Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/getting-stuff-written).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 321 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Last week, I was in London. This week, Craig is in London. We were literally flying through the air at the same time in opposite directions. But luckily, I found someone in the Pacific Time Zone to help us out.

Grant Faulkner joins us from Berkeley where he is Executive Director of the National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo. He is a writer and novelist himself, but the reason I mostly wanted him on the show this week is his great new book about writing. Grant, welcome to the show.

**Grant Faulkner:** Thank you for having me, John. I’m really looking forward to talking creativity today.

**John:** So, I said you were in Berkeley. Is that actually accurate? Because last time I met you, you were in San Francisco.

**Grant:** I am in Berkeley, and the NaNoWriMo headquarters is in Berkeley as well.

**John:** Can you talk us through what NaNoWriMo is for folks who don’t know the program?

**Grant:** Yeah. NaNoWriMo is many, many things, but I won’t go into the whole hour-long description of it, which is really kind of what it requires. But just to go through the rudiments, it is a challenge to write 50,000 words in 30 days during the month of November. And so, it was developed really around the premise that everyone has a story to tell and that everyone’s story matters. But sometimes, so many people say, “I’m going to write my novel or my script some day,” you know, like that mythical “someday” when life is just easy and beautiful and you have money and a beautiful office and expanses of time.

But someday just rarely happens. In fact, I just read this in The New York Times, they did a survey and 81% of Americans say they want to write a book someday, but most of them of course don’t. And so, we exist to say “Make your creativity a priority for a month, in the month of November” and we want to ignite people’s creativity and help them realize their creative dreams.

**John:** So, I was aware of NaNoWriMo for a lot of years, and I’d never actually considered pursuing it until two years ago. I found myself at the end of October and realizing like, “Well, I don’t have a script that I have to write next, and I think I will actually just start writing a book and I will do that in November.”

So, I sat down at my computer. I was in Austin. I was there for the Austin Film Festival. And I started writing this book and it became Arlo Finch. So, my first book is actually a NaNoWriMo book.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Thank you to the program and also for the impetus. Most of our listeners are screenwriters. And so, 50,000 words, that doesn’t necessarily track to sort of what screenwriters do, but that’s sort of like — it’s a script. Maybe it’s sort of a script and a half. It’s a lot of words. So in order to hit 50,000 words, I think it’s 1,650 words per day that you’re supposed to be writing?

**Grant:** Yeah, 1,677 to be precise. And I was so impressed because you not only wrote Arlo Finch during NaNoWriMo, but you sold it, right?

**John:** So, that’s not entirely fair because I wrote about 15,000 words. I got nowhere near the 50,000 words.

**Grant:** Wow.

**John:** But I wrote the first six or seven chapters of it and that’s what actually became the book that we went out and sold. So, I sold Arlo Finch off the initial chapters, the outline for the whole book and that’s what’s got the whole thing started. So, it was a great sort of framework for getting me to sit down and actually just do the work of getting just started. So, I really, really enjoy it.

But since the time I did it, I talked to a lot of other people who have written during NaNoWriMo, and some of those people have sold books, but a lot of people just like, you know, actually sat down and like strung words together for the first time in a year. So I think you’re doing an incredible service to people who are curious about writing, who aspire to write, who wouldn’t otherwise have the motivation to do it.

**Grant:** Yeah. And it’s interesting to me because I think sometimes people think that NaNoWriMo is all about, you know, helping people not only write their novels but publish their novels, as if that’s always the end goal. And I’m really actually impressed by the number of people who sign up every year just to write a novel and to do it in a community of other writers. So, that whole notion of creativity for creativity’s sake I think is really valuable, even if your aspiration is to publish, just kind of keeping that notion, that sort of childlike approach, being playful with your words.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think the childlike focus comes into some of the other programs you guys do. You have the Young Writers Program which we help out with, with our Writer Emergency Packs but you’re in–

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Like, 2,000 classrooms every year to sort of help young writers sort of get started in the process. There’s programs designed for really little kids and for middle grade kids. But I think it’s great that you’re sort of getting people thinking about writing as a thing you do even if you don’t intend to become a professional paid writer.

**Grant:** Yeah. And our Young Writers Program, what is remarkable about it for me, since I was a teen of course before NaNoWriMo was founded in 1999, and I’ll talk to 17-year-olds who have written five, six, seven novels during our Young Writers Program and they might have published some of them with a self-publishing company. And I never — when I was a teen, no one wrote novels. I was a geeky reader, writer and I wrote a long short story at most.

And so, I think like this year, we will have 80,000 teens sign up for our Young Writers Program and close to 350,000 writers for the NaNoWriMo main site. And then, with our Young Writers, we provide Common Core-aligned curriculum for teachers, free workbooks that can be downloaded. We send out novel writing kits and resources to 2,500 classrooms which include your Writer Emergency Pack which is actually good for any age of writer, I think. I like pulling out a card every once in a while.

So, yeah, our premise is just the world is a better place with more creators in it, and our approach to igniting people’s creativity is through writing.

**John:** So, for anybody who has questions about NaNoWriMo, they should go to nanowrimo.org and check out all the great work you do. But I want to focus today on the other great work you do which is this new book that I have in my hands. It’s a handsome little book called, Pep Talks for Writers — 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo. It’s published by Chronicle Books here in the US. It is about an inch thick. If you threw it at somebody, it would hurt them, which I think is a good measure for a book.

What was the impetus behind writing this?

**Grant:** Yeah. And for what I said earlier, one of the, you know, kind of breakthrough successes we have every year is when people find themselves as writers and creators during November and find themselves in our NaNoWriMo community. And they want to — they so often want to keep that creative momentum going all year long, but it can be really tough. I mean, you can’t do NaNoWriMo every month and I wouldn’t advise that. But I would like people to stay creative year-round and to finish those novels they wrote or just make creativity a priority in their lives.

And so, I wrote these 52 insights. The insights are really kind of short essays. Each essay is about two or three pages, I think. And then, each essay ends with an action that you can take within a one-week period. It’s not meant to be like a five-year plan or something like that. So, yeah, that was the purpose. And so, each essay is really just taking a different angle of creativity and help people reflect on being creative with their lives in a variety of different ways, whether it’s setting goals and deadlines to finish that novel or whether it’s going out in the world and practicing becoming a better observer, so just a range of topics.

**John:** Yeah. What I like about it so much is that so often these books are kind of “Yay, writing,” like, “Writing is fantastic. Writing is the best thing ever and just like follow these steps and you’ll be so happy.” And what I liked about your book is that, while I think overall it’s going towards a positive place, you’re really acknowledging some of the pitfalls and problems that sort of keep people from writing — either from starting to write or keep people from continuing to write. It’s a very challenging thing to sort of really dig in on. And even 20 years into this, I found myself nodding at a lot of the things that you point out about part of the reasons why it can kind of suck to write.

And so, I want to dig in to some of those today while I have you on the show to see sort of what insights you have and sort of what advice you can have to people no matter what they’re writing, be it a book, be it a short story, be it a screenplay, sort of get them through to that next step and that next draft.

So, if you’re ready, I just wanted to kind of dig in if we can.

Craig: Yeah.

**John:** Great.

**Grant:** That sounds great.

**John:** One thing you identify, something you call in one of the early chapters, “the Other Syndrome”, that writing is something that other people do. Like, can you talk to me about what you mean by other syndrome and I think we can probably tie it into something we’ve talked about in the podcast before, “Impostor Syndrome,” in a sense that I’m not really a writer. Where did that come from for you?

**Grant:** Yeah. I’ve never talked to anyone who didn’t struggle with this. “I am not a writer” is one way to put it or “I am not a real writer.” And so, I think, you know, for instance like me, I grew up in a small town in Iowa. And so, when I was growing up, real writers — they lived in New York City or Paris. They were adults. They just weren’t me. I didn’t have access to that writing world. And so, I think everybody can probably find a reason of how they feel other than what they determine a real writer is.

And I think if you don’t claim the “I am a writer” with some boldness, it will show with the words you write on the page. You won’t be able to write as bravely if you don’t claim it. If you say “I’m aspiring to write or be a writer. I want to be a writer –” I mean, the definition of being a writer is that you write. And I think the real part is even perhaps more inhibiting because I think what people mean by real is that they’ve been — you’re not a real writer until you’re published. And one publication can, you know, whatever, boost your confidence and make you feel like you are a real writer, it’s a really kind of flimsy and transitory feeling.

I find it like just kind of strange how I’ll wake up in the morning to write and open up my laptop and have a new assignment and I will just really struggle with those first words. It would be like the last thing I want to do is to write. Even though I’ve done it hundreds or thousands of times before and done it with success, each new project is like a totally new thing. And you can go back into all those sort of low moments of self-esteem or lack of belief in yourself no matter where you are in your writing journey.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s dig into psychologically why people have this sense that other people are writers but what I’m doing is not writing. And so, you were talking about growing up in a small town in Iowa. I think there is a sense that when we see writers portrayed in media, they’re always these people who live in big cities, off by themselves and who, like, they cloister themselves in their little rooms and they type these brilliant things and the editors love them. And if they do go out, it’s to mingle with other writers who wear little ascots. Like, it’s a very fancy kind of thing.

**Grant:** Exactly.

**John:** Writing is a really invisible process. It’s like just a person sitting there, doing something. You don’t see them on a daily basis. You don’t see people who are creative writers out there in the world so much. You might pass that person at the coffee shop who’s working, but like you’re not seeing them doing their work as much as you’re seeing an athlete practicing or playing the game.

**Grant:** Right.

**John:** You don’t see them the way you see musicians. Writing is just a thing that happens.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Last week on the podcast, we answered a question from a listener who asked like, “Is it okay to call myself a screenwriter versus an aspiring screenwriter?”

**Grant:** Exactly.

**John:** And I think our basic answer was a lot like what you said, is that identify yourself by the verb, not the noun. And if you are a person who writes, then you are a writer and that’s absolutely fair to say. And so, I think your idea of the “Other Syndrome” though also ties into I think we talked about it in the show before, which is the “Impostor Syndrome,” which is even when you’re doing it, even when you’re getting paid for it, you always have that sense of like “Oh, no. At some point, they’re going to figure out that I’m not really the person they should be trusting to do this work.”

I love that you included this quote that I’d never seen before. I’ll read the quote here. “I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out that I’ve run a game on everybody. They’re going to find me out.’” It’s a quote by Maya Angelou. And so, here’s a woman who’s remarkably successful as a writer and yet she still says that each time she sets out to do a new project, she’s like, “This is the one they’re going to realize that I’m not that good, that I didn’t deserve that praise before.”

And in your book, you talked through some of the reasons why even really successful writers have that sense. Like, what do you think that is?

**Grant:** Per what you were saying earlier, I think one reason that people don’t feel like they’re writers or that they aren’t real writers is that they’re only reading the final draft of their favorite writers, right? The novels they love have been through, who knows, five or ten edits and had professional editors look at them. Whereas, like most of us are sitting with our rough draft and it’s so easy to see how it might not measure up to what we want it to be.

So, writing is so crazily difficult and challenging and I think that that flows into what Maya Angelou was saying as well is that it’s an activity of self-doubt. It has like so many masochistic components to it. The joy and the meaning one finds from the kind of painful exercises is just such a different type of joy than you might find in other activities. And so, I think a writer is just constantly wrestling with that self-doubt no matter where they are in their writing career.

And I think if you feel, depending on the degree that you feel the “Other Syndrome,’ I actually think there are whole different layers. I mean, I’ve done an exercise where I’ll write “I am a writer” in the middle of a circle and then draw concentric circles going out to the perimeter. And I think some people are on the out, like the very edge of the first concentric circle and some people are really close to that middle, I am a writer. And so, I’m imagining Maya Angelou might have been on that closer to the perimeter. So, her natural self-doubt as a writer might really rear an ugly head from time to time.

But, yeah, I think the thing is, is that publishing also doesn’t solve these things. Fame doesn’t solve these things. Awards don’t solve these things. As a writer, you’re always struggling with yourself and your ability to put the right words on the page.

**John:** You talk in your book about the inner editor and how the inner editor is that force inside you that is constantly pushing you and it can be pushing you in a good way or pushing you in a bad way. It’s like that coach who sort of calls you out on all your mistakes and good coaches can sort of push you to your best work and bad coaches can make you quit the team.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** I think that’s an aspect of this “Impostor Syndrome” as well. You have this inner critic who is saying, “You are not good enough. Look at how brilliant that other writer’s work is and how bad your work is.” But of course, as you point out, you’re only comparing this crappy first thing you’ve written, this crappy first draft you’ve written to the finished masterpieces of that other thing. So, naturally, it’s not going to be as good.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re always thinking about the worst of your stuff versus the best of theirs.

**Grant:** Exactly. And we’re not even the best judge of our own stuff, you know. I mean, I think writers just because of that inner editor, which can be — your inner editor has its place and you might banish it during the first draft, but you need it later on because your inner editor wants you to succeed, but it can have a harsh voice. And I think sometimes writers — I mean, we internalize that inner editor and it helps us refine and revise our novels but it can also, you know, I think add to our self-doubt sometimes.

And so, you know, I think when you’re comparing your draft to a published author’s, your eyes probably aren’t the best at that point to judge it.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about process because the classic NaNoWriMo process is basically a quantity kind of goal. Like, you basically just like turn off your inner critic, like, don’t listen to that voice that says, “This isn’t good enough,” just like keep generating pages and go through it.

Do you find that that needs to switch at any point? Can people keep writing at that pace and that speed? There’s a screenwriter who’s out there today who does a lot of work who famously can write zillions and zillions and zillions of words and yet the people will call them out on quality. Do you find that people who go through NaNoWriMo process, what happens in those other 11 months? Like, what is the next step for them after all those words?

**Grant:** Yeah. We definitely — I think I do know one person in the world who did NaNoWriMo every month for an entire year. She wrote 12 novels, 50,000 words a month and she’s a rarity and we don’t advise people to do that. After NaNoWriMo is over — you know, 50,000 words, a lot of people aren’t finished to start. They might need to write another 25,000 or 50,000 words to finish. So, I recommend that they finish because I think there’s just something so rewarding about, you know, writing The End after writing a whole rough draft and then revise of course, you know, and revise, you know, multiple times.

So, sometimes I think people think that we think that you can write a novel in a month and publish it in a month and that’s certainly not the case.

**John:** Yeah. One of the numbers you point out in your book is that if you wrote just 250 words a day, you’d get to 80,000 words in a year. 80,000 words is a pretty good sized book.

**Grant:** It is.

**John:** That’s a book to be proud of. It may not be the best book ever, but it would be about an inch thick and that’s sort of a way to measure sort of what you’ve done. So, you know, consistency even at smaller amounts can be a huge help as well. But how do you then sort of reengage the inner critique, that inner editor, after you sort of try to ignore him or her during that initial process? Like, what’s the way of sort of inviting that creature back in?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think writing a rough draft and banishing the inner editor, it takes practice especially for someone like me because I wrote with an inner editor very present in my writing life until I discovered NaNoWriMo. So, I still — I write pretty slowly because my editor is always somewhere whispering in my ear, “You can refine that sentence a little bit more before going on.”

I think editing and revising takes a lot of practice. I think a lot of people — I’ll see writers revise for the first time and they’ll really kind of only revise on the sentence level. You know, they’ll brush up their grammar and stuff, and revision is such a deeper process. One of my favorite quotes about revision comes from the author, Karen Russell, who said that 90% of her rough draft doesn’t make it into her final draft. I mean, I think you have to open to totally, dramatically changing what you wrote in that first draft, you know, and I always advise people not to attach themselves too much to the plotline or whatever it is in that rough draft because it’s just going to change so much.

And I think Karen Russell is not an anomaly. Most writers I talk to or most novelists, so they say the same thing. The rough draft sometimes as a story just changes so dramatically. It’s barely recognizable. In fact, I just talked with a NaNoWriMo writer who, she did NaNoWriMo I think like 9 or 10 years ago and that 50,000 words that she wrote, she just published her book, but most of those words she said it was kind of a seed of the idea.

So, the rough draft, you’re really exploring. You’re really trying to take different pathways and not be too attached to them. You’re really just trying to open up and find your story. And if I can impart one more quote, I just heard of this as well, Barbara Kingsolver says she starts on negative page 100. So, she’s writing 100 pages just to get to the beginning, just to figure out what she’s really saying. I think the rough draft can even be like a kind of like planning stage. You know, it doesn’t get talked about like that, but, you know, call it zero draft. You can write a rough draft and then outline it afterwards and then, you know, almost write a whole new story.

So, yeah, there are so many different ways to go about it and even though we do have this framework for NaNoWriMo, NaNoWriMo is a creative experiment from its beginnings and I try to experiment with my own creative process every year because that was the gift that NaNoWriMo gave me. The reason I did it back in 2009 was because I felt like I was in a — my creative process was in a rut. And so, I just want to shake it up and it led me to, you know, take these risks on the page that I wouldn’t have ordinarily if I’ve been writing in my kind of ponderous, precious mode.

**John:** Let’s go back a little bit there because you went to a masters writing program, didn’t you?

**Grant:** Yeah. I did. Yeah.

**John:** So, talk us through it. So, a small town in Iowa, and then, what was the process that got you started as a writer and also that led you to NaNoWriMo?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think there was something in me that was kind of predetermined to be a writer. I can’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t want to be a writer. So, even when I was going down other possible, you know, career paths, it was always an idea writing some way.

I went to a study abroad program when I was 20 and basically sat in France and read novels in cafes and said, “This is the life for me.” So, I decided to be a writer and never looked back, never had Plan B. And so, yeah, in my mid-20s, I went and got my masters at San Francisco State. But then, that’s when the writing got really tough. It was when I was in my 20s, I was totally broke and needed to make a living and I worked as a journalist and worked in corporate communications and then finally found my way to the National Writing Project which is a wonderful nonprofit in Berkeley dedicated to helping teachers teach writing better. And then, that led me to the NaNoWriMo board.

Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, invited me on and I’ve been here for six years. So, I feel blessed that I’ve managed to find a job in writing that speaks to — you know, I’m a very mission-driven person. So, I really love that this organization helps so many people become creators and, you know, it’s like I get to think of creativity and talk with people who are engaged in writing every day. So, I’m always learning something.

**John:** But, let’s circle back to this Masters of Creative Writing Program that you took at San Francisco State.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** So, what was that like because that sounds like kind of the fantasy, like, “Well, of course, he’s a writer because he went to that amazing program.” So, what were you actually doing during your time there and what was the process of like dealing with other students in the program?

**Grant:** Yeah. I went there somewhat casually. A lot of people are very directed and they choose, you know, very prestigious writing programs, but I was living in San Francisco and I enjoyed my life and just wanted to stay here. And I was reading and writing every moment I could when I wasn’t working, and I just thought I should get a degree for it.

So, I wasn’t really driven purposefully. You know, I didn’t have grand visions of learning things, in particular. But I think the things that I learned were the value of developing a writing community. It provided that, and I think a writing community can serve you in so many different ways, whether it’s getting feedback from your peers and friends or whether you’re getting inspiration from them or wisdom from their experience or networking opportunities.

Some of the professors definitely introduced me to new ways to write, Robert Gluck in particular. He taught experimental fiction. But, yeah, I can’t say that I had — you know, I think a lot of people go to programs and they want to find this mentor who will love them and that mentor will then, you know, open every door in the world for them to get published. And I think that does happen but it’s very rare. And so, I think you have to really think — I mean, if I were going to go back and do it, I would really think about what do I want out of this. I wouldn’t be so casual.

**John:** One of the questions we get most often on the podcast is, “Should I go to film school?” And I think our answers tend to be very much what you describe is that film schools are a great place to be surrounded by people who are trying to do the same things you’re trying to do and get that community, but you can’t go into it expecting “I’m going to go through this program and suddenly I will have the success in this field,” especially in something as esoteric and strange as writing. It’s hard to anticipate that you’re going to be able to graduate from that program and suddenly, you know, all the gates will be open to you.

**Grant:** It’s really true and what’s interesting to me is the number of people who go to MFA programs and they don’t write now, and they’ll quit writing soon afterwards. And I’m always like, “Why did you do it? That was a huge investment of time and money.” And I think it speaks to like what really makes a writer or a screenwriter is that inner passion. It doesn’t matter whether you have a degree in it. It doesn’t matter if you’ve taken any classes in writing at all.

You know, in fact, Chris Baty who founded NaNoWriMo, he hadn’t taken any writing workshops or anything like that. And I think especially with the novel, I don’t know if this applies to scriptwriting so much, but I imagine it does to a large part, is that the best way to learn to write a novel is by writing one, you know. You can’t really read about how to write a novel or just listen to someone lecture on it. You have to experience it in tandem with a larger conversation around it and you can find the conversation in books and in writing communities like NaNoWriMo, of course.

**John:** One of the things you talked about quite a bit in the book is sort of the virtue of being a beginner and sort of like how to sort of remember what it’s like to be a beginner so that you can, you know, approach things with an openness and interactiveness. There’s a quote you used by Matsuo Basho, “Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.” And which is basically a great way of expressing to sort of be able to retain that sense of openness and curiosity that you have as a beginner.

And I think that may have been one of the main reasons I wanted to do NaNoWriMo is because I’m really good at screenwriting. I sort of think I know how screenwriting works. I really didn’t know how writing books worked. And it was so thrilling to be a beginner again at something and I think part of the reason why I keep trying new things is that I’m sort of a dilettante and hopping in between things is because it’s so much more fun to explore something new than to sort of than to sort of keep trudging over the same terrain again and again.

**Grant:** Yeah. And I think the more you stay in one field and kind of specialize in it, the more your sort of expert rigidity just keeps getting more and more rigid. It’s even hard for me sometimes to go back to my beginning stages of why I wrote to begin with. And NaNoWriMo provides that in the sense of the community. I get to talk to a lot of beginning writers and they help me remember that sort of — you know, it’s just so strange. It’s like traveling to a new city that you’ve never been to before. You’re just experiencing the world in such freshness.

And I do think that we lose that kind of childlike appreciation of storytelling the longer that we write. And so, the more that we can do to go back and remind ourselves about it and you mentioned one — I mean, the one thing that I love is like learn something new. Like, when I started playing the guitar five years ago, it was such an interesting experience to be a total beginner in another art form. And so, I think people should like embrace that really as a new year’s resolution. Learn one thing new every year because it brings you back to that beginner’s mind, and then you can apply that to your writing.

**John:** Absolutely. One of the things, a truism that we hear again and again about writing, we hear about screenplays but I think even more so about books is to write what you know.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** And I like what you were sort of going into about that idea because so often it will be brought up, and it will be sort of immediately dismissed because like, well, that’s stupid because I don’t know anything about, you know, space travel, but I love to write about space. And, you know, there’s so many examples that people writing things that they couldn’t possibly have firsthand knowledge of it, yet it really works.

Where I think you do a good job of sort of digging deeper is looking at what you’re really trying to get out with writing, what you know, which is sort of the emotional memory, the stuff underneath the experience that is so crucial about writing what you know. What things should people be looking for when someone says, “Write what you know”?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think “write what you know” is funny. That’s like one of the top three probably maxims of writing, right? Like, people are always saying, “Write what you know.” And I remember when I first heard that. I was like, “What does that mean?” You know, because, if I take it at its literal face value, I think that I have to write about only those things I’ve experienced in my life like my small town in Iowa. But it’s not really about that.

I think like just what you said, you should never limit yourself. Like, if I — I don’t know, if I want to write about aliens on another planet, if I want to write about a region I’ve never been to in the world which I’ve done, you know, if I want to write about characters, whatever they are, like neuroscientists, so, I don’t know any neuroscientists, but we should give ourselves that permission because it’s part of the reason we write is to see the world through people’s eyes and to explore the world in different ways.

And so, I like the method acting or method writing approach that you’re really applying your own personal emotional experience to the characters you’re creating. Actually, there’s a Shelley Winters quote where she says, “Act with your scars.” And so, you can apply your scars to any character. But I do think that, you know, that requires, like method acting, a lot of introspection and not just like tossing yourself into characters willy-nilly but really thinking about the purpose of what scar and what experience of that scar is appropriate for certain characters.

**John:** When I read writing that feels very real, when the characters seem like they have flesh and blood, I do think it’s because the author has invested a bit of him or herself into their experience. And so, that, you know, author has a very clear sense of that character’s inner emotional life because he or she is using some things from their own life to sort of proxy for it.

When I was doing the script for Big Fish, there’s a sequence at the end where Will is sort of going through the story of his father’s death and I knew this is going to be an incredibly emotional thing for the character but also for the audience watching it. And so, I would — this incredibly method writing where I would bring myself to tears and then start writing.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** And it seems crazy and why would you do it that way, but I’m pretty sure the only reason why I got to those specific words and those images was because I was at that emotional state as I was writing it. And that’s a, you know, it was an incredibly valuable exercise for me is to sort of let myself feel those feelings and then let those characters express themselves while I was feeling those feelings. And, you know, I would just encourage people to try those things because really what’s the harm of trying those things? And there’s something sort of embarrassing about feeling strong emotions or to psych yourself up into a place. But you do it for other things. You’ll rev yourself up before giving a speech. You’ll do other things to sort of get you into the emotional state. Get yourself into the right emotional state for the writing that you’re doing.

And that’s really what we’re talking about in terms of write what you know. Write those feelings that you know. Use the things that are specific and unique to you to help create some specific and unique moments for your story.

**Grant:** Yeah, that’s a great point. I think the stories that I connect with most I think, I agree with you, the writer or the creator has done something that is just so personal. He or she has made themselves vulnerable in a way that, you know, they’ve gone deeper. And so, I really think vulnerability on the page is more important than any craft advice, you know, or craft tips that you might write with.

And that’s where — with Shelley Winters, like act with your scars, it’s really going deep, you know. Like, be willing to reveal your scars on the page and go there.

**John:** You also bring up the idea of using a pseudonym to sort of give yourself permission to write something that you yourself wouldn’t feel personally comfortable writing. So, J.K. Rowling with her Robert Galbraith books, like she basically created a whole other character who is the person who is writing those books. And it’s a nice way of like, you know, giving herself some arm’s distance so she felt safe to have this other guy be writing those books, but also so she could write herself more into it.

It seems like it’s sort of an impossible sort of, you know, double twist. But by creating somebody, a proxy for herself, she could, you know, more personally invest in what she was writing. Have you had any experience with that personally?

**Grant:** I have, yeah. I know some somewhat renowned writers who have written what with a pseudonym or through a persona and they’ve done it to be more vulnerable on the page. You know, to be more powerful and write more bravely. Like just that shield, I guess, that the persona gives them helps them do that.

I mean, I think really, in the end, every time we sit down to write, we’re doing it through a filter of some persona, you know. Like I might think I’m writing with my natural self, but I think like there are ways to shift that, you know. What is your natural self, really? I sometimes like to pretend I’m somebody else just to try to access a different voice.

**John:** For me, you know, John August is the person I became sort of when I was 21, so I ended up switching from my born last name to use my dad’s last, middle and full name.

**Grant:** Oh.

**John:** And so, like it really was a process like, well, John August is the person who could do this. But the other John maybe couldn’t do this, but John August could do this. Like I was literally a different person who could do these things that were, you know, terrifying to the other John.

Whether I had to legally change my name or not, I think if I had given myself a pen name or permission to do those things, it might have been easier. I feel like the people who write fanfiction and slash fiction and do all that amazing work in that space. I think some of the reason why they’re able to do so much and sometimes do such great work is because they are writing under not their real names. And so, they can expose themselves more, because there’s no way to trace it back to them.

Like, the fact that they are 17 years old and living in Missoula, Montana is not an issue because they are just some avatar on a forum and some name they made up. I think that may be one of the things that’s giving them permission to write as much as they’re writing.

**Grant:** Yeah. And I think in some ways it’s interesting. Going back to the beginning of our conversation, that statement I am a writer or I am a real writer. You know, do whatever it takes to do that. And if it takes using a pseudonym or a persona or an avatar, you know, that’s a perfectly legitimate way to claim that identity.

**John:** For NaNoWriMo, has fanfiction or slash fiction become an issue in terms of like the kinds of work that people are doing? Do you guys talk about that at all as an organization or as part of your mission statement?

**Grant:** Yeah. I mean, our premise is we want people to tell their stories and we don’t really care what those stories are. We don’t judge the quality or the topics of people’s stories. So we do get a lot of fanfic writers and I think that’s great, actually. I mean, in some ways, I think all writing is a variation of fanfiction. We’re all writing through the voices and the stories that we’ve experienced. I love the metaphor of Odysseus, you know, being handed down from one oral storyteller to the next. And that is a kind of process of fanfiction, too. We’re always building on the original story.

So I think fanfiction actually is a wonderful way to learn to write because you’re taking these known characters and known plot lines and then going crazy with them.

**John:** It takes the pressure off of like, oh, I have to create something brand new, or I couldn’t create something brand new, I can use these things that already exist out there in the world. And of course we’ve seen that like, yes, you can do that but if you do that well enough, you can basically change the characters’ names and suddenly you have “Fifty Shades of Grey,” you have one of the biggest books of all time.

So, you know, I think it’s a way of giving yourself permission to be creative that you might not feel that you’re entitled to otherwise.

**Grant:** Yeah. And it may be similar to using a pseudonym or a persona, maybe writing through this known world is a way to feel safe and express yourself, you know, and be vulnerable on the page.

**John:** In your section on writer’s block, you talk about throw-away writing or basically the writing you might do at the start of your day so that, you know, it takes the pressure off of things that you don’t expect they have to be good so that it can — you know, there’s less consequence for it. And I think fanfiction could be one of those examples.

You talk about some exercises like Ray Bradbury’s list of nouns. Can you describe that to us?

**Grant:** Yeah. Ray Bradbury, I think he was the one actually, like his phrase throw-away writing, I think that came from him maybe. He says that every writer needs to write — I can’t remember if he says every writer needs to write thousands or hundreds of thousands of throwaway words. But I think that that’s a good way to view it because you’re essentially practicing writing through those words.

And when he first started becoming a writer and just in that kind of moment of like, “What do I write about?” Maybe instead of going to write what I know, he did this approach, he wrote down 20 nouns and he just made a list and they were totally random. And then he would write these very tiny little essays, like 100 or 200 words which he called pensays. And he would write them about each noun.

And within that sort of meditation on these words, he would piece together, like kind of the interaction of his subconscious and these real words, a story. And that’s how he wrote many of his most famous novels and stories, including “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

**John:** In the book you go through a list of like these are the nouns that were interesting to him and he sort of looks for the factions between them and that became the basis of the story.

I always find it real interesting when people describe writer’s block as if they like, “I have no idea what to write.” And so rarely in my life has that actually been a factor. It’s more the factor of like, “Man, I just really don’t feel like writing,” or, “I really don’t feel like writing this next thing.”

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** And I kind of wish everyone would agree on a different set of words for describing those two different phenomena because they’re not really the same thing.

**Grant:** Not at all.

**John:** So, often I know exactly what I want to write, what I need to write, what I’m compelled to write. It’s just like it’s just torture to actually sit down and get into that next thing. And yet, through books and through movies, we have sort of romanticized this kind of ritualistic idea of writer’s block where it’s like this shrine to which we sacrifice ourselves. And it’s just rarely like that in my daily experience, and yet, you know, we as writers still talk about it.

**Grant:** Yeah. I think shrine is the word. Too many people sort of worship at that shrine almost. They’ll go years without writing and claim it’s just because they have writer’s block. And I think even when sort of famous writers have had it, it’s been overly mythologized.

I oftentimes think it can be just an excuse. Or as you put it, it’s more like it refers to other things like “I don’t feel like writing today” or “I have too many things happening in my life to be creative.” And I think there are so many ways to get around it, whether you’re using Ray Bradbury’s list of nouns, or a photo, or any kind of prompt. There’s a million prompt books out there that you can buy.

But just putting down one sentence on the page, I’ve never experienced a moment when that one sentence didn’t lead to a second and a third sentence. Writing is largely about beginning and establishing or creating some creative momentum. And, you know, there are throwaway words — you know, Julia Cameron, she has the technique, morning notes, where she says it advises people just to sit down and write anything, wither it’s like a list of 20 nouns or like a diary journal or diary entry, or whatever it is. Just to put the pen on the paper, write a couple of pages, throw them away and then begin on your real writing.

So there’s just so many ways to start writing that I think I would just banish the notion of writer’s block from your mind.

**John:** You have an interesting notion of muse. And so we talked about like the muse comes and like the muse sort of whispers in your ear and tells you the brilliant things to write. And like the fear for a writer is that like, oh, the muse won’t show up today. But you described it as a very different thing. You described it sort of more as a group of tiny pixies.

**Grant:** [laughs] Yeah. Well, I think, you know, the classic notion of the muse comes from Greece where they’re — you know, if you go into a museum, you’ll see a lot of, especially with old paintings, these paintings with the muse, you know, strumming her harp near the writer. And the idea with the muse is like whispering the story into the writer.

I mean, I don’t think that’s really the way the muse works. I think too often we’re waiting for that thunderbolt of inspiration to strike from the sky. And at least in my life, that kind of huge moment of inspiration, it happens just so rarely there’s no way I could build a creative process around it.

And so, yeah, per your comment about pixies, I think just putting the words down on the page and focusing on them, and I call them like little sprites that are whispering to you. Yeah, you’ll find the inspiration more likely on the page than you will from the thunderbolt in the sky.

**John:** Yeah. For me, I find it’s the combined momentum of like “Those words fit well together, okay, the whole sentence works well together, okay, that thing he’s saying leads to this thing leads to that thing.” Eventually, you know, there’s flow that happens and it’s just the right things are stacking up in the right way. But to wait for some great muse to strike you with either amazing inspiration or exactly the right words to express those ideas is rarely sort of what the real experience is like.

And, yeah, again, it’s one of those things like writer’s block where we’ve romanticized it to the degree that there is like, you know, this profound lightning bolt that comes out of nowhere that tells you what to do. And maybe you’ll get a few of those in your life where things really do happen that way, where if you’re Kevin Williamson, suddenly you go off and like in three days you write Scream because you just had like this vision for what it’s going to be.

But most writing isn’t that way. And I think we need to sort of really focus on the day-to-day of what most writing is like.

**Grant:** Yeah. And, you know, back at when you were saying like our movies always present writer’s block and contribute to that mythology, growing up, I thought that that’s all that writers did. They sat there by their typewriter with a, you know, shot of Scotch and a cup of coffee and a bunch of cigarettes and they’re wadding up paper constantly and throwing it at the waste basket. But that, for me, is more a metaphor of experimenting on the page. That’s the way I would like to interpret it instead of writer’s block.

And the fact is even when you’re having those moments where like, I don’t feel like writing today, like you mentioned, I mean we all have those moments, but so many times we have to sit down and write. And the fact that we do it in those sort of bad moments, I mean the next day, I’m always like, “Woo, thank God I wrote yesterday.” My present self thanks my past self so much because now I can like sit down and edit these words no matter how crappy they are.

**John:** There’s a movie from 2015, Trumbo, which talks about sort of this writer’s process and sort of the blacklist and like there’s all these wonderful novel things. But I see the scenes of him like, you know, in the bathtub typing with his Scotch. And even if it’s true, it’s frustrating because I just feel like there’s going to be another generation of people watching that movie thinking like, “Oh, that’s what screenwriting is. It’s sitting in a bathtub being cruel to your family while you smoke and drink Scotch.”

And maybe two or three of those things are accurate for most screenwriters, but the bathtub thing, no, most writers are not in bathtubs their whole life.

**Grant:** [laughs] Yeah. I haven’t tried the writing in the bathtub. Maybe that’ll be my next book.

**John:** Yeah. Craig and I are both big advocates of the shower, so there’s the shower for those moments where like you can’t figure out what to write next.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** Something about the shower drops your inhibitions and you start being able to make stuff happen.

**Grant:** I think if you’re looking for an a-ha moment, yeah, go to the shower. They haven’t done research on this, but I’m pretty sure more big ideas have come in the shower than anyplace else.

**John:** I’ll tell you that one of the things I found most interesting about writing prose after writing screenplays for so long is the process of writing a scene for me in a screenplay is I can just sort of sit quietly and sort of loop through the scenes so they can sort of see like, okay, this is what’s happening in the scene and I think it’s of course very rough blocks and then as they sort of keep looping through the scene, I could that, okay, like this is the personalities of people in the scene, they’re moving through the scene. There’s a few things from like this. And I can basically visualize it here as the whole scene because scenes are short, they are mostly about three minutes long. So I can visualize and hear what it’s like. And once I have that, I can sort of quickly scribble it down and then just do the better version of it.

What I found so fascinating about doing prose by comparison is like you can’t do that. A person’s buffer is not big enough to hold a whole chapter or even, you know, a page. And so I have to really tie it down to sort of like paragraph by paragraph. Like I can’t sort of build it all in my head and then put it on the paper. I actually have to create the whole thing on the paper sort of line by line. That’s been one of the biggest and most interesting changes and challenges I found switching over to prose fiction after doing screenplays for so long.

**Grant:** Yeah. Like the three-minute scene you’re writing, so much of the work of that is happening with the camera, right?

**John:** Mm-hmm. Absolutely.

**Grant:** And so in a novel like the — all the camera work has to happen on the page, is that right? Is that difference?

**John:** I think there’s a lot of it because screenplays are so minimalist, it’s just going to be like there’s a dialogue and enough scene description to let us feel what is specific and unique about that scene in those moments. So there’s such an economy to screenwriting, that to get to that prose section you have like, “Oh, I can use all the words I want. I can describe all the sentences, I can do all these things.” But it’s also all those words tend to be sort of necessary to do certain things. And so finding your way through that sentence that feels good and that it will feel good next to that next sentence and the sentence after that. Those things are just such different challenges than what I normally deal with as a screenwriter.

**Grant:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean a lot of you take scene description really seriously, so I will slave over those sentences for a long time. But, you know, books are basically entirely scene description, and that’s just a lot of words and a lot of really precise details to these words to make things make sense. That’s I think — to the degree to which my inner editor was kicking in as I was writing for Arlo Finch, was like I can’t use the word because I used that word two paragraphs ago. And so I’m going to find different words so that I’m not repeating myself. Those are the challenges that you just don’t face as a screenwriter.

**Grant:** Yeah. And I think what — as a novelist, too, you’ve got to find that right balance, you know. You got to keep the narrative moving or the suspension, the tension of it. So you just can’t go off too deeply into description, at least depending on what you’re writing, you know. It’s a tough balance to strike sometimes.

And I do things that’s being — like writing scripts is good for novelists. I think a lot of novelists have a tough time moving the action forward. And, you know, by writing a script, you’re just naturally more focused on keeping the story moving. And so going — you know, and I mean because novels in some ways, they don’t have any boundaries.

**John:** Yeah.

**Grant:** So you can go into backstory for 50 or 100 pages and some people — some writers like William Faulkner have been successful in that, but most of the time you’re not contributing to the suspense and tension of the forward moving narrative.

**John:** Agreed. I thought we’d wrap up this discussion of your book by talking about envy because you do a nice job describing it. You have a quote here. “Envy is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” And so I was looking that up online to see who the person was who said that and it turns that you can find baically that same quote with almost every other negative word stuck into the word of the place of envy. So a grudge or revenge. And so basically any negative emotion is sort of like that drinking of poison, but it’s really kind of what it feels like. I remember early in my career being really envious of David Benioff. And then I got to know him, and like he’s a great guy so I thought it was ridiculous for me to be envious of him.

And yet, I also do wonder if just a tiny bit of envy can be good motivation for a writer starting out. Like it’s somebody that helps convince them to sit down to work because if I’m not working, that other person is working because — do you feel that? Or is it only a negative thing?

**Grant:** Yeah. I think envy can be a real creativity killer. I think comparing yourself to another — you’re setting yourself up, you know, as I put it in the book. Like Jonathan Franzen was my version of your David Benioff, you know. And when I encountered him on Time Magazine as the great American novelist, you know, I did — I was deeply envious, but later I did sort of my — you know, I realized, okay, I’m projecting this on him. He doesn’t know who I am, for one. And no one is keeping score, you know. No matter if it’s Jonathan Franzen or one of my best friends down the street who’s a writer having more success, I would be the only one keeping score. So Jonathan Franzen might have 100 points, right? I have two. But no one else is keeping score, so it’s totally negative energy that I’m putting into the world and mostly on myself. I’m the one drinking the poison.

But I actually do agree with you. I think there is a type of envy that can be motivating and can make you work harder and strive for more and try to get, you know, better and practice more and more determined. I’m trying to remember the author. I think it was Harold Bloom, the literary critic that wrote a book called — where I took this idea of the anxiety of influence. And his working premise was that every generation of writers is competing against all of history. So everyone is in their way trying to rise to the top. And I think that can be a healthy type of envy, at least if you kind of keep it in balance.

**John:** Yeah. I can definitely see that. And you’re always — for me, it was that I was able to look at other writers like Kevin Williamson, you know, as I started off. I could look at them and sort of see like they have a template. I could use that as like a — I could imagine myself getting to their place because they existed and so I was grateful for them to have been out there.

And then sometimes when people are more at a peer level, I could look at sort of like, oh, David wants to go down on this path. Well, I’m going this path. I could ask myself, have I chosen the right path? And both cases, like, yeah, you know what I chose a good reasonable path. And, you know, I think it was useful to see that there are other people out there doing different things. And I could sort of compare what they were doing versus what I was doing, and eventually stopped worrying about whether they were having more fun than I was having.

**Grant:** Yeah. I gotta say, one of the main benefits of growing older as a writer is that my envy decreases. And, again, it goes back to I think some of what we said earlier. It’s like why did we get into this in the first place, you know? I mean I started writing, you know, for many different reasons especially when I was a kid. I just wanted to tell a story just for the sake of it. I didn’t get into writing to compare myself to other people and to try to one up them or do better. So again I say it is that beginner’s mind moment where I think you’ve got to go back and think about the source of your creativity and what you were — why you write and why, you know, why — because it’s a tough profession, right? Instead of like — and envy is not going to get you through the tough spots of your writing journey, you know. You’re — the source, the real reason you do it is the thing that’s going to keep you going. In the end, that’s what success is always for me. It’s not the number of books that I sell or publish. It’s about sitting down every day and making meaning of the world through my stories.

**John:** That’s a great place to leave that on. So on our podcast, every week, we give a One Cool Thing. So do you have a One Cool Thing you could share with us? Something you’ve liked. It could be a book, a movie, something out there that you want people to know about.

**Grant:** Yeah. There’s something because I’ve been so absorbed in my book and National Novel Writing Month that I’ve barely been doing anything else, so I haven’t gone to many movies or plays or listened to much new music lately. But I do want to mention I’ve been reading Leonard Cohen’s biography since he died about a year ago. And he’s influenced me a lot since I was very young. And part of the reason I’m reading it is that I decided that I’m the type of person who — I experienced a lot of different things that may be only mainly on the top surface level. And so one of the things I wanted to do more in life is go deeper.

And so this biography is called I’m Your Man. It was written just before he died or published maybe a year before. And I’m reading it and one quote that came out that I thought I’d share with people is form Leonard Cohen’s mentor and older poet called Irving Layton and he would say like, “Leonard, are you making sure you’re doing it wrong?” And I thought that that was like actually great. Like I think every once in a while artists and writers should think, maybe I should do the wrong thing here, not the right thing, because sometimes the wrong thing leads to a more interesting story.

So I’m just going to mention Leonard Cohen’s biography, I’m Your Man. And another reason I’m reading it actually is because I love his voice, like his singing voice, but also his poetic voice. And when I have a writing hero like that, I really like to sort of live in their voice. So sometimes when I’m writing something it’s almost like the persona of conversation we’re having. Like I might write something kind of through his voice.

**John:** Very cool. My One Cool Thing is called “The Last Invention of Man: How AI Might Take over the World.” It is by Max Tegmark from MIT. And so it’s not quite a short story. It’s not quite an article. It’s more sort of an imagination of sort of how a group of motivated people could use AI or the ability for AI to keep improving upon itself to, you know, becoming incredibly powerful. So I don’t agree with a lot of what’s in here and particularly like Tegmark speculates that one of the first things that this AI would do would be to basically generate a bunch of like really good CG movies and sort of basically take over Hollywood and take over the entertainment industry with computer-generated movies that made a lot of money to help fund all the rest of the innovation that they’re going to do.

I think he is underestimating sort of how challenging it is to do the creative work we’re doing and also how long the feedback cycle is to know sort of like whether that creative decision was the right one, that sort of propels you forward in time. But I still think it’s a really interesting thought experiment, so I’ll point people to “The Last Invention of Man” and you could tell what you think of that.

That is our show for this week. Grant, thank you so much for being on the episode. It was great to talk through with you. If people want to find your book, where should they buy your book?

**Grant:** Yeah. It’s in all the usual places. So, you know, online, you can go to your favorite online book retailer. I won’t recommend one. But it is published by Chronicle Books if you want to buy it there. And then yeah, it should be most bookstores I believe.

**John:** And if people want to do NaNoWriMo this year, what advice would you give them?

**Grant:** I would advise them to sign up on nanowrimo.org. I would advise them to tell themselves, I’m a writer. I would tell them to believe that you can write the 50,000 words in a month. And before you do so, though, have a strategy. Go on a time hunt and think about where you can find time in your days because that’s the number excuse I hear, I’m too busy. So all of us are too busy, but if you cut out social media, if you cut out some binge watching, if you don’t go a couple of dinner parties, if you wake up an hour early sometimes or write on your lunch break, you can write a novel in November and that’s a gift.

**John:** That’s awesome. All right. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us to listen to, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. It’s also a place you can send longer questions. But short questions, I’m on Twitter, @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Grant, you’re on Twitter, are you not?

**Grant:** I am. @grantfaulkner. F-A-U-L-K-N-E-R. Some people spell it F-A-L-K. But F-A-U-L-K.

**John:** Fantastic. That’s also a place where you can tweet at him to tell him how much you liked him on the show and that you’d purchased his book. You can find us on Apple Podcast. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Leave us your review. We’d love that. Craig just — he stays up every night just reading reviews. It’s the only thing that keeps him going. You can find the notes for this episode at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts that goes about a week after the episode airs. We have all the back episodes of Scriptnotes. Now available at scriptnotes.net. And the first 300 episodes on the Scriptnotes USB drive so that you can click a link in the show notes to get to those. Grant Faulkner, thank you so much for being on the podcast this week.

**Grant:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Good luck with your book. Good luck with the month of November which you now own. So it’s going to be busy for you.

**Grant:** I hope you’re going to write a novel with us again this year, John.

**John:** I’m not going to write a whole novel, but I’m going to finish the second Arlo Finch in November.

**Grant:** Cool.

**John:** So that’s my goal and mission.

**Grant:** Great. Well, thanks too much for having me.

**John:** Okay. Thanks, Grant. Bye.

**Grant:** Bye.

Links:

* Grant Faulkner’s [website](http://www.grantfaulkner.com) and [Wikipedia entry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grant_Faulkner).
* Pep Talks for Writers by Grant Faulkner is available [here](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1452161089/?tag=johnaugustcom-20).
* You can participate in [NaNoWriMo](https://nanowrimo.org/), too!
* [I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0061994987/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Sylvie Simmons
* [The Last Invention of Man: How AI might take over the world](http://nautil.us/issue/53/monsters/the-last-invention-of-man#comm) by Max Tegmark
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Grant Faulkner](https://twitter.com/grantfaulkner) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_321.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/should-you-give-up).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So Craig and I recorded this episode almost a week ago. And a few things have happened since then. For starters, Harvey Weinstein. You know Craig has opinions about that so we’ll talk about that in a future episode.

Another thing that happened is that if you’re a screenwriter in the WGA West, you may have got an email from me and the WGA Board inviting you to a lunch to talk over screenwriter issues and this current state of the studio system.

There are five lunches conveniently located all over town, all happening this next month. So if you’ve got the email, please RSVP for one. I’ll be at two of the lunches, will even try to get Craig to come to one of them. So you can ask him in person for his Harvey Weinstein umbrage. Now, on with the episode.

Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is episode 320 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode consist entirely of listener questions. We’ll be talking about Bulgaria, Netflix and the quote-unquote, “growth mind set.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But I thought today, we’d start with the giant question we’ve never actually addressed. Craig, do you want to tackle this big question?

**Craig:** So we’re going to present to you this question as if somebody wrote it in, but really it’s an amalgam of the question we’ve been asked a million times. And it goes a little something like this:

“ Dear John and Craig, over the past few years I’ve written a couple of scripts, I think they’re pretty good. Some folks have read them but no one is busting down my door to make them.

“My question is, at what point do I throw in the towel and decide that maybe screenwriting isn’t going to work out for me. I always think back to my high school coach saying, ‘winners never quit and quitters never win.’ But that can’t be right, can’t it? At what point am I allowed to say, ‘enough’ and move on?”

Oof, heavy one.

**John:** Oh, this is a heavy one. And I think the question kind of underlying a lot of the conversations I have, you know throughout the time we’ve been doing this, even back when I first started answering questions on IMDb for, you know, about screenwriting. It’s like I’m doing this thing but it’s not really working or doesn’t seem to be working, can I stop doing it?

The first time actually I heard it’s actually asked of me were sort of like, you know, come back to me was we did a live show and I remember being at the WGA Theater and it’s afterwards that this guy came up and it’s like, “Hey, I just want to let you know that like I listened to your podcast says, that it be okay for me like to stop screenwriting?” And at first I was just like, “Oh that’s horrible.”

[laughs]

**John:** And he said no, no, no, it’s good. Like, you know, maybe realized that like screenwriting is not a thing I actually really want to do and I feel like talking about it but I don’t actually enjoy it. And he was happy and so it made me happy. And so I thought we’d dig into this sort of all of the issues bundled up here about, you know, this aspiration of screenwriting and when you’re allowed to give up that aspiration.

**Craig:** And in doing so, we are not just standing on but embracing, hugging this third rail especially in our culture today. David Zucker, his answer to this one is always when someone says, “Should I quit?” He should say, “Yes, you should quit.” And if you ignore that advice, you’re halfway there to making it. And that’s clever but it is essentially a spin on the kind of advice you get all the time which is non-advice, apologies to David.

Because really what people are saying is, you should definitely not quit if you’re going to make it, eventually. And if you do quit, we know for sure you’re not going to make it. So the real trick is can you tell if you’re going to make it or not? Well, no. Generally speaking, you can’t. However, I think that for a lot of people, they can probably tell if they’re not going to make it.

And so part of the trick here is to have a very honest self-appraisal of the work you’re doing and the kind of response it gets and ask yourself, “Okay, if this just landed in front of me in a mix of scripts that eventually got turned into movies, would it even feel like it belonged in the same world of these other scripts? Or do I have enough evidence that actually this is not something that I can do at that level?”

**John:** Yeah, there’s a quality of self-delusion, which is so crucial to you know any new endeavor. And so whether you’re doing a startup, you’re like you’re launching a new business, a new venture, you’re some sort of tech product that you’re going to put out there, there has to be some level of self-delusion where like, “I know there’s a way I can do this.”

And at a certain point, you have to sort of stop and assess like, “Am I just still doing this because of sort of the sunk cost fallacy, like, I’ve invested this much into it emotionally and sometimes financially that I just have to keep doing it? Or can I step back and take an honest assessment of this is how far I’ve gotten, this is not where I want to be.

The hardest I think to appreciate when you’re in the middle of something is the opportunity cost of the things you’re not doing because you keep trying to do this one thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s one of the things where like, you know, if you are pursuing a career you don’t like, you’re just like, “Oh, but I could go off and do this other thing.” And okay, that’s great. You know, I can make that natural change. But with something like screenwriting, like, you might kind of like it. I mean, you might feel like it’s hard to sit down and write but like I feel like I’m doing something each time but all the time you’re spending trying to make it as a screenwriter or as an actor or a musician, there’s a lot of other careers which are so similar, that’s time could’ve been doing something else, something else you generally would enjoy and be good at.

I sat down for dinner this last week with CGP Grey who’s a great YouTuber and podcaster and he had a video out recently and one of the things he sort of touched on was this toxic idea of “follow your bliss” and basically, you know, that idea you should be delightfully happy doing whatever it is that you’re doing and it creates this system where you feel like, “Well, if I’m not doing the thing that I love most in the world, I’m a failure,” and this is sort of self-perpetuating cycle of like nothing will ever be good enough. And so–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It might be worth an assessment of like what is it that you actually enjoy? What are the sort of goals you have in your life and is screenwriting high on that list? Great, but if it’s not high on that list then maybe you do need to stop and really think about where you’re spending your hours of your day.

**Craig:** I agree. I have some practical advice for folks who are starting out or maybe are early on in their journey, and it’s to ask yourself a critical question. What is it that you are fantasizing about? If you’re fantasizing about being a writer, that is dangerous. What you should be fantasizing about is writing. The amount of times in any given year that I experienced, let’s just call it the nowness of being a screenwriter is very limited. Here and there we have a meeting where you’re a screenwriter or somebody who refers to you as a screenwriter or you get a call from somebody, but most of the time, the vast majority of the time, and I’m sure it’s the same for you, we’re writing.

It’s actually a life of action not of being a thing and I think that people think because of what they see which is the final product that you’re a thing. I am a writer. If your identity is invested in that, then it’s going to be very, very hard for you to, A, honestly asses your own work and, B, let it go if it’s not working. Because now you’ve entwined who you are with this imaginary position in the world. I don’t really feel like I have any position. What I do is write movies, but I don’t think about a position that I occupy. I think about the work I’m doing every day. So if you make it about the doing as opposed to the being, I think you’re already better off.

And the second thing I would suggest to people is that you remove any notion of romance from what it means to be a screenwriter. In reality, it is terribly unromantic. I would argue everything that we think of is being romantic, every occupation. If you actually do it, is not romantic. The joy you get from writing television scripts or movie scripts, day after day, week after week, year after year, decade after decade, is like the joy of being married for a long time which is something that you and I both know.

It is not the heady excitement of an early romance. It is not intoxication. It is that more subtle, calm satisfaction. It’s hard to describe, but it is not exciting in this fireworksy kind of way. And I think sometimes people are chasing that. If you’re comfortable with “I am writing and I don’t need it to be romantic, I just like writing” then you keep writing. And make sure that you’re supporting yourself or anyone that’s relying on you while you’re doing it however you need to, and then you’re fine and either it will or will not happen, but, for you, you’re writing and so you’re okay.

**John:** Craig, I think that noun versus verb distinction is crucial and when I see people who are so obsessed with the status or the image, the idea of themselves as a writer as opposed to the person who’s doing the writing, it’s very clear sort of where they’re at in their process. In talking about, though, that the verb is what it matters that the writing is what matters, I don’t want to, you know, have people give up on their business because writing is really hard and writing isn’t fun. It’s not fun. It is hard.

And so the day-to-day process of sitting down at the computer isn’t always a joy, and in fact it is often really difficult. Even the stuff that should be fun can be really difficult. So I’m here in London and we’re doing Big Fish and so we’re in the studio, we’re preparing to get to the stage and there are things you see as like, “Oh , I actually need to write something new here because that isn’t going to work the way we’re trying to do it now.” And so, you know, I’ll move from, like, being the writer or sitting at the table. I feel like, “Crap, I need to figure out how to write something here that’s going to make this all make sense.” And that’s — it’s pressure and it’s sort of exciting that’s also sort — it’s work and it’s not easy and so I don’t want anyone to decide like, “Well, I’m going to abandon this because I don’t like sitting down at the computer everyday to work.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s probably most writers — most working writers you’re going to talk to are going to have similar experiences there.

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t necessarily have a thrill when you start writing. However, if you can’t find a certain deep sense of, I don’t want to call it joy, but I think satisfaction is the right word.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you can’t find the deep satisfaction once you’re going —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then that’s a problem because I think that being a writer is a symptom of writing and a lot of people think that writing is a symptom of being a writer. I hear a lot of things like, “Well, I’m a writer so I have to write.”

No. No. No. I mean, look, if they killed my job tomorrow and I had to do something else, I wouldn’t eat a gun, you know? I would be bummed out because I do love writing on some sort of deep, non-romantic, satisfying level but it is not the only thing in the world. There are other things I love. There are other things you love. So it’s really about the process and finding your satisfaction with the process. No one can take that from you and in fact there are people that go to karaoke once a week without fail and they have the best time. They cannot sing at all. No one ever says, “You’re an idiot for enjoying that,” because they’re not. They’re enjoying it.

Maybe you love the process or, again, you find that deep satisfaction and you’re just not very good at it but it still gives you something good inside, keep doing it. The world will let you know one way or another if money is coming, but if it’s not and you’re enjoying it fine. If there is something else you can do that is as satisfying where you will be rewarded more, then it’s okay to go do that.

**John:** I completely agree. So there’s a bunch of little questions that came in that are about the same topics, so I thought we’d fold them into this discussion. Let’s start with Michael from LA who writes, “What’s your opinion on aspiring screenwriters who are not yet getting paid as a writer saying, quote, ‘I’m a writer or I’m a screenwriter,’ in conversation with a person not familiar with their occupation, without the aspiring modifiers/disclaimer?”

Craig, what do you think of aspiring writers saying I’m a screenwriter?

**Craig:** It’s a tough one. I remember never doing that. If somebody would say “What are you doing?” then I’d say, “Well, this is my job but I’m working on a screenplay.” I would say that because I felt like it was a little pretentious in the most specific form of that word like “I was pretending” in that sense. You know, you can say you’re a painter but if you’re just painting on your own and no one is asking you to paint anything for them, you’re kind of a painter, but not the way people think of painters.

And so it’s a little bit — I mean, look, in the end it really is all about intent. If you are humble and you acknowledge where you are and you’re not trying to impress somebody or put one over on them or puff yourself up, then it’s okay. But if you feel like you need to say this to impress other people or to impress yourself, then I think you have a noun-verb problem.

**John:** Yeah, the noun-verb is the great distinction there, so I would always say identify yourself by your day job and then you can talk about that you’re also writing and then it’s fine to sort of transition the conversation about the writing that you’re doing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When I talk to people at conferences and stuff, I will often ask like what are you writing because I’ll assume like if they’re here they’re probably a screenwriter and like it’s a natural thing to start talking about the work rather than sort of like “What have you actually gotten produced?”

**Craig:** I remember when I was first out in Los Angeles. I was 21 and you remember the 21 parties, John, when you were 21 in Los Angeles?

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** You’d end up in like someone’s bad apartment, like, jammed onto their balcony. Everyone drinking cheap beer and everyone is 21 and everyone is just reeking of desperation. Everyone is trying to get into this business and we’re all feeling each other out and everything. It’s a weird time. And I met this guy, I was just chitchatting with him and, you know, I didn’t know what he did. I don’t know — he didn’t know what I did and then someone else came over and then they asked this guy, “So what do you do?” And he said, “I’m a successful screenwriter.”

And I mean, I couldn’t believe it and I thought “If he is a successful screenwriter, what’s wrong with him? How do you become a successful screenwriter if you’re so bad at words that you would think that would be a good answer to that question?” [laughs] So then later I looked him up and no, he wasn’t. And, you know, it took me a while to kind of get over the 21-year-old umbrage into the more mellow middle age umbrage which was — not even umbrage, more, honestly, pity. You’re scared, you’re insecure, and you’re desperate for people to know that once somebody paid you 10 grand to do something, but it’s not a good look.

**John:** No. Not a good look at all. Ryan has a question which is “I have one issue that grinds my ears. Several times Craig has talked about the potential success of aspiring screenwriters in terms of quote, ‘having it or not having it.’ I think this is a toxic idea. I think the skills that have made you and Craig successful screenwriters can be learned. This is the difference between the growth mindset that says that skills, traits, intelligence are not fixed but are instead subject to be learned through effort, experience and training versus the fixed mindset which suggest that skills and traits are innate, we are just born with them. Craig, do you want to tackle the growth mindset?

**Craig:** Yeah, I feel like Ryan is script-splaining to us here. [laughs] You know, he’s explaining to us why we’re successful like your theory of why you’re successful is not at all correct actually. Oh, John, you know, I’m so woke.

**John:** Yeah, I’m very woke. Yeah.

**Craig:** John, I’m so woke. Oh my god, I’m the wokest. Right, so Ryan, I think actually what you’re suggesting is the toxic idea. Now, this should not be shocking to you. You probably knew this was coming, but it’s okay that we disagree. Here’s where I think you’re going wrong. You’re kind of engaging in the either-or fallacy. You’re saying, “Look, it’s not that you have it or don’t have it. It’s then you — and that the skills, traits and talent aren’t fixed, instead you learn them through effort and experience in training.” And so it’s that or the fixed mindset, and what I say is you have to have both. This is the worst news of all really. I believe that, of course, there is an innate talent to any form of artistic expression. I can’t necessarily prove this to you other than to say that if you’ve ever sat in a class in 3rd grade and everyone is asked to draw a picture of a clown, one kid’s clown is going to be fricking awesome and then one kind’s clown is going to, and mine, is going to look like this pathetic collection of squiggles to the extent that people might wonder if perhaps this 9-year-old child had suffered a stroke in the middle of it, okay?

There is a talent to artistic expression. It is innate. It is not in of itself enough. And when it comes to writing which is something that is influenced repeatedly by an expanding vocabulary and an expanding philosophy and an expansion of your human experience, absolutely you begin to grow as a writer. Effort and training and learning lessons and falling down and getting up and avoiding pitfalls because you’ve fallen into the pits, all part of it. But writing apparently is the one area where people say, “Unlike athletes or painters or singers, you folks, you just — you can grind your way to this,” and no, not even remotely.

Why — John, do you think it’s because everyone can write something so is that the confusion?

**John:** I think that is, because if you look at the other examples you listed so a singer and athlete, there’s a physical quality to them that is different than other people. So, you know, singers may have these remarkable vocal abilities that could be sort of how they are born and this is the reason why singing can run in the families. There’s — if you look at, you know, athletes, sometimes if it’s a case like basketball like height is a true advantage.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there’s also marathon runners or sprinters. They’re just built in a certain way that is incredibly helpful for the sport that they’re trying to do, but at no point are we ever expecting like, oh, that person is always going to be that fast. He doesn’t need coaching. He doesn’t need any sort of training. He doesn’t any sort of —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Practice to do that stuff like, in fact, all we do if we talk about athletes is practice and training. And so while, yes, I think, you know, the practice of writing and the constant feedback can improve a person’s writing, and I’ve seen it time and time again. There’s also a reality check of, like, there are some people who are not going to be fantastic writers, and that doesn’t mean we should give up on them or sort of, you know, move away from them but to acknowledge that like there are some people for whom writing comes naturally and they can become better. And these people for whom writing is really a struggle and they can get better, but they’re probably not going to ever get up to the level of the people who is really great for. One of the other–

**Craig:** Terrible. You know, it’s okay to say these things.

**John:** Yeah, one of the things that I think is interesting about screenwriting as opposed to writing novels or other works is that because screenwriting is just this intermediate step towards making a movie, it’s conceivable to be a person who is, like, pretty good at throwing things on the page that will ultimately become a movie. There’s a lot of sort of writer-directors who are kind of really directors who are not fantastic writers and they made stuff happen and so there’s — you see like a whole class of people who are moving into screenwriting not really with the goals of, you know, writing the best thing on the page possible but just do like “I want to make a movie” and that that weird transitional thing is what’s odd about the career that we’ve chosen.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that there is a flipside to what Ryan is suggesting, and I find it a little troubling, and that is that if what he’s saying is true then to all the thousands of people that are working very, very hard to try and sell screenplays and become professional screenwriters, well, they’re just not working hard enough apparently or they haven’t taken the right class or they haven’t read the right book. The point is there’s a thing to do and when they do that thing then they too will be like you, John. I think that that’s a rough thing to say to those people, because I think they’re trying incredibly hard.

I think that there is an industry of people who want them to believe what Ryan is saying: that they’re one book away, they’re one seminar away and there are quite a lot of film schools that are peddling the same thing. But the fact is that you and I, both, and honestly, anyone that’s every read any screenplays has certainly come across a screenplay where you think, right, this person should not be doing this at all. And there is no version where someone can come along like Henry Higgins and get this Eliza Doolittle to suddenly be something that she wasn’t in the beginning, because it’s not about learning how to pronounce your Hs and not go “aw.” It’s talent. Talent is a thing. It’s okay.

People — it’s one of the best parts of life. I am fascinated when I meet people who have these talents for things. I mean, you and I both worked with musicians. When I sit with Jeanine Tesori and I watch what she does on the piano, and I watch how her mind works, and I watch how she is doing a different kind of — a different kind of writing in her mind with a different grammar and when she does these things, I just think what a gift that I get to be here and watch it because in a million years I couldn’t do it. And I’m a musical person, but she’s got something else and it was certainly there from the start. How could it not have been?

**John:** But saying that it was there from the start does not negate that she’s not spent years of doing this and–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Learning this and teaching herself, and so it is both but there was something there to start with, I fundamentally believe.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely.

**John:** A question from Nate in LA. He writes, I moved to LA two years ago. In that time, I’ve managed to form genuine friendships with a handful of professional writers whose work I respect and whose careers I admire. So my question is, is there a reasonable way to ask them to read my work? These people know that I hope to write for TV, but so far none of them have offered to read my scripts or pass them along to agents or managers. I don’t want to soil the friendships by asking them point blank to do this, but, at the same time, I realized it’s a business of who you know and I actually know people who are situated where I would like to be someday. Do you have any suggestions for tactful and non-friendship risking ways of asking them for help with my career, or should I just keep things casual and wait for it to happen organically?

**Craig:** Well, this is a good question. When you’re talking about writers — so most writers aren’t going to be able to hire you to write something because they’re writing things, you know, so it’s a slightly different thing than if you were to say, you know, ask somebody whose job is to hire people or represent writers and so on and so forth. I think if you’re going to ask a writer, one way you could always say is, “Hey, I would love for you to read this, but I know what that means and I know nobody wants to read anything and I respect that because I don’t either.”

“So I’ll tell you what? I’d love to give you five pages, and you are allowed to just — that’s it. I’m not going to bother you about it. I’m literally going to give you five pages and I will never mention it again. Either you are going to come back to me and say “I want to read the rest of it” or you are going to come back to me and say “I’m not — I don’t want to read the rest of it but here’s what I think about the five pages” or you’ll never mention it again or you’ll never read it. I’m okay with that, but would you be okay with that deal?” I think most people would say, “Yeah, I’d be okay with that.”

**John:** There’s an episode in the bonus episodes of scriptnotes.net where I sit down and talk to Drew Goddard and talk through sort of how he kind of got started and it sounds sort of like what Nate was doing. And so Drew had been working as a PA on films shooting in New Mexico. He moved to Los Angeles. He didn’t really know anybody, but sort of started sort of picking up friendships with people, started hosting game nights with other writers and eventually people started reading him and eventually said like, “Hey, why don’t you come in and we can see if we can get you staffed on this show.”

It organically did happen, but it felt like what was crucial was he was never pushing it. And I think Nate has a good sense of like not wanting to push it or ruin it, but at the same time you can’t sit back forever and like not–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, not put it out there as a thing that could happen. The way you described it, Craig, is a term we coined around the lunch table — you’re sort of doing a pre-traction where like in saying — you’re actually retracting it as you’re saying it like, you know, “I know this is really a bad idea but” — or “I know it’s weird for me to be putting this out there but if you would ever like to read something I’d love to hear your feedback on it.” That’s totally fine and fair and natural to do.

So Nate, I think you’re right in the right spot in terms of figuring out how much to push and how much to sit back.

**Craig:** Certainly the tenor of Nate’s question is a good sign.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So he seems to be aware of what other people might be thinking or feeling, which is it turns out as one of the talents of being a writer. And I would say also, Nate, that when you have a relationship with somebody that is based on more than you want something or they want something or what they do for a job or what you do for a job but rather you’ve worked on something together or you have helped them or anything, then in that context things are different, because most people are decent. I believe that. And most people want to help somebody, and if you’ve been a good guy then I think there is — you know, there is a reason that people might go, “Yeah, you know what? You’re a good guy. Sure. Sure.” Not always but I think, yeah, sure.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Do you want to take this last question from this batch? This is Chaz from Glasgow.

**Craig:** Right, so Chaz from Glasgow says, “I’ve recently started writing everyday for the first time in a number of years. I’ve got a degree in scriptwriting and filmmaking, but in the six years since I completed my course I’ve bouncing from job to job and can’t seem to hold one down. I also have a criminal record so I can’t enter the United States. But anyway” — this is a great transition. But anyway enough about that.

“Is there much of a point in continuing screenwriting with my limited experience and general F-ed upness? I can imagine why no studio would want anything to do with me.” Well, Chaz is in a little bit of a bind here. What do you think, John?

**John:** Chaz shouldn’t sell himself short in terms of like “No studio would want to deal with me.” I think some people might find it fascinating that you have a criminal record. But I think he raises a good point overall. It’s like, if he’s in Glasgow, it sounds like it’s going to be hard for him to travel to the US. If he’s serious about filmmaking, he needs to be looking for stuff he can do in Scotland and stuff he can do in Europe so that it’s actually a possible thing.

I would also just say though, if he’s writing every day and he seems to generally enjoy writing, write some things that are not movies so you can actually see those things come to light. Like, write a book. Write short stories. Write something else that’s not movies if you’re really concerned that movies or TV are not going to be a thing that’s going to be possible for you based on what’s happened in your life and the challenge of trying to get outside of Scotland.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all great advice. I mean, look, here’s the good news, Chaz, writing is writing, right? So, your script can enter the United States and a good script is a good script. People will want it. Here’s what concerns me a little bit. You say that you’ve been bouncing from job to job and can’t seem to hold one down. And it doesn’t sound like you’re saying you’re bouncing from screenwriting job to screenwriting job. You’re bouncing from regular job to regular job, and can’t seem to hold one down.

Now, there may be other things going on in your life here that are causing some distress or keeping you kind of on a stable path. As it turns out, the only way to be a consistent, successful writer is to live a very — well, just kind of a rigid life. It requires a certain stable, patterned, consistent nose to the grindstone, disciplined life. And if you have trouble living that way, it’s going to be difficult to be a screenwriter at the very least. There are other kinds of writing that can be done by people who aren’t quite as patterned and disciplined in their daily work. But screenwriting, a bit tougher. Because unlike novels where it’s just you and your mind and you go as you wish, in screenwriting, you’re constantly being held accountable to what will ultimately be a crew of many hundreds of people as well as a studio chockfull of employees and then, ultimately, audiences.

So, I’m not sure, based on what you’re saying here, that screenwriting is necessarily the most compatible thing for you. But if you’re really good at it, you should just keep doing it. That’s the thing. The only other thing I’d mention to you is you don’t say what the crime is, just that you have a criminal record. Some crimes are — you know, you’ve paid your debt to society, you have a record, people understand and they evaluate your script without putting it in the context of your past.

There are other crimes that are a little more difficult. There are certain crimes that people consider, I think rightly, to be horrible. And if you have committed one of those, then people may be very reluctant to get into business with you. The thing about show business is it’s a very public business. So they don’t necessarily want, you know, a murderer. I’m not suggesting that that’s what you’ve done, Chaz. But I think, Chaz, I think you know what I’m talking about, the kind of crimes I’m talking about. I think you get it. But, no, if you were involved in a breaking and entering 10 years ago, I don’t think that’s an issue.

**John:** I agree with you. Craig, I do want to push back about sort of like “Writers have to have a stable life so they can have sort of a steady way of getting those words done every week.” I feel like I know a fair number of writers who don’t have a particularly stable life, who are the sort of like catch-as-catch-canning and like they will bunker down and get a bunch of stuff done and then they’ll just sort of go off the reservation for some weeks.

And I would say, yes, it’s more challenging to be a screenwriter that way because people are kind of counting on you a little bit more. But there’s a lot of kind of not particularly stable people who do the kinds of jobs that we do. So, I would try and figure out sort of what percentage of the writers I know I would say like, “Oh, their life is really well put together.”

**Craig:** Well, maybe I’ll shape it a little bit here and I don’t know if this will bring you closer to where I’m thinking or not, but it’s not so much their lives have to be stable, in a sense that they have healthy, stable relationships with another person like a partner in their home, or that they’re well dressed, or that they don’t drink too much, none of that. What I’m really saying is the writing part of their life is somewhat stable, that they get the writing done.

**John:** Yeah. Okay. That’s fair. And probably more so in screenwriting than in like sort of the classic person who goes off and — the songwriter can have a very chaotic life because there’s not that expectation of like, every day, I have to generate like this many verses. That can be just you can get a bunch of stuff done and then not do it again for a year.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The screenwriting is — I guess because you’re going to be writing such long documents that if you are not able to actually sit down and finish a long document, it won’t ever happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s kind of what I’m getting at.

**John:** Cool. All right, some other questions that came in that we might tackle.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Josh from Albuquerque writes, “I have a question regarding the Paramount Decree which has been discussed a few times in recent episodes. How can Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon act as producers, distributors, and exhibitors while major Hollywood studios cannot? I understand the simple legal answer is that they are not, quote-unquote, ‘theaters.’ However, could you see a time in the next decade when streaming services become so dominant that the Supreme Court rules as an antitrust sort of Netflix Decree, or is the current entertainment landscape so broad, from movies to TV, videogames, YouTube, that we’ll never see another monopolization like there was during the Golden Age?”

**Craig:** Well, Josh, I don’t think that this is going to happen with, say, an antitrust Netflix Decree kind of thing, and here’s why. The whole point of the Paramount Decree was there are a bunch of theaters in the United States, they are physical spaces. And if the studios own those theaters, then no other studio can really come into be because a studio requires a theater to show its product and all the theaters are owned by these companies. A theater can’t exist just by showing a new company’s films because there won’t be enough. So, essentially, it was an anti-competitive practice.

None of that really applies to the internet, because there is an unlimited distribution space. Netflix is incredibly popular because people like their shows and certainly, there are a number of large players out there, all of which are owned by multinational conglomerates. But, someone can come along and start showing other movies on their platform if they can afford to license them and distribute them, and there is no physical space that they’re being locked out of.

Where it gets a little dicey is if, say, Warner Bros. which owns HBO said, “The only place we’re ever going to put any Warner Bros. movies is on HBO.” Then you could say, “Well, HBO has an unfair advantage.” The problem though is that other movie studios are going to put all their movies on these other things and Warner Bros. is going to start losing money because other people want Warner Bros. movies on platforms other than HBO.

So it does seem like right now, the kind of vibe is that things get spread around. The original content on Netflix just being on Netflix I don’t think is enough, frankly, for an antitrust Netflix Decree.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s worth stepping back and taking a look at — so the Paramount Decree, you had limited physical spaces where those movies could be shown and that kind of vertical integration made it impossible for some — for a movie to break in to those spaces.

If you look at sort of how FinCEN worked in television where studios could not own networks and so that there had to be some difference of relationship, that all broke down — there was a sense of, like, there was limited space out there because we were on the airwaves, and so there could only be a certain number of channels. That sort of all fell away as cable rose.

And Josh’s question points out like, you know, Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon act as producers, distributors, and exhibitors, well, really, so does Disney. I mean, Disney has its own channels that it’s putting stuff through. It’s already murkier than that. Where I think the interesting thing that’s going to happen down the road is the question of our antitrust laws, our ideas of monopolies just are from a very different era.

And so, if you look at the Amazons and sort of like how powerful they are and how much they can sort of use their incredible dominance in one area just to sort of move into another area into another area, that could become a factor as we look at media things down the road. But I don’t think it’s something that’s going to happen anytime soon.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the test basically is not whether or not you’re a monopoly. Antitrust laws do not proscribe monopolies as far as I understand them. What they do is say “You cannot be anti-competitive.” So, if you’re a monopoly but you’re doing nothing to stifle the natural birth of new competition, I think you’re okay.

So, Microsoft, for instance, was a monopoly. They were the operating system monopoly, essentially. They vanquished Apple. And so, now, Windows was by far the dominant operating system. And that was okay until they created a new product that was a browser. And they weren’t the first browser. There was an incredibly popular browser out there called Mozilla which became Firefox and that was the dominant browser in the market. And then, Microsoft said, “You know what? Let’s leverage the monopoly we have on operating systems and force people — not really force them, but basically channel them towards our new browser called Explorer.” And that’s called bundling. And that got them into hot water.

If Amazon starts doing things like that or if Netflix starts doing things like that, then, yeah, definitely they’ll catch the eye of the Feds. Maybe not in this administration, but, you know, in a reasonable one. [laughs]

**John:** And the other thing to look for is classically in the US, antitrust concerns come over like whether prices are rising for consumers, and which seem to be a very natural way to sort of look at it. A weird thing that happened though is you look at Amazon’s dominance in e-books, and so, Amazon with the Kindle and controlling a vast percentage of the digital market there. When Apple came in with iBooks, really, it was Apple who was the one who got slammed by unfair —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — business practices because they cut deals with the publishers. Zooming out, it looks like the energy was misplaced by our regulators because you actually want competition and they were slammed for basically trying to create competition. So, that’s another kind of situation where I could see down the road these giant media companies jockeying for space, that kind of friction could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, price-fixing is another big part of this sort of thing. But, I think, Josh, I think they’re kind of in safe — they’re in safe places right now.

We’ve got something here from Mike in London who writes, “I’m working on a script at the moment where there are lots of characters who feature more prominently later on in the film, but I also want to make sure that they are in earlier scenes. These earlier scenes include lots of people like weddings or other mass gatherings, but I find that putting them all in action lines pulls focus a little bit. There are only so many times I can write ‘Bob and Julie are also here. You’ll hear more about them later.’ And then, Bob and Julie are also present. So, for times like this, would it be acceptable to include some kind of note that simply says, ‘X character is present in scenes X, Y, and Z’? I just feel it would make it a little clearer.”

“Also, there are some specific notes I have regarding costumes and how they should deteriorate as the play goes on. Would something like this be okay to write in some kind of note section at the start of the script? I guess my questions both revolve around notes and whether it’s okay to include them or whether it steps on too many toes and I should just assume they’re unnecessary.”

John?

**John:** It’s a very good question and I’ve definitely been in a situation where there’s characters who become important later on but they would have been in earlier scenes. I don’t have sort of one great blanket answer for you. I would say most movies do not find that they need to do this kind of thing where there’s sort of a meta note outside of the script that sort of says like, “These characters are in these things.”

But, if what you’re trying to do, it is just really clunky and sort of like include them in every scene or like call them out in every scene, then I have done it in my own scripts. Like, a little sort of bracketed note to sort of say like, “This is a meta note. Like, these characters are in the next seven scenes or like they’re in all the scenes that take place here, but I’m not going to single them out each time.” I would never say the “I’m”. But like, “The viewer will see these people and they’re going to become important later on.” That’s entirely fair.

This thing about costumes deteriorating, my instinct would be to just clock it along the way so that three scenes in, have some reason to say that his thing has gotten worse.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That his jacket is falling apart. But I wouldn’t sort of bring it out because that does feel too much like you’re just having a sidebar with the wardrobe department.

**Craig:** Correct. You don’t want to feel like you are having sidebars really mostly because it’s taking people out of the world of the movie, and you’re trying to show them a movie with your words. I wonder how frequently these characters need to be in these scenes.

What’s catching me a little bit is that you’re saying they’re in these scenes, but they feature prominently later on. Well, what are they doing in these scenes exactly? If they’re just passing by in the background, then, I think it’s fair to just say, “In the first time, in the background we’ll see so and so. We will see them later or we’ll hear more about them later,” like you say, and then just not mention them again because if you’re not making a point of looking at them in these subsequent scenes, do they even need to be there at all?

If you are going to put the camera on them, then there should be a reason that the camera is on them. If they’re literally just moving like background artists — and I’m just kind of wondering if we’ll even notice them at all. So I would suggest to you that maybe for some of these areas, you may have a decision to make about whether you really need them there or not. And if you do and you want the camera on them, give me a purpose for that camera there.

Lastly, I would say the one thing you should never worry about is stepping on too many toes. It’s your script, step away.

**John:** Yeah. I think one of the things we’re hitting on here is that Mike is looking at his script as being the blueprint. And like, if this were a blueprint for building a building, you cannot leave out those incredibly important like rafters and girders. But this is still like a reading document. So, make sure that it reads naturally and cleanly.

And so, in doing so, you may leave out some details that will become important for the AD later on, but you have to have trust and faith that, like, those other professionals who are going to be working on actually making this movie, they’ll have those conversations and figure out like, “Oh, do we want those characters in that scene?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, you don’t have to sort of worry about like everything being incredibly logic’d out at this stage.

**Craig:** Yeah, and you’re right. If you have this note that you think is important, save it, wait for the green light, then send it to the production staff.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And then they’ll know.

**John:** Ben in Colorado writes, “A question for John. In the writing and editing Scriptnotes, Craig mentions the dangers of auteurism in modern filmmaking. As someone who’s worked successfully with one of the great modern auteurs in Tim Burton, what is your experience with auteurism as a very successful screenwriter?” And I would say you also have worked with some filmmakers who have a very distinct style, so like, you know, working on the Zucker brothers movies.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like that’s a person who has a very distinct style.

**Craig:** Or Todd Phillips, same thing.

**John:** Todd Phillips, another great choice. I would say one of the remarkable advantages of coming in, working with somebody who has a very distinct style and a very distinct cannon of work is that you can come in with a sense of like “These are the things that are going to be interesting to him, and these are the things where I know he can sort of knock this stuff out of the park.” And so that is a great luxury to sort of come in with a set of expectations that you can sort of push beyond. And so, you know, the first time I’m sitting down to write I guess Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is the first new thing I’ve written for Tim, I can approach that meeting with like, “Okay, these are some things I think he’s going to really respond to just based on like all the other movies of his that I’ve seen.” And that is really, really helpful.

Auteursim as a general concept, for me, is just — it can be frustrating to see people write about auteurs as if everything they’ve done is entirely through their work and that there really were no other people involved in those things. That sense of like it’s just of this one sole creator behind stuff. And yet, I would say the process, at least for me working with Tim Burton movies, has been really great because you have a director who knows very much what he wants.

**Craig:** It feels sometimes that people confuse auteurism as it was originally imagined, meaning the director is the single creative authorship voice behind a movie with directors who have distinct styles.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Having a distinct style doesn’t necessarily make you an auteur, particularly when you’re a director that’s not writing at all. Now, if you’re a director that writes and directs your own material, I think you can start to make arguments about this. But if you have a distinct style, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re an auteur per se.

But in talking about directors who do have a specific style, I couldn’t agree more with John. There is such a relief, a burden lifted, when you’re sitting with a director whose style is unique to that person enough that when they say “That’s not going to work but this will” you don’t have to wonder if they’re right or not. They’re right because they’re making — because Todd Phillips is making a Todd Phillips movie and David Zucker is making a David Zucker movie.

There are directors that make all sorts of different kinds of movies and they don’t have this really clear distinct sharp style which is perfectly fine. Some of my favorite directors are like that. But then when they say, well, I’m not sure about this, I’m not sure about that, well, okay, let’s discuss it. But when somebody with a distinct style like Tim Burton says, “That is not — I don’t think that’s good for me at all,” there’s really no argument because what he’s saying is that’s not part of the Tim Burton thing. So then you’d be Tim Burton-splaining to Tim Burton which is just what’s the point, right? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But then the greatest part is when they’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s going to work.” You think to yourself, “It’s going to work.”

**John:** One of the greatest moments in any pre-production I’ve done with Tim is I’ll go into his office and I’ll see like tacked upon on all the walls are watercolors of like different characters and the different stuff, the, you know, different sets. And it’s like, oh, okay, this has been processed through his brain. He knows how to do all this. This is going to be great. This is — there’s a plan for this. Like this is all making sense.

And I agree with you that sometimes you talk with an author who has a whole bunch different styles and those first, you know, three weeks of meetings with them is basically them figuring out sort of like what kind of movie they’re making in general.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s great. That’s can be a part of the process, but, you know, when you have somebody who has a very distinctive voice and style, you can skip past along that and that’s incredibly helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean the flipside of course is that directors like that often as much as you love them and love working with them, you know that okay, well, this material — no, like you write things and you will, okay, the one person I know I cannot give this to is Tim Burton, he’ll hate it and it’s not at all what he does. Whereas I know some directors who I think “I bet you could probably direct anything assuming you wanted to, there’s nothing I would limit from you.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s — so I — you know, I never want to feel like I’m over praising the stylist, the unique stylist in any way that diminishes the other directors because I think I just — anybody that does a good job directing is a little miracle for me and so I’m just happy to know them all.

**John:** I agree. All right, last question comes from Andreas in Norway. He writes, “I’ve seen quite a lot of different takes about how a car chase is written especially in terms of formatting choices and the layout of the structure. For example, keeping the exterior to simply read ‘road’ and using terms of like ‘on a Land Rover’ or ‘on the Ford’ to shift the focus of the reader. I’d like to hear your guys’ takes on writing car chases.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean look — and car chases are like any other action sequence in that what you’re describing ultimately needs to be focused through the lens of humans making decisions and the world impacting them. So you’re making a chase and you’re trying to define it by what the character behind each wheel is thinking and doing. And then if a boulder rolls into the road, obviously you need to call that out as well. But “on the Land Rover,” “on the Ford,” “behind this,” “inside of this,” all that punchy kind of vibrant kinetic language I think is a perfectly good way to move around. You certainly don’t want to be languid. Your writing kind of needs to match the vibe of the score you would imagine playing under your scene.

**John:** One of the questions Andreas is trying to ask there is like, “Do I have to go INT/EXT for every time I go inside and outside of the car?” And that will kill you if you try to do that too much.

**Craig:** Oh god, the worst. The worst.

**John:** And so if every other line is a new INT or EXT, then people stop reading. So that’s where you use — getting down to single lines, getting to the “on the Ford”s. You know, let it feel like just the flow of what it would actually look like on the screen, but don’t get trapped inside of where we’re at in cars. It’s going to be intercut anyways. So just feel that energy as you’re writing the scene.

**Craig:** Well, that’s exactly the point. Look, the whole purpose of interior and exterior is not to satisfy some sort of format god in the sky. It’s there to help production understand what kind of lights are we using, because is it night or is it day, are we inside or are we outside, all that stuff, right? Once you establish the car chase, which is certainly going to occur in real time. You know, it’s not like — people don’t montage a car chase over the course of a day and a night. It would be kind of cool, I suppose, if they did. But typical car chase takes place in roughly real time in a movie. So once you establish “exterior,” so we’re not car chasing inside, which has happened for instance in the Blues Brothers, and what time of day it is, you’re done. You gave them the information they need. And now, what they really need to know is, “Okay, what car am I looking at and am I inside of it or outside of it while you’re describing things so that I get a sense of the geography and the movement?” Simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. I said the last thing was the last question, but in this setup, I said Bulgaria, so I wanted to get to this–

**Craig:** You promised us Bulgaria, John. So Peter in Bulgaria did write in to say, I’m a white male from Bulgaria, the poorest country in the EU. Am I a diverse writer?

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. I mean, look, this whole diverse writer thing, no, on one hand, if you’re talking about programs that are targeted to diverse writers in the United States, we’re not talking about white men from Bulgaria. That’s not to say that being in white man in Bulgaria is easy or that, frankly, being a human being anywhere isn’t easy because everybody’s got their own story and some people have it great and some people don’t. But specifically speaking for those programs, no. They’re not talking about white men from Bulgaria.

However, in the larger sense of things, obviously, your unique situation helps inform who you are and makes you interesting, certainly more interesting than a white male from Sherman Oaks, California. Lastly, I would say to you, Peter, don’t worry about that because the deal is this: people get wrapped up in this stuff and they forget that the reason that these programs exist is because the numbers are stark and clear. More white males are working at these jobs than not white males. So if you’re worried about the statistics, well, they’re still in your favor I guess is how I would put it as a white male. They’re still out of whack. I think people get really hung up on this stuff.

And I understand it, we’ve talked about it before from an emotional level. You never want to feel like you’re being judged for your race. Ironically, that’s exactly what’s going on regardless and that’s what some of these programs are trying to combat. So don’t get hung up on it, Peter in Bulgaria. The thing that you should be hung up on is writing something terrific. There is nothing that will stop a wonderful script, nothing. It continues to be, and I believe always has been, the single best way to get into the entertainment business.

**John:** Absolutely. Last bit is just actually follow-up. So in the previous episode, we talked about Exposition News as Craig called it. This is where you turn — there’s a cliché of turning on the TV to find it playing exactly the news story you needed at the moment. And so I was pretty sure that other shows had — or maybe said call it out as a thing and of course they did and of course our listeners are the best listeners. So they point to at least four examples of this being done. So we’re going to slice in at the end of the episode some examples of this. So, from Arrested Development, from Community, from The Simpsons, and from Shaun of the Dead. So you’ll hear snippets of how other shows have tackled that trope.

**Craig:** I think my favorite of them was the Arrested Development one because it was so awkward. [laughs] Loved it.

**John:** It goes on and on, yeah.

**Craig:** I just loved it.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a thing that has actually been out for a while, but I had not known about it until I listened and clicked through a different story. So the BBC added Nigerian Pidgin as one of the languages that they have stories in on their website. And so, then I fell down a deep rabbit hole of like figuring out, like, what is Nigerian Pidgin.

And so, Nigerian Pidgin is a form of English but it’s not quite English, that’s spoken in that portion of Africa and linguists could argue whether it’s a Creole or a Pidgin because there are second generations that are speaking it. It’s still sort of this being formed kind of language. But it’s really fascinating, so I’ll put a link in the show notes to the BBC site for Pidgin.

And you can see the stories and like, you look at it, it’s like, “Oh, that’s English,” and then you’re like, “Wait, no, that’s not quite English.” You can sort of understand it, but some verbs are just working very differently. I thought it was fantastic and I thought it was, you know — as you read more about sort of like how they figured out how they were going to do it and how to sort of formalize and standardize some things that are still very nascent, just hats off to the BBC for this sort of new venture into Pidgin.

**Craig:** I love that word. I’ve always loved that word, Pidgin. When I was a kid, I had a little paperback book — I think I might have even gotten it from the Scholastic Book Club — that would teach you Hawaiian Pidgin. That was the first Pidgin I had heard about and the first time someone had said that to me, of course I thought it was pigeon like the bird. And in my mind still, it’s sort of pigeon like the bird.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they–

**John:** Two different words.

**Craig:** And it eternally shall be.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I have a related One Cool Thing. How odd. My One Cool Thing is a real-life Babel fish. So, if you’re a fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which you should be, then you know about Douglas Adams’ famous science fiction fantasy invention, the Babel fish, which solved this really annoying problem that Star Trek and other shows have solved by simply ignoring which is, why does everybody talk English across the galaxy? And his solution was this tiny little fish that you would stick in your ear and it would just automatically translate things back and forth. Wonderful.

Well, Google — you’ve heard of this small company — they have come up with these things — well, I mean, they kind of ripped them off from the Apple ear buds, you know, the new AirPod things where, okay, they’ve taken the headphone jack out of their new Pixel phone. But their little ear bud things connect to it and they flawlessly use Google Translate. So the idea is you hold your phone up, right, and someone is speaking in Spanish, your phone hears it, does a Google Translate on the fly and pipes that into your ear.

And as we have discussed before, Google Translate has sort of taken these huge leaps because of the new way that they’re processing it with the neural net. And right now, they have 40 different languages. It’s pretty bananas. And you can presume that if this works even okay, that means in 10 years, it’s going to be fricking awesome and everywhere, and then, then the world gets really interesting.

**John:** Yeah. That really will make a huge difference, because there definitely — like, you know, this last year, that I was living in Europe. You know, so in France, we can speak French and it was fine and it was easy. And then, you know, Germany, everybody speaks English okay. Even Athens, everyone speaks English. But then as we made our way out of central Greece and into the mountains, there were definitely some times where it’s like, wow, we were just having to communicate on really basic levels.

I remember going into a restaurant and trying to sort of start and they’re like, “No, no. Stop, stop, stop,” and then they hold up their phone and like they’re calling the one guy in town who can speak English, who then runs in and is like, “Oh, hi. Let me help you.” To be able to move past that I think will be fantastic. And there’s definitely, you know, amazing opportunities for letting people venture deeper into places where there’s not going to be anybody who could speak the same language.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, that’s the key. It’s when we get rid of the language barrier finally, then a lot, I think, of the misery of separation begins to go away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not all of it, mind you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, I still hear people speaking English and saying insanely awful things.

**John:** Yeah. Weirdly, on a daily basis we’re hearing that.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, sometimes at the highest levels. But I think it would help a lot and it would — look, more communication is only a good thing, I think. So this is an exciting thing. And, you know, unfortunately, it looks like it is only available on their phone, which, mind you, could be a possible antitrust thing if it gets big enough. Like, no, it’s going to be everywhere, pal. So let’s see what happens.

**John:** That sounds very exciting. Before we wrap up, I want to make sure that we’ve drawn a good enough bow around the — the fundamental question of the episode is, should you give up? And I hope that in talking about that question, we have not sort of inspired people to, you know, give up on their dreams, but to maybe like set themselves free of this vision of like, “Oh, I have to be a screenwriter or I’m going to be unhappy in my life.”

It was interesting. This last week, I was here in London talking at the London Screenwriters’ Festival and they had this special coffee thing. And I spoke to a couple of people who were like, they just like the show. Like, they were Scriptnotes fans who like the show and they like listening to us talk about stuff, who was like, “Yeah, I have no aspiration of actually writing a screenplay.” And that’s fine, too. It’s okay to not be a screenwriter, I guess, is what I’ve come back to.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And it’s okay also to write screenplays without necessarily insisting upon yourself that they must sell. Those things are going to happen, or they’re not going to happen. And while you can help it with a certain amount of effort, at some point, the script is going to have to speak and do the work for you, right, once you’re done with it.

So if you can find joy in the writing, then do find joy in that writing. I don’t think you should ever define your life by any vocation, at all. I think that we are all so much more interesting than some dream we imagine. Remember, if you’re not yet a professional screenwriter, your understanding of what it means to be a professional screenwriter is a massive guess. It’s just a huge guess. Even if you sat with me or John or any other professional screenwriter every day for a year, all you’d really find out is what it’s like for us to be screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what we know is, because we talk to each other, we’re all special little snowflakes. So you don’t know what it’ll be like for you. And that is true for all these things. So dreams are great, but just remember that they are dreams. The real thing on the other side is something else. So don’t define yourself by some dream that you are imagining. Let that be a motivation for you, but not your definition.

**John:** That sounds great. All right, that’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro to send us, you can send that link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today. For short questions, on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We’re on Facebook. Search for the Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcast, look for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a review. That helps us a lot.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes at scriptnotes.net and we now have the USB drives back in stock.

**Craig:** Yay.

**John:** So right before I came to London, Megan was busy, like, bundling them and putting labels on them, so they’re now back at the warehouse and they are shipping out to people. So if you want those first 300 episodes, you can get them now on your little USB drive.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice. Papa’s going to get a pair of brand new shoes. [laughs]

**John:** So looking forward to those shoes. They’re the fanciest shoes in the world.

**Craig:** Whoo.

**John:** Craig, thanks for a fun show.

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

**John:** All right, bye.

Links:

* [CPG Grey’s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CGP_Grey) [video,](https://youtu.be/QC-cMv0e3Dc) [channel,](https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey) and [website](http://www.cgpgrey.com/)
* Exposition News on [Arrested Development](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjqbiMFonR8), [Community](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGg8Cddkocw), [The Simpsons](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VueRO6xot8), and [Shaun of the Dead](https://youtu.be/d8A254PJjWc)
* The BBC adds [Nigerian Pidgin](http://www.wired.co.uk/article/bbc-digital-pidgin-language-service)
* Google’s [Pixel Buds,](https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/04/google-pixel-buds-translation-change-the-world/) or the real-life [Babel Fish](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_races_and_species_in_The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy#Babel_fish)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/diary-of-a-first-time-director-2). This episode originally aired August 25, 2015.

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode is one from the vaults. Back in Episode 212, Craig and I sat down with Marielle Heller, who had just directed Diary of a Teenage Girl, which is terrific. So since the time we did this interview, she’s gone off and directed a couple episodes of television, but also a new movie starring Melissa McCarthy, so we can look for that in the future.

A little bit of housekeeping. So next week should be a normal episode with me and Craig. Then we’re going off and doing the Austin Film Festival, so if you’re coming to the Austin Film Festival, you should check out the Live Scriptnotes we’re doing, and then also the Live Three Page Challenge. If you’re going to be going to the Live Three Page Challenge, and want to submit your pages, make sure to go to ohnaugust.com/threepage and click the little tick box that says you’re going to be going to Austin, because we might invite you up on stage.

So thanks, enjoy this episode from the vaults. If you want to hear more back episodes, you can go to Scripnotes.net. For two bucks a month you can listen to all the back episodes. Thanks.

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 212 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today, we will be looking at how you get your first movie made, with special guest Mari Heller, writer and director of Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Mari Heller, welcome to our show.

**Marielle Heller:** I am so excited to be here.

**Craig:** Mari Heller. Here’s how she comes to us.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** So Mike Birbiglia, standup comedian, filmmaker, occasional radio commentator —

**Marielle:** Yup.

**Craig:** I was in New York and he invited me to come to his house in hipsterton. I believe it’s in the hipsterton section of Brooklyn.

**Marielle:** [laughs] Yes. All of Brooklyn is sort of hipsterton. But, yes, North Hipsterton —

**Craig:** This was like North Hipsterton.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** But as the night was winding down he said, “By the way, you know who lives right on the other side of this wall in my duplex here in hipsterton is Jorma Taccone and Mari Heller.” And I was like, “Oh, that’s cool,” because, you know, as I’ve mentioned on the show [laughs] many, many times, I think MacGruber is one of the great American films and should be in the Library of Congress.

**Marielle:** I totally agree.

**Craig:** And it’s awesome. But I didn’t really know much about you.

**Marielle:** No.

**Craig:** I was just very excited about Jorma. And he said, “Well, you know, Jorma and Mari are big fans of the show.” I was like, “Wow, this is great.” You know, and he said, “And she’s a filmmaker. She’s got this movie coming out.” And I was like, “Uh-huh, well, great.”

**Marielle:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m sure she does. Why don’t we get them both on the show? It’ll be terrific.

**Marielle:** But really, you just wanted to talk about MacGruber.

**Craig:** Mostly. I was like —

**Marielle:** Let’s be honest.

**Craig:** I had MacGruber in my eyes and I was really, really excited. Head back home to my hotel. And there is an email waiting for me from Dan Chariton, another friend of ours, who said, “Hey, weirdest thing. I was at the park. We’re having a little baby play day and Jorma Taccone and Mari Heller were there. And they were talking about how they’re big fans of the show.” And I was like, well this is…this is…

**Marielle:** It was weird.

**Craig:** It was weird.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So then we started talking. And then I realized actually that the movie you had made was supposed to be pretty awesome. And I was like, well —

**John:** But did Craig run out and see the movie right away? No.

**Craig:** Well, no, no. I don’t do that.

**Marielle:** No. I know.

**Craig:** Let’s just be clear. I don’t do things like that.

**John:** But you have seen it now because we both watched it last night. And it is fantastic.

**Craig:** Well, so this is the thing. And this is what I want to say to you before we let you start talking. Because when we let you start talking, then you go and you go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we won’t stop you. It’s better than MacGruber.

**Marielle:** Ohh!

**Craig:** And I know — and I feel a little weird about saying it. And I know some people would be like, are you being sarcastic? I’m not being sarcastic. MacGruber is a great American film. This is better than MacGruber. And obviously it’s a very different film.

**Marielle:** Very different.

**Craig:** But you two together ring both sides my bell so great. I mean your kid is going to grow up to be an amazing filmmaker who really pleases — I mean just was blown away. So thank you, Mari Heller, for coming to talk to us on our show.

**Marielle:** Oh my God, I’m so happy. And there are so many other weird coincidences on the other side of all of those coincidences.

**Craig:** Okay, tell me.

**Marielle:** You just — well, Mike Birbiglia is the one who introduced me to your guys’ show. We moved next door to each other randomly. We knew Mike. We bought our place in New York and we’re in escrow, we were like — we didn’t even have the keys yet. And I happen to go into our agent’s office and an agent popped her head out, and was like, “Hey, I hear you’re moving to blah, blah, blah,” named our address.

And I was like, “How does she know this? We don’t even own the place yet.” And she was like, “I know who your next door neighbor is.” And we’re like, “Who?” She was like, “Mike Birbiglia.” And we were like, “Wait, we know Mike. He’s our buddy. We didn’t know him that well yet.” So we ended up moving in randomly, sharing a wall.

**Craig:** Sharing a wall.

**Marielle:** We’ve become such close friends with he and his wife. Like they are just some of our best friends now. They have a baby, we have a baby. It’s like — it’s amazing.

**Craig:** So when there is one screaming, crying on the side of the wall —

**Marielle:** Who cares?

**John:** Who cares?

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it would actually be cool if you did care and you were constantly banging the wall.

**John:** [laughs]

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when your baby was crying, you’re like —

**Marielle:** You’re like, “Get over it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a baby, ass.

**Marielle:** Exactly. Yeah, so that was random. And then he is the one who introduced me to your guys’ podcast and got me totally addicted. And we talk about it all the time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** We talk about filmmaking. We talk about your podcast. We talk about — we watch movies together all the time. It’s this great little —

**Craig:** That’s awesome.

**Marielle:** We’re building a great little life in Brooklyn [laughs] together. And we have a little artistic —

**Craig:** You’re little kibbutz.

**Marielle:** Yeah, kibbutz, exactly.

**John:** Well, now that you’re here with us, I want to talk about your movie. And people who have not seen your movie, which is probably most of America because you’ve just come out —

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** I want to give a little bit of a back story on what this movie is so people know what the hell we’re talking about. So Diary of a Teenage Girl is a new movie out in theaters right now. It stars Bel Powley.

**Marielle:** Bel Powley.

**John:** Bel Powley as the titular 15-year-old Minnie living in 1976 San Francisco. And we have a clip from it. So we’re going to play a clip from the trailer so people know what we’re talking about.

**Marielle:** Awesome.

**Craig:** We can do that?

**John:** We can do that.

(Video Starts Playing)

Minnie Goetze: My name is Minnie Goetze. I’m recording this onto a cassette tape because my life has gotten really crazy of late. I had sex today.

Female: What? So happy. [laughs]

Minnie Goetze: If you’re listening to this without my permission, please stop now. Just stop.

Female: I’m going to kill you.

Minnie Goetze: This makes me officially an adult. Do I look different than I did yesterday?

Male: Hey.

Minnie Goetze: Hey. It feels so good to imagine that he might be thinking about me. I wonder if anybody loves me who I don’t know about.

Male: (Inaudible).

Minnie Goetze: I get distracted sometimes, overwhelmed by my all-consuming thoughts about sex and men.

Female: I don’t know what’s wrong with you. I think he’d be more into boys.

Male: What are you waiting for?

Female: You have a kind of power, you know. You just don’t know it yet.

(Video Ends)

**John:** So the film also stars Kristen Wiig who you just heard as Minnie’s mother. And Alexander SkarsgÂrd as the mother’s boyfriend with whom Minnie begins a very complicated affair which is really the bulk of this movie.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** The film debuted at Sundance this last year to —

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** Huge acclaim. It is 94% Rotten Tomatoes. It’s just crazy and it’s really, really good. So thank you very much for —

**Marielle:** Thank you.

**John:** Coming here to talk to us about it.

**Marielle:** Yeah. And I also went through the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and Directors Lab with the movie.

**Craig:** With Scott Frank.

**Marielle:** With Scott Frank was one — so that was another connection.

**Craig:** So that’s another one. So Scott cast you in Walk Among the Tombstones.

**Marielle:** And cast me in A Walk Among the Tombstones, which I largely was cut out. I did have a scene where I was sort of alive, almost like a ghost and then —

**Craig:** You were briefly alive.

**Marielle:** And then I got cut out.

**Craig:** He sends his love. So he was one of your advisors.

**Marielle:** He was.

**Craig:** And he said he just thinks the world of you and is just —

**Marielle:** And I feel the same about him, yeah. I texted him at some point when you guys were talking about him on the podcast. And I was like, “I just heard them talking about you on Scriptnotes.”

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. He’s like, he hates all the — you know how I hate podcasts?

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He really hates podcasts.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** I can imagine that about him. But that makes me love him even more. He’s a great guy.

**Craig:** Obviously I agree.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Obviously I agree.

**John:** Talk to us about your movie. So where does this movie come from? So I know it’s based on a graphic novel. And did you find the graphic novel and that was the start? How did this movie come to be?

**Marielle:** This project has been like an eight-year total passion project for me and actually was the project that started me writing. I was a theater actor mostly. And I just read this book that my sister gave me. She gave it to me as a Christmas present. And I fell in love with it. And I had been thinking about writing. And I had wanted to write something for a while and the right thing hadn’t come along, I hadn’t had the idea that I felt like was the right thing.

And reading this graphic novel, I was so blown away by this character. She felt like the most honest depiction of what it really felt like to be a teenage girl. There’s a lot of movies and a lot of books about teenage boys and not a lot what it really feels like to be a teenage girl.

Anyway, I was so blown away by it. I actually closed the cover and called the publisher. Like Googled the name of the publisher, picked up the phone, and started rambling about, “I want to make this into something.” And I had no idea what I was doing. I didn’t even have an agent at the time. So I was just trying to get the rights myself.

I got kind of shut down by [laughs] her agents at some point who were like, “Who are you? No.” And then just kept pestering and stalking the author and her agents until they eventually gave me the rights to it.

And first, I wrote it as a play, as a stage play. And then —

**John:** Did you end up performing it as a stage play?

**Marielle:** Yeah, we did the stage play in New York in 2010. I played the lead character. And I wrote it, produced it. I had other people direct it and I was in it. Kind of put it away for a little while and then started to think about it as a screenplay because meanwhile the project had sort of sparked me to writing. So over the course of the many years it took me to put the play up, I started writing screenplays, I started working with a writing partner.

We wrote a number of screenplays and kind of started getting work on, we wrote a couple of pilots and wrote a few screenplays, none of which got produced sadly. But, you know, we were like making our living as a writer. So I had gotten that bug and then I started thinking about this as a screenplay and started writing it. And somebody early on said, “This is going to be a really hard movie to make.”

**John:** Yeah. You set a very — you set a very low bar. So it’s a 15-year-old girl exploring her sexuality —

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** In period San Francisco.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** Easy.

**Craig:** They do those all the time. That’s all Fox makes now.

**John:** Yeah. It’s 100% —

**Marielle:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** They have a whole specialty label that it’s just those movies.

**Marielle:** I know. God, it’s like every other movie.

**John:** But what was it that sparked to you about this idea? Because we’re all too young to have actually lived —

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** As a teenager in those times. And yet, there’s a specificity to what you’re trying to do with this experience.

**Marielle:** But I did grow up in the Bay Area. And the Bay Area has a really specific culture. And there was just something about this girl’s voice that felt really, really authentic. And I have this pet peeve about the way all teenagers but mostly teenage girls are depicted mostly in movies and TV where they’re always either — they’re just two-dimensional. They’re really quippy and they have like a perfect response for everything, which is just not how it felt to be a teenager to me.

I was really dramatic and everything felt like it was life or death. I was not able to cope with the world with everything rolling off my back and some little sarcastic response to everything that happened. It was actually a painful time of life for me. And I felt like this book kind of captured what that really felt like, even though it wasn’t my exact experiences. It was just, it captured what it felt like to be a girl starting to have sexual thoughts who doesn’t know what to do with them. And it just felt important for that reason.

**Craig:** Well, before we get into some of the interesting writing challenges that you had in the movie and how I think you sailed through them beautifully, let me just say I’m glad that you found writing and I’m glad that you found filmmaking because this is what you’re supposed to be doing. I’m sure that you were great on —

**Marielle:** Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** I’m sure that you were a fine actor on stage. I’m sure. However, there’s like a billion of those people, right? There’s precious few people, honestly, who can do what you did. And what’s so interesting when I was watching the movie was every now and again — and, by the way, it’s not always when it’s the same writer and directors, because writer/directors can fall into traps as well.

But every now and then, I see a movie and I think it’s all of a piece. I don’t see the separation between the filmmaking and the writing and the writing and the directing and the acting and the dialogue. It’s all of a piece. It feels perfectly integrated. You did a spectacular job. I mean, you have such a good eye —

**Marielle:** Oh, thank you.

**Craig:** By the way. Just a remarkable eye. I mean, these are things that I don’t think anyone can teach. I know they try and teach these things but I think it’s a waste of time. You know how I feel about all that stuff.

I just love watching movies where I think, “Well, I couldn’t have done that in a million years. I don’t even know — why did she put the camera there? I don’t know. I’m glad she did. I would’ve never put the camera there.” So I just wanted to say right off the bat, you’re supposed to be doing this.

**Marielle:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So don’t do other things. Do this now, okay?

**Marielle:** I appreciate that. And this is what I want to do now.

**Craig:** Good.

**Marielle:** So —

**Craig:** Well, many people will be calling and offering you Transformers sequels but we’ll work on what —

**Marielle:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] We have a lot of creative advice for like sort of which projects to tackle next.

**Marielle:** I appreciate it.

**John:** Yeah. But that’ll be off air.

**Marielle:** Okay.

**John:** Talk to me about then moving from the play to moving to a screenplay. What were the writing changes that happened there? And then how did Sundance get involved? What were the next steps there?

**Marielle:** I sort of started from scratch when I started to think about it as a movie because obviously, it’s such a different — the play was sort of this distilled version of the story. It was five characters, it was a really intimate play. We performed it in the round. It was very theatrical. I thought the whole time when writing it, why does this have to be a play?

And I tried to write a version that couldn’t be a movie, that couldn’t be just a book, but that needed to be a play. And then had to basically toss all of that to start thinking of it, “Okay, now why does it have to be a movie? And what are the ways in which it’s inherently filmic? What are the ways in which it’s visual?”

It’s based on a graphic novel, so that sort of led to this animation. The graphic novel isn’t a traditional graphic novel. It’s not all comic book panels. It’s diary entries with full page illustrations and comic book sections. So it’s sort of a hybrid, so that kind of gave me the inspiration for the movie to be a bit of a hybrid and have mixed media all kind of playing with each other.

Yeah, and the world can be so much wider when you write it as a screenplay. You can have more than five people who speak.

**Craig:** Yes. Unless you’re the movie Ghost.

**Marielle:** Right, right. [laughs] I enjoyed that episode very much. Yeah, obviously I knew the material so inside and out after working on it as a play and I had written so many drafts of it as a play. So I had the material really already. It was all memorized also because I had played the character. But I really did kind of start from scratch when I started writing it as a screenplay.

And then going through the Screenwriters Lab was really key for me, too. It really changed a lot of things and kind of clarified — I was so clear about the story and all of the things that were important to me. But the ways that those were functioning the way I wanted them to be and the ways that I was failing at how I wanted it to function just became really clear.

**John:** Talk through the experience out of the Screenwriters Lab for you. So, you come into the lab with a finished screenplay.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** You’re sitting down with a bunch of advisors, you’re up on a mountain in Utah.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** What is the, I don’t know, psychological process of going through and talking with the different advisors about this thing you’re trying to make?

**Marielle:** I mean, it kind of breaks you down and sort of destroys you mentally in a really good way but I think forces you to learn how to take feedback. You sit down one-on-one with advisors who’ve read your script in a more detailed way than I’d ever have anyone read a script for me.

I was so used to having these really surface-level conversations with people who had done a really loose pass of reading the script and given me their first thoughts. And they would get the names wrong or they would miss whole sections when they were remembering how it had been. This was not like that. This is sitting down with people who are like, “On page 15, you have this moment where you,” and you’re like, “Oh, you are serious about this. Okay.”

**John:** Is that Susan Shilliday?

**Marielle:** [laughs] I did have a Susan Shilliday. But everybody there, everybody has read it in such a thoughtful way and is there just to help you make your movie the best it can be. There’s no second agenda there. It’s just to help you make your script as good as possible. But that doesn’t mean everybody agrees with each other, too. So you’ll have like a three-hour meeting with Scott Frank. You’ll sit down, he’ll give you all of his thoughts about the script. And you’ll leave going, “Okay, I know exactly how I’m going to rewrite.”

And then you’ll sit down with Dana Stevens and she’ll tell you something totally opposite. “Oh no, I loved that part, I hated this part. This is what I think about this.” And then you leave going, “Oh my god, now I have no idea what I’m going to do.”

**Craig:** That in and of itself is great training and you almost have to have a meta awareness of how this all works because we — I think we’re all sponges by nature. That’s how we do what we do. We can’t really talk about the world, describe the world, describe humans if we’re not absorbing the people around us.

Dangerously, however then, we absorb strong voices. Look, I’m writing a movie right now for Scott to direct and Lindsay Doran is the producer. They don’t always agree.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** But boy, they’re convincing when they’re talking. And what happens, you have to be really careful about is that feeling where suddenly you realize, “Where is my compass?”

**Marielle:** Exactly.

**Craig:** “Where is my vote? I’ve lost — “

**Marielle:** Exactly.

**Craig:** “I’ve lost my vote in here somehow.” And now I’m just kind of chasing. And then that’s a great time to step back and say, “Everyone, shut up.” [Laughs]

**Marielle:** Let me digest this. Let me figure out —

**Craig:** Now it’s my time.

**Marielle:** How it’s sitting.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Marielle:** And what they do so smartly at the Writers Lab is they don’t let you write.

**Craig:** That is a great thing because you have to absorb, absorb.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you can’t write towards anyone, you go away. Because here’s the thing, you also learn a lesson there, which is, they can’t all be right.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** They can all be brilliant but they can’t all be right. They can only be right for the movie that they would make of your movie.

**Marielle:** Exactly. There isn’t really a right. All there is is who’s helping you get closer to what you want it to be.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And unfortunately then what that means is the movie that you want it to be, your understanding of what it’s supposed to be, ultimately comes down to something that is inherent to you, is not teachable.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** Right? So there needs to be some core of substance there that people can work upon.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** They can’t make it for you. So —

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I love the story because I love listening to people getting the disparate views and then synthesizing them through themselves.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the only way we get stuff done. Because you’ve gone through these iterations.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m wondering, did you ever feel like writer Mari was having an argument with director Mari or vice versa? And how would those arguments be litigated? Or did it all feel like —

**Marielle:** I did feel like I had those moments mostly actually in production. Up until then, I was really much more in my writer place for so many years. And then I had this weird moment where I would be just sitting and talking with the actors and they’d go, “You know, could I change this line?” We did a lot of rehearsal, which not everybody gets to do on their movies. But I come from theater, I love rehearsal. I really wanted to rehearse with the actors. And I had great actors who wanted to rehearse.

But we would be sitting around and talking about a scene and, you know, maybe Alexander would say like, “I don’t know, the way this line is coming out of my mouth isn’t feeling quite right.” But what I loved about working with him and with Bell and with Kristen is they wouldn’t just change it. We would talk about it and I’d go, “Okay, let me rewrite that.” And I’d come back the next day with new pages based on their thoughts or their notes.

But sometimes they’d go, “Could I change this line in this?” And I’d go, “Yeah.” And then in my mind I’d go, “Wait, this is the final rewrite.” Whatever we’re deciding right now, I’ve done 85 drafts of this script over these many, many years. And it’s always felt fine to try something new and to shift something, “Yeah, let’s change that line,” because it was never a final choice.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** And then to suddenly be in production and to go, “Oh, wait, whatever choice we make right now, that’s the final rewrite.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** That felt really scary all of a sudden. So I would have those moments where my writer-self and my director-self would kind of bump up against each other.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m very familiar with that. You know, I don’t blame actors at all because they only see what you give them. They don’t see the mile behind it of stuff. And frankly, sometimes either they’re right because their perspective is new or it doesn’t matter, they have to say it.

**Marielle:** Totally.

**Craig:** And if it doesn’t come out right from their mouth —

**Marielle:** And their version of this character is maybe different than the version you had in your head, at least a little bit. Shade is different. And I had actors with great instincts. So often, if they came to me and said, “Something about this isn’t feeling right,” they were right.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that you have to find some ego gratification in the sense that, look, I did this for all this time and now this person is coming and going, “Can I just change it?” and not think to yourself, “Oh, is it that easy? We’re just going to change it, la-la-la.” But to think what they’re asking to — their change only exists as a result of what I’ve done —

**Marielle:** Right. Right.

**Craig:** You know, and the current text around it.

**Marielle:** And what I grew to love about the way the actors were approaching it was they felt really protective of these characters because they had felt like they knew them based on all the work I had done. They felt like these were characters who they loved and they wanted to protect and they wanted to do right by. So if they wanted to make a change, it was because they were invested. And that was a good thing.

**Craig:** Right. They cared.

**Marielle:** They cared.

**John:** So you had many years to work on the writing of this.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** How did you learn about directing? Because you seem to be a very quick study. It’s really, really well-directed. I mean on every level, on production design, on shot design, it’s all really smartly done and performances you get are astonishing. What was the process of learning how to direct?

**Marielle:** Well, I didn’t go to film school. I went to a theater school.

**Craig:** Good.

**Marielle:** [laughs].

**Craig:** Good. I’m telling you, good.

**Marielle:** Yeah. But as you said, my husband’s a director. And so I’ve been on a lot of sets and I’ve been around and honestly wasn’t that interested in directing for a long time.

**Craig:** Watching him you were just bored to death.

**Marielle:** No, no, I mean I was kind of like, “Okay, this is interesting,” and I enjoy being on set. But I was never eager to talk about like lenses with him or like how you were going to set up a stunt or anything like that. Mostly because I’m really character-based in the way that I get excited about things, too, and some of the technology felt like, “Well, this isn’t the thing that’s driving me.”

But as I started to imagine my movie being directed by somebody else, I was like, “Oh, no. I have to direct my movie. This is my movie.” So I just had to figure it out kind of. And I sort of used the Sundance Directors Lab as like my sort of film school.

**John:** So talk us through that because people might not be familiar with that part of it. So the screenwriters lab — were you the winter’s lab?

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you were up on a snowy mountain.

**Marielle:** Snowy mountain just in your head.

**John:** Just in your head, a bunch of writers.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** It’s really small. Directors Lab is a much different experience.

**Marielle:** Directors Lab is like so physical. The Writers Lab is just this totally internal heady experience where you’re having one-on-one meetings. And then the Directors Lab is five weeks where you get a small cast, you get a small crew, you take the hardest scenes of your movie and you workshop them. And you shoot them.

And it’s almost like a reality show because you do like one day of prep, one day of shooting, one day of editing, and they limit your hours. So at 5 o’clock, someone knocks on your edit door and is like, “You’re done.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s miserable.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, but you probably learned a lot there. So which scenes did you pick to be the ones you wanted to — ?

**Marielle:** So —

**John:** They don’t say your hardest scenes, they say the ones that scare you the most.

**Marielle:** The ones that scare you the most. And these will only make sense if somebody’s seen my movie. But pick the scene where they do acid.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** Which was one of my hardest scenes through the writing process, [laughs] the shooting process. Every part of the process, that was a really, really difficult scene to nail because it’s a drug sequence. People have done drug sequences in movies forever. Sometimes they’re done really well, sometimes they’re done really poorly.

I didn’t want to do the same version that I’d seen before but it’s also a really critical turning point. And both of the characters have a major emotional moment that happens that has to be treated seriously, so you can’t just be laughing at them through the whole thing either like, “Ha-ha, they’re on drugs. Isn’t this hilarious?”

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** You actually have to believe the emotional build that happens throughout the scene, too. So that was a really complicated one. That was the one I failed the most at when I was at the labs.

**John:** [laughs]

**Marielle:** I did a scene where they have a big fight in the car and she ends up going into this sort of fantasy sequence in the bath tub.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** And sinks down into the —

**Craig:** Yes.

**Marielle:** Into the —

**Craig:** Into the ocean.

**Marielle:** Yeah, yeah. So I did that sequence kind of trying to mesh a really realistic, difficult emotional scene with this sort of fantasy.

**Craig:** You shot even like the wide shot of her.

**Marielle:** I didn’t get the wide shot of her.

**Craig:** You didn’t get that one, right.

**Marielle:** But I did like in the bathtub and we did all of these practical effects and we did it in this really small way at the labs. That’s part of the fun thing about the Directors Lab, it teaches you how to do things really practically. And that was really good for me.

**Craig:** I was fascinated by the general, let’s call them the technicals of this movie. And there were a bunch of things that I watched over again just to watch and see. Like for instance, that one. I guess I saw it and the best of it is you don’t notice it. And then after it goes by, I think, “Wait, hold on, where did that ocean — “ I want to see like what’s the line there. And I watched it and so I can see what’s happening and I assume it’s a pool or something —

**Marielle:** It was a pool, yeah.

**Craig:** There was a big light. But I loved the way the light worked behind it.

**Marielle:** That was a pool with garbage bags lining it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** And a giant light over it.

**Craig:** A big light.

**Marielle:** I mean it was —

**Craig:** It’s amazing how that works, right?

**Marielle:** And it was dirty. The pool got dirty and the particles ended up being like this beautiful —

**Craig:** Filter, right?

**Marielle:** It was amazing.

**Craig:** I mean first of all, I’m fascinated by the look of the movie because — did you shoot digital and then filter the hell out of it?

**Marielle:** No. We shot digitally but we shot anamorphic. And we shot with these beautiful lenses from the ‘60s.

**Craig:** Okay, so you shot —

**Marielle:** So we shot on the red epic —

**Craig:** Vintage lenses.

**Marielle:** But we shot with vintage lenses.

**Craig:** Fascinating. And then, but color-wise too, I mean it’s like —

**Marielle:** So this is a little tidbit I love. Brandon Trost who was our DP, shot movies like The Interview, Neighbors —

**Craig:** Wow.

**Marielle:** MacGruber.

**John:** So I was looking at his credits and I was like — it was such a great lesson to like not necessarily judge a person’s artistic abilities based on the things they had done before —

**Marielle:** Totally.

**John:** Because none of these things would ever suggest to me that he could do the DP for your movie.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** MacGruber was shot brilliantly.

**John:** Yes, but as a comedy.

**Craig:** Brilliantly.

**Marielle:** Brilliantly. And what’s really funny is I think Brandon sort of became the comedy DP because of MacGruber. But the whole reason that Jorma wanted him to do MacGruber was because he didn’t look like a comedy DP. He didn’t do this like blanket lighting, really bright —

**Craig:** Walmart lighting.

**Marielle:** He shot it like an action movie. And that’s what Jorma wanted for MacGruber. So he hired him because he was the anti-comedy DP.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** And then it ended up leading all of these people to be like, “I want that guy.” And so he’s done all of these comedies —

**Craig:** Yeah. This movie is going to change —

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** That for him.

**Marielle:** The way people see him. I know.

**Craig:** Because, I mean it just was beautifully done. And then on your end of things and with your effects team, the way that the animation was integrated was really gorgeous and I loved how simple it was and —

**John:** Well, it looks simple. But I was watching this last night and thinking like, “Oh, she must have been so excited when she like wrapped production.” It’s like, “Oh, now we have to make an entire animated film on top of this movie.”

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean that was —

**Marielle:** We actually started the animation really early. That was the first element that I started. It was all done essentially by one animator, Sara, who’s an Icelandic animator who lives in New York who’s amazing. And she hand-drew everything.

So I brought her on creatively like a year before we started filming because I was like, “This is huge and I think we need to figure a lot of this out before we film.” Just so I could shoot based on what we needed for the animation. Some stuff we found later but a lot of things were planned out ahead of time. But also, she just had so much work to do with it.

**Craig:** There was a moment in the animation that I almost felt was like, “Is this rotoscoped?” And I couldn’t tell. When the guy is telling her you’re too intense and that, you know. And in animation, she’s holding the monster and just looks away and a tear. Was that rotoscoped or was that — ?

**Marielle:** The tear or the face?

**Craig:** Yeah, the face and the tear at that moment.

**Marielle:** The face was rotoscoped in that moment but not the tear.

**Craig:** Okay, but I knew the face were —

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it was great.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** All right, so rotoscoping, for those of you playing at home, rotoscoping is when you take film, live action film, and then you — it’s a process where you draw over it. And there are a lot of good examples of rotoscoping in movies where it’s essentially they’re animating real live footage. So it has that funky look to it. But there was something about that moment where it’s like it had to be because it had to be real.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know? And god, that look away that she does there is nuts.

**Marielle:** That’s one of my favorite kind of plays between the animation and the live action, too, is that sequence because it kind of really — there’s something about it. She’s having this experience with a boy who’s kind of shaming her and making her feel really bad about herself sexually and then she’s imagining herself as this gross big monster stomping through the city.

That’s how you feel emotionally in that moment and it was just personifying that. That was one of the moments that I was happy with how it came out. And I thought you were going to bring up the moment in the acid trip where she kind of turns into a bird, because that’s another rotoscoping moment.

**Craig:** Yes, that was rotoscoped. Correct. It was rotoscope because it needed to be rotoscoped —

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** Because it was on her.

**Marielle:** But it was rotoscoped in maybe a way that you wouldn’t even know. What we discovered when we were doing tests for that was that in order to get the movement of feathers, it’s really difficult to do that animation-wise in a way that felt really real. So we did all these tests and she realized, you know, this looks better if we have real feathers moving. So then our costume designer had to hand-sew a bird suit where she sewed every single feather on in a way that they could all move. And so it was the most difficult —

**Craig:** And then you rotoscoped on top of it.

**Marielle:** And then we rotoscoped on top of — every single feather got rotoscoped.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow, well that works.

**John:** So before you had rotoscoped those feathers, you actually had to raise the money to put this movie into production.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** And that’s the thing I was sort of most curious about watching this last night because, as we talked about, it’s such a difficult movie to get made.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** So you’re dealing not only with period, you’re dealing with a young girl. You’re dealing with a really, potentially uncomfortable — I mean this would now be statutory rape, so —

**Marielle:** It would have been then, too.

**John:** Okay.

**Marielle:** I mean age of consent was 18 at the time in San Francisco.

**Craig:** She’s 15?

**Marielle:** She’s 15 and having sex with a 35-year-old man.

**John:** Right. And in certain markets like in England, you have like a harder time getting released.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** Here it’s a rated R movie.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** So these are all things that a financier would look at and say like, “Well, what is the upside of making this movie?”

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** Like basically you wrote a movie that has to be just like brilliantly perfect. And good luck and congratulations it is but —

**Marielle:** And a lot of it was going to ride on execution and tone because some people would read the script and would find it incredibly dark. And what I’m proud of with the movie is I actually think there’s a lot of humor in it and there’s a lot of lightness. It’s a tough subject matter but it hopefully doesn’t make you feel horrible about the world.

**John:** What were the conversations? So like who were you sending this to? Were you sending this to small production companies, like what were the — ?

**Marielle:** I was sending it to small production companies or people that I was hearing were excited to take risks, who were interested in interesting projects rather than — obviously this was not going to be a giant budget movie. So coming out of the labs, I felt really like I’m ready to make this movie.

Jorma already had a relationship with a commercial company called Caviar and we knew they were wanting to start making movies. So we sent them the script and they were the first people who came on financier-wise. And they were really just excited about the script and felt like this is a project that I want to get involved with.

But actually, the way that the process really went was I actually got the actors involved first. So I got Kristen Wiig involved before I had even really set up the money.

**Craig:** Which helped?

**Marielle:** Which helped. And it was a juicy part. It was something she could get excited about. And it was kind of a backdoor way of getting the movie made was sort of getting the actors involved and then getting the money to follow basically.

**Craig:** What was the budget for this film? I have a guess number.

**Marielle:** I can’t really talk about it.

**Craig:** Oh, you can’t?

**Marielle:** I think I’m not supposed to talk about it, yeah.

**John:** You never supposed to talk about with Sundance movies —

**Craig:** You’re not allowed to talk about it?

**Marielle:** No.

**John:** They’re never supposed talk about it because —

**Marielle:** Because it’s Sundance, it’s a Sony and like —

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right. You have to sell the movie. But it already sold.

**Marielle:** It’s sold but I’m still — I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah, you still don’t ever say.

**Marielle:** I’m still not supposed to say.

**John:** With The Nines I never say what the budget was.

**Marielle:** But I can tell you after.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s see if I was close.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** But you can tell us about sort of the challenges of production because —

**Marielle:** It was a small budget. I will say that. It was a very small budget and we shot the whole movie in 24 days in San Francisco.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s remarkable.

**John:** But shooting in San Francisco, you know, is notoriously one of the worst places on earth to film.

**Marielle:** So apparently if I had gone to film school, I would have learned a lot of things that I was not supposed to do on my first movie. Not set it in a period, not have 38 locations, which is what I think we had, not shoot in San Francisco. What are the other big mistakes I made? But I didn’t go to film school, yeah —

**John:** But you also had a lot —

**Craig:** And no dogs.

**Marielle:** A cat.

**Craig:** Oh, you had the cat.

**Marielle:** I had a cat.

**Craig:** And the cat had to hiss on —

**John:** That was good luck.

**Marielle:** That just happened. That was my cat.

**Craig:** That cat nailed it.

**John:** Domino.

**Marielle:** I know.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**Marielle:** I know.

**John:** You also had situations where you had to shoot night for night because you were in this apartment and windows were looking out of the whole city.

**Marielle:** Oh, everything had to be.

**John:** But that was all great production design and production value, you know, out of that.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** How early did you have a production designer, art designer on to find all of those yellows you have in your movie?

**Marielle:** Our production designer, Jonah Markowitz, who is brilliant, came on four weeks, eight weeks?

**John:** Wow.

**Marielle:** But maybe I met him eight weeks before we went in and we only had four weeks to prep. It was crazy.

**John:** So —

**Marielle:** Yeah. I mean, on such a small budget, we had so many sets and they had to basically take an apartment that existed in San Francisco, which did have the bones that felt like a real ‘70s apartment. But every single thing you see in that movie, every piece of wallpaper, every piece of furniture, every rug, every little detail, they did. They painted, they, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And boy, does it look great.

**Marielle:** I know.

**Craig:** It reminds me because I mean, look, 1976, I was five. I can remember it

**Marielle:** We looked through a lot of our families’ pictures and kind of tried to really — because growing up in the Bay Area, there’s a specific vibe there. It’s different than Ohio in 1976 or New York in 1976. And so we really wanted to get that right of like, “There’s a lot of stuff from the ‘60s still hanging around. It’s not just the newest thing that came out in 1976.”

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s a mistake that people make —

**Marielle:** Definitely.

**Craig:** When it’s definitely like, “Look, everybody, it’s disco.” No, people actually don’t like — by the way, I had that tape recorder. I had it. I saw it and my heart just —

**Marielle:** Oh, I love that.

**Craig:** Exploded, with the stupid mic.

**Marielle:** Yeah. I mean, didn’t we all do that? Another thing I really related to about this character was being a kid who just makes projects out of anything.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Marielle:** You’re an artist. You’re always like recording things or recording yourself or pretending you have a radio show or —

**Craig:** Oh, my god. My sister and I —

**Marielle:** We didn’t know podcasts yet but —

**Craig:** My sister and I would record interviews with each other.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** It was insane. We would put on shows all the time.

**Marielle:** Totally.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** So what scenes did not make it into the movie? What stuff that you filmed isn’t in the movie we watched last night?

**Marielle:** There’s a whole story line where Pascal, who’s Chris Meloni’s character in the movie —

**John:** I had a hunch he had more.

**Marielle:** Sleeps with Minnie’s best friend, Kimmie.

**John:** Aha.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**Marielle:** And Minnie finds out that they’ve been sleeping together. And has a huge breakup with her best friend, basically. So on top of everything else in her life kind of going really wrong —

**Craig:** I could see —

**Marielle:** She also has this breakup.

**Craig:** I knew why that’s there. That would make me really tense because I’m like, “Oh God, if that’s a problemó”

**Marielle:** Right. She has nobody.

**Craig:** But the truth is I also can see why you don’t need it.

**John:** So at what point did that storyline, you know —

**Marielle:** I cut it out in the edit, probably like, eight weeks in the edit, maybe more, where we had watched a number of cuts of the movie. And it was running a little long, but it was also kind of taking us off track emotionally. And I had fought to keep it in in the script.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Marielle:** There had been people who had suggested it going earlier and I wasn’t ready. And we shot it and I’m —

**John:** It was Scott Frank, wasn’t it? Scott Frank is the —

**Marielle:** No.

**Craig:** Well, it’s funny that mentioned, because Scott, I had a moment with Scott where he had shown me his draft of A Walk Among the Tombstones in script stage. And I said, “Look, here’s the storyline between Liam Neeson and Liam Neeson’s son that could probably just go.”

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** And he’s like, “I know.” And he fought for it and he kept it and he shot it.

**Marielle:** Got cut out in the edit.

**Craig:** And the thing is there are times when people say, “You don’t need this.” And you fight for it. And you did need it.

**John:** Yes.

**Marielle:** Yes. And I totally had those moments.

**Craig:** Right. But then, there are those times where it’s like — and it just goes to show you can’t be perfect. That’s kind of why I love the way that you were able to sort of start making the movie before you made the movie. If everybody gets the chance to do that, because the truth is most people go and make the movie, they don’t have your experience at Sundance. So they can’t shoot the LSD scene —

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** Three or four times. They just shoot your first bad version of it.

**Marielle:** Right. Exactly. And then, they go into the edit and they go, “What do I do?”

**Craig:** Pretty much.

**Marielle:** “This is not what I want it to be. This isn’t telling the story I needed to tell.”

**Craig:** I know.

**Marielle:** I also found it really helpful that I did a number of readings of the script, which Mike Birbiglia does those readings. There’s something about just hearing it out loud that I want to do for every movie I ever do also because you do just hear things and recognize problems when you hear — it’s so different than when you’re just writing something.

**Craig:** Every stage that gets it further away from text —

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is informative. The reading is informative. Watching them do it on set is informative, so you go, “Okay. This next take, let’s try something else.” Your first — watching your first cut is informative. And then as many times as you’ve seen the cut, watching it with other people, it’s like you’re seeing a different movie.

**Marielle:** Totally.

**Craig:** Every single time, you learn more.

**Marielle:** It’s true. Yeah. And I’m never going to get to have the experience of going to the Sundance Labs again with my movies, unfortunately. I wish I would, because you just learning as much as you possibly can before you’re shooting. Because shooting is so fast —

**John:** Yes.

**Marielle:** It happens so quickly.

**Craig:** And final.

**Marielle:** And it’s final. And there’s that weird feeling of this is final. I want to take as much time as I can before you get to that phase of getting to know all of your problems.

**John:** Yeah, I think sometimes people are afraid of doing the prep work because it’s like, “Oh, you know, I want to be bold. I want to make big bold choices.” But I find that, honestly, if you don’t do the prep, you’d end up sort of making way too safe of choices sometimes.

**Marielle:** I think that’s right.

**John:** You over cover things because like, “I don’t know how I am going to do this. I’m just going to shoot it a thousand different ways.” And you’ve lost that great shot you could have gotten because —

**Marielle:** Right.

**John:** You didn’t trust yourself.

**Marielle:** You don’t trust yourself to just, “Let’s get this as one big oner.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** That’ll be so fun. And you if really know, if you’ve worked it out, you can trust that’ll work in my edit. I know this will work. And Sundance does that really well. They push you to take crazy chances —

**John:** Yes.

**Marielle:** When you’re shooting your scenes and to make mistakes.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you’re not prepared, you end up making other people’s choices.

**John:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You end up making the AD’s choice or the DP’s choice —

**Marielle:** You get swayed by people on set. You get —

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Marielle:** Swayed by your actors. You’re like, “Oh, look at that really funny thing the actor is doing. It doesn’t have to do with the original scene, but maybe that will be great.” And sometimes it might be great and sometimes it might take the scene totally off course.

**Craig:** Sabotage.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** They’re all trying to sabotage you.

**Marielle:** Or, “Oh, look at that cool lighting that just happened.”

**Craig:** Right

**Marielle:** “Maybe we should shoot the scene like this instead because of that cool lighting.” All of those things are problems that —

**Craig:** They all see their own movie, right?

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the actor’s movie is about their character.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the DP’s movie is about the look.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the AD’s movie is about getting out on time.

**Marielle:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** Literally.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is their job and they’re all important, but only you see all of it.

**Marielle:** Yeah. And the props department cares about that lighter. And whether that lighter gets used right —

**Craig:** Only about it.

**Marielle:** Yes. And you need everyone to care that much about their jobs in order to do a good a job, but you have to be the one who keeps it all together and doesn’t let yourself get —

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Marielle:** Swayed by all of those.

**Craig:** Because in the absence of your choices, they will fill in. Oh, my god, will they fill in.

**Marielle:** Yes, it’s so true.

**Craig:** And then, you’re at the mercy.

**Marielle:** It’s true.

**John:** So one of the biggest things in preparation you probably had to do is figuring out all of the sex scenes in the movie.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** Because you have — there’s a tremendous number of sex scenes in the film.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** So many sex scenes.

**Marielle:** So many sex scenes.

**John:** So much sex.

**Marielle:** There’s a fair amount of — there’s a fair amount of boning.

**John:** I think there’s like 12.

**Craig:** 12, really?

**John:** I bet there’s 12.

**Marielle:** I don’t think there’s 12. I think there’s probably about six.

**John:** Six. All right.

**Craig:** Yes, that sounds like —

**John:** Or maybe sequences.

**Marielle:** Well, it depends on how you can —

**John:** Yes, exactly.

**Marielle:** We have a little montage. [laughs]

**John:** I’m accounting you to the little shots of the montage.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** But you had to think about sort of —

**Craig:** The thing in the bathroom doesn’t count as a sex scene for me —

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** That was a transaction.

**Marielle:** Right. Right.

**John:** But within the sex scenes, you have to figure out sort of, obviously, where you’re at with the characters emotionally.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** But also, where, as a movie you are with the nudity, where you’re at with the relationship.

**Marielle:** Yeah, it’s a really fine line to balance all of the amount — how much nudity you’re going to see, how much sex you’re going to see.

**John:** So what are the conversations you’re having internally? And then, what are the conversations you’re having with your crew and with your actors and sort of how you’re going to do all of this.

**Marielle:** Well, I kind of made rules for myself while I was writing about — I never wanted the nudity to feel exploitative and I never wanted it to feel gratuitous, but you can’t make a movie about coming of age and a girl’s sexuality without showing some nudity and having some sex scenes. So I sort of just laid out certain guidelines, which is like, the scenes where you see the most nudity are non-sexual situations. So she’s examining her body in the mirror. They have a big fight, where she’s almost totally naked. They’re not sexual. And then, the sex scenes tended to be therefore sort of where there’s less nudity, you see less. There’s more implied. There’s actual sex happening, but we also wanted the sex to be more truthful. And so it’s not like shot with quick cuts and really sexy angles. It’s much more straight on.

**Craig:** I was surprised by the lack of saxophone.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** [laughs]

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Really shocked.

**Marielle:** Especially after seeing MacGruber. You’re like —

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Marielle:** They love saxophone.

**Craig:** Oh, God, MacGruber. The sex scene in MacGruber. Sorry.

**Marielle:** The sex scene in MacGruber —

**Craig:** May be the greatest sex scene.

**Marielle:** Ruined sex

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It may be the greatest.

**Marielle:** So many people have said to Jorma like, “Wow, that sex scene really kind of ruined sex for me for a while.”

**Craig:** No, that sex scene —

**Marielle:** Enhanced sex for you?

**Craig:** Absolute — it’s like all —

**Marielle:** Oh, that’s a problem. That’s a problem, I think.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “Uh, uh, ohh, ooh, I’m going to shoot.”

**Marielle:** “I’m going to shoot.”

**Craig:** “I’m going to shoot.”

**Marielle:** Oh, God.

**Craig:** I say that to my wife all the time.

**Marielle:** There’s one shot in MacGruber where you can see Kristen during the sex scene as starting to laugh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** And she has to turn her head away from the camera.

**Craig:** I know that, too. I know that well. Of course, because I’ve seen it many times.

**Marielle:** And it — but it was such a good take of Will, you couldn’t cut away from it. It was too important.

**Craig:** And I’m sorry to hijack this, because we’re going to talk to Jorma about all of this. But also the look on —

**Marielle:** Ryan Phillippe?

**Craig:** No. no, no.

**Marielle:** Val Kilmer?

**Craig:** No. His dead wife.

**Marielle:** Oh, Maya Rudolph.

**Craig:** It’s so weird because I’m like literally Minnie Riperton’s daughter. That’s how like the mind works sometimes. We’re you’re like the obvious name is gone. The trivia is there.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** Maya Rudolph is making this face when he’s having sex with her.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** And it’s like — it’s not disgust, but it’s almost disgust. She’s like looking down her nose. I think she’s into it. It’s hard to tell.

**Marielle:** So she was eight or nine months pregnant —

**John:** Pregnant, I know.

**Marielle:** While they filmed that.

**John:** She’s basically always pregnant. [laughs]

**Marielle:** Yes, she’s had four kids. [laughs] She was so pregnant shooting the grossest sex scene in a graveyard.

**Craig:** So great. So great.

**Marielle:** [laughs] And then they had to like digitally take out her belly. It was so ridiculous. And I was — we were all sitting there during that sex scene when that was being filmed, just being like, this baby, like what is this baby’s experience of this?

**Craig:** I know. The baby is like, “Why?”

**Marielle:** This is so insane.

**Craig:** She will always have that moment on film.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** Well, I think that you accomplished what you were setting out to do because the truth is I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie with that much nudity where there was no arousal whatsoever on my part. There was nothing arousing about any of it. And it wasn’t like it was off putting either.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** It was more — I was really invested entirely in what was going on emotionally with the characters.

**Marielle:** Well, hopefully, you’re more in her perspective.

**John:** Yes.

**Marielle:** I mean —

**Craig:** Yes, 100%.

**Marielle:** That was sort of the point. It was like, being in the teenage girls’ perspective more than being — we tend to see sex scenes from a male perspective. That’s how they tend to be shot.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** That’s how they tend to be written. And this was a movie that we were just trying the whole time to not be in the grown up perspective and to not be in the male perspective. We wanted to be in the teenage girl’s.

**Craig:** Well, let’s talk about this for a moment because you succeeded on that level. And you also managed to — because sometimes when I have seen scenes from the — they’re strictly from the female perspective, that sex is then automatically a problem. I don’t like this.

**Marielle:** Oh, no. No.

**Craig:** Or this is, you know — she does like it.

**Marielle:** This is a character who’s totally into it.

**Craig:** She really likes it. And so, I guess the larger question is, it seems to me that you very cannily avoided tropes just everywhere you could.

**Marielle:** Oh, good. Yeah.

**Craig:** However, there is a risk when your primary goal is let’s not do what other people have done because, of course, at the heart of every trope, there’s something that’s real that connects to people. That’s how they became tropes in the first place.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** So, did you ever worry that you were essentially wandering off the reservation to the extent where maybe people would not be able to recognize themselves in this character or —

**Marielle:** Well, the particular trope that teenage girl characters tend to fall into, which is that they don’t like sex and that the narrative that we’re given as teenage girls is like boys are going to want us to have sex with you and you’re going to have to decide when to give it up.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** But you’re not going to want it yourself. That particular trope is just not true.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** And so for me personally that always felt like something that —

**Craig:** That was an easy one to smash.

**Marielle:** It was like this isn’t truthful and when you’re a teenage girl and you’ve never seen that told in a truthful way, it’s actually really damaging because you think something’s wrong with you, if you think about sex. And the only examples you have in movies are like boys think about sex, girls don’t think about sex.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** So for me, that made me feel when I was young, like, maybe I’m a boy? Or like, maybe something’s wrong with me because I think about sex. And so that was like no question. This is a trope that needs to go. This is a teenage girl who thinks about sex and —

**Craig:** Right.

**Marielle:** Wants to have sex. But I did worry, I suppose, about the whole movie being so specific and so about this one time and place. And I thought, I hoped that the specificity of it would make people connect to it more. But I guess I did worry that it might be a movie for a small group of people.

**Craig:** Well, it is — I think you made a movie that I would show anyone. And by the way, this is a movie I would show my daughter, not yet. She’s 10.

**Marielle:** How old is she? No. Yeah, not yet.

**Craig:** But here’s the interesting thing. What this character does is it reminds me a lot of movies, if I were to translate it over to the boy zone, where there are movies about teenage boys who do outrageous things that I go, “Okay, I understand why you did those outrageous things, I understand the spirit of those. I share that spirit and that impulse. I don’t do those.”

**Marielle:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** You don’t have to act on all of those impulses —

**Craig:** Correct.

**Marielle:** In order to relate to them.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so —

**Marielle:** It’s like Into the Wild. Like I never ran away from entire my life but there’s something about the humanness of that impulse to like get — just to leave your whole life, your parents, everything you grew up with, all of the rules that you’ve been taught your entire life and throw them to the wind and to just like go out into the wilderness. I’d never do it but I relate to the impulse.

**Craig:** I related. You know, that’s the thing. Even when she was doing things that were dangerous, I’ve — one of the best choices in the movie is when she and her friend, after the bathroom scene, say we should not have done that.

**Marielle:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I needed that.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I literally needed it or I was going to start —

**Marielle:** You need the remorse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I was going to start to lose her.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** You know, I needed it because she’s making terrible choices over and over and over.

**Marielle:** As most of us did when we were teenagers.

**Craig:** That’s what —

**John:** Yes.

**Marielle:** Even if they weren’t like that extreme, we all still probably made some pretty bad choices.

**Craig:** We all made some bad — well, this is the thing. Children, we tend to idealize children in movies, when in fact, children are the worst of us. I believe.

**Marielle:** Right. [laughs]

**Craig:** Basically, they are the worst of us. If children ran the world, it would just be flames and broken glass in the next five minutes. But we then doubly do it to girls.

**Marielle:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because we ask that our female characters are more moral.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Marielle:** We do. Particularly, teenage girls, we want them to be examples of how we wished teenage girls were. We don’t want to see what they truly are.

**Craig:** And, you know, so you don’t have a sister, do you?

**John:** I don’t.

**Craig:** So my sister is a year and half younger than I am. So when I was in high school, and we shared a bathroom. So when I was in high school, I would, you know — when I would go to the bathroom, she’s got her Seventeen Magazines all stacked up. So I would sit there flipping through Seventeen Magazine. And it would make me laugh because every Seventeen Magazine gave girls the following two messages. Here’s how to look as sexy as possible. Do not have sex.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well —

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How can we expect any girl to not lose her mind?

**Marielle:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So I loved all — I mean I just thought that you managed to avoid tropes but at the same time, there was — it was also you made a new trope. I don’t know, it’s like weird way of saying it, but like, a new thing that’s true, a truism, that people just weren’t ready to talk about.

**Marielle:** Mm-hmm. Interesting.

**Craig:** Which is the way that female sexuality is so scrambled up at the age. Anyway, you did a fantastic job.

**John:** You did a fantastic job.

**Marielle:** Thank you.

**John:** Has the TV show Girls come up in any of the making of the movie, the discussion of the movie? Because I —

**Marielle:** Totally.

**John:** I look at this character and you can see a Hannah Horvath character if she was transported through, you know, time and space and put there, some of the same issues and struggles that she’s facing. And has that been a useful thing for you as a filmmaker or a frustrating thing when those comparisons come up?

**Marielle:** Well — oh, no, it’s been useful. I mean, I started working on this movie before Girls came out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** But I remember when Girls came out kind of feeling like maybe this will help me because people will be a little more open to this conversation right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** And it felt like I was sort of cluing into, I don’t know, this bigger conversation happening in our society about female sexuality.

**John:** That there’s an audience, there’s an eagerness to talk about —

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** Sexuality

**Marielle:** And it’s always nice to think when you’re writing something, I don’t think you can plan it this way, but when suddenly you recognize that there’s a bigger conversation that you’re sort of stepping into and becoming a part of and it has to just — the timing has to work out right. And it felt that way with this. It felt like, “Oh, we’re sort of becoming part of the conversation.”

**Craig:** I have to say, though, this is why I love that movies are still here and I know that television does great work in — and has done better work lately than ever before, but this is the kind of thing that a movie does best. Because when you have television and the characters must continue on, what ends up happening is a sort of ultimately a trivialization of these incredibly I’ll say traumatic and yet wonderful experiences that happen to us in our lives.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** This is what movies do best, is they focus in on those moments — the big change moment of your life. Television will ultimately have to trivialize it.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** Because they have to keep doing it over and over again.

**Marielle:** Well, television has to be about more mundane things in order to kind of keep us involved.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Marielle:** And it can’t — it can’t — if the stakes were that high all the time in TV, you’d get burned out.

**Craig:** You’d get burned out. I mean, you — and the fact is just by repetition of seeing a certain circumstance over and over and over, you’d become burned out. This is what movies do best. And there is a — you know, this moment when your childhood breaks apart and you slowly put yourself back together, movies will always do this better.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s a terrific coming of age movie. And I honestly feel like everybody over the age of 15 [laughs] should see it.

**Marielle:** Thank you.

**John:** Can we talk about the nature of your role now after you made this movie? The movie comes out at Sundance, it sells.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** But you were still on a treadmill for quite a long time to —

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** Make this movie out. So, you know, we are friends through friends and that’s why you’re here, but you were on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. You were —

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** You were talking. And this is going to be continuing all the way through the award season. So, your job continues.

**Marielle:** Nobody talks about this. How long —

**John:** So let’s talk about this.

**Marielle:** The period of —

**John:** Let’s talk about this.

**Marielle:** Movie making is.

**John:** It’s a haul. Especially —

**Marielle:** It’s a halt.

**John:** When you have a January Sundance movie that’s coming out the next year.

**Marielle:** And when you are first time filmmaker and so it’s the little film that really needs that kind of word of mouth and it needs the hustle behind it in order to get it seen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Marielle:** So, yeah, we’ve done the festivals circuit, so we did Sundance. We got bought by Sony Pictures Classics there, which was amazing and so much more than I could have dreamed. Then, we went to Berlin. I should mention, I had a 5.5-week-old at Sundance.

**Craig:** God.

**Marielle:** And then he was eight weeks by the time we went to Berlin.

**John:** This is a human child.

**Marielle:** Human child.

**John:** Not a dog. This is a human child that she gave birth to.

**Marielle:** Yes, yes, yes, exactly.

**Craig:** And then let’s also point out then all of the pregnant time prior to that?

**Marielle:** Right, so I wrapped filming and got pregnant within about a month and then was pregnant all of post.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Marielle:** And then —

**Craig:** So you weren’t throwing up after you saw that first assembly because it was bad.

**Marielle:** Right. Who knows? Who knows why I was throwing up?

**Craig:** It may have been bad.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It may have been the baby.

**Marielle:** It may have been the baby. It’s hard to know.

**Craig:** Either way, you’re puking.

**Marielle:** Yeah, I was puking, puking, puking. Exactly. Yeah, there was — I had, I had a meeting set with distributors for the day that I went into labor. It was all like, it was all pushed up to the limit.

**Craig:** That happened to me.

**Marielle:** Yeah, I know it’s a classic story.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Marielle:** So then we did the festival circuit. We did New Directors, New Films at MoMA which was a really cool festival. The movie has travelled to even more festivals than I’ve been able to go to because it’s gone to like Sydney and Seoul and it’s gone all over the world. And I’ve been able to go to a certain number of festivals. Bell has gone to a certain number of festivals, the lead actress from the movie. We’ve gone to some together. Alexander’s gone to some with us. So kind of through the fall we did the L.A Film Festival. We’ve done a ton of festivals. And then we sort of started the bigger press roll out. So we’ve been doing press in L.A. and Dallas, and San Francisco.

**Craig:** The movie is out in theaters now.

**Marielle:** It’s out in theaters now. We just expanded this weekend.

**Craig:** This weekend, okay, this past weekend.

**Marielle:** This past weekend, right. This comes out on Tuesday’s. I know you guys, I’m a really big fan. So at this point, I think were in about 30 cities.

**Craig:** Great.

**Marielle:** So it’s getting much wider.

**John:** So this is sort of the Whiplash plan where like it’s a very slow rollout.

**Marielle:** Right.

**John:** And there’s no video-on-demand. It’s strictly theatrical.

**Marielle:** It’s only theatrical and the hope is that word of mouth helps build, you know, helps to build an audience because it is such a small movie. It’s not going to be the type of movie that we blast everywhere all at the same time but build slowly.

**Craig:** I hope that you’re getting a lot of attention from people at our movie studios because I if were running a movie studio, I would be saying to you, “Please, please even these are the movies I’m making pick one and do it.”

**Marielle:** I got to say I am getting a lot of attention.

**John:** Good, that’s fantastic. I put you on a list this morning.

**Marielle:** You did?

**John:** I did.

**Marielle:** Thank you. It’s a funny time to be a female filmmaker. There’s a lot articles being written, a lot of conversations, the ACLU hearing that happened. There’s a lot of conversations about how underrepresented women are behind the camera. 9% of Hollywood movies are getting made by women. That number hasn’t changed in 30 years.

So right now in this moment, though, I think public opinion has started to shaming the studios into catching up and there’s this feeling of like, “Oh, we got to be doing more. We need to be hiring more women.” And kind of am getting one of the [laughs] —

**John:** Great.

**Marielle:** I’m getting to see the benefits of that.

**Craig:** I’m going to disagree with you slightly. I do think that they are right now making an aggressive effort.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** I do because I think they are embarrassed. I don’t think that’s why they’re calling you.

**Marielle:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I have to say, as one of the, it’s one of the unfortunate side effects of any kind of effort to improve diversity statistics is that then if they go up, there’s always that question are you —

**Marielle:** Of like did it happen because they were good or did it happen because they were just a girl?

**Craig:** Are you in here because affirmative action? Are you here because you’re a girl or you’re in here because of quota or whatever?

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** And that sucks, it sucks all around, but I will say that in your case I truly believe that because, look, they just love money more than anything. They love money and I think they look at your movie and they look at you and I think this is an incredibly assured filmmaker with a voice and an eye and she writes. We can make money off of this person. That’s what I think it’s about.

**Marielle:** I think that’s probably true. I mean I feel I can tell the difference between the calls that are about people who truly love what I’ve done and the types of stories that I want tell and the people who are like what are the women? Who are the women? Who we’ve approved? Who do we put on this list? Let’s find a woman for this.

**Craig:** Just make sure that Mari is not like some European guy.

**Marielle:** Yeah, [laughs] exactly.

**John:** “That is a woman, right?”

**Marielle:** Like I did get a call, I think it’s okay for me to say this. There was that moment where the director of Wonder Woman fell out, there was like that one day scramble and my agents called and were like are you a huge Wonder Woman fan?

**John:** [laughs].

**Marielle:** Because your name is coming up and I was like, “Wow, they are really just pulling any woman that they can.” There’s just trying to find a woman director who they can — yeah. And I —

**Craig:** It was certainly there was — it appeared that there was like — there was that panic that day. Yes.

**Marielle:** For that one day, and now they have a wonderful woman involved and who probably should be and whatever but it was a funny moment where I was like, “I’m just getting this call because I’m a girl right now.”

**Craig:** Yeah, probably [laughs].

**Marielle:** Yeah, [laughs].

**Craig:** I think so [laughs]. That one, I’ll give you that.

**Marielle:** That one, yeah.

**Craig:** I’ll give you that.

**John:** I would step back and take a look at, you know, Colin Trevorrow coming off of Safety Not Guarantee jumping up to Jurassic World.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**John:** Like your movie and his movie, they’re similarly like really well done versions of tiny little indie movies.

**Marielle:** There, that’s a big conversations that’s happened out of Sundance is like why is it that the white male directors who come out of Sundance who make a million dollar movie get offered hundred million dollar franchises and the women very rarely. They might get their next movie is the $3 million movie. Why is that leap not happening?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Maybe, maybe break that pattern.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, in part, it will require you to want to make one of those movies.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** You know, Colin Trevorrow wanted to make Jurassic World. And so here’s my secret hope because as again, I love MacGruber. So you know the kind of movies — I mean I love this movie, I love MacGruber. I love lots of movies.

**Marielle:** It’s a great double feature [laughs].

**Craig:** It really is amazing. By the way, the best of all.

**Marielle:** Which one should go first?

**John:** I think the mashup version is really good.

**Craig:** The mashup would be great no. You have to Diary first, to get everybody really like, “Wow.” And then just hit them with MacGruber.

**Marielle:** Yeah, and just get — the laughter just leaves you.

**Craig:** Take these broken wings — okay, anyway, so we’ll have that episode. But I hope you that actually you can find a movie, you know, because they open up their big cabinet and they’re like look at the stuff we stuff we want to make.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** A lot of times what they want to make is horrendous. But sometimes in there there’s something great and I hope you find something that you can get a budget for and you can get a big movie with, and you can get all the toys to play with and that you want to do.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** Because that would be the best thing of all. I mean I really — this is what you should be doing, do this for sure.

**Marielle:** I want to. I mean I really did enjoy it and this, there was something about directing that just felt really natural to me because I am an actor and I love actors and I love working with actors and I loved — and being on set is just so fun. It’s so infectious like it’s just a great experience. It’s so stressful, it’s so hard [laughs]. The whole thing is so difficult but it’s also so great.

**Craig:** You did a fantastic job.

**John:** Hooray.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s come time for One Cool Things. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** So, I actually have a One Cool Thing this week and I’m going to do it — while I’m talking about it, I’m going to do it.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** It’s so cool and actually weird and I got before I saw your movie, Mari, but it kind of flows into it. So this is called, VHS camcorder. And it’s like, I don’t know, four bucks or something. And so I’m going to do this, so it’s got this like little thing. And it basically turns video into like — into VHS and you can even change the — but it really actually does look like it. I mean it’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** So for people who are at home who can’t see this.

**Craig:** Put this up. Say hi.

**Marielle:** Hi.

**John:** There’s time code in the bottom and it very much feels like —

**Craig:** Now I sound like a crazy man. [laughs]

**Marielle:** Hello.

**Craig:** And there’s John.

**John:** And I’m here.

**Craig:** Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes and even though it says August 21, 2015, really?

**Marielle:** Does it look like the beginning of Elf?

**Craig:** It looks [laughs] do a head turn for me like you’re on Elf. Starring Mari Heller.

**Marielle:** Wait, wait. I have to be — I have to be on the phone.

**Craig:** Okay [laughs]. Okay, that’s perfect. Anyway, it’s a great app and it’s fun and it’s cheap. And I don’t know, for kids like I showed it to my kids, I’m like, “Look, this is what Daddy’s videos used to look like.” And they’re like, actually my son was like, “Wow, this is pretty cool.” Like because, you know, for them now everything is like add vinyl noise to my, you know, my electronic music track, so anyway that’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Very cool. My One Cool Thing is an article I just read this morning. It is called I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago by Rachel Ward. And it’s a true story so she’s a producer for Morning Edition and it’s her talking through the last two years after her husband died. So she’s, you know, a young married woman.

**Marielle:** Oh my God.

**John:** Her husband died in a very sudden —

**Craig:** Literally coughed to death?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Just like he started coughing —

**John:** And then died.

**Craig:** Just randomly?

**John:** Yeah. So, it goes into sort of what actually happened or to the degree to which they understand what actually happened. But on the podcast, previously, we talked about sort of how those moments of death that we see in movies and sort of the ambulance coming or the coroner like are never quite the way it is in real life. And so she talks through what that reality is, but also in a very smart way talks through what it’s like to have to introduce to yourself to new people as like, “I’m a widow.” Like it’s a strange thing.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**John:** So what I’m bringing it up here is that she’s kind of actually kind of like a great movie character. You can very much envision sort of this is the start of a movie story and sort of what that is. So I thought it was just a really well written piece.

**Marielle:** It’s kind of like The Year of Magical Thinking.

**John:** Yeah it is, but a very, you know, young version of that which is so different. Also just fascinating to see it on Medium which is such a weird medium for it to be in because you’re used to this being like if it was a New Yorker article, you sort of know what that’s supposed to feel like but Medium where there’s like a comments like midway through and stuff. It’s an odd format for it but also very relevant at the time. Mari, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Marielle:** I do, you guys I agonized over my One Cool Thing. I’m such a big fan of the show that I was like texting people being like I have to come up with a One Cool Thing. I don’t know that I came up with the best one but it’s a parenting thing and you guys do talk about parenting on here sometimes. I’m a parent of a young, young baby, 8 months and there is an app called Wonder Weeks that I have found to be really useful.

It kind of goes through the major cognitive leaps that a baby goes through, it’s really focused on brain development. And babies do tend to follow pretty clear patterns like between six and eight weeks this major leap happens to them, they learn to see patterns in the world or whatever it is.

At this point at four months, they’re able to understand the concept of something going inside of a cup and something coming out of that cup [laughs]. You know, these really kind of basic leaps but they — what happens is when a baby is going through a major leap, they tend to have a lot behavioral problems, their sleep gets disrupted because their brain is making this major leap and they’re figuring things out and they’re practicing when they should be sleeping, instead they’re like practicing things with their hands or their minds.

So it’s really helpful to know what those leaps are as you’re going along so that you can be a little patient and you can have some empathy for what your baby is going through and you can go, “Okay, this is just a normal leap they’re going through and in a week, it’s going to settle back down.”

**Craig:** Do they have that app for teenagers?

**Marielle:** They should. [laughs]

**John:** That would be awesome.

**Craig:** Because I would really like that.

**Marielle:** I don’t know if it’s as predictable with teenagers as it is with little babies. But yeah, I found it to be, to make me a more patient parent where I can look at this app and it has a whole calendar listing of where all the different leaps happen. It’s just, and it makes me kind of, it makes me empathize with him and what he’s going through and how much he’s growing and learning.

**Craig:** They don’t have the fear of the unknown.

**Marielle:** Yes.

**Craig:** So why is he shrieking all of a sudden for last three days?

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** And usually people, the immediate thing that parents think is what did we feed him, what did we feed him?” He’s got — most kids are fine. You feed them whatever they want, they’re like goats. But that makes sense that they’re — that cognitively because think about it, it’s like it’s brain damage in reverse.

**Marielle:** Right.

**Craig:** I mean every time your brain changes, it’s traumatic.

**Marielle:** Right. And my kid just started scooting. So he’s just figured out how to move and it has totally flipped his brain out. I mean he’s so excited, but he can’t go to sleep because he’s like trying to scoot around everywhere and it’s —

**Craig:** Boys by the way are — they’re just so hyper.

**Marielle:** He’s so hyper. And he wakes up just bouncing off the wall, so excited because his body can suddenly do things that he’s clearly wanted to do for so long.

**Craig:** I’m so glad I didn’t have two boys. If I had had two boys, honestly, I would just — all right, I —

**Marielle:** Jorma and I were talking about that this morning. I was like, I have to say my biggest fear of us having a second kid is that I’d have another boy, and I’d just be this one lone woman in a house full of boys.

**Craig:** Yeah, in a house full of — yeah.

**Marielle:** It’s scary to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, especially during the teenage years. My daughter — I mean that’s other great cure for panic over what’s going through your baby’s mind is having your second baby, because then you’re like, whatever. It works out.

**Marielle:** It works out, I know.

**Craig:** I know what’s on the other side of this at the very least.

**Marielle:** I also just find it kind of interesting to understand what they’re going through and that babies do fall into such clear patterns and that almost every baby does kind of follow these patterns. It’s so crazy.

**Craig:** All those — you know the things that like this, this thing that the baby does, whatever they call it —

**John:** The Heisman?

**Craig:** They call it, yeah, the fencing maneuver, it’s like and then the startle thing, all babies do this.

**Marielle:** Yeah, that’s called like moray.

**John:** Yeah, reflex.

**Marielle:** Something reflex, right and it’s not moray, that’s when —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, but they think — they do that and no one can see because it’s a podcast. This is why I don’t listen to podcasts because you can’t see. Anyway, yeah, we’re all incredibly similar

**Marielle:** Well, and that one I heard the startle reflex is from when we were apes or when were — it’s evolution when we were having to hold on to our mother’s backs and the hair.

**Craig:** Wait, evolution, you believe in evolution? [laughs]

**Marielle:** No, no [laughs]. But that when that babies needed to hold on to their mother’s hair if they were falling, so they would do this in order to not fall off.

**Craig:** That would work with you though, you actually have incredible hair.

**Marielle:** My baby pulls on to my hair and uses it as ropes to lift himself up, yes.

**Craig:** I bet he does.

**John:** Good stuff. You can find that information about Wonder Weeks and VHS Camcorder apps and this article I talked about on our show notes on the show page, johnaugust.com. You can also find this on the iTunes store. We are at Scriptnotes, just look for us there, you can also find the app. Our outro this week is composed by a young composer named Jack Mazin.

**Craig:** Oh yes, my son has —

**Marielle:** How cool.

**Craig:** He’s been working — he’s starting to do like electronic music and stuff and this is one of his first compositions.

**Marielle:** That’s so cool.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. And Mari Heller, thank you so much for coming and talking to us about directing.

**Marielle:** I want to keep going, I just don’t want this to ever be over. This is such an exciting moment for me.

**Craig:** We’ll have you back. I mean this isn’t the end. This isn’t the end.

**Marielle:** I’ll just come back when you have Jorma on to talk about MacGruber and I’ll just listen.

**Craig:** By the way, you have to be here. That would be great.

**Marielle:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we should also put in the show notes just because it’s not like — there aren’t billboards out there, let’s put a link in for people to go get tickets to go see on Diary of a Teenage Girl.

**John:** Absolutely. So we’ll have a link to the website which will have all that information and to the trailer.

**Craig:** Great job, Mari. Mari, you were an excellent guest.

**Marielle:** I’m so happy.

**John:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes and a live Three Page Challenge will be at the 2017 Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [Submit](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) for the Three Page Challenge
* [Marielle Heller](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1716636/) on IMDb
* [The Diary of a Teenage Girl official site](http://sonyclassics.com/thediaryofateenagegirl/) and [the trailer](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/sony/thediaryofateenagegirl/)
* [The Diary of a Teenage Girl, Revised Edition](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1623170346/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Phoebe Gloeckner
* Scriptnotes, 121: [My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s Screenwriter](http://johnaugust.com/2013/my-girlfriends-boyfriends-screenwriter), with Mike Birbiglia
* [Sundance Institute Feature Film Program](http://www.sundance.org/programs/feature-film)
* [Director of Photography Brandon Trost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Trost) on Wikipedia
* [Rotoscoping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping) on Wikipedia
* Mari Heller on [NPR’s Fresh Air](http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/431997207/a-diary-unlocked-a-teenage-coming-of-age-story-put-on-film)
* [VHS Camcorder](http://rarevision.com/vhscam/)
* [I’m Sorry I Didn’t Respond to Your Email, My Husband Coughed to Death Two Years Ago](https://medium.com/keep-learning-keep-growing/i-m-sorry-i-didn-t-respond-to-your-email-my-husband-coughed-to-death-two-years-ago-9e12c93c92fa) by Rachel Ward
* [The Wonder Weeks App](http://www.thewonderweeks.com/about-the-wonder-week-app/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive) are available!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jack Mazin ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_212_rebroadcast.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2017/movies-dodged-a-bullet).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 319 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, it’s a new round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at samples sent in by our listeners to see what’s working and what’s not. Then we answer perhaps the most important question of all, is how do we number our files.

But first there’s exciting news. This past Monday, or actually a week ago now that the podcast comes out, I got elected to the WGA board.

**Craig:** You didn’t just get elected, John. You got more votes than anyone, which actually does matter. It means that when you go into the boardroom as a new board member everybody is going to know that you’re for real. You’re the real deal, buddy. And I couldn’t be happier. Obviously I voted for you and endorsed you wholeheartedly. We are in desperate need of you on our board of our union.

And so I wish you the greatest of luck.

**John:** Well thank you very much. I want to thank everybody who voted. These elections are always sort of low turnout because they end up being sort of low turnout, but I’m really grateful to everybody who did go out and vote. Also, the other candidates are terrific. And so most of them will be joining me on the board this next year, so I’m looking forward to that.

So, by the time this episode comes out I will have been through my first WGA board meeting. I will have gone through the gauntlet and all of the hazing rituals. And will hopefully have come out the other side.

**Craig:** Yeah. The hazing rituals is really a hazing ritual and it never stops. The nature of the ritual is to bore you to death. I’m telling you, man, those board meetings, the homophone is appropriate.

**John:** Mm-hmm. I will post a link to two things that I have written about the WGA experience. First is on the site johnaugust.com there is a link now for WGA. So, if you are a WGA member who has something you need to tell me about what’s going on, that is a link you can click. Also on the blog I just did a post sort of outlining general objectives for what I hope to be able to look at these next two years. The short version is that there’s a lot of stuff that’s affecting writers on a day-to-day basis, and I want to look and see what we can do on just an enforcement basis. That’s not a negotiation. That’s not a big fight, but it’s just sort of getting people to honor the contract we already have.

Secondly, I want to be able to spend these two years looking at what’s down the road. And making sure that we’re prepared for big changes in the industry and the impact they could have on writers like you and me and the brand new writers who are just now joining the guild.

**Craig:** Music to my ears. We are always in a state of looking forward these days. I think this is a problem that our generation has far more than the generations that preceded us. The business basically was the business for many decades, but with the advent of technology it’s been a little nuts. So, we do have to look forward constantly. But even more important I think is that E-word you mentioned — enforcement. Because we have been locked in a cycle for a long time now where we fight very, very hard and occasionally even strike to get terms in our contract. And then we don’t really seem to do a fantastic job of enforcing those terms when they are violated by the companies.

So, excellent news. You know what? I do not regret voting for you as of this point.

**John:** As of yet. So join us next week to see how I’ve disappointed Craig.

**Craig:** The regret will kick in. And just the fact that you’re the cohost of this podcast will not save you.

**John:** No. Not a bit. I will take the full wrath and umbrage of Craig Mazin for my role in the WGA.

**Craig:** Gonna be good.

**John:** Revisiting past umbrage and confusion, MoviePass was something we’ve talked about twice on the show before. The first time it was sort of a head scratch and a “huh,” like how could this possibly work. And then in the second bit of follow up we said like, oh, I guess I can see sort of a way that it could work. And now there’s more follow up. So, for people who forget what MoviePass is, this is a service you sign up for for now $9.95 a month. You can see unlimited movies in the US. And that seems impossible. Like theatrical movies, in the movie theater.

It turns out it’s actually a credit card you are getting. With that credit card, when you buy your tickets, the money is refunded to you. So, we have more information. This week an interview by Rob Cain for Forbes, in which he talks to the CEO of MoviePass about sort of what the actual plan is.

And, Craig, I don’t know about your experience with this, but I felt like, oh you know what, I could see a way this could actually work for MoviePass. What’s your take on this new information?

**Craig:** Yeah. Now that I look at it, I do think, “OK, there’s a possibility here.” I mean, first and foremost what Mr. Lowe says, this is — what’s his first name?

**John:** Mitch.

**Craig:** Mitch Lowe. What Mitch Lowe says is that he expects that in time most users of MoviePass will settle into what they believe is a fairly predictable rate of usage, which is essentially one movie a month, or I guess he says a pattern of just over a movie ticket per month. Because, you know, you could do digital fractions of things. But so, OK, if the average cost of a ticket is $9 and he’s charging about $10 a month for MoviePass, he’s breaking even on that. That’s his expectation over time.

So you’d say, OK, well, fine, you broke even. But how do you make money? And the way he’s making money it seems is that he’s creating essentially a targeted advertisement platform, as far as I can tell.

**John:** Yeah. That seems to be part of it. I guess originally our concern was how do you make money if people are going to three movies per month and it’s costing you all that money and they’re only paying $9 a month. And I have some increased belief that he actually knows what he’s talking about because he comes from Netflix, he comes from Redbox, so he does have a lot of background in sort of customer behavior when it comes to movies.

And the case that he makes in this interview with Cain, he says that, “We found that at $40 per month, subscribers would attend an average of 3.8 times per month. At a higher price they would attend more frequently. At a lower price, a lot less. So at $9.95 a month we expect the average subscriber to settle into a pattern of just over one movie ticket per month.”

So he’s targeting sort of the reluctant moviegoers. And he describes it as basically bad movie insurance. So the people who don’t go to movies all that often, people might go once or twice or three times a year, there’s a fear of loss, of what if I buy a ticket and I don’t like the movie. Well this sort of psychologically gets them out of that fear because the ticket was essentially free for them for that month.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I can see in some ways it could increase movie-going if the people who are actually subscribing to MoviePass are in that sort of reluctant filmgoer mindset.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s also talking about perhaps capturing a small commission on concession sales. Not quite sure how that works and we’ll see if the large movie theater chains want to go along with it. But what is interesting about what he’s doing is he’s capturing information that nobody else is capturing. The point of sale other than MoviePass is of course the movie theater ticket box office. There are some other ticket purchasing outfits out there, you know, if you buy online through Fandango or something like that. But I think a lot of people they go up to the box office window and they say I want a ticket and they sell you a ticket. And the theater isn’t collecting any information on you.

And so here he is going to collect an enormous amount of information on the kinds of people who go to certain kinds of movies and how frequently they go. And he’ll be able to sell that information to studios and say, by the way, here’s a group of people that are going many, many times to the movies each month. Here is a kind of movie that gets a lot of repeat business. Here’s this. Here’s that.

So, you know, I can see how this could work. It really is all based essentially on the guess that people will not overeat at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

**John:** Yeah. This was the most intriguing part of the whole article to me. “When we get to ten million subscribers, we’ll be able to generate $7 million in additional box office for an independent film. At that point, it makes sense for us to get into the distribution business.” And so circling back to our conversation about how theatrical exhibition works, movie theaters like Loews, like AMC, they cannot make movies themselves. That is part of the consent decree. They cannot become movie producers.

But this guy, MoviePass, he can totally make movies if he wants to make movies. And at a certain point if this is successful enough, if it becomes like a Netflix, it will make sense for them to make movies because they’ll have tremendous information about who could buy their movies and could offer discounts on their movies. I could see it becoming a thing.

Will it become a thing? I don’t know. But I can see a way that it could evolve into something that is good, and new, and exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah. If he gets to his 10 million subscribers and he wants to go ahead and get into the distribution business, at that point he will almost certainly face a gauntlet of legal challenges that will either be initiated by the government or by large movie chains lobbying the government. That will be a fight. No question about it. They’re going to want to–

**John:** Why do you think there will be a fight? Because he’s not an exhibitor. He’s just a distributor the same way that a studio is a distributor.

**Craig:** I think there is an argument to be made that he is selling movie tickets, and therefore is directly selling movie tickets to people through MoviePass and therefore he is kind of an exhibitor.

You know, like Paramount Pictures can’t sell you movie tickets that you then go and bring to a theater. That’s kind of part and parcel with the whole split up of the producers and the exhibitors.

It’s not to say that what I’m saying is determinative or that he won’t get there. There’s no question that if he’s thinking about it, it means plenty of lawyers have said we can make the argument that this will work. But it’s going to be a fight. The AMCs of the world are not going to lay down and let this guy start basically playing by rules that — new rules or not having to play by the rules that they played by.

So, you know, let’s see what happens. It will be interesting.

**John:** It will be interesting. I agree. Last bit of follow up, listener Matt wrote in to say, “I was wondering if you could elaborate more on Episode 315 in which you touched on how the music industry was crippled by the digital age, but movies did not suffer the same fate. Being a former musician, I know this better than most, but I was wondering if you could go into more detail on how exactly film managed to survive. I know the midrange movies took a big hit as DVD sales declined, but what else happened, and why?”

So I threw this on the outline without doing any additional research, so this is just going to be speculation and opinion.

**Craig:** We’ll wing it.

**John:** We’re totally winging this. Some things which occur to me that are different about movies versus music. Theatrical I’ll say is sort of like our live performance. And so the same way that recording artists took a giant hit when their songs became downloads rather than CDs that were purchased, and they were then making their money sort of going out on tour, our movies in movie theaters are sort of like being out on tour. They are that public performance where everyone is going to buy a ticket and see the thing live in front of them on the big screen.

And that’s been surprisingly resilient, even in the face of new challenges, because it’s a chance to get out of your house. It’s a chance to go on a date, or hang out with your friends. It’s an excuse to get together with people. So I think that has helped the movie business buck up a bit.

I think a difference between movies and music, which was important at the time but is much less important now, is that the files are huge. And so it was easier to schlep around music files. It was much harder to schlep around giant movie files. And so torrents made that easier, but still they were much bigger files and as bandwidth increased it became easier to send around giant movie files. But they weren’t happening as much as early.

Once you have those files, it’s harder to get them onto your TV. Clever people can always find a way to do that, or they’ll be willing to watch them on their laptops, but it’s harder to get them on the screen. And if you’re watching these movies overseas and it’s a western movie in English and you want to watch it with your subtitles, solutions have sort of come up for like how to pirate movies and slap on the subtitles, but it’s not easy. It’s not simple to do that. And I think that’s another thing that has slowed down some piracy of movies or at least let movies sort of get some — it gave them some time to get ahead of piracy.

**Craig:** Well that all sounds accurate to me. I would add on a couple of other things. When Napster happened, and started to change the way that people were paying — or in this case not paying — for audio, and for music, the radio business continued as it continues. You know, the radio business plays music for free. I’m talking about not the satellite subscription, sort of terrestrial radio. You listen to music for free and then they pump ads at you. And that’s how they make their money.

Well that’s exactly how broadcast television and a lot of cable television works. Right? So the difference being that that was how you got the product in television, broadcast television, and cable television. It’s not like you were going to a store to buy this product before it was running on television. You had to go to the television to get it in the first place, which meant you were getting the ads on you right off the bat.

If I buy an album, if I buy a whole bunch of albums and music that I want to listen to, I don’t have to go listen to the radio station to hear that music because I own it. And in fact that directional issue is I think a lot of why music suffered and the movie business didn’t.

In general, like you said, movies are like concerts, right? And then the DVDs are like the albums. Well, notice that in movies and in television the performance comes first. That is the main product. And then the album equivalent comes after. That’s something that the fans then buy afterwards because they want to see it or experience it again.

Not the case with music. In music, you buy it first. If you like it, then you go to the concert. So, if the first option is free, that’s what people are going to want. And in movies, they’re not free. The first option is you’ve got to go to the theater. And television a lot of times the first option is free, or there’s a monthly subscription that they’ve already gotten used to, going to HBO and so on and so forth. And then if they liked it, yeah, you know, most people who go and see a movie and they love that movie and they want to see it again, they would go — they were used to renting it. They would go to Blockbuster and rent it. So they’re in the pattern of paying for that. No big deal.

The excitement of short-circuiting the entire thing and getting something new for free by stealing it was, I think, the problem with the music business. Because the free part, the change part, happened at the front of the experience. Not at the middle or end of the experience the way it did in television and in movies.

**John:** I think you are hitting on a key point here. And if you look back historically, the movie business existed long before there was home video. So for many, many years there really was no way to watch Gone with the Wind if it wasn’t playing at the theater down the street. And yet the movie business was completely viable.

And so as home video arose, that was a whole bunch of new money. And it was fantastic. And we made a lot more stuff and it benefitted writers tremendously because residuals became a more meaningful thing. So the rise of digital downloads, legal and illegal downloads, did hit home video in a really hard way. But there was still a way for movies to make money. And that’s I think why they were able to survive.

When you look at music, yes, there had been that tradition of live performance, but we’d had recorded music for so long. It had been so expected that you go out and buy an album and that was your primary way of consuming music. That when that got disrupted the whole business model did collapse.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is fascinating. The other aspect of music that’s so interesting to me is that there isn’t a work-for-hire in the music business the way that there is in movies and television. So, part of the problem with the music business was that all the album sales, the first part of the experience, almost all of that money went to the companies. And then the — I mean, some money went to the artist, but a lot of it went to the companies. And then the performance, going out and touring, that was all about the artist.

But then they would have to send back money if the company promoted it and stuff like that. Or the company fronted them money for videos and so on and so forth. And so when you chop that thing in half, then I think for a moment maybe artists thought this is good because that side of the business, the album sales side, I was always getting screwed on anyway. But, you know, the performance side is going to be great and I’m still going to sell t-shirts and make my money.

Except that they kind of forgot that no one goes to a concert for an act they don’t know. And that all the promotion was coming from the companies and the album sales. So there was a symbiotic relationship that got really disrupted there. And so you do have this strange thing now where we have these acts, the most successful touring acts, are old. With rare exception.

You know, The Rolling Stones still, you know. It’s hard to break new bands that then make a ton of money on tour. At this point now, a lot of them are I guess manufactured bands that are literally created for the purpose of this sort of thing. But when I look at the list of the highest grossing concerts, I’m like, oh my god, everyone is old.

**John:** Yeah. I do think it’s worth going through the thought experiment of like what if there had been more bandwidth earlier. If a few variables had changed, I do think we would be in bigger trouble. I do think if there had been tremendous bandwidth and it had been easier to get pirated movies onto your TV, I think home video would have collapsed more fully, more quickly. I think the economics would have changed. I still think the theatrical experience would remain. I think all the doomsdayers are saying like, oh, your TV at home is going to be so great and people are going to want to stay home rather than go out and suffer through the movie theater experience. Those are old people. Those are old people who don’t want to be around teenagers. Teenagers want to get out of the house and movies are a good excuse for doing that.

**Craig:** Yep. As long as kids want to make out in a dark room, there will be movies.

**John:** And there will be a MoviePass or something like that to try to get them to do more of it.

**Craig:** Naughty children. Well, that probably — that should get us to our Three Page Challenge, don’t you think?

**John:** We absolutely should tackle these three pages.

**Craig:** What should we start with here?

**John:** Let’s start with Steven Wood, a script called This is Absurd. Now, if you want to read along the three pages as we go through them, you can find them on the show notes. Just go to johnaugust.com and look for this episode. We’ll also have them up in Weekend Read so if you’re on Weekend Read you can read along with us.

So here’s a synopsis for this first one. A dapper middle-aged gentleman works the front desk at a motel. He stands perfectly still, with his hands clasped. A single room key hangs on a peg behind him. Joey enters, tired. He waits to be greeted by the manager. He rings the bell, but still no acknowledgment. Finally, Joey speaks, only to be cut off by the manager.

The answers do not quite feel stock, but the conversation is disjointed and unnatural. The manager accepts Joey’s payment without knowing the amount and sends him to his room. Joey and Dale, with whom Joey arrived, share a smoke outside their room. Joey mentions that the manager didn’t even count the money.

In the dingy motel room, Dale clicks the TV to a new station. Joey warns that “They’re going to find the car.” Dale is not worried. He wiped it down for prints. He goes to the bathroom just as the news anchor announces these two men as fugitives.

Craig, do you want to start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. So we talk a lot about confusion versus mystery. I think these three pages do a very good job of creating mystery as opposed to confusion. The manager and the nature of this motel are a mystery. You and I don’t know what it is, but if it turned out that the manager is the devil that would make sense to me. If it turned out the manager was an alien that would make sense to me. If it turned out the manager was a robot that would make sense to me. There’s all sorts of possibilities about what’s going on here.

The way it plays out and the scene craft is quite good, I think. The first scene here between Joey and the manager. Mostly good because I think the manager is created really interestingly. It’s a smart thing to have the manager say nothing until the bell rings. It makes us wonder what was it about the bell. See, they’re all like little hints.

I also like the way it was set up visually. And the part I liked was it says, “A leather-bound ledger is atop the counter along with a fingerprint-free brass bell.” That’s interesting. It’s almost as if this motel has been waiting. It’s like it popped up out of nowhere and is just waiting for these two guys like a Venus fly trap or something.

So, I liked that. And the fact that Joey has to sign his name and his room number felt very, I don’t know, hell-like to me. So, all that was good.

If I have any criticisms, it’s that the introduction of Joey is kind of a whiff. So, the manager gets MAN in all capitals, Joey doesn’t get anything. The description of Joey is as follows: Joey. That’s it. That’s all I get. Joey. I don’t know his age, I don’t know his height, his appearance. I don’t know anything. Until it says he, I didn’t even know if Joey was a man or a woman.

So, that’s not good. I want to know more about Joey. Similarly, when Joey does enter through the front door, it says tired. He slams his forearms on the counter. I don’t think anybody has ever done that. I don’t know what that means. How do you slam your forearms on a counter? That’s a very odd motion.

**John:** Yeah. So I think it’s throwing your weight down on the counter. So I got what he was going for, but I had read it twice or three times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wasn’t quite sure about that. And then following that it says, “Dale waits outside.” Um, who? Dale? Oh, OK. I don’t know who Dale is either. And also how do I see him. Is there a window? Is the door–

**John:** Glass?

**Craig:** Yeah. What’s going on here? So, the descriptions were really scant. Joey I don’t think is quite interacting with the manager the way I would expect somebody normal to. And it’s not that Joey has to be normal. But when you have a character in a scene who is so wildly abnormal, isn’t that the title of this? This is Abnormal?

**John:** Yeah. This is Absurd.

**Craig:** This is Absurd. So we have an absurd character in the manager, which means we in the audience sort of need to be anchored in a non-absurd character opposing him in this back and forth conflicted scene. And Joey doesn’t quite get there. I wasn’t really with him on this. But, you know, it wasn’t bad. The line that sort of stopped me was when Joey says, “I’m going to wait” — ”I’m gonna to wait,” so let’s fix those typos. “I’m gonna wait and let you finish with your little spiel so you can stop interrupting me.”

It didn’t really seem like the manager was, I don’t know, interrupting him that aggressively. They’ve done bad things, Joey and Dale, and now they’re in a deadly motel of some kind, where they will receive some sort of punishment. That’s my prediction. But overall good.

**John:** Yeah. I enjoyed it as well. So, I have exactly your same criticisms in the sense that the manager is so well described, the environment is so well described, and Joey is just nothing. He’s just a name. And so giving us some specificity on who he is so we can relate to him and relate to his experience interacting with this manager is crucial. So even if you don’t want to tip us off that Joey is a bad guy, just give us some sense of who he is so we can get a sense of what his voice is going to be as he starts talking.

I also agree with you that I felt — it’s not that the manager was too pushed, it’s just that Joey’s reaction to his being pushed didn’t seem reasonable. And I flagged the same moment at the end of page one that you did.

I think if I had a bigger concern is that I’ve seen The Twilight Zone. I’ve seen Tales from the Dark Side. I was thinking back to that sci-fi series, The Lost Room, that I liked a lot. The idea of a haunted motel is a bit stock. But it’s still delightful. And it harkens back to almost like an Edgar Allan Poe kind of sense of like “this is the place where your sins are going to be punished.“

I just needed — I wish I got a sense after these three pages that our screenwriter sort of knew the tropes and could push past the tropes, or could at least know that he had a plan for sort of going past those easy things. Because by the time I got to the end of page three I was like, “OK, yeah, they’re criminal on the run,” but I’m not confident that this is going to be the subversion of this kind of story I’ve seen a lot.

And an example of something of where I thought we were missing an opportunity is at the start of page three. We have our only exterior. So “EXT – MOTEL – OUTSIDE ROOM FIFTEEN — NIGHT. Dale and Joey take a few drags off a smoke before going inside.”

That action is great. So, that they’re sharing a cigarette is also great. But where are we? If we’re exterior someplace, we have to be someplace. And so is there a rain storm? Are we in a desert? Are we in the middle of a city? We’re nowhere. And I think it’s absolutely a valid choice to start in a place where you don’t have any sense of what’s outside this room, but once we are outside this room you’ve got to give us some environment. And that’s where I felt like, OK, we’re on a sound stage someplace in Toronto and it’s going to be one of those sort of incredibly teeny tiny budget things that doesn’t really add up to anything.

**Craig:** Unless these three pages are not the first three pages. You know, if — and I would imagine people would probably let us know, but if these aren’t the first three, because we’ve never said that people have to send the first three. If it were in the middle then, OK, I would understand why Joey isn’t described and why Dale isn’t described and why the general area isn’t described.

But, some other things to consider. And certainly if this is the first three, no question about what you’re saying. When they’re standing outside Dale and Joey take a few drags off a smoke before going inside. “He didn’t even count the money.” What’s Dale thinking? Does Dale even know what he’s talking about? I feel like I’m missing something there. It’s like Joey is presuming that Dale is watching the movie with us. He wasn’t in there. He didn’t even hear any of that.

So, what is Joey trying to impart to Dale there exactly?

**John:** There’s a sense of which this could be the end of a conversation. So if you wanted to signal that like this was the last part of a conversation you’d say like, “Yeah and it’s weird, he didn’t even count the money.” Crushes the cigarette. Goes in the room. Like the sense that this was the end of a longer thing. But I agree, it just hangs there in a weird way.

**Craig:** It’s sort of a naked line because there’s no action inspiring it. It’s unmotivated. So what you end up happening is — you have two actors and they’re out there and you say, “Action,” and they’re smoking, and then one says, “He didn’t even count the money.” And the other one looks at him. Shrugs. And then they both go inside. But then why did you say that? It will seem like an odd cut.

You can certainly do what you’re suggesting, which is you get there and they’re smoking and then Dale says, “Really?” And Joey says, “Yeah, he didn’t even count the money.” And then you go, OK, I get it. I’m at the end of a conversation.

Lastly, I want to point out that trope-wise the news anchor, the helpful expository news anchor working for Exposition News Nightly, needs to be driven from the planet, ejected into deep, deep space. The news anchor helpfully informs us, “The two men have been identified as Dale Shelton and Joseph Williams, both should be considered…”

You know what? No. First of all, news anchors, when was the last time you heard a local news anchor say, “Both should be considered armed and dangerous?” Oh please. So, anyway, there’s so many better ways of doing this. If this happens in the middle, then we don’t need to know. But if it doesn’t happen in the middle and I don’t think it does, I think these are the first three pages, then he says, OK, “You know they’re going to find the car, right?” “Who cares, I wiped it down.” Good. Not expository. Just intriguing. Fine.

And then show me casually one of them putting his clothing in the drawer and as he’s moving his underwear in there’s the gun. Or show me that he wipes his hair back and we see that there’s a blood stain. Show me something else that makes me go, OK, these guys are bad guys and they’ve done a bad thing. The news anchor has got to go.

**John:** It’s got to go. That to me is the new air vent. It’s just the convenient thing that’s there which would almost never happen in real life.

**Craig:** And also it’s amazing. Every time they turn on the news that’s what they’re always talking about.

**John:** Isn’t that great? Yeah.

**Craig:** How cool is that?

**John:** I’m sure there are shows that have hung a lantern on that idea of like that trope and so if people who are listening to the show can point me to things where they point out the absurdity of that, we will maybe run those on a future episode, because it has to be just called out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think somewhere somebody must have done Exposition News Network, because… — All right. Well let’s see, which one should we do next?

**John:** Before we go on to the next one, there’s one last thing I want to signal. Five paragraphs in, “An awkward moment passes, no one speaks, Joey waits to be greeted by the Manager, who only stares, not making eye contact.”

So, that’s a lot of commas in a row. And there’s ways in which that could be great. It just wasn’t great for me there. So breaking that up into some sentences would help you out.

**Craig:** No question. And also they’re not used properly. “An awkward moment passes. Period. No one speaks. Period. Joey waits to be greeted by the manager, who only stares, not making eye contact.” Grammatically speaking, that’s how you would do that.

**John:** There’s no stylistic reason why those commas are helping him out there.

**Craig:** No. None at all. They just sort of mush up your sentence there.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to do the next one, Craig?

**Craig:** Sure. How to Make Friends by Elizabeth Boston. OK, so a beautifully lit garden party is filled with happy guests and Bon Voyage balloons. We follow a partygoer to the restroom. She knocks, but inside the restroom is Tula, 30, who politely calls back through the door and says, “It’s occupied.” After a second knock, she claims to be pooping but she is not.

She gets a text from her friend that says she’s running late, but that Tula should socialize. Instead, we see a quick montage of Tula killing time in the bathroom. Painting her toes. Plucking a stray hair. And then actually pooping.

We then cut to Pam and Katie, both 30, who are skipping arm-in-arm down the street a la the Laverne & Shirley opening, for those of you old enough to know what that is. And then we smash cut to reality. Oh, that’s not really what was happening. What’s really happening is Kate is super-duper drunk and attempting the Laverne & Shirley routine. She pukes. Then tells Pam that Pam will miss her when Katie is in New York.

Pam says they are late to her, meaning Pam’s, goodbye party. Katie kneels down near a sleeping homeless man to tie her shoelaces, but is actually doing it to steal money from his collection can.

And that is How to Make Friends. John, dig in.

**John:** I shall dig in. So, my guess after these three pages is that this is a story about the three women. So, it sort of looks like it’s a Tula story, but I believe that the weight is probably going to be shared between the three women, or at least Katie who is such a drunk in this thing, maybe she becomes more of a thing that is carried around through the course of the story. So maybe it’s more Katie and Tula.

I was frustrated because I was happy to see these women sort of having their individual moments, but it wasn’t adding up to a lot for me. And I didn’t feel like I was seeing anything remarkable that was intriguing me to read more down the road. And some of it was — I’m going to say that horrible word again — specificity. From the very start, “EXT. PHILADELPHIA STREET — NIGHT.” Night.

Then “EXT. BACKYARD PARTY — NIGHT.” So the Philadelphia Street gets no scene description at all. So it should just not be there if you’re not going to tell us anything about that Philadelphia Street, because a Philadelphia Street could be a giant boulevard. It could be a tiny back alley. It could be in a posh neighborhood. It could be somewhere else.

I just don’t know what this is. And so then we go to this backyard party. I still have no sense of where are we. Are we at some sort of row house? Are we at a mansion? You’ve got to anchor us in a place or anchor us with a character in those first shots so we can really see what’s happening.

Then we follow a partygoer toward the house. Well, partygoer, so I see the kind of shot we’re trying to describe here, which is where we’re sort of floating behind somebody who is leading us into the house to get to a place. But is that partygoer a man, a woman? Who are the people at this party? And without any of those details, I have a hard time getting into Tula’s point of view or any of these other women’s point of view, because I just don’t know what situation I’m in.

**Craig:** Mm. Yeah. I’m right there with you on this. I think that we appear to have a Girl’s Trip/Hangover-y sort of thing going on. This looks like three crazy characters who love to party. I know a little something about this. It’s not really breaking any ground. I want to talk a little bit about tone. We’ve got pooping on page one and we’ve got puking on page two. There is something that we call the cumulative effect in comedy. We know that certain transgressive things get big laughs. And sometimes pooping gets a big laugh. And sometimes puking gets a big laugh. But the more you do it, the more it sort of collects. And there is a cumulative effect.

It starts to make people angry. There’s a fine, fine line. And, granted, it’s different for different people. But to go one-two punch on page one and page two like that is signaling the wrong thing. I think it’s telling people you’re going to be in the toilet for a while.

**John:** Yeah. And I think it’s actually not a one-two punch, but it’s a two-three punch maybe? A number two and a number three punch?

**Craig:** Oh, wow.

**John:** What do you call — is vomit number three? Like in terms of bodily fluids being expelled?

**Craig:** Now this podcast has a cumulative effect.

**John:** It does. So, I think that’s a very important point that I never really sort of thought about before. But you look at Melissa McCarthy’s moment in Bridesmaids where she’s in the dress and she has diarrhea and uses the sink. I mean, it’s all those things on top of each other that make the diarrhea so funny. Because if she’s not in the big dress, if she’s not doing it in the sink, then it’s not funny. But it’s the specificity — I’m sorry, again — that makes it so funny. And it’s Melissa McCarthy and she’s amazing.

Anything that Melissa McCarthy does that involves a fluid is hysterical. Like her salad dressing sketch from Saturday Night Live is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen.

**Craig:** Amazing. It’s amazing. Well, that scene, you know, the other thing about that scene in Bridesmaids is it’s a set piece. So when we talk about comedic set pieces, what we’re talking about are extended sequences that are built around large comic actions. They are usually physical in nature. And they are motivated. So they’re carefully set up like little machines, like little Rube Goldberg machines, or like imagine one of those little Domino things. And then something flicks the Domino and then there is a cascade. And so it escalates into insanity.

The Hangover movies do this, of course. And most mainstream comedies will have the big set piece, or two, or three. That one is a good example. There really isn’t bathroom humor in that movie until you get to that point. So that set piece is motivated by Kristen Wiig’s character and her desire to one-up her competition to be the bride’s best friend. And who insists that everybody go to this Brazilian all-you-can-eat buffet. And they all get food poisoning. They are all now very, very sick. And we understand why. And it’s not like, oh, you’re very, very sick because you’re just kind of a pig that drinks too much. You’re very, very sick through no fault of your own and now it’s funny.

And then we watch it all kind of come apart. And what do they do? They’re brilliant. They put it in an all-white room. And everything is pristine. And then it all just goes to hell.

That’s a set piece. This is just casually I’m going to puke. And I’m going to poop. So it’s just, meh, look at me. I’m pooping. Ha-ha. And that’s — you know, you can do it. And you can do it once. Like if all that had happened here was, OK, she’s pooping, I’d go, oh, OK. I get it. It’s this kind of movie. But then one page later to have another thing like that right off the bat, it starts to make me think that this is just going to be dopey.

And unfortunately I’m kind of with you, nothing else really got me out of the dopey. What we’re dealing with aren’t really characters. We’re dealing with caricatures. So Tula is kind of just singing a little hip-hop to herself. Having some fun. Being sort of selfish. Not letting other people come into the bathroom.

And I’m not really sure frankly why she’s doing all this.

**John:** That was my frustration. If there’s a reason why she barricaded herself, because she just didn’t want to talk to these people because she was nervous around them, because she wanted to smoke a joint, because she just wanted some me time, I could get that. But I wasn’t getting that out of any of those reasons out of these scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s just sort of motivationlessly grooming herself. So, not really sure what the deal is there. I enjoyed the contrast between the kind of fantasy imagining of these two women, seeing themselves as Laverne and Shirley, and then, OK, here’s the reality, they’re not. Except I don’t know who they are. Also, whose dream is this? Because the two of them are in the dream. And then when we come out of the dream, not really the dream but the fantasy I guess, one of them is doing it and the other one isn’t.

So, that was sort of confusing to me. Also don’t know who they are. It takes a while for me to figure out that the party that Tula is at is supposed to be for Pam. And then you’ve got kind of a — Katie appears to be just, you know, train wreck. She is the train wreck. She is drunk. And she’s stealing money from homeless people. Wow.

**John:** So, the second half of these three pages, the stuff with Pam and Katie, it reminded me of Broad City, which I think is a phenomenal show. And it made me think more about sort of why Broad City works and sort of the central sort of premise of how those two characters work together. So you have Abbi and Ilana. Abbi is the wrecking ball who keeps knocking everything down and couldn’t care about offending anybody, but is completely obsessed with Ilana and sort of making Ilana happy. Ilana is mortified by everything and so she’s the one who like terrible things will always happen to. She’s the one who would have food poisoning and have to try to find a place to deal with it.

And you have to have those two competing interests — people who are aligned with each other, but are also going to push each other’s buttons. And maybe that can be — maybe Pam and Katie can have those similar dynamics, but we’re seeing them in a moment where we don’t have any sense of what their real relationship is, or sort of why they’re together.

And so stealing the money from the homeless man is like, “Oh, that’s shocking and transgressive,” but I don’t know anything about Katie or Pam to know why that moment should land or not land.

**Craig:** Well, right. And to confuse matters, Katie is really, really drunk. So like at the beginning of The Hangover, we see Bradley Cooper’s character, Phil, collecting money from his students. He’s a teacher and he’s collecting money for a class trip, which we then realize he’s just stealing to use in Vegas. He’s not drunk. He’s — we learn a lot about who is right there.

But she’s drunk here, so when she’s stealing the money from the homeless man’s tin can, I’m not even sure if she knows what she’s doing, so I’m not sure how I’m supposed to feel about it.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** I just want to be really clear for Elizabeth’s sake, I don’t have a problem with lowbrow humor. God knows I don’t. Just go ahead and check my IMDb page out. I love it. But there is a science to it. And I think we’ve all made all the mistakes that I think Elizabeth is making here. We’ve all made. But the problem is that she’s making all of them kind of in these three pages all at once.

We need clarity. We need specificity about who these characters are and what they want and what their problem is. And if we’re going to be transgressive, we have to set it up. We have to understand why. You have to let me know that I’m supposed to be learning something and I need to know what I’m learning. In a very annoying and craft-based way, comedy requires the most care and attention. Because it’s always a soufflé. Even the dumb ones are soufflés. In fact, the dumb ones are the most soufflé-ish of soufflés. The slightest little thing and it all just collapses. It’s science.

So you have to be scientific about it, and unfortunately these three pages, they have a lot of sloppiness in them. And so we’re not quite sure how to feel or think. And I agree with you, I think that they need to be reworked or people aren’t going to keep going.

**John:** Something I do want to highlight, “TULA ANDERS, Black, 30, with the outfit of a fifty year-old middle school teacher.” I like the outfit of a 50-year-old middle school teacher. Give me more like that. Let that inform what I’m going to see next, because I don’t have any action or dialogue from her that reinforces that idea of the good character description you gave me there.

So, reading that I think maybe she has tremendous social anxiety disorder. There’s something about her that would help explain why she’s barricaded herself in the bathroom. So I’d just say like maybe look for — find little details and build out from those to create your characters and you’ll maybe get to a good place.

Last little things I want to point out on the page. Let’s talk about the ellipsis, dot-dot-dot.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** It’s just three periods. There’s no spaces between the periods. And so they’re used all the time in screenwriting to sense a trailing off or connecting two things. So don’t be afraid to use them, but it needs to just literally be dot-dot-dot. So, in this case we have extra spaces between them. It looks weird. Please don’t do that.

The other thing you have to watch out for, on the Macintosh, sometimes the Mac will try to substitute the ellipsis character — which is like three dots really close together — don’t use that either. You just literally want period-period-period.

**Craig:** Yeah. The biggest issue I think with the same way that Elizabeth is doing the dot-dot-dot is that it just eats up a lot of space. And so we try and limit that. Just a suggestion, Elizabeth, for you if you do want to re-approach these pages and think about a different way of getting into them, you have the partygoer, Anonymous Partygoer approaching closed door, knocking. Maybe you should start with Tula. And start with presenting us with somebody. And so here is this 30-year-old woman, she’s black but she’s British, so that’s an interesting combination for Americans. But she’s got this frumpy, old way of dressing. So we’re kind of getting this interesting sense of who she is. And then she excuses herself to go to the bathroom and then shows us a totally different person inside that bathroom. Maybe that’s just a way to kind of be intentional about all of this, because right now it just sort of feels haphazard.

**John:** There’s nothing more relatable I can imagine than showing up at a party for a friend and that friend isn’t there and sort of how mortifying it is. Like, I don’t have any anchor at this party. I don’t know any of these people. And then I completely understand the instinct to just barricade yourself in a bathroom. Like that is a start that — and it doesn’t have to be a lot. Like you could just start on her face and then — or one of those sort of locked off cameras where you’re just moving through this party with her and she’s like “There’s no one here I know.” And then stop, and cut to in the bathroom locking the door, and she’s just going to bunker down until her friends get here.

That is a completely relatable experience and that tells me a lot about Tula that helps me so much in the scene that you have there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. You know, what’s interesting about that notion is that it’s actually short-circuited by the way Elizabeth has done this here. Because we start with Tula in the bathroom. She’s already decided not to come out. Then the phone says Pam, meaning Pam — this is the other thing. If Pam is sending the message, it’s weird to have the message say, Pam, be there in 10. Because now I’m thinking Tula’s name is Pam. But let’s put that aside.

Pam is telling her I’ll be there in ten minutes. Sorry. Got held up. So, she’d already decided to put herself in the bathroom. If she’s walking around this party, she clearly doesn’t know anybody, and then she gets a text, “Sorry, meant to be there. I’m running 30 minutes behind.” At that point I understand the panic and the “What do I do, what do I do.” So get out and socialize or go around and socialize. And Tula decides I know exactly what I’m going to do. The opposite of that. I’m going to lock myself in the bathroom.

Now I understand what’s going on. I just need motivations. Motivation.

**John:** Motivation is a crucial, crucial thing. All right, let’s get to our third and final Three Page Challenge. This is Shaker Heights by Dan Pavlik.

We start at a community pool, bustling with the excitement of a youth swim meet. RJ, 38, attempts to give his son, Hudson, 8, a pep talk as he gets ready for his race. RJ is not so good at pep talks and says things that would only make a kid more nervous. Rondell, the starter, who wears a sweet baby blue sweat suit, calls the swimmers to the pool. The other boys are wearing Speedos, besides Tyler, 8, who wears a full torso high tech suit. Hudson, meanwhile, wears trunks.

On the other side of the pool, RJ dismisses his son’s ability to Tyler’s dad, Stefan. It appears that they have placed bets on this race. The race begins. Tyler and Hudson are neck and neck, but Tyler barely pulls through for the win. RJ shouts in celebration. The pool goes silent seeing RJ celebrate his kid’s loss.

Hudson is disappointed. RJ tries to recover.

So, in reading this synopsis I would say I did not the first time reading through it know that they were betting on the race until quite late. Craig, what was your take on the betting or not betting?

**Craig:** I just found out that they were betting on the race from that summary. I didn’t see any — I mean, I didn’t understand the hustle line. But I also didn’t see any indication that these guys were betting. So I don’t get it.

**John:** All right. So, what did you get from these three pages?

**Craig:** Well, let’s start with some simple crafty, format-y stuff. And these pages are again by Dan Pavlik. So, Dan, I see you, and I see what you’re doing, which is expanding your dialogue lines to be way longer than a dialogue line should be. So there’s margins, right? Now, we can all fudge margins here and there. You know, if I’m writing dialogue and the whole thing spills over so that the fourth line of dialogue is the word “all” or “you,” OK, I’ll cheat the margins to pull that up. That’s no big deal. It’s not going to deform the script. It’s not going to make that paragraph look bizarre.

But here’s all one line: “Next up, event 32, boys 8 & under backstroke.” No. And to make it even worse, to shove that all in one line, you also used “8,” the number eight, for eight when generally the rule is ten and under you spell you out. And then you ampersanded the word “and.” What? We don’t do that.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Just don’t do it. You can put “&” in dialogue if the person is referring to the title of something that has an ampersand in it. Other than that, nope.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Just we don’t do it. So there’s some cheaty stuff going on here. And it carries throughout. I just saw a number of dialogue lines where I thought, “OK, these margins are way too loose.” But that aside, we start off — I can see the room, I can hear the room, which I like. And I have no problem with things like “A drone shot, high & wide shows a packed pool deck.” I’m fine, you know me. I think we’re allowed to direct things.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then we have this pep talk between a dad and a son. And it’s cute. I mean, we get the idea which is, OK, I’m nervous and I’m going to use my nervousness by telling you not to be nervous. And that I really don’t care if you win or you lose, but obviously I do or else I wouldn’t keep talking about it. And the kid seems to be well onto his own father and just like “Leave me alone, I want to go swim.”

So that was all fine. I was good with that. By the way, we have a couple of issues with default whiteness I noticed in two of these, where we mention that someone is black but we don’t mention when people are white. You know, if you want to mention race, mention race, but then mention race.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We have — and maybe an indication of something, I wasn’t quite sure on page two. There’s certain bits of description that I think are important, but then they kind of fell in between the “Is this important or is it not important” zone, and I need to know.

So, it says, “At the far side of the pool, we see RONDELL RI’CHARD (48). Rondell is a black man, wearing a sweet, baby blue sweatsuit.” OK, he is the race starter. He calls for the race to begin. Hudson, along with five other boys, step up to the edge of the pool. Next to Hudson is Tyler Kim, a wirey” — spelled wrong, I believe.

**John:** I looked it up. Yeah, that is incorrect.

**Craig:** Yep. Korean kid. Now here’s the part where I got, huh. Four of the boys wear baby blue Speedos. Tyler wears a full torso, high tech baby blue suit. Hudson wears regular swim trunks. So, on the one hand I get what’s happening here, which is that these other kids are advanced swimmers who are geared up and ready to go. And Hudson is wearing the wrong kind of bathing suit, so he’s not. But baby blue Speedos. So, are they on like a team that the guy that’s the starter is the coach of? Because he’s got the baby blue sweat suit? Or is that just random?

**John:** I agree with you. I was confused as well. It felt like they’re all on a team and he’s the guy competing against them. But that doesn’t actually make sense. So if it’s a meet, they’re not all going to be on the same team. So, that was just weird. I just feel like “baby blue” trickled in in places where it did not need to be there. It would also just make more sense — the point is that most of the kids are in Speedos, this one kid has an amazing full body suit, and the joke is that Hudson is in just regular swim trunks. That’s the point. Not the colors.

**Craig:** Correct. Exactly. So you want to just be clear. You don’t want to muddy these things up, because now I’m just confused about what I’m supposed to be paying attention to here. When we get across the pool, so the race is about to begin, and we go across to where Dad is, RJ. And he’s standing with Stefan, “a tall, athletically built Korean-American man.”

So we’re going to presume, I guess, that he is Tyler Kim’s dad, because Tyler is a wirey Korean kid. Interestingly Tyler is from Korea, whereas his dad is Korean-American, so we got to figure out what’s going on here. But RJ says to Stefan, “He doesn’t stand a chance.” Who doesn’t stand a chance? Is he talking about his own kid? Probably. But then tell me that he’s nervous. Tell me that he’s embarrassed.

Obviously he knows Stefan, right, because you wouldn’t just start saying that to some guy you don’t know. But then Stefan says, “The board shorts don’t fool me. He’s got the eye of the tiger.”

**John:** Can I pitch a fix here?

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** This is what I would say. So, first off my daughter competed in swim team last year, so I actually learned a lot about swim team, and I would say most of the details here feel kind of correct. Except for the board shorts. That would just not happen. It’s not a thing. Like a kid who competes on swim team is not going to be in board shorts, unless — and this would be your opportunity — if RJ’s line of dialogue here is like, “Man, I can’t believe I packed his board shorts rather than his Speedos. What an idiot I am.”

If he were to say something like that, it would take the curse off of the board shorts and make us believe that he’s an incompetent father. And then the overall joke that basically he’d been rooting against his son would make more sense in the end. That he’s basically trying to sabotage his son so that his son wouldn’t win this race.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll get to that part, because I really got confused about that. But I think you’re right. We need to explain this one way or the other. Either the dad forgot and screwed up, or the kid forgot and screwed up, or they’ve never done this before and this is his first time. And so they didn’t know. And he’s embarrassed.

But either way, the problem is his relationship with Stefan implies that they know each other, so it’s weird to have Stefan making comments like this as if he’s never met Hudson, the kid, before. And then RJ says, “My boy doesn’t possess the intensity gene.” So he’s sort of apologizing for him. And then Stefan says, “Maybe so, but at least this isn’t his first backstroke event ever.”

OK, now, so OK, I guess he has been doing this for a while, so then he shouldn’t have the board shorts. Why would he have the board shorts if he has done it before? And Stefan seems to be implying that his son, Tyler, has never done the backstroke before. And then RJ says, “Did you just hustle me?” So they did bet on it? But if they bet on it, then why would RJ bet on it because he says that his kid doesn’t stand a chance and he doesn’t possess the intensity gene. And he doesn’t.

So, I don’t understand what’s going on I guess is my point. And at the end when he roots — he’s happy that his son loses. Is it because he bet on Tyler?

**John:** Yes. He bet on Tyler. He bet against his own son in the race. That I think is meant to be the overall point of this scene. Like here’s a dad who bet against his own son in a race. And was trying to sabotage his son in the race. So I think if you read through what’s there, I think it supports that thesis. I just don’t think that it does the best job of supporting that thesis.

**Craig:** OK, if that’s what’s going on, first of all, “Did you just hustle me?” when Stefan says, “At least this isn’t his first backstroke event ever,” why is Stefan talking down his kid if RJ has bet on Tyler? Hustling him would mean talking Tyler up.

So I don’t understand exactly what’s going on. But regardless of that, if you’re going to do something in a script that is as extreme, and frankly interesting, as a father betting against his own kid, I need to see it happen. That’s the interesting part. Not this other nonsense.

Sorry, I don’t mean to be a jerk and say nonsense.

**John:** Yeah, I get it.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? That’s the moment I want to see. So the scene is you have these two guys and one of them is like I’ll put $30 on Tyler. And he’s like, you sure? He’s never done this before. I’m putting $30 on him, don’t worry. And then he’s going to win. And you’re like, OK, this guy is betting on, I don’t know, what? Don’t know. Then they walk out of the locker room or parents’ area into this school thing and the kid — and this guy who has just bet on Tyler walks up to his kid and says, “Listen, you can do it, blah, blah, blah. Go get him, Hudson. Oh, hey Tyler.” And you’re like, oh my god, whoa.

Right? There’s a way to do this that is exciting and pays something off and makes people gasp. This isn’t it.

**John:** I agree. So, I think what you’re describing is the scene as written right now, there’s probably not a version of like this is all happening in one real time thing that could do the best job of it. The way I would pitch for it is if they get up to the starting block and you’re starting to see that these guys have the conversation. You could do the flash cut back to like their betting in the parking lot, or some moment beforehand where they said like my kid is worse than your kid. My kid is going to tank. No, no, my kid is the worst. That could have been the thing basically before this thing started, so you’re recontextualizing what just happened and then you start the race is another way you could do it.

But I agree, it’s going to be challenging to — the fact that you got confused in these three pages and being able to go through this a couple times on the page, it’s probably not going to work especially well even if you shot it just like this.

**Craig:** No. This one definitely is not in the mystery zone. It’s not trying to be a mystery. It’s confusion.

**John:** Great. Let’s talk about an interesting choice that Dan has made with bold face. So bold face is a thing that exists in computers and you will see bold faced in scripts. Dan is choosing interesting things to bold face, like Lane Markers. Starting Blocks. Goggles. Sort of some random things seem to be boldfaced. I don’t think it works in this. I think it’s fine to sort of experiment with the form and bold face things that would not normally be boldfaced, but the choices he’s making here don’t seem to merit that.

Usually you’ll find in screenplays when boldfaced is used it’s because you got to really call out something to make sure that someone who is skimming does not miss this thing. Goggles does not deserve bold-facing, in my opinion.

**Craig:** I’m with you. In general if there are key props, I might put them in all caps. Boldface in action is for — I think I would probably just reserve it for some enormous reveal. Something that’s supposed to shock people. In dialogue, boldface always looks better onscreen, and then you print it out and you’re like, oh god. It just, you know, if I really need to emphasize something in dialogue, I’ll use italics or an underline, but almost never boldface.

**John:** A few other things that are just confusing for the read. Rondell Ri’chard wears a “sweet, baby blue sweatsuit.” I think it’s a “sweet baby blue sweatsuit.” I think it’s all one thing. Because breaking off that sweet just confusing the read.

In American English we put commas inside quotes, which is just how we do it here. If you’re British, don’t have to do that. But we do that here. So I see that on page two.

We tend to do uppercase for things like “the crowd cheers.” We tend to do uppercase for when we introduce groups of people as well. So like “the crowd.” It’s not the end of the world if you don’t do that, but just to know that it’s a convention.

And reaching back to our first Three Page Challenge, one of the arguments for those were not the first three pages is that the manager got uppercased but the other two guys walking in did not get uppercased. And they wouldn’t be uppercased if it was not their first scene. So that could be an argument that they actually had a scene before the three pages you sent through.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** I would use PA Announcer (OS) rather than (OC). OC is off-camera, OS is off-screen. I just don’t use OC really at all and I just don’t see it being used at all. Do you use OC?

**Craig:** No, I use OS.

**John:** OS. I think OC just has kind of gone away. I think OC would kind of make sense just in the sense of the character is just past the eye line. Like one character is talking to an off-camera character, but OS is general purpose and is better used here I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s not–

**John:** Not a big deal.

**Craig:** Not a big deal. But yeah, generally speaking I don’t see OC.

**John:** Last bit of grammar thing I’m going to point out. Page three, “We hear victorious shouts; YES, YES!” No. That’s not a semicolon. That’s a colon.

**Craig:** Sure is.

**John:** It is. Any time you use a semicolon your first question should be like is this really supposed to be a semicolon? And I would say 75% of the time the answer is no.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, basically unless you are using it to separate a series of items that include commas within the items, semicolons should be completely interchangeable with periods.

**John:** That is correct. So it’s a way of joining together two sentences that could exist separately but by fusing them together with a semicolon they ascribe meaning to each other, I guess.

**Craig:** Yeah. The sentence, I guess second independent clause, is in some way explaining or illuminating the first.

**John:** Yeah. And just the nature of what screenplays are, we’re not going to use that a lot.

**Craig:** No. I don’t think I’ve ever used a semicolon in a screenplay.

**John:** I know I’ve used one or two, but it’s just for very random small things like that. All right, those are our Three Page Challenges. Thank you, guys, for sending them in. You guys are incredibly brave to share these with us. We pick them because they have valuable lessons for hopefully our listeners at home, so you guys are awesome for doing that.

If you have three pages you would like to send in to have us look at on the air, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, and there’s a little form. And you attach a PDF and you click a button and it gets whisked away to Megan’s special little inbox where she looks through all of the Three Page Challenges. She read like 40 yesterday to help pick these. She’ll be reading even more because we’re going to do a live Three Page Challenge in Austin. So if you have three pages you would like us to look at at the Austin Film Festival and you will actually be there, there is a special little checkbox to say I will be at the Austin Film Festival. And if we choose your three pages, we may invite you up to talk about your three pages so we can actually ask, “Hey, are these actually the first three pages” or “Hhat happens to these characters after page three?”

**Craig:** And we’re nice. We’re not mean. And we will also — by the time this episode airs, so you’re listening to this now, and the Austin Film Festival has put up their official schedule. So you will see on that official schedule that I am doing some events in addition to the Three Page Challenge, but most notably John and I will be doing another live show. This will be on Friday night at 9pm.

Last year we did it Friday night at 10pm which was amazing because everybody was kind of toasted and was a good, fun time. But this year they moved it up to nine because I guess, well, what they said was it’s overlapping with some parties. And I think we actually impacted the attendance of some parties because this was a very popular event. They put it in the big, big ballroom at the Driskill Hotel. It was a great time. So please do make that a part of your schedule.

We will show up slightly inebriated. It will be a fun time. Last year the format was stand up and ask us questions. Because that’s why you’re here. And we had a great, great group of people. We had Tess Morris. We had Malcolm Spellman. We had Katie Dippold. We had a great group of people. And I expect that this year we will have a similarly fantastic group of people. I think we’ll have Megan Amram and Scott Frank and Dana Fox, or somebody. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.

**John:** And you’ll have me. That will be a key change to the lineup, because I was not there last year. And there will probably be little bit more order. Just the nature of things.

**Craig:** There’s going to be an adult. It won’t be as much fun.

**John:** I’ll be the Ilana to your Abbi.

**Craig:** It will not be as much as last year, because dad will be there. But still it will be fun.

**John:** It should be a good time. All right, let’s get to one question here. This comes from Clive, which is apparently a fake name, in Los Angeles. He writes, “I have what is possibly the most boring question in the history of the show. What filing and or naming conventions do you use for your script files? And do you distinguish between drafts or major changes, polishes in your file names? I don’t mean for production revisions, but just for your own internal purposes. Also, how do you guys collate all your notes on a draft and file them so they make sense? I’ve been putting them in the same folder for whatever draft they were for, but it’s quickly become quite messy.”

Craig, I have known you for years, I have no idea how you number your files.

**Craig:** I’m pretty simple. The first draft is Draft 1. And then I work on that. And then when I send it in, I put the date in parenthesis along with the name, so then if there are some little notes before I’m sending in an official draft one, then it will Draft 1 with a new date. And then when the official one is designated, I’ll just say Official Draft 1. So, you know, I have multiple versions of it.

All the while, I’m generating PDFs, which I’m handing back and forth between myself and Jack Lesko, who is my editor. And so that’s roughly how I do it. And then I go to Draft 2. I don’t distinguish between drafts, polishes, rewrites. Everything is a draft. Draft 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. Doesn’t matter to me. And in terms of notes, yeah, I mean, I don’t really write down a bunch of notes. I mean, they give you a bunch of notes, or in a meeting I’ll take notes of the notes. And then I just print it out and look at it.

But I don’t really collect the notes per se. I just do the thing. So I just have folders. You know, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. That kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah. So on Dropbox, I have everything on Dropbox. I’ll have a folder for a project. So I’ll have a folder for Aladdin. In that folder I’ll have — once I start assembling a script, I’ll just give it a date. So whatever date I’m turning in that script — so whatever date I’m putting on the title page, that will be the number at the end of it. So it will say Aladdin 2.28.17, because I like dots in my dates, because I’m that guy. And that will be the draft.

And so that will the draft for both my Highland file and also for my PDF. I’ll use that same convention for numbering, for putting the date on things. And then everything for me is just the date on it. So the file just shows what the date would be on the title page of that script. I don’t say first draft, second draft, whatever draft. It’s just that–

**Craig:** Just the date.

**John:** Just the date.

**Craig:** I had to figure out a slightly new system because Chernobyl was in episodes. I’ve never written anything in episodes before. But I just made folders. Each episode got a folder. Episode One. Episode Two. And it worked out just fine.

It’s a little annoying, actually, because in movies we’re on the draft we’re on. So I just know like, OK, I’m on the second draft. I can live in that folder for a while and not have to worry about going in between folders. But to keep things neat for Chernobyl, I did divide it up by episode or else it would have gotten out of control.

And the other thing I do is when a movie goes into production, then there are other folders that get made. And then I’ll make a production draft folder. And that’s when you do get into your revisions and I’ll have a folder for casting, and a folder for storyboards, and a folder for this, and a folder for that.

**John:** Once we get into color revisions, then I will sort of label the script, like Blue Revisions, and stuff like that. Which is natural for this.

The other thing I’ll say is that there are going to be times where you’re cutting stuff out of your script, like there’s a scene that you want to hold on to that’s not part of it. What I used to do was create a separate scratch file of things that got cut out of it, so I could go back to those things if I needed them. In the new Highland, there’s bins. So there’s a place you can just drag stuff over and it will just keep it there. And so I just tend to use the bins that are sort of part of the file itself. And so I don’t ever lose those little pieces.

**Craig:** That’s smart. Yeah. In Fade In there is a function where you can also bin large chunks of stuff within the file without it showing. But I still will — just as force of habit, I’ll just make it, you know, cut–

**John:** Cut and paste. Yeah.

**Craig:** Command N for a new file. Paste. Save it as, you know, and just write a description of it. Maybe three or four times every project there will be three or four of those that get shoved off to the side.

**John:** Cool. All right, one of the most important questions of the history of Scriptnotes has been answered today.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. I’m going to cheat. The first is a book I am reading right now called Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney. It’s delightful and it’s one of those rare cases where I’m trying to read the book before everybody else in the world has read the book because I usually read things like a year or two late, and all the conversation has past. So, there’s going to be Slate Book Club stuff talking about this book and so I wanted to read it now.

It’s quite good. She’s an Irish author. It revolves around two college students in Dublin, Frances and Bobbi with an I. It’s their relationship with a married couple named Melissa and Nick. It’s good and it reminds me so much of my early 20s and how obsessed I was about studying very tiny interactions and my paranoia of what people were doing around me and my social status. It’s a very well observed thing.

And your early 20s are a fascinating time. I think this author really nails it, so I would recommend that. I’m only halfway through, though, so maybe it completely falls apart at the end and I’ll retract my observation.

**Craig:** That would be awesome.

**John:** A thing I have watched to the end is a short called Meet Cute. It is written by Ben Smith. It is directed by Ben Smith and Scriptnotes producer Megan McDonnell. And just this past week it went up online. It’s delightful. So I will send you to IndieWire where you can watch it. It stars Jon Bass and Juno Temple. And I don’t want to spoil what happens in it, but you think you know what’s going to happen and something very different happens. So it’s a quite well done little short film. So I recommend you guys take a look.

**Craig:** Well, you did two, so I don’t have to do any. Phew.

**John:** Craig escapes once again.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place you can send questions like the one we answered today.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer your little short questions on Twitter. So hit us up there. We are on Facebook. Just search for the Scriptnotes podcast. Megan actually kind of uses Facebook, so maybe she’ll answer questions there, too. Who knows?

You can find us Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. That’s also where you can leave a review for us. That’s always delightful. Helps people find the show.

Pretty soon we’re going to have actual information about who listens to episodes because they’re going to release all the download — beyond sort of downloads, they’ll have very specific granular information about who listens to shows all the way to the end. And we will know so much more about who tunes out halfway through the Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** That’s going to be awesome. I love it. We can call them up and let them know we know.

**John:** That would be Mike. Mike does not listen to the Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** I don’t think Melissa listens to any of these. You know what? Let’s find out. Let’s see if she does. Melissa, if you listen to the podcast, then I want you to say the word Umbrella to me really loudly and, if you do, I will do all of the laundry for a week.

**John:** That is a hell of a deal. That’s good. You’re betting on yourself, and that’s what I like.

**Craig:** I think I’m going to win.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the Three Page Challenges we just did. You’ll find transcripts. Within a week of the show airing we’ll have the transcripts up.

We have all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. We used to have USB drives and we ran out of USB drives. We actually had to refund some money to people who bought USB drives and we didn’t have, so sorry about that. We’ve ordered more, but it could be a couple weeks before we get more of the first 300 episodes on USB drives. We’ll let you know when those are back available. But there will always be back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

And, just this last week I was at your party and I was talking to a young writer/director, a woman who has been a guest on the show before but I don’t want to spoil who she is at this moment, but she said that after being a guest on our show she paid for the premium subscription and has gone back and started listening to key episodes and she loves the back episodes.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So yet another person who is paying us $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** Paying you $1.99 a month.

**John:** Oh, me, us, it’s all the same.

**Craig:** No it’s not!

**John:** No it’s not.

**Craig:** I get nothing.

**John:** Craig, thanks for another fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGA Section of johnaugust.com](http://johnaugust.com/wga-board)
* [I’m Joining the WGA Board](http://johnaugust.com/2017/im-joining-the-wga-board)
* [CEO Mitch Lowe Pulls Back The Curtain On MoviePass And Explains Its Economics](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robcain/2017/09/18/ceo-mitch-lowe-pulls-back-the-curtain-on-moviepass-and-explains-its-economics/) from Forbes, by Rob Cain
* Three Pages by [Steven Wood](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Wood_3pgs.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Elizabeth Boston](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Boston_3pgs.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Dan Pavlik](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Pavlik_3pgs.pdf)
* [Submit](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) for the Three Page Challenge
* [Austin Film Festival 2017 Film Slate](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festival-and-conference-aff/festival/film-slate/)
* [Conversations with Friends](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0451499050/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Sally Rooney
* [Meet Cute](http://www.indiewire.com/2017/09/juno-temple-jon-bass-meet-cute-short-film-1201878128/) – Short Film on Indiewire
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive) will be available again in a few days!
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_319.mp3).