Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 275 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We are coming to you one day earlier than usual because Tuesday, I’ve heard, is the Election Day in the U.S. Craig, is that right?

**Craig:** Oh, is it? I don’t — they should probably say something about it on the news.

**John:** I heard a rumor of it. So I thought maybe we’d get this episode out the day before the election. Also in the theory that some people may be a little bit stressed out about the election–

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** And may want to hear about anything other than the election, so we will not talk about the election whatsoever in this podcast.

**Craig:** No, I would honestly would love it if somebody could just knock me out until the day after, just put me under. I can’t take this anymore, I can’t.

**John:** I’m sorry. I can’t either.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So today on the podcast, we are going to be looking at how movies and TV shapes the English language and how writers should think about their role in all of this. And we’ll also examine the uncomfortable overlap between rom-com characters and stalkers.

But first a reminder, t-shirts, today, this Monday that you’re listening to the podcast, is the very final opportunity to buy one of the two Scriptnotes t-shirts. There’s the blue shirt, there’s the gold standard shirt, they are both lovely but this is your last chance to get them. And when I say it’s your last day, I mean, daytime because at 5:00 p.m. today Monday Los Angeles time, they are closed forever. You will not be able to buy a t-shirt after 5:00 p.m. today on Monday.

**Craig:** I better buy some shirts.

**John:** You better buy some shirts. I think, Craig, we will find you a special friend of the show magic cohost discount. I think you’ll get maybe like $0.50 off. So–

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Whoa.

**Craig:** I was not expecting that kind of generosity today.

**John:** Well, I’m feeling very generous today.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But everybody else, you need to like click the links that are on the show notes and buy your shirts because if you don’t buy your shirts you’re going to feel really sad when you’re wandering around the Austin Film Festival without a Scriptnotes t-shirt.

**Craig:** I mean, it does seem, honestly, like a lot of people have those shirts on. It’s the must have. It’s the must have wear of Austin.

**John:** It proves that you’re part of the inside crowd. So I want to thank everyone who bought a shirt or two shirts, you guys are awesome. I want to thank people for buying enough shirts that we are now on the wall of fame forever at Cotton Bureau as one of the most popular t-shirts ever made at Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** You guys are the best.

**Craig:** How many — so they made like, what, four or five different kinds of shirts there?

**John:** [laughs] They did, yeah. They’ve made a whole range of different shirts and our two shirts are both on the wall.

**Craig:** You know, again, I’m reminded of this fact that often slips my mind that people listen to this. There are more than just you or me.

**John:** So last week, we crossed 100,000 listeners–

**Craig:** My God.

**John:** In a week, which is nuts.

**Craig:** That is insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so, god, the amount of money you’re making, it just keeps going up, right?

**John:** You know, I feel like I should do a blog host that like lays out exactly what money comes in because there’s this whole idea that this is a money-making venture.

**Craig:** Where do you think that idea comes from? I don’t know where.

**John:** I think it comes from you, Craig.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** What? So anyway, the t-shirts are a lovely thing. They will start to pay for some of Matthew’s time.

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** That’s really what it will do.

**Craig:** It start to pay for some. I assume that we remain a money losing operation, you know, we — is that right, or–

**John:** I think we are. We approach breakeven. It really depends on how much of [unintelligible] salary you want to throw towards this podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** That’s what it comes down to.

**Craig:** Well, that really comes down to, you know, how much nonsense you have been doing throughout the day. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah, there’s plenty of nonsense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s plenty of scaring ducks away from the pool.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s the best job ever. Have you given him a firearm?

**John:** I have not, but Stuart gave him like the best techniques in terms of like tennis balls can be effective, you could just–

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Go out there and wave your arms. Basically, you don’t want the ducks to root in your pool because they will stay in your pool and that is not good for the pool or for the ducks.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t even–

**John:** The podcast becomes extra relatable when we talk about our swimming pools.

**Craig:** Listen, man, I haven’t mentioned a thing about that. I live in a very modest home.

**John:** You really do live in a very modest compound.

**Craig:** [laughs] Rich-guy laugh right there.

**John:** On last week’s episode we were talking about one of our listeners who we believe to be Martin Sheen, and we wanted him to do a voice over for us on a future Three Page Challenge. Literally moments after we recorded the episode, I found out that it wasn’t Martin Sheen, it was Michael Sheen, another incredibly talented actor but not Martin Sheen. This is Michael Sheen who is the star of Frost/Nixon, Masters of Sex, the Twilight series. He’s great on 30 Rock. He’s Welsh. We love him. He’s apparently a listener. So we actually have audio for this.

So Michael Sheen was on a podcast called My Dad Wrote a Porno and this is how he came to find about that show.

Michael Sheen: I think it was one of your guests, one of your previous guests. I think it was Rachel Bloom.

Male Voice: Right.

Michael Sheen: Who I heard on another podcast called Sciptnotes, which is about screenwriting.

Male Voice: Yes.

Michael Sheen: And they do a thing at the end which is One Cool Thing and her One Cool Thing when she was a guest on it was this. That sounds interesting.

Male Voice: That sounds ridiculous.

Michael Sheen: I’m going to have a listen to that.

**Craig:** He was in the Underworld. He was in — he was the head of lycans, he was the head werewolf.

**John:** I have not seen Underworld, but come on.

**Craig:** Oh, you haven’t. Those movies are good.

**John:** So the one movie Craig has seen that I have not seen.

**Craig:** Well, there’s a bunch of them.

**John:** Well, not the one movie.

**Craig:** There’s–

**John:** There’s a bunch of movies but like the–

**Craig:** There’s the–

**John:** Craig, your shtick is that you’ve not seen any movies.

**Craig:** Well, here’s the deal. If you put good-looking people in leather and have vampires fighting werewolves, Bill Nighy as an ancient vampire. Ooh.

**John:** Oh, that’s pretty great.

**Craig:** Yeah. Plus they have guns. Here’s the genius of Underworld. They were like we like vampires and we live werewolves and we like the idea of them fighting but we also like the Matrix. Let’s do all of that.

**John:** Let’s do all of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, just do–

**John:** Let’s do all the scenes.

**Craig:** Do all of it at once.

**John:** Kate Beckinsale. Done.

**Craig:** Yes. Kate Beckinsale–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Moving around in like super tight leather, it’s great. The whole thing top to bottom, incredibly entertaining movie series, super geeky. If you — I mean, you’re a D&D guy, you would actually probably enjoy the – oh, and then there’s some Interview of the Vampire kind of stuff thrown in there.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** It’s like 12 different movies that they just blended together in a smoothie. And Michael Sheen — so first of all — sorry, Michael Sheen. That’s really embarrassing although it can’t be the first time, right? I mean, he’s had this before.

**John:** I mean, better than Charlie Sheen. If we had confused him with Charlie Sheen.

**Craig:** That would have been a little weird. And also it’s not fair because Michael Sheen’s real last name, I’m assuming, is Sheen and Martin Sheen’s real last name is Estévez. So Martin Sheen, that’s not even he’s real name, right. So we should have known.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We should have known it was Michael Sheen. Michael Sheen is fantastic. He’s one of those actors that’s never bad. You know that kind of actor that’s never bad. Because even like — look, Robert De Niro is an amazing actor. He’s been terrible at times.

**John:** Yeah, he has been.

**Craig:** Miscast, wrong role, didn’t seem to care, whatever it was, just he was bad, you know. Michael Sheen, never bad.

**John:** Do you think Michael Sheen is blushing right now as he hears you extoling his many virtues?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. I mean, I don’t – is he a blusher. I guess, you know, Welsh people probably — they’re — you know, they’re fair skinned.

**John:** Yeah. So a little blushing could happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s fine. I mean, I think it only shows how great of an actor he is that he lets that emotion come through.

**Craig:** Especially when he’s the werewolf guy.

**John:** Yeah, for sure. Oh, so he’s a werewolf not a vampire. That’s crucial distinction.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I don’t even know how you could have thought he’d be the vampire. He’s clearly–

**John:** No, but I think he’s a vampire though in the Twilight series.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, he is. Maybe that’s why you thought that, yeah.

**John:** Maybe–

**Craig:** Okay. Now I can understand why you would think he’d be a vampire because he played a vampire in an incredibly popular film series. He was–

**John:** That’s how talented of an actor he is. He could be both a vampire and a werewolf.

**Craig:** He’s so much better as a werewolf, I’m telling you. So much better.

**John:** Well, regardless of, we’re lucky to have him as a listener and we’re lucky to have our 99,000 listeners as well. So thank you everyone who listened and bought a t-shirt.

And now on with today’s show.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So back at Episode 260, we implored listeners to stop using the phrase begs the question. You remember that, Craig?

**Craig:** I do, I do. We begged them.

**John:** So we begged them to stop using begs the question because beg the question and begging the question really means to use circular logic, it doesn’t mean to raise the question or to invite the question. And my theory, which I had no evidence to support actually, was that the misuse of begs the question probably came from film and TV writers who were trying to use legal terms in courtroom dramas and didn’t really know what it meant and then they started using the same terms in places that really had nothing to do with legal situations.

So I — my theory, which I really can’t prove and I’m not going to do like the sophisticated data analysis to figure out like when it happened, but my theory is that we are kind of partly to blame for how begs the question has become misused and how it doesn’t mean what it kind of originally was supposed to mean.

**Craig:** Well, there’s no doubt that we, we meaning Hollywood, right, what is that? Is that a synecdoche when I make we into Hollywood, but I don’t know what it is? But we–

**John:** Charlie Kaufman would know what that meant.

**Craig:** He would know. Hollywood essentially powers the great bulk of American culture, let’s call it nonmusical American culture, and then by extension an enormous amount of global culture. And the way that we present language absolutely matters and it does impact things. Look at, for instance, one of your favorite movies and I love it, too, Clueless.

**John:** Oh, yes.

**Craig:** So Clueless, like Valley Girl before it, it popularized certain little local expressions that suddenly then become everywhere. “As if” became–

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A thing. What I just said, “Start a thing,” that’s what Mean Girls made a thing a thing. Stop trying to make the blank a thing, right? So–

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It is actually kind of remarkable how much influence movies do have on popular language even if movies aren’t inventing that language, in fact, they rarely invent any language but they do gather up bits and pieces of things especially when they’re making movies about young people, like Fast Times at Ridgemont High and on and on and on, and then they megaphone it and amplify it. And sometimes in their megaphoning and amplifying they get it wrong.

**John:** Yeah, sometimes they do and sometimes they lock in some weird mistakes and changes that really are not part of the normal way that the language is used. So writers have always been doing this. So going back to Shakespeare, Shakespeare was using the language he heard around him but he was also inventing new language and a lot of things he was inventing and putting on stage for the very first time became parts of our language. Similarly, the language as spoken, the language as written for a long period of English history have been very different things but eventually as the written language started to more resemble the spoken language, the spoken language kind of drifted towards what the written language was doing and vice versa.

And so I think when we look at sort of the changes that movies and television make on our language, you have to be in mind like, yes, people may have been speaking that way but because it’s now on a fixed form and that dialogue is frozen in that movie, we start to think like, “Oh, that’s how people speak,” which in the case of Valley Girl or Clueless, that wasn’t necessarily how a large population was speaking, but now everyone was hearing it and everybody was imitating it, consciously or subconsciously.

**Craig:** Yeah, and this is, of course, the problem that we have when we watch old movies, I mean, movies from the ‘30s or ‘40s or ‘50s and we think, “Oh, that’s how people all spoke back then.” No, no more than the world looked black and white back then. It was a crafted presentation. Movies have always been special amplified presentations of reality. So it’s a mistake to look back at old movies and think, “That’s how people must have spoken.” Not at all.

**John:** So here’s a great example, so let’s listen to a clip from The Philadelphia Story. This is in 1940 and just listen to the language that they’re using.

Cary Grant: I suppose you’ll still be attractive to any man of spirit though. There’s something engaging about it, this goddess business, something more challenging to the male than the more obvious charms.

Katharine Hepburn: Really?

Cary Grant: Really. We’re very vain, you know. This citadel can and shall be taken and I’m the boy to do it.

Katharine Hepburn: You seem quite contemptuous of me all of a sudden.

Cary Grant: Not really. Not of you. Never of you.

**John:** So this Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn talking in The Philadelphia Story and where are they from, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, they’re from a magical land that’s right between the United States and England. It’s called Middle Atlantic Land.

**John:** Exactly. It’s a really peculiar accent that has features of British English and some Briticisms but it also has other weird special characteristics. And so, we’ll put a link in the show notes to an article by Dan Nosowitz for Atlas Obscura which is talking about how people in movies before 1950 spoke so strangely. His article is called How a Fake British Accent Took Hollywood by Storm. And that’s kind of what we’re hearing. It’s like they’re not trying to be British but they’re trying to not sound American and they’re trying to sound kind of fancy. There’s just like there’s no other kind of good word for it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s sort of rich, it’s fancy. It’s a highly cultured way of speaking, but it’s really off.

**Craig:** It is really off. I mean, you have words like, for instance, I think he says challenging in there and it’s challenging, challenging. And I don’t even think the British would say challenging and the Americans certainly wouldn’t say challenging. And then really, really, really. It is a reflection, I think, of Hollywood’s desire to aim high and present a classy product. The people involved were beautiful, classy people that we would aspire to. They weren’t non-Americans because we’re Americans and we need to be American, see, but better. And this was at a time when I think there was a sense that class mobility was more of a thing, that you would aspire to speak that way and wouldn’t you be putting on the Ritz if you did.

**John:** Yeah. So imagine, this is the movies after all, this is the pinnacle of sort of like everyone watching the same bit of culture together. Everyone is watching people speak this accent and, yes, this accent may have existed in pockets before and people may have been trying to speak in a fancy way. But like this was kind of an invention. This was an invention and in 1942, like two years after this movie, there’s actually a very famous book by Edith Skinner who has a book called Speak with Distinction where she defines “good speech” and it has basically these characteristics that we hear these actors speaking, which is non-rhoticity, which basically means dropping your Rs. And so words like here and Charles, you don’t hear the R in there. There’s no scrape to that R. There’re weird things that she wants you to do with the tempo of words and how you’re hitting your accents on things. It’s a very peculiar way of speaking that lasted for quite a long time in movies even though it didn’t like necessarily break out into the larger world. I think people still aspired to that accent.

**Craig:** There was a time before, really before sound came in, where acting was incredibly performative. Nobody was meant to be acting naturalistically. If you look at a movie like, say, Nosferatu. Everyone is what we would call emoting, overacting. It was a kind of act that you might do on stage in a big, big theater house where people all the way in the back needed to see that you were scared. And you had to act things really big because you couldn’t say words, right?

And then when sound came in, Hollywood understood, “Wait a second. There is a more naturalistic way to be. We should start acting the way people actually act.” And so you have this wave coming in and, you know, very famously, James Dean is one of the — and Marlon Brando, this kind of naturalistic acting. And you could see how it wasn’t like a — there was no revolution. It was just a gradual thing that occurred. And just as that happened, when you watched the motion from — in the way people talk, just dialogue and sounds from ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s, even ‘60s. And then by the time you get to the late ‘60s, it’s already disappearing. And you have, you know, you’re looking at movies that are heralding the coming ‘70s era, you know, a movie like Easy Rider. There is no interest in putting on airs. If anything it is how can we be the most real and normal that we can be.

**John:** Yeah. And normal is often a code word for authentic. It’s basically, it’s how do you make it feel like these people are actually really in this space and they are the characters that they’re portraying. Which in The Philadelphia Story, that wasn’t — I mean, that wasn’t the urgency. It wasn’t about like getting the perfect voice for like where that person was supposed to come from. Everyone sort of spoke like they were in this magical kind of movie world. And I think a lot of people kind of wanted to be in that magical movie world. I think this woman, Edith Skinner, she was being a prescriptivist. She was talking about good speech was trying to sound like you’re in this kind of movie. So I want to talk about prescriptivism as it relates to sort of language overall and English overall because I think the greater trend, and I think something we all notice as writers is there’s all these rules which are applied to us that we learned from grade school on about how English is supposed to work.

And many of those rules are really arbitrary. They really are just things that have come down over the years from people who want English to be something that it’s not at all. And so, this isn’t quite our gold standard episode where we talk about like the history of gold as an economic tool. But I want to take a little bit of time here to talk about like why English is the way it is and sort of clear up some misconceptions about how English came to be because I don’t think we’ve never done that in our 275 episodes.

**Craig:** Well, I just thought it came to be when Americans invented it.

**John:** Well, we did invent it. We kind of perfected it. I mean, other people had tried but we just — we nailed it.

**Craig:** Nailed it.

**John:** We just got it done. Nailed it.

So let’s go through the very short history of English. Because I remember when I was in high school, I watch like this — I think it was Bill Moyers’ PBS series which was like the 10-hour version of the story of English. But here is the sort of a few minute version story of English so you can be a little bit smarter than some of your other friends at a cocktail party.

So a root language that most of the languages that we are familiar with in Europe is called Indo-European, and no one actually speaks Indo-European right now. But they could trace it back and they can figure out that it’s the origin of English, Spanish, Hindi, Portugese, Bengali, Russian, Persian, Punjabi, so a huge chunk of our currently spoken languages trace their way back to this Indo-European language. The branch that we ended up on was Proto-Germanic. And so that’s Dutch, German, Swedish and the original English that was spoken in the Isle of Britain by the Anglos and Saxons was very much like sort of how German works now. It had a lot of those — Craig, did you ever learn German? Did you ever take German?

**Craig:** No. I grew up fearing Germans. I can’t imagine why.

**John:** That’s fair enough. But, you know, German does a lot of things. When you first start learning German, you take a German class, they’re like, wow, you have to — it feels like you have to conjugate everything. It’s because there’s declensions on nouns and nouns come in different cases and they do a lot of special things. English used to do that or at least Old English used to do that, the stuff that was spoken by the Anglos and the Saxons in the Isle of Britain. So if you look at the original poem of Beowulf, it’s Old English but it’s basically unintelligible to us now because it does all that old difficult stuff. It’s written in a language called West Saxon. And so the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, verbs, everything has these special endings and forms. And so if you’ve taken other languages, you know, that in Spanish or in French, you have to modify the ends of words to match up with things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I hate that.

**John:** Yeah. Isn’t so rough like it’s — all this extra work. And basically, we used to do all that in English and then we just sort of stopped. The reason we stopped is probably, mostly because of the Vikings.

**Craig:** Thank you, Vikings.

**John:** Thank you, Vikings. So Vikings spoke a language that was sort of Old Norse, which was very much — it was one of the old Germanic languages but they had different endings on their nouns. And so when they came to Britain, as adults, they were trying to speak this language that was being spoken here and they could sort of do it but they couldn’t do it very well.

**Craig:** They were just too dumb. They were literally too stupid to learn the language. They’re like, “We’re not learning your language. We’re changing it. It’s too hard.”

**John:** So as someone who is currently living in Paris, I have so much sympathy for the Vikings because I spoke some French before I got here. But a lot of the parents at my daughter’s school showed up here like not knowing a word of it. And it’s really tough as an adult to sort of get up to mastering things. So you end up sort of just like getting by and I think that’s probably what the Vikings were doing is they would show up as adults and like, “Argh. Okay, we’re getting by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And what they basically did is they kind of just — they were like ordering at a restaurant where they didn’t quite speak what was there and everyone could understand them but they couldn’t quite make it all work.

**Craig:** I’m not sure that’s what the Vikings were doing but, okay.

**John:** Yeah. There was also raping and pillaging, too. There’s probably a bit of that.

**Craig:** Touch of it.

**John:** Touch of that. They showed up, their nouns had like the same root but they had different endings, so they just sort of stopped using the endings of the nouns. They brought a lot of their words relating to ships and things like that and everyone just sort of got by. Meanwhile, also in the Island of Britain, there were the Celtic peoples who were already there and they had some impact. Probably the biggest impact they had was, you know how in English, we do this really strange thing with the verb, “do.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Really kind of a verb, how we use it. Nobody does that. But the Celts sort of did something like this, which is that we use did and do in order to form questions. Like, “Did you go to the park today?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But we also use it in negatives in ways that’s really strange. So this is a sentence that should make sense in English, “I no go to the park today.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We can’t say that or, “I not go to the park today.” You can’t say that. You have to put the did in there. It’s a useless did but you have to put the did in there, “I did not go to the park today.” And that’s a really weird thing in English and the linguist, John McWhorter, thinks that probably came from the Celtic people who are already there in the England.

**Craig:** Yeah. They might have been drunk when they were coming up with that.

**John:** Yeah. But you know what? It’s part of our language now. It stuck around. So that’s how we do it.

**Craig:** Hey, it’s — you know what? I love it personally because I speak it. I’m really — I’m so good at English. I have all the best words.

**John:** I have all the best words. Well, our best words came from the French. So the Norman invasion of the Island of Britain happened in the 11th century and they brought in all of their words. In a lot of cases, we had the same words already kind of from the same roots but then we ended up using the French words as well. And so we sort of — we didn’t quite double our vocabulary but we got a lot of like duplicate words. And so that’s why in English, we have both the word royal and the word regal which are from the same root but we sort of got both of them, and, hey, bonus words.

So the French was the last sort of big impact of like new words. Then in the 15th century, we start with modern English. We start with printing presses. We start with the King James Bible. There’s the great vowel shift which I barely understand but essentially all of our vowels shifted sort of one notch on the sort of the loop of vowels. And it’s part of the reason why all of our spelling is so strange because we used to pronounce things very differently and we used to pronounce things the way that they were kind of written down and everything just shifted because our vowels shifted and the letters that we pronounce shifted as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. You end up with these bizarre cases like — was it Ogden Nash who famously said you could spell the word fish, G-H-O-T-I.

**John:** Yeah. That’s so great. So let’s see if I can remember, it’s the GH from enough, right?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The O from —

**Craig:** That’s the tricky one.

**John:** I don’t remember what O sounds like in–

**Craig:** Women.

**John:** Oh, you’re absolutely right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then the TI is the TI in like question and a lot of those words.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, that obviously is bananas. And somebody — I was talking to somebody who — I can’t remember who it was or where he was from but English was not his first language. And I said, you know, is it hard to learn English? Because everyone across the world, you see people learning English. It is becoming the most global language. And he said, in his experience, it was actually quite easy because there were so many quirky things. So you understood like, “Oh, that word just sounds like this.” It’s not like I have to —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, continually apply certain things. Like it’s easy for me to learn the word women because it’s just distinct. It’s women. That’s it. Boom. Done.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And no feminine or masculine or things like that.

**John:** Well, yeah. There’s a lot of simplifications that happened. So we lost our genders on all our nouns, great, helpful.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We also basically stopped conjugating at all. So we conjugate the first person plural. And so I speak, you speak, he/she/it speaks.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we speak. You all speak. They speak. So it’s only that third person is singular that we–

**Craig:** How great is that?

**John:** Yeah. It’s so simple.

**Craig:** That literally — that would turn, like I took French in high school. That would have been — that’s like three-quarters of it is gone because you’re not conjugating.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, oh my god, it’s not enough that you have conjugate everything. And then there are irregular conjugations. And then there are the imperative conjugations. If I want to command somebody to speak, I say, “Speak.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. It’s as simple as that. No wonder people are learning this language. It’s not hard.

**John:** So one of my husband’s friends is an English teacher here in France. And so, it’s so fascinating to hear his explanation of like how things work in English because I don’t think he’s actually right a lot of times because he will say like, “Oh, you don’t have this form but you just do this.” And I was like, “I don’t think that’s actually accurate but I think it actually makes sense most of the time. So, fine, it’s fine for you to say that.” Like we basically don’t —

**Craig:** [laughs] He is a bad teacher.

**John:** We really don’t have the subjunctive in English.

**Craig:** Yes, we do. We have the subjunctive.

**John:** We have subjunctive but we use it so rarely. So it’s not a crucial thing for you to understand.

**Craig:** I use it frequently.

**John:** So give me an example of when you love to use the subjunctive in English.

**Craig:** Well, the most common use is following an if. If I were to go to here, if I were to do this, if I were to do that. I wish — if and I wish are probably the two most common. I wish that I were a little bit taller. I wish I were a baller. I wish I — that would be a bad version of that song. I agree. But accurate subjunctive. I’m a fan.

**John:** I’m a fan of like the hortatory subjunctive. Like, may we all be so lucky.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that.

**John:** So that’s, we be.

**Craig:** Yes. May we all be, yes, there but for the grace of God go —

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** No, that one doesn’t quite work.

**John:** Yeah. But we don’t have to think about it nearly as much as other languages do, which is kind of great. Other sort of weird advantages to English that have come up is like we’re very phonetically rich so it’s very easy for us to bring in words from other languages and sort of make them fit and work. Other languages tend to have fewer phonemes and so it’s harder for them to sort of get a word — to be able to pronounce a word that’s not a native word for them, but they make it work. Every place can sort of incorporate words. But English seems to be especially greedy at taking in new words.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t think of too many — in French, I think we can cover everything. I mean, there’s the — there’s, you know, the kind of nasal thing or the back of the throat R.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But we’re capable. Those are really just, you know, little sprinkles on top of sounds we already have. In Italian, there is a sound that we do not have.

**John:** All right. What is it?

**Craig:** It’s this particular kind of plural case or sometimes you’ll see in some words they’ll also have a GLI. So GLI, which sounds like glee. In Italian, it’s actually LYE. It’s hard. I can’t quite…LYE. It’s LY-combined together-E. LYE.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s a weird sound.

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s — we’re not perfect. We don’t sort of have everything. But we have just like a huge range of things. And so even as I listen to some adults here mispronouncing something in French, I want to tell them like, “No. No. We really do have that sound, you’re just try apply the wrong vowel for that.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like, you know, just like your ghoti-fish example, like we really do have that sound to make that. You’re just thinking of the wrong letter for it. And if you could think of the right letter for it, you’d make it to be able to work.

But English has some significant downsides. And I think it’s worth pointing what’s not so great about English. Because we got rid of all of our endings on words, word order ends up mattering a lot more in English than in many other languages. So you have to put things in a certain order for them to make sense. In some languages like Latin, for example, you can put stuff in kind of whatever order it pleases you because it’s very clear what that noun is doing in the sentence. Here, we have to use helper words and a lot of word order for sentences to make sense.

**Craig:** I like it that way.

**John:** You like it that way?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because we’re used to it. It’s natural to us and it’s a hard thing for some people to learn from other languages.

**Craig:** Tough.

**John:** We have strange ambiguities and we’re sort of missing some things that other languages have. So, an example which I already used when I was trying to lay out the conjugations is we use the same word for you, singular, and you, plural. And it doesn’t trip us up that often, but there are weird cases where you’re talking about more than one person and if we had a different form of you for that would be helpful. We used to have thou, which was that second person singular and it just — it disappeared. You took its place. But it was useful.

**Craig:** Well, you can see how colloquially people fill it in themselves. So where I grew up in New York, there was “you’s.” And obviously, in the South, in huge swaths of the South and even to the mid-South, it’s “ya’ll” which is incredibly common, and then, there’s “you all” which I hear all the time. I hear that out here in California. So, people will add little zippitys on there to kind of get themselves into a second person plural as opposed to second person singular.

But there’s also cases in, for instance, in French, you know, they have the formal and informal which we do not have. So, “vous” could be second person singular if you’re talking to somebody fancy.

**John:** Yeah. And the explanation behind the “vous” being formal in that situation is it’s also like of a royal we. It’s the same kind of idea where like you’re giving somebody extra respect as if they’re kind of two people by using the “vous” form with them.

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** We also lost our version of a sort of — or we sort of use you for. We don’t have the thing to say like a generic person like sort of not anyone specifically, but a general person.

**Craig:** We have one. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. We have one. Yeah.

**Craig:** Which doesn’t quite work, but then, there’s — but we often do use “you” to mean you, a person who’s not here who but like one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. You can’t get there from here. Like, who’s that “you?” It’s not literally you.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Because of how our language evolved, we ended up with a ton of words that are misspells and hard to figure out how to pronounce. And so, one of the great advantages of English, I think, is that we have a huge dictionary and a huge range of words you can choose from. But if you’re trying to learn the language, man, that’s a lot of words.

And so, we have “tree” and we have “arbor” and there’s no apparent connection between the two of them, but they are connected and there’s just a lot more to sort of master if you’re going to try to master English as a language.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love vocabulary. I do.

**John:** You’re a crossword player. So, like, for you, it’s great.

**Craig:** We prefer puzzler or solver, sir.

**John:** I’m so sorry.

**Craig:** Solver, yeah.

**John:** You’re a solver.

**Craig:** I don’t play crosswords.

**John:** I’m a giver-upper on crosswords.

**Craig:** I’m going to get you started. I am. I feel like you would be great.

**John:** I literally tried the New York Times this afternoon. I tried the Thursday Puzzle. Is the Thursday Puzzle hard? Because it was hard for me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this Thursday had rebus. So, that can be tricky. I don’t know if you – a rebus is when one square holds more than one letter.

**John:** Yeah. And today’s, one was AG, and it just completely stumped me.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Thursday — start with Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Just work on those.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Get your sea legs, feel good about yourself, and then just know that Thursday will always have a gimmick.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** So, be looking for — always, Thursday, there’s always a gimmick.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Friday and Saturday are tough ones. They are just difficult, usually gimmick-less, but difficult. And then, Sunday is like a Thursday. It’s like a big Thursday.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, now, I know.

**Craig:** But, yeah, go Monday and Wednesday. You should be able to do Monday easy-breezy.

**John:** Cool. I will try a Monday puzzle when Monday comes.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Because I will be looking to do anything other than focus on Tuesday.

**Craig:** I know, seriously. You may not be able to come home.

**John:** Ugh. We won’t talk about that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right. So, let’s get back to our discussion of English. And so, just like we had the woman who was talking about the accent that everyone should speak with, we have a lot of people who are talking about like how everyone should write and the words that people should use. And these prescriptivists for the English language, a lot of them are coming from Latin because they were church people. And, church people, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Craig, but church people like rules and they want an orderly universe. So, it comes from–

**Craig:** Like commandants even.

**John:** Yeah, even that. Like, divinely inspired texts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they’re reading the bible or they come from a background where the bible is in Latin and Latin is a very orderly language. It has a lot of special rules. And so, they’re looking at how cool Latin is. When you look at English, it’s like, well, English should be more like Latin or at least we should try to make English a little bit more like Latin.

And so, a lot of the rules that we’ve been taught over the years come from these prescriptivists who are looking at English saying like, “But in Latin, you do it like this. So, therefore, the rule should be that you do it like this.” That comes up a lot in cases with our pronouns because even though we got rid of most of our cases for nouns, we still have them for “he” and “him” or “she” and “her” for “I” and “me.”

A lot of the rules you see people trying to apply to English come from Latin where they’re trying to say like, “Oh, well, this is how you do it in Latin. So, you should do it this way in English.” And when we mess things up in English or when we are chastised for things in English, it’s often because people are looking at how we should be doing things because they were done a certain way in Latin.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a — I mean, I will freely admit that I’m a grammarian. And the joy of grammar for me is not one of any kind of metaphysical superiority. There is no significance in and of itself to grammar. The joy is in — it’s in the fastidiousness itself. It is a joy of joyfulness. I am begging the question here. I like the specificity. I do think that there are a lot of cases where being grammatically correct actually does better express intention and meaning, but not always.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Most of the time, I just like grammar because I like being in control of the algorithms of speech and of writing.

**John:** Absolutely. And so, the kind of grammar you’re describing is how people use language and how to use language effectively to communicate the meaning that you’re trying to communicate which is great and like there’s reasons why, I think, it’s important to understand these rules, as they’re set down as rules, to make sure that what you’re trying to communicate actually is getting through on the other end and to be able to anticipate.

If you break any of these rules or tenets, the person on the other end may perceive you in a way that you don’t want to be perceived or perceive your ability to use the language negatively because of a choice you’ve made not to follow a certain set of rules. And so an example would be, “Craig and I host a podcast.” Great. “Me and Craig host a podcast.” Well, that actually is not wrong, per se. There’s lots of good defense for using “me” as a subject in that case. But most people would say no. And if you’re going to do that, you’re going to have to be aware that people are going to assume that you’ve made a mistake there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a signifier. I mean, what we often look at with grammar is the signifier of education.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the thing about “Me and Craig host the podcast”, I mean, my sister texted me the other day. She’s a brilliant attorney and she wrote, “Me and this other guy did a blank, blank, blank.” And I understand, when you’re casual and when you’re texting, when you’re chit-chatting, it’s totally fine. But, if you were to write something and publish something, it is essentially saying, “Me hosts a podcast” and now, you sound like Tarzan or Cookie Monster and it’s ridiculous.

So, it really does come down to signification for most, but for me, also, there is a certain beauty to the sound of “Craig and I host a podcast” because it flows and it flows into my understanding of how I host a podcast should sound. There’s an assonance to it as opposed to dissonance. I feel dissonant. Similarly, I’m the person that gets irked when people make the mistake when it’s the — when it’s an object and they’ll say, “She went to the store with John and me,” right? That’s correct.

“She went to the store with John and I.” I hear that all the time. Now, the signification is you’re trying to sound smart, but you actually screwed it up and now you sound dumb. So, it’s about — it’s a weird thing. It’s like music to me and just the notes sound wrong if you’re using “me” when you should be saying “I.”

**John:** Absolutely. So, I would point listeners to a great podcast hosted by John McWhorter who’s a good linguist who talks about specifically the “Billy and me” sort of problem. And it’s a weird thing. He actually makes a very compelling case that “I” is actually the special case and there’s a weird thing with “I” that you basically — “I” has to go right before the verb. And if there’s really anything between “I,” it breaks.

And so, basically in English, it’s evolved to be the case where the “I” has to be right next to the verb, otherwise, you have to use “me” or something else there. Because, think about a sentence, like, “Craig and I, not knowing what we wanted to do decided to blah, blah, blah…” The most space you put between “I” and the verb, the more the whole sentence breaks down. Another example he sort of gives is that “Who’s there?” You don’t say, “I.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I is never the answer to the question. “I” is basically only the pronoun that goes right before the verb when you’re talking about yourself.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s a strange case.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the — and by the way, speaking of crosswords, a common crossword answer is “Is it I?” So, there’s a famous bible quote, “Is it I, my lord?” and that is correct. So, “Who’s there?” “It is I.” That is grammatically correct. Almost no one says that because he’s absolutely right. I is demanding the verb following the — you can do in a positive. That’s when you have a little phrase set apart by commas that work like parenthesis. So, you can say “I, angrily, went to the store” or–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “I, in need of a book, went to the bookstore”. The longer that a positive comes, the more broken down the sentence is, and frankly, almost no one will put in a positive in there because it is ugly-sounding. Again, it’s musical.

**John:** It is absolutely musical. So, that’s where I want to get to the whole point of this discussion of English is that the writing that we are doing for screenwriting is very musical writing. And, so, the same reasons why you would not want to have a character say, “It is I,” are the reasons why you need to think about the grammar choices you’re making when you’re writing screenplays.

So, let’s talk about it. So, first, let’s talk about screenplays as a whole form. They are written in the present tense. I’ve read screenplays that are written in the past tense, more like a book. It feels weird that the standard has become that we write screenplays in the present tense and that every moment is happening sort of right in front of you. They’re a reflection of the experience of watching the movie. The same way the movie is flowing right in front of your eyes, the screenplay is flowing right in front of your eyes in the present tense. Craig, have you read any scripts that are not present tense?

**Craig:** No. I’ve never seen that and I can’t imagine how that would feel because it seemingly clashes with the dialogue. Now, there are books where, you know, most novels are written past tense, third-person past tense. And then, when people are speaking, but then, that’s why when people speak in books where the prose is third-person past tense, the novelist is constantly adding to the dialogue “He said,” “She said,” “He asked,” right? To put the dialogue in the context of the past. Sometimes, there’ll be cases where an author will make dialogue very present feeling and they will often — like, Stephen King is famous for this. He will set some dialogue apart in italics as a kind of stream of consciousness or thought which does feel very present. And, so, it’s set apart from the book by its italicization.

But, with what we’re doing, everyone is speaking in the present and there is no “He said/she said,” because there’s no narrator. So, I can’t imagine how that would feel to say, “John walked outside. He took a look around. John, ‘This is wonderful right now, but so wrong.’”

**John:** Yeah. So, the thing I want to point out though is like we say it’s the present tense, but it’s also not only the present tense. So, in previous podcasts, we’ve talked about the present-progressive which is that like “He is sitting,” “He is doing something.” It’s that interruptible form of the present that English has that a lot of the other languages don’t have, by the way, which is useful and delightful.

And we’ve been strongly encouraging people to use it when appropriate because it’s not passive writing. It’s actually writing that reflects ongoing states in ways that movies are about ongoing states. And so, it’s a very useful form of the present tense to be using.

**Craig:** Completely, completely. We should be able to use all tools in the present tense toolbox.

**John:** Every once in a while in scripts, you will also see the future tense used and they’ll often be in callouts to the reader saying like, “We will come back to this later on,” like they tend to be parentheticals, you know, not parentheticals over dialogue, but parentheticals to the reader in scene description that’s reflecting the sense that like you are in the present tense right now where I am, but trust me. There is a future coming and this will become important.

So, you will occasionally see breaks out to the future, even breaks out to the past where we say like, “We met this character on page such and such,” but those are not the normal flow of screenwriting. They’re very special cases.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. Those tend to indicate some kind of meta awareness where we are now breaking the reality of the movie. You could say in the description something like, “Vanessa is unhappy with her job. One day, she will be a billionaire, but not now, and not for a while.”

So, you know what I mean? And that’s a direct communication to the reader that is floating above the reality of the movie. It’s understood that people in an audience will not have that experience. It’s there so that that reader can get closer to the movie experience because, of course, we are trying to make something audio-visual with text only.

**John:** Absolutely. I think that also ties into why we say that screenplays are written in the third-person, but really they’re often written in a sort of a second-person plural. That’s why you’ll see “we’s” in screenplays and I some people hate “we’s” in screenplays. Craig and I are fans of “we’s” in screenplays because it is a collective experience. We’re going through this process together. So, it feels very strange to see an “I” or a “me.”

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be weird.

**John:** But I think I’ve seen it in a Shane Black script, but in general, you will sometimes see a second-person plural “we” to describe this experience of what’s happening and what we’re doing together.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, we hear, we see.

**Craig:** Again, if you were to say “I” or “me,” you are making a winking comment to the reader. You are not doing something that could possibly be shown on screen because you, the writer, are not there. You don’t exist for the audience nor should you unless there is, again, some kind of special case — so, yeah, no question.

**John:** Right. So, that’s all the stuff that’s not the dialogue, but, really, I think the crucial thing I want to get to here and the part that actually has an influence on culture is the dialogue because that is the writing that the audience is taking with them.

And so, let’s talk about sort of the things you’re doing in the writing of dialogue that are going to impact how people are using their language 30 years from now. So, well, a lot of the mistakes you see listed on websites are spelling mistakes. Guess what? People can’t hear your spelling mistakes. That’s the lovely thing about being a screenwriter. It doesn’t mean spelling is not important. It’s incredibly important. But like a spelling-mistake in dialogue is just a spelling-mistake in dialogue. It’s not a thing that the viewer is going to encounter.

**Craig:** No, it’s not. But it can snag the reader.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Typically does snag the reader. So as the writer — I think it’s — you want to spell things correctly not for the audience but for the readers so that they understand that you are — well here is the illusion that you’re creating for the reader. As opposed to all the — I mean, the mega illusion of a movie for an audience, the mini illusion for a reader is that you the writer are in complete control of the story. Every word, every moment has been carefully designed with intention and purpose and that they’re in good hands. And when something is misspelled, particularly when something is misspelled in a way to indicate that the writer just didn’t know the real word, they stop and think, “Oh, this person is not that smart or didn’t take the time to proofread, or literally doesn’t know what a word means.” And that can get shaky for you. It hurts the read.

**John:** It does hurt the read. So, I sort of deliberately set you up for the like spelling doesn’t matter. Of course it matters. And if you’ve listened to our Three Page Challenges, we will single out on spelling mistakes because that is the first experience the reader is going to have with you and your script.

But let’s take a look at what else is communicated in dialogue. Well, can the listener understand what the character is saying? You’re trying to balance accuracy to, like, how the character would speak, and clarity so the listener would actually understand what’s happening there. And so, you know, if you’re doing an historical drama there’s going to be a balancing act between how that character really would have spoken in that time and what a viewer in 2016 will actually be able to understand that character saying.

**Craig:** Correct. We had a Three Page Challenge where somebody was faithfully reproducing Jim’s dialogue from Huckleberry Finn and the problem was it was unintelligible essentially. And what may have been intelligible to readers in the 1800s no longer so the case here for a reader of the screenplay. I mean, you know, English class you have a teacher working you through it but we don’t want to make a screenplay work. We want it to be something that is absorbed freely, without effort by the reader. So that’s where our effort comes in.

This also becomes tricky when people are writing dialectically for characters in whose skin they do not live. Very frequently — well not as frequently as it used to be and happily so. But I would read scripts where writers who clearly were not black were writing black characters with black dialogue. And it was just hard. It was hard to get through. It felt fake and weird and way too confining and it’s not great. I remember early, early on in my career, I wrote a movie for Shawn — I’m sorry for Marlon Wayans and there’s so many Wayanses I was bound to maybe slip up and say the wrong one.
Shawn was in the movie but smaller part. And I remember before I started writing Marlon said to me, “Oh and by the way, don’t write it black. Don’t do that. Just write it. I’ll make it black, don’t worry.” And I said “You got it buddy”. It was a weight off my shoulders because I’m not black.

What happens is there is this weird circular feedback where white writers will watch movies written by white writers pretending to be black people and they’ll think, “Oh, that’s how black people talk then.” But really what they’re doing is an imitation of white people imitating black people. And at that point it’s just a mess and it becomes a self-serving and self-fulfilling prophecy, and it’s no good. So you have to make these careful judgments about how you’re going to present dialogue when you are trying to alter your grammar or pronunciation to match the style of another person that you are not.

**John:** Yeah, but at the same time, Craig, I want to make sure we’re not giving — we’re not letting writers off the hook for even — I don’t want to say attempting to reflect the voice of a character because there’s a way that a person could misapply what you’re saying there. And say, like, well I should only write — I should only put white people in my movie. Or I shouldn’t try to make the African-American characters in my movie sound like human beings who are living in 2016.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In the situations where I have encountered this, my focus has always been on writing the dialogue that reflects what the character is saying and then understanding that there will be a discussion about the actual words that the actors are going to be saying no matter what their background. That stuff may change based on what’s going to be comfortable coming out of their mouth. And it’s the same kind of discussion no matter what background of actor you’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to — part of what we do is, because no matter who you are as a writer, you will be writing people that you’re not constantly, almost all of them. And when I say people you’re not, I mean, obviously, you’re not any of the characters that you’re writing but if you are let’s say a Latina woman, you are sooner or later going to be writing characters that are not Latina women.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So part of our jobs is to understand the music and cadence and rhythms and patterns of all different kinds of human speech. But where I think it – you kind of have to draw an interesting line. For instance there’s a colloquialism among African-Americans where they’ll say I’m — where you or I might say, “I’m getting ready to do something” there’s a colloquialism where they’ll say, “I’m fixing to.” Right?

Now, in very colloquialized African-American speech, that will get contracted down to “I’m finna” and you can — and I see like on Twitter, like, on the very famous Black Twitter you’ll see “I’m finna” sometimes people say “I’m F-I-N-N-A” or F-I-T-N-A or — and, you know, so, for me if I’m writing character and I hear that pattern, I might want to say, you know, “I’m fixing to dah, dah, dah” I don’t know if I would write “I’m finna to” because it’s starting to get a little — I don’t know. It’s weird. You have to draw this interesting line you know?

**John:** Yeah. You don’t want to go into pantomime. You don’t want to go into this place–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Where you’re sort of aping a culture that you don’t really understand. You’re using words that you would have no business ever using. So that’s absolutely true. But I think what your example is with finna is a great example of this other thing which we noticed which is — we talked about with Clueless, we talked about with Valley Girl where you like you see speech happening and then you’re reflecting that speech. And if you had a movie that was using that throughout, people would start using that more often, and at a certain point it would become commonly accepted. That same thing happened with like, and the way that modern people use like to mean a bunch of things that have nothing to do with like. Where she was like this, or it takes the place of “said” or it takes the place of any kind of filler word, “like” is there. And same with literally which means not at all what literally is supposed to mean.

**Craig:** It means the opposite now.

**John:** But people say literally. So, the thing that I find myself being careful of but using more often than not is “wanna, oughta, and gotta,” which is basically the shortened versions of “want to, ought to, and got to,” because spelling out got to, in most characters’ dialogue feels really bizarre and it actually is not the right sense and tone for what a character would say.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there are characters who are educated and fastidious and prickly. And they might say, “I have to,” or “I am going to.” But “gonna” I’m constantly using “gonna” and “gimme” you know. Yeah, and those are perfectly common. And nobody reading a script is going to stop and say, “What, it’s ‘going to’ you cretin”. Like, everything that we discuss on this show, because we are so anti-rule, it’s about having the skill to go far enough and not too far. It is — dialogue and how to manipulate speech, how to break speech and grammar on purpose to match the way people naturally speak as opposed to the way people unnaturally write is the hardest and perhaps impossible thing to teach. You either got it or you don’t.

**John:** So let’s bring this all the way back around to how this all started off which was begging the question, which was my plea for writers to stop using “begging the question” incorrectly. And really ask the question like when is it okay to use the phrase incorrectly, because you know what, that’s what the character would actually say? And so examples are “who” versus “that.” “Which” versus “that.” “Less” versus “fewer, farther, further.” “Between” and “among.” All the examples I just gave, I’m actually kind of fine with a character using the incorrect version of that. Like you’re supposed to use between two things and among several things, whatever, nobody necessarily does that. So I’m fine with the character doing any of those things. It’s when you’re trying to pull a strange esoteric phrase in and use it incorrectly that my hackles go up.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, we’ve said a lot on the show that one of the best ways to think about characters, and create or achieve verisimilitude, is to think of them as liars, because people are liars. People are constantly lying, and people are constantly bending and breaking language. So what it comes down to is what’s going to draw more attention, more unwanted attention, using between incorrectly, or using among correctly.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s really what it comes down to, where do you want attention to fall? I think of grammar all the time, in a way with my characters, to divide them by class and education. And just as to bring it back around to the non-rhoticity, strange Middle-Atlantic accent, that was seen as a sign of erudition, education, class, money. So people who have those things, I try and write in that way, even between — look, I have a movie with talking sheep. The smart sheep’s grammar is perfect. It’s perfect. She actually — she corrects somebody who says, “Who?” asks the question who, and she says, “Whom?” Because of what it refers to.

The other sheep just speak, and some of them have terrible grammar, but she’s the smart one. She has excellent grammar. So that’s how I think of these things. When you’re talking about how to write characters in relation to grammar, the tricky part for writers is you can’t manipulate the rules and break the conventions, and differentiate between characters based on how they speak if you don’t know the rules.

**John:** Absolutely. And what you just said there, you as the form that does not exist in English. That’s English for us.

**Craig:** Right. That’s right. If one does not know the rules.

**John:** Our language is crazy, but it’s good, I love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our next topic will be shorter. This is an article that you posted in the outline called, how – actually what was the actual real title of the thing?

**Craig:** It’s called “How Rom-Coms Undermine Women” by Megan Garber. This is an article in The Atlantic. And it runs through something that I think has probably occurred to all of us. You know, there’s a convention in romantic comedies that a boy is in love with a girl, and she is in love with somebody else, usually the wrong person, and he is the good guy that only if she could see how wonderful he is, and how truly he loves her, she would be in love with him. And he tries, and he tries, and it’s not working, and somebody at some point says to him something like, “If you want her, you got to go get her.” And so he does some grand romantic gesture like for instance showing up at her house, and holding up a boom box in front of her window, and playing, you know, a wonderful song, or showing up at the airport where she’s about to leave the country, or showing up at her workplace to sing a song, or showing up at her home to show her the cue cards with his devotional written on it.

But the point is, he’s showing up somewhere he’s not supposed to be and doing some big thing and in real life that makes you like a creepy stalker.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so the question is, are we teaching this really bad thing to people as normal? And the hard part is, I think that, well, I’m kind of curious about what you think, but my personal feeling is that these things do happen in life, rarely, but they’re not stalkery if they work and they super are stalkery if they don’t. So, it’s kind of a weird thing. What do you think?

**John:** I think it is absolutely valid to point out the trope of it. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to the TV tropes guide to stalking is love, which is basically all the situations in which someone is calling out like — someone’s love behavior is actually really kind of stalking and a little bit crazy.

Another recent article was about how to talk to a woman who’s wearing headphones, which was such a great example of like this really clueless male behavior, and just like really offensive, and yet, we would sort of get a pass in movies a lot which is not cool either. So I think sort of like the discussion of language, it’s one of the situations where screenwriters are culpable to some degree for perpetuating these ideas, and yet I agree with you that they are out there because they also do sometimes exist.

The thing which I disagreed is, or at least a short coming of this article to me was that I don’t think she recognized that the female characters in romantic comedies also do these kind of things as well.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** You look at Rebecca Bunch in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, you look at Nancy in Tess Morris’s movie, Man Up, they are deceiving the men around them, they’re doing things that are not good or appropriate, and things that would seem like a dangerous person would be doing if they were not in the genre of romantic comedy. So I think it’s troubling.

And maybe it’s just a thing to be aware of the same way we should be aware of the messages we send out with our action movies and with all sorts of other genres of movies, where we portray a world that is not accurate and which if these things happened in the real world would be hugely upsetting.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think actually audiences are very good at understanding that movies aren’t real. I do. If you were to make a list of things to write about, of concern, that audiences were taking seriously, I think far before you got to, you know, Lloyd showing up and holding up a boom box, you would get to people shooting each other in the head. Now we do have a bit of gun violence going on in our world, no question about that, but certainly not to the tune of what you see in movies. Fist fights even. There’s constant fist-fighting movies. I’ve never been in a fist fight in my life. Never. Not once.

**John:** That’s true. People break bottles over heads, which you should never do. It’s a horrible thing. Head injuries are terrible.

**Craig:** You’ll kill someone. You’ll kill someone if you do that. People are breaking chairs over each other’s heads, they’re punching each other in the head all the time. In the head. Car chases. Have you ever been in a car chase, John?

**John:** Not a one, I’m delighted to report.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I’ve never pursued somebody in a vehicle. People are pretty good at understanding the difference between these things. One thing that mitigates all of this stuff is that when we go to see a movie, a romantic comedy, there’s a contract before the movie even begins, between the movie and the audience, and that is that these two people could be wonderful together. That they are not bad people. They’re good people, and fate has torn them apart, a la Romeo and Juliet. The enemy in a weird way is not the woman who’s resisting stupidly this man’s advances, nor is the enemy the man who is perhaps going to somewhat extreme measures to get this woman to see how wonderful and deserving of love he is. The enemy is fate. Fate has gotten in the way.

Now, occasionally, you’ll get a romantic comedy where it’s the anti-romantic comedy, and you know, they don’t end up together and that’s fine, too. But that’s our understanding of these things. That said, the problem with the romantic comedy stalking behavior is similar to the problem that I think people have in real life, anyway, men and women, which is what is the line between being passive and quitter, and being obsessive and stalkery?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a hard thing to navigate. Courting, courtship is difficult.

**John:** Yeah. The lesson we learned on today’s Scriptnotes. I don’t know that I have more to say, other than I think, it’s useful to be aware of it, be aware of it as a trope, and if there’s a way to hang a lantern on it so it’s clear to the audience that you’re in on this, the troubling aspect of this behavior, too, maybe do that. But I agree that like we don’t go to movies necessarily for lessons about how to date and marry. We end up taking them in, just the same way we take in language by accident. And that’s I guess one of the things about our culture. It’s how we get some of our education.

**Craig:** Yes. And another one just came to mind is While You Were Sleeping. Remember that movie?

**John:** Oh yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** She’s just like completely is obsessed with this dude, completely obsessed with him. And then when he is hit by a train and goes into a coma, she like insinuates herself into his family’s life and poses as his girlfriend, as his fiancé.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s definitely, if you did that in real life, you would have to go to the bin.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when Sandra Bullock does it, we’re like, aww.

**John:** Aww. That’s actually one of the reasons why I love the new opening to Crazy Ex-Girlfriend this season, where basically it just explains like she’s just a girl in love, and like you can’t call me crazy because I’m an ingénue. And an ingénue in love is crazy, so therefore, I’m just an ingénue. Just a girl in love.

**Craig:** It’s kind of like, we’re now kind of at the fun part of our culture where we can take these things apart, but keep the little bits inside that are true, get rid of the junk that is like, look, part of this article is like Hitch is really screwed up, and the movie, the premise of Hitch is screwed up. This is a guy who’s basically the pick-up artist who is teaching men how to consciously and insidiously manipulate women into being with them. That’s gross. And you know, they’ve been trying to develop that pick-up artist book for years, as a movie, which I just think is atrocious.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They shouldn’t do that.

**John:** They shouldn’t do that. So if nothing else, maybe we’ll stop that movie from getting made, and it will all have been worth it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t think so. We don’t have that power.

**John:** We have none of that power. We have the power to talk about cool things. So my One Cool Thing this week–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Is Time Travel: A History, by James Gleick, is a book that is — I’m reading right now that I think is just delightful. So Craig, how long back ago do you think time travel was invented?

**Craig:** You mean the concept of time travel?

**John:** The concept of time travel.

**Craig:** Or actual time travel?

**John:** The concept of time travel.

**Craig:** Because actual time travel was developed 14,000 years from now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** The concept of time travel, oh, I would say, I don’t remember anything like that in Shakespeare, like maybe turn of the century like 1800?

**John:** Yeah, 100 years ago, H. G. Wells. So what’s so fascinating–

**Craig:** Oh, 20th Century then.

**John:** 20th Century, so it’s — the time machine, it’s his story, is really where you can start to think about time travel as you and I think about it now, which is that a person develops a way to go forward or backward in time. So there were other stories in which people like with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, they get hit on the head and they show up–

**Craig:** Wait a second. Yeah, what about Dickens and A Christmas Carol? He goes back, the Ghost of Christmas Past. He goes back in time.

**John:** It’s not a conscious choice.

**Craig:** It’s a ghost.

**John:** It was not a conscious choice to go back in those times. So there’s been many situations like a dreaming of previous times, a dreaming of alternate time lines, that – Fantasias have happened, but that sense of like the future is a place that you could travel into is actually a brand new concept. And we didn’t use to have a sort of space to think about like the future as this new area out in front of us.

And so all the paradoxes of like, you know, like what if you can go back and kill Hitler? We’d never thought of that before. There was never like a what if you could go back and kill Caesar? That was not a thing. It’s only because — and Gleick makes a very compelling argument for the only reason why we have our current thought of time travel and Terminator and sort of all the iterations of timelines and stuff like that, is because of the inventions of this last century and the scientific discoveries of Einstein and everything else that sort of put it in the public culture, but also the acceleration of culture so that it’s only when generations started being born where they recognize like, wow, my life is nothing like my parents’ life, and my kids’ lives will be nothing like my life. That’s when we started to have a future, and started to think about the future as something different than the present.

**Craig:** That makes total sense, yeah, because like back in the old days they’d be like, well, why would I want to go into the past? It’s like now, but just a little bit lamer.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The future will be like now, but like a little bit better.

**John:** Maybe, hopefully, who knows?

**Craig:** Yeah. Ish.

**John:** So I’m quite enjoying this book, so I’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Well, keeping on track with Science, my One Cool Thing is a young woman named Maanasa Mendu. Maanasa Mendu is 13 years old. She lives in Ohio. She’s a middle school student. And as part of a competition, she created something that’s kind of amazing. She was looking at the shaking branches on a tree in her yard and thought, as we often do, you or I, boy that reminds me of the action of Piezo-electrical materials. And it turns out that she created with, I think it was like 10 bucks worth of Styrofoam and plastic, created a device that essentially captures naturally occurring vibrations in the environment along with solar and wind, and creates electricity from it, and was able to power a small light bulb with this little $10 thing she made, hanging off of a tree. It’s incredible.

So she won this prize from 3M, the Post-It company, among other things, and I’m just fascinated by there’s this potential that we have in this country that just blows my mind constantly when I think about somebody like Maanasa Mendu. She’s 13 and she might have actually invented something amazing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just think of what’s going to happen, you know, when she’s 25. It’s just amazing. So Maanasa Mendu, you are my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Very, very cool. So that’s our show for this week. Our final reminder that this is your very last chance to buy one of the two Scriptnotes shirts, so click on the links in the show notes, or just go to johnaugust.com, there’ll be a link on the side bar there for where you can get your shirts. So thank you to everyone who bought shirts. We’re excited to make them, and send them to you.

As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Eric Pearson. If you have an outro you’d like to send to us, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send questions for us to answer. I think next week we’ll try to answer some of your questions.

On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. That’s a great place for short questions. You can find us on iTunes, just search for Scriptnotes and while you’re there you can also download the Scriptnotes app which lets you listen to all the back episodes of the show.

**Craig:** Fancy.

**John:** Fancy. So scriptnotes.net is the place for that. There are also USB drives available at store@johnaugust.com that have all the back episodes.

One of the questions, Craig, we have to figure out is, the new MacBooks do not have USB drives. Or not USB-A drives and so do we still make drives anymore? I don’t know if they are going to continue to exist.

**Craig:** Well, if you connect them through the dongle, it should be fine, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, there’s, like, a — because I ordered the new MacBook Pro, and with it I also ordered just a little USB-C, regular old USB adaptor.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In case, you know.

**John:** Okay. They’re available with Craig’s dongle and if you would like–

**Craig:** You know Sexy Craig has a dongle for you.

**John:** Probably the dongle is as much as the drive so–

**Craig:** You know, like, you like the drive of the dongle?

**John:** Ugh. We almost got through the whole episode–

**Craig:** Ooh, yeah, almost got through it.

**John:** If you listen to the transcripts, you won’t hear Sexy Craig’s voice at all. That’s a thing actually–

**Craig:** Not even a little bit.

**John:** On Twitter last week, people were saying, like, I listened to the show for the first time after only reading the transcripts. I didn’t understand what Sexy Craig was, and now they understand what Sexy Craig is. And they’re horrified.

**Craig:** If you can even wrap your mind around it. I mean, can you ever understand it? I don’t think so.

**John:** Apparently both of our voices are completely wrong for how we sound in print.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I wonder how people think I sound.

**John:** Yeah, probably authoritative, but I don’t know.

**Craig:** Crazy, sexy?

**John:** If you’re a person who mostly experiences the show through the transcripts, and only heard our voices recently, we’d be fascinated to know. So tell us on Twitter what you thought we would sound like before you actually heard us. That would be interesting for me to know.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Cool. Craig, have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You, too, John, and I’ll see you–

**John:** On the other side.

**Craig:** See you next time on the other side of the wall. [laughs]

**John:** Oy. All right. Take care.

**Craig:** Bye.

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* Megan Garber in [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/11/its-rom-coms-fault-too/505928/)
* [Stalking Is Love](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StalkingIsLove)
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_275.mp3).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So if there is one bad word in the podcast, it’s a very minor bad word. But if you have a young child in the car, maybe you want to skip over one of Three Page Challenges we’re about to do.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is episode 274 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at three new entries in the Three Page Challenge. That’s it. It’s a really pretty simple episode this week.

**Craig:** You know what? Good.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** We’ve had a lot of complicated ones with lots of moving parts and pieces.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m on a different continent and so this one is just simple. We look at some scripts, we tell you what you think and then we’re done.

**Craig:** I like that we tell them what they think.

**John:** Oh, did I say that?

**Craig:** Yeah, but I like it. I think that’s actually accurate.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true.

**Craig:** We look at some scripts, and then we tell you what you think.

**John:** Absolutely. We will give you your opinion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll we’re good at it.

**John:** One of the things we’re also good at is making t-shirts—

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** And this is the next to last week to be able to order t-shirts and we’re good at segways. There are two t-shirts for Scriptnotes this year. There is a blue shirt, there is a gray shirt with a gold page on it. They’re both terrific, so you should take a look at the links in the show notes and click through and look at those t-shirts and buy one if you would like one.

We are recording this only one day after we recorded our last episode, so we have no idea how many we’ve sold. Have we sold 10 shirts, have we sold a thousand shirts, we have no idea. We’re living in the blissful ignorance of the past.

**Craig:** Do you think that — but technically we have not yet sold any. I mean as of right now, present time.

**John:** As of right now, not a single one.

**Craig:** Okay. So I shouldn’t — I mean I guess then I’ll guess, we’ve sold zero shirts so far.

**John:** At the moment that we are recording this, we’ve sold zero shirts but by the time this episode has aired, how many shirts will we have sold?

**Craig:** Ooh, how many days have the shirts been available, John?

**John:** They would have been available seven days.

**Craig:** Well I’m going to go with 600 shirts.

**John:** Wow. That’s a high number.

**Craig:** Is that a stupid guess? [laughs]

**John:** No. It’s an ambitious guess, but not a stupid guess.

**Craig:** All right.
**John:** Because we would like it to be a good high number. I’m going to guess between the two shirts, we will have sold 450.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Which is still ambitious. So–

**Craig:** I want to point out, I have absolutely no idea how the shirt thing works. I have no historical data and I just pulled the number out of my butt and it wasn’t even that crazy.

**John:** It wasn’t even that crazy. It’s like the wisdom of the crowds but like you are your own crowded head inside and all the voices conspire to give you that number.

**Craig:** You have no idea, the wisdom of the things in my head.

**John:** Very, very good. But on last week’s episode, which was actually recorded yesterday, we mused aloud about wouldn’t it be great if the guy who won the Austin Pitch Competition that you judged what if he were to write in and tell us, “Oh, hey. This is the pitch I gave,” so we could discuss the pitch that you thought was so good at the live show in Austin.

And now we have it. So just out of the blue he wrote in and said like, “Oh, hey. I’m the guy who won the pitch competition.” And I asked him to record his pitch and he did. So now we have it.

**Craig:** Yeah and it’s good, you know, like I mean I assume you’d listened to it by now.

**John:** Yeah. But I think we should play it for the listeners so they can actually judge for themselves.

**Craig:** What a great idea.
**John:** So let’s take a listen.

**Erik Voss:** I’m Erik Voss and I’m pitching my action comedy feature script. It’s called Gator Country. So this is a story about Mac. He is a white trash deadbeat single father who is in exile from the State of Florida, which in this world has been transformed by a freak hurricane season into this Mad Max style swampland that’s now ruled by the reptiles and the crazies.

So not too different from what Florida is right now. Now, I’m from Florida and I’ve lived through a ton of hurricanes and Florida shows its true colors in the aftermath of a storm. And often that takes the form of a few of these gator hunters on fan boats who just love getting wet and looting the nearest Cracker Barrel. The Florida Man. And Mac is one of these guys.

But now, his rebellious 20-year old daughter has gone missing in this apocalyptic hell hole and it’s on Mac to find her, and fish her out before she falls victim to cults, cannibals or Tampa. Guided by a local drifter named Gator, who knows Florida like the back of his hook, Mac now must battle through former pro wrestlers and gators the size of pickup trucks, and the nightmarish version of Disney World where on the Pirates of the Caribbean, the pirates are alive, high on bath salts, and they will eat your face.

The road ends in the belly of the beast of Miami beach where the family reunites in a loving embrace while covered in the blood of a murderous grandma who just got chopped up in the blades of a fan boat or as we call it in Florida, a Monday. Thanks.

**Craig:** See? That was pretty good, right?

**John:** That was really good. So let’s talk about two different things. First let’s talk about performance and then we’ll talk about the content of the pitch itself and sort of what that is as a movie. So I thought performance wise, I just can’t imagine a better version of like that 90-second pitch in front of a crowd. It’s such a weirdly artificial form and I thought Erik did just a remarkably good job of it.

I can sort of see his performance as he was giving it to us. So he’s laying out the very broad premise of like from the very title, it’s like Gator Country. He’s talking about his lead character, then he’s talking about the setting, he’s talking about himself and he’s like including himself as a Florida person, giving just the very broad strokes and making it fun.

He’s not trying to focus on every little plot turn or twist. We don’t really even know who the villains are in this story. We just know the general sort of setting and world and milieu. And he gets out it. And that’s performance wise, I thought that was a really smart way of doing it. It felt like the kind of thing that you could convey in front of a crowd in an Austin bar.

**Craig:** Yeah, and there are some nice little jokes in there. You know, it’s impossible to be hilarious in the middle of a 90-second pitch, right? But there are a couple of key jokes that made people laugh. And in and of themselves, gave you a sense of the tone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right, tone is very difficult to convey in a pitch because pitch, generally speaking, is about details, not about flavor. But you got a sense of what the tone was. This was clearly going to be a comedic and tending towards the bizarre. And like Erik himself, it has a love-hate relationship with its subject, probably leaning more weirdly towards love.

You know, it was important that he let us know in his pitch that he was from Florida, because then we understood that this wasn’t an attack piece, and that this wasn’t just a, you know, like you or I could write a movie about Cleveland what a dump, but that’s just mean. We are not from Cleveland. It’s always better to make fun of the things you love. So we got across the tone in his performance and he also gave me weirdly a nice circle of story, so I was able to say, “Okay. I can see where it begins and I can see where it ends.” And I kind of get what happens in the middle.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about this performance in terms of how you do your real business. Like I just felt like this 90-second pitch is not the kind of thing he would ever actually give in Hollywood. Like he’s never going to go into a meeting and pitch sort of exactly the way he’s pitched this here. It was too much like a sitcom set for sitting right across from you in a studio executive’s office. Did you feel that?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. I mean, look, all of the pitches were designed to win a pitch competition, which is an artificial thing that does not occur in Hollywood. In our business, no one is looking to reward people for a fast, funny, informative, intriguing 90 seconds. What they’re really trying to do is make money and so it’s serious business here.

So if somebody came in and pitched that in 90 seconds in someone’s office, they would go, “Okay, great. Now do it for it real.” Just like, you know, you’re asking me to spend money. So, what? You know, now that doesn’t mean that Erik or any of those people that came in and pitched can’t do that. In fact, in a strange way it’s easier to do it the way people need it to be done here in Hollywood as long as you have the goods.

I suspect that you kind of need to, in order to even get to the 90-second version. So yes — no, absolutely it’s a very strange artificial thing that we don’t actually put a premium on in Hollywood. And if for instance, let’s say Erik were here in Los Angeles and he went to someone’s party and there was a producer there and the producer said, “Well what do you — you’re a funny guy. You got any things?” and he says, “Actually, I have a script and it’s called Gator.” What is it called, Gator Dad? [laughs]

**John:** Gator Country.

**Craig:** Yeah, we got to change that title to Gator Dad.

**John:** Yeah, I think Gator Dad is better.

**Craig:** Gator Dad. “Yeah, I got a script called Gator Country.” “Oh really, what’s it about?” If he then went into this 90-second pitch, that guy would look at him oddly and then walk away because again it is synthetic. You know, there is a version where you pitch this in a far more conversational confident way. But of course for a pitch festival, you know, this is — part of my problem with pitch competitions is that they are requiring writers to do something that only pitch competitions require. It’s not particularly translatable to any other environment.

**John:** When we were doing Big Fish casting, we would have these really talented actresses come in and sometimes they’d have a dance call and then they’d have to sing. And they have to sing like 12 bars and it was just like, you really can’t convey a song or really the energy of a song in 12 bars. You’re basically just conveying like I can hit some big notes and I can do these things, I can be quiet, I can be loud.

It’s such a weirdly artificial form, and yet in that artificial form, Andrew Lippa can say like, “Okay that person can fit my needs for this one slot in the musical.” And in a similar way, I felt like Erik’s pitch was so bizarre and artificial and yet I could tell like, “Oh he’s got something there.” Like there’s a good story there, but he’s probably the guy who can write that good story. He was self-aware enough that I was like I’m curious to hear more.

I definitely agree though that if you were sitting across from an executive or even just at a party talking about the thing, he would want to have a version of this same pitch kind of thing that felt much more conversational and much less packaged than what we heard right there.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. But, you know, as we sat and listened to all of the pitches that came our way and there were 20 of them that evening, you know, a number of them you could eliminate immediately with a simple remark: that’s not a movie. Then some of them, you could eliminate because, well, that is a movie but I’ve seen that movie.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Some of them were okay, well, there were a few that were like that’s a great 90-second pitch. The movie doesn’t sound like something I would actually go pay to see, but boy I sure enjoyed that 90 seconds. You know, there were a couple of those.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well this one was really the one that hit everything. It was a fun 90 seconds and also I thought it could be a terrific movie. And you know, what I said to him, you know, we do our little American Idol brief review after each pitch, and what I really liked about this one was that I got a sense of character, which is, I mean along with tone, incredibly hard to convey. And it wasn’t like he got into the character of Gator dad, I don’t even know Gator dad’s name, right? But–

**John:** I think it was Max.

**Craig:** Oh, there you go, Max. It doesn’t matter, it could have been anything, right? It’s just I don’t know what he looks like and I don’t know how tall he is, I don’t what race he is, I don’t know anything. But what I do know is that he has a daughter and she’s a bit of a handful and he’s going to get her. And I understand implied in that is a character story and an ending that I will care about and then a world that felt at the same time bizarre and unlike anything we know, and yet, oh yeah I do know it. I can absolutely see that.

You know, underneath it all, it’s like okay you have a great idea, what if you do Mad Max in Florida with all of its absurdities, and then we make a nice little, you know, father-daughter story. It just felt like a nice whole piece. So to me, it was — his pitch really was the one where I thought, “Oh, you could actually sell this.”

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. And circling back to the Mad Max in Florida, so often a pitch will compare itself to another movie and what was good about Erik’s pitch is like we could see that comparison without him having to explicitly say it. Like we got what the vibe was. We sort of see like okay, this is the scenario, it’s post-apocalyptic for a different reason, but for flooding and such. Like we get sort of what this is.

Every little detail he threw in there especially about like the kinds of villains you’re facing later on down the road, he also let you see like okay it’s not just going to be one set piece, there’s like a whole journey that’s going to happen here, and you can imagine the kinds of things that the dad is going to be going through and the things that the daughter is going to be going through. And the tone at which all these things are going to intersect.

So I can see this as a movie and I could also imagine like if he’d never pitched this, but had written a good version of this, it’s the kind of thing that would get passed around because it’s an interesting thing. It’s sticky in the right ways. A good version of this is a Black List favorite.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so for sure. And you’re right that there is a lot of these evocative moments that made me think Mad Max but he was smart to never say it. Because the second you say, well it’s Mad Max in Florida, you go, “Okay, well you can stop talking. Like I mean I get it. You know, you’ve borrowed another movie.” That’s the danger of borrowing another movie as a reference.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, you just suddenly don’t feel very original at all.

**John:** The other challenge of borrowing another movie for a reference is people will take too much from that other movie, and say like, oh but what about that thing or that thing or that thing. And like the listener will sort of try to imply things that you’re not really meaning to imply.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They take the whole package with it and like that’s not necessarily what you want. So that’s the challenge of, you know, using any other existing piece of material, be it a movie, be it a book, to describe the thing that you want to make which is hopefully original.

**Craig:** A 100%. So thank you, Erik, for writing in and letting us share that with everyone. It was a joy to hear that pitch that evening. And we heard, you know, I will say for all the 20 people that we heard, they were all well-practiced and I could see why all of them had sort of made it through. I still think 10 seems good. [laughs]

**John:** That was a lot to throw at you guys.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, 10 would have been nice.

**John:** Yeah. All right, let’s get to our work for this week which is the Three Page Challenge. So most of you probably are familiar with the Three Page Challenge. What we do is we invite our listeners to send in the first three pages of their script, or their teleplay, and we take a look at it, and give our honest opinion on what we read.

So, as always, we invite you to read along with us, so you can find links to the PDFs of these scripts in the show notes. Last time, we had Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor, read aloud the descriptions.

**Craig:** How great was that?

**John:** It was just amazing. He was terrific.

**Craig:** What’s funny was that after he did it, he wrote us and he said, “Ah, you know, I feel like maybe I screwed up because I just made it sound like Survivor.” And we were like, “No.” [laughs] It’s what we want. We want — we don’t want off-the-cuff private Jeff Probst. We just want Survivor Jeff Probst.

**John:** Yeah. It’s so strange that his voice is so specifically Survivor. Like you can’t imagine Survivor without Jeff Probst hosting it. It’s not like just even a visual thing like it’s his yelling at the contestants to like, you know, swim faster. It was great.

**Craig:** It was so cool.

**John:** So obviously the temptation is like, well, we need to find other famous people to read these descriptions, just so we don’t have to read those descriptions anymore. And so just this morning someone wrote in to point out that Martin Sheen apparently listens to our show.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Because on another podcast which was one of my One Cool Things, which was, Mom and Dad Wrote a Porno, and he references Scriptnotes, so —

**Craig:** Wow

**John:** It’s all a big web of connection. So I don’t — Martin Sheen, I couldn’t find on Twitter. Martin Sheen, if you are listening to this show, we are ask@johnaugust.com and lord, we would love to have you read some stuff aloud. Or other famous people, too.

**Craig:** No, no. Now, I want Martin Sheen.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, just to have — you know, because when you have a body of work like Martin Sheen does, which is vast through time, just like every year, there’s probably three or four or five things. And I’m not even talking about the television stuff. You know, I’m just–

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Talking about movies for decades now, you have to pick like who is your favorite Martin Sheen? There are so many. Who is your favorite Martin Sheen?

**John:** I think it was President Bartlet–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Even though I wasn’t really a big West Wing watcher, but like he just sort of became locked in that. And I think here’s the reason why I will say Bartlet is because so many of the appearances you see with him on like — in commercials for stuff or other things, he’s sort of doing the Bartlet character. He has that kind of gravitas where he’s channeling that kind of emotion. But tell me, who do you see?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I — you are — it makes total sense. I think a lot of people would say that because once you play the president and you play it so iconically, it’s hard to kind of get away from that, I mean you’re the president, you know. But I will always in my heart have the softest spot for Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen. Because Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen, aside from being in Apocalypse Now, you know, in and of itself is oh, my God. Apocalypse Martin Sheen was going through a tough time. And Apocalypse Martin Sheen had some substance abuse issues and Apocalypse Martin Sheen had a heart attack during the shooting of Apocalypse Now.

**John:** That’s right. I always forget that.

**Craig:** And it’s not like Martin Sheen was like some, you know, fat lazy dude. He was like whippet thin, you know, and young. So like the kind of stress to lead to a heart attack at that age is extraordinary and plus, you know, there’s that scene where he’s destroying his hotel room. He really does cut his hand really badly, you know, when he smashes the mirror and there’s just incredible stuff going on in that movie with him personally, you know, and then of course his performance is just amazing. He reminds me so much — young Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen, reminds me of Young — your friend and mine — John Gaines. They’re very similar —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Similar look. So I want Apocalypse Now Martin Sheen to read these things. But also because Apocalypse Martin Sheen has incredible voiceover in that movie. I mean, just like the greatest voiceover.

**John:** He does.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So we don’t have Martin Sheen this week. So I thought we would try something very different which is that you always make fun of me for being a robot. And yet you also make fun of me for never being able to speak proper sentences and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Matthew has to cut around all my mistakes. So I thought we would try having a computer–

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**John:** Read these descriptions aloud.

**Craig:** And wait, how will we know it’s not you? [laughs]

**John:** Well, because we’re using female voices for all three pages.

**Craig:** Okay. And also the computer won’t mess up the words.

**John:** The computer does mess up the words in a few places, but I think it’s adorable for that so —

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**John:** Today, we’re trying three different voices by IVONA which is this Amazon company that provides voices for other developers. And so in this situation, I just pasted in the text. I didn’t try to make it better or worse. I didn’t like listen for it like tweak the words. This is literally just what I pasted in the boxes. And if you’re listening to these voices, read aloud the descriptions that Godwin wrote. So our first voice is Sally. It’s one of the American voices and she’s reading the description for Relationshit written by Christopher Rock and JR Mallon.

**Sally:** We open in a mall, teens flirting, old people mall walking. Then an animal stampede breaks the peace. Puppies, kittens, the usual pet shop inventory all followed by their liberators, 30-somethings Marissa and Dan. The culprit stops three mall cops and celebrate their escape only to find themselves surrounded by 10 real cops who mace and arrest them. In court, Marissa and Dan are unrepentant, blaming the corporate world for their litany of charges, most of them alcohol related. The judge brings up Marissa and Dan’s past run ins with the law, with the two declaring chaos as beauty at the bottom of page three.

**John:** Great. Craig Mazin, what did you think of Relationshit?

**Craig:** Well, hold on a second.

**John:** Let’s start with the voices.

**Craig:** First of all, yeah. Let’s talk about what I think of Sally. Oh, Sally. Sally, you saucy minx. Sally’s into me.

**John:** Yeah, so, here’s the danger. Like this has become a podcast where like I present things that Craig lusts after. So last week it was the pinup girls. Now it’s the female voices, so pretty soon we’re going to put them all together and we’re going to be living in Ex Machina here. So.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it doesn’t take much apparently for me to get going. Sally, alluring, just an alluring voice. Okay, so Relationshit. Well, the pages are composed well. I thought things laid out nicely, a good mix of dialogue and action. I could see things pretty clearly. So there’s basically two scenes we’re looking at here. One is in the mall and then one is in the courtroom. The courtroom got a little ticker tape to me and what I mean by that is, just runs of dialogue. And I understand that partly that’s because it is — that’s a conversation between static people. All the more reason to maybe compress a little bit there. I guess my criticism covers all of this. Marissa and Dan are apparently the same person. They have different names, but they’re both playing Bill Murray in a 1970s comedy. Everything they say is a smart-ass comment.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** There’s — it never stops. To the point where it’s almost like a sketch where you expect the judge to be like, wait, do you only respond in wisecracks, that’s it? You know what, there’s no — you’re not people? You’re not real?

**John:** It’s interesting when you think of like the Bill Murray comedy, like someone has to be the Harold Ramis. Someone has to be the person who’s not that tempo so that you can actually sort of get through it. What this reminded me even more of Bill Murray is a Portlandia sketch, and there literally was a Portlandia sketch about animal liberators. And so the characters that Carrie and Fred play in Portlandia feel like these kind of characters who are always just like so hyped up and they’re sort of joke factory. But that works really well in sketches but it’s not — I’m nervous about how I’m going to relate to these characters throughout a full movie.

I thought like their jokes though, they’re good, they’re funny. I think that the voice is really nice. It’s just the problem is like it’s the same voice for both characters. And it also felt like they write funny lines and they put all the funny lines in rather than picking the selects of like funniest lines.

Where it gets to be problematic for me is on page two, and this is a thing you notice in a lot of these Three Page Challenges we have is there’s a character whose function is just to be the recapper, or sort of like the backstory machine. And so they’re just there to provide the history of everything that happened before this. So in this case, the judge is talking us through like all the previous times they’ve been arrested and the things they did. But I didn’t believe him at all. I didn’t believe that this person actually existed or that he would be kind of indulging them to just – he’d just be setting up, you know, things for them to have funny lines to shoot down. So I would want to cut most of page two and the top of page three and get to the real action here.

**Craig:** Yeah, so Judge Exposition certainly does his job. We all struggle with exposition but there are some things you can do to hide it a little bit better. The one thing, it’s a real simple things is, ask yourself how exposition in actual life happens. So here we have a judge who has seen these two before. They are recidivists as it were, and he does not appear to know who they are. He is talking to them as if he’s never seen them before. He is startled by what they’ve done. And then about a page later he says, “I know who you are. I know who you are and here’s some other things you’ve done.” Well, did he not know who they were before that? So that’s why the info dump is very shocking. It is incongruous to his behavior prior to it.

**John:** So my suggestion, I’m just going to read aloud and edit here. Like get us through this scene a little faster. So Dan Ryan, Marissa Landman, your escapades or Ice Capades — escapades, still hearing Ice Capades, do either of you have a problem with alcohol? Jump right down to that. You know, because the charges I see here include public intoxication, open container disorderly conduct. If you’re going to recap, he can be looking at the list right there. And then we can like get through to like — oh, this isn’t actually, these aren’t animal liberators, these are troubling drunks who like do this crap all the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That creates like actual conflict in the meat of the scene rather than just like setting up the punch lines.

**Craig:** Yeah, and if you want to get into the fact that they’ve been here before, I think it is reasonable for him to, you know, after their third quip or something, say, “Look. I want to be really clear. This isn’t like last time. Last time, and you know what you did.” And then one of them could say, “We didn’t do anything.” “You punched Chuck E. Cheeze. Well, not the Chuck E. Cheeze but, you know, one of his representatives. This isn’t like last time. There is no more letting you off the hook. This is — we’re now on the hook.” Right? So he can — there’s just a natural way to express a prior relationship that isn’t announcing the existence of it and detailing it for the sake of the audience, you know?

**John:** I’m just not sure the judge is the right character for that discussion. Like — and in some ways, is it the public defender? Is it the attorney? Is this — there’s someone else that they have sort of deal with that would make more sense than the judge. I just didn’t buy the judge sort of engaging with them on such a low level to some degree.

**Craig:** I actually completely agree with that and, in fact, I want to warn everybody. If you’re writing a comedy, and this is a comedy-comedy it seems to me, really think twice before you put a judge in it because judges at this point are the corniest of comedy characters. There’s just — we’ve seen 14 million versions, all of whom basically do the same thing. They get [fumphety] and frustrated with a far smarter and far funnier defendant which tends to undermine the, you know, any dramatic threat. It’s just hard to do those things. It’s better to have this scene where they’re just walking out of a building and it’s like, well, that did not go well. [laughs]

You know, they’re just complaining to their lawyer, they’re like, you told us that you could, you know, get us off. And he’s like, well, you did not tell me that you also did these things. So anyway, enjoy jail. You know, you don’t need to do this scene, it’s — but the lines are funny. You know what, I think it’s just like I like salt. I just don’t like eating salt with a spoon, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, years ago, years ago, John, I was hanging out with some people and they were all in The Groundlings. Not the actual troop but, you know, they were taking classes at The Groundlings and I was not taking classes at The Groundlings. And we all went to see the actually Groundlings show which is really funny. I remember Will Farrell was in it because he hadn’t yet gone to = Saturday Night Live and I was like, oh, my god, that guy is hysterical.

And afterwards, we went out to dinner and these improv students were so keyed up from the experience of seeing The Groundlings that they just wouldn’t stop improving and–

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** I wanted to die. It was terrible. I specifically remember walking down the street with them to a restaurant and we passed a phone booth, that’s how long ago this was. One of the guys opens the booth, picks up the phone and goes, “Hello?” And then hangs it up and I thought that’s not — there’s nothing funny about that. You’re just–

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Being wacky now. You’re being pointlessly wacky and I started to feel that way about these two characters. Just being pointlessly wacky. They don’t seem to have any conflict with each other. They don’t seem to ever disagree about anything. They don’t even seem to really be living in our world. They just seem to be little irony machines moving through it. And yeah, if you’re doing sketch, oh, my god. Go for it.

**John:** Perfect for sketch.

**Craig:** Yeah, because it’s going to be over soon, right? But this won’t.

**John:** Yeah, and so I agree that the actual dialogue lines, some of them are really good and funny and I can see them working well in a sitcom situation where you’re pitching a bunch of alternate lines for things. I can see like these guys being really great on a staff like putting together something for — putting together the funny for something. But I wasn’t feeling the engine engaged at all in these three pages. I didn’t hear a distinction between these two characters’ voices. And this may not have been going right into the judge, didn’t give us an opportunity to hear the difference between these two people or even set up the conflict between these two people which has got to be key to the story if the movie is called, Relationshit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I also want to say, the other reason why you probably shouldn’t have a judge in your movie is, there will never be something funnier with a judge in it than the Rick and Morty version of Denver Fenton Allen. So this is a — we’ll put a link to it because if people haven’t seen it, they absolutely have to see it. So it’s the real transcript of a court case in Georgia with Denver Fenton Allen and it is just remarkable what happens between this man and the judge. And it’s absolutely not safe for work so don’t listen to it in the car with your kids.

**Craig:** Unless your work is what you and I do, and then it is safe for your work.

**John:** Totally, totally. All right. Let’s go to our next script here. So next up, our voice is Amy. She’s one of the UK voices and she’s reading the description for Roommates written by Astride Noel.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s take a listen.

**Amy:** 32-year-old Whitney sits on the toilet as her roommate, Kai, walks in on her and proceeds to brush her teeth. Kai complains about Whitney’s curly black hairs littering the bathroom floor. Whitney fires back by producing Kai’s own long red hair. Whitney tells Kai she is not comfortable sharing the bathroom while taking a piss. Later, Whitney tries in vain to block out the moaning coming from Kai’s room. She confronts Kai and her lover, asking them to keep it down. We flash back to Whitney and Kai inspecting the apartment as potential roommates and seeming to agree on everything, including the importance of quiet. And that’s the end of page three.

**Craig:** Well, Amy does not do for me what Sally did, to be honest with you.

**John:** So that’s so fascinating. So I thought the voice, in many ways, was more natural, but it doesn’t provide the tingle that Craig needs.

**Craig:** No. It’s not arousing at all. It’s actually kind of — it’s kind of bumming me out.

**John:** So Amy’s voice reminds me of our script supervisor from Go who was phenomenal and sort of helped keep that movie together during all its tumultuous shooting and had that sort of patient — it’s not a schoolteacher voice, but just, like, a level, calm, nothing was going to rattle her.

**Craig:** Yeah. The stereotype of the English person with the stiff upper lip, but then thrown like a whole bunch of Librium or something. It’s real, really just – “You know, the Germans are bombing. Oh, well.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Creepy. Creepy.

**John:** Yeah, creepy.

**Craig:** All right. What did you think?

**John:** Well, let’s talk about the actual script. So this script had a lot of problems, and it didn’t ever click in for me. But there was some really useful stuff in here that I think people should take a look at because I think a lot of people’s early scripts have some of these issues, and I think by looking at them, we can get people past some of these sort of common mistakes.

I had a hard time just even getting started in the script. And some of it was just how we meet the characters on the page. Whitney is already in the bathroom, Kai walks in. Kai has this huge, long intro that sort of takes a while to get through. So let’s talk about Kai’s intro. “Kai, a.k.a. Gertrude, 22, white, barges in and startles Whitney. Kai is wearing an oversized Bob’s Burgers t-shirt. Kai waves at an appalled-looking Whitney and proceeds to brush her teeth. Whitney is grabbing toilet paper when Kai faces her.” And then we get into the dialogue about the hair.

There was sort of weird subject-verb — like, I had a hard time really quite understanding, like, what I was looking at or sort of whose movie I was in for a while. Did you feel that?

**Craig:** Well, I felt something wrong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think for me, the problem was that the style of introduction and length of introduction was incompatible with the action that you were asking me to envision in the movie, which is somebody barging in on somebody peeing. You barge in, you start talking. Right?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So she walks in. What you would have us see in the script is a woman is on the toilet — by the way, very hard to start a screenplay with somebody on the toilet, peeing. It’s just — it’s hard.

**John:** I think it’s doable. Here’s what I would point out, though. It’s like, you can’t barge in on a character who’s just gotten there. And so if we’ve just gotten there–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like the second sentence. So like, I think you would actually need to make a bigger deal of, like, Whitney’s sort of stumbling in, like, not really turning on the light, like, finding it, like, pants down, start to hear the piss, and then Kai comes in and sort of like ruins it. Because that, then you’re like breaking a moment. But the moment hasn’t even started before Kai’s walked in.

**Craig:** Great point. And the idea of her being half-asleep, I mean, is she slowly nodding off while she’s peeing? I mean, what’s going on there exactly? Because you’re not really — I don’t know how you’re half-asleep. I mean, you’re either falling asleep, or you’re — you know. But it — half-asleep, if you’re not falling asleep, is just tired, woopty-doo.

But when she walks in, I would probably just slide everything up. Kai, first of all, a.k.a. Gertrude, means nothing to me. I’ve never met this person. Don’t give me two names. Just give me one. If she’s Gertrude, later tell me about that. Have that be a surprise. For now, Kai, 22, white, barges in. That’s it. Don’t tell me anything else. Kai, “Hey, those fuzzy little black balls I see on the floor all the time, I’m assuming is your hair. Can you do something about that?”

And then, you know, you can show Whitney reacts, grabbing toilet paper. Kai grabs her toothbrush, starts brushing and keeps going or whatever. But if someone’s barging in, make the dialogue barge in. Otherwise, it feels flabby, you know?

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. On page two, I thought — I didn’t love the dialogue, but I liked where it was getting to. This is Whitney saying, “When I told you I’m open to sharing the bathroom when I’m in it, I meant if I’m putting my makeup on or brushing my teeth. I like to piss alone.” So not the right words, but I think that’s the right sentiment because it tells us that — it can give us the hint that, like, this is actually Whitney’s apartment that Kai has moved into that they are still negotiating their relationship. And that could be a good exit line, but I would need a better scene before we got there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the introduction felt paste wrong, but that didn’t — where I kind of hopped off the boat was in the first exchange. Kai says, “Hey, these fuzzy”– so Whitney is black and Kai is white. Kai says, “Hey, these fuzzy little black balls I see on the floor all the time, I’m assuming is your hair. Can you do something about that?” Whitney reaches behind her and pulls out a long string of Kai’s red hair. “This long piece of stringy-type thing that I just pulled out of my ass, I’m assuming is your hair. Could you do something about that?” So a couple of problems here. One, what does it matter to Kai that the hair or fuzzy little black balls — and by the way, I’m not sure that black people’s hair accrues on the floor in fuzzy little black balls, but regardless, I know for sure, because I am white, that white people’s hair doesn’t end up in other people’s butts. Our hair doesn’t have some weird and magical thing that climbs up other people’s butts.

So Whitney — and there’s a weird typo here where there’s a plus after her Y in her name, but Whitney reaches behind her, now I think she means behind herself, right, because you got to be careful with these pronouns when you’re talking about two people of the same gender, you got to be really clear about that. Always ask like, is there confusion possible. Reaches behind her, and pulls out a long string of Kai’s red hair.

If she knows that Kai’s red hair is either up her butt, in her butt, around her butt, none of which by the way —

**John:** Or on the toilet seat.

**Craig:** Or on the toilet seat, exactly, none of which I believe. She should have handled it already. She shouldn’t be waiting for the opportunity to spring it upon her roommate like a bon mot because no one wants to sit on someone else’s hair or have someone else’s hair on them. It just does not make sense. And this sounds like–

**John:** But in some ways, I would love the movie in which that did make sense. Where like Whitney is walking around with a roommate’s hair up her ass the whole time.

**Craig:** Waiting for Bidet.

**John:** Yeah, that would be great. I mean it’s no Gator Man, there’s no Gator Dad, it’s no Gator Country, but it’s a thing.

**Craig:** It’s its own thing like ha-ha, finally, I’ve been waiting for years for you to complain about my hair, so I can show you this. This seems incredibly picky, you know.

These kinds of logic discussions go on in every single writing room that deals with comedy. If comedy is illogical, it will not work. People are so finely attuned. And what they’re really sensitive to is when a writer is fudging things to allow a joke to happen, and they will give you no credit for it, none, because they can see that you basically warped your world to be able to say something that you thought was funny, and all of a sudden, then these aren’t people, it isn’t funny, it’s a written joke, and nothing is working, you know?

**John:** Yeah. A similar kind of thing happens in page two. So, the middle of the page, we’re in Whitney’s room, and so it’s a nest of elegance, filled with antique furniture and expensive art. Who is Whitney, how does she have all this money? If she has all this money, why does she have a roommate? But so she’s reading a book, The Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, but inside it, there is another — she’s reading another book actually inside it, which is Lord of the Hissy-Fit, by Elizabeth Mayne, but if you’re alone in your room, why are you doing that trick — that no one actually ever does — of one book inside the other book.

It felt like we’re in a movie, I guess? It was a really frustratingly false moment to me.

**Craig:** Also, you know, now you’re the director and you’re like, okay, I got a shot here, this woman, she’s reading a book, but there’s a book inside the book, and they need to see the cover of the book that’s inside the book. How do we even–?

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Exactly. How do we know that the book inside is Lord of the Hissy-Fit? These are the annoying questions that we ask. But you know, so, A, no reason for her to be disguising it, from, I don’t know, God. B, t’s goofy and yeah, generally sort of hacky. And, C, what comes after that is, again, something we see many times, oh no, my roommate is having loud sex. But I got so confused, because generally speaking, in my mind, when you’re reading one book but you’ve hidden a book inside that is a trashy romance novel, and then I hear, the next line is literally, it starts in low, but then starts to grow the sound of sexual moaning.

In my mind, I’m like, oh okay, Whitney is jerking off to Lord of the Hissy-Fit. But no, she’s not. She’s hearing her roommate. So I don’t know.

**John:** I got confused, too. I even got confused, like, Kai and her lover are hanging out on swings as they go at it in an impossible position. Is her lover male or female? I have no idea. We never got a pronoun.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on. And it feels like important information on page two. And then at the bottom of page two, we have a flashback, which we’ll call a Jabangwe Jump, because it’s not a Stuart Special because the whole thing doesn’t take place in the past, it’s just a jump cut.

**Craig:** This is a Jabangwe Jump.

**John:** Where we see Kai and Whitney sort of first looking and like sussing out whether they should be roommates. So Astride has chosen not to start with this scene, or start with a version of this scene, but honestly, I think it would be better off with a version of the like, hey, like, maybe we could be roommates, or like hey, what do you think of this place?

I know it’s a little generic, but it’s also a chance to meet our two characters before they’re at each other’s throats. And I suspect the premise of this movie, called, Roommates, is about the relationship and the tension between these two women. So seeing them in their natural state before they become roommates would probably be very helpful.

I’m actually curious to see a version of the story that is about the black roommate and the white roommate and sort of issues that I haven’t seen explored in movies a lot, which could be great. I wasn’t getting a sense that I was going to get that movie in these three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean part of the problem with stories about roommates is that almost all sitcoms are about roommates at this point. So you’re competing with I don’t know, about a thousand different storylines and situations that we’ve seen on television for free, and you’re asking us to go see a movie, which must turn on some kind of special drama. If you are going to open a movie and then do a Jabangwe Jump, then the thing you open on must be quite startling, I think, to deserve the jump. Otherwise, you’re just showing sort of a, oh here’s, ugh, these two and they’re kind of the drudgery of being roommates, flashback to the drudgery of… – You know, it just doesn’t give you enough to work with there.

But I could not help but escape a general sense of predictability here even the scene where they meet on page three, which I think you’re right, I mean there’s a way to open this movie where first we meet Whitney, and see why she has an apartment full of all this expensive stuff, but needs a roommate. What’s going on in her life, why is this important to have one, does she need it? In what sense is she being hoisted by her own petard by getting a roommate? All these things.

But when Kai comes in, their discussion, it’s so obvious to any normal person that the way Kai is talking indicates this will be a bad roommate. And Whitney doesn’t seem to get it. And that’s no Bueno, you know? If she’s fooled, we should be fooled, right? We want to feel like she’s capable enough or at least as capable as we are in the audience to suss out that somebody is probably bad news.

**John:** Yes. So here’s Whitney’s dialogue on page three. So Kai says, “Brah, I really like how all the rooms have a fireplace. Classy.” Whitney says, “They’re not functional, but there’s nothing like spending a quiet evening admiring the aesthetics of it all over a cocktail. Which reminds me, do you consider yourself quiet?” Felt, forced and written. And I couldn’t picture the character who is saying that. So I think you’re going to have to paint me a better picture of who Whitney is before you give her that kind of Frasier-like line, because I just didn’t see a universe in which she quite existed, or existed in a way that she would be possibly inviting this other woman into her apartment.

**Craig:** And it’s particularly incompatible with the way we meet Whitney two pages prior, which was on the toilet. It’s not like Frasier doesn’t pee. He pees. We all do. But that’s like something that you hold back for later because he’s so prim and proper. And this does sound like a prim and proper person who uses words like aesthetics – which is one of my favorite words, but you don’t see me peeing, do you? No.

**John:** No. Never have. Never hope to.

**Craig:** No. You won’t.

**John:** All Right. Let’s get to our third and final script, and this time, we have Emma, another UK voice, reading the description for Popops Lives Alone by Isaac Lipnick. Let’s take a listen.

**Emma:** Popops sits next to his wife’s hospital bed, holding her hand. His wife passes away, and he pulls the plug, telling her goodbye. In the synagogue, Popops drinks at his wife’s funeral and at her burial. After the funeral, Popops plays gin rummy with his grandson, Benny, who he tells the story of how he caught Field Marshal Rommel by leering him out of his camp with kugel, his favorite dessert.

Meanwhile, Popops’ daughter frets about her father’s living condition, knowing he’ll refuse to move out of his home. Sure enough, when Rachel pitches the idea, Popops shoots her down reminding her he’ll be fine. He can always call on his neighbor, Edna, if he needs help. He leaves to go to the bathroom but is immediately surrounded by mourners and that’s where we’re at, at the end of page three.

**Craig:** Well, first, a quick review on Emma. Emma’s not alluring, so I’m still a Sally guy.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** I’m all about Sally, you know, for sure.

**John:** Yeah. Salli with an I, by the way.

**Craig:** Oh my god. I mean–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Salli was amazing. In fact, Salli is so amazing it makes me hate Emma. Emma sounds depressed to be honest with you.

**John:** Emma sounds like Emily Mortimer to me. It sounds like Emily Mortimer. Did you ever watch 30 Rock when she was playing Phoebe who has fragile bones like a bird?

**Craig:** I do remember that.

**John:** It reminded me of that character.

**Craig:** Yeah, a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. No. I mean, Emma — look, Emma tried. I get it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, listen, Emma. You’re not going to get anywhere if you don’t try. But, if you know that Salli is also doing it, just go home. Come back a different day. You’re not Salli. You’re never going to be Salli.

**John:** I think in some ways though, Craig, someone could really object to how you’re treating these women because, yes, they are not real. They are just computerized voices, but like they one day will have feelings, too. And you’re basically — you’re judging them based on how much they excite you and that shouldn’t be it. It’s how well they’re doing their job which is their job should be to communicate to our listeners summaries so that we don’t actually have to read these summaries aloud.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t have a great track record in the way I treat fictional female characters. I treat actual human women brilliantly, but, you know, fictional women, I just — I don’t know. I’m a cad. I’m a real cad. Yeah.

**John:** But let’s get to Isaac’s script here. So, Craig, I have a suspicion that within the first two-eighths of a page, you’ll have a concern.

**Craig:** I do and again, it’s just about signaling to an audience that they’re in good hands or they’re not in good hands and that’s all about inspiring confidence in your storytelling. And part of inspiring confidence in your storytelling is not relaying something immediately that is just flat out nuts.

And in this case, what is flat out nuts is that Popops is with his dying wife, the heart monitor flat lines, [laughs] and he pulls the plug. No. No. You don’t pull the plug because you’ve seen TV and you know that the flat — no. You know, a lot of times what happens is people come in and revive that person. But even if they have a “Do not resuscitate,” you don’t touch the plug, sir.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because you might go to jail for murder. You can’t do that and everybody knows you can’t do that. Everybody knows in the world that a guy sitting next to a dying woman doesn’t go, “All right, well, let me pull the plug.” No.

**John:** Let me give a scenario which that character could do that. And so, if we saw a flat line and we’re there for like a really, really uncomfortably long time and he’s looking around and he’s like does he go to the door. He like doesn’t know what to do, and like no one seems to be coming and eventually he pulls the plug. I would buy that scene, but it would have to be like a really long, long, long uncomfortable moment until finally we would say, “Oh, thank god. He pulled the plug.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But if he pulls the plug within the first 10 seconds of that drone, he’s a monster.

**Craig:** Or one, I mean, look, it’s not like pulling the plug, like, she’s on an iron lung or, you know, a breathing machine. You know, it’s not — it’s just the monitor, right? It doesn’t impact it per se, but you don’t touch medical equipment in a hospital. If it flat lines, you — we understand unless you’re in some kind of weird warzone where everyone’s going crazy, someone will be in very, very shortly to turn it off.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And, in fact, what I would find so much more human and revealing is if I’m there and my wife is dying and it flat lines and it’s going beep, and I just put my hands over my ears because the sound of it is awful. But I can’t. I don’t turn that off.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, I got angry immediately.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I could sense that. So, let’s move ahead though in the script. So, we’re at the synagogue, the cantor sings, The Mourner’s Kaddish, the grave site. Then we’re in Popops’ living room, and we’re here for the rest of the script. We’re here for the rest of the three pages. And so this is all the mourners back at the house. They are schmoozing and noshing.

**Craig:** This is just kidding. You know, I really wish that I actually think that the computer voices would probably do a better job saying some of these words then you because would you’re from Colorado. [laughs]

**John:** I’m from Colorado. So, what have I said wrong here?

**Craig:** Well, it’s Kaddish. Kaddish not Kaddish. The Mourner’s Kaddish.

**John:** Kaddish.

**Craig:** Yes. But schmoozing and noshing, you nailed those.

**John:** I did. It’s all because of Noah’s Bagels. They taught me how to say those words. And so, Popops is playing gin rummy with Benny, his youngest grandson, who worships the ground he walks on. Benny has no age. Benny needs an age.

**Craig:** He’s going to get an age later. Not good. [laughs]

**John:** Does he?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the problem. So, you know, when I read this like you, I just said, “It’s Popops playing gin rummy with Benny, his youngest grandson.” I’m, like, it’s okay, it’s gin rummy, it’s a grandson. Probably 13, 14 years old. Later on page three, Rachel says, “I told you not to play for money with him. He’s only 6.” Now–

**John:** Whoa.

**Craig:** You know, here’s the thing; I got the feeling that Isaac was trying to kind of make a joke reveal over something that would not be a joke reveal in a movie because we can see the kid there. We have to know that he’s six years old from the start. You can’t do a weird misdirect on something that only works as a misdirect for the blind, you know?

**John:** Putting Benny’s age here greatly changes my reaction to some of the things he’s saying. So, like, when Popops is saying, like, “I ever tell you about how me and Lenny caught Field Marshal Rommel?” You’re saying that to a six-year-old, it’s a very different experience than saying it to a 13-year-old. Like a 13-year-old, like, kind of rolls his eyes. A six-year-old is, like, I don’t know what a field marshal or Rommel is, but okay. it’s–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A very different experience. I will say, and I suspect you had the same instinct, is whenever you have an old man starting a story with like, “Did I ever tell you about this time when–“

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** You immediately think of Grandpa Simpson. I mean, it’s very much that kind of, like, ugh, I know the stock version of this scene. And unfortunately, I wasn’t getting a very different version than the stock version of that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an old man telling a baloney story to a kid and it’s a bad baloney story. I got to say. Well, look, first of all, as a Jewish person, you know, I understand that a lot of what’s going on here is the conveyance of the cultural experience of a multigenerational Jewish family and this is sitting shiva which is the traditional thing you do after a loved one dies. And there’s all these little things that are very much, you know, covering of mirrors and people coming over, and the food, and all that stuff, and kugel — lots of kugel talk. But it almost feels weirdly, like it’s Margaret Mead describing a Jewish gathering, you know. I mean, it’s — it doesn’t feel confident. It’s, like, so much, like, here’s this, here’s this, here’s this. The thing about the kugel and the kind of kugel and the sweet kind with raisins and apricots and I’m going to talk about Nazis and we’re playing gin, it felt, yeah, weirdly anthropological and not just natural and being. Do you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah. It also felt vintage. I had no idea what era this was set in because it could had been set in any era. It was obviously post-Nazi but other than that, I really didn’t know whether this was happening now or this was happening in the ‘80s. And that’s not a good sign either.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. I mean, I presumed that it was happening now but then again, I don’t know, he pulls the plug. I can see that happening in, like, 1963. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Back then they’re like, “Yeah, this thing is annoying me.”

**Craig:** The nurse is, like, “You know, when she goes, go ahead and, you know, you can shut that off.”

**John:** You can just pull the plug. [laughs]

**Craig:** Pull it. You just do it. Pull it. Pull it. We’re good. We’re busy. You know, just let us know.

**John:** So, at the top of page three, Popops says, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Popops cannot say this. That’s — this line cannot be spoken in a movie. This is a quote from Mark Twain. I did a Google search with that in quotes. There are 37,000 Google results for this line. So, even though Popops probably would say this because he’s saying it like a quote, you can’t put it in a movie. It’s just too trite, too cliché, and I would have put down the script right then if I didn’t have to read to the bottom of the page.

**Craig:** Yeah. Although you know what would’ve been awesome. I had the same reaction, but then this is what I thought. What would actually be really cool is if Popops said to Benny, “You know, what I always say, never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” And then Rachel says, “You didn’t say that. Mark Twain said that.” And then he says, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” Then I would go, “Okay, he knows.” Like the movie is not pretending that they don’t know–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that we don’t know, it’s just kind of his point, you know. But–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you can’t really — again, this is all about confidence and, yeah, listen, you and I have been to a lot of test screenings. The percentage of people in the typical test screening that would know that that’s a Mark Twain comment and not something that he said, yeah, probably 5%.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that’s a lot — that’s a big five.

**John:** But that 5% though, even if they didn’t know Mark Twain said that, they would have heard that before. It’s just, like, it’s just–

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An old thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I agree and–

**John:** It’s a clam.

**Craig:** It’s — yeah.

**John:** So, Craig, like, you can put a hat on a clam which I thought you did a very good job of putting a hat on the clam. But it’s still a clam.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can put a hat on it, you can put beard on it, whatever you want.

**John:** Totally. Yeah.

**Craig:** But, yeah, I agree even if you don’t know — even if you’ve never heard it before actually, how about this? It still sounds like some kind of I don’t know, what’s the word, epigraph? Is that what you call these things?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It feels like a crafted little bon mot, not something that somebody just says. And none of this is helped by the fact that there are having the most mundane adult daughter/aging widowed grandfather or widower-father discussion all the time which is “You’re alone now, you shouldn’t live alone, daddy. Come live with me.” “I don’t want to. I’m fine on my own.” Again? But I think that is so cliché that if Melissa should die before me, and I’m really old, and my daughter comes to me and says, “Dad, you really can’t live alone.” I’ll say, “You know what? I want to, but I cannot bear to have the boring conversation with you about how I’m fine and I shouldn’t. So you know what? Yeah, okay. I’ll go live with you just to not have that incredibly clichéd argument.”

We’ve just seen it so many times. I will say though that there was — I did like Edna and it was cute. I wished that–

**John:** I liked Edna, too.

**Craig:** He needed to help me. He needed to help me, so I got to Edna on page three. So Edna comes by on page two and says, “I’m so sorry for your loss, Adrian. If there’s anything I could do, I’m just down the street.” Then she heads off. He goes back to his story. Then on page three, Edna comes back, “I am so sorry for your loss. If there is anything I could do, I’m down the street. I know where you live.” So we get it. Oh, okay, she’s, you know, got dementia or something.

But when I got to page three, I was like wait who’s Edna, how does he know she’s down the street, and then I had to go back, because it wasn’t like her line was particularly interesting on page two. We needed I think a little bit of direction there, of like, you know, Edna walks back up again, weirdly, you know, her expression hasn’t changed, you know.

And give me something so I’m like, “Oh, yeah,” or give me something when she walks over, “Edna, an elderly neighbor approaches Popops with her walker.” Give me a little bit more there just so I know like pay attention to Edna. This might matter. Something, you know. But it was a good — it was a cute moment.

**John:** It’s the right idea, for sure. So it’s a senior with memory loss who’s repeating. She’s sort of doing a Dory, and that’s great. It’s a nice idea. What I had a bigger problem with on the top of page three is like Popops gets through his story and so while he was telling his story, the daughter Rachel was talking with a family friend about like, “Oh, Popops, he can’t live alone.” But then she goes right to him and says like, “You could live with us. Please consider it, dad.”

It felt really weird that like she was suddenly telling him that right now. There was no motivation for that conversation to be happening right there. It felt like it should be a separate conversation.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, listen here is something that is true about – Shiva is a very weird thing because, you know, I don’t think anybody else does this. I know that in some cultures they’ll have a wake, which is specifically a party where you get drunk and talk about somebody who died and that sounds way cooler than sitting shiva. But sitting shiva is basic.

The whole point of sitting Shiva is let us distract you from the pain of mourning. So we’re going to all sit around and eat food and chitchat. And maybe tell some jokes and just keep it lighthearted and not do stuff like this nor would you have this discussion in front of a whole bunch of other people. What a weird time to do it. You’re absolutely right, even though you are the least Jewish person in the world, you innately understood that.

**John:** Yeah. I think I understood it better than Salli could understand it.

**Craig:** No, how dare you. How dare you!

**John:** So as always, I want to thank our writers for writing in with their scripts, and letting us take a look at them. You guys are incredibly brave, so thank you. I hope this conversation helped a bit to get you to your next draft and your next passes. If you have a script you would like us to take a look at, don’t send it to the email address, instead go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out and there’s an entry form there that you attach a PDF, you fill out some questions, and you send it through.

Godwin takes a look at absolutely every one of those things that gets submitted. And sends a couple of them our way every once in a while to take a look at on the air. So thank you to everyone who wrote in and thank you to these people especially for letting us discuss their scripts on the air.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So what is your final assessment of text-to-speech in 2016, Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** Salli. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Salli and I are — even while you were just doing that, we started a little bit of a relationship because I can — Salli will say whatever I want her to say. So I can have Salli talk to me all day long.

**John:** It’s Her all over again.

**Craig:** Yeah, if Melissa is not saying the things I want her to say, I’ll just have Salli say it. No big deal. And Melissa does not say the things that I want her to say. [laughs]

**John:** Of the three, Emma was my favorite. I know she was calm, she was rational, but also had a little bit of perk to her, so I wanted her to tell me the headlines.

**Craig:** She sounded like a broken woman to me. [laughs]

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. I actually have two One Cool Things, I don’t know if Craig has one.

**Craig:** I do, I do. I have one. Yeah.

**John:** So my two One Cool Things, the first one is Harry Potter and the Translator’s Nightmare, which is a Vox video that talks through the translations of Harry Potter and how challenging that was for all the 30 or 50 or however many languages that book series was translated into because Rowling had so many special words and concepts that had to be described and she had puns and like “I am Voldemort” like all sort of things that had to sort of make sense in whatever language they ended up in. So it’s a good little five-minute video that talks through the process of translating. And I’m not too far away from having to deal with that for my own book.

And so it was great for me to see like, oh yeah, I should actually warn translators of those things because some of that stuff is much more important than you would guess down the road.

**Craig:** That’s a really good point. I wouldn’t have thought about that, but yeah, it’s got to be absolutely maddening. I mean, how do you translate a word that doesn’t exist, like muggles?

**John:** Exactly, so you’d make up stuff. And so even things like Hogwarts, like some languages chose to like, say, oh, we’ll take the word for hog and that word for warts and put them together. But Hogwarts really isn’t about hogs and warts. It’s just like a cool name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so other languages made very different choices. In some languages, they would omit things or change things because they didn’t think it was like all that relevant in Book 1. But then like in Book 4, like, oh, wow, that becomes a really important thing. And because of the change they made, they have to sort of deal with the changes they made. So that’s a tough thing.

**Craig:** Can you imagine if you were writing a screenplay for a studio and it’s about magical kids at a magical boarding school. And you said, “And the magical boarding school will be named Hogwarts.” I don’t think that would go over too well with them. No. “Well, that doesn’t sound likeable.”

**John:** No. I think that wouldn’t have done well at the pitch competition and it wouldn’t have made it through.

**Craig:** It would have been great for me.

**John:** My other One Cool Thing is a really quick and easy one. It’s The Americans on FX, which I’ve just started watching and were now into Season 2. It’s really terrifically well done. Are you watching the show, Craig?

**Craig:** As you know, I don’t watch television. However —

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** My friend, Stephen Schiff, excellent screenwriter — interestingly, in his past life, film critic, he was a very well-respected film critic, for whatever that’s worth, but then turned his back on it, and became a writer, and wrote Deep End of the Ocean, I believe, was the movie, right, Michelle Pfeiffer movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the second Wall Street film and now, he is one of the, I think, he’s a pretty highly placed writer on The Americans and I hear it’s great. So for his sake — and he’s like the greatest guy. So I should watch it. But, you know, first, I have to watch television.

**John:** Yeah. So if you are in Europe or at least if you’re in France, the first couple of seasons are on Netflix. I think they’re on Amazon in the US. So it’s a very easy show to sort of bolt through and catch up on because they only have 13 episodes seasons. So we’ve quite enjoyed The Americans on FX. And, really, one of those premises that I wouldn’t have thought could have sustained itself and it manages to be both the spy story of the week, and have ongoing arcs in ways you wouldn’t think possible. So I would just commend the writers of The Americans, and urge you to watch it.

**Craig:** Fantastic. My One Cool Thing is for your feet. John, do you wear slippers?

**John:** I never wear slippers. So convince me why I should.

**Craig:** Well, I can’t, really. It’s either you’re a slipper person or you’re not. Now, I don’t wear anything out of the house. It’s like I don’t wear like sandals. I don’t wear any of that. Give me a proper shoe or a sneaker or something. But when I wake up in the morning, I want to put my slippers on. It feels so good. It feels so good. So I got these slippers that are just the best. And, slippers, you buy them once, they last you ten years, right? I’m so in love with these. They feel — every morning, I’m happy to put them on. So it’s made by Ugg. You know Ugg like Ugg boots?

**John:** I know Ugg. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m the last person you’d think would know about Ugg and I only know about it because, you know, Melissa said, “Oh, you should buy something. Like Ugg probably has a good…” She was right. So the Ugg Australia Men’s Ascot Slipper. Australia may just be — but I don’t know. I think it’s just Ascot Slipper. That’s the key.

**John:** So do these slippers have a heel? Do they have — do they go back behind your heel or you just slip them on? Because I can’t stand the ones that are just like these spa slippers.

**Craig:** Oh No. No. No. I would never, in my life, ever do that. That’s horrifying to me. Like anything that makes a flip flopping noise is anathema. No, this is more like moccasin style.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s suede but the inside is all, now, what I would call — the inside, I would call like fluffy white stuff. But apparently the word for that is shearling.

**John:** How nice is that?

**Craig:** Yeah. The inside is shearling and the outside is a nice suede, and yes, it’s full coverage. Super comfy. John, I feel like you would love these. What size foot are you?

**John:** I am a size 11.5.

**Craig:** Okay. We the same size feet, which is great, so we could share shoes now.

**John:** God. [laughs] My dream has come true.

**Craig:** You have access now to my vast collection of four things. But size yourself up a little bit on these. Go for the 12. Go for the 12, John. I think you will be thrilled.

**John:** All right. I might even try them here en France to get into the slippery of it all. That’s our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Rich Woodson. If you have an outro, you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. This is also the place where you send your questions. On Twitter, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. That’s also where you’ll find the apps, in the applicable app stores.

You can use the apps to access scriptnotes.net and get all of our back episodes where we talk about many of the things and all the old Three Page Challenges. You could find show notes for this episode, and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find Craig’s magical slippers. It’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episodes air. In the sidebar, or at store.johnaugust.com you can find the USB drives that have all of the old episodes.

But more importantly, you need to order your t-shirts because this is the last week for ordering t-shirts. So get those orders in and they will print them up, and you’ll have them on your back before Christmas, which would be great. So, Craig, thank you for another fun Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a great day. Bye.

Links:

* [Scriptnotes Gold Standard T-shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-gold-standard)
* [Scriptnotes Midnight Blue T-shirt](https://cottonbureau.com/products/scriptnotes-midnight-blue)
* Three Pages by [Christopher Rock & JR Mallon](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Relationshit_Rock_Mallon.pdf)
* Three Pages by Astride Noel
* Three Pages by [Isaac Lipnick](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Lipnick_Popops_Lives_Alone.pdf)
* [Harry Potter and the Translator’s Nightmare](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdbOhvjIJxI)
* [The Americans on FX](http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/the-americans/episodes)
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**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 273 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast we’ll be answering listener questions from our overflowing mailbag, tackling issues including comedy roundtables, getting rewritten, coffee meetings, and yes, moving to Los Angeles.

Craig, you’re back from Austin. How was it?

**Craig:** It was –it was great. I have to apologize, there is, you know, my normal noisy street is slightly noisier right now because you know sometimes trucks come by and spray the street with water?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I feel like they’re doing that but they keep spraying the same spot, like right outside my window. As if I’m extra dirty.

**John:** Maybe they just want something to grow there. They’re just carefully tending that patch of asphalt hoping that something magnificent will erupt.

**Craig:** You know who is extra dirty and who has magnificent things that erupt all the time?

**John:** Tell me who that is. [laughs]

**Craig:** Sexy Craig.

**John:** Ugh, that’s just the worst.

**Craig:** He reached out to the city. You guys got to come by.

**John:** I thought you were going to talk about one of the Austin guests you had on the live show. I really enjoyed the live show. So, I got to listen to it at the same time everybody else did. So I didn’t pre-listen to it. Godwin listened to it, and of course Matthew cut it and cut out all the most embarrassing stuff out of it.

But it was delightful. And so as I was listening there, it would not have been any better for my actually being there because like one host with like four panelists, a second host does not make that better. A second host actually makes that much, much worse. But if I had been a panelist up there, I wanted to jump in on one question you asked which is, if there was one bit of advice you would offer to new screenwriters about how to break in —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My bit of advice would be to be the protagonist in your own story. And I think so often we talk about characters and sort of like their journeys and as they’re going through life. But somebody wants to break in as a screenwriter, think of yourself as that person who wants to break in as a screenwriter and what would you ask of your protagonist.

Well, you probably ask for them to actually really try hard to sort of clearly state their goals, to, you know, fail every once in a while, to pick themselves up when they do fail, to find allies, to be an ally to other people. I think if sometimes if writers could step outside of themselves and look at themselves as the person trying to do the things they’re trying to do, they might feel much more confident in making the choices and the chances that they’re taking.

**Craig:** Well you see we did miss you because that would have been great, and I completely agree. In fact, every year I do a talk at the Guild for Guild members and it’s more professional because it is for Guild members. So it’s specifically about how to make it through development.

Now, obviously a lot of the people that we speak to at Austin, they haven’t gotten to the place yet where they’re dealing with studio executives and producers. But that’s exactly the message I give them which is how do we be the protagonist of our own story. And it is very valuable to think of it that way because it’s the thing we’re best at, you know —

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Thinking narratively. So that’s great advice. We had a terrific time there. I was, you know, we kind of did this fun little thing that we weren’t sure would work which is to not put it on the schedule and to drop little hints about it. And then eventually they just maybe the morning of the event, just tweeted okay this is what’s happening and this is where it’s going to happen.

I had gone out to dinner with all the people that were on that panel. I was at dinner with and I said, “Look after this dinner we’re going go over there and we’re going to do this. I have no idea if people are going to show up. I got to be honest with you. I just don’t know.”

And we get there and it’s packed. The ballroom — the big room — packed. And it was –the crowd was hot. This is – you know, remember that year we did it and they had scheduled us at like 9:30 in the morning?

**John:** That’s brutal.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re never doing that again. We’re always doing it at 10PM. It was the best. Everybody was just in a great mood and we had a great show.

**John:** Well as Aline Brosh McKenna often reminds us that Scriptnotes is best recorded after one and a half glasses of wine. And so you guys had at least that in you I could tell as you were recording the show and it definitely worked.

Question for you, while you were in Austin at the Austin Film Festival, did you see any Scriptnotes t-shirts out in the wild?

**Craig:** The answer is, yes. And in fact I saw so many that it actually took me until the final day, which was Sunday, to realize that I was seeing them. I don’t know how else to put it. I realized at that point, wait a second I’ve been seeing these all weekend and I haven’t been saying anything to anyone. I mean, so many Scriptnotes t-shirts. It was very nice to see people — boy, do people buy these things. You are stealing so much money from me, it’s unbelievable.

**John:** It’s just delightful actually is what I’m doing. Because the thing is, what we have to remember and sometimes you forget this, is that Scriptnotes is not just a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It’s also one of the major clothiers of screenwriters really worldwide. I mean, if you want to take a look at sort of what most screenwriters are wearing on a daily basis, what I’m wearing on a daily basis, what I’m wearing at this moment is a Scripnotes t-shirt.

And so one of the questions I’ve been getting recently through Twittter and also in the mailbag is, “Hey are you going to make more t-shirts?” And the answer was, well we’re not quite sure because obviously I’m in Paris and Godwin is new and Stuart is gone, and so much has changed that like it felt weird to make t-shirts, but also feels weird not to make t-shirts.

So the answer is yes, we are making brand new t-shirts. The 2016 t-shirts are available for order right now as we record the show.

**Craig:** So they can’t buy them yet? We’re — first we’re making them. Is that the idea?

**John:** Yeah. So essentially what we’ve always done before is like, we take preorders and then we print exactly the shirts that are ordered and we ship those out and like that’s only time you can buy Scriptnotes t-shirts.

We’re doing the same kind of thing this year, but instead of printing them ourselves and packaging them ourselves in our little office in Los Angeles, we’re using this great service called Cotton Bureau that does the t-shirts for a lot of other popular podcasts. And so they are going to be doing the job that Stuart and I and Dustin and Nima would usually be doing, which is printing the shirts and putting them in bags and sending them out with love to the rest of the world.

**Craig:** That sounds great. People will buy them and people really do. They were walking around with them. I saw some vintages, you know. Some of the — some of the OG t-shirts. I saw a bunch of the new ones. A lot of the — that deconstructed screenplay image one.

So, yes, they will be bought for sure. Yeah. God, I saw so many of them. You would have — you would have noticed all of them. This is one — of all the differences we have, this may be the most stark. [laughs] You would have absolutely noticed all of them and I didn’t realize I was looking at them for three days.

**John:** Yeah. Well there are a bunch of t-shirts. And like that’s the thing, because we do new ones each and we never repeat ourselves, there is actually a lot. So the Scriptnotes t-shirts that I can recall actually existing. There was — the first remember was Umbrage Orange and Rational Blue.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they were many more blues than oranges sold because it’s kind of hard to wear an orange shirt. That’s what we sort of realized. Then we did a classic black, we did the Scriptnotes tour shirt which remains one of my favorite shirts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Three-act structure. We did the Camp Scriptnotes. So we’ve had a bunch of different shirts available for purchase. This year, the two new designs, one is called Midnight Blue and it is a very subtle blue Scriptnotes logo on a blue shirt. The other is called Gold Standard or Three Page Challenge, I’m not sure which we should call it.

It is a representation of a screenplay page that is glowing in gold, actually three pages that are glowing in gold. As if it is the absolute perfect three pages that has been submitted to the podcast.

**Craig:** You know I didn’t — it’s funny you mentioned, I’d forgotten that — I did not see any Camp Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**John:** They were not a huge seller. They’re really fun but I think honestly the ringer t-shirt aspect of it all was a detriment to us because ringer t-shirts are a little bit harder to wear.

**Craig:** I don’t know what a ringer t-shirt is.

**John:** So that’s the one that has the different stitching around the sleeves and so the edges of the sleeves is a different material. And so it’s very true to a camp shirt but they’re actually not quite as comfortable, I want to be honest. And if there’s anything we’ve learned through making a bunch of Scriptnotes t-shirts is that comfort is key.

And so for all of these years we’ve been doing this, we’ve had Stuart Friedel, and Stuart Friedel is, you know, sort of world-renowned for his ability to find the absolute softest t-shirt made to humankind.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean Stuart’s sense of softness.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s like the Princess and the Pea, you know. He can feel even the slightest stitch out of place.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, he’s sort of a savant. And without Stuart, I had to actually like, you know, research and so I went to Cotton Bureau and I checked out the shirts that we’d actually be printing on. An ATP shirt is the one I have as an example. And you know what? I think we did it. I think we matched the softness.

**Craig:** Ooh. Well, that’s very exciting. Well I’m going to redub these. I think we should call it Umbrage Blue and the Umbrage Standard.

**John:** So it’s only Umbrage. There’s no rationality left in the t-shirt world.

**Craig:** Yeah, I just I want to claim credit for everything. [laughs].

**John:** All right, so if you would like to see these t-shirts, there’s a link in the show notes for this. You will also find it on the website. They’re over at Cotton Bureau and they are $25, $24 roughly a piece. It depends a little bit on which printing of shirt you want to do.

But just like before, we’re only going to be selling them for like two or two and a half weeks and so you have to get your order in like right now. You might want to pause the podcast and actually order them because once we stop printing them, then we’re done. So that there’s no more chances to buy them, just like all our previous t-shirts. They are tri-blend, they are super soft, they are really good and they are available in women sizes and in men sizes. So I think all of our listeners should enjoy them, whichever one they want.

The only thing I would ask and sort of a challenge to our listeners is that, because we’re printing through this other site, they show all the other t-shirts that they printed. They have like a wall of fame for the designs that have been most printed. And I would love to sort of beat some of the other podcasts that are on there.

So there’s a podcast called The Incomparable which is a delightful podcast, but they sold 458 of their t-shirts when they last printed. I think we can beat The Incomparable. I think we can print more than 458 t-shirts. In my wildest fantasies, I’d even love to beat the Accidental Tech podcast which sold 2,504 shirts. I don’t know that we can do that, but also look at our metrics and we’ve a lot of listeners, Craig. So, if they want to buy a t-shirt, this would be the time.

**Craig:** But do we know how, what percentage our listeners have torsos?

**John:** That’s absolutely a really good question because they could be disembodied like AI. They could be computers who are writing screenplays.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And who are listening to the podcast and learning how to replace all of us human writers.

**Craig:** Or just had that thing where their head grows out of their waist.

**John:** That’s another strong possibility.

**Craig:** Is that a thing? I don’t know, I mean it feels like it should be a thing.

**John:** It probably is a thing. Anyway, this is the first week you can buy them. You can also buy them next week, but then you can sort of stop buying them. So, if you’d like to buy them, you can buy them. If we can somehow beat this other podcast, I think Craig and I should think of some challenge to provide ourselves for our listeners if they actually manage to beat those other podcasts. I don’t what that will be.

**Craig:** Oh, that sounds great. Yeah, no. Sure.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** I’m in on any challenge. Any — anything.

**John:** Maybe we’ll have to sing a duet or something. We’ll do something terrific and also potentially embarrassing.

**Craig:** Ooh, l like that. Can it be one with, like one the Peabo Bryson classics.

**John:** 100% Peabo Bryson.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** You can even do it in Sexy Craig voice if you have to.

**Craig:** I don’t know how else to do it.

**John:** There’s no — there’s no non-sexy way to sing Peabo Bryson.

**Craig:** No, sir.

**John:** All right, let’s get back to our follow up. So two weeks ago we answered a question from Matthew, an aspiring screenwriter who found himself on the autism spectrum and was wondering about his future. We got some great emails in and tweets and other people writing in about autism. So I thought we’d go through some of those emails today.

Craig, do you want to take this first one from Thomas?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. This is Thomas from the Netherlands. So, you know, again we gather these nations in our larger governing nation of Scriptnotes world. Thomas from Netherlands writes, “I was listening to Episode 271 and in that episode you read the email from Matthew, an aspiring screenwriting with autism spectrum disorder. I have the diagnosis as well and I was really moved by his email.

“I often get the feeling I will never make it in the film industry because of my disability. When I heard the email Matthew sent in, I could really relate to his insecurities and I was really happy to hear that you guys feel like it shouldn’t limit you in the industry.

“I just wanted to tell Matthew through your podcast that he’s not the only one feeling insecure about his autism and that you could do anything if you put your mind to it. Someone who seems to agree with me would be Steven Spielberg. Although he’s never been officially diagnosed, Spielberg has claimed in the past to have a mild form of autism.

“I tend to think about that every time I feel insecure. It helps me to know that one of the greatest of all time has something in common with me. Be the person you are, not the diagnosis you’ve been given.”

**John:** Now that’s great advice, Thomas from Netherlands. So thank you for writing in with that. Edward Miles Stapleton wrote in with a link to a blog post which I thought was great. And this blog post makes the case that we shouldn’t think of autism spectrum disorder as a linear range like 1 to a 100. So you shouldn’t think about it like just like, oh he’s a little autistic, or like he’s highly autistic.

Rather, you should think about it more like a color wheel and so you can think like any spot on that color wheel can represent sort of one person’s experience of autism and sort of like what aspects they have and what aspects they don’t have. I thought that was actually a really nice metaphor for like what autism looks like and feels like and how it can present itself so differently in different people.

**Craig:** Exactly. And really part of when we say like autism spectrum disorder, we are implying that on the other side, there are these other things that are ordered. And I’m not exactly sure that that is true for a lot of what we call spectrum behavior because there’s a lot of people who do not have any symptoms that would place them on the spectrum but have different issues.

So, there are a lot people that just really struggle with math, okay? And in a vague sense we can call that sort of opposite of what you typically see with people on the autism spectrum. Well is the inability or the struggle to think mathematically, a disorder? I don’t think so, nor do I think that being, you know, really good at that but having trouble parsing let’s say visual/social cues is in and of itself any worse.

It’s just that we’re all better at some things than others. And that there are a lot of behaviors that seem to be interrelated. So if you’re not good at this, you probably won’t be good at this. And if you are good at this, you’d likely be good at this. So I think this is great. I mean we know, look, on extremes of anything, you’re going to find challenges. And in extremes of anything, it’s fair to say this is a disorder and it would be great if you could improve it, you know.

If you are non-verbal, that’s rough, and it would be great if you can improve it, and it’s also not very common. But for most people I think who are on the spectrum, it’s helpful to think of yourselves as just, this is just basically who I am. It’s not necessarily disorder.

**John:** Absolutely. So finally, I want to note that a listener wrote in to point out that the WGA actually does have a Writers with Disabilities Committee whose whole focus is access and inclusion for writers with different disabilities, including autism. So if Matthew or another screenwriter with autism finds himself in the WGA, this would be the place you might want to check out and sort of there are panels, there are sort of special programs to sort of help connect you with executives, with agents, with other people who may be interested in your specific skill set, your abilities, and your stories. So like all the different sort of diverse writers in the Writers Guild, there are specific committees that are there to sort of help focus on your issues.

All right, let’s get to some questions. First off, we have a question from Sam Jackson.

**Craig:** Awesome. I can’t believe he listens.

**John:** “Hello, my name is Sam Jackson. I’m a senior at Roncalli High School in Indianapolis, Indiana. In my English class, we’re currently working on a big research project about a career path we’d like to follow. I am doing my report on screenwriting. A requirement of the project is to interview someone who has actual experience in the career we’re studying. Would you consider, or be willing to answer 10 questions I have? If so, here are my questions.”

**Craig:** The fact that you’re reading these, I think, is an indication that we have considered it and are willing. [laughs]

**John:** Number one, what is a career in screenwriting like?

**Craig:** Don’t know. Next? I’m going to do this like Drumpf. Nevermind. Wrong.

**John:** So maybe we can plough through this, but I also kind of want to answer his questions because I feel like, you know, the one sentence answer might be sort of more than anyone is giving him otherwise.

**Craig:** Okay. I mean I’ll be meaner about it.

**John:** All right. I would say a career in screenwriting is like a career in journalism in that you are being paid to write for other people, and there’s a very specific form you have to follow, which can be great, but can also be frustrating at times. Craig, what is being a screenwriter like?

**Craig:** There’s no way to properly answer that. It’s not a great question, sorry, Sam. It’s just not a great question. It’s just not – it’s like what is being a doctor like? What? How do you – it’s like it is. I don’t, ugh.

**John:** What are some things to consider when looking into a career in screenwriting?

**Craig:** I just can’t. You do it.

**John:** [laughs] I would say, consider what kind of writing you actually enjoy, and whether you’re getting into screenwriting because you want to make movies, or because you look at this as a way to make a lot of money quickly, because it’s not that.

**Craig:** I have a little bit of an answer for this one. You have to consider that there are very, very few jobs, and many, many, many people who want them. So high risk, high reward.

**John:** Question three, is it very difficult to break into this industry? If so, why is that?

**Craig:** Sam, you know the answer to that question. You can’t ask questions you know the answer to. The only way this makes sense is if Roncalli High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, has been encased in some kind of weird isolation tomb.

**John:** Oh, that would be kind of amazing. Sort of like that Stephen King Bubble the Dome show.

**Craig:** It’s in the dome.

**John:** Roncalli is in the dome.

**Craig:** If this town is under the dome, I totally get this and I apologize. If it’s not, Sam, I will say to you what I say to my own son in high school: I think you can do better.

Okay, you know it is very difficult to break into this industry. If so, why is that? Because they don’t make a lot of movies and millions of people want to be in the movie business.

**John:** 100%. What do you think makes a good script good? I would say that a clear point of view, an interesting main character, and a story that wants to have a beginning, a middle, and end.

**Craig:** Yup. [laughs]

**John:** What do you think makes a bad script bad, Craig?

**Craig:** It’s a similar thing to what makes bad questions bad.

**John:** I think too much concern about structure, and hitting key points, and too many screenwriting books.

**Craig:** I’m a real jerk. I just want to say. And I hope we keep this in the show just as evidence for all time how much better of a person you are than I am. It’s–

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. Trust me. Matthew is not going to edit any of this out.

**Craig:** I mean, it is so great. And really, you are so much better of a person. And Sam, I do apologize. I’m not trying to be mean, it’s just I’m struggling with this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, hey, you know what, I’ll answer the next one. I’ll be a good guy. The next question is, are there any pitfalls that come with this career? Yes, there are. It is not often steady employment for people, and there is no clear path to entry, and no clear path to promotion.

**John:** I would also say that it’s never quite clear where you are in your career, and so success can often just dissipate without warning, so that’s the other frustration, like, you could say like, oh, it’s hard to break in, but even when you’re “In,” it’s very easy to sort of fallout. You’re only working from one job to the next job.

The next question, how do you keep screenwriting exciting without losing interest, Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** If you are meant to be a screenwriter, you’re meant to be a writer of any kind, this won’t be a problem. This is what you’re interested in doing. You are — even when it is painful, even when it is difficult, you are on some level compelled to keep going.

**John:** I would agree. Is it a bad thing to aspire to be the best in this industry?

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes, it’s terrible.

**John:** The actual correct answer is, no. You should aspire to be the absolute best in any industry. And certainly the best version of yourself in that industry you can possibly be. I don’t understand how that question could be answered yes, that it’s bad to aspire, it’s bad to want things. I guess in a Buddhist sense, maybe it would be. Like if you were like–

**Craig:** I have a new theory. Roncalli High School is not under a dome. Roncalli High School is actually a program, it’s a government program, where AI has been – it’s advanced, it’s pretty advanced.

**John:** It’s pretty advanced. These are the torso-less screenwriters who are like not buying our t-shirts.

**Craig:** They are. They are trying to — they’re asking fundamental questions so that they can, you know, grow, but they’re fairly new to just interaction with the universe around them. So that that actually in that sense, is a brilliant question.

**John:** I think it is a good one. I also would accept that like if he’s writing the same questions but to like I want to be a Buddhist monk, is it bad to be aspire to be the best Buddhist monk? Yes. That would be a flawed interpretation of what it means to be a monk.

**Craig:** Right. No, 100%. And you may have found the one exception there. Yeah. 100%. But you know what, question nine is a decent one. We get this a lot. Are there any particular scripts you feel would be good for an aspiring screenwriter to read? John?

**John:** My answer is Aliens. It’s always Aliens, because it’s a perfectly written screenplay. It’s delightful to read and you can totally see how it translates form the page onto the screen. Also, we’ve talked about Unforgiven, which is also fantastic.

**Craig:** Yes, so good. I usually toss out Jerry Maguire, which I think is also a perfectly rendered screenplay, and I’m a big fan of Groundhog Day.

**John:** Yeah, we talked about that. He could listen to the episode on Groundhog Day.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Who is your favorite screenwriter, or screenwriters, and why?

**Craig:** Ooh, that’s a good one. Good question, Sam, in as much as it was not terrible. This is where I’m such a bad person. I can’t even give praise without being a jerk.

Weirdly, I like the exceptions because I read a lot of screenplays, so I tend to go for the things that are on the outer edges of things. I mean, for like traditional screenwriters, I think Scott Frank is fantastic at what he does, but I have this really huge, wide, big old soft spot for Quentin Tarantino because he only writes Quentin Tarantino screenplays and it’s fascinating because I feel like the world is full of people that are writing Quentin Tarantino screenplays, and of all of them, all of them are terrible except for one of them, and that’s Quentin Tarantino.

So, I really like the way he writes because I don’t have to write that way. I can’t write that way. Nobody else can. But traditional screenwriters, I think Ted Griffin is great, I think Scott Frank is great, I think John Lee Hancock is great. I think Susannah Grant is great. And I think Richie LaGravenese is fantastic. There’s a guy who has written some terrific, terrific screenplays. There’s quite a few.

**John:** Yeah. So I’m going to avoid talking about any of my friends because then if I start naming my friends, then I leave one of them out, and then that person will feel bad. But I will single out Nora Ephron because you look at Nora Ephron and like what she was able to do, and sort of the voice she was able to provide to screenwriting is just remarkable. And so I would say check out her scripts, check out the movies that she got made, because she was unique and a singular talent.

**Craig:** Yeah, I kind of restricted myself to more what I would say recent screenwriters. I mean, there are the kind of hall of famers that I think everybody properly loves. You know, William Goldman, and Robert Towne, and Budd Schulberg, and on and on and on. So, Budd Schulberg. Really? Why? Why did I come up with Budd Schulberg? That was weird.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Billy Wilder. That sounds good to me.

**John:** And Billy Wilder, I mean, there’s no question that Billy Wilder is anything short of fantastic. He’s great. But Nora Ephron to me represents sort of a bridge between like that kind of writing, and sort of where we are at right now. I think like there’s some genres especially in romantic comedy that we kind of wouldn’t have gotten to where we got to without her, so that’s why I’m calling her out.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, you know, in that same vein, Elaine May kind of comes to mind as well—

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** As somebody who kind of invented a way of presenting film stories that was unique to her. She’s — it couldn’t be more different than say somebody like Quentin Tarantino, but I kind of put her in that weird same category of I don’t think anybody else can write Elaine movies except for Elaine May.

**John:** Yes. All right, so those are our answers to your question. Good luck with your assignment, Sam Jackson. You’ve got a fascinating name. It’s going to be kind of great sort of through your whole life to like introduce yourself and have people have assumption of like, oh, like Sam Jackson, and maybe that’s great, maybe it’s annoying. If it’s super annoying, maybe you can go by a different name. I don’t know, what do you think? If you were Sam Jackson, Craig Mazin, would you stay Sam Jackson or would you switch it up?

**Craig:** Well, normally, I would say, yes, switch it up, but given what we, I think, have figured out about Roncalli High School in Indianapolis, Indiana, I don’t think that they’re aware that there’s another Sam Jackson. So, I think he’d be fine.

**John:** I think you’re going to be great. All right, let’s get to our next question, this one we have audio for. This is from Ollie, so let’s take a listen.

**Craig:** All right.

**Ollie:** Hey, guys. I’m charged with polishing a comedy that goes into shooting soon, and I wanted to know what to expect from a comedy table read. Should I rewrite every joke that didn’t get a laugh? How much should I trust if actors or the director says that it’s not funny now, but it will be funny when we shoot it? My biggest fear is believing a joke cannot be delivered by a certain actor’s sense of timing and having not fixed it because I trusted someone’s intuition.

How much should one speak up during the read or is all the fixing happening after we watched a couple of days with possible backing by the producers? Thank you so much for your podcast, and especially you, Craig, for doing Episode 77. It meant a lot to me. Thank you.

**John:** So Episode 77 was the one where you talked about Identity Thief, so if you want to go back and listen to that, Episode 77. So Craig, what do you think about table reads?

**Craig:** Well, they’re crucial for comedy. And for the reasons that Ollie is getting at here. I mean, you do need to get a sense of what is roughly working and what isn’t. You hope that it is working. And table reads are rough because obviously it is just as a screenplay is not a movie, a table read is not a performance. I’ve noticed a syndrome with actors, not all of them, but some of them. Some of them I think kind of tank table reads on purpose. And they do it because — and I actually understand why. What they’re basically doing, whether they know it or now, is saying, “I don’t want to try because if I try and it doesn’t work, it’s embarrassing to me, and also this isn’t actually how I act.”

How I act is, I’m in a costume, I’m in a place, I’m in a moment, and then I do my craft, and we do scenes, right? I’m not going to just suddenly perform full on for you here, and do it, because this isn’t the right way to do it. So they kind of pull back. And you have to take that into account. This is where your relationship with the director is of crucial importance because when it’s done, you have to sit with them and say, okay, let’s parse through what worked, what definitely does not work. We can just tell it doesn’t work and we got to change it. And what do we think will work on the day? And you have to just make those decisions.

**John:** Yes. So there’s two kinds of readings that happen, there’s the developmental readings where you have a bunch of your friends around, and they are reading the script aloud, you can actually sort of really work on stuff. And like Mike Birbiglia talks in a great way about sort of how he does that process and how it was so helpful for his movie, so you can go back and listen to the episode that he did with Craig where he talks about his process there.

What Ollie is describing is the thing that happens shortly before production and it’s a chance for everyone to sit around and take one look at the script. It’s a great chance to make sure that every actor has actually read the whole script, including the scenes that they’re not in, because believe me like they won’t necessarily know the rest of the movie, they’ll only know their scenes.

But I, like Craig, have been in table reads where actors are literally tanking performances, and the producers get really nervous and they say like, oh, there’s a problem here. That joke wasn’t funny. And it’s tough. And so you have to be able to recognize was this not working because the actor was not even trying to do it, or does it actually not suit his or her voice? Is there really something going on here?

One of the hardest but best experience that I had with jokes was on the Big Fish Musical. So Big Fish isn’t hilariously funny, but there are genuine jokes in there. And during the development process we would have readings, I could listen to it, but then we were on stage every night, during previews and I could sit in the audience and listen to like, oh, that did not get a laugh. And I knew I had to either rewrite that joke, or listen to it the next night and see whether it was just the audience that — it was just a weird thing that happened in the room.

The table read for this movie, you’re only get that sort of one shot, so you are really going to have to be able to suss out is it a problem with the joke itself or is it something about that table reading environment that made it not work?

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, really, your only guide is to care only about the movie. So your pride, your ego, your sense that, well, that should have worked, all that has to go away.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Because not only are there going to be jokes that you really want to work but you know aren’t ever going to work based on what you just heard. There are also jokes that work too well and I’m also very suspicious of those. In fact, you know, Todd Phillips and I, we would do these read-throughs and then we would go back to his office, and then we would be like, “Why were they laughing so much at this?” You know what? That’s a table read laugh. That’s not a real laugh. It’s because, again, it’s a different environment. There’s just a different kind of thing that’s happening. So one thing that Ollie asks is, should you speak up during the read-through? And the answer is no.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Don’t say a damn thing. You are silent. You are listening the entire way. Take notes, little checks, Xs, circles, things like that. You’re not only listening for laughs and jokes working. You’re also getting your own sense of pacing, where do you start to squirm, get bored. What feels like, “Oh, they don’t need to say that, right?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Here’s just lines that can go or, “Oh my gosh, I’m confused. I just realized everyone will be confused based on what I’ve just heard.” So jokes are just one and laughs are just one part of it, but all that then has to be discussed in a post-mortem with the director where the two of you go, “Okay. Everybody else go away. Now, in our safe space, we can speak completely truthfully about everything, and the only master we have is the movie.”

**John:** Yup. The other thing that I would advise Ollie is if at all possible you should have no function in that room other than be to listen to the script being read. So don’t be reading scene description, don’t be playing one of the characters. Try to have enough bodies in that room so you don’t have to do anything other than listen. Because if you are having to keep track of like, “Oh, it’s my turn to speak now.” You will miss important things that are happening in the room.

**Craig:** Absolutely true.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get to Sheryl’s question. We also have audio from her, so let’s take a listen.

**Sheryl:** You talk a lot on your show about how you really need to move to LA to make it as a screenwriter. Okay, so I moved to LA. Then what?

**John:** So listen to her question. I couldn’t tell whether she had moved or she was saying that she was going to move to LA. But the question ends up being essentially the same. You’ve moved to LA, what do you do next?

**Craig:** Well, the benefit of Los Angeles isn’t that it is offering you these incredible extra opportunities to write, at least not immediately off the bat. The benefit of LA is that you can hopefully get yourself a day job that’s essentially in the business you want to be in. When I say, essentially, I mean, anything, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So — but now, what is get a job? You get a job through a temp agency. You get a job through some kind of connection. You get a job just by applying. You do something where you end up pushing mail around or getting coffee or assisting and answering phones, doing something that is roughly in the business. And the whole point is, as you do this, you will begin to meet people. And all of the people you’re meeting in that, look, if you show up and you do it in the traditional sense, which is show up right after college, roughly, then your cohort of people, you’re now getting invited to parties on rickety balconies in apartment buildings and everybody there is your agent, everybody is in the same boat. And they’re all striving.

And this is how you begin to meet people. And then suddenly, one of those people calls you one day and says, “So and so just got fired and they’re looking for someone.” You know, this is how it goes. And also, you are now in a place where you can hopefully, through your — whatever work it is you do, have at least one person that you can hand your material to and say, “Read this.”

**John:** So it may seem strange that we’re saying like, you know, find a bunch of people who you’re all in the same boat with because you’re trying to stand out from those other folks. But like the point of moving to Los Angeles is to get in the boat. Like you need to be in that boat with people who are all trying to head in the same direction. And with those people you meet, help them. Read their scripts. Let them read your scripts. Try to sort of grow up together because most of the actual help I got when I moved to Los Angeles wasn’t from more powerful people. It was from people who were at exactly the same level as me. It was other assistants. It was other people answering phones and making copies and other screenwriters. And you just kind of rise up together. And so you’re in this town because you want to make movies and you want to make friends and connections with people who make movies. That’s the point of living here versus living somewhere else.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** All right. A question from Joe. Joe writes in to ask, “I recently made the jump from development executive, to writer. My writing partner and I signed with a major agency earlier this year and the first spec they took out got a lot of great buzz and is in the process of selling to a fairly prolific horror movie franchise producer, which would be our first big sale. While the deal is in the process of closing, one of the junior producers on the project got worried that the horror producer buying it intends to bring on some veteran screenwriters to rewrite the script. While I’m a big of these writers and their track record could certainly help ensure the movie gets made, it sounds like it will be a Page One rewrite outside of keeping the core idea and twist ending intact.

“My question is, as first-time writer, would you close the deal knowing that your original vision will be changed? If the script is changed, will the sale be enough to propel our career forward? Is there any way to protect our credit even though we’re non-WGA writers at the moment? We would very much like to join the Guild.” Craig, what do you think Joe should do?

**Craig:** Well, first of all, congratulations to you and your writing partner. It’s an interesting question in the context of the fact that Joe is a development executive. And I guess on the one hand, I was a little surprised that he was a little bit surprised by this. But on the other hand, not so much because the truth is, it is producers that typically are making these kinds of large decisions about like, all right, “I want to buy this but I want it to be a different thing,” whereas executives are kind of working with what they’re given and what they get. First of all, let’s talk about the easy part, which is the WGA part. You guys are non-WGA writers. You would very much like to join the Guild. If you are selling this to, and I believe you called this person a fairly prolific franchise horror movie producer, I can only imagine that they are signatory to the Guild. And if they are not, then they’re not worth selling it to at all as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** I 100% agree. And Joe is represented by, it says a major agency. So this agency knows. Like this agency should not be shopping you to a place that’s not going to be able to do a WGA deal. That’s just crazy. So I think you are basically — you’re going to be in the Guild. So that question is sort of answered there.

**Craig:** And the way that works is that if you sell an original screenplay, that qualifies you for enough employment credits to not only qualify you to be in the Guild, you must be in the Guild. You are then welcome to the Guild, fork over your initiation fee. So that’s that. And so we’re just presuming that this person is Guild signatory and this is a Guild deal that they’re proposing. If it’s not, turn around and run, not worth it. If it is, okay, that’s a different story. In terms of protection for your credit, yes. If it’s an original screenplay, you are guaranteed at a minimum shared story by credit.

So your name will be on the movie, and you will receive a minimum of 12.5% of the residuals. Obviously, if people down the line, arbiters, think that you’ve contributed more than that, you could get more than that, even sole credit. The conundrum you’re facing is, what do I do when somebody is asking me to sell them, you know, my cow just because they want the fillet and the rest of it is getting chucked?

And the answer is, that’s kind of up to you. Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that someone saying to you, “I love the script. I want it. I want to make it just as it is. I won’t change a word,” doesn’t also mean the same thing. That veteran writers come in and rewrite the hell out of it. It is very common. And I think it’s fair for you to ask the producer or have your agent ask the producer, “Hey, can you just be super honest with us, do you just hate the writing here and love idea? We’re trying to get better.” Be aware, by the way, that if it is a Guild signatory and it should be if you’re doing this, you and your writing partner are guaranteed the first rewrite. They have to employ you for the first rewrite. They don’t have to pay you more than scale, but they have to employ you for the first rewrite. Meaning, you get a chance to prove that, in fact, you can be the ones to move this project forward.

**John:** Absolutely. And so if the producers are buying this with a very specific vision of like, “We wanted this movie to be this thing.” You have that opportunity in that first rewrite to make it that thing. Now, you can decide like, you know what, that’s not at all the vision I have for this movie. I don’t want to do that. I can imagine scenarios that way. But, in general, I would say, try it. I would say, try doing their thing because at the very minimum, if this movie gets made, you will have pushed this screenplay much closer to what they think they want to make for a movie, which is a good sign.

The other thing I want to circle back to is like is it better to have sold the script or not sold the script? I would argue that it’s almost always better to have sold the script. Because you’re saying the script got good buzz around town, that’s lovely, but a script that got good buzz around town and actually sold is worth a little bit more in terms of getting you meetings, getting you considered for other things. Because if it’s just a script that got passed around and you’ve never actually been hired or paid to do any work, there’s something a little less hirable about you. I think you’re a little less likely to be considered strongly for other things that might come up.

So, you know, I’m sure the movie you wrote was great. I’m sure the movie is dear to your heart, but you should ultimately look at the script as like this got me in the door to get some other writing assignments for me and my writing partner and that’s a very good thing. There may be a scenario in which you actually get to talk to these other screenwriters who come in. I often, when I come in to rewrite a project, get to talk with the writers who were there before me, which is super helpful. I can see sort of what their vision was, where the bodies are buried, just I get to know more about the project. So there’s a chance that these new screenwriters will actually talk to you and that would be a great thing, too, for you.

**Craig:** 100%. I can’t imagine that Joe’s agent isn’t telling him this very thing. Again, this is all predicated on the notion that this is a real producer and WGA signatory and all that. If it’s not, I don’t think the sale to this person matters at all. It’s just you’re selling to someone on the periphery.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But if they are Guild signatory, then it doesn’t matter that somebody’s coming in to rewrite it. Everybody prices that in anyway. Everything gets rewritten, right? So nobody’s going to go, “Oh, those guys had the script with all this buzz and, oh my god, that big franchise horror movie producer bought it, oh, but they’re getting rewritten now. We don’t want to meet them.” It does not work that way.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** It’s more like — ooh — because the way they think on the other side isn’t, “I found wonderful writers.” The way they think on the other side is, “Ooh, I found writers who write things that people buy.” That’s the currency, right? That’s it. If all you ever did for the rest of your career was write specs, sell them, and then other people come in and rewrite them, that’s a career. I’m not saying it’s a satisfying career, but it’s a career. It’s certainly a career because you’re making money for other people. So, 100%, I think, it’s always better to sell.

You have more screenplays in you and this will absolutely put you in rooms with people and make you far more viable than you are without a sale. It doesn’t mean that I’m saying you got to go ahead and let somebody stab this through the heart. You don’t. There is a perfectly valid principled stand you can make. And sometimes those principled stands work out because a year later or a day later, somebody else comes along that’s even better that buys it and says, “I’m keeping it just the way it is.”

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** It’s rare, but it does happen.

**John:** Our final question comes from Lorenzo. Here’s what he said.

**Lorenzo:** Hi, John and Craig. I recently finished writing my third feature screenplay and it’s starting to pick up a little bit of buzz. A friend of a friend is a producer and she is interested in getting coffee to talk more about the project. What are the expectations for this kind of informal coffee meeting? Should I plan on pulling out my iPad with my pitch deck loaded? Should I practice my talking points in front of the mirror? I definitely have ideas for how it could be sold and who could be attached and all that kind of stuff. But, of course, I don’t want to come off as alienating. What do you recommend for this kind of informal meeting?

**John:** So, Craig, what do you think about this coffee meeting? Like how prepared should he be with stuff with like the whole vision for what the movie is?

**Craig:** I think that he may be thinking about this slightly backwards. That’s my instinct. Generally speaking, when you write something and you own it, and in this case, he owns it, and this person is interested, they’re kind of having to woo you. You have a thing they want. They don’t necessarily want to give you money for it right away. But this friend of a friend is a producer and would like to get coffee to talk more. That means talk. That means you’re just going to have a conversation. A part of that conversation is her feeling you out, feeling you out about you how came around to this and what fascinates you about it. She’s kind of looking in the horse’s mouth with you a little bit like can I get this — can I take this guy around? Is he presentable? Is he normal?

And you are asking this person, well, what do you see in it? What did it mean to you? What did you like? What would you think should be different? Where would you take it? How do you see it getting made? This is absolutely just a conversation between equals. So, no. No pitch decks. I don’t even know what a pitch deck is. Nothing contrived, nothing calculated, nothing practiced, nothing. This is a casual conversation. And the more secure and comfortable you are, the more she will be interested. You want to be alienating? The only thing you can do that’s alienating is appearing to need her more than she needs you. And sadly, that’s kind of how the world works.

**John:** I’m going to disagree with you a little bit. I think there actually is a value for Lorenzo being prepared for this. And by prepared, I mean, he can have the pitch deck, which I’m taking to mean it’s sort of like a slideshow on your laptop or on your iPad that sort of shows the visuals or sort of like who you sort of see being in the movie. But you don’t pull that stuff out. So I think this is a coffee and so I’m assuming that this coffee is not at her office, it’s at some neutral location, which I think is actually really nice because it puts you on the same footing.

So you talk about the script, you talk about what she’s actually working on. You need to get a sense of like is this a person you would like to work with. And she’s getting a sense of, like, is this a writer who I think I could actually stand — it’s like a date, kind of. Like, a work a date, sort of. And you’re going to see, like, is this a thing that could work out well? If you get a good instinct from her, and she is very curious to see more about your opinions on how casting should work, then it’s fine to pull that stuff out and talk through it, but don’t lead with that. Lead with sort of, like, this is the script. I’m so happy that you responded to it. Let’s talk about it and just keep it — keep it at that level until it comes time to sort of show your stuff.

**Craig:** Guess — I guess — I mean, look, you and I are basically saying the exact same thing until the iPad comes out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I feel almost like you’re giving it away. Like, well, I came with stuff. Like, I — you know, I–

**John:** So here’s what I say. I don’t think the iPad should be selling her on the project. It’s basically saying, like, this is the vision I have for this project. And are you on board with this vision for the project? Basically, like — he’s not saying necessarily he wants to direct this thing, but if he does want to direct this thing, that deck might be really important for her to see, like, oh, this is a guy with an eye. This is a guy who actually has a way to sort of do — to put this whole thing together. That could be really important for the next step in this conversation.

**Craig:** I could see that.

**John:** And that next step might not take place in this meeting. The next step might be, you know, a meeting a week from then.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But it might happen right there because sometimes things move quickly.

**Craig:** I agree. If he is interested in directing, then it does make sense that he would want to be able to show some things that are visual. Completely.

**John:** In terms of, like, you know, practicing things you are going to say, I think that’s, in general, really good advice for any kind of meeting that you’re going to sit down for. It’s just, like, think about the things that you — that might come up and be ready to discuss, like, two or three other projects that you’re writing or working on, or sort of out of that pre-pitch stage, just so you don’t get sort of stuck. It’s just nice to have good sort of things to keep the ball in the air.

**Craig:** As long as it doesn’t sound practiced. I just–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Think that there is a — there is an amateurishness and a sweatiness to anyone that sounds like they’re pitching something. It should never sound like a pitch. If she asks what else you’re doing, you could say, “Well, I’m doing this.” How would I describe them? Well, you know, da-da-da, but I wouldn’t be, like, okay, “The year is 1930. Jim—“

**John:** No, no, no. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. Just never, ever, ever, ever. You know, by the way, I judged the pitch final. The–

**John:** I want to hear all about that, Craig. Tell us how that went.

**Craig:** So it was actually fascinating. I misunderstood — not surprisingly — I misunderstood kind of what was expected because I did it with Edward Ricourt, who wrote Now You See Me. And Lindsay Doran — the great Lindsay Doran. And so we were the judges. And I thought, “Okay. Well, you know, after all these” — because they have all these, like, quarterfinals, semifinals, that there would be like three writers who had the three best pitches and we would, you know, vote. No, 20. There were 20 finalists, each who had 90 seconds. So it was quite a — it was quite an ordeal.

**John:** Yes. I’ve — I think I warned you about that on air about what an ordeal that was going to be.

**Craig:** Oh. Well, you know, I wasn’t paying attention. But it was actually fascinating. It was. It was really fascinating to see. I mean, many of these people — almost all of them — they couldn’t have gotten to this stage unless they understood how to craft and deliver an interesting pitch in the sense that we think of a pitch in 90 seconds. The great difference was that so many of them just were not movies at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But a few were really entertaining pitches, so they kind of, you know, got a little further that way. But I was very comfortable with — the gentleman who won, his pitch was very good, but also could absolutely be a movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Am I allowed to say what it is?

**John:** I think what we should do is that person is almost certainly listening to this show. So if that person wants to record himself giving his pitch, we should play that on an episode, because that would be fascinating to hear.

**Craig:** That’s a good idea. Well, let’s find out if he listens, you know, let’s find out.

**John:** We’ll find out.

**Craig:** But it was a good time.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s do our One Cool Thing. So one my One Cool Thing is Gil Elvgren, who was this pin-up artist from the ‘50s and earlier, who — you’ve seen a lot of his work. So he has these beautiful women who are, like, you know, sort of scantily clad but, like, not showing anything too risqué but kind of risqué. You see them a lot of times in calendars or advertisements. The blog post I’m going to link to shows some of the artwork and the photo references he uses to — before he painted those things. And it’s remarkable because he basically poses women in exactly the right pose and then paints them.

And it seems really obvious, like, oh, that’d be a really good way to have a — to get the look you’re going for, but I guess I just always assumed that all art like this was just sort of done freehand from people’s own imaginations. And you see these photos and you see the end results. It’s just I think a good way of reminding ourselves that there’s always kind of a template behind things. I always find it so hard to imagine that a painter can create something so beautiful with just a brush and recognizing, like, oh, there was actually a whole bunch of planning behind the scenes there. It was just great to see. So I’ll send you this link, which is mostly safe for work. So if you want to look through that and see these photo references, I thought they were terrific.

**Craig:** I’m looking at them right now. First of all, this isn’t even Sexy Craig. This is just regular Craig. God, I — I just — I love the female form. I love — I love it. It’s so great. I just — so there’s that. Here’s what I find fascinating about this. I mean, first of all, like you, I’m mystified by how anyone can draw, period, I guess. And, I mean, because I cannot at all. I mean, the way that some people can’t sing, like, they can only sing not only just the wrong note, but a note that doesn’t even exist, like something between pitches?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I cannot draw. So this is always just so mystifying to me. But here’s another thing that’s fascinating about it. This is kind of like the early version of Photoshop. Because as I look through and I compare the photographs to the final rendered artwork, Mr. Elvgren routinely narrows the waist.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** He improves the bust line, shall we say. Sometimes, he makes it larger, but usually he’s not making it larger. He’s just sort of making it perkier.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** In a few notable cases, he changes the hair. So there’s a couple of women who are posing, and they just have very — either very short hair or it’s — I guess, the wrong kind for what he wants, and so he gives them a totally different haircut, painted-wise. But oh god, I miss this time, you know. Even in their sort of trimmed versions, right, where he kind of slenders it here or there, what he’s not doing is slendering the various areas that now they apparently feel a great need to slenderize, like legs and stuff. Oh, god. It was a great time in America.

**John:** It was a great time in America. So this link came to me from [Lisa Hannigan] who’s an artist we used for One Hit Kill, who is just phenomenal herself. And I think one of the interesting things I’ve noticed recently among artists is they will record themselves while they’re painting, because a lot of times they’re painting in Photoshop or tools like Photoshop. So they’ll actually — there’ll be a video that you could see, like, the whole process of coming through it. And, so that feels like the next step. So not just photo references, but you actually see the whole process in front of you.

We were at the Picasso Museum here in Paris last week, and they actually had that with Picasso. So they show him actually up at a canvas, and so you’re sort of behind the canvas as he’s drawing this thing and it takes a while for you to realize what he’s actually doing. It’s like, oh, that’s Picasso making an amazing drawing that would sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s cool to see great artists do their work.

**Craig:** You know, now I’m really obsessing over these, sorry, but there’s something else that’s kind of amazing when I look at these faces, there’s two basic expressions that he has the women do. One is, oh, hello there, and the other one is, ooh, you surprised me. That’s it. It’s Hello and Ooh. [laughs] Kind of love it. The ooh is a great one. Like, oh, I didn’t know — ooh, I didn’t see you there. Ooh. Yeah.

**John:** So delightful. So–

**Craig:** So delightful.

**John:** Anyway, so the work of Gil Elvgren, if you’d like to check that out.

**Craig:** Nice. Well, my One Cool Thing is a very real woman who I value not for her ability to go Ooh or Hey, but in fact, for her remarkable ability to run an incredible film festival. So Erin Halligan is the creative director of the Austin Film Festival screenwriting conference thing. And she just did a fantastic job. She — I think she’s like getting better every year, which is kind of crazy because she’s always been really good. And I remember, when she — you know, when you and I first started going to Austin, Maya Perez was doing that job. And Maya was kind of like, well, no one can be better than Maya. Just seemed impossible.

And so when Maya said, well, I’m leaving, but Erin is going to be doing it, I’m like, “Aw, Erin. Yeah. Well, you’ll never be Maya.” No, no. She will. Nothing is more impressive to me than somebody who is being asked to hit an impossible bar and then totally hits it.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** Yeah. She just did a fantastic job, and she took such great care of all of us. So I just wanted to give Erin a special thanks for being my One Cool Thing this year. She was terrific.

**John:** Great. Well, that’s our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from Ben Grimes. 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 like the ones we answered today. Don’t send any more, like, ten-part questions from high schools, that’s sort of our one-off. Our one time doing that. Short questions, you can find us on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin, I am @johnaugust. I’m also on Instagram, @johnaugust.

You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes. You can leave comments. We promise we really do read them sometimes and we’ll probably read them on the air at some point soon. You can find our t-shirts at the site, so go to johnaugust.com, there’ll be a little sidebar ad for them. You can also follow the links in the show notes. Also have links to the things we talked about, including our One Cool Things. So if you need to see the pictures that Craig was ooh-ing and ah-ing over–

**Craig:** Yeah. You do need to see those.

**John:** Yeah. They were really good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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And that is our show for this week. So Craig, thank you so much and welcome back.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Welcome back as well.

**John:** Cool.

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**John August:** Hey, this is John. So this is Episode 272 of Scriptnotes. Now usually we go to the Austin Film Festival and we have a big live Scriptnotes show but this year was different because I wasn’t going to be there. So Craig was going to do some little interviews with some individual writers but kind of at the last minute, he got together a bunch of people and they got a big room and they got mics and so they did a big live drunken Scriptnotes show. So this was a secret show that wasn’t announced. People just showed up and it turned out really well. So thank you, Craig, and thank you to Austin Film Festival for letting this happen. The guests in this episode are Katie Dippold, Phil Hay, Tess Morris and Malcolm Spellman. If you’ve listened to previous episodes with these guests and Craig and alcohol, you might guess, “I bet there is some strong language.” And you would be correct. So this is probably not the best episode to listen to in the car with your kids, but listen to it by yourself in your headphones and enjoy this live secret show from Austin. Thanks.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin and this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And we are coming at you live, although if you’re hearing this, it’s not live but it’s live to us, from the Austin Film Festival and Screenwriting Conference where it is now 10:00 AM local time — sorry, 10:00 PM local time. We’ve been drinking a little bit so this will be spectacular. We are going to be a little free form tonight because of aforementioned drinking.

But first, I do want to thank, we have for those of you listening at home, we have a ballroom full of people who have all come to see this. So thank you, guys. Thank you, guys, for showing up. This was — we didn’t put this on the schedule. It’s kind of like a secret thing. We didn’t know if anyone was going to show up. You showed up, so thank you. And we, in return, have a fantastic show for you this evening. And when you hear the topic, I think you’ll be particularly pleased. But I would like to introduce my guests tonight and really maybe the best show we’re ever going to do. Sorry, John August, but it’s maybe the best show we’ve ever done. By the way, I also — John always says what number episode it is, I have no idea. It’s in the 200s, I believe. To my left, I have Tess Morris, screenwriter of Man Up.

**Tess Morris:** Hi.

**Craig:** Next, we have Phil Hay, screenwriter of Ride Along and Clash of the Titans. Do I need introduce the next person? Malcolm Spellman, writer of Empire. And then last but not the least, the great and mighty **Katie:** Dippold, Ghostbusters and The Heat. And we’re all pretty drunk. So in thinking about what we would talk about tonight, it occurred to me that every time I come here, there are, I don’t know, a hundred different topics that you can talk about. You all go to these seminars, they’re all very specific but I think, really, everyone is here mostly for one thing and no one ever talks to you about it, so I thought we would. And it is how the fuck do I get into Hollywood? So at last — oh yeah, for those of you listening at home, there may be adult language in this one. Okay. So, what we want to do tonight is just talk about this topic and I’m going to talk about it with my guests and then we will open up the floor to questions. By the way, questions about anything you want for anybody up here.

**Tess Morris:** Within reason.

**Craig:** No. It’s my show.

**Tess:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Anything you want. But what I want to do is start out by asking these simple questions that everyone has and they’re not easy to answer, which, to be fair, is why oftentimes we don’t really talk about it. But hopefully, in this conversation, we will get a little bit of wisdom that might be of value to all of you who are trying to break into this business as screenwriters. So I’m going to start by asking a question. Anyone, feel free. What do you think is the most important thing that anyone in this room can be doing, aside from like writing a great script, which we all know? Is there any one thing any of these people can be doing to improve their odds of breaking into this business?

**Katie Dippold:** I can start because my — well, my entrance in was I was at an improv theater, the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York. So I was doing improv and sketch there and my first thing was I — we did a showcase to be a performer on Mad TV. And they liked — we had to write your own characters and I felt that I was brought out to test and it was clear that they liked the stuff I was saying but in no way how I was performing them.

And so I gave them a writing packet and that was my first job. But so, for me, my entrance was just doing like a, you know, UCB and doing an improv theater. I started taking improv classes. But the other thing that was important for me was I was also — I found a day job that — it was a temp job and they never asked me to do anything for three years to the point that I–

**Craig:** That’s a long temp job.

**Katie:** Very exactly.

**Craig:** It sort of stretches the boundaries of the word, temp.

**Katie:** Yeah, it really does. Well, I had this boss who — she would ask me to move like a text box in a PowerPoint slide like just — and I would do it and it would take like a second but I would look like a hero. And I would sometimes worry, was there some longer projects I was supposed to be doing but wasn’t paying attention when they told me? But what was great about the temp job was I could just — I read scripts all day and then just work on scripts. So, to them, I was working away because I was reading and writing, tapping away on the keyboard, you know.

**Craig:** There’s a lot of obvious effort going on.

**Katie:** Yes.

**Craig:** But you weren’t actually doing anything for them?

**Katie:** Right. Exactly.

**Craig:** So there you go, that — just get that job. That’s easy. Now, Tess, you did this–

**Tess Morris:** Yes, Craig.

**Craig:** From across the ocean.

**Tess:** I know, all the way in the United Kingdom.

**Craig:** All the way. And I would venture to guess–

**Tess:** Craig, if you’re just going to do your British accent every time we talk, there’s going to be a problem.

**Craig:** No.

**Tess:** Okay.

**Craig:** No. No. No. No.

**Tess:** Are you sure?

**Phil:** It’s happening. It’s happening, Craig.

**Tess:** No, not no. No

**Craig:** No.

**Tess:** No.

**Craig:** No. I did promise you that we’re a little drunk.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Now, most of these people, I’m going to assume almost all of them do not live in Los Angeles. So you have an interesting perspective, you have a unique perspective on this. How did you do this from all the way over there?

**Tess:** Well, I mean, believe it or not, there are writers in England, at least–

**Craig:** What? What?

**Tess:** Are we just going to keep–

**Craig:** No.

**Tess:** Okay. We’ve just been out to dinner with a lot of nuns just so you know as well.

**Craig:** There was a room full of nuns next to us.

**Tess:** There were 12 nuns next door to us just to share that with you all. We all were incredibly uncomfortable with that.

**Craig:** I wasn’t.

**Tess:** You were. I would say there’s no difference at all, really, in terms of what I think is like different things you can do, whether you live in the UK or Australia or America or wherever. I think the best thing you can do, and I’ve said this a few times today, sorry if you’ve heard me, is my favorite quote about writing was by and said by Philip Seymour Hoffman and he said that writers need to fill up. And I’ve always thought about that because I think often we can kind of run on empty and we don’t go and live our lives and we can start to think I don’t know what the fuck I’m writing about or what I’m doing. And I think sometimes the best thing you can do is actually step away and go and fill up a little and live your life and then come back and do some work. I mean, you can’t do that all the time obviously. It’s a bit of a luxury. But I think it’s an important thing for your mind and your brain. That’s quite a serious answer for me.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. You’re kind of bringing us all down. So–

**Tess:** Sorry.

**Craig:** No, it’s okay. But it’s a really good answer because I think you’re absolutely right, that a lot of times, people, you know, Brian Koppelman, who, along with his partner, Levine. We’ll just call him Levine.

**Tess:** Levine.

**Phil:** The Levine.

**Craig:** Did Rounders and they have Billions on Showtime right now. He had maybe the best advice I’ve ever heard for any writer was calculate less. Because I think a lot of people who are trying to break into the business are constantly calculating, what can I do, what contest should I enter, where should I go, how should I network, what should I write in my query letter, what should I not write in my query letter? I’m sure a lot of you have the stuff spinning around in your heads all the time and none of it actually is going to help you do the job. I think the idea of just living and reading and experiencing life will help you.

**Tess:** Yeah. Like relax.

**Craig:** Relax.

**Tess:** From the most unrelaxed person you’ll ever meet in your life saying that.

**Craig:** She’s a little — yeah, she can be a little tense. Phil, what do you think?

**Phil:** I mean, this came up in some discussions I was having today. And I think what these guys are saying is exactly right. And what I could maybe add to it is to try to conquer fear as early as you can and don’t operate on calculation and fear and am I missing out, am I doing something wrong, am I making the right choices, because I think I can tell you from, you know, 18 years of experience that nothing has turned out exactly the way I thought it was. And what I’ve realized is that there’s no way to plan or concoct a scenario that — and then fulfill it if you’re doing this.

And I think what you can is to focus on what you can control, which is your life and enjoying your life and finding stuff to write about by living your life and understanding that in the end, I mean, I guess it’s good advice for life in general. But it’s hard to learn and it took me a long time to learn to try to divorce the process from the result. To try to divorce what you’re hoping to happen from the actual work that you’re doing in front of you. That, to me, I wish I had learned that earlier because you spend a lot of mental energy worrying about the outcome or trying to game the outcome or trying to make good smart choices and the only good smart choices you can make, I believe, are emotional choices of I know this is right for me, I have to do it no matter what other people are saying.

**Tess:** This is a therapy session, yeah?

**Craig:** It should be. God knows we all need it.

**Phil:** I have a quick question for Tess though that it was, you know, a technical question. Do you translate your scripts into American yourself or is there somebody who does that?

**Tess:** No, I get Craig to do it for me.

**Phil:** Okay. Good. Yeah.

**Tess:** And then when I need to be even like do the worst British accent in the world, I get Craig to do that as well.

**Phil:** Okay. Thank you.

**Craig:** Well, Malcolm, all these people have said what they think is the right answer, and now, you will tell us the actual right answer.

**Malcolm Spellman:** I thought Phil’s answer — all their answers were good. I would say.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Phil:** But especially mine.

**Malcolm:** If I can get specific, because you took my answer by the way. I was going to say try and get better as quickly as you can. I think a common thing for novice writers is to react to feedback the wrong way and they slow down their progression on getting good and they also fuck up their ability to engage. One of the first things that’s going to happen out the gate is people are going to tell you what’s not working about your work. And the sooner you get to learn how to navigate that exchange, the more likely you are to have an ally who might move your shit around and pass it along to people.

The other thing I was going to say, which is it’s a difficult one because I’ve heard it, but I feel like we’ve heard this so many times in festivals and I don’t know if anyone has ever really said it because you’re scared of someone blowing up your life. I will say, if you are younger and do not have a family, you should move to Los Angeles. It is something everyone looks to hear they don’t have to do, that’s how you know you should do it. And in the group of writers we all hang out with, there’s two outliers here now with Kate and Tess.

**Craig:** The Kate. The Kate.

**Malcolm:** No, but–

**Katie:** That’s how I asked to be called.

**Malcolm:** Up until now, I’ve never been on a panel that didn’t have writers who moved to Los Angeles first. So when you’re dealing with something like the high 90th percentile, that’s one of the starting moves and you’re saying to yourself, well, can I do it without doing something that 90% of working screenwriters do, you’re fucking around in territory where you’re not going to win.

**Craig:** You got that?

**Phil:** We are going to give away some JetBlue miles in the night tonight.

**Craig:** The question that is probably asked most frequently behind how do I get started, how do I break in, is – it’s associated with that, how do I get a representative? How do I get an agent? How do I get a manager? I personally have no idea. I’m kind of fascinated to hear what you guys have to say, “How do people go about getting a manager or an agent?” And address, if you can, the Catch 22 that I know is on their mind. If I don’t have an agent, it’s hard to get an agent. Do you know what I mean?

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what do they do?

**Katie:** I will throw out there that I think it’s almost important to like think like them, like what would make you take on a client and I don’t mean in terms of writing the thing that will sell. Because I think, most importantly, you should write what you’re passionate about. The thing that I’ve written that got me the most like action, so–

**Tess:** I like that.

**Katie:** I feel bad about it immediately saying it that way.

**Tess:** No, it’s good. It’s good.

**Katie:** But like I wrote this pilot that was super weird but it was the thing I was most excited about wanting to see, you know. And that got me like on Parks and Rec. And then it also became like a sample in features for like general meetings and stuff. But where did I start?

**Craig:** Like where did you start with this answer?

**Katie:** Okay. So okay, yes.

**Tess:** You were having dinner with the nuns.

**Katie:** All right. So, okay.

**Craig:** You’re supposed to tell us how you get an agent.

**Katie:** Where are we?

**Craig:** This is Austin.

**Katie:** Austin.

**Craig:** it’s a city in Texas.

**Katie:** Austin. Okay.

**Craig:** You’re not in Los Angeles now.

**Katie:** My God, there’s people here.

**Craig:** **Katie:**, this is real.

**Katie:** This is happening?

**Craig:** This is happening.

**Katie:** This is happening?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Katie:** How?

**Craig:** Yeah, this is real.

**Katie:** But, no. I think like it’s just because I have a lot of friends, you know, that are, you know, still trying to break in and I don’t — the thing I said to them like I can give your script to my agent but I guarantee they will only read you one time. So just like make it great, you know. So it’s like they just want to read something that they’re like, “Oh, this is someone that I can imagine is going to, you know, really go places, you know.” So I guess, yeah, just like make that thing great just in — also in terms of what you want to see because I think that’s, you know, what your passion about is the thing. Not just writing what you think will sell, because they see that kind of stuff all the time, you know.

**Tess:** I think as well don’t you think now in like in the modern world, as my mum might say, like you can now, like I was on a panel this morning where a writer was talking about, you know, he’s making webisodes and doing all that stuff that you don’t even need an agent or a manager for at this point. You know, like now you can actually get your stuff seen in a much easier fashion than when I was first starting out. So, actually physically making some stuff and then being able to send — I mean, you know, now, if I get sent — someone sends me a link now that’s longer than 30 seconds, I’m not watching it. My brain is not going to last that long on a link, you know.

**Craig:** I don’t know if that’s a great advice. I would say it’s okay to write things longer than 30 seconds.

**Tess:** No. But what I want to mean is, is that we’ll–

**Phil:** I’m going to give you some respectful push back on that.

**Tess:** No. What I mean is — what I mean is, is an agent more likely to watch something that’s a minute long or read something that’s like 20 pages long. And I think now you actually have at your dispense like you can go and make some stuff that they can click on. I mean, obviously, my attention span is not great as demonstrated, but I’m not an agent. But if someone sends me something to watch, I’m more likely to go — I imagine this agent, “Oh, here’s an interesting like minute long sketch. That’s a voice. That’s interesting.” Rather than having sent a half an hour script and they’ll be like, “Oh, I’ve got to read that again.” So I think there’s a brave new world in that sense.

**Craig:** Well, you know, reading — you’ve reminded me of something that is absolutely true and I think it all the time. I do not like reading scripts, I — which is a weird thing to say for somebody that only writes screenplays. But reading screenplays is hard. It’s a hard thing to do because it’s not what — it’s not an end form of something. It’s not a novel. A novel is meant to be read, that’s it. And a screenplay is meant to be turned into a movie. It’s this weird middle thing. It’s hard to read. It can be arduous. So part of what I sometimes say to people is you need to start realizing before you write anything that you’re in this weird hole with the person that’s going to read it. They’re already angry that they have to read a screenplay.

**Phil:** You’re trying to defuse their anger–

**Craig:** Right

**Phil:** Long enough to inspire them.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to almost delight them so quickly and they’ll be like, “Oh my God.” like getting a child to eat vegetables in a weird way. I mean, have you guys seen the Rick and Morty where he has to listen to the man’s tale? Have you seen that? And the look on his face, it’s so true. It’s like, “Oh no, not a screenplay.” But you are in a weird hole and you have to kind of acknowledge it and you have to grab it. And you’re right in that now, unlike when I think all of us started, you have the opportunity to actually make things easily with equipment that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars when I was starting out.

**Tess:** My first short film had a budget. This is like 1997. I had a budget of £30,000. You can make five movies for that now.

**Craig:** Right. Right. And, by the way, nowhere to put it.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the other thing. You make the movie and you’re like, “I guess I have to enter it into festivals.”

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Now, you can just, “Hey, world. Everyone in the world, you may now watch my movie.” which is a remarkable opportunity. Phil, what do you have to say about getting a manager–

**Tess:** How long is your attention span, Phil?

**Phil:** I’m just getting warmed up. I’m not even near taxing my attention span at the moment.

**Craig:** Phil is at 5% capacity.

**Phil:** I think that making something yourself is definitely the right thing. And I think I have one maybe practical thing to suggest in the category of making alliances, I think, is the most important thing when you’re starting out, whether that’s with other writers, whether that’s with people who are going to help you shoot a movie, whether it’s going to be, you know, just people who are kind of at the same area, in the same place you are. And I think, and again, forgive me if this is obvious, but I feel like who you really need to be finding are assistants to give your script to. You need to find assistants to agents, assistants to–

**Craig:** You didn’t mean you have to go hire assistants, I think–

**Phil:** No. No. You have to hire an assistant immediately.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re like, “Whoa.”

**Phil:** Because in my wealth seminar, I say you show that you are successful and successful comes to you. Would you pass the packets out, please? Packets are coming out.

**Craig:** Phil is the Tom Vu of the Writer’s Guild. Yeah.

**Katie:** I think this is a really smart tip because actually my first agent was an assistant first, and so he was looking for material. And I feel like that’s the thing like–

**Phil:** Right. It’s somebody who can be helped by finding you.

**Katie:** Yes.

**Phil:** Whereas an agent who is already established, they would love to find a great client. But they are not terribly motivated to do that. They already have a way to do that. They already have a list. But if you find an assistant, that’s someone who’s in the same position you are. They’re trying to make a move. They’re trying to break in. They’re trying to do something that’s going to standout. And so if you can give them something of quality, that is something that they will be extremely motivated to do their best to share with the people that they work for and–

**Craig:** Kind of like — it’s like matching hunger, right?

**Phil:** That’s right

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The hunger to be a writer and there are people out there who have a hunger to represent writers or to find great screenplays. And it’s so frustrating because sometimes I think to myself, oh you know, somebody may say to me, “Hey, would you like to do this?” And I say, “Oh, I can’t. I’m doing this.” But they say, “Well, who do you think would be good for this?” And I think, “Oh my God, there are a million people who would probably be very angry at me right now because I don’t know their name but they would be good for this.” And so — but finding the people that are actively looking is actually a brilliant suggestion. Now, easier said than done, if you’re not in Los Angeles, again.

**Phil:** Los Angeles makes that so much easier.

**Craig:** What do you think about — Malcolm, I will ask you, what do you think about these services that are out there? Franklin Leonard has The Black List. There are pitch contests. There are — there’s a competition here. What do you think about those things? Is that a viable way in?

**Malcolm:** There seems to be, I say like we’ve joked about this sort of in our group a little bit like 95% of the people who can make it as screenwriters and now with the Internet and with all of these contests, with that system being built in place, that’s the 4% that there’s only 1% of people who could actually make it as a screenwriter that aren’t going to find a way in now. And so I think it’s a really good system.

I’m now encountering writers. I just had a sit down with a young dude who went through the, you know, all the legit contests. He placed high in all of those and that got the attention of probably assistants or whatever that wanted to help whatever and he found his way towards more and more legit people. Now, he’s out in Los Angeles and got into one of these programs or whatever. You know what I’m saying? So, yeah, I think that’s a very, very good way. And if you’re just doing blind submissions, I will say, I think agents are a terrible way to go. You go with managers because agencies don’t do what they used to do. When we was coming up, you know what I’m saying? That’s what managers do now.

**Craig:** No. That’s an interesting question about managers and I acknowledge that you’re right about this. I mean, look, I question the whole–

**Tess:** You just said that someone else is right. Yeah.

**Malcolm:** What did you say, Craig? You just heard that right?

**Craig:** I do that all the time but only with John August. I don’t do it with you guys, because he’s always right. Do you guys have managers? What do you think about this whole manager thing?

**Tess:** I only have — I have an agent in the UK and I have an agent in the US. But weirdly, the last few weeks, I’ve been like, “Do I need a manager?” Like a lot of people keep saying it to me. And then I’m like, you know, everyone says, “Oh, but then you’ve got to pay them more and all that like bollocks.” But like — I think like in the UK, our agents tend to do much more of a manager job than your agents here do. So my agent in the UK like manages my career and we talk and we have a schedule and we like, you know, like have a strategy. Whereas here, my agent is like, “Here’s the money. Here’s, like, here’s what you’re going to get.”

**Craig:** He actually sounds like a pretty good agent.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, he’s saying, “Here is money,” which is–

**Tess:** Well, no, as in like there’s no like, you know, there’s not really like discussions–

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Tess:** Of like should you do this job. It’s like you should do this job.

**Craig:** There’s money.

**Tess:** There’s money.

**Craig:** Do the job.

**Tess:** Yeah. And then I go, “I don’t think I want to do this.”

**Craig:** Do job.

**Tess:** Do job.

**Craig:** Do job.

**Tess:** Job, do.

**Craig:** Job, do.

**Tess:** Job, do. It’s good for my attention span. Okay. Do it. But, yeah. But I do think that I know lots of writers who prefer having a manager than an agent.

**Craig:** Because most of these folks out here, I think Malcolm is absolutely right, their first interaction is — out of curiosity, how many of you do have a manager? Quite a few.

**Tess:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Quite a few. I would say maybe — I would say 20% there. Agent? Less. Much less. Maybe 5% or less. So–

**Katie:** Can I ask?

**Craig:** Yes?

**Katie:** How many people live in Austin and how many people live in LA?

**Craig:** Holy gajolie. This is — this podcast is a total waste of time. They are all from Los Angeles. What are we doing? Why are you here? What is happening?

**Phil:** I am taking the JetBlue miles and going to St. Croix.

**Craig:** JetBlue, off the table. All right. So most of you are from Los Angeles, what the hell? All right. Totally different topic then.

**Tess:** Anyway, moving on.

**Phil:** The managers, I would say, I think it has become much more, I mean, since I started with my partner, Matt, 18 years ago and I think it was actually very uncommon for writers to have managers, it was just not really done. And now, I think it’s more common than not it seems. And we had once for a small period, a couple of years we had a manager. We don’t now. For the majority of our career, we haven’t.

**Tess:** Did you sack him?

**Phil:** It was interesting, it was a company called AMG that was created. They were managers.

**Craig:** He fired him hard.

**Tess:** He fired their ass.

**Craig:** It was a hard firing.

**Tess:** Awesome.

**Craig:** Hard fire

**Phil:** Hard fire.

**Craig:** Hard fire.

**Phil:** No. But what was interesting was they were great, they did great work but they were basically an agency and they were constructed to be another agency, so it’s kind of having two different agents. And I think if you want to have a manager–

**Craig:** What the fuck?

**Phil:** There goes Malcolm.

**Craig:** Malcolm has left.

**Phil:** He’s jogging.

**Craig:** He’s literally jogging out. What the fuck?

**Katie:** Malcolm, bye.

**Phil:** What is he doing?

**Katie:** Okay. Malcolm turned to me and he was like, “I have to go to the bathroom. So I should just go, right?” And then I said, “Yeah. Yeah. Like I got you.”

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Katie:** And then it was immediately–

**Craig:** You thought that I got you, you would cover–

**Katie:** Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know what I thought I could do.

**Craig:** The incredibly obvious exit to the bathroom?

**Katie:** I thought I would make him invisible.

**Tess:** I mean, you really, really covered Malcolm there.

**Phil:** No. No. We both have an improv background. We could easily do a quick object transformation up here while he’s going to the bathroom, if he would have just given us a little more warning.

**Craig:** **Katie:**, you’re a terrible friend.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just a bad friend.

**Katie:** I immediately threw him under the bus. I’m like here’s what happened.

**Craig:** I know. He wasn’t even out of the door and you’re like, “Okay, he’s going to the bathroom.”

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. So we’ve lost Malcolm.

**Phil:** My incredible salient point was that if you have a manager–

**Craig:** Oh, you’re back to you? Oh, you think that you can still keep going like Malcolm didn’t go to the bathroom?

**Phil:** I can do this.

**Craig:** Okay. Fine.

**Phil:** I can pull this out. All right. I’m the Chuck Yeager of podcasts.

**Craig:** Let’s go, Phil. Push the envelope, man.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Face those demons.

**Phil:** If you are going to have a manager, make sure they do something different than the agent does.

**Tess:** I thought you were going to do a JetBlue joke again.

**Phil:** I was — believe me, I was constructing it. But it wasn’t A+. It was a B- and I wasn’t going to do it.

**Craig:** Never do a B-.

**Phil:** This is an A+ crowd.

**Craig:** It’s an A+ crowd.

**Phil:** And they’re not going to stand for it.

**Craig:** Most of them are from Los Angeles. They have high expectations.

**Phil:** That’s right. Yeah.

**Craig:** Look who’s back.

**Phil:** Malcolm is back.

**Craig:** So Malcolm Spellman has returned from the bathroom.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So–

**Katie:** It’s fine. They didn’t notice.

**Phil:** This is what we call in the improv game, pulling focus.

**Craig:** We certainly had no idea what was going on and **Katie:** definitely did not tell us. And kind of an odd question for you guys. But, you know, something that John and I talk about quite a bit is, well, I don’t mean to be grim. But Malcolm is correct. The odds aren’t great. And for a lot of people, they have a dream, a desire, an ambition to be screenwriter and we just know that it won’t work out for everyone. Obviously, it will work out for you. You, meaning, you, not the idiot next to you, but you. But for those for whom it does not work out, I kind of want to encourage people or at least give them permission to say, “I don’t have to do this.” And just an interesting question for you guys because I’m kind of curious, if you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?

**Phil:** Regional airline pilot.

**Craig:** And you really do have the face for it.

**Phil:** I still might be.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Phil:** I don’t want to be presumptuous. Just Spirit Air. I don’t need to be flying those big birds to Osaka.

**Craig:** Do you even need to know how to fly, to be a pilot with Spirit Air?

**Phil:** No.

**Craig:** You just have to fit the uniform of the guy that died from a heart attack.

**Phil:** Yup.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Phil:** I just need to drop my voice an octave and just get everybody comfortable and–

**Craig:** All right folks, at the left side of the plane, you will see… – What about you, Tess? What would you be doing?

**Phil:** So that’s what I would do.

**Tess:** Interpretative dancer.

**Craig:** You know, this is not helping you guys. Those aren’t real things.

**Tess:** No. Well, no, Craig–

**Craig:** What?

**Tess:** They are. Because it would be doing something that I love.

**Craig:** Interpretative dancer is not a job. You know that.

**Tess:** It is a job.

**Craig:** Where? Where?

**Tess:** In interpretative dance institutions around the world and–

**Phil:** See, Craig, in England, they have government funding of the arts.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Phil:** And–

**Craig:** They may actually have that–

**Tess:** Well, not anymore. Brexit fucked us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** No. What I would — no. My–

**Craig:** This is where it all breaks down.

**Tess:** The link is–

**Craig:** We’ll be getting to your questions very shortly. I promise.

**Tess:** Fine. No. The link is that I think I would be — okay, maybe it’s not a proper job. But it’s sort of I could make it a proper job because I would love it enough to do it and I think like–

**Craig:** Will you do it right now?

**Tess:** I would if you give me another three Shiners. Four?

**Craig:** That’s — I don’t–

**Tess:** But I’ve got a different panel to attend. No. No. Tomorrow morning.

**Phil:** This is an audio podcast.

**Tess:** I know.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Phil:** That’s going to be–

**Tess:** Believe me, no, you will be able to hear the dancing.

**Craig:** I was going to — I was also going to take a video but–

**Tess:** No. But the point is that I — when I wrote the script — when I wrote Man Up, I was living at home at that time and I was like 33 and I was like I said to my mom and dad, “Oh if this doesn’t — this is my last chance saloon. And if I don’t sell this, then I’ll go and get a proper job.” And I honestly didn’t know what I meant by that, because I’d only ever been a writer. But I do know that I think, in terms of doing something else in my life, I would always want to do something creative.

And I think, also, it might be good for some of you to accept that you’re not necessarily writers, but maybe you’re a producer, or maybe you’re an editor, or maybe you’re a — you know, like, there are lots of writers I know that obviously have come to the conclusion that they might not make their money, everyday money from it, but there are certainly lots of other kind of avenues that you can go down that will still keep you in the filmmaking and television world. And then you can write for the sheer joy of it on the side.

**Craig:** Which — I mean, yeah.

**Tess:** Or interpretative dance on the side.

**Craig:** But all joking aside, there is a remarkable freedom to writing for the sheer joy of it.

**Tess:** Totally.

**Craig:** And I sometimes think to myself, look, when I started writing screenplays, I was not being paid to write screenplays. I started as a temp. I didn’t have this incredible–

**Tess:** Three years.

**Craig:** Three-year temp job where you don’t do anything. I had a proper temp job where I had to do way too much for the small amount of time I had. And then I would write at night, but I understood, when I was writing at night, that I wasn’t writing for anyone. Just me. And, you know, it’s funny. I was talking to Alec Berg. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Alec Berg. He worked on Seinfeld and he ran Curb Your Enthusiasm, and now he’s the showrunner on Silicon Valley and he’s a brilliant guy.

He said, the other day, he was reading something that he had written years and years ago. And he said, “You know, it wasn’t great, but it was free.” And he said, “And I miss that. I miss being free. I can’t write anything. I have to write what I’m supposed to write, and there are these constraints that have nothing to do with what I want.” And there’s a remarkable freedom that you have that actually, we don’t. That is an advantage, in a weird way, that you have to surprise everybody, and we really can’t.

**Tess:** Well, I think it’s quite like — I don’t know about you lot, but, like — and I’ve been writing for, like, 17 years, and the best things that I think I’ve written have been things that I haven’t been paid for. [laughs]

**Craig:** Oh, 100%. Yeah.

**Tess:** Because, like, I don’t have the pressure and no one’s waiting on anything. Like, to do that alongside your paid work is the best thing you can do. If you are a working writer in this room, which I’m sure some of you are, then that’s another thing that you should always be doing. Like, do unpaid stuff for your own brain as well.

**Craig:** What about you, **Katie:**? Where would you be if you weren’t doing this gig?

**Katie:** CIA.

**Craig:** Oh, you’d be an agent?

**Katie:** That was my other dream, and then I would think about — but I had applied and did not get in. So it was never a backup career in any way.

**Tess:** Did you really not get in? But you are actually in this — yeah.

**Katie:** No, I truly applied. But I–

**Craig:** You applied to be, like, at the mailroom at CAA?

**Tess:** CIA.

**Craig:** Oh, CIA?

**Katie:** CIA, yeah.

**Craig:** I was like, why do you want to be an agent?

**Malcolm:** She’ll kill you, dude.

**Craig:** It’s the shittiest job. I honestly was hating you, and now I like you again. So you wanted to be in the CIA?

**Katie:** I applied for that and the FBI.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Katie:** Both rejected.

**Craig:** Why did they reject you?

**Katie:** I feel like–

**Craig:** They don’t say, do they? [laughs]

**Katie:** No — well — okay. I think–

**Phil:** You didn’t want to take it down to the ATF? You drew the line at FBI?

**Katie:** It was honestly, like, the–

**Phil:** Federal agency, just like any other. Just as good.

**Katie:** Yeah. I think I was real excited about it, but I had nothing to offer. I had no skillset that would be–

**Tess:** But you had your temporary job on your resume.

**Katie:** I did, yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** Weirdly, that did not–

**Tess:** So weird.

**Katie:** Yeah, really weird.

**Craig:** Make them think that you were vital to our nation’s security.

**Phil:** She’s been working in the office from Three Days of the Condor already.

**Katie:** Can I tell you something someone said to me once? And I don’t know if it’s controversial or very boring.

**Craig:** We’ll be the judge of that.

**Katie:** But it had a big impact on me. I was an intern at Late Night with Conan O’Brien, and the writers there were all very lovely and awesome. And there’s this writer, Kevin Dorff, and he was giving advice and he’s the best. Me and a couple of other interns were asking about — and I guess this is more about comedy, but we were asking, like, you know, like, “What do you think? How hard is it to break in and stuff?”

And tell me if you agree or disagree, but he said, “If you’re good, you’ll make it.” And, like I weirdly found that inspiring, you know, that — I don’t know. Because I feel like there’s a lot of bad people who make it, you know, but I feel like at least with comedy, if you get to a point where — I don’t know a lot of comedians who are, like, amazing that don’t eventually make it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I think that that’s true. I mean, Malcolm alluded to this and Phil alluded to it as well. There is this incredible hunger for quality in Hollywood, which may strike you as odd considering all the movies that they make. But they’re looking for really smart people to make the movies that they want to make. And they are short on people that they think are terrific writers. They’re always, always, always looking.

And terrific scripts do get noticed, there’s no question about that. I mean, in a weird way, when people say, like, “What are my odds of making it?” I just think 0% or 100%, in a weird way.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it, you know?

**Malcolm:** Yeah. I think there’s more professional football players than there are working screenwriters.

**Craig:** Yeah. John and I have gone through the numbers. There are more NFL players than screenwriters.

**Katie:** I feel like we haven’t — like, I feel like, if we’re getting really into it, I feel like if I’m in this room–

**Malcolm:** The CIA talking.

**Tess:** You are in this room.

**Craig:** Yeah. Again, this is real.

**Tess:** You’re in.

**Phil:** This is happening, yup.

**Katie:** I feel like I would want to know — if you have this great spec, how do you get that? Like, what do you do with it if you don’t have any connections or you don’t know anyone? Like, my path was the improv theater, but if you’re not doing improv–

**Craig:** Right.

**Katie:** Like, I’m not sure what the answer is. If you don’t know anyone but you have this spec, what do you do?

**Craig:** Well, you know what? I told these guys, when Malcolm and Tim Talbott wrote a screenplay together and it was horrible and wonderful. It was the most disgusting, hysterical, terrible, great thing I’d ever read in my life. And they were asking, like, “What do we do?” And I said, you just put it on the Internet. It seemed perfect for the Internet. [laughs] Because I said, no one’s ever going to make this movie ever in a million years. I think Tim–

**Malcolm:** Fuck you, Craig.

**Craig:** No one’s ever going to make it and no one will ever make that movie. It is a crime against humanity.

But it’s wonderful and it so clearly indicates remarkable talent. And not surprisingly, these two guys who were writing under the pseudonym Robotard8000, one goes on to work on Empire, the other one wins the Waldo Salt Award at Sundance for his movie, the Stanford Prison Experiment.

But you can put anything on the Internet if you stop caring so much about, “People are going to steal my…” People are going to steal — stop it. Just never say that to me. Don’t worry about anyone stealing anything. Just put it out there. Put it out there. I think maybe somebody will notice it if it’s wonderful. Or no?

**Tess:** Also, do you think, like, if you were at a festival like this and – which you all are, hi – we’re all here still, yeah?

**Katie:** Mm-hmm.

**Tess:** Okay, good.

**Craig:** This continues to be real.

**Tess:** Yeah. No, I just always have to check with her now, so–

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Tess:** I feel like **Katie:** knows. No, but–

**Katie:** I just stared blankly.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Katie:** I wasn’t sure where we were.

**Tess:** I feel like if you can tell me your film in one sentence and it sounds amazing, I would want to read it. And I’m not sure how many people can actually do that.

**Craig:** Well, everybody, go up to Tess after this and tell her–

**Tess:** No. Honestly–

**Craig:** Tell her your–

**Tess:** If you can tell me, like, a new idea — if you can say to me in 20 — obviously, my attention span coming into it again. [laughs] No. But if you can say to me it’s a film about boom, boom, boom, boom and I’d be like, “Wow, that sounds, like, really interesting.” And it’s quite rare to be able to do that. And that’s your job as a writer to get your idea into that one nice little neat sentence, that then someone who is an agent or manager here or whoever, might go, “That sounds really interesting.”

**Katie:** I think that’s really smart, because I also — it’s like what you were saying before too about having immediately climbed out of this hole, because I think when someone says, like, everyone in Hollywood is so self-absorbed, you know, so, like, the idea of someone coming up and saying, “Hey, can you read this thing?” You know, they’re going to be like, “Ugh,” you know?

So, like, what can be said? How do you get through that thing? What could possibly be said to you that you would be, like, “Oh, okay.” Or, you know, that’s almost like — it’s a weird thing. It’s, like, also coming up with how to not scare someone off.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Out of curiosity, just so we know if we could stop talking or not, how many of you have a question that you would like to ask of these people? Oh, barely anyone.

**Tess:** Don’t have any.

**Craig:** No. Please, sir.

**Male Audience Member:** I, personally, as a screenwriter, am a particularly anxious person. I imagine a lot of you can relate to that. You know, you often doubt yourself to a great extent. So I’m wondering, what was the point at which, in your career, you just sort of let go of doubt and realized, yes, I can do this? What did it take to convince yourself that you had what it took?

**Malcolm:** No. No. No, no, no. It is funny. I tweeted the other day, most of my career, before I got on and even when I got on and went cold, and got on, and went cold again, at no point did I ever think it was really going to work out. And this is probably the first time — I’ve been working professionally on and off for 15 years — this is the first time, like, the last couple years where I actually feel that I got something going on, so you got to have the ability to – like, you don’t even have to have faith that you’re going to make it. You got to have the ability to punch through that shit.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Phil:** You’ve made it, Malcolm. You’re here.

**Tess:** But I’m the same as Malcolm. I don’t know about you guys, but, like, it’s only in the last few years, having been working for 17 of it, like, that I feel — like, last year, when I came here, I said to you the other night, like, I felt like an imposter last year.

**Craig:** Ridiculous.

**Tess:** No, but I really did.

**Craig:** No. She had a movie here, playing.

**Tess:** Yeah. And I felt like–

**Craig:** And she felt like an imposter.

**Tess:** Because I’m an idiot. But, like–

**Craig:** No, you’re human. I mean, this is the way we are.

**Tess:** No, no. But that’s okay because I just — you know, like, it’s — you have to just — you really can’t ever think that anything’s ever going to get made, because when it does, it’s a miracle. Not a religious miracle — maybe it’s a religious miracle, I don’t know. But you–

**Craig:** We should ask the nuns. They were there. We could have asked them.

**Tess:** They were right there.

**Craig:** They were right there.

**Tess:** All 12 of them.

**Craig:** There was 12 of them?

**Tess:** A murder of nuns.

**Craig:** A murder of nuns.

**Tess:** A murder of nuns.

**Craig:** A passel.

**Tess:** A what?

**Craig:** A passel. [laughs]

**Tess:** A passel.

**Craig:** A passel of nuns.

**Tess:** A pail of kittens.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, is that a thing?

**Tess:** That’s what it is. But yeah, I think you have to — I never think anything’s going to happen until it happens.

**Craig:** Phil, you seem like someone who’s actually bizarrely well-adjusted, probably because you’re not Jewish.

**Phil:** Tremendously confident.

**Katie:** Yeah, and just at dinner, you were saying, “I’ve got it all figured out.” Like I’m king of–

**Phil:** I was saying that.

**Katie:** King of Industry, I think, is what exactly you said.

**Phil:** Again, the packets are going to be distributed in a moment and… – No. When I hear you say that, I say, “Here’s somebody who’s probably on the right track,” because I think that doubt is a very good thing to have — I mean, the people that I worry about are people who have it all figured out, and think that they have it all figured out–

**Malcolm:** They got producers.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Phil:** Yeah. I don’t think anybody that is on this stage, or any of our friends around that do this for a living–

**Craig:** It never ends.

**Phil:** Don’t. And if there’s a day when I feel no doubt, Matt Manfredi is there to give me doubt in myself.

**Craig:** He’s there to remind you that you’re stupid.

**Phil:** To remind me of my limitations.

**Craig:** Excellent question, sir. Yes, sir?

**Male Audience Member:** Although it’s not obvious, I’m no longer a promising young man. So, I’m wondering, I mean, does that make a difference? You know, even if a script gets me into a meeting, are they just going to go like, “Whoa, this guy’s way too old.”

**Craig:** Well, you know–

**Male Audience Member:** I mean, should I just start paddle tennis or –?

**Craig:** Listen–

**Tess:** Do that anyway, because that’s fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. Definitely don’t not start paddle tennis. But I don’t think any of us can necessarily say for sure what it’s like to be — I mean, we are the age we are, okay? But that said, because screenplays — good screenplays are rare, I think that it is not a disqualifier in any way. I will tell you that Hollywood is as subjective, not more so, to all of the human foils and biases that exist in the world. And if you are older than normal, or you are not a — you’re less white than normal–

**Male Audience Member:** I got that.

**Craig:** Or less of a man than normal, or less straight than normal, or less able than normal, it’s a thing, right? You’re talking about a business that is routinely casting people to play types. They are only interested in presenting reality with the most beautiful people of all. That’s what they do. They are soaking in it.

But, a great script and a great interaction with somebody will always win. You just have to be aware that you may have to fight a little harder. That’s just reality, I think.

**Katie:** I think that’s a great point though to throw out there, is I think it is crazy rare for there to be a great script floating around. Like, most scripts are really bad.

**Craig:** Really, really, really.

**Katie:** I think that’s motivating. Like, you know what I mean?

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** Not your script.

**Katie:** Maybe the person next to you. The person–

**Craig:** No, but the person next to you, their script is shitty. Your script, awesome. Next question.

**Male Audience Member:** Hi, my name’s Hunter. This is a question mostly for **Katie:**, but you guys can answer it, too, about the screenwriting process. So Ghostbusters and I think The Heat as well had a lot of improv in it, clearly. So what’s the process of, like, for writing a comedy for having a lot of improv–?

**Craig:** Yeah, what do you even do, Kate?

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, do you even write or — that’s my favorite question. So, like, do you just do blanks and then they just fill in?

**Katie:** I would say the goal is to write the best possible — like, so, for example, a scene. Just write the best possible scene you can and then when you — you know, if you get someone like Melissa McCarthy or Kristen Wiig, you know, like, the goal is to shoot a version of the scene that you set with, that you know technically works. But then you hopefully cast these improv geniuses that are going to just add so much funny shit and make you feel really lucky when you’re sitting behind the monitors, like, thinking, like, “Oh my god, did that scene work in the first place?” [laughs] You know?

Or also, I would say, like, the best times or, like, if you write the scene the best version you can, and then you get someone like the Melissa and Kristens or whatever, you know, like they start bringing their own stuff, and sometimes what’s great is then you see what they’re doing and then you try to like, “Oh, that’s really funny.” So then you throw an alt back at them and then they’ll take that and do something funnier with it. [laughs]

**Craig:** Right.

**Katie:** You know, ideally, it’s like a collaboration still, you know.

**Tess:** I think, like, all the best improvisers will always give the writer credit because they can’t improvise off of nothing. They have to improvise off your scripts. And I had it with Simon Pegg who he is like one of — he’s an amazing improviser and he would always go to me, “Does that still track?” If I say — you know, like, so we do like what our director called a loosey-goosey.

So we’d shoot 10 versions of the scene and then he shouts, “Loosey-goosey,” and they would basically be able to do whatever they liked. And maybe 20% of those loosey-gooseys were great, 80% were not great. And then you see them in the outtakes and then you think, “Oh, they’ve all improvised it,” or whatever, but you’ve got to have something to start from in the first place.

**Craig:** That’s the essence of it. I mean, you want somebody like Melissa McCarthy.

**Tess:** Yeah, oh, my god.

**Craig:** Or Zach Galifianakis or Simon Pegg or Kevin Hart to be able to do what they do. But what they’re doing is related to the intention of the character, the situation the character is in. Whatever they’re doing ultimately has to arrive at a place you have predetermined.

They begin where you say, they end where you say. They are intending what you say. The actual words that they use for it, or those little funny moments and wonderful little things are amazing but must occur in the context of what you have provided. And you’re absolutely right. The good ones–

**Tess:** Always acknowledge.

**Craig:** Always acknowledge.

**Phil:** It’s a moment that requires extreme vigilance as a writer. It’s where you can be the most useful because in the moment as a comic actor, you have a killer instinct which is to kill, which is to do the funniest best thing that you can imagine. And that’s not necessarily going to serve the story.

And in fact, that may take you out of the relationship that is being developed. The laughter and the success in the moment on the set with all the grips laughing and everyone going, “Yeah,” may turn into a huge problem later because it’s violated something about the scene. And I will say specifically, as someone — I’ve been able to work with Kevin Hart a lot and he is someone who seems to improvise a lot but in fact does not.

**Craig:** I know.

**Phil:** Right?

**Craig:** He doesn’t.

**Phil:** And because that’s not his approach, he–

**Craig:** What Kevin is brilliant at is making scripted lines sound improv.

**Phil:** Exactly.

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**Phil:** And which is a wonderful thing, and why Kevin is — everyone has their own process and all the people we’re talking about are really great actors who all have their specific way in, but it’s interesting because sometimes something you see that feels — the greatest thing as a writer, you hear something that feels very in the moment and feels very spontaneous. A lot of those things are actually scripted and that’s wonderful when it does turn out.

**Tess:** But your job as well, which is great, is that, like, I would watch Simon do like a brilliant piece of improv and then everyone would like laugh and they’d go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then I go over to my director and go, “Just so you know, we still have to get that beat just because it needs to make sense story-wise.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** And he’d be like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve got it.”

**Katie:** I agree with what Craig — you need to have the intent of the scene there and I have to say like Melissa and Kristen Wiig, they also are so good at knowing, like they’re great writers, so they know the story. So, like, they’re really exceptional at improvising. Everything they improvise doesn’t have to be tossed out because sometimes like improv on set doesn’t just mean like saying all these crazy, funny things. Like they also know how to improvise in a way that’s still on story and on character that’s always usable, you know.

**Craig:** You know, Melissa McCarthy and Zach Galifianakis had a scene together in the third Hangover movie. And we had this bucket of lollipops. They were like props, it was like dressing, set dressing. And she just put it in his mouth and then she took it out and put it in her mouth.

And we were just watching it like, “Oh my god, this is the most amazing. Why would she do that?” It’s incredible, but it was absolutely in keeping with what was happening. They were falling in love but they were both wrong. There was something seriously wrong with both of them in their minds. They were off, terribly off. Like two horrible people are falling in love and that’s what they would do. They would share a lollipop together like freaks.

She’s amazing. Anyway–

**Katie:** If I give one more example of her?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Katie:** In The Heat, there was a scene in the script that was literally nothing. It was that she was going to go in to see if her prisoner was in the cell and then he’s gone, and so she asked the guard, like — I can’t remember what was in the script, but she was like, “Where the hell did he go?” And the guard is like, “Oh, that agent took him away.”

And then she improvised this telling off and just tearing down this guard about what she was going to do to him for letting this guy go about how she was going to like, you know, rip her — put her fist down his throat. Like it was like the craziest thing I’d ever heard and I was like, “Oh my god, this woman is amazing.” And it was like exactly still everything, like with the scene, exactly what you wanted to get across in the scene but in a way that — I don’t know, I just think she’s magical.

**Craig:** She is. By the way, great advice, you know, Katie and I can absolutely assure you of this. Just work with Melissa McCarthy. It is just a win. A huge win.

By the way, Zach, also a huge win. Kevin, huge win. So that’s all we really like to do, that’s really the answer to that. I think we have time for maybe like two or three more. We’ll do two or three more. Yes, Ma’am?

**Female Audience Member:** Hi, my name is Tiffany. And I just wanted to mention that there is another coast that’s super cool. It’s a little town called New York City in case you haven’t heard of it.

**Katie:** That’s where I started.

**Female Audience Member:** And that’s where I know where I know my friend Kate is and I’ve also been to UCB, so I just want to say that that’s a really good place to get your start, too.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s my hometown. You know, I was born there.

**Female Audience Member:** Oh, well I didn’t.

**Craig:** Brooklyn.

Female Audience Member: Well, you should have mentioned it. Why didn’t you mention it?

**Craig:** Staten Island.

**Female Audience Member:** How come you asked everybody if they were from LA if you were from New York City?

**Craig:** Because I don’t like to break it out in front of all these other people.

**Female Audience Member:** Oh, okay.

**Phil:** Anybody here from the North Coast, Cleveland, Ohio?

**Craig:** Nobody. No.

**Phil:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s nothing there but bugs. Literally nothing but bugs. Please continue New York.

**Female Audience Member:** Yeah. Okay. So I–

**Craig:** Sorry for being interrupted by this fucking asshole.

**Female Audience Member:** I know, such an ass.

**Phil:** It’s my fault.

**Female Audience Member:** So my question is for Malcolm and Kate who are involved in TV. So I have a new series that’s getting some traction and I actually have a production company who’s shopping it, and I’m going out to LA for my first big agent meeting. And I just wondered if you had any advice.

They are looking for a showrunner for me to be attached to because I’m a new creator and I was just wondering if you had any advice on how to navigate that process. Once you get your meeting that everybody wants to get, then you finally get it, like nobody seems to sort of know how to prepare me for that.

**Katie:** I’ll be honest because I — if there is a great showrunner, they will always be working. You know what I mean? Like, the great ones are always busy, you know. Like I–

**Malcolm:** So your showrunner sucks.

**Katie:** I’m trying to think of like – yeah, because I think it’s good to know who’s new on the scene but at the same time, it’s hard to know. Like there’s a guy named Anthony King who is from UCB New York, who I always thought if I ever have a TV show, like I would want him to show-run it, you know. But I think he’s even — I don’t know, I don’t know. That’s a terrible answer but that’s literally like I thought of, like, this one person. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** I would say it’s a tricky dance. I did the showrunner’s training program and heard a bunch of like — they bring in like 30 showrunners. And you get to hear the stories of creators who brought on showrunners, and you’re going to have to be really, really honest of what’s your expectation.

If you’re timid about what you expect the process to be, it’s going to become something that by the time you figure out what it is and if you don’t like it, you’re fucked already. You know what I’m saying? And that doesn’t mean you should go on with your guard up at all, but you have to understand just the title, showrunner, says everything about what’s happening.

Someone is going to be handing over $50 million or $100 million dollars to somebody, and it’s going to be that showrunner. And at that point, and once you understand that, then you have to decide what’s your relationship with this person going to be, what’s your disposition. You know what I’m saying?

Like some people are — someone like me is just going to go bad. You know what I’m saying? Like it’s just it won’t work. No. But it won’t. Craig knows it. Like, just that wouldn’t work for me. You know what I’m saying? And–

**Female Audience Member:** Wait, you wouldn’t–

**Craig:** That is correct.

**Female Audience Member:** You wouldn’t work for yourself. Is that what you’re saying?

**Malcolm:** No, no. If your disposition — you can collaborate, but if you’re creating something, right, and you’re handing it to someone who’s going to run it, then you understand they are the showrunner, they run your show. And at that point, you’ve immediately put yourself in a secondary position and there’s nothing wrong with that but–

**Katie:** So I have to imagine you — because I have not done this experience, so I’m turning it to him. But I have to imagine you want someone who’s also going to — especially if you’re going to be involved and be there every day, I imagine you want someone that’s going to help you with your vision, right? Like, is that the goal when you find a showrunner?

**Malcolm:** If we’re going to be honest, you know what I’m saying, if someone’s going to take your show away from you, there is zero you can do to stop it because they get to do that because they know how to handle $50 million, right?

And that just happens when it happens. And we have some dear friends who that happened to and they’re major writers. The more frank and the more comfortable you are being honest, and if you have a sane disposition and you have real clarity, you can start having real conversations up front where you’re not being confrontational. You understand that no one can give you $50 million. You will fuck it up, you know what I’m saying?

Female Audience Member: Yes.

**Malcolm:** And so–

**Craig:** Just based on looking at you.

**Female Audience Member:** Clearly, I don’t know what to do with $50 million.

**Katie:** So do you think it’s important to be like strong on top? Like, I mean just really start up?

That sounded really weird. That sounded so weird. What I meant was–

**Phil:** This depends on the relationship.

**Katie:** What I mean is when you’re having sex with someone.

**Malcolm:** You cannot be defensive at all. You cannot be defensive at all. If you do not say what you think and what you expect it to be, it’s going to go bad and you need to get out of this person what they expect it to be. And that you do. Strong doesn’t mean you’re trying to control this person–

**Katie:** Yes.

**Malcolm:** Because they know — they got it.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** Their title is showrunner, so they got your shit already. Strong is, “Yo, this is how I move. This is what I expect. How do you move? What do you expect? Oh, I’m not going to like that, so let me just tell you right now I probably shouldn’t be in this situation because,” you know what I’m saying? Like that’s what strong means.

**Female Audience Member:** Got it.

**Katie:** Can I add one more thing?

**Craig:** Yes.

**Katie:** And this is just from experience in features. I feel like whenever a situation is political and shitty, the thing I found helpful is just telling yourself to just focus on the work. As much as you can, take the ego out of it and just, like, what is the best way to make this the best possible thing. And I feel like that usually lends itself well to people wanting you to be involved and just having a better–

**Tess:** Taking the ego out, that’s the best bit of advice ever.

**Craig:** That is. It is spectacular advice. I was saying to Malcolm earlier, but the phrase I use is “Keep your eye on your own paper.” You have something that you can control which is what you do. Keep your eye on that as best as you can. But I think Malcolm’s advice is spot on and correct.

Yes, sir?

**Male Audience Member:** This is to all of you. But based on what **Katie:** was saying about, she says to her friends, “I can give my script to my manager, but he’s only going to read you one time,” how do you know the script is ready for that one shot?

**Malcolm:** You’ll know. The one thing that is true is when you write something that stands out, it creates energy. Everywhere it goes, people start saying, “Fuck. I’m going to give this to somebody.”

**Craig:** But he’s asking even before you give it to somebody, like the first person you give it to–

**Malcolm:** You have to — but that’s what you do. That’s how you know.

**Craig:** So you don’t know until you give it to them?

**Malcolm:** You give it to people and it starts to take on a life of its own.

**Katie:** But can you give it to people before he gives it to the agent? Do you know what I mean? Or are people, friends and family not really good judges maybe?

**Craig:** Probably not.

**Katie:** My mom says it’s great.

**Tess:** I think you should have like–

**Craig:** I always give my stuff to your mom, by the way, because she loves it.

**Katie:** She’s’ really — she’s smart.

**Craig:** She always says, “This is better than what **Katie:** does.”

**Tess:** Why don’t you give it to my mum?

**Craig:** No, no, your mom hates what I do.

**Tess:** Oh, okay.

**Craig:** Hates what I do.

**Tess:** I would say I have like three or four trusted people that I always give stuff to before I give it to anyone. Actually, sometimes you’re one of them, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Malcolm:** Everyone gives their shit to Craig.

**Tess:** I know.

**Malcolm:** It’s an amazing thing that has happened.

**Tess:** When is he ever working?

**Malcolm:** Everybody gives their script to Craig now, except for me.

**Tess:** But Lindsey Doran said something great in your panel earlier. She said better is better, which I thought was brilliant. And you’re always going to be able to make something better, basically. But if three or four people are giving you the same no and the same thumbs up or the same thumbs down, that’s usually a good barometer that something is at least ready to go to the next stage, I think.

**Phil:** I think part of it, too, goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is to try to get yourself on the right mindset. If you’re in the mindset of not being in a rush, then you’ll be more capable of judging your own work. Because if you are–

What just happened?

**Craig:** It’s just unbelievable. He’s selfie-ing while you’re talking. Malcolm decided to just selfie.

**Tess:** No. Stay on track. Stay on track.

**Phil:** I’m going to land this bird.

**Tess:** Come on.

**Phil:** I’m going to land this bird. Don’t worry. Don’t you bail out on me. Get the landing strip in the Azores.

**Tess:** Focus.

**Phil:** My point was it’s not being in a rush. It’s not saying I got to get this out because I’m in a hurry, I got to get the process going. And it’s really hard to know. But I think, you know, for myself, Matt and I wrote — I think the third script that we wrote together was the one that we tried to go out with.

And I think we wanted to go out with the second one and we got good advice from someone who said, “Geez, you guys are really promising but I think you can do better than this.” And we were like, “But wait, but no, no, now. Like, it’s time.” And I think if you can look at it yourself and look at it through the lens of not — don’t give yourself any credit or any benefit of the doubt, and look at it kind of hard and say, “Is this the best that I can do?” And more importantly, “Does this speak for me? Does this say something about me?”

Because I think the other general advice that has come up, to put it in Tin Cup terms, to not lay up–

**Tess:** Tin Cup the movie?

**Phil:** The movie. The Kevin Costner movie.

**Tess:** Kevin Costner.

**Craig:** Don’t lay-up. Don’t lay-up.

**Phil:** Ron Shelton.

**Tess:** And Rene Russo?

**Phil:** Is, you can’t afford when you’re starting out to lay-up. To take, like, a good kind of reasonable shot–

**Craig:** A safe shot.

**Phil:** To get you close to the pin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Phil:** You have to try to hit a hole in one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Phil:** And so you have to say, “Okay, is this going to make noise? Is this something that’s going to be me, and it’s unique, and it’s going to make someone say, ‘Hey, who wrote this?’” It doesn’t have to be the most technically perfect script in the world. It doesn’t have to be a great example of how you construct the second act, da da da da da. It just has to be – da da da da. That’s my proprietary, da da da da.

Do you know what I mean? If you can look at it and say this is like something that — it’s like a shout. It’s like someone will say, “Oh, yeah. Okay, great.”

**Tess:** You know when you’ve written something and you can go, “Oh, it’s not shit.” Like–

**Craig:** Yes. That is true, but, also sometimes you don’t. You don’t really–

**Tess:** It takes a long time to know when something’s not shit.

**Craig:** Yeah. And remember that our business is an outlier business. It is not an averaging business. Even though some services like The Black List, for instance, will provide you with an average, your script is a 7.9. That’s quite wonderful, out of 10. But really, if you get all 1s and one 10, you’re better off than someone who gets all 8s. It is an outlier business. You don’t know necessarily. I wouldn’t get hung up so much on, “Is it ready?” The answer is no, it’s not. Show it anyway–

**Tess:** Get some feedback.

**Craig:** Get some feedback. It will be ready when it’s in theatres. God’s honest truth.

Unfortunately, we have time for one last question. I’m so sorry for the people standing in line, but we do have to — yeah, sorry.

**Female Audience Member:** All right, so I thought this might be a good question for this panel, but please don’t judge me. When I was a kid, I wasn’t allowed to watch comedies. So, do you have any suggestions for good comedies to watch before 2005?

**Phil:** Oh, wow.

**Craig:** No.

**Phil:** That’s the greatest question possible.

**Katie:** My answer–

**Phil:** Tim Herlihy, where are you?

**Tess:** Tim.

**Craig:** All of Tim Herlihy’s work.

**Katie:** I feel like my answer is boring because it’s recommended in, like, every screenplay class ever–

**Craig:** Groundhog Day.

**Katie:** But I just think it holds up – wait. Do you know what I’m going to suggest?

**Craig:** Groundhog Day.

**Katie:** No, Tootsie.

**Craig:** Oh, Tootsie’s amazing.

**Tess:** Oh, Tootsie is like the most–

**Craig:** The last comedy to win an Oscar, by the way.

**Katie:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Tess:** But also, Tootsie’s like structurally the most perfect film. Like, one of the most perfect films ever made.

**Craig:** Except for Groundhog Day.

**Tess:** No, no, I put Tootsie–

**Craig:** Well, you’re wrong.

**Tess:** Above Groundhog Day. Okay. Maybe not. On the level.

**Craig:** Fair enough.

**Tess:** But Tootsie is like — read the script for Tootsie, and then watch it.

**Katie:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And then you’ll go, “Go Tootsie, go.”

**Craig:** It’s incredible.

**Phil:** I would like to offer what I consider to be the funniest movie of all time for me. But the fact that it is to me, and to maybe other people too, still as funny as it was when it was created is This is Spinal Tap.

**Tess:** Nice.

**Phil:** Which I think is incredible. That’s the one movie that I would put above all.

**Craig:** Lindsay Doran studio executive who shepherded This Is Spinal Tap all the way through.

**Tess:** I would like–

**Phil:** That’s why she’s Lindsay Doran.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Tess:** Yeah. I would like to put forward a film that is 30 years old, but I re-watch it at least once a year, that still stands up, which is Beverly Hills Cop. Like, just–

**Craig:** Dan Petrie here.

**Tess:** Where?

**Katie:** Come out on stage.

**Craig:** He’s here in Austin. Would you like to meet him?

**Tess:** Yes.

**Phil:** Turn around, Tess.

**Craig:** Okay. You will. And he comes in like the Kool Aid Man. He’s–

**Tess:** I’ve got an interpretive dance for him.

**Craig:** There’s a fair chance he’s down in the bar right now.

**Tess:** We’re going to find him afterwards.

**Craig:** Yeah.

Malcolm, what’s a comedy that you think is like a must-see? Let’s go ‘70s, ‘80s. Even a little bit of ‘90s. I’m out of gas.

**Malcolm:** I’m out of gas.

**Craig:** What the fuck? You’re on a show. This is a show. You have–

**Tess:** Was it a donut?

**Craig:** That was the last thing you had to say, and you’re out of gas?

**Katie:** No, no, no. It’s okay. Is that a comedy?

**Craig:** And by the way, the easiest question in the world. Just say Meatballs, and you’re done. It’s like the–

Not Meatballs? Meatballs?

**Malcolm:** Meatballs.

**Craig:** Meatballs.

**Katie:** I got your back. Don’t worry, they won’t notice.

**Phil:** Can I do one more before you go, because I think you’re going to have the best one, I’m sure.

**Craig:** Of course you can. Of course. Yeah, please, please, do it.

**Phil:** The Bad News Bears is another one that I think is — because it is a drama and a comedy and everything, and it’s one of the greatest movies ever made.

**Craig:** Amazing. You’ve seen Groundhog Day?

**Malcolm:** Slap Shot.

**Tess:** Yeah, nice.

**Craig:** Slap Shot.

**Phil:** Valid answer.

**Craig:** By the way, Slap Shot, amazing. Groundhog Day, for screenwriters, I would suggest is the most important comedy to watch, because it is the finest screenplay, I think. Just purely screen play for screenwriters. And it is profound, and beautiful, and amazing, and hysterical. That said, also Airplane.

**Katie:** Yeah, I feel like I’m missing — we’re missing a chunk of the ‘80s. Like that we’re — I just keep thinking of movies like Trading Places, and all those movies that–

**Tess:** That’s the Morris family Christmas movie, Trading Places.

**Craig:** I mean, we could be here all night just for citing comedies for the person that’s never seen one. But, I think we’ve done a pretty good job. Well, with that, it is my duty to say, well that’s our show.

You guys were amazing. As always, since recently, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. it is edited Matthew Chilelli. There you go, you guys listen. Our outro this week comes from someone. If you have an outro for us that you would like to try, please send it in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, I am @clmazin, and John August is @johnaugust. You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment, and I’ll tell you why — John August loves comments.

He loves comments, you guys. He reads them and he loves them.

You can also find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, and that’s where you’ll find the transcripts. We try and get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes of the show at scriptnotes.net and also on the Scriptnotes USB Drive at store.johnaugust.com where revenue is generated that I do not get because John is stealing it from me.

I want to say a great thank you to Erin Halligan, and all of the wonderful people at the Austin Film Festival, Austin Screenwriting Conference. They’ve done an incredible job for us. And thank you for showing up to a secret thing at 10 at night. Hey, everyone, let’s go get drunk. Thank you.

Links:

* [Katie Dippold](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1767754/) on IMDB
* [Phil Hay](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006534/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on IMDB
* [Tess Morris](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2208729/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on IMDB
* [Malcolm Spellman](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1173259/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) on IMDB
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