just won’t be. [laughs]

**John:** …they won’t be. It’s not going to end up being exactly what you thought it was going to be. Things will change. Accept that as well. It doesn’t give you permission to not be great. And that full scene needs to be shootable. And I get frustrated — and some of the samples we’re going to look at today — they aren’t shootable scenes. They aren’t anywhere near what they need to be to get onto the page. They feel more like what my scribble version should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. Think of your first draft like ancestors. If they’re not alive then the eventual chosen one will never be born. So, they need to be crafted correctly because they’re what get you to the next one, and to the next one, and to the next one.

**John:** Absolutely. Every draft along the way should be shootable. You should never turn in something that’s not done. If you are — if you’re writing a scriptment, if you’re writing one of those James Cameron Alien scriptments, god bless you. That’s great. That’s fantastic. That’s a helpful part of your process. Do like the thing where you don’t have full dialogue, you just sort of have big blocks of pieces. If that’s useful to you, fantastic.

But that’s not a screenplay. That’s not a final script. And when you’re writing real scenes, write real scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah, you won’t make it otherwise.

**John:** No.

And my last point was also kind of misinterpreted in the Reddit version. It says: Repeat 200 times. And by that I actually meant that most scripts you’re going to write like 200 scenes for them. People think like, “Oh, it’s 120 pages, so maybe it’s 100 scenes or something.” No, actually most scripts consist of a lot of smaller little moments.

And we think about, like oh, you’re writing those big moments, you don’t recognize that most of the bulk of a screenplay are those little scenes. And you’re going to be doing that again, and again, and again. It’s a much more intensive process than you realize.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess the 10,000 hours thing applies, huh?

**John:** Yeah. So, by the time you’ve written a screenplay you’ve written probably 200 scenes. You’ve spent a zillion hours on it. And you’re going to spend a zillion more hours on that script, and then a zillion more hours on the next script. And that’s the nature of it.

**Craig:** Yup. That’s what we do.

**John:** That’s what we do. Another thing we do on this podcast is sometimes read Three Page Challenge samples that were sent in by our listeners.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so there’s a frequent question. People who follow us on Twitter will ask, “Hey, are you still accepting Three Page Challenges?” And the answer is always yes, We’ve decided we are having an open, no-deadline for Three Page Challenge.

What you do if you want to submit a sample of your three pages to us, go to johnaugust.com/threepage. It’s spelled out “threepage.” And there are guidelines there for if you want to submit your samples, how you do it, what you need to include, some boilerplate legal text so you don’t sue us. And Stuart takes a look at any of those emails that have the proper boilerplate and picks them out and sends them to me and Craig.

So, I don’t read all of them, Craig doesn’t read all of them, but Stuart — god bless him — does read all of them.

**Craig:** God bless him.

**John:** God bless Stuart. And three of the ones that were sent to us today we will be reading. And let me start with — this is actually a rarity, which is a script by Josh Golden, and one of the ones that does not start on page one.

Most of the times people send in these scripts they’re starting on page one, and so the very start of the script. Josh sent us page 14, 15, and 16.

**Craig:** I liked his moxie. I loved it.

**John:** I loved his moxie.

So, while I loved his moxie, I was also a little confused by how it started, and so I just chose to kind of ignore the first three-eighths of the page on page 14 because it involves monsters, I think. And Drake — I had no context of who these people are.

**Craig:** I tried the same thing. I took at stab at the little remnant of the scene that we don’t see on page 13. It didn’t make sense because we don’t know the context, so I just forgave it and moved onto the middle of the page.

**John:** Great. So, let me give the summary for Josh Golden’s script. We don’t know the title of the script, so it’s a script maybe with monsters in it.

**Craig:** Untitled Josh Golden Project.

**John:** I love it. And big seller on Variety.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We start in The Summers Home. It’s evening. It’s a ranch house that’s a little bit run down. 37-year-old Sarah Summers, she’s getting ready for a date. She’s being helped by her 18-year-old daughter, Alex. Sarah is concerned she looks “mom-ish.”

Downstairs her date, Nick, maybe it’s not downstairs, but elsewhere in the house her date Nick, who’s 35, is talking with Ben and Maggie. Ben is 13, Maggie is 6, who are apparently also Sarah’s kids. Sarah comes out. Nick brought her a single rose, just like on The Bachelor. And as we leave these pages they prepare to go out the door on their date.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So, in terms of the mechanics of things, the way the pages layout, everything seems quite nice. The descriptions, I thought, were appropriate length. The dialogue sounded natural. I guess this is one of those three pages where I shrug a little bit only because, well, let’s tie it back to an earlier discussion — surprise.

There’s no surprise here.

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** It’s pretty much…seen this kind of confrontation a gazillion times. It’s a mother whose husband has died or left, she is off on her first date. She says something woeful that we’ve heard — it’s a version of something we’ve heard before. We have the somewhat precocious teenage daughter who is helping her out. Quite a few pop culture references. And more precocious children who are suspicious of the new guy.

If there’s really any crime here — because all of that sort of rises to the test of sort of general rookie sin of mundanity — the only crime really is that this Nick character who is the guy who is coming for the date is incredibly bland. And since we’re meeting him for the first time his blandness is a huge problem, particularly if we are meant to actually care that he ends up with this woman.

**John:** Yes. I forgot in the preface to say that if you’d like to read these pages with us they’re all at johnaugust.com/podcast and you’ll see all three samples are PDFs right here.

Nick is a problem. But I’d also say I think this is the first time we’re meeting Sarah, and the kids, and everybody else. They’re all capitalized and we’re getting their ages, so this is probably the first time we’re meeting any of these characters.

And so it made me wonder whether their setup kind of deliberately generically so that something bad or funny could happen to them because we’re on page 14. It’s a little bit late to be introducing primary characters, but maybe introduce some characters who are going to be involved in complications along the way.

I agree with you that it was mundane in a way that made me wonder why Josh would send us these pages.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because this felt like they could be pages in any script and there wasn’t anything sort of special or unique about them. There wasn’t anything that says like, “Oh, well this guy is fantastic.” I can say with these pages, like, well this guy knows how to format words on the page and it feels just fine.

The pop culture references, we talked about this on the show before, it really is a frustration to see — there’s a Wisteria Lane reference to Desperate Housewives, Kate Gosselin. It’s like: those are not going to date well in a feature film.

**Craig:** They don’t date well now.

**John:** No. And it’s one of those things where like if you’re doing a television show you can kind of get away with it sometimes because television gets made faster, it expires faster. That’s kind of accepted and okay. But these didn’t work out great.

I also had some challenge with some of the references here. Nick is described as, “Nick, 35, attractive in a scruffy Chicago flannel sort of way.” I have no idea what that means. I don’t know what Chicago flannel is. I don’t know what’s special about Chicago flannel.

**Craig:** Maybe it’s there’s no such fabric as Chicago flannel, I think he meant in a Chicago guy who wears flannel sort of way.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** But then maybe flip the word “scruffy flannel Chicago sort of way.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Maybe like a “Chicago scruffy flannel wearing sort of way.”

**Craig:** Also, one thing that sort of popped out to me, also, was “Clearly uncomfortable, can’t decide which way to cross his legs. ‘So, you guys are Sarah’s kids, huh? How long has that been going on?'”

A couple things. One, that line is just too doofy. Adults don’t make that mistake. It is — you’re setting up precocious 13-year-old Ben to slap him down with an easy comeback line. But, frankly it is such a weird goofy thing to say that an adult would either not say it or would correct themselves upon saying it.

And also you can’t really decide which way to cross your legs if you have the first line in the scene and nothing else is going on.

**John:** The other challenge with that line is it doesn’t pass the logic test. It doesn’t pass the logic test that this would be the line he could say at this point, because how did he enter into the house? It’s meant to establish sort of who these people are in the scene, but it’s not a thing that the character could actually say.

**Craig:** You’re right.

**John:** And “How long has that been going on,” it feels clammy. It feels like I’ve heard that actual phrasing before.

**Craig:** I agree. If you want to set up a scene where people who are suspicious or displeased are looking at someone who is trying to win them over, and it’s an awkward situation, then maybe you just show them all sitting silently. And then one person lifts a glass, drinks a little water, puts it down. More silence. Then…

If the object is to portray awkwardness, portray it. but to just jump into a line, you’re right, it seems quite odd. It seems a little sitcomy, because they don’t have the time for that sort of thing. But these are movies; we do have time.

**John:** One of the opportunities I felt like, so “Maggie, 6, clenching her stuffed monkey,” which she’s a little bit old for a monkey, but that’s okay. Nick could call them, “You seem kind of old for a monkey.” It’s like, “Oh, I’m 6.5.” There’s pointing out sort of the oddness and the awkwardness of it felt like a better opportunity.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I also noticed that Maggie’s age is sort of impossible. So, she’s listed in the scene description as “Maggie, 6, clenching her stuffed monkey.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Ben says, “Well Maggie’s 7, I’m 13, you do the math.” Then, “Maggie nudges her brother and whispers in his ear, ‘My mistake. She’s seven and a half.'”

So, is she 6, 7, or 7.5? It’s been two-eighths of a page and we can’t seem to agree on that.

**Craig:** Certainly for Josh, if you’re going for sort of comic patter, you don’t want to distract with that kind of mistake. It’s okay, it happens sometimes. It wouldn’t be a good deal if it said, “And Maggie, 6, clenching her stuffed monkey,” and a woman says, “Excuse me, have you seen my daughter? She’s seven, she was just here. Oh, I think I saw her over there.”

Okay, you made a mistake, whatever. But, if you’re actually doing dialogue based on her age you can’t really get the age wrong in the description. You’re kind of blowing it.

**John:** Yeah. So, I’m giving Josh the benefit of the doubt. The fact that page 14 clearly involves monsters of some kind, I’m thinking maybe the Summers family is going to get eaten and that could be fascinating…

**Craig:** I don’t think so.

**John:** You don’t think so?

**Craig:** No. Because there’s too much time and too much characterization for characters who are merely to be eaten. [laughs] I just don’t believe it.

**John:** Yeah. But here’s the thing: Everything is competently done and I want to stress that that gets you somewhere. Some of these other things don’t achieve competence.

**Craig:** For sure. Look, sometimes we read pages and I think, “Well, this person can’t do this.” And I don’t think that here, Josh. I think you can do this. I just suspect you’re new at it. And you have a facility, which is a wonderful thing. So, build from that facility and now you have a way of writing scenes that seem properly shaped and so forth. Okay, but now really think. Let’s go a little deeper. I suspect that you have better in you and better to come.

**John:** Yeah. And your pages are better than Craig’s pages from a long time ago.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, whose aren’t?

**John:** [laughs] Let’s do Willa next. Do you want to do that summary?

**Craig:** Sure. So, Willa, by Kate Powers, opens on the exterior of O’Hare Airport, also Chicago, at night in Winter and we follow some footprints into the airport. And the footprints are matched with a drop of blood along the left footprint of each footprint. And we follow the track into the airport. We are trailing the blood and the muddy footprints into a public restroom where a cleaning woman is wiping away the blood and finally gets to its source which is behind a locked stall. There are no shoes visible but she can smell a homeless person in there and she leaves.

The homeless woman emerges, filthy, early 30s, she’s wearing rags which we get the sense maybe were once actually nice clothes, but something quite awful has happened to this person.

The cleaning woman and an airport cop are about to head in there to apprehend her. We fade to black and now we are flashed back. There is a title card that says, “Denial,” and we’re flashed back to the control room of a studio for a talk show named Willa which is an Oprah-style show.

The woman in the bathroom now looks quite lovely and nice. Her name is Corey. And she’s with her producer. They’re watching Willa conduct an interview with a woman who had fought off a rapist, and they’re sort of critiquing the fact that Willa is about to shift away from this brave woman to switch to a different guy who’s going to give away gifts to the audience.

How was that?

**John:** That was good. That was a good summary.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** This is, again, competent. There’s nothing in here that was sort of badly done. I have some questions about sort of use of time and use of our attention. So, from the very start we fade in and we’re in italics the whole time. And maybe this was a mistake, or maybe this was a deliberate choice to show that this was in the past, but don’t do that. Italics are just a burden to read. So, don’t do italics.

Italics are fantastic for emphasizing that words are in a foreign language, some special emphasis or unique case. Don’t do it for a page. I got a little bit confused with are we following a set of feet or are we following footprints? And ultimately I decided we were following footprints, but because she was saying “sets” and the way we were tracking, I just didn’t believe that we were following footprints.

And I didn’t know that it was necessarily the right image to be getting us into seeing Corey in the bathroom there. I didn’t fully believe it. I didn’t believe that we would be following these footprints through an airport. And if we’re not believing your first image, then that’s an issue.

The cleaning woman smells her, and it’s like, yeah, you can do that sort of sniff-sniff thing, but I don’t — again, sense of smell is not a movie thing. I mean, if you’re going to see that there’s a person in there, you could always sort of look through that crack and see that there is somebody in there. That felt like a more realistic way to get in there.

But, she’s doing a very kind of classic technique, which is where you’re seeing somebody in a terrible situation, and then you’re flashing back to an earlier place in their life where they weren’t in that situation. That’s fine. That’s accepted. And I suspect that this Denial tag is going to be some sort of Kübler-Ross stages of grief. I think there’s going to be some journey that we’re going on. So, I was willing to buy it sort of at the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree with what you’re saying. First, let’s talk about these footprints. Here’s what I got hung up on. It says in the second paragraph, “Footprints march across the ice-crusted sidewalk, mostly headed towards, loved ones, home. But one set heads into…”

**John:** That’s what I got confused about!

**Craig:** Here’s the thing. I wasn’t confused. I understood “footprints march across” implies feet marching across. I was looking at it, okay, I know what she means. She means tracks, not actually feet. What I got hung up on was how in god’s name am I in row 15 going to figure out… — First of all, it’s an airport. People are going in and out of an airport constantly. There’s no airport where everyone walks out and then one set of footprints walks in and I’m supposed to be able to discern the heel and toe pattern of an inward bound footprint.

It is a clever thought, but somebody at some point is going to have to make footprints into an airport. You’re going to be there, if you’re lucky, and no one is going to know why they’re doing it because you’ll never notice. All you see in the audience, because you don’t know — remember, no one hands these pages out to the audience.

Here’s what the audience is going to see: Chicago O’Hare Airport. Night. Snow.

That’s it. They won’t even register the footprints, because footprints are irrelevant. What they will register is blood. Start with the blood. [laughs] That’s my advice. You can have people walking through and you can land down and you just arrive at a little patch of snow with a blood drop. And then you move, and you see this blood drop. And then you start to realize that the blood drop is next to a very distinct shoe print.

Okay, great. Now, we follow the blood drop into the bathroom. And then there’s this woman in a stall who comes out. My advice is get rid of this cleaning woman. You don’t need her. First of all, again, think about the audience because they don’t have these pages. A cleaning woman in a bathroom sniffing at a closed stall is a poop joke. That’s all that we’re going to get, because we don’t even know a person is in there. We don’t know what they can smell.

There’s no reason for this woman to be in there. Of course, when you get to this point in the movie when you catch up to this point there’s going to be a situation where a cleaning woman brings a security guard in. But just do it then. You don’t need to introduce this cleaning woman now. It’s not interesting.

You can have just a regular civilian knock on the door and say, “Sweetheart, are you all right?” “Go away.” So that woman leaves, and then — alone — out comes this woman and she looks in the…

So, there’s just some staging issues here. And there is some disconnect between what you are putting on the page and what we could ever experience.

Yes, for sure, we’re going to be dealing with denial, anger, bargaining, and all that stuff. And that’s fine. I think it’s a perfectly cool thing. And I actually really liked when it faded to black and then a title card came on that said “Denial.” That’s fun. That’s interesting.

**John:** Let me pitch you my opening to do the same thing.

Chicago Airport. Big wide shot. We’re at Chicago Airport, it’s winter.

Next shot — in the bathroom, underneath the stall. The door is closed but there are no feet going down, and blood drops down, and drops down from her foot which is cut and bleeding.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Great. So, you gave us the wide shot, we’re in Chicago Airport. You gave us the bathroom shot — we’re in the bathroom. Here’s our girl and there a cleaning woman, someone else, that scene, that moment can start. And we didn’t need any of that rigmarole of having to track through an airport. Because it’s set up as a Hitchcockian kind of thing, but it’s not a Hitchcockian kind of moment.

**Craig:** Well, that’s exactly right. What you’re doing is you’re reverse engineering a beginning that fits to the scene that we then see. Because the scene we then see feels like a slightly bubbly, maybe even comedic world, but a light world. I mean, the Willa character feels comedic to me. And the opening sequence, which would be the sort of thing you might see with a credit sequence of us tracking a blood trail into an airport bathroom feels like a thriller opening.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, there is a tonal disconnect there, for sure. So, you have to either fix the tone of the Willa studio, which seems to light and breezy for the opening, or fix the opening to be less of a thriller vibe, and more of just the shock of this disheveled woman in trouble.

And, you know, look, and this script is called Willa, so this gives me some concern. The talk show character is deadly, to me. And now this isn’t really a critique of how you’ve written it, it’s just a general thing. It’s so hard to write the fake Oprah, because it just feels fake. The whole thing feels fake.

It’s like fake talk show host. Fake late night host. Fake news anchor. It always feels fake.

**John:** I would like to single out that Kate Powers does hang a lantern on the fact that Willa Lear is an Oprah-like character. This is how she describes her: “Self-help author/TV host, Willa Lear, late 40’s, intensely maternal. And, no, it’s not your imagination. Her clothes, the stage, everything echoes a taste of Willa’s idol, Oprah.”

So, at least you’re calling it out saying, “Yes, I acknowledge this is an Oprah kind of character.” It’s deliberate and we will probably reference that somewhere in the actual show itself. Fine. That’s great.

My bigger concern with the Willa studio here is that we’re coming in Corey Ryan who is this woman we saw in the bathroom, but she doesn’t have anything interesting to do. It’s not about her. And so we get sort of a close-up, but then it’s just all the other studio business for the next two pages, and that’s not interesting.

If she is our protagonist, which you’re definitely setting the expectation that she is the important person to follow because that’s who we started the movie with, she doesn’t get to do anything interesting in this next page and a half.

**Craig:** It says that Willa is her boss. Well, is she Willa’s assistant? Is she Willa’s producer? I mean, there’s another producer there. Is she Willa’s what?

And if she has a job, show me her doing the job.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And, look, here’s my thing about these fake talk show hosts is that inevitably the first scene is a very shopworn critique of talk shows. And we see it right here. Willa is not emotionally genuine. Well, yeah. Yeah, okay. We’ve seen it. We’ve seen it, you know.

**John:** Yeah. That you’re going to show us a cruel Nazi.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. Exactly. Uncaring, venal, ratings-obsessed talk show host, that is not well-mined territory.

**John:** Yes. What I would like to say about Kate’s writing though overall is that she does get it. And she actually can sort of push stuff around on the page in a way that’s nice. I didn’t think everything worked here especially well, but I feel like she can write a script. I feel like this is probably part of a full script, she didn’t write just three random pages. She wrote this whole script and there probably is a thing to it. And she probably has an idea because it’s set up with — the bathroom didn’t work exactly right — but she’s flashing back to an earlier time.

She has some sort of structural idea behind how these chapters are going to work. So, there could be something interesting here. I just felt like it wasn’t the best execution of these pages.

**Craig:** Totally agree. I think it’s a very similar situation to our first writer. Kate is somebody that could do this and was in control of the pages, even when they went wonky. And so it’s just about now asking what is real and what can people see. Even the thing that you cited, “It’s not your imagination — her clothes, the stage, everything echoes the taste of Willa’s idol, Oprah.”

And I in the audience know this how? If I’m drawing my own conclusion than maybe there’s another way of putting that. But, regardless, there is nothing here that jumps out as disqualifying in any way. The dialogue wasn’t clumsy or rough.

So, I think that there’s better yet ahead from Kate Powers as well.

**John:** I agree. I do want to shout-out for Aline Brosh McKenna’s Morning Glory, which features a young producer who gets drafted on to work at first a local TV station and then for a national news program. There was a specificity there that was worth taking a look at. Because we know what all those sort of tropes are, and we’ve seen it in Broadcast News and all these other things. And Aline found new very specific things about those characters in those situations and their worlds. And that’s what the script could benefit from.

**Craig:** Yeah. And Also remember that our first glimpse, when we’re writing about shows, our first glimpse of backstage tells us everything. Is it panicked, frenzied, pathetic, depressed, chintzy? The backstage here tells us nothing about this job, the show. It just tells us nothing.

And so really try and relay a vibe. Give us a little crackle, a little energy, or the opposite, but impart information.

**John:** Yes.

Our third and final three page sample is Another Man’s Treasure by A.H. McGee.

**Craig:** A.H.!

**John:** A.H.! I know an American McGee, but I’m guessing this is probably not American McGee.

**Craig:** I guess probably not, no.

**John:** Probably not American McGee. A summary. So, we meet Bruce Hodges as he drives his Audi through a gated community. He answers a phone call in his car and he hears a struggle on the other end — a woman’s scream and then a gunshot.

A title card comes up for “Last Week.” We’re starting at the Langley building, a big office building, where Rudy Franco, a guard in his 60s, is up in the front. Meanwhile, a new security guard named Rosie Chaplain, who’s in her 20s, is getting into her uniform and she struggles to get her walkie-talkie working right.

Our last scene, Rudy is starting her training, apparently. Maybe it’s her first day, or one of her first days, and they’re going off on training.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, you know, if you guys have noticed we’ve gotten a ton of Three Page Challenges where there is an opening scene and then “Last week,” “last month,” “a long time ago,” “how did we get here.” This is becoming almost routine.

Take note, if you will.

It is fine, but if your script doesn’t need it, it’s a little cheap. It’s getting a little cheap. So, consider that.

**John:** Maybe Stuart just loves when scripts do that and that’s why he picks them out for us. Maybe it could be a sample bias.

**Craig:** [laughs] I just like the idea of Stuart going, “Whoa!,” like every time he reads them he goes, “Whoa! I did not see that coming. Oh my god, top of the pile. Whoa!” And then he does it again, like three times a day, he just shouts “Whoa!” And he’s so startled and pleased by the time shift.

The first sequence suffered a little bit from slug line whiplash. We have, in a car, in a gated community, in front of the home, in the car, right outside of the car, right in the car. I think at some point we kind of get it and maybe we could thin those slug lines out a little bit.

**John:** I think so.

**Craig:** Because it was getting a little bit much. It’s a cool — we don’t know what’s going on. We don’t know who the dude is. And then on top of that we add another mystery, which is the fact that someone is calling him. He knows who it is. He has something to talk about with them. He’s sad about it. And then there’s a gunshot and a crime on the other end.

I almost feel like there’s only so much mystery you can put in my face before I start feeling like I didn’t get anything out of it at all. If I had to guess, I would guess that Bruce Hodges is a PI. I would guess that he is being hired by somebody to track a possible straying spouse.

He arrives at a house, and yup, sure enough the straying spouse is that house. The person calling is his client and he has to sadly tell them. And then there is a gunshot. I’m just guessing.

It would be nice if I just knew a little bit more, because it’s enough of a mystery and enough of a shock that there is a crime on the other end of this phone call, for me.

**John:** I did not get that PI thing at all out of this page and half, which is odd.

**Craig:** I wonder if I’m right. Oh, you know what, I’m looking on the PDF, it’s Andre McGee. A.H. is Andre.

**John:** Oh, I’m so sorry.

**Craig:** No, no, it’s fine. The title page is A.H., but the title of the file is Andre. So, hopefully Andre will check in with us and tell me if I’m crazy or not.

**John:** I was taking it as he was having an affair with the woman on the other side, and that he heard this and then got away.

**Craig:** Well, let’s see. Either way, the point is, Andre, I think you failed — you did such a good job of hiding the ball from us that we stopped caring, you know, because it was just basically like a jumble of stuff that happened and it’s like we…

**John:** We forgot there was a ball.

**Craig:** We forgot there was a ball. [laughs] We forgot there was a game.

Now, when we go to “Last week” — cue Stuart, shrieking, squealing with joy — we meet Rosie Chaplain who I suspect is our protagonist. A nice description of her.

This is a tough one. She’s staring at her reflection in the mirror. And she says, into the mirror, “This is only temporary. Hang in there.” I just…forgot whether or not people do that, here’s the problem: A character that does do that is weird to me. Talking to yourself in that kind of self-affirmational way into a mirror is goofy.

And so now I feel like she’s goofy. And I know you don’t want that. So, in a way you have to figure out how to get across this information that this is her first day. The game of smooth, elegant exposition is one that you need to play. So, I would try another tactic there.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. I would also try figuring out what words need to be capitalized and what words don’t need to be capitalized. I’m not talking uppercase/lowercase.

**Craig:** Like two-way radio?

**John:** Like two-way radio. But really from the very start, just odd choices in sort of what got capitalized. And the Audi pulls into a “Gated Community.”

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** Home is in capitals. The “Mini Van.” It’s just strange, almost like not common English usage of what’s being capitalized and what’s not. And does it really matter? Is it going to affect how a film is shot? No, not at all. But it affects your read because it’s like, “Wait, why is that weird and different?”

**Craig:** It does give one pause. For instance, “The kind of homes Hedge Fund CEO’s go to jail for,” is a cool way of describing this gated community, it lets me know where I am. The problem is that you capitalize, not all caps, but initial capped Hedge and Fund. Why? Why? It’s confusing and it’s disrupting what is otherwise an interesting line. I do agree with that.

**John:** The bottom of page, “The call is on speaker, undulating through his top notch stereo system.”. It’s like, ohh, what, ooh?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s not a good one.

**John:** We’re already in an Audi. You don’t need to talk about the stereo system being special. Just like, “Call is on speaker.”

**Craig:** And calls don’t undulate. Sorry.

**John:** No. Also, most phone calls don’t happen the way they happen here. “Bruce, saddened, ‘Hey, there’s something…'” So, a call is coming into him and he answers, “Hey, there’s something I want to talk…”

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, people actually do say hello. I mean, if you wanted to do this because of the tick you’re playing here, he answers, “Listen, before you say a word…” you know? [laughs] Come up with some way of doing that.

**John:** Or, “Thanks for calling me back.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “Thanks for calling me back.” But, you’re right, calls don’t happen that way. Yes, it’s kind of a weird movie trick that a lot of times people don’t say goodbye in movie conversations. But to just pick up and just do that is a little odd.

Do watch your over-thesaurusizing, like “undulating.” And also, you know, when Rudy is talking to Rosie, you have her “Two-Way Radio,” again, two and way are capitalized, and radio. “Her Two Way Radio CRUNCHES. She snaps out of her routine.”

“Rudy,” in parenthesis (O.S.) for off-screen, and then in parenthetical (from two-way) and then Chaplain, in italics. So, that would be triplicate. We get it. He’s off-screen.

**John:** [laughs] Oh, Rudy is not actually in the physical space? He’s not right next door?

**Craig:** He’s not hiding in the radio. He’s not a little man who lives in the radio. So, yeah, triplicate, no. Duplicate, no. I think Rudy, in parenthesis, (on radio), would have been fine. And then Chaplain, “Yes, Sir,” capitalized S for sir, not sure why. “Yes, Sir, I’m here getting dressed.” Again, “Rudy (O.S.) (two way),” and this way two way is not capitalized, “Well, you shouldn’t be. Meet me by the main elevators. Move it.”

Why shouldn’t she be getting dressed?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I don’t understand that.

**John:** I don’t understand it either.

**Craig:** So, you know, then she looks at her watch. She just noticed that she’s late? There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on in there that wasn’t connecting. “Rudy paces back and forth, shielding his frustration from the public.” Because she’s a couple of minutes late? Or she was dressing? I don’t know.

I was having trouble with this character. Rudy felt fake. She felt a little stock as kind of nervous, disappointed with her life girl who talks into a mirror. We’ve got issues here.

**John:** We’ve got issues here. And a lot of the issues here, I would say, can come back to how we started the situation. Let’s look at how you write a scene and how you start a scene. And you don’t have to take my template for those 11 points, but I didn’t feel like he’d done that work on really any of the scenes we saw here, or any of these moments that we saw here.

Well, who’s in the scene? Where is the interesting thing? What needs to happen in the scene? How could this begin? How are we getting through it?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** These are sort of fundamental questions. And it very much felt like he started typing the scenes and let whatever happened in the scenes happen. And this could very well be a first script and things like the triplicate of O.S., two way, “Well you shouldn’t be,” that feels like the kind of situation where like I don’t know how do to this. I don’t know what the proper formatting is so I’m just going to do all of it. I’m just going to overdo it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Andre, I’m going to give you a suggestion here. This is how I would approach this kind of thing with Rosie and Rudy.

— And by the way, Rosie and Rudy is a little bit of an issue, too.

**John:** Don’t repeat character names if you can possible help it.

**Craig:** Especially when they’re right after another. But here’s what we want to get across, right, we want to get across that this is Rosie’s first day on the job. She’s not happy with this job. And Rudy is kind of a jerk.

So, what I would suggest is lose the whole “I’m late” thing, because you don’t need it. Frankly, don’t give Rudy a reason to be angry. It’s more interesting — if you want to show that a character is a grumpy, grouchy guy, show him being grouchy and grumpy without a reason.

Maybe Rosie is in this locker room and she has — she looks at herself, she sighs, and then she looks down at a security guard uniform that’s like still in the shrink-wrap plastic because it’s just come from the uniform service, you know. And her name tag, she has to peel that plastic off, you know, just to get that she’s opening up and putting this stuff on and she doesn’t like it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then she comes out and then all of a sudden this guy is on her. And he’s like, “I was trying to get you on your radio. Why aren’t you answering your radio?” And then she picks it up and she’s on the wrong channel because she’s new, and “I’m sorry, I’ve never used this.” “Just follow me. Do exactly as I…”

Then, just be a little bit more creative about how we present these facts. And be a little more visual about it. And less worried about two-way radios, and back and forths, and “Yes, sir, I’m here,” and all that stuff.

**John:** My guess is that she is a more important character than Rudy is, and so coming into this part of the sequence we really should have started with her and not started with Rudy outside. Because we don’t care about that lobby. Is something interesting going to happen in this lobby? Eh.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She’s probably your actual character, so starting with her. And I like your idea of the specificity of ripping off plastic and sort of getting started feels really good. So, we don’t need to meet him first. We meet her, and through her we meet the guy who is going to be training her. That’s a nice way to sort of get into a world. So, a suggestion.

**Craig:** It’s also because just like the three pages before by Kate, this is a backstage scene. So, maybe start backstage her. Don’t show the lobby at all. First of all, you’re right: obviously this is going to be Rosie’s story. We don’t care about establishing Rudy. Don’t establish the building at all.

We’re in a locker room. We don’t where we are. Are we at a police academy, at a school, at a jail? But it’s a junky locker room. It’s junky and it’s full of cleaning products. And it’s greasy. And then she walks out this door and she’s in this gorgeous lobby full of very wealthy people who are moving around making billions of dollars.

Find ways to surprise us. The best transition in any movie ever probably is when Dorothy walks out of her black and white little crappy Kansas home and there’s this gorgeous Technicolor fantasy world in front of her. It’s so surprising.

So, go ahead. Find those moments.

**John:** Agree. So, we want to thank all three of our people for writing in with their three page samples, because they’re very, very brave, and thank you for sharing them and letting other people learn from what you wrote, and hopefully from some of the conversations we had about them.

It’s time for One Cool Thing. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do have a One Cool Thing. Woo!

**John:** I’m so proud of you.

**Craig:** It’s an app.

**John:** Now, I know that shame is a motivator, but is pride a motivator?

**Craig:** No!

**John:** Does that help? No, I should never say that.

**Craig:** Actually it hurt. God, I don’t want to do it anymore.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** What are you proud of me? Ugh, I guess I can stop.

No, no, the shame is perfect.

So, cool app, I love games on the iPad, but I’ve found so few that I truly love. Actually your recommendation of Ski Safari is one that stuck with me. I loved The Room, and that’s such a great game. Have you played The Room yet, by the way?

**John:** Oh, I played it all the way through. It’s amazing.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** They need to add new levels and new boxes.

**Craig:** I know. Well, they’re working on The Room 2, so I’m super excited about that. And I’ve tried other Room-ish games, and none of them are even close.

So, what ends up happening is I just end up getting stuck with playing the oldies over and over because I’m so rarely impressed by iPad games. There’s so much junk out there. But, very cool interesting game called Waking Mars. Have you heard of this one?

**John:** I have. But tell me everything about it.

**Craig:** Well, it’s real simple. Basically you play an astronaut, a human, who is on this little exploratory mission on Mars, in the future. And you’re moving through caverns. And you move by walking or flying around with your little jet pack which beautifully has no fuel meter on it because it’s so frustrating. I hate crap like that.

If you want me to fly, let me fly. What’s fascinating about it is the game is essentially a puzzle-based platform where you encounter different life forms. And they’re mostly sort of Martian plants. And the Martian plants do different things. Some of them give off little seeds. Some of them give off water. Some of them eat certain other plants, or other animals. And your job is to basically start managing the increasing bio-complexity to create more life to affect your ability to move through the cave and explore Mars. And there’s a sort of macro mystery around the whole thing. And there is kind of clunky voice acting, but okay.

Interestingly, your protagonist is an Asian American which you don’t often see in video games. But, I don’t often encounter a different game scheme, you know? This is a different game scheme. I’ve never played a game where the idea was to figure out what to feed to what. And realize that if you feed this to that it may get you closer to opening the wall, but that thing is dangerous. Whereas if you make a lot of these little things it will take more time and it will be a little more difficult to do, but it’s safer. It’s a very cool game and it’s beautiful. I mean, the graphics are gorgeous on the iPad. Actually put nice music to it.

So, check out Waking Mars. Pretty cool game.

**John:** Great.

My One Cool Thing, there’s not even a possible link to it, because I want to make sort of all of America for not spoiling Homeland for me. So, Homeland is a great Showtime show that I just didn’t watch, and it was one of my sort of broken leg shows in the sense that I figured once I would break my leg at some point, or get laid up, then I would watch Homeland.

And being stuck here in New York, just with my Apple TV, I’ve been able to catch up with Homeland. And I just really appreciate sort of all my friends and everyone else in my life who watched Homeland and said it’s really, really good, but never spoiled it for me. So, this is just a shout-out thank you to everyone who watched Homeland and didn’t run it for me.

**Craig:** What nice friends you have. By the way, John, you know New York is my hometown. Without giving away your exact location, what part of Manhattan are you calling home these days?

**John:** I’m in Midtown Manhattan. I’m pretty close to our rehearsal theater. And I’m actually staying in David Strathairn’s old apartment.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**John:** So, it sounds much fancier than it really is. Essentially when actors or people who need to come to do Broadway plays who don’t live in New York, this is the kind of hotel, hotel-apartment kind of thing, they stick people in. So, David Strathairn was the person who was here before me. And I know that because the guy downstairs said like, “Oh, Mr. Strathairn,” and I’m like, “No, no, that’s not me.”

**Craig:** [laughs] So, you’re right by Times Square/Theater District and that sort of thing?

**John:** I am right in that area.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice to be able to walk over there?

**John:** It is so good.

**Craig:** God, that area used to be just a cesspool.

**John:** Yeah. And now it’s lovely.

**Craig:** It’s amazing the transformation.

Well, thank you from me to our three page listeners and hopefully you took that all in a positive spirit. It is not too late for you. And good job.

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

**Craig:** You, too. We’ll see you next time. Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [@RyanRivard](https://twitter.com/RyanRivard)’s How to write a scene [graphic](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/306566727867711489/photo/1)
* The [Reddit post](http://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/19ehyv/for_fellow_aspiring_screenwriters_how_to_write_a/)
* The [original 2007 blog post](http://johnaugust.com/2007/write-scene)
* Three pages by [Josh Golden](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JoshGolden.pdf)
* Three pages by [Kate Powers](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KatePowers.pdf)
* Three pages by [Andre McGee](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AndreMcGee.pdf)
* How to [submit your three pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Waking Mars](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/waking-mars/id462397814?mt=8) for iOS
* Homeland on [Amazon Instant](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008QTV3X0/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and [Blu-ray](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LAJ17M/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* OUTRO: [New York (Daviglio cover)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz6QsE1dhfU)