Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 297 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at the future of James Bond, script-reading robots, and the realities of overhauling a movie in the editing room. But first, we have quite a bit of follow up.

**Craig:** So much follow up. Let us follow it up. Two weeks ago, Malcolm and I answered a listener question about ellipses in dialogue. And you’d think, John, that that would have gone smoothly. But, no, no.

**John:** No. There were pauses.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there was an issue. And the issue was raised by big shot movie director, former Scriptnotes guest, friend of the podcast, friend of me and you, Mari Heller. And this is what she wrote. “I totally disagree with Craig.” John, I’m tempted to just end the follow up there.

**John:** That basically does it. On any issue, she probably disagrees with you.

**Craig:** Probably. And I feel like it’s going to happen a lot. But no, she says, “I totally disagree with Craig. Craig said that actors don’t worry about the punctuation of a line and it won’t affect the rhythm of their performance. I just finished working on a movie with two wonderful actors, who had a lot of respect for the script. Often we would get into conversations about how the script was written and where the punctuation was guiding them. They took each clue laid out as a guide and tried, unless we decided to dismiss it, to follow the breadcrumbs that the script gave them.

“What’s more, when I got into the edit I realized the editor was also using the details of the script as a guide in creating her assembly. If a beat were indicated, or it was written that an actor hesitated or trailed off, she went to great lengths to find takes that matched the script. I believe when we write scripts all of our choices, like punctuation and parentheticals should be viewed as clues for our collaborators about the rhythms we intend.”

**John:** All right, Mari, thank you so much for writing back with us. First off, it sounded like you had a great experience with really dedicated actors and editors. I would say that your experience has not been classically my experience. But, Craig, I’d love to hear what you think.

**Craig:** I agree. I think this speaks very highly of Mari and her cast and her editor. More often, what I find is that people will come to me – this actually happens all the time – people will come to me and say, “There’s a mistake. There’s a problem.” “What?” “Blah, blah, blah says so and so’s name like they know them, but they haven’t yet met.” “Yes they have.” “No they haven’t.” “Yes, see, here. On this page.” “Oh, you know what? When we did it that day we did it a little differently, so they didn’t meet.” “OK, fine, I understand. However, the script is full of clues.” It’s full of them.

Editors, in particular, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve sat in an editing room and watched something and I’m like, well, why not just do it this way. And they’re like, “Ooh…” and I said, “You know, that’s the way it is in the huge binder next to your keyboard that has this clue book.”

So, the truth is what is Mari is describing is like writer heaven. People are actually paying attention. I guess what you and I were saying about punctuation is given the general state of affairs where people don’t, it’s probably not that much of a thing. But, yeah, ideally it would be.

**John:** Yeah. So, I do like your description of punctuation and parentheticals being the clues that you are leaving to the next people to touch your thing. And it’s great that she has the ability to not only direct this project, but also hire really smart people who are looking for those clues. So, congratulations once again Mari Heller.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. So I was there for the first part of that episode and we addressed a listener questioner about why there was so little non-penetrative sex in movies and TV. Basically where are the handies and blowies? And so while we were having that discussion we left out like one really obvious movie which was Moonlight, which features a very crucial handy there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a mistake.

**John:** We weren’t thinking clearly. We were recording this late. I was in London. I lost a microphone. But there is an obvious Oscar-winning movie that has a non-penetrative sex moment that the whole story hinges upon.

**Craig:** It’s an Academy Award-winning handy.

**John:** Yeah. It’s quite a good one. And just a few days later, like this is always the situation where like the minute you notice something you start to notice it everywhere. So, I was watching an episode from this season of The Americans and Keri Russell’s character receives oral sex in a way that I had not seen certainly on TV before, and it was actually completely on story and on point. So, I would like to once again congratulate The Americans on being a fantastic show. And just put a spotlight on my own ignorance to these acts that are in these shows that I’m just not seeing.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is probably going to happen, right? We say that something doesn’t happen and then of course it happens. We just didn’t see it. We missed it. Or sometimes we do see it and then we just forget about it. Really, I’m arguing that we just end the podcast. We’re so close to 300. How great would it be if we just ended it at 299 and we’re like, Nah.

**John:** Yeah. There’s days I definitely think about that. Just going out in a blaze of glory.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. 300 podcast episodes is like having 300 wins as a pitcher. That’s a big thing. I think that that gets us into the podcasting Hall of Fame automatically.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s sports metaphors all over the place.

**Craig:** You’re always lost when I do this. It’s wonderful.

In a previous episode, John, we talked about movie clichés for expressing shock or bad news. Zack from New York writes, “I’m proud to say that I splashed water on my face today, possibly for the first time ever. I did not receive bad news or experience something terrifying. But I did take a 20-minute nap on my couch and woke up discombobulated. After staring at the wall for a few minutes, I went into the bathroom and threw water on my face. I think it half-worked. I’m awake enough to write this email, but still sort of discombobulated. However, I’m out of ideas.”

**John:** What I love about Zack’s email is that it’s so present tense. It’s right about this is the moment I’m experiencing right now. And I like that he thought of us first in that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I just want to salute Zack for writing in to ask@johnaugust.com to let us know that he splashed water on his face, which we had singled out as a movie cliché that no one does in actual life, but it seemed to sort of help Zack in this moment. So, again, just like with handies and blowies, we’re often wrong.

**Craig:** Oh, god, are we ever. Well, what about this whole situation with you and Lindelof?

**John:** Oh, it’s the worst. So, Damon Lindelof and I talked about the notion of idea debt and we thought like, oh, we’re being clever. But you know who else was clever? Chekhov.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, he was pretty good–

**John:** A little writer. A little writer named Chekhov. So, this is what Chekhov wrote in 1888. So, for the record, that was before we recorded the podcast episode.

**Craig:** Just a little bit, yeah. Just a little before.

**John:** Chekhov wrote, “Subjects for five big stories and two novels swarm in my head. One of the novels was conceived a long time ago, so that several of the cast of characters have grown old without ever having been put down on paper. There is a regular army of people in my brain begging to be summoned forth, and only waiting for the word to be given. All I have written hither to is trash in comparison with what I would like to write.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s Chekhov.

**Craig:** I mean, that is succinct. It’s beautifully said. He did really put you to shame there. And Damon. I think the both of you should feel bad.

**John:** We do feel a little bad. I want to also single out Jason who wrote in with that Chekhov quote to make us feel a little bad. But also I do want to thank everyone on Twitter who said that it was one of the best episodes they’d ever heard of the podcast. So, Craig, at some point–

**Craig:** I’m going to read it.

**John:** If you were to listen to it or read it–

**Craig:** I’m reading it.

**John:** You might enjoy that episode with Damon Lindelof. Finally, we often do segments about How Would This Be a Movie. So, in Episode 214 we did an episode about the French train bros. These were the three American tourists in 2015 who prevented a terrorist attack.

**Craig:** We’re calling them bros? [laughs]

**John:** Well they’re bros. They’re three guys traveling through France. They’re bros.

**Craig:** I guess. Sure.

**John:** They prevented a terrorist attack on a train from Brussels to Paris. They overpowered a guy who had an AK-47. So we said like, well, this could be a movie and Clint Eastwood agreed. So this last week it was announced that he is going to be making a movie based on the book The 1517 to Paris: The Trust Story of a Terrorist, a Train, and Three American Heroes, which was written by the eponymous American heroes, along with a guy named Jeffrey Stern. The screenplay version is going to be written by Dorothy Blyskal, and from what I looked up it seems like this is going to be her first screenwriting credit. So, congratulations Dorothy. You answered the question How Would This Be a Movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s one that people will see. You know, boy, I wish I could be on a Clint Eastwood set. I’ve just heard so many amazing things. You know, just the speed. We’ve all heard the stories. I wish I could see that. I’m not going to be able to.

**John:** Are you? Is there some sort of secret thing where you actually will be able to see that?

**Craig:** No, no, never going to be able to there. I’ll just be in my office reading about it. Well, that sounds exciting. I think that will be fun.

**John:** It will be fun.

**Craig:** You know what? I’ve had enough of follow up. I think follow up is done.

**John:** Follow up is done. So, if we were a podcast ahead, like musical interludes, then we would put the music here and then move on to the next thing.

**Craig:** Follow up is done. Yeah!

**John:** So the big feature topic which we obviously have to talk about this past week because everyone on Twitter wrote to us about it. And follows ScriptBook. Well, what is ScriptBook? Well, back in Episode 232, so it’s kind of follow up, we talked about ScriptBook and I actually remember this conversation. I remember the setting of this conversation because I was in Australia at the time and we were talking about this sort of ridiculous AI thing that would read through the scripts and figure out how successful this movie would be. Basically it had digested a bunch of screenplays and it was pitched towards financiers to help them figure out is this a movie to be investing your money into.

But this last week, someone else decided to use ScriptBook and it didn’t go as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, Franklin Leonard over at the Black List worked out some sort of deal with the ScriptBook people where he was offering to his customers an opportunity to get their analysis, the ScriptBook analysis of their script, in exchange for $100. And it did not go over well. You know, he put it out there. And seemingly put it out there in good faith. It certainly wasn’t anything he was requiring people to do. If they wanted to use the other parts of his service, which you and I generally quite like.

Boy, it just didn’t go well for him. I mean, certainly both you and I felt that ScriptBook was stupid, and fake, bordering on completely useless. And therein is the problem. Because there’s two ways of looking at it. One way is this is potentially useful for people. And the other way is this is absolutely useless.

If you believe the former, then you can see where, OK, he’s offering a product. You either like it or you don’t. But if you believe the latter, if you believe it’s truly useless, it starts to feel a little bit scammy. Like you’re selling me snake oil. And I personally do believe it is utter snake oil.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And a lot of other people seem to agree as well.

**John:** Absolutely. So, the minute sort of the word got out about it, you and I were on a long email thread with Franklin about it, but there were also threads on Reddit and there was a lot of sort of hubbub on the Internet about what this was and what it was doing. So, I think we should sort of spoil the punch line here by saying that Franklin has pulled the product, so it is no longer a thing that the Black List is offering, and so we will put a link in the show notes to his original explanation for what the product was and then his email out and sort of his letter about sort of why they were removing it and why he listened to the community and pulled it out of there.

So, I want to talk about two things, which is that question of like is this potentially useful. Like in a perfect world, if this were free, is this a thing you would want to exist in the world? And then the concern of like, well, is this a thing that we feel like screenwriters should be paying $100 for?

Let’s talk about in the perfect world where it’s free, Craig, did you see any value in the product?

**Craig:** No. None. Well, net zero value. Because where there may be little bits of possible potential usefulness in the free version of this, there’s also potential problems that it causes. And that really was the biggest issue for me. So, you know, some of the stuff you go, well, I guess the AI is saying that my predicted genre is half sport and half drama. It’s a sports-drama, but how did I not know that? Um, there’s a predicted MPAA rating, which again really what it comes down to is it’s telling you everybody knows what G is and everybody knows what R is. So, then somehow tell us if you’re PG or PG-13. Nobody in the world cares about that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is stuff about your character likeability. That to me is just dangerous. Because you might think, oh, my character is not likeable enough. Nobody – what – no, that’s not how it works at all.

Predicted target audience. Absolutely useless to you. The marketing department will tell you what the predicted audience is. And then there’s production budget. Potentially useful if you were maybe trying to produce this on your own. Or you were maybe considering to whom you ought to submit the work. And you know, OK, well these people are looking for movies in the $10 to $20 million range. Well, ScriptBook tells me that my script has a 46% chance of being in that range, which ultimately isn’t really very useful either. Because nobody is going to make a budget based on what ScriptBook guesses. They’re going to make a budget by breaking it down and making a budget.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. So, in the show notes we’ll link to a file that the Black List put up which was a sample report for Fences, the Academy Award-nominated script from this past year. And so as you look through it, it’s a nicely presented report. It’s three or four pages long. It talks about rating, genre, the Script DNA, character sentiment, character likeability. I had concerns with all of these things for the reasons that Craig laid out.

Where I think this is actually interesting was there’s this grid where it shows movies that this is like. And I think the axes as they’re labeled are really unfortunate. So it says Audience Rating, in this case from 3 to 10. And creativity from 0 to 1. So looking at this you would say that well Fences is more creative than Hope Springs, or Sideways, but it’s less creative than The Iron Lady or The Verdict. And it’s also more creative than Beasts of the Southern Wild, which seems kind of remarkable.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** So, that was troubling to me. And yet if I were to take away the lines and the axes and just say like this is a cluster of other movies that feel kind of like this, that I could actually see being somewhat useful. Because I would never think of Fences as being like Milk or like The Iron Lady, but in a way that the people who like Milk would probably also like Fences, or the Iron Lady, that actually seems to make some sense.

So that is reasonable to me. And I was actually a little bit impressed that the AI was able to match these up to some degree. Now, I would love to see it matching Identity Thief and seeing what are the movies around that and see if it actually has a good sense of what that is. I thought that was somewhat interesting. But I don’t think it’s $100 interesting for an aspiring screenwriter. I don’t know what an aspiring screenwriter who is putting a script up on the Black List gets out of knowing that it’s like these things. I don’t see how that’s actionable information.

**Craig:** It isn’t. And it’s also information that you as a human are layering your own insight upon. Because the truth is we don’t know – you can say, well, Fences is – I guess in a strange way Fences and Milk are somewhat related. Are they? Really? Well, they’re both dramas. They’re both about adults. They both take place in cities. They both have middle-aged men kind of at the center of it. But, are they really? I mean, I guess anybody could just – at that point you could just say any movie with people like that and go, oh, that’s interesting. I guess those movies are sort of like…

Fences and Sideways are nothing alike. Nothing, as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** But I would say they are both in terms of who they are appealing to, I think they’re actually more common than you might necessarily believe. Though the fact that it recognized that Fences was potentially an award movie seems interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But again, we don’t know. We’re looking at exactly one example. So I don’t know how much to read into this. But I found that at least interesting. I put the T in there for Aline.

**Craig:** It is vaguely interesting. But anybody who just scrolls through a list of award movies, right, you have Fences. That’s based on a brilliant play. So you’re making an award movie. Just run through a list of award movies then, I guess. I mean, this is not – I don’t understand these metrics. So you have this creativity metric and, well, you could say Fences and Milk are equally creative sort of, I guess whatever that means. But apparently Raging Bull is less creative than Hope Springs. What?

**John:** I don’t know what that means.

**Craig:** Wait. The Usual Suspects is less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted. That’s right. Let me say this again. That’s the Jamie Kennedy movie, I believe, where he’s – isn’t that right – where he plays a rapper?

**John:** I think it is. Yes. He’s a rapper.

**Craig:** The Usual Suspects – here are the movies that are less creative than Malibu’s Most Wanted: The Usual Suspects, Cool Hand Luke, Heat, Michael Clayton. [laughs] What? And The Avengers.

**John:** Yeah. The Avengers and Catwoman down there at the bottom there.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. Computer, you’re wrong. And Malibu’s Most Wanted shouldn’t be on this. It makes no sense.

**John:** It should not be on there at all.

**Craig:** I also don’t understand the vertical axis of Audience Rating. So, how do we have the audience rating exactly for Cool Hand Luke? What audience? I mean, the audience of over 30 years? Or then? Beasts of the Southern Wild less creative than The Blind Side. And, I mean, I don’t understand this.

**John:** I don’t understand it either. But here’s what I would say zooming way back. I mean, is it clear that there are AI things that can actually find patterns where we wouldn’t see patterns? Absolutely. Do I think this is a case where the kinds of patterns it is finding are going to be useful for the target audience of this service? No, I don’t. I just don’t think that sticking Milk and Fences close to each other on a graph is helping a writer. And a lot of people seem to feel the same way.

So, let’s segue to the scamminess of it all. Because you and I both know and like Franklin. He’s a smart, good guy who is not scammy. And so in our conversations with him, we wanted to sort of make it clear that this felt scammy, but we didn’t think he was scammy. And that we were concerned for him and for the brand because that’s not the way we want to see him out there in the world.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And he did the thing that people so rarely, rarely do. He listened.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** He listened. I mean, Franklin is a humble guy. He’s a business man and he’s an aggressive business man, but he’s not afraid to say, OK, I made a mistake. And in this case what happened was it wasn’t about you or me. We hadn’t talked about his involvement with this on the air prior to his decision that he made to remove it. But he listened to writers on Twitter. He listened to writers on Reddit. Keith Calder, a good producer, who really went after it on Twitter I think made an impression. And he said, “OK, you know what, I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t like this. I did. And I thought people would like it and I think some people still could get use out of it. On the other hand, I hear you. So, we’re dumping it.”

And that’s a big boy grown up thing to do. And in today’s world, it is a rare thing. And so–

**John:** It is. Yeah.

**Craig:** I had a lot of respect for that. And, you know, again, you and I, we like the other part of what Franklin does, which now that we’ve gotten rid of this thing, that is what Franklin does. We like him. He’s our friend. And I think that his general service is a good one. So, it looks like we’re back to a good situation.

**John:** Which is a very good thing. All right, next topic is the battle for James Bond. So, this was – I’m going to link to an article from the New York Times by Brooks Barnes. I’m sorry, Craig.

**Craig:** You know, Brooks Barnes, I had to correct him the other day. He wrote an article about the strike and referred to the long strike of 1998, which did not exist.

**John:** Did not happen.

**Craig:** Oh, Brooks.

**John:** So I can’t verify that all the facts in this article are true, but I will say that in a general sense it raised an interesting issue of what happens when you have a franchise that is essentially a free agent. So, that’s James Bond. When you see a James Bond movie, the opening credits are United Artists, MGM/United Artists. But that’s not actually who releases it. And so for the past four James Bond movies they’ve been released by Sony. But that contract is up. And so now five different companies are competing for the right to make that next James Bond movie. The companies being Warners, Universal, 20th Century Fox, Sony, and Annapurna, which is the little small label that mostly does fancy award movies.

So, that’s kind of an interesting and unusual thing to happen in Hollywood is to have this franchise sort of up for grabs.

**Craig:** It is. And it’s sort of up for grabs, because the truth is they’re not really going to be making it. What they’re going to be doing is giving MGM/UA the money or a big chunk of the money to make the movie, and then they’re going to be advertising the movie and distributing the movie. And therein is the problem, because when you actually look at the way the deal has been structured, if we’re to believe what Brooks has said here, there’s not that much profit really coming back to you. In huge success, you’ll make a pretty good amount of money. You won’t make as much money as say they’re making off of Get Out, because your profit is capped. It’s seriously capped.

So what he describes as under the previous agreement, and I can’t imagine in a bidding war why the new agreement wouldn’t be even more favorable to the Bond folks than the previous one. But, in the previous one Sony paid half of the production costs. So, you pay half of what it costs to make the movie. That’s just to make the movie. And in return for that, you get one-quarter of certain profits, once costs are recouped. That’s probably the certain costs there for those things may involve taxes and insurance and things like that. And obviously, you know, you’re only getting your share of the ticket price and so forth.

**John:** It’s also unclear if Sony is releasing this internationally, like what distribution fee do they get to charge for their distribution services. The math behind this can be very, very complicated.

**Craig:** Extremely. Yeah.

**John:** So it’s not a matter of the film itself becoming profitable. They’re getting money in at every step of the process.

**Craig:** Well, they’re putting money in and they’re taking money out all the time. So, you’re right. For instance, they’ll say, well, we’re going to spend $60, $70, $80 million of the total marketing spend. We’re going to be accountable for that. So we’re spending $80 million. But we’re going to charge you $20 million in marketing fees. So it’s always this weird game. But in the end, here’s the truth: all these people want it because it’s kind of a sure thing. And there is the potential for many more movies. We live in an interesting time.

So, you say to a studio, “You have a choice. Roll the dice on a $20 million movie. It will either make $4 million, or it will make $120 million, but there won’t be another one. Or, make this movie. You will make $30 million off of it. And you can do five more of them. And each one will make you $30 million.” They’re going to go for that second deal all day long.

**John:** Yeah. I think so. And I think it’s as much about the psychology as the actual dollars coming in. So in think about it if you are the head of one of these studios. If you make the Bond movie and it just does OK, no one is going to call you an idiot for making the James Bond movie. It was a safe bet and everyone is going to acknowledge it was a safe bet.

Also, you are keeping the entire machinery of your studio engaged to do it. I mean, one of the weird things about a studio is you have these whole departments that have nothing to do unless you give them a movie to work on. And so a lot of times when studios are in crisis it’s because they actually don’t have a movie. And so they have these huge divisions that have nothing to actually do. So this is a thing to do. It’s a reason to keep all those people employed doing their jobs. Bond is one of those few kind of known brands that whether it’s a fantastic James Bond movie or a just an OK James Bond movie you know you’re going to clear a certain bar with it.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And you know that you’ll have the right to attach one of your other movies’ trailers to that, because studios can do that where they’re like, OK, if you run this movie you have to at least run our trailer with it. And you know that you’re going to be attracting a certain amount of talent which then if the relationship goes well you might be able to transition into a different movie, filmmakers. You’re keeping people close.

The difference with Bond is the people that control Bond are notoriously protective of it and really they do it. You actually don’t really do anything when, as a studio, other than you sell it and you distribute it. So you’re not really getting much back. It’s an interesting thing that all of these studios are so into it. I mean, it just goes to show you that they make more money and they make it more consistently than we know.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** Because if they can make consistent money off of this arrangement, and they want to do it again, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. They’re doing OK.

**Craig:** They’re doing all right.

**John:** Let’s look at some of the other reasons why you don’t want to make the Bond movie or why you don’t want to chase it. It has a limited upside. So, you’re capped at sort of how much you can get out of it. Including you’re capped on this movie that you’re making, but down the road if like let’s say you reinvigorate the Bond franchise, well another studio could make the next movie. And it’s like you’ve helped them, but you’re getting nothing for having helped them. So, that’s a concern.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have limited creative control because the Broccoli family controls it so tightly. Also, you’re weirdly forced to make it. Like, let’s say you get the script and got the director and you’re reading this and you’re like I don’t want to green light this. You have not choice basically. You have to green light this. That’s part of the deal you’re making right now. So these guys are pursuing the rights to Bond, but they’re not looking at a script right now. There is no script right now, I assume. They’re just talking about the idea of making a Bond movie. Maybe with Daniel Craig. Maybe not with Daniel Craig. So, it’s a mystery. And they’re on the hook to make it kind of no matter what happens.

And, finally, there’s an opportunity cost. So, if you’re making the Bond movie, that’s another movie you’re probably not making, either because you don’t have the resources to do it, you know, money wise, or there’s just not a slot in your schedule for another movie right now. Which for some of these studios is probably a good thing, because they’re just looking to do the minimum it takes to sort of keep them in their jobs.

**Craig:** Well, I think that the – you know, it’s so interesting when you talk to people that run studios, one of the things that I’ve heard from a number of them, and it’s very sad actually is that they never really have any moments of victory and joy because when they make these movies, and this is a perfectly good example, they run a spreadsheet and they go, “Well, we are expected to make between this amount and this amount in terms of profit.” The movie is made. It comes out. It either hits that target or it doesn’t. Maybe it exceeds it somewhat. Usually doesn’t.

So, let’s say they have predicted that the movie is going to be quite a success and it’s going to make them $80 million in profit. Two years later, someone says, “OK, yeah, you did it. Check. You did the thing we asked you to do.” There’s no dancing around. There’s no big “oh my god, it’s a huge hit, wow.” Because that implies that they are all just guessing. They’re not.

Unfortunately what also happens is if you miss that target on the low side, the studio bean counters and overlords will say, “Hmm, well, you’re going to have to make it up on one of these other ones.” So even when you exceed expectations, even that triumph is muted because really somebody is going to say, “Well, all right, you should bank that because one of these other ones might miss.” Either way, by the time we get to see the movies it’s like an afterthought for them, because they’ve already priced it and thought about it. And, in fact, they’re now worried about what’s coming out two years from now. And you never get to enjoy it.

**John:** I think if you’re a studio executive, maybe you’re trying to build a hand of three different kinds of suits. You want the guaranteed hits, like the things, you know, Fast & the Furious 9. And, yes, there’s already a spreadsheet for how much that is supposed to make, but you want to be able to hit that thing and hopefully exceed it. You want a couple of cards that are just like they could break out. They have low expectations but they have possible of a lot of upside. You want the Get Outs. The things that could become a Get Out.

And, finally, you want a few of those things that could win awards, because if you’re looking at whether you’re going to be able to reup your contract in a few years, I think you want to be able to show all three things. That you’ve done the expected hits, some surprise hits, and you’ve also gotten the studio some awards. And that’s a lot to try to manage.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is. And I don’t envy them. Honestly, I don’t. I know right now we’re in a bit of a contentious period between writers and the companies, but in terms of the people that I know and I work with, I don’t envy them their jobs. I’m sure they don’t envy me mine. I think everybody that isn’t a screenwriter is horrified by the thought of having to write a screenplay, and I don’t blame them.

But, that’s a difficult gig. And it’s scary. And there’s so much that’s not in your control. That’s the part that’s hardest for me to get my mind around, because you know at the very least we have this wonderful period where we’re in control. And it’s when we’re writing. They never really have that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a strange part of their job is they seem to be the decision makers, and yet they don’t have ultimate control of the thing they’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Before we wrap this up, let’s take a look at some other franchises and just look and see where they fall on sort of this matrix, because the James Bond is like one of the most free-agenty kind of things out there. At least in terms of how MGM partners up with a different company every time.

But Terminator strikes me as a similar situation, because that was made by Carolco way back in the day. It keeps I think passing through different sort of financiers who own the rights to it, but it could end up different places.

**Craig:** It has a home now.

**John:** OK, where is it now?

**Craig:** It is at Skydance.

**John:** OK. Well, Skydance I would sort of count as sort of an MGM type situation where they’re a place with a lot of money, but they are not – they don’t have their own distribution deal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They just distribute through somebody.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Marvel for a while was sort of like the James Bond situation where they have a bunch of properties and some of them are at Paramount, some were at Fox, some were at Sony. Spider Man was at Sony. Ultimately they all ended up over at Disney, except for the X-Men universe at Fox, and for Spider Man at Sony. But even then they sort of reached back in and sort of reinvested in Spider Man. But for a while they were doing what James Bond was doing. They could move their movies from studio to studio.

**Craig:** They could. And then they got purchased by Disney. So, once Disney bought them, you can see there is just a general effort now to hold all of that in. And the only ones that are left straggling out there are the X-Men, so you have the X-Men part over at Fox, and you have Spider Man at Sony, which they are now co-producing. I don’t know how long that X-Men – I think the deal with the X-Men is they keep it if they keep making X-Men movies, or something like that. I read something like that.

**John:** That’s my understanding is like they’ll keep making X-Men movies because that’s how they keep their rights to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finally, Star Wars was for a while Lucas Film owned it, so Fox distributed it. But I think Lucas Film really owned the first three prequels that they made, and now of course Disney owns that whole franchise as well. So, again, sort of bringing it in house.

**Craig:** And Disney has been kind of brilliant about this, you know. They just buy the whole company, you know. So, you can negotiate with MGM/UA about the rights to distribute James Bond movies. But if you really want a James Bond movie, just buy MGM/UA. Right? The problem is that’s all they have. They have that. They have the Bond, right? And Bond is very narrow. It’s a fascinating franchise. I’m a huge Bond fan. I’ve seen them all. But it is a very narrow franchise. There I don’t believe there has ever been a Bond spinoff. The entire point is you have James Bond. And then you have a couple of villains that repeat every now and again. Your Blofelds. But there’s a new woman that comes in each time. She comes in, there’s sex, she leaves. Next movie. You know, you have a character like Felix Leiter who is a CIA buddy. No one has ever gone, you know what, now there’s a Bond universe where we’re going to have a movie just about Q and we’re going to have a movie just about Felix Leiter. I’m sure they brought it up at some point or another. But as far as I can tell, nobody on the Bond side of things seems interested in that. So–

**John:** I do remember speculation about Halle Berry’s character being spun off from her movie. Jinx, or whatever her name was.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There was talk of that, but none of that ever came to pass. And it does feel, I agree with you though. Like if another person were to come in and buy that whole franchise, if they bought out the Broccolis for some reason, you would see a universe being formed. Because we know a lot about that universe and it feels like there’s something more you could do with that if you had it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know like if they had an extended Bond universe, you know the movie I would want to write?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** I would want to write the movie of M. Young M.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** And how M is a spy and it is WWII. I would do a period piece. And sort of the early days of spying and the creation – the notion of why you create the Double O. There’s a great story to be told about why you decide as a person and as a government we need an agency where certain people are allowed to murder. Not shoot in self-defense, or be a soldier on the battlefield. Just kill someone. That is a fascinating question. Licensed to Kill.

**John:** Absolutely. I also think you look at some of the classic villains and, yes, they are people who are up to their own – they have their own plans and devices, but like there’s an Elon Musk-y kind of character who is sort of right on the border between a villain and a hero who could be a fascinating centerpiece to a movie. Who ends up doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. There’s something great about that kind of character as well.

**Craig:** And there is really room there. There’s room there. But for now–

**John:** For now it will be Bond. Our next topic was also suggested by many of our listeners. So, this past week there was a video put out by Nerd Writer on recutting Passengers. Basically proposing the question of what would happen if you did a major cut on the movie Passengers where you sort of limited it to Jennifer Lawrence’s point of view, at least for part of the movie, so she wakes up first. So essentially like she wakes up and Chris Pratt’s character is already walking around the space station. And you and she don’t know that he woke her up deliberately.

And, Craig, I don’t know. Have you seen the movie?

**Craig:** No. But I know the story of the movie. And so I understand the purpose of this change. I’m not really sure – I mean, it would be different.

**John:** It would be different.

**Craig:** I don’t know if the people’s primary objection to that – I mean, no matter how long you delay it, at some point you find out that he woke her up and then you’re asked to believe in their romance. And that seems to be the problematic part for people.

**John:** Absolutely. So, I think it’s an interesting idea. I enjoyed the movie, but I think my problems with the movie were sort of the problems of they had to work really hard to sort of keep Chris Pratt likeable, even though he was doing an unlikeable thing, and it sort of strained under that weight. So, this would be a way of addressing that. But I don’t want to actually get into so much the creative solution proposed here, and just talk about what would happen and what does happen when you are facing a movie and you have this idea for a massive restructuring after it’s already shot.

So, let’s say that you saw this movie before it came out and you were the studio executive, or you are the producer, or the director, and you say like, “I think I want to try this thing.” How would that actually come to pass and what are the realities of trying to implement a change like this?

**Craig:** Well, the first thing that has to happen is a general decision about the scope of the work. Because they’ll make a movie, they’ll test the movie, and then they will discuss – let’s just presume it doesn’t go well, OK? So, the question now is what are we talking about here. Do we need a couple more jokes in the movie? Do we need this one scene that would help improve that? Should we fix the ending? Or, do we have something fundamentally huge going on here and we need to do a lot of work? We need to do two weeks of shooting and shoot a lot and recast a couple of parts?

So, first triage.

**John:** Yeah, and a triage moment only happens if there really is a disastrous test screening. If people really just do not like this movie. And I don’t think that was the case with Passengers. My suspicion was, from people I’ve talked with, the movie tested pretty well and the movie was like pretty well and they were surprised by the reception it got, which wasn’t as strong as they’d hoped.

So, I think you would have to have that bad test screening. The studio panicked. The producer panicked. You have to have a director who is on board with making big changes, or a director you can replace.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Those are the only situations in which you’re able to do big things. But, you’re often doing small things. And so what I will say is that even after a good test screening, you are talking about recuts, reshoots, looking for things that aren’t working, finding your jokes. That happens all the time. And I’ve never worked on a movie that hasn’t had changes based on those early screenings and people’s reactions to them. So, but what’s not common, and you and I have both been in situations where they have done the big recut, that is sort of an emergency all hands on deck. You’re really talking about big brand new ideas. Like, what if we were to rethink how this all works?

**Craig:** Yeah. And I’ve done that. I’ve done that. And it’s hard. It’s hard because first of all it’s a rare thing for the people who are involved in the creation of the movie up to that point to continue to be involved. So, we have a huge problem here. We’re probably going to need a different director to come in and do this work. And we should bring a different writer in to come in and do this work, otherwise we’re at risk of repeating the same mistakes, plus there’s just a lot of emotions and defensiveness. And it’s understandable. It’s a mess.

So, when I come and do this, I sit – I watch the movie. And then inevitably after that there is a discussion of here are the things we just can’t do. We can’t change this. And we can’t change that. We have this much that we can change. How should we best do it? So, it is a very tricky puzzle. This is very Rubik’s Cubey. Figuring out how to fundamentally change a movie without touching a whole bunch of it. And it’s rarely perfectly successfully. It can make a huge difference. And it does. I mean, you can see it in test scores. They run the movie and they’re like, my god, look at the difference.

And I always think, well yeah, but there’s still something just – this movie is still just not right. It’s alive. Very tough to do.

**John:** Yeah. When I come into these situations, I always sort of start with like what is actually working. Are there moments of the movie that actually work that sort of suggest the movie it wants to be? And oftentimes it won’t be at the very start of the movie, it’ll be some moment in the middle where like, OK, just for a moment there you kind of found what the movie was. And it’s possible just through cutting and through moving stuff around, you’ll be able to find more of that movie and sort of get us to that place. But in general I find you want to let the movie be one thing rather than the three things.

When a movie is really not working, it’s trying to do too much at once, and it just loses its focus and its tone. It’s just not a consistent experience. So figuring out what that experience should be is really important.

The first Charlie’s Angels was notoriously a very chaotic production. It was chaotic in post as well. But I remember when I came back in on that movie, one of the first things I really worked on was the opening title sequence, which shouldn’t seem that important, but it was really helpful for setting the tone.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** We’d shot all these scenes, but figuring out what it felt like and sort of what the right kind of goofy was. And so I was sitting with the editors working on do the wipes across and make it feel like the TV show in ways that are fun and right. And once we got that and sort of got that locked, we could sort of step back and say, OK, let’s look at the rest of our scenes and see how we can be a little bit more like that in our style, and that was really helpful.

But ultimately there were reshoots. There were simplifications of logic. They were getting rid of things that didn’t need to be there. Classically, World War Z is a movie that had a much, much bigger ending in its original form. This big assault on Moscow. And the movie did not want to be that. The movie ultimately wanted to be a more intimate movie with Brad Pitt and his family and his own survival. And so that was that whole new third act that Damon Lindelof and Drew Goddard had to figure out how to do.

**Craig:** And Chris McQuarrie.

**John:** Chris McQuarrie as well. So, it’s a bunch of hands on deck, really smart people. Looking at what’s there. Looking at what was great, which there was a lot that was great in the first two-thirds of World War Z. And finding a way to carry that through to the end, in that case incredibly successfully.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, those situations are not – thank god – common. It is more common that what happens is – I did this recently. You watch a movie and everyone says, “Here are the things that we’re kind of getting back from the audience on some spots.” And I’ll say, yes, I had those same reactions myself. So that’s good news. It means everybody is kind of in agreement.

Maybe all we need to do here is add a line. You know, so two people are talking and maybe this person says something that just isn’t quite right. It’s causing confusion. So, let’s just have them record a new line and we’ll just be on the other person’s face. And it’s just one line and suddenly that all makes sense now.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** The disruption of experience through poor logic is so dangerous and happily, typically, easily fixable. My least favorite call is come and make the movie funnier with some lines. That’s not going to work.

**John:** Yeah, to try to joke it up. And that will never work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** What I think you’re describing though when you’re adding in a loop line to sort of make something clear, is you talk about people being on the ride or off the ride. And it’s like when did they fall off the ride? And they fall off the ride, they fall off the – they stop believing in the movie when enough things just don’t add up for them. When they start getting confused and sort of confused and annoyed and then they just check out. And so if you can keep them from checking out, if you can keep them engaged, and curious about what’s happening next, you’re probably going to keep them at least somewhat of a fan throughout the rest of the movie.

It’s those moments often in a first act, early in the second act, when people kind of give up on your movie. And if you can keep them from giving up, you’re going to be able to make a lot of those things which weren’t working are suddenly going to feel a lot better.

**Craig:** Exactly. And this is somewhere where a new person coming in is of great help. Because when you’re there from the start and you’re making the movie, you have certain things that you believe. Making a movie is essentially making a million guesses. And you may make almost all the correct guesses, except for two. But, the audience is saying we don’t understand why she’s saying this now but before she said this. And you say, well, it’s because of blah, blah, blah. Right? And somebody else will say, “Well, I didn’t quite get that. I think maybe somebody should say that.” But the people who have been involved, sometimes their feeling is, “But that’s just so on the nose.” Because in their mind it’s in there already. And a new person can say, “It’s kind of not.” And so this is one area where I know it’s going to grate you, because it sounds like it’s on the nose, but for the audience it’s not going to feel – it’s going to actually be interesting, because they’re not getting what you have.

When you do these jobs, you’re actually – this is where being a feature writer feels great, because everybody is, I think, incredibly grateful to the writer who comes in at this point and helps.

**John:** 100 percent. So, let’s wrap this up by talking – go back to Passengers. And so let’s say this is an alternate history version of all this, where they saw the first cut of Passengers, and it wasn’t working. It was sort of like the final movie. And they said like, “You know what? We have this idea for a wild experiment.” What they would actually do next? And we live in a time of wonderful digital editors, so a lot of what the video suggests trying to do, you could actually just do. You could do that in your non-linear editor. I don’t say Avid anymore, because people yell at me when I say Avid.

You would actually chop it up and if there were things that didn’t make sense, you would put in little cards to explain what would happen in this moment. But it’s a day or two to sort of build that cut of the movie and sort of see what it feels like. And maybe it feels great. It certainly would change a lot of your experience of the movie. And then you would have to get buy-in. And that’s where I think they would have a hard time with this radical rethinking, because suddenly your two big movie stars you’re paying $20 million each, they’re not playing the same characters they signed on to in the movie. And they may love it. They may like it a lot more. But suddenly you’re going to be sending them out there in the world to promote this movie which wasn’t at all what they thought it was going to be. You may have already put out a teaser trailer that promised this romance, but the movie that you’re cutting sort of feels more like a thriller.

That can be a real problem as well. So, it’s not honestly as simple as just like, we’ll make the best movie. Make the most compelling movie. There may be reasons why you can’t do some of the things you want to do.

**Craig:** That is precisely why I get frustrated with things like this. Because there is an implication that we out here are just smarter than you. You dumb-dumbs couldn’t see, but we can.

Almost always, no offense to the people that make these videos, they are not thinking of something that we haven’t thought of. Almost always, it’s been thought of and tried and didn’t work with audiences, or it’s been thought of and tried and rejected by the very large number of competing powers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The one thing that people don’t quite understand is it doesn’t matter if something is right. If the movie star, who is going to promote this movie, doesn’t like it. And you may say, “Well, hold on a second. Before we just surrender, can’t we…” And I just want to put my hand up and say, “You’re describing my life. You’re describing my career. That’s half of my job.”

Half of my job is to figure out what to do and get people to agree. The other half is to figure out what to do when the one person who we really need to agree doesn’t agree. Now what do I do? That’s the world we live in. This is collaborative. And some people have an enormous influence on the work.

Sometimes you wish they wouldn’t. But that’s the deal.

**John:** All right. Enough of recutting movies. Let’s go to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, I actually have two. I’m cheating. My first is a newsletter put out by Quinn Emmett, a friend of the show. It’s called Important, Not Important. And it’s just a weekly recap of the things you may have missed in the news, but also sort of other headlines. Sort of a little bit deeper than what you could get on Twitter.

I find it delightful. I’ve been reading it for months. We’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

The other thing I loved this week was this Brazilian artist named Butcher Billy. And what he does is he takes a serious of ‘80s pop songs and he reimagines them as Stephen King book covers. And so if you click through the link in the show notes, you’ll see what I mean. Like Careless Whisper or How Deep is Your Love. There is a Light Never Goes Out. It’s sort of like if you take those titles, they actually can be really good Stephen King books. And so he does the artwork for what that Stephen King book would be. And I just thought they were delightful.

So, I always love sort of reimagining things. I love the unsheets, the sort of make believe posters for movies that we’ve all seen and loved, so I thought this was delightful.

**Craig:** This is pretty great. I’m looking at it right now. That’s cool. Love the font.

My One Cool Thing is Pinball Arcade. Are you a pinball fan, John?

**John:** I’m not a big pinball fan. I’ve never been good enough at it to be a big fan, I guess.

**Craig:** Well, here’s your chance to get good. So, pinball is one of those things that actually they can simulate now brilliantly. So, you know, there’s an app and you can play lots of pinball games. But the cool part is that they’ve gone and licensed and recreated a whole bunch of real pinball games, including maybe the best pinball game ever made. Which was the Addams, Family, the pinball game–

**John:** I remember the Addams Family pinball. I have played that.

**Craig:** It’s great. And so it’s based on the movie from the ‘90s, which in and of itself was based on a television show, which itself was based on the cartoons. And it’s fantastic. I play the Addams Family pinball game every day. It’s so much fun.

By the way, John, do you know what?

**John:** Tell me what.

**Craig:** The Addams Family would actually be a pretty great movie for us to do a deep dive into. It’s so well done.

**John:** It’s so, so, so good. I just love The Addams Family. I love the second Addams Family almost more. The whole camp thing is fantastic.

**Craig:** Amazing. Amazing. In fact, maybe we should do the second Addams Family movie.

**John:** Maybe we should do Addams Family Vacation. And we sort of know Paul Rudnick on Twitter.

**Craig:** I know. You know what? We should get Paul Rudnick to come on the show and talk about it. Oh my god, is he brilliant.

**John:** He’s really good.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Circling back to the pinball game. I will say that one of the things I do love about real pinball games is they’re hot. The lights are actually hot. They have a warmth to them that I find just delightful. They smell a certain way. They have a heat. That is a good thing about real pinball machines.

So, I’m sure they cannot duplicate this quite as well digitally, but still.

**Craig:** They can’t. There’s actually a very interesting – so they’ve had pinball simulators for years and years and years. But the Addams Family only recently, because the rights situation was a nightmare. The game – they had to get clearances from the Addams’ estate. They had to get clearances from Paramount, which made the movie. They had to get clearances from Raul Julia’s estate and from Anjelica Huston. And from – just literally everybody whose voice was in it.

Then they had to go get clearances for the music that was in it. And they wanted to do everything correctly, you know. And they did. Finally they did. So now you can play it.

**John:** Fantastic.

All right, so I will not get to see you at the next Scriptnotes, because you are doing a live show. So you are doing a live show this coming Monday. This episode is out on a Tuesday. On this next Monday, you are recording a live show in Hollywood at the ArcLight. I’m so incredibly jealous for you to hang out with Dana Fox, and Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** A guy named Rian. Well, we have Rob McElhenney who is good.

**John:** Oh yeah. He’s good.

**Craig:** And then we have Rian Johnson who is whatever.

**John:** Just whatever. Delightful.

**Craig:** They can’t all be winners.

**John:** He’s a talented photographer.

**Craig:** [laughs] He’s a good photographer. So, those of you who are still looking for tickets, we have a few left. So, this is – I think it’s a 400-seat auditorium and we’re getting pretty close to 400 at this point. So you better rush.

If you go to HollywoodHeart.org/upcoming, then you can buy tickets. The event is May 1 at 7:30pm in Hollywood at the ArcLight. This is all for charity. Hollywood Heart is a wonderful charity that our friend John Gatins is very involved in. Oscar-nominated John Gatins. And the price of the ticket is $35. And we apologize if that seems a little steep, but again it goes entirely to Hollywood Heart.

Once again, I make nothing.

**John:** Yep. I don’t even make anything on this one.

**Craig:** Even you. [laughs]

**John:** Even I make nothing on this.

**Craig:** God, you’re so rich.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. So, as always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Big thanks to both these guys because we recorded late this week and they killed themselves to get this out. So, thank you guys.

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 where you can send longer questions. But for short questions, on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Facebook. Just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes.

Craig, I think the word iTunes is going to go away. I think we’re going to stop saying iTunes.

**Craig:** Why?

**John:** Because I think they’re actually going to get rid of iTunes as a concept completely. My prediction is WWC, they’ll say like Goodbye iTunes. Because they actually got rid of iTunes Podcast and now it says Apple Podcasts. I think they’re just going to call it, I don’t know, Apple–

**Craig:** What are they going to call it?

**John:** Something else.

**Craig:** Whoa. Weird.

**John:** Whoa. But if you’re on iTunes, or whatever they call it next, just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net.

Craig, thank you for a fun show. Have a great show on Monday. I will look forward to good reports.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir. We’ll do our best.

**John:** Cool. Thanks.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [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))

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig has the week off, but luckily we have someone remarkably qualified to take his spot. Damon Lindelof is the co-creator and showrunner of Lost, a screenwriter and producer of films including Tomorrowland, Prometheus, and Star Trek: Into Darkness. And most immediately the guy behind the HBO series The Leftovers, which began its third and final season this past Sunday. Damon, welcome to Paris.

**Damon Lindelof:** It is so exciting to be here, looking out the window and seeing the Eiffel Tower. It’s a beautiful sunny day here and a little stressed out about sitting in for Mr. Mazin. I feel like Jerry O’Connell must feel when he’s on Regis & Kelly or whatever it’s called now.

**John:** That’s a high stress job. I mean, Chris Hardwick seems like a very natural choice to fill in there.

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** But you have to be very up and present and it’s challenging, but we’re not nearly so demanding of an audience. People are driving in their cars or they’re walking around, so it’s not nearly–

**Damon:** No pressure.

**John:** No pressure.

**Damon:** I understand.

**John:** Yeah. Kelly, she’s always on at the gym. And the gym, that’s a high pressure environment. But you–

**Damon:** That’s true.

**John:** This is nothing. Why are you here in Paris?

**Damon:** I am here for Series Mania or that’s the American pronunciation. Series Mania.

**John:** Sure. That sounds right.

**Damon:** It’s a big TV festival that they have in Paris. And I’m on the jury. So, I’m also premiering the first two episodes of The Leftovers’ third season here in Paris, so that’s going to be tomorrow night at the time of this recording. And so we’re flying in a couple of the actors. So Justin Theroux and Christopher Eccleston will be here. Max Richter, who does our music. So, the premiere is going to kick off this festival, and then I get to watch a lot of great international television that I’ve never seen before. And sort of Sundance or Telluride where we will award a grand jury prize and a couple of acting prizes, etc.

But, it’s basically just an excuse to eat baguettes and coffee and stare out the window at the Eiffel Tower, which I’m going to do right now.

**John:** That sounds really good. So, on today’s podcast, I’m not going to ask you any specific questions about Lost or The Leftovers, because I feel like there’s probably 10,000 hours of tape of you talking about those two shows, which are both fantastic. And I’ve seen every episode of both.

**Damon:** Blah, blah, blah. Yes. Enough.

**John:** But I do want to talk to you about television, because Craig and I get a lot of questions about television and we really don’t know very much about television, so whenever we have a guest–

**Damon:** But you watch a lot of television.

**John:** I watch a ton of television.

**Damon:** So you know a lot about television.

**John:** Yeah, but like the making of television is a very different process. And it’s changed a lot even over the last ten years. So, I’ve not had a series on for quite a long time. But just watching you and sort of your career, it has just transformed a lot. I can tell.

So, I want to talk to you about sort of making a series. But also I’ve known you since before you were a television writer, so I sort of want to talk about growing up, becoming a staff writer, and going into showrunning.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And maybe answer some questions from listeners that have written in. And then finally I want to talk about sort of the back catalog of ideas, because you’re at a place now where you’re done with The Leftovers and you have to figure out what you’re doing next. And I want to talk about how do you decide whether to do something new or to visit something old. So, we’ll go through all of that today if we can.

**Damon:** Oh man. OK.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Damon:** What would Mazin do?

**John:** Mazin would find a way to cut this short and plow through it.

**Damon:** Joke it up.

**John:** He would joke it up.

**Damon:** God love him.

**John:** He’d bring out another character voice.

**Damon:** There’s a closet door behind you and I know that Mazin is going to pop out of it at any moment. And harangue me, which is just the way I want it to happen.

**John:** Sounds good. Let’s go back to sort of your origin story and how you got started as a writer. Because I think I first met you in ’97 or ’98. You were working–

**Damon:** I was working as an assistant probably for Toby Jaffe at the Ladd Company. And I think you were working on a project there. But I remember, like I think I had read Go, but before it was made.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And you came out of the Stark program, if memory serves. And I just thought, wow, you were the – not that you aren’t still – but you were the young, hot, you know, scribe. And this was a time where Hollywood Reporter and Variety were not yet really online. And you would buy the trades and there were always talks of sales and deals and etc. And I remember being in awe of you, which I still am, as I mentioned.

So you basically had the job that I wanted, which at the time I think probably in the mid to late ‘90s, a movie writer. A screenwriter.

**John:** Yeah. For sure. I think at that point I had stopped working as an assistant and Go might have sold. We hadn’t gotten it made yet. And I had a few other assignments. But we had a mutual friend, so a guy who worked at your company was also a Starkie. And so I remember going to lunch–

**Damon:** Yes. That’s right.

**John:** I remember going out to lunch and going to the [Cuccaro] on Larchmont.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And how I first got to know you. And I think I remember, we’ll circle back to old projects at the end, but I remember you pitching me a movie you were writing, a script you were writing, that was about hemophilia.

**Damon:** Oh yes. What a genius idea that was. Just to contextualize, at that time still in the mid ‘90s, even though we were many years beyond the initial Die Hard, that idea of like when you were pitching movies or selling movies it was Die Hard in a blank. The specs that were selling were the kind of Shane Black, you know, big action concepts. And my idea, which I thought was brilliant at the time, was what if there was a guy who was a severe hemophiliac to the degree where any kind of significant subcutaneous cut would put him in enormous peril. And he was incredibly wealthy, like Bruce Wayne, and had a tremendous amount of resource, but was basically living in this penthouse apartment in New York City, but never left.

And he kind of had a – he was a grown man, but sort of a state of arrested social development because to get cut would basically kill him. And what if we took this guy and threw him into like an incredible action scenario where every single set piece he couldn’t end up like John McClane. Where it’s like just the single cut. So he is having sort of a Rear Window, like borderline stalking relationship with this beautiful woman who lives in the penthouse across from him. And she’s in a relationship with this dude who is like some kind of Russian – some bad guy.

And he is watching her and fantasizes about like what her life is, in a very cute, innocent PG-13/non-stalkery way. Although it is stalking in hindsight. And these toughs basically break into the apartment and kidnap her. And he realizes that he is the only one who witnessed this and must go and rescue her. And hijinks ensue.

**John:** Hijinks ensue. So, that was a script you wrote?

**Damon:** Oh, I wrote it.

**John:** You wrote it. And was it your first script?

**Damon:** No. I mean, I had probably written like maybe three or four completed screenplays, one of which was a bad Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, kind of like rip-off, like a party comedy, a John Hughes wannabe thing. And then there were a couple like busted action movie ideas. And then I wrote this western called The Perfectionists that was kind of like in the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino ultra-violent comedy western set in Mexico. And that screenplay was the first thing that I wrote that I was like, “Oh, this isn’t the worst thing that I’ve read in my life and I’ll at least let some of my peers read it.” And got some positive feedback from them. And then I submitted it for the Nicholl Fellowship, which is done through the Motion Picture Academy.

At the time they got like maybe 5,000 submissions a year and I started getting letters that I made the first cut, and then the second cut, and the third cut. And it was down to maybe 50 scripts out of those 5,000. And I was like, oh, this is good. I have to choice to make, which is the next letter may say I’m no longer in the running, and that will be incredibly demoralizing and I’ll decide that I’m a terrible writer again. Or, I can just take all of this positivity and make a move.

And so I sent out an email to everyone I knew and at that point I’d just been watching a tremendous amount of television and I started to have some peers who were working in television. And it felt like my skill set would be much better suited to TV because I love collaborating. And I heard about this thing called a writer’s room, as opposed to the way that you know feature writing works, which is there’s no collaboration fundamentally. There’s collaboration between you and the producer and the studio, but those three entities are very rarely in the room at the same time. You’re getting mixed messages. And then if a draft doesn’t come in exactly the way they want it, they fire you and replace you, versus the way that it made much more sense to me and more fun is to basically take four or five talented people and put them all in a room together. And everyone is basically coming up with ideas and supporting one another and challenging ideas that aren’t working, et cetera.

That was only happening in TV. And a friend of mine, Julie Plec, who was running Kevin Williamson’s company at the time as an executive, and now Julie runs – she’s a showrunner. She’s been running The Vampire Diaries which just ended and The Originals, which is the spinoff of that show. But she emailed me back instantly and said, “Kevin just had a show picked up.” This was after Dawson’s Creek. “It’s going to be on ABC. But you need to start – could you start on Monday?” And this was on a Thursday. So, I quit my job. Ladd told me, both encouragingly and discouragingly, “You can always come back.”

**John:** Yes.

**Damon:** “I’ll be here when things don’t work out.” And I took the writer’s assistant job on Wasteland. And that was in the 98/99 season, so that was 19 years ago. I’ll be a professional television writer for 20 years next year.

**John:** That’s crazy. So, I remember Wasteland, because I was doing a competing show.

**Damon:** Really? Very few do.

**John:** I was doing a competing show. I was doing D.C. which was the WB show. Your show was like young twenty-somethings in New York, mine was young twenty-somethings in Washington, D.C.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** Yours lasted like 13 episodes. Mine lasted three.

**Damon:** No, only two episodes of Wasteland aired.

**John:** Oh, fantastic. So, I may have beaten you.

**Damon:** We made 13.

**John:** Yes, absolutely.

**Damon:** And D.C. had a – you know, the premise of Wasteland was Friends as a drama series with no comedy. Like, it was just twenty-somethings having existential crises. But at least D.C. they were in pop–

**John:** Yeah, there was some kind of reason.

**Damon:** There was a franchise.

**John:** Mine was supposed to be like post-Felicity. So it was supposed to be fun. But it was not a good show. Have you gone back and watched any of those early things that you wrote? Because I’ve not gone back to watch DC at all.

**Damon:** Oh my god. No, I have not. But I think I probably should, just to–

**John:** Might be sobering.

**Damon:** Some sort of learning, yeah. I could use some sobering.

**John:** So, you start as a writer’s assistant. And were you able to write an episode during your time as a writer’s assistant? Was that an actual writing job?

**Damon:** What ended up happening on that show, because Kevin Williamson was the de facto showrunner, except he had just handed off Dawson’s Creek to Greg Berlanti who was like a one – I think he was like 24 or 25.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Running basically Dawson’s Creek.

**John:** And he still seems like a boy wonder.

**Damon:** Amazing.

**John:** The man does not age.

**Damon:** I mean, how prolific and incredible his shows are. Kevin was also directing this movie called Teaching Mrs. Tingle, for New Line, so he was not around for the early days of Wasteland. He would just basically buzz in for an hour or two a day and the room would pitch him ideas. But he was not able based on his other projects to take the reins.

And what ended up happening over the course of just about six weeks is that the showrunner quit, a number of other writers were fired, and by the end of six weeks it was the staff writers and the story editor and very junior level writers and me. And there was no material beyond the fifth episode. And we were about to go into production on it. And I was like I’m just going to write a spec Wasteland, just on my own. And I did that over the course of two days and handed it off to the staff writers and said, “If this is worth anything, rewrite it, put your names on it, but at least we’ll all be employed for another week or two.” And they went into their office and closed the door and I was feeling really anxious and the door remained closed for 45 minutes. And I was like I’ve made a huge mistake. I’ve overstepped my bounds.

And then Kevin, he was a friendly guy, but he’d never – I didn’t even know that he knew that I really existed. And he walked right up to my desk, which was in the kind of bullpen. And he said, “Are you Damon?” And I said, “Uh, yeah.” And he said, “Did you write an episode of the show?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you have an agent?” And I said, “No.” And she said, “You better get one.”

**John:** That’s great.

**Damon:** And he went into his office and then moments later Jim and Andy, who were the staff writers, they came out and they were like, “We really liked the script. We called Kevin.” I was like, yeah, he just…

So, you know, it was off to the races from there. So, I ended up writing on three or four of the 13 episodes of Wasteland that were produced, but again only two aired before it was canceled. So, that’s how I got my WGA status and my representation and all that stuff was on that show.

**John:** I want to connect a few dots back earlier. So, Julie Plec was the person who brought you in to do this.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** How did you get to know Julie Plec?

**Damon:** I’m sure it still exists today, but there was just – there was like an assistant circuit of the assistants from agencies, studios, and production companies would have like these mixers, you know, on Thursday nights. And we would just go and basically network with each other and get drunk and make out and make friends. And so everybody started as PAs and then became assistants and then people started getting development jobs. And so I had known Julie, circling back to Jerry O’Connell, he and I were really good friends at NYU. He did Scream 2.

**John:** Which was Kevin Williamson.

**Damon:** For Kevin. And then that’s how I met Julie through that group.

**John:** So you didn’t show up in Los Angeles with any network of anybody? You just started working and built it out from there?

**Damon:** Literally knew nobody. Came out here with my roommate from college in ’94 and we wagon-trained from – he lived in – I came from New Jersey to Chicago. He lived in Michigan. And the two of us, his name is Erik Baiers, he is a big mucky muck at Universal now. He and I drove out and like basically just rented an apartment. And answered ads in the trades. Went to Kinkos and faxed our resumes in. And got internships and then just parlayed that into assistant jobs.

**John:** So, what I like about your story in terms of both leaving the Ladd Company and writing the script for Wasteland is you didn’t ask permission, you just sort of did it, and very politely waited for the next step to happen. You sort of put yourself into positions where you could become lucky by going out for that job, letting people read your script, by letting people read the spec you wrote which you decided to do. That’s a common thread as I’ve talked to a lot of writers who have progressed up is that they didn’t sit around waiting for someone to tell them that they could do something. They just did the thing and sorted it out as it happened.

**Damon:** Yeah. I mean, I think that it didn’t occur to me at the time that – it wasn’t like How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Sort of like moxie play. Like in my brain at the time that it was happening it felt like it was a survival play. But there was also this other ingredient in what you’re talking about. Because I agree with what you’re saying. And I feel that there is commonality. But the missing ingredient, other than luck and let’s just say, you know, that you have some fundamental talents or experience, because a lot of people in that situation, you know, it does have to be on the page, or you do have to be able to speak articulately about story, but desperation also happens to be part – usually part of the story. And so I can guarantee you that had Wasteland been a successful show, like on the scale of Dawson’s, that I never would have made that move.

Like, I would have gone through the entire first season doing my job, the job that they hired me to do as writer’s assistant, but it wasn’t like, ooh, I see an opportunity, I’m going to grab it. It really was dark days. The show is going to go down. You know, they’re going to shut us down. We don’t have scripts. Like, I have nothing to lose.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** And it felt like a very low risk play.

**John:** Yeah. I had a good conversation with Drew Goddard and we were talking about sort of his first–

**Damon:** Hack.

**John:** Hack.

**Damon:** Hack. Oh my god. The worst.

**John:** A charming hack. He was talking about his first TV experience and it was with Joss Whedon. A similar kind of situation where like–

**Damon:** Haven’t heard of him.

**John:** You know, the show was really having a crisis and they were lacking an episode. And so he just happened to be the person who was nearby and just started up the conversation and became the idea between takes. And he wrote it. And as I was talking through the whole conversation with him, you see that at sort of every step along the way Drew just worked harder. And also just like he was the guy who did stay up all night to do the thing so it could sort of save the day.

**Damon:** Yeah. And you know I’m a big believer in when we hire writer’s assistants on shows that I’m running, I’m hiring writers. So, the de facto rule is that the writer’s assistant does not speak in the room, because their job is to basically synthesize everything that everyone else is saying. And if they’re thinking about pitching their own ideas, they’re not really listening. That’s the thinking. That said, there are moments in the room and out of the room, like when the room isn’t actually up and running, for the writer’s assistants to pitch. And because there is this – I don’t want to say it’s a political – it’s more of like sort of a social dynamic thing. It’s like you want to hire people who figure out like – who see their moment and take it.

And it’s very hazily defined. Like, you know when it’s too soon. And you know when it’s too late. And it’s hard to do it when it’s just right. But the thing is, you know, what I would say to all writer’s assistants or anybody in that position, you know, the first thing that you say better be great because if that first thing that you pitch is not great, then the second thing that you pitch has to be exponentially greater than that thing.

So, just bide your time, but essentially you have to jump into the Double Dutch jump rope at some point. That is an expectation. And certainly on The Leftovers over the course of the three years we promoted both of our writer’s assistants, both our writer’s assistant on season one, Nick, and our writer’s assistant on season two, Haley, because both of them demonstrated they were able to do the job of writer’s assistant incredibly well, but they also found those moments to demonstrate that they were writers.

**John:** So, when I was doing D.C., my first TV show, I had to put together a staff. I never was a staff writer, and suddenly having to assemble a writing team. And I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any real good sense of what I needed. So, now that you’ve done this a couple of times, what are you looking for as you’re putting together a writing staff, from writer’s assistant all the way up to the people who are going to help really run the show with you?

**Damon:** Well, almost everything that I learned I learned from Carlton Cuse. He’s been a mentor and continues to be a mentor to me on so many levels. But, following Wasteland, which was not the most functional staff in terms of the way that it was assembled at first, although consisting of amazing writers, I went on to Nash Bridges in its sixth season. Sixth and final season. So it was this well-oiled machine. But something happened at the end of season five where essentially there are just moments in television shows where the entire staff basically goes off to do other things, and it happens simultaneously just because they’re at the end of their three-year deals or whatever.

So, at the end of season five, Shawn Ryan, who basically wrote a spec called The Farm, because he wanted people to think that he could do more than just Nash Bridges, that ended up being like FX’s first drama, The Shield, and one of the greatest television shows of all time. And Glen Mazzara, they both left at the end of season five. So, Carlton basically reconstituted the entire staff because with the exception of he and John Worth and one other writer, Reid Steiner, there were five new hires. Because I think that he realized that Glen and Shawn were so powerful in the room that let’s just kind of do a complete and total overhaul. And I was one of those writers.

And so the first thing that you do is you read samples. And it’s not a zero sum game in terms of this person is a good writer, or this person is a bad writer. Like you have to be able to assess how are they with dialogue, how are they with character, how are they with plot, how are they with humor. How are they with pace? And nobody is going to check all those boxes. And the key is to basically not have redundancies. So, don’t meet with three people who are really great at dialogue because certainly in the sixth season of that show the voice of the show is already clearly defined. And so you have to be a good writer, but it’s a lot more technical.

**John:** So, you were the person being staffed, so you weren’t reading other people’s things for Nash Bridges.

**Damon:** That’s correct.

**John:** So why do you think they hired you for Nash Bridges?

**Damon:** Carlton said he read two of my samples. I wrote a one-act play about time travel and a spec Sopranos. And he read those two pieces of material and met with me. And in the meeting, he was like, “Tell me what’s your story. Where do you come from? What do your parents do?” He didn’t really seem interested at all in what I had to say about Nash Bridges. He was more interested in who I was as an individual. And I think that was the other component which is try to build a room that comes from a different place than you do, and looks at the world in a different way than you do. But then in the overlapping Venn diagram you’re all going to meet at the show, so there has to be some common language.

But I was very candid with him in saying, “Here’s the thing. Nash Bridges is on Friday nights at 9 o’clock. I’m out, like partying. But the episodes that I’ve seen, and I love Miami Vice, I’m a huge Don Johnson fan. I love Cheech. I really think this is a great show. And I think that I could write for it.” But that was like 5% of an hour-long interview.

And to go back to your initial question, so you read somebody’s sample. That gets them in the room. But the intangible is you sit down with them for an hour or 90 minutes if the interview is going particularly well, and you just have to ask yourself could I hang out with this person in a room for nine to ten hours a day and enjoy hanging out with them? And that’s just a gut instinct. And there are some amazing writers, incredible on the page, who I just had very awkward stilted interviews with. We just didn’t click. Like, that’s just as much on me as it is on them. And I ended up not hiring them because of that.

And then each writer you hire you have to basically think about them now existing in that room as you start to build the room around them. And I don’t say this just because it is the politically correct thing to do, but having real diversity in a writers’ room, particularly on gender lines. I mean, I think that the industry has a huge way to go in terms of finding writers of color in general. The agencies are just – their rosters are very anemic when it comes to that. But in terms of men and women, there’s more of an equal balance. And so just start from a de facto place of the room has to be 50/50 because if it’s just eight guys in a room, it’s not going to be good for the show.

**John:** So, you’re making the decisions about who you want to bring on, but there’s also other voices saying, “How about this person? How about this person?” So there’s a studio talking to you, there’s a network talking to you.

**Damon:** Sure. Right.

**John:** There’s a bunch of agents talking to you.

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** How, as a showrunner, do you sort through all that? And when do you decide to read a person’s script or not read a script? Is there a first vetting process is somebody helping you go through that pile first?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, I think that probably the loudest voice in that mix is the network. When they’re staffing a show, either shows have just gone done, or they have overall deals with talent, probably less so now than before. Or someone that they’ve been monitoring and they’re huge fans of. So, you know, if HBO when we were putting The Leftovers together, Michael Ellenberg was basically our point exec on that. He had like seven people that he felt would be good on the show and that I should read. They came from a whole spectrum of they were playwrights, some of them were novelists. Very few of them had any actual television experience before because I think the thinking was like let’s put people in this room who haven’t done it before because maybe they’ll come up with more outside-the-box ideas.

So that’s first and foremost if the network says you’ve got to meet with these people, or I think that you would like – you have to do it, just on general principle. And chances are you’re not wasting your time by doing that. And then level two is Warner Bros., the studio, is producing The Leftovers. They also had talent that their executives had been developing. And I think that they have immaculate taste over Warner Bros. So, I met with those people.

And then my agents. So I’m represented by CAA. I’ve had a relationship there for 15 years. And so my agent is not going to waste my time sending me – they know me better than anybody else. Just as a person versus as a writer. And what I’ll try to say to them is just send me like your three or four best. I know that you’ve got a lot of clients to service, but your three or four best. And then the other agencies will send one or two as well.

And in the hiring process, I’ll probably generate a stack of between 30 to 50 scripts of writing samples. And I will read pretty religiously like the first 15 pages of every script. If something is like particularly spectacular, I’ll actually finish it, because I’m just like oh my god, like I just want to see how things turn out. But for the most part, within 15 pages or so I can kind of determine whether or not it’s going to be a match.

**John:** So, you’re putting together this staff for a writer’s room, but I feel like you have sort of different qualifications for writing on something like Leftovers, which correct me if I’m wrong – I think Leftovers you wrote all the episodes before you started shooting. Is that correct?

**Damon:** It is incorrect.

**John:** It is incorrect. So, on the first seasons of Leftovers, how far were you in to the writing before you started filming?

**Damon:** I think that we had three scripts completed and had broken the fourth episode and maybe an outline on it. And potentially had some sense of what the fifth episode would be. That’s beyond the pilot. So, HBO still pilots shows. And so Tom and I wrote the pilot together. We produced the pilot. And Toto edited the pilot. And then HBO said we will pick this up to series. So that was in the can.

So, I really only think we had two scripts when we went into production.

**John:** That’s much more like a traditional broadcast situation. We’ve talked to the Game of Thrones guys, and like they have to write the whole thing ahead of time because they’re block scheduling things that it’s impossible to sort of do that show any other way. But I guess going back to staffing, so you need to find people who can work well in the room, but you also are looking for some people who have the experience of actually producing television so that they can do that functional job of like going to set and looking at a cut. You have to find people who have some skills beyond just throwing words around on the page.

**Damon:** For sure. And that’s why there are staff writers are story editors and the expectation on them because they’re newbies is it’s primarily a writing job, but then once you get to the producing levels you do expect some producing acumen.

On Lost and The Leftovers, we migrated to a philosophy where the writers did not go to the set. And I know a lot of television shows do send the writers to the set, and that’s wonderful. But the model of both those shows was we had incredibly strong producing directors. In the case of Lost, Jack Bender. In the case of The Leftovers, Mimi Leder. And so the idea of having a writer on set felt like to do what. You know, to basically protect their material?

So the writers are always available. They would be involved in the tone. Calls with the directors, which are key. And very heavily involved in the prep phase. But all of which can happen by phone and did. And we had writer-producers, Kath Lingenfelter, and Jacqui Hoyt in season one, who never visited the set, but had incredible – like were totally producing their episodes and the whole series writ large. Gave notes on cuts. Watched dailies. All that stuff.

So, I think that that thinking not just migrated from eliminating the redundancy of nobody should be on set who doesn’t have a clear cut job, but the other issue was I’m just a very room-heavy showrunner. There are other showrunners who float in and out of the room and I want to be in the writer’s room six to eight hours a day. That’s my favorite part of the job. That collaboration. The kicking the tires. We beat out every story with a great degree of specificity.

If you send a writer off to set, and they’re going to be there through prep, on a show like The Leftovers, they’re gone for four weeks. And so the idea of losing a valuable player is like the equivalent of the designated hitter in baseball, where it’s like they only get one at bat every three innings. But you don’t get to use them in the field. And so I just kind of felt like I wanted the writers in the room. Not the best way to do it, but the best way for me.

**John:** So let’s talk about being in the room versus when writers leave the room. So you have your writing team assembled. You’re breaking an episode. So let’s say you’re on episode four of the first season of Leftovers. Is that process going up on the whiteboard? What is the process for breaking an episode of a show like that?

**Damon:** So by the time you get to episode four, you’ve already got some sense of what you want to happen in episode four because you’ve got some sense of hopefully what episode ten is going to be, and what it is you’re moving towards. You’ve learned things from the first three episodes. But essentially, episode three is off the board and is being written and exists in draft form. And you erase all the boards and you’re looking at these big white boards. And you start – we usually would do at least two, sometimes three days of blue-skying. Which is kind of anything can happen in this episode. Let’s talk about what we want to be happening thematically. What do we want to have happen between certain character relationships? In the storytelling mechanism do we want to focus on just one story, or are we doing three stories? So there’s a lot of experimentation and sort of fumbling around.

Until you basically land on what I would say is like the big idea. And in the case of the fourth episode of The Leftovers of season one, somebody pitched, you know, what if the baby Jesus gets stolen from the nativity scene. It’s just a prank. I was like, oh, that’s cool. It has thematic resonance for the idea of the show. It could be a little bit fun and silly. And we’re getting to talk about religion without talking about religion. And it’s something that our chief of police isn’t going to want to deal with because he’s got more important things to be dealing with, like the fact that his wife has joined a cult. But I was just like, OK, so that’s going to be the organizing principle.

And so then you start saying like, what are the beats of that story? And then someone pitched like, oh, it would be really cool to watch that baby being made like in a doll factory. And see the mold being poured. And then it being put on the assembly line. And then having its eyes painted and put in a box. And then the box ends up on a shelf in Target. And then a woman buys the baby and then she dresses it up. And then the whole end of that idea, she puts it in the manger.

And so we’ve just basically shone you how Jesus Christ is made in the real world. And everybody goes like, oh, that’s awesome. That’s a great idea. And then that’s how it’s going to start. And then you try to figure out the corresponding bookend, which is what’s the end of this episode going to be? In the case of episode four, it’s interesting that you just threw that out arbitrarily, which is that’s the episode that I think had the most problems in the first season because we broke an entire story, an entire what we would call a B story, which we stopped doing towards the end of season one, and we started doing much more interconnected singular point of view stories, but we did a story with Kevin’s son and Laurie’s son, Tom, and this girl Christine as they joined this commune of barefoot people who are like these kind of hedonist hippies.

We shot the whole thing, and it was an utter disaster. And we scrapped it. It’s the only thing we ever shot for the show that didn’t air. And then basically re-broke it. And in the process of re-breaking it, we came up with a new ending for the Baby Jesus story which incorporated Matt Jamison, who we had now seen dailies for episode three and we saw what Eccleston was doing. And we were like, oh, we have to – like the payoff for the Baby Jesus story has to be a scene between Kevin and Matt, which didn’t exist in the original draft.

So, the show starts telling you what it wants to do. But, the story-breaking process is what’s the first scene, what’s the last scene, and now let’s just fill in everything that happens. What do you have to do to earn the last scene?

**John:** So this is all going up on a big whiteboard?

**Damon:** Yep.

**John:** And then ultimately whose job is it to transfer what’s on the whiteboard to a document that everyone else can look at?

**Damon:** The writer’s assistant.

**John:** OK.

**Damon:** So one of the low level writers, a staff writer or a story editor, is putting stuff up on the board. So for the blue-sky phase, once we land on something that we like, you just write a sentence. Like baby doll made in Tijuana. And then like last one is Kevin throws baby out window. And it’s literally just those sentences. And after two days, you look and you have about 20 of those sentences up on the board and then you’re ready to go into the next phase, which I think is what I would call the story-breaking phase, where you just go scene-by-scene and you start to pitch specific dialogue, character dynamics, etc.

And so it’s usually for an episode of The Leftovers, wire-to-wire, like a two-week process I think from the beginning of blue-skying until an episode comes off the board. But when it comes off the board, by then all five whiteboards are filled in super mega detail. And then off of that the writer will go to outline.

**John:** Great. So the writer goes to outline, so you assign one of the writers who is in the room, like this is your episode. And does that writer know ahead of time that this is going to be his or her episode?

**Damon:** Yeah. In the first season less so. I mean, usually you try to do it hierarchically, so the more experienced writer-producers get the first scripts. I told everyone when I was hiring them I’m going to be co-writing every episode of The Leftovers with you, so that we can develop and find the tone of the show together. Because I think that that’s going to help me learn how to write the show, but also it will put you in a position to be more successful. And also will generate material, the scripts a lot more quickly, if we’re co-writing them. And everybody was down with that.

So, we just had a rotation. But I co-wrote all the episodes in the first season, say for one, which was episode eight.

**John:** So it’s gone from this detailed five whiteboards to a document, an outline that everyone can look at?

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And off of that outline, are there notes or changes? Like does the studio see this?

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** Network sees this? OK.

**Damon:** The outline is the first that the studio and the network catch wind of what it is we want to do. They would give notes. Very good notes. Points of clarification. Our outlines were very detailed, like they were 20 to 30 page documents. Because more importantly, because the scripts were sort of the last thing to come, and we always had the scripts in time for prep, which is a week before the – a week to ten days before the episode shoots. But usually like right up against it.

But, we would also – production would have the outlines. And that – they’d have that like a month ahead of time, and that was really important because they’d know what all the locations were.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** What the cast asks were going to be. They could start to build a schedule and more importantly a budget off of the detail of those outlines. But then particularly in the first season of the show, the notes would sometimes detonate outlines. And I would come back to the room and say we just got blown up. And sometimes you get a note that blows you up and you immediately resist it just because you know how much work it’s going to create for you, but you know that it’s right. And other times a note is potentially explosive, but you feel like it is wrong and you can scrap it out.

We were getting many more good notes than bad notes. I can’t think of any bad notes that we got in the first season. So, the outline is basically the first test. And it’s a little bit like the Congress and the Senate. Like if the bill makes it out of outline, you’re going to have a lot less problems when it crosses the President’s desk. So, we wanted to generate – we didn’t want there to be any surprises in script.

**John:** Yeah. So from the five whiteboards, how long does it take to make an outline? Is that just a day to write that out?

**Damon:** No, because the outline is a piece of writing. So, it’s not – the writer’s assistant has taken what’s off the board and generated notes, but now the writer has to actually write it and create all the things that a writer does. So, it could take like a week from it coming off the board before the writer generates that outline. Because, again, like I said, it’s a pretty lengthy document. And because I would be chugging along on the next episode, that writer would basically generate that outline pretty much independently of me and then I would notes them or rewrite it. But I was much more involved in writing the scripts than the outlines for sure.

**John:** Great. So once you have an outline that everyone has signed off on, or signed off on enough–

**Damon:** Sometimes they say, “We’ll see. We’ll see how it works in the script,” which you know like oh my god that note isn’t going to go away.

**John:** How long is it taking you guys to go from the outline to the script?

**Damon:** That’s fast. I mean, that takes just almost the same amount of time that it takes to go from board to outline. Maybe just a week. And, again, because there’s two of us, we would just divvy it up.

**John:** You just pick scenes and do it?

**Damon:** In the case of the first season, there’d be like the Kevin story and a Jill story and a Laurie story, so you just say like, Kath, you take the Laurie story and I will take the Keven story. Then we started doing episodes like episode three which was just a Matt Jamison story, which I co-wrote with Jacqui. In that case I would be like these are the scenes that I feel like I have a beat on. And she would take the scenes that she felt she had a beat on. And then we would basically exchange notes to each other and then I would do a conformity pass.

**John:** So you’ve divvied up the scenes between the two of you, but in the outline stage is it so clear sort of how a scene is going to begin and end? Because I can just imagine if you have a scene that’s butting up against the scene that she’s writing, you want to have a natural transition between the two of you. Do you just not worry about it until you are assembling the whole thing together? Or are you asking her sort of like what the first thing is there? Or is that already in the outline basically how you’re going to start that next scene?

**Damon:** That’s a great question. I mean, for the first season of a show, as you’re determining what its rhythms are, I think that you’re asking the pivotal question which is how do the transitions feel. How to you carry water from one scene to another? And I think that we learned that essentially we would have a higher degree of success if I took the first 25 pages and the other writer took the last 25 so that you could build your own internal rhythm versus writing patchwork, alternating scenes, for exactly the reason that you specify which is I think that the outline sometimes did indicate here’s the first moment in the scene, but maybe not the first line of dialogue or you would find a different blow, a different out for the scene.

And writing The Leftovers was a much different experience for me than writing Lost at a number of levels, but just in terms of construction Lost had commercials. And so every seven pages of a Lost script had to have–

**John:** You had to start over, yeah.

**Damon:** Bum, bum, bum. Like, you know.

**John:** But you also have the joy of coming in with new energy. And being able to sort of open up the curtain again.

**Damon:** So you could just separate by act. You know, you’d basically say like, OK, Eddie and Adam, you guys take acts two and three and five. And I’ll write the teaser. That’s how you could divvy and you knew like you were just all building into the commercial. Whereas I think writing a pay cable drama, or even a show like Mad Men that has commercials, but those commercials in Mad Men were always like, what? It’s not meant to be watched with commercials. It’s meant to be experienced as a single one-hour movie or whatever it is you want to call it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s tackle some questions, and then I’ll get back to some of my own questions. These are things that listeners have written in. Sam writes, “I co-wrote a pilot script a few years ago, which went out to almost every major studio network. One of the major studios loved it and put a deal in motion to buy and develop the pilot. A few days later, the deal fell apart when it went to business affairs because a production company attachment we had that the studio did not want. Their attachment deal has now expired. And we have full control of the project again. But the development people that wanted the show are no longer at the studio and we’re starting from scratch. We still love the show and believe in it.

“Are agents and basically everyone else is telling us that once a project goes around once, it is old news and no one wants to look at it again. So they don’t want to take it out again. In your experience, is that true? Do we have any shot of reviving this?

**Damon:** The answer is yes and yes. So, yes, our industry does for some reason have a bias towards anything that is rehashed or old news. Or when they think about the narrative of a project, they want to be able to say this thing started with my enthusiasm for it versus somebody else was enthusiastic about it once and now I picked up something someone else rejected. Which to me is like a great narrative. But I do think that the reality is when I think about a question like this, I think it’s all in the hands of the representatives, which is like nobody knows that this event happened other than you and your rep and the development executives who are no longer involved.

And so unless your agent discloses that this happened with this material three to four years ago, there’s nothing that should prohibit them from presenting it as new, especially because you control it now. So–

**John:** Well, he does say though it did go out and everybody read it.

**Damon:** Oh they did?

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So he’s saying people were enthusiastic about it at one point, but are no longer enthusiastic because it happened years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** To be completely candid, that sounds like a polite pass to me. I mean, I think that strong material, if available, people will snap it up. And another Sam, Sam Esmail, who had no prior showrunning experience and is now on the short list of the greatest auteurs working in television today, you know, he wrote Mr. Robot as a movie, then repurposed it as a television show. And nobody is decrying the fact that it’s the same material in a slightly different format. But–

**John:** Wasn’t Mad Men also like an old script that he dusted off?

**Damon:** My understanding is that Matt wrote Mad Men while he was on Becker, and the Mad Men sample is what got him the job on The Sopranos. And that David Chase loved the Mad Men pilot and wanted to produce it, but HBO passed. And so he took it to AMC. And everybody scoffed because AMC, what’s that, and now 11,000 Emmys later. But he had that material for quite some time.

So, you know, I think that great material is evergreen and I would suggest moving on to the next thing.

**John:** I would suggest moving on to the next thing, too. A thing that I find really weird about TV and tell me if you find this to be true as well. I have friends who staff on shows and when they’re going to move from one show to another show, they need to write a new pilot to represent themselves. And it seems crazy, because I feel like if you’ve written a really good show, especially written on a really good show, that should show your talent. But, no, the agents want a fresh thing that they can send out for staffing, which seems crazy to me.

**Damon:** It does seem crazy to me, too. But I also sort of feel like television writing, and probably any kind of screenwriting, is like the singularity now where the rate at which TV writing is changing and shifting is happening so fast that a piece of material that someone wrote two years ago doesn’t feel of the now because it’s – when you wrote it, you weren’t aware that Stranger Things existed. You weren’t aware that Transparent existed. And so this idea of like a piece of material kind of has to push the buttons that like all this zeitgeist-y shows are pushing and sort of demonstrate kind of like some awareness.

I mean, I remember I wrote a Sopranos spec, and that’s not the same as writing an original pilot. Tony’s mom was in it. And then she died. Nancy Marchand died. And so I was basically like, well, who cares. I mean, it’s still something that I wrote. It’s still The Sopranos. But people would read it and be like, “This doesn’t feel like The Sopranos anymore because the character is dead.” And I think like writ large that idea of pilots have to kind of be of the now. They have to kind of feel like they have that sort of energy. But, I don’t know. I mean, I think a great piece of writing is a great piece of writing. And agents, it is their job to put you in the best possible position to get work. And so if they’re not seeing the best result from your old sample, or they just want you basically exercise that muscle again, etc., or I would venture to guess they’re trying to trick you into writing something that’s so good somebody wants to buy it as a TV show and that it’s not a sample.

I mean, I’ve read some samples, some pilot samples recently where I was like this should be a show this is so good. Like why would I hire this person to be on The Leftovers? This should be a show.

**John:** Cool. Lou writes, “I wrote a spec pilot based on a friend’s idea. He asked me to do it. The story in the pilot is from his real life experience. What would be the appropriate way to write credits on the title page? To clarify, we are not writing this script for anybody other than ourselves at this point.”

**Damon:** Sure. I don’t know what the Writers Guild response to that is, but Lou is the one who is writing it, so it would basically say the name of the – The Adventures of John August by Lou whatever your last name is. And then I put Inspired by the life of John August. Or based upon the memoirs.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** So, you know, I’d solidify the fact that you are the only author of this material, but it is based on the life of your friend.

**John:** That seems fair to me, too. Again, this isn’t sort of the WGA credit. But when there’s an underlying source behind things, it’s important to acknowledge that on the cover page just so – it’s the morally right thing to do, but it’s also just – it’s going out there in the world and it’s based on someone’s real experience.

**Damon:** Completely agree.

**John:** Richard writes, “I’m writing a pilot that contains a mystery surrounding a certain symbol.” This feels very much up your alley. “That symbol is both the opening and closing image of the episode and it carries great importance. Since screenwriting is a highly visual enterprise, I would like to show the symbol in the script rather than just describe it, which would be tedious and devoid of impact. I’ve encountered the opinion that inserting pictures into a script exposes a hack and my screenwriting software does not even include such a feature. What are your thoughts about including a symbol in the script?”

**Damon:** Wow, that’s a great question because I agree with everything that you just said. Now the reality is because it is the first image of the script, normally I would basically say is there a way for the symbol to be the last image of the script. Because you don’t want to send that hack flag up–

**John:** On page one.

**Damon:** On page one. But if your writing is great and the story is great, then you can put it on page 50 and no one will think you’re a hack because they’re completely and totally into the storytelling. I agree that that sends like a real – having illustrations of any kind or symbols is, you know, is immediately sort of you have to find a way to describe the thing without showing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** I can’t even – I will say this, though. Based on this question I’m like, ugh, what is this symbol?

**John:** What is it?

**Damon:** Like–

**John:** My instinct would be to do it on a page between the title page and the first page of actual script. And so if there was an intermediary page that just had the symbol and didn’t even necessarily explain why that page was there, but then when you sort of read through it you get like, oh, that was what that thing was.

**Damon:** Got it.

**John:** But having it break in the flow of the text, that’s where it feels hack to me. That’s where I get really nervous about doing that.

**Damon:** Right. And the other thing is if you can’t describe it in simple – there has to be a way, even if the symbol feels like it’s complicated to describe, you know, you or I could describe Prince’s symbol in a sentence, which is like it’s kind of like the symbol for male or female but with some artistic flourishes, without saying it’s got arrows on the end of each – you know, you don’t have to be overly descriptive.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there. Rian Johnson’s script for Looper has one image in it, which describes like one thing sort of late in the script, but it’s not on page one, and he’s also Rian Johnson.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** And so that’s a difference between his situation and Richard’s situation.

**Damon:** Yeah. I think that once you’ve established yourself, then symbol it up.

**John:** Yep.

**Damon:** Go symbol crazy.

**John:** So, you’re wrapping up The Leftovers, and all the episodes are shot now. They’re all edited now.

**Damon:** Yep. It’s as done as done gets.

**John:** That’s great. So, a thing we were talking about before we started recording is that while you were doing Lost you kept getting hit with two questions. And I want to sort of address those two questions that everyone always asked you about the show and what effect they could have. So what are the two questions?

**Damon:** I could do like a psychic act where I can say if you were watching Lost, I want you to close your eyes right now and think of what is the one question, especially in terms of process. Forgetting about polar bears and all that fun stuff. Like what you would ask. And I will predict that it will be one of two questions.

The first question is were you making it up as you went along. And certainly as we were writing the show that was in the present tense, are you making it up as you go along? So that’s question number one. And when someone asks you a question like that, they’re not curious. There’s an answer that they want. Because who in the history of the world has been asked that question and you want the answer to be, “Uh, yeah, I’m just making it up as I go along, man. I’m just winging it. I’m President Trump. I’m just like tweeting and figuring things out as I go. This is a tough job.”

You want people to have a plan for sure. So that’s the correct answer is we are absolutely not making it up as we go along. There is a roadmap. There is a bible. All of these things exist. That’s the appropriate answer.

Question number two. How much influence does the audience/fandom have on the outcome of the show? We’re really engaged. We have theories. We go to fan events. We’re on Reddit and Twitter talking about and theorizing about the show. Do you read that stuff and does it influence you? And the answer to that question, the desired answer is, yes, you as an audience have a tremendous influence on the show and the outcome of the show. We’re listening to the things that you don’t like and we’re course-correcting and we’re listening to the things that you like and we’re doing more of that.

And yet there doesn’t seem to be an awareness that these two ideas are paradoxical.

**John:** Absolutely. They’re completely antithetical. Like something can’t be predetermined and be, you know, have free will based on what the audience wants.

**Damon:** That’s a very Rousseau/Locke way of putting it. That those are the philosophers, not the crazy French women and the guy in the wheelchair. But, yes, if there is a plan, the audience has no effect whatsoever on its outcome. And if you’re always listening to what the audience tells you, then you have to be winging it. So, how do you thread the needle?

**John:** And so when you’re doing a show like Lost, which had 24 episodes in its longest season.

**Damon:** Yeah, 25 hours with Season 1.

**John:** It was crazy. And so on a show like that, you are writing the show while you’re filming the show. It’s an ongoing process, so you can actually see sort of what’s working in broadcast and change things.

**Damon:** Correct.

**John:** But with shorter seasons, that’s much less likely to happen. So, even on the first season of The Leftovers, had any of the episodes aired by the time you were producing the final episodes?

**Damon:** Oh, for sure. I mean, we produced the pilot in the summer. You know, in July. And then it got picked up. And then we went into production on the series I think the following January or February in New York. I think we were still in production when the episodes started airing.

**John:** But if somebody watched the first episode or the second episode or the third episode and they said like, oh, I really want it to be more like this, there wasn’t much of an opportunity for that to happen.

**Damon:** No.

**John:** Because it was–

**Damon:** All of the material was already generated. I mean, where the space exists is between seasons. So, certainly between the second and third season of The Leftovers had certain things that we did, like big swings – we did an episode called International Assassin that takes place in a – I’ll just say a different reality than the rest of the show. Had the audience rejected that idea instead of embraced it, that would have affected the storytelling in season three for sure.

In fact, you know, one of the big storylines of the third season, I’m not going to spoil anything here, but if you’ve watched any of the trailers or the promos for the coming season, you know, the idea that Kevin, our main character, died and came back to life is a major story thread. And I think had that not worked out in the second season, we would have just pretended that it had never happened.

**John:** So, this comes up, this idea of like is it all prefigured out or not prefigured out. Two recent series sort of brought this home to me, which were Stranger Things and Westworld. So, Stranger Things is a Netflix show. It all dumped at once. And so you knew from the start that nothing you thought about the show was going to change the show, because the show was done. Because you could see that all of the episodes were there, ready for you to watch.

Versus Westworld as I was watching it week by week, and I love the creators and I’m so happy with the show, but I detected a lot of fan annoyance about how slow things were moving. There was a frustration that was building from fans based on how the storytelling was reeling out which I don’t think would have happened had it been all dumped at once.

**Damon:** Oh for sure. It’s the – did you get me a bike? It’s a bike, right, for Christmas paradigm where your kid basically asks you for something for Christmas and it’s the big gift. And your kid knows that you love them. So, yeah, chances are they’ve got the bike. But they’re not getting it until Christmas. And so all they’ll basically say is whether they believe in Santa or not, another spoiler alert, you know, am I getting a bike? Am I? Am I getting a bike? Did you get me a bike? Am I getting a bike? And I think that there is a certain level of anticlimax and frustration, but your job as a parent is to basically preserve that moment on Christmas morning when they get the bike. And I think Jonah and Lisa have spoken pretty candidly about the idea that they didn’t expect Reddit to reach certain conclusions that fast–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** But the reality is when you can hive-mind a solution it only takes one person to figure it out before something catches on. And so if there’s millions and millions of people watching something like they are in Westworld, they’ll figure it out. And then I think the other thing that’s sort of worth talking about per both those shows and what you’re saying is there’s a time investment. And so what’s interesting is your time investment in watching Stranger Things and Westworld is exactly the same. You invest ten hours in watching those television shows. But in Westworld–

**John:** But they’re ten very different hours.

**Damon:** You actually feel like you’ve invested 100 hours because you’re counting the hours in between the weeks that you are discussing, debating, you know, doing the deep dive on, talking about the men in black. How far in the future are we? Are we on a different planet? All that stuff. That time and energy you also count as your investment. And so the more time you invest, the more possibility for frustration there is.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Damon:** Unfairly, I believe.

**John:** I agree that it’s unfair, but it has to be something that’s on your head as you’re thinking about going forward. So, right now Leftovers is finishing up and you need to be thinking of what you want to do down the road. And I don’t know if you’re thinking about TV at all, but you have to be thinking about anything you do in TV now is going to be a decision of like is this a show that should all be watched at once, or are we going to try to do this sort of week by week basis. What’s your feeling?

**Damon:** Here’s what’s interesting. The answer is both. Because, so for me the “have your cake and eat it, too” scenario is you roll it out week by week, so for that portion of the audience, that’s how they watched Big Little Lies. You had to wait until Sunday night in order to watch it. And now it’s over and the finale was widely adored, including by myself, and so the people who didn’t want to take the risk that it wouldn’t turn out well or not to invest in it yet, they’re now going to binge it.

So, the way that the show lives on is always going to be in a binge model. Is always going to be in a you can watch all the episodes at your own leisure. But for this one period of time when you’re first rolling it out, as Dickens did with Great Expectations, you know, I mean, we all read Great Expectations as a novel, but when Dickens put it out it was serialized. So, why not have your cake and eat it, too, and do it both ways. Because I want to engage in shows. Like I wish that Stranger Things dolled it out. You know, because as much as I loved it, when it was over I was like, oh, that – I did it too fast. I wished that I could have been part of the community. Instead I watched this thing for three days and now we’re all talking about the entire series. But I wanted to speculate as to what Barb’s fate was, as opposed to I’m now exactly 90 minutes away from determining Barb’s fate.

**John:** Well, but in order for this cake and eat it, too–

**Damon:** #Barb.

**John:** Barb. You have to have an end. And so in the case of Lost, it was 100 episodes you did?

**Damon:** 121.

**John:** 121. And so it was so many episodes out in the future. And so I know you asked for a stop date at a certain point so you could plan for it, but someone who wasn’t sure whether they were going to commit to the show, they had to decide am I going to wait four years for it to finish. So something like The Leftovers, each season is very discrete. Like you can sort of watch seasons – well, you really can’t – it’s hard to sort of come into season two and for it to make a lot of sense.

**Damon:** Although I’ve heard.

**John:** People do it.

**Damon:** I’ve heard anecdotally some people are like just start with season two, and they’re a little confused at first, but it’s fine.

**John:** It’s fine. But the advantage to Big Little Lies or Stranger Things is that you know that it’s only ten episodes, and so you’re not going to have to wait that long to start watching it if you–

**Damon:** I think Big Little Lies is like seven episodes or something like that. Yeah. No, you know, the thing that I always say is people want to know how thick the book is before they buy the book. So, it’s sort of like it’s why Sorcerer’s Stone is of a certain thickness and Order of the Phoenix is of a – because it’s like by then J.K. Rowling is basically like I got you. So, these are going to be as thick as I want.

But I think if the first book was as thick as Order of the Phoenix, that certainly would give me pause. And so but television, almost until recently you don’t know how thick the book is. And so even Game of Thrones, you know, when HBO started airing it you knew before you watched the pilot of Game of Thrones, and I had read the first three of George’s books at that point, I knew that I was like signing up for the long haul. Like, oh my god, is this going to be ten years of my life if the show works? And I’m down with that. But that’s an intimidating commitment to make. It’s daunting.

And so I really feel like Ryan Murphy and Noah Hawley are at the apex of the newest trend in television which is the serialized anthology. The way that every season of Fargo feels like it is self-contained but part of a larger, sprawling narrative. And they are interconnected in terms of how they move around in time. So, a massacre that was alluded to in season one is actually dramatized in season two. But season two doesn’t feel like a prequel, even though it’s chronologically taking – it feels just as important. And then they connect with the movie Fargo, so the money that Steve Buscemi basically hid and was unresolved in the movie is actually found in season one in Fargo in the Oliver Platt storyline, etc.

But there’s a larger – it’s not just, oh, here’s another season of Fargo. There is a sense of serialization in there. And then Ryan, of course, who with American Horror Story he’ll have actors basically play different characters, but there is also a sense of some meta interconnectedness. And I think that’s a new storytelling form, which is very exciting.

**John:** But, I mean, I will push back a little bit on Noah Hawley. Legion, which I thought was a terrific pilot and a really interesting show, it felt like it was designed for streaming, yet it came every week.

**Damon:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** And so I have a suspicion that the show plays much better if you actually just watch the episodes straight through. But with the week in between you lose the connective tissue. You just can’t actually kind of remember what happened week to week. It’s such a complicated show that without seeing it sort of back to back to back, a week between things have sort of destroyed the momentum.

**Damon:** I had an entirely different reaction to Legion which was that I loved having the anticipation of the next episode, but I also felt like that show was teaching me how to watch it. And you’re probably right in terms of there’s an intricacy in terms of storytelling and plot and figuring out who is Lenny, and is Lenny is a guy. Who’s the shadow king? Like all of those things. But, for me it was in the way that Twin Peaks was, it was more about a mood. And it’s sort of broadcasting at a different frequency. And so I feel like the penultimate episode of Legion, and again not to spoil it if you haven’t seen it yet, or something like that, like dropped into the middle of a binge, and then suddenly that episode would end and you just have – there’s just this amazing – they do this thing with Bolero and then it’s black and white and you’re in a silent movie. And there’s major revelations and this animated thing on a chalk – it’s just like the idea of that episode ending and then immediately going I’m now watching the finale, versus I need to just take some time with that one, I don’t know. I appreciated–

**John:** I can the arguments both ways. I felt like my experience of understanding what actually happened over the course of the season would make a lot more sense if I had watched it all together as one thing than just spread out the way it was spread out.

**Damon:** Yeah, I mean, I think that one thing that sounds super pretentious/precious is that the showrunners of these shows, the storytellers of these shows, should start prescribing the way that they want their shows to be watched. And the audience can choose to ignore them. Like for me, I’d be like, “Noah, what do you want me to do?” And I just assume Noah wants me to watch them every Tuesday night, the week that they’re on, because that’s the way that he’s – Noah Hawley, if he wanted to, he could do the show on Netflix. I mean, maybe he’s in an overall deal at FX or whatever, but like I do want to have a stronger sense of how the people making it feel like it should be watched, even if they’re wrong.

**John:** Yeah. J.K. Rowling with Harry Potter, her initial recommendation was that it’s designed to be like one book a year. And so it’s meant to be you grow up with the kids. And so the later books are more advanced because you’re supposed to be a more advanced person reading them.

**Damon:** For sure.

**John:** It moves from middle-grade fiction into YA.

**Damon:** And we’re reading Half-Blood Prince right now with Van, my son, who is ten years old, and we started Sorcerer’s Stone I think when he was six.

**John:** Yeah, that’s just right.

**Damon:** We’re a little bit faster than once a year, but there was no way that we finished Order of the Phoenix and he wasn’t like, next. At that point he was like, “Let’s get to it.” But you do appreciate how brilliantly she recaps the previous book, because when you and read them the beginning of episode six where they’re dealing with the British PM, having to like basically be apprised of the fact that Cornelius Fudge has been replaced by Rufus Scrimgeour, and then all the things that happen in between books. I remember when I picked up Half-Blood Prince I was like, oh man, it’s been a while since I read Order of the Phoenix. How am I going to remember what happened?

**John:** And there’s a previously on…

**Damon:** And she just did it so brilliantly. Oh my god. She’s the best. The best. And you’ve seen–

**John:** I saw the play.

**Damon:** You saw it.

**John:** Yeah, it’s good. The play is really good.

The last thing I want to get to is this idea of idea debt. And so this was some articles I sent to you. The first one I read was by Jessica Abel. And she had a conversation with Kazu Kibuishi where she’s talking about this sense of the old projects that were sort of always lingering behind. So this is what she actually wrote.

“Let me tell you about Forest Lords.

Forest Lords is a series of ten fantasy novels, each a 1000-page brick, about the epic adventures of Greenleaf Barksley, elf proletarian, and his journeys to attain the Golden Leaf and save his homeland from the scourge of the Curse of the Titaness Denox.

The thing is, none of this series exists—not even Forest Lords Volume One: The Elven Soul. There are binders and binders of “lore.” There are a hell of a lot of character designs (that look suspiciously similar to Elfquest characters). There is the vivid, lively picture the putative author has in his head of how it’s going to feel to write a fantasy series that has everyone panting for the next book or movie or TV show.*

But there is no book. There is only Idea Debt.”

**Damon:** Yes.

**John:** So, this felt really familiar to me.

**Damon:** Yeah. It felt really familiar to me, too. And I had the same smile on my face as I read the article that you have on your face as you read aloud that part. Look, I think that world-building is super exciting. And I think that this idea of a broad and expansive universe and saying that this thing is epic in scope, it’s a saga, is a wonderful thing. But the grounds of creative storytelling are littered with the corpses of these elven warriors. And I think that ultimately my takeaway from reading that article and the others is that that’s the fun part, this world-building. The hard part is actually just writing the first one. And the more worlds you’re building, the less storytelling you’re doing. Because it’s sort of like the world-building is easy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** But what’s getting me into the world, like if you just basically think about like how much time did George R. R. Martin spend building the world of Westeros before he actually started typing chapter one, and now there’s dire wolves. Well, chapter one is kind of our introduction to the White Walkers. But now basically dire wolves pups are being presented to all the Stark kids and Jon Snow. And I guess that there wasn’t a lot of lag time between the idea to do Game of Thrones and the writing of that chapter. And then he started building his world along the way.

And I think that this idea debt is basically prohibiting people from actually working.

**John:** Yeah. I think people approach it with these weird expectations where they think they need to build George R. R. Martin’s world for Game of Thrones, or they need to build the Potter-verse for J.K. Rowling’s universe, without remembering like, oh no, you actually have to write the book first.

**Damon:** Sure.

**John:** And that the universe doesn’t come before the actual text comes. But I think the reason why people want to do that world-building is because there’s no risk. You can’t fail at the world-building because there’s no actual product. But the minute you actually start to write something, it could suck. And that’s the fear. And so you put it off because you’re worried about it.

**Damon:** I couldn’t agree more. And I also feel like the thing that the world-building is devoid of is the fundamental thing that we attach ourselves to in story, which is the characters and the emotions. And if you read George Lucas’s original treatment for Star Wars, you know, whatever, when it’s Luke Star-Killer and it’s, you know, the Wills and all that stuff, is like it’s all that stuff. It’s all that world-building stuff, but it’s lacking the moment on Tatooine, looking out at the twin suns. It’s certainly – he had to write Star Wars to learn that Vader was Luke’s father. Like, that was not in the world-building part.

And so you have to – I know that there’s a lot of debate, and I don’t even know if J.K. Rowling has spoken about this or been asked this, but it seems to me that had she known about Horcruxes prior to when they were revealed in the books that she could have used that word once or twice casually by Azkaban. And the fact that she didn’t leads me to believe that it was an idea – the story was telling her what to tell, because you have to listen to the show. You have to listen to the story. And all the time that you’re not writing it, it’s not telling you what it wants to be.

**John:** Absolutely. The sense of what it wants to be and what it doesn’t want to be, the second part of this idea that like all of those things that you have sort of abandoned along the way, those ideas that sort of got half-developed that you’ve never actually done anything with.

And there’s a guy named John Sexton who has a good piece I’ll also link to in the show notes talking about all those things that you’re sort of dragging with you from apartment to apartment, project to project. Those things you always meant to write that you’ve never actually written. And I found myself nodding a lot as he was going through his list, because I have all those things, like someday I’ll get back to that stuff.

**Damon:** Right.

**John:** And I’ll never get back to those things.

**Damon:** Right. If it sits in your storage unit for like a couple of years, there’s a reason for that. It wants to stay there. But I would say that certain things that are tickling you or get you excited as a writer, they will work their way into – like for example, I always wanted to do a show about time travel. And then I suddenly realized, hey, Lost is that show. Like there is not time travel embedded in the pilot of lost, but J.J. and I tried to do everything that we could to open up all possibilities in the pilot so that if we wanted to get to time travel, we could.

And I always wanted to set a show in the ‘70s, and I was like, well, we’ve got time travel now. So Lost is that show, too. And I’ve always wanted to do like a pirate show. Well, Lost could be that show, too. .

So, if you basically find the canvas that can accommodate all those disparate ideas and you can kind of cram them in there, it’s amazing how resilient television storytelling can be, particularly in this day and age. Where the audience will sort of let you go. And the idea that Noah Hawley is like maybe he – I haven’t heard him talk extensively about Legion yet, but he’s a colleague and I’m a huge fan of his, but the idea that Noah Hawley had always wanted to do a super hero show and it ends up being Legion, you know, is sort of like he seems much more interested in other genre elements than the super hero genre, but there are some things that are distinctly super hero-ish in there that he doesn’t seem particularly interested in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Damon:** And that makes the show all the more fascinating that it’s like, oh, like this is an X-Men show. Like it can be this, too? Oh, that’s cool.

**John:** Yeah. Circling back to this sense of the world-building and sort of knowing everything that’s out there before you get started, you know, we were talking about J.K. Rowling, whether she knew Horcruxes, but like you guys didn’t know everything that Lost could be when you were writing the pilot for Lost. You guys were just writing the pilot to make the most compelling pilot possible. And sort of to stake out a giant circle of possibility around you.

But if you had actually had to go into it with a plan for like this is the six seasons. This is how it’s all going to work. This is how these two things connect. There’s no way you could have done it. You had to discover it by doing it.

**Damon:** Yeah. You’re back to do you have a bible. You know, and even the bible was written, you know, I mean I guess there are people out there who believe that the Bible was written by God and then dictated to man, but even the Bible was written one verse at a time, one story at a time. And in the pragmatic reality of storytelling, that’s the only way that you can do it because J.J. and I had ten weeks to basically write and produce and deliver a two-hour movie. That was the two-hour pilot. And the idea that we also in our spare time were able to get together and say like, hey, let’s talk about what season three of Lost might look like. It just didn’t exist.

It’s also hubris. I mean, I think that I always say to studios and networks who are saying like we need a bible or we need to know what season two is, I understand that concern. You’re investing in this thing. You want to know that we have some sense of where we’re going. But, the job – my job right now is to just make one great hour of this thing, not just the pilot. And then episode two has to be – that’s the real pilot of a television show is episode two. But if you make three bad episodes in a row, the audience is out. And it really doesn’t matter if you’ve got a great idea for what season two could be. You should have been more focused on what episode four was.

And so I’m a big believer in look at the episode right in front of you and do everything that you can to make it great. Have some sense of where you want to take things, but then there has to be a discovery process along the way.

**John:** Cool. Let’s go to our One Cool Things.

**Damon:** I discovered the show called Occupied on Netflix. It was recommended by a friend. And I don’t know when it was made, but I have a feeling it was made in the last two years. And it’s about a silk glove invasion of Norway by Russia. It’s kind of I guess got 24 and Homeland baked into its blood. But what’s sort of fascinating about it is I didn’t know anything about Norway. And I’ve always had this idealized version of what it is to be Scandinavian. And this is kind of the nightmare scenario. The storytelling set up is that each episode is a month. It doesn’t take place over a month, but is titled like April, May, June. So they jump 30 days between the ending of and the beginning of episodes, so part of the fun is like, hey, what happened in between these episodes. There’s a little bit of catching up. But essentially over the course of the first season you see what it looks like for a country to be invaded by another country. And particularly in terms of what’s happening in the world right now, it’s the most like V, which is a show–

**John:** Oh, I loved V.

**Damon:** I loved.

**John:** Oh my god. I loved V.

**Damon:** Of anything that I’ve seen in the last two decades, but it’s sort of like what if V happened in the real world. And I’m not saying that the Russians eat guinea pigs. I’m not saying they don’t. I’m not saying they could.

**John:** They peel off their skin, it is reptilian underneath.

**Damon:** But the Russians are–

**John:** Who is the Diana of the show? Is there a person–?

**Damon:** Yeah, there is a Diana.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Damon:** You know, it’s a Russian woman who is essentially – she’s very charismatic. Like the Russians are not just straight up bad guys in it. That’s what’s really interesting about it, too. I would say like the Norwegian Prime Minister is not being presented as this incredibly noble and flawless individual. Lots of different shades in it. And also there’s a lot of English. It makes you, again, hate yourself as an American because every Norwegian and every Russian speaks fluent English. So when they’re talking to each other they speak in English. When the Norwegians are speaking to each other they’re speaking in Norwegian. But you’re like, oh, like all these people are all multi-lingual and here I am like I can order like a burrito and I feel proud of myself.

**John:** I always feel bad on The Americans, because there are times where I’m sort of half paying attention. Like it could be the radio play, where you can sort of hear the discussion, but then they’ll switch into the Russian section and you have to–

**Damon:** You got to watch.

**John:** You got to watch close, because it’s going to be something about the food supply.

My One Cool Thing is also a series. Fits in really well with this idea of recycling your old ideas. It’s called City Girl. I don’t know if you’ve seen this. It’s a romantic comedy done by Parenthood’s Sarah Ramos. And she wrote it in 2003 when she was 12 years old, but it tells the story of this 28-year-old boutique owner and she has this weird affair with her allergist, like her migraine doctor.

But basically, this writer, she found her old script and shot it the way – she didn’t change it. She didn’t update it. She actually just shot it the way she wrote it when she was 12 years old.

**Damon:** Oh my god.

**John:** And so it’s like this weird misunderstanding of sort of like what a 28-year-old is like, and what the motivations are.

**Damon:** Oh, that’s great. They just shot it as is?

**John:** They just shot it as is.

**Damon:** Where is it?

**John:** It’s a series of like web shorts. And so I’ll put a link in the show notes to that. But it’s really–

**Damon:** Oh, that sounds fascinating.

**John:** Brilliantly done.

**Damon:** Can I do one more tiny one?

**John:** Please.

**Damon:** Which is the writer and personality John Hodgman, who is a genius, super amazing. He wrote a pilot that you just reminded me of. They did a live reading of the pilot, because it never got produced. But the premise was that it’s his – it’s a coming of age story of him as like a 13-year-old boy, but it’s played by John Hodgman as an adult. He’s the only adult on the show, so all the other kids are played by actual 13 year olds, including his love interest, who is also a 13-year-old.

It’s amazing. And they did this live reading of it that is listenable. I think they did it as a podcast. It’s amazing. It’s so good.

**John:** Cool. We’ll find a link for that in the show notes as well.

**Damon:** Do it.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show, as always, is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. 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 where you can send questions like the ones we answered. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Damon is not on Twitter at all.

**Damon:** I’m off Twitter.

**John:** He’s fully off Twitter.

**Damon:** Craig can keep his day job, because this is big boots to fill.

**John:** Yes. You can find us on Facebook, just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. That’s also where you can find us on iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. That’s always helpful.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. There’s apps for both Android and for iOS. You can listen to all those back episodes.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find transcripts and links to all the show notes. So, Godwin gets the transcripts up about four days after the episode airs. This one might take a little bit longer because it was a longer episode. But, Damon, thank you so much for coming to Paris and being on the show.

**Damon:** It’s so weird, because we live so close to each other in Los Angeles, and you made me come to–

**John:** Yeah, I made you fly all the way here to do this.

**Damon:** But it was worth it.

**John:** Yeah. Cool. Good luck. Bye.

**Damon:** Bye.

Links:

* [Damon Lindelof](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0511541/)
* [The Leftovers: Final Season Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9w0sz5y83k)
* Jessica Abel on [Idea Debt](http://jessicaabel.com/2016/01/27/idea-debt/)
* [How I Got Out of Idea Debt](https://medium.com/@heyjohnsexton/how-i-got-out-of-idea-debt-124d3cdc4031) by John Sexton
* [Occupied](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QWC_DZj0HE)
* [City Girl](https://thehairpin.com/sarah-ramos-explains-how-she-gave-life-to-city-girl-the-rom-com-she-wrote-at-12-years-old-addd405b56b0)
* John Hodgman’s [Only Child](http://www.maximumfun.org/dead-pilots-society/episode-2-only-child-written-john-hodgman)
* [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_296.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 295 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program Malcolm Spellman returns to help us answer a bunch of listener questions, including the most important one of all – what’s Malcolm up to.

**Craig:** Oh, he’s not going to know the answer to that. I’ll fill that in for him.

**John:** All right. So, I sound a little bit strange because I just flew from Rome to London. I made it here, but my microphone did not. My bag got lost, and so I’m on a pair of really crappy white iPhone headphones. So, Craig and Malcolm are going to take most of this episode by themselves. So, through the magic of editing I’m going to be here for the intro and for the outro, but it’s going to be the Craig and Malcolm show. So I am as excited as the listeners are to hear what Malcolm is going to say.

**Craig:** Everybody hang on to your seat. And I guess we should probably mention that when Malcolm is on the show, the chance of us not having the explicit rating is zero. So, folks who are listening in the car with children be aware that we will be using adult language in today’s program.

**John:** I think it’s a very strong bet. Some follow up. First off, the tickets for the live show on May 1 are now up for sale. You can go and find them at HollywoodHeart.org. That is Monday May 1, 7:30pm to 9:15pm, at ArcLight Hollywood. That’s Rian Johnson. That’s Dana Fox. That’s Rob McElhenney. It’s going to be amazing, so you guys should go see that. I will look forward to hearing it myself.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s for charity. Hollywood Heart is a terrific charity that our friend, John Gatins, is involved in. And of all the live shows that we’ve done, this may be the most impressive guest lineup we’ve ever had. First of all, just Rian alone. Star Wars, people. Star Wars. But with Dana, and then you throw on Rob McElhenney, creator and star of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which now is like the longest running sitcom in television history.

**John:** That’s remarkable.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. It’s amazing. So that’s our lineup. And it’s like the tickets are not that expensive. And it goes to charity. So, if there’s even any left, jump on them.

**John:** Sounds good. Next up, one of our very first episodes of How Would This be a Movie was the Hatton Garden Job. So if you don’t remember that, that was a bunch of British bank robbers who carried off a very complicated bank robbery where they broke in through walls. It was a bunch of old geezers. And we figured, you know what, someone is going to try to make this into a movie. The first movie version of Hatton Garden Job is actually coming out. April 14. The writing credits are Ray Bogdanovich, Dean Lines, and Ronnie Thompson, who also directed. Reviews seem pretty good so far, so hey, there’s already one of these movies out there in the world. So, I think it’s our first movie that we successfully made out of the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Craig:** Shouldn’t we have some sort of thing that we could put on a movie like the way the ASPCA puts stuff on No Animals Were Harmed. Like this gets the Scriptnotes Seal of Prediction, or something?

**John:** Well, I think it needed a little special laurel around it that says Scriptnotes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Win. [laughs]

**John:** As inspired by Scriptnotes. As discussed on Scriptnotes. Win, yes.

**Craig:** Win.

**John:** Win. That was a reference to last week’s episode where we talked about the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition. We had another listener write in. This was Guy Poland who wrote in. He says, “I, too, was a winner in said contest. A three-time winner, thank you very much. I won gold for comedy, a silver for a thriller, and I was a finalist for comedy for Meeting Mr. Gimbel.” So, let’s pause here to say why did you enter this competition three times? You won three times, I guess. But wow.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, after the first time when your life didn’t change, maybe save the entry fee.

**John:** Well, I guess he submitted for all three of these things simultaneously. So, he put three different scripts in in three different categories.

**Craig:** Oh, OK. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** But it’s like $30 a pop, I’m sure. So he writes that “I, too, emailed to ask about prize money. I was not afforded a response and didn’t push the issue because I knew it was all bullshit. They did, however, send me three nice winner certificates in a PDF format that I can print out, frame, and hang on my wall. Note that they misspelled Comedy on the certificates and had to redo it. No prize money or coupons whatsoever. Certainly not $200.”

**Craig:** Hold on a second. This poor guy didn’t even get the coupon to the non-existent software. And I love this. You enter a contest and the contest said on their webpage, Malcolm, they say, “$20,000 in prize money and stuff, or whatever, in prizes.” Nobody gets anything. And I love that when you win the contest you have to email them, “So, can I get the prize?” And they’re like, “Um, no.” And then you go, “OK.” And then they send you PDFs of a certificate that the best part is they couldn’t even mail them a real certificate. They sent him PDFs that he had to print out himself. My god.

**John:** No, he writes there was another option. So they also gave him the option of receiving a winner’s trophy, “Which I would have the pleasure of paying for at the modest price of $150, plus $20 shipping.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Now, the point of a screenplay competition is, of course, to get interest from the industry. It says he got zero read requests as a result of winning these three things. Let’s see, “Oh, a bonus fuck up for you. At some point the competition staff mixed up some of the winning scripts with the wrong writer. Put another way, the scripts were posted on their site, but the corresponding writer was wrong. They finally got that straightened out.”

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s good. They’re on top of it then over there at the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition which appears, from what we’ve heard, to be the worst screenplay competition in the world. And that’s saying something because pretty much all of them are horrendous. This one, though, wow.

**Malcolm Spellman:** It’s the Russian version.

**Craig:** It’s the Russian Screenplay Competition. They’re just mining your data. Amazing. Amazing.

**John:** So, we get to hear Malcolm Spellman in the background, but Malcolm I want you to lean a little closer to the microphone and tell us what you’re up to, because I have not seen you in nearly a year. But listeners haven’t seen you even kind of for longer than that. Last we talked with you, you were on Empire. I honestly don’t know what you’re doing at this moment. Fill us in a little bit on what’s happening in the Malcolm Spellman universe.

**Malcolm:** It’s a big point of transition for me right now. So, I did three years on Empire, which was awesome. And learned a ton. Probably learned more in that three years than the entire 13 years leading up to that I was in screenwriting. And I’m moving on now, but amicably. And I am enjoying Hollywood with some heat for the first time since I first broke in.

**Craig:** Since your fumbled heat.

**Malcolm:** Since my fumbled heat. And it’s very, very interesting to see the difference in temperature when I walk into the room. And it feels like I am now in a position where maybe some shit can happen. You know what I’m saying? We’ll see.

**Craig:** All right. That’s a pretty good position.

**John:** And what is the shit that’s happening? Are you doing TV shows? Are you doing movies? Where’s your focus right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m doing a pilot with a buddy of mine at Hulu. And I have a couple of things. I’m overseeing a couple of writers on a pilot also. And I have a feature I’m writing for Warner Bros. And I think there’s a couple things pending. I’ve got a lot going on, John. It’s popping.

**John:** That’s fantastic. And you’ve also promised that if Craig kills me for some reason, you’ll investigate my death and avenge me if it turns out to be Craig. I have your word on air right now?

**Malcolm:** I’m not that good investigating, but I’m definitely good at avenging, so it gets to that part.

**Craig:** If you believe him, because maybe I already hired him and he’s just doing his job right now making you think that.

**John:** Man, Craig Mazin, you’re really, really good.

**Malcolm:** He’s Russian.

**John:** So, I’m going to leave you guys to talk through, we have a bunch of questions here that listeners have written in with.

**Craig:** Did you just call me racist?

**Malcolm:** No, I called you Russian. But that’s the same thing. That’s absolutely the same thing.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**Malcolm:** In Russia, you spell Racist – Russian.

**Craig:** It’s the same word. It’s like the Eskimos have 50 words for snow and Russians have one word for racist. Russian. All right. Sorry about that, John. We’re having fun over here.

**John:** Which is really good. So, I’m going to bow out for the bulk of this episode, but I left you a bunch of really nicely organized questions.

**Craig:** You did. You did.

**John:** In the outline. So I look forward to hearing your answers to a bunch of these questions. You know what? I got to stay for at least this first one because it has some good vocabulary. So I’m going to stay for this first one, and then I’m going to bail, then let you answer some more questions. This was a question we got from Blake. He says, “Why do so many shows, no matter the network or targeted age group, seem to act as if no sexual acts exist that don’t involve full penetration and the possibility of pregnancy. Basically, where are the hand jobs and blow jobs? There are a number of shows that talk about sex in a fairly frank manner, but they’re almost all judgmental and fearful. And most willingly ignore or underplay sexual activities that are less likely to involve a pregnancy.”

So, Malcolm, you come from a show that was a big Fox show. Were there blow jobs and hand jobs on Empire? I didn’t see. So tell me.

**Malcolm:** They fuck. I got to think, and there’s a good amount of gay sex.

**Craig:** But the specific question here is why is it only just fucking. Why in television shows and movies do people not just sit there and watch somebody getting a hand job?

**Malcolm:** Man, I got to imagine it’s because no one cares about – I mean, grown-ups don’t care about hand jobs.

**Craig:** I’m so with you on this.

**Malcolm:** Grown-ups don’t – I mean, you’re not making TV for kids – listen, if there’s a hand job or a blow job and it’s not for kids, and if it’s a grown-up, they want fucking or further.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just feels like kind of funny to me. Watching somebody get a hand job is funny because it’s so lazy.

**John:** So, a couple of perspectives I have on this. So, first off, in the Showtime pilot for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, she gives the guy a hand job in the pilot. And it becomes a very funny plot point. And I agree it is sort of funny, because she’s trying to interrogate him while giving him a hand job. And they actually play the fact that her hand is on his dick.

My theory is that it’s very hard to hide a penis. Like, if you’re showing sex, then you’re not sort of seeing the penis. But if you’re showing a blow job or a hand job, it’s sort of hard to hide it. And that may be part of the reason why we’re not seeing them so often in television.

**Craig:** Well, but you can fake it. You could do it in such a way where you weren’t seeing a dick, but the thing is it is funny. It’s just so – and I think that just a natural thing – there’s like a weird narrative short hand. If I see somebody getting a blow job in a movie, I don’t like them. I feel like they’ve done something wrong. And if I see somebody getting a hand job in a movie, I feel like they’re lazy and inattentive.

I don’t know why. Because in real life, of course, blow jobs and hand jobs mean neither of those things. Most of the time I would hope that they’re just mutually happy. I don’t know. Maybe it’s boring to watch?

**Malcolm:** There was a blow job on Billions last weekend.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. And how did it come off, so to speak?

**Malcolm:** Someone was fucking up.

**Craig:** They were fucking up.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, the dude was not supposed to be getting a blow job.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Malcolm:** And he was getting one.

**Craig:** See? There’s like this thing where if you’re getting a blow job in a movie or a television show, you’re a villain. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** [laughs] Sucking dick is for bad guys.

**Craig:** No, sucking dick is for good guys. Getting your dick sucked is for bad guys.

**Malcolm:** So, wait, if it’s two dudes–

**Craig:** If it’s two dudes, then the guy that’s blowing the other guy is like a good guy who is probably getting taken advantage of or there’s a misunderstanding.

**Malcolm:** You’re right.

**Craig:** Something is going wrong. He’s being paid–

**Malcolm:** That’s so fucking right.

**Craig:** There’s so many things, right? And the guy getting one is just a bad dude.

**Malcolm:** It’s true. You just cracked the code. Even as you’re saying it as a joke, it’s fucking true.

**Craig:** It’s just true. John, do you agree that I’ve cracked the code?

**John:** I think you may have cracked a trope. I don’t think it’s anything we should aspire to. I think the underlying question here that Blake is writing is in real life people are having sex in ways that are just not depicted on screen. There was an HBO show called Tell Me You Love Me which was sort of notorious for like they had a lot of sex in it and they actually showed penises. And so like Adam Scott was in that show and so he had this fake penis that you saw a lot. And so he would be getting blow jobs and you would see his fake penis getting a blow job. And it was weird just because you’re not used to seeing that part of the body.

Even a show like Girls on HBO, there’s a lot of sex in there, and you see like a lot of anatomy, but you don’t see dicks, really. And it’s a strange thing even in that show where like they talk about everything, but you’re not seeing that specific part of the action.

**Craig:** You know, I think sometimes we forget that sex, like all human behavior, comes in varying degrees of interesting illustration. I mean, like a lot of people eat lunch by hunching over their desk and shoveling it into their mouth as fast as they can. It’s really weird.

**Malcolm:** That’s me.

**Craig:** Like Malcolm. But we don’t really show that in movies and TV, unless we’re trying to make a joke of it. Because even though it’s completely normal and expected, it’s just not – I don’t know, we just don’t like watching it so much.

**John:** That’s true. I don’t know why. All right. I’m going to jump out for a bit and let you guys answer questions about martial arts, about managers, about parentheticals in dialogue. So, those are all going to be great things. Then I’m going to circle back and come to you when it comes time for One Cool Things and our outros.

**Craig:** All right. So, now it’s just down to you and me. So let’s answer some questions here. We’re going to blow through as many of these that we can in the time that we have. I’m just going to tee them up and you’re going to answer them as best you can.

**Malcolm:** OK.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve already heard from Blake and we already discussed blow jobs and hand jobs. How could we possibly top that? We can’t. But, we do have something from Alan, South Carolina. And Alan wants to know, “When writing a spec feature or series that would rely heavily on specific types of martial arts, like Kung-Fu, Highlander, Badlands, etc., how can the writer convey this emphasis without assuming the mantle of the fight choreographer or bogging the story down in specific fight details that would likely be ignored anyway?”

**Malcolm:** It’s a dance. It’s definitely good to flavor a script, especially if you have expertise in it, because I know one of the things – like when I was first coming up as a writer, I used to love reading action scripts where someone had done enough research that like, oh, this dude knows his guns. Or this dude knows the physics of what’s happening to play out here. So, if you can quickly reference why – naming a specific martial art is important to the scene, meaning this, like this form of martial arts specialize in weapons, so this dude is going to be picking up every single thing in the room. Then you ain’t getting bogged down in it, but you understand that a different dynamic is at play and you’re getting a different set piece.

**Craig:** Yeah. That to me right there is the key. I don’t think I particularly care about where on the body you’re striking somebody unless it’s sort of a signature move or something like that. And I think it’s probably boring to sit and read, you know, “Reverse kick, then rib punch, then…he ducks the leg and then turns around.” It’s really about the character moments, right? Every fight has a choice or two in it. Something that means something dramatically. Getting up off the ground when you think you don’t have enough left in you, but you do anyway. Doing the thing you were taught to do that you weren’t able to do before but now you can.

Whatever it is, those choice points are what matters. Technically speaking, if there’s something like whatever the heart of the particular martial art is, show it. Yeah, makes total sense. You know, if you’re like sword master, do sword stuff. So, early Steven Seagal, like before Steven Seagal went crazy.

**Malcolm:** Before he got fatter.

**Craig:** Right. But in the early days, the three word days, where it was like Above the Law, and Out for Justice, and whatever there was. You know, the typical Steven Seagal scene is he would walk into a pool hall full of thugs, and he would beat them all up using the things that were there, like his moves were you can’t punch me because I slap your hands out in the air and then I pick up a pool ball and I hit you with it. And then I pick up a cue stick and I hit you with it. And I use the environment. Those are the important things.

**Malcolm:** I think like also if you’re facing off with a martial art form you’ve never seen before, then that’s going to evoke a feeling in your lead character. You know what I’m saying? Like oh my god, this dude is using the crane technique. I have no counter for this. And it’s not just about no counter. It’s how it makes me feel. All of a sudden my confidence is bleeding out.

**Craig:** Character. As always. So, I would say, Alan, the key there is to think about character. If it’s something that is a specific fiddly thing that a fight choreographer can change without impacting the character or the scene, then perhaps it’s not the most important thing to put in the pages. All right, next up, Sasha writes, “Up until–,” oh, you’re going to like this one.

**Malcolm:** Oh shit.

**Craig:** You ready? “Up until about three hours ago,” now I don’t know exactly when Sasha was writing this, but let’s just say recently, “up until about three hours ago I was working with an extremely unprofessional and volatile manager. I never signed a contract as I always had a bad feeling about him. Today, after he threatened to assault my writing partner…”

**Malcolm:** [laughs]

**Craig:** “…I sent him a very calm email explaining why we should no longer work together. Duh, the dude repeatedly used the phrase, ‘I’m going to punch him in the fucking face.’” That’s the manager to her writing partner. “The manager is now firing off a series of missives demanding commissions on projects that have yet to sell. He wrote, ‘As is customary in our business,’” we’re going to be challenging that in a second, “’if a job or a sale on one of these projects happens in the next 12 months, I am entitled to a commission on it for the life of the deal.’”

Sasha continues, “I’m guessing he’s just peacocking, trying to scare me into submission, but is there any validity to his claim?”

**Malcolm:** No, but also how the fuck do people meet these kind of people? Like, I think more importantly fuck that manager and he can’t do shit to you. And don’t ever – when you do sell something, you will have a lawyer and then he’ll deal with that manager. So that’s the answer to that.

But I do think like, you know, on the board or whatever, I’ve been hearing more and more stories about writers of various levels, some who are pretty high level, dealing with slightly abusive or reps that take you on. And I think for writers who are coming up, you have to have a sense of destiny or you’re going to – there’s no way – I know a ton of fucking up-and-coming writers who haven’t made it yet who would not be dealing with a manager like that for one fucking minute.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that’s because they believe they’re going to make it, and therefore it allows them to actually behave in a way that will get them to a proper manager more quickly, because they ain’t wasting a minute with a motherfucker like that. You can’t.

**Craig:** It’s pretty crazy, right? Well, let’s talk about the legal stuff for a second. Malcolm is right. What he said here is complete bullshit. In fact, I got to tell you, Sasha, that if your manager has done anything to violate the Talent Agency Act, which would include for instance procuring you work or attempting to procure you work, then not only do you not have to pay him for the rest of your life now that he’s fired, on anything you make, but you could file a grievance against him with the Labor Commissioner of the State of California and actually get him to cough up money that you have paid to him. Which I’m sure he wouldn’t want.

I strongly recommend that if you do not have an attorney now, you get one. And that you have the attorney state to that person in no uncertain terms, “Fuck off. You’re getting nothing.” The rules on how managers work in the State of California, I believe a lawyer once told me that it’s called On the Wheel, Off the Wheel. So, the deal is that unlike agents who earn 10% for the deals they negotiate, and who collect that money even if you fire them the day after they close the deal, they collect the 10%. Because their 10% is based on what they negotiated.

But managers really are service employees. You are paying them while they service you as a manager. They’re on the wheel. When you fire them, they’re off the wheel. They are not, even though they collect commissions, they are not entitled to the money that keeps coming out. The idea is that the commission is simply paying them for the work they’re doing while they are your manager, and not one minute after.

**Malcolm:** But also, you know what, that dude is threatening to hit people. Call the fucking police. You know, if you got time, make him pay. You know what I’m saying? He shouldn’t be doing that.

**Craig:** All right. So then let’s talk about this other issue, which is how writers deal with abusive people. And first of all, why? Why are there so many abusive people? Look, I think every business has abusive people. Every business has bullies. But, in Hollywood I think there are certain kinds of predators who understand that artists – and I’m talking about writers, and directors, and actors – come out here because they’re looking for validation. They’re looking for love. And they take advantage of it. And I think it’s in their interest to make us feel afraid. And most importantly, it’s in their interest to make us feel like we need them. And so, you know, it’s an abusive spouse situation when it gets like that.

You actually don’t need any single agent or manager or lawyer. You need an agent. You need a lawyer. Maybe you feel you need a manager. But there is no specific individual one that is going to change your life or make a huge difference. Your work will. Your work got you this manager, your work will get you another manager. If you’re listening, and anybody in your professional life is treating you in any kind of abusive way, get out. And they get nothing. Ooh, that felt good.

All right, let’s move on to Seth. Seth says, “In addition to being a writer, I’m also a voiceover director, and I find that when I write dialogue I lean heavily on the use of ellipses and other punctuation to create specific rhythms and flow. Do you think that’s micromanaging the actor’s potential performance? How much use of punctuation to control the flow of dialogue is reasonable?”

**Malcolm:** I am just starting to wean myself off that. So, he probably is micromanaging, but it’s also something you learn over time. Like I use less parenthesis than I used to. I like some ellipses though. I do. I do. It really is an effective tool.

**Craig:** It’s the best.

**Malcolm:** You know what I’m saying? So, yeah, he’s probably micromanaging a little bit and you will as you write become more and more confident in the fact that your readers, especially if you’re fucking with pros, are going to know – they’ve done this a million times. They know how it shown be flown. You know what I’m saying? And you start to wean yourself off of it. I’m almost done with exclamation points. Not quite. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Yeah, I use those pretty rarely.

**Malcolm:** You know who killed me on that?

**Craig:** McQuarrie?

**Malcolm:** Yes. Worst thing ever.

**Craig:** He’s the devil.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** McQuarrie is too obsessive about exclamation points. But you get a couple per episode, you know.

**Malcolm:** His quote was every time you use an exclamation point it’s an admission of failure. [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s a little strong. Look, I used ellipses all the time. I use dashes all the time. When I do, I like to take a moment to stop and go, do I need it? It’s always more elegant without. Of course. But I think that Seth’s focus on micromanaging the actor’s potential performance is off the mark. Actors don’t give a damn about any of that stuff. They remember the lines and then they start acting. It’s not like they sit there and go, “Oh god, there’s a dash-dash, I got to respect that.” They don’t. They perform it how they perform it. And the director works with them and it becomes – it’s entirely about the reader. It’s about the reader getting the scene and feeling the pace and feeling a trail-off.

See, the dot-dot-dot at the end of a line isn’t anything an actor is supposed to perform anyway. It’s the way almost every sentence ends. I just did it.

**Malcolm:** You did.

**Craig:** Right? Very few sentences end with a period.

**Malcolm:** Mine do. I make people uncomfortable with that shit.

**Craig:** OK. Maybe you do. But most people kind of – there’s an invitation to continue the conversation. So I think people worry too much about this stuff. I wouldn’t be too concerned about it. I do think that if a reader is saying I got distracted or thrown off by the mass of punctuation and other stuff, take that seriously because that’s who you’re trying to put a movie inside of. You know? Inception.

Jeff in San Jose, California writes, “In Episode 134…” You remember, Malc, right? Episode 134?

**Malcolm:** Yeah, I listen to all you guys’ podcasts.

**Craig:** “Craig takes umbrage with Oscar winners who neglect to thank their writers in their acceptance speeches.” Fact. “To paraphrase Craig, without the screenplay nobody working on a movie can even begin to do their job and all Oscar winners should thank their writer first.” It’s true. “My question is do you have any sense of how many writers who win the Oscar thank the other writers, if any, who worked on the screenplay but did not receive credit?”

Damn, Jeff has got a pretty good – this is a nice shot here.

**Malcolm:** It’s getting weird.

**Craig:** But it’s a good shot. I like it. “I don’t recall any Oscar-winning writer actually saying during the ceremony, ‘I’d like to thank Jane Doe for her uncredited writing on my screenplay.’ Then again, perhaps those uncredited writers are among the names rattled off during the winner’s speech.”

All right. So, Jeff is calling us out on the mat a little bit here. You got an opinion on this?

**Malcolm:** Well, for starters, Jeff’s got to understand 90% of writers think they wrote everything, so they wouldn’t be – in their mind whatever is on there is all them. You know what I’m saying? So, they can’t go through that. On top of that, I would imagine it could get weird legally if you start naming people, like if people ain’t getting credit on a movie, you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** I don’t think there’s a legal problem. If you were trying to erase somebody’s name, maybe then, you know, there would be an issue.

**Malcolm:** OK, well maybe not legal for a lawsuit, but I don’t think that the graciousness of doing that actually would have the effect you think it would be.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Malcolm:** Because you’re calling in ghosts and shit who didn’t make it past the threshold of an arbitration that had nothing to do with any of you guys. And you’re giving them credit. You know, that’s weird. You know what I’m saying? But mostly all writers think they wrote everything, so why would they do it?

**Craig:** I think that’s a huge part of it. I mean, if you have credit on a movie and somebody else did not receive it, then they couldn’t have done that much. And, no, you’re probably thinking to yourself this Oscar belongs to me. I’m the one that got the credit. I did all the work. And maybe that’s true. The other thing is that I’m not sure other writers would necessarily want that. If I worked on a movie for a couple of weeks quietly like that. I suppose if somebody thanked me I would feel really nice about it, but the studios would hate it.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** The press people would hate it. The people representing the movie would hate it, because all you’re doing now is calling into question the illusion. And it is an illusion that a person did everything. Right? So when directors get up there to – you know, a film by blah-blah-blah, what a joke, right? But that’s movie magic that they’re using to sell stuff. So I think the studios would hate it. That’s probably why I’m guessing.

**Malcolm:** But mostly it’s because the writer who is up there believes he did it all.

**Craig:** I think that’s probably the lion’s share of it, too. Greg writes, “What if the first three pages don’t grab you? Are there movies that went on to be successful that due to complexity or weirdness or something else didn’t grab the agent/director/studio/or producer in a compelling way in the first three pages if there was something still that made it worth reading just a little further?”

**Malcolm:** Yeah. This whole culture that’s happening online and like sometimes a professional writer or a big time producer or director will tell you you got to grab them the first three pages. And that is a good thing to do. And they’re not thinking that they just made that statement that they’re going off to work on a script that deliberately meanders for 20 or 30 pages and then takes off. They don’t even realize that off that statement, a bunch of novice screenwriters are thinking you always have to do this.

And you absolutely don’t. Yes, it’s good to grab someone in the first three pages, but the other thing is usually within three pages you know if a motherfucker can write. That’s really what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** And so that’s the next threshold. And if you can promise that you’re going to go somewhere, then you don’t have to grab someone because you’re promising. You know what I’m saying? You’re saying, hey, in these first three pages it’s very clear that this writer has a handle on what’s going on and is leading me somewhere and wants me to be kind of a little bit mundane or whatever. You know?

**Craig:** I could not agree more. In fact, I think the problem is what people think the word “grab” means. I think they think it means everything has to explode on page one, and then on page two the planet collides into another planet, and on page three you find out that your dad is really your mother. That’s just plot. I am not grabbed by that ever. I’m grabbed by that intangible thing.

I can read three pages where nobody says a word and nothing is happening and yet while I’m reading it I think I’m in the hands of somebody. They’re doing something. I’m fascinated by this. I want to keep – I’m grabbed.

So, that’s the problem. When they hear the first three pages got to grab you, they think, oh my god, let’s just get out the clowns juggling, the chainsaws, and people on fire and all. No. No, no. It means just write something that makes me want to keep reading. That’s it. And usually, at least for me, the thing that makes me want to keep reading is it’s good. I can’t define it any better than that.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s good. There are plenty of movies where, I mean, god, can you imagine sitting down and reading the first three pages of Unforgiven, which is one of the best screenplays ever written. And I’m pretty sure it starts with a guy just feeding pigs while his kids watch, and then he can’t get on a horse. And he’s old and he’s tired. And there’s a grave there. Right? Zzzz.

Except it’s written so beautifully. And you wouldn’t know from the first few pages what’s coming.

All right, let’s get to our next question. Heather from Agora Hills wonders, “If I have a specific scene from an old movie that I would like to play alongside the end credits, how do I write it? Do I put it in before Fade Out and before The End, or in between those two? The only examples I’ve been able to find simply state Roll or Over Credits, then whatever it is the writer wants to show. They didn’t write Fade Out or The End at all.”

This feels like a question we can just solve right here permanently. This feels like it has an answer.

**Malcolm:** Give it.

**Craig:** My answer is you get to the end of the movie, you want to do stuff over credits, you can say Fade Out if you want to Fade Out, or Cut to Black, and then you write Roll Credits, and then you describe whatever the hell you want. And then instead of saying the end just write End Credits. And you’re done.

**Malcolm:** Yes.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve answered that. Heather, that’s the answer. That’s literally the answer. Damon writes, “I’m currently working on a sci-fi spec and I’m getting into some complicated storytelling territory. It’s not a time travel movie, but I can compare it to that kind of created world with lots of moving parts, difficult to understand science, and multiple timelines. Some of these elements won’t show up in the film, but I need to understand them to make sure I have all of my bases covered in the final story. Do you have any suggestions or tools for keeping complicated details in order as you figure out how the story will play out?”

Malcolm, any suggestions for Damon?

**Malcolm:** I will say that in general being complicated and messy is probably my biggest weakness as a writer. And I advise people to bat that shit down and get it to where you can express it verbally very, very cleanly.

I saw a movie, I’m going to go ahead and name the filmmaker. There are films in which when you start doing world-building if your rules aren’t neat and tidy, you have to constantly keep resetting the rules and explaining a new rule. Right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** And that can become exhausting.

**Craig:** It is. Well, it’s exhausting because you feel like all they’re doing is constantly moving the goal posts. Why should I believe anything you’re telling me when ten minutes later you’re going to say, oh, but only if blah-blah-blah?

**Malcolm:** Yep. And M. Night did it in that movie there’s a pool in it. You couldn’t see the people.

**Craig:** Lady in the Water.

**Malcolm:** Yeah. And it’s like, so, rules and world-building really need to be reduced to what is active and matters, because honestly one of the things I learned about sci-fi writing in general – you may know this already – but this was a revelation to me. In general, when you pick – like let’s say you’re writing something that’s set in the future or whatever, right, where there is some sci-fi dynamic. Usually there is one thing that is different about the world than that is kind of the main thing you’re exploring.

So, if you look at Minority Report, it is this is how crime is solved in the future. And yeah, they’ve got flying cars and shit, but that’s the main thing, and that’s what you keep coming back to. And when you’re just doing a world in general, which I’ve seen, I have a buddy who has a history, he does this a lot, right? And it’s not one thing you’re investigating. It just becomes a sprawling mass – it’s like a comic book.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a comic book or maybe it’s, you know, a very involved miniseries. But, yeah, I mean, if you look at Star Wars, other than the space ships and things, what’s the thing, the force. That’s the thing.

**Malcolm:** Inception you’re entering the brain. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Exactly. So, I would say tools-wise, Damon, I’m not sure what to recommend here. I know a lot of people like this program, Scrivener, because it apparently lets you organize all sorts of things and then tag them back and forth together and connect them to a screenplay. I’ve never used it. My main tool is a corkboard. Corkboard and index cards.

**Malcolm:** So unsexy.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s like you get the work done by getting the work done. So, you write everything down, you put it up on the board. Things that are related, you connect them together. And what ends up happening over time is you just know it. You just know your world. You know what’s going on, especially because you’re inventing it. But the complicated things and the feedback, I know that Rian Johnson when he was writing Looper was really careful about that. And he had very carefully worked out diagrams so he understood. So anybody asked him a question, he has an answer for it. So, I think maybe the tool is your brain and the suggestion is work hard, which you’re going to have to because it does sound kind of complicated.

We’ll do one more. What do you say, one more?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll done one more.

**Malcolm:** One more.

**Craig:** Lucas, he’s going to give us our last one of the day. Lucas writes, “I just finished a revision on a screenplay and here’s the thing. The screenplay has no dialogue. It’s something like the first half hour of There Will Be Blood.” Love that movie.

**Malcolm:** All-timer.

**Craig:** All-timer. “Do you have any advice or experience on restricting yourselves this way? Do you have any specific things you do when trying to tell the story visually? Any general advice on telling a story like this?”

There’s a couple of things, I mean, WALL-E comes to mind, that very long extended no dialogue section. And our forefathers who started screenwriting, they didn’t have dialogue, right? They weren’t talkies. So they had to write almost everything like that and then just little cards of dialogue.

When you’re writing extended sequences with no dialogue, are there some tricks? Some tips?

**Malcolm:** Be efficient. You know what I’m saying? Because you’re asking a lot. And that will actually probably help you clarify whatever the purpose is in any given scene. And I think personally, I don’t know, this still feels like something that would drive some screenwriters crazy. I think it’s OK to cheat. I’m not someone who believes in never do anything that you can’t film or whatever, especially if you’re doing something like this. You might have to write a sentence that lets the audience know what they need to be expecting moving forward through this scene. You know what I’m saying? Like in this scene Tom is about to confront his inner most fear. Because you ain’t got no dialogue. You know what I’m saying?

In this scene Tom is going to – like you can cheat like that, I think. Especially in a situation like this.

**Craig:** I agree, but I’d do a little differently, and I don’t think it’s cheating at all, in that what I think is if there’s not going to be dialogue, but I want the audience to understand what the character is thinking, then I am OK with writing their dialogue in italics in action. So, they look at something and it’s like we’re reading their minds kind of. But we know it’s not going to be spoken. But I get it. I know that an actor can perform that face.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** And I know that that face is something the audience can perceive. So to me, that’s all right. That’s completely all right. The cheating that drives me the craziest is when people introduce characters and tell us about their life story when all I’m doing is looking at them sitting at a bar and nothing else, so that’s cheating. But this is different, right?

So, if you have a character, he turns the corner, and he sees a man holding a gun to his brother’s head. And so let’s say our character here is Charlie. Charlie stops, stares. And then I might put in parenthesis, (Please don’t, please). He can act that. Charlie can act that. So, I try and think a lot about that, because it can become very technical and it can get boring, I think, for people reading.

You know, when people read scripts, I think a lot of them just read the dialogue.

**Malcolm:** Damn right.

**Craig:** And so I perversely then spend so much time thinking about the not dialogue, because I want them to read it. So I try and make the not dialogue entertaining, and interesting, and fun, because if they’re not reading it, then they’re just getting the dialogue and they’re not seeing the movie.

You know, I think we’ll hold back a couple of these other questions for next time. I think we got a good show in.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they don’t all have to be two hours long.

**Malcolm:** Nah, they don’t, Craig.

**Craig:** No. They don’t.

**Malcolm:** It’s OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if you and I did this show together, let’s say we killed John.

**Malcolm:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Keep talking.

**Malcolm:** No, I understand exactly what you’re saying.

**Craig:** I think the show would be – it would run 45 minutes, right? That’s not the end of the world.

**Malcolm:** It would run hot, too, though.

**Craig:** It would run hot. See, that’s the thing. The 45 minutes would be fiery.

**Malcolm:** Right.

**Craig:** Fiery. People would talk.

**Malcolm:** Right. There’d be occasional falling outs between us in the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, and when we say occasional we mean every single episode something would go wrong. Well, with that being our last question, I think we should probably go to One Cool Things.

All right, so let’s bring John back to wrap our show up now that we’ve answered those questions expertly. Mr. August?

**John:** Pleasure to be back. My One Cool Thing this week is Patrick Lenton’s story of the Dog in Skyrim. So, this is actually a Twitter thread he did a year ago, and someone put it back up in Twitter this last week. And I just remember how much I loved it. So, it’s this guy who’s playing Skyrim and he basically tells this long story of how in Skyrim he’s sort of adopted this dog. And the dog was just an incredible drain on his life, because he was always so worried about the dog dying that he had to sort of do all these things to try to keep the dog alive. And to like build a house where he could have a family and have an orphan who could adopt the dog so the dog wouldn’t be killed.

And it just reminded me so much of playing Skyrim, but also it felt very much like how life actually is, is that you end up becoming attached to this one thing and then you sort of focus all of your energy on saving this one thing, even if it’s not your real goal. So you end up not fighting dragons. You end up sort of worrying about mining ore and saving this virtual dog who you don’t really care about, but you just don’t want to see die. So, that was a great recap of the experience of trying to save a dog in Skyrim but also sort of go through your life.

**Craig:** Yeah. I play Skyrim, of course, and I play every Bethesda game. Fallout 4. And one of the first things I do when I play those games is I just make a choice. No companions. Don’t want them. Don’t want them near me. Don’t want to care about them. Don’t want to bring them with me. I got that dog in Fallout and I immediately sent it home. Just stay at home.

**Malcolm:** That’s fucked.

**Craig:** Everybody that was like can I walk around with you, no you can’t. Yes you can until I get the quest that that unlocks, and then I’m sending you home. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** That is awful.

**John:** So, I’m playing Skyrim right now, so I’m playing the up-res version of it and really enjoying it. So, I do have like one companion I go through and I did kill my first companion and I felt just horrible about it. This guy who I am playing with now seems really sturdy, but I’m not going to be upset if he dies. But I’m definitely not adopting any orphans. I don’t care about my little house and breeze home. I’m trying not to play that. I’m actually just playing the quest.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. I can’t remember, I know in Fallout 4 you can fall in love and sleep with your companions, but I don’t think you can do that in Skyrim.

**John:** You sort of can. There are companions that you can marry and companions you can’t marry, but I married the first time and I completely lost interest in the game once I got married.

**Craig:** Just like life.

**Malcolm:** Just like life.

**Craig:** Just drains the color out of everything, doesn’t it? It’s amazing.

**John:** [laughs] Why are there no blow jobs in Skyrim? That’s the real question.

**Craig:** Why are there no blow jobs? I almost had the first gay sex of my life in Fallout 4. Almost. I came close.

**Malcolm:** And you ended up having it in real life. You were like, fuck it, didn’t happen in Fallout 4, so I decided to in real life.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was like, exactly, like that guy turned me down, so I got to get Grindr. No, I came close. I came close. But what can I say? I got to be me. I ended up sleeping with the newspaper editor lady. I don’t know. She had a way about her. But I got close. I got close, John. I’m getting there.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** Give me time. All right, my One Cool Thing is a super short One Cool Thing, but it’s also videogame based. Every year San Diego Studios puts out MLB The Show for the Sony PlayStation platform. And this year they are up to MLB The Show 17. MLB The Show series is fascinating because of the weird way that licensing worked for a long time with Major League Baseball. They had given their exclusive rights to I think Electronic Arts and the only way that you could get the rights to baseball player’s names and likenesses is if you made a game for your specific platform, but you couldn’t cross platform games.

So, the Electronic Arts game was not very good, but MLB The Show is spectacular and it’s just getting better and better. And the reason that it’s my One Cool Thing this year is because this version of the game does this – there was something that was making me crazy about this game for so long, but I understood it was hard. Baseballs have stitches on them. That’s why you can throw curveballs and sliders. You can make them do things. But similarly when you hit a baseball really hard, it will not travel in a straight line. It will curve. It will bend. Sometimes it almost seems like it takes off in the air mid-air because of top spin and air pressure. All this stuff.

And, of course, in videogames it’s hard to do. Well, this year they nailed it. It just looks so good. When you hit a baseball coming off the bat it just bends and it drops and it hangs. It does all the things that baseballs do. So, I love that. Love this game. If you’re a baseball fan, like I am, and the season has begun, MLB The Show 17 for Sony PlayStation 4. Highly recommend.

Malcolm, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Malcolm:** I do. I thought of it. My One Cool Thing is Fantastic Negrito is opening up–

**John:** I knew it.

**Malcolm:** He’s opening up for an artist named Sturgill Simpson. And it’s a big deal to us. We wanted to get on tour with him for a while. When you bring up other musicians, it’s very hard to find people who, for Negrito anyway, are like, oh yeah, I’ve been watching that guy. You know what I’m saying? I’m into his shit. And what Sturgill represents, and the fact that Negrito already knew about him, and that we tried to get on his tour before, it’s a big deal for us because it represents something. Like it’s not about this is an established artist so much as this feels like a connection in the trajectory of this dude’s career that is meaningful. Like I said, it represents something. So, that’s a cool thing. He’s opening up for Sturgill all over the country.

**Craig:** Well, pretty much everything this guy is doing is working these days. So, I have to assume that’s going to work, too.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Jeff Bayson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones Craig and Malcolm tackled today. For short questions, though, I’m on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Malcom is @malcolmspellman.

**Malcolm:** Yep.

**John:** We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there leave us a comment or a review. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts.

And you can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. You can listen to them through the apps you can find on your applicable app store.

So, Malcolm, thank you so much for being on the show this week. You were fantastic as always.

**Malcolm:** Thank you for having me this week.

**John:** And Craig and I will be back next week. Hopefully my microphone will be back and I can join for an entire episode. But until then, have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** Thanks guys. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Live Show Tickets](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/)
* [The Hatton Garden Job](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5351458/)
* [Patrick Lenton’s Dog Story](https://twitter.com/patricklenton/status/717163582115307521)
* [MLB The Show 17](http://theshow.com/)
* [Fantastic Negrito](http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/)
* [Malcolm Spellman](https://twitter.com/MalcolmSpellman) on Twitter
* [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 Jeff Bayson ([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_295.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 294 of Scriptnotes. A podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And, Craig, there’s exciting news. So, we had talked about a live show with Rian Johnson. It got postponed but it’s now back on the calendar.

**Craig:** It’s back on the calendar. Right now I believe we are looking at May 1. I think it’s going to be at the ArcLight in Hollywood and Rian will be there as will Rob McElhenney, the creator and star of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, an excellent show and an excellent guy. Dana Fox will be filling in, playing the role of John August. So, between Dana, and Rian, and Rob, we’ve got quite a lineup. Rian, of course, has directed a small film which will be coming out in December. And tickets, not yet on sale, but maybe. So we’ll have a link once we get them.

**John:** Yeah. We’re not going to string you along with promises of a live show and never deliver. We will eventually have this live show. I will be seething with jealousy that you guys get to be in a room together and I will not be. And the ArcLight feels like a great home for it. We’ve talked about the ArcLight as a venue before. We’re often across the street at the LA Film School, but actual ArcLight seems great.

When you have Rian Johnson there, please recall the anecdote of Rian Johnson when he was doing Looper, he actually came into an audience screening of Looper and he had dressed up as an ArcLight employee and did the standard greetings and welcome. And like, you know, turn off your cell phones. And did that for a screening of his own movie, which I thought was just delightful and very Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Did he let anyone know that he was Rian Johnson?

**John:** Apparently he got recognized a ways into his spiel.

**Craig:** Damn.

**John:** That’s just great.

**Craig:** That is pretty great.

**John:** So I would love to do that at some point.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Today on the podcast, we’ll be discussing chess, bad news, baseball, god, and screenwriting competitions. It’s a hodgepodge episode, Craig.

**Craig:** Really? Because to me those always get discussed together.

**John:** What’s weird is a lot of the things do go together, like bad news and baseball obviously is great. Baseball and god, I can see there’s–

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Like Aaron Sorkin would talk about the connections between these different ideas, but it’s just a lot of things.

**Craig:** Aaron Sorkin was in the news recently.

**John:** He was in the news recently. What was he talking about? Oh, he was talking – yeah. I felt kind of bad for Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** I did, too. I did, too.

**John:** I saw it as a Twitter storm outrage, but it felt like he was quoted a little bit out of context. Like he sort of sarcastically answered back to a question and then probably said something more, but we saw his little snippet of it and it sounded like he had no idea what was going on.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not sure it was sarcastic. So, for those of you who are wondering what the hell we’re talking about, the Writers Guild Foundation had their annual festival. I participated in it, in fact, with Derek Haas. We had a very nice discussion with some folks. One of the main acts, as it were, was a discussion with Aaron Sorkin. And during it the topic of diversity and underrepresentation of minority writers of all sorts of types in Hollywood came up. And he seemingly was shocked that – I think what he was shocked about specifically was the idea that white male, or white straight male directors for instance, are perceived as getting free passes or opportunities that perhaps they haven’t quite earned, whereas other writers who aren’t that norm, so to speak, would not. And he seemed flabbergasted by this.

And said, “Well, OK, now that I know, what can I do to help?” And there was some outrage of the sort of, “Really? That’s classic white privilege for you to not know this.” And, you know, so I was actually talking with one of the organizers of the festival about it afterwards and he said, “You know, in the room his comments were received quite well overall and that people were actually quite heartened by his concern and his desire to do what he could do about that.”

When you just take it as an isolated comment and you put it on Twitter, it does sound oblivious. And I – the truth is it is oblivious, but oblivion is certainly not as bad as awareness and lack of care. It’s a weird time we live in where people maybe are late to understand that there’s a certain kind of injustice, express a dissatisfaction with that injustice, and express a desire to do what they can to correct that injustice. And that is seen as a failure.

**John:** Yeah. I can definitely sympathize with the it felt one way in the room and it felt a very different way when looking at a transcript, because we make a podcast that has transcripts and every once in a while something will come up that will become an outrage because of what was in the transcripts, which never was an outrage when we were actually speaking it. And so when I saw those comments out of context, I assumed it was just the snippets around things rather than the actual meat there. I do share your frustration that sometimes we become outraged by the person who is trying to be an ally but sort of bumbles it a little bit, rather than the person who is actually trying to do harm.

That’s the nature of the world that we’re in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, I’m not suggesting that we give people extra credit for ham-fisted or late-to-the-party attempts to be good people. I don’t think people deserve credit for that. Frankly, I don’t think you should get credit for doing what you’re supposed to do anyway. I just don’t think they should be torn down. And certainly, look, I had a crazy experience as you may recall a few years ago when we did a live podcast and sort of the same deal. In the room there was absolutely no problem whatsoever. Not one comment was made at all. It was only afterward, when somebody pulled it out of a transcript, somebody who had not been there, that it took on a life of its own.

So, you know, these things do happen. So, I did feel somewhat bad for him. I didn’t think that he quite deserved the grief. I don’t think he deserves credit, but I don’t think he deserves grief. Well, see, that was an unplanned topic.

**John:** It was an unplanned topic, but you know what, I think it actually ties in very well to our planned topics, because I think it raises the issue of benefit of the doubt. And I think many of the things we’re talking about tonight really do speak to benefit of the doubt and whether giving benefit of the doubt could make some of these things that seem outrageous a little bit more understandable.

**Craig:** Can I give you a compliment? I want to give you a compliment. I think that one of the essential aspects of intelligence is the ability to find connections that are not necessarily obvious in things that would otherwise be viewed as disparate. That is an overlooked aspect of intelligence. And you are absolutely right and that was very, very smart.

**John:** Oh, great. So–

**Craig:** You’re smart.

**John:** Thank you. Let’s see if it bears fruit in the actual discussion.

**Craig:** Yes, so now don’t be stupid.

**John:** The follow up. Let’s start with a really simple, simple question. This was raised on Twitter a week or two ago. And you and I both tried to deal with it on Twitter, but let’s talk it out here. A question that came from Matt Schlicter who says, “Does an atheist/agnostic capitalize the G in god in a script? I.e. when a character says, ‘Thank god.’”

So, you and I answered this question in different ways. So, Craig, talk about your answer. I’ll talk about my answer. And see if we can come to a common ground.

**Craig:** Yes. So I am an atheist. Generally speaking, I do not capitalize the word “god” unless I am referring to god in the specific religious sense. So, if I have somebody say, “Oh my god, or oh god, or goddammit,” or any of those things–

**John:** Or god bless.

**Craig:** Or god bless. I don’t capitalize the G. If I have somebody saying something like, “Do you believe in God? Or when I pray to God,” then I would capitalize because that person is – I presume that character is religious and believes in God and is also speaking specifically to God.

**John:** Yes. So, I generally do capitalize, and so I would do it in Thank God and other things, but I’m not sure I’m entirely consistent. So I could do some sort of grep search through all of my old files and see whether I’m capitalizing that G or not.

**Craig:** Grep search. Nerd.

**John:** Yeah. Nerd.

**Craig:** UNIX.

**John:** But I have not actually done that kind of search. But in general I do capitalize it. My rationale for it is that God is sort of a character. Like I would capitalize Zeus. And so therefore I’m capitalizing God. And that I generally think of God as being the God of Abraham. And so I’m referring to a specific character and therefore I would refer that character, the capital name.

That’s not entirely reasonable. And I think your distinction between like would the character saying that word capitalize it or not is a reasonable thing to do. It’s just sort of a choice to not capitalize it, so I’m sort of not making that choice. And it’s just simpler for me to capitalize it in most cases.

**Craig:** I don’t think it really matters, unless you’re submitting a script to a faith-based producer.

**John:** Then you should capitalize Thank God.

**Craig:** Probably capitalize it and also take out the abortion stuff, and your gay characters, and your Jews.

**John:** There are faith-based producers who are happy with the gays.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure there are.

**Craig:** Wait a second. You went from “there are” to “I’m sure there are.”

**John:** Indeed. I’m gradually backtracking down there. But I have certainty that there is some faith-based producer who would be offended by a lower case G but not be offended by Gays in the script.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? You’re probably right.

**John:** Mark Burnett. Mark Burnett is a religious person. But I also think he’s probably not an anti-gay person. Guessing.

**Craig:** Hopefully not. But yeah, I think that generally speaking it doesn’t really matter one way or another. It would be glaring to me if I saw the lower case G and it was a priest and he was saying, “You need to come to God to understand God,” and that was all lower case. I would just think was this person’s shift key broken? But, if I see someone say, “Oh my god,” and it’s – frankly I find the capital G in oh my God to be too religious. It’s weird. Because in my mind when people say that they’re not talking about actual God. It’s simply a phrase. So it’s personal choice.

**John:** It is personal choice. I would also say like in the words like goddammit, like that feels really weird to sort of capitalize the G in that, so I’m probably not consistent at all in my things. It’s just when it’s the single word by itself I tend to capitalize it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to less controversial topics. This is an email that came in from Jason Kessler, a listener. He says that, “Every once and a while the topic of screenwriting contests comes up and whether or not they’re useful. I thought it might be helpful to share my experience with you.”

**Craig:** I’m sure this is going to go great. I’m sure he’s had a wonderful experience and nothing went wrong.

**John:** OK. “The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest has 13 different categories—“

**Craig:** And we’re off.

**John:** “The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest…” – sirens are going off right now.

**Craig:** I mean, red flags on top of sirens. Yeah. Yikes.

**John:** Let’s pause here, because Beverly Hills and moviemaking really don’t have a lot to do with each other. I mean, it’s like while the talent agencies are in Beverly Hills, I guess, it’s not like, you know, oh, let’s go to Beverly Hills and make movies. No, you go to Beverly Hills to see tourists buy expensive jewelry.

**Craig:** No, for sure. First of all, CAA isn’t even in Beverly Hills anymore. And second of all, Beverly Hills isn’t even Beverly Hills. Because that’s just like back from 90210 days where everyone was like, Ooh-ah, Beverly Hills. Yeah, Beverly Hills is fine and everything, but most of Beverly Hills is just, you know, it’s the flats. It’s a bunch of houses and stuff. The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest just screams of fakeness.

**John:** It does. So, this contest though has “13 different categories, each with a gold, silver, and bronze winner. And then one overall grand prize winner. The website advertises the competition as having “over $20,000 in prizes and awards.” So Jason writes, “My Silicon Valley spec script was the gold winner of the TV Existing Series competition this year.” So, congratulations to Jason.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** Because you wrote a good episode of Silicon Valley, which is a fantastic show. So, hooray for him. “As a winner, I was informed that my one and only prize for winning the gold in the category was a coupon code for a free copy of the Scrivener Screenwriting Software…”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “…that is hardly worth more than the entry fee to the contest.”

**Craig:** What was the entry fee to the contest, by the way? Do we know?

**John:** $30.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** “So unless the grand prize winner got a check for $20,000, I find their claim of over $20,000 in prizes and awards to be very questionable.”

So, if I were Jason I would be a little bit frustrated that, you know, I won the gold and I’m getting a coupon code.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, this is the worst lottery of all time. This is right up there with buying scratchers. You enter a contest for $30, you pay them $30, and if you are one of the top winners, right, because there’s 13 different categories, each has one gold winner. So, if you are one of the 13 best, I’m excluding the grand prize winner which I doubt did get $20,000, you get something that’s worth $20 more than you paid in? This is the worst.

**John:** So, fortunately Jason is not just the kind of person who writes into us. He actually wrote to the competition people themselves to sort of ask a question and complain.

**Craig:** Atta boy.

**John:** So, this is the first update we got. So, Godwin, our producer, has been on the email chain with him quite a lot. So we have some follow up here.

So he says, “I pointed out to them that their website says the gold winners will receive a copy of Imagination Pro 4 software and they asked for my mailing address and said they would send it to me.” So, Imagination Pro 4, I kind of–

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** I kind of recognize this. I think it’s basically like brain-mapping software.

**Craig:** Oh Christ.

**John:** It’s outlining kind of stuff. I don’t know anybody who uses it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s a useless software that exists.

**Craig:** Useless.

**John:** He says though that, “Now if you check the same webpage about the prizes, they’ve edited to remove that part of the Imagination Pro 4 software,” so he’s guessing that they won’t be sending it to the other gold winners.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because he got their one copy? By the way, I love a contest where you win something, then you write to them and you’re like, hey, I didn’t get all the stuff I was supposed to win, and they’re like, “Oh, OK, would you like it?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess I would like it. OK. Well, no one else gets it anymore. What the hell?

**John:** There’s more. “So the contest wrote to me last night and offered to send me the cash value of the Imagination Pro Software instead of the actual software if that’s what I prefer. I said yes, even though I don’t know what the software is and can’t really find it online to check out what the retail value should be. They said they’d send the cash via PayPal. The whole thing is pretty weird.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So yeah. I’d say that’s pretty weird.

**Craig:** It’s pretty weird.

**John:** PayPal. I mean, it’s potentially money.

**Craig:** Right. No, so they have gone through the rigorous process required to achieve a PayPal account. So, good on you, Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest.

**John:** Well, I’m sure they had the PayPal account because they had to take the $30 entry fee.

**Craig:** That’s right. There you go. So out of their massive pool of cash that they’ve suckered out of people, they said, “Oh you know, we actually,” I feel like they were like, “We don’t actually have any Imagination Pro copies here. And we got to go buy one and then we got to send it to this guy. Can we just give him the money instead? It will be faster.”

**John:** It will be faster.

**Craig:** And I love that he was like, “I can’t even find this software online for sale to see what it costs.” [laughs] This is amazing. By the way, also, can I just say the worst title of software in history is Imagination Pro 4. What about Imagination is Pro 4 Software supposed to do for me? How is software supposed to enhance my imagination? Oh my god, I want to kick this contest in the nards.

**John:** Well, I mean, it’s a big step up from Imagination Pro 3. Because that was–

**Craig:** That actually made your imagination worse?

**John:** Yeah. It was soul-crippling.

**Craig:** It took your imagination away. It made life gray.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. It was like the Dementors from Harry Potter just like flew in and sort of sucked your soul out a little bit.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god. And that’s for the Pro version.

**John:** It was a bug really, but they fixed it. They mostly fixed it.

**Craig:** It’s not a bug. It’s a feature.

**John:** It’s much better. So finally there is some resolution here. So often just like we’re going to kick this around and never know what happens, here’s actually what happened. Jason finishes up that, “All in all I ended up with $200 cash, a free copy of Scrivener Software, and the ability to tell my friends and network that I won a screenplay contest, all for an entry fee of $20. So I definitely made out ahead in the end.”

OK.

**Craig:** Yeah. He won. I mean, it’s kind of crazy that you’re like, “OK, after winning, and a bunch of communication, I did actually do better than what it cost me to enter.” I mean, that’s – that shouldn’t really be a struggle, right?

**John:** Obviously there was a lot of follow up here. “My takeaway advice to all screenwriters when it comes to choosing contests, rule out any contest that doesn’t explicitly state what the exact prizes are for each winner. And be aware that a claim of X dollars in prizes does not mean cash. It might mean free software or ambiguous ‘promotion’ to their network and [industry meanings] they can assign and inflate a dollar value when making the claim about the overall value of prizes.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yes. He says, “I didn’t get any inquiries from managers or producers. But I can also confirm that in the end they did send me $200 cash and it cleared my account. So my final call on them is if they continue to make ambiguous $20,000 claim in prizes without specifying exactly what prizes go to each winner, then I would recommend avoiding this contest.”

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** He’s under-learned the lesson here.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s the most patient, accepting person I’ve ever met in my life. I would go bananas at this point. So first of all, let’s expand our definition of the contests that we should avoid. It is not merely the ones that claim absurd inflated amounts of prizes that include self-assigned values to ambiguous nonsense. How about just about all of them? Just about all of them are worthless. When you win the gold prize in a screenplay contest and zero people in the business seem to be interested, and the contest has failed to deliver any real actionable result to you, then it is worthless. You don’t need Scrivener, by the way. I don’t use Scrivener. You certainly don’t need Imagination Pro 4. And this is a bad way of turning $30 into $200.

Generally speaking you won’t – you meaning collectively you – will not be the gold prize winner. Just avoid these things.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s take a step back and look at screenplay competitions overall, because we’ve talked about them in previous shows. Our basic advice is that the Nicholl Fellowship, if you win the Nicholl Fellowship, you are a finalist in the Nicholl Fellowship, that’s awesome. That’s aces. That is really a thing that matters, because people will actually notice that and say like, oh, I will read your script. That is a fantastic thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** To some degree, Austin can be helpful or not helpful. There’s really a mixture of opinions on sort of what degree Austin is going to help your career. But don’t try to go to Austin saying like, “I’m going to win a prize.” Winning a prize, like a cash value prize, that shouldn’t be the point. Your point should be to start a career. And so whether you got a $200 piece of software or $200 thing from PayPal, you don’t want $200. You want a career. And so if you’re entering a competition with the hopes of getting your career going, enter one of the ones that could actually have an impact on your career. Because the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition or any of these other ones with like $20,000 in prizes – that’s not going to start your career.

**Craig:** Not at all. And while it may be tempting to think that if you’ve completed a screenplay there’s some upside to monetizing it through contests, this is not a very good money-making scheme. Each one of these places charges a submission fee. You’re not going to win most of them. And so this is a bad way of making money. It’s also not a lot of money to begin with.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Beyond that, I question why these exist. I understand why the Nicholl exists. It is run – managed and run by – the Motion Picture Academy. The people that–

**John:** The Oscar folks.

**Craig:** The Oscar folks. Right? That’s quite legitimate. And everybody certainly pays attention to what they have to say. Many of the people in our business who are important and successful are members of the Academy, including. But not me. [laughs] That will never happen.

**John:** One day, Craig.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. But that aside, why are these people running a contest? They can’t seem to deliver anything in terms of industry contacts. They can’t seem to deliver even what they promise in terms of “prizes.” So what are they in it for? And at that point I think a reasonable question is are they in it for the money? Is this a for-profit contest? If it’s not for profit, is part of the expense of their not-for-profit paying salaries to the people that run it? I don’t understand why this exists. And I would not participate in it.

**John:** Let’s circle back to our umbrella theme for today. Benefit of the doubt. So, if we want to give the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition benefit of the doubt, I could imagine a scenario in which they incorporated with the idea of let’s be a screenwriting competition that makes a difference, that helps young writers, that exposes writers to new talent. Maybe they actually had a relationship with one or two managers and they think like, oh, this is a thing we can do and we will charge a minimal fee of $30 to pay readers because you’ve got to pay readers, because you’re going to get a bunch of stuff being sent in. So it could have been done with the best of intentions, but the best of intentions does not lead to a good outcome in this scenario.

So, I don’t want to ascribe any negative necessarily motivations behind the people of this competition, but I don’t think it is serving screenwriters well to exist.

**Craig:** No. I don’t either. And I’m looking at their website and I don’t see anything that states that they are non-profit or not-for-profit. I don’t even see anything explaining who runs it. There’s not a lot of transparency here. It appears to me that it is a scheme. It’s a promotional scheme where they collect fees and they offset their costs through sponsorships. And the fees go in their pockets, I guess. I don’t – I could be wrong. But I don’t see anything that indicates otherwise.

**John:** Yeah. The two sponsors listed are Sellingyourscreenplay.com. Hmm.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And Scrivener. And Scrivener did provide the coupon codes for this, so I don’t know, but I’m not seeing a lot of excitement there. Also their logo sort of looks like a red Christmas tree.

**Craig:** Oh my god, their logo! First of all, they have two things going on on their page. They have the worst logo in history. And then underneath their big banner it says, “Over $20,000 in prizes and awards,” which somebody possibly could class action lawsuit, “Introductions to producers, develop execs, and agents,” or not. “Exclusive benefits from leading industry partners,” which I presume includes the before-mentioned Imagination Pro 4. “Script analysis from professional judges.” Fine. And then in the middle of that, you know the double laurel thing that you see that all film festivals have?

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, I won, you know, Cannes, the double laurel. Well, they have the double laurel and in between it it says, “Win.” Win. [laughs] So if you want, let’s say you submitted your script and the movie got made and it went to Cannes and it won the Palme d’Or. Then on the poster it could say that, you know, with the Palme d’Or double laurel. And next to it it could also say, “Win.”

**John:** Win.

**Craig:** Win. This is the dumbest. I don’t like it and they should be ashamed.

**John:** I think that’s fair. Even with benefit of the doubt, I think we’re not going to encourage anyone to enter the Beverly Hills Screenplay Competition or really any kind of screenplay competition.

Let’s move on to one of our bigger topics, which general category of getting things wrong. So on a previous episode we talked about the importance of trying to do the research to make sure you were doing things properly in a medical show, or with the law. We pointed out our frustrations when writers and filmed entertainment falls back on tropes that are not even accurate. And so we were encouraging people to do the research to get things right.

Robert Lee writes, “I’m currently writing a script in which chess plays a major role. A lot of drama and conflict will come from the game itself. Would it be suitable or possible to put diagrams of the chess moves into the script?” I will answer for both of us. The answer is no.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Putting diagrams into your script in general is not going to make sense. Craig, I think, in previous times has said it would be great to include a picture for something to show what something is going to be like. But in general, no. And I think the chess diagram will just annoy people. And the third time I see a chess diagram, I am throwing the script across the room if it’s a printed script. But I don’t really print anything anymore, so I would probably close the PDF reader on my iPad and play some Heart Stone if I saw another chess diagram.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, even in a world in which script software and the industry together have evolved to a place where people want to see visuals and imagery in screenplays, you still wouldn’t put diagrams of chess moves into a script for one simple reason: people that don’t play chess have no idea what the hell they mean. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. 99% of the people reading your screenplay, Robert, will not be chess experts. They won’t even be chess dilettantes. They will not know how to read the diagram. And even if they do know how to read it, like I’m terrible at chess. I know what chess diagrams are and I know roughly what they mean. I still wouldn’t know what the significance of the particular moves are. It’s just absolutely no. It is no.

**John:** We’re saying that most people reading the script are not going to be chess experts or chess aficionados to the degree that they will understand that, and yet there are experts out there. And so I’m going to put a link in the show notes to this great article by Cara Giaimo who is writing for Atlas Obscura called Why Chess Fans Hate the Movies. And she goes through and explains why chess in movies is so often so wrong and how it drives people who actually know what chess is like absolutely crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So some of the things that she points out are no one actually like knocks over the king in a checkmate situation. A lot of times you’ll see the pieces on the board in actually impossible positions. And so you see it from episodes of The Office. You see it From Russia With Love, The Shawshank Redemption, Ace Ventura, When Nature Calls, which is I think really pushing for an example.

If you’re a person who knows chess and can look at a board and recognize that there’s a mistake, that’s going to frustrate you. And so after we talk about our next topic, let’s go into sort of why some of those things happen and maybe how you can try to avoid those, but also how you can provide some benefit of the doubt to those filmmakers for why they make such horrible mistakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there are levels of these things. And in part they are related to the kind of movie and story you’re telling. If you’re making a movie that is not about chess at all but there happens to be some incidental moment where people are playing chess, you know, certain things are understandable. The knocking over of the king is not something that chess players do, but we’re all accustomed to it. If you’re making a movie about chess specifically, that becomes a little trickier. I happen to love Searching for Bobby Fisher. I’m sure that Cara Giaimo has issues with it. Certainly there is the knocking over of the king repeatedly. But what I would say to people like Ms. Giaimo is we can’t afford to limit our concern to chess players. We have to think about the general audience and we have to explain and dramatize things.

And it is generally speaking better storytelling to do something visually than to just have somebody say, “Oh, OK, well, good game.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because we in the audience won’t necessarily know what happened. So, for instance, she cites an example in Season 5 of The Office there is an episode where Jim has both of his bishops on white squares, an impossible orientation in that particular game, in any game. I think in chess one bishop is on a black, one bishop is on a white, they can only move diagonally so they can never change colors. That’s reasonable. Nobody should really make that mistake.

But, the other stuff, meh.

**John:** Yes. And yet having been on sets I can totally imagine how that mistake came to be. Or even that was a plot point that somehow just got dropped out of the edit. So, I’m sympathetic to sort of how these things happen. But let’s go to an example that’s actually more writing oriented. This came from David in San Diego who writes in, “In addition to being a Scriptnotes listener, I’m a fan of baseball. Recently my favorite baseball podcast, Effectively Wild, played a clip from an episode of Chicago Justice, an NBC legal drama produced by, among others, your friend Derek Haas. The show’s lead character, Peter Stone, is a former Major League baseball pitcher turned district attorney. In the clip, Peter attempts to impart some wisdom to a younger colleague by telling her an anecdote from his baseball days. The point of this story is that Peter felt personally responsible for losing a game rather than blaming it on a teammate’s error.”

Let’s actually take a listen to this little snippet from the show.

Female Voice: That was the best redirect I have ever seen.

Male Voice: In your three years of practice?

Female Voice: Seriously. It was Atticus Finch. Tom Cruise kicking the crap out of Nicholson.

Male Voice: What if Kaleelah had adult onset diabetes? What if she said the deputy had two fingers raised? Hmm?

Female Voice: Never ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

Male Voice: I was naked out there.

Female Voice: I know I screwed up, Peter. I should have asked if she wore a—

Male Voice: Forget it. Forget it. You know I played baseball, right? I pitched. It was Cubs/Sox, 2007, bottom of the 9th, we’re up one. I throw the sinker and it’s an easy grounder to third. A sure double play. Until my third baseman boots it. And just like that we lose. Now, the entire north side of Chicago, they blame the third baseman. But the only person I blamed was myself. See, if had thrown the splitter, the batter would have popped it up to right and we would have won.

**John:** So David continues, “The problem is that for a baseball fan the anecdote makes no sense. In his anecdote, Peter did exactly what a pitcher is supposed to do and his teammate simply screwed up. And the details, such as the type of pitch he should have thrown, are all wrong. The character could have just as easily told a story that got the baseball details right while accomplishing the same goals for the scene.

“My questions are, A, how does this happen? B, is it unreasonable to expect a network drama to get these kind of details right? And, C, given that baseball is integral to the lead character’s backstory, why wouldn’t the writers have called on someone to fix these type of questions when they came up?”

So, Craig, what do we say in this scenario about this one anecdote that doesn’t ring true to a person who actually knows what baseball is? Because I’ll be completely honest – I have no idea what he’s saying. He could just be talking random nonsense words and it makes as much sense to me. It’s like, you know, Sheldon on Big Bang Theory talking about quantum mechanics. I’m more likely to understand the quantum mechanics.

**Craig:** Well, that’s actually part of the problem, I think, with the anecdote there. But I think that David in San Diego makes a perfectly justifiable point here on one level. The anecdote makes no sense. He’s saying I really should have had him pop up and so I should have thrown him the splitter. Splitters are the most groundball-inducing pitch you can throw. So, that makes no sense. If he wanted the guy to pop up, he would have said, “I should have thrown him an elevated fastball.” So, it’s incorrect. It’s just flat out wrong.

Oh, and we should add, by the way, Derek is associated with Chicago Justice, but he actually doesn’t write on Chicago Justice or supervise the writing of Chicago Justice. So I don’t want Derek to get folded into this.

**John:** Yeah. We did email him about this. And he’s like, “I really don’t know anything about that episode.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** We completely excused him from any discussion of this. But, I think it’s interesting to talk about why this has happened, or how does this kind of situation happen. And I can imagine the scene in abstract. Let’s say like me, a person who doesn’t know anything about baseball, is tasked with writing this scene. And the purpose of this moment is to clarify that this guy sees an analogous situation in his previous career where he made a choice that was the wrong choice, or that he escaped blamed when he really should have gotten blamed for a scenario.

And so me not knowing the baseball of this all, I would seek out an example of what that might be like in baseball terms and attempt to write it. And then find somebody honestly who could tell me that I was wrong in the situation. And so it’s surprising to me that this made it all the way through to air, but I don’t the specific scenarios on like how it got to be in the show.

**Craig:** The point is that sometimes the wrong person gets blamed. That was a bad example. It was a bad example because as, again, David points out correctly the wrong person didn’t get blamed. Any time a player in the field commits an error, it’s their fault. An error by definition in baseball is a play that is not made that could otherwise be made with reasonable effort.

So, that doesn’t make sense. And also then the follow up about what pitch he should have thrown doesn’t make sense. Why does this happen? It happens because usually there isn’t anyone in the group other than the person writing it who feels or who has additional expertise to say that actually doesn’t make sense. Sometimes there are arguments about these things and the people who are correct lose the argument. I mean, television writing staffs are notoriously regimented and there’s a certain hierarchy.

I, like you, tend to want to confirm and reach out on all of these things. But I want to point out here that there is another level to this, which is if the audience gets the dramatic point, and the audience generally isn’t easily understandable as authorities or fans of the topic you’re discussing, in the end does it matter that much? No.

Look, I always strive to be correct in these things. Always. And we should. Believe me, I’m not excusing mistakes. However, other than David, I don’t believe there has been an outcry from the very large, millions and millions of people large, audience of Chicago Justice. So that tells me that, well, it looks like maybe they got away with this one because the dramatic point was understood. And in the end that is what matters. But, I agree with you that in general we should reach out and check on these things. We don’t want to get caught with our pants down.

And in today’s world where there are a million blogs and Twitter ready to call you on every mistake, it seems like a little extra care is probably called for.

**John:** Yeah. So, I want to look at both this chess example and the baseball example and the experts in both these scenarios are frustrated by what they’re seeing portrayed on screen. And I can imagine a doctor, a lawyer, a police detective, a military person shaking their damn heads as they’re like, “What are you complaining about?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because every single time they turn on the TV they’re seeing things reflected back that are not the actual experiences of being any of those jobs.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so there are shortcuts being taken in all those things for the sake of expediency in television. And so while we are always pushing for authenticity and for getting the details right, there are just things that in every medical show that are not sort of the way it would actually be done. There are things in every police show that are not done that way. We’ve compressed time. We’ve simplified things. We’ve merged jobs. I’ve never seen Chicago Justice, but I would guarantee you that there are unlikely things that happen in every week’s episodes on a legal basis just because that’s how legal basis legal shows work.

And so if you look at like a Law & Order, you know, we kind of forget that like, oh you know what, they’ve compressed out two years’ worth of time for an episode.

**Craig:** The boring time.

**John:** Exactly. So I have sympathy for the chess fans and for the baseball fans, but also I want them to broaden their sympathies to everybody else who sees their real world not being portrayed accurately on screen.

**Craig:** I think that’s fair. I mean, the one thing I would caution writers is if you know you’re doing something for narrative expedience or dramatic expedience, that’s one thing. Actually you could have taken no more time and crafted an anecdote there that would have been baseball logical. And so that’s an avoidable mistake. The incorrectness, it does not accrue to your benefit in any way. Whereas various legal inaccuracies do accrue to your narrative benefit, because they compress time or make things more exciting. Knocking over the king accrues to your narrative dramatic benefit. This one just seems like a mistake.

So, if you can avoid it, avoid it.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s take a look at why some of these mistakes happen, or why these situations happen. I think the biggest one by far is simplification for clarity, which is both the knocking over the king, it is the compressing of time, it is the characters explaining some part of what they’re trying to do to a character who would not need to know that explanation. It’s characters doing something in the course of their job in a different way than they we would do it in real life. Just that action makes sense for an audience who has no familiarity with that. And that’s a thing that’s going to happen and your challenge as a writer is to do that in the most natural way that doesn’t feel gross or forced, but you have to make sure it makes sense to a person who doesn’t know what the heck that person’s job really is.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I mean, just the fact that we’re telling the story the way we tell it, we are required to cheat. Sometimes we’ll make shows that are set in another country and people there are speaking accented English. They don’t speak accented English. They speak their own language. It’s just that we didn’t want to deal with the subtitles the whole time, so we have to cheat things. We have to cheat time and space all the time.

And so I’m not a huge fan of the gaffe squad type people. You know, the other thing that happens sometimes is people will catch the mistake. For instance, the aforementioned bishops, two bishops on white squares. By take two, somebody is probably rushing over and going, “Um, the bishops are in the wrong spot.” And the director is like, “What? No one cares, dude. Now our continuity is going to be all screwed up because the bishop is going to be moving back and forth between shots. Let’s just keep going. It’s not that important. Let five nerds complain about it, but I just don’t want my piece hopping back and forth now in between shots.” And that’s legitimate.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** That is a reasonable decision to make.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes you’ll see characters are supposed to be heading west, but based on where the sun is in the sky there’s no way they’re headed west. That’s just moviemaking guys. There’s really nothing more you can do about that. It’s the schedule of when you shot. It’s when the light looked best. It’s when you had those actors.

Again, there’s also genre conventions. And so we have a genre convention where even though you shouldn’t hear sound in space, we hear sound in space. You know what? There’s movies that will be very adamant about not doing that, and it feels weird, but great, go for it when you want to do it.

We also have a genre convention of warp drives. You know what? It’s certainly not possible the way we show it in movies and TV shows. But without warp drives, it would just be incredibly tedious and you wouldn’t have the Star Trek Enterprise. So therefore we have warp drives.

**Craig:** Yeah. We love seeing the streaky star line things. I don’t think that’s how it works. But then you know again it’s not real anyway. I mean, certainly when you’re getting into science fiction, that’s a whole other discussion of how accurate to science do you want to be, because you’re walking a very strange line there. You don’t want to simply have no rules, because then it feels like you’re just cheating. On the other hand, you have to change some things that are true because we’re not supposed to be able to go faster than the speed of light and we want to. It’s fiction.

**John:** Yep. It’s magic.

**Craig:** Yeah. Magic.

**John:** Your point about characters speaking with an accent when they should be speaking their own language, a thing that has always struck me is in movies set in the past like everyone speaks British English, and even if they’re cultures that shouldn’t be speaking the same language they can speak to each other. And it’s just because we don’t want to stick anybody in subtitles. And I just get it. There’s a reason why you’re doing that. And like you could choose to put a lot of subtitles in there. And Game of Thrones I think impressively decided there would be a common language and then like everybody else would speak different languages and that was just a thing they were going to choose to do.

But they could have made a choice to not do that, and that would have been I think equally defendable.

**Craig:** For sure. And even in Game of Thrones, you’ll notice that when they have scenes where people are speaking say–

**John:** Dothraki.

**Craig:** Dothraki, right? Or Essosian, I don’t know what that one is called. Valyrian. That they will have very few scenes where that is the only language being spoken. It occurs. Those scenes tend to be short. Typically there are translators going on, because you have various characters who don’t speak that. And so we are getting the advantage of that. Yeah, but they do short scenes.

The problem with – and we have to just account for this – is let’s say you were writing a movie, you were hired to write a Game of Thrones movie after the season concludes. And the movie takes places in Essos. Well, you can’t have an entire movie where everyone is just speaking that, because it’s annoying after a while. It’s like give me a break. And there is a natural disconnect that occurs, not in short bursts, but over time a natural disconnect that occurs between us and characters who are not speaking a language we understand. It is inevitable.

**John:** It’s true. So let’s wrap this up again with our benefit of the doubt umbrella over things. I think we are both urging sharp-eyed viewers to give the writers and filmmakers the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t deliberately ignorant. They weren’t trying to undermine the authenticity of things. Just something got messed up along the way, or it wasn’t the high enough priority either – in the writing it’s harder to defend – but on the day it couldn’t be the top priority to get that bishop on the right square. And, sorry, that’s a thing that’s going to happen. The priority was getting the story told and making sure you were focusing on the things they wanted you to focus on. So, I definitely am mindful of how frustrating it can be to see things portrayed incorrectly on screen. That’s why we always urge people to try to be accurate and specific.

But I think you have to take a breath when you see things that aren’t accurate.

**Craig:** Yeah. Do the best you can, but don’t be trapped by purity.

**John:** Cool. Craig, this next topic is yours. You put this on the outline. It’s about bad news.

**Craig:** Yeah. This kind of was inspired by a fun Twitter thread. Adam Sternbergh. @sternbergh started a thread in response to a post by Gary Ross. I guess the Gary Ross, I think.

**John:** I hope it’s the Gary Ross.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Who wrote, “Note to filmmakers. People don’t actually stare at the receiver after they get disturbing news.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this created a long list of responses of people coming up with things like that, which kind of, you know, again, falls into the category of faking stuff. And so some of the examples that came up are – beyond staring at the phone receiver – entering – I love this one – entering an apartment or house, pressing back up against the wall, closing eyes. [laughs]

**John:** It’s so specific and so true.

**Craig:** It’s so true. People do that in movies all the time. They walk inside. They close the door. And then they just press their back up against the wall and close their eyes. Covering your mouth with your hand. People do that in movies–

**John:** I actually do that sometimes, though.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I did it instinctively just now doing this. That sort of gasp.

**Craig:** You’re so dramatic.

**John:** So dramatic.

**Craig:** Splashing water on face.

**John:** That drives me crazy.

**Craig:** Have you ever splashed water on your face to change your emotional state? [laughs]

**John:** I have not. Although I feel like maybe it was in this thread or it was another conversation with Aline Brosh McKenna. She said like, “Oh, yeah, of course I do that.”

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Just like I put my hand over my mouth, she splashes water on her face. Or, I’m completely misremembering and Aline I apologize if I misremembered something we talked about.

**Craig:** But we can agree that nobody in real life ever walks into their house, closes the door, and backs up against the wall. That’s just–

**John:** Like I can’t believe I just got through that. Yeah.

**Craig:** Like oh my god. Never. Never.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So what do we do about these moments? I mean, we want to convey this sensation to people in the audience that this character is feeling overwhelmed or is absorbing this terrible news. But on the other hand, you know, maybe we want to try and do it in some interesting new ways.

**John:** So, let’s talk about some options here. So the first is just kind of to find a way to articulate what is actually going on inside. Find the new way to demonstrate that thing and try to be accurate to what you might actually do in that scenario. I don’t shut the door and lean back against it and close my eyes, but I might drop the keys on the console, or I might rest myself a little bit. I just shake off that experience that just happened.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’re asking the right question which is what do we actually do. And then of course out of the various things that we actually do, we want to try and pick one that the audience will be able to pick up on. Because I suspect that most times this is entirely internal for people and so there is no way for the audience to see it. But one way that we can show these things dramatically is by watching the person attempt to not absorb it. And then it hits them.

So, they receive this bad news. They’re struggling with it. But they soldier on bravely as if it weren’t bothering them at all. Usually by just going about their normal activities, the mundane. And then something finally breaks through and it comes out. And there’s this very famous moment from the ‘70s sitcom Good Times. Florida is the mother. Her husband has died. And everybody is very upset about this. But she’s just sort of soldiering through. And she’s in the kitchen. She’s alone. She’s just moving a glass dish from one place to another and then she finally just lifts it up and throws it on the ground and smashes it. And she goes, “Damn, damn, damn!” Which is freaking awesome. And we’ll have a clip in the show notes for that moment if you haven’t heard it.

It’s spectacular and it felt very real. I think it actually was quite shocking to audiences at the time, because you know in the ‘70s sitcoms were still rooted in the stagey. You know, we were not that far removed from the early days of I Love Lucy where television was kind of a represented stage vaudeville kind of format. And everything was very carefully curated. That was very raw.

Now, it’s 40 years later and we’re a little more progressed down the line, so that would probably in and of itself now seem hokey today. But at the time it was sort of shocking. And the kernel of the theory there is a good creative kernel to think about.

**John:** A similar story I heard last night from Andrew Lippa, the composer for Big Fish who I got to see in London last night, and he was talking about going through a really emotional moment, but he was sort of ignoring the emotional moment. And he dropped the remote control for his TV on the floor and the battery shot out and the dog freaked out, like ah what’s going on. And so Andrew was laughing because the dog was freaking out and he’s trying to gather the batteries. But the actual physical process of laughing became like sobbing. And the physical experience of shaking that way shook out the actual tears and became a big emotional moment. And that I think is the equivalent of a damn, damn, damn in real life.

And that’s the kind of thing I’d love to see characters encounter in our stories. That’s a thing that is such catnip for an actor because it’s getting to really get to some primal physical feelings under there.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in a moment like that, the advantage to doing that as a writer as opposed to very quickly and short-handedly having somebody press their back up against the wall is when they press their back up against the wall we go, “Oh yeah, they’re upset.” When somebody starts laughing at something absurd like that and then that turns into tears, we’ll cry, because it’s jumping up on us in a real way in the way it’s jumped up on them. And that is where the alchemy happens.

So, that’s really the point. It’s not – I never think that the point of avoiding tropes is to seem original. The point of avoiding tropes is they’re not working as effectively as they should.

**John:** Yeah. So we talked about the big reaction, but like the small reaction, the under-reaction can be just as powerful. It requires more work in the scene setting to make sure that we actually understand what’s going on there. That we can actually read what the character is doing. But the character who is sitting very silently and small in the frame, or we’re in a close-up of that character can also be a great way of showing the impact of the moment we just encountered.

**Craig:** Yeah. This also truer to life. But in this case what you’re going to do is take advantage of the internality of these kinds of moments. So one example that I think about often is the scene in Unfaithful where Diane Lane is on the subway, or the train, and she’s coming back home from just having had an affair. And the camera is just looking at her. And the whole world is zipping by through the window of the train. But she’s just sitting there. And she’s thinking about what just happened. And we’re watching her be excited and she’s pleased and she feels loved and attractive. But then the guilt comes in. And you watch all of it happening quietly, just on her face.

The story is telling us that this is – keep watching. Just watch this person. And that is interesting. That is a moment that feels real. It requires an excellent actor, which Diane Lane certainly is. It requires a patient, secure director who does not feel the need to get in the way of the performance. Sometimes all you need for a moment like that is a locked down camera. Sometimes a little bit of a push. In that case, also, you can play some editing tricks. You can just jump cut around. So you can see, OK, what we’re watching here is a long train ride and this is occurring.

But it is truer and I think it feels more for us when we see it unfold in that way. You just have to know as a writer you’re instructing everybody this will be quiet and it will take time.

**John:** Yeah. I can think of several moments in Michael Clayton that do that kind of thing. So the last shot I recall with George Clooney is the equivalent version of that, where he’s like in a car and we’re tracking with him. But you see Tilda Swinton, who is just remarkable as well. There are moments where you’re able to see her reacting to things. And there’s bigger moments, there’s smaller moments, but it’s not the scale, it’s not leaning back against the wall. It’s really taking the hit for that emotion that just happened. And finding the moment that she can actually expose what’s going on there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Keeping them accountable to the news they’ve just heard or the thing that they’ve just done.

**John:** A thing which I see in movies but I also feel is true, I just know this from my own life, is that when I get devastating news I sit down. There’s something that actually – like gravity gets a little stronger and I just feel like I need to sit down to make sure I don’t fall down. And so being on the phone and then sitting while you’re still talking on the phone is a thing that I find myself doing often, sometimes because it helps me focus. But also just because I need to make sure that I’m safe while this happening.

And so if a character can’t sit down, they will lean against things. They will find ways to support themselves while they are getting burdened by the news they just encountered.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in those moments, too, sometimes – and this is why my most hated fake rule/bad advice for screenwriters is don’t direct on the page. The camera in those moments is meant to be us. And the camera is telling us are we meant to be sympathizing with this person or are we perhaps meant to be standing in judgment of them?

In the cast of say Diane Lane on the train, we’re clearly meant to sympathize or empathize. We’re meant to be in her mind and to experience this collision of contradictory feelings all at once. Sometimes in a case where, for instance, somebody sits down. The camera may slowly start to back away from them, as if to say they’ve done something wrong. They have to be alone now. We have to leave them in their little private hell. Because what they’ve done is bad. And I think about these things all the time. And it’s important, I think, for writers to think about the camera in this way.

This is an essential part of storytelling. And we fail ourselves and our readers. And then, by the way, the director, and the actors, and everybody if we don’t think about stuff like that. Because if I just write on the page, “John sits down,” OK. Now if I write, “John sits down. We slowly move back and away from him, out through the doorway, out through the door, until he’s barely there.” That implies – even if that’s not what the director does, they understand the point.

**John:** For sure. I think the other thing we need to look at from our writing perspective is are we better serving this story moment by letting another character provide the reaction for us? Or another character investigate the reaction. So let’s say we have the character is receiving bad news on the phone. If there’s another character in that scene who can be listening, can be watching, can be trying to read what’s going on. We will naturally sort of be doing the same process with the spectator character.

So, an example at the start of Big Fish, Billy Crudup is in Paris. He receives word that his father is in the hospital. And it’s because Josephine, the wife, is there to watch them that we know what the actual content of the other side of the phone call must be. We know sort of how serious this is.

So, look at whether this is sort of the opposite of the character closing the door and sliding against it. There’s another character watching and through that other character watching and reacting we can see what’s really going on and the extent of that bad news.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to approach this. If there’s any general advice to give, it’s that you at least start from a place where you’re going to be honest to how this would really work.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then think about how that is specific to the character that you have and the moment that you have. And then think about where your camera should be. Is it with them or is it away from them? And is it moving, is it not moving? What is their reaction? How slowly or quickly does it evolve? Does it surprise us or does it just dribble out? Think about all those things and then try and do it true.

And if you can, I guarantee you it will be more effective than the splashing the water on the face, because at this point so many people have splashed water on their face it doesn’t mean a damn thing anymore.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a thing that people do in movies.

**Craig:** It’s a thing people do in movies.

**John:** Yep. All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is the video to All This Time by Jonathan Coulton. It’s just terrific. And so the song is great, but the video takes the form of a text-based adventure game, sort of like Zork, and it’s so incredibly well done.

**Craig:** All right, I’m in.

**John:** Yeah. It’s very smartly done. Jonathan Coulton also did the Still Alive from Portal, which also has the feeling of this. But this is really pushing it to the next level. It’s one of those rare videos where you have to do a lot of reading, but it’s worth a hundred percent of your attention for those few minutes. So I strongly recommend All This Time by Jonathan Coulton.

**Craig:** Did you play the Infocom games when you were young–

**John:** I did, yeah. I loved them.

**Craig:** Kids today. Now, you know, you can play all the Infocom games for free. I think there’s a website that just has them. And I was reminded how terribly frustrating they were. They actually were horrendously designed games in the sense that they were not fun. But they were so – I don’t know – they were just very important to me when I was a kid to go through them.

I mean, the most brutal of them, that was famously brutal of them, was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I don’t know if you ever played that one.

**John:** I don’t think I played deep into it. But I remember playing before we even had our personal computer, my dad had a terminal which was the kind that had like the [unintelligible] things you could attach. And so there was an online version of that that I could play. And I think I might have even played Zork way back in the day, which was on an equivalent BBS system. And they really were remarkable things.

But once I started playing like Ultima or the things that had some graphical component I never went back to those original just text-based games.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they were so frustrating. OK. Well, my One Cool Thing is a website called Every Noise At Once. We’ll put a link in the show notes, but it’s pretty easy to remember. Everynoise.com. And then when you get there you will see these folks have put up this massive Ngram style plot. Well, Ngram isn’t right. That’s the Google thing, right?

It’s more like a word cloud, like a keyword cloud kind of plot of literally every kind of music noise that has been made in culture. It is massive. And it’s got everything. There are things on there I did not know existed. You know, some things I knew existed but I never listened to, or there are things like, OK, there’s 20 different kinds of trance music. I wasn’t aware of all the different sub-genres. Then there are things like [Schrempf] or something. Some crazy German format where it’s just repetitive industrial noises. All the way down to Gregorian chants and Islamic religious singing. And it’s just got everything. It’s fascinating.

You could spend hours just looking through it. It’s something else. They have like Norwegian Christmas music. It’s insane. So, check it out. It’s a lot of fun. Every Noise At Once.

**John:** I accidentally clicked Kirtan, which I don’t know what it is, and now it starts playing. So it’s a good thing to–

**Craig:** It’s pretty wild, right?

**John:** Experimentation there. Yeah, it’s neat. Cool. That’s our show this week.

Our show, as always, is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Ben Singer. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, like the ones we talk about on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Also search for Scriptnotes Podcast to find us on iTunes.

You can leave a review for us, which is lovely. You can also download the apps which are currently the only way to get to our back catalog of nearly 300 episodes. Actually more than 300 episodes because there’s bonus episodes with people like Aline and Rachel Bloom and all sorts of good folks.

You will find the show notes for this episode and all previous episodes at johnaugust.com. It’s also where you can leave reviews of previous episodes. Go to johnaugust.com/guide. And you’ve left so many great reviews on your favorite episodes, which are terrific. So, in the next couple weeks we’ll figure out what form we’re going to put these recommendations in, be it a book, be it some other sort of web tool for people finding their best episodes.

So, if you’re new to the show, we can point you to the episodes that are most worthy of exploring. And, if you are interested in coming to the live show that we talked about at the top of the hour, go to Hollywoodheart.org. That’s where they’re going to be putting up the tickets. We’ll also have a link on Twitter once there is a link. So we’re excited to see everybody there for that. We’re excited to be at the ArcLight.

Craig, thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

Links:

* The Beverly Hills Screenplay Contest
* [Adam Sternbergh’s Tweet](https://twitter.com/sternbergh/status/841075763675820032)
* [Good Times – DAMN DAAAMN DAAAAAAMN](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKUwcCp7LPE)
* [Jonathan Coulton – All This Time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvVNxqosZ7s)
* [Portal – ‘Still Alive’](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI)
* [Every Noise At Once](http://everynoise.com/engenremap.html)
* [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 Ben Singer ([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_294.mp3).