Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 293 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie, where we take a look at three stories in the news and figure out how we might convince a director like say Jordan Peele to attach himself to the project. Craig, have you seen Get Out yet?

**Craig:** Get out.

**John:** Get out. I’m guessing you’ve not seen it yet, because you don’t see a lot of movies.

**Craig:** I haven’t, but I’m going to because everybody loves it and everybody says it’s great. And I’m sure it is great. I’m sure it’s awesome. And I’m a huge fan of Key & Peele. And I know this is different. So, yes I’m going to see it. Haven’t seen it yet. Not ashamed.

**John:** You should not be ashamed. But you should see it. And I’m looking forward to seeing it whenever I get a chance to see it. It’s not here in Paris yet. But hopefully it will come here sooner, because it has been so successful. And I’m so happy for that.

But I do think that Jordan Peele could get nearly any movie to happen. Like he has so much heat at this moment that the world is his oyster.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you might be right. The list of directors in features is incredibly short. And all of them work. All of them. There is currently as we all know a push for diversity among the cadre of feature film directors, which is blindingly white and blindingly male. And so I can’t think for even a second that you’re not exactly right. I would imagine that he’s on the top of every list. And apparently well earned. But not yet willing to confirm that on my own behalf because I haven’t seen the movie.

**John:** Yeah. But I trust that everyone in America is correct and it’s a phenomenal movie, so I look forward to seeing it. But let us talk not about a movie that already exists but movies that could exist. It is our segue to How Would This Be a Movie, one of our favorite features to do. This week we needed a special to really help us out here.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m very happy to introduce a writer who has done several of these true life adaptations. Irene Turner is a novelist and screenwriter of An American Crime. Her new film is The Most Hated Woman in America, which just debuted at South by Southwest. Welcome Irene.

**Irene Turner:** Hi guys. Thanks for having me on. I have seen Get Out.

**Craig:** Get Out.

**Irene:** All right. And I’m out. I did love it, so there you go.

**Craig:** All right.

**Irene:** And I don’t even go to horror films.

**Craig:** Well, I’ve heard it’s not really a horror film. It’s more like a – well, like old school thriller.

**Irene:** Old school thriller. And the end – and you’re cringing in your seat and wanting to run. And I enjoyed it. But no spoilers.

**Craig:** Got it. Got it.

**John:** Zero spoilers. So, you are just back from South by Southwest. You’re back from Austin. And like literally just last night landed. So thank you for coming to do this. But tell us about this movie because I think as long as I’ve known you you’ve been working on this movie. So this is the story of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, a famous atheist, who is kidnapped. But what is your journey on this movie? How did you come to write this movie?

**Irene:** It’s been a minute on this one. And I guess we started – the idea got brought to us by our producers, Max Handelman and Elizabeth Banks. And neither Tommy O’Haver nor I, who is the director and also my writing partner, had heard of her.

**Craig:** You hadn’t heard of Elizabeth Banks?

**Irene:** Well, Elizabeth Banks we had heard of. But Madalyn Murray O’Hair we had not heard of. And in fact nobody under the age of about 70 had heard of her.

**Craig:** Except of course for me.

**Irene:** Well, except for Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I’m sort of an MMOH fan.

**Irene:** Well then there you go. But Madalyn was once really well known for fighting to get forced prayer out of public schools in Baltimore, Maryland. And it went all the way to the Supreme Court with it. And after that formed an organization called American Atheist. And kind of fighting atheist causes and fighting for First Amendment rights, which are near and dear to my heart.

And the great thing about her as making a movie about her is that she was conflicted, complicated, opinionated, got in her own way. And had problematic relationships with her family. So, oh boy, strong character. Fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems to me. I mean, one of the things we talk about all the time when we go through these How Would This Be a Movie is we see the facts of some complications, circumstantial drama, and then we are inevitably asking, OK, but what about the people. Where is the people stuff? And she was a fascinating person and kind of a little bit of a monster.

**Irene:** She was a big bit of a monster. She got in her own way. She had problematic relationships with her kids. She smothered them and pushed them. And her one son, Billy Murray, Jr. actually, ended up being an alcoholic and had other issues and finally found god.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**Irene:** Yeah. And at this point is still alive and is fighting to get prayer back in public schools.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Irene:** But she was so difficult. She ended up having sometimes hiring felons to work for her at her atheist organization. They didn’t pay very well. And she felt like she could just judge character and it would be fine. Kind of difficult.

**Craig:** And how did that work out for her?

**Irene:** Not real well. See the movie.

**Craig:** And this movie, this is a Netflix film, correct?

**Irene:** Yeah. One of the reasons it took so long to make is that Netflix as a streaming organization making original movies didn’t exist when we started writing it. And so Netflix, I think, fills a really important niche to get independent small films out there. It’s not really a big studio movie. Mm, murdered atheist that nobody remembers except Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Franchise!

**Irene:** Mm-hmm. But where’s the sequel potential? So just getting to make those kind of niche films. And Netflix has a lot of other kind of films as well. But I think they’ve been really a force in the indie world for making sure that what otherwise might be a festival film and two theaters in New York and LA, at best, gets out there.

**John:** So, talk to us about, so Elizabeth Banks and Max Handelman came to you with this idea. Was it just the idea? Was it a specific book? What were you working off of when you sat down to start writing this movie?

**Irene:** We had thought about using a book and then that morphed into there’s so many different points of view about her and what she wrote, what other people wrote about her. And we ended up, it’s actually original. We sources. We used her diary. We used books about her. She did a lot of press.

**Craig:** She did talk a lot, didn’t she?

**Irene:** She talked a lot. I appreciate that. Because, yeah, she lived in an era where Johnny Carson would invite people to get on the Tonight Show and talk about atheism in America. So her opinions on things are well known and so we kind of gathered from lots of sources to try and discover what made her tick. You know, what she wanted in life. How she got where she was. What, you know.

**Craig:** So, when you go through all these sources, because I’m dealing with this right now on this miniseries I’m doing. It’s based on true events, and so true people. Did you have any sort of legal guidance about what you could and couldn’t use without having say rights to an estate or rights to this or that?

**Irene:** Well, the basic principle is having multiple sources for facts that are in the public sphere. The great thing about Madalyn is she did give so many interviews and she’s been written about so much that nothing is only coming from one source. If you’re only coming from one source on something, then you can’t use it without getting the rights to that source.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**Irene:** That’s the basic answer.

**Craig:** OK. Fair enough.

**John:** Were there any concerns about libel or sort of the public rights of the people who are still involved? So you say that her son is still alive. So was there any sort of zone of safety around that character to make sure you weren’t doing anything with that character that the person could come after you for?

**Irene:** Yeah. With him, yes, we had to be very, very careful, because we don’t have his life rights. And we had to use sources from the time period and what he said or did to newspapers. Fortunately, he did a lot of speaking tours and things like that, which were reported on. But you know with the characters who are no longer living, you can’t libel the dead, and so that makes the standard much easier to deal with.

**Craig:** Can you slander them?

**Irene:** Only if you want to.

**Craig:** Because I know so many dead people I want to say wrong things about.

**Irene:** You can get sued by family members of dead people who are saying that you’re libeling their family legacy and things. And it can kind of get tricky. On An American Crime we had a 90-year-old lawyer who pretty much hated the film. I mean, and it’s a child abuse film and there are children abusing other children. Very difficult subject matter. Some of them are alive, although most of the living ones had taken assumed names in the interim. So just tricky. And he just didn’t think we should be discussing the subject at all, in my humble opinion. And so 90% of the dialogue in that film is from court transcripts. And he actually made us adjust a scene where a 12-year-old boy who has been abusing another girl, we have him teasing a dog. And we had to cut that back because there was no evidence that this character had been teasing a dog in this way.

**Craig:** Oh, well.

**Irene:** It’s a standard.

**Craig:** And is that 90-year-old lawyer still available? Because he sounds great. Or has he since moved on?

**Irene:** I don’t know. And I’m trying to forget him because I got stuck at the last minute with annotating everything and anything. And it was not easy.

**Craig:** Well, you know what? Maybe we’re free to slander him at this point. You know, if he’s, you know.

**Irene:** Dead? Yeah.

**John:** So your movie, people can see it starting on March 24 on Netflix, correct?

**Irene:** March 24 on Netflix. Yes. Worldwide day-and-date. Which is crazy to me. You want to see Melissa Leo in Spanish, Italian, French, go to it.

**Craig:** That’s so great. And she is, from what I hear – I mean, obviously I haven’t seen it yet because it’s not out – but I hear that she, as per usual, is spectacular in this role.

**Irene:** She is Melissa Leo-ing all over the Melissa Leo and she is great. If you don’t like Melissa Leo, don’t watch this film because she dominates it in a really great way. Like there’s a fabulous supporting cast and things like that, but the center of it is Madalyn. So, and she is–

**Craig:** The Most Hated Woman in America. So that’s Netflix. March 24. Melissa Leo. Josh Lucas. Adam Scott. Pretty great cast you go there. Directed by your writing partner, Tommy O’Haver.

**Irene:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Well fantastic. Congratulations. But I feel like we should use you here because you’re obviously good at this. Because what we like to do is find these articles and try and figure out how would they be a movie. And you’re kind of an expert at that. So would you be willing to help us with this?

**Irene:** I would love to.

**Craig:** Well–

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** John, we’ve got ourselves a partner.

**John:** We got a partner here. So, our first story is The New Underground Railroad. It’s a New Yorker article by Jake Halpern. So it’s centered around a safe house in Buffalo, New York, where asylum seekers from around the world prepare to flee the United States for Canada. So, it’s based around this New Yorker article, but I actually first encountered this as part of a Trumpcast episode, Slate’s Trumpcast, where Halpern did an interview with Virginia Heffernan and it was a really great piece. And so if you are a podcast person, which you probably are because you’re listening to this podcast, I would actually go to the podcast first because it’s really great and it gets much more into Halpern’s reporting of the story which I find is also fascinating.

So, guys, how are we going to start digging into this story because there’s a lot here? So, we’re looking at this house, basically this old abandoned schoolhouse called Vive, which is founded by these nuns, and it’s been a safe house for asylum seekers since 1984. We have the different asylum seekers who are coming through here. We have Halpern himself. Where do we want to start with the idea of this as a movie?

**Craig:** Irene, what do you think?

**Irene:** Hahaha, I knew you were going to make me start.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Irene:** I mean, it’s a great setting for a movie. And there’s the potential for great characters. And what intrigues me about it, and it’s the sort of thing I would have enjoyed doing, is it’s a spin on all the kind of movies where people are trying to get into the United States. And so the spin on people, A, trying to get out. People undergoing great hardships to both get here and then to get to Canada.

And also these individuals’ stories, there’s so many of them. I mean, the problem for me would be like picking the right stories of the right refugees and also avoiding the trap of going in, you know, kind of from the American protagonist. That you want to make sure that you’ve got a variety of voices in there. Kind of picking the characters and picking the separate journeys. The other problem that just struck me right away was make sure you haven’t set yourself up for a play. Because this sanctuary is so isolated and contained and just kind of know where you’re going to be able to break out of it and see parts of the – you know, like the containment. Make sure you’re not writing a play.

**Craig:** That is absolutely the thing that jumped out at me as well. I was very concerned with the insularity of it and the internal nature of it, because it really is in this one small house in a terrible neighborhood. A neighborhood that’s so bad that they warn everybody, “Don’t leave the house.” They even describe it sort of quasi-prison like in a sense, even though they’re willingly there. But it is cramped and it is small. And they are using this really to funnel people, as you said, sort of in and then out. So it seems to me if I were approaching this material, I would probably start by saying this is not going to be a movie about this house. This house is going to be one part of a movie that is about being a refugee and your relationship to the United States and your relationship to the world and the struggles that you have.

And I guess I would probably call Stephen Gaghan up and just say, “Hey Stephen, remember doing Traffic? Do you remember doing Syriana? Can you do that again, but about immigration?” Because it just seems like this is in his wheelhouse to gather disparate stories – a government official, a fleeing person, a nun, a border patrol. Telling all sides of this story so that all of the proverbial blind men feeling the elephant, we get the whole elephant. It just feels like I would want to Gaghan this up.

**John:** Yeah. I definitely was thinking of Syriana and I was also thinking of Babel, where you have these separate stories being told in different parts of the world. And basically you’re setting up these characters who are all going to cross through this nexus and then try to find their way into Canada through different means. And so let’s talk about who some of these characters are. I’m going to pick out three, but there’s more who are in the world of the story.

The first we meet is Tita. She’s an Eritrean woman. She’s trying to reunite with her family who are already in Canada. She has a husband who she got married to at a previous refugee situation. So she was able to make it out of Africa, I think to somewhere in Europe, then to Brazil, then to Mexico. Then she crossed the border and she made her way to Buffalo, New York. So she has this huge journey, paying this trafficker $15,000 to get her to this place.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And still not quite sure if she’s going to be able to get back to her husband and her young son who doesn’t really necessarily remember her. So she’s got an amazing story.

**Craig:** And she’s sort of married. But the marriage is a religious marriage and it’s not a government-recognized marriage, so there’s – actually one of the things about that story that really jumped out at me was how important paperwork suddenly becomes. And in just now your life is in limbo because of papers.

**Irene:** Papers define who you are. It defines your personhood. It makes you either a person or a non-person, or someone who can go places or can’t. And we’re not used to that for those of us who are not refugees or whose families have been in this country for a long time. That being defined by a piece of paper says what and who you are.

**Craig:** That part of it I found fascinating.

**John:** Absolutely. So another character who we follow through this, and I think Halpern has the most direct relationship with, is Fernando. He’s the young Columbian man fleeing gang violence. So he’s made his way to Vive and he’s trying to find his way across. And so this is where we get into a strange part of the immigration law here. Whatever country, either US or Canada, that you enter into first, that has to be the place where you’re supposed to be seeking asylum. And so if he were just to cross the border and try to get asylum in Canada, they would just send him right back. And so there’s a loophole though: if he can cross further into Canada and go to not a place on the border, but deeper in, he can seek asylum.

So he’s trying to find a way to get across from New York into Canada and get deep enough in that he can go to a place and sort of try to document himself there.

Here we have a young man fleeing gang violence. He’s the most action-adventure things that are happening in the New York/American section of the story.

**Irene:** Oh yeah. Absolutely. Because there’s that tension in his journey. How far is he going to get? I mean, he really needs to get – it’s not just step over a line and then freedom. You’re outside of the Eastern Bloc. You’re over the Berlin Wall, and then it’s done, in the ‘70s, or things like that. And he’s also got the most tenuous situation in terms of he’s not coming from a war-torn country. In a sense it’s a gang-torn country and he’s seeking asylum for those kind of reasons. And those are more difficult.

And so, yes, his journey is very fraught. And the physicality of that. That gets you outside that box.

**John:** Absolutely. What I liked about it is like if you follow Tita’s journey, it’s like a long journey. There’s a lot of little speedbumps along the way. But his is the most like an action movie, where he literally is going into a dark field and not sure what’s on the far side. And it’s that panic of getting lost and falling in a river and nearly freezing to death. He has the most sort of movie adventure beats. It’s also nice that that probably happened late in the story when you’ve already gotten to this place of comparable safety.

**Craig:** There’s something inherently ironic, which we’re always looking for. Somebody is escaping violence and the escape from violence is putting them in a situation where they might die.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that’s what we’re afraid of in the back of our head. That the narrative is leading us to that Twilight Zone ending. And so we’re so, so hopeful we don’t get that.

**Irene:** Yes. The stakes are very, very high for all of them and especially him.

**John:** So the last characters I’ll single out are the two Mohammeds. They’ve come from Afghanistan. They are both soldiers. They’re here in the US for training. And so they have a day off where they go to Washington, DC. They don’t get back on the bus. Instead they’ve hooked up with an Afghan family who has gotten them up to this haven in Buffalo, New York. And that’s where they’re trying to make the crossover into Canada. They are the only of the stories that we’re singling out here where they were not successful and they are ultimately sent back to Afghanistan.

So they were trying to get out of Afghanistan because they were going to be assigned to watch over the poppy fields and they felt like they were going to die if they went back to Afghanistan. So, they felt their life was in huge danger if they go back. And ultimately they are sent back. So I think we learned the least about them in the story, but I liked that they were coming in a very different way than the other two characters.

**Irene:** Also, John, I think their story is good and maybe if you were diving further into this you might find another one that’s good as well. But you have to show the refugees that don’t make it. That get turned back. It can’t just be the feel good story of the ones that got through, because that’s not the real situation, and you kind of have a duty to make sure that you’re showing the heartbreak and the sadness as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. This one, I think the value was that there is failure at the end of it, but probably would want a little something else going on here. I would want a parent who had lost a child. Or I would want someone falling in love with another person. They don’t even speak the same language, but they’re two refugees who have both lost people they love, and now they’re in this little house and they fall in love. And then one of them gets to move on, and one of them has to go back.

So, I want something a little bit more. The nature of their story, I mean, obviously in a true-life sense is tragic. But in a narrative sense, didn’t – I would probably veer away from the specificity of it, because I’m not sure I would get enough drama that I would want. Or a different kind of drama.

**Irene:** Yeah. I was fascinated and the article didn’t go into them as much, but their residence – they tried to make private rooms for the people who just had been there forever. And who couldn’t move. And that’s hard to show cinematically. But as a small thread of a larger picture, there’s a residence there and I would try and show it.

**John:** So let’s talk about what the characters might be in this movie. So, there’s obviously the people who are running the organization. So it was originally created by nuns. It’s no longer really run by nuns. And some of the people who are working there are former refugees who have been through the system or are there for one reason or another. Also, a question of whether Halpern himself becomes a character in the story. Because especially in the podcast I listened to, he’s a very big character in the Fernando story. And there’s a really interesting line of like as a journalist does he cross over or not cross over in terms of like giving advice to this kid who is trying to make it across. And he has the normal human and kind of paternal feelings of like I don’t want this kid to die out in the woods. And yet as a journalist he needs to step back and sort of like report the story and not create the story.

So, he’s a potentially interesting character, but also potentially troubling for the sort of white savior aspect of this character in this movie. What did you guys think?

**Craig:** Well, on that front I actually never really find the crusading journalist character particularly, well, let’s not call them crusading journalist, but the protective journalist character, it just feels like a false struggle. Because I don’t have that problem in my life because I’m not a journalist. So it’s something that’s very specific. It’s a very specific ethical problem for journalists. I’m not sure I would love to watch that unfold on screen.

If I’m watching a border patrol guy who catches him and has to bring him back, and then catches him again and brings him back, and then the third time he thinks he’s going to go out there again and he might die tonight because of X, Y, or Z, what should I do. That I find compelling. And it’s not about savoir. It’s just about two people on the opposite side of a fight discovering this shared humanity. I would probably go in that direction more than the journalist direction.

**Irene:** Yeah it’s not The Year of Living Dangerously, or you know, films where journalists are going into hot spots and trying to bring back a story that people need to hear. In that sense it’s not that you couldn’t have him as a minor character, but I think it would be a mistake to make him kind of the eyes of the audience character, or the protagonist, or starting the story on him starting this story. I think it would be problematic.

**John:** I agree. So let’s talk about this as a movie. And so where do we see a movie like this happening? Like what are the scenarios in which this kind of movie could exist?

**Craig:** Netflix. Amazon.

**Irene:** We love us some Netflix.

**Craig:** It’s not a studio film.

**John:** Oh, I think it is a studio movie. I think this to me feels like the studio’s Oscar movie. So this to me feels like an A24, it feels like we’re going to go for it and we’re going to push. And I think because it’s timely, because it does have the possibility of some really big visuals, because you’re going to a lot of different environments, so you get to go to Africa, you get to go to Afghanistan, you go to Mexico. So I just feel like you’re going to be able to find the filmmaker, probably the international filmmaker, who is the right person for this. And I think you’re going to be able to do something great.

**Irene:** Cast-dependent. You better right that script so well that that name cast comes in kind of brings it up to an Oscar-bait movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, even A24, you’re still talking about an independent financed film. But it would have to be – yeah, so I mean a studio could pick it up and release it, but I totally agree with Irene. This is where you need somebody like Matt Damon for Syriana, or you need, well, all of the people that you had in Traffic. Quite a collection of actors.

**Irene:** An Idris Elba. You know, kind of a cast that combines on that kind of level where they’re really making interesting choices and give actors meaty roles.

**Craig:** Right. Like Emily Blunt is in Sicario. I’m not sure you can get Sicario made without Emily Blunt. So, I think that that’s correct. And this, by the way, this is part of the problem that writers run into when they’re trying to avoid the white savior problem, and then what happens is a lot times the foreign sales people, because in independent films the independent film financiers aren’t going to do it unless they can presale the film overseas. And the foreign sales entities are saying, “Well we need one of the following list of stars. And they have to be the star.” And they’re all white. And now what do you do? This is where it gets insidious. This is a movie that has to be pretty carefully – so I guess what I’m saying is I don’t see it as a mainstream studio developed project.

I think it would be independent and then released.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a version of this where it’s sort of like a Plan B, Brad Pitt, you know, like 12 Years a Slave is an example of a movie that you’re able to make because, yes, he can play one part in it, but like it just has enough high class people around it that people are going to – a studio will roll the dice and spend the money they need to spend on making this movie. And, yes, it’s very execution dependent, but in good execution you’ve made a movie that could do really well.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a movie to be made about immigration and the state of being a refugee in the world today. I don’t know if the halfway house is where I would begin. I guess I would put it that way. I think it’s a little bottleneck-y for me.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get on to our next story. This is called You May Want to Marry My Husband. It is by Amy Krouse Rosenthal writing for the New York Times Modern Love section. So Rosenthal, who at the time of writing the article was dying from cancer, makes the pitch for potential suitors about why her husband is such a catch. So it’s her writing about her husband and how great he is. And how much she’ll miss him, yet also ladies pay attention. This is a guy you want to keep on your list. Where do we start with this kind of movie? Who wants to take this off?

**Irene:** Well, this is so outside the kind of movie that I might write. The problem with this is, and I’m guessing it has been optioned because it got so much buzz, and the author has since passed away. The article itself is sort of a jumping off point. There’s so many questions I have. Is it about their relationship? The article makes me want to read her memoir and read more, actually more about her husband to see if there’s – like what’s the story?

We’ve kind of seen the movies, like is it Step Mom with Julia Roberts and Susan Sarandon, where Susan Sarandon is dying and Julia Roberts is going to kind of mother her kids and things. Is it the husband’s story after the author of the article has passed away, has died? It’s really – I looked at it and I went, wow, I’m glad nobody offered me a lot of money to adapt this because it’s got like a thousand directions you could go. And I’m not sure what the right one would be.

**Craig:** Well, it’s very sad, obviously, and it’s very sweet. Amy Krouse Rosenthal is an excellent writer. You can see that she’s just in total command of her art. And here she is. Actually the first line says, “I’ve been trying to write this for a while, but the morphine and lack of juicy cheeseburgers (what has it been now, five weeks without real food?) have drained my energy and interfered with whatever prose prowess remains.”

Well, I disagree. That’s a pretty amazing sentence. And she wrote this on March 3. She died ten days later. It is a beautiful thing and it is the scariest kind of thing to try and turn into a movie because the potential for what snopes.com calls Glurge is extraordinarily high here.

**John:** Define Glurge for us here.

**Irene:** Yes please.

**Craig:** Glurge is, they apply it generally to things that you might see passed around on Facebook and so forth. They are incredibly sentimental, sweet, sappy, tear-jerky stories about dying children or puppies who are missing a leg. Or a grandmother that reunites with her long-lost twin. And it’s so – it’s glurge. It’s overtly whip out your Kleenex time and cry.

So, when you’re talking about a woman penning a letter to America saying, “Won’t one of you marry my husband because I love him very, very much and I’m about to die,” I’m already going, OK, this is very–

**Irene:** It’s saved by her prose, but the movie doesn’t have her prose.

**Craig:** It doesn’t. The movie doesn’t have her voice. Now, you could theoretically create a sense where she’s over the movie like a Ghost, obviously you don’t see her, but you hear her.

**Irene:** But like Ghost. Not the thriller-ish, but yeah.

**Craig:** The way that Kevin Spacey is doing the voiceover in American Beauty and as it turns out he’s dead the whole time. You can hear this voice. But even so, again, the potential for glurge is high. And as a writer, I would not take this job on because specifically I feel like she did what she had to do. She wrote this article. Those were her words. That was her feeling. She did it beautifully. Who needs me to come along and turn it into fake drama? It just seems gross.

So out of respect, frankly, even though I could come up with all sorts of easy, cheapo ways to do this, I wouldn’t. I just wouldn’t.

**John:** I’m not that scared about the glurge. Yes, there’s a lot to be avoided, but I think there’s a lot to sort of lean into here as well. So, yes, we have to be mindful that part of what makes this article so effective is her voice is just so terrific. And we won’t have that literary voice in the movie. But I think you do have a generosity of spirit, a sense of what is special about these two people’s relationship. And to be able to see that is a good thing.

And so while the headline, which she probably didn’t write the headline because they rarely write their own headlines, the headline by itself feels like a great – obviously a great Facebook title, but it’s also a good title for a movie in general. But I think the movie itself may want to be that story of tracking their relationship and sort of like what do you do with that relationship when you know it’s going to end. It’s sort of what happens to a marriage as the kids move out and you have all these plans. And the plans are taken away from you because of this diagnosis.

And we’ve seen the bad version of that so many times. But a really good version of that, a James L. Brooks version of that could be something remarkable. And so I think that’s the opportunity here. How do you take a tragedy and find some good in it? And that’s what she was able to do in her piece. And I think that’s the challenge for anyone trying to take this story and move it to the big screen is finding what is the fresh, engaging way to deal with this thing that could be so horrible. And I think that’s the opportunity.

That’s why I think there is a reason to be thinking about this as a movie.

**Irene:** The thing is it made me want to read her memoir to learn more about her as a person because the article is so much obviously about him and what she wants to leave for him. And that’s how I kind of discover whether I think there was more of a movie in it than this thing right here. Yeah, it scares me. It’s way outside what I generally do and I – ooh.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? I can like to write sentimentally at times. I just feel like – almost feel like this story has put its thumb on the scale so heavily that it doesn’t need me. I don’t know how else to put it. It’s like it doesn’t need me. I would be working really hard to say look at this fresh interesting take on this very sad and yet beautiful thing this woman did. And I just don’t think we need it. This is why I shouldn’t be running a studio, because I’m sure every studio would be like, “Yeah, of course we’re going to make this.”

**Irene:** And it would turn into a Nicholas Sparks movie.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, that’s the thing. It would.

**Irene:** And I can’t write Nicholas Sparks movies. But I couldn’t write, you know, the version that I would want to write, that would be tough.

**Craig:** See, if somebody came to me and said, “Look, we want you to write a movie and we have an idea. And the idea is a woman is dying and she writes a letter to America saying you should marry my husband.” I would say, oh, that’s an amazing idea. I know how to write that movie. And I could see all sorts of fascinating ways to approach it. Not the least of which is tracking this man as these women appear to him because it worked. But he’s so broken and yet so alone and lost and ashamed to think that maybe he would—

There’s a whole exploration of grief and recovery and finding new love. But because it’s real, I don’t want to do it. It feels creepy.

**John:** Craig, is it because it’s real or is it because it’s successful? Like if you had come across this thing and it was not a giant popular article, would you be as scared of it? I don’t think you would be. I have to believe that it’s because this is a big thing out there, and so there’s a giant spotlight on her and this one thing. But if it was just a little thing that only you knew about, you wouldn’t be so worried about it.

**Craig:** No, I wouldn’t. But that’s the point. It’s that there wouldn’t be a thumb on the scale. Because this is so well known, and because she did a brilliant job of achieving her goal here, I’m just kind of using it. It’s like I’m using her pain and her beauty and her brilliance to get you to cry in a movie theater and fork over $12 and buy some popcorn. It just doesn’t feel right.

**John:** Yeah. So I go back to Big Fish. And so I read Big Fish when it was a book. And Daniel Wallace wrote a great book. And it’s really a lot of stories about him and his dad, but I was able to take that and say like, OK, I can’t really use those directly, but it’s a way for me to talk about the things that I want to talk about and incorporate what I knew sort of about that whole world and that emotional terrain. And so I feel like, yes, her story is going to be the jumping off point, but I think there’s great material to explore and great intra-emotional material to explore given this framework.

**Craig:** But Big Fish is fiction.

**John:** But it’s not entirely fiction, though. I mean, yes, it’s fantastical, but the emotional stuff underneath it.

**Craig:** Oh, sure, sure, but it’s different.

**John:** No, but I’m saying Daniel’s relationship with his father, that is the story of Big Fish. And so I was taking a lot of his own personal stuff and mucking around with it. But that’s the nature of what adaptation is.

**Craig:** Yes, but–

**Irene:** The tricky thing with this article is it’s her voice as the voice of the article, and yet if we’re speaking in screenwriter terms, she’s the character who is dying and do you then write a film – you know if it’s an idea as Craig said, then do you write the film about the guy in recovery trying to navigate this post-Amy world? Then that’s something I can kind of see, and yet her voice is so strong that you don’t want to negate that. So then do you write the film that leads up to that? Or do you do double stands?

It scares me. I admit it. Raising hand.

**John:** Yeah. I get why it’s scary. Before we finish this up, I do want to circle back to the Nicholas Sparks of it all. Because I think we’re using Nicholas Sparks as a shorthand for sort of like the bad version of this kind of movie. And just like we sometimes we’ll throw Katherine Heigl for like the bad version of romantic comedies. But we can’t be paralyzed about a whole genre just because there’s bad versions out there that we’re afraid we’re going to trip into. Like there’s bad versions of sort of every genre. I just think there’s potentially a great version of this movie. We shouldn’t be afraid of writing the great version of this movie.

**Craig:** I agree with you. Look, and the truth is I like The Notebook. My issue with Nicholas Sparks’ movies is that there have been so many of them. And they aren’t different enough that over time I feel like I don’t need see them. I saw The Notebook. It was very sweet.

The problem with the Sparks-ing of a story like this isn’t that Nicholas Sparks’ movies are inherently bad. Not at all. It’s that this is real. And it is public. And we have all seen it. And it was specifically intended to be real and public and personal. And none of the Nicholas Sparks stories are real at all. They’re just made up – they’re made up glurge. But they’re oftentimes well done glurge.

**Irene:** Some of them are really great and some of it have become a little bit of a factory.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. This to me – look, you’re going to make all the money on this.

**Irene:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But Irene and I will be here like, yeah, but you know what, we kept it real.

**John:** You kept it real. So, our third and final topic for today is about Prenda. And so this is the movie that you’ve not ever seen before. So, I originally put in the outline this article by Nate Anderson who is writing for Ars Technica about Prenda, but it’s actually so obscure and so far at the end of this story that I think honestly the Wikipedia article is a better place to start your adventures in Prenda.

So, in the early 2010s, a Chicago-based law firm named Prenda Law went after porn downloaders for copyright infringement. And so this is from a different Ars Technica article by Joe Mullen. “The basic scheme worked like this. Prenda Law, or one of several attorneys who worked for the law firm, would file a copyright lawsuit over illegal downloads against a ‘John Doe’ defendant they knew only by an IP address. They would then use the discovery process to find out the subscriber name from various ISPs around the country. Once they got it, they’d send out letters and phone calls demanding a settlement payment, typically around $4,000, warning the defendant that if they didn’t pay quickly they would face public allegations over downloading porn.”

**Craig:** These guys were so brilliant. What an amazing plot. So they’re like, OK, so they’re sitting at home and they go, you know how the Recording Industry Association of America, they send out these letters to people they occasionally catch file-sharing songs, and then they jack them up for a grand or two. We can do that. Oh yeah, we could, but we don’t actually have stuff we own. Well, let’s make some stuff. Let’s make porn and then let’s put it out there ourselves, then let’s watch it, make sure somebody downloads it “illegally.” Then we’ll send them a letter and they’ll totally pay up, because if they don’t everybody is going to find out because we’re going to file a court case that they were watching our screwed up porn.

It’s genius. And it almost worked.

**Irene:** It’s genius. It’s evil. It’s hilarious in a certain sense. And you would totally want to see these guys get caught.

**Craig:** I would totally see this. And I should add that I have a personal friend, a great guy named Ken White, who is a criminal defense attorney. He used to be a federal prosecutor. And he is also the primary author at the website Popehat, which is a pretty popular blog that talks about legal issues about rights.

**Irene:** It’s a great blog.

**Craig:** It’s terrific. Freedom of speech, and so on and so forth. And he has been all over Prenda since the start. He was one of the big – the early investigators of their whole – because somebody basically forwarded him one of the takedown letters that Prenda had sent. And he smelled a rat from the start. I mean, this feels like a Coen Brothers scheme, doesn’t it?

**John:** It does. So I think it’s great that you brought up the Coen Brothers, because I was really having hard time figuring out what are we actually seeing on screen and who are we following. Because they’re so despicable. So ultimately they claim to have raked in about $15 million, or at some points they have claimed $15 million. There’s reasons to doubt that because there’s reasons to doubt everything they’ve ever said.

So in a 2013 civil ruling, they were found to have undertaken vexatious litigation, misrepresentation, calculated deception, professional misconduct, and to have shown moral turpitude.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I think Coen Brothers, Craig, is a really interesting way to go into that, because it allows it to be like nasty and fun at the same time. Because I was worried it was just going to be nasty. And I don’t want to just see a nasty movie.

**Craig:** No, I think it’s hysterical this thing. I mean, look, you’ve got these guys, Paul Hansmeier and John Steele. Right off the bat, those names are amazing, right? And it does feel like Fargo. Like you’re watching weasels turning on each other. These guys, if you read all about this, I mean, they were inventing fake people and there was some guy that they said worked for them and he literally didn’t work for them, but he knew them vaguely. And they were just using his address.

They just get deeper and deeper, and what’s so beautiful about Paul Hansmeier and John Steele as far as I can tell, because I never met these two people, they’re actually not that smart. They’re just ambitious as hell. And watching them get hoisted by their own petard over and over is so incredibly satisfying. So, I just think I would approach this from the black comedy perspective. What about you, Irene?

**Irene:** Absolutely. I mean, everybody likes to see evil lawyers go down. I mean, seriously, it’s almost a trope, and it’s fun every time. And their machinations are so ridiculous. And so all of it, it’s funny. I don’t know if you guys have seen I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore, which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance – now streaming on Netflix.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Irene:** Oh, I hope Netflix is listening. I love you guys. But yeah, that’s also kind of a Blood Simple-esque story with Melanie Lynskey–

**Craig:** I got to watch it, because I love Melanie Lynskey.

**John:** We all love Melanie.

**Irene:** If you love her, you should see it. It’s an indie – it’s good.

**Craig:** Done. Sold.

**Irene:** But everyone says, oh, you have to have a sympathetic character to follow and we all know that that’s insane. And I mean I keep writing about difficult people and, you know, people who are tough to love and problematic situations and complications are fun and interesting. They make better films. And even these guys, just the joy of watching these guys go down would be just great to write.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’ll get a natural good guy in the lawyer that’s pursuing, but it’s that Texas, Murdering Texas Chainsaw.

**Irene:** Cheerleader.

**Craig:** The Cheerleader Mom. It’s just watching these petty creepy people who are just greedy little monsters. And they just aren’t anywhere near as smart as they think they are. And just watching the walls close in on them is delicious.

**John:** So, how do we see this though? Is this Fargo on the big screen, or is this Fargo on the small screen? Is this better as a movie, or is this better as a TV show or as a season of a TV show? How do we do this?

**Craig:** Again, it’s casting-dependent entirely. But I could see this absolutely being on the big screen. It’s not going to be some big summer movie, but if you’ve got the right people and you had a great trailer where you really were laughing – and obviously make this for a price, right? So, like the way John Lee made The Founder or something like that. You make this for $20 million and you cast two terrific. You know, you cast Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as Hansmeier and Steele, or whoever. You know, McConaughey and whatever. And you just have fun with it. Yeah, I think you could do just fine.

I mean, keep the expectations low. But it seems like it would be entertaining as hell.

**Irene:** I think you could do the $5 million Get Out version of it, too. You know, kind of the – it feels more like a film because I’m not sure there’s enough substance in there to go ten episodes in terms of twists and back and forth. I mean, it would depend on who I was pitching to.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Irene:** Maybe I could find a TV series if I thought I could get a job doing one, but I think I would probably aim for a film version.

**John:** I could also see like Seth Rogan and sort of his folks, Jonah Hill. I could see a version of that that uses those kind of people in there, because that’s sort of the new batch of people we have who do this kind of comedy. And they could do a great job. So, I can see the big screen version of it. But I can also imagine a small screen version of this working.

**Irene:** Actors love playing larger-than-life assholes.

**Craig:** They do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No question. So do I, by the way. I don’t know if people have noticed.

**John:** We’ve heard the voices, Craig.

**Craig:** I have so many different voices.

**John:** Ugh, so many. So at the end of these we like to figure out which of these How Would This Be a Movie will actually become movies. And our batting average has been remarkably good. So, usually if we’ve singled something out, like someone is going to make that as a movie, within a few weeks someone has optioned the rights to that. So, of these three, which do we think are the most likely to become actual movies?

**Craig:** Well, unfortunately I think if the estate of Amy Krouse Rosenthal or Amy herself prior to her passing agreed to sell the film rights to her New York Times essay, that will certainly be bought and somebody will attempt to make it. I don’t think they should, but fine. And I think that’s probably it. I don’t really imagine that we’re going to see a Prenda movie. Maybe on cable. I think it would be great, but unless somebody like the Coen Brothers comes along, I just don’t think it’s going to happen. And I have to say I don’t think the Underground Railroad is a movie.

**Irene:** I would love to see the Underground Railroad get made. It’s just in the realistic look at what does get made, it’s tough. I mean, I feel like the Prenda stuff, I mean, you’d have to go in with attachments and pitch it with attachments. Or spec it or things like that. It would really need to start with more things worked out than are in an article right now.

**Craig:** And what about the You Want to Marry My Husband?

**Irene:** It’s got so much reach and so widespread that it feels like unless the estate, or you know her husband, unless they’re so wrapped up in her passing away, which is so recent, it just feels like it’s inevitably going to get made because those kind of cultural events like that tend to.

**Craig:** Unless they don’t agree to sell the rights.

**Irene:** Yeah. They may not. It may not be what he wants to do. So, or what she wanted to do.

**Craig:** What do you think, John?

**John:** So, I actually think the most likely movie to get made is the Underground Railroad. I think we will see an announcement about rights on this within the next two months. I think someone will try to make this movie.

**Irene:** I hope you’re right.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** I agree with you that the You Should Marry My Husband is either – it’s all a question of whether they agree to sell the rights to this or not. And I can see good arguments both ways. I didn’t think there was any chance of the Prenda movie, but you guys actually completely convinced me that there is a movie here. Because I was not seeing the black comedy part of it. And that makes it delightful.

So, if the Prenda movie happens, I think it will be because we helped frame some borders on that. And I think we deserve our 1% take on that.

**Craig:** Get a little taste.

**John:** A little taste. Just a little off the top there. It’s time for our One Cool Things. So, Craig, why don’t you start?

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is super easy this week. It’s obvious, how could it not be, a new podcast. I know, hold on a second. Everyone is going, “Wait, wait, wait, wait. You don’t listen to podcasts.” And that’s true. I don’t. Except when this happens. New podcast called You Had Us At Hello, cohosted by Tess Morris, our beloved Tess, and Billy Mernit. And I believe it’s going to be a limited run podcast, but it’s basically the two of them discussing romantic comedies, the writing of, producing of romantic comedies. Why they love the ones they love.

Tess Morris, as most of you know, friend of our show. Screenwriter of the most excellent Man Up. And Billy Mernit wrote a book called Writing the Romantic Comedy, which was highly influential for Tess. Billy also works in the story department at Universal where he reads every script that everybody writes over there and puts all the notes down on paper for all of us. So, including a lot of my work. And so I am grateful to Billy and his whole crew over there. So, I’m definitely going to listen to this. And I think we might even have – a little sampler for people?

**John:** We do. So at the end of our show, after our outro, you can hear about ten minutes of this first episode that they did. What I love so much about it is it’s completely Tess. And so you can hear the teacups and the china. And you can hear the dogs barking in the background. And it feels like two good friends sitting around a table, talking about their favorite subject which is romantic comedies. So, congratulations Tess.

**Craig:** You know the only thing that could possibly make it better?

**John:** Oh, no. It would make it much, much worse, Craig.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think it would, John.

**John:** I thought you were going to do Sexy Craig. The Bane is actually probably much worse in this.

**Craig:** Is that tea? Are you drinking tea, Billy?

**John:** Irene, do you have a One Cool Thing to save us?

**Irene:** You know what? Watch I Don’t Feel At Home in this World Anymore. I really liked it. And Melanie Lynskey is great. And I’ve loved her since Heavenly Creatures. And if you don’t want to watch that on Netflix, watch Heavenly Creatures.

**Craig:** You know I have the biggest crush on Melanie Lynskey. I mean, I’m friends with her husband, so I can’t–

**Irene:** You can’t do anything about it?

**Craig:** Or, I don’t know, are they married? Jason Ritter. Greatest guy. Yeah, no, no, no. It’s a platonic crush.

**Irene:** Don’t we all carry just like a little flame for Melanie Lynskey? Just like a teeny bit?

**John:** We all do. 100%.

**Craig:** And literally the nicest person I’ve ever met in my life. She’s the greatest. You can’t even believe.

**Irene:** I am so happy to hear that. Because there are some actors I don’t want to hear that they’re terrible in real life.

**Craig:** I know. Well, like I want her to be my mom.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s amazing. So I’m going to totally watch that.

**John:** That’s good. My One Cool Thing this week is two apps, but it’s really more kind of a concept. It’s called Couch to 5K. It’s this idea that if you’re a person who does not run, but you want to learn how to run, that’s sort of the couch part of it. Like you’ve been sitting on a couch for a long time. You can get up to running a 5K race pretty easily. It just takes a couple weeks of training. And basically every other day you’re sort of building up a little bit more, a little bit more. So you have the app that’s sort of talking you through when you’re walking and when you’re running, and it gets you up to running a 5K.

So, I did the 5K version of this when I was back in LA. I’ve done the 10K version of it here in Paris. And so I can now run a 10K, which is sort of remarkable. Because I’m not a person who ever was sort of born to run. But it’s been great. So, I’ll put links to these two apps in the show notes.

But there’s actually a lot of other apps, so while I like these apps, you should try some other ones because they all work a little bit differently. But they’re all gradually up to running a full 10K.

**Craig:** Wonderful. Good. Will keep you alive.

**John:** That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Victor Krause. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions. For short questions, I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Irene, you’re on Twitter?

**Irene:** I am. @renila.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** I should follow you. Do I follow you?

**Irene:** I don’t know that you do.

**Craig:** I’m gonna. Doing it right now.

**John:** It’s so interesting to hear you pronounce it, because I would pronounce it Renila. But it’s like Irena LA. So, yeah, it makes much more sense.

**Irene:** Everybody does. It came from like an old online dating handle, Renila, from like 10 years ago. And so it’s short, so it became my Twitter handle.

**Craig:** Following.

**John:** Following. We are on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes podcast. Find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Leave us a review. We’ll love you for it. We might even read it aloud. Also, while you’re on iTunes, you can download the Scriptnotes app. There’s an equivalent Android app. That’s right now the only way to get to all of the back episodes of the show. So we have 292 previous episodes, plus bonus episodes.

**Craig:** So many.

**John:** You go, you subscribe to those. It’s $2 a month. Show notes for this episode and all episodes are at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We’ll try to get those up a couple days after. But in the show notes you’ll find links to Irene’s movie, which is on Netflix, so you can watch that.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And all the things we talked about, including the articles. And, Irene, it was so great to have you on the show. Thank you so much for coming in.

**Irene:** I love you, John. I love you, Craig.

**Craig:** We love you, too. And congratulations on your movie.

**Irene:** Thank you so much. It’s good to get things made.

**Craig:** Isn’t it?

**John:** It’s the best.

**Irene:** It is so good. Ah.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** See you guys.

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

Links:

* [Most Hated Woman in America | Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsAIPE2f0QQ)
* [The New Underground Railroad](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/the-underground-railroad-for-refugees)
* [A Safe House for Refugees](http://www.panoply.fm/podcasts/trumpcast/episodes/46O6tturlKCUeKq6sAUIEo)
* [You May Want to Marry My Husband](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/style/modern-love-you-may-want-to-marry-my-husband.html?)
* [Prenda, Copyright and Porn](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/its-official-prenda-copyright-trolls-made-their-own-porn-seeded-on-pirate-bay/)
* [Prenda Law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prenda_Law)
* [Couch to 5K](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/couch-to-5k-running-app-and-training-coach/id448474423?mt=8)
* [5K to 10K](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/5k-to-10k/id526458735?mt=8)
* [You Had Us At Hello](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/you-had-us-at-hello/id1215934253)
* [I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a891D5_bGY4)
* [Irene Turner](https://twitter.com/renila) 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 Victor Krause ([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_293.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 292 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, we’ll be answering listener questions about credits and casting, pilots, and professional experience. But first, Craig, we have some follow up.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Let’s follow up.

**John:** So the biggest announcement in last week’s episode was about the live show and we have news about the live show.

**Craig:** Yeah. So maybe people were wondering, hey, when will the tickets go on sale so that I could see Craig talk to Rian Johnson. And the answer is not yet because we have been postponed, not indefinitely. The folks that are running the charity asked for a little more time because they’re trying to find the right venue. So, I think probably instead of at the end of this month, which is what we were talking about, we’re looking more towards the end of next month. So, calm down, take a deep breath. We promise we will give you plenty of lead time to purchase tickets once we know where it will be.

**John:** Because we do have people who like fly in from across the country to do this. So I hope no one actually bought the tickets for that time, but if you did buy tickets to come at the end of March, maybe come anyway. I mean, if you look around Los Angeles carefully enough you’re likely to find Rian Johnson somewhere. He’s got to be here somewhere, right?

**Craig:** Well, or people that look like Rian Johnson, and there are so many.

**John:** That’s really true.

**Craig:** There are so many.

**John:** A baby-faced genius is what you’re looking for. That’s Rian Johnson.

**Craig:** Baby-faced blond genius with circular glasses. Basically, you remember Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch?

**John:** Oh, absolutely. Of course.

**Craig:** Cousin Oliver, age him up, stick the glasses on. You got it.

**John:** Yeah. Rian Johnson ruined The Brady Bunch but he saved cinema. So, it balances out.

**Craig:** You know, to defend Oliver, The Brady Bunch ruined The Brady Bunch. And I say that as a Brady Bunch fan and aficionado. But Oliver didn’t make it worse.

**John:** I apologize to Cousin Oliver, because of course he did not ruin it. It was just a late season addition. It was the Pucci of the show.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And you can’t really blame Pucci. It was just a bad addition.

**Craig:** Yeah. Pucci died on his way home to his own – I also have to apologize. Because last week during our Three Page Challenge I made an error, a grammatical error, which as you know hurts me so. But important to correct these things. You know, because we live in a time when our leaders make it clear that when you mess up, you should fess up, right?

**John:** Yep. Completely.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s obviously what’s going on. So, a gentlemen named Richard Komen called me out on Twitter and he was correct when he said that I was wrong to say that nervously cadenced should take a hyphen. This was in Carne, I believe, was the Three Page Challenge that we were reading last week. And he said, no, it shouldn’t take a hyphen. It’s an adverb modifying a noun. That’s that. And I checked. So I checked, because I was like, hmm, that does sound compellingly true.

And here’s what I found. The Chicago Manual of Style, which is a pretty good reference, says you should only hyphenate combinations like that if the adverb doesn’t end in LY. Sorry, it’s adverb/adjective, so for instance much-needed takes a hyphen, but nervously cadenced does not. So, in the adverb/adjective combo, if the adverb doesn’t end in LY, you stick a hyphen in there. Otherwise, you don’t. I was wrong. I apologize Thank you, Richard. You were right.

**John:** I want to just open this up a little bit. So Chicago Manual of Style is a good reference source for writers looking for how do I actually get this thing on paper and make it make sense. But Chicago Manual of Style is not the end all/be all of everything. And so I believe you will find other references or other authors, other works that do put the hyphen in there. So I don’t think you were necessarily wrong to suggest that a hyphen could be put there. It’s all style and usage. Again, it’s like there are no hard fast rules here.

So the Chicago Manual of Style does not call for a hyphen there. I would not be upset to have a hyphen there. I can see sort of why your instinct was to put the hyphen there. I don’t know. And the difference between an LY adverb and an adverb that doesn’t have the LY is really a very arbitrary distinction. Would you agree?

**Craig:** Well, so much of grammar is arbitrary. And I know that ultimately clarity prevails. But in this case, well, at the very least I was wrong to say that it was wrong to not have it. So, yeah, sure, if you say, well, it’s my preference. Nobody, just to be clear about this, because people do get really wound up about this stuff when they talk to ding-a-lings and charlatans and frauds about how to write screenplays that no one is going to grade your screenplay like a test paper in tenth grade English.

**John:** No, not at all.

**Craig:** So, clarity should rule the day. But I was wrong to suggest that it ought to be that way. If anything, it probably shouldn’t. But, yeah, I agree with you. If you want to throw a hyphen in there for funsies, because you feel like it makes it read better, throw it in.

**John:** I have a hunch that if people went through all my scripts and looked for those situations where I was doing this, I probably was putting the hyphen in there and I suspect you were, too.

**Craig:** Well, it was clearly my instinct. Yeah. So I’m sure I did. And you know what? John, it hasn’t slowed us down, has it?

**John:** No. Somehow we’ve been successful despite our over-hyphenation.

**Craig:** So successful.

**John:** Another thing we sort of referenced but is not actually available in the world from last week’s episode, so Roman Mittermayr is a guy who has written I think outros for us. He’s also a coder. He’s done some great things called FRUJI, but he also created this app for Amazon’s Echo. So, I don’t have Echo because they don’t work here in Paris. Craig, you don’t have an Echo, I believe. Is that correct?

**Craig:** No, I’m a little – I don’t like it. [laughs] By the way, let me just say, I don’t – my problem with the Amazon Echo and all the rest of it isn’t that I’m worried about surveillance, although I am kind of excited about this new crop of crimes that are being solved by Amazon Echoes. But that aside, my problem is I just hate talking to the Internet. I feel like such an idiot to say, “Hey Siri, Hey Alexa.” I just feel so dumb. I feel dumb.

**John:** Yep. So what you did just did there just annoyed a bunch of people because they were driving in their car or they’re at their house and you now activated a thing. So, we’re going to let that one pass. But we’re not going to do that anymore. So any future instances where we accidentally do it, we’ll have Matthew bleep those out.

So, I end up using Siri on my phone a lot for certain things. I use it for setting timers. I use it for starting exercise on my watch. I find it really good for that. It’s now on my computer. I don’t use it at all. So, I’m not a person who is used to being in my house and sort of using it for things, but I’m used to using it on the go or like when I’m in my car.

But Roman most crucially has built a skill for Amazon’s Echo. So, you can now say, “Lady in a Can, enable Scriptnotes.” So, Lady in a Can is the name of the – it’s the ALEXA word. I’m just saying Lady in a Can so you don’t actually, it doesn’t trip it on your–

**Craig:** Why don’t you just say Aloxa?

**John:** Oh yeah, just mispronounce it. So, Aloxa, Enable Scriptnotes. If you do that, it will install the skill. And then you can say, “Aloxa, ask Scriptnotes for latest episode,” and we will start playing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m never going to do that. I’m just being real clear.

**John:** You’re never going to do that, but you know what? People with this Lady in the Can, they might do it.

**Craig:** Maybe can we call her Malexa? What about Malexa? Does that trigger it?

**John:** That sounds a little evil.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But, yeah, it’s so interesting how you have to name these characters and make them seem like they’re helpful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So Alexa I think is always female, but Siri is actually male in certain markets. And so I think in the UK Siri is default male.

**Craig:** My son has rigged his Siri to be an Australian man. [laughs]

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** I don’t know why. Every time. And by the way, kids, I will say, well–

**John:** They love it.

**Craig:** I’m going off of my sample size here of one teenager, because my daughter is not yet a teenager, but my son and his friends, they talk to their phones all the time. It’s terrifying.

**John:** I mean, and dictation on the phone has gotten so much better that I will sometimes find myself starting to type and realize like why am I typing? This is going to be so much faster if I dictate it.

**Craig:** I love typing.

**John:** And 80% of the time that dictation works great.

**Craig:** I love it. I love typing.

**John:** You love typing on your phone?

**Craig:** I do. I love it. I just love typing in general. I feel like–

**John:** I hate typing with my thumbs.

**Craig:** Really? I’ve trained my mind to think through typing. I mean, right now I’m not typing, so I can speak. But when it comes to composing something intentionally, my fingers just start to go. The neural pathways have been wired so directly to the manual activity of typing that I just have to do it.

**John:** That’s absolutely true when I’m at a real keyboard, but on the phone it just does not work the same way. And so a lot of times I’ll be so far ahead of where my thumbs are at with my thoughts that speaking aloud is a much better case.

**Craig:** I want to write that song, by the way. I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**John:** [laughs] It could be a song about typing or about hitchhiking.

**Craig:** Well, it just sounds like a great show tune. It’s an 11 o’clocker. You know? It’s a big song.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s like you finally realized I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**John:** I don’t think it’s an 11 o’clock number, Craig. I think it could be an I Want song in a certain way, about the vision you have.

**Craig:** No, I don’t think so.

**John:** Or it could be an end of the first act. [sings] I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are at.

**Craig:** See, I think it’s more like [sings] I’m so far ahead of where my thumbs are. Anyway, we’ve lost listeners. We’re losing listeners in droves.

**John:** So many listeners. Who has two thumbs and no listeners? This guy.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Let’s get to our questions this week. We have a whole bunch of questions. We’ll try to speed round some of them. Other ones we’ll dig in deep. Owen writes in to ask, “How long should it take your agent to read your script?”

**Craig:** Exactly 3.7 days. Next question.

**John:** I say a week. And if you haven’t heard back in a week, then you should ask, “Hey what’s up?” Because your agent should read within a week. And a week needs to include a weekend, because basically no one reads anything except over the weekend, which because Hollywood is messed up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that’s about right. Basically the first weekend they have available. They’re your agent. They should read it. If you are – look, you got to know your place in the world. If you’re the lowest man on their totem pole and you’re a brand new client and you’re just starting, it may take them two weekends. And that’s fair. I mean, the larger question is who cares what your agent thinks about your script. But I know it matters. I know it matters because they’re the ones that have to go and sell it and they have to understand it.

But as I say to my agents all the time, “Yeah, you can read it if you want to.”

**John:** Let’s pause here for a second, because it is interesting like how much more important it was for our agents to read our scripts when we were new. And now it’s like it’s good that they read them, because that way they can have meaningful discussion with people about next steps on things. But like it’s actually not that important that they read them. And so [Cramer] calls, like, “Hey, do I need to read this?” Not really. It’s sort of the thing you read before. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Sometimes my guys will be like, “Can we read this?” Yeah, if you – oh, yeah, of course. It’s not like you can’t read it. But it is true, at some point their purpose really does shift out of advocacy for you and into more of they’re mediative. You know, they’re about getting you a deal and then handling problems along the way as they might crop up. But they’re not really advocating for you specifically about things as a writer.

They never stop being advocative for talent, you know. I mean, I hate that word, because writers are talented, too. But we’re called literary and then on the other side is talent. So actors, they’re constantly advocating for actors. That never stops.

**John:** Yeah. Because they’re trying to make sure the actor is positioned properly for this kind of role. Or you might not have thought of her for this, but she would actually be great as that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because writers like ultimately people can read us. They can see the movies we’ve done. They can talk to the people we’ve worked with. It’s not the same kind of thing. And so once you are established, there’s less of that need. So, there may be a reason why let’s say you’re a writer who has been writing low budget thrillers and now you’re trying to segue into something different, then yes they need to be able to read you and sort of position you differently. But that’s kind of the exception. That’s not really–

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Where most people are at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And by the way, it’s the same with directors, too. They advocate for directors. I got a call the other day from an agent saying, “Hey, for this thing you’re doing, have you considered my client blah-blah-blah to direct?” And they do that because directors and actors both are to some extent waiting for script material. Whereas we’re not, because we’re writing it. But you’re right. When you’re trying to break out of a mold, and particularly when there is an open assignment, your agent can lobby for you and make a case. And in that sense it’s good that they know what you’ve written.

But that was a very long answer. Owen, oh, a week or two. How about that?

**John:** That sounds good.

**Craig:** All right. We have Thomas writing in who says, “On the poster for Nocturnal Animals, Tom Ford has two credits. Screenplay by Tom Ford and Directed by Tom Ford. I realize the writer on a movie gets a credit on the poster in the same font size and weight of the director, but did they have to be separate for any reason if it’s the same person? For instance, on There Will Be Blood, the credit is Written for the Screen and Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. Both appear to be screenplay credit.” I’m not really sure what they mean by that.

“Or, does Tom Ford just like seeing his name on things over and over?” John, do you have guesses about this?

**John:** I believe the answer to the question is that if you have the director’s name on the poster in a certain size, you have to have the writer’s name on. You can say Written and Directed by, but the challenge with Tom Ford’s movie is that it is based on preexisting material, so therefore he cannot have Written and Directed by because Written by includes both story and screenplay. So, it has to say Screenplay by Tom Ford. There can be an exception for Written for the Screen. And so we’ve seen it here in Paul Thomas Anderson’s credit. I’ve seen it also for the Coen Brothers.

So, I believe his credit could have read Written for the Screen and Directed by Tom Ford. Is that your understanding?

**Craig:** Not sure about that last one. I have to check on that. Written for the Screen and Directed by may refer to somebody who has gotten screen story and screenplay credit. Or that may just be an alternate way of saying Written and Directed by. I have to check on that. But I think you’re absolutely correct though that when you say Screenplay by Tom Ford and Directed by Tom Ford, this is not Tom Ford’s choice. It’s because he does not qualify for a Written by credit.

Unless maybe Written for the Screen does qualify as screenplay and maybe he could. I don’t know. I have to check into this. The truth is I’m not sure.

**John:** So, I was pulling up this Written for the Screen and Directed by Coen Brothers, which I think was off of True Grit, which was a remake, so therefore they wouldn’t have gotten story credit, but they could have gotten screenplay credit. So that’s my assumption for why that and for Paul Thomas Anderson it made sense. I agree it looks just weird. And so you would love to be able to combine things in ways that are nicer, but it’s here because the WGA is trying to protect writers from getting knocked off the poster.

And the WGA is very particular about what things you can combine. So, you can combine written and directed. You can’t combine written and produced. You’re not allowed to sort of stick those guys together. So I was a writer and a producer on Go, so we asked if it could say Written and Produced by John August. You cannot. Written by has to be its own thing.

**Craig:** Yes, you definitely can’t combine producing credits with that. So, we’ll double check with our intrepid credit staff and I will get the firm answer on this one.

**John:** If you’d like to know more about sort of the politics of credits, not sort of the business of credits, but sort of like why directors and credits are such a complicated thing, I’ll put a link in the show notes to this Vanity Fair article by Margaret Heindenry, where she talks through the history of A Film By or A Blank Film, and sort of how complicated it has been in Hollywood and sort of the arguments between the DGA, representing the directors, and WGA for the writers. And the mess it has become.

So, that’s another sort of in depth look at sort of where we’re at in terms of possessory credits for filmmakers on their movies.

**Craig:** What a dumb – I hate that credit.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s try Sue in the UK’s question. She writes, “I’m reasonably clear about how writing credits for features are worked out, but what if a producer buys a feature spec and then develops it as a TV show instead? What credit would the original writer be entitled to in that scenario? If they’re not involved in writing the TV show, might they get some sort of producer or creative consultant credit instead?”

Craig, what’s your instinct here?

**Craig:** If they develop it as a TV show, and I guess what Sue is saying is that the person writing it for television is somebody different. So, Sue, let’s say they buy Sue’s feature spec, and then they just turn around and hire somebody else and say, “Start writing a pilot that is based on this.” I think that’s kind of what she’s getting at, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, a couple things. First, the question is, because Sue is in the UK, was the spec script written under the WGA? If it wasn’t, then we have an easy answer: it becomes source material. Just like a novel or anything. And in fact I don’t think you’re really guaranteed much of anything at all in this circumstance.

But if it was done under the WGA, and then the next person goes and turns it into a television script, I mean, first of all usually when you sell feature scripts there is a deal that says that you get the first shot at writing a television adaptation. But I don’t know. That’s a tricky one, too.

**John:** So, I do know. And I know that the answer is complicated. So, I don’t want to reveal which projects are involved here, but there are recent shows that have been based on films. Sometimes produced films or sometimes not produced films. And this issue of whether the underlying script was literary material, that it’s an adaptation from that, or that it was actually sort of WGA material, that it was actually script material became a very important issue in arbitration.

So, ultimately arbitration did happen. And there had to be sort of pre-hearings. It becomes quite complicated.

So, I can talk through sort of my own experience. If you look at Charlie’s Angels, so Charlie’s Angels is based on a TV show. But at the time I came onboard to write Charlie’s Angels, it was an adaptation of this underlying piece of property called Charlie’s Angels. And so therefore the original writers were credited as like having created Charlie’s Angels, but they were not credited – they weren’t part of the overall arbitration process. It wasn’t like they had screenplay material in the final thing. Other properties along the way, and more recently, they have been found to be actually part of the chain of title that led up to the script and therefore have gotten some WGA credit, which is a thing that can happen.

**Craig:** You know what I like about these two questions is that they’re the Writers Guild equivalent of Stump the Ump. Have you ever – yeah, why I am asking you if you’ve read a Stump the Ump?

**John:** I know Stump the Ump.

**Craig:** OK. So, I mean, there was like a book, I remember as a kid where they would say, OK, here’s the situation. What would the ump, what would you say if you were the umpire? And they’re really complicated. These are like a couple of those. These are definitely a couple of those. They’re tricky. And they depend. So, sorry, ish questions.

But you know what? I’m going to run both of these by credits staff to get firm answers. How about that? We’ll follow up with those next week.

**John:** You know what? A more sophisticated podcast might have like looked at these questions and actually gone to the staff ahead of time and gotten the right answer. But we’re not that podcast.

**Craig:** [laughs] You say sophisticated and I say boring.

**John:** Ha-ha.

**Craig:** That’s a boring show. This is more exciting. We have a cliffhanger now. Let’s go from England to Canada. Mark in Toronto writes, “I’m looking for an efficient way to make it clear that some pieces of dialogue are basically unimportant. The dialogue is only there so the actors have the words to say, but what they say is intentionally throw away and irrelevant to other things that are happening in the scene. Does it need to be spelled out in the action preceding it? Something like Jill launches into an irrelevant and boring story that no one listens to, followed by her dialogue? Or is there a parenthetical that would work? Something like (irrelevant) or (throwaway)?

So, John, how would you handle that situation?

**John:** I think trying to – the challenge with irrelevant or throwaway, like throwaway I could see as a parenthetical. That means the actor is meant to be throwing those lines away. But that’s not really what you’re telling – that’s an instruction to the actor, but it’s not really an instruction about the scene. I think your better instinct is to set it up in the action ahead of time and set it up in the reactions of the other characters so we can make it clear that it does not actually matter that much what the speaking character is saying.

And that’s a fine line because you have this temptation to sort of underwrite what the speaking character is saying, but you shouldn’t do that. You need to actually think about what can I have her say that is actually not crucial or germane and will let us tune it out so that we can focus what the other characters in the scene are doing. Craig, what’s your instinct?

**Craig:** Well, when I was working with David Zucker and Jim Abrahams, they had a word for this, because in their style of comedy a lot of times people are just rambling in the foreground while funny things are happening in the background. And the rambling is part of the point of it all. And they had this Yiddish word for it called [Flucher] dialogue. And I’m not even sure if that means anything. Somebody will let us know. [Flucher] dialogue means anything. But they would call it [Flucher] dialogue. But you would write it. You would always write it out. It was actually very important because you wanted to make sure that the actor was saying it in such a way that the story was clearly intentional from them, right? They weren’t aware that they were just rambling. Otherwise they’re going to run out of words and then the gig is up, or the jig is up.

So, you would always write that out. What I would do in those circumstances is I would put a parenthetical in and it would usually be (drones) or (droning). And then they would start writing. But it was clear that therefore that wasn’t important. And then the next time they would talk, (still droning, still droning). So I would say droning. That was my word for how to kind of get across that they were performing this essential foreground but unimportant task.

**John:** Absolutely. What I think is good about that parenthetical is make it clear – it’s something for the actor to be aware of. That it’s not just a meta scene kind of thing. Because irrelevant or throwaway is not a playable moment in a weird way, but droning kind of is a playable moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like you’re commenting on its purpose in the movie, and I just want the actor and that character to do what they’re doing. Because the truth is that’s what they’re doing. They’re droning. They’re droning on. And oblivious. The other thing is sometimes I would say (oblivious). Because that was also important that they not notice what was going on in the background, otherwise that dialogue isn’t funny anymore. You know, its function isn’t funny anymore.

So, there you go, Mark. A couple of different ways to handle that.

**John:** Cool. Next up we have Mickey Fortune which is, again, an impossibly wonderful name. I don’t’ know if it’s a real name. But Mickey Fortune writes in, “If I am writing an original pilot as a writing sample, can I use the first episode of a limited series, or should I try to focus on creating a more traditional pilot for a series that would have multiple seasons?”

So, Craig, you are not a person who staffs TV writers. What’s your guess on whether what Mikey Fortune is trying to do is a valid choice?

**Craig:** Well, we certainly talk to plenty of showrunners, and every last one of them tells us that what they want is some kind of original work. They want a pilot of an original series. I’ve never heard any of them say and it has to be intended to be an ongoing series. Not one of them. I think if you wrote the first episode, of what was intended to be a six or ten episode series, well first of all, I’m not sure they would know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And second of all, who cares? Right? They’re not really evaluating you on your ability to generate a premise that could last 12 years. That’s what network executives might be looking for. But they’re just looking for good writers. So I don’t think it would matter at all.

**John:** I don’t think it matters one iota. You have to write the best 30, best 60 pages of scripts you possibly can write that will keep them incredibly intrigued. And if that is for a limited series, fantastic. And if anything, you know, the fact that it could be a little bit ambiguous whether it’s an ongoing series or something short, that’s something you can talk about in the room if you’re so lucky as to meet with this showrunner, this executive. You can talk about what this pilot was and what it might want to be.

Especially in an era where there are so many great limited series happening, there’s nothing to be avoided about having a limited series as your writing sample. People are making those all the time, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** I am making one right now. Steven in Los Angeles writes, “I try to be mindful of representation when describing characters in terms of race. However, in my current project the characters races don’t play any significant role in the plot or interactions with other characters. They could be played by an actor of any color, despite how I’ve described them. Is it better to simply describe the character in colorblind terms? That is to say bright eyes and flirty smile? Or with racial implications, like dark skin and dreadlocks?”

OK, John, how do you approach this?

**John:** So I think the crucial thing to start off here is there’s no sort of perfect answer to this. And you’re always going to be wrestling with two sort of competing instincts. So, if you as the writer say nothing, the reader will likely default to thinking of these characters as white. Unless you’ve done something in the universe of your script to make them reach a little bit beyond white. So if the other characters in your world are diverse, they might be thinking more diverse about this character. But in general you can kind of safely assume that people are going to think these characters are white unless you give them some other reason not to think that they’re white.

The second thing to keep in mind is that every choice is a choice. And so the more specific the choice, the more important the reader is going to think it is that you’ve made that choice. So, they’re going to be asking like why is the boss Jamaican? They’re going to feel like there’s going to be some good reason why that boss is Jamaican. It’s going to pay off in some way. And so you might be sort of over-signaling things you don’t mean to signal.

So, you have these sort of weirdly competing things where you’re trying to be both specific about who your characters are, and also not just go back to default white on all these things. So, as an example, let’s think about a character in your script who is like a paralegal. And do you specify a race for that paralegal who is in like two or three scenes? It’s really hard to say. Craig, where do you come down at defining race for a character who is going to recur but whose race sort of by nature is never going to be a crucial aspect of the plot?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t call it out, but when I don’t call it out I am aware of something which is that I have a certain influence over these things, at least now in my career. So I can say to – when I submit, a lot of times when I submit the script to the producer or the studio, I will say, “By the way, here’s some of the people I was thinking about.” And in that email I will include people who obviously have race. Everybody has a color of some kind, right? White, black, or whatever. And so as I call people out, some of the actors will be what they are. And they will get a general understanding, OK, that there is no default white in this script, at least I didn’t write it as default white.

If I call it out specifically in a script, it’s because that character needs to be that race for a reason. So, for instance, I’m writing a movie for Disney and there’s a character who is largely CGI, so we’re really talking about a voice. And I’ve recommended somebody who is not white. But I don’t say that they’re not white in the script, because they don’t have a race at all. Similarly, there’s another character who is a human being and I’ve sent in a couple of recommendations that are different races, because the race is not important. It’s really about age and gravitas and other things that are just more important than skin color.

So, I think it’s fair for you, if you’re writing – especially if you’re writing a spec script to include here are some general ideas of who I was thinking when I was doing this, and that gives a general sense. Even that, that small thing, will unlock people from default white. They can start to see a more appropriately reflective cast to actual humanity.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s also worth looking for how do you sort of try to figure out race when you don’t have any more information, and what you probably are looking for is description, like as you’re reading through books how you’re trying to figure out race or to what degree are you aware of race as you’re reading things. And some of the things that tend to tip people towards certain choices are character’s names, their first names and their last names. So if you’re giving a character a first name and a last name, or however you’re identifying that character, that’s going to signal something about race. And so you can choose to be explicit by giving somebody a last name like Kim that strongly suggests that they are Korean, but you can also be mindful of like don’t give them a name that makes it sort of very difficult to imagine them as something other than that race.

And so if everybody in your script has a very Swedish or Norwegian name, those characters are unlikely to be cast as anything other than sort of white people. And so be mindful that you’re not putting up weird roadblocks in your script by naming characters certain names. And so it’s a balancing act.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** To the degree you can suggest people, you know, outside of the script for things, then you’re doing your job to sort of help make sure that the world of your movie is diverse and inclusive and representative of the world you’d like to see. But you’re always going to mindful of what you’re putting on the page there, so you’re not over-limiting your choices.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I think sometimes what ends up happening is people start to get nervous. And it’s white people that are getting nervous. Let’s be clear about this. White writers get nervous, not all of them, but some of them about seeming racist or falling into some kind of trap. And so they overthink. And they start to suddenly pepper the script with all these racial descriptions to signify look at me, look at me, I’m not default white. Which is fine, except that you’re actually doing something somewhat artificial at times. Because it doesn’t really matter.

If you have a waitress and her job is to look up and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, you forgot your credit card,” that’s not necessary to call race out there. The script starts to feel almost pedantic in it’s like everybody gets a race.

Race is – you know, my whole attitude towards race is the ideal world is nobody gives a crap, right? And that’s the ideal world where it’s just like it doesn’t matter. Now, it does matter in the world today, so we have to be aware and conscious of it. But you don’t want to be artificial about it. It starts to remove the reader from the experience. I think it’s better to just think broadly in your mind about actors who are not just white or male.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then write and then let people know here are some of the people I was thinking about. It’s just a more artistically honest way of approaching it. I guess that’s how I would put it.

**John:** Yeah. I would say as I’m working on a project I’m trying to do a lot of diverse casting in my head as I’m writing it. So this sounds like what you’re doing for your Disney project as well. You are trying to envision the world of your movie as a diverse place and having lots of different kinds of people in it. And so I’m thinking about certain roles and certain actors in certain roles. And that may naturally sort of tip sort of some of the choices I’m making writing towards that theoretical actor. But you want to make sure that in writing for that theoretical actor, hopefully a whole range of actors could play that. And the degree to which you have influence over the process of actually making the movie, try to make sure that, you know, good choices are being made by everybody else.

**Craig:** There you go. I think that’s the perfect way of putting it.

**John:** Cool. Greg in Los Angeles writes, “As I listen to Episode 285, specifically the discussion about Sea Monkeys’ creator, I couldn’t help but think of the Spirit of St. Louis. It may seem like an odd connection. But when writing that film, Billy Wilder chose to ignore the racist aspects of Charles Lindberg’s life. Obviously when writing a film based on a real life person, we cannot include every aspect of their life. But would you consider it amoral to ignore such a defining characteristic, especially when considering such a crucial part of someone’s personality could to some degree affect the general public’s historical understanding of that specific individual?”

Craig, what do you think? So we talked about this, you know, on that episode where we talked about Sea Monkeys, like do you go into the racist stuff or do you not go into the racist stuff? What’s your thought overall about historical people?

**Craig:** It’s tough. You know, when I was a kid, I read – my dad had that book, The Spirit of St. Louis. So, I’ve never even seen the movie. I’ve just read the book. And it was pretty good. It was a good book. It’s a good story. An impressive guy. And also a Nazi. [laughs] So there’s that.

Yeah, you know, do you ignore these things? Let’s put it this way: it’s getting harder and harder. We live in a time now where no one is going to be turning a blind eye to any of that. If anything, people are looking for it. And I don’t think you can really get away with it anymore. It’s just about the culture. I think it feels too salient. So there are people still that because I guess they’ve been grandfathered in – Roald Dahl notoriously said some terrible things about Jewish people and, you know, we’ve kind of grandfathered him in, you know, function of his time and all that.

Then, you know, Lindberg you could argue function of his time. So, yes, the Founding Fathers were slave owners, but it’s so widely known and understood and people have contextualized it as, OK, yes, so George Washington clearly was a slave owner. And Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner. And they’re on our money. And we have had a long national discussion about that. When you’re introducing new people that people aren’t quite as familiar with, like for instance the Sea Monkey guy, I don’t see how you can avoid it. Because somebody is going to dig it up and go, “Uh, did you not think this was worth mentioning?” You know?

**John:** Yeah. I completely agree with you. So, there is a different responsibility when you’re being the first sort of movie to introduce the world to this person. And especially a person who you could frame as a hero, it’s really problematic if you’re framing this person as a hero and the reality is they did some horrible things. That will come out. There’s no clean way to do that.

But I want to circle back to the Founding Fathers, because I think it is actually a really challenging time to make a movie about the Founding Fathers, because you sort of can’t ignore the slave stuff now. I think 20 years ago if you made a Washington movie, oh, you could sort of like do a little lip service to it. But you sort of can’t get away from that stuff now. And I don’t know that we really have had sort of the thorough national discussion about what slavery was like. I think it continues to sort of – more stuff does continue to get out. We still are grappling with sort of how we’re going to deal with that.

So about two years ago I went to Mt. Vernon and I’d been there as a kid, but going back there as an adult, they completely changed everything around and about it, so they were very much more upfront about sort of here’s Washington’s slaves’ house, and this was what it was like to be a slave on Washington’s plantation.

And so there was still the pretty house, and there’s still the family, and still sort of the normal Washington stuff, but it was all in the context of like these are the slaves and this is sort of what the reality of their life was like. And I have a hard time imagining a movie about Washington right now that would not go back and explore that. So, you look at Hamilton and Hamilton was able to sidestep some of that, but by making the racial aspect of it both a focus and sort of a recontextualization.

**Craig:** Yeah. But even in Hamilton, someone as brilliant Lin-Manuel Miranda has to at some point submit to the demands of narrative. So, he makes a point of Jefferson being a slave owner repeatedly. Jefferson even says, “Sally, be a lamb,” refers to Sally Hemings, famous slave that he had an affair with in the first song that he sings, What Did I Miss? And it is to Jefferson that Hamilton says, you know, talking about the south, “Keep ranting. We know who’s really doing the planting.” And they talk about slavery a lot.

Washington is never mentioned in the context of slavery. And Washington is presented really as a pure hero in that musical. That’s part of the problem with slavery is that it unfortunately unwinds all heroism and all goodness. So, choices have to be made even in a show like Hamilton so that you can root for someone. And it doesn’t start to feel like it’s nihilistic because these are very difficult things. And when you’re creating a narrative, you are forced to simplify. And you could make a good argument that simplification is an inherently amoral act. It’s a very complicated topic, to say the least.

I would love to talk with Lin-Manuel Miranda about that very thing. I’m very curious how he approached that character of Washington given the circumstances of how – because the show is so clearly – goes out of its way, not just through the casting, but through the subject material itself and the lyrics to comment on slavery repeatedly.

So, interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let’s see. We’ve got Jason writing in. “For an aspiring screenwriter, how much weight does the industry give toward professional experience in a given field? Me, Jason, I have 19 years in law enforcement, specifically detective work. If I write something that uses that experience, a crime thriller for example, would my biography and background give me an advantage beyond hopefully a sense of verisimilitude? Basically, do pieces speak for themselves, or is the writer as a person taken into account?”

That’s an excellent question, Jason. John, what is your answer?

**John:** So I think Jason has a leg up in a couple ways. So, he definitely has experience. Hopefully he’ll be able to translate that experience into the words on the page. If he can’t translate that experience into the words on the page, his real life experience is not so helpful. But I think he’s starting from a great place in that he actually does understand what the real life is like. And that should help him in his writing.

Secondly, the degree that he actually gets in the room with people, that’s fascinating. And so I think that sort of experience would help get him staffed on a TV show or help get him a certain assignment to do a police thriller because it’s like, oh, this guy actually knows what he’s talking about in a way that’s incredibly useful.

In general I would say that if you have a lot of experience as like an emergency services dispatcher, that’s going to be less valuable than sort of a cool cinematic experience like being a police detective. Craig, what do you think?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no question in my mind. No question at all. If you have this kind of background, I think people love that in Hollywood. They actually love it too much. So, it is a great calling card. They will immediately grant you a certain legitimacy as a writer. Definitely if you are writing something that draws on that experience, it’s a great calling card. It’s a great way in. If you’re writing something that doesn’t, obviously it’s irrelevant. But there are some writers who were physicians and then turned to writing. Zoanne Clack, for instance, is one. And they tend to work on medical shows. I think David Shore–

**John:** He’s a real lawyer.

**Craig:** Oh, he was a lawyer. Because he worked on House and–

**John:** Oh, maybe he was a doctor.

**Craig:** But, no, he also worked on Law & Order, so he might have been a lawyer. Look, there’s a ton of lawyers. I think there’s so many lawyers that turn to writing that that doesn’t mean anything anymore. But, being a detective in law enforcement I think would absolutely grab people’s attention. So, I would encourage you if you’re interested in writing material based on that, you should. Yeah, I think you use the phrase leg up. Perfect phrase for it.

**John:** David Shore. Prior to becoming a writer, Shore was a partner for a law firm in London, Ontario.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Canadian there. Where he practiced corporate and municipal law. But yeah, people coming from law firms who then write legal thrillers, the John Grishams, that’s a really common experience. For you to go from being a police detective for 17 years to then writing those things, that could be great, but it’s ultimately going to come down are you a really good writer? Because that’s going to be more important than your experience really?

**Craig:** We should get Zoanne Clack on this show. So, Zoanne Clack worked on Grey’s Anatomy and – is that show still on the air? Is that on the air?

**John:** Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air. Yeah.

**Craig:** Maybe she still works on it. Sad, I don’t watch the television. But, she is a real doctor. Real doctor. She actually worked even for the CDC. So that’s obviously a huge boon, certainly if you’re going to be writing a medical show. Can’t beat that. So, yes, Jason, go for it.

**John:** You know who we need to get on the show? Shonda Rhimes. I know she’s been a fantasy guest for a long time, but we know people who know her. I don’t know why we – maybe when I get back to Los Angeles, that will be a goal. We’ll get Shonda on the show.

**Craig:** I feel like we don’t need to know people that know her. We just call her up. Just say hey.

**John:** I went to film school with Shonda Rhimes. I used to hang out with Shonda Rhimes way back in the day.

**Craig:** Then you know you who knows her.

**John:** I know me who knows her. But it’s been years. But it would be great to catch up with Shonda Rhimes.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Let’s go to Sam in Australia who writes, “How do you implement a broad ‘make it funnier’ note? For example, you submit a scene and the reader doesn’t think it’s that funny, so they say, ‘Make it funnier.’ On one hand, it’s your audience, so you should try to appeal to them. On the other, you love it and you think it’s hilarious.” Craig, make it funnier.

**Craig:** No. [laughs] That’s not a note. That’s stupid. That’s a failure. Look, that is an indication that something has gone terribly wrong. Either you’re not as funny as you think you are, or there is a mismatch of sense of humor here. Or mismatch of tone. Now, sometimes comedy technicians can get together and say, OK, here’s why I think this isn’t as funny as it could be, and here’s what I think we would need to do to make it funnier. That’s different. That’s the sort of discussion that – and I call them comedy technicians. I’m one of them. Because if you write comedy, and I’m talking about comedy-comedy, whether you’re on a sitcom or you’re writing like heavy comedy movies, like comedy-comedy-comedy, jokes-jokes, jokes, there is technique involved. There is a lot of machinery involved. It is a science.

And so that’s one thing. But if you’ve got some note-giver, a producer or an executive sitting there going it just needs to be funnier, well, you’re done. There’s no – I don’t know what that means. So, no.

**John:** Well, I do know what it means. I’ve never actually given the note Make it Funnier, but I definitely have thought the note Make it Funnier, where like I see a scene that sort of feels like it’s jokeoid-ish. Like it has the – it feels like it wants to be funny, but it’s not actually funny. And sometimes I can be specific about like this is why it’s actually not working for me. But sometimes it’s just like this just isn’t a funny way to do it. Or like you’re trying to make a joke out of something that’s not really a joke.

And so I will never give the note make it funnier, but I will try to focus on why this is not making me laugh. Now, this note that you’ve gotten, if this is the third time they’ve read the script, that Make it Funnier may be partly because they’re just sick of it. Jokes aren’t funny like the third time through. And so it’s hard for you as the writer to remind them that like, you know what, that is actually funny. It was funny the first couple times they read it. It’s just it’s not new to them anymore. And I’ve encountered that with real life stuff where like a movie that’s been in development for a year and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, it would be great if like this relationship was funnier.” It’s like, “Well, it actually is funny, but you just don’t remember it being funny because you are seeing it for the 15th time. And when you stick actual actors saying those lines, it will be funny.”

And that’s hard for you as the writer to say. But sometimes that is the reality.

**Craig:** Look, comedy is the hardest. The hardest. And the truth is we don’t really know. I mean, even the best – best, best comedy people – are guessing, all the time. That’s what writing comedy is. It’s an endless series of guessing that you are going to put this combination of words and actions together and shoot it and edit it in such a way that people are going to have this involuntary physical reaction and start laughing at it. You’re guessing.

And nobody bats a thousand, right? I mean, that’s why things get cut out all the time. You just want to be batting as high as you can. But I can’t tell you how many times I have been surprised by how strongly people have laughed at something. And then also on the other hand, people just, no. Nope. That doesn’t work at all.

You know, most of the time you get the response you expect. But there are those things on either end. So it’s just very, very difficult. Sam, the truth is you may be really, really funny and this person may just stink.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Or, you may not be that funny and they’re just telling you. Or, something in between. There’s really no way to know. But if you think you love it and you think it’s hilarious. That’s it, right? That’s what you think. And now really what it comes down to is does anyone else agree? And if you can’t find anyone to agree, then there is a mismatch between your sense of humor and the rest of the world, which happens.

**John:** It does happen. This last week I posted a long blog post and someone pointed on Twitter, which was absolutely true, like you’re blogging a lot. Are you avoiding other work? I’m like, yes, I’m avoiding other work. I’m trying to avoid starting on something, and so therefore I’m blogging a lot.

But I blogged about this Twitter joke which I thought was just fantastic and was so clearly destined to become a clam, which is Hold My Beer. So, one of the first times I remember seeing this joke set up on Twitter was around the election. And so this was a Tweet from Brian Pedaci. It says, “BRITAIN: Brexit is the stupidest, most self-destructive act a country could undertake. USA: Hold my beer.”

So the structure of the joke is basically like, you know, speaker A says something outrageous and impossible to top and speaker B says, “Hold my beer,” like I’m going to get in this, I’m going to be able to do this.

And so I wanted to sort of look into why is that funny and why does it work and why does it not work? Because one of the great things about Twitter is you can search for phrases or exact matches of phrases and figure out like how are people trying to use this joke and sort of what are the actual requirements for this to be funny?

So, I say this not to our Australian friend to encourage him to study the structure of comedy jokes and try to figure out why his jokes aren’t working, but there can be sometimes clear reasons why a person’s joke is not working. So, for the Hold my Beer joke to be funny, you have to know who speaker A is. And that’s sort of a fundamental thing in most jokes. Everything about the premise has to be incredibly straight forward for us to be able to understand it. So, you have to understand who speaker A is, the thing that speaker A says has to be reasonable for who speaker A is. Speaker B has to be recognizable. And the Hold my Beer has to relate to something they’ve just done, or something they’re just about to do.

And so almost all jokes, whether they’re like this sort of Twitter joke, or the kinds of things you’re setting up in your scene, there is a fundamental kind of logic behind them. There has to be a very simple believable way to get into it and the payoff, the surprise, has to be related to it in a meaningful way. And so this is a long discussion of like spoiling a really funny Twitter joke that was very clearly destined to become a clam.

**Craig:** I think you just killed it. [laughs]

**John:** As I sort of wrote the post, I recognized that like it was destined to die anyway. So, I just wanted to actually look at it and also a lot of times in a dead joke beautiful things grow in the bones of that dead joke. And so I’ve seen already some really good second wave of those, which is like, “Girlfriend: I’m sick of people barking patriarchal instructions at me. Me: Hold my beer.” That was a Tom Neenan joke.

So people who use the format of the joke to make sort of a meta joke. And that’s the delightful time we live in.

**Craig:** We do. We do. Yeah, that one has been around for a while. I feel like that one has been around for a while. It’s kind of the grandson of Now Watch this Drive, which was based on a George W. Bush moment.

Yeah, but Hold my Beer, it actually goes way back to – it used to be just something that dumb people said before they did something stupid and then hurt themselves.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And now it’s evolved into this thing. But I’m pretty sure you just assassinated it.

**John:** Back in 2014 it really was the setup. It was the frame around a stupid thing that someone was going to do. And so by putting it as the punchline though, I think it’s actually a much better form and a much better form for Twitter. It’s going to die, and so I think I hastened its death, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I also loved the variant forms of it. So like there’s obviously Hold my Drink, or Hold my Juice Box, but I also love Hold my Earrings, because just the idea of a woman taking out her earrings because she’s going to like go into somebody.

**Craig:** That’s different. That’s a whole different thing. Yeah.

**John:** That’s an amazing – because you can see the action when someone is taking out their earrings. It’s just great.

It’s come time for our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is an episode of Girls from this season called American Bitch. And so it is written by Lena Dunham. It is directed by Richard by Shepard. And it’s a two-hander. It just stars Lena and Matthew Rhys, the guy from The Americans. And if you’ve not watched Girls or if you’ve watched a few episodes of Girls and sort of stopped watching it, it’s absolutely worth going back and taking a look at this one episode, because it’s all self-contained. It’s two characters on a set talking. And it is remarkable.

And it deserves all the acclaim it’s gotten. So, I’ll link to an Emily Nussbaum article. She wrote about it in The New Yorker. But I think it’s just actually a great study in how much you can do in a short basically real time piece of two characters in a room talking. So, in this case you already know Hannah’s character, the character Lena Dunham plays. But to set up a character and set up the conflicts to allow the viewer to sort of fill in the details of what must have gotten them to this place, it was just great. It started in the middle of an action. It was just a really well done episode. So I strongly encourage everyone to watch American Bitch from this last season of Girls.

And while you’re falling back in love with Matthew Rhys, you should watch the new season of The Americans because it’s a great show and he’s great on that.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll put that on my list of things that you know I’ll not get to.

**John:** Craig, I would argue that you would very much like this episode. And doing the things you need to do in television these days particularly, it’s so remarkably well done.

**Craig:** What if I hate it? What if I hate it?

**John:** If you hate it, it’s 25 minutes of your life.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** 25 whole minutes.

**Craig:** Do you know what I normally do with those 25 minutes?

**John:** We know exactly what you do with those 25 minutes. The door locks. Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. John. Locks from the outside so you can’t get in.

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That doesn’t make any sense.

**Craig:** No. I don’t have to make sense. I just have to make love. Oh, Sexy Craig, beat it. Well, my One Cool Thing is – this is not at all what you said. It’s totally different. Yes, it’s another app.

You know, I’m on an app kick lately, but my son introduced me to this one. It’s one of these games that you can play with your friends and it’s called Stop. But it’s very, very clever. So the game, Stop, that’s what it’s called. And it’s essentially just like a category game where you spin a wheel, a letter shows up, and then you have five categories. And you just have to fill in a word that fits that category that starts on the letter that you’ve picked.

But, the little brilliant twist to this is that at any point if you’re the first person, so if you won the last round you get to go. You can hit stop. So, if you look at the five categories and you’re like, oh god, I only know one of these. I’m typing in real fast, I’m hitting Stop. That amount of time you spent is the only amount of time the next person gets. But they don’t know how much time they get. So, when you’re going after somebody, part of your equation is like, oh god, how much time do they take? How much time do I have? How should I prioritize my answers?

Very clever little game. Lots of fun. You should play it.

**John:** Very good. It sounds like there’s some game theory involved in the game itself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Cool. Before we wrap up today, I want to thank everybody who submitted their reviews for the listener’s guide, or the Scriptdecks, or whatever we’re going to call this big compendium of user reviews for Scriptnotes. Basically what episodes do you think are the “can’t miss” episodes of Scriptnotes for new listeners.

So, we’ve gotten more than a hundred now of people writing in to review sort of which episodes they think are crucial for listening to. And surprisingly few repeats. I mean, there’s some which I sort of knew were going to be really popular. But like from all seasons from all years, there are things that have been singled out. So thank you very much for everyone who has contributed. Please continue to do so. Whenever we have enough of these, I don’t know what enough is going to be, but we’ll figure out some good form for those. It could be a book. It could be another site. Some other way for people to experience Scriptnotes. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Pow.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Boom.

**John:** If you have an outro, you can send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s where you can also send questions like the ones we answered today on the podcast. On Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We love to answer your short questions on Twitter. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. Also search for Scriptnotes in the iTunes store and leave us a review there. That’s lovely when you do that.

We have an app for both iOS and for Android. That lets you get to all the back episodes, all nearly 300 episodes of the show, including some bonus episodes. To subscribe, you go to Scriptnotes.net. And it’s $2 a month and is a bargain at that price.

**Craig:** Bargain.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this week’s episode and all previous episodes at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find the transcripts. They go up about four days afterwards. And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Let’s do this again next week.

**John:** We will.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** End of Recording.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The Vanity Credit Turns 100](http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/03/vanity-credit-a-film-by)
* [“The Cunning “American Bitch” Episode of “Girls””](http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-cunning-american-bitch-episode-of-girls)
* [Stop](http://www.stop-fanatee.com/)
* [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 Matthew Chilelli ([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_292.mp3).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 291 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at listener’s scenes and offer our honest critique. We’ll also be discussing techniques for letting the audience know your characters’ names. Plus, Craig has been stockpiling his umbrage for weeks and may have found a worthy target. So, hold on.

Before we get to the umbrage, Craig, we have exciting news.

**Craig:** Yes we do. So, last year fans of the podcast might recall that we did a live show here in Los Angeles to benefit the charity Hollywood Heart, which is a wonderful charity. And our good friend, John Gatins, is the connection to that. I believe he is on their board of directors. Well, we’re doing it again. This year, in fact, it’s coming up fast. It’s going to be March 28. Now, do we have tickets on sale yet? As of this minute of recording, no. But very, very soon.

You will want to get them. Obviously, John, you will not be with us because you’re in France.

**John:** You have a pretty amazing replacement guest host for this event.

**Craig:** We do. So we have Dana Fox, who is the best version of you I can imagine. So, screenwriter, television writer, director Dana Fox.

**John:** Former John August assistant, Dana Fox.

**Craig:** That’s right. Basically everybody that’s successful in Hollywood is a former John August assistant as far as I could tell. But for all of you out there in film fandom, you might want to check this out because we have a number of guests, but perhaps our featured guest we’ll say is Rian Johnson, director of the upcoming Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson. Also, the screenwriter of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. You’re going to want to see Rian Johnson, aren’t you?

He’s probably going to tell everybody in the audience what happens.

**John:** Probably so. Assuming like small nondisclosure agreements and it’s the only chance you’ll ever get to know what happens in Star Wars ahead of time. By the way, that’s not his only credit. He’s directed many other incredibly great movies and episodes of television. But, the thing we may want to talk about this time is how you go from directing those amazing movies to one of the biggest movies of all time.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** So, I cannot contain my jealousy that you will get to talk with him then live. I will be asleep while you’re recording it, but I will send through some sort of prerecorded welcome to all of you people. Or, I’ll give Dana special instructions for how to really get under your skin.

**Craig:** Dana can’t get under my skin. It’s just – I love her too much. Here’s the problem. You’re going to tell her to do things that if you had done them would get under my skin. And when she does them, they’re just going to be adorable.

**John:** Yeah. She’s a pretty wonderful person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, if you are interested in coming to this live show, there will be a link in the show notes assuming that the tickets are actually available by the time the episode posts. If not, keep following us on Twitter because it’s going to be a popular show. I suspect it will sell out, so you will want to–

**Craig:** It will.

**John:** Follow us to make sure that you will get a chance to see Rian Johnson and Dana Fox. And a third guest to be announced soon.

**Craig:** And it will be a third guest of high caliber. We don’t just, I mean, you know what we do. Last year we had the Game of Thrones guys. We had Jason Bateman. It was a great show.

**John:** It was a good show.

**Craig:** Yeah. This time we have Rian Johnson, Dana Fox. It’s only – frankly, it can only get better from there. So I presume Steven Spielberg. I haven’t checked with Steven Spielberg. Maybe I should check with him.

**John:** You know who it should be? It should be Stephen King.

**Craig:** Ooh, I would love Stephen King.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t think he’s going to fly out to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But Stephen King would be great.

**Craig:** But we have Rian Johnson.

**John:** And Rian Johnson is fantastic. So, if you are curious about what Rian Johnson might say, you may want to check out the previous episode that Rian Johnson was on. A live show in Austin where he was one of our featured guests. That is a segue to my next topic, which was the Scriptnotes Index. So, last week we talked about this idea of, you know, there’s all these back episodes and people are coming to the show and they are staring at 300 episodes and trying to figure out like where do I even start.

So I proposed, and Craig stole the idea and co-proposed, doing an index for the show in which our listeners who have listened to every episode could point new listeners to. These are the episodes you don’t want to miss. And so this might become a book. This might become a website. We’ll figure out the best way to get this out in the world. But, so far 47 of you – this is only three days after we announced it – have written in with recommendations on the can’t miss episodes.

So, if you would like to add your own recommendations for which episodes listeners need to make sure they hit, it is johnaugust.com/guide. And that’s where you can leave a review for individual episodes. Let people know why they should listen to it and who it is for.

**Craig:** I think we should call it the Scriptdecks. I like Scriptdecks.

**John:** Scriptdecks?

**Craig:** Scriptdecks.

**John:** All right. We’ll workshop that. So, it’s definitely a contender. We’ll put it on the whiteboard.

**Craig:** I don’t like the sound of that.

**John:** So, at least we can always fall back to Scriptdecks.

**Craig:** You know what you did? You just Kellyanne’d me. You dodged. You bobbed.

**John:** A little bit. But people should know that Scriptnotes is actually Craig Mazin’s title for the show. He was the one who came up with the title Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** That’s right. But I’m going to be honest here. I might have Camel cased it if the typography had been up to me. So, phew. Bullet dodged.

**John:** But it wasn’t.

**Craig:** Yeah, it sure wasn’t.

**John:** Bullet dodged. But one bullet will not be dodged which is the next bullet–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Craig has put in the chamber and he’s been ready for this all week. So, this is a person who runs another website. Craig and I are not really bloggers so much anymore. I still have my site. Craig sort of let his site disappear. But this is a site called ScriptShadow. And it is run by a person names Carson Reeves, who I’ve never met, but I sort of encountered online various times. And a person who has very strong opinions about screenwriting, which I generally do not share.

But this was a breaking point for Craig. So, Craig, for our listeners at home or people who are driving who can’t actually pull up the blog post, could you just read aloud the moments that really set you off?

**Craig:** Sure. So, this is from ScriptShadow who puts himself forth as an expert on screenwriting and screenplays and how to become a professional screenwriter, even though he is none of those things. And here’s what he wrote recently. “Moonlight and Manchester By The Sea won the Adapted and Original screenplay awards respectively. And they’re both terrible screenplays. There isn’t even a discussion to be had on the matter. They’re awful screenplays that display no skill in the screenwriting department whatsoever.

“How can I say such a thing? One of the easiest ways to judge a screenplay is to ask, “Can someone else have written this?” Is the skill on display at a level where other writers could’ve written something similar? I can say without hesitation that there isn’t one writer of the 10,000 members in the WGA who couldn’t have written either of these scripts.”

**John:** Wow. So, first off, welcome King George to the podcast. So, he seems to be claiming that all 10,000 members of the WGA could have written Moonlight. They could have written the story of a gay black kid growing up in Florida over three different periods of his life. Because that’s, you know, it’s a universal experience and we’ve all had that. We all could have written that script.

**Craig:** How many times have we seen that movie? He’s right. I mean, it’s like the staple of Disney sitcoms. And not only could any of the 10,000 members of the WGA, which I wonder if he’s even one of them, not only could any of them have written it, they would have all written that way.

You know that scene where he’s cradling him in the water. That obviously would have written that way with those words in that sense. And similarly Manchester By The Sea just feels so obvious in all ways that, you know, it’s kind of weird. Like why haven’t all of these people written these screenplays? Seems kind of crazy, right? Since we all could have, why didn’t we?

**John:** Absolutely. And it’s also why are these two films so acclaimed when they clearly are just coasting on good cinematography and good performances. Because what ScriptShadow is teaching us is that the screenplays themselves really have no bearing on why the films turned out well. Which seems ironic considering it’s a site about screenwriting and the importance of screenwriting. So–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s all a conundrum really why these films turned out so well despite not being good screenplays.

**Craig:** But here’s the strangest thing of all. You and I are having a discussion on this matter. And ScriptShadow has told us quite clearly there isn’t even a discussion to be had on the matter. Because ScriptShadow, as far as I can tell, he is either an idiot or he is suffering from delusions of grandeur. To say that two screenplays that have won these awards are both terrible screenplays is something you’re allowed to say to a friend if you choose. Your opinion is that they’re terrible screenplays. I understand.

It’s usually not the case. Even when movies win an Oscar award and I think, oh, I did not like that movie. It’s not that they’re terrible. It’s just that I didn’t love it that much. And so it goes. But what this idiot is saying, and he’s saying publicly so that we can all see him be an idiot, is that they are objectively terrible screenplays, both of them, that display, “No skill in the screenwriting department whatsoever.”

And I must ask, of course, what makes him the arbiter of skill in the screenwriting department? By the way, I’ve seen something that ScriptShadow has written. I’ve seen an actual piece of work that he wrote. Did you know that?

**John:** I think I do remember this. This was years ago, but yeah, I do remember this.

**Craig:** Yeah. He sucks. I mean, like sucks to the level where he would not be picked for our Three Page Challenge. That Godwin would just go, oh yeah, this goes in the slush pile. He’s terrible. So when he asks rhetorically, “How can I say such a thing,” the actual proper response is, “Idiot, delusions of grandeur.”

**John:** All right. Enough ScriptShadow. Let’s get on to our real business today. This was a question that came to us on Twitter. Erin McGinley wrote in to ask, “Can you do a bit on the ways to introduce character names? How do we escape, what’s your name, or hi I’m Sally?” Erin, that is a great question.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** I don’t think we’ve ever done an episode about this. If we had Scriptdecks we could look that up. But I don’t think we’ve really talked about this as a topic.

**Craig:** It’s catching, isn’t it, by the way? [laughs]

**John:** I know. I’ll say it three more times and suddenly it will feel like, oh, well of course that’s the right answer.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of those things that plagues us all, Erin, so thank you for asking this question. And certainly we all know the worst way. Actually, you haven’t even noticed the worst way, because you’re saying how do we escape, “What’s your name? Hi, I’m Sally.” Sometimes, “What’s your name? I am Sally,” works – depending on context.

The worst way is just when two people who know each other are taking like John and I are talking right now. And I’m like, well, you know John, out of nowhere I just mention your name. Scott Frank always blows up about this. He’s like how many times do we use each other’s names when we’re talking to each other? Zero percent of the time. We both know each other’s name. That’s always the worst.

**John:** It is the worst. So, but I think the reason why we try to do it, and sometimes do it awkwardly is that the audience really does want to know characters’ names. I think there’s an inherent story sense that as we’re watching something, if a character feels important, we want to know their names. And if we are not told their names pretty early on in the story, we will just assign them our own name. So we will assign like, oh, Albino guy, or French Idris Elba. Like we’ll assign something that sort of takes the place of name just for simple mental categorization.

So we are always listening for a name. And so let’s talk through some ways to get that name out there. The horrible way tends to be sort of like two people having a conversation and awkwardly using their name. But if you have more people in a conversation, then there could be a natural way of like, you know, you’re distinguishing who you’re actually talking to, or you’re calling to somebody. That can sometimes do it, as long it doesn’t feel forced.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You can sometimes show it. So, there’s ways sometimes you will show a name on a desk, on a door, on some other bit of business that will naturally do it. That can feel really forced as well, but it’s sometimes a way to get that name out there. Craig, other thoughts?

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there are moments where your name gets called for things. You’re waiting for something at an office and somebody calls your name. There’s pieces of paper that might have your name on them that you’re filling out a form and then we have phone calls. Sometimes the best way to learn someone’s name is through two people that aren’t that person. So, we see – a very typical thing in the beginning of a movie is we see our main character and she’s working at her desk. And then we see two other people who are across the hallway and they’re like, “What’s with Virginia this morning? I don’t know. She’s…”

So, sometimes that happens, because it is natural at that point. You wouldn’t say what’s with – if there’s more than one person, you wouldn’t say what’s with her. The person would say what’s with which one, which who.

So there are ways to do this. Here’s the thing, Erin, and all the rest of you. It’s all annoying. It’s all annoying. I hate it. It’s one of my least liked – well, because it’s hated – parts of screenwriting because it always feels artificial. The truth is I have no problem writing a script where nobody ever knows somebody’s name. In fact, I do it all the time. And here’s the crazy part. Usually people don’t notice. Every now and then, somebody towards the end will go, “Is anyone going to ever say that person’s name?” And I’ll just no. They won’t. You know what? They’ll just know who they are, because they’ll see them.

But, you know, everybody seems to want to try and get the name in. I hate it. I hate it.

**John:** I completely agree that there’s characters in scripts who you don’t ever need to know their name, and just whatever their category of that they do is fine. But I think she’s talking about a principal character in your film. If we don’t their name, and sometimes it is awkward to get that name out there. And so you can imagine scenarios in which a person is alone for a lot of the movie, if you didn’t get that name out there pretty early on it’s going to be really challenging.

If you can have a character speak their own name, it’s simple, but it has to be sort of natural to the world of the story. So it’s like they’re introducing themselves or like they’re signing in at a reception desk. They are on a phone call. Like, hi my name is blah from this. So, Big Fish does that. My name is Will Bloom calling from the AP. That’s the kind of thing where people do actually use their name.

So, I would also just recommend as you go through life over this next week, this is sort of everybody who is listening to this, listen for times where people say their names or you learn somebody’s name in a natural way. And just take note of that. And maybe you’ll find other good ways to get that name out there in your script.

**Craig:** There’s also games you can play with it. In Identity Thief I had Melissa McCarthy tell her name to Jason Bateman, and then we hear somebody else yell her actually name, so we get that she lied when she was telling him her name. So you can play around with it.

You know, I’ve never actually written a scene, I just thought of this, but I assume that people have introduced names in movies by having somebody order a coffee at Starbucks. Because they always ask you your name.

**John:** I’ve absolutely seen that. So, it feels kind of TV, but–

**Craig:** Right. It feels TV because it’s such a boring scene to put in a movie. Somebody ordering coffee.

**John:** Yeah. But, it’s a way to do it. It gets it out there in the world.

**Craig:** I hate the name thing. I really do.

**John:** I hate the name thing, too. [Unintelligible] wrote a whole movie about it, but yes, I hate it, too.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our big marquee feature today, the Three Page Challenge. So for people who are new to the podcast, every couple weeks we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script. It can be a screenplay. It can be a pilot. It can be anything that looks like a movie or TV show. And we will read it. And Godwin sorts through all the entries. He picks the three that he thinks are most interesting for us to talk about. So, what we’re about to share with you are people who wrote in to say like, hey, please critique this.

So, unlike ScriptShadow, who is just critiquing other people’s stuff, we are inviting people to send stuff in. And so people have very nicely agreed to let us talk about these things. We will have the PDFs for all of these entries linked in the show notes for the show, so you can read along with us. But, because you might be in a car or someplace where you can’t actually open the PDF, we do a summary before we start.

And the summaries are not always our most favorite part of this. So, a few episodes ago we tried having a guest reader, and so we had Jeff Probst come on. He did a fantastic job.

**Craig:** He did.

**John:** Doing the summaries. And we thought we might try to top that. We might try to go a little bit more. So, we reached out to Elizabeth Banks to ask if she would be willing to read the summaries for this week’s Three Page Challenge. And she said no. But eventually we convinced her, and she said yes.

So, this is Elizabeth Banks. She’s an actress, producer, director from Pitch Perfect, The Hunger Games, Wet Hot American Summer. She’s Rita Repulsa in the new Power Rangers movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she’s the real deal.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you what else.

**John:** What?

**Craig:** She’s fantastic. You’ve worked with Elizabeth, right, at some point or another?

**John:** I never have. I only know her socially.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Very, very smart person. Sometimes I have to be like, I don’t want to use the word alpha, but in working arrangements I feel like I’m driving the bus somehow, just because sometimes as a screenwriter that’s what you have to do, especially if you’re coming in and you’re rewriting stuff. She so drives the bus. She’s the bus driver. So, I sit next to her on the bus, but she’s driving the bus. She is in charge. I love that lady. Excellent person.

**John:** I played Catan against Elizabeth and her husband. And, man, they’re hardcore Catan players. They don’t mess around.

**Craig:** Again, yeah, and Max, who is a great guy. They’re bus drivers. Just there are people in life – I feel like there are bus drivers, there are people who sit next to the bus drivers. And then there are passengers. They’re bus drivers.

**John:** They are bus drivers. So, we can ask Elizabeth Banks, will you please introduce our first entry in the Three Page Challenge?

Elizabeth Banks: Carne by John Lambert. In a sterile room we see a pair of gloved hands turn over a slab of red meat for inspection. The meat is then dropped onto the sheet of brown butcher’s paper. A thump from outside. The hands freeze for a moment, then hastily wrap and tape up the meat. A pair of feet rushes down the hallway and out a set of steel doors. The package is tossed into an igloo cooler in the passenger seat of a Chevy van.

The van drives off through the streets of New Orleans. The unseen driver of the van meets up with Levi Cheval, a prick in his 30s. Levi asks the driver what he brought. Flanks and tenderloin. Levi asks about the ribs, insisting that he always wants the ribs.

The driver drops the package into Levi’s trunk. Levi hands over a thick envelope. The van drives off revealing a decal that reads Cheval Funeral Home.

Later, a butcher’s cleaver cuts into a slab of meat. We read the embroidery on the chef’s coat. Levi Cheval, Chef de Cuisine.

**Craig:** So, we’ve got ourselves a nice little short film here to open up a pilot and it certainly is going to tell us the topic of the show which is that a chef is using human body parts in his restaurant. This is kind of a thing now. There’s that, what is called Santa Clara Diet?

**John:** Yeah, Santa Clarita Diet.

**Craig:** Santa Clarita.

**John:** Drew Barrymore and Tim Olyphant.

**Craig:** Right. People are eating people now. It’s en vogue.

So, let’s just talk about the – there’s a broad issue, and then I’ll get a little more granule. The broad issue is that we are stuck, I think, in a situation where we can’t see the driver’s face, because we’re not allowed to for some reason. I assume it’s important later. And it’s just too long. There’s two pages and it’s a two-page conversation. That’s a two-minute-ish conversation, ish, where we’re not allowed to see one person’s face. And it’s really awkward and uncomfortable that we’re not seeing his face.

You can get away with that for a page, I think, maximum. A page. Two pages and I’m like, why is the camera just avoiding this? And now I’m not watching the scene. Now I’m like show the freaking face already, because there’s no reason for me to not see his face. If there were a reason. If I had a better sense of why I was not allowed to see this person’s face, because he was an important person, or a dangerous person. But he’s not. He’s actually submissive to Levi. He’s clearly just a work-a-day guy. He’s a little scared of him.

And so I really don’t understand why I can’t see his face and it’s really annoying. And the second issue is that we – we kind of are a little ahead of the reveal, I think.

**John:** Yeah. I think we’re way ahead. And this is really my fundamental issue with it is like by the third paragraph I knew what this was. By the time I see the meat on the butcher paper and it’s called Carne, I was like this is going to be about cannibalism. And so that’s my first thought. And then everything is just backing it up. And so I feel like I’m 2.5 pages ahead of where this three pages is. And that’s a real challenge.

And so my proposal, and this is just John take this for what you want, but I think you cut out that first scene. Cut out the meat. Don’t show the meat. And get to the delivery, get to something else first. And maybe then open up the package and see that there’s meat inside there, because I was just way ahead of you for far too long.

**Craig:** Yeah. I understand that on page three when Levi says, “How is he?” And the driver says, “Same as always,” clearly he knows somebody that the driver knows. So they have someone in common. And then when the van drives away it says Cheval Funeral Home. OK. And then the next thing we see is that his name is Levi Cheval. This is actually kind of bumming me out. It’s one reveal too many.

I wouldn’t mind the reveal that Levi Cheval, the cannibal chef, is buying meat from a funeral home. But then I would make the second reveal – I would hold it back. Because that’s another thing. He’s related to, I guess his dad or something who owns the funeral home.

Frankly, for something like this, I would do this backwards from the way that you have done it, John. I would start in a restaurant. And I would start with somebody eating and it would be delicious. And the chef comes out and compliments, “It’s the most amazing. It’s just fantastic. Thank you. We go through remarkable lengths to procure the finest.” And then he goes back in the kitchen and someone is like, “Oh, the meat guy is here.” And he goes, “Oh, great, great, great.” And he comes outside and it’s just business as usual. “What’s going on man? You’re supposed to deliver me blah-blah-blah and blah-blah-blah.” “Sorry, I got held up. We couldn’t get that, but we have these.” And he’s like, “All right, I’ll take them. Thanks.”

And the guy drives away and then we see funeral home as the reveal. I would just do this backwards. And I would also make it so much more mundane because it helps inform the audience that this is not new. This has been going on for a while, you know. I always feel like criminals who are stuck in a kind of recidivist, repetitive criminal act are as work-a-day about it as anybody at any job.

This felt very cloak and dagger and unnecessarily so.

**John:** I agree. You know which movie had really great work-a-day criminals in it? Moonlight. You know, good street drug dealers. Felt like it was their ordinary business.

**Craig:** Anyone could have written.

**John:** Anyone.

**Craig:** Why didn’t ScriptShadow write that script? If only just to get the notoriety of having an Oscar. Because what he’s saying is he could have written it. So, he should have really written it.

**John:** He really should have written it.

**Craig:** That’s just silly. That’s just business silly.

**John:** It is business silly. So, let’s go back to John’s script here. And I think it’s an opportunity to look at some of what he’s doing on the page and highlight some things that are working really well and some things that could work better. If you are using dashes at the end of a line, so it’s an abbreviated line, it’s two dashes, not one dash. In another Three Page Challenge we’re going to look at, it really is just – I know this sounds horrible as a person who comes from typography, but it really is. It’s two dashes. It’s not an em dash. There’s no such thing as an em dash in Courier really. So it’s just two dashes.

So, there’s a couple times here where I’m seeing a single dash, which just doesn’t cut it for me.

Midway down the first page, INT. HALLWAY. Day? Night? It’s just normal to put the day there. And I know it seems weird because we’re not necessarily seeing the sunlight, but you put the day. It’s just standard.

I liked the sort of two-thirds the way down the page, as we get to the asphalt parking lot, it sort of feels like quick cuts. “IGLOO COOLER ON PASSENGER SEAT Opened. Fresh ice. The package is tossed in. Cooler shut. THE GRILL OF A WHITE CHEVY VAN SHAKES as the engine ROARS to life.” Great. I get the feeling of movement. So nicely done there.

With “VARIOUS SHOTS. STREETS OF NEW ORLEANS. DAY.” That’s an Exterior. Give us an EXT. It’s fine to say various, but again we’re outside. Just let us know we’re outside.

At the bottom of page one, this is the paragraph as written. “It pulls into an empty parking lot, in a seemingly empty industrial district. Empty, aside from a murdered-out Cadillac coupe in the corner, which it parks next to.” Too many empties. Kind of an awkward phrasing there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A simpler version of this might be, “It pulls into a parking lot in an industrial complex. Empty, aside from a murdered-out Cadillac coupe.” Great. So just simplify.

**Craig:** Simplify is a good thing. I like to use capitals the way that John does. I like to call out things with all caps. And I don’t necessarily do it in any rigorous way. Sometimes I call out things. Sometimes I call out actions. Sometimes I call out signs. So all the things he’s doing here.

When you do call out things with capitals, I think that’s when it becomes helpful for the reader if you bold your slug lines. Because the capitals start to mush. And even though slug lines have an extra line break in front of them, the bolding of the slug lines really helps you kind of focus. And it helps make the other capitals pop more. Otherwise you start to feel like you’re taking a slight moment to determine, especially if you’re not going to put a traditional EXT/INT in front of something. Is this – am I being told a location here, or is this something that’s actually happening in the scene? And any tiny little pause is bad for the read.

John puts periods at the end of his slug lines. They’re not necessary. I don’t do that. I don’t think many people do. But none of these are fatal sins.

**John:** No, not at all. I will say that there’s some terminology which is a little blurry here, and it’s just the nature of screenwriting. So, I will apologize on behalf of screenwriting for it. Slug line can mean the INT/EXT, but you can also call that a scene heading. And scene heading is a little bit clearer, that you’re really talking about the start of a scene.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Slug lines can also refer to what Craig is talking about, which are these sort of intermediary slug lines. They’re in the middle of a scene and they give you a sense that you’re looking a different way or it’s a change in the action. They’re incredibly useful. It’s just the terms are sort of blurry over the two of them.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sorry. So I mean bold the scene headings is what I mean.

**John:** Yeah. And I agree on bold scene headings. I was a late convert to it, but I think it’s really helpful. Also I stopped doing the extra return before scene headings. If you’re bolding them you can get away with the single–

**Craig:** Ooh. I keep those in there. I keep those in there. I know, listen, I know that it’s literally six pages on top of my script by the time it’s all done, but I don’t know. I agree that there’s a lot of really good evocative stuff here. In a sense, sometimes it goes a little too far. So I love things like, “The sound of latex snapping against skin.” But then we have “INT. HALLWAY. The sound of quick feet echo, growing louder, as we peer down a long and empty hallway of white sterility, save for the red exit sign and steel double doors at the end.” That’s too much.

**John:** Too much.

**Craig:** Too much. Also quick feet echo, that’s a rough three words. The sound of quick feet echoing is probably what I would put there. That’s where I would want the [unintelligible], because “quick feet echo,” it’s just there’s two nouns in a row there that I struggle with.

**John:** The reason why we say it’s overwritten is because you’re giving us three sentences for like it’s a hallway. There’s nothing actually that’s going to happen here, so don’t give us this marathon sentence that it’s just, you know, a hallway.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t mind things being described to paint the picture so I can see it, as long as they’re purposeful. So, the red exit sign and steel double doors at the end, it’s really not that important, especially because two steel doors swing open in the very next bit.

This is the epitome of over-writing. “Two steel doors swing open and the nervously cadenced legs hurry past us.” Well, if you’re going to do that, you need to hyphenate nervously-cadenced, but more importantly, no. Right? That’s just crazy. Two steel doors swing open. Someone hurries past us. Or we see legs hurrying by.

This is starting to get purple, right? When we say purple we mean ornate, overwritten, Rococo, pick your – baroque, pick your adjective here.

**John:** Pick the most baroque word for Baroque, and that will be the right one.

**Craig:** And so there’s little too much going on here. And none of it is impactful. What’s so much more impactful is the “THE GRILL OF A WHITE CHEVY VAN SHAKES as the engine ROARS to life.” I get it.

**John:** Got it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I want to talk about something I really liked on page two. So Levi is having the conversation with the driver:

Fiiine. Whadya’ got.

Just flanks and tenderloin.

No ribs?

Too skinny. You would’ve passed.

We’ve gone over this. Allow me to pass.

Okay. You would’ve passed though.

That feels like sort of the ordinary give and take. That feels like the flow and it tells me a little bit about their relationship. It tells me about Levi in terms of like he’s just kind of being a prick there about this. But that he’s looking for a specific thing. So that got me clicking back into what was actually happening here.

There definitely are moments here I can sort of see the shape of what this wants to be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This is supposed to be a pilot, and so I am curious sort of like what the series out of this would be. But I’m not sure just based on these three pages if I would have made it to the end of the first act, honestly.

**Craig:** I think it’s the wrong opening. I think that there is a – I think it’s backwards, personally. I think there is a better opening and a better reveal. But, there is promise. I mean, I think that John has a very good sense of sound and sight. Maybe just needs to pull back a little bit on how much he gets into it. By the way, that one line that you read, I really liked it once I understood it. “We’ve gone over this. Allow me to pass.” That’s where you actually want an underline or an italic on the word me. Because the phrase “allow me to pass” is actually an unnatural enunciation of that phrase. Normally it’s allow me to pass, as in let me go by. So, it’s, “We’ve gone over this. Allow me to pass,” and I’m like allow you to pass what?

Allow you to pass?

**John:** Oh, yeah, exactly right.

**Craig:** Yeah, so allow me to pass.

**John:** Underlining either allow or me would have made it clear that that’s what you’re trying to say.

**Craig:** Right. Right. Right. So you needed a little bit of emphasis on that one. But, by the way, I swear to god, the biggest issue here is you’re forcing the camera away from somebody for two pages. That is nearly impossible to do well.

**John:** That’s really challenging. All right. I think it is time for Elizabeth Banks to come back and talk us through our next summary for our Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Elizabeth, take it away.

Elizabeth: Cult of Personality by Nathaniel Nauert. High in the hills of Topanga Canyon news helicopters and law enforcement agencies surround an old ranch home. They’re eating KFC and drawing analogies to bin Laden. Inside, 30 cult members sit in a circle holding hands. These are the Valentines. They chant in unison while their leader, Simon Ducis, stands alone. Simon decides it’s time to face the music. Getting ready to give himself up. Stephanie, one of Simon’s disciples, throws herself at his feet, unwilling to let him go. Simon reassures her that his physical absence changes nothing. If they destroy the school where you learned, do you lose the knowledge you gained there?

He then instructs another Valentine, Beth, to take everyone to Andromeda if the plan fails. Simon emerges from the house with his hands raised. The police captain tells Simon to lower himself to the ground. But instead, Simon begins to levitate. And that’s the bottom of page three.

**John:** Nathaniel, I really dug your three pages. And there’s some really exciting stuff here. I have some questions about certain things, but I can see what you’re doing here. I would definitely have kept reading this script if this had been dropped on my desk.

First off, I love cults, so like I’m always a sucker for cults. But I really liked the tone you were able to find here. Because it’s funny without trying too hard to be funny. And that’s a challenging thing. It would be so easy to sort of go for the easy laugh, and you didn’t do that. And at the bottom of page three we have a mystical moment that seems impossible. Well, you sort of sunk your hook there and I thought that was really effective.

We’re going to talk about some things that aren’t working here, but that was my sort of bigger headline is like, Nathaniel, I think you did something really cool here.

**Craig:** Yeah. If I get to the bottom of page three and he’s not levitating, I don’t love these. But he is levitating, so now I’m kind of loving them. I mean, I was a little more wobbly on the tone than you, only because some of the comedy felt weirdly broad for what was happening. Or what he was saying. So I wasn’t quite sure – like at times I thought is this sort of spoofy? It’s really when he was dragging Stephanie around with his leg. That felt Naked Gun-ish to me.

**John:** Yeah, but I could also picture it, though, because I could picture the version where like it’s sincere and yet it’s also absurd at the same time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And some of our great sort of HBO comedies are able to do that thing where like it’s both believable that that character in that moment would do it, and it’s also just absurd because you shouldn’t be dragged around like a child by a parent.

**Craig:** The tonal break in a weird way wasn’t that she was doing that. It was that he calmly walked around the room and then we revealed that he’s been dragging her. The reveal is a physical comedy broad way of doing that.

**John:** Yeah. Agreed.

**Craig:** To say like, oh, she’s so – that was the only tonal break where I was like, OK, am I in spoof territory or not? But then we do have that last line, where he starts levitating and Jason says, the cop says, “Hold still Simon. That’s an order. You hear me? Quit floating?” So I–

**John:** I’m a little nervous about that line, too.

**Craig:** Sounds like Naked Gun to me. Is this Naked Gun cult or is it – I’m not sure about the tone.

**John:** Yeah. I like that it was a little ambiguous about the tone, honestly. I felt like it could go both ways. So like the cultists are called the Valentines. A bit that I was confused about it says 30 people. But I felt like Nathanial meant 30 women, because I don’t see any men actually singled out or mentioned. And it felt more like a sex cult kind of place because there’s a waterbed and a Jacuzzi.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So my guess is that it’s a woman-dominated cult, or like he’s the only guy left in there. A major problem, we talked about characters speaking their names. The captain should be named Dixon, not Jason. And so all of his character cues, his character names above his dialogue, it gets confusing because Jason and Simon are just too close together.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** So, you set up a character who feels like he should be named Dixon. Just call him Dixon throughout this whole thing. Even Dixon and Simon are a little bit close considering they’re the only two men speaking. So if you have another name for one of these two characters, I would go for that.

I was singling out in the last script about dashes at the end of lines. Here Nathaniel is using em dashes. He’s using the very long dashes. And in typography you use those all the time. You just don’t use them in screenplays because screenplays are 12-point Courier. And they look weird. They look sort of strangely out of place. So I would just go back, and I know it’s going to kill you, but just go back and do your two normal hyphens. It will feel much more natural on the page.

**Craig:** So really other than the things I’ve mentioned here, the only other thing that I felt needed looking at was the – and again, this implies a spoof sort of tone – is the first paragraph says, “High in the hills of Topanga Canyon, California, sits a LARGE RANCH HOME, surrounded by lush gardens and grazing livestock. It’s pastoral, idyllic, and tranquil as F.” It doesn’t say F, but I’m trying to keep it clean here.

OK, fine. So, then the next paragraph says, “WHUP, WHUP, WHUP. Maybe not. NEWS HELICOPTERS jockey for position in the sky above the quiet sanctuary. Surrounding the compound, it’s mayhem: LAPD, FBI, ATF, and KFC (delivering breakfast)” – see, it’s a spoof – “crouch in silence, eyes and guns locked on the old wooden structure.”

So, it can’t be pastoral, idyllic, and also mayhem with news helicopters. It’s one or the other. That’s a joke that only works when you’re reading the screenplay, but it’s not really a joke that works on screen, so I would not do that.

**John:** Yep. I agree with you there. My other notes about stuff I’m seeing on the page is top of page two, Simon says, “He’s right. Dixon’s right. It’s time for me to face the music.” Well, first off, he’s calling him Dixon, so we should call that character Dixon throughout. But why is he saying this to himself? He’s not saying it to anybody around him. And it just felt really strange. It’s a weird moment at the top of page two so he says this seemingly to himself, but everybody hears them, and then they respond to him. I think you’re going to be in a much better place for him to sort of reach the decision and then for everyone to react. So for him to actually just announce it to the group or somehow otherwise expose what his next step is. It just felt too odd that he’s just talking to himself at that moment.

The same kind of thing happens on page three, though. So, middle of page three, Dixon is on the megaphone saying, “Okay, Simon, you’re doing the right thing here… That’s far enough. (then, lowering the bullhorn) Been waiting a long time for this, psycho.” Wait, who is he saying this to?

It’s always really odd the–

**Craig:** It’s a spoof.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe so.

**Craig:** Well, spoof tone. Because that’s a very spoofy sort of thing. Because the traditional spoof mode, not the crappy new spoof mode, but the old school spoof mode is to be like a bad soap opera essentially, where people do these sort of weird mannered things like mutter to themselves and turn away from camera and say, “Oh, I don’t know.”

So, I don’t know. I feel like maybe that’s what’s going on here. It’s hard to tell, but I think it’s well done and I agree with you, I would keep reading to find out what’s happening. So I think overall Nathaniel, you know, he’s on to something here. I’m not sure what it is, but he’s on to it.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to our third and final Three Page Challenge. It’s our last chance to hear the lovely voice of Elizabeth Banks. Take it away, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: Music Festival by Alexandra Gioulakis. We fly over sand dunes, Joshua Trees, and dried out cattle skulls as we come upon a massive music festival in Tehachapi, California. In voiceover, 18-year-old Dylan tells us that today is the last Saturday before high school graduation. She’s at home while her friends are stuck in detention. As she lounges in the pool, Dylan’s friends show up in a minivan. Dylan introduces them, still in voiceover, as they file out of the van.

There’s Stephanie, Dylan’s butch BFF since childhood. Steph brings the beer. There’s Josh, hot, and Dylan has a crush on him. And Matt. Matt and Dylan have a history, including seven minutes of not-so-heaven in eighth grade. Then comes Madison. Stephanie is secretly in love with her, but Madison is dating Matt. Dylan is Team Stephanie.

Finally, Goldie, the nerd everyone thought would be a computer whiz, but is really just awkward and clumsy. Dylan is the only one of her friends not to get into college. She plans to either kill herself, or go to cosmetology school. That, and travel across Egypt. She’s got plans. With that, we hit the bottom of page three.

**John:** So, interesting that we had our topic of how do you introduce character’s names. Well, this is one way. You sort of shotgun them out. And as they file out of the van you identify them by name. And talk us through their descriptions. I thought this was a really interesting mess. And I don’t mean that to be disparaging, really. I think there’s some really promising signs of talent here, but these three pages didn’t really work for me.

How did you feel?

**Craig:** I agree that this feels new. In that it feels like Alex – I’m going to call her Alex because that’s part of her email address – that Alex is approaching this kind of from a neophyte position because it’s doing that thing that new writers do, which is talk, and talk, and talk, and talk. It’s very mannered. And that’s not terrible. I mean, some of that’s just a matter of taste, right? And I don’t really like to get into matters of taste so much. But, this is a case where I think much less would be much more. Because if you clear out some of the extra, then the things that are kind of lovely and interesting start to pop out more.

**John:** I agree. So, you know, it reminded me of sort of Don Roos’s scripts, so Don Roos, Opposite of Sex, sort of great movies with Christina Ricci and other talented young actresses moving up. It also reminded me a bit of sort of the feeling of the CW teen shows. Sort of the Riverdales where it’s – everything is heightened in a way that’s sort of interesting.

So, that’s where I think the voice is promising. But there was just too much voice. There was just too much being in Dylan’s head and hearing her talk without anyone actually doing anything in these three pages. And I thought that was the real limitation.

So, we start by flying over Tehachapi, and sort of seeing this music festival. But then our initial voiceover has nothing to do with the music festival at all, really. It’s talking about these three friends who are in detention who we’re not seeing, and then we’re coming to her in the pool I really felt like the tone of this movie should be like when we arrive in this music festival she needs to say something about this music festival, or disparages music festivals, or do something to let us know what is her relationship with this music festival before she starts introducing all of these friends in sort of shotgun manner.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s also, you know, I love line breaks. I’m a big fan of line breaks. I like making – to me, the fewer words you can get away with on the page, the better off you are. However, too many line breaks in this. This is actually – so congratulations in a way. You’ve somehow managed to out-line break me. We have ten lines of action and description, most of which are half of the length of a line long. It all starts to turn into like – it almost feels like a teleprompter at some point. Those need to be squished together because it’s actually becoming hard to read that way. When usually we break things up to make them easier to read.

And I agree that the opening voiceover doesn’t really have much to do with that. And neither does what she say – I’m going to read what she says. So, the opening line, while we’re watching all this music festival visual stuff is, “Today is the last Saturday before high school graduation. My friends were all stuck in detention while I was lounging at my subdivision pool.” Ok. I’m going to stop there. Stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff, stuff.

Then, here’s the last line, “I chickened out like almost immediately because I don’t like tight spaces.” Smash to black. Title card: Music Festival. I don’t know what that has to do with that. I don’t know what the – I don’t know what either of the handles on that speech have to do with the things before and after them.

And if you’re going to throw to a title, kind of needs to feel purposeful and ironic or reflective or something.

**John:** A big problem I had with the first sentence is, “Today is the last Saturday before high school graduation. My friends were all stuck in detention.” Wait, so is this present tense narration or past tense narration? And it managed to be both in the first two sentences. So, you’re going to need to pick a tense for where her voiceover is at. Is she talking about what’s happening right in front of us, or is she talking like this is a thing that happened?

Later on, she’s decided to stick with sort of present tense narration. So she’s talking about all these people in the present tense. So, that’s great, but if you’re going to do that, do it throughout the whole thing. I also felt like, again, these first sort of single lines that are setting up the music festival, the last two of those, “This is Tehachapi, CA. Population: 8,451 Population this weekend: 72,107.” That’s kind of interesting, but it would be more interesting to have somebody say that than just to read it in a script.

**Craig:** It’s trivia otherwise. It’s just a random trivia fact.

**John:** It’s a trivia fact. So, if you’re going to use that, I would say just put that in dialogue or find a way to make that speakable, because it’s not doing anybody any service by putting it in the scene description right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then we get into the body of these pages which is an iteration of her friends and a description of her friends. There is a high degree of difficulty for this. And the reason there is is because you’re telling us who people are. And generally speaking we like finding out who people are. Unless they are a menagerie of interesting side characters. You know, like in Goodfellas you can kind of go, “That’s Tony Two-Times. He said every two times. And that was Maury blah, blah, blah, he wore a wig.” Then, OK, that’s fine because the whole point is I’m going to introduce you to a bunch of side people. They’re not important.

These people seem important. So, you’re just going to tell us who they are. You’re going to tell us everything about them. This is a massive info dump. And what – now, Alex makes it interesting because she’s clever. So, she’s clevering us, and that’s what I mean by mannered. For instance, “She’s my main chap from another mud flap.” That made me laugh. That’s really funny. I never heard that before. Maybe Alex invented that. It’s really funny. That’s not going to necessarily overcome the fact that you’re telling me everything about your relationship with her, who she is, what she wants. It starts to feel like I’m being force-fed something, like one of those ducks that’s being raised for foie gras.

**John:** You know where this voice would actually be amazing is honestly the YA novel version of this, where you actually are inside the character’s head and you’re right in Dylan’s head as she’s saying all these things. That would be great, honestly, and that would feel really natural. But here just sort of stop the movie just for these long chunks of voiceover from the main character who I think by the bottom of page three no one has said any lines to each other. It’s all just been her voiceover. And it’s just too frustrating here.

But, I do want to come back to like I think there’s really good lines within this. And so like I had high hopes that Alex can write dialogue because she can definitely – she has a voice for how these characters speak, and at least how Dylan speaks. I suspect she can have these characters talk to each other in ways that are really interesting. I would just like to see that, because I don’t think I was going to be enjoying the rest of just seeing Dylan’s point of view on this.

**Craig:** Well, one of the things that I was sort of desperate for, and it’s not here, is anything that makes me feel with Dylan. There’s actually – one of the remarkable things about this run where she’s describing her friends is how clinical it is. Everything that she says is clinical. There is no real emotion. In fact, there’s general denial of emotion. It’s this high irony, highly detached voice. Even when she gets to herself and she’s describing herself, it feels so dead inside.

And so that may be part of this character’s problem, but that’s a problem that I want to kind of come to experience, and also frankly I never really believe anyone is dead inside. They’re just hiding something. Right?

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** I don’t even know what she’s hiding here, because I get no clue. So I actually don’t know how to relate to Dylan because I haven’t been given that little tiny piece of humanity. A little itsy bitsy bit of something that makes me go, ooh, I love you, or, ooh, I feel for you. Ooh, I’m worried about you. Nothing. I feel nothing for her. And I want to feel something. Even if it’s anger. I just want to feel something about your main character. And right now I don’t. Right now I just feel a kind of intellectual superficial cleverness, but no human underneath it. And that’s where I would attack this to start with, Alex.

Because you’re obviously smart. I mean, you can see the intelligence throughout, but the intelligence is kind of masking a little bit of something here I think.

**John:** Yeah. I do wonder if this is sort of stealth Stuart Special, in that we see this musical festival and then we’re actually jumping back to an earlier time. And if that is sort of what the play is, I would love to see Dylan at that music festival and we see something that is honest and real about her or genuine moment or there’s something that sort of clues us in there’s a real interesting character here, before we get to this sort of hardened cynical Dylan who we’re seeing voiceover for her friends. That might be an interesting contrast between the two of those. Because then there’s a question that I’m eager to answer.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, I was trying to think about movies that had these long runs in the beginning and I don’t know weirdly Ferris Bueller came to mind, because it does have such a long monologue. Now, it’s not voiceover. He’s talking to us. That automatically makes us more relatable. And he’s funny. And he just seem engaged with life. Actually the whole point of Ferris Bueller is that he’s so alive and he loves things. There’s like a double removal here, because what Dylan is saying feels removed emotionally, and then she’s not even saying it. She’s just thinking it and we’re staring at somebody floating, which makes it doubly removed.

So there’s just a cold distance. I want to feel more. So, Alex, make me feel more.

**John:** Aw, give Craig the feels.

**Craig:** Give me the feels. I don’t need all the feels. I just a feel. I need a feel.

**John:** Give Craig a feel.

**Craig:** Give me a feel. That sounds weird.

**John:** That sounds just horrible. But what does not sound horrible is our fantastic guest reader. So thank you again, Elizabeth Banks, for doing that for us.

**Craig:** Thanks E.

**John:** And that’s our Three Page Challenge for this week. So, if you have three pages that you want us to take a look at, the place you send that is johnaugust.com/threepage. There’s a little form you fill out. You attach a PDF. It goes into Godwin’s inbox and he will sort through them for us. So, thank you to the three writers who wrote in this week with your pages. You were very generous to share them with us and I hope that was helpful.

And it’s time for our One Cool Things. So, Craig, why don’t you start us off? Give us your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Sure. You know, I haven’t really talked about what this HBO miniseries is that we’re going to be doing. You know, I may be over where you are next year. Well, not France, but Europe. So, we might be doing a little swappy on this terrible time zone nightmare.

But one of the things we have to do is find ourselves a good filmmaker. And so I’ve been watching television, which as you know I never do. I don’t like watching stuff. But I was pointed at a couple miniseries. They are British miniseries, because we’re going to be based I think in London. And I have encountered this writer that I think everybody must have known about this guy, but I’m just discovering him.

So Jack Thorne is a British writer. He has written movies and he has written lots of television. And the two miniseries that I’ve seen that he’s done there, one I think is six episodes and one is four episodes. So they’re short run series. One is called The Last Panthers. And the other is called National Treasure. No relation to the Nicholas Cage movie here. Their National Treasure is the story of a beloved television personality in England who is late in life accused of a series of sexual assaults, sort of a la Cosby.

And they are brilliant. This guy – first of all, they couldn’t be more different. And they’re both brilliant. I’m kind of in awe of this guy. Jack Thorne. I don’t know how he does it. I’m watching these things and I’m just thinking, boy, is there any mistake here? Won’t he make a mistake? Won’t he upset me at least once? Even just as a matter of opinion. No. Absolutely wonderful work.

He is really, really good. Like if I ran a movie studio, I would say, “Hey Jack Thorne, write a movie. Just write a movie. I don’t care what it is. And we’re making it. If it costs under $50 million, so you don’t bankrupt my studio, we would make it.” I would make any movie this guy wrote. I just think he’s amazing.

**John:** Holy cow. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. Jack Thorne. Jack Thorne is my One Cool Thing. Plus, that name. Jack Thorne.

**John:** Come on, it sounds like a spy hero.

**Craig:** Right? Thorne. Jack Thorne.

**John:** Good stuff. My One Cool Thing is a telephone. And, you know, I feel like over the past couple years innovation has really sort of died in phone making. Because it feels like every phone looks the same. It all sort of looks like an iPhone. Whether it’s a Samsung or whatever. They all basically look the same. They do the same kind of thing. They’re like these flat black pieces of glass that are magical. And it’s fine. I think we live in a time of wonder that we have such great phones. But I like it when there’s still some innovation out there.

So, this is the most innovative phone I’ve seen this week. It’s called Beat the Boss 3-in-1 J8 phone. And what’s remarkable about it is it’s incredibly small. So, it weighs 18 grams. It’s dimensions are 68mm by 23mm by 11mm. That’s smaller than many key fobs are. And it’s also 99 percent plastic. You might ask well why is that so good, like who wants a plastic phone that’s so small? And the answer is you could still lit up your butt. So it is a phone that is perfect for smuggling into prisons.

**Craig:** This is not cool.

**John:** It’s an innovative use of technology to serve a market that was being underserved. It’s like people who want to smuggle a phone into prison.

**Craig:** You’re not supposed to have phones.

**John:** Well, they’re not supposed to have phones, but that is a market and they see the market and they go after the market. And because it has very little metal in it, even a lot of the sort of X-ray detectors like the Boss can’t actually find it. The Boss being a chair kind of X-ray designed specifically for looking for phones up people’s butts.

**Craig:** That’s terrible. No. Because hold on a second. Some guy is going to get this key fob phone up his butt. He’s going to go into prison. He’s going to hand it over to another guy. And that guy is going to use that phone to call somebody on the outside to murder people. That’s why they use phones. Well, not all of them. But some of them. Someone is going to die because of this.

**John:** Theoretically someone could die because of this phone, but theoretically someone could die because of any phone. Like, we can’t outlaw all phones. And so this was a market that was underserved. I just think it’s fascinating that there is a–

**Craig:** Theoretically someone could die from any phone.

**John:** Yes. I’m doing the Bane defense.

**Craig:** I smuggled it up my butt. [laughs] Bane Craig is a whole new guy. I just want you to know that when I do Bane Craig voice I actually put my fingers over my – like I make a Bane mask for my own face.

**John:** It’s important because it not only mimics the sound, but it really gets you into character. You have to really feel like Tom Hardy being strangled while he says that. I’m also sort of bringing up the prison phone up the butt thing, I’ll put a link to the other sort of horrible thing that’s happening with prison phones now is the FCC is rolling back its protections on sort of prison phone price gauging. And so if you are trying to have a phone conversation with a person who lives in prison, the prices of a phone call into or out of prison are just absurd. And they should not be absurd. And it’s a weirdly profiteering way of dealing with people who are incarcerated.

**Craig:** Yeah. So that stinks. But also–

**John:** But a phone up your butt kind of stinks, too.

**Craig:** Ha-ha. Get it. Because it’s up my butt. Bane Craig was born on, what is today, March 7. So many different Craigs. So many.

**John:** Too many Craigs.

**Craig:** I don’t like the way you said too many.

**John:** Too many Craigs.

**Craig:** I said so many.

**John:** Too many Craigs.

**Craig:** You made it too many. Too many Craigs. Too many Craigs.

**John:** Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Panic Moon. Oh, and it’s a good one. 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, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We love to answer your little short questions on Twitter. We are on Facebook. Just look for the Scriptnotes podcast on Facebook. You should also search for us on iTunes and subscribe.

You can leave us a comment there. Occasionally we read through those comments and we love to see them. You’ll find the transcript for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find show note, the links to the Three Page Challenges will be there, too.

Reminder that if you want to send in a Three Page Challenge, you go to johnaugust.com/threepage to send that in. If you want to send something for the guide, a review of a previous episode, go to johnaugust.com/guide.

Longer questions, send in to ask@johnaugust.com.

You can get all the back catalog, including the previous Rian Johnson at Scriptnotes.net. And if we have a link to tickets, look for the show notes right now, because that link will tickets will be in the show notes. If they’re not there, it will be on Twitter as soon as we have it.

Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Cool. Bye.

Links:

* [ScriptShadow](http://scriptshadow.net/and-the-oscar-goes-to-here-you-read-it/)
* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* Three Pages by [John Lambert](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JohnLambert.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Nathaniel Nauert](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/NathanielNauert.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Alexandra Gioulakis](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AlexandraGioulakis.pdf)
* [Jack Thorne](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2113666/)
* [Beat The Boss 3-in-1 J8 phone](https://www.amazon.co.uk/J8-World-Smallest-Mobile-Phone/dp/604016994X/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_product_top?ie=UTF8)
* [Prison Phones and the FCC](https://www.buzzfeed.com/zoetillman/the-fcc-has-stopped-defending-its-own-rules-lowering-the-cos?utm_term=.vnw3p0GZ8#.sjAXp79EW8)
* [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 Panic Moon ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Sexy Craig Mazin.

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

**Craig:** Interesting. Mm.

**John:** Today on the podcast, we will be looking at how and whether screenwriters should use social media and in addition to answering some listener questions we will be asking longtime listeners to tell us which episodes are worth pointing out to newcomers. So, Craig, I was trying to hedge you off with the Sexy Craig, but you went right to the Sexy Craig. You went right to your safe place.

**Craig:** You want to head off Sexy Craig? You can head off Sexy Craig.

**John:** I thought maybe Smooth John could talk us through some of these rough patches in life.

**Craig:** So smooth.

**John:** So smooth.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the problem. Sexy Craig, it’s really, it’s just impossible. He’s impossible.

**John:** He’s just the worst. Or the best. He’s superlative in many ways.

**Craig:** It’s really about how sexy you’re feeling at any given point.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not feeling sexy right now. Let’s do some follow up. We’ve got a lot of follow up, so let’s try to crank through this. Joe Bruckner tweeted at us. He said, “In Scriptnotes Episode 72, you say we’ll be giggling about UltraViolet in a few years. Four years later, what’s the verdict, Craig?”

Craig, how do you feel about UltraViolet?

**Craig:** I would be giggling even I even remembered what the hell it is, so I guess that sort of says it all, right? It was like that weird digital locker that we were all going to be using for 14 seconds or something?

**John:** Yeah. So I had to look back at the episode to make sure that really was what we were talking about. So, yes, it was the studio’s plan for basically you buy a DVD and you also get a digital copy that goes in your magic locker. And so I just sort of assumed it had gone away and that it had died, but then I looked it up. And so on January 6 of this year the DEG reported that UltraViolet accounts grew by almost 20% in 2015 to hit more than 25 million with 165 million movies and television shows in UltraViolet libraries.

So, it’s one of those weird sort of undead things where it’s like it’s not really dead, but no one is talking about it.

**Craig:** No. And I – I mean, I guess, yes, accounts grew. Who the? I don’t know anybody using this. It is not culturally important. The studios do not talk about it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is certainly not relevant. And, yes, it is giggle-worthy. We were correct.

**John:** We were correct. So, I was on a panel at CES in Las Vegas. It was an industry panel and they brought me as like the filmmaker/screenwriter to be with all these studio people. And they were so excited about UltraViolet and how it was going to change the industry. And I was the one person saying like, “I don’t really think it’s going to change the industry.” And everyone is like, “Shut up. Shut up.” And I don’t think it changed the industry.

But if you are a listener who has inside information that it actually has changed the industry and that Craig and I are just ignoring it somehow, do let us know. But I don’t think we’re wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re not. I’m just going to say we’re not wrong.

**John:** Ivan Munoz tweeted at us to point us to this article by Christopher Mele for New York Times, talking about filler words and discourse markers. So, we talked about the discourse markers on a previous episode and how they’re crucial bits of connecting material between lines of dialogue in real life and in film. But this article was really interesting because it was talking about the other use of those kind of words, which is just for fillers. It’s not just the uhs and the ums, but the likes in the middle of sentences. The sort of stall and pause and the ways of sort of – just what I just did right there – of putting a gap in your speech.

And so I thought it was a really interesting article. Did you have a chance to take a look at that?

**Craig:** I did. And this is something that I’ve thought about for a long time, because I remember very specifically, I think it was maybe when I was in my sophomore year of high school. When I just decided that saying “like” was stupid. And I forced myself to stop saying like. And I do not. I just don’t do it.

**John:** A piece of advice that’s in this article, which is absolutely true from my own experience, is that if you tape record yourself long enough you will stop doing some of these annoying behaviors. And so doing this podcast every week, the first 20 or 30 episodes I edited myself. And when you have to take out all of those annoying pause-discourse marker-filler words, that is a drag. So you learn to be much, much better about not sticking those things in there.

So, I feel like I’m a much smoother speaker after having done this podcast for nearly 300 episodes.

**Craig:** No question. I’m kind of curious, were there certain pause words like that that I repeatedly did?

**John:** You know, you probably have more than you think you have. Sometimes I’ll see Matthew’s actual edit and you’ll see sort of what gets dropped out. Sometimes they’re just actual pauses. They’re just open spaces while you’re sort of thinking of the next part of the sentence and he can tighten things together. But there are some uhs, some ums. There’s little things that sort of get stuff stuck together again.

**Craig:** I mean, I would say that there are things like um and uh, if they’re not, um, see, I just did it. If they’re not, um, routine, then I don’t think that in and of itself is a signifier of something. I mean, the danger of certain of these words is that they signify stupidity.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. There’s actually no reason for the word like to signify stupidity as opposed to the word um. They are doing the same thing. But because like is associated with youth, and particularly a kind of flight-full youth, then they are viewed as signifiers of stupidity. And they’re not, but that’s a problem.

I mean, it’s all optics, really. You know, I have a friend who says, “You know what I’m saying? You know what I’m saying?” That’s his like.

**John:** That’s his like.

**Craig:** He will use – it’s a very long like, you know what I’m saying. What does it actually mean? Nothing.

**John:** It means nothing.

**Craig:** It means nothing.

**John:** A listener tweeted at me this last week and I don’t have his name in front of me, so I’m sorry, but he pointed out that I say somewhat or sort of alike, and it’s a way of sort of taking the spin off of things. And I think I sort of try to undercut what I’m about to say by using somewhat or sort of to dial it down a little bit. And that’s something I was actually happy he pointed that out, because I will try to listen for myself doing that and not do that as much.

But I think Ivan Munoz was trying to point out when he sent us this article is how does this influence how we actually write dialogue for our characters. Should we script in those little filler words? And the answer is really no, unless it’s actually crucial to the scene. Because you got to let the actor actually put in those filler words if it’s actually important to how they’re performing that line.

But I would not generally script those things in, unless it’s actually crucial to understanding how the scene is working.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every now and then I might have a character throw in a like to – because I think it would be funny in that particular spot of dialogue. But, other than that, no.

**John:** A lot of times what we are really doing for that is the parenthetical within a block of dialogue to indicate that there’s a shift, that there’s something that’s happening in there. You sort of scripting an action or scripting a reaction within that block of dialogue. And they may end up using a filler word to sort of cover that change, but that’s not necessarily a thing you need to script in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if you’re writing a comedy, maybe it’s a dark comedy, and there’s a teenager. And someone is pointing a gun at them. That teenager can say, “Are you going to shoot me?” But if you script, if you actually write in, “Are you like going to like shoot me?” That’s funnier.

**John:** It’s much, much funnier.

**Craig:** It’s just funnier. So those are the only times I would ever do it is to call it out. You know, I’m saying to the actor you really should do it here, otherwise, you know.

**John:** Otherwise, I know.

**Craig:** Sorta.

**John:** Sort of. Kind of. Somewhat.

Several listeners pointed at this article. It’s actually a FDA announcement that these homeopathic teething tablets have been pulled off the market for concerns about them. So this comes directly from the FDA announcement. “Inconsistent amounts of belladonna, a toxic substance, in certain homeopathic teething tablets, sometimes far exceeding the amount claimed on the label. The agency is warning consumers that homeopathic teething tablets containing belladonna pose an unnecessary risk to infants and children and urges consumers not to use these products.”

**Craig:** You know, belladonna is nightshade. You know like – like witches, you use nightshade?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s belladonna. It’s deadly nightshade. That’s what it is. It’s actually got some great stuff in it, like have you ever used the – sorry to derail you here – but you ever used the patch for sea sickness?

**John:** I’ve not used the patch for sea sickness. Is that belladonna as well?

**Craig:** Well, it’s scopolamine which is one of the poisonous compounds in deadly nightshade/belladonna. And scopolamine is a very powerful drug. I mean, even when you use it for sea sickness, you – they make sure when you use that patch, it’s a very tiny, tiny amount. You have to wash your hands really thoroughly afterwards and do not put your hands anywhere near your eyes, because you will literally dilate your pupils and not be able to see very well.

And that’s a tiny, tiny amount. So, apparently these people went a little monkey with it. Go ahead.

**John:** So, what’s fascinating is like they’re saying like, “Oh, there was too much of this substance in there.” And when we talked about homeopathic treatments before, the problem is generally in homeopathic treatments there’s nothing in there. It’s just sugar. So this is just sugar and poison.

**Craig:** Right. So the fun part of this is it really exposes the stupidity of homeopathic “medicine,” because I presume that what they were trying to do was take deadly nightshade, belladonna, scopolamine, and a few other things that are in there, and then using their principle of nonsense, water those poisons down to less than could possibly exist. And then magically the water would have memory of it. And then help teething babies for some bananas reason.

So, there are really only two possible outcomes to the manufacture of a product like this. Outcome number one: they have manufactured a useless sugar pill that will do nothing for your infant or your child. Outcome number two: they’ll slip up and mistakenly put in an actual amount of poison, which will injure your infant or child. This is all you can get from homeopathic medicine. Just so people are clear. You will either get nothing or an unintended bad consequence. Congratulations homeopaths.

**John:** Here’s the embarrassing part. I’m pretty sure we actually used this brand of teething tablets when my daughter was an infant.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** And so here’s how we used them, and I think we were even told this will do nothing, but it will make you feel better to use them. We sort of took the tablet and rubbed it right on the part that hurt. And you know why it probably helped?

**Craig:** You were rubbing.

**John:** Because you’re rubbing the part that hurt. And you’re giving the baby something sweet that made her feel better about the pain.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** That’s what it is. It was the sugar being rubbed into her gum.

**Craig:** Yeah. You were just rubbing sugar into her gum. You could have just dipped your finger in some Sprite and it would have done the same thing.

**John:** Yeah. Or Whiskey, which is my go-to, instead of homeopathy.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, yeah. And way better. I mean, god forbid that – there’s no reason to buy these things. They have to stop them. By the way, I would argue that a company like CVS for instance, which in this case was marketing two of the products containing too much, meaning any belladonna – CVS should stop selling these things. CVS, for instance, is a huge pharmaceuticals/sundries chain here in the United States. CVS should stop selling all of this. They stopped selling cigarettes.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Right. So, they don’t sell cigarettes, because cigarettes are bad for you. They should stop selling these products because they don’t work.

**John:** I mean, cigarettes or baby poison. I mean, you got to make some choices about the things you’re not going to sell.

**Craig:** Right. I also feel like if you are selling a proper array of medicines, whether they’re over-the-counter, or prescription, and you are advertising yourself as a place where people will come to make themselves better, you should not sell any substance as far as I’m concerned that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not one. And it makes me nuts.

**John:** It does make me nuts, too. All right, let’s move on to our next thing which will make us less nuts. So last week’s episode we talked about – we sort of ripped into an article about avoid screenwriting traps. I argued this article was ridiculous to say that scripts from professional writers and scripts from new writers are fundamentally different. I argued that the things that Craig and I are writing are on the page identical to what an aspiring writer should be writing.

Listener Cody wrote in with a counter point. Do you want to read that?

**Craig:** Sure. Cody says, “With factors like the Black List, a rise of literary managers, and a new generation of young executives, I’ve watched as screenwriting styles have evolved in even just the 17 years since I’ve been writing in Los Angeles. Aspiring writers look for inventive ways to make their work stand out, writing in a stylized, edgier voice to make it a better read, despite that it has nothing to do with what we see on screen.

“It’s a trick that clearly worked to impress development executives, gain heat, and land on the Black List, which helps many new writers get noticed and find representation.”

What do you think about that?

**John:** I am ready to concede Cody’s point here. And I would be curious to have Franklin Leonard on the show, or somebody else who is reading a lot of newer writers, to see whether they find this true as well. Is that I can imagine just like the way that a lot of times spec scripts have these like crazy inventive titles that sort of get attention, even though you would never release the movie with that title, I do believe that sometimes writers are deliberately kind of not even over-writing, but sort of like super-stylized writing in order to sort of get attention.

I can imagine that happening and I don’t have evidence that it’s not happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. That seems plausible to me. I’m not sure, and here’s where Franklin would grimace, or will grimace when he hears this, I’m not sure that it’s relevant particularly whether you get on the official Black List. I don’t know how relevant that is. Because a lot of those scripts were good scripts that get on the Black List and also are going into production. There’s the whole correlation and causation thing.

And standing out and being noticed for a flashy, wild read happens. It, for instance, got the guy that wrote the Lax Mandis script, he sure got attention. It wasn’t the good kind. Getting attention is important. Getting attention doth not a career make. It doesn’t even make a sale. It just means attention.

So, I’m all for writing something that is stand out. You are always, I think, best advised to write something that stands out because your voice is unique and you have written something that is producible and should be a movie. Gimmicky stuff is gimmicky. So, I smell the rise of gimmickry. I do. I can see Cody’s point here that there’s a lot of that going on. I know that titles have become a playground for gimmickry.

**John:** What I do wonder if what Cody’s leaning towards is that in some ways some of these spec scripts are super voice-y, it’s like this crazy writer voice that’s coming through the script and it may not be the kind of thing that we’re necessarily being asked to write as we’re writing stuff for studios. So I can see that as being a possibility in the sense that my script Go, which sort of broke out, it is written a little differently than some of the other stuff I’ve written, but not crazily. And so I just don’t feel like in my career there was a huge shift from the scripts I’ve written for myself and the scripts that I’m writing for other studios. But this is a 20-year career. And I can imagine there might be more pressure for some new writers now doing that.

I still do not believe that the article that was the jumping off place for all this proved its point that writers need to be writing vastly different scripts for readers than they are for producers or going into production.

**Craig:** I completely agree. At some point you have to decide what is the hurdle you’re trying to jump. It’s not like the hurdles are lined up in linear fashion. It’s not as if you manage to get yourself a good rating to the regular Black List site, and then the next hurdle is to get a manager. And then the next hurdle is to get on the official Black List. And then the next one is to get an agent. And the next one is to sell your script. And the next one is that it gets made.

Not at all. The hurdles are all horizontal. None of those hurdles lead to another hurdle inexorably. So, the question is which hurdle are you trying to get over?

**John:** Get the movie made.

**Craig:** Yeah. Get the movie made. Some of them will kind of – they will help, to some extent. But the only hurdle worth getting over is sell a movie, get a made. That’s it.

**John:** Yeah. And get the next one set up.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** Start a career.

**Craig:** Start a career.

**John:** So, next up, on a bunch of previous episodes I’ve threatened that we would read through some of the reviews that people leave for us on iTunes, because people leave such nice reviews on iTunes. And this week it’s actually relevant, so I thought we’d read three recent reviews on iTunes and talk through them and sort of what they mean about the future of the show. So, Craig, do you want to read this first one?

**Craig:** Sure. This first one is titled, “Best Dose of Reality Ever, Five Stars,” by S. Wright. This is from November 11, 2016. And S. Wright writes, “The reason I love this podcast is for all of the pain and suffering it saved me. After writing three scripts, and despite living in Maryland, not Los Angeles, my hubris buried the needle. Then I found this amazing and honest podcast. I quickly listened to all of the earlier episodes. And now I’m a loyal listener of over four years. They dashed my dream, but it felt so good. These are two of the smartest guys and I am truly thankful not to be pursuing a sale anymore. It remains my favorite podcast.”

**John:** Aw. Thank you, S. That’s very nice. So, a second review comes from T. Tippet. It says, “More Umbrage.” It’s five stars, from November 29, 2016. “Just started listening and actually went back to start from the beginning on their app. And John and Craig are awesome. It is great as a new/aspiring screenwriter to be able to learn the ins and outs of the business from two guys who are very ‘inneresting.’ I would and have recommended this podcast to anyone interested in screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. Keep up the great work, guys.”

**Craig:** All right. Well, that’s lovely to hear. We will. We will!

**John:** We will. We promise.

**Craig:** We have one more. And this is from Levy Ryan from December 23, 2016 entitled “Post-Partum Depression.” Uh-oh. “Started listening four months ago and just polished off the archives. Well, what now? Listen to Mr. Kasdan again? The way Episode 247 ends has you sitting in silence for an hour afterwards.”

**John:** Very nice, Ryan. So, I wanted to bring up those three because one of the things that’s really weird about our show as opposed to other podcasts is that that back catalog actually does get listened to a lot. And so on Twitter kind of every week somebody writes in saying like, “Oh, I just finished going through all the archives and I’ve been through now 289 episodes and now I’m caught up.” And that sense of being caught up on a podcast, you know, with Serial or something that’s shorter and contained, you can sort of see that. There’s a narrative. But some people actually have listened to the whole show.

And so this last week on Slack, Godwin our producer, suggested, “You should do a book of the Scriptnotes transcripts.” Because we have transcripts for every episode. And so Godwin’s suggestion was we could do a physically printed book so you could have on your shelf like the transcripts of the entire series. Just like how we sell the USB drives, it would be really cool to have a printed book for the whole show.

**Craig:** Ooh, like bound in Corinthian leather?

**John:** Corinthian leather, perhaps. And so Dustin, who works for me, a designer, I asked him to do up like one chapter which would basically be one episode, the transcript, to see sort of what it would like. And he did it and it looked really good. Craig, it’s in the folder if you want to take a look at sort of how it looks.

**Craig:** Ooh. I’m going to look at this while you’re talking. No one else can see it, but I can see it.

**John:** We’ll put a link to that in the show notes, too.

**Craig:** Argh.

**John:** But what’s – so what’s fascinating, Craig, is I think that looks really nice. How big a book do you think the Scriptnotes transcripts would be? How many pages?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I’m looking at this. It does look really nice. Oh my god, how many pages? Well, well, I guess I could do the math because these are so many pages for one episode. My goodness. Oh my god. [laughs] OK, so good lord, we talk a lot. So about 14 pages here. Quickly doing the math. We’re talking about 520-page book.

**John:** No, it’s actually between 3,000 and 4,500 pages. So when you actually do out all the math for all of the episodes.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** It gets really, really, really big.

**Craig:** Oh my god. How is that possible? Because we have to put in all of the Three Page Challenges and–

**John:** The other stuff. And so it gets to be quite big. So, there’s not going to be a printed copy of the entire Scriptnotes catalog. But, the process was really good because we could certainly do an e-book version of this. And so we’re talking about doing that. So, it’s something you could get on your Kindle or your iPad or your other device. Something you could get as a PDF. It would be the entire catalog, which would be great, so people could have that.

**Craig:** You’re going to get so rich.

**John:** So, so rich. But, one of the other suggestions that we sort of came to is if you are one of these people who is trying to catch up on the whole thing, you might not really want to listen to every episode. You might want to listen to certain episodes that are especially good or especially relevant or about a specific topic. And when we have them on the website, it would be great to have some sort of reference for that.

And so that’s where I thought we might be able to enlist our listeners, because some of our listeners really have listened to every episode. And so what I’m asking for is if you have recommendations for these are the episodes that you can’t miss, or that you should definitely try to single out if you’re listening through the catalog, right into us with those. And don’t just write into the Ask account I set up a special page for you to leave a review and a recommendation for this is a good episode because of these reasons.

So if you go to johnaugust.com/guide, there’s a little form you fill out. You put in the episode number, you tell us who it’s for, and then give us a little blurb about that episode. And if we get enough of these and good enough ones of these, we’ll try to put out some sort of e-book or even a printed book that people can sort of look through as sort of an index and a guide to Scriptnotes. Because we’re coming up on 300 episodes. It would be great to be able to point to people like, oh, if you’re curious about these things, this is the episode you should go to. Or, if you don’t really care about screenwriting, but you just want to hear the funny episodes, this is a way to do that. So, these reviews would really help us figure out which episodes to highlight.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea. I’ve decided it’s my idea. I had a terrific idea.

**John:** So tell us this great idea. Can you summarize in your own words what the idea is?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re reaching out to our listeners and asking them what their favorite episodes are. And we’re going to even categorize their favorite episodes in such a way that new listeners can find our show and start with some of the most loved episodes. I am so smart.

**John:** You really are smart. And what is the URL people should go to if they want to tell us what the best episodes are?

**Craig:** They should go to craigmazin.com. [laughs] They should go to johnaugust.com/ – I love when they say forward slash in ads like we don’t even know. Forward slash guide.

**John:** Yep. So this all goes into a database. If it works out well and it’s interesting, we’ll try to do this thing. So, it’s all on your guys at this point. Thank you in advance the people who might want to leave some reviews. And, by the way, you can leave reviews on multiple episodes. So if you know like the ten best episodes, just leave ten separate reviews for those episodes and we’ll get them all.

**Craig:** Brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** Brilliant. So, so much of what we talked about today was generated based on things people tweeted at us. And so you suggested that we do a segment on social media and how screenwriters should use social media.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve been thinking about it for a while because the truth is it’s not quite as casual as it used to be. They – they meaning the studios – they actually care about this stuff now. It’s remarkable. I’m still not sure that they should be caring about it, because I’m still not sure how directly impactful it is. But, it is to some extent. So, we know that when we’re talking about casting movies and we’re looking for very popular movie stars, the amount of followers they have is actually a topic of discussion in the room. It matters.

**John:** It’s not when they’re like casting, “Oh, should we cast Will Smith,” but it’s like when you’re casting that third or fourth person down. Sometimes you are kind of looking for the degree to which they are moving the needle.

**Craig:** That’s right. Or sometimes when they’re saying, “Hey, we want to make a movie starring this person that maybe you wouldn’t think of starring in a movie, but look at how many followers they have.” They will do things like that. They will also talk about how many times a trailer is retweeted or mentioned. And every showrunner is now being tasked directly with tweeting, live-tweeting, engaging with the audience.

For screenwriters, for feature writers, it’s a little less directly connected, but we’re starting to see more and more writers achieve a high profile on Twitter, and for some of them it translates into a real career. So, I thought we should talk about how that all works and maybe some advice on how to do it well. Because, you know–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I think you and I actually do it pretty well.

**John:** I think we do it pretty well, too. And it’s worth pointing out that Aline Brosh McKenna, who has been a longtime guest on the show, she’s finally on Twitter now. And she’s finally broken the seal and gotten on Twitter. And I think that’s partly because she is a showrunner now and there is that responsibility of being able to speak for your show and sort of engage with the fans of your show. I don’t feel it happening as much with screenwriters right now, but I think it’s also because we are much more loosely coupled to our films than TV writers are to their TV shows.

There’s less of a direct relationship to our movies. We’re not the spokespeople for our movies to the degree that a showrunner is for her show. And do we know what we’re talking about? We kind of know what we’re talking about. Craig, you have 94,000 followers on Twitter.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s my army. And they really are my followers, just so you know. If I tell them to do something, they’re doing it.

**John:** They’ll absolutely do it.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** But you did not have those last year. So, they were a growth. They’re largely due to things you talked about in a very honest way about your former roommate.

**Craig:** Yeah. I was somewhere around like, I don’t know, I was actually fairly new – I was late to Twitter. I wasn’t an early tweeting tweetie guy, and you know that because I’m saying things like I wasn’t an early tweetie guy. I had about, I don’t know, 12,000 followers or something like that. And then the Ted Cruz thing happened.

But, you know, I’ve held onto them.

**John:** You’ve definitely held on to them. And you’ve done a very good job sort of managing them. You engage with them in ways that I would not engage with them, but we can get to that when we talk about sort of how you deal with people.

**Craig:** It’s fun.

**John:** I have about 59,000 followers. And I was very early to Twitter, not surprisingly. I was on Twitter in 2007, before everyone was really saying Tweet. It was like a “Twitter post.” I was on Twitter before there was actually an App you could use.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** So you were texting to a number. So I used it at Sundance when my movie, The Nines, was there. And it was great. But it’s so interesting to go back and look at your very early tweets, because it was just a very different medium at that time. It was before there was native retweeting. It was a really different world.

We talked about it’s important for actors, but I would say it was also a little bit important for me with Arlo Finch, because novelists are incredibly closely coupled to their work. And so when we were going out to sell Arlo Finch, this wasn’t a major factor, but I think they did take notice of like, oh wow, he has a bunch of Twitter followers. And they look at that and say like, “He sort of knows how to go out and promote things.” And that is probably useful to a publisher that wants to make money off this book.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s absolutely true. The thing about screenwriters and Twitter is our movies come out very sporadically, and that’s for the best of us. You know, you have a movie come out once every two or three years, you are among the crème de la crème of screenwriters. So, there’s a sporadic nature to that.

So it’s not quite as vital, I think, for screenwriters in terms of the commerce. However, if in those in between times you do build up some goodwill and some notoriety, when you do have something that you want to promote, they’re there, which is helpful.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But no question if you are a novelist, and that is yours, I mean, so many of the writers that follow me, for instance, I’ve noticed, are novelists.

**John:** And some of them do a great job. So, let’s talk about sort of why it might matter for a screenwriter. And so I have four basic thoughts about why it might matter to be on Twitter and to sort of use Twitter well.

I think Twitter helps prove that you’re not a crazy person. And so one of the first things I do if like a new person’s name comes across my desk is I will Google them and I will see if they’re on Twitter, because then I can go through their timeline and see like is this a crazy person, is this is a crank? And that can be very helpful to know that, oh no, they’re actually a sane, rational person. Or, they are a crazy person and I won’t engage with them. So, Twitter is a very public way of sort of seeing whether somebody is somebody you want to engage with.

It can show if you’re funny, if you’re supposed to be funny. And Twitter doesn’t have to be funny. Twitter tends to be sort of funny. It tended to be funnier before the election. But it does sort of show who actually has a sense of what a joke is, and that can be really important if you’re looking for a funny person.

Twitter can potentially connect you with interesting people. And by this I mean it lets you be reachable by other interesting people, so like because I’m @johnaugust on Twitter, people can reach towards me and I can sort of engage with them if I choose to. It also lets me reach out to certain people. And if I don’t know somebody, I can tweet at them and sometimes they’ll respond.

We’re going to talk about sort of like best practices for that, but it’s a way to sort of get towards somebody that’s not crazy and stalkery.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, finally, the most important thing I think is it allows you to publicly respond to things. Rarely are screenwriters sort of in the midst of controversy, but if there is a controversy, that Twitter handle is sort of your public face and it lets you sort of directly address something that’s going on in a very quick and sort of clearly your voice way.

**Craig:** That is an excellent summary of what you have there. And a couple of those things I hadn’t really considered. But, yeah, prove you’re not a crazy person. It is true. I mean, whether it’s rational or not, when we meet somebody for the first time and we don’t know much about them, and I’m saying this in the absence of Twitter, and someone else says, “Oh, they are extraordinarily popular and the following people just love them,” I think, OK. That’s relevant.

Well, Twitter sort of does that. If I meet somebody and I see who’s following them and I see who they’re following, then I get a sense that, OK, this person is at least acceptable enough that the following other people that I accept have accepted them. And that matters. There is a social currency to that.

**John:** And I find that there’s more of a social currency to Twitter for me than for Facebook, because if I see he’s friends with that person, it’s like I don’t really know what “friends” means, but if I see that other person has engaged with them on their timeline then it’s like, oh OK, there’s something there. They’re actually pals in some meaningful way.

**Craig:** Precisely. I mean, the problem with Facebook is some people just will – people say can I be your friend? So they’re asking you for something and then you have to agree. And many people just say, sure, you can be my friend, you can be my friend. So, sometimes somebody will ask to be my friend. And I try and keep Facebook for my actual friends.

**John:** So do I.

**Craig:** But they’ll say I want to be your friend and we have a mutual friend. And I’ll click on it and it’s Derek Haas every time. Because Derek – he’s cool. He’s like, you want to be my friend? You’re my friend.

On Twitter, people have to follow you. You know, it’s not like they’re asking do you want to be. So, people make a choice. I can’t stop. So, here would be something cool. It would be cool if Stephen King followed me on Twitter. I don’t think he does. But I follow him.

Stephen King has to make a choice to follow me. That’s kind of cool. You know?

**John:** It is kind of cool.

**Craig:** Because if he does, it’s awesome. I don’t he does. But he should.

**John:** He totally should.

**Craig:** He should. I’m wonderful.

**John:** So, Craig, can you give us some suggestions about best practices or what you should do if you’re new to Twitter or how to use your Twitter account?

**Craig:** Well, yeah. And these are – I’m going to tailor these for writers. And they’re best practices and they’re also worse practices. And to be honest with you, I see all of this. And as many times as I see people doing it right, like Megan Amram, who is just the queen of Twitter, I see people doing it wrong and I cringe. I cringe and I cringe and I triple cringe.

So, some easy positive things. If you can be funny, be funny. Being funny on Twitter is a tricky thing because it’s like you are doing a late night monologue and there are 14 billion other people doing a late night monologue right next to you. So, just a little advice, if it’s sort of the obvious joke, don’t do it. Because there’s so many other people doing the obvious joke. And if you’re not that funny, don’t worry about it. Just don’t push it. You know, it’s not that big of a deal.

**John:** What I will say is if I have the idea for like there’s a news event, something has just happened, and I have the idea for the joke, and it’s like five minutes after the event has happened, I will search for what I would sort of use in the joke term to see if someone else has made the joke. Because you just know it’s going to happen so quickly. So, you got to be quick with it, or just let it pass.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think sometimes in lieu of being ha-ha funny, being clever is good. Because a lot of times I don’t – it’s a little bit like when I watch The Simpsons. When I watch The Simpsons, I don’t actually typically laugh out loud that much. I just appreciate how clever it is going through. It is entertaining me and it is comedic, but it’s a different kind of appreciation. There’s a wryness to it. And I think that that’s perfectly fine on Twitter. Being passionate is always a wonderful thing, especially if you’re positively passionate. Everybody likes somebody loving something. They do. It’s informative. And it’s attractive, honestly, to hear somebody talk about something they love.

Here’s some things to not do, and I see this all the time and it makes me cringe – when you are promoting something, promote. Fine. But do it sparingly and do it informationally. And avoid the walking billboard syndrome. There are some people that are just – they so obviously have gone on Twitter because someone has told them this is a wonderful way to promote your brand, and they just keep whacking that button over and over and over until nobody cares, because they get it. You’re just there to manipulate people into doing what you want, which is the worst way to get them to do what you want on Twitter. And I would suggest that you’ll never know, because losing followers is sort of old school. Getting muted is new school. That’s what you don’t want.

You don’t want people muting you.

**John:** Yeah, so essentially those people who are still following you, they’re just actually not seeing your tweets. And so you’re basically shouting and they’re not hearing you at all. And I find the awkward self-promotion tends to be from people who I don’t think are actually on Twitter that often. Basically they go on Twitter maybe two times a week and maybe scroll through it and then they tweet the thing they need to tweet. And then they get off Twitter. And so they don’t sort of understand the conversational nature of it. They don’t sort of read the room. And so they just go in, they promote something, and then they disappear. And that’s not a great choice.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. I mean, you really do have to think of yourself like a late night talk show host. And all of your tweets consist of the stuff you would do during your show. And then the commercials in between the show. Well, you got to limit your commercials, and they have to be varied, and the preponderance of the stuff you put out has to be show. So, there are some people who come on and they’re not even doing it frequently. They come on every couple of weeks and what they’ll do is either promote themselves or they’ll just retweet other people’s promotions, which I think is generally the worst.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, basic rule of thumb, if somebody says something lovely to you, you give it a little heart. But you don’t retweet it. That’s just my rule.

**John:** I don’t retweet the praise. And so I will give the heart or I will give the reply thanks, or the actual acknowledgment of the specific thing they said, which is great and lovely. And it’s all good. And when you do that, by the way, when you actually reply to somebody, that also shows up in your timeline if people are actually looking at your tweets and replies, and it sort of shows like, oh, you’re engaging the person in a normal, human kind of way.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But honestly the heart, the little like, that’s generally enough. It’s the head nod to say like thank you for that, I get that, I see that. And it’s appreciated.

**Craig:** 100%. I mean, the worst of it is when somebody does the like and does the thank you, but puts the period in front of the name of the person they’re doing it to so everyone in the world can see. Automatically, look what I did. Look at what they said about me. It’s just so transparent.

You know, begging for approval on Twitter is a bad deal, because the good news is you’ll get it, and the bad news is you’ll get it. And so it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It really doesn’t. Just be secure. Yeah, just be secure about it.

**John:** Let’s talk about how you convey what you’re actually feeling or how you put into words the thing you want to say. Because that sense of authenticity is really tough when you have 140 characters. And so sometimes people do the sort of tweet storms, they’ll do the threaded comments. By the way, if people don’t know how to do threaded comments, let’s just have a little sidebar here, because it’s really helpful if you can sort of do threaded tweets so that it actually works right. You do the first tweet, then you reply to your tweet. You can delete off your name, but it will keep those things threaded together. The metadata will hold it all together. It lets people sort of see your tweets in a proper run, so they’re not just randomly spread out tweets.

If you have more to say than one tweet, maybe consider doing the multiple tweets, but don’t do that too often because you’ll annoy everybody.

**Craig:** Threaded tweeting. I think I’ve screwed that up twice. Or thrice.

**John:** It’s really easy to screw up. My best tip for you is to write the tweets in advance, like sort of figure out the tweets and make sure they’re the right length. And then you do the first tweet. You reply to that first tweet, paste in the second thing. You reply to the second one to the next thing. It’s not at all obvious or intuitive, but it’s a way to get it done.

**Craig:** So on the third one I’m replying to the second one?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, then I’ve done it right, I think. I think. Well.

**John:** But it’s really easy to mess up.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t do – I’ve done only maybe in my Twitter career I think three rants. I’m not a big ranter. The things that I think tend to work well are honest expressions. You will inevitably upset people with some of the things you say, particularly if you’re talking about things that are aggressive in some way.

But if you are honest, and you are authentic, in the long run presuming that you aren’t professing honest and authentic opinions that everyone detests, you will be viewed positively. The worst of it is the lying. Humble-bragging is not bad because it’s bragging. It’s bad because it’s false. Because it’s manipulative. You know, when you see a writer go on and say something like, “OK, woke up, realized I have three scripts due, and tomorrow we start shooting one. And my agent keeps calling. And, argh, this is going to be a crazy day,” I just want to reach through the computer and punch them in the face. And punch through their face. Through. All the way out the back. And then do that thing where you twist your fist around a little bit. And then pull it back out, just to make sure I get all the bits.

Because that’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah. And so the person who did that didn’t mean for it to be read that way, but that’s exactly how we do read it. It’s like, oh, look at me, look at my luxury problems that I have three movies to write and another movie in production. You’re not doing yourself any favors by tweeting that. Don’t tweet that.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s this weird counterpart that has risen somewhat recently that I call – I don’t know what to call it – because it’s kind of the negative counterpart to humble-bragging. So I call it bravery-complaining. And bravery-complaining goes a little bit something like, here – here’s the one I’ve written as a sample. “Some people clearly want me to believe I’m not capable of telling this story. But I am. I’m a writer. And I won’t be ignored.”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** OK. I don’t know who those some people are. I don’t know what the story is. I don’t know if you are capable of telling it. I don’t know anything other than this: that tweet was designed for a whole bunch of people to say, “We are behind you. You are amazing. Don’t let anyone get you down.” Blah, blah, blah. It’s fake.

And, more importantly, that tweet exists to help no one but yourself.

**John:** Yeah, going back to both of these kind of tweets is the relatable version of that tweet actually has something that like everyone else can sort of nod to. It’s like, oh yeah, I’ve felt that same thing, too. So, they’re able to be very specific about sort of this situation, but everyone can sort of see like, oh yeah, I get that. In sort of the same way that standup jokes work is because, oh yeah, I recognize that situation and you’re making a good observation about it. The two examples you gave, the humblebrag and the bravery-complaining do none of those things. They’re just about look at me. They’re sort of narcissistic and unhelpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can proud-brag if you want. Proud-brag. And if people are like, “Jeez, it’s a little braggy,” you can say I know, I’m sorry, but I’m really proud of myself. That’s honest. And you can sad-complain. You know? And you can ask for advice if you really do need it. And if you’ve gone through something where people knocked you down and you got back up again, then maybe you can use it as an instructive example for others, so say look, if you’re in this position just know there is a better way. There is hope. That’s instructive and helpful to others.

In the end, we’re not coming to Twitter to help you. We’re coming to Twitter for you to help us. That’s why I follow people. I want information coming from them to me. I certainly don’t want them begging me to fill whatever emotional gap they have on that particular day.

**John:** Yeah. So, an example of authenticity, sort of earlier on as I was here in Paris, about two months in I got really homesick. And on Instagram I posted like the photo of the kale salad I found. And in the description I wrote how incredibly homesick I was and this was like the thing that actually sort of got me through it. And I got some really genuine responses to that because it feels so kind of embarrassing to admit that you’re homesick in a really pretty lovely place, but I was genuinely homesick. And people could sort of see it was truly how I was feeling and I was dealing with it. And people could sort of nod along with it.

And so that’s specific but also kind of universal and relatable. That’s fine. But it’s honestly a better Instagram post than a tweet because it literally wouldn’t have worked the same way on Twitter.

**Craig:** Well, it might. I mean, look, that’s a sad-complain. I mean, there’s this component, because the bravery complaint I wrote had this very important thing that bravery complaints have, which is the bravery part. Where they’ll say, “This is something that I think is wrong, but guess what? It won’t work.” OK. So are you asking me to empathize with you? Or are you telling me you are untouchable? Because what I’m hearing is somebody whose feelings have been hurt, insisting that their feelings haven’t been hurt, which is a very fourth grade boy way of dealing with the world.

**John:** 100%. So the other thing I notice a lot among writers on Twitter and sometimes frustratingly aspiring writers is that they are suddenly giving advice to the world about how to write. And some of these people are good people, and I’m not subtweeting anybody by saying this, but there are writers out there who I think are good writers but I think they should also really watch how much they are sort of offering advice out to the world about how to be a writer, or talk about their process in such exhausting detail.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, you and I do this every week. We come on this show and we give a lot of advice. One of the things that I find, well, I’m just pleased by is that from the very start, from Episode 1, neither you nor I have taken on any kind of Yoda like persona. We are not cult leaders. We do not profess to stare into the great cosmic eye. I think we are fairly self-deprecating in a funny way. We both know our limitations. We both know we’re not perfect.

We give honest advice in the most honest way we can. There are some people on Twitter who are clearly dolling out advice as if they are sitting cross-legged on the top of a mountain in Tibet, having achieved some kind of nirvana. And they’re doing it in a way that I can’t help but think is about them. Is about crafting an image for themselves as a guru, as wiser than they are.

It is important for writers who are achieving at a certain level to pass on and – not to die – but to pass information on. It’s crucial. I’m actually really emboldened by what I see, because when you and I started nobody was telling us anything. And now there’s this wonderful culture.

All I would suggest is it’s a question of tone. When you are sharing your earned wisdom with others, do it in a way that is self-aware, that doesn’t have an air of infallibility, because you are not. And unless you’re Larry Kasdan, or Scott Frank, or Callie Khouri, maybe just dial the Yoda vibe down a notch. Just a notch. Because the more authentic you are, I honestly believe the more you will be listened to.

**John:** I would agree. So, some advice if you do have that sort of moment of insight is look at how Jane Espenson offers out advice. She will find something delightful and she will write about it and say like, “Isn’t this delightful?” As if it’s a little discovery she saw in somebody else’s work. That’s wonderful because she’s not claiming brilliance for herself. She’s saying like, oh, I found this thing, or like, oh, is this a clam that’s developing? A lot of times there’s a sense of a question, and so like you might say like, “Has this ever worked?” That can sound really negative. But has there ever been a good joke about blank? That’s a structure of a tweet that offers both advice but also invites a reply. That’s a great way to sort of approach those kinds of moments where you kind of have a Yoda thought but don’t phrase it as a Yoda thought.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great point, John, and Jane is wonderful on Twitter. If you’re going to talk about some wonderful piece of writing, make it somebody else’s, for god’s sakes. You know, you and I on the show, we love talking about other people’s writing. We love talking about other writers. We have them on the show. And then occasionally, and we are long overdue for one of these, we do a big deep dive into a movie we love and we really talk about why we love it.

We’re not so much sitting here over and over saying, “When I had this brilliant idea for…” That’s not what we do. Because it’s weird. It’s weird. We’re all proud of the work that we’ve done, some of it at least. But it’s a strange thing to teach people with your own work. It’s so much more interesting to teach them with other people’s work. It immediately eliminates any whiff of self-promotion or a general sense that this so-called guru is actually desperately insecure and needs our worship.

**John:** Absolutely. And I think a general point to take out of this is like to talk about the things you love. And so talk about the writing you love. Talk about the things you see out in the world that are fantastic. So that means movies and TV shows. Don’t crap on people’s movies. And don’t crap on people’s TV shows. Because, you know what, they worked really hard on those movies. And you’re doing nobody a favor to say what a terrible movie that thing was. Rather than do that, find something really good somebody can watch and get them to watch it.

Or like a great movie is on HBO right now and you’re watching it, tweet about that and why you love this thing, rather than crapping on something.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Look, live by the sword, die by the sword. If you want to go on Twitter and you want to take shots at other people’s movies, they’re all coming back to you. All of them. Every last one of them. And god help you if you complain when they do. And generally speaking, the people that take swipes at other people’s movies and television shows do complain when it comes back to them. Which delegitimizes them even further. The last thing you want to become is a Twitter sideshow freak.

**John:** 100%. And what we say about don’t crap on people’s TV shows or movies, do not crap on other writers. And I see this every once and awhile and nothing drives me crazier. So, to publicly trash a writer is kind of unforgivable. But to do the subtweet where it’s clear you’re talking about a specific person, even if you’re not naming that person, is just – it’s not classy. It just shows your own insecurity and your own sort of desire to lash out at somebody, but your fear of lashing out at somebody. It’s not cool. It does no one any service.

**Craig:** No subtweeting does anyone any service at all, but you’re absolutely right. To subtweet writers or movies or shows is gross. I mean, we either are or are not a community that sticks together. And any writer that works on anything knows that it is hard. And there is no circumstance – none – in which I would go after a writer or their work on Twitter. Absolutely none.

**John:** Yep. So, Craig, let’s try to give some practical advice. Let’s say you’re on Twitter, you have put out some tweets that people are loving. You put out some things that people are not loving. What do you do with the trolls? Because you get a lot of trolls?

**Craig:** I do? [laughs]

**John:** You get some negative things headed your direction. So what’s some good advice for dealing with negative things headed in your direction?

**Craig:** OK. Well, it’s part of life on Twitter. The quickest thing to do is to mute them. I generally do not block people. The only people I block really on Twitter, anti-vaccination people. Because I just – I just – it’s fun. It’s just fun for me. But other than that, and there aren’t too many of those, at least I haven’t encountered too many. For the rest of it, I just mute them. They have no idea and it’s wonderful. And now I don’t know that they’re there. And so they’re gone.

**John:** And for people who don’t understand the difference between muting and blocking, muting just means that you don’t see their tweets anymore. And so they don’t know that you’ve done anything, but they’ve just disappeared. You’ve made them invisible. And it’s a delightful little feature that people should use much more frequently. Blocking is like sort of a public act and they can see that you’ve blocked them. There’s really very rarely a point to blocking somebody. Just make them mute and make them invisible.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all.

**John:** Now, you and I probably should have prefaced this whole conversation is that the trolls and the negativity that we deal with is nothing compared to what some people on Twitter deal with, especially women on Twitter. So, I do want to say that like – to acknowledge that we are in a place where, you know, we’re getting some haters, but we’re not getting the kind of haters that some women and people of color and other people–

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Craig sometimes does.

**Craig:** You know, I’ve been threatened with death and told that I should be put in an oven. And I’ve been called a kike. And I’ve gotten some pretty heavy stuff. I think murder threats, that seems like about as bad as it gets, right?

**John:** It gets bad, yes. Murder is bad.

**Craig:** Murder is bad.

**John:** Murder is bad. I don’t want to sort of say like, oh, well the mute button will solve all your problems. It certainly won’t do that. And I think there’s definitely a call for better actions on Twitter’s side, but it’s not sort of within the power of this podcast.

But I want to offer some examples of people who we think do Twitter really well. We talked about Megan Amram, Jane Espenson. Adam Rose is a guy we both know. He’s an actor and a writer.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** He’s great at it. He’s also great in other media, so Instagram and Snapchat. Derek Haas I think is great. So, we were making fun of him for his Facebook friending, but he does a great job as a showrunner. Every week does ten questions that people can write in about his shows. There’s no one better in the world at Twitter than Rob Delaney, so the creator of Catastrophe. He was a Twitter person before he was the creator of that show. He’s brilliant.

A guy who is not a big writer yet, but I thought was really good on Twitter and is how I first got to know him is Aaron Fullerton. He hosts the 3rd and Fairfax podcast, but he’s a staff writer.

Kumail Nanjiani, star of Silicon Valley, is great on Twitter. And so he’s the person who I don’t actually know, but just because of seeing him on Twitter I just really like him. And he’s so smart at being able to both be funny and political at the same time.

**Craig:** Kumail is the best. You have to follow Kumail. I’m saying it. You’re done. You’re following Kumail.

**John:** And then also Felicia Day, who is sort of early to Twitter, she’s sort of an Internet person, but she’s really good at it. And I didn’t appreciate how good she was at Twitter and the Internet and what a unique skillset that is, but she’s really good. And she built her career off of doing that and being able to marry the things she was making with the things she was presenting online. She’s really great. So, definitely another person to watch and model as you start to look at Twitter as a way to build your portfolio.

**Craig:** Brilliant. Brilliant.

**John:** Some general advice from me about interacting with people you don’t know on Twitter. So, if you are tweeting at somebody who does not follow you, that’s fine. But don’t multi-tweet. Like tweet them once and if they don’t reply back, let it go. And don’t try to reengage with them for a while. Just because there’s sort of nothing more frustrating than like when somebody keeps trying to get your attention and you don’t really want their attention.

If you’re going to reply to something they say, try to add to the conversation. Don’t just sort of say, “Hey, notice me.” That’s the “hey pretty lady” kind of thing. Don’t do that. Contribute to the conversation or just give a like. That’s plenty.

And if you’re asking a question, make it a good question, because people will reply to an interesting question or a new way of thinking about things. But look at sort of the other replies they’ve gotten and that they’re not answering the same question again and again. So if they’ve already answered your question, don’t ask the same question.

**Craig:** Hey, I have one for people that follow you and me. Don’t ask us to retweet your short films.

**John:** We won’t do it.

**Craig:** Because we can’t. Because if you’re asking, you can only imagine how many other people are asking. We just can’t do it. We can’t watch them and we can’t retweet them because we don’t have the time. And also that’s not why we’re there. We’re not there to advertise your work. It’s nothing personal. It’s just there’s too many people asking. And so the only real possible policy is to never do it.

So, we apologize. Really, we want to help everybody as we can, but you know the life boat will get swamped.

**John:** It will get swamped.

My last bit of advice is a utility I found really helpful, which I think I turned you onto, called Fruji. And it’s from Roman Mittermaier, who is a Scriptnotes listener. And it’s a really useful utility for figuring out who follows you. And so basically you log in with your Twitter handle and then it charts who is following you. And so it’s been really useful for me to figure out, oh, those are people I didn’t know who followed me who I actually really like, who I should follow. And it sort of creates relationships in ways that are really interesting. So, it’s a good way of sort of keeping track of connections you might not know you have in your Twitter timeline. So, an example would be Stephen Falk, who is the showrunner of You’re the Worst, I figured out followed me on Twitter and that was great. And I love his show and so we can have a conversation about his show, even though I’ve never met him in person.

**Craig:** I’m Fruji-ing right now.

**John:** I thought I sent you that when your Twitter population exploded.

**Craig:** I probably did it and then I just stopped doing it. And now I’m doing it again. I don’t know why.

**John:** Yeah. You should do it, because you’ll be fascinated. I mean, when Stephen King follows you, that will be how you figure out that he followed you.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a good point. Maybe he’s following me already. No, he’s not.

**John:** So, anyway, our general advice for social media, honestly we’re Twitter people, so it’s mostly Twitter advice. But I think a lot of this applies for YouTube. YouTube is where Aline and Rachel first got to know each other, which is great. Facebook is useful for some people. It’s just not useful for me. But, sure, leave us a comment on our Facebook page.

Snapchat is great if you understand how Snapchat works. It’s just not for me.

**Craig:** It’s for my kids.

**John:** Some people are finding great stuff on Snapchat. And Instagram is really good as long as you’re doing something visual. And so I find, like there’s photographers who I got to know through Instagram. There’s a photographer who actually took my headshots who I got to know because of Instagram and he was great. And definitely I would say use social media. Just be smart about social media. Listen a lot before you start speaking. And sort of figure out what the culture is before you go in and start chatting up people.

**Craig:** Smart.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer a listener question. And so–

**Craig:** Should we?

**John:** We should. So, Space Jennings wrote in with a question about short films. Let’s take a listen to that.

Space Jennings: I wonder if you can answer a question related more to filmmaking/screenwriting. I’m trying to write my very first short film to direct, and I wonder if you can provide your opinion on what you think makes a truly great short. What do you think is too short or too long? What would you avoid in a short film? What makes you cringe watching a short film? And what’s absolutely essential to include and how to basically make it stand out? More importantly, I’d like to hear your opinion on what you think makes a really bad short film and what not to do. Thanks a lot. I love the podcast. Best thing I ever discovered. Keep it up.

**John:** So I love this question because this last week I went in and spoke to my daughter’s school here in Paris. And because they’re doing this short story competition, so basically everyone in the sixth grade has to write a short story. It’s part of this Parisian competition. And so they wanted to ask what makes a good short story. And I think the things that make a great story are the same things that make a great short film is that they are short. And by short they need to be simple in a way that it can be about one idea.

I think a great short story and a great short film, they sort of have the structure of a joke in that there’s things that set up and they lead to a punchline and then they’re over. Even if they’re not a funny short film, it leads up to a thing, a conclusion, a clear end, and then it’s done. And when I see bad short films and bad short stories, it feels like it’s trying to be the first chapter of something much longer. Or something that’s much, much longer and sort of got compressed and squeezed down.

It has to be a clear simple expression of one idea that follows sort of one story with a beginning, middle, and end, and really wants to be a short. Not just a movie that happens to be short.

Craig, what are your thoughts about short films?

**Craig:** First of all, Space Jennings, incredible name.

**John:** What a great name.

**Craig:** I wish my name were Space. It is not. For me, great short films employ full use of every second of the time they have. Because they’re short films, my understanding is – just this is the contract between me and the short film. I’m in the audience. You have five minutes, ten minutes, 20 minutes, I think beyond 20 minutes you’re running out of short film territory kind of. Maybe 30, right?

You don’t have a whole two hours to tell your story. You are telling this compact tight thing. That means it must be machined. Perfect. No wasted space. Every decision must be beautiful and purposeful. And so that requires like John said a certain narrowing of focus. It still needs thematics and still needs that beginning, middle, and end, but you have to really make use of everything. I want to feel like every choice you made was purposeful.

The last thing in the world I want to see in a short film is something that I think, oh, you could have cut that out.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** If your short film can be shorter, it should be shorter, right? So efficiency and just a careful crafting of each moment.

Bad short films tend to wobble. The worst short films are moving towards a twist you see coming. The worst short films are moving towards a twist. You may not know what the twist is, but you’re like, ugh, it’s obviously something kooky is going to happen. It’s either this, or this, or this. You’re not actually in it. When you go and watch old Twilight Zones, and Space, you should, the most incredible thing about those shows, especially the best of them, is that you’re watching the Twilight Zone. You know what that means. It means that at some point there’s going to be this crazy twist ending. Oh my god. But so many of them are done so well that by the time you’re a minute into it you’ve forgotten that. You’re with people. And you’re just watching a story unfold. The way that when I went to go see Titanic, I actually forgot the boat was going to sink, because I was into the love story.

I mean, I didn’t forget-forget, but my mind was no longer on it. So, to me, avoiding that syndrome of, ugh, just get to the big stupid twist already. This is all filler. No. The joy of the joke and the punchline that you’re telling with a short film, whether it’s comedy or not, but that rhythm, is that all the lead up is and of itself delicious and meaningful and fascinating. It will make the ending so much more relevant.

So, watch old Twilight Zones and read short stories, because all of the DNA is in there. If you read The Lottery, if you read The Catbird Seat, you will see how to make a great short film.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m going to put a link in the show notes to one of my favorite little short films, which does the classic sort of joke format, but does it really, really well, called It’s Not About The Nail. I think it’s Jason Headley directed it.

**Craig:** Oh, so good.

**John:** So good.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s wonderful.

**John:** It’s a great example of you have this idea and it’s clearly just a short film idea. And that’s what is so crucial to me is that it has to be an idea that wants to be expressed as a short film and it’s not just trying to be a short movie. It really is compact in that setting and it doesn’t need to be a second longer or a second shorter. So, I will put that in the show notes as well.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** I think it’s time for One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing – actually I have two One Cool Things. I’m going to cheat. The first is archive.org. So this is founded back in 1996. The Internet archive is sort of this giant dump of all of the Internet from different ages. And so basically it crawls the entire Internet. It saves a copy of it. And so it has 150 billion web pages going back to 1996. And so the point is it’s trying to offer permanent access to parts of the web as pages get taken down or changed.

And so it’s so fun to go there and enter in the URL for a website that you go to, so like I go to johnaugust.com and you can see the original version of johnaugust.com and sort of all the changes along the way.

What’s so helpful, though, is also it finds when things have been changed. And so a week or two ago I saw this tweet saying like, oh, the Trump White House has changed the Bill of Rights page on the whitehouse.gov site. And they’ve changed people to citizens, so that the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens and not to people in the United States. And like that’s horrifying and shocking, I can’t believe that. Wait, I kind of don’t believe that. And so I could go to archive.org and look at that same page back through the years and find out that page was actually that way three years ago. So it wasn’t a new thing and I could tweet out and say like, hey, I know this feels true, but that was not actually true. And put the link to archive.org.

Incredibly useful. So many people don’t know about it, so definitely it’s a great sink hole to find yourself drifting through old versions of things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My second thing is very relevant to these next two weeks, because the LA elections are soon. And so I had to fill out my ballot here in Paris to send back to LA. And Ballotpedia is just the best resource I have found for ballot measures that are coming up. And so it’s like Wikipedia, but it just goes through and like here is the ballot measure, here are the arguments for it, here are the arguments against it. Here is who is supporting and here is who is against it. Really useful. And very clear information about ballot measures which are I think designed to be completely perplexing.

**Craig:** Yeah. The people who write them generally write them to promote the opposite of what they actually intend. It’s remarkable. It’s all flimflam. If you see a ballot measure that’s called Fewer Taxes for You, it means more taxes. [laughs] And if there’s something called the Medical Freedom Act, it means they’re trying to take your medical freedom away. It’s amazing how pernicious this is.

**John:** So, definitely please vote on March 7, because there’s actually a lot happening in Los Angeles. Measure S is the one that’s getting the most attention. You should vote against Measure S. But you should go to Ballotpedia and figure out what all those initiatives are, because it’s really, really helpful.

**Craig:** I don’t live in Los Angeles, so I’m just with you in spirit.

**John:** There’s an LA County measure though that you do need to check out as well.

**Craig:** Yes. I will take a look at Measure H. Measure H.

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a lot like my One Cool Thing last week, which as you recall was an app called Fran Bow, which is a creepy, creepy game, which I loved.

Well, this is another one. This one is even creepier.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** This one is macabre and downright disturbing and yet brilliant and I love it. It’s called Rusty Lake: Roots. And it is very similar to Fran Bow in that it is a simple point and click game where you’re solving puzzles of various kinds. But, you are doing so as part of a family over the years who live in a house by a lake and terrible, terrible things are happening. And oh my god. It is done in the most bizarre way.

It is so worth playing. Rusty Lake: Roots. Available on iOS and possibly on Android, but I don’t care.

**John:** Is it a better iPhone game or an iPad game?

**Craig:** I think all games are better iPad games, like this, these kinds of puzzle-solving games, just because it’s not meant to be played casually. You’re meant to sit there and really work on it. So, I would definitely recommend iPad.

**John:** Very cool. I will check it out.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And that’s our show this week. So, our show as always is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Eric Pearson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions, on Twitter, social media. Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. I’m also on Instagram @johnaugust if you want to see me there.

Our show is on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, you can leave a comment like the three we read aloud today.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all back episodes at johnaugust.com. While you’re at johnaugust.com, please go to johnaugust.com/guide and let us know which episodes you think are the ones that people should definitely tune into if they’re coming to the show new.

At johnaugust.com you’ll find the transcripts. We try to get them up about four days after the episodes air. And you can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. It is $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** $1.99.

**John:** And you get access to the whole back catalog. And you can also listen to them through your app of choice. Scriptnotes on iOS and on Android. And that is our show for this week. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Talk to you soon. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [UltraViolet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraViolet_(system))
* [Stop Using Filler Words](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/us/verbal-ticks-like-um.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1&referer=https://t.co/v2Lw3fCWIc)
* [Homeopathic Teething Tablets](https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm538684.htm)
* [Scriptnotes Listener Guide](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [Fruji](http://start.fruji.com/)
* [It’s Not About The Nail](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4EDhdAHrOg)
* [Archive.org](https://archive.org/)
* [Ballotpedia](https://ballotpedia.org/March_7,_2017_ballot_measures_in_California)
* [Rusty Lake: Roots](http://store.steampowered.com/app/532110/)
* [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 Eric Pearson ([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_290.mp3).