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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/intelligence-vs-charisma).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 541 of Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, which trades are the most important when it comes to a career in screenwriting? We’ll wade into the discourse to help you maximize your stats.

**Craig:** Awesome. It’s like the Elden Ring of screenwriting. I love it.

**John:** 100%. We’re going to min-max the heck out of you.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Then it’s a new round of the Three-Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and tell them it doesn’t really matter because it’s all a social game anyway.

**Craig:** Wait, what does that mean, it’s all a social game anyway? What does that mean?

**John:** We’ll get into that. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, you know who doesn’t do a lot of their own writing?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Composers. We’ll take a look at film and TV scores and how they’re written and ghostwritten.

**Craig:** I want a ghostwriter.

**John:** I want a ghostwriter.

**Craig:** [Cross-talk 00:00:47].

**John:** A ghostwriter feels pretty good right now. Craig, mixed news on the labor front this past week. Gizmodo, which is represented by WG East, reached a new contract with Kotaku and the other websites that they write for. That’s great news. They went on strike. They were picketing around. They got a new contract. Congratulations to them.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** We like when writers get contracts, union contracts. Meanwhile, we still don’t have a deal for the Animation Guild, which represents folks in animation, including animation writers. There’s still ongoing efforts to try to get a new deal there. I recorded a video in support of animation writing, reminding everybody that animation writing is writing. I’m frustrated. I really hope that we can get a better deal for the folks who need to work under the Animation Guild contract. I will remind everybody that writing under a WGA contract is a good way to improve your life as a person who is writing for features and television.

**Craig:** This is going to be a tough one, for all the reasons we said before. In case people are just checking in now, the Writers Guild does represent some animation writing, notably primetime television animation box. The Animation Guild represents most animation writers, story artists who do narrative work, who are unionized at all. The Animation Guild is part of IATSE. There are also a lot of people writing in animation without unique contracts at all. Pixar, for instance, non-union. It’s a tricky fight for the Animation Guild, because they very much are a small Rebel force facing up against a fairly large Death Star, but as you know, there is one exhaust port that leads directly to the reactor.

**John:** A thing I just want to remind our listeners is that if you are creating a new animation project, you got a choice. You got a choice whether you are going to sell that project to a place that will force you to take an Animation Guild deal or a non-union deal, or you can say, you know what, I’m going to take a Writers Guild deal or bust. I think you’re going to find more writers who have the leverage to say that just say that.

**Craig:** You’ll also find a lot of people getting bust. They’re going to be tough about this. I don’t want to make it rosier than it is. I was able to do this once. I was successful in doing it, because what they do is they just can create a company.

**John:** That’s all they have to do.

**Craig:** That is a signatory to the Writers Guild. They create companies all day long, the way that we all generate laundry for ourselves. They can do it, but it’s a precedential issue for them. It’s a big fight. You just have to be aware that when we say… You might have to go in there and say it’s WGA or bust. That bust is a real option.

**John:** Bust is a real option.

**Craig:** They may just say, “Okay, then we’re not doing it.”

**John:** That’s always a choice. Craig, did you follow any of this story? This is a screenwriter who is suing their management company for breach of contract. We’ll put a link from the show notes to this. This is really interesting. This is a writer who had created a project, and his management company said, “Oh, you should sell it to this company. Here’s the deal you’re going to be able to make,” and had not apparently fully disclosed that they were actually a producer and an investor in this company. It feels very breach of contracty to me. It feels like people were not doing their fiduciary duties as managers, to me. Not a lawyer, not a lawyer, reminding everyone, but I can see what the arguments are here.

**Craig:** The problem is, managers don’t hide what they are. I’m not sure it is a breach of contract of fiduciary duty, because they are literally telling you, “We’re not talent agents. We can’t procure you employment,” although they do that all the time, and also we do produce things that our clients do. There is an inherent conflict of interest in that. It’s wide open and blatant for everyone to see, which is why I get so frustrated when anyone recommends managers as the solution for whatever problems we may have with agents. They’re not.

I think management as a whole is a deeply problematic profession in our business, particularly as it relates to writers, for this very reason. They tell you up front that it’ll work out great for you if they produce the work you do, because you won’t have to pay any commission on the money you make. The problem is, once they’re producers, they’re management. They are deeply incentivized to have you be paid as little as possible. You never want to decouple your income from your representative’s income.

I just find all of management, the entire thing to be problematic, and so I am entirely on Kurt McLeod’s side. He’s the writer who’s suing here. I am concerned that a court may look at this and say, “Oh, you went to murderers and then they murdered.” That’s what they do. I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to clean up the management business. It’s inherently troubled.

**John:** We can’t clean up the industry as a whole, but what we could do for a writer in this situation is to say, you need somebody else looking at your deal in your contract. That person who actually has by law, clear fiduciary duties to you would be a lawyer. I do feel that if a lawyer had looked through these contracts and really examined them, would have been in a better position to say, “Listen, this does not feel right, and the cap they’re trying to put on this does not make sense. This does not track with my own experience with what these budgets are going to be. I think there’s a problem here.” I would just urge any writer who’s dealing with a manager who may be involved in these productions to get an outside opinion on this from a lawyer who actually knows what there doing.

**Craig:** Just caveat scriptor. We’ve said it many times. They’ve told you what they are. Believe them. I am extraordinary wary of managers. I had one once.

**John:** Yeah, you did.

**Craig:** I fired him.

**John:** You like to fire managers. That’s a thing Craig likes to do.

**Craig:** Did it once, felt great.

**John:** Let’s have some happier follow-up. We had Jack Thorne on the podcast. He was talking about the need for accessibility coordinators on sets on productions to make sure that folks who need things on set or things in production to let them do their best job would have someone that they could go to for this. It looks like in the UK, ScreenSkills is stepping up to help fund this for productions of a certain size.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Accessibility coordinators will be a thing happening at least in the UK, soonish, the same way that we have intimacy coordinators to make sure that sex scenes and sexual material is handled in ways that are appropriate to the performers and everyone else on the set. We have COVID coordinators who are there to make sure that the sets are safe for COVID protocols. Having an accessibility coordinator feels like a right, smart step for everyone involved in production to make sure that we are thinking ahead about really just fundamental things like where are the bathrooms and are the bathrooms accessible for everybody.

**Craig:** That’s great. We are currently shooting an episode with a deaf actor, the child. We have all sorts of folks that have come and joined us so that we can do this right, including a director of ASL and translator. It’s shocking to me that people wouldn’t have done this already in the first place with anyone who has a disability. Now, with unseen disabilities, we talked about invisible disabilities with Jack, and those are tougher, because sometimes you just don’t know.

When you think of how much money productions spend on things that are just a bit wasteful, honestly, weird decisions, bad decisions, confusion, “Oh, you only wanted one car? We got you 80 cars,” all things like this, the expenses for people to help other people feel welcome and capable and cared for and thought of is nothing. It’s negligible. We should always be doing it. Jack is a terrific person. He’s a saint and he’s done the saint’s work here. I think it’s great that UK has stepped up to fund the training, because that’s the most important thing. We can’t just send people in there who have a title. They need to actually know something, because everyone’s going to be relying on them.

**John:** It’s making sure that these coordinators are actually trained, you’re hiring a person who really knows what the heck they’re doing.

**Craig:** Otherwise you’re just handing somebody an extra $500 a week to pretend to do something.

**John:** Jack is a person we spoke to on the show, but of there’s a bunch of other people behind the scenes doing this. We’ll link after the article that really highlights the work that they’ve been doing too.

**Craig:** I only give credit to Jack. [Cross-talk 00:08:56].

**John:** Craig, this last week my daughter was working on a rewrite for an essay she was doing for school. She was doing an essay on Frankenstein, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It was a pretty good essay. She’d done a rough draft that she turned in, and then she had to do a rewrite. She had to do revisions on it. I was talking through with her what my process would be on revisions, and she rolled her eyes, because that’s what a teenager should do. She was rolling her eyes.

As I was thinking about this, I came across this article that Jeffrey Lieber had written about his rewrite map. It’s basically when he gets notes on doing the next pass on something, he tries to avoid that paralysis of just not doing anything by actually really thinking systematically about, this is the work I need to do, creating a separate document that’s like, here’s the checklist of what I have to do. Here are the scenes. Here’s how it’s going to affect every scene. I thought we might spend a few minutes thinking about that in terms of how you approach a rewrite, how you approach a significant revision, so that you are actually doing what you need to do and not moving commas around.

**Craig:** It is its own organizational task. I can see here from what we’re looking at that lists are important, a list of tasks, to-do lists. Those are very good for what I would call the more easily or focused notes to achieve, having to go through this list, ah, in this scene I need to make sure that so-and-so appears, in this scene I need to change that line from this to this. Then there’s just a conceptual rewrite kind of thing which I think comes first. We have your big things and we have your little things. The little things go into lists gorgeously. The big things don’t. The big things just need to take the same kind of time and thought that initial preparation does.

**John:** In some cases, what you may need to do for those bigger rewrites is really think about, okay, what is this episode, this movie, this series, what does it want to become, where is it trying to go to, and really think about where are the big strokes things that I need to do. Once you have this overall plan for this is what the movie’s going to become, then you will be able to make some sort of task list things for the new stuff that needs to happen, new stuff that will change.

I do often find that, and I’ve said this on the show many times, is that it’s going to be most helpful to really think about this from a new document point of view, and what are you going to bring from the current document into this new document versus trying to just make the changes in that original document, because so often then you will find yourself saving too much. You’ll be so concerned about this perfect sentence that you had, that you won’t be looking at what the overall goals are of this brand new thing that you’re creating. It’s really an adaptation of your previous work into the next work.

**Craig:** I think sometimes all it needs, and I feel for Amy, because I suspect she didn’t get this, is time. You just need time to let the other one go a bit, the way that sometimes if you’re working on a puzzle and you get stuck, you come back the next day and you just see stuff.

**John:** You see where all the jigsaw puzzle pieces really want to go.

**Craig:** No, I was talking about a puzzle, John, a puzzle that you solve.

**John:** Yeah, exactly, a jigsaw puzzle.

**Craig:** No. Sorry.

**John:** With all the pieces that go in. Sometimes you get like, oh here’s the bumps and here’s the connects.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You’re like, oh does that row actually fit into that row?

**Craig:** It would never happen.

**John:** [Cross-talk 00:12:00] similar?

**Craig:** Literally would never happen, because it’s just this rote task of just pushing pieces of cardboard into each other. It’s not a puzzle, and time won’t help you. Nothing will help you. Nothing. It’s not a puzzle. It’s a smashed picture.

**John:** Here’s what did help Amy with rewriting her essay is that she came up with her new thesis statement and she went and talked to her teacher about like, “This is what I think my new thesis statement is.” That was a five-minute meeting. She’s like, “Yeah, that’s great. I can see how your essay’s going to revolve around that.” She picked a new thesis that could actually find evidence that was supported in the text and could bring in the stuff that was useful in what she’d already written. Many times really what you’re doing with a rewrite is going back to what is the thesis for this new thing that I’m trying to write.

**Craig:** Yeah, going back to basics. You are writing a new thing, but you get a huge head start. You’ve learned a lot of lessons from the first thing. It’s important to also not forget the good stuff. You don’t want to leave the good stuff behind. There are things that people connected to. It’s fair to want to try and preserve things as you go.

Rewriting is, like everything in writing, a product of experience. The more you do it, the better off you get at it. You get faster. You get smarter about what to keep and what to not keep. You get I think more efficient about not having to go backwards and forwards quite so much. With all the stuff, just doing it… I know we do a podcast, and I know that the point of the podcast, in part, is to help people, but there’s only so much we can do. Really, if you listen to all these podcasts, I think we might save you 1 year out of 20 years of experiencing, which is a lot, by the way, I think.

**John:** Which is a lot.

**Craig:** I think a year is an enormous amount.

**John:** It’s a good amount. I’ve been thinking about, listen, if she could tolerate listening to any podcast, she hates podcasts, but if she could listen to any podcast that was about writing essays for high school, she’d have listened to the podcast and listened to a whole bunch. She could listen to 541 episodes of that, but it wouldn’t get her all that much closer to actually writing her thesis, because you just actually have to learn how to like, okay, how am I going to get these thoughts to stick together, how am I going to make transitions between stuff?

As a person who reads all the stuff she writes, I do see her progressing tremendously in terms of just fluency of sentences and ability to get thoughts to connect right and link this paragraph to that paragraph. It’s still hard work for her in a way that’s just not hard work for you and me, because we have craft. We just have the ability to make these little pieces fit together like a jigsaw puzzle that she just doesn’t have yet.

**Craig:** Again, just to be clear, that’s not what’s happening. What’s happening is far more complicated than a jigsaw puzzle, which is just moron’s work. What’s happening is her mind is growing. Her brain is growing. Neural pathways are forming, that we have reinforced over and over and over, over many years. Think of all the things that our daughters have to study in school. We don’t. We’re in one class. Everything else we do is an extracurricular, but we’re in one class.

**John:** I have forgotten everything I knew about chemistry, and that’s okay.

**Craig:** It’s okay.

**John:** It’s okay.

**Craig:** We’re in one class, and that class is screenwriting and deadlines. Her brain’s still growing. Part of parenting is having the humility to say, actually, I’m not doing much here really, which is, again, waiting, and waiting for their brains to finish. Then we’ll see what we got. She’s got a good one. I like the fact that she rolled her eyes at you. I think that’s great. It’s appropriate.

**John:** That’s her job and her function.

**Craig:** It’s appropriate.

**John:** Let’s get to one of our marquee topics here, because this was part of a Twitter discourse. We actually had a good listener question. I think it sets up a lot of this. It’s a long one, but Megana, if you could start us off with what Patrick wrote in to say.

**Megana Rao:** Patrick writes, “Your conversation last week got me thinking about the recent online vitriol about peer writing versus networking as competing imperatives for advancement in this competitive industry. In my own view, these two capacities constitute the inalienable double-helix structure of any viable screenwriting career. It’s fundamentally a false choice. We’ve all known either A, an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable, but simple can’t wrangle a useful meeting or make a constructive social connection to save their life, or B, an average or underwhelming writer possessed with such charisma, social gravitas, and yes, just occasionally connections. They’re able to effortlessly secure prized business opportunities that stubbornly allude most.

“It all got me thinking, what if one applied the timeless RPG character leveling framework to the enterprise of screenwriting. Screenwriter A above, for example, might be a chiseled level 65 tyrant on dexterity, but a paltry level 2 on charisma. I’m curious how seasoned nerds of our distinguished hosts pedigree would rank themselves and what their dream allocation of attributes would be in crafting the ideal questing screenwriter.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I think Craig and I are going to fall back to what we know best, which is the six attributes which you use in Dungeons and Dragons.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** There are three physical attributes, which are strength, dexterity, and constitution.

**Craig:** We don’t need those right now.

**John:** Those are pretty self-explanatory. Strength is how much you can lift and move. Dexterity is how nimble you are. Constitution is your just overall fortitude, your ability to take a blow, keep going, your workhorse-ness. Those are the physical ones. The mental ones would be intelligence, which is your overall genius, wisdom, which is your ability to recognize patterns, to see things as they truly are. Charisma, which has probably been the most retconned in the DnD world, which is your force of personality, your personability, your ability to inspire either admiration or fear among those around you. Safe description of what those six stats are?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that’s about right.

**John:** I think we could all agree that charisma is what we’re talking about in terms of a person who’s really good at networking and playing that social game.

**Craig:** That’s right. That will be charisma. I suppose we could argue that pure talent would go under intelligence, which is a dump stat for most classes in DnD, but if you’re a wizard or a screenwriter, it’s the one that directly influences your magic.

**John:** Intelligence, it’s not a perfect thing, because you could be… Stephen Hawking is probably not a very good screenwriter. You can be very smart but not a good screenwriter. We’re really talking about verbal dexterity. It’s the ability to string words together. Intelligence is about as close as I guess we’re going to have for that, even though it’s not a writing skill.

**Craig:** It’s not a perfect fit, because intelligence as an attribute doesn’t mean pure IQ per se. Then there’s this wisdom thing, which is the third thing that I think everybody left out in this whole debate, which look, the debate basically boiled down to what’s more important or do you need both. Look, I will go down with this ship. You don’t have to be good in the room. You don’t have to be good at networking. You could have a charisma of zero as far as I’m concerned. You could have a charisma of negative two. It doesn’t matter. If you’ve written a great script, that document, which is completely detached from you as a human being, is going to circulate around and someone’s going to buy it.

Now, if you are a weirdo, that may limit you to some extent, but it won’t limit you completely. We’ve all known let’s say an incredibly talented writer whose command of prose and story craft is undeniable but simply can’t wrangle a useful meeting or making constructive social connection. I know people like that who are very rich from screenwriting, because they’ve written excellent screenplays. Everybody just knows, okay, that’s the way they are. They have their function, and then at some point somebody else may need to come in to help. Yes, there are also people who can, for a while, surf entirely on charisma, but eventually they cost someone money and that’s the end. It’s wisdom that I think has been left out of this debate.

**John:** Wisdom is a tough attribute to say, because you could start your career with a certain amount of wisdom, but really that wisdom will grow as a function of your experience. Experience is that level 65 of it all. You and I have leveled up enough times that we could just see how things work in ways that it’s very hard to at the start of your career. We got hit by the sword more times and have a sense of when to dodge and when to duck and when to parry, in ways that a brand new screenwriter may not recognize. We should also know, oh, let’s maybe listen at that door before we open that door, because there could be monsters inside.

**Craig:** That’s right. Wisdom helps people decide what should I write. What would be a good thing to write right now? Whose advice should I listen to, and whose advice should I ignore, which is a huge one. A lot of young writers, new writers have low wisdom. Because they have low wisdom, they can be easily charmed by agents who tell them this is what you ought to be writing, and they believe them. Agents don’t know what you should be writing, at all. At all. No one actually knows what anyone should be writing. The only thing they know is that when they read something exciting that’s awesome, they want it. Simple as that. Wisdom.

**John:** What I think we’re saying is all three of these, the mental aspects of DnD, do play very important roles. Intelligence, wisdom, and charisma are all factors there. You could maximize one of them and maybe have some success. People who have maximized their intelligence and are really good at writing that script can be great, but if they don’t have the wisdom to see what they should even be writing, that’s a problem. If they don’t have any social skills at all, that can hold them back to some degree. Trying to maximize for one of those stats is not great.

What I don’t see in this discourse is that, as we know in any adventuring party, it’s good to complement each other’s strengths. That’s why sometimes you’ll see people who, our writing teams, where one person is a really fricking good writer, and the other person’s really good at chatting people up and doing that stuff, and together they are a real force of nature. That may be a situation where if you recognize that you are really not great at one aspect of this, that’s an opportunity for you to partner up with somebody.

**Craig:** Even if you are writing solo, a good agent is serving that role and a good producer is serving that role for you, usually. They can help. That’s why they are there. The original that kicked this all off was someone said, “The screenwriting advice that, quote, you just need a good sample, quote, to, quote, cut through the noise, quote, really isn’t true. At least half of the business is about relationships and it’s better to recognize that and plan accordingly. Lots of people have good samples.” Then David Iserson, a fine writer–

**John:** Who’s been on the show.

**Craig:** He has been on the show, and also a fellow graduate of Freehold High School system–

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Said, “With respect to the stranger on the internet, no. Write a great script. Everything else is secondary.” I agree with David Iserson. I think that is correct. I think everything else is secondary. I think that the notion that half of the business, or as this person said, at least half of the business about relationships, is not correct. I think when we start off, we don’t have any relationships. I didn’t. In fact, writing a good sample that cuts through the noise is true. It’s just incredibly rare. I know that what people want is to believe that if you have enough wisdom and charisma, you can make it. Intelligence is your key stat. Every class has one key stat.

The key stat for screenwriters is screenwriting talent. That is your key stat. Load as much of your upgrades into that as you can. The next two, which are secondary, but important, are wisdom and charisma. I would probably load as much into charisma if you can, because it does help. Wisdom you can accrue along the way. Hard to be pre-wise, although some people I suppose are. You will not go long and last without that key, which is being able to write a good script. That is the rarest thing there is in Hollywood, the ability to write a good script. Lots of people have good samples. Wrong. They do not. I wish that were true.

**John:** I stayed out of this discourse pretty much entirely, but I did see [unclear 00:24:03] tweeting along the way. I think Franklin Leonard was one who pointed out that people overestimate how many great samples there are out there, how many great scripts there really are. I think people see, oh, there’s The Black List, there must be a zillion good scripts. Those scripts never touched the light of day because of some other problem, because that screenwriter has some other deficiency. No, there’s actually fewer of those than you believe they are. They do get passed around when [unclear 00:24:28] is really good. I had that experience with Go. Go got passed around a lot because it was a good script. That helped make my career. Don’t think that you’ll write something that’s pretty good and then your charm will make it happen. That’s not been our experience.

**Craig:** No. What are you supposed to do about it anyway? You’re supposed to sit there and start making relationships or forcing this terrible calculated networking? Honestly, how many people on the internet giving advice about screenwriting are professional screenwriters? Of those, how many have actually been consistently produced and have lasted? I think you and me, and I don’t know, there are probably six others, maybe.

**John:** There are some others. There are some people who are genuinely trying to help, and there’s also producers who are weighing with their experience. That’s great. That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** There’s just a lot of people who, they just want something to be true, and they also just like the sound of themselves giving advice.

**John:** Let’s give some of our own advice to–

**Craig:** Segue them in.

**John:** Folks who have written in with their Three Page Challenges. For folks who are new to the podcast, welcome. Every once in a while we do a thing called a Three Page Challenge, which is where we take a look at the first three pages of people’s scripts, sometimes their pilots, sometimes their spec screenplays. We offer our unfiltered advice on what they’ve written and what could be improved and what we’re loving and what maybe they should take another look at. These are all volunteers. These are folks who went to–

**Craig:** They wanted this.

**John:** They wanted this. They went to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. They filled out a little form. They said it’s okay for us to talk about their scripts on the air.

**Craig:** We’re going to.

**John:** It’s all in the spirit of fun and sporting. These are brave folks who have written in. Megana, how many samples did we read this week, did you read this week? I’m sorry. As if I did any of this work.

**Craig:** No, we didn’t do any of it.

**Megana:** I read through about 150 submissions.

**Craig:** Good god. Whoa. 450 screenplay pages.

**Megana:** Correct.

**Craig:** That’s just too much.

**John:** That’s a lot. That’s a lot.

**Craig:** You could probably read through half of those but tell John you read through all of those. He doesn’t even know. In fact, that’s probably what you did. You read through five.

**Megana:** Yeah, I actually only read five.

**Craig:** You read 5, and you were like, “I’ll just tell him I read 900.” We won’t know.

**John:** She made a sampling of these. Remind us, Megana, what is your filtering mechanism? What are you looking for in things that you want to discuss on the air with us?

**Megana:** I’m looking at things that I personally would not be embarrassed if they were out there, so things without typos, things that I think are formatted correctly and promising. I’m reading through a lot of these submissions, and so things that I think are exciting and I’m into the premise, I’m into the world. Sometimes the pages aren’t quite doing it, but I feel like with a few fixes or advice from you guys, you might be able to really help improve the work.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Let’s see how we do.

**John:** We should remind everybody that if you would like to read these pages, we’ll have links to them in the show notes. Also, if you’re on an app listening to this podcast, you can probably just click through and get to the pdf. If you want to read through these with us, you’re welcome to. Megana, if you can give us a quick summary of this first one.

**Megana:** The Man Who Could Be Macbeth, by Daniel Bracy. We open on a call center in the middle of the workday, while Bill Wangley’s coworkers chat and answer phones around him. Bill is haunted by a witch. Bill seems to be the only one who can see or hear her. Bill’s about to confront the witch in the break room when he’s startled by his boss instead. Bill’s boss remarks that Bill’s after-work activities seem to be affecting his performance in the office, and advises Bill to cut back. On Bill’s drive that evening, he tries to play the radio in his car, but instead hears the witch’s voice again. We see a script for Macbeth open on the seat next to him, with Bill cast as the character Lennox.

**John:** Great. Anyone who’s [unclear 00:28:10] is going to quickly realize, oh, it’s like the witch from the start of Macbeth. That’s the witch that we’re hearing. It’s one of those haunting witches that’s setting up the premise of Macbeth. Here’s a plug for the new Macbeth with Denzel Washington, which I thought was terrific. That is not the script that we’re reading right now. Megana, there were more typos in this than I would normally expect. That said, there was something that was interesting, that I think it’s good for us to talk through, because I think there’s also examples of we hears and we sees that I would probably trim out. Craig, what is your first take on The Man Who Could Be Macbeth?

**Craig:** I really enjoyed the concept of this. This is an interesting concept. I think I know where it’s going. There were so many awkward descriptions where there could’ve been elegant, simple descriptions, that it was hard to get any rhythm as I read. I can walk through a few of these. Right off the bat, the very first words, “Heads of hair.”

**John:** I circled “of hair.” What is this?

**Craig:** What is a head of hair? Now, I understand where he was going. He said, “Heads of hair,” I stopped and went, what? “Stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Now, what he means is we see a bunch of office cubicles, an open office space, and we see all those little cubicles, and we see people’s heads sticking up. One of them is balding, but instead we get, “Heads of hair stick out over the walls of a cubicle asylum.” Asylum is not the right word. “One balding round head,” which I think we need a comma there, “One balding, round head stands out from the rest.” By the way, the odds that only one person is balding… Is two bald guys just a lot? “Phones ringing and light chatter is heard among the workers.” There’s this passive voice that happens, “is heard.”

**John:** Take out the “is heard” and it’s fine. That’s a case where I’m happy with a sentence fragment, “Phones ringing and light chatter.”

**Craig:** Then the next line is, “Over the cluster of office noise.” That’s not the right word again, cluster. Just, “Over the noise.” Then it says, “The deep gravelly.” That should be deep, comma, gravelly, “Voice of a woman is heard.” Again, passive.

**John:** “Of a woman,” not “a women.”

**Craig:** “Of a women is heard.” My brain fixed that typo before me. Well spotted. “The deep gravelly voice of a… “ Also, if you are describing the voice of a woman, and it’s deep and gravelly, you need that to come second. You say, “We hear,” and that would be a perfect thing, “We hear the voice of a woman. Oddly, it’s deep and gravelly,” or, “We hear the voice of a woman–“

**John:** “Oddly deep and gravelly.”

**Craig:** Yeah, just something that sets apart deep and gravelly as interesting, as opposed to the average deep and gravelly voice of a woman. Then we do have a formatting disaster here. You and I are pretty good about formatting disasters. Look, nothing is ever going to kill you, but “witch” and then in parentheticals below the character name is says “V.O.,” then it says the dialog. We just never do that.

**John:** No. V.O., continues, O.S., O.C., we stick this up with the character name, just because they’re not a true parenthetical.

**Craig:** Also, it’s V period O period. It’s not V period O. If V gets an abbreviation, so too does the O. Anyway, this goes on. There are comma issues. There’s a lot of just overwrought, clumsy action description here. Hard to see what was going on, and yet eventually I did see it, and this is a testament to the concept, because I wanted to keep figuring it out, because Daniel had me interested, which is the most important thing.

**John:** Here is the premise to me. It’s like what if Office Space but Macbeth, basically where this guy is cast as a minor role in Macbeth and wants the major role in Macbeth, and so he’s obsessed that there’s a witch haunting him throughout this. Sure, I get that. The office was too generic. I’m happy with the cubicle form. That’s great, but I need some specificity about what it is this company does that makes it not just Dunder Mifflin or whatever the business was in Office Space. I need something there, a little bit more. I was also frustrated that we never got a proper introduction to Bill. Bill’s our main guy. He never gets his name put out in upper case, so we can see this is Bill. What’s his deal?

**Craig:** He’s bald. That’s it.

**John:** He’s bald.

**Craig:** That’s all we know. He’s bald.

**John:** That’s all we know. Craig, you and I are identical, because we’re both–

**Craig:** We’re both bald.

**John:** Two bald white guys.

**Craig:** We don’t even know if he’s white.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** All we know about him is that he’s bald. He could be 80 or 12.

**John:** It’d be fascinating if he was 12 years old.

**Craig:** I know. It’d be cool.

**John:** A 12-year-old bald guy working in an office.

**Craig:** Alopecia.

**John:** That would be specific.

**Craig:** Alopecia.

**John:** Alopecia. It’s a real thing.

**Craig:** Child labor law violations. Also, he’s in a call center. No one’s talking. There was no action in the call center. When it says light chatter is heard, the people are going to be like, “What should we say?”

**John:** Everyone, light chatter amongst yourselves. Both Bill and his boss, they need actual proper introductions and they need specificity, because right now the boss just appears in a line of dialog. These are all problems. The other thing which I would say is an overall thing for our writer to work on is recognizing run-on sentences and when to chop sentences into two bits or when to use the gerund to continue the idea. “He’s an older man with large-framed glasses, his eyes scan over his cubicle wall.” “His eyes scanning over his cubicle wall.” You can’t just stick two independent clauses together and join it by a comma.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It reads weirdly. If we were to read this aloud, I think you would recognize, oh yeah, there’s something wrong there.

**Craig:** That was one of the common problems. I apologize, he is an older man, so he cannot be a 12-year-old boy. The boss is named Boss. That’s pretty bad. There’s a moment, a cool moment where the witch appears, but we see her, then we see her make a cool motion that makes her neck crack, and then it says, “Bill suddenly stands upright in response. A shiver rolls down his spine as his eyes widen, the witch still behind him.” Shouldn’t we flip that around? Also, “suddenly stands upright,” I think “stands upright in response” implies suddenly. It would be better for us to be with Bill, to hear a sound, for him to stand, for him to turn, for us to see the witch when he sees the witch. This is a little backwards. Boss, his first line is, “Hey Bill, how’s it going?!” What? Why is there, “How’s it going?!” What’s happening? Why?

**John:** It’s fun that Bill screams in response and drops his water. Great, but is that the out of the scene? Probably not. You need some beat to react to that. What does the boss do? What is that next moment?

**Craig:** He screams back.

**John:** Yeah, because then we’re going to stay in that break room, which is fine. We could stay in that break room. We’re jumping ahead in time. It’s just a weird out on that moment. The other thing I want to point out is, we see, we hear. Craig and I are big fans of we see and hear when the time’s appropriate.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** At the top of page two, “We turn slowly to see, in the opposite corner of the room, a witch staring at Bill from behind a chair.” We turn slowly to reveal? I’m just a fan of more specific words than “see” when it’s helpful, and revealing is a good choice for this.

**Craig:** It is. Also, we don’t really turn. We can hear things. We can see things. We can notice things.

**John:** Slowly reveal.

**Craig:** Or pan slowly to see something like this. It’s very, very hard, by the way, as you guys walk through these things, to have a scene in a break room and then to cut to a scene in the break room later is extraordinarily difficult to do production-wise without looking bad. How do we know time passed? You need to very carefully describe something. Look back at the episode we did on transitions and think of one, because you’re going to need one. That’s hard enough to do that I try as much as I can to avoid it.

**John:** You try to avoid it. An example would be, if in that being startled, he drops his water and water goes everywhere, and then we cut to he’s on his hands and knees, cleaning up the water with paper towels. That’s an example. We jumped forward to time to do that. That can work. You got to be specific about what it is, because just staying in the same place and jumping forward in time is a real beast there. A lot here to work on. It was actually nice to start with one that actually had some stuff on the page that was a problem, because I feel like our next three, we’re not going to be so focused on mistakes on the page and we can really talk about what we’re getting out of them.

**Craig:** Take a look as you go through, Daniel, these sort of things that may not get through your spell check. Top of page three, “This isn’t the first time its.” Wrong, “it’s.” “Effected,” wrong. “Affected.”

**John:** “Affected.”

**Craig:** Also, Bill’s in his car and he’s listening to the radio. It appears to be FM. He’s pushing the buttons to the presets. What year is this?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Megana wouldn’t even know what that is. She would not know what that is.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** Very end, below the title, is a list of the actors’ names. That should be “actors’,” S then apostrophe, as it is a possessive plural. Anyway, lots to do there. I think get simpler, get clearer. There’s certainly an interesting premise here, so well done.

**John:** I’m looking at the log line that was provided. It says, “Bill, an unsuccessful local theater actor working in a call center, is pushed by a mysterious Shakespearean presence into stealing the titular role in a production of Macbeth by whatever means necessary.” We did get the setup. We understood what the premise of the story was.

**Craig:** That’s really smart. Macbeth is a bad ambition. This makes sense. Hopefully he has a girlfriend who convinces him to stab someone. Anyway, so onwards we go to Pizza Boy written by Mick Jones.

**John:** Pizza Boy. Talk us through, Megana.

**Megana:** Dimitri and Clara flirt over dinner at a Beverly Hills restaurant. Their banter slowly turns to dirty talk. Suddenly, Claire’s voice warps into a man’s voice, asking Dimitri to confirm. We cut to Dimitri’s car outside the restaurant, where Dimitri sits in the driver’s seat. He’s picking up a brown takeout bag of food. The waiter has interrupted his fantasy to confirm that Dimitri has picked up the order.

**John:** Great. This is an example of a surprise situation where it’s not a Stuart Special. What we just saw was a fantasy and now we’re coming to the reality of it all. Are we going to name this for Megana? Does Megana get to claim this trope?

**Craig:** We need something that implies… A Megana Mirage.

**John:** A Megana Mirage, of course. It’s all a Megana Mirage.

**Craig:** This was all a Megana Mirage.

**John:** Spoiler, we’re going to have another Megana Mirage in a future three-page challenge here, our next one. Let’s talk about what Mick Jones did here in Pizza Boy and where we’re at in the course of these three pages. The idea of a guy picking up food at a restaurant and fantasizing that he’s at the restaurant, sure, I get that. I was a little bit frustrated that I didn’t feel like his flirtation with Clara was being paid off really, because Clara’s not in our scene. Clara does not appear to be the waiter who he’s talking with or the person who’s coming to confirm the order. I just got a little frustrated by the end of page three, that everything I’d been through wasn’t… I didn’t have an immediate payoff. There didn’t seem to be a pattern that was being fulfilled here.

**Craig:** This is the danger of the Megana Mirage is that the mirage has to, in and of itself, fascinate you and interest you and work for you, without you knowing it’s a mirage, because if you know it’s a mirage, it’s boring and it doesn’t matter and the stakes are irrelevant. If you don’t know it’s a mirage, but it’s not working on its own, the reveal that it’s a mirage just makes you go, oh, okay, that’s why that was that way. That’s not what you want from people. You don’t want them going, “Oh, okay. Okay, I guess that makes sense now.” Making sense isn’t the same as good.

The issue here is that the flirtation between Dimitri and Clara, it’s very arch. It feels very written. You could argue, Dimitri is writing it in his mind, which is fine. When people have fantasies in this way, I tend to find that it’s most interesting when one of them seems very grounded and real, and the other one is exciting, smart, interesting. In this case they’re both doing this thing that it’s sort of like bad porn writing, where everyone’s clever and everything is a double entendre and all the answers are witty. There’s some difficult description that happens early on.

**John:** “Manner born.”

**Craig:** Manner born is correct.

**John:** It’d be M-A-N-O-R.

**Craig:** Actually, the first use was… Manner born, M-A-N-N-E-R, is how it started.

**John:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, in Shakespeare I think, but then manor born, it may have even been a pun. I was reading about this actually the other day. It’s the weirdest thing that the manner born thing happened in this thing. Manner born may have been a pun on manor born. I tend to use manor born. They are both fine.

**John:** Is that appropriate for a Beverly Hills crowd?

**Craig:** No, it’s not. If it were, you would still want a dash in there. You wouldn’t want “manner born crowd.” “Dimitri is aloof, feigning interest,” but he also grins and “never breaks eye contact with Clara.” Now, how do you do that? You never break eye contact, but you’re aloof and feigning interest. That’s just impossible. Basically, I was annoyed by the conversation. I didn’t like either of them, because I didn’t believe either of them. It all felt fake. She said that he’s funny. He hasn’t done anything funny. There’s an example of a good Megana Mirage in, I believe it’s the first… I think it was the pilot episode of Ozark, yeah, maybe the second episode, where we see Jason Bateman’s character having a Megana Mirage with a woman in his car and she’s saying all these things to him. You believe it. He’s a wreck, and she’s telling him these things that he needs to hear. It’s lovely and then you realize that she’s a prostitute and it’s not working like that. You need to believe in the scene itself. I think that was the biggest issue I had here with this particular, I’m just going to keep saying it, Megana Mirage.

**John:** A thing I noticed on the page here, on the bottom of page one, Clara says, “Why don’t you just imagine that I’m not?” The “imagine” is not underlined, but it has asterisks around it. Sure. In Highland or other apps, the asterisks would actually create an italic.

**Craig:** A markup thing.

**John:** A markup thing, yeah. That’s fine, but also people do speak with little asterisks around them, so it didn’t bug me. It’s another way of creating a sensation of like there’s a spin on that word. Great, I’m happy to see that. I think English is constantly evolving, so using things like that is absolutely fine. The joke at the bottom of page two, which goes into page three, Dimitri says, “And what do you find attractive?” He says, “Confidence, red, curly hair, a beautiful smile.” She says, “Do you want to F me or Carrot Top?” Carrot Top, the visual works, but also Carrot Top is not a person you refer to in 2022. It felt like a clam.

**Craig:** It is a clam. Also, weirdly, there is that… I had no problem with the asterisks as well, but then suddenly he is emphasizing words not with asterisks, but with italics and underlines at the same time, which is a very strong emphasis. I think a simple italic there would be fine. I tend to find those underlines seem a bit yelly to me, whereas italics feel like stress. I think, “What do you find attractive?” just could’ve taken an italic, and simply later then when it says, “Then I’m going to pull your panties off with my teeth.” Oh, Dimitri. Which actually just is awkward. No need for the underline there.

Here’s my advice. Let’s be positive and constructive for a minute here, Mick. I think my advice is this. Clara can be this person. She can be tricky and she can be mean and negging him and she can be beautiful and she can suddenly be seductive. She can be all these things, as long as Dimitri is as confused and low power status as I am when I’m reading it. Do you know what I mean? She scares me and I want him to be scared and I want him to be confused and I want him to not be able to follow her. Then I want her to take a little pity on him or decide that he’s adorable enough for her to take home. That’s what I want. I want something that feels real and will help me learn something about Dimitri, since he’s our character.

**John:** Let’s take a look at the log line that Mick provided, which is, “To pursue his dreams of becoming a comedian, a young man must endure untold humiliation as a delivery driver in Los Angeles.” We got delivery driver in Los Angeles in these first three pages. That’s great. I wouldn’t have known that he’s a comedian. I think there’s an opportunity for this. If we see him trying jokes in this, I think there’s… I could imagine a version of this scene where we see that he’s trying to make her laugh and he’s trying material on her. There’s something you could do in this that would get us to that he’s actually a comedian, because I think that’s important information for us to get out in these first three pages, and I don’t see that happening.

**Craig:** No. The first few pages tell us what’s important to somebody. I think we’re starting with our I want song, in a way. What this tells me is that he wants a girlfriend.

**John:** Clara, yeah.

**Craig:** He wants a girlfriend. He wants to be a Romeo. He wants to be that guy that all the women want to date. What it’s not telling me is that he wants to be a comedian. If you did the same exact concept and it was a party and we’re in a backyard of this beautiful mansion and Dimitri is the center of a group of people, he’s telling a really funny story and he’s really good at telling it. He’s confident, and everyone’s laughing. Then you cut to or reveal that he’s actually standing there on the edge watching somebody else doing this who’s an actual comedian.

**John:** He’s going to hand the bag of food to take somewhere else.

**Craig:** He’s just there to deliver something for the party. That guy is the guy whose life he wants. Then I would understand what this movie is. I would get it.

**John:** Let’s go to our next Three Page Challenge. Can you talk us through Evergreen by Heather Kennedy?

**Megana:** Great. Frank Harrell, 80s, white, swims in the pool of the Evergreen Estate, a 1950s Bel Air mansion. A member of the staff, Joel Garner, 50s, Black, reminds Frank that he’s not supposed to swim alone. A woman’s cry calls him inside, where they find Margaret, 80s, white, has just discovered the dead body of Joe Johnson. Joel calls the police and tells them a guest has been shot dead. We pull back from the estate as an ambulance appears, revealing that we’re actually in modern Los Angeles.

**John:** That’s the Megana Mirage. We thought we were in a period movie, but it’s actually modern day Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s a mirage. This could be something else, because it’s not a fantasy where the bubble gets burst.

**John:** It’s a Rao Reveal is what it is.

**Craig:** It could be a Rao Reveal. That’s exactly right. This could be a Rao Reveal.

**John:** A Raoveal.

**Craig:** A Raoveal. This may have been a Raoveal. Just a quick disclosure, I’m friends with Heather.

**John:** Oh, nice.

**Craig:** She and I are both puzzle solvers.

**John:** You’re puzzlers.

**Craig:** We’re solvers, John.

**John:** When you’re putting pieces together.

**Craig:** She lives in Austin.

**John:** Shaking that puzzle dust out of that little box.

**Craig:** Never. We’ve done some escape rooms and we frequently talk to each other about puzzles. Lovely person. There’s something that could be excellent here. There’s a Pleasantville possibility I think is what’s going on. We have trouble in these first two lines. This is where I think so much could be solved, because I’m not sure what I’m actually seeing. Okay, some possibilities. One, that when these people are walking around, they’re delusional and they think they’re in a 1950s black-and-white movie, because they’re old.

**John:** Some sort of memory care thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, or this is a weird bubble of reality, where once you cross the line you are in 1950s black-and-white Hollywood, or this is just a funny opening to introduce us to what will be a story about a regular old age home. I’m not sure. I would love to know better somehow. The first few lines say, “As the first light flickers onto the screen, we discover this is an old Hollywood black-and-white film.” There’s not much discovery there. You could just say, “This is a black-and-white film.” Black-and-white. Or you could just say, “Black-and-white.”

There is an interesting tonal issue that occurs, because on the second page we meet Margaret. “Margaret speaks in that mid-century, mid-Atlantic movie accent prevalent at the time. Oh Joel, it’s awful, just awful.” She’s great. She also says, “Oh Gwennie. Please. You mustn’t,” which made me laugh out loud, because that’s just so funny.

In the prior page, which is in the same black-and-white universe, Frank, who is floating in a pool, says, “I can’t be blamed if Joe didn’t see fit to join me this morning. Asshole’s afraid he’ll lose.” No one said “asshole” in these 1950s black-and-white movies. That was just simply not available to them, and it wouldn’t fit.

Also, he says, “Did I ever tell you that Johnny Weissmuller taught me how to swim?” “Yes, sir, once or twice.” Now, that makes me think, okay, so that was a long time ago, but Johnny Weissmuller was… “Johnny Weissmuller’s teaching me how to swim,” might help, because then I would think, okay, I’m in that… It was hard to pin down exactly what the concept was here. I know what I want the concept to be here. I just don’t know if it is.

**John:** Like you, I enjoyed the things that felt like ‘50s period and I enjoyed the mid-Atlantic accent. I enjoyed that kind of voice of it all and recognizing that race was a factor here as well. Starting as a black-and-white movie just felt kind of like cheating. Am I watching The Artist? I just didn’t know what I was actually experiencing and how seriously to take it. I didn’t know when I was going to transition to full color to show that we are in present-day time. Just remember, Sunset Boulevard, which you’re also referencing here at the very start, you don’t need to shoot things black-and-white to make them look old. You could actually just shoot them in present-day things and if the production design feels like 1950s, we’re going to believe it’s 1950s until you break that illusion. That’s going to be a better solution for you for most things.

**Craig:** I couldn’t agree more. To me, costume and hair and makeup and speech patterns, dialog patterns, furniture, all these things can absolutely convince me that I’m in period Los Angeles. The reveal is not from black-and-white to color. The reveal is period Los Angeles to 2022 Los Angeles, which is not at all like that. Once you get past the gates of this place, you realize, oh, we’re in the middle of now. Again, the question will remain, is this just a memory care type facility, where people just think it’s in the ‘50s, or is this some weird time bubble? It’s hard to say.

I love the fact that there’s a murder mystery in the offing here, because those are always wonderful. I thought things were fairly well described. I could see things. I saw, for instance, the bottom of page one, “A woman’s scream startles them. They pick up their speed.” That’s great. That’s a nice transition. “Interior Evergreen Estate. Joel and Frank follow the commotion.” I thought, okay, I’m going to go to the next page, but what is this living room, and boom, there it is, the interior of the mansion. She lets you know. Then there’s a very funny line. Then I could see exactly the body. I could see what the body looked like. I could see how he was shot. I love that there were feathers everywhere from the pillow. All that stuff felt great. It’s just conceptually we need to know what we’re supposed to understand, because kind of don’t.

**John:** It gets back to our confusion versus misdirection, and I just got a little confused. Don’t name a character Joel and a character Joe. We’re going to get those names confused.

**Craig:** I wouldn’t even name a character Joe and a character John. We got to watch that. Also, there is an errant I-T-apostrophe-S when we should have an I-T-S at the bottom of page three. I know that Heather will be kicking herself at that. I know her well enough.

**John:** As a puzzler.

**Craig:** Yes, solver.

**John:** Fortunately, we do have an answer about whether this is a time-space bubble. Her log line that she submitted says, “When LAPD homicide detective Keiko Sanjiko [ph] discovers the bigoted elderly residents in a home for the stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age won’t answer her questions, she hires the spitting image son of their beloved TV private investigator to be her proxy. The two uncover a decades-old feud and love affairs, but will that help them solve this locked-room mystery with a surprising emotional twist?”

**Craig:** That’s a really fun concept. I think that concept is terribly served by beginning this in black-and-white. In no way, shape, or form should that be what you do there. You just start it, we think we’re in the ‘50s, and then we realize, oh, these people, it’s just a memory care thing. I think there’s an opportunity to actually have a secondary reveal, which is Interior Evergreen Estate Office Day. This is Joel, who’s looking after them. “He walks into his office, closes the door behind him. Now that he is alone, he is visibly shaken.” He would be visibly shaken also seeing a dead body prior. He’s not an actor. “He walks to a nearby desk and dials 911 on the rotary phone. Someone on the other end answers. Yes, I’m… My resident, a resident has been shot. He’s dead.” To me, if he walked into that office and we were like, “Oh, whoa, this office has a computer,” that’s [cross-talk 00:53:15].

**John:** He’s pulling out his iPhone, yeah.

**Craig:** Then he just picks up the phone, dials it, and he’s like, “Yeah,” and he just speaks without any kind of mannering and 1950s nature. He’s a more interesting reveal than the city. Then you can show the city, which is perfectly fine. A human and his mundane things. He could pull out his iPhone. He doesn’t need a rotary phone.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** He could be like, “I’m going to go get you your tonic.”

**John:** Bloop bloop bloop.

**Craig:** He goes to the room and goes into another room, and in that second room he unlocks the door and that goes into just a regular office and he pulls out his iPhone and dials 911. I think that would be more interesting.

**John:** I agree with you there. Let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. Megana, will you talk us through Scavenger.

**Megana:** Great. Scavenger by Phil Saunders. A boyfriend records his girlfriend opening her birthday present from him, when the entire building is suddenly rocked by an earthquake. The footage cuts to black as we hear the room collapse. The handheld footage picks back up with quick shots of the couple running through the Santa Monica Pier as the earthquake wreaks havoc. The Ferris wheel falls and crushes the girlfriend. An office tower collapses. We pull back to reveal Edgar Corman in his 50s in a private jet watching the footage under the caption “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.” He video chats with Thania Redrick. They’re surprised that the footage was recovered. Thania tells him a scavenger found it. We cut to Fin Lorca in her 20s diving through underwater ruins. She swims past a barrier and discovers a sunken carousel.

**John:** Great. Craig, a thing I like about these pages is that it can be so hard to show a bunch of chaos happening. A bunch of chaos happens, and people just basically track what’s going on. I see this is all found footage. I’m getting a sense from these glimpses about what this must be. I felt like it was live and present in ways that did make me want to… It kept me actually reading through the stuff. Even if I didn’t have to read exactly, I didn’t need to look at each bit of time code, I got a sense of what was happening. That can be tricky to do on the page. I did like that about how these pages started.

**Craig:** It’s an interesting thing. I really enjoy the first page. I really enjoy the third page. I struggled mightily with the second.

**John:** I did as well. Let’s talk about why, because it’s when we get to this reveal, like, oh, here’s the person on the private plane watching, it’s like, wait, I don’t get why this footage is so important here. I just wanted that scene to go away and get ride to my scavenger having found a thing or jumping ahead to this is what the sunken city of Los Angeles is like.

**Craig:** I agree. There’s something very smart and very poetic about the way Phil has laid out his first page here. A young woman wakes up, stretches like a cat. 23, bedhead and bleary eyes.” Thank you. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. “Smiles at us as we get closer. The mirror behind her catches her boyfriend’s reflection.” I can see this. He says, “Happy birthday, lazybones,” capturing it on his phone. It’s “Corrupted like a bad copy.” I know something’s going on already. I like that it’s corrupted like a bad copy. “His hand reaches out with a wrapped gift. The size and shape scream jewelry. Lazybones, tired smile, wakes up.” That was really interesting, because he decided to name her Lazybones, even though her name is Young Woman, which I think is correct. It’s smart.

There’s this little banter back and forth with them that is very mild but believable, didn’t bore me. She says something that feels like the kind of thing people say. It’s not too clever. It’s not too boring. It’s just fine. The way the disaster happens is really interesting. It felt real. Then I had no idea what the hell was going on. To start with, it says, “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” It took me a while to understand that this was a private jet. It doesn’t say private jet. It just says, “The jet’s only passenger.” I’m assuming that he’s in a 747 when I see “Interior Aircraft Cabin.” The first action line is, “10 years later, the quake through the eyes of its victims.”

**John:** Where am I seeing that line?

**Craig:** Then it says underneath, “A tabloid website streaming on a screen in the hands of… “ When we say screen, do we mean tablet? What is that?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Tabloid websites streaming? What does streaming mean? Do you just mean that that’s the headline of a tabloid website? What tabloid website? Then we have this guy, who we’ve heard prior. There’s this prelap of people talking. By the way, it’s not V.O. In that case it’s probably something else, off screen. I don’t know if it’s V.O. Voiceover is when people are narrating things.

**John:** People are talking directly to the audience.

**Craig:** I think this is something else. Also, he has to figure out what to do here, because one of them is talking in a scene and the other one, her voice is coming over this feed. I have no idea what is going on. I don’t know what any of this means. I know I’ll find out later. Sometimes jargon as mystery makes me crazy, like, “You had to pull me out for this.” Pull you out, what does that mean, pull you out?

Then, “Someone made it in. How far? Far enough to recover that footage. Christ, this could save us. Who?” No one says, “Christ, this could save us.” No one, ever. I don’t know what they’re talking about, but John, if you and I know that if we had something that could save us, and we watched a video, and it seemed that somebody might have that thing, I would go, “Oh my god. They might have it.” I wouldn’t say, “John, that is the very thing that we have discussed a thousand times that could save us.”

**John:** “Christ.”

**Craig:** “Christ.”

**John:** “That could save us.”

**Craig:** “Goddammit.” No. I completely agree that I want to be in the next page. I just want to skip page two. I just want to go from this crazy moment of Los Angeles being destroyed to underwater, and then seeing this woman come through and having her scavenging. We get it. It’s many years later, because everyone’s a skeleton now.

**John:** Yeah, so cool. There’s something in this footage that is the McGuffin. There’s something that they are seeing in this footage that is important. I would say maybe spend that top of page two focusing in on that thing that is important, and that let us as an audience know that that thing is important. We don’t need to go to the guy to say that thing is important, because you’ve told us as an audience that thing is important. Great, we’ll be getting back to that. As long as you held on that, we’ll know there’s a reason why we held on that.

**Craig:** When we meet Aleta, who is scavenge diving, there’s all this really cool imagery and stuff. She’s looking at a driver’s license. “She pulls a driver’s license from a rotted walls, compares the faded image of a woman to a skeleton, as if trying to imagine it in life.” That’s wonderful. Such a great visual. “It’s one of many littering the ruins.” I can see it now. “Aleta traces a cross over the corpse and begins to rob it.” What a great sentence. Love that sentence. Then there’s this science-fiction thing happening. “A liquid electric fence known as the Barrier stretches sea floor to surface between high-tech pylons, emitting a deep bass thrum you can feel in your gut. It sparks and flashes warnings, restricted, keep out.”

Now I know it’s not actually saying those things, and I know that there’s no way for us to know it’s called the Barrier, but I get it, because I know when I watch it, that will be clear. A fish swims through it and dies. She sees something on the other side and takes the pain of reaching through that thing to reveal that there’s a carousel horse buried there, and that means something to her. In fact, it means so much that she forgets her arm is in this thing and she pays for it with some burns. She’s found something. She goes up to the surface. She’s going to tell somebody she’s found something.

This is all good mystery. It’s very beautiful and it’s visual and no one’s talking to each other with this stuff. I’m nervous, Phil. I’m nervous, because I think you’re a good writer. I’m just worried about your dialog, which is its own kind of writing, because the dialog was not strong here.

**John:** That’s a thing he could work on.

**Craig:** That is a thing that he can work on. It may be that his dialog is fine. It’s just that he’s trying too hard with these guys to be clever, mysterious, provocative, confusing. If you want to keep it this way, Phil, I would suggest making it clearer and just doing a little bit less. Do less here.

**John:** Actually, the dialog on the first page was appropriately less. I believe those moments as authentic. Here’s the log line we got sent for this. “In the sunken ruins of post-quake Los Angeles, a cursed salvage diver finds redemption when she goes up against a military epidemiologist to save her refugee community from a deadly outbreak.”

**Craig:** Whoa, that is a lot of stuff.

**John:** That’s a lot of stuff.

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** Deadly outbreak is a surprise to me. I like the universe that we’re playing in. I would certainly have kept reading to see what was going to happen next, because we haven’t heard Fin speak yet.

**Craig:** We haven’t. I think no matter how this turns out, Phil clearly has a way with words. He can do this. He can make pictures with words. That’s a huge part of this. He also understands the interesting contrasts of things. I’m hopeful.

**John:** I’m hopeful too. Thank you to everyone who submitted, all 150 people who submitted, especially these four who we talked about on the air today. Three out of four of these were written in Courier Prime, which is why the italics look so nice. Thank you for using some Courier Prime. This was a good exercise. Thank you, Megana, for going through all of these entries.

**Craig:** Thank you, Megana.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is The One, which was built as the most expensive house in the United States. I do not recommend anybody buy this house. It was originally sold for $295 million. I will recommend that people take a look at this video of the touring of it, because it’s a half-hour long, and I’ve never seen such an impressive building that I wanted to live in less. It is essentially, at a certain point you build what is like a museum, that is not an actual house. The primary bedroom is bigger than any normal person’s house would ever want to be. It looks so uncomfortable to live in this space. After you watch this video, I’d also recommend, I think this is a previous One Cool Thing, Lauren Greenfield’s documentary The Queen of Versailles.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Is so amazing. It’s about this woman’s quest to build this giant house in Florida. You see her current already giant house and how hard it is to live in a giant house and how her husband just wants to live in this one little small room, because big spaces are not comfortable. I just wish people would understand that no one wants that kind of space and rooms of that scale. It was so fascinating and so uncomfortable to watch.

**Craig:** Obviously, John, if you do buy the house for 295 million, you know you’re going to spend another 30 or 40 million just fixing up the little things.

**John:** The small things, yeah, because I’ll be honest, the little golf course on the roof, it’s fine. It could be better.

**Craig:** Obviously.

**John:** The indoor saltwater pool, it’s fine.

**Craig:** It’s fine.

**John:** It’s not the best.

**Craig:** Because it’s Los Angeles, if you do buy it, and then you bring an interior designer or architect over, they will just explain to you why it’s all wrong and needs to be redone. Doesn’t matter what you buy, all wrong.

**John:** There’s four bowling lanes, but really, you’re going to have to split lanes, you’re going to have to share. Come on.

**Craig:** Just do it right or don’t do it at all.

**John:** I see what you have here and I have the same recommendation.

**Craig:** I can’t even get it out. My One Cool Thing this week is Elden Ring.

**John:** After we ranted about it last week. I switched classes and you switched classes. I think we made the right choice to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, we did. I was really struggling, obviously. We could hear it last week. I was just so confused.

**John:** It is confusing.

**Craig:** It’s outrageous how they just don’t care about you in this game. It is undeniably gorgeous and massive. I was just feeling like, oh my god, everyone’s just saying it does get better. I did a little research, because mostly, I understand that even though the game requires dying, I don’t like dying. I am a coward. I’ve always been more of a ranged fighter than an up-close guy. I did a little research and finally understood that if you are a ranged fighter, there’s one class. There’s really one class to take, and it is curiously the best caster. Even though you could be a bandit and shoot arrows, not as powerful or as good as the astrologer, which is their name for wizard, essentially.

**John:** A wizard, a spell caster. I also switched and made myself an astrologer character.

**Craig:** So much better.

**John:** It’s so much easier to fire equivalent of [unclear 01:06:02] fireballs from a distance. You eventually run out of mana, whatever that mana is, but it’s just easier.

**Craig:** Some recommendations if you’re starting, choose the astrologer. The next screen will come up. You get to pick a name. There’s also a little starting gift you can have. Always pick golden seed. Always, because that gives you an extra jar of mana restoration.

**John:** Yeah, a little extra flask. Then you can set your flask so you regenerate two mana flasks and two life flasks [cross-talk 01:06:32].

**Craig:** I would actually go for three and one. I don’t think you need health much, because you’re not going to get close to anybody. Battles that were incredibly difficult for me became trivialized. I did even, in my first try at the big first boss, Margit the Fell, I did kill Margit the first try.

**John:** Congratulations. I’ve not tried to do that yet. I think it is the right overall approach. You’re spamming from a distance, but that’s fine too.

**Craig:** Look, I’m not playing this game to be humiliated, because mostly, here’s the thing. I am a story mode guy. I like the stories, which granted in this thing I don’t think are going to be particularly compelling, but still fine. I mostly like discovery. I like to go to new places and see new things. It’s hard to do that when you can get one-shotted by almost anything. It’s become way more enjoyable. I can tell I’m going to be into it. Astrologer. Take a little bit of time to level up.

**John:** [Cross-talk 01:07:35].

**Craig:** Get your intelligence to 20 as fast as you can. Get your mind to 20 as fast as you can. Intelligence increases the damage you do with your staff, and mind increases the amount of mana you have to cast, so you just cast and cast and cast.

**John:** The other recommendation I’ve seen is that dexterity is also helpful too, because that helps you just avoid getting hit. That could be another [cross-talk 01:07:55].

**Craig:** You hopefully aren’t so close that you’re getting hit. Once you get Torrent the horse, you can ride around to really avoid getting hit. Dexterity does impact how fast you can cast. After you hit, you send one glint, pebble, shard, whatever it is, how quickly can you send another one. Even with your dexterity being fairly low to start, you can cast pretty quickly. Vigor will help boost your HP a bit, which is nice, keeps you from dying too quickly. Again, you don’t want to get near anybody. You want to stay far away and just blast from a distance. Astrologer in Elden Ring if you are a baby like me or John.

**John:** In Elden Ring we are recommending that you maximize your intelligence, your dexterity, and perhaps your vigor. As a screenwriter we recommend that you maximize your intelligence, your wisdom, and your charisma.

**Craig:** Yeah, intelligence first.

**John:** Intelligence first.

**Craig:** Just like the astrologer.

**John:** Astrologer.

**Craig:** Then for screenwriting, you’re going to want to then go for charisma and then wisdom.

**John:** Wisdom, yeah. We love it. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Joe Palen. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. I will not get involved in the screenwriter discourse, but Craig might. We have T-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. We also have hoodies that are wonderful. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re supposed to record about composers. Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Craig, that was an example of music being composed really unspecced, just for fun, by Joe Palen in that circumstance. I want to point you to an article that’s talking through the way in which film and TV music is written, because so often you’ll see this is the named composer, but there’s actually a whole stable of sub-composers who are working for that person who are doing the actual work of coming up with all the cues. Is this something you’re familiar with coming into this conversation?

**Craig:** Yes. The composer can’t do everything. Some composers also are not particularly good, for instance, at taking the music that they’re composing, which they often do on one instrument, and transposing it, or I’m sorry, I should say transcribing it into notation for an orchestra, nor are they expert in arranging it for an orchestra. Arrangement and instrumentalization and notation is a huge part of this.

Hildur Guðnadóttir, for instance, who did our score for Chernobyl and did the score for Joker, her husband is a guy named Sam Slater. He’s also a composer and a producer. He is very much this kind of partner for her to help take the musical thoughts and ideas and themes and then help her practically create tracks out of them and build them into larger things as need be and engineer them and produce them.

There are teams, certainly, of people. When you look at how much work some composers are doing, it would be impossible for them to be doing it all on their own. I could argue that if you’re John Williams and you come up with (singing), then you’ve done it. If you hummed the theme for ET or Star Wars or Jurassic Park and then told people to just spool it out for me and then listen to it and then you change some things, you’ve done the hard part. That is the genius part.

**John:** This article we’ll link to by Mark Rozzo from Vanity Fair, weirdly John Williams is apparently the person who actually does do all the stuff himself.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** He’s the exception. Hans Zimmer is the person who’s most known for it. It sounds like over the years Zimmer’s been better at crediting and acknowledging all of the people who work for him and who are doing some of that real work in terms of putting those keys together, because you’re right, these people are sometimes working on four projects at once. They’re like those artists who become factories, that just do all the stuff. He might be coming up with the main theme, but everyone else is building out that stuff.

Where it’s become a crisis though, is that classically, the work that was done for a movie or for a premium cable show, there could be a reporting of that. There could be royalties. The other people who are credited there could get a percentage of that stuff. In the streaming age, those royalties are becoming harder and harder to access. People are really struggling. Folks who are getting some portion of that money down the road are not finding that same money in a Spotify universe.

**Craig:** This is not something that you or I tend to have any experience with. When you’re a writer, you are writing. If you’re running a room full of writers, then they’re all writing as well. On a television show, most of them almost certainly will get some kind of credit on a script, an episode. There will be residuals. There will be an acknowledgement. For this area there does seem like there’s a gray zone. One would hope that composers, particularly the most successful and well-known, would be compensating their partners fairly, treating them fairly, and if they are working significantly and adding a lot creatively, that they should be rewarded for that on an ongoing basis, not just as a buyout, which I suspect may be the case.

**John:** We as screenwriters and television writers, we are represented by a union. Composers and lyricists are not represented by a union, so they don’t have the same kind of workplace protections and workplace standards and minimums that you and I benefit from. I think we’ve talked about, with Rachel Bloom, I think on the show before, is that there’s also this weird thing where she could be hired on to write a song for an episode or for a movie, and she’s creating literary material, she’s creating story for that. She’s creating a moment. She’s creating that scene in which that thing happens. She doesn’t have the Writers Guild protection over that work. She’s not considered a credited writer for having written something that could be a really significant portion of what’s happening there in that dramatic work.

**Craig:** I think it’s a great thing for us to draw attention to, not only to acknowledge that other people are doing this work and to help people understand the way things are. There’s no shame in this. This isn’t a secret or anything. Nobody’s pretending that those people aren’t there. Hopefully they are being taken care of. I haven’t noticed any major lawsuits or things, so one would hope that everyone is being taken care of and treated appropriately. That said, wish in one hand, poop in another, and see which one fills up first.

**John:** You and I both know of a screenwriter who is notorious for having had a room of writers who were apparently doing the work for him.

**Craig:** Who knows?

**John:** I think the fact that you and I are both thinking about the same person probably means that it is really exceptional.

**Craig:** It’s rare. It’s really rare.

**John:** It just doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** It’s a very rare thing. It’s not endemic to what we do.

**John:** Agreed. Craig, thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* Follow alone with our Three Page Challenge selections [The Man Who Could be Macbeth](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FThe-Man-Who-Could-Be-Macbeth-first-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=966ed6db27560a1e5248d4684aa3146ac99d688911bdcb6a6772792247a6aebc) by Daniel Brace, [Pizza Boy](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FPizza-Boy.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=b44cfadd9bbd1cd9a3eaebec7895a2df7236effe3476b09341bfcb26bbba234d) by Mick Jones, [Evergreen](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FEVERGREEN-by-Heather-Kennedy-3-pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=04d28a15776ebee0415aa8362aad6fa04df7782a7f0ecbd58bc5f67ded5341c7) by Heather Kennedy, [Scavenger](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F03%2FScavenger_1st3pages.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=f4b2401ba8d366f6414ee2f8aa5276338fc77d22672536f60f2b1e2229ed77fd) by Phil Saunders.
* [WGA East Settles Five-Day Strike Against G/O Media](https://deadline.com/2022/03/wga-east-settles-five-day-strike-against-gizmodo-media-group-1234972332/)
* [RSVP for the Animation Guild Rally](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf1nAG5CQeIl-UT2VoZB4kMXaoC7XH3EGppg4tIU9J-YVtFHg/viewform) Sunday 3/20 at 2pm in Burbank, CA
* [‘Copshop’ Screenwriter Sues Zero Gravity Management For Breach of Contract](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/copshop-screenwriter-sues-zero-gravity-management-for-breach-of-contract-1235107246/)
* [ScreenSkills To Fund Accessibility Co-Ordinators For British TV](https://deadline.com/2022/03/screenskills-to-fund-accessibility-co-ordinators-for-british-tv-1234975989/)
* [Behind the Tweets: “Rewrite Map”](https://www.wga.org/news-events/news/connect/3-11-22/behind-the-tweets-rewrite-map) by Jeffrey Lieber on WGAW Connect
* [Scriptnotes Episode 530: The One with Jack Thorne](https://johnaugust.com/2021/the-one-with-jack-thorne)
* [David Iserson’s Tweet on Great Scripts](https://twitter.com/davidiserson/status/1498832466575912961?s=21)
* [Touring the MOST EXPENSIVE HOUSE in the United States!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8Cd_McCdow) on Youtube and [The Queen of Versailles](https://www.magpictures.com/thequeenofversailles/)
* [The Astrologer on Elden Ring](https://eldenring.wiki.fextralife.com/Astrologer)
* [“The Minions Do the Actual Writing”: The Ugly Truth of How Movie Scores Are Made](https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/02/the-ugly-truth-of-how-movie-scores-are-made) by Mark Rozzo for Vanity Fair
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Joe Palen ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/541standard.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/20-questions-with-john).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name’s Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 543 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

While it may sound like a normal John and Craig episode, it’s actually not. Craig and I couldn’t find a time to record together this week, so instead we’re recording two separate episodes in which we attempt to answer 40 listener questions.

I am going to tackle the first 20. Of course, all this wouldn’t be possible without our intrepid producer, Megana Rao. Megana, welcome to the show.

**Megana Rao:** Hello.

**John:** I say welcome to the show, but you’re actually always on the show. We can hear your laughter sometimes in the background, even when you’re not asking questions. Today you’ll be asking so many questions.

**Megana:** I’m ready. I’ve done all my vocal exercises.

**John:** Sounds good. Now next week you’ll be doing the same exercise with Craig, who will answer 20 more questions. I’m curious who’s going to have the better answers. I will be listening to this without having any exposure to it. It’ll all be a surprise to me when the next week’s episode comes out.

**Megana:** Yes, but it’s not a competition, because they’re different questions. I couldn’t bear to pit you guys against each other.

**John:** Also, we’ll have a Bonus Segment, as always. This week, Megana and I will discuss murder architecture, specifically how it relates to the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Fresh. Basically, who are these architects and contractors who are hired to build these houses in which all you can really do is kill somebody? I really want to get into the backstory behind how these houses exist, because they’re really cool and cinematic, but they’re also not practical for things other than murder. It’ll be fun.

You and Craig, I suspect you’re going to discuss millennial stuff, because Craig is obsessed with you as a millennial.

**Megana:** I hope to represent us well.

**John:** Represent us, but not me, because I’m Generation X. You’re representing your people.

**Megana:** Correct.

**John:** Your millennial identity. Last week’s episode, we were talking about keyboards. Craig mentioned that he was incredibly fast typist, he was over 100 words per minute. I was joking that you were a slow typist. We actually took a typing test and found out that you are a faster typist than I am. What number did you get?

**Megana:** I had 81 words per minute and 100% accuracy.

**John:** I had 62 words per minute and 100% accuracy. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the test that we used, so if you want to compare yourself to the Scriptnotes folks to see how well you did. The 100% accuracy, I did make some mistakes and then back up and fix some things.

**Megana:** It counts against your total time, so I think that’s fair.

**John:** I think it’s fair too. That’s with my current weird keyboard. I do feel like the typing test, obviously you’re looking at stuff and you’re trying to type what they’re having you type, but that’s not necessarily reflective of how I really type in real life, which is basically dumping my brain out onto a page, which I think could be a little bit faster than that.

**Megana:** Because this typing test was you had to accurately notate what words they were giving you, it wasn’t–

**John:** Yeah. If I wanted to write their words, I wouldn’t be a screenwriter. In our discussion of ergonomic keyboards, several listeners also pointed me towards the ZSA Moonlander, which is a very cool looking keyboard. I always wanted to try it out, because it does look neat. It’s one of these very split keyboards where your left half and right half are completely separate units that you can position however you want to position them. They look neat. I’m eager to try something. An advantage to it may be that it’s much more portable, because one of the challenges I have with my weird vertical keyboard is it’s a bitch to pack. It’d be great to have something I could travel with if I need to travel. I’m going to be traveling this next week, so we’ll see.

**Megana:** Do you normally travel with that keyboard?

**John:** I don’t. Normally if I’m just traveling, I’m just using my MacBook, which is fine for short times, but it’s harder for longer periods of time. The year I was living in Paris, I did have to travel with my big keyboard, and so I had to find a whole setup there for how I was going to make this work with the keyboard. It’s a fragile thing to be packing and traveling with this stuff.

**Megana:** It’s massive.

**John:** It’s massive. It’s big.

**Megana:** This thing’s gorgeous though. I hope you get it.

**John:** You’ll see it. It’s coming in about two weeks. By the time I’m back from my trip, it’ll be here and we’ll try it out.

**Megana:** Cool.

**John:** Cool. It’s time for all these questions. Usually on the show, the questions get pushed to the end of the episode. Now we’re going to start with the questions and go through it. You and I were both looking at the 72 Questions with Phoebe Waller-Bridge from–

**Megana:** Vogue.

**John:** Vogue, yeah. This will not be nearly as scripted, but hopefully we’ll have some good answers to questions that our listeners actually really truly have.

**Megana:** Cool. Are you ready?

**John:** I’m ready. I’m ready. I’m stretched. I’m limber. Let’s go for it.

**Megana:** We’re going to start with a short one. Steve asked, “Are Stuart Specials a bad thing?”

**John:** Stuart Specials are what we call when we get a Three Page Challenge that starts in a way where a situation, a scene has happened, and then at the end of the three pages, then we flash back to the real time. Essentially, it’s opened in a flash forward. I don’t think Stuart Specials are always a bad thing. They become a cliché in the Three Page Challenge.

Here’s an argument for the Stuart Special is that you’re giving the reader and viewer a taste of where your movie is headed to and what it’s going to evolve into, which may not be indicative of what the normal start of the movie would be. It’s attention-grabbing in that way. Go opens with a Stuart Special. That’s fine. It is a little bit of a cliché. Megana, as you’re reading through Three Page Challenges, do you find yourself avoiding any of them because they are cliché within our little domain?

**Megana:** I think that’s exactly it. I like Stuart Specials when I see them on screen, but when I’m reading through so many Three Page Challenges, I think I get frustrated because I feel tricked by the end. I’m like, “Where is this going?” because I only have the three pages.

**John:** When I see them in real movies, they can be really effective and it gives you a sense like, oh, this is where it’s headed. You’re also waiting for that scene to happen. Sometimes you can become impatient for that moment to happen, because you know it’s supposed to be there.

**Megana:** I also realized this as I was reading this question. I forget about the beginnings of movies a lot.

**John:** That’s fair too. A movie that’s doing well, a movie that’s setting us up well and going well scene by scene by scene, you forget what you saw before, and you’re really just in it in the moment, so therefore you’ll forget about the Stuart Special. Hopefully, it caught your attention, but it’s not making you think back to it. If you’re thinking back to the opening halfway through the movie, something’s not working halfway in the movie. Cool.

**Megana:** Sam asks, “I’ve encountered a lot of advice over the years about dealing with scripts that are too long, but I rarely see people talk about what to do when a script comes up short in length, like when a feature draft is 75 pages. I realize I might just write 75-page features, but I have a hunch that I rush through things. I’m a video/podcast editor as my day job, and I think my instincts to cut things down take over during outlining and writing. I have a hard time not going as quickly as I can from wherever I’m starting a script to the ending I have in mind. Do you have any advice for how to allow scripts to breathe or for how to take a short script and look for what might be missing from it?”

**John:** Sam, I think the real problem here is you probably don’t have a second act. I’m guessing that what you’re really writing is a first act and a third act, and you’re not really allowing a second act to breathe and develop and grow and change. By that, I mean you’re creating a situation and then you’re resolving that situation, without building and conflicts and other developments in between. I suspect it’s not that your scenes are too short, that you’re running too efficiently. It’s just that you’re not actually creating enough obstacles along the way for your story to finish. There’s nothing inherently wrong about a short script. I think we all love things that can clock in at under two hours. You are probably just not actually creating enough moments of conflict and development and suspense. You’re just not doing enough there. It really is probably an outlining phase problem.

Before you start your next project, really look at where are you starting, where do you think you want to end up, but where are the surprising things along the way that can happen? What are the detours that will be rewarding? Remember, you as the writer know where it’s all headed, but the audience shouldn’t know where it’s all headed. Really, what does the character want in the moment? How can you send that character down a road that makes sense for the character, that point, but is going to lead to new obstacles and new complications? I think you’re just probably missing beats. You’re just not letting yourself explore and enjoy the story the way that you want to in a feature film.

**Megana:** Great. No Context asks, “What tools do you use to keep track of notes and ideas that happen when you’re not at your desk, digital or analog?”

**John:** A couple things. I’ve talked on this show a lot about how I have a stack of index cards scattered throughout the house. If I need to write something down, like a note, an idea, a thought, I’ll just grab an index card and write it down and put it some place where I can find it again. If it’s in the middle of the night, I will take that and stick it by the bedroom door so that it’s there and I can take it downstairs in the morning and process it and put it in my notes of things to do.

I will also use the Notes app on my phone for things like casting lists or like, that’s a good idea for this person in this role. The Notes app is really helpful for that. We certainly share notes between me and my husband for things like the grocery list and stuff like that, stuff we want to be able to easily access and add to and share at any moment.

For things that I want to hold on to and I don’t have a thing to do with them right now, but I need to not forget them, I started using Roam, R-O-A-M. It’s called Roam Research, which is like a personal Wiki where you can just dump information. I’ll have broad categories of places where I’ll put stuff. It wants to enter everything into a daily view, so you can track what day you entered some stuff. Then it’ll have little category labels for things. If this is related to a project, I’ll just use that project category and dump in my notes for that. That’s how I’ve processed those individual index cards full of information, make sure I don’t forget those things. I don’t do a great job of going back through that, honestly, and remembering it, but I know it’s always there. It keeps it from being a loop in my brain.

I think one of the best things about taking notes is it just frees your brain from having to remember stuff yourself. The only way you can remember things is by looping it and keeping an active memory. Put it in that long-term memory, and then you don’t have to stress out about it.

**Megana:** Super helpful.

**John:** Megana, what do you use for your notes? I see you doing different things. What are you using right now for your notes?

**Megana:** I mostly use the Notes app on my phone, but it’s an absolute mess. I found a note on there the other day that just said “animals” and I have no idea what that means or why I wrote that. I will write things in the middle of the night or whatever, I have an idea, I’ll create a new note for it, but it’s not organized and it’s not functional in any way.

**John:** We don’t have phones in our bedroom, and so I don’t ever turn on my phone in my room. Having just physical paper is good, because it lets me get it out of my head, but it doesn’t invite me to do anything more with it. I can’t look something up in the middle of the night, which is really helpful for me.

**Megana:** That’s very cool. I’m going to try the index card thing.

**John:** If you’re reading a book and you need to take a note about something in a book, how do you do that?

**Megana:** I guess I take a picture of it on my phone.

**John:** Then do you do something with that picture or it just sits in your photo roll?

**Megana:** It just sits in my photo album.

**John:** I think using the camera as a memory tool, it’s so helpful and it’s just so handy, but it’s hard to doing anything with that after the fact. Now with the iPhone, you can select the text in a photo and copy it out. It’s a thing to do, but you have to actually remember to do that.

**Megana:** You can search by text now, which is cool, because I’m always quoting things that I read, but have no sense of where they came from, so that’s helpful.

**John:** It’s nice. If I’m reading a book and there’s something I do need to remember, I will grab an index card and just write it down, because the actual process of having to actually write it makes me think about it more and makes me think of the context of it. I will, again, try to just use paper when I can.

**Megana:** Do you ever annotate your books?

**John:** I’m not a person who marks them up a lot. I don’t underline or mark stuff up. You’ll see some books around the house where I’ve done that, but it’s really the exception. Are you a marker-up of books?

**Megana:** If it’s something I’m using towards my writing, then yes, but otherwise, not really.

**John:** Makes sense.

**Megana:** It’s a lot of effort.

**John:** I feel like I’m never going to see that again. I have that shame about not marking up books, because what I was taught in grade school and libraries is you just don’t mark up books. I always feel bad for the next person who’s going to get that book.

**Megana:** Exactly, or embarrassed that they’re going to think the things that I marked up were lame.

**John:** It’s always fun when I read a book on Kindle. You can see that a bunch of people have marked, have highlighted a passage. It’s like, oh yeah, I can see why everyone has highlighted that one passage.

**Megana:** I know, but I judge them for that. I’m like, oh really?

**John:** So basic.

**Megana:** Clint asks, “Since shorts move so quickly, I’d like your opinion on ways to do character development. It feels like there isn’t much time to develop a character. Should we strive for longer shorts of characters more the focus rather than plot?”

**John:** Clint, I wonder if you’re not thinking about shorts in the right way, because I think we talk so much on this podcast about character development and characters having wants and needs and going through a journey, and there’s this whole sense of leaving home and emerging transformed, and it’s all about a onetime journey that transforms a character. Shorts aren’t necessarily that. Shorts are often just a situation. Shorts are like short stories. They’re really describing what a character is experiencing. They’re like a snapshot in many ways, more than a full journey at times.

I think maybe you can ease off on your pressure to have this massive character development, because there’s not really a time or space for that. It’s not really what a short film is designed to do. A short film is more like a joke. It has a setup, development, and then a punchline, a delivery. That’s great. You don’t have to think about, oh, I need to make a longer short in order to have better character development. No. I think as long as you’re really exploring the question that the short film is asking and delivering a good answer, that’s really the goal.

What you may also be thinking about is how many characters you’re trying to introduce into your short film. I think some of the best short films are really constrained in the number of characters they’re giving us, so it can really follow one person’s short journey in it. You may not have time or space to have meaningful characters set up who are having real conflict with each other. Really, it’s about one character encountering a situation and getting through a situation.

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think maybe the expectation for a short is different. Even as an audience member, I’m not expecting to see character development. I just want to see something, a little slice-of-life sort of thing.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a postcard rather than a full book.

**Megana:** Adrian asks, “In what part of writing the script do you think about music? Not like the movie Yesterday where the plot revolves around the music. I’m particularly curious about music rights that you don’t own.”

**John:** I tend to think about music pretty early on in the process, because I’m really trying to figure out what does this movie feel like, what does this show feel like, what does it sound like. I will try to build playlists for myself in Apple Music pretty early on, just like, this is what reminds me of this movie that I’m writing. Those songs won’t necessarily make it into the soundtrack. They may not be part of the script, but they’re just giving me a sense of what this all feels like.

There’s a new project that I may be doing. I’ve already started pulling some songs that make me feel like, oh, I would love to see this in context of the show, or it just reminds me of what I want this to feel like. This is a composer that I think would be fantastic for it. This is a vibe that I think is fantastic for it. Pretty early on, I do think about the music.

Yes, there are practical concerns about what songs you’re going to actually be able to get or not get. That’s going to come down the road. I don’t try to stress out about that too much at the start. For my movie The Nines, I wanted some musical kind of numbers. There would be two songs that would be sung in the course of the movie. Quite early on, I knew those would be important story scenes and that we needed to actually license the rights and prerecord them and do all that stuff. That was great and that was exciting. That’s not the norm for most scripts you’re going to be writing for someone else to read.

I would say just use thinking about music as a way to help you build the world in your head, but also don’t let it become a time suck where you’re curating the perfect playlist for this movie that you’re never actually writing. All these kind of things can be distractions from the actual real hard work of sitting down and putting words after each other to actually build your movie.

**Megana:** I get to listen to that music sometimes when you and I are driving around or something, but are you sharing that with anyone else?

**John:** Generally not. There’s one project which I had a collaborator on, so he and I have a shared playlist for that. No, I’m not usually sending in a bunch of tracks along with the script to the studio. If it is generally musical, then of course we’re all listening to the same things or making sure we’re talking about the same songs. At this stage, I wouldn’t be sharing this with anybody else. For one project I’m working on, there’s a very specific vibe of music that I’m trying to do. I think it may make sense for me to put in links in the script to some examples of what this is going to sound like, because otherwise people may not really have a sense of what it is I’m describing. You’ve actually talked about one of your projects, you just put links in the pdfs to the songs, and that was helpful. I’ve done that with another project, on your suggestion.

**Megana:** Cool. I’ve never seen you reference a particular song if it wasn’t a musical in your script before, but I definitely feel that the vibe that you’ve created in your playlist translates.

**John:** In my script for Dark Shadows, Let the Sunshine In was an incredibly important song for one sequence. That’s a thing where I did script into the movie, like, this is going to happen here, but that’s really an exception for me.

**Megana:** Cool. Nick asks, “What are some of the ways seeing your work produced has influenced your writing style, particularly seeing actors perform your characters and their dialog, and possibly the questions they ask you about it?”

**John:** It is a big difference when you first see something actually happening in front of you. The first thing I had produced was Go. I remember sitting on set. We were shooting this scene which is no longer in the movie. We’re in this apartment building. I’m sitting on the floor outside of camera view and watching this first scene get shot. I was just so excited. I’m seeing these things happening. These words I wrote are actually now… Actors are saying them and it’s all happening in front of me.

Then you realize it all becomes small technical questions on the day. You approach the scene with this perfect idealized version of how it’s all going to be. Then when you actually get there, you realize there are a thousand compromises and some wonderful discoveries you make along the way, like, “Oh, I didn’t see that as a possibility. This is really great. I love that line reading they’re giving. I love how the director’s staging this thing.”

More importantly and more present are the compromises that are being made based on the reality of the locations you have, the time you have, who you have, the number of setups you can get into. I think a thing you learn over time is what’s easy and what’s difficult in production. The things that are going to be obstacles along the way could be the number of night scenes you have, the number of kids you have, the number of really complicated setups, the number of characters you have in a scene.

A thing I don’t think I realized was when I was just pushing words around on paper is that if you have a character who is not doing anything in a scene, it’s really tough for that actor to be present in a scene but not actually have lines or have a specific thing they’re trying to do. They just become dead weight there. When we’re reading a script, we don’t really notice it in there, but then you actually shoot a scene, you realize, oh wow, that character’s standing there and has nothing to do. That becomes a problem. That’s a conversation you end up having with directors and actors and finding business for them on the set.

A thing you also recognize once you’ve actually had things produced is recognizing that scenes that aren’t absolutely necessary will probably get cut, because there’s just this ruthless pressure to have everything build to the next thing and build to the next scene. If you have a scene that you really need to keep in there for tone reasons, for comedy reasons, make sure there’s a plot reason why it also needs to be in there, because otherwise, it’s in real jeopardy.

When you talk with actors about what they’re doing in the scene or what their motivation is, it’s important, as a writer, to remember that they are there to be the character, they are not there to be the movie. Always frame your answers in terms of what it is they’re trying to do right now and what is right in front of them and not what the scene is supposed to do or what’s happening in the movie, because they don’t know, they don’t care, that’s not their responsibility. Their responsibility is to their performance in this moment. That can be a thing that’s hard to remember, because you are the person who has this God’s-eye view on the whole thing. You remember why that character’s saying that line, because it’s setting up something down the road that doesn’t matter. What matters is why they are saying in that moment.

One of the things I think is really useful about being the screenwriter though who does have a God’s-eye view is sometimes there can be an instinct in a scene to make a little change. It doesn’t matter. It flows a little bit more naturally, but you know it sets up something very important later on. It echoes something later on. You may need to stop and say, “I get why you’re trying to do that. This becomes important later on for these reasons,” and you can have that conversation. That’s another good reason to have a writer on set, because you can sometimes point to things that they wouldn’t otherwise see.

The last thing I would say is that you’ll see in director Q and A’s about a movie that came out, it’s like, “Oh, I had this long scene, and then we decided that actor can just do it in a look. They don’t need all this dialog. They don’t need all this stuff.” Sure, that happens some. Often, you do need the dialog, or at least without that dialog you wouldn’t have gotten to that look. It’s recognizing that you are giving them things to say and stage directions to help create that mood. Sometimes they can cut things out, because we got it with a look. That doesn’t mean it was a failure on your part as a writer. It means it was a success that you were able to create a situation in which they could give a performance that didn’t need to have all the words you originally could’ve put there.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful. You and I both watched a movie recently where you could say all of the actors are in their own different movie. That’s a really helpful thing to keep in mind. Your point about having actors who are necessary to the scene reminded me of that Patton Oswalt clip in, I think it’s the King of Queens, where he’s in the scene but doesn’t have any dialog, and he just stands perfectly still in the background. Have you seen it?

**John:** I haven’t. That sounds great.

**Megana:** It’s amazing. I’ll include it in the show notes and Slack it to you. It’s so good.

**John:** That surprises me with something like King of Queens, because I feel like an ongoing show would have a really good sense of like, okay, we have to service all these characters and all these actors. They probably wouldn’t put somebody in the scene who didn’t absolutely need to be there. Sometimes they needed him for one line, which was coming at the very end. There are these wide shots that you can just see him there in the acts. It’s tough.

A thing you don’t appreciate when you’re writing scenes is how they’re going to be shot and how coverage is going to work, which is basically when the camera is focused on one actor versus another actor and when you’re in wider shots, when you’re in medium shots, and how differently it’ll play than the master shot that you’re probably thinking about as you’re writing the scene. Generally, we’re writing scenes to reflect reality, like what is actually really happening in this space. We’re not hopefully thinking too much shot by shot by shot by shot, but ultimately it is going to be shot by shot by shot by shot, and understanding that some things are going to change and feel different because of that. The rhythms and the tempos will change. That’s just the compromise we’re making for the media that we’re chosen to write in.

**Megana:** I’d love to hear you guys talk more about just the mechanics of characters entering and leaving scenes.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s put that on the board for a future episode, because entrances and exits are so crucial. We try to cut them as much as possible, because they can be shoe leather, but they can also be really essential when they need to happen. On stage, they have to happen, because bodies have to move on and move off. There’s a whole art to that. There’s a very different art to how we do it on film and television.

**Megana:** Great. Next question, Katie in LA asks, “I’ve been wanting your perspective on the intersection of parenting and art, specifically in regards to Euphoria. Do you watch it? Do your children? As a parent of a five-year-old, it gives me panic attacks, but as you are further along in your parenting journey, I’d love to know if it’s a thing for you and/or how you’re talking to your kids about it.”

**John:** As a parent of a teen, Euphoria also gives me panic attacks. Listen, it’s a show about high schoolers, which means that junior high schoolers really want to watch it. They want to watch it most. Yet it’s a show that’s really made for adults.

I want to both support the show in terms of it has its vision of showing high school life through a very different lens, and I want to support that vision, and yet as a parent I really wish the show didn’t exist. I can say that. I wish the show didn’t exist as a parent, not as a writer, because I think it is so dangerously attractive to exactly the teens who shouldn’t be watching it. It’s not trying to glamorize that life, and yet it is glamorizing that life, because these are ridiculously attractive people doing really dangerous things in this perpetual Southern California fog somehow. For all the reasons it is so attractive to teenagers, I think it’s also not a great thing for certain teenagers to watch. I think it can be really triggering for some kids who should not be seeing it.

Katie’s talking about she has a five-year-old. You can control access to media for a five-year-old. It’s much harder to control access to media for a 13-year-old, a 14-year-old who has the internet and who can find stuff, even if you were to put a password on your HBO Max account. That’s a real question. I think the issues of responsibility kick in there too. Yet I don’t want to take away their specific vision of somebody who wants to make this show about this experience. It’s just tough.

I have to hold both things, that I want the show to be able to exist, because it’s a show with an artistic vision and really great performances and all the things that are noble about it, and as a parent I don’t want it to be out there for teens who shouldn’t see it. It’s really hard to keep your teens from seeing it. I do feel like sometimes people who create things like this aren’t aware of how challenging it is to keep things from teens who want to see it. Megana, what’s your take on Euphoria? You’ve watched it.

**Megana:** I’ve watched it. I watched the first season. I haven’t seen the second season yet. I also don’t know if I’m ready for it. They are impossibly cool and hot. I could totally see how if I was in junior high school it would set up this expectation. I think kids are able to parse things out and know that that’s not reality, but it is a little bit harder to discern when you’re that age and you’re that close to it. I totally hear what you’re saying. That makes a lot of sense.

Jerry asks, “I’m intercutting between two scenes that happen at the same place, but at different times. This will be sustained for three and a half pages. Is it best to use slug lines in transitions or offer an action line detailing the nature of the transitions early on in the scene?”

**John:** The word Jerry wants is intercutting or intercut. What he can do, and this is common, you’ll see it in a lot of scripts, is let’s say there’s two basic scenes happening. There is a bank robbery happening and there is a scene in a diner happening. They’re happening at the same time. You’re intercutting between the two of them. They have some sort of play between the two of them, but they’re not the same scene. They’re two different spaces. Generally, you’ll set up one moment. The bank heist is happening, and we’re seeing what’s happening in the vault. That’ll be its own scene header. New scene header for INT diner day, and these two characters are having this meal.

Then at a certain point you say intercut. Intercut means both scenes are going to be happening. From that point forward, you can just use the scene description to talk about what’s happening in those moments. You don’t have to keep going back to scene header, scene header, scene header. For most situations, this will get you through it and it’ll feel nice and natural, because you’re not stopping the flow constantly the way you would be if you were throwing in scene headers all the time. It makes it really feel more like the sequence would be in the movie then just a bunch of scene headers on a page. Intercut or intercutting is your friend there.

At a certain point when you’re done with that, you say, END INTERCUTTING. That’s all uppercase, generally with a period, basically like, hey, we’re done with that sequence and now it’s time to move on. Then either you stay in one of your moments, in one of your situations, or you go to a whole new scene header for a new place that you’re going to end up.

**Megana:** I see. Would you also delineate when you are going to see a certain scene by using voiceover from the other scene? Does that make sense?

**John:** If it’s important that we’re not seeing the character on screen doing it, but that it’s a voiceover, sure, you put the VO after them. I think you would probably want to indicate, from Max side, Molly VO, they’re coming right towards you, or something like that. That’s a situation where you might want to try to make that more clear. In most cases it will just make sense. You can find ways just with scene description to have it make sense. We know who the characters are. We know where they are. You don’t need to hold our hand through it all.

**Megana:** That’s super helpful.

**John:** That was a good palette cleanser there. We can go back to something a little bit more challenging.

**Megana:** Enthusiastic But Not Ignorant asks, “I’m a mid-career mid-list novelist. I’ve written several books which have been published by commercial houses and well-reviewed in major outlets, but I’m not a bestseller. Now an established production company with a solid track record has made an option offer on my latest book, with the aim of making a limited series. My question is this. If I wanted to use this opportunity to get some TV writing experience, what is the best way to go about it? Should I ask to take a crack at the pilot on spec? Should I wait to see if something goes into production and try to get in the writers’ room? I want to be involved, but I also want to give this the best chance of success, which probably means allowing people who have actually done this before to take the reins.”

**John:** I love Enthusiastic, because Enthusiastic sees what they want, but also recognizes why going after what they want too aggressively may hurt the thing down the road. You’re coming at this from the right perspective. Congratulations on writing the books, and this book in particular which may go to limited series. Take that victory for what it is.

I think your goal now should be, how do I help this series be as awesome as it could possibly be? That is by being supportive and enthusiastic about the project, supportive and enthusiastic about who are they bringing to be the showrunner on this project, who hopefully you will meet with. Try to be that resource for them, so that they always feel like you’re on their side, you are that person who can help them achieve greatness with this.

I would not try to write this pilot yourself, because you don’t know how to do it. All the natural problems that are going to come up with writing this pilot are going to be amplified, because they’re going to be worried about you as a new screenwriter trying to adapt this thing. You could turn the same script that somebody else could turn in, but they’re going to judge it weirdly because you don’t have experience actually making the show. I think you should not try to write it.

I think you should offer to read absolutely anything, give enthusiastic, positive notes, really try to help the process, but not intervene very much in it, because I do worry that you’re going to probably derail it more than you’re going to help it. In success, then you have the opportunity to be more involved on the next project, and you’ll also read a bunch of these things, you’ll have seen how this all happened and how the sausage was made.

**Megana:** Would you recommend that Enthusiastic try to get into the writers’ room down the line? I hear what you’re saying about the pilot, but should they, I don’t know, try to position themself for any sort of writing credit on this project?

**John:** I don’t think that’s a great idea, because I think if you were going to be in the writers’ room on a project, there’s going to be this weird power dynamic between you and the showrunner, because you are the person who created the original material, and this is the showrunner, and if they’re changing things, people look, like, “Oh, is it okay that they’re changing this thing? I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

If people can write with other experiences where it’s worked out great, fantastic. I know on The Leftovers, Damon Lindelof and the guy who wrote the book The Leftovers, they did collaborate on stuff, and that sounded great. If the person who wants to adapt your book wants to adapt it with you, that’s great. That’s a fantastic dream scenario, but that’s not likely. It’s going to probably be a very special situation if that’s the case. I think Tom Perrotta is the man I was trying to think about for The Leftovers. Maybe that’ll happen, but I don’t think it’s going to probably happen in this case.

**Megana:** Got it. Francesco asks, “I’ve been watching the Dirty Harry series on HBO Max recently, as well as Bullet, and found myself wondering why we don’t get a lot of movies set in San Francisco anymore. In the ’60s and ’70s it seemed like a reasonable place to set movies, but in the last couple of decades, everything seems to be set in either New York or LA. The exceptions are biopics about people from SF, like Milk. Even a movie that was written and set in San Francisco like 500 Days of Summer ended up being switched to LA. Is there some financial or logistical reason for this, like San Francisco not offering good tax credits, or are cities other than Los Angeles and New York not considered relatable or interesting anymore? I ask about the lack of San Francisco-based movies because it’s my nearest big city, but I suspect if they were making Rocky now, it wouldn’t be set in Philadelphia. Thoughts?”

**John:** I think Rocky would still be set in Philadelphia. I think San Francisco is a weird special case that’s worth looking at. San Francisco, from what I understand from producers who try to shoot there, it’s just ridiculously hard to shoot there. It makes you recognize how much LA and New York City bend over backwards to make it comparably easy to shoot there. When it comes to permits, policing, neighbors, parking, basically the infrastructure within a town to make it simple to shoot a film there are just much robust in cities that shoot a lot. There’s a virtuous cycle where because things shoot here, it’s easy to shoot things here. Because things aren’t shooting in San Francisco, it’s harder to shoot things there. You don’t have the crew and equipment infrastructure, because there aren’t crews ready to go in San Francisco of a size for a big studio feature, because there aren’t people living up there who have been doing that all the time.

There are some logistical problems in San Francisco apparently also just because of it’s so hilly. Where you park the trucks is a real challenge. If you don’t have good cooperation from police and traffic and everybody else to move cars off the road, so you can actually park places where you need to put those big trucks, that can be a challenge.

That said, there are movies that are shot there. I’m thinking back to Diary of a Teenage Girl. Marielle Heller came on to talk about that. That was shot in San Francisco. Again, it’s a smaller movie. It has a smaller footprint, which makes a lot more sense for that. The HBO show Looking that I loved was also set in San Francisco, shot in San Francisco. They made it work, but I bet it was more challenging in San Francisco than it would’ve been here in Los Angeles. They made the choice to really do it in San Francisco, which is great for that.

I do think Rocky would shoot in Philadelphia. That was iconic for that movie, that place. You’re also close enough to New York City that you can pull in a crew from New York if you need to. It’s not that challenging.

When we made Big Fish, we were in Montgomery, Alabama and Wetumpka, Alabama. There was no crew, and so we had to pull people in from every place else. The city was really accommodating for us because we were the first big feature to come in there, but they didn’t have the kind of infrastructure that other places would have. We had to wing it. We had to spend money that we wouldn’t have otherwise had to spend, just because of the challenges of shooting in a place that was not used to filming.

**Megana:** Interesting. Cool. Paul asks, “Will Zoom pitches still play a big role in post-pandemic life or will this all go back to, quote, in the room?”

**John:** I think Zoom pitches are here to stay. Right now in Los Angeles as we’re recording this, it’s safe enough that people could go back in the room to do things in person. I actually think they’re going to go back to doing stuff in person. All the meetings and the pitches I’ve had recently have been on Zoom, and producers and other folks who aren’t even in Los Angeles. It would be really impossible or very unlikely to get them to fly to Los Angeles to do this one pitch. I think Zoom pitching is here to stay. I think 70, 80% of pitches coming up will be Zoom pitches, at least for the next few years. It’s not just the pandemic. It really is an easier, better way to do some of this work.

Megana, you’ve been helping me out so much on pitching recently. I have these slide decks I need to use. We discovered it’s much easier for you to join the Zoom call as well and be the person driving the slides while I’m just talking. I’m not responsible for clicking forward and switching stuff from one input to another input. I think it does just make sense for pitching really. When you’re on Zoom, everyone can look at the same set of slides or everyone’s looking forward. You’re not having to pay attention to one person in the room or other people in the room. I just think it’s better, and I think Zoom pitching is here to stay.

**Megana:** All the things about, I don’t know, your bodily awareness you don’t have to worry about in a Zoom pitch, like, oh, this outfit I’m wearing is scratchy or I’m too hot in this room. You can control it, because it’s your house.

**John:** Megana, you’ve been pitching a ton, but you’ve only done Zoom pitches. You don’t really have the experience of pitching a project in a room, correct?

**Megana:** Correct, but I love Zoom pitches. They’re fun. I guess I’ve adapted to the Zoom of it all. I’m sure I would love in-person pitches too, because I like meeting people and chatting. I think the Zoom, and now that we’ve all gotten a little bit better at the logistics of sharing kino and the tech behind it, it’s become really seamless and everyone knows what to expect.

**John:** What I do miss about in-person pitching and in-person meetings, general meetings too, is I think you get a sense of whether you vibe with somebody better in person than you do on Zoom. That’s just a reality check. I remember very early meetings with Andrea Giannetti, who’s at Sony now, but back when she was at TriStar, she calls me into her office and she’s like [unclear 00:37:46] going through stuff and just get a sense of, oh, I get who you are. I don’t think I would have that same experience with her now on Zoom, just because a Zoom meeting is just much more functional. It’s not hang out and vibe and chitchat a bit. It’s different on that level. I will miss a little of that, but on the whole, we’ve had the chance to pitch to, as you saw, 12 places that would’ve been impossible to pitch if we were trying to do this in person.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh. That’s a great point. I’ve had a couple of generals that have been in person. From the logistics of meeting someone and figuring out who they are at the coffee shop or where to go in the office, all of that in-between stuff, I do think you get a good sense of your dynamic and who the other person is that you don’t via Zoom.

**John:** There’s going to be some function of in-person stuff for certain kinds of things, but if we’re actually going out to pitch a project and trying to pitch to 10 places in a week, Zoom is just so much better. I remember when we were trying to set up Prince of Persia, and Jordan Mechner and I were literally driving studio to studio to studio, and it was all like, could we get from this place to that place, or suddenly we’d have to go from Sony to Warner Bros.

**Megana:** Oh my gosh.

**John:** It’s tough. The folks who don’t live in Los Angeles are like, what’s the difference between Sony and Warner Bros? It’s an hour in bad traffic.

**Megana:** What else is nice is I feel like it frees up your day, because there are certain times of day in Los Angeles where no one should be driving. Now you can pitch at 4 o’clock and it’s no big deal.

**John:** There was a company who wanted to do Arlo Finch, and so I remember going out to have a meeting with them in Santa Monica. I liked them, but the fact that they were in Santa Monica made me really a little bit down on them as a place. Now, much less of a deal, because I recognize I would never be driving out to Santa Monica.

**Megana:** Moving on to Ben, Ben asked, “I finally got a job at a major film studio. I’m a receptionist/office coordinator. On my break, my boss’s boss’s boss saw me working on my script. We talked about story for a while, and as she was leaving, she invited me to send her a, quote, solid script, and that she would forward it to the head of the studio. I told her that I had just started on this script and I wanted to take my time. She said, ‘No worries. This is an open invitation. Take a year if you need. We aren’t going anywhere.’ My question is, can I really take a year? I’m worried that she’ll forget about her offer or she might move on to another studio or something like that.”

**John:** Ben, you can take a year. Don’t burn this offer too quickly on something that’s not great. Whatever you do decide to give to her, have some other people read it first and tell you, oh, this is good, because don’t give her something that’s not good, because it’s not going to help anybody. She says she’ll forward it to the head of the studio. We’ll see. She’ll forward it to the head of the studio if she really, really, really likes it. More importantly, she’s a person who could be a fan on your side, so that’s great.

It seems like Ben is back in person where he’s working, because someone’s walking by and seeing him do something. That’s exciting for Ben. That is one of the real advantages to being in person is that casual notice somebody’s doing something and have it work there. It reminds me of when I was an intern at Universal. I was responsible for really menial filing of paperwork and stuff. Doing my lunch breaks, I would type up my script. I had handwritten pages, and over the lunch break I would type them up on my little laptop in the commissary.

**Megana:** Aw.

**John:** Some people would ask to see stuff, and I just knew that I wasn’t ready to show this to anybody. It was nice that they asked. They could see that my goal wasn’t to be a clerk filist, my goal was to be a screenwriter, and they were rooting for me in some way, which was nice. You had more experience though with this probably recently with folks in your writing group and when they show it to superiors or folks they’re working with. What is the consensus you’re hearing out there on the street?

**Megana:** I agree with you. I think a year is totally fine. I think in LA there’s just a weird sense of time because we don’t have seasons. To me I wouldn’t even notice if someone sent something to me a year later. The other point that I was going to make is I think definitely have your friends or your writing group or writers you respect read it. A piece of advice that my friend Joey Siara from my writers group gives is, at a certain point though, if your friends have been reading multiple drafts, they’re no longer objective readers, and they’re your friends, so they can’t always give you harsh feedback. I think at a point like that, using something like the blacklist or having a third-party reader who’s not been invested in your project since the genesis of the idea is really helpful to get some more measured and neutral feedback before you send it to a professional like your boss’s boss.

**John:** For sure. [Unclear 00:42:37] next.

**Megana:** Mark from Tennessee asks, “Can you give examples of scenes that you wrote that you realized would be difficult to shoot and how you rewrote them to be more shootable and/or production-friendly without compromising the quality or purpose of the scene?”

**John:** Great, I can think of a lot of examples of those kind of rewrites. In the original script for Big Fish, there is a sequence about how Edward Bloom was born. It came from the book. It was this big mythological birth moment that happened. We got to Alabama, and Tim Burton said, “I just don’t have a place to shoot this. It just doesn’t actually work here. Can we do something simpler like he’s really slippery?” I’m like, great, he can be a slippery baby. It became a much shorter, simpler scene. Also, it got a laugh and it was the right kind of change. It was really a production change. It was a money, budget, couldn’t actually shoot it change, but it was a better change for the movie, so I was happy to make that alteration.

In Go, the original script, there is an additional character who appears in the third section. I always called her the Linda Hunt character. She’s a supervisor to Burke. She got written out because she had nothing else to do. It was logistical in the sense of we just couldn’t really afford the scenes, but also it just didn’t need to be there. It was a good cut. Then when we went back and did the reshoots for Go, originally the three sections of that movie branched off from different scenes. It was at the supermarket, but they were different scenes. That’s what kicked them off. It was recognized, oh no, we should go back to the exact same scene each time that jumps us off to the new place. It was this simplification there that really helped.

For The Nines, I think one of the things that was really helpful is we found a way to shoot LA for New York City. When we did the actual real New York City stuff, our footprint was super, super small. It was just me, a camera operator, and a local sound person. We didn’t have any trucks. We didn’t have anything. We could just shoot the New York exteriors we needed and sell that. We didn’t need to bring anybody else there to New York. A lot of the stuff that takes place in the New York section of the movie is all LA, including the New York jewelry district, just because our downtown LA can look like New York if you frame it right.

The other thing which was so crucial for The Nines was recognizing that usually when you’re trying to schedule a movie, you’re trying to schedule around locations. You’re trying to shoot out a location and move on to the next location so you don’t have to go back to a location. In this case, we had to optimize for what part of the movie we were in, and really it came down to the state of Ryan Reynolds’s hair and beard, because we were cutting his hair, we were coloring his hair, he had a beard, he had no beard, and so we had to optimize for that. Because we were shooting the main set as my house, we could shoot at my house, go do something else, come back to my house, go do something else, and so we could dress the house and do the house, just be really flexible in that location. That made all the difference, because the movie would cost so much more if we had to do wigs and other things to make all the rest of the things work so we could shoot out a location. That was a big factor.

The general things you’re looking for when you’re trying to figure out for production concerns are, does it have to be night. If it can day, it’s going to be just simpler. Can we not have children? Can we not have animals? Those are things that add complexity. If you can avoid those, you’re going to save some time and some frustration.

**Megana:** Can I ask you a question about this simplifying out the Linda Hunt character? I know that you worked on movies that are shooting as you are rewriting things. What is your methodology for that? I feel like my brain would explode.

**John:** That got dropped out before we had really even budgeted. We knew that that was going to go away. If you’re in production and you’re recognizing, okay, all these things are shifting… The Charlie’s Angels movies are examples of everything was shifting every day, and you had to figure out what we shot, what’s coming up next, what was public. You really just try and optimize for what is the movie we’re trying to make right now and not be too beholden on what the original plan was behind things. If there’s a simplification to be had, do it. If it’s not going to materially affect the story you’re trying to tell or the production value you’re trying to achieve, you do it. Things like if you have to move the crew from one place to another place, that’s a huge drag, unless it’s not.

An example in Big Fish is we were shooting in Montgomery, Alabama, and we would shoot exteriors at the river, but then if the weather turned or the light was not good, they could just pull up the trucks at lunch and move back to our stages, which was just this warehouse, and shoot stuff in the afternoon at the stages. Being flexible and recognizing what is the priority. In the case of Big Fish, sometimes the priority was let’s get really good light for these exteriors, and you could optimize for that.

**Megana:** Very cool. Moving on, Ryan asks, “Screenplay examples for instruction comes in waves. Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca. Which scripts from the last 20 years do you think should get, quote, taught in film programs?”

**John:** My first instinct was to say Aliens, but then I realized Aliens is more than 20 years old, which makes me feel so, so, so old. Listen, I think there’s so many great scripts to be picking there. A lot of indie films should also be higher up there. I think Booksmart is a great movie and does a really good job of its storytelling and character wants being explored and expressed, and it has a sense of fun and a sense of style, which is great. All Lord and Miller’s work is creative and fun and does really interesting things with audience expectation, so I’d move those up higher there. Wow, other great, recent movie examples…

I think the reason I was reaching back to Aliens is that was such a seminal script for how we’re writing action on the page, and I feel like it’s been duplicated so thoroughly and modeled so much in movies after that point that you could probably read any action film over the last 10 years and it’s still going to have some of that quality to it. Megana, I’ll throw this back to you. You’re newer to the screenplay format. Of the stuff that you’ve read that’s more recent, what do you think is going to be very teachable?

**Megana:** I guess a couple of other examples that I think seem fresher to me are The Wolf of Wall Street or Adam McKay movies where there’s just so much breaking the fourth wall and exposition done in a different way that feels new. Is that true?

**John:** I think that is also true. I think it’s playful with the format. You look at The Big Short and it’s how it’s getting that information out there. We’ve talked about The Social Network as being a really good movie to watch in terms of how it is telling a story, how it is using real life just as a springboard to make a very specific point about this environment. I think those movies will be on the short list.

It’s also worth noting that so many of the classic movies we’re pointing to, say like Tootsie, Star Wars, Casablanca, white guys wrote them, and so I think making sure that the canon that we’re teaching from isn’t just like, these are the white male screenwriters of that era. There’s really amazing films being made by filmmakers of all different backgrounds, and making sure that we’re not just teaching one kind of thing.

**Megana:** Totally. Eliza asks, “I’m an aspiring writer, and I’ve recently learned about the TV fellowship programs and decided to apply. Fast-forward to a month later and I’m bleeding out of my eyeballs and pulling out my hair.”

**John:** Oh no, Eliza.

**Megana:** That was so graphic. “The truth is I find TV spec scriptwriting to be incredibly hard. The number one tip that I’ve encountered is, spec what you love, but I love highly serialized shows. When I sit down and try to find some tiny crevice where I can maybe explore something further, say on a season of Killing Eve or The Morning Show, I run out of steam by the end of Act One. I just can’t for the life of me come up with a spec story that has legs long enough to travel for 60 pages, which lines up perfectly with what occurred in the preceding episode and what will occur in the succeeding episode.

“Writing a TV spec has been so shatteringly difficult that it’s making me question if I have potential as a writer at all. It’s supposed to be a straightforward exercise that amateur writers can use as a steppingstone to become professionals. In other words, it’s child’s play, right? Is this an indication that I should just pack up my stuff and head to the exit?”

**John:** Yes, Eliza, you should give up now. You should completely give up. No, Eliza, you have, I think, some wrong expectations. Let’s disabuse you of your wrong expectations. First let’s talk about what spec writing is for TV. When someone says a spec script when it comes to TV, they’re probably referring to this is an existing show, I’m going to write an episode of this existing show, not because they’re paying me to do it, but to show that I know how to write and that I could write a show like this. You write one of these things not because you’re trying to get hired for that specific show, but as a sample for you to get staffed on a show that could be kind of like it. If you’re writing The Morning Show and you’re hoping to get staffed on Bridgerton or something, you have the ability to do an existing thing.

These kind of spec scripts have fallen a bit out of favor. They were much more common when I was starting. Some showrunners really like them. I remember Mindy Kaling tweeting about how much she loves reading specs, because you get a sense of can this person write this voice, can this person really understand how this TV show works.

Useful exercise, but just understand that it has its limitations. One of the limitations that you’re encountering is that you really can’t try to fit your episode into the existing narrative and existing plot lines of a serialized drama that same way. You can’t make this be an alternate Episode 3 of Season 4. It’s just not going to work. Take that pressure off yourself. Instead ask, what is something you would love to see the show do at a certain point. Don’t try to be so serialized.

Find a way to take these characters and have them do something interesting that feels like it could be an episode of the show, it just wasn’t an episode of the show. The characters feel consistent with the universe of that original TV show, and yet they’re not trying to directly slot into something else that has happened in there. I’m going to reach back to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You don’t have to make it fit into one season mythology or one big bad mythology. Just have it be something that feels like a classic, good episode of that show. Maybe if you’re going to do something interesting, take those characters somewhat out of their normal environment, put two characters together who don’t generally have opportunities to interact.

Do something that is both the voice of the show, but also stands out and is unique, so that a writer who may want to hire you, a showrunner who may want to hire you, says, “This person not only understands the show, but understands how to do something interesting with those characters and the elements that they’re given.

**Megana:** Totally. I think some of the expectations that Eliza has are a little too high. I don’t think anyone who is reading these fellowship applications is going to be tracking at one point in the season or the plot line this goes. They probably don’t even watch that show. They just have a sense of who the characters are or maybe they’ve seen an episode. I think that you’re absolutely right, and taking some of that pressure off will really help.

**John:** Don’t bleed out your eyeballs and don’t give up on this, because you’re trying to do something that’s really difficult, and it’s not a normal job at all. It’s not a normal thing to have to write an episode of a show you’re not getting paid to write, that you don’t have the writers’ room as a resource. You’re trying to do a weird thing, so just try the best job at it you can. I think honestly these kind of spec pilots make more sense for comedy. They show your comedy chops and your ability to write characters’ voices in a way that make more sense, which may be why I think so much of staffing has moved to reading original stuff rather than specs of existing shows.

**Megana:** I think specking what you love makes a lot of sense because you know the world of the show, but I’ve never specked something that’s a highly serialized drama. I wonder if that’s also making it harder for her. I wonder if there’s a procedural she likes enough that she could write a spec for.

**John:** That’s such a great point. It reminds me of that Ira Glass quote about, at a certain point you recognize you have taste, but you don’t have talent. She probably has really good taste when it comes to The Morning Show, so she knows exactly how it’ll all work and she knows what a great episode this is, and she’s comparing what she’s writing to the very best episode of The Morning Show ever, and not being able to see the process to get there. I do think picking something that she loves so much may be part of the problem.

**Megana:** Totally. Moody asks, “What’s the deal with streamers and residuals? For example, do the writers of a Netflix Original or another subscription-based streamer make close to what a writer for a studio is going to make with purchase and rental fees? Are residuals even relevant the way they used to be?”

**John:** Oh yes. The question of streamers and residuals is an ongoing one. It’s going to be inevitably a focus of negotiation for the next MBA negotiations. Let’s talk through the current state of, if you write something for a streamer, how residuals work.
The important thing to understand is right now it is a fixed residual. Let’s say you got story and teleplay on a credit for a one-hour that you write for Netflix. This is an example here. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the WGA document that talks you through how you actually calculate what these things are, based on the current deal. For this one hour written for Netflix, the residual base would be $29,657. That’s not money you’re getting right now, but that’s what’s called the base of it. That’s how much the residual pot is worth for that.

Then it depends on how big the streamer is. There’s this thing called subscriber tiers, which is by how many people, I think only in North America, are subscribers to that service. In the case of Netflix, it’s the highest tier because they have the most at more than 45 million subscribers. It’s called a subscriber factor. You multiply that original 29,000 by 150%, so it increases that. Working off that, there’s what’s called an exhibition gear percentage. Basically, each year, a percentage of that total money, you’re getting paid out as a residual. It starts at 45% in the first year. It drops to 1.5% in years 13 and beyond.
For this hypothetical show that you’ve written that you got written by credit on, you would be getting a first-year residual of $20,000, and then it would drop dramatically year after year after year until 13 years where you get 1.5% of that, or one 40th of that really is the best way to think about that.

It’s really hard to compare this residual to what you would be getting in cable or in broadcast, because cable and broadcast, they are generally not fixed residuals. There’s a fixed residual for the first rerun in broadcast, but really your residual in normal TV is based on a percentage of the licensing deal. When Friends sells, for licensing, there’s a certain amount per episode, and you as a writer get a percentage of that. An incredibly successful show like Friends, that licensing fee is huge and your residuals can be huge. A show that is not a big hit could be a lot less.

Right now the deal with the streamers is, probably for some shows you’re getting a little bit more residuals on it, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s a success or not, but for the big hits you’re getting really screwed. You’re not getting any piece of that pie on a giant hit. If you write Stranger Things, you’re still getting the same crappy fixed residual. It’s not great right now. It could be a lot better. It’s a reason why I think there’s going to be so much focus on trying to improve how we’re doing this and to really make the success of a given show be reflected in the residuals that a writer gets for having written that show. Did that make sense? I’m trying to talk through a lot of numbers.

**Megana:** It does. We’ll link to this WGA article, because it’s really helpful, these graphs, and then the calculations and the examples that they walk through make it easier to follow. It is surprisingly complicated. I didn’t realize how much these percentages dropped off year over year.

**John:** Yeah, I think it falls off a cliff. Some caveats here, we’re talking about high-budget subscription video on demand, which is what you call the expensive stuff made for something like a Netflix. There’s a lower-budget thing, which obviously the results aren’t going to be as good, and the calculations work differently. If you’re making a movie that is originally intended for a theatrical market, but then it’s released on Netflix instead of being released theatrically, in that case they have to calculate what’s called an [unclear 00:59:01] license fee, which is basically how much they think the movie would be licensed for if it were out on the open market. That becomes harder and harder to do as there are fewer movies out there who then are showing up on streaming later on. There’s ways to calculate it when it’s not clear that it was made for this market, but it’s complicated.

When you’re in one of those situations, you get the Guild involved to check on it, and the Guild is constantly arguing about how certain things should be counted, so it’s tough. Let’s say you have an existing show that is then licensed through a streamer. That goes through a more normal residual process, which is basically there’s a license fee, Netflix is paying a certain amount per episode, you as a writer get a percentage of that amount in your residuals.

**Megana:** I have a lot of follow-up questions. Is that why day-and-date release stuff that came out during the pandemic was more complicated? Did that affect drastically how writers were being paid for movies that were simultaneously being theatrically released and put on streamers?

**John:** The fact of the residuals to some degree had a bigger impact though on box office bonuses, which is one of the ways we get around the problem of not having backend participation or having a meaningful backend gross is that we say in our contracts, okay, when this film reaches $50 million in the US box office, I get a bonus check of this. When it hits $100 million, I get a bonus check of this. It’s a way of giving us a backend. If something’s released day-and-date, your box office is going to be greatly lowered because of that. The Scarlett Johansson lawsuit over Black Widow was really about that, which is basically she had bonuses in her contract that she was not going to be able to hit because they released the movie day-and-date theatrically and in theaters.

**Megana:** Got it. Cool. We have four more questions left.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Megana:** They’re pretty quick. Mattias asks, “Other than writing, what’s something aspiring writers who live in LA should be doing?”

**John:** A quick checklist of things you should do other than write while you’re in Los Angeles. You should see movies. You see a bunch of movies. See the new releases, but also go to things like the Academy screening series. Go to any sort of retrospective stuff. Those are great to see. Anything where there’s a Q and A afterwards, especially with the filmmakers, with the writers, those are terrific. Whenever the ArcLight reopens, they do those. Directors series at Film Independent is really good. I host some of those events. Go to festivals. Go to festivals like Outfest or the indie festivals. Volunteer to crew at one of these things. You’ll meet some people. You’ll see a bunch of movies.

Go to plays. Go to comedy shows like Groundlings. You’ll see stars before they become stars and see how all that works. Take a class if you feel like taking a class. Again, you’ll meet other people who are trying to do what you’re trying to do, and writers, which is always good. If you’re in LA, you should hike, because you can, because there’s just a ton of hiking around Los Angeles.

Make sure you’re exploring different parts of the city. It’s really easy to get stuck in your one little bubble in Los Angeles, but LA’s giant and there’s so much to do. If you’re in Silver Lake, make sure you make it out to the ocean every once in a while. Vice versa, if you’re on the West Side, make sure you’re hitting downtown and other parts of the city.

Crew on your friends’ films. Find films that need PAs and be a PA. Just get some experience on a set while you’re here, because there’s always so much shooting. Learn how to shoot something. Get a camera. It doesn’t have to be an amazing camera. You can do it on your phone as well. Write a short thing and learn how to shoot it, because that’s a skill you’re going to need to learn to have. Understanding how shot by shot by shot you put something together is crucial. LA is where film was born, so do that while you’re here.

Finally, there’s a bunch of events that are always happening in Los Angeles. It’s one of the biggest cities in the world. Go to concerts, go to museums, make an art date with yourself to get out of your apartment and see things and do things, because there’s no reason to stay trapped indoors in Los Angeles. Go out and do stuff. What other advice would you have for Mattias here?

**Megana:** I think all that’s great. It’s made me more excited to live in LA. I think also specifically do things that are not related to the industry or not going to help you in any way. I think working in the industry and living in an industry town is really overwhelming and sometimes just suffocating, and so having things that are completely separate from that is helpful, like hobbies like swimming or pottery or things where there’s no way for you to network or be thinking about anything professional.

**John:** Agreed.

**Megana:** Great. We have a question from Flustered. Flustered asks, “Later this year we’re shooting my first US studio feature. I’m not a total newbie. I have experience in my home country, but this film is definitely my biggest moment to date. I pride myself on being a pretty chill person. I’m used to working with actors. I’m someone who’s never really been into celebrity culture. People are people. That is, until they attached our lead.”

**John:** Oh, no.

**Megana:** “They booked someone who would have made my 16-year-old self fall out of my chair. What I want to know is how do we as screenwriters be chill? I’ve had a couple of meetings with him to discuss the character pass I’m about to do, and he’s been bloody lovely, of course, so I’m off to an okay start, but come production, I’d love to get a photo with him. Ugh, just typing that feels so cringe. I just need tips on professionalism, and if asking for things like a photo is crossing some invisible line. This is a total nonissue in the scheme of things, but I literally didn’t know who else to ask.”

**John:** Don’t ask for the photo, Flustered. Celebrate the fact that you are interacting with this actor in a way that they see you as a professional and that they are excited to have you on board as the writer of the project. Don’t be a fan. Don’t ask for the photo.
It can be hard to be chill around people who are really famous and who are rich and successful and just gorgeous and all these things that overwhelm you. I find it helpful to be specific and really focus on what is your job, what do they need, how do you help them get the best performance, what are they interested and into.

My first meeting with Drew Barrymore was about Charlie’s Angels, and we really could talk, really vibe on what is the movie that we are trying to make, what does it feel like. We could arrive at a shared vision for how the movie should feel. That was a really good experience. Yeah, she was very famous at that moment, but she was also focused on the work. It sounds like this actor is focused on the work too. Don’t make it a fan situation by asking for a photo.

Here’s when you’ll get your photo. You’ll get your photo at the premier, which will be fantastic, because you’ll be on the Red Carpet and get a photo together, or on set, or the stills photographer on set. There can be some fun way for you to get that shot that you really want, but really focus on the movie rather than the photo.

**Megana:** This is the perfect time for fake it ’til you make it.

**John:** 100%.

**Megana:** Rena asks, “Do you have any tricks for not falling into patterns and dialog? For example, I find myself using the word honestly a lot, and honestly, it’s getting old.”

**John:** Oh Rena, I hit the same situation, and I find myself doing things like that where I’m just like, “Oh my god, I used the word actually three times on a page.” The only thing you can do is just be aware of it, and when you see it, stop it. Having someone else read through it, having, honestly, Megana read through stuff and say, “You used this word twice,” is how you’re going to notice it. Then when you do notice it, you will find a way to stop yourself from using it so often.
Now, in terms of dialog, yes, you’re trying to make characters sound like themselves. I think what you may be noticing is that if one character says “honestly,” another character shouldn’t say “honestly” that much. If one character says “honestly” a lot, that can feel authentic, because individual characters should fall into loops where they do say things the same way and have the same structure to things. That’s why Jim Halpert sounds different than Michael Scott. People have the natural things they go to, the patterns that they go to. I think Rena’s going to be okay.

**Megana:** Yeah. Also, with a tool like Highland, you can Find and Replace and just search for those things once you notice them.

**John:** Absolutely. If you notice “honestly,” just do a find for “honestly” and see all the times you’re using it and see when you don’t need that word. “Honestly” is one of those things where it generally can just be cut, and it’s a stronger sentence without “honestly” in front of it. If you need a softener, just find another softener to get you into it.

**Megana:** I have a problem with my action lines where I’ll say “starts to” instead of just whatever the action is. I do a pass where I edit all those sentences.

**John:** Good plan.

**Megana:** Last question, Shewani [ph] asks, “How do you handle balancing writing your own passion projects versus pitching on assignments?”

**John:** That’s a good question. I don’t always balance it great, but I think I’m always aware of these are things that I want to write. I have a short list of projects that I do want to hit at some point, or either start writing or come back to. These are things that are just things that I own and control that I want to be my own stuff. Whenever I turn in an assignment for someone else, I will try to prioritize going to one of those passion projects for at least the time I have, while I’m waiting on notes back or whatever, just so I do get some time to spend with those projects.

In terms of pitching versus writing your own stuff, if I am pitching something out there, I still have a lot of free writing time. I’ll try to use that free writing time on my passion projects. Am I trying to pitch these passion projects? Sometimes. Sometimes it feels like this is the time to get that thing out the door and get people reading it, but more often, the stuff I’m pitching on is stuff that exists that I’m trying to get to the next point or I’m trying to either get the job or get this project, this book or other property, set up some place. I still have the time to go and write the new stuff that is for myself.

Basically, I would say recognize that your writing time is crucial and important, and if you’re not doing work for somebody else writing, make sure you’re doing that work for yourself writing. Megana, we got through 20 questions. Was it only 20 questions? It felt like 9,000.

**Megana:** I’m sorry. I hope that wasn’t me asking the questions, but yes, that was 20.

**John:** 20 questions. 20 questions done. Let’s see Craig Mazin beat that. Should we go on to our One Cool Things?

**Megana:** Yeah.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is this video by Paul Stamets, who is a mycologist. He studies fungi and mushrooms. He as a scientist developed this fungi that attracts ants and termites, and they eat this thing and they bring it back to their nest where it kills them. It’s a pesticide, but it’s a very specific, clever pesticide where they bring it back into their nest and it kills them, but also makes everyone else stay away from it. It’s very site-specific, which I think is a really good idea. His patent is expired. He got his patent 17 years ago. Patents expire.

What I liked about this video is he was describing how excited he was that this is now open for anyone else to use, that this is now in the commons and people can build products off of it. Also, he was never able to actually bring it to market. He could never actually find a way to do it. I liked his honesty about like, “I really thought this would be a great thing and revolutionary, and I couldn’t do it. Maybe somebody else can. Also, here are the challenges you’re going to have, because it doesn’t have this patent protection anymore.” I just really liked his approach to this thing he developed which was really cool, which was not successful commercially, but is still good for the world. It’s just a good mix of the open sourcing and public goods and the real challenges of capitalism all wrapped up into one little video.

**Megana:** That really fits with the ethos behind your work.

**John:** Fountain is an example. It’s a public good. It’s screenwriting syntax, which is good for a lot of people. It’s had some success, but it hasn’t revolutionized the world in ways I would’ve liked. It hasn’t been the ever-attracting mushroom that has destroyed other entities, but it’s had its own little, small successes.

**Megana:** Very cool. I guess thematically related, my One Cool Thing is Under White Sky: The Nature of the Future. It’s this book by Elizabeth Kolbert. She won the Pulitzer Prize for this book The Sixth Extinction. I haven’t finished it yet, but I think there’s nine different examples of ways in which humans have tried to fix certain problems that have happened in ecosystems or the environment, and now she looks at things 30, 50 years down the line, and how we are now trying to remedy the ways that we have interfered and caused greater problems in the environment. She looks at the Mississippi River and carp. I was just telling you this example about these pupfish that are in Devils Hole in the Mojave Desert. While that land has been protected, 100 miles away in Nevada they were doing nuclear testing, and how that has influenced this very specific species’ survival rates is so fascinating.

**John:** On the inspiring-depressing scale, where would you put this?

**Megana:** I was thinking about that before I recommended it, because I was like, it does depress me, but you know I love some dry nonfiction to get me to bed.

**John:** Oh yeah, me too.

**Megana:** It’s pretty bleak, because so far it doesn’t feel like we as humans can do anything right. If we do something that seems to temporarily help the environment or help the world in some way, this takes the long view look at it, and it’s like, nope, you actually messed things up far more than you realized. It is pretty bleak. It’s depressing.

**John:** I’ll add it to the list, but I think I have a few more cheery things to get through before I get to a mass bleak book.

**Megana:** Fair enough.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Thank you again, Megana Rao, our producer, for all those questions, and for everybody who sent in their questions. That’s so, so helpful. Our show’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Out outro is by Ben Gerrior. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. We have T-shirts and hoodies, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can also sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to record on murder houses. Megana Rao, thank you again.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** Megana, let’s talk murder and architecture, because you had encouraged me to watch this movie Fresh. It’s only a very mild spoiler to say there is a killer in this movie who has a really stylish house, a house like, oh, I would love to have this house. It’s a little bit remote. It’s not a creepy cabin. It has good, natural wood finishes and details. It feels nice. It also has a basement that is set up for murder, but not a grungy, grimy murder. It’s much more sophisticated. It feels like a spa. It’s like a spa where you get dismembered.

**Megana:** Like one of those places where you can get plastic surgery but you’re still at this retreat.

**John:** Oh yeah, completely. Like where she goes in Hacks.

**Megana:** Yes, exactly.

**John:** Like that. It’s all tasteful, all well-done. You might be chained to the floor, but it’s got good aesthetics to it. You got your stainless steel toilet. You got a little drinking fountain. You’ve got some things you need. Even the bars closing off your cell, they’re wood. It looks like teak.

**Megana:** It’s like Scandinavian.

**John:** It’s very Scandinavian, which is also a good tie-in to Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a Scandinavian thriller in which ultimately we discover this murderer who has this house. It’s like, okay, part of your house is just designed as an abattoir. It’s clearly set up to just slaughter people.

**Megana:** I re-watched that scene from Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. He also has this whole setup in the basement where instead of a sprinkler system, it fills the room with gas and he has his own personal gas mask that he just attaches, I guess, when he climbs down the stairs. It’s just all part of the process. I feel like he must have rigged that, because how do you get a contractor to do something like that?

**John:** Are they just really good do-it-yourself-ers who just have really good skills for this, because I was thinking the main character in Fresh is an accomplished surgeon himself. I don’t understand how he’s doing all the work he’s doing as a surgeon and as a dismemberer of bodies and as really an entrepreneur. Also, he has clearly some facility with how to build concrete structures and these things. Assuming he does have a contractor and an architect, what is the cover story for why these rooms are being built this way?

**Megana:** It’s like, yeah, I need you to build these guest bedrooms with metal chains that are bolted into the ground.

**John:** Maybe the chains are something he could do himself, or he could have just one lackey in on it with him. The bigger construction things, you got to have a crew there. There’s stuff that has to happen. Even with the pretense of, oh, maybe he has this private surgery center, yeah, I guess, but I find it suspicious, or maybe I find it as an opportunity for a movie or a docuseries about the people who build murder houses, like a home-flipping thing, but it’s really about murder houses.

**Megana:** You’re someone who owns a house and has remodeled your house. My understanding is that any time you want to make a change, you do have to get a permit from the city. Is that true? Is that true for everywhere or just LA?

**John:** I think that’s why murderers are moving out of Los Angeles, because it’s the bureaucracy really. It’s all the permitting that’s really getting in the way of innovation and murder houses. You have other things listed here in terms of the aesthetic. Parasite, of course, a great example. There’s the whole basement in Parasite. Essentially it’s a bomb shelter, I get that, but also it feels like a murder hole.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** Invisible Man. Look at this house that he built, that also seems set up for devious deeds. In that case, I can’t remember any specific room in there that feels like, okay, this is just a room that could only be used for evil, but maybe.

**Megana:** He has that room where he keeps the suits. I don’t know what about these really ultra contemporary homes is so frightening. I think maybe it’s all of the glass and then the concrete.

**John:** That sense of it’s all transparent so you can see everything, and yet…

**Megana:** It’s so disorienting.

**John:** Yeah, disorienting. Everything’s being hidden. It’s hiding in plain sight in some way. Concrete does feel fairly industrial and brutalist and confining and soundproof. They’re always a little bit remote so no one can hear you screaming as they’re cutting you apart. I see here in the Workflowy you have other examples of things that are tied into murder architecture or really questionable, like why would you build this this way.

**Megana:** Correct. One TikTok sensation that our whole office was obsessed with was Samantha Hartsoe, this woman in New York who discovered a secret… I guess she was getting a breeze through her bathroom and so she discovered that through her bathroom mirror, her apartment connected to an entirely different apartment.

**John:** Basically she could take out her medicine cabinet and climb into this accessory hallway that went into a completely different apartment which was empty. Why would you build that accessory hallway? It was all just unsettling.

**Megana:** So unsettling. Then I have this other story in here. I remember when I was in college, I was reading this story, the headline was Ohio State Students Discover Stranger Living in Basement. In the article, it actually really warmed by heart, because I was like, this is so Ohio. These boys were living in this house on campus. There were 10 of them. Strange things were happening in the house, but because there were 10 of them, they just always attributed it to a different roommate. Halfway through the school year they discovered that there was a squatter living in their basement. In the most Midwestern turn of events, all of the quotes are, “He seems like a really great guy. We wish we could help him out. Would’ve loved to be his friend or get to know him, but it’s actually not okay for him to live here.” It’s so apologetic and accommodating. It was so sweet.

I texted one of my friends from high school, my friend Sean, and I was like, “This is so funny and this is so Ohio.” He was like, “Yeah, man, that’s my house. Yeah, I was living there. He’s a great guy. He’s a philosophy major just trying to get by.” I was like, “This is so funny and heartbreaking.”

**John:** It reminds me of the people who are squatters in the Hamptons. Off-season in the Hamptons, they’ll just pretend that they should be living in these houses, and live in places where they don’t actually have any right to be there.

**Megana:** If Craig was here, he would talk about the nature of higher education and how cost-prohibitive it is, but yes, it is very similar to that.

**John:** College is the problem. Which would probably end up on Room, because you think about it, Room, it’s not within the house, but this guy has a structure in his backyard that it’s just designed to hold these people in. It’s apparently soundproof. I’m trying to remember. It’s underground? Basically, you can’t easily get out of it. A similar thing happened in one of the seasons of Search Party, where there was a secret underground bunker room that was all soft and padded and where she couldn’t hurt herself. Again, I ask, who are the contractors who are building these things, and what do they think is actually happening? I just think there’s a, I think if not actually a docuseries, then at least a good Onion article about the contractors brought in to do this project and what they believed that they were doing.

**Megana:** I think that there’s maybe too much overlap, and we need to be more suspicious of doomsday preppers and murderers. I don’t want to miscast doomsday preppers, because it’s like, do your thing, but I think maybe we should just be a little bit more skeptical or ask a few more questions around some of those precautions.

**John:** 10 Cloverfield Lane is a great example. It’s both a survivalist prepper bunker situation, but also a creepy murder shaft. The two things do seem like they fit together. If you have gratings in your floor and the ability to spray down blood into the floor, I don’t think that’s normal doomsday prep. It’s just me. I think those should be some things that if it’s on the spec sheet for the construction project, I think you’d intervene there.

**Megana:** Not only are these people committing crimes or murder, but they’re also probably violating some zoning laws.

**John:** 100%. Got to be strict here. Thanks, Megana.

**Megana:** Thanks, John.

Links:

* [Patton Oswalt in King of Queens Scene](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2QE3JpWfTo)
* [ZSA Moonlander](https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/)
* [Compare Your Typing Speed Against ours here!](https://www.typingtest.com/test.html?minutes=2&textfile=benchmark.txt)
* [Phoebe Waller Bridge – 73 Questions with Vogue](https://www.vogue.com/video/watch/phoebe-waller-bridge-on-fleabag-british-humor-and-her-creative-process)
* [Residuals for High-Budget Subscription Video on Demand (HBSVOD) Programs](https://www.wga.org/members/finances/residuals/hbsvod-programs) from the WGA
* [Paul Stamets on Seven Mycoattractant and Mycopesticide Patents released to Commons!](https://paulstamets.com/news/paul-stamets-on-seven-mycoattractant-and-mycopesticide-patents-released-to-commons?mc_cid=5d4ff8f8e6&mc_eid=8952ca1075)
* [Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert](https://bookshop.org/books/under-a-white-sky-the-nature-of-the-future-9780593136270/9780593136270)
* [Murder House Architecture](https://twitter.com/johnaugust/status/1506362648887136256)
* [Samantha Hartsoe’s TikTok NYC Apartment](https://www.tiktok.com/@samanthartsoe?lang=en)
* [Ohio State Students Discover Students Living in Basement](https://www.thelantern.com/2013/09/ohio-state-students-discover-stranger-living-basement/)
* [Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!](https://cottonbureau.com/people/scriptnotes-podcast)
* [Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/gifts) or [treat yourself to a premium subscription!](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Ben Gerrior ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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