Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/anthrax-amnesia-and-atomic-veterans).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 260 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, Craig and I are going to implore all screenwriters to think twice before using the phrase “begs the question.” We will also be doing one of our favorite features, How Would This Be a Movie? This week we’ll be looking at Anthrax, Amnesia, and Atomic Veterans.

**Craig:** Now, that in and of itself would be a fantastic single movie.

**John:** One hundred percent. I think you need some, like there’s a superhero aspect. There’s a courtroom trial aspect. Atomic Veteran just feels like a lesser grade Marvel hero.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, we can’t get Captain America, but we did find Atomic Veteran.

**John:** Completely. He doesn’t remember that he is Atomic Veteran because of the anthrax attack. But it will all be sensible by the third act.

**Craig:** Yeah. Atomic Veteran’s principal super power: reminiscence.

**John:** Oh, very – fond reminiscence but also a little heartbreak.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** The things he had to do. The flash of light that took away his true love.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. This is actually getting to be a really good movie.

**John:** It’s going to be a good movie. So, let’s save that for the key points, though. Because last week was a huge bombshell episode.

**Craig:** I mean, everything happened. We are the show where nothing happens for 258 episodes, and then at 259 the whole thing goes up in flames.

**John:** So, to recap, I am moving to Paris. Stuart is leaving us. We have a brand new producer, Godwin Jabangwe. Also, I sold a book.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so on the episode last week I talked about it in a vague sense because the announcement hadn’t gone out, but now it is out. So, the books title is Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire. Arlo Finch is the lead character of it. It is middle grade fiction. It is sort of the kids’ fantasy fiction. The same kind of book as a Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. There will be three of them at least. And it’s Macmillan that bought it, so it’s a division of Macmillan. And I’m so excited. I am writing them now.

So, my year in Paris will be spent writing kids’ books that are not set in Paris.

**Craig:** Arlo Finch is so instantly recognizable as a YA hero name. And it’s great.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I kind of secretly want there to be a YA series where the hero is Jim Cummings, or Tasha O’Brien. Just something that’s so – it’s not even mundane. It’s in the weird uncanny valley between Jim Smith and Arlo Finch. You know, just like–

**John:** I see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** It’s so average, it’s nothing.

**John:** Like Tasha O’Brien is an interesting case, because Tasha could go somewhere and O’Brien could go somewhere, but Tasha O’Brien feels just like weird. And it doesn’t have–

**Craig:** Like a mistake.

**John:** Like a mistake. You’ve got that weird sort of Shwa at the end of Tasha O’Brien.

**Craig:** It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing. And I just thought of it. I have to give myself a pat on the back, because, you know, the things we ask our brains to do. I said, Brain, fetch me a name that is weirdly off.

**John:** Yep. So, I’m very excited to be writing it. At some point I’ll go into sort of more of the details on how I wrote it and how I sold it, but this was my NaNoWriMo project. I wrote a bunch of it back in November. I didn’t write all of it back in November. What you actually sell when you sell a book is often, in this case, the first bunch of chapters and then a proposal for the rest of it. And so that is what the editors read and that is what they bought. And it’s been exciting to go back and write the whole book.

**Craig:** Now, I see that it’s coming out through Roaring Brook Press. And Roaring Brook is part of Macmillan. So, give us a sense of the other kinds of books that we’ve seen from Roaring Brook so we know what your family is of books.

**John:** From that specific in-print, I cannot point to any titles that you would have recognized. The other books that my editor, Connie Hsu has worked on, they’re really good sellers and really well done books in that genre, but they’re not like big blockbuster names.

**Craig:** You will make Roaring Book Press – I mean, you will be the – Roaring Brook will be the house John August built.

**John:** It could be. So, it is good to understand, we always think in terms of studios, and so we have Paramount and we have Warner Bros, but within each of those big places you have the individual labels. Like Sony has TriStar, they have Columbia, they have Studio 8, and Sony Pictures Animation. There’s different houses within that. And that’s sort of is what it’s like with Roaring Brook Press. They are one of the labels within the bigger company, Macmillan.

So, while I’m so happy to be writing for Connie and for this division, bigger people at Macmillan had to make the call whether to say yes or no to the book, and so I’m happy that they did.

**Craig:** Did it go all the way to Macmillan?

**John:** It goes to Mr. Macmillan himself. He has a monocle. And so you have to speak very quietly and slowly, but then he says yes or no and it’s all good.

**Craig:** I will never, never release my child-like view of the world. I just presume, oh, the company is Macmillan, well, so when can I speak to Macmillan?

**John:** Exactly. But Macmillan is actually headquartered in the Flatiron Building. So, I’ve not actually visited their offices yet, but I’m excited to visit their offices because it’s that weird narrow building in New York City as you head downtown. And you always see that in movies and that’s actually where they will be dissecting every comma in my book.

**Craig:** I believe, just off the top of my head, I think the Flatiron building is right near a place called Eataly.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Eataly.

**John:** I’ve heard many legends of Eataly. I’ve never been there, but that is the famed sort of Italian market with a zillion restaurants and a place where everyone enjoys their Italian food.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really cool. I like it.

**John:** Cool. There’s other follow up. So, last week not only did we have the season finale episode, we also had Matt Selman , Aline Brosh McKenna, and Rawson Marshall Thurber discussing the season finale episode in a bonus episode we called Duly Noted. That was just the three of them. I wasn’t there while they were recording it. I hit record and I left the room. And so I want to thank them for doing that. It was just a weird lark experiment.

Craig, what did you think of it?

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you know the answer to that. I don’t listen to podcasts, John. I have no idea what they said whatsoever. I mean, I love all three of them. At some point I will listen to it. Was it good?

**John:** It was good. It was – they’re three very smart people. So, it was weird and fascinating to hear them talk about me and us without us being there. And so that was great. They’re all three big fans of the show. Matt Selman has never been on the show, but has listened to almost every episode, so it was great to have him as an outside voice dissecting sort of what we do. So, it was fun.

It was just sort of a lark. And I don’t know that there will be more Duly Noted, but let us know what you thought of that and if you’d like to hear more of those in the future. It’s not going to be a weekly thing. This isn’t going to be our weekly recap episode.

**Craig:** No. We can’t support that sort of thing. We’re just not that interesting.

**John:** No. I will say that if listeners find a given episode so noteworthy that they actually want to record their episode, I wouldn’t stand in their way. So, if you do want to record a response episode and you can do a good job of it, send us a link and I would consider putting it in the feed as a Duly Noted episode. You could be any random people who have the ability to have a good conversation about the show. I’d consider that. No guarantees, but maybe.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s very generous of you.

**John:** Well, I’m not really promising anything other than I might listen to it.

**Craig:** So, I take it back. That was just empty generosity.

**John:** [laughs] Last week, you had a One Cool Thing, and we had a listener who wrote in with a response to your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I was talking about the idea that we live in a simulation, which I pretty much agree with. And then I had read that the existence of Pi and irrational numbers like Pi that never stop, the digits just keep coming and coming, that they prove possibly that we’re not in a simulation because there’s no end, and a simulation theoretically should be finite.

And about 14,000 dorks on Twitter patiently explained to me that that was not true. Alit decided to write in. So, we’ll give Alit the floor. Alit says, “PI being theoretically infinite,” well, hold on. Well, I guess that’s fair, because we never got to the end. “Pi being theoretically infinite doesn’t preclude a finite simulation including Pi as part of its construct. This is because Pi is defined as a ratio between a circle circumference and it diameter. Any representation of Pi in real rational form, that is 3.14, is necessarily an approximation, both in a simulated and non-simulated universe.

“So any simulation dealing with Pi would only need to compute Pi out as far as practically necessary for the simulation. Therefore, Pi exists, therefore we’re not in simulation argument doesn’t hold.” And a bunch of people said similar things. Including, oh, you know, if they’re smart enough to create a virtual reality as complicated as the one we appear to be in right now, they could probably toss on a few hundred trillion digits of Pi. I think we’ve managed to get up to a trillion or something like that.

**John:** Certainly. So, Craig, the important question is are you convinced by this line of reasoning?

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems convincing. I think I’m going to have to stand down on the whole Pi thing and revert back to my initial perspective which was that none of this is real. And especially not you.

**John:** And especially not the 10,000 Twitter people who tweeted you the answer that Pi was not proof, because they weren’t real either.

**Craig:** No. No. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, I got to say, I’m really enjoying the show so far. I mean, the show of reality is just terrific.

**John:** It’s really well done.

Last week we also talked about Overboard and one of our listeners had done a recut sort of as a request that took the Goldie Hawn comedy and made it a thriller. We have a different trailer that Latif Ullah also wrote in with, which also does similarly a good job of using moments from that movie to set it up as a thriller. So, we’ll put a link to his version, or her version. I don’t know if Latif is a male or female name, in the show notes.

**Craig:** Also in follow up, a little something about Phil Lord, who recently moved off to England with his writing and directing partner, Chris Miller. I went to Chris’s house for a little goodbye soiree and ran into Phil. And he told me that he listens to us in the shower. So, when Phil, and this is now the person that’s going to be imbuing life to the new Han Solo, when Phil is nude he listens to us. But more importantly, John, I wanted you to know that he told me that he uses Highland.

So, Highland theoretically now will be used to write the new Han Solo standalone movie.

**John:** That is pretty much amazing. So, Phil Lord, who I should also say has one of those names that is kind of broken and wrong in a Craig’s bad YA novel character way. Like Phil Lord, it’s like it’s two words, but it sort of comes out as one word. Phil and Chris are fantastic. And Phil had actually emailed me a couple weeks ago because there’s something they were trying to do in Highland and he couldn’t figure out how to do it. It was a Courier Prime problem, and I talked him through how to do it.

But I was so excited that he was using Highland to write this new version of Han Solo that he was working on. So, hooray.

**Craig:** Hooray.

**John:** Let’s get to questions. We have a question from Zack in the UK. And rather than us reading it aloud, I asked if Zack would actually record himself asking the question so we could hear his question in his own words. So let’s listen to Zack.

Zack: Hi John and Craig. Zack from London here. I wondered if you might be able to help solve a script problem that’s been driving us all nuts. We have a script in which a characters’ consciousness are transferred between bodies. When describing the character, it’s important to know which consciousness we are looking at, as well as which body. Both consciousness and bodies recur during the script, so we can’t just discard them after each switch.

So my question is, how would you suggest notating the script to make this clear to the reader. The danger is that bad notation turns a script into one big hot unreadable mess. Is there an elegant solution?

**John:** Craig, what’s your thought? Is there an elegant solution for dealing with a situation where the person speaking is not the person we see onscreen?

**Craig:** I think there is. I dealt with something like this when I writing a script called Cowboy Ninja Viking, which I guess still might get made. Chris Pratt has signed on to do it, so that’s exciting. And the idea of that property is that there’s a guy who in his mind has I guess what you’d call split personality, and so imagines himself as a cowboy, a ninja, and a Viking. And in these scenes, sometimes we would see those characters when we were in his perspective, but then from other people’s perspective, we would just see him.

And at times, he alone would be acting as a cowboy, or a ninja, or a Viking. So, what I did in those situations was the character’s name is Duncan, so I would have Duncan, and then I would have Ninja, and then I would have Duncan as Ninja.

So, in this case, I would probably do something similar. Like if it were you and me and were switching minds, I would say John, Craig, Craig inside John, John inside Craig. Something like that.

**John:** We have one listener in particular who is so hot and bothered hearing John inside Craig and Craig inside John.

**Craig:** It’s Sexy Craig, right?

**John:** That is.

**Craig:** Inside.

**John:** Just awful. So, what you’re describing, Craig, is that in the character cue, so like the little bit that goes above dialogue, you are saying Duncan as Cowboy. That’s the name of the character who is giving that dialogue, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. So I changed the character names, and this way – because as you’re reading through a script, as much as possible you want to keep the flow. The one thing we know that always breaks up dialogue is a character name. There’s no option to not have it there. So, that seems like good real estate to repurpose to kind of help get this across. It should do the trick.

**John:** It should absolutely do the trick. And so my advice is the same advice. There are times where I’ve had to do character name/somebody else. Usually that means you’re sort of hearing both people talking at the same time. Or, character name and then in parenthesis after it, like the form of the character that we’re actually experiencing. But anything like that to indicate what’s going on is helpful.

I will say that in general any kind of body switching movie, it can be very tough both on the page and in the movie to remind the audience of who they’re actually seeing. The Change-Up was a movie starring Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, both friends of ours, and I had a hard time over the course of that movie really remembering who it was that I was watching and following. And sort of what I was supposed to be paying attention to and sort of who was doing the action.

I think it’s actually harder when the two people are kind of similar.

**Craig:** Little bit of a problem with that movie, wasn’t it?

**John:** It was sort of a problem with that movie. It’s much more obvious when you’re in a Freaky Friday situation. It’s like, oh, she’s being teenager and she’s being a mom. When it’s a huge difference between those two things, then it’s much more clear. Or, in Ghost when you have Whoopi Goldberg possessed, then you can sort of see what’s happening there. It’s tough when you have people who are very similar to the other form of themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. In something like this, also, I think Zack you would be well advised to put a little paragraph in when this starts. And when it starts put a little paragraph, put it in italics, you can put it in parenthesis so everybody gets that it’s a comment. And just say when you see XXX or XXX, this is what it means, so people know.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Everybody gets the drill here. Clarity is hugely important. And it’s going to ruin everything if people are confused. So, that little note and then changing the character names so we understand, it’s Craig inside John, yeah.

**John:** That’ll do it.

All right, let’s get to our bit of umbrage for the episode. And this is a topic that I think most recently came up on Twitter. We had a little spat back and forth on Twitter. Not between us. Like we were in agreement, but someone else was disagreeing with us.

So, I want to dig into this issue of Begging the Question. And we’ve actually used this on the show. I searched the transcripts and back in Episode 188, we were doing follow up on the Tess Gerritsen Gravity lawsuit and you said–

**Craig:** Begging the question means building an argument around something that needs to be figured out by the argument. It’s essentially saying people are definitely hungry because they’re hungry. This guy – and this is the person we’re referring to – is basically saying I’m baffled by your continued defense of Warner Bros and Cuarón because they’re wrong.

**John:** Exactly. And, Craig, is that begging the question?

**Craig:** It’s essentially begging the question. Yes.

**John:** So talk us through what that term originally meant.

**Craig:** Originally, begging the question was a – it came up all the time in discussion of logic and philosophy. And the idea of begging the question was to take something that you were trying to prove and incorporate it into the basis of the argument to prove that thing.

And so you would end up saying, well, I believe B because the following is true – A, B, and C. It doesn’t work that way. And when you boil it down, really what begging the question refers to is a tautology. In its simplest form, the way it comes up is you can’t teach those people because those people don’t learn.

**John:** Exactly. So, some examples of begging the question would be opium induces sleep because it has a soporific quality. Well, induces sleep and soporific mean the same thing, so you’re basically arguing A equals A.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Let’s plow through some more examples just so it really lands. Strawberries are delicious because they taste good.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] And you know it’s funny, when you say a proper tautological argument, one that begs the question like this, it sounds so ridiculous, but you have an example here that I think we actually hear all the time in slightly tweaked versions. If marijuana weren’t illegal, it wouldn’t be prohibited by law. Now, I hear a version of this argument these days a lot surrounding police shootings.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** If they weren’t doing something wrong, they wouldn’t have been shot. Meaning you deserve to be shot because you were shot. Doesn’t work that. That’s begging the question.

**John:** You hear that with immigration as well. Like, well they’re breaking the law because they’re here illegally. There’s implicit like, well, that’s breaking the law because it’s illegal. Like, you’re not actually getting to what’s really the cause here.

**Craig:** Right. And so you end up drawing conclusions that are faulty because your entire argument is based on the thing that you’re attempting to prove.

Now, we are among the very few people that use it this way, which is the proper way. The vast majority of people say “that begs the question” to mean that invites the question.

**John:** Exactly. And so to the degree to which even in dictionaries now, sometimes they won’t even distinguish that it’s not the original usage of the phrase. The original usage of the phrase comes back form Aristotle days. And so it meant this kind of circular reasoning. And lawyers would use it. And rhetoricians would use it to describe this exact phenomenon. And my hunch, and I have no evidence for this being the actual case, is I think screenwriters and television writers are partially to blame for sort of how this phrase has drifted into modern usage.

My suspicion is that people would see courtroom dramas and they would see the defense lawyer stand up and say, “He’s the begging the question.” And really no one kind of means what that means, but they would hear that phrase begging the question. Like that’s an important thing to say.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because they hear that important to say, they try to use it in their own speech. And they would use it in a way that really means to suggest the question, invite the question, elicits the question. Which is a very useful thing to say. So, I don’t want to be negative on the construct as like that’s a useful thing to have. I think it’s very, very useful. But, by using begs the question to mean invites the question, we’re sort of stepping over the original usage of the word.

**Craig:** It’s so funny that you bring up that courtroom thing. It’s absolutely true. And if you stop and think about it, that really should have been the place where people stopped and said clearly this doesn’t mean invites the question, because somebody would say, “Objection your honor. Begging the question.” And the judge would say, “Sustained.”

Well, if it meant invite the question wouldn’t everybody go, “True, go ahead and ask the question.” It’s just a totally different thing. This is one of those things where the war is not only unwinnable, it has been lost for years. You and I are like those Japanese soldiers they would keep finding on islands in the ‘50s who hadn’t heard the news we’ve lost. But I will still fight. I will fight on for the truth of begging the question.

Although I see that you’ve indicated a very good substitute for it which would definitely avoid you pedantically explaining to somebody what begging the question is, and that is to say, “Oh, you’re using circular reasoning.”

**John:** Yeah. And so maybe we could put this all to bed by saying when you’re trying to use the logical argument for it, maybe say circular reasoning so people know that that’s what you mean. Because I think people kind of figure circular reasoning, it makes a little bit more sense in terms of what logically the fallacy that’s happening here.

But if you’re using the phrase “which begs the question,” I would just ask you to please stop and think could I say which invites the question, or which raises the question. Some examples here. I have 40,000 Twitter followers, which invite the question, why am I not verified? Or which raises the question, why am I not verified. But to say which begs the question, well, that’s kind of ambiguous. And who are you begging? It’s a strange thing. You’re trying to use this smart-sounding phrase that isn’t actually the correct phrase.

**Craig:** I mean, you can see how this happened. I mean, someone goes, well, the idea is that it’s so obvious that it’s begging to be asked, right? But, yeah. Which raises prompts, invites, all that would be great. We’re losing this fight. Even right now, John, I feel the blood draining from me and the world grows dim.

**John:** The only reason why I think it’s worthwhile raising this thing, because I’m not even fighting this fight anymore, I’m just raising this because our listener base are the people who are writing movies and television.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** And I think as the people writing movies and television, let’s just be mindful of what words we’re picking and what words we’re putting in character’s mouths. And if there’s an opportunity to not use the sort of twisted version of begs the question, let’s do that. If there’s an opportunity to say circular reasoning rather than begs the question for this other thing, maybe we should do that.

And let’s also just be mindful of are we trying to use phrases we don’t really understand and putting them in the mouths of big Hollywood actors who are going to say them in blockbuster movies and therefore perhaps shift the usage of language or sort of break a phrase in language when we didn’t need to?

**Craig:** You know what? You’re right. You’re right. Fight on.

**John:** We will fight on. It’s our last dying battle for begs the question. So we just ask you to look at your drafts and look at any usage of begs the question. Look at the usage. Just do a find/replace for “which begs the question.” Because that’s almost the only construct you’re going to see this in. And anytime you see that, just consider using a different word rather than begs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s get on to the subject of the day, How Would This Be a Movie? And so on Twitter this morning I asked people to send in suggestions for this segment and we have the best listeners in the world, so a bunch of people sent in a bunch of great suggestions. I picked two of them and then one of them was a thing I just – was a deep Wiki hole I fell into myself.

But the first thing that someone suggested was The Day that Went Missing. It’s a New York Times Story by Trip Gabriel. And this was suggested by Elise McKimmie, who is a friend, and she’s also the person who runs the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. So she’s so smart and she wrote in with a suggestion.

So in this story, Trip Gabriel, who is a reporter for the New York Times, he’s discussing June 17, 2015. He went sailing and he does not remember this day whatsoever, because in fact all he does know about this day was waking up in a CAT scan machine and reading a Post-it note saying you’ve had an incident, you have a form of amnesia called Transient Global Amnesia. You’re going to be okay. You didn’t have a stroke. It’s going to be fine eventually.

Craig, what did you make of this story?

**Craig:** Well, this story falls under the general category of Oliver Sacks. And the great Oliver Sacks, sadly the great late Oliver Sacks, was a neurologist who wrote a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. And it was a collection of stories based on his work and his research into others. People who were suffering from neurological conditions that changed the nature of the way they interacted with the world. And one of Oliver Sacks’ stories became the basis for the movie Awakenings, which was a wonderful movie. But it’s a genre to me. I think of this as the Oliver Sacks genre of what to do with someone whose mind is now functioning a way that changes their inherent way of dealing with the world around them.

We had the romantic comedy version of this is 50 First Dates. So we know about that.

**John:** The thriller version of this is Memento. In Memento he can’t form any memories, but this is sort of more limited version of Memento. But even in the story, Gabriel is discussing Memento with his doctors. He says like, “Oh, is this like the movie Memento?” And then a few seconds later, “Is this like the movie Memento?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finding Dory is another extreme example of a character who has no recollection and no ability to sort of form those long term memories.

**Craig:** Precisely. And in 50 First Dates they introduced an interesting twist where Drew Barrymore’s character would proceed through her day thinking that it was the day that she got into a car accident that caused the injury. And would be perfectly fine throughout that day, but then in the morning wake up and it was the same thing all over again. Sort of Groundhog Day in her own head.

These are hard to do because they are gimmicky by definition. Memento, for instance, I think smartly understood that it wasn’t enough to have somebody not remember stuff. They needed to tell the story backwards to make it really fascinating for all of us.

So, it’s a tricky thing. You can’t really do a movie that’s just like, oh my god, I have amnesia. What do I do? You can’t do a Terms of Endearment version.

**John:** I think there’s a version of this that could be like a Gillian Flynn novel like Gone Girl where it centers on this event that happened. So, in Gone Girl it’s her disappearance. In this case it’s like what happened during that day. And it’s all focused on a character wakes up and you’re trying to figure out what actually happened during the course of this day and reconstructing what must have happened. And obviously something very big must have happened during the course of that.

And that’s a classic setup for a story, and especially for a thriller, is not knowing who you were before this moment. I mean, The Bourne Identity is based around Jason Bourne waking up and not knowing who he was. Not just a day was missing, but a whole lifetime was missing before this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, we like as audiences watching characters try and solve the puzzle of their own life. And that is what The Hangover was. And that’s what Dude, Where’s My Car was. And we enjoy that process. And we can induce that in all sorts of ways, whether it’s okay you drank too much, or you got hit on the head, or you were part of a secret government program.

**John:** Or you were roofied.

**Craig:** Or you were roofied. Exactly. Rohyphnol. The idea of sort of living with this as a condition – so I feel like, first of all, I would say I think we have a pretty good supply of movies where characters have amnesia that are then comedies, romantic comedies, thrillers, spy movies, et. So then the question is is there an Awakenings style movie here?

So, Awakenings was about a patient who sort of had like a – well, I guess we now call Locked-In Syndrome. They seem to be catatonic and yet they were awake. And so the question is are they alive in there, and if so, how do we get to them? And it’s Robin Williams plays the doctor who is interacting with Robert De Niro, the patient, and they do wake him out of this. And he wakens up.

But what we understand in the movie is really it’s about Robin Williams’s character and how he needs to wake up from his own life, which is sort of a flat line. So, you can do a drama like that with this. The problem with amnesia is it disrupts every relationship with that character. Constantly. I have to take my hat off to Tim Herlihy and everyone that worked on 50 First Dates because it really – I love that movie. And they manage to make the relationship work.

**John:** Well, if you look at that movie versus Overboard, like at no point in 50 First Dates do you feel like Adam Sandler is taking advantage of Drew Barrymore’s character. It would be very easy to set that up in a really uncomfortable kind of rapey way. And they were able to move past that, which was very, very smart.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And one of the ways they did that very cleverly was by having Adam Sandler meet her father and brother very early on. So he understood that there were people watching and taking care of her. And that they were naturally suspicious of anybody who is going to interlope.

But I’m not really sure this one says movie to me.

**John:** So, going back to your Oliver Sacks version, there’s a book I read a couple of years ago called The Answer to the Riddle is Me, by David Stuart MacLean. And this might be the longer version that sort of can build out to a full movie. So, in this version, MacLean, it’s a true story, he woke up in India and had no idea where he was. And was basically having this crazy acid trip and went through a horrible two weeks. And these people sort of took pity on him and kept him protected. But eventually they were able to figure out who he was and contact his family and had his family come pick him up and bring him back to the US.

So, it turned out that he was doing work in India and was taking this drug for malaria which sometimes causes these horrible freak outs. And it’s like a form of amnesia where it just kind of wipes your identity clean. And so it was the process of him trying to rediscover who he was and sort of the bad things about who he was. It’s like you always sort of think like, oh, if I could reinvent myself or sort of come back with a fresh slate, but you sort of never get that fresh slate. And all the bad stuff came back with him.

So, that might be the longer Oliver Sacks version, because the journey happens post-recovery from the actual syndrome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Maybe.

**Craig:** But I don’t know. It just seems like a slog.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I don’t know. My studio is not buying this.

**John:** All right. Why don’t you pitch the next one? This is Atomic Veterans. This was suggested by Maxwell Henry Rudolph, our listener, and it’s all about the post-war atomic tests.

**Craig:** Yeah, so between 1945 and 1962, approximately 500,000 American soldiers were exposed to radiation from tests of atomic bombs. It’s hard to imagine because we live in a time where there’s a comprehensive test ban treaty and nobody tests atomic bombs. And technologically we would know if somebody did. It was going on constantly.

The US was constantly blowing these things up, as was the Soviet Union. And they were also constantly using – we were constantly using our own soldiers, almost exclusively men, as guinea pigs to see how close you could get.

**John:** Yeah. So, there are two articles we’ll link to in the show notes. The first is by Tom Hallman, Jr. The second is a New York Times piece by Clyde Haberman. The Clyde Haberman one also has a video that goes with it which is really well produced. But essentially after WWII, well, we detonated these bombs. We knew they worked. We knew they could level cities. But the question was how else can we use them? So we were testing like what happens if we blow them up above a ship? And so they would put a ship out there and blow it up and they’d have a bunch of sailors like kind of cover your eyes, watch it, while the ship goes up in the distance. And then the sailors would have to board the vessel and measure it for radioactivity.

But they’re just wearing tee-shirts. There wasn’t a fundamental understanding or, I don’t know, cleverness to sort of like say, wow, we should have some protective gear here. Or maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all.

Then, of course, there were the bomb tests in the deserts where they’d be digging trenches and they’d blow things up. And we’ve seen versions of that in movies before where they’re seeing like could we level a house. Well, what happens next? Well, what happens many years later is you have a bunch of these soldiers with cancers that seem quite unusual. And in some cases we see cancers or other problems showing up in their kids and in the generation after that. So, these soldiers who weren’t killed by the blasts, but suffered some sort of radiation poisoning, and that becomes I think the focus of any movie that you try to make out of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are actually a ton of different approaches here. We can go on the nose. Let’s set this in the 1950s and let’s have somebody investigating the government’s effort to use our own men as guinea pigs. And let’s have a sort of domestic espionage movie.

You can definitely do a movie about the men now as they exist now as veterans. It’s very tricky when you’re dealing with older people who are in physical peril. Whether we know it or not, we are all little insurance actuaries in our own minds. And we do this narrative calculation the way that courts do calculations of how much money somebody who has been wrongfully injured should get. And a huge part of that is how long do you expect to live. Well, you’re 15, that accident cost you your eye. It was that guy’s fault. We’re figuring you got 80 years or 75 years of not having that eye. You get this much.

My grandmother, my late grandmother, was diagnosed with cancer when she was 80. And it was stomach cancer. And they strongly recommended that she have her stomach mostly removed. And so she went under the knife at 80, which is an enormous risk, and did survive the operation only for us to find out she didn’t have cancer at all. That it was a contaminated slide that the pathologist had messed up. And so my parents sued for malpractice.

And as you can imagine, one easily – it never went to court. But that’s when I learned, if you’re an 80-year-old woman, they’re like, well, we’ll pay you for the next, I don’t know, expected six years of your life. So, we do a similar moral equation when we’re watching movies and old people are at risk, because in part we’re like, well, all right, but you know, he’s 80. Uh, am I worried about him making it to 85?

And it’s wrong, but we do it.

**John:** My hunch is that the place where this movie wants to live is in the ’60s or ‘70s. And so these people aren’t especially old, but maybe they’re having their first kids with like birth defects. That feels like the sweet spot. Because what’s also fascinating about this point in time is they think they’ve been good soldiers and at the time of the tests they signed pledges that they would never reveal what happened. Basically it’s treason for them to talk about these nuclear tests.

But once your own kid is having these problems, or you start to have these problems, or your friends start to have these problems, you have to ask yourself like, well, do I hold myself to this pledge, do I risk treason to perhaps save my daughter’s life, to save all of my fellow solders’ lives? At what point do you cross over that line? And that to me I think is probably one of the really inflection points.

And the true story is this is where they first started appealing to the Senate for help.

**Craig:** There’s another like totally wild way to go is let’s just go fictional. Let’s go science fiction, because any time you’re exploding nuclear devices theoretically you’re messing around with quantum physics and stuff.

You’ve got some guys that are exposed to this. They’re too close. And it disrupts time/space fabric. And they are now moving through time, but always in other places where a nuclear device is about to go off. This actually feels more like a TV show.

Remember like–?

**John:** Quantum Leap.

**Craig:** Yep. Quantum Leap.

**John:** Or Voyagers.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Voyagers is really what it is. So, it’s like, okay, it’s happening again. At some point in time, right, there’s now bad people who have nuclear devices moving through time and we have to keep up with them because they will detonate this nuclear device and destroy Paris in 1770. And so we are now there at the same time as them trying to stop them. It’s like there’s so many, you know, a movie studio, they’re not going to make the straight up movie. Ever.

Never, ever, ever. Because there’s just not enough, I think, for them to latch onto. But, the idea of a government – if you are writing a movie and you needed to show how the United States government mistreated its own soldiers, this would be a great scene to show it.

**John:** Yes. I think the straight ahead version of it could be made for an HBO. I think it could be made as a History Channel movie. I think there’s a venue in which the kind of Erin Brockovich-y version of this could be a really compelling movie. And it would have a really good home.

But I don’t think we’re often making the big end of year blockbuster movie about this very often. Although sometimes we do. So we make Spotlight. And this could be a Spotlight. It could be the one of these a year that we get that is focusing on one particular abuse by the government in this case and we are going to really show the character’s affected by it and the fight to have the story told.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s possible. But unlikely. I think my studio will not buy this project either.

**John:** So, the actual people who are mentioned in some of these stories, Frank Farmer who is 80 years old during part of this, but I feel like the other characters you’re going to focus on would probably be lawyers, they’d be soldiers, they’d be bureaucrats. They’d be family members. No matter what, it feels like an ensemble version if you’re doing this.

If you’re doing the Marvel version, then they see the atomic blast and they get super powers. And we’ve seen versions of that quite a lot.

**Craig:** And they will never stop. Ever. Ever.

**John:** All right. Our last story for How Would This Be a Movie is about anthrax. And so I fell into this Wikipedia hole over the week because Mike Pence, who is the Republican VP candidate, I was reading an article about him and it mentioned he was a big proponent of investigations during the anthrax scare. And I had sort of forgotten about the anthrax scare.

So, this is what happened. In 2001, one week after the 9/11 attacks, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to ABC, CBS, and NBC news, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. And then later on two more letters were mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. So, the first letters read, “9/11/01. This is next. Take penicillin now. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” The second letters read, “9/11/01, you cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.”

And so the return addresses on these envelopes were a fake elementary school. Overall, 23 people were infected with anthrax and five of them anthrax. And so what followed is what’s considered one of the biggest FBI investigations in history. A lot of the initial suspicion focused on this guy, Steven Hatfill, who was eventually exonerated. He was a bioweapons expert.

Ultimately, the blame was pointed at this guy named Bruce Edwards Ivins who was an anthrax researcher who actually wanted people who was involved in the research effort for the FBI, he was one of the main sort of scientists trying to figure out where the anthrax came from. He committed suicide. And so in 2008 he killed himself with an overdose of prescription Tylenol. And the FBI closed its investigation.

So, I will say that there’s still a not too Tin-Hatty discussion that he really couldn’t have been the guy, or at least not the only guy. But right now it is considered a closed case and that he was the guy who sent the anthrax.

**Craig:** Yeah. I remember this whole thing. I remember that the letter was sent from very close to Princeton University. Here’s the part of this that jumps out at me and that I think, ooh, you could go anywhere with this. You don’t have to be stuck telling this particular story, because this particular story feels old and no longer immediately relevant, because we have bigger problems now, different problems with terrorism, both domestic and international.

But what fascinates me is the idea of the perpetrator being hired to find the killer.

**John:** Absolutely. I think that’s the most compelling thing. Especially if you as the audience either know or suspect that he’s involved in it from the start. That’s great. It’s compelling.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s something about the government facing this challenge. Someone has done a very bad thing and they cannot figure out who it is. And this case has landed into – it’s always good when it’s some new law enforcement person who needs to prove herself, you know?

So, this is a big break. And you use the trope of the old drunk who used to be great. So the one person who can help you that we haven’t been able to get through is blah, blah, blah, because he’s out of the game. But there’s all sorts of ways you can get to that person. The point is, that person becomes her partner. And we’re telling that very familiar story of two odd couple/unlikely partners on the trail of a criminal.

And then she starts to suspect it’s him. That’s really interesting.

**John:** I think it’s interesting. That obviously you could take that in a fictional direction and it doesn’t have to be tied to this one anthrax attack. And you could set that present day. That’s a great dynamic between two characters. Classically like do you trust that partner? And so Training Day has an aspect of that, too, although that was much more sort of present tense.

What I think is compelling though about the original anthrax attacks, and made me surprised that I hadn’t seen a good movie version of this, is I feel like people kind of remember what happened during that time. I mean, 9/11 was sort of overwhelming everything, but I remember the paranoia that people felt. I remember like people handling their mail with gloves on. And this paranoia like where are the letters going to come next.

The Unabomber had a quality of that, too, where every couple of years the Unabomber bomb would go off and you’re like, oh wow, that’s still a thing that’s out there. To me I think the home for this kind of story would be as a limited series. Like a People v. OJ Simpson, where you chart through and you follow this session of history and really drill down into it.

I found myself really compelled by this, and if I weren’t just incredibly busy, I think this is the kind of thing I would pitch a network as a limited series because I feel like there’s a really fascinating story to chart through, particularly Ivins’s role is just so good and so castable. It feels like the kind of thing you can bring a movie star in to do this limited series and make something really cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. What you would need I think to find in there is that cultural relevance that obviously OJ Simpson had. You’re always looking for the bigger picture of, okay, I’m going to get you inside the minutia of this investigation, this story, because that’s an exciting soap opera. But ultimately, this meant something and it meant blah, blah, blah. And I’m not sure what the answer is with this one.

**John:** Yeah. I think what was so interesting about that time is that obviously 9/11 we had the attacks then and it was such a visible scar on the world, whereas this was almost more like a sniper attack. It was hitting individual things, but in some ways had a bigger effect of disrupting our news media and our entire postal system than the 9/11 attacks themselves did. It was strange that it was happening at the same time, and yet it was such a different scale.

And in some ways the people who were affected were just so kind of random. There’s a quality of, you know, sort of the cliché movie moment where they’re circling things on a map to try to figure out where something came from. This actually has that, where you had to figure out like well what mailbox did these all come from. And we have to trace it all the way back. It has those qualities which is compelling.

**Craig:** There’s a short story I remember reading from way, way back when about a detective who is on the trail of a killer. And he cannot find the killer. And it made me think of this. I was looking at the Wikipedia page that you linked to and interestingly we’ve combined two of our ideas here. Ivins apparently said to the FBI when they were investigating him that he suffered from loss of memory, stating that he would wake up dressed and wonder if he had gone out during the night.

And that led me back to my memory of that short story, because the trick of the short story, and there’s a serial killer out there who is cutting people up, it’s horrible, and it’s preying on this poor detective. And he comes to understand finally at the end it was him. When he thought he was asleep, he was doing these things.

That’s a really interesting thing. The idea that you’re chasing yourself. Tricky. I like that.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think there’s a lot of material to be mined there. So, whether it’s this individual attack, or it’s just that idea of the agent within who is subverting the whole thing is fascinating. We’ve talked about No Way Out on the podcast before, and that’s another great, compelling moment.

In No Way Out, they save it for the very, very end of the story, that reveal. But if you revealed early on sort of what’s going on, then that’s compelling. We love to watch the villain and sort of watch the villain try to stay ahead of things. There’s a tension that’s naturally there when we know something that the hero doesn’t know.

**Craig:** That’s very typical horror movie type stuff.

**John:** Cool. All right. So those are our three entries. Thank you to everyone who sent in suggestions for what could be a movie and How Would This Be a Movie. If you have more of those suggestions, always write in. So you can just write to ask@johnaugust.com, or hit us on Twitter. When I see things that are interesting, I just file them away and eventually we get them sometimes.

It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** So, my One Cool Thing is macOS Sierra beta. And this is the beta version, the preview version, of what will be the new Mac operating system to follow – what are we on now, Mountain, Tiger, what is this thing?

**John:** I think we’re in El Capitan now.

**Craig:** There you go. Oh, that’s right. They switched from cats to landmarks. And they’re still in landmarks for Sierra.

So, this is new for Apple. Apple went through this one very big thing where they suddenly were like, hey guess what, the operating system is free, which is awesome because you could just hear pants filling in Redmond, Washington as Microsoft was like, “What????”

So, yeah, and lo and behold, Windows, which used to cost hundreds of dollars, now free.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So that was the first big change that Mac introduced. But this is the first time I believe they’ve introduced a beta of the entire operating system out in the wild to anyone – anyone who wants it. And we’ll put a link up in the show notes for you to download.

I did download it because I’m crazy like that. And it’s actually working quite nicely. The big change is Siri. You have Siri built into the system, so it’s not just on your phone now. If I want to ask my computer a question, I can.

**John:** Have you found it useful so far?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s about as useful as it is on my phone. Which is, you know, once every week maybe?

**John:** I find myself as a heavy Siri user. And so I haven’t installed the Mac OS beta because of some other issues, but on my phone I do use it a lot and I think it’s because I just – if you just sort of push yourself to use it more, you find it incredibly useful, especially in the car. I use it for sort of like quick math things. I won’t pull up the calculator. I’ll just ask Siri the answer. And she’s really good at that.

I find it generally pretty useful.

**Craig:** My problem, honestly, and I don’t know if I’m common this way or not, but my problem is I am so embarrassed, even when I’m alone, to say, “Hey Siri,” I’m embarrassed.

**John:** Yeah. And you don’t have to. You can just push the home button.

**Craig:** I know. But if I’m driving and my phone is over there, then I want to, then I’m like, oh my god, am I going to say it? Am I going to–?

**John:** I say it all the time. And I’ll ask for directions while I’m headed someplace and a lot of the times it works. It doesn’t always work, but it works enough that I’m actually really happy to have it.

You don’t have the Amazon Alexa, do you?

**Craig:** No. Alec Berg has it.

**John:** People love it.

**Craig:** Again, I can’t say, “Hey–,” sorry, I don’t want to say it. “Hey Thingy,” I don’t want to say that because I’m embarrassed. I feel like a dope. But I understand that there needs to be something for it to know that I’m talking to it.

**John:** It’s true. I mean, I do like that we’re kind of living in The Next Generation where they tap their little badges and ask the computer a question. That’s always been my fantasy. One of my very favorite episodes of The Next Generation was where Doctor Beverly Crusher discovers that she’s in a simulation – or not really in a simulation – she’s in a time bubble. And she’s the only character in that part of the episode, and so she’s only talking to the computer, and the computer is giving her answers back. But the computer is describing the ship as like, well, what was that sudden shock? Well, the first three floors no longer exist. It was decompression of the hull.

I love that sense of talking to the computer and talking to this disembodied voice. And Siri and Alexa, they’re getting us closer there.

**Craig:** What a surprise that you like talking to a computer.

**John:** See, if you had listened to the Duly Noted episode with Matt Selman and company, you would know so much more about that.

**Craig:** Now I got to listen to it.

**John:** Now you got to listen. My One Cool Thing is called Phased. It is a Vimeo video shot by Joe Capra. And what is it is a series of time lapses of different sections of Los Angeles. And so we’ve seen a lot of time lapses where clouds drift by and things are really lovely. This was shot in 12K resolution on this camera called a Phase One XF IQ3. It’s 100 megapixel camera.

**Craig:** Geez.

**John:** So what that lets you do is you’re in this incredibly wide panoramic shot, and then you can punch into a pretty good close-up of a section. And so you can go from like the panorama to like, oh, I can see individual people. It’s really remarkable. And so I thought it was terrific. I can imagine lots of uses for this, particularly, I mean, for visual effects certainly, so you can get these incredibly detailed backgrounds on things, but other smart directors will find great uses for this just like they found uses for slow motion and for high frame rate photography.

There’s going to be something really cool to do here. So, I do want to stress that what I’m linking to is time lapse, so everything always sort of looks magical and cool because it’s time lapse. But there will be some great uses for this in the future I can sense.

**Craig:** Grand Theft Auto 7.

**John:** It does look like a video game already. And that’s what’s so remarkable. What I love about time lapse of cities is there’s just a glow behind things just because of sort of light bouncing around in special ways. And it does just look magical.

**Craig:** I think honestly the next generation of these big sandbox games will be normal. But I can easily see, like I don’t know, Grand Theft Auto is once every five years, something like that. I could easily see that, we’re maybe two years away, so seven years from now when Grand Theft Auto 7 comes out, they will have 12K’d an entire city. Or, maybe even the entire country at that point. And figured out a way for you to access it as you’re driving around, looking at the real – it’s going to be amazing.

**John:** It’s going to be Pokémon Go, but real. And basically you’ll just shoot real people. [laughs]

**Craig:** I can go to my own house.

**John:** So here’s what’s going to happen. Essentially they’ll just decide that the world is now Grand Theft Auto and the rules are just there are no rules.

**Craig:** The rules are there are no rules. I actually feel like it would be a more peaceful world. Because when you’re feeling really pissed off, you just go into your computer and you blow up people you want to blow up and you get it out of your system.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what we need. It’s like training for how you should deal with things in life.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Oh, shoot, I thought I could just hit reset, but I can’t hit reset. Like all those Brexit voters who thought like, oh, I can just refer to a safe state.

**Craig:** Well, Brexit voters are, yeah. They are not saved.

**John:** They are not saved. That’s our episode this week. There are links in the show notes to almost everything we talked about, including a lot of the articles we discussed. Our One Cool Things. So, definitely check those out.

If you’re listening to this episode in most podcast players, they have the links below the title artwork. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our editing is by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** If you have a question for us, write us at ask@johnaugust.com. You can also find us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on iTunes. You know how to leave a review for us. And that would be so fantastic if you would. It just helps new listeners find our show.

And our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us, send it in to that same address and we will maybe play it on the air. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Arlo Finch](http://arlofinch.tumblr.com/) on TUMBLR
* [Duly Noted: Let’s Talk about Episode 259](http://johnaugust.com/2016/duly-noted-lets-talk-about-episode-259)
* [Craig’s One Cool PI Thing](https://www.quora.com/Do-irrational-numbers-like-pi-disprove-humanity-being-a-simulation)
* [Latif Ullah’s Cut of Overboard](https://vimeo.com/174891455)
* [Begging the Question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)
* [Begging the Question Fallacy](http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the-question.html)
* [Trip Gabriel](http://nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/the-day-that-went-missing.html?_r=0)
* [Oliver Sacks](http://www.oliversacks.com/)
* [The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia](https://www.amazon.com/Answer-Riddle-Me-Memoir-Amnesia/dp/0547519273) on Amazon
* [Tom Hallman, Jr.](http://www.oregonlive.com/living/index.ssf/2016/07/the_fight_continues_for_vetera.html)
* [Clyde Haberman](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/us/veterans-of-atomic-test-blasts-no-warning-and-late-amends.html?_r=1)
* [2001 Anthrax Attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks)
* [Bruce Edward Ivins](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Edwards_Ivins)
* [macOS Sierra](http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra-preview/)
* [Phased](https://vimeo.com/173472729) by Joe Capra
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-exit-interview).

Previously on Scriptnotes.

**John August:** Subject: Podcasts. Wondering if you’d have any interest in doing a joint podcast on screenwriting?

**Craig Mazin:** A podcast would solve my “I want to talk about screenwriting, but I’m tired of writing about screenwriting” problem. So, yes, count me in.

**John:** Bonjour. Et Bienvenue. Je m’appelle John August.

**Craig:** Je m’appelle Craig Mazin.

**John:** There’s NaNoWriMo, which is National Novel Writing Month. I’m strongly considering actually just doing it this year.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And there’s an idea I have that is not a movie idea, or at least it’s not an idea that wants to exist first as a movie. And so I’m thinking about actually doing it this year and writing a book.

Bin Lee asks, “When can we hear Stuart’s voice on the podcast?”

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, we could just keep him like Maris, Niles’s wife on Frasier. Sort of a presence.

**John:** Indeed. Like in Fight Club the whole time through. I’ve always – I’ve actually been Stuart the whole time through.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 259 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the season finale of Scriptnotes, we have major announcements about the future of the show that listeners may find exciting and/or troubling. So, if you’re driving a car, please don’t swerve and hit a Pokémon Go player.

You might want until you get to a safe space. We will also be discussing that computer algorithm that says that there are only six plots, which is pretty much a layup. And, Craig, welcome. You are here in person. This was a big show, so we couldn’t do this by Skype. You had to be here live.

**Craig:** No, I had to be here live. I wanted to be here live. I did, unfortunately, mow down 14 Pokémon Go players.

**John:** Were they in a parking lot?

**Craig:** And nothing of value was lost.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I mean, what? What?

**John:** So, here’s what we were talking about before you came. It’s like if a Pokémon player dies while collecting Pokémon, do they all spray out like the rings like from Sonic the Hedgehog?

**Craig:** That would be amazing, because then the amount of murders – Pokémon Go related murders. Because then we would be living in Grand Theft Auto 5.

**John:** Yeah. It kind of feels like we already are. So, it’s a nice time.

**Craig:** Actually, that reminds me of my One Cool Thing. Because, as you know, I do believe in the fact that we are. But there’s maybe a way out. So, my One Cool Thing is going to be about the way out of that. But, no, I’m happy to be here. It’s very exciting. I don’t know what season finale of Scriptnotes means, since I believe our new season starts next week.

**John:** Our new season starts next week. But this is the end of five seasons. So, this is our fifth anniversary we’re coming up on.

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** Which is crazy.

**Craig:** What you get me?

**John:** Uh, nothing. I got you some changes. I got you some changes to the show, which is sort of exciting, too.

**Craig:** I hope they’re good ones.

**John:** And the reason I was thinking about the season finale concept is that when a television series comes to its series finale, there are certain things that are sort of tropes that are going to happen. And so there tends to be the defeat of a big, bad villain. I don’t know if we have any villains on our show. Do we have any villains?

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** Well, yeah. We have the death of a major character. The removal of a major character. Someone leaves the show. We have a change of venue.

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** He’s not a venue. He’s sort of a world onto himself.

**Craig:** Right. Good point. Good point.

**John:** We have meta conversations about the series and sort of how far we’ve come. There’s always that thing. There’s always that thing where you’re reflecting back on sort of all the stuff you did. Or like, hey, do you remember when.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So like at the end of a season of Survivor they used to do that thing where they had like all the torches, the torches of the fallen, and they got through all that. Jeff Probst listens to the show, so–

**Craig:** I know! I know. I think you and I are one of the 12 people that he follows on Twitter, which I think is fantastic. I was for a long time a longstanding Survivor watcher. It is a huge commitment of your life to be a first season to current season Survivor watcher.

**John:** I’ve watched every season.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. Admittedly, I – my wife continues, but I fell off somewhere in there. But that show is brilliant.

**John:** It’s really, really good. And so on that show they would always pass the torches of the fallen. And basically it felt like a huge filler, but it was excuse for showing footage of all the people who used to be on the show who are no longer on the show.

**Craig:** Well, it’s like in the Hunger Games when somebody dies, and then they show their face in the clouds. And they play sad music.

**John:** Yeah. But the last thing you always do on a season finale is really set up the next season. So that the wheels are in motion for next season. And like True Blood used to do a really good job of like they’d wrap up all their business like halfway through the final episode of the season, and then like introduce the whole new thing that was going to happen. Sort of tease that next thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or in books sometimes they’ll have the first chapter of the next book at the end of the book. The kids’ series will have that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like when the season – I think two seasons ago on Game of Thrones, the last shot was Arya Stark heading off to Bravos. So, you knew, okay, exciting things would be happening with her in Bravos, which curiously just was kind of a zero in terms of it’s actual – like the one thing I can criticize about what those guys have done character-wise, and I don’t even think it’s their fault, because I think they had to… – It’s like, look, that’s a huge chunk of the books. But, narratively, if she had missed that boat and then hit her head and slept for two years, she’d be right back where she is now.

Well, with little changes.

**John:** With little changes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Little changes. She’s got some new skills.

**John:** So, we are to some degree sailing off to Bravos. Hopefully there will be some growth and some change, but that’s this episode.

And so we’re going to dig into it after we do some follow up. And we’ll start with some boat follow up, though. So, in an earlier episode we talked about magical dad transformation comedies, and someone brought up the Goldie Hawn/Kurt Russell comedy, Overboard. And we both, I think, commented that like that movie is really dark when you think about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The actual circumstances of Overboard require a man to take massive advantage of a brain-injured woman, gaslight her, total gas-lighting her into believing that. And then kind of employ her as a domestic slave. And then also have sex with her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then in the end convince her to stay of her own volition.

**John:** So a troubling premise, really. And so we said on the show, someone could easily recut that trailer as a dark kind of thriller. And one of our listeners – because we have the best listeners in the entire world–

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** Did this. So, Fredrik Limi, we’ll provide a link in the show notes, he did what’s sort of a David Fincher version of it called Girl Gone Overboard. And it’s nicely done. I found it a little bit long, but I thought he found the really good shots that sort of told that very dark story from her point of view. Questioning like, wait, am I really the woman you say I am?

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I wanted creepier music.

**John:** Yeah. Creepy music is very important.

**Craig:** We can’t help but criticize everything, right? We’re the worst.

**John:** We are the worst.

**Craig:** We’re the worst.

**John:** We’re the worst.

**Craig:** This guy did us a favor.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we’re like, eh, it’s too long. Change the music.

**John:** I thought he did a brilliant job selecting out those moments.

**Craig:** He did. Actually, there were moments that I had forgotten happened, like when he’s pushing her head in the water. And you’re like, “Oh, god.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a terrible, terrible premise for a movie.

**John:** Terrible premise for a movie. Today’s episode is unique in the history of our podcast, because in this episode Stuart Friedel, who has always been a man behind the curtain, a person we refer to but don’t actually invite onto the show itself–

**Craig:** For good reason.

**John:** Yes, Stuart Friedel is here because this is his going away. This is his exit interview.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Stuart Friedel, the producer of Scriptnotes for five years, is finally leaving the nest. So we thought it’s about time to have him on the show to actually talk about what he’s done, what he’s doing, what he’s going to do. Stuart Friedel, welcome to Scriptnotes.

**Stuart Friedel:** Thanks for having me.

**Craig:** Wow. He did that so well. It’s like he’s learned. This is bizarre, because as you know, I still – even though I’m looking at you, Stuart – right now I’m not quite sure you’re real.

**Stuart:** I’m not either, frankly.

**Craig:** Good. So we’re on the same page.

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I guess we should probably start by finding out why you’re leaving, right?

**Stuart:** Yeah. That’s a good question. I would say that I’ve hit the critical mass of other projects, so it’s just time for me to pack my bags and hit the road.

**Craig:** And your other projects are of what nature?

**Stuart:** TV writing, kids’ TV primarily, which is my – I’d say my life’s work. My passion.

**John:** So, I think it’s good for us to fill in the backstory and really chart the entire person who is Stuart Friedel, because so far he’s always been this name, or the person who answers the emails, or like sends out the tee-shirts, or gets yelled at when the phone rings while we’re trying to record.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s my favorite part.

**Stuart:** [laughs] Those are all things that I do. This is true.

**John:** So, Stuart has been my assistant for five years. And I hired you from Disney Channel.

**Stuart:** You did. Yeah. I was working as the Assistant in original programming development at Disney Channel.

**Craig:** And how did you even come to find him there and pull him out like a bird stealing another bird’s egg?

**John:** That’s what it was. Stuart went through the Stark Program, the same graduate school program that I went through at USC. And so when Matt Byrne, when my previous assistant, was time for him to go, he got staffed on the TV show Scandal and is still a big writer on Scandal.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We put out the call to Starkies saying, “Hey, this job is open.” Whenever that job becomes open, people scramble for it. So, we don’t sort of put out the call too wide. How did you find out about the job?

**Stuart:** I was at the time teaching – is a very loose word – but I was instructing a third of a Stark class at nights, The Negotiation Game, which is awesome. And one of co-“adjunct professors” was on a Stark email list that I didn’t know existed. And they were like gossiping about it after class.

And I kind of kept my ear to the ground. We had Chad and Dara come speak to us, and I guess Dana come speak to our class, while I was at Stark.

**Craig:** All former John August assistants.

**Stuart:** Yeah. They all gave the advice, like if you have any interest in writing, you know, keep your ear to the ground. And my time at Disney, for this job specifically, my time at Disney was fine. I was definitely at a point where it was like a crossroads. And I was either going to be there for a long time, or not. And for a few reasons I kind of wanted to be in the “not” camp. And so this was like fate. It was the exact right moment. I was at Disney for 365 days on the nose. And I had always said I don’t want to do it for less than a year.

**Craig:** This means something.

**Stuart:** Yeah. So it was, you know, kismet.

**Craig:** Nice. And so then John plucks you away.

**Stuart:** Yeah. The application process was long.

**Craig:** Long and arduous.

**John:** Yeah. So I think during your session I met with like five different candidates, and I had you edit together a bit of the blog – because at this point there was no podcast, so it was mostly about the blog. It was mostly about johnaugust.com. And I had you read a script? What else?

**Stuart:** Yeah. So I remember the job description was like don’t write a typical cover letter. So I remember writing this two-page cover letter and like going over it. I remember I had line that was like “In the grand Disney tradition, I’m ready to be rescued,” and like all that stuff. I was really proud of it.

**Craig:** That’s adorable, Stuart.

**Stuart:** That was true. And then came in for an interview. And first round interview was just meeting. You sent me home with a script and said do notes on this. And it was like this whole prompt. And the last line was, “And proofread it.” Come in with like casting, all this.

And I got here an hour early and I was sitting in the car, and I was like all ready with my notes and my casting. And then it was like, “And proofread it,” and I had totally forgotten to do that. And I remember coming in during my interview and saying like you asked that at the end, and I was like I thought I had gotten through the whole, and forgot that you wanted us to proofread it. And I was like, “I got to be honest,” and I told that story. And I was like, “And while I was reading it, I found one mistake, which was you wrote four-poster bed, but it’s supposed to be four-post bed.” But then I looked up on my iPhone and it actually is four-poster bed.

So, not only do I have no mistakes, but the one mistake that I found wasn’t actually a mistake.

**John:** Yeah.

**Stuart:** And then, for some reason, you didn’t count me out. You sent us home again–

**Craig:** Yeah, I would have – just that ridiculous story, I would have, absolutely, I would have removed you from my premises.

**John:** So not only did you not follow instructions, then you were wrong when you attempted to follow the instructions, but at the last minute you scrambled.

**Stuart:** I owned it. And I admitted it. Hopefully I–

**Craig:** That’s the worst part. That’s the absolute worst part, is now you’re making me have to care about your problem. I would have had you removed from the premises.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I mean, that’s what I figured. If I make him internalize it. If I–

**Craig:** Well, that worked on him.

**Stuart:** [laughs] Yeah. And then you sent us home and it was like the next prompt was – or the hypothetical. I want to write a book that is the blog as a book, that’s very much like Chapter Three of Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants. And went to Barnes & Noble that day and I read cover to cover at work the entire book. And then you were like, “So what’s the table of contents of my book.” And we went, I think, three notes sessions back and forth.

And then I remember the day that you called me, and I went to the Disney Channel parking garage to take the call.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Aw.

**Stuart:** And I got the job.

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. Now, for people that are thinking about breaking into our business, I don’t know – because I actually never did the typical assistant job. My first job was through a temp agency really. So there wasn’t much of an interview process. It was just, “How fast can you type? Yeah, you seem to wear clothes. You’re fine.”

Is this normal or abnormal?

**John:** I think it’s abnormal in the sense that most times when you’re hiring an assistant, you’re basically like can you keep track of my calendar and schedule and–

**Craig:** Phones.

**John:** Phones, yeah. And that kind of stuff. And I recognized that over the years, my assistants, there wasn’t a lot of that calendar and phone stuff. But there was a lot of like the ability to talk about the script I’m working on, the ability to read stuff and proofread it. The ability to sort of recognize what was important and what was not important.

So, some backstory on my side. Like I’ve been lucky to have this string of remarkable assistants. My first assistant was Rawson Thurber, who has been a guest on the show. Then I had Dana Fox. I had Chad Creasey. And the Creaseys went on to do great stuff. I had Matt Byrne. And now Stuart Friedel.

And so I got to recognize over time that it wasn’t just about the person sitting there being barely level competent. You wanted somebody who could actually do something really good. And somebody who I wouldn’t be annoyed with sitting downstairs and doing their own stuff the whole day.

**Craig:** That’s the huge part. Because that eliminates almost everyone for me.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. You don’t want anyone else in your space.

**Craig:** No. No, to look at somebody – I do have someone who works with me, and she’s been with me for years. And I can’t do – like if she came to me and said, “I’m thinking of moving on for a reason,” I would just say, “Well, then I’m retiring.” Because I can’t do this again. I can’t meet anyone new. I can’t look at a new person. It’s going to be terrible.

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**John:** The other difference is that I’ve hired a lot of other people sort of in addition to assistants, so I’ve had designers, and I’ve had Nima who does our coding. So there’s been other people who have sort of come through the world. And so you get a sense of who is going to fit in and who is going to be additive in a great way.

**Stuart:** I remember in the final interview you said like, “I’m not always the best roommate, but in this situation we’re not roommates. I’m the boss. So you just have to be aware of that.” And I think that’s a very–

**Craig:** Perfectly. I mean, that is accurate. I wouldn’t have said that either. Because, to me, what do you not know that I’m your boss?

**Stuart:** Right. Right.

**Craig:** I’m already – you could see the problem with me, right?

**John:** So I’ll tell you that when I hired you, I really didn’t think you would last five years.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** I thought you would last one year. And here’s why. I remember telling Mike my husband this. Is I thought like, well, he’s really good. I bet in a year he’s going to go back to kids’ TV, because he’s the only person I’ve ever met who actually genuinely loves kids’ TV. Like you’re not faking it. You really do love kids’ television. And when we come back from a trip, on the DVR we’ll see all the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon shows that you’ve recorded that you’ve actually watched because you keep track of that stuff. You actually know the names of the actors. You can recognize sort of trends and things.

**Craig:** Well, Stuart, you should be on children’s TV. I mean, people don’t necessarily know what you look like. But you look exactly like the sort of guy I would be thrilled to have my young child watching a la Blue’s Clues.

**Stuart:** Oh wow. I thought you meant as a child.

**Craig:** No, no. Steve from Blue’s Clues.

**John:** He very much has a Steve from Blue’s Clues quality.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, you look like fun. And you look safe.

**Stuart:** All right. Cool.

**Craig:** And you look nice and kind. And you would be – you should make a show for yourself.

**Stuart:** All right. I’ll take that one to the bank.

**Craig:** Only if you do it. If you don’t do it, now it’s just tragically upset guy.

**Stuart:** If I were a kid that lived in LA, there’s no doubt I would have pressured my parents to getting me on at least in the room for those things.

**John:** Stuart, who is the one kid I see on everything now who has the red hair, who is in the recent version of Wet Hot American Summer, but he was also the pseudo bully kid, but he’s also in Another Period recently? He’s in everything.

**Stuart:** Yeah. And he was on those commercials as the fairy that flies through that room. I don’t know his name, but you’re right that he is on everything now. He’s not really on many kids’ things though.

**John:** No. he’s always the kid in an adults’ thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s sort of – he grows up to be you.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I had a kid when I was a camp counselor who I really liked, but he was like the punk red-headed kid that was in my cabin. He’s that kid, but this generation’s “that kid.”

**Craig:** That kid. Yeah.

**John:** And so I thought that you were going to be leaving about two years ago, also, because when my assistants are working for me they’re always writing stuff, and I never read their stuff until they ask me to read it. And so finally you asked me to read something. And I read it and it was really good.

And it may not have been the very first thing I read that said like, “Oh well, he can really do it,” but like the second thing I was like, oh, that’s really good. I can totally see–

**Craig:** Stuart can do this.

**John:** He can do this. And like you are going to get staffed, and then all this stuff was going to happen. And I remember actually talking with a showrunner who called in sort of doing a background check on you. And I was like, well, he’s totally—

**Stuart:** Oh really? I didn’t know that.

**John:** The MTV show.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I know what you’re talking about. I didn’t know that they called.

**John:** Oh, no, they called.

**Stuart:** I didn’t get the job.

**John:** No, you did not get the job.

**Craig:** What did you say, John?

**John:** I said lovely things about how talented he is.

**Craig:** Stuart should be a character on a child’s show. He appears to be an animated Muppet. Yes. Oh, what is your channel? MTV? Oh, no, no, no, no.

**Stuart:** Glad to hear that that staffing meeting went well, because I thought it went well, and then I was sort of disappointed that I didn’t get the job. But at least if they were calling about me it means I wasn’t crazy.

**John:** I’m sorry that for the last two years I haven’t told you that the meeting went well.

**Craig:** What else have you not told him?

**John:** That’s sort of the bulk of it. So, as Stuart is preparing to leave, I can tell you that there’s a pattern that happens where people’s scripts get passed around without them knowing they get passed around. And so when I started hearing from Stuart that like, oh, someone else read this thing and I didn’t even know they were reading it. When I started hearing those kind of conversations I was like, oh, his clock is ticking. This is all happening here.

And then people come to a point where the number of meetings they have to have and the number of phone calls they have to have is just tremendous. And I was able to sit down with Stuart and say like the most important thing for you to do is to take all these meetings and do all these things. And I need somebody who is here to answer the phones and do stuff. And so we’re at this threshold now. And I’m happy that we’re at this threshold.

And also, you’re–

**Stuart:** A lot of good stuff is happening.

**John:** And you’re getting married.

**Stuart:** Getting married in three weeks.

**Craig:** I’m so excited. I’m going to be there.

**Stuart:** Me too. Yeah. I’m pretty stoked.

**Craig:** Are you going to be there?

**John:** I’m going to be there.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**Stuart:** The all-stars Scriptnotes team.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Is your dad going to be there?

**Stuart:** My dad will be there.

**Craig:** I love Stuart’s dad so much.

**Stuart:** Me too.

**Craig:** Your mom is great.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I love my mom also. It’s her birthday today actually.

**Craig:** But there’s something about your dad. Oh, it is? Happy Birthday, Mrs. Friedel.

**Stuart:** I’ll pass it along.

**John:** Congratulations. Indeed. Stuart’s parents and even grandparents would come to live shows, which I just found remarkable.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Because live shows can be really filthy. Like, this is a clean episode, but sometimes they’re not clean.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I have a brother who lives out here. And he in the course of my working here has had two babies. And so I’ve been lucky enough to have four grandparents that will come for those things. And those things also seem to coincide with live episodes.

**Craig:** And all of your grandparents are alive?

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Wow. Good genes.

**Stuart:** Yeah, right, it’s kind of crazy.

**Craig:** Is everyone red-headed?

**Stuart:** No one. I’m the only one.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Stuart:** Back to post – like before my grandparents. I’m the only one.

**Craig:** Then, if the pattern holds, you will also be the only one who dies young.

**Stuart:** There we go.

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**Stuart:** As a statistician, you understand how these patterns and things work.

**Craig:** Absolutely. What I just said was mathematically valid.

**John:** We have questions from listeners and you’re here, so let’s have you answer some of these. Kevin writes, “I wonder, does Stuart – hi Stuart – keep a mental track of the best entries in his opinion in the Three Page Challenge? If so, that could be a great post on your blog, or yearend podcast material.” Stuart, do you keep track of the best entries in Three Page Challenge?

**Stuart:** Well, first of all, hi back Kevin. No I do not. If you’re saying best as in like most professional, I wouldn’t feel comfortable judging these scripts in three pages for that in and of itself. We were talking earlier about the Stuart Special–

**Craig:** Oh, the Stuart Special.

**Stuart:** It’s sort of something that happens–

**John:** Describe the Stuart Special.

**Stuart:** So, what has been deemed the Stuart Special is–

**Craig:** No, it’s the Stuart Special. [laughs]

**Stuart:** Is something happens exciting and then it’s like “two months earlier, six hours earlier,” you know, the flashback. The tease and then the flashback. And I do not go out of my way to purposely pick those. I think what happens is, so we say you can turn in any three pages of your script. Most people – and by most I mean over 99% of people – turn in their first three pages. And in your first three pages, you should hopefully be writing something eye-catching in some sense.

If it were me, I wouldn’t be turning in my first three necessarily. I would be turning in–

**Craig:** Right. I’ve always been surprised by that. I’ve always thought that more people would–

**Stuart:** I think people think it’s a precedent. I think people think like, oh, it’s supposed to always be your first three because they usually pick the first three.

**Craig:** We’ve only done the first three I think, right?

**Stuart:** I think we had one. I think we had one that wasn’t.

**Craig:** One that was in the middle? Okay.

**Stuart:** But, not only have we never said that, but it clearly says it I believe on the submissions page.

**Craig:** For sure.

**Stuart:** At least it has. So I think that people turn in their first three and then a lot of times there’s not something eye-catching there, or just not something to talk about or something exciting.

**Craig:** You mean, so they’re kind of forcing – they rewrite it to create a Stuart Special?

**Stuart:** Or, it’s just that those are the ones that wind up getting picked because those are the ones that have something in it that are not first three page moments. And so even though they are “the first three pages” but there’s something happening that’s actually a third-act or a second-act moment.

**John:** Because they’re actually starting in the middle of some action, so therefore there’s things to discuss that isn’t just like clearly like let’s open up the story.

**Craig:** Right. That makes sense. But you don’t necessarily pick the ones that you think are “the best.” You’re looking for the ones that you think will give us the most to discuss.

**Stuart:** Right. And I should be clear that if you are chosen, you are in like at least the 85th or 90th percentile. I am not picking the ones that are not competent. I am picking ones that are – I don’t think these people should be embarrassed to have their pages exposed. I would never purposely embarrass somebody.

And don’t think – like sometimes I would go on like Reddit Screenwriting or something in the early does of Three Page Challenges and see the way that people were talking about ones that got ripped apart. And I felt really bad because I was like I wanted to reach out to those people and say, “Oh, you were so much better than 75 others that I read at the same time that I read yours that I flagged yours for a reason.”

So, I’m not picking the best ones. The best ones – there’s nothing to talk about. Oh, you want to read good writing, I will tell you what professional screenplays you can read that’s good writing. You know, like it’s the one that if – my goal is we’re teaching a class and we’re going to take out that little slide projector thing that puts some pages on the wall and we are as a class going to go through this together and dissect it.

And what three pages of this pile of 1,500 submissions has something in it that the whole class will benefit from?

**Craig:** That’s the current amount that we have?

**Stuart:** It’s over 1,500. And by the way, since we switched to entering through the web page – it used to be an email submission, and we had however many more even before that.

**Craig:** Oh wow.

**John:** It’s a lot. So, you’re going to miss Three Page Challenges tremendously. You’re going to wake up in the middle of the night going how could I possibly – people will just start sending your Three Page Challenges just so you can enjoy them.

**Stuart:** Yeah. Yeah. I have no doubt. I mean, I’ve gotten that before. Like, I’ve met people at parties and they hear who I am and they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to send you three pages.” Or, “Oh, I sent my three pages. Can you go read them?” And I’m like, “Well, I probably read them.” My answer is, I never say like, “Yeah, I’m going to go home and read it today.” It’s either like I’ve read it, or I will read it, or, you know, and you don’t get special treatment. And–

**Craig:** I’m just, you know, I get very frightened when the reality of the podcast enters my vision, you know, because I like to just think that we’re talking and no one is listening to this. So that story makes me nervous. [laughs] I don’t like it. It’s scary.

**Stuart:** And you guys, and now I’m an old man, I’m settling down and getting married, but in the day when I was going out on Saturday nights and meeting random people–

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**Stuart:** Well, you know, at parties. It’s Los Angeles. Go to Los Angeles parties. Then I’d fairly regularly come across people that were listeners and had entered.

**Craig:** You know what I’m going to ask you now?

**Stuart:** What’s that?

**Craig:** Did it ever?

**John:** Did it help?

**Craig:** Did the whole, “I’m the producer of Scriptnotes,” did that – did it Stuart?

**Stuart:** Uh, it most certainly did not.

**Craig:** I had a feeling. [laughs] It probably does the opposite.

**Stuart:** It’s a conversation starter for certain people, for sure. And, great, I’m happy to talk about it. If you ever see me, I mean, there’s a gentleman who I’ve seen at Village Bakery in Atwater a few times who is really nice and said hi to me. And I was like, cool, I’ve officially been recognized now.

**Craig:** Oh nice.

**Stuart:** First time in my life. And probably only. He’s probably listening to this now.

**Craig:** Until you get your show.

**John:** Till now. Next question is from Andrew in DC who writes, “After a few years of development hell, the $200 million movie is finally being made. Who plays John and who plays Craig in the Scriptnotes movie?” So, Andrew proposes Thomas Middleditch for me. Tony Shalhoub for Craig.

**Craig:** It’s the worst.

**John:** And Douglas Rain for Stuart. And Douglas Rain being the voice of HAL in 2001.

**Stuart:** Great.

**Craig:** This is terrible.

**John:** Terrible question. So who plays you though?

**Craig:** Who plays me?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know. That’s a tough one.

**John:** I could see like Paul Giamatti, but you’re much younger than Paul Giamatti.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I definitely have the hang-doggy, grumpy, and then vaguely ethnic–

**John:** Steve Zissis could play you.

**Craig:** That’s who I want. I want Steve Zissis to play me. You are not played by–

**John:** I’m not Thomas Middleditch. He hasn’t seen me.

**Craig:** You’re older and you should be, ooh, there’s those actors that look like you.

**John:** So, I’m blanking on his name right now. He’s always the villain in things. He’s always a secondary character.

**Stuart:** Danny Trejo?

**John:** Danny Trejo is really who I should be.

**Craig:** That’s who should play John.

**John:** I’ll think of his name in like five minutes. But he was the villain in Ant-Man.

**Craig:** You know what? When I was a kid, I don’t know if you guys had them where you lived, but we had the commercials for Hebrew National hot dogs. And the mascot for Hebrew National hot dogs was Uncle Sam. And he said we answer to a higher authority. It was like, okay, god is telling us what the…

And that guy is probably dead by now, but in his prime, that’s who you were.

**John:** Sounds very good.

**Stuart:** He may have been, I don’t want to say a One Cool Thing, but I think that – I mean, I’ll find the link again for this episode, but I think we’ve actually linked to that in a previous episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** To the Hebrew National guy?

**Stuart:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** Corey Stoll is who I was thinking of. Corey Stoll as the Ant-Man villain.

**Stuart:** He’s great.

**Craig:** That works.

**John:** I’ll be Corey Stoll. But who should be Stuart now? Because obviously this person has no idea what you look like.

**Stuart:** Is it just a voice?

**John:** Yeah, I guess you’re just a voice.

**Craig:** No, I mean–

**Stuart:** If it’s just a voice, it’s Billy West, who is my favorite voice actor.

**John:** Is he on Futurama?

**Stuart:** He is on Futurama. And he is on Doug. And he’s on Honey Nut Cheerios commercials. But, if it’s just a voice, I mean, I might as well shoot for the stars.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it shouldn’t be a voice. Obviously we get that kid that we were just talking about.

**Stuart:** That child? That 13?

**John:** Because in the movie version, he is a child.

**Craig:** That child? By the way, the best thing is that Stuart is played by an 11-year-old, but we give him all the dialogue of an adult. And we never comment on the fact that this child is producing our show.

**Stuart:** Louis C.K.’s agent in Louis.

**Craig:** Right.

**Stuart:** I wrote a pilot that I’ve done nothing with called Recessive Genius, about a redhead that wants to be a rapper, and all of his red-headed family members. And so I have a cast list somewhere of all the redheads in Hollywood. We can pull that.

**Craig:** There’s a good amount.

**Stuart:** Yeah, there is. I mean, it’s cast-able. Homeland.

**Craig:** What’s her name?

**Stuart:** Faye Dunaway?

**Craig:** Ron Howard’s daughter.

**Stuart:** Paige. Oh, Bryce Dallas. Sorry.

**Craig:** Bryce Dallas. Bryce Dallas Howard.

**John:** Good stuff. Our final question comes in from Mark in LA. He says, “Have you seen the writing credits for the new film Ghostbusters? I almost fell out of my chair when I saw that Ivan Reitman’s name is listed in the writing credits as Based on the 1984 film Ghostbusters, directed by.” So, let’s talk through sort of what the writing credits are, the writing credits block on the new Ghostbusters, because it is a little bit strange.

So, it says written by Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, based on the 1984 film Ghostbusters directed by Ivan Reitman, written by Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd.

Craig, you are the credits master. Talk us through what’s going on here.

**Craig:** Well, it is very odd. Typically you will have a “Based on” when there is source material. And that’s the company can sort of say, okay, we’ve assigned you a certain amount of material. So, in this case, certainly when Katie and Paul sat down and made their deals to write Ghostbusters, they were assigned everything. So, I guarantee you they were assigned every prior Ghostbusters, the scripts that have been written, like Lee and Gene had done one, and a whole bunch of people, right?

So, all of that was assigned to them. And also Ghostbusters 1 and Ghostbusters 2, the original movies were assigned to them as source material. So, yes, normally what you’d see is it would say “Based on Ghostbusters,” but it doesn’t have to say that, by the way.

I mean, on remakes typically they don’t bother with that. So, in this one they did. And then they added the credits in. So, Mark is not correct. Ivan Reitman’s name is not listed in the writing credits. The credits are actually accurate. He’s the director. And then Dan and Harold are listed as the writers, which is correct.

So when I saw this, I assumed that what happened was Paul Feig and Katie Dippold went to the Guild and said this is something we want to do. Would you grant us a waiver? It would require a waiver. So, the Guild can – because our credits are governed by our contract, right? So any time we want to do a different kind of credit, and the studio wants to do a different kind of credit, the Board of Directors has to vote to grant a waiver. And so I suspect they went, because they wanted to do this, and the Guild said sure.

**John:** To clarify, the based on, that whole section is considered the underlying materials credit. So that’s not the actual writing credit on this movie. That is the source material credit. And does the Guild have like final authority on determining what is the source material for the project?

**Craig:** Yes. So, typically what happens if there’s any dispute about it, then that’s a pre-arbitration and that has to do with the company. But usually it’s pretty well-governed because the contract that we all get is a – we call it a Guild-covered contract. That means the contract is conforming to our collective bargaining agreement. And one of the ways you conform to it is you say I’m assigning you the following material. That now becomes underlying material. So the Guild doesn’t actually have to do after-the-fact choices. It’s just sort of baked in.

But like I said, on remakes – one thing that does happen on a remake is the writers of the original movie actually go in to the arbitration as Writer A, which is an interesting thing. Now, it’s rare that that writer does get credit, because usually on a remake quite a bit changes.

But there have been cases of it. 3:10 to Yuma. And most notably the new – the remake of The Omen. Only the writer of the first movie got credit because essentially they felt that nothing had changed substantially in such a way that another writer should have credit. That’s remarkable. And I don’t know of any other movie like that.

But, so for instance, when Gus Van Sant remakes Psycho word-for-word, the first writer gets credit alone.

**John:** So in the case of the new Ghostbusters, Harold Ramis’ estate and Dan Aykroyd, they are not getting residuals for this new thing because they are not the credited writers on this new movie.

**Craig:** Right. So all of the residuals for this movie will go to Katie and Paul. They will be split in half exactly.

**John:** Because they are ampersand, we should clarify. They are ampersand as a writing team.

**Craig:** Whether they were ampersand or not.

**John:** They’re a single writing credit, yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, if one team, they would share it. If two separates, they would share it. And they are the only ones. It’s possible that Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis had a separate producing kind of thing, but that’s aside from what the Guild does. That’s extra money on top of things.

So, the writing credits are – in terms of who actually wrote the screenplay of the Ghostbusters that’s in theaters now – Katie Dippold and Paul Feig, and that’s it.

**John:** Very good. All right, many people on Twitter this week wrote in talking to us about these six plots. So, essentially what happened is a bunch of researchers at the University of Vermont in Burlington, they used sentiment analysis, which is where you look at strings of words to determine their emotional content. You set algorithms in computers to do all of this.

And they mapped the plot of 1,700 works of fiction. Most of these are novels, but some of them are plays. And so they track the changes of sentiment from moment to moment. And they build these charts of the overall arc of these different works. And from there, they determined there are basically six categories of works.

There are works that have fall, rise, and fall, like Oedipus Rex. There’s rise then a fall. There’s fall then a rise, like a lot of super heroes. There’s the steady fall. There’s the steady rise. There’s a rise, and a fall, and a rise, like Cinderella. So, we’re basically out of business because the computers have figured out that there’s only six plots.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look. Everyone knows that Romeo and Juliet is a timeless classic and still works to this very day because it has a steady fall.

**John:** Yeah, that’s really–

**Craig:** WTF to the maximum level of WTFs.

**John:** Because there’s no moments of happiness or joy in Romeo and Juliet. There’s no rise, there’s no love, there’s no flash of love.

**Craig:** There’s nothing frankly at all except a steady fall? This is the dumbest of all these things. And many of them are dumb. I love the graph. A stupid graph. And then the fact that these… – This is what happens, unfortunately. I love science. You know, I’m a scientist. But, see, I don’t go into labs and start pressing buttons. And I really wish that scientists would not go into novels and start pressing buttons, because what they’re doing is they’re just engaging in a kind of reductive analysis, which anyone could do.

You could also say that there’s really only one plot: beginning, middle, end.

**Stuart:** Right. There’s arrows. There’s up and down. And in a macro view – we’re not even going to look at the way there’s up-down-up-up-down-down – just in a macro view, look at where the up is, and look at where the down is. There’s only six plots.

**Craig:** And also, why are the ups and downs now how they define plot? That’s not how I define plot at all.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, Nima who works for us, he was pointing out that essentially there were theoretically eight different plots you could find. But they compressed them down because you could theoretically have rise-rise-fall, or rise-fall-fall, but they compress those down to just rise-fall.

So, even in potential plots, they’re just compressing them down.

**Craig:** It’s like trigonometry. Side-angle-side. Side-side-angle. Angle-angle-side. It’s the dumbest. Of all of these, this one truly is the dumbest because it is useless. It’s bad science that provides click-baiters something to say. It teaches you nothing. It informs nothing. It doesn’t inform you as a reader. It doesn’t inform you as a writer. It doesn’t help you think about the world in any way. It is the emptiest of noise.

I hate it.

**John:** [laughs] I knew this would be a simple layup here.

**Craig:** I do always rise to the occasion. I mean, never once will I ever resist umbrage. When you wave a red flag in front of me, I’m going to do what I do. I’m a simple man. Rise-fall-fall.

**John:** All right, so it’s time for our second big announcement on the show, about a huge change that’s happening. Which is something that, Craig, you’ve known about for quite a long time, but I’ve deliberately sort of not said anything about it because it’s one of those things where you tell people that it’s going to happen and then everyone is like, “Ahhhh….” And it makes people sort of nervous.

And so now it’s 30 days away, so it’s time for us to say. I am leaving Los Angeles. I am moving to Paris. And so I’m going to be living in the City of Light. I’m going to be a writer there in Paris.

**Craig:** But not permanently.

**John:** Just for a year. So, for one year, I will be in Paris. And I’ll be living there. So, it’s always been the plan. This is not in reaction to something. I don’t have like insight about what’s–

**Craig:** You’re not fleeing.

**John:** I’m not fleeing. There’s no investigation. I’m not nervous about sort of the – well, I am nervous about the election. It always has been the plan that I’d be gone for the last part of the election.

**Craig:** Well, Europe seems to have managed to screw themselves up even worse than we are.

**John:** Absolutely. And there’s a French election coming, too.

**Craig:** That’ll be brilliant.

**John:** Really genius. And so the plan has been for quite a long time that my family and I are going to be moving to Paris starting in August and going through next August for my daughter’s 6th grade year of school. So, she’s been at a K-5 school. The schools we want to go to start in 7th grade after that. And so for 6th grade we had to do something.

And so a bunch of years ago Film France took a bunch of screenwriters over to Paris and showed us a bunch of locations that they wanted us to film in. So, I was on a trip with Derek Haas, [Unintelligible], and John Lee Hancock. And John Lee Hancock – and Justin Marks – but John Lee said, “You know what? I’m loving this. I’m going to pull my kids out of school and we’re going to live in Paris for a year.”

And I said that’s a great idea. I’m going to steal it right now. And so that’s been the plan for–

**Craig:** But he didn’t do that.

**John:** He never did it.

**Craig:** No. Because I could have told you that John Lee Hancock does not run his household. Holly Hancock, on the other hand–

**John:** Yeah. Holly Hancock is fantastic.

**Craig:** Amazing. And surely said to him, “No.” And that was the end of that discussion.

**John:** But you’ll notice that now they are single parents because their kids are off in boarding school.

**Craig:** Not far from here. So they’re visiting them plenty.

**John:** They’re visiting them plenty. So, anyway, I stole John Lee Hancock’s idea. It’s been the plan for the last five years that we’re going to be moving to Paris. And now it’s finally suddenly here.

And so I want to talk about why you don’t expose that ahead of time, because I didn’t want sort of everybody in Hollywood to know that I was moving because then it’s that weird thing like, well, are you going to hire somebody for a job knowing that they’re not going to be around to deliver the second trip.

**Craig:** Absolutely. This comes up. I remember actually – not to bring everybody down – but I remember having a long talk with my friend Don Rhymer, who was a working screenwriter for many, many years.

**John:** He did the Rio movies.

**Craig:** He did the Rio movies. Exactly. And Surf’s Up. And then he had worked in television for many, many years, like on Evening Shade and other shows like that.

And he got sick. He got cancer. And he was really worried about who do I tell, because I don’t want people to not hire me, because right now I’m happy to work. And he did, by the way, he worked – it was remarkable. His whole cancer odyssey was about four years long and unfortunately did not end successfully. But, the entire time he worked.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And at some point he was unable to keep it from people. But, it’s a real thing. You don’t want people to suddenly put you in the box of, “Oh, you’re moving to Paris. Well that’s like you’re dead.”

**John:** Yeah. Women writers often face this with pregnancy. And so our friend, Dana Fox, who was on the show – I’m not sure quite where it was in her development process – but she had a pregnancy that required her to be on bed rest, and yet she also had a tremendous amount of work to do. And she had writers to meet with.

And so she had to sort of keep the pregnancy a secret from the people she was working with so they wouldn’t freak out about her TV show.

**Craig:** She just pretended to be incredibly lazy?

**John:** I think she’s fine with me telling you. She faked a back injury to sort of explain why she was having to take meetings at her house rather than at the office.

**Craig:** In her bed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I feel like I want to that now, just so I don’t have to get out of bed.

**John:** It’s a really good plan.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** It’s an amazing plan. So, obviously we live in 2016 in a time where I can remotely on anything, and so most of what I do is emails anyway. It’s not going to be significantly impacting my ability to do my work. But it is a real change. And even when I was in Chicago doing Big Fish, or New York doing Big Fish, I was always sort of in the country and in the same time zone.

And so a challenge for our show is that we do the show by Skype, and so that’ll be the same. But we’re also on really different clocks.

**Craig:** That’s the problem. So, Paris is 10—

**John:** Depends on what time of year. But, yeah, 10 hours.

**Craig:** Does it go down to nine when we–?

**John:** I think there’s some times where we’re at nine, and sometimes where it can go more.

**Craig:** Based on Daylight Savings. So, that’s a terrible time split.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** It’s nearly flipping AM/PM. So, it’s always going to be one of us either too early or too late. But I’m happy to take the late shift by the way. That’s my jam. I don’t like getting up.

And then the nice thing is, you’re right, we could be on different planets the way we do the podcast normally. But, you know, we have some plans to – that I don’t think will disrupt your… – I mean, I’d like to think because – not because we care about our listeners but because we’re just the way we are—

**John:** We are the way we are.

**Craig:** We deliver a consistent product.

**John:** Agreed. And so you’ve done episodes without me. Like the Alec Berg episode you did, which was terrific. And so there’s already a plan for a solo one that you’re going to be doing very soon. There are writers in the UK and in France who I may be talking with in doing some solo things, too.

We’ll find ways to make it work. You don’t listen to any other podcasts, but if you did, you would know that some of them actually go to like a season format where they’re off a few weeks, and then they’re on for a bunch of weeks. So, Serial does that. And other shows do that. I don’t think we’re going to go quite that far, but there may be some weeks where we’re doing a best-of, or we’re just off. And we’ll let you know if that happens. But I think we’ll be able to keep up sort of like a normal schedule.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. Certainly we’ll have plenty to discuss. I’m not freaked out about it completely. I’m freaked out like 78%. You know, because I’m your child. Daddy is leaving.

**John:** And Stuart is leaving. So it’s a lot of change.

**Craig:** But I never believed Stuart was really real. So, that’s not a problem for me at all.

**John:** Matthew though is staying put. Matthew is still editing our show.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Matthew, you’re listening to this right now. Please – please stay.

**Craig:** Good. Okay.

**John:** The other sort of big change and sort of big bit of news is this next year I’ll be doing a lot less screenwriting because I sold a book. I sold a series of three books, which is very exciting.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** So, this next week, sometime they’re going to announce it. By the time you’re hearing this podcast, it may already be announced. But we’re recording this on Thursday, so I couldn’t be sure that the news is going to be out there. But back when we were at Austin Film Festival and you remember this last year there were those horrible storms and everything. And Melissa was there and my husband Mike was there.

I was talking on the phone with this novelist who had written this middle-grade fiction book that was really good. And we were talking about whether I would adapt his book. We had a great conversation and I asked him a lot about sort of the history of the book and sort of the history of writing and sort of stuff, and over the course of this hour-long conversation I realized like I really don’t want to adapt this book, but I think I kind of want to write a book like this.

I don’t want to be the guy who gets sent all these adaptations, but actually the guy who like writes the original book. And so that was October 30. And then November 1, start of NaNoWriMo, I just sat down and I started writing the book.

**Craig:** So this is the one that came out of NaNo – I’m not going to say that word, because I hate it. Hate it. It’s a nonsense word. It’s nonsense. This is the one that came out of the National Book-writing Month?

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** Fantastic. You may be the only person that has ever made a dollar. I’m a terrible person. I’m a bad guy.

**John:** That’s fine. You’re not bad at all.

**Craig:** No, I’m bad.

**John:** So for people that don’t know NaNoWriMo at all, we actually mentioned it on the air that I was thinking about doing it, and then I did it. It’s this idea where you write every day in November and you can build up to a full book by the end of November. And I didn’t write the entire book then, but I wrote enough of it that like, oh, this feels like the outline of this book.

And so it’s middle-grade fiction. It’s the same genre in general as a Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. It’s very much sort of my childhood and sort of pushed into a fantasy realm. And it was just a delight to write. It was a delight to write fiction. You’ve written some fiction over the years.

**Craig:** Yeah, not much. I mean, honestly, I’m still deeply on the hamster wheel of screenwriting.

**Stuart:** Popcorn Fiction.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, no, I’ve done it. And I have a little secret novel that I work on every now and again that, you know, is mostly for me. But, yeah, no, I can’t tell if I’m envious of you or not. I think I am. Because I’m currently on a – it’s a hamster wheel.

**John:** So, what’s interesting is we obviously know a lot about how screenwriting works. We know how the screenwriting industry works. We know about Hollywood.

And when I went off and did the Broadway show, I got to learn how all that works. And you recognize: these are things that are the same, these are the things that are very different. These are the gatekeepers. This is the process. And with the book, I got to learn all that again. And I’m still learning it now. So I’m just taking a lot of notes as I sort of see it. But, I’d written this first third of this book, I’d written the proposal for the rest of it. You show it to your agent. Your agent shows it to another agent. You find a really good book agent. You’re very lucky that she says yes.

And then you go out with it, and it’s very much like going out with a spec script. But rather than going to studios, you’re going to the big publishing houses. And there’s this whole conversation about which editor at which house is the right one. And all these discussions and debates.

And then you make your top choices. You go out. And I was very lucky that the place we wanted to do it said yes.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And bought it up and bought it for three books.

**Craig:** And that’s Hustler? Hustler Press?

**John:** Hustler Press, yes. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** Got it. Good. Good label.

**John:** Raunchy middle-grade fiction – it’s really – that’s the future there.

**Craig:** Well, they put a lot into marketing.

**John:** They do. So, anyway, I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks about it, and I’ll have stuff on the blog, and there will probably be a second site that’s geared more towards the people who would ultimately be reading this book.

It’s weird writing something that is not sort of for my age to read. It’s a strange thing, too. But I’m really looking forward to all of it.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds fantastic. And since I have, you know, our daughters are essentially the same age, so I’m sure that my daughter will be reading. In fact, she can be one of your beta readers.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Or even gamma reader. Is that–?

**John:** Alpha.

**Craig:** Oh that’s right. It goes–

**Stuart:** There’s an alpha bed.

**Craig:** Right, so gamma would be like, oh my god, we’re almost about to–

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. So there’s a whole thing called Advanced Reader Copies Arcs that you send out ahead of time. And our mutual colleague, Geoff Rodkey, is a writer and he’s been incredibly helpful sort of in those initial conversations about like what do I even do. What is the process here?

And so I’ll be trying to sort of keep track of the process. And I may end up doing a second podcast that is just like a six-episode leading up to the book to sort of show this is how you actually do it.

**Craig:** I don’t have to do anything for that?

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Because then I can just – now I can stop paying attention to that.

**John:** You can not even listen to it.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. What were you saying? [laughs]

**John:** That would be the most Craig thing you could do.

**Craig:** Got to be me.

**John:** The last and most crucial thing we need to do today–

**Craig:** This is the big one.

**John:** This is the big one.

**Craig:** You thought that all that stuff was big.

**John:** That’s all–

**Craig:** Jettisoning Stuart. Moving to France. Writing a book. None of that matters.

**John:** Yeah. So some of you listening to the show may go like, well, without Stuart, like what’s going to be here. Or should I polish up my resume because Stuart’s job is now open?

And so we need to hire somebody. Maybe there’s going to be a giant competition, where we’re going to ask our listeners to send in stuff.

**Craig:** That sounds great, John. Let’s do that.

**Stuart:** The best Three Page Challenge gets picked.

**John:** Becomes my new assistant and becomes the producer of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** What a great idea.

**John:** It’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Or, no.

**John:** No. Or actually no. But I think we are going to do something very different. And we sort of hid Stuart away for five years, our new producer is not going to be hidden away anymore. It is time for us to actually introduce our new producer of Scriptnotes. We’d like to welcome Godwin Jabangwe.

**Godwin Jabangwe:** Hi.

**John:** That’s Godwin Jabangwe!

**Craig:** That’s perfect.

**John:** That’s fantastic. Godwin, you are my new assistant. You are the new producer of Scriptnotes. Have you listened to the show ever?

**Godwin:** Yes. I have. And I love it, obviously.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Godwin:** And I’m really, really excited to be here and to be playing a part in this.

**Craig:** Well, I already like him better than Stuart.

**Stuart:** Great, thank you.

**Craig:** But that’s not saying much.

**Stuart:** The bar is low.

**John:** Godwin, some backstory, you are currently at UCLA. You are studying screenwriting?

**Godwin:** Yes, I am. I just finished my first year. I am going into my second and final year at UCLA. Go Bruins. And I just have to throw that in.

**Craig:** Of course.

**Godwin:** And, yeah, I love it. I am excited. I’m from Zimbabwe, so this is like a big deal for me.

**John:** So you were born and raised in Zimbabwe, and from Zimbabwe you went to–?

**Godwin:** I went to a small college in Michigan where I got my undergrad in film production. And then I applied to UCLA and somehow they said yes. So, yeah.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, they obviously saw what – I feel like whatever we saw in him, and really it’s John. I mean, that’s the truth. John, no big surprise, did all the work here. Obviously.

**Stuart:** Hiring his own assistant.

**Craig:** I would have also picked you. I would have done it quicker. I would have done it with much less drama. But, no, of course, they saw in you whatever John saw in you. It’s exciting. And I believe that we know your instructors at least are the Wibberleys.

**Godwin:** The Wibberleys. I took a class with them last quarter. And they are fantastic. If they’re listening, hey.

**John:** So, the Wibberleys are married screenwriters. They worked on – they did the National Treasure movies. They also worked on the second Charlie’s Angels movie. I met them because they rewrote me on the second Charlie’s Angels movie. And the very first time we had a phone call, the very first time I actually met them in person, was at the Charlie’s Angels premiere. They were seated behind me. And so we just talked.

And they were so cool. And they’ve been great. So, when it became clear that Stuart was leaving, I did put out some small feelers, both to Stark Program which is where I’ve always gotten my assistants, but also to other folks. And the Wibberleys raved about Godwin and they were correct.

**Craig:** So, not a Stark guy.

**John:** Not a Starky. First non-Starky.

**Craig:** Good. Let’s break that tradition.

**John:** Let’s break that mold, yeah. So, I was able to meet with five fantastic candidates. And there are just remarkably talented people out there. And gave them different assignments than what Stuart had, but a chance to sort of talk through their work, to sort of see how their brains worked. And it’s been a pleasure to have Godwin be part of this.

**Craig:** So how does this work with Godwin being a student and also doing this job? Tell us how that’s going to- or one of you can tell us.

**Godwin:** Well, it will be a lot of work. But it’ll be fun work, because what I am hoping to learn and pick up is what I’ll be applying to my schooling. You know, the writing program at UCLA is intense and it’s a lot of work, but I’ve been doing this for a while and I know that I am not – I’m not here to play, either in school or at work. So, it’ll be a fun challenge.

**John:** Stuart, any advice for?

**Stuart:** Your classes are at night, right?

**Godwin:** Yes. I mostly take my classes at night.

**Stuart:** I mean, honestly, I think you will find, especially with John away, that this is like – sometimes you get detention in high school and it’s a blessing because you get all your homework done. I think you’re going to find that your life is actually kind of a little easier. You’re getting up. You’re going into an office. And you’re just going to do the work that you are going to be doing.

**Craig:** That’s another good point. So, you’re going to be John’s assistant, but John is going to be in France.

**John:** Yeah. So one of the things I had to warn him about, all the applicants before they even applied, saying like we’re going to be starting work at 7am LA time, so that we have some overlap of hours.

**Godwin:** Yeah. So, but–

**Craig:** Oh man.

**Godwin:** I wake up early anyway. So I’ll be fine. I can handle it.

**Craig:** All right. I wouldn’t have taken this job.

**John:** No, clearly.

**Craig:** I mean, 7am.

**John:** It’s early. You’ve seen 7am, but usually on the other side of 7am.

**Craig:** No. I’ll tell you, this is why – I love production, but the worst part of production is waking up.

**Stuart:** Oh god.

**Craig:** I hate it. I hate it so much.

**John:** For me, the worst part of production is when you’ve done a night shoot, and you’ve done all night, and then you’re racing to finish night shots before the sun comes up. And when you’re cursing the sun for rising, that’s a bad sign.

And then you’re driving home against rush hour traffic. That was Go. And I will never write a movie that’s mostly shot at night again.

**Craig:** I love shooting nights. Oh my god.

**John:** I love how quiet it is. But then I hate the end of it.

**Craig:** So great. I love it. I just love being – because now, yeah, the world has gotten out of your way. There’s just something, I don’t know, calmer at night. But I got a lot of mental problems.

Godwin, I’m very excited. And now as the producer of Scriptnotes, maybe you could finally explain to me what the producer of Scriptnotes does. Because I don’t know.

**Stuart:** I would love to hear this.

**Godwin:** I’m looking at Stuart like help me out here. I think creating the transcripts of the show. Making sure that everything is right with each episode. Making sure that it’s uploaded to the website. That it is shared on Facebook. You know, just bringing it to the people.

**John:** I always forget that Stuart actually has to manually share it on Facebook.

**Stuart:** Yeah. I think, honestly, I think that the credit I’ve been given is a little generous at times. At the same time, I think that there’s probably a lot of little things that you guys don’t even realize I’m doing to help the machine stay well-oiled.

**Craig:** I didn’t realize you were doing anything. So, it all goes under the folder of “What does Stuart do?”

**Stuart:** Yeah. And sometimes I – when I talk to my dad about it I say like, it wasn’t something specific, but we’ll have a conversation at lunch, and then next week that conversation is the fodder for what becomes the episode. As simple as that.

**Craig:** Well, you know, Stuart, I like to tease you, because you’re adorable.

**Stuart:** Well, thanks.

**Craig:** But you’ve done a spectacular job. And I know it’s a lot of work, because I know I’m not doing it. So, we’re going to miss you.

**John:** We will both miss you very much. You’ve done a fantastic job.

**Stuart:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** You have big ginger shoes for Godwin to step into.

**Godwin:** Yes.

**Stuart:** Get ready.

**Godwin:** I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** But you will be available, I assume, as a resource if he calls you?

**Stuart:** Well, let’s put it this way, if you ever need me, feel free to email me. I will reply to you as quickly as I can. I hope to be too busy to be [unintelligible] very quickly.

**John:** Yeah, we’re being cagey about sort of what he’s heading off to do. But I think it’s going to be a big, noteworthy announcement.

**Craig:** It’s not war?

**John:** It’s not war.

**Stuart:** It’s as much war as waking up at 7am for production is war. Hopefully. We’ll see. Knock on wood things continue to go well.

**Craig:** I like this. This is exciting. Perhaps one day Stuart will be our guest.

**John:** Oh, that would be very exciting, to announce the launch of a certain project.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** That could be good.

**Stuart:** I’m coming back.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s like coming back to host Saturday Night Live.

**Stuart:** Yeah. Like graduating, you come back to your old college.

**John:** See all the people who are still there, yeah.

**Craig:** I love it.

**Godwin:** So, one thing, you guys were talking about who should play Stuart. Justin Timberlake.

**Craig:** Kinda, yeah. Actually, I kind of get it.

**Stuart:** One of my first days here, John’s daughter told me I looked like Phillip Phillips, who I had never heard of at the time. And I looked him up and I look nothing like this person. And I’m the worst singer in the history of the world. And now I’m apparently being compared to another very good singer, who is significantly better looking than I could ever dream to be.

**Craig:** I would love to hear you sing.

**Stuart:** Oh, well, you know, if you guys stick around for 150 episodes, I’ll take out my guitar, and then we’ll delete it before we put it in.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** It’s time for our One Cool Things. Mine is actually a recommendation from Aline Brosh McKenna, who is our favorite sort of go-to guest. She recommended this podcast called My Dad Wrote a Porno. And what it is is these three guys, three British people, one of whose father was trying to be Fifty Shades of Grey, but he’s like a 60-year-old man trying to write erotic fiction.

**Craig:** Oh no.

**John:** So they read aloud the chapters and it is sort of half commentary while they’re reading it. It’s just delightful.

**Stuart:** That’s fabulous.

**John:** It’s fantastic. So, the book that they’re reading is called Belinda Blinked.

**Craig:** Belinda Blinked?

**John:** It’s just remarkable. So there will be a link in the show notes to My Dad Wrote a Porno.

**Craig:** Wow. Awesome. My One Cool Thing is a little bizarre, but you know I talked before about how I think that this is not real and that in fact what we think of as reality is a computer simulation. And there are a lot of very fancy physicists who have put this theory forward.

And one of the arguments for it goes like this: if we can create – eventually we’ll be able to create a simulation in which the people in the simulation don’t know that they’re in a simulation and they are fully intelligent. And if that’s the case, what are the odds that some other civilization like us hasn’t existed and made us that?

Okay, so an interesting argument has emerged against this. And the argument basically boils down to pi, the irrational number. Because pi never ends. And the argument is if we’re in a simulation, the simulation must be finite because it is created. If it is finite, you can’t have a number that never ends.

And I think we now have a computer that has calculate pi to the three-trillionth digit, with no repetition of pattern, and no suddenly a trailing bunch of twos. Basically, think of pi as like Truman in the Truman Show sailing on that water. But he never gets to the wall.

So, it’s possible that this might – I’m now saying this is a chance this is real. It’s a slim, slim chance.

**John:** But the counter-argument would be that there’s some programming that’s happening that’s making us believe that pi is incalculable. Essentially, Nima, our coder, says that’s absolutely true.

**Craig:** That we are essentially being manipulated in this. But what a bizarre and pointless manipulation. Or is the point of the manipulation to make us think that it’s real? This is the great trick.

**John:** Exactly. That’s the great trick. The greatest trick the devil ever played.

**Craig:** Okay, so then whoever is listening now above us, and watching our simulation, must be concerned that we’re onto them.

**John:** What if this is actually the last episode of Scriptnotes?

**Craig:** Or the last episode of existence.

**John:** That, too. Both are tragedies.

**Craig:** Wow, man. One Cool Thing.

**John:** We’re going to give Stuart the last word, so Godwin, why don’t you give us your One Cool Thing.

**Godwin:** My One Cool Thing is something that is happening in Zimbabwe. We have this incredibly brave one man who has stood up and started what can be called the Zimbabwean Spring. And so you should check out the hashtag called #ThisFlag and see how people are finally speaking up in Zimbabwe and it’s about time.

So, I’m really thrilled about that.

**Craig:** What is the man’s name?

**Godwin:** His name is Pastor Evan Mawarire. And so—

**John:** Say that back three times.

**Craig:** Well, I knew about Morgan Tsvangirai.

**Godwin:** Tsvangirai. He was an opposition leader. This guy is not a politician. He is not starting a party.

**Craig:** He’s a religious man?

**Godwin:** He is just getting the people to get up and—

**Craig:** Robert Mugabe cannot leave soon enough from this earth as far as I’m concerned. Well, we will definitely check that out. That’s excellent.

**Godwin:** You should.

**John:** So, the hashtag is #ThisFlag?

**Godwin:** #ThisFlag.

**John:** Great. Stuart Friedel?

**Stuart:** Thanks for making me look petty.

**Craig:** So, his was that entire nation. Mine was about the nature of reality. And tell us, Stuart, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Stuart:** Right before we started recording, John said like do you have a One Cool Thing? And my response was it’s 260 episodes. I’ve had over 260 One Cool Things. I just haven’t been able to say any of them. And in the time that I’ve worked here I think I’ve introduced John to some things that I’m proud to have introduced him to, like Nathan for You, and the iced tea that we drink in this office.

But there is one thing that I’m perhaps most proud to have introduced him to. And it is my One Cool Thing. And I’m going to pitch it to you, to all of our – I think it’s going to be helpful to our listeners as well. And that thing is specifically the chicken kabobs at Fiddler’s Bistro on Third Street, right near the Grove. And here’s my pitch.

**Craig:** That’s right up there with #ThisFlag.

**Stuart:** Right. Exactly. So, you’ve probably all seen Fiddler’s Bistro. Like you drive down Third Street. It’s just sort of there. It’s unremarkable. It’s just a sign. It’s just there. It’s near the Grove. It’s next to 7-11.

**John:** It’s part of a motel complex, right?

**Stuart:** Part of a motel. It’s the bistro in a motel. Exactly. And I remember once a few months ago, or I guess a few years ago, you and Mike made a joke that I had heard before that’s like, “Whoever goes to Fiddler’s Bistro?” And I was like, ah-ha, I have. And it’s awesome.

It is right near the Grove. I hate the Grove. I absolutely hate the Grove. And my least favorite part about the Grove is parking there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s terrible.

**Stuart:** So, if you go to Fiddler’s Bistro, there is parking on the street. There’s also a little lot and there’s parking right around the corner, so you can park there if you’re going right before the Grove and then walk to the Grove. Leave your car there. Easy.

But the best part are these chicken kabobs. So you get there, you walk in, it is unpretentious. There are a lot of restaurants in Los Angeles that look really fancy and pretentious and their food is not very good. Fiddler’s Bistro is the exact opposite of that.

It caters this motel, so they have everything on the menu – breakfast all day. But, there’s one section that is differentiated, that sticks out, and that’s the kabobs section. And there’s a reason for it. Their chicken kabobs are out of this world.

So, you sit down. First thing they give you is warm bread with this roasted red pepper dip that is fantastic. And then the chicken kabobs. Simple marinated chicken that is so succulent and delicious. You have no idea.

**Craig:** This is the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard.

**Stuart:** Some of the best hummus you have ever had. Really good pickled beets. Great rice. Peppers. Onions. Pita bread. Absolutely delicious. If you live at Park La Brea, you’ve probably seen it 500 times. You never thought to walk in. It fabulous. And if you read the reviews online, you’ll see that it’s either five-star or like two-star. The five-star reviews are all from people that either got the kabobs or this chicken couscous soup that I’ve never tried, but now I have to try.

And the two/three-star reviews are all from people that were staying at the motel that just got regular food and were not terribly impressed. But the chicken kabobs at Fiddler’s Bistro. My One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** My mind is blown right now by the – I love – I’ve never seen you this enthusiastic about anything.

**Stuart:** Find something I love, and I—

**Craig:** Turns out the answer was chicken.

**John:** Chicken kabobs at one place. So, Stuart brought in the kabobs from there this week. And the hummus was wrong. And there was no red pepper sauce.

**Stuart:** And the credit card machine wasn’t working. But first time in seven years that I’ve been there that there has been any sort of blip.

**John:** Everything is falling apart.

**Stuart:** Now that I’m leaving. Such a forgivable blip, though.

**Craig:** But how were the chicken kabobs, John?

**John:** They were fine. But without the red pepper sauce, it’s just not the same. The red pepper sauce is what sort of pushes them over the edge to me.

**Stuart:** Well, John had this idea that in all my years of going there, I first was introduced to this place by a friend of mine from Stark. Matty C. Matt Conrad, if you’re out there, hi Matt. And Matt lived near me.

**Craig:** He’s doing shout-outs now. This is unbelievable.

**John:** I just love that. He’ll be like turn down the radio while I’m talking on the phone.

**Craig:** When did we become the Morning Zoo?

**Stuart:** Five years. Five years! Five years!

So, Matt was like, oh, we got to try Fiddler’s Bistro. And I was like, “That place I’ve walked by a thousand times? Why would I go there?” It’s a perfect place to like sit back, relax, and write.

This red pepper sauce is what like – the second they brought that out, I knew I was somewhere special. And when I brought it here the first time for work, John saved some. And the next day I came in and was like, “I use that on my eggs.” And that is a game-changer.

**Craig:** Oh, the red pepper sauce on the eggs?

**John:** That’s how you do it.

**Stuart:** Get it to go. Save some of the extra. Use it on eggs the next day.

**Craig:** I’m just—

**John:** You’ve learned so much.

**Craig:** I’m happy. But, that was pretty great, actually. I got to say.

**Stuart:** Oh great, good.

**Craig:** You delivered.

**Stuart:** Thank you.

**John:** Well done. That is our season finale, but we’ll be back next week with the start of the new season.

**Craig:** Which is the most ridiculous thing. I’m going to miss Stuart.

**John:** I’ll miss Stuart, too.

**Stuart:** Thank you guys for five fabulous years. I mean, all I’m doing is pushing buttons. You guys are the—

**Craig:** Yeah, but we love you.

**John:** You’re the only one here getting paid, so.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s not true. I know you are. I know you are, John. I know it. I know it.

**John:** At some point there will be forensic accounting and you’ll see all the millions that we’re raking in.

**Stuart:** We’ll show you the numbers. You’ll have a good laugh.

**John:** The other person getting paid is Matthew Chilelli who edits our show. Thank you, Matthew. And our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and Godwin Jabangwe. And, yes, we did pick him because he had a good NPR-sounding name. It’s just a fantastic—

**Craig:** That was the only reason?

**John:** It’s a reason. Not the only reason.

**Godwin:** It’s funny you say that, because I have been writing like tweets to NPR for years saying I have the perfect name for NPR. It’s paying off.

**Craig:** It’s finally paying off.

**John:** It’s finally paying off.

**Craig:** Godwin Jabangwe reports.

**Stuart:** Close enough. It is so phonaesthetically pleasing. It’s like Cellar Door. Godwin Jabangwe just flows so – it’s like Best Ever Death Metal Band out of Texas. You know that song by Mountain Goats?

**John:** No.

**Stuart:** It just flows. Like your tongue is in exactly the right place for the next syllable.

**Craig:** Godwin Jabangwe. You’re right. It’s like typing the word point.

**John:** I’ve been looking forward to it all week to be able to say it.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Guys, thank you very much, and thank you to our listeners for five years. That’s just crazy and remarkable this has been going on for five years. And we look forward to what happens in the next couple years. See you.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Girl Gone Overboard](https://vimeo.com/174427174), cut by Fredrik Limi
* [Stuart Friedel](https://twitter.com/stuartfriedel) on Twitter
* [The Peter Stark Program](https://cinema.usc.edu/producing/)
* [Matt Byrne](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4791766/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1), [Chad Creasey](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1548657/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1), [Dana Fox](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1401416/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1) and [Rawson Thurber](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1098493/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1)
* [Thomas Barbusca](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm4564958/?ref_=tt_cl_t13)
* [The Three Page Challenge](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Steve Zissis](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1587813/?ref_=nv_sr_1) and [Corey Stoll](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1015684/)
* One of John’s doppelgängers [as Hebrew National’s Uncle Sam](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qf2j-YzZRAA)
* [Ghostbusters (2016)](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1289401/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm) credits on IMDb
* Gizmodo on [The Six Plots](http://gizmodo.com/data-analysis-suggests-there-exist-only-six-book-plots-1783263768)
* [NaNoWriMo](http://nanowrimo.org/)
* [Godwin Jabangwe](https://twitter.com/itaizhou) on Twitter
* [The Wibberleys at UCLA TFT](http://www.tft.ucla.edu/2015/02/the-wibberlys/)
* [My Dad Wrote a Porno](https://overcast.fm/+FQ0rlFek8)
* [Do irrational numbers like pi disprove humanity being a simulation?](https://www.quora.com/Do-irrational-numbers-like-pi-disprove-humanity-being-a-simulation) on Quora
* [Pastor Evan Mawarire](https://twitter.com/pastorevanlive) on Twitter, and [#ThisFlag](https://twitter.com/hashtag/thisflag)
* Fiddler’s Bistro [chicken kabobs](https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/fiddlers-bistro-los-angeles?select=O5lDBWpGnHsPoGEcP69Qxw) and [red pepper dip](https://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/fiddlers-bistro-los-angeles?select=0ASoVfJyY3ahUW_S2p3Uwg)
* The phonaesthetically beautiful [cellar door](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellar_door) and [The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IsXKMkDAMQ)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_259.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/generic-trigger-warning).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 258 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we will be looking at three new entries in the Three Page Challenge. We’ll also be answering listener questions about disabilities on screen and which WGA you should join.

**Craig:** Hmm. This is going to be a good episode already.

**John:** It’s going to be a great one. I think it’s also going to be short, because we are trying to wedge this in between my going to pick up my daughter at summer camp and you have a thousand things on your plate, some of which I know about, and some of which I don’t. So, it’s a busy time. Summer is supposed to be easy for us, but summer got really busy for both of us.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. Summer is the worst.

**John:** It’s just the worst. Here’s the thing: it’s the worst because it’s super busy and everyone is also gone. And so we’re recording this the week after July 4, but half of Hollywood seemed to say like, “Oh, we’ll take the whole week off.”

**Craig:** I know. People are like, “Hey, so are you going anywhere this summer?” And the question shocks me. Like what? No. I have too much to do. I’m not going anywhere.

**John:** But then there are some people who are like, “Oh yeah, we’re going to go to the East Coast for four weeks.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In summer. Like landed gentry.

**Craig:** Right. I don’t have that. Apparently I’m forever bougie.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last week, we had a discussion with Gabe from Southampton who was shocked we had not heard of Anagnorisis because his tutors had talked about it often.

**Craig:** Yeah. So I was very confused, and I think John you were as well, by the use of the word tutor. Apparently in the United Kingdom, tutor is the word they use for college professor, hence our confusion.

**John:** Our confusion. So, that was yet another word we did not know. We also got some feedback from other British folk. Tony Lee wrote in to say, “I’m a British screenwriter like Gabe. I don’t know any British screenwriters, professional ones at least, for a second think that Americans do the story and Brits do the characters. It’s an idiotic belief and one that any screenwriting teacher worth his salt would try to shy away from.”

And I think that is our message as well is that screenwriting professors around the world hopefully recognize that story and character are not two different things that are done best on two different continents.

**Craig:** Yeah. Quite a few of our British friends wrote on Twitter. They seemed completely stumped by Gabe’s professor’s point of view. It doesn’t seem like a shared opinion. And I was happy to see that.

**John:** Yeah. All around the world there are good writers listening to our program, so thank you very much for writing in.

Let’s get to some questions from this week. So, Brian in Chicago wrote in to ask, “Do you guys think there’s a ‘moment,’ for lack of a better term, going on with disabilities in film and television? I am myself physically disabled, and while far from an activist or a person terribly interested in ‘disability issues,’ it’s hard to miss the current visibility of physically disabled characters in film and television.

“Game of Thrones does such a good job with Tyrion because of how his malady occupies both the foreground and background of Tyrion’s character, but isn’t his total character. He’s many things. A dwarf is just one of them. It’s relevant when it needs to be, or makes sense to be, such as his relationship with his sister, the Battle of Blackwater, but it’s not so singular as often happens with other disabled characters.”

Craig, what do you think? Do you think there’s a moment happening?

**Craig:** I do. I think there’s a moment happening for physically disabled characters. I think there’s a moment happening for characters of color. There’s a moment happening for characters who are LGBTQ. And the reason why — and it’s the strangest thing — while on the one hand we have a very strong academic tendency towards identity studies, the interesting symptom of our concentration on identity is an ability to look past these identities as all-consuming things for our characters. Whereas a while ago you would say, “Well, describe this character.”

Oh, he’s a blind guy. That’s his character, right? Blind guy. No one does that anymore. Well, I’m sure people do, but most of us now our whole thing is, great, that’s an interesting aspect of a human being, and their experience, and we should now be curious and we should be authentic to that experience as best we can. But it does seem like there’s a moment in general where we are all as filmmakers growing up very rapidly about all of these things and underlying all of it is a general movement toward presenting full human beings whose “labels” are merely an aspect.

**John:** Agreed. I think there’s two facets I’d like to look at. First off is that it’s the recognition that the world is complex and beautiful and filled with many different kinds of people and many different kinds of situations and that it’s great if the stories that we’re telling reflect the diversity of persons and diversity of experiences that are out there in the world.

And so that means looking beyond the initial sort of stock presentations of a character or a character with a disability, to look at sort of what is the full range of that, and how would having a person with a given set of physical circumstances impact both how he or she is perceived in the world, but also how he or she perceives the world. Let that be a jumping off point, but don’t let it be the entire character.

I think Tyrion is a really interesting way of looking at that. At first I said like, well, that’s not actually a disability. He’s just a very small person. And yet it actually does track the way we think of characters with different abilities in stories. There are things he cannot do because of his small size, but there’s things he does differently and smarter because of his small size.

And not having read the books, my belief is that in the books don’t they make more of his small size? Like he’s like nimble and spry in ways that are important?

**Craig:** I think in the book, and I could be wrong about this, but I think he’s more — he’s more of a small person, whereas on the show they’ve cast Peter Dinklage who has dwarfism, which is a physical condition. It’s a congenital condition. It’s genetic.

And when we say physical disability, there is obviously an implied pejorative there. There are certain physical downside beyond size to having dwarfism. There are difficulties. And so it’s not merely about being small, but it’s about how joints work, and hips, and knees, and elbows, things. But in general, I think we’ve all gotten a bit braver, too, about not running away or shying away from these things. Nobody on Game of Thrones is afraid, either — either in front of the character, or in the writing room, behind the scenes. Nobody is afraid to talk about the “elephant in the room” to the extent that it’s not an elephant in the room.

Everyone is very blunt about everything. And so you begin to demystify and de-taboo-ify a lot of these things that we previously thought of as somehow dividing us.

**John:** So, a few weeks ago I was in on a meeting about remaking an older film. And there’s a character in it who can present as being very problematic in terms of a — I guess you’d call it a disability, but there’s sort of a supernatural reason for why the disability exists.

And I thought it was actually a really interesting moment to look at that story now in the current light about, well, what is the reality of living with that condition. And this is very much like a condition that a large percentage of the world population actually encounters. And so let’s not run away from it. Let’s actually sort of embrace that and sort of not let it be a curse that a character is under, but actually an opportunity to explore a world that had otherwise been shut off from that person.

And so I do think there is a moment happening here. If we are using the wrong terms for any of this stuff, if Craig and I on this podcast, or people out in Hollywood are using the wrong terms for things, apologies, but also know that we are — I think it’s more important to be discussing the opportunities here than to be running away from them. Or to not engage with them as characters who were sort of missing from film and TV.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I’m very — I’m actually very excited by the way things are going, and also how fast it’s gone. So, an excellent question from Brian. Thank you, Brian.

I guess we should get in this question from James.

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** And he’s from Brooklyn, so I have to read it, right? I won’t do the accent. Because also no one in Brooklyn has this accent anymore. It’s just all hipsters now.

James in Brooklyn writes, “I know you guys have occasionally mentioned differences between the WGA East and West. The West has more members and more lawyers, for example. But could you break down more of these differences, or at least go into a little more detail why an East Coast writer might be better off joining the West. I mean, why shouldn’t I join the WGAw, despite being based in New York City?”

**John:** Craig, I’m so glad you’re on this podcast, because I do not have a good answer here. So, an important thing to understand, which does not really make sense, but is just how things really are, is that there’s a Writers Guild West, which is mostly what Craig and I mean when we talk about the Writers Guild. That represents Hollywood. It represents most of the things you see and are familiar with.

There’s also a Writers Guild East, which is based in New York City. It represents the writers in New York City. The Mississippi River classically divides the East and the West of the United States, but I don’t have a good sense of why right now in 2016 a writer joins one versus the other. So, tell us, Professor Craig.

**Craig:** Well, I won’t go into the history of why it is the way it is, other than to say that when the guilds were founded New York was a much more important media center. It was the center of television, for instance. Whereas now essentially television — at least entertainment television- is centered in Los Angeles, just like screen.

It is the Mississippi River, that’s the dividing line. And the way it works is if you gain your first employment and your first qualifying employment to become a member of the union, if you are working east of the Mississippi you are funneled into the East. And if you’re working west, you’re funneled into the West.

Now, that actually does not prevent you from changing. You can change. There is a mechanism by which you are allowed to elect a change. The instructions of which are buried somewhere online. It’s not a common thing, but if you call up the Writers Guild East and ask how you should change to the West, after they attempt to stop you from doing it, I think they would — I have to tell you, it basically involves writing a letter to the executive directors of each union and then they have to process it.

Why would it be valuable to join the West, first of all, it’s not unless you are a screenwriter or you are working in entertainment television, or the kind of television that the West is the main operator on for contract. So, there are members in the East who work in news media. And they are almost certainly better off in the East, because that’s where the majority of news writers are. But, you know —

**John:** But, also, there are a lot of live — the late shows that are often writer WGA shows that are based in the East Coast. And so if you have a bunch of people who are making that same kind of thing on your side of the country, I guess it would make sense to stick around.

**Craig:** Mm….

**John:** No?

**Craig:** Kind of. Here’s the big advantage to being in the Writers Guild West, whether you work on late night television, or you work on a sitcom, or you work in movies. And it comes down to how we negotiate our big contract. The contract that does cover late night TV, and sitcoms, and movies, and all the stuff we think of as entertainment television. Without getting into too much of the boring details, the Writers Guild West takes point on that.

Essentially, the way it works is that there is a negotiating committee. The membership is proportional, which means the vast majority of members of the negotiating committee are from the West, so we have a larger voice in that committee. And then we take the lead. So, once the committee comes back with a proposal for a contract, the board in the West votes on it. If we vote to approve it, the East then — their council, which is their equivalent of the board, they vote, but they can only undo it if they vote against it by two-thirds.

So, they have this — there’s a barrier there for them. And even then, if they should vote by two-thirds to negate what the majority did in the West, it’s not over yet. Then, they add all the totals together of all the votes, and if there’s still a majority for approval, then it goes to the membership. So, if the WGAe votes unanimously to approve a contact, and there’s nothing the East Council can do to stop it from going to the membership.

So, basically the big benefit to being in the West is you have a vote for the people that are going to be probably making the determinative decision about what we get to vote on. The board members in the West, the members of the negotiating committee in the West.

Is it a huge benefit? No. It’s small, but it’s something.

**John:** So, another possible benefit, and you will tell me why I’m wrong to think this is the WGA West handles many, many, many more arbitrations than the East does. And so there are situations in which an arbitration is handled in the East because the writers were in the East, and they may not have the proficiency with the arbitrations. Is that fair? Is that accurate?

**Craig:** It is fair. If there’s a theatrical arbitration, and the writers are all members of the East, the East does handle the arbitration. It’s not that they are incompetent — I would never say such a thing. But to be fair, our credits department I think is larger than their entire staff in the East. And our credits department is jammed packed with attorneys whose legal specialty is credits. That’s it.

So, I tend to think that they are much more thorough and there’s just a larger wealth and breadth of experience there. If you end up with one of these difficult arbitrations, and boy, do we get them? So, I do think that that’s a benefit to being in the West.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s a situation where if you’re going in for heart surgery, you’d like to go to the place that does heart surgery all the time versus the place that does heart surgery a couple times a year.

And it’s not to say that you’re going to have a bad outcome at the smaller place, but if things go poorly, you want to be at the place that has done it a lot of times before and has seen all of the stuff that can happen.

**Craig:** Great analogy. Perfect.

**John:** Great. All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenges. These things are so far away from being finished movies, but who knows, they could end up in arbitration themselves.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Segue Man. Now, what I sometimes forget to do is to tell people where they can read along with us. So, if you are in your car, do not try to read these on your phone as you’re doing this, because it would be dangerous. But if you’re someplace safe, or if you can pull to the side, you’ll find links in the show notes to the three PDFs we’re talking about. So, just go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and you’ll see this episode and you’ll see the PDFs that we’re discussing.

So, these people were incredibly brave to write in and let us see the first three pages of their screenplays. Sometimes they are pilots, but in this case they all feel like features to us. And they have agreed to let us show these on the air and discuss them.

And Stuart goes through every single entry and he picks three that he thinks are interesting. And something Stuart would like me to remind you is that he doesn’t pick the best entries. He picks the ones he thinks are going to be most interesting to talk about on the air. And so these are ones that have interesting strengths or weaknesses or possibilities so that we can really dig into them.

So, it’s not meant to be a competition that you win. And Stuart sometimes gets frustrated when people think like, oh my god, I was featured on Three Page Challenge and now my career is going to be set. It’s not. It’s not going to be.

**Craig:** No, no.

**John:** Hopefully we will give you some good advice and other people can learn from the things we tell you. So, let’s get started.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Which one should go first, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, the first one in my hand is The Real Pearl. Shall I summarize?

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** Okay. The Real Pearl, written by Philip Lemon. What a great name. Philip Lemon.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** Okay, so we begin in a warehouse. We’re looking at Pearl who is a 25-year-old woman. She is in distress. And in fact a plastic bag is yanked over her head. We watch from her perspective as this large man beats her and then tosses her into the trunk of a car.

She wakes up, she comes back into conscious, in the trunk of the car, and she gets out of the plastic bag. She’s breathing. And she sees another woman in the trunk with her. This is a dead woman. She kisses the woman’s lips lovingly, closes her eyes, and then begins to look for a way to escape.

We cut to inside the car. And we see that it’s being driven by Ivan, a Russian. And he is driving at gun point. In the passenger seat, holding the gun, is the man who presumably was the one who was beating Pearl. Ivan realizes as they’re driving to some distant location that the trunk lid is rising. Pearl manages to escape. She leaps out of the trunk. The people in the car keep going. They don’t notice. She lands on the road and then she is just about to get run over by another car coming toward her when we smash cut to Pearl. And now she’s actually in a city street, bracing for impact, but there is no impact. In fact, now she’s dressed completely differently. She’s got makeup on. She looks terrific. She’s standing in the middle of a city street. And a cab driver just yells at her.

**John:** Yep. So, I feel like maybe I should have put a trigger warning at the start of this thing, because if you have any experience being taken or being kidnapped or being sort of restrained, this would make you feel very uncomfortable. I could see this provoking some bad feelings.

It provoked some bad feelings in me, too. I don’t know how to even dig into this, because a lot of the writing was fine. And yet I didn’t want to sort of keep in the world of this movie. Do you see what I’m seeing?

**Craig:** Well, I do. And I think that it’s important sometimes to discriminate between the writing and our taste. You know, so this may not be your kind of movie. And generally it’s not my kind of movie either, although I was fascinated by these pages.

Philip I thought did — putting the — let’s put the content aside for a second. I saw everything. I heard everything. I understood perspective perfectly. I always knew when I was with Pearl, which I thought was fascinating. There was a mystery without confusion, which I thought was great, particularly the mystery of the corpse in the trunk with her.

And I was very surprised by the way the pages ended where it seemed suddenly this might not have happened at all. This may have been in her head. That was fascinating to me. So, I thought these are actually wonderfully written. There are some spelling issues, and Philip included his phone number on the cover page, which obviously we don’t share with you guys. But I can tell you that he’s from Australia. So there’s no excuse for not being able to spell dilapidated or gorgeous.

But I thought that regardless of whether or not this is your genre that Philip did everything you’re supposed to do in three pages of a screenplay.

**John:** I’m mostly there with you in terms of his ability to visually create the world and to strongly ground us in a perspective. And we’re largely in the perspective of the woman who is being kidnapped and sort of her journey. So, having made a movie with a character locked in a car, trunk of a car, I sort of know what that feels like and I thought he did a good job feeling us through that with her.

I didn’t believe or buy the corpse or the woman in the back of the trunk with her. Sort of the intimacy and the kissing and the touching, it really pulled me out. I loved that her reaction to the corpse was not just an “oh my god, there’s a corpse in the back of the car,” that there clearly is a reaction. This is somebody she knows. At the same time, I didn’t believe the actions that were there.

I loved the introduction of the Russian who is driving the car and the man holding the gun on him. I thought it was very smart to sort of set an expectation like this is clearly going to be the bad guy driving the car, and then realize like, oh no, he’s actually also a captive in this situation. That was terrific.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As we got to the end there, I was reading this as a Stuart Special. I believe that we’re actually jumping back in time to a time before her makeup was messed up. And so I think there was going to be on that next page a “Six Weeks Earlier” or “Four Hours Earlier” that just sort of show us how it had gotten to that situation.

But, I don’t know. I think the alternate explanation that like this is all in her head, or that there is some other movement in time between the two is also possible.

**Craig:** Well, I would be disappointed if it were a Stuart Special, as I’m about to be disappointed by our other two Stuart Specials. But, again, for people that don’t know, a Stuart Special is when you open a movie with a scene and it’s, “Oh my god,” in media res, and then you go, okay, but six months earlier, and then you start the movie.

You’re right. That may actually be what’s going on. Philip, very quickly, you’ve got a typo in addition to some spelling errors. On page two, olive-skinned, you have olive-sinned.

**John:** I love olive-sinned people.

**Craig:** But, overall, I was interested. I thought, also, I’m going to — I mean, again, you know, if this makes you uncomfortable, just turn it down, but this is how it opens, and we talk a lot about how you describe characters, right. And you know my whole thing — hair and makeup. And maybe people are taking this to heart.

“INT. WAREHOUSE — DAY. A WOMAN’S TERRIFIED FACE,” that’s all in caps, “fills our vision. This is Pearl, 25, blonde, sweat smeared makeup, lips curled back, eyes bulging as she — ”

Next line. “SCREAMS,” capital, “her lungs out, struggles desperately.”

This is very — I mean, I’m gripped. And what I thought was really interesting was there was no commentary about how she’s pretty, or how she is this sort of — there’s no unfilmmables, as we say. I’m in the moment and I can see it. So, I thought Philip did a really good job and, you know, on some material that isn’t always for everyone.

**John:** Agreed. So, let’s take a look at a few specifics that I wanted to single out here. About halfway through the first page, “We frantically snap bicycle KICKS up at him; he bats them aside.” I tripped on bicycle kicks. I had to read it a couple of times where I was like, oh, he means the kind of kicks where you’re doing that, like where you’re pedaling a bicycle. Bicycle didn’t help us there, so I’d just get rid of the word bicycle. It helps us out there.

**Craig:** I like bicycle kicks.

**John:** Fine to keep then. I would say capitalize bicycle, too.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. I like that. Yep.

**John:** So it all stays together as one idea, because when you capitalize part of it, and you don’t capitalize the other part, they read as different ideas.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s look at the first transition here. ” BRUTE cocks a meaty fist, SMASHES US INTO: INT. CAR TRUNK — DAY.” That was just a weird transition. We’re missing a word. So, brute cocks a meaty fist and smashed us into INT. CAR TRUNK. Just like the and would just help — let it read as continuous thought.

A general goal is if you’re going to do that kind of the dot-dot-dot transition even without the dot-dot-dot. Make it read like a complete thought, so they’re not just weird fragments out there. Let it read as one continuous line.

Same page. “PIN PRICKS OF LIGHT stab into the BLACKNESS transforming it to GLOOM.” I don’t know what gloom is. I don’t know how you transform into gloom.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think he means like low light or something like that. But, yes, gloom is not the right word.

**John:** No. “The plastic is RIPPED open and Pearl GASPS, collapses back.” The plastic rips open. Again, it’s a situation where keep it as present active tense as you possibly can. Passive voice can be lovely, but this was not a passive voice moment in any way.

We go to “crazed pit bull” twice. You know, it’s fine to describe somebody as a crazed pit bull, but don’t use that as the thing you’re going to hang that character description on later on. Same way he uses olive-skinned twice. Don’t repeat “crazed pit bull.” It’s a one-time description. Don’t ever use it again to — don’t use it as the noun. Use it as the archetypal phrase to describe who this person is this first time we see him. Don’t keep coming back to it.

**Craig:** I agree with that. I for sure agree with that. Anything else? I mean, I would also say one thing for readability on that first page, Philip, is after “Brute cocks a meaty fist, smashes us into,” and then you have “INT. CAR TRUNK — Day. Blackness.” That’s always tough. And it’s accurate, because it is day, and it is black. You might want to move blackness above. So, “Brute cocks a meaty fist and smashes us into — and then on the left side, “Blackness.” Then say “INT. CAR TRUNK — DAY — footsteps and muffled.” So we’ll know, okay, we’re in black. And then “Pin pricks of light stab into the blackness,” you know, or “Still black to just make sure people know.”

But blackness, if it’s ahead of that thing it might help you a little bit there.

**John:** It’s also a weird thing where “into” above an “INT,” you sort of read both things the same way. So, the simplest thing might be “Smashes us to — INT. CAR TRUNK — DAY.” It feels like it’s less of a repeat there. Just some way to make that feel like one continuous thought would help.

My last little bit is on page three, “Pearl, staring in disbelief, spots the BOX CUTTER.” Disbelief doesn’t feel like quite the right word for a woman who has just like rolled out of a moving car onto a highway. There’s something — disbelief feels like, “I can’t believe she said that.” Versus the shock that you’d actually feel, or the bewilderment, the overall kind of daze that she would be in.

**Craig:** I think that’s absolutely right. You don’t have time to be disbelieving there. You should be, you know, you get the feeling that she’s gone into animal mode there. Animals never disbelieve anything.

**John:** Yep. For sure.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Let’s get on to our next one. This is How I Unleashed Mayhem and Saved the Free World, by Lynn Esta Goldman.

**Craig:** Great title.

**John:** It’s a fun title.

Our story opens over black, a voice over from Max. “I didn’t mean to cause trouble. Or to kill anyone. And I don’t think that I did. At least, not intentionally.” We meet Max as he is running for his life. He is 24 years old. Max Klovis is wiry and thin. He is a sort of parkour expert. He’s running from four thugs who chase him through alleys, through a Chinese restaurant. Ultimately, they corner him. He’s holding a phone. And that’s apparently what they’re going after. Then, Stuart Special —

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** Eight Days Earlier. We are in an office where we see Max being interviewed for a job by Howard Cobb, who is pale, wire-rims, generic as the furniture. And they’re talking about this coding job he’s interviewing for.

Max explains he had top grades from Stanford, but he had to leave to take care of his father who had cancer. Trying to defend that Steve Jobs dropped out of college. But the interviewer, Cobb, is not having it. He says that, “We have other candidates who are much cheaper, much better, who didn’t hack into the Fox News website and put obscene comments up there.”

And so we leave the end of the three pages with Cobb saying, “We’ll keep your resume on file.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Well…

**John:** Well…

**Craig:** These are certainly competently written pages. There’s not so much an issue with the structure of them. I mean, there are a few little tweaky things that I’m going to point out. I think the larger issue is that I believe I’ve seen this foot chase a billion times.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** This precise foot chase, in this precise way, including the run through a restaurant that should be called Foot Chase Restaurant, where you go through the Foot Chase Kitchen, and the Foot Chase Chefs go, “What?” And you go into a Foot Chase Alley.

**John:** I think they have whole sound libraries which is just for the “Whaaaa?” of like someone running through your kitchen.

**Craig:** The clattering pots. And somebody yelling at you in Chinese, or something. There you go, it’s a Chinese seafood restaurant. Of course it is.

So, these are very cliché. There’s nothing wrong with the concept of starting with somebody running for their life, but you have the burden of a thousand movies behind you. And you have to at least take a moment to say what can I do to surprise somebody here and not give them a foot chase that we’ve seen in Steven Seagal movies. Right?

So, that’s a primary objection. After we do the Stuart Special and we’re in the job interview, Lynn, first of all, you tee yourself up here. And this is a dangerous thing to do with a character. Max in his voice over leading into the Stuart Special says, “It all started with an iPhone, in a bar. Actually. It started with the job interview from hell.” Now, first of all, we can’t do that anymore. We can’t say anything from hell anymore. That is at least 15 years of corniness on it. But the bigger problem is you’ve told me now this is going to be one hell of a scene. This is going to be one hell of an interview. It’s the interview from hell. It is not.

It is not remotely the interview from hell. It’s mildly uncomfortable. That’s what I would call it. And the information that’s coming out — so this is not an inappropriate and inelegant way to do an info dump, and that’s what we’re doing here. We’re getting Max’s backstory. And what we learn about Max through the info dump job interview is that he’s a dropout because his dad had cancer, so he must be a good guy. He is a hacker who obviously was doing sort of, oh, kind of puckish little pranks that we can all get on board with like, you know, screwing with Fox News and so forth.

He’s got martial arts expertise. And he really, really, really wants a job. But no one is going to hire him because, you know, he doesn’t fit their — again —

**John:** Everything felt very shoe-horned into this interview. So my dad had cancer. I was at Stanford. I’m really into martial arts. It was — you could feel everything being crammed in there in ways that weren’t particularly rewarding. And if you’re going to show us the job interview scene, just like the foot chase scene, you are fighting a hundred scenes that were just like that we’ve seen in other movies. You’ve got to recognize that it can’t be just a version of that scene we’ve seen a hundred times before.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What I thought was interesting is like you I thought it was actually well done on the page versions of sort of these very stock familiar scenes. And like I could imagine if you were to watch that foot chase scene, and your assignment had been like, okay now having watched this, now write the script that goes with it. I thought she did a good job of actually charting what that could feel like on a page and actually making it feel good. A good representation of that thing that we’d already seen on the screen.

It just wasn’t exciting because it didn’t seem to acknowledge that this is the stock version of that scene, and therefore I’m going to spin it in a different way. I’m going to present something brand new that you haven’t seen before.

**Craig:** A hundred percent. It’s got craft. And that’s a great sign, Lynn, because you know a lot of people just can’t work in this format. And it’s not uncommon for writers, particularly if you’re starting out, to ape. And you may not even realize you’re aping. You may think you’re writing something original, but what you’re really doing is you’re aiming towards the familiar, because you’re trying to emulate something, instead of working in our own voice and being dangerous a little bit. You know, and especially when you’re talking about the kind of movie that I think this is setting up — a little bit of danger is terrific.

You know, the thing about Max in this job interview is the job interview is a terrific instrument to give us facts. But it is a terrible instrument to reveal character, because you’re not yourself in a job interview. In fact, it is one of the few times when you weirdly and formally force out information about yourself when people are usually a little less forthcoming about these things. You don’t just randomly tell somebody on the street that you took care of your dad because he had cancer. But in a job interview, suddenly you’re forcing it out there.

So, I actually learn nothing about Max’s character. I just learn about his circumstances. And those are two very different things. So, if you’re going to keep the job interview scene, one suggestion is to reimagine it from the point of view of what is the essence of this guy’s attitude and feeling about the world. The way he holds himself and how he communicates with other people. And how can I get that across in a job interview? Vastly more interesting than facts.

**John:** Absolutely. Look for what is the conflict in this scene as well. What is it that Max is trying not to reveal or trying to get the other person to see? Right now there is not conflict in the scene. It’s basically just a ping pong match back and forth. But there’s no real stakes there. And I don’t know what Max even wants.

And you’re teeing this up that it’s the job interview from hell, so I don’t understand why Max wants this job. So, you’re fighting a lot of things there.

The other thing I’ll say about job interviews, and I like your point about people are not themselves in job interviews. They’re this idealized version. That’s I think why job interviews are so good for comedies. Because you have a character who is trying not to reveal who they are really are. And the natural tension and sort of the little lies that they get caught up in over the course of their job interview can make for such great comedy moments.

But this doesn’t feel like this movie wants comedy here, at least not from what we see in these three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I could see a version of this where Max is describing himself, and it sounds fantastic, and exactly what this guy wants. And this guy is like, “Boy, you really are everything we could ever want. Do I have any other questions? Oh yeah, here’s one: why did you get arrested for hacking?” You know, and like how did you find out about that is now the question.

So that Max was attempting to hide something, and now it’s a game of how much do you know? So should I keep lying or not? And of course you keep lying. And he keeps busting them on the lies until finally it all unravels.

Something like my dad had cancer is very private. And it’s very serious. And so that’s another thing that you may want to think about how or if it should be revealed.

So, good craft.

**John:** Yeah. A few little small things I want to point out on the page. Page one, we see his face. “Boyishly handsome. A bad-boy glint in the eyes.” You get one boy. Not two boys. You can’t be a boyishly handsome bad boy.

**Craig:** Yeah, also it’s very hard to — frankly I think, you know, we had talked about there was that run of really bad introductions to female characters. This kind of falls into the opposite version of that. This is your hero and you’re describing him as “boyishly handsome, bad-boy glint.” That’s a little bit like hot but doesn’t know it. It just feels very cliché and very vanilla pudding.

And, also, difficult to show realistically when in fact when we’re looking at his face he’s running in fear from thugs. So —

**John:** Exactly. So, you get that glint if you are hitting on a girl at the bar, but you don’t get that glint when you’re running for your life.

**Craig:** Nor do you look particularly boyishly handsome in that moment.

**John:** You don’t.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Bottom of page one. “The three Thugs advance toward him… his back’s against the brick wall, it’s the worst place to be.” It’s the worst place to be — it’s not interesting, good information for us. I would scratch that kind of stuff out. Keep it simple. Keep it short. Like, “Back against the wall.” We know what back against the wall means.

**Craig:** We know how brick walls work.

**John:** We have seen that.

Last little thing. Page two, Max has two blocks of dialogue in a row. So he says, “I left to take care of my father. He had cancer.” Action line is, “Cobb continues to glare at the resume.” “Steve Jobs dropped out of college. Bill Gates. Mark Zuckerberg — “If a character is going to keep talking with an intermediary line of action in between, it’s a good idea to put the CONT’D, the continued after his name. It just reminds people this is a continuous block of dialogue.

It’s not a must. The world won’t come crashing to an end. But it’s useful. And you will often see in a table reading if you don’t have those things, characters get confused because they’re like, “I said my line. Someone else needs to talk now.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve stopped doing those. But what I will do is if I’m going to do a split like this, I include something about Max as well. I don’t want to — because the problem is, for shooting purposes here, Max is continuing and he doesn’t seem to be reacting to what Cobb is doing. So, I would be okay with Max stopping if I understood that he was stopping.

“Cobb continues to glare at the resume. Max sweats. You know, juggles.” Whatever, you know, scrambles. Just something so that I know this is happening for Max and not just you’re just stopping him talking so that I can see this guy stare at something.

**John:** Yeah. So what I’ve done is I’ve turned off the automatic character CONT’Ds, but for when it’s just one line in between, I’ll usually use the CONT’Ds. The reason why I turned off the CONT’Ds overall is sometimes you’ll have like three paragraphs worth of action that takes place in the middle point. And then it’s ridiculous to actually Max Continued, like it’s not the same thought. A bunch of other stuff has happened in between.

But for these cases where it’s just a single line, I usually will use it. The world doesn’t end one way or the other.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. Our final entry, do you want to take care of this?

**Craig:** Yeah, because I really want to say this title. Baby Alligators.

**John:** I love Baby Alligators.

**Craig:** Couple of good titles here. Actually, all of the titles were good.

**John:** Well done, title makers.

**Craig:** Good job, guys. Baby Alligators by J.E. Alexander. So, we don’t know gender there. We’ll just go with J.E.

And here’s what we have for Baby Alligators. We being over black. A woman’s voice, low and ragged, saying something that’s not quite in English. Then we cut to a skyline and we see a vast industrial district with factories and blast furnaces. Heavy industry. The sounds of industry. We move in closer and closer and closer until suddenly it’s not that industrial district at all, but rather a model of it. And a big female hand coming into view. She’s building the model. This is Laura Hayes.

She is a perfectionist. We cut to she’s in a studio, I assume meaning like an art studio. We then go into the toilets, the bathroom, and she’s washing her hands. She hears a rattling coming from one of the cubicles.

J.E. must be from England because I think cubicles is like our stalls. Laura is curious about this — it’s a little eerie. What is that gurgling noise? And then she sees that it’s a water pipe that’s hanging from the ceiling. She leaves. She exits the studio, which is the Sparks Model Makers Ltd, lights a cigarette, puts on her headphones, and heads across a wasteland. And we see a canal and some train tracks. There’s a sense of decay. A car speeds by with a drunken man yelling at her. She gets to a residential, evening, gets off of a bus, and goes to her apartments.

She notices a disheveled hooded figure shuffling on the lawn of her apartment building. She waits until that person leaves and then she runs inside to her apartment building. Tries to lock it, but it doesn’t work, so she uses a fire extinguisher to barricade the door.

Heads to her flat, her apartment, asks for Kate. And we see that Kate is another woman who is sleeping in one of the rooms. She watches — Laura watches Kate sleep and then heads into the bathroom, turns on a bath, and begins combing her hair.

**John:** And that’s our three pages. I really like the tone of these three pages. I don’t know what’s happening in the story, and I’m not yet frustrated by my lack of understanding what’s happening in the story. But I like the world that J.E. has sort of framed for this.

I like the sense of like the industrial skyline and then pulling out that that’s a model. But then the actual real world outside is also kind of bleak and dark. I was intrigued by all that.

I don’t know much about our lead character at the end of these three pages other than she is nervous. And I can appreciate why she’s nervous because the world seems a little bit scary.

I was not concerned, but a little confused, like why is she the last person in this model building space. Has everyone already left? Is she the only person who works there? I think there were some opportunities to give me a little sign of why she’s leaving now, or why she’s staying late. Sort of what’s going on here, because I didn’t know if she was the only person, or if this was a larger space. So, I didn’t know if she was the boss or an employee. And that does kind of matter.

And I think we could have very easily gotten that information in these first few — even if we didn’t want to have any characters speaking, which I think is great, but just the sense that everyone else is packing up, or you see those other people leave and she has to be the last person to lock up could be great.

It felt like a horror movie set up kind of, in that you have this sense of dread. You have these noises. You have the ominous guy in front of the doorway. It was all well-handled. I didn’t know where it was taking me, but I would have read the next ten pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m similar to you. I think I could have used a lot more funneling of me as I went through it, because it careens around in so many different ways between — you keep expecting, and it doesn’t do what you’re expecting, but nor does it particularly surprise you. So, you start to feel a distance. And I think it’s very — I think that J.E. has done a good job. This is a great of example of three pages that with some careful adjustment could be terrific.

First off, we begin with over black, “A woman’s voice. Low and ragged.” And the voice says, “Ajutati-ma…” Okay, that is some foreign language. That voice is not referenced again in the next three pages, which is challenging. It’s particularly challenging because as the reader, the first person I’m going to meet is someone named Laura Hayes. Well, she speaks English. And the second person I’m going to meet is Kate. Also speaks English.

So, the problem with starting with something that off the beaten path is that you need to at least acknowledge that it happened. Nothing acknowledges that that happened here. That’s tricky.

The transition from the skyline that appears to be real, and then we transition into the model, on the page is problematic. Because we’re seeing it for real, we believe it’s real. That means we’re shooting it for real, right? Then, we go INT. STUDIO — EVENING. “Suddenly, the very same scene becomes still and silent.” That’s not going to work. That’s not how the world works. It could dissolve into a model version of it, right?

**John:** Yeah. I was taking this that J.E. meant that literally you see this thing and you sort of assume, we hear the sounds of all this stuff, and then a hand comes in. And then we’re pulling out to see this. But that’s not how it’s described on the page. And I like my version better.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, look the problematic word then, if you’re correct, is churns, which I actually loved. I love that word, right, so I was so happy when I saw it. “A VAST INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT churns darkly against the sky.” So already in my mind I see smoke belching out and fires and something turning. And, you know, conveyor belts. That’s what churning is. There’s motion. But this model is — and it says, “We are no longer looking at the real skyline, but a MODEL version of it.” So, I do think I’m right, I just think that the transition isn’t correct.

So, you got to help us with that transition, because you can’t film it the way you’ve described it.

The bathroom scene, so I think, okay, this is science fiction. That’s what I feel like after a half a page. I’ve got fake language, and I’ve got a dystopian industrial district turning into a strange model with this woman building it. It seems science fiction-y.

Then she goes to the bathroom and has a Japanese horror movie scene. Which is a creepy noise in a bathroom and it turns out to be a misdirect. But, absolutely. At that point I’m like, oh no, no, no, this is a horror movie.

**John:** But I will say what I liked about the bathroom scene at the start, why I wanted more specificity and detail is that she shows her sort of like getting all the glue and paint off of her finger nails. I’m like, oh yeah, I can believe that, because that’s a thing that would happen. So it matches her to the job we just saw her doing. It feels connective.

But I agree with you that it doesn’t feel — the sounds that she’s hearing isn’t going to connect to the stuff we’re feeling later on in the story.

**Craig:** Precisely. And so here’s where a very simple thing like connecting a little piece from the prior scene to the bathroom scene will help me feel like it’s all one story, and not like we’ve begun a new movie, which is a horror movie. If the gurgling sound — she hears a gurgling sound for a moment while she’s making the model, and then it goes away. Huh. And then she’s in the bathroom. She’s washing her hands. And then the gurgling sound again.

Then I would think, okay, this is all part of the same movement. I also need to know, is this expected? Is it meaningful to her? Because right now she is staring at this gurgling sound intently. Now, either that means she’s scared by it, because it’s unfamiliar, or she’s concerned by it because it may be familiar. We don’t know. And she doesn’t tell us. Nor do you, J.E. And I kind of need to know. I kind of need to know.

When she heads outside, she now no longer seems concerned at all. She seems quite carefree. That’s what people are when they light cigarettes and put headphones on. And yet she is now walking through a wasteland. And then I thought, wasteland, do you mean actual wasteland? Or is that a figurative wasteland?

**John:** Yeah. And so, again, it’s one of those situations, like we don’t know whether we’re talking Mad Max, or we’re just talking like a bleak part of town.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so there’s an area where I need you to funnel me a little bit. Help me out. If it is, in fact, Mad Max, give me a little hint of Mad Max when she walks outside before she puts her headphones on. If it’s not, let me know that this is almost like a wasteland.

**John:** Yeah. I have a hunch that it’s not Mad Max, because Mad Max does not need model makers. There’s just not a job. Like what do you do? I build models in a Mad Max post-apocalyptic wasteland.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** So, wasteland is the bad word there. And so look for ways to describe bleak, but without sort of making it feel like there’s going to be crazed mad men running past.

**Craig:** Now, she’s heading home. She’s walking home now. Right? And she’s walking obviously where cars go, because a car speeds by and a drunken young man sticks his head out of the passenger window and snarls like an animal. Which makes me think, oh, maybe it is a little Mad Max-ish. She frowns. Hmm. Now, again, I’m not sure what is this world and what does she think of it?

Then we’re in a residential area and she’s getting off a bus. When did the bus happen? I thought she was walking home. See, this is all just — I’m getting discombobulated. She sees this disheveled hooded figure and she waits anxiously, clearly reluctant to engage with this person. Is that a monster? Is it a zombie? Is it a post-apocalyptic guy? Is it her boyfriend? Is it her dad?

**John:** It’s probably a creeper. Let’s go back to the road. So, you know, she’s walking along the road and then your concern is like now suddenly we’re on a bus. But if she walked to the bus stop. If we saw her at the bus stop and the guy goes past and does the face, and then she’s getting off a bus, then we’ve connected those two things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Oh, I get it. She was walking to the bus stop. And now we’re here.

**Craig:** Exactly. All is forgiven. Yeah.

**John:** So, the general sort of macro note I want to give here, which goes all the way back to the very first “Ajutati-ma…” over black is you have this opportunity to build trust with your reader and with your audience. And that trust contract is basically if you give me your attention, I will make it worthwhile for you to have given me your attention. But you can only ask the audience to hold on to a certain number of things that aren’t being paid off until the audience goes like, “Okay, I give up. I don’t see how all of this is connecting. I’m backing away.”

And so being very mindful of the things you’re asking the audience to hold on to and not forget. And at the end of three pages, I’ve already forgotten about “Ajutati-ma…”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have to make sure that you acknowledge that you’re asking the audience to hold onto that and you’re going to make it worthwhile for them. So, it means repeating it again, or finding some other way of rhyming back to that idea so that the audience knows like, oh that’s right, that’s a thing that I need to hold on to because it’s going to pay off.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess my overriding note for J.E. is that the mysteries that you’ve built in here and the subtleties and the originalities are all potentially wonderful. And my advice is simply to recognize that we will identify very closely with Laura. And so we are — our comfort level will entirely be through her responses and reactions. Her responses and reactions don’t seem to calculate. They don’t feel consistent to me, or they’re not present. So, I don’t know how to feel, because I don’t know how she feels. So, it’s the circumstances and the weirdness of the world are less discombobulating to me than her lack of or inconsistent responses to it.

**John:** One hundred percent.

So, again, thank you to all three of these writers who were so brave to share their pages. If you have your own three pages you would like us to take a look at, the way to send them to us is go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And there is a form there that you sign a little thing and you click to attach a PDF. And it magically shows up in Stuart’s inbox so he can look at them and find your three pages for a future Three Page Challenge.

So, again, thank you to everybody who has sent them in, and especially to these three writers for letting us talk about them on the air.

**Craig:** Yeah. Thanks guys.

**John:** It is time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a simple infographic by David McCandless. It is on Information is Beautiful. And this is Common Mythconceptions. Like Myth — I’m not mispronouncing that. But they’re basically myths that are widely believed to be true and often spread by the Internet. Things like that dropped pennies will kill people.

**Craig:** I love that one. [laughs] This is great.

**John:** Salty water boils more quickly. Sugar is hyperactivity. Goldfish have a three-second memory. There are things that sometimes there’s a kernel of truth in there, but the general accepted truth to them is not actually true at all. And so you have to be mindful of these things. And some of them are completely unimportant, and some of them are actually sort of more important.

So, there is a list of about 40 of these and I thought it was a good thing worth sharing.

**Craig:** This is great. I’m really enjoying this. I’m just reading through these.

**John:** So, one example being we have five senses. And we think of the five senses, but of course we actually have a lot more. And we all know about proprioception which is the sense of where your limbs are in space. But you also have your balance. You have pain. You have hunger. You have thirst. And just because they’re not the same kinds of senses as sight or sound, they’re still incredibly important to us. So, getting past your preconceptions of what senses are is very important.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is Patrick Patterson. Who is Patrick Patterson, you ask — Patrick Patterson is a gentleman who let us know on Twitter, “Yesterday I donated my bone marrow and saved a life all because I heard about Be the Match from John August and Craig Mazin on Scriptnotes.”

**John:** Patrick Patterson, you are my favorite listener of the day.

**Craig:** I mean, of the day? Of my life.

**John:** That’s just remarkable.

**Craig:** We saved a life, theoretically. This podcast actually did something that I respect. [laughs]

**John:** I think it is remarkable. So, we’ve talked about Be the Match on several occasions. We have friends who have benefitted from its remarkable work. Bone marrow is one of those things that is so crucial to saving people’s lives and it’s not at all difficult to be tested for. Craig and I have both done it. We strongly encourage you to, also. So, we’ll have a link in the show notes for how you can sign up to Be the Match.

**Craig:** How great is that? Patrick, you’re awesome. And I don’t know if the person whose life you saved is aware that you are the one who saved it, but it would be great to hear from them, too. Just so that I could hear from the person whose life I saved. [laughs]

**John:** All the evil Craig has done in the world is wiped away by that one thing.

**Craig:** Sweet redemption!

**John:** By One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Very nice. As always, our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Comer. If you have an outro for us that you would like us to try, send it into ask@johnaugust.com. Links are great. Or SoundCloud links. However you want to send it is fine.

That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered on the air today. On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on iTunes at Scriptnotes. Just search for Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment. We meant to sort of read aloud some comments today, but we forgot. So, on a future episode we’ll read aloud some of your great reviews and comments. Thank you for doing that.

If you would like to send in three pages to the Three Page Challenge, there’s a link in the show notes for that. And we’ll be back next week.

**Craig:** See you later, guys.

**John:** Thanks much.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three Pages by [Philip Lemon](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/PhilipLemon.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Lynn Esta Goldman](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/LynnEstaGoldman.pdf)
* Three Pages by [J.E. Alexander](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JEAlexander.pdf)
* [Common MythConceptions](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/common-mythconceptions-worlds-most-contagious-falsehoods/)
* [Patrick Patterson](https://twitter.com/pdpatterson/status/750745376441954305) saved a life with [Be The Match](https://bethematch.org/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Comer ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/flaws-are-features).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 257 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be looking at unforgettable villains, screenwriter billions, and something else that rhymes with illians/illions. Maybe we’ll find a good rhyme for illions.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the Nathan Fillions. All the Fillions.

**John:** All the Nathan Fillions. Done.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig Mazin for the rescue. We’re also going to be answering a bunch of listener questions, so it’s going to be a packed episode, but sort of a hodgepodge. There’s no central unifying theme.

**Craig:** Good. Because as we know, that’s a terrible thing for drama.

**John:** It’s absolutely the worst. I think you should have a bunch of disparate elements that don’t really add up to anything. That’s the sign of a quality piece of entertainment that’s working at its very best.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t it be great if that were in fact the opening salvo of Aaron Sorkin’s thing online? Where he just suddenly goes for everything. His master plan is to ruin all screenwriting forever. [laughs] Because everybody will listen.

**John:** That would be fantastic. You have to throw in as many things as possible and don’t pay anything off.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** Ever. That’s the kind of advice I was giving this last week up at the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. I was up on a mountain in Utah, talking with a bunch of writers, directors, and writer-directors about their projects. And it was really good. This was the 12th, or 13th, or 14th time I’ve done this. But there were really good projects this year, and a bunch of movies I’m excited to see get made.

So, the process for people who’ve never heard about the Sundance Labs, is a bunch of people apply to be part of it, or they’ve been sort of recruited by Sundance to come up there. And we spend a good week looking at their projects. We have individual meetings. Andrea Berloff from Scriptnotes fame was there with me.

And so you’re sitting down with them, talking about their projects, and sort of what they are trying to do and trying to help them get their scripts into the best possible shape. And it was so great because the kinds of projects that go through Sundance Labs are not big Hollywood studio features. They’re generally very specific, unique things that you couldn’t imagine existing anywhere else. So, it was a very good, fun time.

**Craig:** That sounds great. One of these days. One of these — I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but I was supposed to go one year, but I ended up having to cancel because we were shooting. One of the Hangover movies. And then nobody ever called me again. [laughs]

It was like you don’t cancel on Sundance, Buck-O.

**John:** Yeah. So I actually spoke to Michele Satter, who runs the program, about you and about that. And so I think I’ve gotten you back on the list.

**Craig:** Was she like, “Yeah that’s right. He canceled on us. And you don’t cancel on — ”

**John:** Dead to me.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. And I did before I was invited to go up, I did have lunch with her. She’s delightful.

**John:** She’s the best. So I think part of the pact of getting you back into the Sundance fold is that I did maybe promise that at some point we would do a live show benefit for the Sundance Institute. And so at some point in the years to come we will be held to do some sort of live show for them. Which could be great, because I feel like we don’t talk a lot about indie film. We’ve had some indie filmmakers on here, but I think a live show focusing on that could be fantastic.

**Craig:** Let’s do it tomorrow.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Everyone just write in, or just show up. Just show up wherever you want to show up. Just show up at Sundance and we’ll be there.

**Craig:** Exactly. We could do a very good show, even if we limited our guests to graduates of that program. Like Mari Heller came out of that program.

**John:** Oh my god, of course. Yeah. There are really fantastic writers, directors. Quentin Tarantino, to name somebody.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Lena Dunham was up there with a project. That’s where I first got to really know her.

**Craig:** We should get Lena Dunham on the show.

**John:** She’s fantastic.

**Craig:** I say that like we never even thought about it. Obviously she would do it if we — like, hey, come on.

**John:** Come on. So, Lena Dunham will every once and a while email me back when I email her, but she’s kind of busy running a TV show, and writing a book, and a blog, and a newsletter. So, there’s a lot that he’s doing.

**Craig:** In my mind, that turned into you emailing her every day.

**John:** I do. [laughs] Lena, Lena, please email me back.

**Craig:** No, you don’t even acknowledge. Just every day you’re like, “Hi Lena, so here’s what’s going on. Here’s something funny that happened.” And then like, I don’t know, twice a year she writes back and she’s like, “Ha-ha.”

**John:** Yep. Totally delightful.

**Craig:** Or, “Funny!”

**John:** The reason why I know that is so specifically true for your experience, is because there’s going to be people in your life who are just that same way. And you can be frustrated by that, but you can also just acknowledge that like, hey, that’s an incredibly busy famous person. And that’s fine.

**Craig:** I’m trying to not email famous people.

**John:** I text famous people more than I email them.

**Craig:** You know, by the way, if you ever do want to get in touch with Melissa McCarthy, text her. I have tried calling. I have tried emailing. She will not — I mean, forget it.

**John:** She won’t email me back. But Ben Falcone will. And so like I will tweet to Ben Falcone, or email, or I’ll CC Ben on an email, and he’ll answer back sometimes.

**Craig:** Ben sometimes just is at my house when I wake up.

**John:** That’s really — that’s the best thing about him. Because it’s sort of like a jarring presence, when you first open your eyes.

**Craig:** Very.

**John:** But then, no, it’s fine. Because he has that improv background, so he can sense what you’re feeling, and he’ll just go with it.

**Craig:** He’s perched on me like that famous gothic painting, of the little demon. And when I wake up, and Ben Falcone is perched on me, and looking down at me with his mustache.

**John:** Well, Falcone/Falcon. It all makes sense. It all adds up. It’s an Edgar Allan Poe-y kind of thing. Let’s get to our follow-up.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Aaron Sorkin’s masterclass, you brought it up, but John from Quebec wrote in to say, “This is the best bang for your buck around, at least for writing — forget tennis and singing. I did the James Patterson masterclass and I can tell you it’s really polished and professional. And includes the A-Z of writing a novel in video segments, a course book, an outline of Patterson’s novels, a class forum, permanent access to the masterclass, and various feedback classes from the author where you can submit log lines, etc. And is all ongoing. Really complete and interactive.”

So, that’s John’s experience with James Patterson’s class. Or, is it James Patterson writing in to tell you how good his class is?

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s possible that James Patterson uses a sock puppet, John from Quebec. But I tend to think that this is true. How could it not be the best bang for your buck considering that they’re charging $90, and everything else anyone charges money for stinks?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, talked about damned by faint praise. But I do think that this is going to be a valuable — it seems like it’s going to work. It’s Aaron Sorkin, for god’s sakes.

**John:** So, John is the only person who wrote in about his experience with this program overall. And I guess not with Sorkin’s thing in specifics. If you are a listener who bites the bullet and tries the $90 once it’s available, let us know what you thought. Because, Craig is never going to do it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Craig doesn’t do anything.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Also on last week’s show, we talked about Anagnorisis. And Gabe in Southampton, England wrote in. Craig, what did he say?

**Craig:** He said, “Listening to your talk on Anagnorisis in Episode 256, I was quietly amazed that you hadn’t heard of it. My tutor,” hmm, “made a big deal of it. And used a great example in Greg Kinnear’s father character in Little Miss Sunshine when he dances alongside his daughter. Every film teacher I’ve had has made a bit of a deal about how American’s are great at story, and Brits are great at character. Which they also attributed to why US films sell across the world, whilst British films are more intricate.”

I am so getting so angry here.

“Do you think this is why you hadn’t really heard of Anagnorisis before? Is scriptwriting taught differently around the world?”

John, please, tell me your honest reaction to Gabe’s inquiry?

**John:** All right, I was a little bit offended at the end, but mostly I want to reassure him and our other listeners that no one is talking about Anagnorisis on a general basis. So, I was up at Sundance this last week and after a screening of — I think Tiger Williams showed a clip from Se7en. And at the end of Se7en as we all know there is a head in the box. And when Brad Pitt realizes what must be in the box, that is a moment of Anagnorisis. We realize that Kevin Spacey’s character has done this thing and that everything is different than you thought.

And so I said that like, oh, we actually just talked about that on the podcast and it’s called Anagnorisis. And no one there knew what that word meant. So, it’s great that Gabe’s tutor —

**Craig:** Tutor.

**John:** Uses that term.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But I would say that you should not feel that your screenwriting career was uninformed or that every screenwriter talks about Anagnorisis or that all the British screenwriters talk about Anagnorisis. I just think it’s a think that this one person brought up that other people don’t bring up.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe this is what happens when you have a tutor?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Or maybe this is being lost in translation. In America, a tutor is a privately hired one-on-one instructor that provides supplemental education on top of your normal education, typically because you’re falling behind in something. Gabe, I don’t know. I imagine now Gabe as being a Lord, and he has a tutor who obviously — here’s the thing to understand, Gabe. We all talk about Anagnorisis here, we just don’t call it Anagnorisis. We call it other things. We call it “that moment,” “that revelation.” Sometimes we’ll say, you know, the “eureka moment.”

But it’s the word that is unknown, not the concept of it. As far as the discussion about all of the film teachers you’ve had, and I can only presume now it’s quite a number, their theory is Americans are great at story and Brits are great at character. Those film teachers apparently haven’t been watching many movies.

I can tell you some wonderful films written by British screenwriters that are very much about a terrific story and the characters aren’t particularly what you would say intricate. And likewise, I could point to many films written by American screenwriters that are absolutely gorgeous. I mean, I don’t know, Paul Thomas Anderson, does he strike you as somebody that’s really great at story, but not so good at character?

It’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. So, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that every film teacher you’ve had is a dope. And that, in fact, what of the things I love about British screenwriters is that they are really good at telling stories. They do like to entertain. Tess Morris.

**John:** Tess Morris. We love Tess Morris.

**Craig:** What a great storyteller.

**John:** Kelly Marcel I’m a fan of as well.

**Craig:** Great storyteller.

**John:** Great storyteller. I would argue that it’s very hard to differentiate story from character, at least in successful films. Is that I can think of very few things as like, oh, that’s a terrific story. Too bad about the characters. That’s not really a successful film, in my estimation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree. I mean, there are films where you look at — you’ll say, oh, it’s a character study. But inside that character study there is a story that’s occurring. It’s just that your film teachers, Gabe, weren’t smart enough to realize that both things were going on at the same time. And I’m trying not to be an offended proud American. Really what I’m saying is this is just dumb. Americans and British are really good at making movies, I think.

**John:** Yeah. And so are Iranians and so are Chinese.

**Craig:** Oh my god, by the way, I’m glad you actually singled out Iranians. Iranians are fantastic filmmakers.

**John:** There’s a tradition of just phenomenal filmmaking that combines really amazing character work with just fantastic storytelling.

**Craig:** Storytelling. Koreans, oh my god. Dude, Snowpiercer? Wow.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** So many across the world. I don’t think any one particular — I don’t know if writing or story are taught differently across the world. I do know this: that across the world, people are looking at big, famous, important movies, and they’re not always the same. But big, and important, and famous as touch stones for what they want to do. And that is the movies themselves that are the most important and powerful instructors of up and coming filmmakers, not film teachers.

**John:** Gabe may have had a moment of Anagnorisis right there with that education we provided him.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Aaron in Shanghai wrote in to say, “You briefly touched on the magical dad transformation story and said that there’s not a direct female equivalent. You’re right, but there is a close equivalent if you look at romantic comedies, which include a lot of magical ingénue transformations. In this trope, you see successful hardworking but romantically inept female lead discover that she’s worthy or capable of romantic love.”

And that’s absolutely true. So it’s the magical thing that is the problem. Is that by some supernatural means, the person is changed. In the romantically challenged equivalent, or the ingénue who doesn’t sort of see what’s important, it’s very rarely magic. It’s usually like a handsome man teaches her a lesson.

**Craig:** Or she just finally takes off her glasses.

**John:** Yeah. I love that trope. That’s a good one.

**Craig:** That’s amazing. I mean, clearly you have a magical story in Cinderella that is very much about someone waving a wand and turning her from this dirty whore wretch into this beautiful princess. Yeah, usually it seems like movies where females are transforming in clunky, silly, tropey ways, there isn’t magic involved.

I wonder if the implication is that, again, we instinctively understand that female characters have the psychological capability to change if they are confronted by certain things. Whereas men literally require supernatural intervention.

**John:** I think the other thing she’s bringing up is that someone intervenes and is like, “Oh no, you’re better than you think you are.” And in these magical dad transformation things, someone intervenes to say like, “No, no, you’re being terrible. You need to learn how to be better.” It’s basically like it’s like in the ingénue ones, it’s like they’re stripping off a coat a paint and revealing the beauty inside. Versus the dad ones are like, “No, no, no, you’re terrible. Let me fix your soul.”

**Craig:** Absolutely, yeah. And I understand that. I mean, there is something believable about the notion that for many women that there is an issue of self-image, or lack of confidence for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is the patriarchy. And so, so yes, the idea is hey sister, you’re stronger than you think, and go get ’em.

And we inherently kind of buy into that narrative, as tropey as it is. And again, for men, we presume that they’re just dumb. They’re literally stupid. And, in fact, they’re so stupid, they need to be punished by god. Like in Liar Liar, he is so ridiculously dumb and impervious to good behavior that he needs to be punished by god until he finally breaks down and realizes what he must become.

**John:** So several listeners tweeted in to say like, oh, you were talking about Nine Lives. And that really was the genesis point for this. You’ve seen the trailer for this, Craig, right? This is Kevin Spacey is a dad who is transformed into a cat.

**Craig:** I’ve seen it and I — I mean, I never say bad things about movies. What’s going on there?

**John:** It looks like a parody of a movie that it is. And I think for that reason alone, it might just be fantastic.

**Craig:** I could be. I was just —

**John:** It may be leaning in so far to what it is that it’s just like brilliant.

**Craig:** And I believe in this movie he’s a dad who works too much, and so he must be punished by god and turned into a cat?

**John:** Yes, that is correct.

**Craig:** Huh.

**John:** And so he still has Kevin Spacey’s voice, so that makes it fantastic.

**Craig:** By the way, that actually kind of does make it fantastic. [laughs]

**John:** Zander in Portland wrote in to point out that the closest comparison for women is probably enforced motherhood, with the examples being Baby Boom and Overboard. And a few other people brought up those two movies. He says, “In both the enforced motherhood and the magical dad transformation comedies, the protagonists realize that she or he has been missing things in life, and thus becoming a better parent, a happier person, and a more moral creature.

“The key difference is the female had never been exposed to parenthood before, while the male was already a father. The male thus requires a magical awakening to see the true unrealized riches in his life. In this way, the male archetype is arguably more stunted than his female counterpart, because he requires supernatural intervention.

“On the other hand, mothers often take on a greater child-rearing burden than fathers do. One could argue that the male can call in his role more easily, so intervention is required.”

**Craig:** Yeah. This is great. I love this. Enforced motherhood. That’s exactly right. Baby Boom is a perfect example. Yeah, and Overboard, too. Actually, they’re both great examples. And actually, yes, there is something that speaks to this belief that all women are really supposed to be mothers, and they’ve just been avoiding being a mom because they’re afraid.

Now, that’s not true as it turns out. That a lot of women are not mothers because they don’t want to be. I know, it’s crazy, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s seductive, because plots that circle around people overcoming a basic fear are catnip for screenwriters, because a lot of the work is suddenly done.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And so for a while there, you could do those movies because I think, still, there was this underlying presumption that, you know, if you just hit your head and woke up on a boat with a bunch of kids and you were told that these are your kids, you would by behaving like a mom suddenly realize, oh my god, this is what I wanted my whole life. That’s baloney.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s baloney. And that movie is basically about wrongful imprisonment. And —

**John:** It’s really troubling when you sort of add up all the things that happen in it. And it’s not troubling in the way it’s like a dark comedy about it. It’s actually a pretty light and bright comedy that just trades on some very dark themes.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know. There’s — someone should do one of those recuts. You know, when they take a movie and they recut the trailer to be different genre?

**John:** Absolutely. Where The Shining is a father comedy?

**Craig:** Right. Or Mary Poppins as a horror. And somebody should do this as like one of these serial killer/thriller movies.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like Saw with children.

**Craig:** Right. It would be so cool. Somebody do it.

**John:** We’ll do it. I won’t do it, but one of our listeners will do it, and it will be fantastic. That idea is out there in the world, so please someone do that.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** The other thing that happened last week was Brexit. So, Tim from England wrote in. Craig, take it.

**Craig:** Tim from England writes, “Rather than some backward look at an old England past, the leave campaign made clear this was a vote for the future. Unshackling the UK from a Soviet style European Union and freeing us to make bilateral trade deals with America, India, China, etc.

“What leavers did want to get back to was a pure European free trade agreement, which is what we were originally sold back in the ’70s, not propping up a bloated EU super state. To use a Star Wars analogy, you should be applauding the rebels and not the Empire.”

Oh, boy, he doesn’t know me at all, does he?

**John:** I included this because I knew it would anger you, but also I think it is really important that last line, which is like Star Wars and these kind of things are one of the situations where both sides can kind of claim the meme high ground. And I just thought it was a fascinating way to frame it. As like any terrorist group can say like, “Oh no, we’re the rebels of Star Wars.”

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Prisoners starting a riot. “We’re the Rebels.” I always root for the Empire. I believe that only through the Dark Side can you bring order to the Galaxy. And from order shall follow peace.

Look, a lot of what Tim writes is dismissible simply as opinion. And there’s a lot of opinion to counter it. I mean, we could go into a long discussion of how his belief that this is going to lead to better trade deals for the United Kingdom is insane.

But, I’m going to pick on one thing that actually bothers me. And it’s when he says, “Soviet style European Union.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t care how bad the European Union is. I’ve been spending, because of this project I’ve been working, I’ve been spending a lot of time living with Soviet research and watching Soviet television recordings. And going through books and books and books that are centering around Soviet decisions. The European Union isn’t in the same universe as the Soviet Union. It is not Soviet Style. Soviet Style was a terror that literally led to the deaths of nearly 100 million people either through starvation, bad policies, or bungled military moves. And those are the people who died.

Forget about the people that were imprisoned or just lived in misery. So, let’s not say Soviet Style European Union.

**John:** So I think Soviet Style is one of those things which you have to be so careful when you bring it up, because it’s almost like a Godwin’s Law thing where like you mention Hitler and then you’re just done. Or saying like a Holocaust, or something. Like, when you bring that up, you’re actually dismissing the huge realities of what that thing is. And making it just impossible to have a discussion. So, you can say like the bureaucracy, all these things.

And we talked about last week, like kind of no one likes the European Union. It’s really messed up in a lot of ways. But it’s not the Soviet Union. And it’s not that situation whatsoever.

**Craig:** Every now and then somebody in the United States will compare something to slavery, and you can just hear — you can hear their credibility crashing to the floor.

The problem is we all know why people do these things. They compare stuff to the Soviet Union or the Holocaust, or Hitler, or slavery because they’re really trying to make their point. Eh, you know what, if you need that crutch to make your point, your point may not be so hot.

**John:** Yep. This email came in early in the week, and so I do feel like over the course of the week his arguments may have changed even from there, because it’s clear that they will not be able to make these amazingly better trade deals. Because they can’t. Because a smaller thing can rarely make better deals than a bigger thing.

**Craig:** They might not even leave the European Union. I mean, that’s the beauty of the whole thing is that there’s no one to actually do it. So, remarkable.

**John:** Well, one union we will never leave is the Writers Guild. See, that was the segue I was waiting for.

**Craig:** Because they won’t let us. [laughs]

**John:** They will never let us. Actually, the Writers Guild will let you leave kind of. You can always go FiCore, which means you are no longer a voting member and are not bound to certain things, but you’re still contributing your dues to the WGA.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** And just today as we were recording, the WGA sent out their financial report. So, this is a place where I can remind you that in the podcast we provide chapters. So, if WGA financials bores you silly, you can skip through to the next chapter where we talk about villains.

**Craig:** No one will skip this.

**John:** No one will skip this, because it will be fascinating. So, we will try to provide a link to this. When we got this this afternoon, it was only on paper, but there should be a link for this pretty soon. So, this one looks through basically what happened in 2015 and gives you the breakdown by people writing for screens, or writing for the movies, and people writing for TV. The bulk of the income for the WGA comes from TV. But I thought overall the picture was not so bad.

Craig, what was your first instinct on this?

**Craig:** Yeah. Basically seems like more of the same. You look at number of writers reporting earnings total, it’s essentially hovering in the same zone it’s been hovering in since 2013, which is around 5,000 or so. A little bit down from last year. A little bit up from ’13.

Total earnings, kind of down a touch, but not much.

**John:** Here’s the important thing to say. Whenever they report earnings for the previous year, they’re always a little bit depressed because they don’t have all the numbers coming in yet. So, they actually warn you in the stats that these numbers always creep up.

And so when you look at it year-to-year, the numbers are basically flat. So there’s about 5,200 writers, so feature and TV writers. Altogether, they’re earning about $1.2 billion, which is a lot of money.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** That’s a serious amount. Except that if you think about the AMPTP, the people we’re working for, they made about $49 billion in profits over that same year. So, there’s a lot of money out there in the system.

**Craig:** Well, and that’s profit. So that already discounts —

**John:** Profit-profit, yes.

**Craig:** Yeah, the money they pay us.

**John:** So our money already came out of there. So like even after they paid us, they had $49 billion left over.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re good. They’re going to be just fine. In terms of television employment, it does seem like actually even with the creep up it’s going to be down a bit from last year, but that was inevitable because last year you saw perhaps what was kind of a peak given the explosion of Netflix and Amazon. So, it was only inevitable it would come down a little bit, but it’s still up quite a bit. I mean, it’s up massively from five years ago. How about that?

I mean, you look at total earnings in 2010 for television writers – $570 million. Last year, and this was the non-creep up number, $800 million. With a nearly 900 more writers working in television.

So, television continues to be fairly healthy. In screen, some good news.

**John:** Yeah, some goodish news.

**Craig:** Ish.

**John:** So these numbers will still creep up a little bit more, but we had more writers employed last year in 2015 than the year before, so we are up 3.6%. Earnings were up to $362 million, versus $355 million. So, still an increase. And I would say that on the ground, it feels that the feature world is shrinking, and shrank last year. But in terms of actual dollars, it didn’t appear to.

**Craig:** Well, kind of.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Part of the problem is that every year from 2011, almost every year, from 2011 to 2015 you’ve had more screenwriters reporting earnings. So, for instance, in 2011 it was 1684. Last year, almost 1,800. However, we’re making about $13 million less overall as a group than we were in 2011.

So, we’re making less, and there’s more of us making it. So, the amount per —

**John:** The per-writer, per-capita.

**Craig:** It’s the amount individual screenwriters get on a — yes, on an average basis has gone down. And it gets really frightening when you look, going back to 2010, where our total earnings were $408 million. So, we are way — we’re still way, way — we’ve come up from the low point in 2013, but we’re still way off where we were in 2010. So, again, to compare to TV, TV is up essentially $230 million and we are down about $45 million. No Bueno.

So, that’s still — it’s good news only in that it didn’t get worse I guess is how I’d put it.

**John:** So, the how writers earn their money we talked about on the show many times. And so TV and film writers, they’re paid money for writing their screenplays, or for writing their scripts. That is the bulk of what a writer earns in a year. The other important caveat we should put on this is that TV writers, they do make money as writers, but they also make money as producers. And sometimes that producer money is vastly bigger than the writer money. That producer money does not show up in these figures at all. So, that is not covered by the WGA. That is a whole separate thing that they are paid.

So, it can be a little bit confusing because a TV writer might be bringing home a lot more, but they’re not being paid as writers for that extra income.

**Craig:** Correct. We also then have some numbers on residuals. And residuals overall continue to go up for television. And they are driven — that increase is driven essentially by the explosion of new media.

**John:** Yeah. So, again, sort of the quickest recap is whenever a TV show or a film is reused in different mediums, or not how it was originally broadcast or put on the big screen, writers get a tiny little fraction of that money that comes in. And the rates are different based on DVD, or VHS, or new media which includes things like streaming. It includes iTunes purchases. And there are different rates. And most of our WGA negotiations are about those rates, it turns out.

And the new media rates, which were a contentious thing a while back, are now a very significant portion of the residuals that both TV and feature writers receive.

**Craig:** Yeah. No question. There’s also a fairly large increase, a dramatic increase actually, in foreign free TV and basic cable residuals. So, our programs are now airing over across the world much more frequently than they used to. In 2010, we were looking at $29 million in residuals for that. And last year, $56 million.

**John:** Yeah. That mirrors sort of our experience in both first run in TV overseas as well. We talk about how increasingly TV shows are profitable from the moment they first air because they’ve made all those foreign deals. That also holds true for the explosion of foreign free TV for residuals. And so there are more places around the world showing our programs, and we get a little bit of money every time they do that.

**Craig:** Sadly, the theme of poor screenwriters continues. Not technically poor, but theatrical residuals down. And they will probably continue to tread water for a while. What’s nice to see, of course, is new media reuse which, let’s say from 2015 over 2010 it’s an increase of 1,043%. But, of course, in 2010, only $1.2 million came in from new media, which is amazing. But then you have to remember the iPhone didn’t even exist until 2007. 2015, closer to $14 million, which still seems low to me considering that I feel like everyone is — but maybe it’s the Netflix thing.

Paid TV, still the biggest driver: $54 million of our $138 million. Overall residuals, down. Forget about from last. Down from 2010. We are — we have not recovered. And I don’t think we’re going to recover from the double whammy of the loss of the DVD market and the strike. I think what happened in the days following 2008 —

**John:** The DVD money was never coming back. So, DVDs were the perfect way to watch movies for a while. And that was a huge source of income both for studios, and therefore for screenwriters in residuals. That sort of went away.

If there’s a positive trend here I can see is that you look at the new media reuse residuals, they are going up by $3 or $4 million most years. There’s a very steady increase. And so, that is going to surpass DVDs. And it’s going to surpass other things down the road. And that — luckily we actually have a better rate on those than we ever did on those other things.

**Craig:** Yeah, kind of. We do for rentals. For sales, we have a slightly better deal on sales than we do on DVDs, but that covers all the stuff that’s been produced and put in theaters since the strike. Everything before the strike, this is one of the big disputed items, and this is one of the areas where the Writers Guild dropped the ball in a way that, frankly, everyone should have fired, but that’s just me. The Writers Guild thought that they had also gotten that slightly better rate to extend to the library, which we consider back to ’71 or something like that.

And the companies said no you didn’t. And it turned out the companies were right. We didn’t.

Now, the companies’ positions, oh that, DVD rate, no matter if you buy anything from before 2008, DVD rate, whether you buy it on iTunes or not. We, I think, ultimately have to accept that.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s other factors, because like the purchase through iTunes tends to be a lower price point than a DVD. But maybe at that lower price point more people are buying that stuff. Streaming seems to be dominating everything anyway. And so certainly in music streaming has become so incredibly important. I have to believe it’s going to continue to be incredibly important for videos. So, we’ll see.

I’m a little optimistic that some of this down slope in feature residuals will perk back up.

**Craig:** Yeah, me too. I mean, one nice thing about new media is that the margin is so much better. They don’t have to print a thing on a disk, stick in a box, stick it in box, ship it in a box. You know, but then Apple takes a pretty decent cut, I’m sure.

**John:** Yeah. They do.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, I think the summary for the numbers is that if you have to say bullet points for a friend who kind of cares is that the numbers were not terrible. And so these numbers are for writer earnings for 2015. It doesn’t get into our pension health. It doesn’t get into some of the other really crucial things that screenwriters and the WGA is looking at.

But it’s talking about sort of like how overall writers are doing this past year. It wasn’t terrible. And so there was no steep drop offs or declines or anything that would set off huge alarm bells for me.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get to a craft topic. So, way back, we’ll find the number of the episode, but we did an episode about villains. And it was actually one of my very favorite episodes we’ve done on the podcast. And so I wanted to write up a longer piece for it. And so I got this guy, Chris Csont, who is a screenwriter himself, to write up a long piece about villains and focusing on what I came up, sort of seven fundamental tips for unforgettable villains.

So, a lot of times in features, you’ll see — and TV as well — you’ll see sort of functional villains, like, well, that villain got the job done. Basically served as a good obstacle for your hero. Kept the plot moving. But a week later, I couldn’t tell you anything about who that villain was.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I wanted to look at sort of in the movies that I love and the movies that had villains that I loved, what were some of those characteristics of those villains that I loved. And so I boiled it down to seven things and then Chris wrote up a nice long blog post that sort of talked through in more detail and gave more examples of what those kind of villains were and how they functioned.

So I thought we’d take a few minutes to look at this list of unforgettable villains and sort of how you can implement them.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. So, my first tip for unforgettable villains is something I’ve said a lot on the show, is that the best villains think that they’re the hero. They are the protagonist in their own stories. They have their own inner life. They have hopes, they have joys. They might seek revenge or power, but they believe they have a reason why they deserve. They can reframe all of the events of the story where they are the good guy in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nobody does bad things just cause. Even when we have nihilistic villains, they’re trying to make a point. Like the Joker is trying to make a point, you know. There’s always a purpose. And so, yes, of course, they think they’re the hero. They have — you know that thing where you look at somebody on TV, maybe in the middle of a political season, and you think how is that guy so happy about all of these terrible things he’s saying?

Well, because he believes in part that he’s the right one, and that his purity is in fact why he’s the hero. Just as a character says I won’t kill is being pure. You know, Luke at the end of Return of the Jedi is being pure. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m not going to kill you because I’m a good guy.” Right? That’s my purity.

Well, on the other side, the villains are heroes with the same purity towards their goal. And other people are these wish-washy, mush-mouthy heroes in name only. They’re HINOs.

**John:** Yeah. So I think it’s absolutely crucial is that they are seeing all of the events of the story from their own point of view and they can defend the actions that they’re taking because they are heroes. Our favorite show, Game of Thrones, does that so well, where you see characters who are one hand despicable, but on the other hand are heroic because you see why they’re doing what they’re supposed to be doing. So, Daenerys can completely be the villain of that story. It’s very easy to frame her as the villain in that story, and yet we don’t because of how we’ve been introduced to her.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then look back to the very first episode. It’s maybe the last line of the first episode, I think. Jamie Lannister pushes Bran out the window, sends him theoretically to his death, although it turns out to just paralyze him. And then he turns back to his sister and he says, “The things we do for love.” And he’s doing it because he’s protecting her because they’re in love. Now I go, okay, I don’t like you, and I don’t like what you did, but I recognize a human motivation in you.

Now, some movies are really bad at shoving this in. You ever get to the end of a movie where you’re like, “Why the hell was this guy doing all this bananas stuff?” And then as he’s being arrested he goes, “Don’t you understand? Blah, blah, blah.”

**John:** Yeah. It’s like it’s already done. It’s already over. Or, that bit of explanation comes right before they’re about to, you know, “Before I kill you, let me tell you why I’m doing what I’m doing.”

**Craig:** And it’s like a weird position paper. It’s not felt. Whereas at the end of — speaking of Sorkin — A Few Good Men, when Jack Nicholson says, “You’ve weakened a country,” I believe he believes that.

**John:** A hundred percent.

**Craig:** I believe that he instructed people to hurt other people because he’s doing the right thing. He’s pure, and they’re not.

**John:** So, let me get to my next point which is unforgettable villains, they take things way too far. So, whereas hopefully all villains see themselves as the hero, the ones who stick with you are the ones who just go just too far. Simple villains who have sort of simple aims, like I’m going to rob this bank, well you’re not going to remember that one. The one who is like, “I’m going to blow up the city block in order to get into this bank,” that’s the villain you remember.

And so you have to look for ways in which you can take your villain and push them just too far so that they cross, they transgress something that no one is ever supposed to transgress. And the ones that really stick, you know, the Hannibal Lecters, the Buffalo Bills, the Alan Rickman in Die Hard, they are just willing to go just as far as they need to go in order to get the job down. And actually too far to get the job done.

**Craig:** Correct. And in their demonstration of their willingness to go to any length to achieve their goal, you realize that if they get away with it, this will not be the last time they do it. This person actually needs to die, because they are a virus that has been released into the world. And if we don’t stop them, they’re going to keep doing it forever, until the world is consumed in their insanity.

And then you have this desire in the audience for your hero to stop the villain. We rarely root for a hero to stop the villain because we want the hero to feel good. We root for it because that person has to go, you know.

**John:** Absolutely. We don’t root for the hero as much if it’s like a mild villain. It has to be the villain who is absolutely hell bent on destruction. And doesn’t have to be destroying the world, but like destruction of what is important to us as the audience.

**Craig:** Yeah. It could be somebody who just wants to take your kid from you.

**John:** Yep. That’s a good one.

**Craig:** And then you’re like, argh, and you just realize — you won’t stop — you’ll ruin the rest of my kid’s life. And you might do this to somebody else’s kid. You just feel like you should be stopped in order to return the world to its proper state of being a just world, which as we know, realistically it’s not.

**John:** Never going to happen.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Third point about unforgettable villains is that they live at the edges of society. So sometimes they are literally out in the forest, or the creepy old monster in the cave. But sometimes they’re at the edges of sort of moral society. So they place themselves outside the normal rules of law, or the normal rules of acceptable behavior.

And so even if they are the insiders, even if they are the mayor of the town, they don’t function within the prescribed boundaries of like what the mayor of the town can do.

So, you always have to look at them — they perceive themselves as outsiders, even if they are already in positions of power.

**Craig:** They certainly perceive themselves to be special.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There were a lot of people, speaking of the Soviet Union, in the ’30s and ’40s, a lot of people who were Soviet officials who did terrible things. But, frequently they were tools, or sometimes Stalin would go so far as to call them “useful idiots.” Stalin was special. He considered himself special. And special people are different than people who do bad things.

So, when you’re thinking about your villain, you know, it may not be one of those movies where the villain actually has henchmen, per se. But, special people do have their own versions of henchmen. People who believe them at all costs. You know, the poor — the albino guy in The Da Vinci Code. You know, he’s a villain, kind of, but he’s not the villain. He’s a tool.

**John:** Yeah. So even if the villain has prophets or a society around him, he perceives himself as being outside that society as well.

**Craig:** He can go ahead and bend the rules, because he knows, once again, he knows what’s better. He is different and above everybody else. That’s we’re fascinated by a good one.

**John:** Also because they hold up a mirror to the reader. That’s my fourth point. Is that a good hero sort of represents what the audience aspires to be, what we hope we could be. The unforgettable villain is the one who you sort of fear you might be. It’s like sort of all your darkest impulses. It’s like what if I actually did that terrible thing. That’s that villain. It’s that person you worry deep down you really are.

**Craig:** Which goes to motivations. Universally recognizable motivations. And this is something that comes up constantly when you’re talking about villains. The first thing people will ask is, “What do they want?” Right? Just like a hero, because they are the hero of their story, what do they want? What are they motivated by? What’s driving them to do these crazy, crazy things?

And it’s never, oh, it’s just random, because again, that’s not — so for instance, you can look at Buffalo Bill, the character in Silence of the Lambs, as really more of like an animal. We can talk about his motivations, and they do, but those motivations are foreign to all of us. It’s a rare, rare person who is sociopathic and also violent and also attempting to convince himself that he will be better if he’s transgender, which he’s really not. That’s not any of us.

But, Hannibal Lecter is. Hannibal Lecter has these things in him that we recognize in ourselves. And in fact, it’s very easy to fantasize that you are Hannibal Lecter. It’s kind of sexy. It’s fascinating. A good villain is somebody that you kind of guiltily imagine being.

Who hasn’t imagined being Darth Vader? He’s the coolest.

**John:** Yeah. Imagine having that kind of power. The power to manipulate. The power to literally control things with your mind. That’s a seductive thing. And I think the best villains can tap into that part of the reader or the audience.

Also, I would say that the great villains, they let us know what they want. And we sort of hit on that earlier. Sometimes you’ll get to the end of the story and then the villain will reveal what the plan was all along. That’s never satisfying.

The really great villains that stick with you, you’re clear on what they’re going after from the start. And even if it’s Jaws. I mean, you understand what is driving them. And you understand at every moment what their next aim is. And they’re not just there to be an obstacle to the hero. They have their own agenda.

**Craig:** Yeah. A good movie villain will sometimes hide what they’re after, and you have to kind of figure it out, or tease it out. For instance, you mentioned Se7en. You don’t quite get what Kevin Spacey is up to. In fact, it seems just random. Like so a bad villain. Random acts of senseless violence. You know, kind of connected together by this interesting motif. Until the end when you realize, oh, there’s some sort of larger purpose here.

They often tell us what they want because they have clarity. Good heroes don’t have clarity. The protagonist shouldn’t have too much clarity, otherwise they’re boring as hell, right? They should be conflicted inside about what’s right and what’s wrong. They make choices.

Villains are not conflicted at all. So, of course, they’re going to be able to say, “What do I want?” I want this because of this. That’s it. I figured it out already. I don’t have any of your handwringing or sweating. I know what I’m going to do, and I know why, and I believe it’s correct. That’s it.

**John:** And they tell us what that is. And so they may not tell the hero what that is. Often they will. But we as the audience know what they’re actually going for, and that’s really crucial.

And ultimately whatever the villain is after, the hero is a crucial part of that plan. The great villains make it personal. And so we talked about Se7en. Like you can’t get much more personal than sort of what Kevin Spacey does to poor Brad Pitt’s wife in Se7en. It starts as a story that could be about some random killings, but it dials down to something very, very personal. And that’s why we are so drawn into how things end.

**Craig:** Well, what’s interesting is that in the real world, this is another area where narrative drifts so far apart from the real world. In the real world, most villains are defined by people that do bad things. And they’re repugnant. We like our movie villains to be charismatic. We love it. We like our movie villains to be seductive, and interesting, and charming. And part of that is watching them have a relationship with the hero.

We want the villain to have a relationship with the hero. It can be a brutal relationship, but a fascinating relationship. And the only way you can have a relationship is if the villain is interested in the hero. And inevitably they are.

Sometimes it’s the villain’s interest in the hero that becomes their undoing. Again, you go to the archetype of Darth Vader and Luke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He wants to know his son. And so ultimately that’s what undoes him.

**John:** Yeah, you look at the Joker and Batman in Christopher Nolan’s version of it is that the Joker could not exist without Batman, fundamentally. They are both looking at the same city, the same situation, and without each other they both wouldn’t function really.

It’s like the Joker could create his chaos, he could sort of try to bring about these acts of chaos to make everyone look at sort of how they are and how the city functions. But, without Batman — if he can’t corrupt Batman, it’s not worth it for him.

**Craig:** Right. Batman is the thing he pushes against. And The Killing Joke, which is maybe the greatest graphic novel of all time, is entirely about that relationship. And there is something at the heart of the Joker/Batman dynamic that’s probably at the heart of most hero/ villain dynamics in movies, and that is that there is a lot of shared quality. There’s a similarity. It’s why you hear this terrible, terrible line so many times, “You and I, we are not different.”

Because it’s true.

**John:** Because it’s true. It doesn’t mean you should say it.

**Craig:** That’s right. Don’t say it.

**John:** But it is true. You can maybe find a way to visualize that or sort of let your story say that for you, but just don’t say that.

**Craig:** Just don’t say it. Or have them make fun of it.

**John:** Yeah. My final point was that flaws are features. And that in general the villains that you remember, there is something very, very distinctive about them. Either physically, or a vocal trait. There’s something that you can sort of hang them on so you can remember what they’re like because of that one specific tick, or look, or thing that they do.

And so, obviously, Craig is a big fan of hair and makeup and costuming. And I think all of those things are crucial. But you have to look at sort of what is it about your villain that a person is going to remember a month from now, a year from now, that they can remember — that they can picture them. They can hear their voice.

Hannibal Lecter is so effective because you can hear his voice. Buffalo Bill, we know what he looks like when he’s putting on that suit. Find those ways that you can distinguish your villain so that we can remember him a year from now.

**Craig:** It would be nice, I think, for screenwriters to always think about how their villain will first be perceived by the audience. Because you’re exactly right.

This is part of what goes to the notion that the villain is the hero of their story. That the villain is a special person. What you’re signifying to the audience is this is a person who is more important than everybody else in the movie, except our hero. Right? And just as I made a big deal about the hero, I have to make a big deal about this person, because they are special.

And if you look at the first time you see Hannibal Lecter, his hair — let’s first start with the hair — is perfect. It’s not great hair. He’s a balding man. But it’s perfectly combed back. And he’s wearing his, I guess, his asylum outfit, crisp, clean. And he’s standing with the most incredible posture. And his hands, the way his hands and his arms are, it’s as if he’s assembled himself into this perfected mannequin of a person. And he does not blink.

And that’s great. Just from the start. You know, we all get that little hair-raising feeling when somebody creepy comes by. Sometimes it’s the littlest thing like that.

**John:** And sometimes it’s a very big thing. So like Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies is one of my favorite arrivals of a villain in a story, because she’s wearing this pink dress that she’s in for the whole movie. And from the moment you see her, you know in a general sense what she is. But you just don’t know how far she’s going to push it. So she seems like this busybody, but then you realize she’s actually a monster. She’s a monster in a pink housecoat. And she is phenomenal.

And that’s a very distinctive choice of sort of the schoolmarm taken way too far. And you see it from the very start. And so I can’t — I could never see that kind of costuming again without thinking of her. That’s a sign of a really good design.

**Craig:** That’s a great reference. And it goes right back to J.K. Rowling’s book. That’s an example of taking something that’s amusingly innocuous and not villainous, like oh, a sweet old lady who loves cats and collects plates. And loves pink, and green, and pastel colors. And saying, that lady, now she’s a sadist. Ooh, blech. Great, you know, just great.

And then you get it. You walk into her office and you can smell that bad rose perfume, you know. Terrific.

**John:** Terrific. So, I have these seven tips, but also a very long, very detailed article by Chris Csont you can find, so that’s at writeremergency.com/villains. There will be a link in the show notes, too.

But, Chris, thank you for writing up a great post. And we’re going to try to do a few more of these things, we’re we can sort of do a deep dive. I don’t have time to write these big long things, but Chris does. And he does a great job at them. So we’re going to try to have a few more of these up over the course of the year.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer a question or two. Tom wrote in with a very simple question. “What are your thoughts on opening a script with a quote?”

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t mind it so much. I mean, it’s a little cliché. I always feel like when you open your script with a quote you’re basically borrowing somebody else’s genius and importance to create a mood that you have not earned yourself. So, I say if you can avoid it, probably try it without it.

**John:** Stuart got really frustrated by this question. We were talking about it at lunch. And he said, I think a very good point, is like, “The script is supposed to represent what the movie is going to feel like. And if the movie is going to feel like it’s going to open with a quote, use it. If it’s not, then don’t.” And I think that’s actually very good advice is that always remember the screenplay is meant to duplicate the experience of seeing the movie. And if that’s important for your movie, it’s important to set the expectation of what your movie is, use it. Otherwise, don’t. And I agree with that.

So, I think the only one of my scripts that started with — not even a quote but sort of a dedication page — was Big Fish. It was very important for Big Fish, because it had to set the tall tales expectation. So, I wanted you to stop on that page and understand what kind of movie you were about to get into.

One of the great scripts at Sundance this year had a similar kind of thing where it was very much setting up the tone, and I loved that. But I think it’s only the scripts that need it should use it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just don’t throw it on there, you know. I mean, let’s put it this way, if you could conceive of your movie actually opening with this quote on the screen, then sure. You know, it’s got to feel like something that’s appropriate.

I’m not a purist about this. But I would say if you cannot, don’t. Right? Because it’ll just be, I don’t know, you’ll just impress people with your writing immediately, you know? As opposed to something wry from George Bernard Shaw.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say don’t use a quote that we’ve heard before.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, don’t.

**John:** That doesn’t help. It’s just like, oh, this is a cliché.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re not an original person. You just went on Bartleby.com.

**John:** Craig, do you want to do this last question? It’s Jay in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Sure. Jay in Los Angeles writes, “I’m a screenwriter who is finishing the deal to sell my spec script to a known production company. The deal should be announced in the next week or two.” Congrats.

“I have an agent from a top-four agency, as well as a lawyer handling the deal. A well-known actor is attached to the project. I was able to attract interest from a producer on my own and then hustled to find my reps after the fact.

“The agent on the deal, and I, never had a conversation on my becoming a client.” Is this my son writing this? Because he does that thing where “on my becoming,” and I’m like you got to stop writing that. Anyway.

“The agent on the deal, and I, had never had a conversation about me becoming a client. He never even asked to read the script. Am I already a de facto client? I want to be able to while the iron is hot, get a manager, and try to get in as many rooms as possible. I also have a pitch prepped for a new project. The question is: how does one approach that conversation with the agent? What can I do to prepare for the news of the deal to get out, aside from prepping a new pitched script?”

**John:** This is actually not an uncommon situation where you sort of got stuff started, you got stuff to a producer. This agent helps you make this deal. And then it’s sort of this vague situation like “am I client of this agency or not?”

The way to find out is to ask the person who you should ask. And ask, especially if you like this person. If you don’t like this person, you haven’t really signed with this agency, and maybe you can take some other meetings. This producer may help you meet some other folks. But you are right to be thinking about what your next steps are and to capitalize on the news of this getting out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree. It’s as simple as asking him the question, or asking her the question. I wouldn’t worry so much about the agent — oh, it’s a he — the fact that the agent didn’t ask to read the script. I don’t need my agents to read my scripts. I just need them to get me as much money as they can.

So, I’m not freaking out by that. Yeah. Ask them. Also ask yourself: what do you think about this person? I mean, so far so good, I guess, right?

**John:** I guess. I would say, you know, be honest with yourself about what you want to write next, what things you’re interested in doing. What else you have ready to kind of have pitched. And then have the conversation about sort of like what is the deal with this agency. Do you guys want to represent me on an ongoing basis? Is this a one-off thing?

They will say like, “Oh, no, we want to represent you on an ongoing basis,” but then they should probably bring you in for a meeting where they meet with you and with other agents there and they talk about the things you want to do. Before you have that meeting, you should actually be able to answer that question about the things you want to do.

So, I think you’re in a good place, but you’re also right to be asking these questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can try and prepare things like a new pitch or script, but don’t rush anything in there. Don’t feel like you need to have this shoebox full of stuff. Frankly, your concentration should be on writing the next draft of your spec script.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** That’s where you are now. But unless you haven’t sold it under a WGA deal, and I can’t imagine that’s the case, you are guaranteed the right to be the first rewriter of your script. So, you need to start now transitioning from being a spec guy to a professional writer.

**John:** A hundred percent agree. Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, Craig, did you already click on this link? Because it’s really good. You’re going to like it a lot.

**Craig:** I did. And I thought it was spectacular.

**John:** So, this is called The Mill Blackbird, so the Mill is a place that shoots a lot of film type stuff and special effects things. The Blackbird is this very cool car they’ve built. Essentially if you’re shooting a car commercial or anything on film that involves a car, it is a hassle because the client wants the car to look beautiful, you are trying to do things under different conditions. And sometimes cars change, or you want to change the color of the car afterwards. So what this thing does is basically it’s this skeleton of a car. The wheel base is adjustable. You can change out the actual wheels on it.

But essentially you are driving this thing around and then you are putting the car skin on top of it in post. And it sounds like, well, why would you do that? That’s ridiculous. But you would totally do this in a lot of situations because it lets you switch things out in really remarkable ways. The car itself, this Blackbird, also has cameras on it that are capturing everything around it, and so you can use that for VR applications, but also to get all of the data that you need so that you can have proper reflections on the car when you are putting the skin of the car on in CG.

It seems like just a very smart idea. I can imagine it’s going to be used a lot. Chris Morgan, doing the Fast & Furious movies, probably already has three of them on order.

**Craig:** Seriously.

**John:** It seemed very, very cool.

**Craig:** It is cool. You know, cars are something that they’re so good at making digitally. Like the car racing games are always the best looking games. Those are the ones that are the most close to, wait, is this real? There’s something about just the metal and the paint and the whole thing. It works so great.

And I had no idea, by the way. I’ve been fooled this whole time. I thought those were cars out there. Ah, what do I know?

**John:** What do you know? I would say like a lot of times you’ve seen so many fake cars in movies, and when people complain about like, oh, bad CG, people don’t realize that half the cars you’ve seen in movies are not actually there. So, when you see car racing and stuff in films, a lot of times that’s all done digitally.

**Craig:** Yeah. People complain about CG because they’re like, “I saw a thing.” Yeah, you didn’t see a thousand other things, did you? So, maybe you shouldn’t complain.

**John:** Maybe not.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe you should shut it. I’ll tell you what is my One Cool Thing. Strangely enough, helium. Did you know that we were running a little short on helium? [laughs]

**John:** I remember this being a thing from before. But they found more of it.

**Craig:** They found a whole lot more. So, helium is not only used for the party balloons, although if you had asked me, I would have said, “Balloons, right?” It’s kind of important. We actually, for instance, use it in every MRI scanner. There are over a million MRIs in the world, and we need helium for each one of them. We need helium for energy production. We need helium for all sorts of things.

And we were kind of starting to run low, because the deal is helium is an element. You don’t make it. Right? It’s just what we have is what we’ve got.

**John:** I presume once we get fusion really going, you can make helium. Is that correct? People will tell me if that’s not correct. I assume that we can actually make helium off of fusing hydrogen atoms, but I could be wrong.

**Craig:** I’m not going to say yes or no to that.

**John:** All right. We’ll let Wikipedia determine.

**Craig:** Smells a little wrong, but I don’t know. Sometimes the most right things smell a little wrong. But, and we, by the way, this is another thing I didn’t know. We have something called the Federal Helium Reserve. It’s in Texas. And it’s this massive thing. It’s got 242 billion cubic feet of helium, which is about 30% of all the helium in the world. Until they just found this whole big thing in Tanzania.

A massive helium gas field. Apparently, we’re going to be fine. And some Tanzanians hopefully will get rich off of the helium. How do you mine helium?

**John:** Carefully? I don’t know. I just worry it would all leak out.

**Craig:** Balloons. Just endless balloons.

**John:** Endless balloons. Poppers. It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Poppers.

**John:** Swelling up so high. A lot of squeaky voice. I bet that’s how they found it. I bet like, “There’s something wrong here,” and —

**Craig:** Somebody goes into a mine looking for something, comes out like —

**John:** “Something’s really weird.”

**Craig:** “I didn’t find anything”

**John:** Craig, your helium voice was much better than mine.

**Craig:** All you have to do is like really shrink your voice.

**John:** Well done. I got to say. I would prefer that to almost any of your other characters. [laughs]

**Craig:** Helium Craig is official now. Helium Craig.

**John:** It really is. I looked it up as you were talking, and so yes, you can make helium off of a hydrogen fusion process. It’s probably a terrible, dangerous version of helium. It probably would kill everyone. But I bet it could make some balloons float up.

**Craig:** I don’t care. Listen, man, you were right about it. I think they should do it.

**John:** They should absolutely do it. Scriptnotes, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is a class Matthew Chilelli outro. But if you have a new one for us, you can always write in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered on the program today.

You will find links to most of the things we talked about on the show notes, which are attached to this podcast, or you can find them at johnaugust.com.

If you want to read that whole villains piece, that’s writeremergency.com/villains.

If you would like to tweet to Craig, he is @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. If you are on iTunes for any reason, please leave us a review. We love those. We haven’t read those reviews aloud for a while. Maybe we’ll do that next week.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And that’s all I got. Craig, thank you so much for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thanks John.

**John:** See ya.

Links:

* [Sundance Feature Film Programs](http://www.sundance.org/programs/feature-film)
* The [James Patterson MasterClass](https://www.masterclass.com/classes/james-patterson-teaches-writing)
* [Nine Lives trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jHA97HzhxE) on YouTube
* Scriptnotes, 75: [Villains](http://johnaugust.com/2013/villains)
* [7 Tips for Creating Unforgettable Villains](http://writeremergency.com/villains)
* [The Blackbird, from The Mill](http://www.themill.com/portfolio/3002/the-blackbird%C2%AE)
* Newser on [Tanzania’s game changing giant helium field](http://www.newser.com/story/227284/game-changer-giant-helium-field-found-in-tanzania.html)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))