Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-where-alines-show-debuts).

**John August:** Hey this is John. So today’s show we have a clip from a movie that has some strong words in it. Not the F-word, but other words. So, if you’re driving with kids in the car, that is a warning. That is going to be our third segment of the show today.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 219 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we are going to be talking to Aline Brosh McKenna, our favorite podcast guest, our most repeated podcast guest. She is here to tell us about the launch of her show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, which she discussed way back on the Christmas episode last year. She’s the best.

Are you excited, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, she is and will always be our living Joan Rivers.

**John:** Yes. So, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show with Rachel Bloom, that debuts — it debuted yesterday if you’re listening to this on Tuesday.

**Craig:** Ooh, exciting.

**John:** But we recorded this before it came out, so who knows. Maybe things went crazily wrong. But they didn’t, because the show is great. We’re also going to be talking about Indian screenwriters who have gone on strike and what that means and sort of what they can look forward to. And we’re going to be looking at three pages from this aspiring writer who I think, you know, we’ll see if he has a career ahead of him. His name is Scott Frank. And we’re going to be taking a look at these three pages he wrote and also a scene he shot that was in a movie he shot that people love. And it’s a good look at sort of how the conflict on the page between two characters in a scene with dialogue can translate into a movie and sort of what you look for in writing on the page.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. And this should be an excellent show. I have a good feeling about this show. We have Aline, so you know we’re — I mean, she’s about to come and we’re going to have a ton of bizarre mixed metaphors and analogies.

We have some interesting follow up stuff that we’re about to get to. And then I’m really excited to sort of tear this scene apart in a good way and really analyze bit by bit how these things happen. Because, you know, it’s been a while since we’ve really gotten super crafty, so.

**John:** Yeah, this will be a crafty episode.

**Craig:** Crafty crafty.

**John:** So, let’s start with the follow up. The t-shirts for Scriptnotes are now out in the world. And so as I was going to see — I saw Sicario and The Martian over the weekend. I was walking from the restaurant back to go see The Martian and I saw one of the purple Scriptnotes shirts out in the wild, like a guy on Sunset Boulevard was wearing it.

And so he saw my double take and he goes, “Hey John.” I’m like, hey. I was just so surprised to see the t-shirt out there in the world. So, if you are out there in the world wearing a Scriptnotes t-shirt, that is fantastic. If you want to #Scriptnotes or #ScriptnotesTee on Instagram or Twitter, that’s also fun and fine.

If you are overseas, it’s a chance that you’ve not gotten your shirts yet. If you’re in the US, it’s more likely that you’ve gotten your shirts. They all went out last Friday, so a week ago as we’re recording this. So, people should be having them in their hands ready to wear.

**Craig:** Spectacular. It is fun to see those shirts around. I do occasionally see them. If you are walking around with a shirt and John crosses your path, you too can have a conversation with John that begins and ends with, “Hey John. Hey.”

**John:** I think there’s going to be a lot of those in Austin.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Speaking of Austin, the Austin Film Festival is coming up very soon. There will be two Scriptnotes sessions. There’s going to be a live Scriptnotes show on the Friday and there’s going to be a Three Page Challenge on Saturday. We were able to use our collective muscle to move the Saving Mr. Banks conversation between Kelly Marcel and John Lee Hancock, so it’s not at the same time as Scriptnotes anymore.

So you can go to both the live Scriptnotes show and to Kelly and John’s discussion and be happy.

**Craig:** As well you should. Yes. There was a little bit of a — I don’t want to call it an uproar, because it was about four people. But those four people were very upset, so we took care of them.

**John:** Yeah. We took care of those folks. So come join us for all those things if you’d like to. I don’t know our venues yet. I don’t know anything more about our shows, but I’m excited to be going to Austin and performing those shows with Craig and folks.

**Craig:** I think they said that we’re doing the live podcast in a church.

**John:** Yeah. And so the church last year, Craig wasn’t there last year. The church is a lovely venue, except last year we were seated on the — so, there’s pews, but we were seated on the floor. We weren’t up on risers. And it was actually very hard to see. So, I will do my best to make sure that we are up high enough so you can actually see us in that church.

**Craig:** No one wants to see us. They listen to us. It’s a podcast, for god’s sake.

**John:** Absolutely. Really what you can do is you can just put your blinders on and just pretend — like listen to it live before everyone else can.

**Craig:** Really what we’re saying is fly to Austin so you have slightly better audio.

**John:** That’s really what we’re going for. Actually, maybe worse audio, because now that Craig has a good microphone, we’re all set.

**Craig:** Great point.

**John:** Another bit of follow up. So, a couple episodes ago we talked about how would this be a movie, and one of the things we brought up was the French train heroes, so basically these three Americans who were on a train in France and they ended like taking down this guy who was shooting at the train. And they were hailed as heroes.

A weird bit of follow up that happened this last week is Spencer Stone, one of the three guys, ended up getting stabbed repeatedly in Sacramento. And there was video of it. It was just a really strange incident.

So, it wasn’t related to the French train attacks directly, but we were really wondering as we were talking about the French train possible movie, well, what would the second act be? How do you structure that? And maybe that’s a possibility of how you would think about what the second and third acts of that movie would be is basically what happens after that.

If that big incident happened in the first act, what is the life like for those guys moving forward? And as those 15 minutes start ticking down, interesting to think about sort of what happens when this heroic person goes home and whether that becomes a factor in other things of his life.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little reminiscent of the Chris Kyle story, who was murdered here in the United States by an unhinged friend. This guy seems to have been stabbed in sort of just a random incident of guys out at night. And maybe getting into an argument or a fight or something.

He’s going to be okay from what I understand. It doesn’t feel — I mean, if I had passed on this movie initially and then someone came back to me and said, “Well what about now?” I’d say it’s still a pass.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s still a pass, too. And I don’t want to sort of make light of the real plight of what happened to this one true guy, Spencer Stone, by saying like, oh, well, it changes the plot of the story. Obviously we’re talking about sort of a fictional movie about maybe some fictional people. But I think it was an interesting way to think about sort of what happens next, if you structured this kind of story with the big dramatic train incident happening at the start. What is the ongoing story of these three young men?

**Craig:** Indeed. Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. You have a bit of follow up here about Craig and Ezra and Marissa. I don’t even know what this.

**Craig:** I know, isn’t this is exciting? So, I have the craziest. A couple of nights ago, Chris Morgan and I went to the guild to speak to a group that was sort of a hybrid group of Writers Guild members and members of the Universal Emerging Writers Program, which essentially it’s designed to promote diverse writers, African American, Latino, Asian American, LGBT, the whole — the usuals, right?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, like okay, these are the folks. And it was interesting because they expanded that beyond just the people who had gone through the program to Writers Guild members in general. And I’m not sure exactly how they expanded it, but it was by far the most diverse room I’ve ever seen in the guild, ever. I mean, it was actually really encouraging.

And so we had this really nice talk about stuff and then afterwards Chris and I went over to Canter’s, because I haven’t been to Canter’s in — you know, I used to live around the corner from Canter’s. It’s been like 12 years.

**John:** I’m going to pause you for a second, because people who don’t live in Los Angeles have no idea what you’re talking about.

**Craig:** Oh, Canter’s. Canter’s Deli is an institution. It’s been around since the — I’m guessing the 20’s? 30’s?

**John:** It feels like 20’s.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an old, old building in the old Jewish district of Los Angeles, which isn’t really — eh, it’s kind of still Jewish.

**John:** It’s Jewish and Ethiopian in a weird way.

**Craig:** Right. It’s Jewthiopian. But it is an old school deli. And it is unchanged. And it’s just a neighborhood institution. And I used to go there all the time. It was the closest thing that I could find to sort of New York Jewish comfort food.

And it is New York Jewish comfort food. It’s just in LA. So I’m sitting there and Chris and I are chatting, and then he gets up to go to the restroom. And this guy comes over to my table, young man, nice guy, millennial mustache. I love the millennial mustache.

**John:** It’s fun.

**Craig:** He introduces himself. His name is Ezra. And he says, “I’m sorry to bother you. Is your name, Craig?

“Yes.”

“Are you Craig Mazin?”

“Yes.”

“I’m a fan of Scriptnotes.” And he’s super nice. He’s wearing a Mets hat, which I don’t like, and I tell him —

**John:** No, not a bit.

**Craig:** We talk about that for a bit. And then he says, “By the way, my girlfriend is sitting over there. Her name is Marissa. Her family owns Canter’s.”

**John:** Crazy.

**Craig:** And I was like, what? This is awesome! So I just went over and sat down with Marissa. Her mother is Jackie Canter. And we talked about Canter’s. It was the craziest — it’s like the coolest thing to meet nice people. I feel like all of our listeners are super nice. They are dating people that own classic restaurants, which is a huge plus for me because Jackie did send over some free black and white cookies and rugelach to Chris and to me.

**John:** Aw. That’s very nice. My similar kind of Scriptnotes adjacent story is a friend of mine was talking about he went to his barber who is in the Valley, I believe, and they were talking. And it turned out the barber said he was really tired because he has to stay up late after his shift because he’s a screenwriter and he wants to work at night. And he said like, “Have you ever heard the show Scriptnotes?” And he was a big fan of the Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So I just love that we have barbers in the Valley who listen to the show as well. If you are that barber in the Valley, hi, hello.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know what? Ezra, I just want to say thank you for coming over. You were an incredibly nice guy. I loved how much of a fan you were. And thank you for interesting me to your wonderful girlfriend, who should become your wife, Marissa. Because, let’s face it, Canter’s.

**John:** So when I saw this on the Workflowy, the outline of the show, I was like — so I was thinking is this Ezra Miller? I’m trying to think who is an actress who could be the Marissa. I was thinking too much is really what I was thinking.

**Craig:** It turns out to be a very simple but beautiful story.

**John:** A similar simple but beautiful story is really the Aline Brosh McKenna story, who is our first and — she was our first guest. She’s our first guest on the episode today. She’s first in our hearts. Let us welcome Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Aline Brosh McKenna:** I’m very happy to be here.

**John:** So, Aline, we are recording this on Saturday, but on Monday your show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, debuts.

**Aline:** It does.

**John:** And people are listening to this on Tuesday. So, it’s this weird state of being both before and after the moment. So, tell us about what you’re feeling right now, two days before your show premieres?

**Aline:** Well, I’m feeling quite after about the pilot, because we started shooting it a year ago. And we finished it around Christmas of last year.

**John:** You were actually on the Christmas episode and we talked about your pilot.

**Aline:** So, at what point in the grieving was I there?

**John:** It was pre-grieving. So, at this point you were like, “Oh, we’re a Showtime show and everyone loves us.”

**Aline:** Yeah. I think they did love us before they set us free. I think I’ve talked about the fact that the pilot sort of hung around for a while, got picked up by the CW. It was a shock to us how quickly it happened. We didn’t know we were going to be on the fall schedule. So we geared up very quickly. And the pilot we did a little tszuj on the pilot. We added some material and we edited out some profanity. And I’m excited that people are going to get to see it, considering how close it came to living on a shelf, or in a bin, in some garbage.

**Craig:** And so now you have this interesting thing. You ever see that — sometimes I’ll notice in a movie when I can tell when they’ve done a pickup or a reshoot because a bunch of times come by and the actor looks slightly different. With all the time in between, does everything still feel like, okay, from episode one to two does it still feel like, oh yeah, it’s still the same person, it’s still the same vibe?

**Aline:** Well we had a lot of the same crew come back, so we had a lot of people who were familiar with everybody’s look. And then one character was completely recast, so we didn’t have to worry about that. And there was one set, which is quite important to the series, but you only see it once in the pilot. And we were able to completely rebuild that. And that’s one that we use a lot.

So, I think you’d have to be a pretty fine careful student of the pilot to see the differences.

**Craig:** It’s the only way I’ll watch TV, just so you know. [laughs]

**Aline:** With a microscope.

**Craig:** With a microscope and a checklist.

**John:** Now, Craig doesn’t watch any TV, so the real question is going to be whether Craig actually watches your show. So far the critics have said that he should watch your show. This is Brian Lowry of Variety writing, “One of the fall’s most promising hours, full of infectious energy.”

Willa Paskin at Slate writes, “Charming, ambitious, utterly singular show.”

And there’s also a New York Times article which I’ll link to, because you guys have done a ton of press on this show. You’re actually one of the shows that people are singling out as being sort of groundbreaking and unique and something people are excited about.

**Aline:** Again, all the more gratifying. We’re very grateful. But all the more gratifying considering how close we came to being garbage.

**John:** I was at an event a couple of weeks ago and I was talking with an executive who works, I think, at CBS, and she was saying how much she loved your show and how excited she was. It’s so complicated, but CBS and Showtime are related, and so is CW. And so I said like, “I’m so happy and excited for Aline and for Rachel, but I’m also hoping that — I’m both hoping for their back nine and I hope that they don’t have to do the back nine,” because I’m just trying to think how will you possibly survive 22 episodes of your show.”

Because, you’re shooting what episode right now?

**Aline:** We are just in the middle of seven.

**John:** Great. And so you are only a third of the way through it. You must be exhausted already.

**Aline:** Well, I’m not thinking about it, because we don’t have our back nine order. They ordered five extra scripts. But we’re just kind of chugging through these first 13. You know, and it is what everybody says it is in terms of the workload is quite intense. But it’s been so fun. And it’s been such an interesting different kind of job for me. I’ve really enjoyed it. So, you know, as tiring as it is, I really don’t dwell on that. I’ve really enjoyed it.

**Craig:** I would love to know how you guys — I mean, look, any TV show is a difficult march. But how do you continually create new songs that rapidly and that frequently?

**Aline:** It’s, yeah, I mean, it’s quite something. We, Rachel and I, had thought about this show in quite a lot of detail when we thought we were a Showtime show. So, we had a bunch of stuff backlogged and that helped us. And when we started we hired — Rachel did the music on the pilot with her friend, Jack Dolgen, who now writes on the show and writes additional music.

But we hired this guy, Adam Schlesinger, who is halfway to an EGOT, among other things. He was in the Fountains of Wayne.

**Craig:** I love Fountains of Wayne.

**Aline:** He composed a Broadway show. He’s written a lot of comedy songs, including Broadway’s Not Just for Gays Anymore. And we picked him up at the beginning of this, when we got picked up. And he has been writing with Rachel, and with Jack. And they kick out the songs very quickly.

It’s funny. That has not been as much of an inhibiting factor. Sometimes we switch out the song that we want to do in a given episode, because while the songs are kind of standalone pieces in a way, they have to fit emotionally into the show. So, if the show gets rewritten, sometimes the songs change.

But Rachel and Adam, once they have an idea for a song, either separately or together, and then Jack as well, we’re able to kind of cook through those once they know what they are.

**John:** I have friends who write on other network shows, and they will get studio notes and network notes, and they’ll have to quickly scramble to incorporate those notes. And it seems like it must be an incredibly bigger challenge when you have so many other pieces that are depending on it. So, you have — not only you have Rachel being so busy, but you have the writing of the episode, you have the writing of the songs, you have the choreography. You have so many things dependent. So to try to make a simple, what seems like a simple change, would be incredibly difficult for your show.

Have they been mindful of how challenging that gets?

**Aline:** We hand the demos in as soon as we get them. And the songs — we try and get the songs with the lyrics into the script. Sometimes we’re behind. But conceptually they know where we are, song-wise, most of the time. And most of their notes reside in the storytelling, in the traditional aspects of the show. So, they’ve been tremendously cooperative. And I think people also people are real fans of the music, so they’re very excited to get those demos. And I think that is the funnest part of the show, for everybody who works on the show, including the crew. It’s just always fun when we have a day when we’re doing a video and there’s music and dance on the set. Sort of everybody wants to come down and participate. Those are fun days.

**John:** Talk to us about the writing. As you are figuring out an episode, there is a written document you’re turning in that is sort of for approval. Is that an outline? What does it look like? And how long is that?

**Aline:** Well this is new to me, because in features I try to avoid written outlines, because I find that people get bogged down and you end up in outline cul-de-sac. But in TV there’s really no other way to do it.

So we do two documents. We do a short document, which is like sort of a pre-outline, which is a couple of pages. We send that in. And then we get notes on that. And then we do a fuller outline. And then we try and make that as detailed as possible, so that when the writers go off to script they have a really detailed roadmap.

But I have found that I don’t mind the outlines as much when I know I’m in production. I think in movies what I never liked about those outlines is they just seem like it’s so theoretical. It’s so many steps to get to before you get to your job. Whereas in TV you know you’re making these things, so they seem like just necessary consensus builders, because not only do the networks need them, but every department needs them to sort of anticipate who is coming up casting wise, costume wise, art direction wise, and in all departments.

**Craig:** That’s the other edge of this brutal scheduling sword. I mean, they can pour notes on you and they can ask for outlines and all the rest. But the train is moving. So, their ability to influence things is limited as well. You’re right, in features, you turn an outline in and you could argue about that outline for a year if you feel like it. You can’t do that, for you.

And obviously the outline helps you — I’m going to use a phrase that I think fits you. It allows you to impose your creative will upon others. So, you’re in charge of this room now of writers, yes?

**Aline:** Yes.

**Craig:** What is that like coming from our world where you are in charge of your room, which is you, to now being in charge of all these people and now you have to be accountable for yourself, but you also have to be accountable for what they’re doing? It’s a huge transition.

**Aline:** Yeah. I mean, I’ve loved it, because I’ve always struggled against the isolation and the claustrophobia of screenwriting. It’s always been a challenge for me. And it’s why I did TV early in my career.

We really have a lot fun. Our staff is six women and three men. And then we have two consultants. I have to say, it’s really fun to be writing in a room with smart people who are kicking in ideas and jokes. And it’s much more social. I really have enjoyed that. And I have enjoyed collaborating with all of the departments.

It is, you know, one of the things about — I’m definitely busier, but I’m definitely — I’m less stressed. And my husband has been noticing this. I think a lot of the stress that I experience as a screenwriter, obviously your days are not as grueling. As a screenwriter, the stress for me was always trying to get your, you know, it sounds pretentious, but getting your vision up on screen when it has to be mediated through a director. If you’re not directing yourself, you know, it has to be interpreted through a director or producer. And you’re not really the person making the decisions.

I think I have found that enormously more stressful in my life, because I am a very direct person. And so being a screenwriter, communicating when something is being made, there’s a lot of indirectness built in. And it really, if you have access as a screenwriter, it’s by virtue of the relationships you had, or you’ve built. But as a showrunner, your access is a natural part of the process. So, I feel like I’ve traded in some of my leisure hours for a more directly satisfying process.

**Craig:** Good answer, Aline. Good answer.

**John:** I was having breakfast with a showrunner on Friday, and he was at the end of his 10-episode season. And so he was now in the editing room. And so it was such a change for him because this whole time through he’s been in the writing room, and then suddenly when you’re in production you’re doing all of these jobs at once.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And so now he was really relieved to just like, “I could focus on doing one thing rather than three things.” What is your favorite part of this process right now? Are you enjoying the cutting room, or the writer’s room? What do you like?

**Aline:** That’s a really good way to describe which is, you know, there’s a writer’s room happening, there’s a production in progress, and there’s a post-department in progress. And all those things are happening at the same time. And I can’t speak for other people who do this job, but for me it’s about finding ways to empower other people to help you do this job. And I have amazing people who work with me who are very, very able to cover me on set, and can also cover me in post as needed.

I have found that the writer’s room is the beating heart of the show. If the scripts don’t work, nothing else works. And I think everybody knows that, especially on a show like this that has a very specific voice. And so I spend most of my time in the writer’s room, even when I’m rewriting. Some showrunners when they rewrite they go out of the room and do it themselves. I rewrite in the room with people, so that I get their input.

My biggest challenge, which is somewhat unique to our show, is that Rachel who is, you know, the show is not my voice or her voice, it’s our voice. And she’s full time in the production department. I mean, she’s in probably 80% of the scenes, 85% of the scenes. So trying to get Rachel’s viewpoint/involvement/writing style, all of those things inculcated into the scripts at every point is our biggest kind of institutional challenge.

**John:** So that it feels like it comes from one brain, even though it’s coming from both of your brains simultaneously. And since she’s on set, it’s sort of like Lena Dunham being on set. She can see whether this is not a choice that makes sense for the show, and call you in when she needs help on that kind of stuff, too.

**Aline:** Well, you know, the good thing is — I’ve never collaborated with an actor who was also writing with me. Obviously that’s an unusual situation. But I never worry about if there’s someone on set who understands the intention of these scenes, because she always understands the intention of these scenes. And if she doesn’t, she and I can huddle pretty quickly. So that’s really wonderful to have an actor who is your partner in that way. And we really love that. But we were laughing yesterday that when the show got picked up we thought, oh, we’re going to spend so much time together. Isn’t that going to be fun? And yesterday was a rare moment where we were walking across the stages together. And it was after the writer’s room had closed. And it was during a turnaround in the shooting where she was getting changed. We suddenly had 15 minutes together, which it felt like — you know, we always feel like we’re lovers sneaking around trying to find an extra moment together.

She’s shooting most of the time. So particularly when we’re on location, we actually don’t get to see each other as much as we would like. Ironically.

**John:** So the show will have debuted yesterday. What will your phone calls be like on Tuesday morning? Have they given you any sense of sort of what the expectations are? What you need to be able to do? Because it feels like you’re in this kind of nice spot, where people really like your show, but you’re also sort of the underdog. You’re like a well-regarded underdog going into the situation. So you just have to sort of clear the bar and get people to come back.

**Aline:** Well, you know, one of the things that’s been nice is I’ve been doing the other job, being a screenwriter, for many years. And I’m new to this job, so every day is a new thing for me. A lot of the people I work with have more experience than I do, so I’m often asking them like, “Now what happens?”

In terms of the reception of the show, I mean, obviously we hope people love it. I don’t have a lot of expectations. I mean, whatever you’re doing when a movie is coming out and you’re looking at tracking, which I try not to do too much anyway with a movie. But with a TV show, I mean, I don’t see why or how I could worry about that. There’s virtually nothing I can do.

My Facebook page is not going to help drive people to the show. So I’m not thinking about ratings and those things. I will be thinking — on Monday I will be thinking, okay, what do we start shooting this week. That’s what I’ll be thinking

**Craig:** Good for you. That’s the way to be. You know, because the truth is the world will do what the world will do. You know, for movies, our stuff is done by the time the release comes around. There is no possible creative impact that obsessing over tracking and box office can have on the movie itself. Not the case for television. And if you’re sitting there spazzing over numbers, I could see where it starts to get in your head and maybe influence how you’re doing it.

You know, I agree with John. I feel like my sense is this show — I don’t understand exactly what the parameters are for success and failure, but I know there is a breadth there. And clearly they like the show, because they’ve given you this extra vote of confidence. And it’s different, you know. I would be surprised — honestly would be surprised if — look, I mean, obviously if the ratings come in early and they’re terrific, then all’s good to go.

But if they come in and they’re not like over the moon, so what, they’re going to give you time. I do believe that.

**Aline:** Yeah. It’s an unusual show and so it might take people a little while. I mean, one of the funny things is I don’t have any of the familiar screenwriting excuses. For starters, their marketing has been phenomenal.

**John:** They really have done a great job.

**Aline:** So I cannot blame the marketing. And the other thing is it’s been a really interesting experience because this network in particular for whatever reason is extraordinarily supportive of women. They have a tremendous number of female showrunners. And they have shows with female content. And they’re so considerate of women that it never comes up. You know, that’s how kind of pervasive it is that no one is ever saying to me, talking to me about the women’s audience or girls, or their perspective. They’re just treating you like you’re making a show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Aline:** They don’t look down at the audience. You’re not ever gaming that point of view. They just want you to make a good show. And it never comes up. You know, we do jokes about female-driven stuff frequently. And it’s not even part of the conversation. So that’s also been a really wonderful experience.

I didn’t plan on doing television. And I think you guys, I’m sure, have been on conversations with me over beers where I’ve talked about why I wouldn’t do it, but now I think we’re in a time where you just go where the satisfying work is. And it doesn’t really matter what the format is. I feel like even the word television in a way is sort of a misnomer now because people are watching it in so many different formats.

You know, for me this has been one of the best experiences because I never made a decision to do any of it.

**Craig:** Right. It just sort of happened. I love that.

**Aline:** Yeah.

**John:** And you were ready for it. I know you have to go, but thank you for joining us for this segment. Because you’re Aline Brosh McKenna, you’re allowed to do one thing out of sequence if you’d like to. So, if you have a One Cool Thing or anything you want to share with our audience, you can do your One Cool Thing midway show.

**Aline:** Well, I do want to do a One Cool Thing. Thank you for asking me. I’ve worked on movie crews and they’re amazing. And you guys, I know, feel the way I do that crews are incredible. And I so admire what they do. But I’d never seen a television crew in process and they jam. I mean, they’re working so fast. We’re shooting so many pages a day. And I just am so impressed —

**John:** How many pages do you shoot in a day?

**Aline:** Seven or eight.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a lot.

**Craig:** Yeesh.

**Aline:** And I’m just so impressed with everybody, just sort of the alacrity, and they’re on top of it. And they’re moving quickly and they’re anticipating stuff. And the crew has really blown me away. And I wanted to give a particular shout out to — we have a person who is to Rachel what Tony Hale is to Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Veep.

**John:** Bag man?

**Aline:** Yeah. We have — and her name is Bola. And she’s fantastic. I mean, she gets Rachel everywhere she needs to be and anticipates her every need. And she’s a huge Scriptnotes fan —

**Craig:** Yay.

**Aline:** And she geeked out when she met me because she’s seen all the episodes and she was excited. So my One Cool Thing is the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend crew, with a shout out to Bola.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Nice. Nice.

**John:** Aline, congratulations, good luck, we’re so happy to have you with your new show.

**Aline:** Thanks guys.

**John:** And everybody tune in, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, on the CW in the US. If you are overseas, you should find a way to pirate it so you can watch it yourself.

**Aline:** It’s on Hulu the next day, I believe.

**John:** Oh great.

**Aline:** Yeah. And I think it’s also —

**Craig:** Do not pirate it. It will be available. It will be available.

**John:** What I will say is that so often these shows are put up online so people can see them for free. And clever Internet users can find a way to see promotional episodes.

**Aline:** Well, here’s the other thing. It’s on free TV. It’s a network. So you don’t you have to pay to see it the first time. You can pay to see it the second time if you want.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s free!

**John:** And you should buy all the products that are advertised on the show to support the show and tell them that you’re buying this brand of whatever because of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

**Aline:** You know what? Particularly Hyundai. Hyundai was our first product placement. They were the first people to come to the table. And we have a big shout out to them in the show, obviously.

**John:** We’re you able to form a rhyme with Hyundai in a song?

**Aline:** No. They’ve not made it into a song. But let it be known that if we find the right advertiser with deep enough pockets…

**John:** It’s a good day for Hyundai.

**Aline:** There will be a song.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Aline:** All right. Thank you, guys. I miss you guys. All right, bye.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** We miss you too, Aline.

**John:** And that was Aline Brosh McKenna.

**Craig:** Ugh, I’m exhausted.

**John:** A national treasure.

**Craig:** I’m exhausted.

**John:** Similarly exhausting is the process of making a movie, and especially a Bollywood epic. And this last week there was news that the makers of Bollywood films were going on strike. There is a sort of general strike against Bollywood, but writers were a particular focus in this issue. And, Craig, you put this on the list, so tell me what you know about the Indian writer’s strike.

**Craig:** Well, this is really bigger than an Indian actor’s strike. This appears to be an Indian movie business strike. So you have directors, actors, music directors, cinematographers, all other technicians, junior artists, screenwriters, lyricists currently on strike, meaning everyone.

We are more familiar with the terms of writer’s deals and what it means to be a writer working under various jurisdictions. So, Anjum Rajabali is the — this is an interesting title — convenor of the Film Minimum Basic Contract. So, they have a union of some kind. I don’t know what labor law is like in India. I suspect quite a bit different than here.

They have something, it just seems to be either very week in areas, or completely disregarded and contravened by the behavior of the companies. Now, interestingly, it’s been a while since we’ve talked about, but the United States is unique among all nations when it comes to copyright. We have work-for-hire law, which says that somebody can commission a unique work from someone and the commissioner can own the copyright entirely. And the person who actually creates the work has no copyright.

No other country has it the way we do. Every other country is protected by the moral rights of authors, including India. And yet they’re still getting around this stuff, which is amazing. So, what it boils down to is that Indian writers don’t have essentially any of the creative rights we have here. They keep copyright, but it is essentially —

**John:** Worthless.

**Craig:** Worthless. It’s stripped down. They don’t get any royalties, because apparently they’re forced to sign them over, or something ridiculous like that, or waive them, which this gentleman argues is illegal. They don’t have any creative rights when it comes to credits. And they’re not guaranteed any credit at all. And this is — and this is amazing to me — they’re not guaranteed credit on screen for work that they share copyright in by law. That’s remarkable and incredibly abusive.

And I just think that those of us here in the United States who work in the intellectual property industry of all sorts should be watching this carefully and supporting the Indian filmmakers and Indian crafts people who are involved in making because it’s an enormous film industry there. Massive. And it is just remarkably exploitative, if this is correct. And I have no reason to think it’s not.

**John:** Yeah, so we will link to the article in the Times of India that talks through what’s going on there. And I can’t pretend that I understand very much about how the Indian film economy works, much less how the labor market in the Indian film economy really works. To me it was just interesting to see and to be reminded of the fact that things are different here and things that are sometimes annoying here, well, they could be much worse. And this a situation where things are much worse, where you have a film industry which is obviously incredibly vibrant and actually very productive, but it’s not necessarily productive in ways that are beneficial to people who do what I do for a living. And that is a real challenge.

So, I mostly read this as a, wow, let’s make sure we don’t slide back from the things we’ve already gained here. And look for like what are the possibilities of the things that do work here, how to spread those out to other places around the world.

**Craig:** No question. It’s a nice reminder of what we have. And all too often I will hear people in our union in their zeal to improve things denigrate what we have to the point of dismissiveness, first world problem whining, et cetera. And here is somebody saying, you know, even — he’s literally saying even the Writers Guild had to strike to get to their enviable position.

So he calls our position currently enviable. And it is.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s a remarkable thing. It’s good to be reminded of it.

**John:** Yeah. As listeners who are listening overseas, there are Writers Guilds in other nations, but they’re often more guilds of artisans, and they’re more sort of about the craft of things and promoting the craft of things, rather than a true labor organization the way that the Writers Guild of America is.

They may not be able to do any of the protections that something like the Writers Guild can, because they’re just not set up that way. And we could probably point you to which ever episode that Craig really talked through part of why it’s different in the US because of the nature of copyright law and work-for-hire, which seems like an abusive thing, but it allows for writers to be covered in labor unions, which would not be possible if copyright were something that we held onto individually. If we were not employees of a corporation, we couldn’t get some of the things we do get.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And it’s interesting, the Indian situation is remarkable. They have 23 separate unions covering workers in their movie business. And I don’t know exactly how the definition of union there. But I’m just going to say presumably it’s similar. But of those 23 unions, there is one what they call the mother body, FWICE, the Federation of Western India Cine Employees.

So, there is some kind of overarching body that we don’t have here that is coordinating this massive inter-union strike. All 23 unions are on strike. This is precisely the kind of thing that calls for a strike. And I’ve always said the only strike worth taking is the one that you have to take because the only thing worse than it is the alternative, which is essentially death. Union death.

To me, if they don’t get this, they are effectively union dead.

**John:** So, what this massive union reminded me more of than anything else here is IOTSE, which is the union which covers many of the trades in the film industry. And they cover some things which are writing. They cover some animation writing. They cover things that many of our listeners may be involved with. And especially because we have many listeners who also work below the line. And certainly happy that there is IOTSE protection for so many of those job. But the IOTSE protection for crafts like screenwriting and animation writing, they’re not as strong as what the Writers Guild is able to provide for those writing services. And I hope that in the zeal to get all Indian film people paid fairly and treated better, and that the creative rights of the writers, directors, lyricists are at least given more than lip service. So, I’ll be curious to see how this shakes out.

And I’m not sure I will necessarily understand how it shakes out because I won’t have a great picture of what it is like right now.

**Craig:** Right. Well, we’ll follow it. And I think once there is a resolution of some kind, hopefully that resolution will make it clear what’s changed. And by looking at what’s changed, we’ll probably have a decent sense of what it was and what it is now.

**John:** Great. So, I’m so excited for this next section, because this is something Craig has recommended. This is actually something you talked through way back when. You had a site called Artful Writer, which if you try to visit artfulwriter.com right now you’ll get redirected because the page has gone away. But through the wonders of Internet archive, Craig was able to find what he wrote about this scene. And the scene is written by Mr. Scott Frank, who we know from Out of Sight. This movie is The Lookout. But he is a screenwriter’s screenwriter. And he is known for writing amazing scripts, but also helping to write a lot of other movies you’ve seen out there in the world.

And this was a scene that you picked out of his movie, The Lookout, and I’d love for everyone to sort of read along with us, but we’re also going to play the clip from the actual finished movie. So it’s not going to be one of those classic Three Page Challenges where you have to download the PDF and read along at home, although that link we’ll be there. We can actually listen to this scene.

But first, I think Craig should set it up, because I watched it without any setup and I was a little bit confused.

**Craig:** Sure. So, The Lookout is essentially a movie about a young many who has a promising future ahead of him. He comes from a wealthy family. And he gets into a terrible car accident. And as a result, he suffers lasting brain injury which is impairing him. It’s not impairing him physically as much as it has disrupted his ability to concentrate, his memory, and to some extent it has damaged his personality. He is a bit of a broken guy.

He actually has to live with another gentleman who is in the same kind of rehabilitation, or I guess you would call it adult monitoring program that he’s in. And this other guy is blind, so that’s his issue. So, you have a blind man and a brain-injured man, both living in an apartment together, kind of helping each other, and looking out for each other.

But The Lookout is not about that. The Lookout is about the fact that this young guy, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and remarkably the character’s name is Chris Pratt.

**John:** Yeah. I found that hilarious.

**Craig:** Isn’t that wild? This movie came out, I want to say, gosh, 2005 maybe, something like that. 2007. So, in 2007 nobody knew about Chris Pratt. [laughs] And so Scott Frank wrote a movie with a character named Chris Pratt. So Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Chris Pratt. And Chris Pratt is at a bar. His job is he’s the night caretaker at a bank, at a small branch in a rural bank.

And he meets up with an old guy he sort of knew from high school, but doesn’t quite know, and his memory is not working very well. And this guy realizes that Chris works as the night watchman at this bank and slowly starts to pull him into a plan where the bank is going to be robbed, Chris will be the lookout, and he will get a share of the money.

And at this point in the movie, Chris who wasn’t necessarily interested in this has kind of fallen for a bit of a baited hook. The bad guy’s girlfriend is a woman played by Isla Fisher and her name is Luvlee, Luvlee Lemons. And she just thinks Chris is the best. She’s falling for him, and he can’t believe it. And, in fact, she’s come back to the apartment that he shares with Jeff Daniels, who plays the blind gentleman named Lewis. And she has just had sex with him and everything is pretty great.

**John:** With Chris Pratt. With the Joseph Gordon-Levitt character.

**Craig:** Correct. She’s just had sex with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. He thinks everything is wonderful. And that’s all really all that Lewis, Jeff Daniel’s character, knows is that something is up. And that’s pretty much it.

**John:** All right. So let me do some descriptive storytelling for people who are listening to this clip, but not watching the clip. So this clip is going to have Isla Fisher and Jeff Daniels. Jeff Daniels is mostly in shadow. Isla Fisher at the start of the scene is at the refrigerator. Then she comes over and sits across from Jeff Daniels as they have their conversation. There are moments at which we cut away and you’ll hear the audio shift. And that’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt listening in the other room to this conversation that’s happening in the main room.

But everything else is just these two characters talking, which is why I think it’s a good scene for our radio theater of Scriptnotes. So, let’s take a listen to the clip.

**John:** All right. And that’s our scene. So, if you want to read along with the script, which is very much like the scene, but there are a few changes in dialogue, you can. That’s also in the show notes, johnaugust.com. There’s a link there for the YouTube if you want to watch the YouTube and see sort of how it was shot.

So, Craig, talk us through what you see in the scene. How you think it’s working and what got you excited about this scene.

**Craig:** Well, to me the scene is really valuable as an instructive tool. We are always looking for examples of good scenes to show to people. Most of the time, what ends up happening is we show them exciting scenes. But exciting scenes are capable of hiding certain deficiencies because they’re full of fun. It’s a little bit like on a cooking show, it’s one thing to say, “Look at this. I made this remarkably complicated soufflé,” versus, “I made you a scrambled egg, but man, it’s a great scrambled egg.” Right?

So, what I loved about this scene was it was paired down to almost the barest minimum you can have in a scene. There is literally I think one or two lines that occur while Luvlee Lemons is walking into the room, but then she sits down and that’s it. It’s just two people sitting, they barely move, and it’s just talking. And, yet, I think it’s a great example of conflict and of what I would call scene harmony.

People will say sometimes, you know, it would be good if your writing were a little tighter. And it’s hard to understand what the hell that means. And what I think it means is that things are serving more than one purpose at a time. So sometimes I think about scenes as moving on three different axes. There’s whatever is going on inside the main character, there is whatever is going on between two characters or two or more characters, and then there is whatever is going on in the world.

And there are wonderful scenes that have only one of those things, but the best scenes to me have all three working together and affecting and impacting each other and kind of unfolding like a little puzzle. So I really thought that there was just some wonderful stuff going on here, and I would love to — I mean, I would literally go through this bit by bit and talk about what I love.

**John:** Great. Let me restate your three things just to make sure that I understand them and maybe anchor them more in people’s minds. So, in any scene, let’s say this is a scene with two characters, you’re looking at what is the inner state of that character, you’re looking at what are they trying to do, what’s driving them, both in the immediate term, but also longer term. So that’s one level of what you’re looking at.

Second level you’re looking at what is the conversation, what is the external thing that they’re showing. So, in this case, it is the ball that they are hitting back and forth. It is their conversation. And so it’s the nature — the scene is really just them talking. So, what words are they choosing, how are they responding to what each other character is saying? How are they both alive and present in that scene, pushing back and forth?

And that third thing is what else is happening in the world. What is the nature — it’s all the scene description, really. It’s the non-dialogue part of this story, which is what is the setting, what are the other sounds, who else is observing this. How does the situation present itself? What is the movement? All those other things that you’re seeing in the scene that aren’t part of the dialogue itself.

Are those these axes you’re looking at?

**Craig:** Yeah. Essentially we’re talking about internal, interpersonal, external.

So, the external ones are the easiest ones. A car crashes into your car. Things happen. Gun shots ring out somewhere. We tend to focus most of our work on the interpersonal. Scenes tend to be mostly about relationships and how people are, like you say, ping-ponging off each other. But there are some wonderful scenes where people are alone and realize the thing.

All of your good revelation moments generally are internal, but we understand them.

The fun of thinking about scenes this way is that you start to focus in on a really important question when you’re writing a scene, every scene, scene after scene after scene. At least one of these states — an internal state, an interpersonal state, an external state — at least one of them must be different at the end of my scene. Or this scene is not a scene. And it doesn’t belong in my movie.

And that’s where we talk — when you and I talk about intention and purpose, this is where the intention and purpose starts to happen. The changing state. What has changed inside of you? Nothing? Fine. What has changed between you and her? Nothing? Fine.

What has just changed in the world? There are times when you can get all three working kind of nicely. And I love that.

**John:** Yeah. Do you want to talk about Scott Frank’s intention as the author as we start this scene, or what the two character’s intention is? Because I think they’re both really interesting things to look at. I mean, Scott Frank has a checklist of things he sort of needs this scene to accomplish narratively and why it needs to fit into the story.

But we can also look at sort of what each of these characters is trying to do over the course of the scene.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s actually a great question to ask. And here’s the nice part and the good news for everybody else. Scott does not have complicated intentions here. Your intentions really never should be that complicated.

Here’s what he’s hoping to accomplish with this scene. He wants Luvlee to be confronted by somebody quite a bit wiser and smarter than the dupe. And he wants that person to start making her feel guilty, because she is guiltable. Whereas her boyfriend, the bad guy, and poor Chris Pratt doesn’t know that that’s her boyfriend because he’s a little brain damaged — her boyfriend is not guiltable. Her boyfriend is just a bad guy.

She’s being used here, too, and so he’s — that’s what he’s trying to accomplish. It’s not Lewis is going to become the superhero of this movie to try and stop her. It’s entirely about having her character have a moment where she’s caught and needs to start contemplating a big choice. Am I going to follow through with this plan, or am I actually going to start honor the legitimate feelings I’m having for this dupe I’m supposed to be duping.

**John:** Great. So that is a goal for Scott Frank with his character. So it’s a change he’s trying to effect in Luvlee’s character.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And as much of a change he’s trying to effect, he’s trying to raise the audience’s question about sort of what her real motivations are and whether it’s possible to shift those motivations.

**Craig:** Exactly correct. And that’s key. Because in this moment, he is essentially creating an expectation for a resolvable drama. It’s a question of will she or won’t she. Is she going to do the right thing or the wrong thing? Does she really love him? Does she not really love him? Is she redeemable? Is she not redeemable? What is going to happen to the lookout?

And it all comes out of this scene. But what I find so wonderful about the way Scott has written this is that he took it upon himself to entertain us the entire time. And his entertainment revolves around revealing information about a character, the dreaded backstory, the dreaded exposition, that normally we’re trying to hide and bury. Here, actually works in service of his greater intention.

**John:** Yeah, the backstory he’s trying to reveal here is that issue of like how he became blind, which is one of those sort of like origin stories that weirdly is not so important in the movie as I recall. It never really comes back around. But it helps to explain how he recognizes the kinds of people that she is and that Gary is. That he’s been around those types of people before.

**Craig:** That’s correct. Suddenly his character starts to come into view as somebody that is more than we thought. He seemed like an avuncular, nice, blind fellow who out of brotherly love was helping this poor kid. And yet now we realize perhaps he sees more than we thought, no pun intended. And his revelation of this puts her in an interesting spot. Her response to it is what starts to make us learn about her.

So I want to talk about this interesting little moment here. The way this begins, she’s coming into the kitchen after post-coital to get something to eat. And it’s dark. And he startles her by saying, “Luvlee, I presume.” And he’s sitting at the table, but in the dark, because he doesn’t need lights.

And she sees him and he says to her this kind of nice — I call this Colombo stuff, like I’m going to lure you in by just being a nice guy. I recognize the perfume. Can I offer you some pie? It’s not homemade, but it’s very nice.

And then he says, “Got to watch your figure, I imagine, your line of work. Nice name by the way, Luvlee Lemons.” This is the first time anyone in the movie has mentioned that she’s a stripper. Or that she was a stripper. Oh, this is how he recognizes the perfume. He’s seen her before, sort of, like he’s been around. He knows that she’s a dancer, even though he can’t see.

And she admits it now very casually. And I love this. And this is when I talk about subtext and dialogue, a lot of times new writers struggle. They have a response. This guy has just picked at this little scab, this thing that she thought was hidden away. And he’s right away in a very pleasant, unassuming manner just gone, oh, I noticed you have this little scab here. Let me pick at it.

Of course, if we put ourselves in the point of view of a character hearing that, we immediately get defensive. And we want that person to be defensive. But in reality, if you think about the way you are with people, when someone puts you on the defensive, if you are a certain kind of person, a capable person, the first thing you do is immediately attempt to mask that you are defensive, because you understand inherently, but to show that is to show weakness.

**John:** So her line back to that is, “I don’t dance anymore. I was never very good at it.” It’s a way of throwing away a reaction to it. Just like, oh, that doesn’t bother me at all.

**Craig:** Exactly. Oh yeah, no, that’s right. Yeah. I was a stripper. I wasn’t very good at it. See, I can play the casual game, too. But already now, and for those of you who write three pages and send them in, think about how much we have learned in a half a page. An enormous amount, not just about who she was as a person, but about who she is now as a person.

And, then, there’s some comedy, which is great. She waves her hand in front of his face. This was a big laugh in the theater because she starts moving her hand in front of his face and he says, “Please tell me you’re not waving your hand in front of my face.” Big laugh. And it’s funny. But also why is she doing that? And you learn something else about her character now. She’s not willing to take it on faith that he really is blind.

What a fascinating thing to reveal about somebody, because now just casually — and by the way I do believe that when we’re in an audience we don’t necessarily pick it up overtly, but it seeps into us that she is suspicious. And who is suspicious of a blind man? Maybe somebody who is a little bit of a con-artist themselves.

**John:** Absolutely. The other thing which this is doing is showing that sort of third axis you talked about, which is what is the actual situation giving you. And so this is the setting, this is — it’s what it’s really like to be in that space. And she’s not convinced he’s blind. He’s already sitting in the dark. And so she’s doing a very natural human reaction which is is he really seeing me and he gets to hit that ball right back to her.

**Craig:** Right. And notice that at this point we don’t necessarily know what Lewis’s goal is. But, as every scene is a little mini-movie, the protagonist of the scene has a goal. The goal, the intention, is what is driving everything in the scene. It is driving his point of view. Everything he says. How he responds. And for the performer, how they are going to play the part.

He has a goal right now. We don’t yet know what it is. So then she says, “Have you been blind your whole life?” And it’s a perfectly bland question. And you might think, well why is she just asking a bland question right now?

What I get off of it is that this is a smart person. I notice that the way she answered his stripper question. She’s playing dumb. She’s playing innocent ingénue, because that’s the safest move. And he says, “Most of it.” And she says, “How did it happen?” And he says, “I looked at the sun too long.” And she says, “Wow, you hear about that.”

Now, another big laugh. When she says, “Wow, you hear about that,” here’s what he doesn’t say, “Uh, I think you know that I didn’t go blind by looking at the sun too long.” He lets it go. Instead he says, “Let me ask you a question. What’s your real name?”

Now I love this. So, again, playing at home, for your Three Page Challenge, and by the way, Scott cheated. It’s actually 3.5 pages, but fine. We’re at the top of page two. And by the top of page two I now know that she is a not trusting person. She is crafty enough to hide her defensiveness. I know that she used to be a stripper. I know that she likes to play dumb to avoid being held accountable. And I also know that he notices that she’s doing it and is going to move right by it, because he’s now interested in upping the ante. He’s chasing something and he feels like he can get her.

We are watching a fight, whether we know it or not. This is good as karate as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** So the next phase here is the “let me ask you a question, what’s your real name? Why, you going to Google me? If I did, what would I find? Probably nothing.” Here you’re making clear what is the intention of the scene, that Lewis actually is approaching the scene with some agenda, which is to try to figure out who she really is. And she is deflecting these questions. She’s answering a question with a question, which is a very classic technique to sort of avoid answering anything.

I think our expectation is that he’s going to keep asking her questions when in fact he doesn’t really care about the answers to those questions. He mostly wants to demonstrate that he’s on to her.

**Craig:** Right. Great point. So, what is the value of demonstrating that you know you’re on to somebody? You start to see what his real purpose is. He doesn’t really care, because he already — I mean, he doesn’t really care what she’s up to, because he knows it’s no good. He already knows it. He knew it before she walked in the room.

What he wants to do is make her know that he knows it, and make her start to question whether she wants to go through it. Whatever it is, he will not know at the end of this discussion what these two are doing. So, she again continues to play dumb. And he says, “If I did what would I find?” “Probably nothing.”

And that is a poor me. You know, like I’m no, you know, I’m no good. Now she’s trying a little sympathy. And he doesn’t pick it up. And he says, “And what happens if I Google Gary?” That’s the bad buy. That’s the boyfriend. And she goes, “I don’t know.”

“How’d you meet Chris?” Great. Great.

Now, I mention this because a lot of times when I read screenplays by new writers, or seasoned writers, arguments become very much to the point. And oftentimes in life they are very much to the point. It’s a rare thing to have a fight with your wife that goes like this. They don’t. But then again, fights with your wife, fights with your husband, they’re fairly mundane and low stakes. Or if they’re high stakes, they’re between two reasonable people who are not trying to entertain anyone with a narrative.

These two people are dancing. So much fun to watch.

**John:** I want to talk a little bit about just the words on the page, because this is basically just a two-hander, just dialogue conversation. But Scott is breaking up the page with these interjections.

So, Lewis asks, “And what happens if I Google Gary.” In the scene description, “She shrugs, hums ‘I don’t know.'” So this is a case where there’s sort of dialogue being put in the scene description, but it’s basically helping us show what it is that she’s trying to avoid saying, the I don’t know.

And also just keeping us from being just a solid gutter of dialogue on the page.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And the shrug and the hum as an action does help us understand a little bit better as we’re reading it. This is let’s say we have not seen the movie. We’re thinking about making the movie. It helps us get a little bit more of what she’s really doing there with this clear change.

Now, another wonderful moment here.

“How’d you meet Chris?” Nine out of ten writers would say, “Why are you changing the subject, Luvlee?” Because that feels fun. But I love that Lewis just answers it. Because he’s better than she is at this. He has no problem being a little patient here. Sometimes in chess you move your piece backwards. Great. This is jujitsu.

You know, there’s times to punch, there are times to feint. A lot of writers forget about the feinting part. So he answers. “Center put us together a few years ago.” She says, “And now he’s your best friend.” Lewis says, “He’s a good friend.” And she says, “Maybe your only friend?”

Now, by the way, this is now at the 1.5 page mark. Let us review. She used to be a stripper. She is suspicious. She knows something about con men or at least has that instinct in her. Lewis is insightfully determining that she’s up to something, he’s not sure what. And he’s not going to let her off. She tries to play dumb. It doesn’t work.

She tries to get sympathy. It doesn’t work. She tries to change the subject. It doesn’t work because he lets her change the subject which takes the power away from it. So now she’s going to stick it to him. This is the first moment where she jabs back and lets him know don’t think that this is going to be that easy.

And so what is his response, John?

**John:** “Hey Luvlee, that thing about the sun, it was a total lie, total bullshit.” So this is, okay, you’re going to hit me with this, then I’m going to lay down a few more of my cards here on the table. And it’s a change that we’re seeing here. Now I want to acknowledge that I am not as much of a fan of this middle section of the scene as I think you are. And I think there is a way this could have been taken out and we could have gotten a slightly better through line on this.

But I do like it more on the page than I liked it staged in that what Scott chooses here on the page, that may be your only friend, I could imagine a line reading of that where the energy really shifted dramatically in that scene. As filmed, I didn’t feel that shift as much I felt the possibility of that shift here on the page.

I think the transition from the earning “that may be your only friend,” and then getting to how he’s getting to “Hey Luvlee,” I really see the possibilities here on the page. I didn’t see it actually performed as much as it was cut together.

**Craig:** Look, I do love the scene as it is, but I understand what you’re saying. This is where the craft of screenwriting can be frustrating. Because, let’s put it this way, the person who staged and shot the scene is the same guy that wrote the scene.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So now imagine what it’s like when you write the scene and somebody else — I mean, the way that things are imagined are often so different, for those of who write them, or those of us reading the writing than they are from what we see. And there will always be those things.

But I do love how Lewis — so on the page she says, “Maybe your only friend?” He doesn’t answer that. Finally leans forward. Okay, I was waiting for you to show that you had a stinger. You did. Thank you. Now let’s talk real. Let’s get to it.

We’ve been dancing, feinting, and jabbing for a page and a half. You’ve now finally admitted that we’re in a fight and that you’re capable. Fine. Here we go.

So he says I’m going to now tell you the story of — he tells her the story of how he went blind. And what’s fascinating is we were not expecting this at all. We had no idea how he went blind. In fact, I remember watching the movie thinking I just assumed that he was blind. I didn’t know that there was a moment he became blind. And, in fact, when he said I stared at the sun too long, I presumed that was just his snarky way of saying I was born blind, duh.

But, no, and now he tells this story. And the story that he tells says that he went blind because he was one of the people cooking meth back before cooking meth was fashionable, and back before people knew what they were doing cooking meth. And he did not know that working with those chemicals in an unventilated room could blind you.

And he says something which probably could have been avoided had I just stopped and bothered to ask a simple question: what am I doing here. Mm-hmm. And at last, right, he reveals his goal. Not only does he reveal it — so, I just love the synchronicity. I love the harmony. What is happening here?

We have learned something that is a fact about our character, his back story. We have learned something about his internal life. Suddenly, this guy has become a different guy to us. He is not just a nice sweet blind man who is worried about his friend. He’s a criminal. Once a criminal, always a criminal. He’s a bad guy, too, in his own way.

And we now know why he’s blind and we have a certain appreciation for the tragedy and drama of that. We now know why he’s protective of Chris, somebody who is innocent and not a criminal and yet on the verge of becoming one. And we now know why he sees her for what she is.

And we also get all of that to change their relationship, which has been changing throughout to something very, very different.

**John:** So, he is telling this story about himself, but he’s putting her into the place of the story. He’s saying, like, you know, I did these criminal things and I should have stopped to ask myself what am I doing here. And that the I pronoun is really meant to be for her. Like what is she doing here? And that she should be asking herself that same question. It’s a way of very classically you tell a story about yourself hoping that the other person will see themselves in the story that you’re telling.

And it’s a smart move for Lewis to do that I largely believe, because he’s able to sell it as if it’s answering her question about how he became blind, but it’s moving forward his agenda with her.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And his — as his tactics have shifted, we arrive at this fascinating one, because the initial tactic was to be gentle, and then it was to be snarky, and then it was to be challenging. And now it’s to be empathetic. When he tells her this story, he’s revealing something of himself almost in trade. What he’s saying is I’m you. Don’t think of me as not you. I’m actually in the thieves guild, too.

So, pay attention now. You’re not getting hectored and lectured by a do-gooder. I’m trying to save you here. Then her response to that is, “What a sad story, if it’s true.” He hasn’t gotten her —

**John:** Yeah. So, once that story, if it’s true, that feels like a recall to “maybe your only friend.” It’s her finding backbone again. My — if I have an issue with Luvlee in this scene overall, it’s that she’s being asked to play dumb and smart simultaneously. And so I look at her lines at the bottom of page two, when he says, “It was a lie. Total bullshit.” She goes, “Oh…” “We started to make money.” She asks, “You blew yourself up?”

And, again, it’s hard to separate myself from the performance that I saw before I read the page, but it seemed like an earnest question, like she’s asking with a sort of baby doll voice, “You blew yourself up,” as if she really believed it. Whereas that doesn’t seem to track with the intelligence that I saw with “maybe your only friend,” or at least what her intention was with “maybe your only friend.” Does that make sense?

**Craig:** It does. The way I got it, I mean, when I watched the movie and the scene again, is that this is her move. Every character has a move, and this move has worked for her a thousand times, a million times. This is someone who has stolen a lot of money and manipulated a lot of hearts while she has lived a sad life. She’s probably also lost quite a few bites in her day.

And she is a stripper and she is using her body and she is using her wiles to survive. And she can’t help but presume that her best shot, her right hook, is going to be the one that will take this guy down. And so she’s going to keep going back to it, like a fighter with a bad habit who can’t believe it’s not working.

So, you know, you can look at her kind of choosing to do the same thing and expecting different results as a flaw in the execution, but you can also look at it as a flaw in her character, which is the way I do. That she can’t stop. But when she says, “What a sad story, if it’s true,” you’re right. That is her coming back to, okay, let me drop that tactic, it’s not working. Let me try a different one.

And also let me reveal that my initial suspicion of you, waving the hand in front of your face, hasn’t gone away. I don’t know — I’m not willing to let you in yet, give you the credibility to make me feel something that I’m probably already feeling. And this is when Lewis finally just says, “We’ve arrived.” We’re at page 2.5 now. “Tell me, what are you all cooking, sweetheart? Why are you here?”

And this is also just craft now, folks. He’s cooked food. She’s going to eat the food. He’s already eating the food. He’s a meth cook. What are you all cooking up here? Subtle. It’s not a big deal. It just makes things feel like a piece, which I like.

**John:** Yeah. It’s rhyming. It’s rhyming a word literally. I mean, it’s rhyming an idea. And using that to make it clear that there’s intention behind the words that Lewis is choosing.

**Craig:** Correct. And so we enter act three. Because I really think of that — that’s like let’s talk about the scene like a movie, act one presumes, and we get into act two when Lewis says, “Let me ask you a question. What’s your real name?” That’s the beginning of act two. The end of act two is, “Tell me, what are you all cooking?” Now we begin the climax.

She is now in full struggle mode. She’s losing. And she’s going to just start now throwing wild punches. “Same reason you are. Chris Pratt.”

He says, “Sweet. Of course, not quite as sweet as meeting at a bar, or giving someone a cellphone.” He knows things. She’s squirming.

Now she just says, “Gary wants to help Chris.” That’s out of nowhere. That was a mistake, right? Like you know how, I don’t know if you ever looked at the chess column in a newspaper where they analyze a game, or a bridge column. They report the moves. And when they get to a move that’s a mistake, they put a question mark next to it. This gets a question mark next to it. She made a mistake. And he’s got her now. And he says, “I’ve known lots of Garys. A few Luvlees, too.” [laughs] It’s so good.

She says, “Meaning?” But it’s over. And he says, “Meaning that something tells me you don’t really believe that you’re going to be invited to the next Pratt Thanksgiving.” Ow. Right? Just like, look, you’re a stripper. You expect me to buy this bullshit that the wealthy Pratt family is going to welcome brain-damaged Chris’s new stripper girl into the house? You don’t believe that. You don’t think anyone would ever believe that. That’s not what you’re up to here at all. This is about Gary. What are you doing?

And she says, “Well I could be.” And he says, just in case you didn’t get it, “Sometimes I wake up, I think I can see, until I walk into a door. The Luvlee Lemons of the world don’t end up with Chris Pratt.”

And she says, “Well thank you, asshole.” That’s it, right? She’s, okay, I’ve lost. I’m not going to give you the satisfaction of admitting I lost. I’m just going to revert back to hurt girl and I’m going to stick with my lie.

And so now he has a problem. Because she’s pulled the rip cord and she’s exiting. And this is a great thing to think about when you’re writing arguments. When we have arguments with people, we’re in three states. We are pressing. We are sparring. Or we’re retreating. An argument is going well when you’re pressing. It means you’ve got them on the ropes and you’re just hitting them, right? Sparring means you’re in that ping pong zone. You guys are going back and forth. It’s an even match. Retreating is when you know this is not going well for you.

And when we are losing an argument, everyone has a strong instinct to say something that will get them out of it. They’re trying to run away now. So this is when people say things like, “I don’t know what you want from me.” Or, “What do you want from me?” Or —

**John:** “Let’s agree to disagree.” Yeah, the closers. Yeah.

**Craig:** Get me out of this. What makes this stop? And the problem is it’s effective. The person who has been pressing suddenly now knows they’re getting out of the ring now. Or the bell is about to ring and the round is about to end. I need to just throw the punch, the only punch that I have left. And so here, at the very top of page four, he says, “Sad but true, but it takes me back to that original question, Luvlee. So tonight, in the dark, let me help you out. Help you out. And ask it again: what are you doing here?”

And she has no response. At which point he gets up and says, “There’s some killer chicken salad in the fridge. My secret is the apples. Gives it a nice texture.” He’s like, all right. That was it. I’ve got nothing left for you.

But we get that his goal has been achieved to some extent. We can see it in her face. He’s planted the seed now. And it’s not a seed of you’re a bad person. And it’s not a seed of stop what you’re doing, or tell me what you’re doing. It’s a seed of using guilt to make her reconsider whatever the hell it is.

**John:** Yep. So, let’s talk about the differences between the scene we’re reading on the page and the scene as staged. And so one of the big differences is that in the scene in the film itself, we cut away to see Chris Pratt is listening to some part of the conversation. And so that is not reflected in these pages. So he’s overhearing some of this, which definitely changes the nature of our audience focus, because we’re always going to be sympathetic to our hero, and sort of what our hero knows. And it changes how Chris is perceiving both this girl and his roommate.

And so it really shifts the nature of the scene to insert that cutaway. It takes away from the sparring match to a certain degree. It’s like every time you cut away to an audience member in a boxing match. Like, well, you’re not in the boxing match to some degree. And it does change the nature of this conflict, because a scene about two people is now a scene about three people.

That’s one thing I noticed. I don’t know at what point during the process the decision to include Chris in that shot occurred.

The other thing I want to take a look at is if you’re watching the scene on YouTube, the conversation between the two of them, once they’re seated at the table, is very much the tennis match. It’s very much I hit the ball, you hit the ball, I hit the ball, you hit the ball. And doesn’t change a lot over the nature of the argument. There’s no — while there’s some pauses, the film itself doesn’t reset itself for some of those other moments and shifts along the way. So it’s a very straightforward way of covering this, which may be the best choice for it. But you can imagine a director taking other ways to sort of visualize what the shifts are in the conversation.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I suspect that the cutaways to Chris were something that they worked out maybe as they were planning how to shoot that. Because they needed to know that they were going to be in his room and shooting him listening. But it’s not on the page here, so I suspect it was a later decision. It’s an interesting one. And it’s also interesting and brave that Scott has this scene dialed in as carefully as he does, and yet is okay with losing some of the words, even in the audio, to really focus on Chris and how this is sinking in.

But it is an interesting choice and I actually think it pays off well, because we want to know that he also is starting to be concerned. And we want to know that this can set up conflict between him and Lewis.

It’s only interesting for Luvlee to do the right thing if she knows that she can get away with it. And so seeing Chris make a choice to believe her puts her and us in a more interesting dramatic state of mind.

The execution of the scene editorially, you’re correct, is very much about competing singles. You know, it’s funny, I remember talking with Scott. It was actually during the process when he was editing A Walk Among the Tombstones. And he said that he kind of had this big epiphany moment in post where he made a concerted effort along with his editor to reduce cuts and try and stay in takes as long as he could, especially in moments like this. And there are some excellent moments.

Another really, really good movie I think, A Walk Among the Tombstones, if you haven’t seen it. Some really good interesting conversations in that movie. And, yes, I agree that when we cut the audience will not necessarily make the conscious calculation that you’re cheating, but it starts to sink in. We know that the rhythm is being manufactured rather than actually being played. It’s a huge thing in comedy.

I mean, one of the great rules of comedy I learned from David Zucker is if you’re going to do a physical gag and it’s a thing where something happens that causes someone to get hurt, it must be in one. You cannot show the thing that’s going to cause them to be hurt and then cut to them being hurt. You’ve lost the credit for rigging the gag.

And similarly here, I do think that there are a couple of spots where it would have been better had it been in one long shot, to see that the two of them actually have that rhythm. Of course, who knows? See, the thing is —

**John:** Yeah, we don’t see the footage. And we don’t know what the actual day was like and sort of what the —

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** This may have absolutely been the best version of this scene with what they had, and that’s totally great. And there may be reasons why these were the performances that really landed. And so I can’t sort of second guess what that is.

Just in the hypothetical version, I love that you were talking about the physicality of her, and her stripper body, because I think that’s a real potential that her nature is — it would actually help sell some of those lines I had an issue with. If her nature is just to go to her baby doll voice and sort of use her body and then — I would love to see the moment of recognition where she goes, oh shit, I can’t do this because he’s blind. He can’t see my tits. So this is not — I need to stop doing this thing.

That is a potential, but that only can play if you have a little bit wider shots to sort of see what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that I wish I could round up movie reviewers and force them to sit and watch movies be painstakingly created, I wish they could see this. There are times when for whatever reason you can’t do what you want. It’s not that you didn’t know. It’s that you could do it. One of the things that comes up all the time when you’re shooting is well how will we cut this. Will it cut together? But, you’re also — when you’re doing takes you’re thinking where do I get the scissors in here? And can I get the scissors in? And do I need to get the scissors in?

Some of the most valuable direction that I’ve seen directors give actors is, “Great. Let’s do this again. And now let’s do it faster.” Because if there is a rhythm to this that is at the tempo I want, I won’t need to cut. But sometimes they flub a line. Stuff happens. This is life. So, I would have been fascinated to have been there that day.

But for people that are writing scenes, what’s so fantastic about this is that it really does focus everything down to — it’s as if Scott has pulled away every easy trick available. There are no guns. There’s no chasing. No one is entering or exiting once it begins. There’s literally barely light. It’s just two people and it’s entirely about the internal and the interpersonal.

And then at the end it is creating an external. It is creating this state that is going to either occur or not. And we know there is going to be a choice in this movie that’s coming down the line.

So, so well done and really worth studying.

**John:** Yeah, I think Scott Frank has a career ahead of him if he keeps writing at this level. We should all be so lucky.

So, Craig, thank you for that suggestion. I think it really is great to look at some finished — we’ve done episodes where we’ve looked at finished movies and we’ve talked through Raiders and Ghost, but this is great to look at sort of the words on the page, the scene, and be able to really focus in on just one specific moment.

I think it’s now time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is actually just a simple thing you can do if you’re ever traveling overseas. You will tend to have a little bit of extra money in whatever native currency as you head back to the US, or head back to your home country. A great thing to spend that on is iTunes gift cards. And the reason why you may want to do that is there will often be situations where you want to watch something that is not available in your home country.

So, for instance, we love to watch Downton Abbey. And we love to watch it when it comes out in the UK, not when it comes out here. Because we have some iTunes gift cards from the UK, we’re able to set up a British iTunes account and use those to fund it. And so we’re able to spend that money to watch Downton Abbey. Sometimes even a movie will be available on iTunes UK and not be available here. And so we spend that iTunes money to do that.

So, really useful if you’re traveling to — if you’re an American traveling to the UK, traveling to France if you love French movies, or Spain, to spend that leftover $25 you have to buy an iTunes gift card.

If you are traveling from overseas to the US, by all means do the same thing because it’s a way to get some of those shows like very soon Crazy Ex-Girlfriend before you might be able to see them in your home country.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a One Old Cool Thing. It’s Games Magazine. First of all, it’s a magazine. My wife gets Bon Appetit. She loves Bon Appetit. She has actually a very cool thing. They have like a club of people in my town that get together on a particular like one day out of the month and each one is assigned a thing from Bon Appetit magazine. And I actually think Bon Appetit is great. But other than that print magazine, everything else is gone except for Games.

Games Magazine has been around forever. It was around when I was a kid. And David Kwong, my favorite magician, and I — who we’re constantly doing puzzles together — he said you’ve got to just get Games Magazine again, because they have really good puzzles. And they do.

So, I love that I can still support a good old paper magazine that shows up at your house once a month. I forgot the fun of a surprise subscription. You know, when it comes in the mail it’s like, oh my god, I got Games Magazine. So, that’s my One Cool Thing this week, Games Magazine.

**John:** Fantastic. So, you’ll see links to the things we talked about on the show at our show notes at johnaugust.com/podcast or /Scriptnotes. Both will get you there. We are on iTunes. So, if you’re listening to the show through the website, better that you go to iTunes and actually subscribe, that way we get credit for you subscribing and other people can find the show.

We have an app for Android and for iOS. You can find that in their respective app stores. Through those and through Scriptnotes.net you can access all the back catalogue, so you can listen back to episode one, or to the Christmas show where Aline first talked about Crazy Ex-Girlfriend with Rachel Bloom.

If you would like to send us a question, you can write short things on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, write in to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you have a t-shirt that’s on its way, give it an extra few days. And if it has not shown up then write into orders@johnaugust.com, and that’s what Stuart checks to make sure people have actually gotten t-shirts in right.

Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth, who has written many of our great outros. If you have an outro for us, just write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to wherever you have it on SoundCloud or wherever and we will put it in the hopper. So thank you for everyone who has sent in those great outros. And that is our show this week. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Austin Film Festival 2015 panel schedule](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festivalandconference/conference/2015-panels/)
* [Train hero Spencer Stone stabbed](http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/crime/article38180571.html), and [Scriptnotes, 214](http://johnaugust.com/2015/clerks-and-recreation)
* [Canter’s](https://www.cantersdeli.com/home)
* [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/) on episodes [60](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), [76](http://johnaugust.com/2013/how-screenwriters-find-their-voice), [100](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-100th-episode), [101](http://johnaugust.com/2013/101-qa-from-the-live-show), [119](http://johnaugust.com/2013/positive-moviegoing), [123](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-holiday-spectacular), [124](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular) [152](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-rocky-shoals-pages-70-90), [161](http://johnaugust.com/2014/a-cheap-cut-of-meat-soaked-in-butter), [175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes), [180](http://johnaugust.com/2015/bad-teachers-good-advice-and-the-default-male) and [200](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-200th-episode-live-show)
* The New York Times on [The Great American Musical, Side B, in ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/arts/television/the-great-american-musical-side-b-in-my-crazy-ex-girlfriend.html?_r=0)
* Rachel Bloom and Jack Dolgen (and Aline) on [Scriptnotes, 175](http://johnaugust.com/2014/twelve-days-of-scriptnotes)
* [Bola Ogun](https://pro-labs.imdb.com/name/nm4459589/?ref_=sch_int), and the full cast and crew of [Crazy Ex-Girlfriend](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4094300/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm) on IMDb
* [Bollywood to go on indefinite strike from October 3](http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/entertainment/hindi/bollywood/news/Bollywood-to-go-on-indefinite-strike-from-October-3/articleshow/49183357.cms) from The Times of India
* Scott Frank on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Frank) and [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0291082/)
* The Artful Writer on [Scene Harmony](https://web.archive.org/web/20120323053754/http://artfulwriter.com/?p=216)
* Three Pages by [Scott Frank](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/luvlee.pdf), and [the scene from The Lookout](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nmYaR_ZllQ)
* [Use gift cards from other countries to make purchases in foreign iTunes stores](http://www.elftronix.com/easy-method-make-us-itunes-purchase-from-any-country/)
* [Games Magazine](http://gamesmagazine-online.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/features-are-different).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 218 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So last week we talked about the business of screenwriting a lot. And it was sort of inadvertently one of those all business episodes, so this week is going to be all about the craft of screenwriting.

We are going to talk about how writing features is much different than writing television. And how those differences start at inception. We’ll also be looking at a couple of new Three Page Challenges.

But first and most importantly, Craig, you did not kill the entire party at the last Dungeons & Dragons game. So I am thankful to you.

**Craig:** Well, it was an effort, actually, to not kill all of you. You know, the thing for a dungeon master is you want to make sure that the party experiences the thrill of danger and the very real possibility of death without going overboard and just wiping the floor with them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, that’s a funny thing. I don’t want anyone to actually die-die by the end of the session, but I do want you to maybe almost die, or at least a couple of you almost die. And that’s exactly what happened. I got it just right. It was a very exciting one. And I can’t wait for our next session, because I got some good stuff planned for you.

**John:** I’m excited to do it. So I was looking through the dungeon master’s guide last night because that’s a thing I do before I try to fall asleep. I noticed there’s a page buried deep in the dungeon master’s guide which suggests another way that you can play the game in which characters have what’s called a plot point. And players can spend their plot point in order to change an aspect of the story, which would be a fascinating way to play the game.

So, at a certain point we could say like I’m going to spend my plot point in order to find a secret door that takes us into that room.

**Craig:** My guess is that as clever as you guys are, your plot points would likely break the game.

**John:** Indeed. The danger of six screenwriters playing Dungeons & Dragons.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. And smart ones. And the real challenge for me is that one of our players is not a — well, he is — I think he does some writing, and he’s involved in Hollywood. I believe he does a lot of coverage and stuff. And he is a very well-seasoned dungeon master.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He knows the rules inside and out. So, I have the ultimate table lawyer constantly checking on me. So, it’s good. I actually feel like I’ve held up okay under his withering attacks.

**John:** You’re discussing Kevin Walsh, who I actually saw at a WGA function just this past weekend. The day after our near total party kill, I saw Kevin at a screening of Black Mass. And I did a Q&A right after Black Mass. And I had a chance to talk to Mark Mallouk, one of the film’s screenwriters, about the journey to the screen of that.

And so as I’m trying to do more often, whenever I talk to screenwriters in that capacity, I record it. And so if you are a Scriptnotes Premium Subscriber, you can actually hear the audio from that session. It’s in the premium feed. So there’s a bonus episode for all the folks who are generous enough to pay us $2 a month.

**Craig:** How thoughtful of you.

**John:** We’re headed off to Austin. We’re going to also be doing a bunch of screenings for Academy Award consideration things. So, we’ll try to do more of those over the next few months, because they’re really fun, and we’re already having the conversation so why not record it.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I’m glad you mentioned Austin, because it’s creeping up really, really fast. I guess we’re officially in October now as you folks are listening to this. And Austin is just four weeks away. So if you haven’t already arranged to be there and you want to be there, do it now.

And I’m not sure if they’ve got the whole schedule up yet, but I do know for sure that both our live Scriptnotes and the live Three Page Challenge will not be at ungodly hours like 9AM. I think they’re at reasonable hours.

**John:** Yeah. You can sleep off your hangover and come in and see us.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Scriptnotes will be on the first day. And so we will have a live Scriptnotes with special guests and it should be really fun. And then the live Three Page Challenge, we are going to be selecting from a group of finalists at the Austin Film Festival and be going through those pages with those people in the audience. And then coming up on stage to talk us through what we just talked through. So, that should be a fun time. It’s the third year we’ve done that. And it should be a good time.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Cool. Some corrections from last week. You had one about Rachael Prior.

**Craig:** Yes. There’s something in the back of my head saying — I don’t know if she’s — I called her a development executive at Big Talk. She’s actually the head of development at Big Talk and also a producer there. So I didn’t want to shortchange her on her full nobility and title.

**John:** Fantastic. A development executive I guess would cover it, but it is not actually as specific as you’d want to be.

**Craig:** No, it makes it sound like she’s working for the person that she actually is.

**John:** That’s true. That’s a good way to describe it. Also, as I was looking through stuff this past week, there was a new review up for the Scriptnotes app. So, in the iOS App Store there’s a Scriptnotes app which allows people to listen to all of the back episodes. And a guy named Paul Horne left a comment that says, “Ridiculous format for an app. It’s an all-premium app. You must have the premium subscription. But there’s no way to subscribe within the app, so you’re on your own. What a stupid company.”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** And Paul Horne is right. Well, not about us being a stupid company, but he’s right about it being frustrating that within the app there’s no way to actually subscribe to the premium feed. It’s because of the weird way that Apple works within app purchases. And Libsyn who actually makes the app, and it’s all their stuff.

So, yes, as a person who makes apps for iOS, we could theoretically make our own app that would be much better than it. It’s just a matter of time and resources. And we just don’t have the bandwidth to do it. So, I’m sorry. I am frustrated as you are. But if you want to subscribe to the premium feed, it’s just Scriptnotes.net. There’s a clunky website for which you can enter in your detail information. But once you do and sign up for an account, you can get to the premium feed through the apps, or any other way you’d like to listen to those back episodes.

**Craig:** That sounds great. Am I — do I have an account? [laughs] I should probably check and see.

**John:** You should probably check and see on that.

**Craig:** I should probably check and see.

**John:** If I dig through the website carefully enough I could either check whether you’re a subscriber, or maybe even give you as one of the podcast hosts a free premium subscription.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** But I’m not even sure I can do that. It’s like that’s how old and janky the website is.

**Craig:** So you actually pay $2 a month?

**John:** I do just to make sure that it actually comes through and updates properly.

**Craig:** Well, if you do it, I should do it. That would be strange. I’m going to do it. You know what? I’m going to give us $2 — I’m going to give you, let’s face it — I don’t get any of this.

**John:** Yeah, unfortunately you’re actually giving Libsyn more of those dollars, because we split the money with Libsyn. So, it’s all crazy.

**Craig:** Good, I’ll give you a buck.

**John:** All right. Let’s talk about writing features, because this last week I had the pleasure of going in and talking to my friend Dara’s writing class. So, Dara teaches a small group of writers from USC. And she is mostly a television writer and she wanted me to come in and talk about breaking features and sort of like what it’s like to go in and figure out how you’re going to break story on a whole feature because it’s not just sort of two pilots back to back. It’s a very different beast.

Previously on the podcast we’ve talked about, you know, are people feature writers, are they TV writers. We’ve, I think, strongly urged that anyone who is aspiring to have a career in Hollywood should be thinking about writing both, because both are valid. And a person who can write a feature probably also can write TV, and vice versa. But they are very different things. And I think we’ve never actually discussed what is so different about features than writing a one-hour drama for television.

So, that is our big topic du jour.

**Craig:** It’s an excellent one. I think that on first blush people might think, well, the difference is that television has episodes and a movie is just a movie. But there are certain narrative implications that go along with that. And there are character implications. And I do think that while it would be great if you could do both, there are some people that are particularly well suited to one kind of storytelling or another.

**John:** Yeah. And, well, before we get into what’s different about the nature of stories between these two things, let’s talk about what might be different about your personality as a writer that might make you gravitate towards one or the other. Do you like being all by yourself and having complete control over everything? That is more of a screenwriter mentality, because you are a person who gets to go off in his or her little room and write the screenplay. And, yes, you have to deal with producers and executives and other people along the way, but the writing process is sort of your process.

In television, that’s not the case. In television you’re having to work with other writers and you’re having to sit in rooms and figure out what story is and that can be fantastic for many people and many people thrive in that environment. But it’s worth knowing what you are good at and what you are not good at. And maybe you won’t figure that out until you’ve actually tried.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think also if you’re the kind of writer that gets very excited by the new, by beginnings, and by endings and conclusions, then you would probably want to consider features more strongly than television. But if you would prefer to kind of live within a space, and have that familiarity, and write versions and variations, then, yeah, I would think television would be the path for you.

**John:** Absolutely. And there’s a problem solving quality I think to doing one-hour dramas, particularly one-dramas that have a procedural aspect which can be very rewarding. Like if you are person who likes to make crossword puzzles, it’s that challenge of how you’re going to fit all of this within the restrictions of both what you can say, how much time you have, what your act breaks have to be. Some people will love that and thrive in that. And that can be a great situation for many people.

Most feature people who try to do their first TV job become very frustrated when they’re first attempting to do a television pilot.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, obviously there’s more television now than not that is commercial-free. But for people that are writing network or commercial-supported cable, I mean there’s that issue of just breaking your story and stopping it and starting it again.

**John:** So let’s start at the inception of story and what kinds of things are different approaching a feature versus approaching television. First is repeatability. So, movies I think are fundamentally stories that can happen just once. A movie can be expressed as this is the time when this thing happened. It’s about events that occur once. It is a change that happens to a character just one time.

So, in television, you might have a one-time setup. You might have the plane crash on Lost that gets the whole series started, but you begin Lost with the idea of what is daily life going to be like on that island and that is the question of the series. The question of the series is also are they ultimately going to leave the island. But week to week it is about the interaction of those people on the island.

In movies there’s not that sense of repeatability. Or you don’t start with that idea of repeatability. There are movie franchises. So we have Fast & Furious 7, but each of those is considered its own movie and it really was thought of as its own movie. And there’s not this underlying desire from inception to create something that can regenerate itself, that can keep growing into more and more stories. It’s not a machine that keeps spitting out more ways to race cars.

**Craig:** Well, it’s interesting because when we talk about this, we’re talking about what makes these things attractive from the start to us. And when we think about what becomes an attractive movie idea, we’re thinking about an idea that burns itself upon completion. It is a resolvable idea. It’s a circle, you know. We begin here and then we end in our narrative circle.

In television, the ideas that excite everybody are the ones that do seem inherently endlessly productive. So, what is the story of Cheers? It’s the story of people who show up at a bar where they find camaraderie in a way they don’t anywhere else. There’s nothing about that that suggests movie.

**John:** At all.

**Craig:** And everything that suggests this never-ending pool of generation for television.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, Cheers or Lost or many of the things we’re talking about, they are characters in a place. And every week you’re coming back to see those characters in that place and the adventures they will have in that place.

Contrast that — we talked in previous episodes about Pixar story rules. Emma Coats had this list of really smart things that Pixar talks about when they talk about story. This is her rule number four: “Once upon a time there was blank. Every day blank. One day, blank. Because of that blank, because of that blank, until finally blank.” So, filling in those blanks is what makes it a movie.

And inherent in sort of how she’s structuring that is there is a change. You’ve started in a certain kind of world that worked a certain kind of way, but then one day something changed and because of that change, nothing could ever be the way it was again. And that is a movie story. And television — things ultimately are back to somewhat like they were before. In movies, ideally, they are not.

**Craig:** Yeah. The focus of a film narrative, a feature film narrative is once upon a time there was blank, until finally blank. And that word finally says a lot. In television, they’re really concentrating on every day blank. So, movies are about shattering the everyday in such a way that it cannot it be returned to. And a new normal is created at the end. And we understand that the dramatic flaw has been cured and the hero is solved. Every day of the rest of their life after the movie should probably be quite boring and stable.

**John:** Yes. And if there’s a sequel, then you are going to reignite that flame. But there’s an expectation that a new normal has been reached at the end of your movie journey. And the character is different for it, but the character has come to a new place of rest. And that is not the experience of television at all.

**Craig:** No, in television, the normal is what is interesting. So, if you watch — I mean, procedurals do this the best, every week the district attorney sits down with his associates and says we have to win a trial. That’s our normal. And that’s what we do each week. There are serializable things that can happen over the course of a television series, but even when you look at those you’ll see in soap operatic fashion that those changes are just as undoable as they are doable.

So, in a movie, let’s say a woman is in love with a guy and he doesn’t know she exists. And that’s her normal life, until one day, right, a thing happens. And that destroys the normal fabric until such time as she either ends up with this guy or comes to some other resting place that is satisfying for her. Done.

In the serialized things that happens across episodic television, people get married, they get unmarried, they break up, they don’t break up. I mean, look at Friends. Every single one of them was in love with one of the other ones of them at some point. They mixed and matched and they got married and unmarried and together and not together, because the point was it can’t end. It’s not supposed to ever end. Which is why, by the way, the last episodes of television are incredibly hard to pull off. They are fighting the nature of television in the way that a lot of movie sequels are fighting the nature of movies, which is why sequels are hard to pull off.

**John:** in the outline you have this described as the difference between life-changing and life-living. And I think that’s a very smart way of making the distinction. Movies are about life-changing events in these character’s lives. Television is about these characters living their daily lives. And in living their daily lives, there are ups and downs, there are peaks and valleys, there are big things that could happen to them. But it is just their daily life. It’s their ongoing story, rather than the one epic that took them from this place to that place.

**Craig:** Which is why, I think, narrative television in the last 10 or 15 years has done such a remarkable job, because in the embracing of the narrative of the everyday, they have found a way to connect to common experiences we all have in nice, subtle, interesting, realistic ways. Somebody spends an entire episode dealing with a thing in a way that is not meant to be buttoned up or solved. And that very closely mirrors our experience of life.

The truth is that for all of us living on this planet, most of us never actually have a movie moment in our lives. Every now and then you do. But those are special.

**John:** Yeah. You may have five movie moments in your entire life. And you could look at — even if you take a very famous person and you’re trying to make a biopic about them, you are going to pick sort of those few movie moments, or you’re going to try to decide what is the movie story to tell of this person’s life, because their daily life was a lot of ordinary. And if they’re an extraordinary person, their ordinary life is probably kind of too ordinary for a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s one of the reasons that when we do biopics we tend to gravitate feature wise towards people that die young, because it is an end. And what isn’t quite as satisfying is a biopic about somebody who just keeps on living. And then they live some more. And then more.

There was a little bit of that feeling, you know, I got that feeling when I was watching J. Edgar Hoover.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He just kept living.

**John:** Yeah. I honestly had that frustration with Theory of Everything. I think that Stephen Hawking is still alive, but I didn’t like that he was still alive in the movie, because you end up with a sort of two little title cards at the end that says sort of what people are like now, and then you’re just — you keep going.

**Craig:** Great example. Because you could make a fantastic television series about the life of Stephen Hawking because it is ongoing. And there are these things that happen all the time with him. And there’s also the progression of his disease, which frankly is more interesting, I would think, in sort of presented in a way that’s realistic.

Now, Turing, on the other hand, he died young. And so that’s a movie.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It’s one of those funny things. Harder to do. I always struggle with — and it’s not fair, in a way, but I struggle with biopics where people just keep on living.

Now, sometimes the end of a narrative isn’t about death, but about a rebirth. So, for instance, What’s Love Got to Do with it is one of my favorite movies.

**John:** I was going to bring that up as well.

**Craig:** Love it.

**John:** I mean, it’s such a — and one of the rare examples of like they found the right place to end the movie on a highlight and just brilliantly done.

**Craig:** Right. Because the movie moment of her life, so she had a movie moment by being discovered. She had a movie moment by becoming famous with this man. She had a movie moment by suffering through domestic violence. She had a movie moment by breaking free of him. And then she had a movie moment of becoming a star all on her own. And when she does, we’re done. We’re good. The rest — Tina Turner is still alive. Nothing interesting is happening with her right now that deserves a movie. That’s why that was a movie.

**John:** I agree. In my conversation with Mark Mallouk about Black Mass, we were discussing Whitey Bulger who was a fascinating character, but as he was writing the story he just disappeared. He was just a dot-dot-dot. And there was no sense — the movie had a sense of closure. And his script had a sense of closure, but not really closure.

And so as they had a director attached and as they were starting to think about production suddenly he got the email that, oh, they found Whitey Bulger and he was living in Santa Monica, which was in 2011. And suddenly he had a very different ending for his movie. And that was in a weird way his capture made it a movie. And it provided a closure to it in a way that was absolutely necessary.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** And there had been talk about trying to do that same — to adapt that same book into a series, and you could imagine what that series was. It could have been a great sort of limited series for HBO or Showtime. But it’s harder to imagine it as a movie without that sort of framing.

**Craig:** Movies end.

**John:** Movies end.

**Craig:** And television doesn’t. I mean, even when you talk about television with a built-in end, when I think about some of the limited series, when I look at those I think it’s just a super long movie. But proper television is meant to go as long as the creators feel like doing it. They could have done another 12 seasons of Mad Men, another 15 of Sopranos. They could have done M*A*S*H forever. Obviously they have to gauge the interest of the audience as the years go on. And they have to gauge if creatively there’s any juice left in it.

But without an ending, you don’t really have a movie, or some kind of limited run.

**John:** Agreed. Let’s talk about what else is different — size. So, movies are about extraordinary events. And often those extraordinary events are huge events. So, obviously if you’re doing a movie like San Andreas, you’re going to have the earthquake once and that’s going to be the fundamental thing that changes everybody’s life.

But in movies that don’t have that sort of big scale event, where there’s no alien invasion, it is a life-changing event for the main characters that you’re facing. It’s the day — I think we go back to the way it was before. In 12 Years a Slave, you follow Solomon Northup’s kidnapping, his ordeal, and his liberation. So there was more to his life. You could have picked it up at different points, but the movie wanted to be about his journey, about his effort to get home.

He had a very clear want and desire which was to be reunited with his family. And so once he was reunited with his family, that’s the end of the movie. And there’s no more movie to make at that point.

Even When Harry Met Sally, you know, it’s about two characters who have sort of an extraordinary first meeting where they both confess their true feelings about what they think relationships can be, and once that premise is established the movie version of that has to be them getting together or finally not ever being able to get together. It’s not set up in a television way. You couldn’t extend that out in a repeatable way across 22 episodes of a season.

**Craig:** Correct. There’s really no fun in watching television characters burn through a relationship or consummate a relationship. When they do it, they’re usually doing it I think because they feel like the status quo that they’ve established to that point is getting a little stale. So they’re not actually beginning or ending things. They’re creating a new status quo that they can then continue with for another five years.

So this is why characters get divorced, or get married, or fall in love, or fall out of love. Not the case in movies. Size wise, I think a movie is capable of expanding or contracting to any size, because it’s really about the depth of focus. How deep are you going to drill down into something?

Episodic television I think does not handle size well, because there is an exhaustion that occurs. And I think a little bit of that happened with Lost. The massivity of what they were proposing and the fact that it continued to be massive at some point became unwieldy. And it started to collapse in on itself. So, you can say, well, science fiction episodes can get big in a sense, but that’s just a trick of effects. I mean, Star Trek was not big in terms of scope of drama. It was as episodic as anything. It might as well have been a western in that regard. Or The Twilight Zone in that regard.

And a lot of the episodes do fit into those patterns. Television, I think, is less adaptable to huge swings of large events.

**John:** I think there’s a suspension of disbelief that happens with a movie where you can say like, oh, well this happens once. I can see that happening. But when you’re on your 5th season of 24 and Jack Bauer has to save the day from nuclear Armageddon yet again, that becomes a real challenge. And it feels like it violates the contract you made with your audience that like it can’t just keep happening again and again.

Heroes is another example of a show that burned so bright out of the gate and when it came time to try to repeat what it was doing, you weren’t up for it. It achieved this giant scale and really smart storytelling, and you didn’t want to see it do that same thing again.

**Craig:** Yeah. It starts to struggle under its own bigness. And actually an interesting exercise is to look at the difference between the way Star Trek episodes are structured and their narrative nature compared to Star Trek movies. So, one of my favorite Star Trek movies is First Contact. And so that’s about the Borg, the evil alien race, incapable of defeating humanity in the future, has decided to go into the past to our — well, sort of near future us now — to destroy the earth or actually destroy the ship that’s going to go faster than the speed of light for the first time, because that’s what essentially kicks us off and creates our connection to the rest of the galaxy and makes Star Trek possible. That feels very big. And very endable. There’s an end in sight from the conception of it, which is are they going to do this or not.

Star Trek episodes don’t really work that way. It’s a good way to kind of make the comparison.

**John:** As we talk about scale, I also want to stress that movies can be small and quiet, but still have a scale to them. So, a movie from this last year, End of the Tour, which I just loved, the story of David Foster Wallace and the journalist interviewing him, from the David Foster Wallace’s character perspective, this isn’t sort of the day that everything changed. It was sort of every day for him. But for the journalist interviewing him, the Jesse Eisenberg character, this was a fundamentally important shift in his life.

And so even though the move didn’t have earthquakes and rocket ships, it was incredibly important to this character, and it had stakes for that character in ways that television wouldn’t have.

**Craig:** Boy, it’s just amazing to consider this. It’s a simple thing, and it may seem a little morbid, and it may seem a little cynical, but I think it’s true — you don’t make that movie if David Foster Wallace doesn’t commit suicide. There’s no end.

**John:** That’s probably true. I mean, I think the whole movie becomes framed in a very different light. And if you go into the movie knowing that David Foster Wallace is still alive, and has an opinion about the movie you’re about to sit down and see, it does feel very, very different. You’re right.

**Craig:** It’s one of those things. You need some kind of end. And, again, I don’t want to harp on death as the only kind of ending, because there are lots of endings and lots of rebirths. But something has to break there permanently.

**John:** Well, I think when we talk about life and death, even if it’s not literally death, it has to be this sense that there are — that the lead characters could fail and there would be horrible consequences for their failure. And that’s movies.

In television, you sort of as an audience don’t believe that these lead characters are going to do, or that their failure could be so devastating. That’s one of the reasons why Game of Thrones I think is so shocking to watch is because we don’t expect to have our television characters killed off suddenly and for seemingly no reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. They do a great job of shaking us out of our, what I’ll call, soap opera complacency. And yet, nonetheless, it is a soap opera. I mean no disrespect to the show by that term. I think most episodic drama is soap opera. I love Game of Thrones. I think it’s the best soap opera ever made. It’s right up there with The Sopranos, which was also a soap opera.

But, yeah, they’re willing to kill characters as The Sopranos did, by the way. But also there is an ongoing process there. Now, it will be fascinating to see how it all lands, because we now know for sure that they’ve run out of books, so they’re now moving past George R. Martin. He himself, I think by his own account, is two books away from the end. So they’re now heading into what would be the penultimate book. I don’t know how many seasons that will cover, one or more. But at some point it will need to come to a landing. And at that point, there will start to take on — the show will start to take on some movie narrative aspects, inevitably. There will be permanent changes. Things will happen that will seem somewhat un-Game of Thrones like in their permanence.

**John:** Which I’m excited to see how that pans out. Let’s talk about characters and the choices the characters make in movies versus in television shows. In movies, you see characters making big, bold, and sort of irrevocable choices. I’m going to fight the world heavyweight champion. They’re stating their goals probably really clearly and boldly and in way that you can actually see in the trailer. And that is what they’re going for. So you’re making the contract with the audience that like this thing that I say I’m going to do, you’re going to see me try to do that.

In television, characters might pine for somebody. They might want a better life. But there’s not that expectation that we’re going to see them do that and become that over the course of watching that show. It’s informing what kind of character they are, but not necessarily what they’re doing on a daily or weekly basis. And it’s very rare that you’re going to see characters in television essentially burn down the house, like basically destroy the place of safety that they have in order to move onto their new world. And in movies you see that quite often. That’s what you end up doing at the end of your first act often is burning your whole previous life behind you, so you can move forward into this next phase of your life.

**Craig:** Yeah, interestingly, television characters are often punished for attempting to be different. They try and change. And they are punished for it, or they come to an understanding that they were better off the way they were. So, television has trouble with change. Television does much better with situations.

**John:** They do.

**Craig:** And by television I don’t mean the series that have ends, but rather television that’s meant to go on and on. So, characters will say, “I’m quitting my job and I’m changing my life,” and at the end the lesson is don’t do that.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Because we have to do another episode next week. And that’s not our show.

**John:** In many half hour comedies you will see a lead character make a fundamental choice that would change and upset everything. And by the end of the episode they’re back to where they are before. And that is the nature of television and we’ve come to sort of accept that.

So let’s say you have an idea for something, and you’re not quite sure if it’s a feature idea or a television series idea. And let’s run through some ways to try to suss out whether we think this is a TV idea or movie idea. So, these aren’t hard and fast rules, but just some frameworks for thinking about like which way you should take this idea.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** For starter, the simple one, length. Is this a story that wants to be told within about two hours, because then it’s a feature. If there’s not a real way to tell the story you want to tell within two hours, it’s not a feature idea, and maybe it’s a TV idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you can now take advantage of this middle ground. So the thing that I’m writing for HBO is far too big to be a movie, but it’s a really long movie. So it’s a six-episode movie. And those are interesting. I like that world that now exists. It used to exist, and then it went away for a long time. Now it’s back.

But, yes, you have to ask yourself is this something that I can encompass within two hours or so. And then the flip side of that is — is this something that would actually be most enjoyable on an ongoing basis? Because it feels that way length wise, that’s where you want to go.

**John:** Yeah. Is what’s interesting about this idea the world and to some degree the characters, or is it the specific plot and story that you have in your head? If it’s the world, more likely what you’re describing is a TV show and if it is the specific plot and the incidents that happen in your story right now, that is probably a movie.

So an example would be I had this idea for a crime thriller set in Alaska. And I knew basically how the police and sheriffs and everything works in Alaska is so different than how we have it in the lower 48 states. And I loved that world. I thought it was really fascinating. But mostly I loved the world. I loved sort of the strange way it all worked. And I had an idea for like what the plot would be with the pilot, but I also felt like this feels repeatable. This feels like a thing that could be down week after week.

And so I pitched and I set it up at ABC and we shot the pilot. And that was a pilot I wrote called Alaska. And it didn’t go forward, but that was very much a TV idea. It was repeatable.

The feature version of that idea was a Christopher Nolan movie called Insomnia. And that was a very specific crime story that kind of happened to take place in Alaska. His story was very specifically a movie and the setting was just an interesting place to set the story.

**Craig:** I think that’s a great instinct that you had to think about world versus incident. I’m a huge fan of Northern Exposure, one of my favorite shows, and that was absolutely about the world. Certainly there were characters and certainly there were events that occurred, that’s what the episodes were about individually. But the enjoyment of the show, the reason you kept coming back week after week was to go back to that place. We are all constantly going back to the Cheers bar when we return for another week of television. There is a familiarity that we wish to reengage with.

And movies are the opposite. Movies are entirely about destroying familiarity and jostling you out of that. And then creating something new at the end. So, that was a smart call. And interestingly Alaska movies don’t — you struggle with Alaska movies. I mean, Mystery Alaska was another one that was kind of tough. Because Alaska does feel like it’s about the place and about exploring it over time.

**John:** Yep. Something I’ll call trailer-ability, is like is there a way to tell what is unique and interesting about your specific story in like a 90-second trailer. Or is it something that is more like a long slice that you’d have to really see a TV show to sort of — to understand what it is.

The details of your story, could those fit into a 90-second trailer? Or do you need to actually have a full season for that to make sense?

The same with Lost, the plane crash in Lost could be in a trailer. And you can sort of get ideas from it, but you couldn’t really get a sense of what the show of Lost was going to be like in a 90-second trailer. It was just beyond the scope of what you could imagine sitting in the theater and watching up on a screen.

**Craig:** In part because there was no designed end game, but you could absolutely have decided at the point of conception to not make Lost as a television show, but to make it as a movie. And you could have made a great trailer, the promise being “and this ends.” You’ll find out.

When you look at a show like The Sopranos, the promotional materials were basically saying you’ve never seen a mob family like this before. And, look, it’s mobsters dealing with the existential dread of everyday life. Well, if I saw that in a movie theater as a trailer I’d think, okay, and then what happens? What’s the thing? Why is this a movie?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you’re absolutely right. There’s a good test there right off the bat. Can you feel the entirety of the trailer in your head? And if you can’t, you might be dealing with a television show.

**John:** This is actually a note that you will hear if you ever go in to pitch a TV show. They will ask, “What is episode 12?” And by that they’re saying like once you’ve burned through this initial sort of set up of your world, what is a normal episode of your show going to be like? And that is a real criteria for whether this is a TV show idea or if it’s just an interesting pilot that doesn’t actually have sustainability.

So, if you have a real sense of what episode 12 is like, that’s probably a TV show. If you don’t, then maybe what you’re really describing is a feature and you need to think about it as a feature.

**Craig:** Yeah. The shows that I truly love manage to make me feel like they were all designed intentionally from the start, even though they weren’t. I know for a fact that when Vince Gilligan and his writer’s room were making the first season of Breaking Bad, they had no idea what was going to happen in season five. Maybe they had some vague senses of it, but certainly not moment to moment.

There were characters that came around in season three that they had no clue that they were going to invent. But it all feels of a piece. What they did know was that at the very least, they knew how to extend this out as far as a year.

And if you can extend it out as far as a year and then end your year on some kind of cliffhanger that promises more gasoline in the tank for your engine, then you’re in good shape.

**John:** Yep. Does your story want to keep coming back to the same sets? If your story mostly takes place in certain locations and you feel like you would be back seeing those same places a lot, that feels more television. And if your story is a road trip — you’re someplace new every scene, that does not feel like television. Not just for the logistics of production, but also for kind of audience expectation. There’s a familiarity about coming back to the same places with the same characters repeatedly over the course of time. Even shows like Mad Men, shows like The Sopranos, great shows. They do go back to their sets. And that’s an expectation in television that’s natural. And so if you find your story keeps wanting to go back to familiar locations, that’s probably a television idea.

**Craig:** It’s either a television idea, or it’s a small independent film.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And small movies can live within very confined areas as long as narratively they feel like a movie. But you’re absolutely right, for television, we’re desperate for the familiar. There’s no reason that the guys in The Sopranos needed to always meet in the backroom of the Bada Bing, or in the back room of the deli store. But we crave it, because that is what television is promising us. It’s promising us more verisimilitude than movies. It’s promising us the small but meaningful dramatic quests of the every day. And for all of us moving through every day, we have a house, we have a hangout, we have an office. That’s our deal. We’re creatures of habit.

**John:** My final criteria is how many characters do you need to tell your story? And if you have a bunch of characters in your world, that’s probably television. If you have a very small number of characters, that is more likely a feature. And so, yes, we can think of features that have tremendous numbers of characters. You can think of the Godfathers where there is a bunch of people you need to keep track of, but in general you have more people on television and you’re going to have more minor characters who are going to resurface.

More often in television you’re not going to be locked to a character’s point of view, so you’ll be able to see things from multiple character’s point of view. You’ll be able to wander off with that woman and see what she’s doing during her day and not always be focused on your one main lead guy. That’s television and that’s our expectation of television. In features, you tend to have smaller, more focused character sets. And generally as you’re crafting a feature, you find yourself combining characters down so that there are not more speaking parts than you absolutely need.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are always exceptions, of course. Big epics can expand to include more characters, but often need to be more than one movie. You have the Richard Curtis model, where you’re doing a Triptych, or you’re following four or five different characters in their own mini stories. But those are all like little short films connected to each other and then interrelated in some way. Actually some film student somewhere should do a paper on the similarities between Richard Curtis films and Quentin Tarantino films, which are remarkably similar in this regard, that they tend to create — Tarantino intends to encompass lots of small mini movies in one movie, as does Richard Curtis.

But, again, done in such a way that they don’t cross. If they’re all mingling together, if you have 12 people moving in and out altogether, all following the same plot, very difficult to do in a feature film.

**John:** Agreed. Compare the difference between Office Space and The Office. And The Office is a television show with a lot of characters. Office Space also is set in an office, has characters, but it’s narrowing down to fewer people because that’s what the feature can actually focus on.

All right, let’s talk about some properties that actually cross the divide. Properties that are both features and television and talk about sort of what happens when things do cross that divide. An example, Mission: Impossible. Mission: Impossible was a TV show. It was a procedural. It was on every week. Every week they would get a case. This message would self-destruct. And people loved that show, and then it was off the air for many years. It came back as the Tom Cruise franchise. And it did most of the things we just talked about, which movies need to do. They focused on many fewer characters. Rather than being the team, it’s really a Tom Cruise movie. He’s very much the focus.

The scale got much, much bigger. It was a once and a lifetime thing for him. Even each time it feels like this is the one he could die in. The scale was increased greatly.

**Craig:** Yeah. Same thing with the James Bond series. Same thing with the Fast & Furious series. You could argue that certain long-running movie franchises are actually massive television shows that have one episode every three years, or every two years, because that’s kind of the way it feels. Especially with Bond. Bond has been going the longest of all of them. And I’m a big Bond fan, so I’ve seen all of them. And putting aside the oddity of the casting changes and just suspending your disbelief, they’re just — each one is just an awesome episode.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Those are interesting hybrids.

**John:** So, with Charlie’s Angles, Charlie’s Angels was a very successful TV show. When it came time to make it into a feature, we really had to think about sort of what does this want to be on the big screen. And how do we tell a story that feels like it is Charlie’s Angels, but is also a movie version of what Charlie’s Angels would be.

And one of the things we came to is like, well, they work for this mysterious boss. This should be the closest they ever come to finding out who their boss is, that their boss is in danger, that they’re saving their father/their boss, the king. That they’re doing things that they would never have been able to do before. And we literally blow up the talent agency. So we sort of see the iconic home. The home was destroyed. It can never be made back the same way.

Those are things you do in the movie version of Charlie’s Angels that you would never do in the TV show version of Charlie’s Angels.

**Craig:** Right. But you could have then considered that the pilot episode of one of these new mega series that comes out once every two years, and —

**John:** That was absolutely the goal until — as I described it during the initial press for the first Charlie’s Angels, I said like, “I really think of this as a pilot that, you know, for a TV show that takes four years between episodes and costs $100 million.”

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** And so the second episode should have been that episode that was like so much better than the pilot, where we sort of fixed all the problems. And instead it was a not good episode of the show, and the show got canceled.

**Craig:** That’s why these are so rare. Because one bad episode early on could be enough. In fact, if you look at the history of Fast & Furious, after the third one they were kind of in a wobbly place. Vin Diesel wasn’t in the second one, or the third one, and so they didn’t seem like it was going to be one of those television series. It seemed more like it was just going to be what it is.

They brought him back and revitalized it and got the series back on track. There are movies out there that continue on in this series like fashion a lot of times right under our noses like The Transporter. You know, another Robert Kamen joint.

**John:** Nicely done. Let’s talk about examples of shows that have done the opposite thing. So, the Sarah Connor Chronicles. This is taking The Terminator, and what we loved about The Terminator is like, well, what if we looked at Sarah Connor and sort of what daily life is like. And so her daily life is incredibly heightened. What Josh Friedman was so smart to do is really look at like what is it like to live under this threat of constant death, where there’s always going to be someone out there trying to kill you. How do you establish a normal life in that situation? So, that’s the fundamental question of the TV series, Sarah Connor Chronicles. Which I loved. Which got canceled way too soon.

And also The Muppets, the new Muppets that’s on right now. Yes, there was the Muppet TV show before, but this really feels more to me like the Muppet movies. And if you took those characters from the Muppet movies which were always having some great adventure and instead you put them in an incredibly familiar locked down TV environment where they’re talking directly to camera and uses all the conventions of The Office or Parks & Recreation, what would that feel like.

And so it’s designed to not be the one time that this thing happened. It’s meant to be like The Larry Sanders Show. It’s everyday life.

**Craig:** It can be a tricky affair, because when we see a movie, sometimes what we have fallen in love with it is not translatable to television. And we’re just not as interested in the more mundane or drawn out or existential aspects of that idea. That said, occasionally it works brilliantly. Perhaps the best example is M*A*S*H.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** M*A*S*H, the movie, is wonderful. M*A*S*H, the series, not really like the movie, but made all the right changes it needed to to be a fantastic television show.

**John:** Yeah, you look at M*A*S*H, the movie, and it had Altman’s huge cast and sort of those kinds of questions that were very appropriate for both an Altman film, but could translate nicely to a TV series. But they had to translate. They had to really think about sort of what the show was going to be like with a laugh track, with standing sets, on a weekly basis. And they made very smart choices that were right for the time.

**Craig:** We should throw Altman into that term paper on Tarantino and Curtis.

**John:** Yep. It’s sort of the, you know, when you have giant casts and each character has the ability to take the narrative reins, what happens?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right. Let’s see what happens with these Three Page Challenges. If this is your first time listening to a Three Page Challenge, what we do is every once and a while we open up the mailbag and look at three pages of scripts that people have sent through. They’re not sending their whole scripts. They’re only sending these three pages.

And if you would like to read along with us, go to the show notes at johnaugust.com, look for this episode. And you can open up the PDFs and read along with us as we take a look at what these writers have sent in.

If you’d like to send in your own pages, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and there are instructions for how you do that and a little form you attach your PDF to.

So, let’s start with Dan Mauer. Is it Mauer or Mauer?

**Craig:** It looks like it’s Mauer.

**John:** Maurer. All right. Dan on the cover page says that he is a 2015 Austin Film Festival Three Page Challenge submission. Please note that I will be attending AFF. So, perhaps we will meet Dan there and be able to talk more about his pages.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Do you want to synopsize this?

**Craig:** Sure. So we open in a cellar at night. There’s just a little bit of light coming from an old kerosene lantern. And we hear the sound “Tap…Tap, Clang…” sort of a metallic sound. Door creaks open. It’s clearly bad weather outside and the distant wail of a police siren. And in comes a boy, a 12-year-old boy, named Billy. He’s in snow boots. He steps over to the lantern and revitalizes the lantern by pumping. It’s some kind of pump-operated lantern.

**John:** Coleman lanterns do that.

**Craig:** There you go. And he hears maybe a footstep. And we see a super, by the way. This is January 1975. And by moving the light around he discovers a dead body. A body of a boy. And then he realizes he’s not alone in the room. There’s another boy in the room. And that boy’s name is Tommy. And tommy whispers to Billy, “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

Billy looks back at the body. Tommy is also 12, by the way. Looks at the body. And then makes the connection that perhaps Tommy did in fact do something wrong. And this his fault. And under all of this, the continuing mysterious noise, “tap…tap…clang…clang.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And that’s the bottom of our three pages. My initial reaction to this is I am interested and intrigued by these boys in the body in the basement. It was a lot of shoe leather to sort of get through for where I got at the end of these three pages. I felt like I could have gotten there faster for what his was.

And there were a few specific things that sort of stuck out for me. The reveal of the super, January 1975, fine for us to do that. But if you’re going to call that out at a specific moment, it needs to be really a revelation that needs to be a very specific time and reason why you’re showing that title right when you’re showing it. And there really wasn’t for me. It was, “Billy grabs the lantern, stands, and holds out the light. Exposed beams, pipes and dusty floorboards hover over head. SUPER: ‘January, 1975′”. There wasn’t an incident that told me, like, oh, this is why it’s important for me to know this is 1975 versus a different time. That sort of stuck out.

There were some choices on sort of how we’re — just some word choices that sort of stuck out for me. “Billy looks around, his lantern pushing back the darkness only a small dim circle at a time.” The circle frustrated me a little bit because while lantern light would cast a circle, that’s not the force that’s pushing forward. It’s like you only see the circle looking down. The geography threw me off a little bit in that description.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, what is your first opinion of this?

**Craig:** Well, overall I thought it was really well done. I liked Dan’s general use of language. It was incredibly evocative. I could draw the room for you. I felt and heard everything. I could almost imagine colors and things and palettes. So, what was happening was a really good use of cinematic writing. I enjoyed the sound aspects in particular.

Some things to consider. I agree on the super. I’m not sure why we didn’t see it at the top. It does emerge oddly there on the page. Obviously it’s not something that’s determinative. It will be done in post, but for the reader, everything should be intentional. The introduction of Billy, the first kid, says, “REVEAL BILLY STONE, 12, fair-haired, open-faced. A young boy eager to leave childhood behind, if only he knew how.” No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s unplayable. It doesn’t help us.

**Craig:** No, he’s fair-haired and open-faced. He could be scared. He could be realizing he’s completely in over his head. I’d love to see how cold he is in his face. I think cold is a great thing to be evocative about on film. I love that he’s well-dressed for the snow, but wears only one knit glove. That’s a great little detail. And that he’s cut on his hand. He sees that.

A little odd that he’s looking at that now. Maybe if it were clearer that he is using the lantern specifically to look at his hand. It seems almost like he just happens to go, “Oh, and by the way, audience, here’s my cut hand.”

So, a little something to think about there. There is, story-wise, I’m certainly intrigued. I want to know what Tommy did. I want to know what Tommy’s problem is. I want to know what’s down in the hole. I want to know what’s making the noise.

I did get a little confused about some direction. When Billy discovers the body he looks toward the hole, trips over something, staggers, and then sees — we see — a balled up gym sock, tattered underwear, wadded up jeans, a child’s barefoot, young dead fingers reaching from beneath loose soil. Cool.

“Billy panics, steps back and trips over a shard of concrete.” That’s the second trip. “He drops the lantern and goes down hard. The light hits the ground, revealing the bloodied and disfigured face of a DEAD BOY.” I was a little confused. Like, wait a second, if the fingers are reaching from beneath loose soil, where’s the head, where’s the face, where are the feet. I got a little confused about how that worked.

**John:** Yeah. I did, too.

**Craig:** But certainly the introduction of Tommy is really cool. The third page is the one where things get a little flabby. Once Tommy says, “I didn’t do nothing wrong, Billy,” you could just as easily have Billy look at the body and go, “No,” and then clang, clang, clang, clang. You could remove a lot of page three.

**John:** I think you could, too. Let’s take a look at the description of Tommy Schneider. “TOMMY SCHNEIDER, 12. He’s fragile; damaged goods. Stringy red hair, blotchy freckles, and an oddly shrunken ear complete the picture of a kid no mother could love.” A kid no mother could love? I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what that means.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, if he’s creepy or, again, I’m not a huge fan of these kinds of baroque character descriptions anyway, but if you’re going to do it, give me something that I think a kid could play.

**John:** Yeah. Fragile and damaged goods I think are both useful. Joined by semicolon, damaged goods doesn’t help me with fragile. And so if you wanted to put that damaged goods after the shrunken ear, sure. I mean, there’s that sense of he’s a fundamentally broken kid. I totally get and understand that.

Like you, I got confused by the geography within the space. Circling back to the 1975 of it all, until I got to the 1975 I wasn’t sure if we were in present day or like in a western, because there’s nothing here — the kerosene lantern made me think like, well, this is a long time ago. But I didn’t really know. So, putting that 1975 up earlier would probably help me just get a sense of place and time and sort of who these kids would be. I sort of have a 1975 kid template that would have been really helpful to apply at the start.

**Craig:** Yeah, I had the same confusion from the lantern. I thought maybe we were in the 1800s or something.

**John:** Yeah. So I guess on the whole I would say interested, intrigued. I think we can do the stuff that these pages do faster. But I’m curious to read page four.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And I really think that Dan’s got a good control over his writing and good control over the — I can tell that he watched this scene before he wrote. And that’s absolutely crucial. So I thought he did a really good job and is very promising.

**John:** Cool. All right, next up, let’s look at Kate Jeffrey’s pages. This is Into the Bazaar. Bazaar like a shopping bazaar. Not a strange place, although it could be strange.

We open on the streets of New York where the sun is low. We follow a delivery boy on a bike as he zooms by. Honks as he’s racing through traffic. He’s in a fancy neighborhood and arrives outside a brownstone on a quiet block. He rings the buzzer. Buzz. Buzz. And then we’re inside the apartment where a small girl, Jane, 14, hears the buzzer.

She sitting on the bed. There’s an untouched glass of chocolate milk on the bedside table. In the living room at the same time, Eleanor, 38, is laying on a chaise lounge. She’s wealthy and dying. There’s an empty container of pills and a glass of water. She hears the buzzer but she does not respond to it.

Jane, he daughter apparently, shows up. Asks he if she drank the chocolate milk and apparently has not drank the chocolate milk. We stay with them as Eleanor dies. She has apparently taken all the pills and she dies there in the scene.

Jane calls a man and we hear on the other end the man answering, yes. And it is her father. And the father is saying, “For Heaven’s sake, speak up.” The daughter, Jane, asks, “Can you come home? Mom has…”

And the father says, “Sorry, hun, I gotta go. Ask you mother.”

And that is the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Right. So, I can sense you were struggling to synopsize this because in part it’s written in a way that defies synopsis, which is not a good sign. Here are the good signs. Again, I liked a lot of the language. And I could see what was going on. And I think that Kate has made this really remarkable choice right off the bat to present this suicide in such a, well, in such a bizarre manner. And so I really like that.

But let’s talk about where Kate is kind of getting in her own way here. First off, we have the first half of the first page is not about Jane, the daughter, or Eleanor, the mother. The first half is about the delivery boy. And, in fact, it’s presented as if the delivery boy is going to be the hero of our movie. Even has an interaction with an old man crossing the street. The old man gets a line. And then the delivery boy arrives and is buzzing and waiting, and buzzing and waiting, and buzzing and waiting.

Well, I’m not sure any of that is necessary at all, unless the delivery boy becomes a real character, in which case don’t call him delivery boy.

**John:** That was my first instinct, too. It’s a red flag the delivery boy doesn’t have an age, so you call him a boy. But is he actually a boy or is he a young man. Is he a delivery guy? Like, there’s no detail provided for him, and yet we’re spending the first half of our first page following him through the city is frustrating.

**Craig:** It was frustrating. I think that timewise Kate has set us in New York at evening sunset — already to go down, so actually it’s not evening, it’s more like whatever you would call dusk.

Then Eleanor seems to have this expectation that Jane would be asleep by now. That doesn’t quite add up.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So —

**John:** Well, so I took this to mean that the mother has drugged the chocolate milk, and so that Jane is supposed to be dead, too.

**Craig:** Okay, well, so then I start to draw some conclusions, including that one. So let’s talk about, again, Kate kind of getting in her own way a little bit here, because she’s got some really cool stuff and she just needs to button up a few things.

When we meet Jane, she is 14 years old, and she’s in a room with an expected array of teddy bears and decorative pillows, which is, you know, an array of teddy bears for a 14-year-old girl is actually not expected. So, I wasn’t quite sure if that was meant to be ironic or informative. If it is, call it out as being unexpected. Don’t call it expected.

And then there’s this chocolate milk. Jane also looking at a doll. Again, is she 14 or is she nine? What’s going on here? I like the buzzing. By the way, if you cut the delivery boy out entirely and there was this buzzing, that would be fine, too.

Now we go to Eleanor. Now, here’s what it says, “ELEANOR (38), lies on a chaise lounge. Wealthy and dying. Her silk robes splay open, revealing a lace nightgown, and her graying auburn hair is fanned around her head.” At this point at the end of page one, Kate I guarantee you 99.8% of writers will think, oh, I see, Eleanor has cancer. Because that’s pretty much what that means.

“She stares up at an ornate chandelier. An empty container of pills and a pessimistic glass of water sit on a wooden coffee table next to her.” Now, I loved “pessimistic glass of water,” by the way. It was great. I did not like empty container of pills. Pills are not easily viewed as empty. Pill containers — the pill containers we all know are those orange plastic things and they’re kind of hard to see. And usually they’re covered by labels and you can’t see what’s in them at all.

If it were spilled over. If we saw some better indication. If we saw her finishing the last of them. Something. You’ve got to give us a little bit more so we’re not completely lost. Because really it took me a while until at the bottom of page two Kate says, with Eleanor having been interrupted by Jane, “An awkward silence. How embarrassing to be walked in on during your suicide.” Well, that’s not — that’s cheating.

I need to know it’s a suicide from what I’ve seen, not from you telling me. So that was one.

“You didn’t drink your chocolate milk I made you” is another one where I think people are going to have to wonder did she really drug her kid. How did she do that? Why didn’t the girl drink the chocolate milk? Why is a 14-year-old girl — why would she think that a 14-year-old girl would want to drink chocolate milk? Is this girl mentally disabled? Is she — she seems regressive to me. She doesn’t seem like a 14-year-old girl.

Then, on page three, the most curious of things. Jane appears to understand that Eleanor has killed herself and is dying. “Jane stares at Eleanor. Then nods. It’s a moment of honesty, and Jane appreciates it. She watches, frozen, as her mother slips away. Eleanor’s alert eyes rove her daughter’s face once more before closing. Jane’s stoic demeanor lasts only a second longer before crumbling.” So, the implication is Jane understands that Eleanor has killed herself. Jane understands her mother is dying. Eleanor understands that Jane understands all this. Jane is attempting to be stoic during it, which is fascinating to me, and really interesting, but also that’s such a puzzling thing that for anything else to be puzzling around it creates confusion.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And then, of course, once her mother dies, she then begins to behave the way somebody would normally, without a puzzling circumstance. She calls her father, desperate for help, and can’t speak. And finally when asking him to speak the father says, “I don’t know what’s going on. Go ask your mother.” Because he has no idea that anything important is going on.

That in and of itself tells me that this was not something that was expected or normal or anything that Jane should have been anticipating. So, I have so many logic questions about what’s happened in these first three. And yet, I have to say, I am emboldened because there’s a lot of beauty inherent in what Kate’s doing here.

So, just got to work on making some of these choices to help us appreciate what she’s doing.

**John:** Yes, I am like you admiring sort of the choices that she’s made in terms of setting up the story and setting up this mother killing herself so early in the story and sort of what the life is like for Jane. But I had to keep rereading character’s ages because I kept thinking like, wait, no, something is wrong. Like the wrong number got typed. Because “A small girl looks up at the noise. She is JANE (14), brown hair, pale and plain.” Well, you’re going to say she’s a girl, okay, and she’s 14, that’s the upper edge of what I would say is a girl, but fine.

But then all of the stuff with her room and all the animals, the stuffed animals, it felt so little girlie, that for you not to hang a lantern on it and let us know like, no really, this is really what it’s like. There’s something about this girl that it is unusual for her to have this stuff is important. Because otherwise I feel like I made a mistake.

Similarly, “ELEANOR (38), lies on a chaise lounge. Wealthy and dying.” An 88-year-old woman, wealthy and dying on a chaise lounge, I sort of get what that is. And then “her silk robe splays open, revealing a lace nightgown, and her graying auburn hair is fanned around her head. The graying hair and the 38 didn’t all track with me, too.

I just was having a hard time picturing who this woman was and what age I was supposed to think. And I knew that she probably was her mother based on those ages, but it all — the pieces weren’t connecting right for me as I was going through that.

**Craig:** Yeah, that gray hair was why I thought cancer. I just think like, okay, if you’re 38, you’re still relatively young. You’re lying there dying. You have medicine near you. And your hair is gray? You’re sick. You’re not committing suicide.

**John:** So Craig likes “pessimistic glass of water.” I hate pessimistic glass of water.

**Craig:** I loved it. I just loved it.

**John:** A glass of water can’t be pessimistic. I mean, a glass of water can be ominous, but like pessimistic is a personality trait that a glass of water I don’t think can have.

**Craig:** I know. But I just liked — I don’t know, it seemed evocative. Look, it’s ridiculous and poetic. Obviously glasses of water can’t be ominous or pessimistic or anything. They’re just glasses of water. But there was something about it that made me think, well, the glass of water is pessimistic because she’s —

**John:** The glass of water is pessimistic because like, oh, no, no, I’m not going to be tasty for you. I’m not going to be —

**Craig:** No, it’s just more like I thought that it was a good way to imply — the whole mood was pessimistic. You know, like Eleanor had just given up. I liked personally. It’s not the kind of thing, by the way, that is going to help you sink or swim.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Do it rarely.

**John:** Another issue I had on page one, I think we’re advocating cutting all of this bike messenger running through the city because it’s not helping us here, but I want to call out, “The chaos of the deep city mellows as he gradually makes his way to the upper echelons of New York. The fancy hood.” Echelons doesn’t mean that. Echelons is actually a class of society. Echelons isn’t a location, it is a social stratus. And so I sort of get what she’s going for her, but like it was enough to bump me, that echelons isn’t the word she’s looking for here.

I’m trying to imagine ways in which we could do some of the same things that she’s doing here and even better land these ideas. If we see Eleanor place the glass of chocolate milk and then leave the room and then start to do things with pills, that’s incredibly ominous and evocative. If we see the moments before this has all happened. To come in so late to all these things, I just think we’re missing out on characters making choices. Like all the choices have been made before we came upon the scene.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree. And if there is — look, the pages are strongly implying that Jane is not a developmentally appropriate 14-year-old girl. That she can’t even speak when she calls her father. She has trouble. She’s so frustrated by her inability to speak that she stomps her foot. This all seems off. If that’s the case, let us know. Let us know clearly and right off the bat.

In terms of the chocolate milk, I would probably have her just bring it in.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just bring the chocolate milk in and put it down next to her mother, so that when her mother sees it she goes, “Oh no. You were supposed to drink that. You were supposed to be asleep.” Let me know what’s going on. Little bits because, look, I love mystery. But we’ve talked about this before. There’s a fine line between mysterious and what the hell is going on. And the second you cross into what the hell is going on-ville, well you’ve lost me. You don’t get any credit for your wonderful mystery. So, this feels like something that would — Kate would actually benefit strongly I think from listening to the script being read by other people because she would then see like, okay, this is the actual information that’s coming out.

Forget the script. Here’s what people will actually see and hear. And it will help her.

**John:** Agree.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve got one more here.

**John:** One more.

**Craig:** This is a script written by Sehaj Sethi. And, by the way, I checked because I was curious. Sehaj may be a man or a woman. It is a unisex name. So we don’t know. But the title of Sehaj’s script is C.A.S.S.P.R. And that’s an anagram — C.A.S.S.P.R.

Okay, so we open, it is outside the orbit around Kepler 438B. And hovering lifeless in space is the long, slender Archimedes, a space ship. And Kepler 438B looms in the not so far distance. It could be earth’s pale rocky twin.

Inside the Archimedes space ship we see that there’s been some kind of problem. There’s nobody in view. But everything is a wreck. Things are broken and shattered and sparking.

Then we go — that’s the main deck. Then we go to the crew quarters, same deal. Bedlam. Illuminated by one lone reading light that’s been left on. And then into the kitchen. Again, same deal. Everything is smashed and tumbled all over the place. And here is where we meet Akash, a slender Indian man, mid-40s. He’s unconscious with a thick gash on his forehead. And then he comes to and looks around bewildered.

We then go to the engine room. Alarms blaring. And similarly, there is a woman here named Monica, late 30s, muscular and opposing, picks herself up. She, too, has been injured. A big bruise on her head. She turns the warning off and we see that the engine has been stalled. Akash is at the main deck trying to restart the ship and failing. Monica stumbles in. And the two of them have a conversation about her sprained ankle. And in that conversation, by looking at each other’s badges, they identify each other. Akash is a biologist, Monica is an engineer. But neither one of them remember anything.

That’s what it says, “I don’t remember anything.” They’re identifying their own jobs based on what they’re wearing. At that point, Monica asks about the nature of the ship. He says navigation isn’t working. She looks outside at Kepler 438B and asks, “Are we here for that?”

Akash says, “We’re just out of orbit. I’d say so.”

She says, “It’s just like earth.”

And he says, “Probably why we’re here. Second chances.”

And those are our first three pages of C.A.S.S.P.R. by Sehaj Sethi.

**John:** Yeah. I enjoyed these pages very much. I was very curious to read page four and see what was going on. So, this idea of characters waking up not knowing who they are is a trope. We’ve seen it in other films before. We’ve probably even seen it in other space films. I still like it. It is an interesting way to begin because we as the audience have the same amount of information as the characters. And we are trying to find out about the world and the situation as the characters are trying to find out about the world and their situation.

I thought the writing on the page was nice. Archimedes is described as “a space ship with more curves than angles. A metal salamander…The enormous curve of Kepler 438b looms in the not-so-far distance. It could be Earth’s pale, rocky twin.” It felt confident about sort of its ability to describe what was going on.

Where I lost a little faith in our sci-fi of it all is as we come upon Monica. And so she picks herself up, she looks around completely confused. “In front of her is a control panel with a flashing green button. She presses it. The geyser of steam stops, as does the alarm.” That felt so, so too easy and so, you know, sort of early Star Trek where there’s like steam shooting out of a little pipe someplace that it made me not trust some of the sci-fi of it all.

I wanted a more specific kind of confused, because as I read this I was like, well, she’s confused at sort of what happened. But for her not to really understand at all what’s going on, I think that was an opportunity for her to really not know what she should do or what is the appropriate action to take. Because once we actually get to the two characters being together and talking about — and figuring out I’m a biologist, you’re this, that is interesting. And that’s the kind of stuff I love about the genre.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a little less happy about these than you. Let’s just start with some simple stylistic things. The very first slug line says, “EXT. OUTSIDE ORBIT OF KEPLER 438B.” That’s not really an exterior. Your exterior is space. And particularly I think since your first visual is the Archimedes, the space ship, and it is described well, just say space because then you get to the enormous curve of Kepler — and I would capitalize Kepler 438B looms in the not-so-far distance. So we understand, okay, there’s our ship, and there’s a planet.

Fine. Now, we have this — we go through the wreck of the ship and we meet Akash. And that’s all fine. Now, I’m going to note, he presses a hand to his gash and looks around utterly bewildered. Utterly bewildered. Now we go into the engine where Monica groans. Akash also groaned. But she groans exactly in the same way and then she is completely confused. Utterly bewildered. Completely confused.

So, basically I’m seeing the same damn thing twice. No Bueno. Do not like. So, you’re going to come up with another thing. If somebody is waking up slowly and looking around, utterly confused, fine. The next person should wake up with a start in a complete panic and start punching at the air. Like give me a completely different dynamic. I want to have separation.

Also, we do have a little bit of the default white issue here. Akash is a slender Indian man. Monica is late 30s. Well, I’m guessing that means white? Don’t know. So, it’s a thing. Generally speaking, if we’re going to be calling out ethnicities, let’s call them out.

I totally agree with you on this flashing green button. And it’s a bit worse than you’re stating. Because there’s a flashing green button that she casually presses that apparently is the stop steam and alarm button. But the screen on the panel is a bright yellow warning blinking that says Engine Stalled. What is this, a ’78 Chevy? [laughs] This is a space ship. There’s no “engine stalled.” What? Engine? Stalled?

Then in the next scene, Akash is looking at the computer bank and it says, “Flashing, navigation system failure,” which again I assume this is just running on Windows ’95 or something. It just feels so fundamental and boring and not cool. It’s just not cool.

Now, I like the fact that they’re both identifying each other in terms of who they are by their badge. Then Akash says, “You don’t remember.”

And she says, “I don’t remember anything. You?”

And he shakes his head. I have a big problem with this. What do you mean you don’t remember anything? Yes you do. You remember how to press a button. You remembered to go to the bridge. You remembered to check the thing. You remembered some basic things.

So, what is it, is it like I remember — I don’t remember — and they remember their names. So, define remember. I don’t know what happened. I was just, blah, blah, blah, and then where is everybody? I think that there would be natural questions that people would be asking of each other in this moment of panic.

I almost laughed in a bad way when she comes in. This is the first time they’ve seen each other. She stumbles into this room, which she apparently remembered to go to. And then Akash helps her and she says, “It’s my ankle.” [laughs] And he says, “Looks like a bad sprain.”

You know, if I woke up on a spaceship that was completely wrecked and dead and everyone was gone, and I couldn’t remember anything, you know, the sprained ankle wouldn’t be necessarily the first thing coming out of my mouth. It just doesn’t seem like it’s super-duper important.

Lastly, and again, this is all about what would people realistically say in these moments, or at least what would we buy dramatically. She looks out at the planet and says, “Are we here for that?” And he says, “I would say so.” And she says, “It’s just like earth,” apparently another thing she remembers. And he says, “Probably why we’re here. Second chances.”

Well, I mean, that was pretty poetic for a guy that just woke up on a wrecked ship. I mean, people don’t stop and get all thematic and poetic in moments of crisis.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there was a lot about this that just rang false.

**John:** So, let’s talk about the possibilities here, because I agree with your complaints on really all of those specifics. Where I think I was excited by was the possibility of what was here. So, let’s get the script a little closer to what it can be. Let’s look at the doubling of the action. So, I agree that you can’t have characters — you shouldn’t introduce two different characters responding in the same way to the same situation. That’s not going to be fascinating. And so we need to see behavior that would let us know that this person is confused and not sure what they should be doing or where to even start and where to begin.

I think there is dialogue to be done, but I would be fascinated to see these three pages if they didn’t have any dialogue at all, and we just had to see only through actions, characters trying to figure out what was going on and trying to figure out how to shut off that warning. And that question of like once they get it shut off, wait, should I have shut off that warning? What’s actually happening?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Once we get to the dialogue, the crucial question should be how much are the characters assuming that the other person is in the same situation? Basically, how are they interacting with each other, assuming the other person actually does know what’s going on?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so if I have amnesia, I’m going to assume that you don’t have amnesia and you’re going to tell me who I am. And then you’re both in the same boat. And then it becomes an opportunity to talk about like, well, what do you remember? What do you know? And I think it is reasonable to assume that there is some body of knowledge, some common corpus that they both kind of have a sense. They knew how to get around the ship. They knew how to do some basic things. He knew that her ankle was sprained and not broken.

But, something fundamentally bigger is happening here. And that might be more than three pages worth of time, but that is I think what the possibility is of meeting these two characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’re talking about priorities. Characters have to follow priorities. And the priorities have to be priorities that are recognizable to us as sensible. So, if I were rewriting this, I would start with Monica. I would have her come to in the middle of this mess.

I would have her be utterly confused about what’s gone on. I would have her be competent enough to do something interesting to shut off the alarm and the steam as long as I understood that she wasn’t just quieting the alarm because it was a nuisance, but rather she was stopping something bad from happening.

Then the next thing I would have her do is make her wade through the ship. I would have her experience the wreckage of the ship through her eyes, rather than the blank narrative of an unmoored camera. And then I would have her move into the room, see some guy hunkered over this thing. He’s the only one alive. And she pulls out here gun and says move away from there, because she’s paranoid that this is the guy that did all of this. And he’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.”

And she goes, “Who are you?”

And he goes, “I don’t — my name is Akash. I think I’m a biologist.” You know? And they start off like who are you, I don’t know, you’re hurt. Sit down.

You’ve got to create dynamics. There’s got to be a sense of struggle and conflict and interaction. This was just like, hey, ankle, yeah. Who are you? What’s my name? Ooh, look at the planet.

**John:** Yeah, what you’re describing is because these pages right now introduce the characters on the same level, we have no sense of who we should be rooting for or what their equivalent power struggle would be, or what natural conflict should be there.

If we stuck with Monica until she meets this other person, our allegiance will always be to Monica. And that is going to be interesting. And if we only meet Akash through Monica, or you could do it the other way around, we’re going to stick with the person we know first. And that’s just sort of how we relate to characters and stories.

**Craig:** And how I think we want to absorb information. We want to experience information with our characters and through our characters. We don’t want to experience all of it and then have them wake up and move through and ask questions of things that we’ve already seen. And we just don’t want it to be so flat.

These two people seems almost lobotomized by their injuries. They’re preternaturally calm.

**John:** Yeah. And that could be fascinating. And, I mean, perhaps that is actually to some degree a deliberate choice that is being made here. But you’ve got to call that out if that’s the case. And you’ve got to have that sort of dumb struck quality really being brought to the surface.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like if you had this weird conversation where these two people were behaving so curiously and you were like, “Well this is a bad movie,” and then one of them turns around and goes, “Oh…” And one of them sees the other one turn around and says, “Oh, you’re hurt.” And then we pan down and we see that they’ve got a gash in their side and there’s robotics in there. We’d go, oh…

**John:** Oh…yeah, that’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Oh, that makes sense, right?

**John:** It would be great if they were robots. Or, I mean, the simpler version is just like there’s a head injury that we’re not aware of until the other character points it out. It’s like, “Oh my god, you have like a horrible…” That gash in the head which is written on the first part, if that was actually hidden away, that would be great.

**Craig:** I’m actually looking through your head. That can’t be good. I’m a biologist. I know for a fact that that’s not good.

But you just can’t have both characters inexplicably being so flat and there’s just no spark between these two. There’s no fun. I’m not enjoying the interactions here.

**John:** In all of our Three Page Challenges, I don’t think you’ve ever so successfully talked me out of liking three pages.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m so sorry. I feel bad.

**John:** You shouldn’t feel bad at all. And none of our three writers who were so brave to send in their pages should feel bad, because we are obviously pointing out things we would love to see improved. But on the whole, these are some of the better pages we’ve looked at. There certainly there was a lot to sort of like here.

We didn’t talk about sort of paragraph length and sort of flow on the page, but in all these cases it was easy to get through the pages and there were no sort of stoppers, except for the little things we singled out.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** And Stuart always wants me to remind listeners that as he goes through every submission into the Three Page Challenge, he really deliberately does pick for us things he thinks are interesting for us to talk about on the show, but also some of the better ones. And so these really are some of the better ones that come into the account. So, thank you to everyone who writes in, but especially these three writers for letting us talking about their pages.

**Craig:** Indeed. And we hope that we were helpful to all three of you.

**John:** Wonderful. It is time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is A24 Pictures, which is a movie label that I see — I see the banner in front of certain movies, and I didn’t really know what it was until I read this piece by David Ehrlich writing for Slate in which talks about the tiny little production and distribution arm and the movies they’ve released. So those are Mississippi Grind, Ex Machina, Under the Skin, Spring Breakers.

And on the show we often talk about the frustration that there are only teeny tiny movies and giant $200 billion movies. And A24 is a production company and releasing arm that is aiming to make some of those smart movies that are between those two poles. And so I thought it was a great article. I’ll put that article in the show notes, but also just I want to see more companies like A24, like STX, like Annapurna that are trying to make interesting movies and finding ways to release them both theatrically and in some cases on demand at the same time.

**Craig:** And they have had some success. I mean, Ex Machina did really well.

**John:** Yeah. It was a great movie.

**Craig:** I enjoyed it.

**John:** And the movies that aren’t sort of big studio blockbusters, they’re able to find ways for those to actually make money and that’s important, too.

**Craig:** Indeed. My One Cool Thing is a soundtrack album that you can all buy now. It was released this week, this past week. And it is the Broadway Cast Recording of Hamilton by Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s spectacular. I’m going to see the show in the end of the year. I’m going to be in New York at the end of the year. I’m going to see the show there. I can’t wait.

What I love about it is, well first of all, I happen to be a huge fan of Alexander Hamilton, the man, and his work and his philosophy. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten into arguments about people about why I think Thomas Jefferson is why overrated. But regardless, topic for another podcast. What I think is fascinating about what Miranda did was he basically delivered a hip hop opera. And what I love is that it encapsulates the very best of what hip hop can do in ways that no other musical form can. It’s so smart. It’s lyrically so aggressive and so ambitious and brilliant.

And it’s also hip hop without the parts of hip hop that I think are so bad. It’s not the hip hop of celebrating violence. It’s misogynistic hip hop. It’s old school hip hop done right. And about a guy that deserves his story to be told.

Just wonderful. I mean, up and down, every single song. All the performances, amazing. I can’t wait to see the show. And for those of you who aren’t going to be in New York, and a really hard ticket to get, just go ahead and buy the album. It’s not that expensive and you can listen to it in your car. And you’ll get the story.

**John:** Cool. Yeah, I’ve held off on buying the soundtrack because I do want to see the show and there are times in which I’ve listened to the cast album beforehand and then when I see the show I’m sort of frustrated that things aren’t matching my expectations, or that I sort of knew too much. So, I’m going to try to get to New York to see it soon enough that I’m going to hold off, I think, listening to it until I’ve actually seen the show.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll just start singing it to you when you least expect it.

**John:** Ugh, that’s so dangerous. Our show as always is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. Thank you, Rajesh. You’ve written so many wonderful outros for us.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s very good.

**John:** He’s prolific. If you have an outro for our show, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link to your outro. But if you have a question, that’s also a great place to write your longer questions. We answer them on the air pretty frequently. For short questions, Twitter is best. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. We’re also on Facebook. We check that occasionally, but not as often as Twitter.

Our bonus episode that I mentioned, the interview with Mark Mallouk from Black Mass, that is on the premium feed. If you’d like to subscribe to the premium feed, go to Scriptnotes.net and that’s $1.99 a month. And you can get that and all the back episodes, including the dirty episode.

We have our show up in iTunes. So, if you want to subscribe to the normal feed, just got to iTunes and click subscribe. That is really helpful. You can find the Three Page Challenges that we talked about and other things in our show notes for the episode, johnaugust.com/podcast.

And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes Premium Bonus episode, with [Black Mass screenwriter Mark Mallouk](http://scriptnotes.net/black-mass-screenwriter-mark-mallouk)
* [Austin Film Festival 2015 panel schedule](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festivalandconference/conference/2015-panels/)
* [Sign up for Scriptnotes premium access](https://my.libsyn.com/show/view/id/44610)
* [Emma Coats’s Pixar Story Rules](http://www.pixartouchbook.com/blog/2011/5/15/pixar-story-rules-one-version.html)
* [Submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Three Pages by [Dan Maurer](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/DanMaurer.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Kate Jeffrey](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/KateJeffrey.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Sehaj Sethi](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SehajSethi.pdf)
* [A24](http://a24films.com/), and Slate on [The Distributor as Auteur](http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/09/profile_of_the_independent_film_distributor_a24_the_company_behind_spring.html)
* Hamilton, the Original Broadway Cast Recording on [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/hamilton-original-broadway/id1025210938) and on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013JLBPGE/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/campaign-statements-and-residual-statements).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 217 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about the results of the WGA election and what that means for screenwriters, and we promise, promise, promise to answer several questions that keep falling off the end of the episodes. We keep running out of time. And today we will not run out of time.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, Craig, last time I spoke with you on this podcast, you were starting to feel sick and I want to know how you are feeling right now.

**Craig:** So much better. And somehow this time I managed to duck this thing that always happens where I’ll get a virus, you know, standard cold, and then it will go into my chest and then turn into bronchitis. It just didn’t happen this time.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, well, look, I don’t like taking antibiotics. Nobody does. So, yeah, I’m feeling much better. On top of the world, almost. Exuberant to the point of mania.

**John:** Uh-oh. So this is a rebound kind of thing that’s happening and we should all be really worried.

**Craig:** You should be particularly worried because tonight I’m going to be DMing our latest session of Dungeons & Dragons.

**John:** Yes. So we are going to be exploring the horde of the dragon queen. And when Craig is feeling too good, it is bad for us because that means he may go for the total party kill.

**Craig:** Total. Party. Kill. TPK. TPK.

**John:** So it’s interesting that you’re feeling better, and this small sidebar on the antibiotic discussion, because I have the cold also. You had a worst cold than I did, but it did go into my chest. And so I have the thing where I am coughing up every once and awhile. So I went to see my general physician and he said, okay, I will give you a prescription for the Z-Pack, but I do not want you to take it unless it persists for quite a long time. Because he does not want me, even though it may actually help the situation, he feels like it is bad overall societally for people to be taking antibiotics for such things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I try and hold off every time. And so this time, for instance, I didn’t call. I just waited and it worked out. When it happens to me and it goes into my chest, it just gets worse and worse and worse. I get that achy feeling. And then I start coughing up nasty gray stuff. And it’s just over at that point. I’ve lost.

And I have to say, luckily for me, the Z-Pack works every time brilliantly. But, yes, we are all rolling the dice, aren’t we?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Playing the fool’s game.

**John:** Yes, you could be the patient zero that starts the next epidemic of antibacterial resistant strains.

**Craig:** Yeah. I didn’t want to be somewhat uncomfortable, so you’re all dead.

**John:** All right, let’s get to some follow-up. Question from Skye in Manitoba who writes, “I have a question regarding your recent discussion on the PG-13 rating system and the use of language in certain films. Your discussion focused mainly on two specifically frequently used swear words, the S-word, and the F-word.” And so I’ve cleaned this up for broadcast here.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** “Suppose that I was writing a script and I did not use the above words, but I might want to use another word that references male or female genitalia in a non-sexual context, calling someone a dick or a C-word. Is the limit you mentioned on the podcast, that is one non-sexual F-word in a PG-13 script, applicable in this context? Also does the same rule apply to swear words from other countries? Like if a North American film featured the British word Bugger or the French word Zut?”

**Craig:** Zut alors.

**John:** And I don’t know how bad those words are, so maybe we’re getting an explicit rating in other countries.

**Craig:** Possibly. I don’t think Zut is particularly bad. Bugger, in England is still kind of mild, although it’s specifically connected to anal sex. It’s buggery. Sodomy is very similar. But people say Bugger It all the time there.

I think that probably calling someone a Dick in a PG-13 movie is absolutely fine. The C-word, See You Next Tuesday, pretty loaded here in the United States. So, I’m guessing that would not work. In England, it’s right up there with bugger I guess. It’s just things that people toss out. So, yeah, it is a little bit contextual. For the MPAA here in the United States, all they’re doing is rating movies for release in the United States. So, it doesn’t matter what other countries think of particular words because other countries have their own ratings boards and their own way of rating films.

But, here in the United States, I would imagine See You Next Tuesday is going to get you booted to R.

**John:** Yeah. I included Skye’s question because I think overall it’s important to remember that it’s not just a simple like you get one use of these certain words. There is an overall context of how much you’re using explicit language. And so you might get away with one S-word and a Dick, but if you had — in aggregate there could be too much that pushes you over the limit. So, you do have to be aware that they’re watching the whole film, and so it’s not just a checklist of how many times you said a specific word. There’s overall situations where you might get dinged because of general coarseness of language. And so we aired that episode, a couple of screenwriter friends wrote in to say that they’ve had situations where they didn’t even use those words, but overall things were considered aggressive enough that they had to change some language.

**Craig:** They keep an eye on what they call a cumulative effect of things. You know, in terms of casual language, I think the good old S-word — you can pretty much go to town with that one and stay within PG-13. They’re pretty okay with that. And, frankly, how many times can you actually say that word anyway?

Yes, but you’re right. They aren’t really doing math. Nor are they really adhering to super hard and fast rules. In fact, any rule they have, they also have a rule that they can break their rule. So, you know, it’s a roll of the dice either way.

**John:** All right. Let’s get to some new stuff. Election results. So this last week, right after we recorded the podcast, election results were announced. And, Craig, how did you feel about the results of the election?

**Craig:** Very happy, bordering on elated.

**John:** See, that’s I think why you’re feeling better. It’s not because the virus passed. It’s because you got a happy email in your inbox from the WGA.

**Craig:** I think I’m feeling better not because of the good things that happened to people, but because of the bad things that happened to people, because I’m an awful person.

**John:** There’s reason for pure joy and a little schadenfreude in the results —

**Craig:** A little schadenfreude, yes.

**John:** In the results of the election. So, the headlines are Howard Rodman was elected WGA president. You and I both think that Howard will do a superb job leading the organization. And then we were very curious about how the board of directors would be composed. And the two people that we were both stumping pretty hard for, Zak Penn, and Andrea Berloff, both were elected.

**Craig:** They were. They were elected and they were also elected convincingly. So, one thing that happens is they publish the vote totals. And while the vote totals in and of themselves aren’t determinative of anything, everybody has the same authority on the board, when you are elected to the board everyone has a sense of who kind of made it by the skin of their teeth and who was swept in with some force. And if you’re swept in with some force, people kind of — they take you a little more seriously.

So, our winners, the top vote getter not surprisingly Billy Ray. And he was an essential for all of us. Then Meredith Stiehm, Andrea Berloff, Mara Brock Akil, Luvh Rakhe —

**John:** I thought it was Rakhe [pronounces it Rock], but I’m not even sure.

**Craig:** Luvh Rakhe. Sorry Luvh. Zak Penn. Carleton Eastlake. Ari Rubin, and Patric Verrone. So, here’s what’s fascinating, to me.

First of all, if you look at Writers Guild politics as basically moderates over here and wackadoodles over here, not to editorialize.

**John:** [laughs] Not a bit.

**Craig:** This was a huge victory for the moderates. And the moderates, by the way, that changes from time to time. I mean, look, Howard Rodman, who is somebody that you and I both backed, was once one of the wackadoodles. And then, I think, got a pretty good eyeful of the way things actually worked and not surprisingly as a rational person started to adjust.

So, voting for Howard was essentially a vote for continuity from what Chris Keyser had been doing for the last four years and what Billy Ray has been doing for the last four years. And so that was great to see.

In terms of the vice-president, David Goodman was elected. I think David and Carl Gottlieb were kind of similar, so I don’t think that was indicative of much. Aaron Mendelsohn is our secretary-treasurer because he ran unopposed, which I hate, but fine. We dealt with that topic last time.

Now, on the board issue stuff, what’s fascinating to me is this — not only — so Carleton Eastlake is associated with Patric Verrone. And Carleton got the seventh lowest vote total. He was also an incumbent. Now, as tradition goes, incumbents always get reelected and always get reelected convincingly, except this time. Carleton slides all the way down to seventh place.

Patric Verrone, the former president, two-term president of the Writers Guild, and leader of the glorious strike, didn’t even get in the top eight. He becomes a board member because Aaron Mendelsohn is now secretary-treasurer and vacates his seat. So Patric only serves for one year, the remaining part of Aaron’s term. That’s shocking.

**John:** And so I’ve heard several different theories about sort of what’s really going on. One of the theories I heard is that the overall percentage of members voting was up from previous elections. We had 27% of members voting, which sounds really low, but apparently for union elections is actually pretty high.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there’s a theory that the sort of Patric Verrone camp, the people who were sort of all riding on — it wasn’t officially a ticket, but it sort of felt like a ticket, that there might be kind of a ceiling to sort of how many votes those people got because Patric got sort of the same number of votes he usually gets. But more people voted and more people voted for these other folks.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that Patric has indicated his maximum support, which at this point is very soft. And to continue the theme of softness, Dan Wilcox and Alfredo Barrios, who were both incumbents running for reelection and aligned very strongly with Patric, didn’t even make it into the top nine.

And when I say they didn’t make it into the top nine, what’s shocking to me is they didn’t just lose to a bunch of people, they lost to some people that had run before and lost themselves. For instance, Luvh Rakhe, he had run, I think twice before and lost.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, this is pretty remarkable to me. And I think it signifies fairly strongly the end of an era. Joan Meyerson, who was Patric’s strong endorsement for president, lost by a ton. I think it was a two-to-one vote.

So, I’m incredibly encouraged by this. I thought that Dan Wilcox was a terrible board member. I’m glad to see him go. This is a much better board. And, by the way, it’s a more diverse board. We have more women. We have more people of color. We have — and the best news of all, John — three, I believe, three feature writers? Maybe four?

**John:** Which is remarkable. And that’s part of the reason why we were so vocal in urging people to vote for Andrea and Zak Penn to make sure that we have feature screenwriters represented on the board.

**Craig:** It’s huge. It’s a great result for us. And I think that — I’m happy to say that in terms of 2017, because we have a new contract coming up, we aren’t in a position where we’re definitely striking. We would have been with Joan Meyerson and a stronger Patric, and Dan, and Alfredo. Oh, no question.

Now, we actually have a chance of negotiating a deal as we have in the last two years. So, very encouraging.

**John:** So, the election is done, but the issues remain. And Jonathan Stokes, a listener and a friend, wrote an email saying, “Hey, could you and Craig talk though some of the issues I see brought up in all of these campaign statements and talk through what they actually really mean?”

So, when Craig and I were on Franklin’s podcast, we sort of talked through some of these things. But I wanted to just give some bullet points of like these are the things that you’re going to hear a lot over the next two years, and some quick impressions on sort of why they’re important, and what the choices are that we have ahead of us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Jonathan brings up agency packaging fees being abusive to writers. So, packaging fees are ways in which the agencies actually collect money from a package being set up either at a TV network or in some cases a feature film, where rather than commissioning from the client, from the person who they represent, they commission from the studio. And there’s reasons why that can be really bad for the writer, but it’s also really complicated.

**Craig:** I’ve never heard of it for features. I’ve only heard of it for television.

**John:** You know, I say that it can’t happen for features in that I’ve seen it, but it’s really a historical thing. I remember there being packages set up with a big spec script that went out with certain people attached and there were ways to do it. But, yes, it is really a television concept.

**Craig:** As a feature writer, this is the one I’m fuzzy on.

**John:** Yeah. Paper-teaming of writers, and this is a thing that’s come up a lot. Paper-teaming, for people who don’t know, is where a show is putting together its writing staff and they decide, you know what, I really like Pam and I really like Chuck. They’re both really good writers. And they’re both really good new writers. I would love to hire both of them, but I can’t. I only have one spot. So, hey Pam and Chuck, why don’t we say that you’re a team and we will put you together as a team and you will get one salary to share, because hey, you’re a team.

And that is a thing that happens far too often in Hollywood today as we’re making TV shows. So that’s called paper-teaming. And something needs to be done because it is a really abusive practice that happens to some of the most vulnerable writers out there.

**Craig:** Yes. We have to kill that. And I’m very concerned that it’s not something we can kill through negotiation. My great worry is that the way to kill it is through showrunners standing up and saying we’re not going to do this.

**John:** Craig, I have a theory, and I’m pretty sure my theory is impossible and unworkable. So I’m going to speak it aloud and then you’re going to tell me why it couldn’t work and then I’ll just move on.

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** So my theory for how to end paper-teaming of writers in television is you are only allowed to hire a team if they are a bona fide team. And how we’re going to track bona fide teams is that they have previously been paid together as a team. Or, they have registered with the guild as a team. And if you attempt to hire a team of writers that is not a bona fide writer under those two conditions, sorry, you cannot do it. And by you cannot do it means you cannot actually hire those writers.

**Craig:** When you say register with the guild as a team, is that something that any two writers can do? Or, does the guild need to see the same history of teaming?

**John:** I believe that it should be something that any two writers are able to do.

**Craig:** Okay, great. So I have Pam and Chuck. I want to hire them both. I can’t. I want them to be a paper team. So I call them up and say I’ll hire you, but only as a team. Go call the guild and register as a team.

**John:** Great. And so there would have to be a criteria, a limit on that basically saying you have to have been registered as a team for three months, six months. You’d have to create a system where you couldn’t just force people to do it. You couldn’t shotgun people into doing it at the last minute.

**Craig:** Okay, new problem.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Pam and Chuck are both writers. They’ve been trying separately to get TV gigs and they’ve had some success, but not much. Then they meet a guy — and they sit down together and they’re like, you know what, we should write together. It would be fun. And so they call up a friend of theirs and say, you know what, we’re thinking about working together as a team. Are you looking for a writer on your show? Yes, I am.

Oh, I can’t give you the job. Why? Because you didn’t register with the guild six months ago.

**John:** I think in that situation Pam and Chuck are SOL. And that is their own fault.

**Craig:** It’s their own fault for meeting — they met too late?

**John:** It’s too late. Essentially, like, you guys haven’t worked together. You have no track record of working together.

**Craig:** But you’re taking their choice away. I mean, in other words, you’re saying to writers you’re not allowed to choose to work together and get the benefits from it unless you chose six months before the benefit could occur.

**John:** So, I would say that union representation is always about taking away choices. So, union representation means that we do not allow you to choose to work for certain employers. It means we do not allow you to accept less than certain amounts of money.

So, yes, it is limiting your choice, but it would be limiting your choice in a way that would protect you from abuses.

**Craig:** Right. Okay, so I guess the only objection left then, because look, generally it seems like a decent idea. The only objection left is that the companies will say no.

**John:** Well, actually can the companies say no? My theory is that when the company says we’re going to hire this writer and pay them half of their salary, the union can say, no, you’re not allowed to hire that writer for half their salary.

**Craig:** Of course they could. I’m looking at the MBA. Now I’m talking like a company nerd. I’m looking at the MBA and it says that I can hire a team of writers for this amount of money. They say that they’re a team and so I’m hiring them. And you don’t define what a team is. The MBA doesn’t say you define what a team is at all. In fact —

**John:** Oh, that’s so fascinating.

**Craig:** We have a definition of what the team is in the MBA. And it doesn’t involve you, or your certification, or anything. [laughs]

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** There’s the roadblock that Craig, going back to the MBA, and finding the way. And I should have anticipated that because during the last round of contract negotiations, one of the things that the studios floated was the idea that a team could be three people. And we said, uh-uh-uh —

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, they’re going to try now to paper-team three people together.

**John:** Good times.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why don’t you paper-team them all together, you jerks?

**John:** All right. I still think there may be some way to do what I am suggesting. And this is really modeled on how the DGA prevents there being two directors on a movie. And everyone hates it, but it’s a way to sort of make it so that it’s one director.

**Craig:** Well, that’s in their agreement, though.

**John:** Yeah, it’s in their agreement.

**Craig:** Yeah. Part of the problem is that there is a tradition, a very healthy, longstanding tradition of teams in writing. And so the companies very craftily have found this week spot. I tend to believe that the Writers Guild is horrendous at solving things through legislation. And that this needs to be solved politically with the showrunners. Because here’s what happens. The showrunners have a certain amount of money to hire writers. And they want more people in the room.

So, they’re told here’s a way you can do it. And they have to have the wherewithal and the strength to say, no, I’m just going to hire one writer per writer position, or hire a legitimate team, because we all know. We don’t need — it’s I know it when I see it. I know a real partnership when I see it.

So, it comes down to — I think it comes down to the showrunners to great extent.

**John:** I think you are probably right. I’m just holding out hope that some part of my idea is workable. I didn’t think I would actually be able to solve it just in spit-balling it here on a live podcast.

Next up on the bullet points, free unpaid pre-writes and producer drafts. This is a thing that happens both in features and television, but features is obviously where I have the most experience with you’re writing a bunch of stuff to get the job, which is crazy. And you’re not being paid for that stuff.

**Craig:** What’s so distressing is that I got involved in Guild politics back in 2003. I ran for the board in 2004. And this topic was super-hot back then. Nothing has changed. We are now — it’s 12 years later. And the reason nothing has changed is because the guild is essentially powerless here. I hate to say it.

There was an arbitration. The guild challenged the companies on — particularly this producer draft issue — and per the MBA it was adjudicated by an arbiter and the arbiter said, no, the deal is this, a writer can end it at any point, development. I write a draft. Oh, you know what, can you fix this? Can you do that? Write another draft. Write another draft. Write another draft. And then we’ll turn it in. And what the arbiter said was the writer can write a billion drafts if they want. Any time they want to get paid, they just turn the draft in to the person indicated in their contract. And that’s a fact.

When people say that this is a guild problem or a union problem, it’s not. I’ve finally come to this place. It is an agent problem. And it’s a writer problem. And, yes, it’s a studio problem in the sense that they’re behaving poorly. But let’s just assume that that’s not going to change. Agents and their clients, but particularly agents, need to figure this out.

**John:** I’m going to make the point that you would usually make at this juncture, as we’ve talked about this a thousand times, is that it is a studio problem to the degree to which they are sometimes getting material in pre-writing that they have not legally obtained. And that will come back to haunt them in a lawsuit. That will be a big copyright problem in the future.

**Craig:** It already has, I think, bitten them a number of times. It’s something that I’ve brought up specifically in our meetings with the studio heads, you know. Sometimes I’ll go, and you’ll go. And they all seem very nervous about that. But they’re not the ones making these demands. It’s the lower ranks who are doing it. And they’re not going to stop because everyone is selfish. So, you have a junior executive who is trying to get ahead. And what they want is a writer that’s going to deliver and then they could say, look, I found this person. I found her. She delivered. Promote me.

That executive doesn’t give a sweet damn about IP or rules or blah, blah, blah. They’re all knifing each other in the back to get ahead. There are so few positions and so many people that want to do this job. So, they’re just going to cheat. And writers end up suffering. And if the agencies can’t get their act together on this, then it won’t stop.

**John:** It is surprising to me that I think we have such large powerful agencies and yet they don’t seem to have very much control over making things better for their clients. The general sort of observation that is not — will have no effect, but just an observation.

Related issue, one-step deals. So, one-step deals is where you’re being paid a certain fixed amount for writing this draft and there is no guarantee that you will have subsequent drafts. Why this becomes an issue with free rewrites is that there is a natural inclination to keep writing, and keep writing, and keep writing because you will not get to those optional steps unless they are happy with you. And one-step deals really goes hand-in-hand with free rewrites.

**Craig:** It does. There’s another dark side to one-step deals and that is that it deprives newer writers of the experience and education that you get going through a proper development process where — and this is something I remember I said to a studio head. I said how are writers supposed to learn how to work for you when you don’t let them. You give them a contract that gives them one step, and all they do is work with the producer. That’s it. And the producer grinds them into a jelly and then you get a script. And then they’re done. And they never worked with you.

They didn’t get your notes. They didn’t go through your process. When I started, I was only working with the studio and I got two drafts, so I was able to try things. I wasn’t also living in such a crazed state because I only had one guaranteed step that I was constantly looking for the next job, so my eye was never really on what I was doing, but always on what I could be doing. There’s so many things that are wrong with one-step deals. Perhaps the worst is that when you have writers that are earning closer to the lower end, they effectively — we are effectively destroying our scale, our minimum payments, because they’re writing five drafts for the price of one minimum, right?

So, one thing that I’ve been talking about for a while, and maybe we can float this one to the companies, is a negotiated term that says if you’re going to pay a writer less than two times scale for a draft, then you have to make a two-step deal with them. If you pay them two times, a minimum of two times scale, then you can do a one-step deal. At the very least, then, we’re protecting the lower end scale writers. Those are the sort of terms where I feel like I could say to the company, look, I’m not asking you to shove more money into Richie Rich’s pockets. This doesn’t impact me. I’m trying to protect the farm team for us all.

**John:** I think there is some good reason to have hope for traction in that idea, because I’m thinking about you and I are sort of at the upper tier of what people are paid for things. And I get frustrated when I am approached with a one-step deal, but at the same time my one-step is a big chunk of money, and those second steps and third steps are big chunks of money, too. So, I can understand the apprehension. Like, we’re not even sure if we want to make this movie and we’re not sure we want to be on the hook for so much money. I kind of get that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It is so abusive to those younger writers and the people who are just starting out. My very first deal was for How to Eat Fried Worms over at Imagine. And it was a standard one-step plus two optional rewrites, plus two polishes. And I burned through all five steps on that project. And I learned so much, because I had to do five really big drafts.

And along the way, honestly, there were some like let me show the producer, let me show the development executive. There were some interim things that were there, but it was never a big deal to move on to my next step because those steps were there and there was an expectation that we’re going to go through those steps.

And that was great.

**Craig:** You were also extended the opportunity to begin a career. Why would anyone who is really smart want to do this if the idea is, so, we’re going to work you for a year and you’re going to get paid $110,000? Well, if you’re a Princeton graduate and you have a lot of earning potential and you’re really smart and what you want to do is be a screenwriter and write feature films, that’s not going to do it, because it’s not $110,000. It’s $100,000. Now it’s $90,000 when you get rid of your agents, your managers, and all the rest. Now it’s really $60,000. And that’s it. For your year, that’s $60,000.

Well, this guy could probably start out at law firm and make 80 or 90. And then you might not even get past that one gig ever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really frustrating to me.

**John:** So let’s assume you do get a movie made, new media residuals will be a factor that you will keep discussing through the end of time. We used to call these new media residuals, but now they just should be thought of as residuals.

**Craig:** Residuals.

**John:** Yeah. They’re the bulk of probably what you’re going to be getting in the future. So, residuals, again, for people who are just joining us for the first time, residuals function kind of like royalties if you’re used to royalties in a book publishing world. They are payments given to screenwriters, to actors, to directors, for the sale on home video, or rental on home video, of things that are originally shown theatrically, or that were shown on television. It’s for those reuse. And so it’s a payment that the studios are required to give you for reuse.

Those rates are set and negotiated in the contract. They are a huge part of every contract negotiation. And at all times, writers believe that those rates should be higher. At all times, studios believe those rates should be lower. And we will squabble over ever period and comma in the definition of what those residuals are.

**Craig:** Well, we can squabble all we want. They’re not going to change, at least they’re not going to be changed by us. The directors will negotiate first. If any changes occur to those residuals formula it will be through that negotiation. You know, we can try, but history has taught us that once the formula is set, it’s set. There are a couple little squidgy areas where maybe things are evolving a bit, you know, like ad-supported streaming and things like that with the imputed values and so forth.

But, in terms of features, yeah, the deal is it’s home video rate for stuff before 2008 and it’s the 1.8% of, what is it, 25%, or 50%? I can’t remember. Anyway.

**John:** Yeah. Portions of portions.

**Craig:** 20%. It’s 1.8% of 20%. And then for sales it’s a full 1.2 of 100%. And that’s it. That’s not changing.

**John:** As we’ve said on the podcast before, if you want to give a screenwriter the most amount of money for watching a movie, it is to rent it on iTunes. Because that is actually the formula that gives us the biggest residual payment.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Yep. Next bullet point in Jonathan Stokes’ email is bakeoffs. Bakeoffs are really a form of often pre-writing. It’s when you are bringing in a bunch of screenwriters to say, hey, we have the idea to do a movie about haunted paperclips. What do you think — come in and pitch us your haunted paperclip movie. And they bring in a bunch of screenwriters, all to tackle one idea. And then they hopefully pick one of those ideas in order to try to develop that into a movie.

Bakeoffs could involve writing. They could not involve writing. But they involve a tremendous amount of a feature writer’s time and they’re generally a bad thing. They’re generally a very frustrating waste of time for almost everybody involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

**John:** Yeah, there really is very little we can do about it, other than just saying no. And so that is, again, a situation where I feel like agencies have to take a stronger hand. If you see that 10 of your clients are going in to pitch on this movie, there’s something wrong, and you need to intervene and stop that.

Next bullet point, the possible erosion of studio pension contributions. I don’t know anything about this.

**Craig:** I don’t either. Just so people understand how this works, when we get paid under a guild deal, the studios kick in a certain percentage on top of what we get paid. So, let’s say I get paid $100. They have to add another, I think at this point now it’s like another $8 on top of that into the health fund, and another $8 into the pension. And that’s tracked. And those contributions are tracked on my behalf. And then eventually I qualify for healthcare on a year-to-year basis. And then when I hit retirement age, I get my pension.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And over time, despite the hysterical nature of the way political campaigns are run in our union, when we get to these negotiations, what it basically comes down to is we’re going to give you a certain amount of money. And the way we look at it is that money is in terms of healthcare and pension and residuals.

And healthcare and pension have been seriously impacted by the market crisis and by healthcare costs. And so a lot of times we’ve come in with a fairly weak hand and basically said, look, just keep our pension and health healthy. And we have.

There’s something else looming, however. And it’s a direct result of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, and that is this impending tax on so-called Cadillac plans. We have a very good healthcare plan. And it may get severely impacted by the law. And this is one of those interesting areas where the unions sort of turned on their democratic bedfellows because this wasn’t going to work out well for them, or at least some of the unions.

So I don’t know where that is right now. But we will always, I think, no matter what people — because it’s funny. Most writers, they think like, yeah, we’re going to go into negotiations and we’re going to fight for better jobs and more dignity. And I wish that that were true, but mostly what we’re fighting for is to make sure that you can still go to the doctor and get paid for and that there’s something waiting for you when you’re old and you retire.

**John:** Yep. These are crucial things. Getting older and retiring, just this last week I was having a conversation with a writer and I had to confess that I fundamentally did not understand how retirement worked for WGA screenwriters. Well, I kind of assumed I would never retire, because I can’t ever imagine stopping. And she informed me that like there really is a reason why starting at 55 you might consider taking retirement. And you would essentially retire for a month and then unretire and start working again. Because that would allow you to start collecting your pension.

And that was enlightening but also horrifying, because I can’t imagine retiring even for that month. It just feels crazy to me.

**Craig:** I have been looking at my pension statements. And on the one hand, I’ve fantasized about this day when I could just lounge around and collect checks. But, yeah, you know, the closer you get to it, the weirder it feels. I mean, you know, look, we’re all still children inside our heads. And retired people are the elderly who either mutter in a booth at McDonalds, or are sweeping up at McDonalds just to keep busy.

And I don’t think of myself that way. But, you know, you and I, we’re basically the same age. We’re mid-forties.

**John:** Yeah, we are.

**Craig:** And it’s bearing down on us like a freight train, buddy.

**John:** Yeah, it’s crazy to me that it would be even a possibility. So, the other thing I should stress is that the WGA pension is probably an important part of retirement for most WGA members, but that nothing precludes you from setting up your own retirement accounts. And you should.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** You should fundamentally do that. So, anyone whose entire retirement savings is based on the WGA pension would have to live a more frugal life, I guess, in order to make it through the end of their ages.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look, most people have nothing except for Social Security. Then, for those of us who are vested in the Writers Guild pension plan, we have that on top of Social Security. And then, hopefully, you’ve also made your own independent investments in IRAs and 401(k)s and all that other stuff. You know, that’s why I keep thinking like, ah, maybe it will be awesome, you know? Because there’s a whole bunch of money I have that I can’t even touch.

**John:** Right. I do feel like at some point we need to have, I don’t know if it makes sense on the podcast, or just some sort of WGA session where once people start making like significant money where we just sit you down and say like, okay, here’s the reality of what you need to start doing. Like at about the point where people need to incorporate, there just needs to be a little sit down and say like, okay, here’s how not to be an idiot about your money. Because I do find there’s this wall that people hit where it’s like suddenly, oh my god.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. And writers — and this is where writers also turn everything over to business managers, which makes me nuts, because now you’re paying somebody 5% of your income to do something that we could probably explain to you in four minutes. Let’s put all those people out of business. I love this idea.

We’ll do a podcast that’s basically just for rich people. It’s exciting.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll do the high class problems podcast.

**Craig:** High class problems.

**John:** The last three bullet points here. Late payments becoming epidemic. Late payments is, again, sort of — to me it’s like the Student Council election where like we’ve got to do something about apathy. It’s like it’s one of those things that’s an evergreen topic. Checks have always come late. And it seems like they come later every year, but I think it also just seems like they come later every year. I’ve advocated for a long time publicly shaming studios that are the worst about late payments, but that’s an enforcement thing. It’s not a contract thing. That is a spending the resources at the guild to go after those late payments.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could shame them. What does that mean? When you get offered a job to write something there you’re not going to take it? [laughs] You’re going to take it.

**John:** Yeah, I say publicly shaming in terms of having the guild actually collect statistics and — the guild knows exactly who is late.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. They know.

**John:** And actually just taking out the ad in Variety saying this is who’s late.

**Craig:** They’ve been threatening that for a while. I think late payment is annoying, but it’s better than non-payment. I mean, in other words, people are getting paid. I don’t know why it happens. This is the thing. Like when I talk to, again, when we talk to studio heads, they’re mystified. They don’t understand it. And then what happens is somebody from a department in a different building will say, well, it’s all this paperwork. And we need somebody to fill the form out. And then you need to call the right person. And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And you realize that there’s this massive machinery to issue checks there, which makes sense, because it can’t just be a simple as somebody picking up a phone and going, “Hey, can you pay this person $700,000?” “Uh, okay.” No, that doesn’t work.

So, it’s just this massive machinery of red tape.

**John:** I always assumed that the like, “Oh, the check is in processing right now,” was just — was that a thing they said. But then years ago I was dating a guy who worked at Universal and I was writing for Universal. And he’s like, “Oh, your paycheck just crossed my boss’s desk.” And it was just crazy. Like literally his boss had to like either sign herself or approve this check.

And so he saw this check that was about to come to me, which was crazy.

**Craig:** “It’s in process.” And then it has to be put into another thing. And then it has to be sent out, and mailed. Blah, blah, blah. And it gets mailed to your agency. And then they take out their — you know, it’s — I don’t like it. But on the list of problems that we have, we’ve got bigger ones.

**John:** Diversity. There’s a problem we could solve.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Let’s spend maybe 30 seconds on diversity here. Matt Damon had a really good answer apparently on to the diversity question on Project Greenlight. I haven’t seen it yet, but he was able to solve it there.

**Craig:** D’oh. Diversity. I know, let’s do more surveys and gather more statistics to show that it’s also bad, again, exactly as it was the year before.

**John:** This feels like one of those situations where, again, you know, in television it’s showrunners taking the lead and making sure that they are finding and hiring the best, most diverse staffs they can. When it comes time for features where it’s studios hiring people, the studios need to hire diverse writers. It’s frustrating, but I don’t think it’s going to be thing that’s going to be solved through contract negotiation.

**Craig:** No. Not at all. And there’s this other thing that I worry about sometimes. Rachel Prior who works for Edgar Wright’s production company, Big Talk, she’s a development executive in the UK. And she’s very prolific on Twitter. A very smart person. She’s an outspoken feminist and she talks a lot about gender topics in our business and the employment of women in our business. And she did say something very interesting recently.

She said, “Look, I want to make sure that when we talk about the tragedies that are occurring statistically,” and we’re just focusing on women for the moment here in terms of hiring of women as writers, directors, producers, studio employees, “that by concentrating on the deficits, which are severe and real, that we aren’t actually discouraging women from wanting to come to this business.”

**John:** That’s a great point.

**Craig:** Sort of like I don’t want a black kid to sit at home and go, “Well, apparently the statistics are that no black people are writing movies, so why would I try?” And I think that we have to do both at the same time. We have to call out the deficits and the failures. We also have to promote the successes.

We must promote the successes, because that’s — nobody is going to come to our business to say, “Well, I know what I’ll do, I’ll fix the negative statistics.” No, people just want to succeed for themselves. So let’s get those positive role models out there. And also some positive stories. It’s not all bad.

**John:** Yep. It’s not all bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not all bad.

**John:** All right. One of those diverse writers who might be coming to work in Hollywood is Pam in Seattle. And so this is question that we’ve kicked it back for three weeks now. So, we’re finally going to answer Pam in Seattle’s question.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So, Craig, tell us what Pam in Seattle wrote.

**Craig:** Pam says, “I’ve written a script which is being well received by the many people I have reading it. I’m revising said script again and again to make it as good as I possibly can. I’m working on the second script, so I have an answer when someone asks me, ‘What else are you working on?’ And eventually I’ll be heading to LA to, well, do something. So far my list is, one, go to LA. Two, sell script.”

I love that.

“If I were to come to LA for a visit, how might I best use my time? I do have a few connections. An actor friend. A showrunner acquaintance. A producer acquaintance. But that’s about it. I don’t want to waste my time or anyone else’s. But I sort of very much don’t know what I’m doing or what I should be trying to do.”

John, some advice for Pam?

**John:** Well, I think Pam is super smart and already kind of funny even in her question. She seems to understand what she doesn’t know, which is great, is that she doesn’t kind of know where to begin. She’s going to want to talk to her actor friend, her showrunner acquaintance, and her producer acquaintance. She’s going to want to sit down with them and get any bit of advice or feedback she can from those folks. But then she’s also going to just kind of soak in to LA and to the situation and figure out where she can meet people who are doing the kinds of things she wants to do.

So if she’s coming to LA for a weekend, there’s not a lot she’s going to be able to do. If she’s coming here for a week, she should have coffee with all those people. She should ask those people, hey, is there anyone else you think I should meet. And if she’s here for a month, then she should try to — an internship may not be possible, but she should try to shadow somebody. She should try to use any alumni connections. Anything she can do to sort of get exposure to people who are actually making film and television.

**Craig:** All excellent advice. I agree, by the way, Pam does seem smart and does seem funny and very realistic. Now, Pam, you have to be a little careful because I’m realistic like you, very pragmatic person. Sometimes those of us who are realistic and pragmatic are so afraid of being delusional that we end up being a little timid.

So, what I would say to you is this — you shouldn’t want to waste your time. Don’t worry about wasting other people’s time. Go ahead, waste their time. You’ve got to push yourself in there. This is not an easy business to polite yourself into. You’ve got to get your elbows and get in there, muscle in. Now, you say you have a showrunner acquaintance. I’d start there. I mean, that’s a big deal. A showrunner is not only somebody that’s very highly placed in the business, they’re also somebody who employs writers. So, whoever this person is, that’s a great starting point.

And really, again, elbow yourself in. Make sure that you get that meeting in with them. It’s more important that than your actor friend. Producer, also, a good idea.

Don’t worry so much about wasting other people’s time. You have to kind of show up with this attitude. I actually deserve to be in this business. I know I haven’t earned my way in yet, but when I do, I will be good.

**John:** So, let’s say that she has her script and she’s gotten feedback from her friends who have brought it back there. If she puts it in competitions and she does well in competitions, if it’s on the Black List site and people like it on the Black List site, she may start to make some contacts of people who said like, “Oh, if you’re ever in Los Angeles…” Those are the people you should actually sit down and meet with when you come to Los Angeles. And you should arrange your trip so that you can get as many of those squeezed in there as you possibly can.

When we had Ryan Knighton on the show, several episodes ago, he talked about like he lives in Vancouver but he comes down here and he books himself solid with meetings for those times that he’s down there. And you’re not Ryan Knighton yet, but you might be. And so you should start booking up all those meetings and those coffees until you have way too much caffeine in you, but that’s great and fine. Take advantage of all of those things.

And some of those people will be jerkoffs and will not be useful to you at all, but you’ll start to learn to anticipate who the jerkoffs are. And that’s education. That’s learning, too.

**Craig:** Yep. Excellent. And don’t be afraid to let people know that you’re ready to move down here permanently. Because they’ll be a little suspicious about the out-of-towner. So many people out of town are like, “Well, I’m just going to play it safe. And once I get a job, then I’ll move.” And that’s never going to work. So, let them know, this is the advanced scout for an inevitable move.

**John:** Great. Adam wrote in to ask, “Let’s say you are a new writer in LA with no agent, no manager, et cetera, and a producer finds your script on the Black List or someplace and options it. What are the next steps you should take? Example, should you ask the producer for a recommendation for an agent? How about getting an entertainment lawyer? Should you contact the WGA? Is there anything you need to make sure you do before signing anything? Maybe you guys could walk us through the step by step from option to production?”

So, that may be too long, but what should he be doing for let’s say a producer is interested in his script?

**Craig:** It seems like all the questions he asked the answer is yes. So, I mean, look, first of all, congrats. Okay, but now you have to be really smart. Somebody is saying that they’re going to pay you some money or make a professional agreement with you on a piece of paper that is legally binding, so smarten up.

Number one, yes, you should ask the producer for a recommendation for an agent. And you should trust that that agent will be independent, even though they come to you through that producer. And you should say, “Look, I can’t really get into an agreement without representation, so help me.”

You absolutely need an entertainment lawyer to evaluate the contract, make changes and adjustments. The lawyer will work on commission, for 5%, and so you don’t have to worry about paying them out-of-pocket. They get paid when you get paid.

Should you contact the WGA? Probably not necessary unless the deal isn’t a WGA deal, at which point you may want to contact the WGA to find out how you can — maybe there’s a way to get it. But again, that’s something your lawyer should be able to do. When you actually sell something that qualifies you for membership in the WGA, they’ll call you. They’re going to find you.

**John:** So how you get into the WGA essentially is once you’re hired to write for a company that is a WGA signatory that has a deal with the WGA, any writer they hire has to be WGA, and therefore if you’re not WGA you have to join the WGA. And that’s good. That’s happy. And that’s a good outcome.

But I completely agree with Craig. And the way I got my first agent was through a producer who was interested in my script. So, it was Michael Shipley who then became a journalist and is now a producer again. He read a script I wrote. And he got the script because Al Gough, who was a classmate of mine, who went on to create Smallville. Al had read the script. He gave it to his intern boss, Michael Shipley. And Michael Shipley liked my script.

And I asked Michael Shipley politely but really sort of hopefully, “Hey, could you help me find an agent.” And Michael Shipley said, yes, I think I know two agents who would be good for you. And one of them I liked, and I met with him, and I signed with him. So that is a very common way to get your agent because an agent fields a bunch of calls, but if a producer says, “Hey, I read something really good. You may want to read this writer,” that is going to go higher up in the pile of stuff for that agent.

**Craig:** All correct. I do want to just adjust one thing you said for people listening so that they don’t get misled.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Meer employment isn’t enough to qualify you for — and compel you for — membership in the WGA. I believe it is in the East, curiously enough, but we don’t talk about them. In the WGA West, there’s actually a system where you earn a certain number of — I think they’re called credits, but they’re not like on screen credits. Credits towards compulsory membership.

So, some jobs don’t get you all the way. For instance, if the very first thing you’re hired to do under a WGA contract is rewrite a screenplay, that’s half the way to compulsory membership. However, if you sell an original pitch or an original screenplay, that’s the full boat, and you’re automatically in.

**John:** Yeah. I should have clarified that, too. My first job did get me all the way in on the one first thing, but you’ll find that most companies have two ways they can hire you. They have the company that is the signatory, and a company that is not the signatory. And they will always try to find a way to hire you through the non-signatory when you’re a new writer. And then you have to remind them, no, no, I am WGA. And therefore you have to do it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. In terms of finding a reputable attorney, I don’t have any great recommendations other than if you look — this sounds really cheesy and obvious — but if you look through the headlines of like people who sold scripts and they say they were represented by this agent and by this attorney so and so forth, that might be the kind of attorney you want. Some person who has been representing writers who have sold stuff recently. And you may just find a contact through there.

If you’re calling into that lawyer’s office and you say like, “This producer is trying to option my script and I need an attorney,” they might take you. And you might get the junior person there, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. And similarly, if you’ve gotten a new agent through your producer, the agent will also certainly be able to recommend a lawyer that they share clients with.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not uncommon for baby writers who sign at an agency to use the agency’s in-house lawyer to do some of their initial contracts.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I don’t think that’s a great idea. I think you’re generally better off having somebody outside.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** You’re making so little money, that that 5% might seem really painful, but I think you’re better off having someone else out there. Because for nothing else, they have other contacts, they have more exposure and experience, and they may see things that other people won’t see.

**Craig:** Well, also, remember, when you have outside counsel, the negotiation for your fee is now being looked at by an agent and the lawyer. So, when I’m making a deal, my agent and my lawyer are both on the phone with business affairs and they’re kind of, you know, it’s not like one can get away with soft pedaling it or being easy or being outrageous, because the other one is there to kind of keep a check on them.

**John:** All right. Our final question comes from Lucas Stroughton who asked on Twitter, “Could you please explain on the podcast the difference between backend and residuals? Thanks in advance.”

**Craig:** Sure. So, residuals are fees that we get for the reuse of material on which we have credits. And the residuals are set in our collective bargaining agreement through our union. And basically they take the place of royalties which is what people get when they own copyright. So, remember, we don’t own the copyright in the material we create for the studios. They do. They employ us as work-for-hire.

So we get residuals as a kind of replacement form of royalties. So let’s just talk about movies. Every time our movie is rented on video, or shown on free TV, or shown on pay TV, a certain amount of money is sent to the studio because it’s been reused. And then the studio sends us a small portion. That’s what residuals are.

**John:** Let me clarify a little bit more residuals. Residuals are a thing that’s negotiated by the Writers Guild of America on behalf of all writers. So, I am not individually negotiating a contract with Sony saying like I want to be paid this amount of residuals on this project. No, no, that’s just a WGA thing that is a blanket for all WGA members, just one set rate for what you’re going to get paid on a movie, which is very different from backend, which Craig is about to explain.

**Craig:** Right. I should mention technically you could negotiate better residual terms for yourself.

**John:** But has anyone done that?

**Craig:** I heard once, just a rumor, I heard that —

**John:** It’s going to be Ted Elliott, right?

**Craig:** No. [laughs] I heard that Tom Cruise tried once, and failed, because the precedent is so strong.

Now, backend is really profit participation in the primary release of the product, along with the secondary release. So, residuals is all about the secondary market, reuse, so we don’t get residuals from the ticket sales of a movie. That’s considered the primary exhibition of the movie. Backend is about sharing in the total amount of money that comes in to the studio, whether it’s from the primary exhibition or secondary exhibition. Doesn’t matter.

And there all sorts of different kinds of back-ends. Very typical one is called cash break where the studio says, okay, once we recoup all of our costs and go into profit, like real profit, not the fake baloney profit, then we start paying you a percentage of money. Usually they also have to recoup what they paid you, by the way, as an expense before they start paying you your little piece of the backend.

Then there is the notorious first dollar gross, where you’re actually getting a piece of every — of the gross, not the profit, but the gross money coming in, again, after they recoup what they paid you. Screenwriters generally do not get backend. Screenwriters generally get paid a lot up front, hopefully, or something up front, and then, of course, we get our residuals as determined by our screen credit. And of the amount of residuals they dole out to writers, 75% is reserved for the writers who have screenplay credit and 25% is reserved for the writers who have story or screen story credit. And if there’s no screen story or story credit, then it all goes to the screenplay credit.

**John:** And so when we say backend for writers, there are cases where like a showrunner, a show creator in television will have a backend, will have a meaningful backend, which is really a slice of the pie. And that is incredibly lucrative. There are cases where big actors will have a piece of the backend on either a TV show or a feature.

But for most screenwriters, you’re really looking at residuals as being the ongoing revenue stream you get for having written a movie. And in some ways that makes sense, because as a screenwriter we don’t know which projects are actually going to get made. And you don’t necessarily want to take a deferment on your initial salary in order to hopefully see something down the road. That’s not a great choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Interestingly I’ll say that the writers in television that do get backend, or writers in features that get backend are usually getting it as a producer. But not as a writer specifically.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree. All right, I think it’s time for our One Cool Things. Craig, you have the coolest thing of all, so you should start with yours.

**Craig:** I do have the coolest One Cool Thing this week. So my One Cool Thing this week is Melissa Mazin, my wife, my wife of almost 20 years by the way.

**John:** Nuts.

**Craig:** I know. Next June will be our 20th wedding anniversary. How about that?

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** It is good stuff. And I’m mentioning her because she is going to be accompanying me to the Austin Screenwriting Conference this year. So, it’s kind of like I’m smashing two cool things together. Really it’s just a way of saying to people, hey, come to the Austin Screenwriting Conference if you haven’t bought your tickets yet. I’m going to be there. John’s going to be there. We’re going to be doing a live Scriptnotes. We’re going to be doing a live Three Page Challenge. I’m going to be doing a panel on thematic structure.

My wife is going to be there. What else do you need?

**John:** I’m curious whether Melissa’s presence will make you wilder or less wild during the weekend?

**Craig:** I’m going to go with less wild. [laughs] I think that’s probably for the best. Don’t you?

**John:** I think it may be for the best.

**Craig:** I mean, every time I go there, I end up exhausted and hoarse and it will be good. Because really what I want to do is just go to my room and sleep.

**John:** Sleeping is nice.

**Craig:** Sleepy.

**John:** Later this evening I will be playing Dungeons & Dragons with Craig Mazin and I will be bringing with me my small little figurine which I painted. And so my One Cool Thing is actually miniature figurines. Because I remember growing up playing D&D and I would have lead figures. They called them lead figures. I don’t think they really were lead, but they were heavy metal figures.

**Craig:** Yeah, like pewter or something.

**John:** Pewter. And I would attempt to paint them and do a terrible job and they would always look mangled. And so for this round of D&D I decided, you know what, I’m going to get a better little miniature figure. And so for Gilly, my little gnome monk who I’m playing with, little Gilly, I was able to find like a great little figurine and it’s because of the Internet and it’s because of better technology.

So, this company I’m using is called Reaper and they make these great little plastic figures that are obviously lighter than the lead, but have tremendous detail. And also because of the Internet, there’s a tremendous number of tutorials about how to paint. And so I learned that I had been doing everything wrong in terms of painting a figurine.

And so I spent. God, probably two hours painting this tiny figurine, but I’m really proud of it. And so if you are at all curious about painting stuff, or you’re looking for some new hobby in which to spend some time and learn something new, I really enjoyed painting this figurine. So I will put some links in the show notes for both Reaper, but also some tutorials that I found really useful for painting a figurine, because it was actually a good therapeutic process.

I listened to some podcasts as I was doing my dry brushing and my flooding with paint. It was cool.

**Craig:** Did you say slutting?

**John:** No. I was doing some dry brushing and some flooding. It’s where you actually get the details out by making your paint far, far, far too wet. And then it sort of floods into all the crevices. And that gives the detail.

**Craig:** You know, Sexy Craig likes that.

**John:** I could tell Sexy Craig would probably like that, yeah.

**Craig:** Just get all wet and flood into the crevices.

**John:** That’s good stuff. Our show as always is produced by Stuart Friedel. Stuart is downstairs right at this very moment folding t-shirts, because the t-shirts just came back from the printer, so they should be going out probably the end of this week, so hooray.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Thank you, again, to everyone who ordered a t-shirt. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro this week is actually another piece of found art. So Luke Yoquinto found the Scriptnotes thing embedded, or actually in the very intro, to the Steve Winwood song, “While You See a Chance.”

So, as you start to listen to this you’ll hear like, oh, wait, there’s the Scriptnotes theme. So, it’s just a thing that’s out there.

I should also as a final bit of celebration I want to congratulate the world for getting the rights to Happy Birthday back.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a song that was under copyright and there was a huge copyright fight and it finally appears that we can now sing Happy Birthday without paying anybody any money.

**Craig:** We don’t have to sing For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow in movies anymore.

**John:** And what will all those restaurant chains that had to sing their own little custom themes do?

**Craig:** Happy, happy, happy, birthday, birthday, birthday, birthday. Yeah.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Geez. You know who else likes painting figurines?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Patric Verrone.

**John:** Yeah, he does like painting figurines. I think he’d be really good at that.

**Craig:** He paints Supreme Court justices. It’s not like painting figurines wasn’t already dorky. He figured out how to make it extra dorky. And for that, I got to salute him.

**John:** I have nothing but praise for that.

**Craig:** That is actually — I give that one the high five.

**John:** All right. Craig, I will see you tonight. Everyone else, we will see you next week.

**Craig:** See you later.

**John:** Thanks for joining us.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WGAw 2015 election results](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=5938)
* John and Craig [on The Black List Table Reads podcast with Franklin Leonard](http://blacklist.wolfpop.com/audio/39626/john-august-and-craig-mazin)
* Melissa Mazin will be at the [Austin Film Festival 2015 Screenwriting Conference](https://austinfilmfestival.com/festivalandconference/conference/)
* [Reaper Miniatures](https://www.reapermini.com/), and [Miniature Painting 101](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLB0292071C3B38CAC) on YouTube
* [All the ‘Happy Birthday’ song copyright claims are invalid, federal judge rules](http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-happy-birthday-song-lawsuit-decision-20150922-story.html) from the LA Times
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) sent in by Luke Yoquinto ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/rewrites-and-scheduling).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 216 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, for a second I thought you weren’t going to introduce yourself as Craig Mazin but rather as Louis B. Mayer because that is the name I associate with you having heard you on Karina Longworth’s podcast.

**Craig:** Yes. Now and forevermore, Louis B — so I’m playing Louis B. Mayer on her new series of You Must Remember This. So her last series was about the Manson family and how they were intertwined with Hollywood. And the new one is about the history of MGM, which is kind of the most classic of the classic movie studios. And Louis B. Mayer was the guy who ran it.

And so, I don’t [laughs] — I keep joking like I got the job because I sound like a quietly angry Jew.

**John:** [laughs] Seething with rage. And I really loved hearing you affect a voice on a podcast. So I want to make it clear to all our audience that sometimes I love it when Craig does voices. And this is a voice you just did spectacularly well. And it’s a great podcast. So we’re going to highly recommend people listen to it.

So Karina Longworth is a film historian. Her podcast, you can go back through in iTunes and find all the episodes she’s done. This new series she’s doing, it’s just about, you know, really the birth of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you can’t think about Hollywood history without thinking about MGM. And so she’s tracking not just how the studio came to be but sort of all the changes throughout the generations. And MGM is still a label that exists today but is not sort of the same —

**Craig:** It’s not the same.

**John:** Kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know specifically where the next episodes are going but I have recorded lines for the next one or I think it’s the next one. From the few lines that I do, I get a sense of what it is and she’s going to get into some interesting things, you know.

The shocking difference between the Hollywood that Hollywood presented to America and the actual Hollywood and the stuff that was going on is just startling.

**John:** You know, I’d be a little bit jealous except I have exciting news of my own, is that I just signed on to be the killer in the next season of Serial.

**Craig:** Ah, great.

**John:** So at least that way we’ll both be doing other podcasts and, you know, sort of raking in money for ourselves.

**Craig:** It’s not going to be much of a mystery. If someone’s named John August, they did it.

**John:** I probably did it.

**Craig:** It’s a killer name.

**John:** It’s a great name. It’s a good name.

**Craig:** What’s your middle name?

**John:** It’s my original last name which is Meise.

**Craig:** Oh, so you made that —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You pulled that in. But did you jettison a prior middle name?

**John:** I did. It was Tilton, T-I-L-T-O-N.

**Craig:** Oh, my god. [laughs] That’s the most —

**John:** Which is a family name but wasn’t really related to anything.

**Craig:** I mean, John Tilton August. Ugh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Shivers.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like, you know, who was that Arkansas serial killer? Oh, it was John Tilton August.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. [laughs] You listen to that name you can smell the mold in the basement in which he is keeping you.

**John:** Yeah. There’s also a distant banjo playing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Today on the podcast, we’ll be talking about the anatomy of a rewrite. We’ll look at how production schedules work and we’ll answer some questions from listeners. We have so much to do on the show this week that we should probably get started.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s go.

**John:** And so first some follow-up. We need to thank everybody who bought a Scriptnotes T-shirt. And we had a whole bunch — this is the biggest order we’ve ever placed. Dustin and Stuart are at the printers right now, placing that order. We will be packaging and shipping these out to all of the people who bought them probably the second week of October so everyone will have them in hand for Austin Film Festival. So, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Next up. Last week we talked about the odds of making it in the NFL versus making it as a screenwriter. And Nathan wrote in with some good statistics. Do you want to share those?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. So he mentions that there are 32 teams in the NFL and each has a regular season roster of 53 players. This I did not know. I’m more of a baseball guy. So the total number of players in the league at any given time is 1,696. Let’s call it 1,700. So you could say that the number of people playing in the NFL is slightly larger than the number of people who are feature screenwriters in a given year, assuming the 1,500 number you gave for 2014 is representative.

Granted the yearly numbers for the NFL are slightly higher than 1,700 as players are added and dropped from rosters but 1,700 is a good ballpark number. And I agree. So we are, I think, under that number, clearly. I think the 1,500 number is correct. And mind you, that 1,500 number also includes our version of pickups and drops, you know, people who maybe worked for a month and then didn’t again.

So, yeah, I think we’re right on in saying that it’s harder to be a working screenwriter, at least statistically speaking, than to play in the NFL. And a lot of people on Twitter pointed out also that there’s another major difference in that if you’re trying to become a professional screenwriter, you’re competing against all people that want to be screenwriters, including women.

In the NFL, there are no women. Women cannot play in the NFL. Not by rule but just by physical reality. So men are only competing with men.

**John:** Oh, Craig, you’re going to get so much email just for that one sentence you just said.

**Craig:** You think so? That —

**John:** That physical reality? Yeah.

**Craig:** Because women —

**John:** By tradition —

**Craig:** It’s not tradition. [laughs] They physically can’t — I mean, I can’t compete in the NFL physically. I mean, you would have to be just an incredibly roided up woman. Yeah, I probably will get [laughs] a lot of letters but I don’t —

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** I’m not judging. It’s just that there’s a reason why we haven’t seen a woman in the NFL, just physical realities. But that’s not the case happily for screenwriting. Anyone with a brain can be a screenwriter. So the competitive pool is quite a bit larger. So, again, tougher to be a screenwriter than to be a football player.

**John:** I think it’s a very useful statistic for your Aunt Sarah. So if she has in her back pocket like, “Oh, my nephew is a working screenwriter in Hollywood, like it’s harder to be a working screenwriter in Hollywood than it is to be an NFL player. It’s like less likely.” And that’s actually probably true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Another crucial difference is that anybody who — that 1,700 people who are in the NFL, those people are all making a living. Their whole job is to be in the NFL, by definition. Of the 1,700 screenwriters, a lot of those are also doing other jobs because they are not making a real living as a screenwriter. So they might be getting paid something over the course of the year. That doesn’t mean that that’s enough to actually support themselves.

**Craig:** Yes. So we continue to crush everyone’s dream with remarkable efficiency.

**John:** So as we crush people’s dreams, let’s go on to lawsuit time. So we’ve talked a lot on the podcast about the Gravity lawsuit. We’ll never talk about that again.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But there was another lawsuit this week settled or at least another development on the lawsuit. This is over The Cabin in the Woods. That’s a movie directed by Drew Goddard, with a script by him and Joss Whedon. So Peter Gallagher was suing, claiming that Cabin in the Woods was based on and inspired by or took from his novel, The Little White Trip: A Night in the Pines.

And so this week, it came down that Judge Otis Wright II who’s just the best name ever for a judge.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right up there with John Tilton August.

**John:** He wrote, “The few alleged similarities that are not grossly misstated involve unprotectable forms of expression, such as the group going to a cabin or the alpha male character attempting a risky escape plan to bring back help. A list of random similarities only further convinces the court of one thing. After thorough analysis of both works and application of the extrinsic test, The Cabin in the Woods and The Little White Trip are not substantially similar.”

So we’ll have a link on the show notes to his whole ruling. It was the first time I’d seen this extrinsic test mentioned, so I went through a little Wikipedia hole on what extrinsic test and intrinsic tests are. But they’re ways of judging substantial similarity.

**Craig:** Right. Well, first we should make it clear. This is not the actor Peter Gallagher. This is —

**John:** But wouldn’t it be great if it were?

**Craig:** It would be [laughs] fascinating, to say the least.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** It would be a weird move by Peter Gallagher.

**John:** It would be like Sex, Lies, and Videotape 2. It would be great.

**Craig:** It would just be like Peter Gallagher sitting down, he’s like, “What could I do that would be the worst possible thing for my career? I know. I’ll sue Joss Whedon. That’ll be fun.”

**John:** Good choice.

**Craig:** This is how all of these end. I don’t know how else to put it for people. This is how they all end. And we’ve said this before. The feeding frenzy and excitement and, “Yes, stick it to the man-ism” that happens at the advent of these things is never matched when they all inevitably fall apart because it’s just not true. It’s just not true every single time.

And when he says something like “grossly misstated”, yeah, I mean that’s basically what we see all the time when you and I look at these things. We see that things are grossly misstated.

**John:** The reason why I want to bring this up at all because we hadn’t mentioned this lawsuit in the first place is that I do feel like we only see the news of these things being filed and we never see the outcomes of them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I just want to sort of highlight the outcomes. And I think there are actually three possible outcomes. There’s the outcome where the plaintiff actually wins, which is very, very rare and it’s so exceptional that we actually note when the plaintiff won like the Coming to America case was a rare case where a plaintiff won something there.

We sort of note sometimes when these things come down with negative opinions and the plaintiffs say they’re going to take it to another court and they’re going to appeal or whatever and they just sort of disappear. But 90% of these cases just magically disappear. And they never get to any sort of meaningful state or they get to a sort of pre-trial finding and there’s some sort of settlement that happens that doesn’t acknowledge any fault but basically says it would be cheaper just to make this all go away.

And that’s the other thing that happens frequently.

**Craig:** I don’t know what the statistics are when you compare, say, in we’ll call it somewhat failure, the difference between cases that are dismissed and cases that are settled. I suspect that if it’s already going to trial and they’ve gone through discovery and there’s a judge that the studios have decided, “No, we’re not giving this guy a dime or this woman a dime. We’re fighting this because, you know.”

Look, if they just routinely settle, just because, all they’re doing is inviting more of it. It becomes a gold rush.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** So I think actually a lot of times what happens is these things get dismissed. I don’t know what the ultimate stats are but I do know that in our lifetimes, I can think of only one case where it was a win and that was Art Buchwald in Coming to America. And he was Art Buchwald. And he wrote a treatment and they definitely ripped the treatment off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that was it. I mean, everything else either if someone has a real case, they do quietly settle. They don’t even bother with the — the last thing they want is this being written about in the media. So I always feel like by the time we’ve heard about it, it’s a loser.

**John:** Yeah, I think you’re right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Alex in Miami wrote in to say, “During the Deflategate portion of the podcast about how would this be a movie,” so we talked about Deflategate and Tom Brady, “you mentioned it might be best to just create new characters that represent these people to avoid conflict.” So rather than use the real people, create new characters that sort of take the place of those real characters. “Can you guys explain what the difference is when compared to a film like Game Change which portrays real people like Sarah Palin and John McCain? How did they get away with it?”

So, yeah, let’s talk about what the difference is between a movie based on real events like Game Change was and what we were talking about you might want to do with this football movie.

**Craig:** Right. Well, when you’re dealing with public figures, you have a lot more latitude. When you’re dealing with private individuals, that is people that have an expectation of privacy and don’t live their lives on the public stage, they have a right to their own life story. You can’t just tell someone’s life story. You have to actually buy their life rights.

But if somebody’s a public figure, then essentially what the law says is the part of your life that’s lived in public and the things that we know from public disclosure, they are public already. So you don’t have to buy it.

Now, obviously politicians, a lot of their lives are lived in public. Similarly, Tom Brady’s life and Deflategate was lived in public. So it wasn’t a question of life rights. What concerned me about the potential movie adaptation was in fact this issue of how to deal with the fact that you want to show logos and you want to be in the NFL and you want to say, “Well, he plays for the Patriots,” and use the names of all these people, some of whom are not public figures.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you cited a really interesting article from Business Insider. So tell us about that.

**John:** So this is something that another listener had sent in. I think several listeners sent in. Business Insider wrote a piece about Ballers, the HBO series that stars Dwayne Johnson. And that uses real football logos. And that seems surprising because we think like, “Well, how can you use those football logos because they’re trademark things. NFL is going to come after you.”

And they just did it. And the explanation they give in this article, I don’t completely buy. I think they’re saying like, because we weren’t portraying the NFL negatively or in an untrue manner, we can get away with doing it.” I think they basically just felt like, “You know what, NFL try to come after us and you’re not going to succeed because NFL doesn’t have the ability to allow somebody to not show, you know, their logo on screen. It’s a real thing that exists out in the world.”

And they basically just had the courage to say, “You know what, this guy plays for the Dolphins and we’re showing a Dolphins logo.”

**Craig:** Yeah. There is always a space in between the obvious yes and the obvious no. And every studio has a different tolerance for playing in that space in between, because being sued is a problem. It’s expensive and it’s embarrassing in the media. And if you lose, it could be disastrous.

I think for Ballers, I think they were like, “Please sue us. This would be amazing publicity.” And it’s not like HBO is a lightweight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think that was exciting. And I think also that they felt from a legal point of view that in that gray space, they were way closer to yes than no.

**John:** I was thinking like the counter examples, like you show character opening up a bottle of Coke and saying like, “This Coke is poison,” and they drink the Coke and then they die from poison, that would be an issue where Coke would probably come after you and would have a little bit more ammunition that you are lying about their product.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And showing their product, you’re associating their product with death.

**Craig:** Correct. In the case of our prospective Tom Brady movie, the problem is that the movie would need to make some kind of statement and take some kind of position to be at all interesting. And all those facts are disputed. And we just saw how the report was disputed and the penalty was overturned by a judge.

So you make your movie and you’ve got people wearing NFL logos doing things like actively cheating, Tom Brady actively cheating. Yeah, you’re going to get sued because he’s going to argue, “No, I didn’t do that, so you’re defaming me.” You can’t defame public — the only thing you can do with public individuals is satire them in such a way that it’s obviously satire. And that goes back to The People vs. Larry Flynt and the Jerry Falwell stuff.

**John:** So, circling back to portraying real people and the difference between Game Change and what this movie was describing, a good movie that sort of falls in the middle of that is The Social Network. And so Social Network shows Mark Zuckerberg and Mark Zuckerberg does not come off especially well in The Social Network. And those are real people and many of those people are real.

But I have a suspicion that as they were thinking about making the movie and as they looked through the people who were like less and less famous, they were actually much more careful about how those people were portrayed. And in some cases may have changed the names of some people just so they weren’t going to run into problems.

And like you said that I did this thing but I never did this thing and I’m not a public figure. Mark Zuckerberg is such a huge figure that he’s sort of impossible to libel. The smaller people have a much greater claim to protecting their own rights to privacy of their own life story.

**Craig:** I suspect that Mark Zuckerberg was a little jammed on this no matter what. Even if some of the aspects of the movie could be considered defamatory or libelous and he had a case or could make a case, the costs of disputing the movie would be the Streisand effect. You’re familiar with the Streisand effect?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So for those of you who are not, Barbara Streisand once sued some random guy who had basically published a picture of her home on the internet and said, “This is Barbara Streisand’s home.” And Barbara Streisand went after this guy. On a website nobody even knew about. And suddenly because she went after him, everybody knew about it and everybody now knew where she lived.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, sometimes I think that’s the wedge against a guy like Zuckerberg because he’s just like, “Ugh, let me just ignore this until it goes away.”

**John:** Yeah. For sure. Our last bit of follow-up, this is actually just a nice email that somebody wrote in. And we get a lot of these and we get some nice comments on iTunes, too, but this was a guy who’s been listening to the show who had some good stuff happen. So I thought we would just read one of these.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Robert writes, “You don’t know me. I’m an avid listener to the podcast and the advice you’ve given to listeners since its inception has been incredible. It’s been such a pleasure and honor getting insight into the industry from you two and the fact that you both generally seem like standup guys makes things even better. I was recently hired by [big company] and started my first job as a staff writer on [big television company’s] show. I’m only on week three but I had to reach out and tell you that your guidance and advice has been absolutely priceless in helping me find and navigate the choppy waters of executives, showrunners, and other writers.

“I use something I picked up from the show probably every day. So I guess the reason I’m messaging you guys is because I wanted you to know that you are making a difference and doing something good for every writer out there who listens. So from all of us little guys who will hopefully be the big guys, let me write something in all caps for emphasis. Thank you. All the best, Robert.”

**Craig:** Well, that’s just wonderful. I mean, that’s why we do what we do. I really do believe that we are training an army of people. An army. And then one day —

**John:** An army.

**Craig:** When we need them, [laughs] we will call upon them.

**John:** We will rise. They will rise. [laughs] But I think part of the reason why I like to have this conversation with you every week is that it’s just talking about sort of the way things are and the way you sort of wish they would be and finding that balance between the two things. And so, hopefully, Robert is entering into a job at big television show where he can both do the work in front of him but also chart a path forward for himself and for writers like him that is at least as good, and maybe better than what we have.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the dream is that as people start to enter the business and people in their 20s, so they’re new, that maybe a writer is sitting in a room with a producer and a studio executive and all three of them maybe have listened to the show and have heard some things about how to behave and how to be kind to each other and how to help each other in the middle of this very difficult process, and how to put themselves in the other person’s shoes.

And who knows? Maybe things will get better. Nah, probably not but that’s when we —

**John:** [laughs] Probably not.

**Craig:** That’s when we mobilize the army and then —

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And then, my friends —

**John:** That’s the goal.

**Craig:** Oh, buddy.

**John:** Yeah. So, we won’t know if it gets better but hopefully it won’t be any worse for it. And hopefully there’ll be some people who know not to do certain things because of what they’ve seen on the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And this is going to be a great sort of object lesson in this because you’re going to talk us through this idea about rewrites and the anatomy of a rewrite and sort of best practices both for managing it psychologically and for the words on the page.

**Craig:** So this topic was suggested by a listener and it kind of shocked me because I thought — I don’t think we’ve actually done this and it’s kind of crazy that we haven’t. So she wrote, “I know you guys have touched on the etiquette of reaching out to writers when you’re hired to rewrite, but I wonder if you guys could discuss the creative process of rewriting. Maybe it’s too broad of a question but I’m curious how your approach is different compared to starting from scratch or compared to each other.”

Excellent question.

**John:** Very good question.

**Craig:** How do we go about this thing called rewriting? So first thing’s first, we have to figure out what the actual scope of the gig is. And sometimes the first thing that happens is you engage in a kind of a triage. You take a look at the material and then you start asking questions of yourself and others. How extensive is the perceived problem? Is this something where we kind of need to go back to scratch and start from page one and write something new? Or is the problem that there are sequences that aren’t working? Is the problem that the story is in good shape but maybe this character needs help or the climax of the movie needs help?

The first thing that you have to do when you’re rewriting a script is to get everybody to agree on a diagnosis of the problem.

**John:** That’s really smart. I think it’s a question of what do I think needs to have happened. But more importantly, what does everyone else who has a stake in this think needs to happen and can I convince them of my vision, if possible?

**Craig:** And sometimes, you find that you’re the only one who thinks there’s a major problem. And that is a great indication that this is probably not a job for you. And that’s good information. I need to know if I’m a good match for what they think is required.

**John:** This happens to me a lot. And tell me if you’ve had this similar experience where I’ll get sent a script and I’ll read through it and like so, “Wow, okay, wow. I just don’t — I mean, I think I know where to start but like I’m starting really kind of from scratch.” And then I’ll get on the phone with my agent and it’s like, “Yeah, I think this is like maybe a week or two of work.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that mismatch, it’s just like it’s so fundamental that I know that like there’s no reason for me to try to pursue this project.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. And in fact, that becomes one of the initial questions. What’s the timeline here? They always seem to give you one. Sometimes, if something is in early development stages, there isn’t a timeline. It’s just, “Look, we really love this project. We would love for it to be something. We don’t like where it is now. What do you think? So sky is the limit. Let’s just figure this out.”

A lot of times, there’s a timeline. The movie will be getting made. Or more commonly, “We need to get this movie in a place where we can show it to this actor by this point or this director by this point because that’s when they become available.” So I always ask, “How much time is there to do this work?” Inevitably, when you hear about these jobs from studios, they’re going to lowball you on the time every single time.

It’s not because they want to pay you less. It’s just standard wishful thinking.

**John:** Yeah. In terms of time, sometimes they’ll come to you with, you know, “We think it’s two weeks work. We think it’s a significant amount of work but, you know, we want to hit the certain date or time.” There have been jobs where it’s like, “Literally we’re shooting this next week, so you have days to get this done.” And you’re getting on the phone with the crucial people right away. And that’s where you have to really be able to discuss exactly what you think you’re going to be able to do and be honest about sort of what’s possible and what’s not possible in the limited amount of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good rule of thumb. When they say it’s a week, it’s two weeks or three weeks. When they say it’s three weeks, it’s six weeks. When they say it needs a rewrite but it’s not a page one, it’s a page one. Just upgrade every single thing [laughs] because that’s what’s going to be true.

You do then have this new challenge, which is you’re coming into a process that pre-exists you. When you start something new, you sell an original or you’re the first person on an assignment, a team is assembled and starts to gel. And you have time to figure out who’s in charge. “See, I know he’s saying he’s in charge but I think she’s really in charge.”

When you come in on a rewrite, that team is there. And you need to figure out pretty quickly who the real boss is. And just as important, you need to figure out how things went wrong before because they did. That’s the one fact for sure you know coming in on a rewrite.

So there was a problem. And the problem may entirely rest with the writer. More often than not, it’s a combination of wrong writer for the project and then problems with the process. As much as you can, if you can try and clear the mines off the field before you start marching through it, you’ll be in better shape.

**John:** And this is a mistake I’ve made before where I would come in to a project, it was a page one rewrite. We were starting over from scratch. And, you know, I had forgotten that like, “Oh, that’s right. They’ve actually been through this all once before.” And it wasn’t until I was like four meetings in on a project and one of the producers said something that was referencing the previous draft. I’m like, “Wow, you still think we’re making that movie that was that movie, you know, six months ago.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I had forgotten that there actually ever was something before because it was such a fundamental rewrite. And so, clearing the field is exactly the right idea. But even if you get all the mines off the field, you have to remember that they’ve fought a war before you even got there.

**Craig:** That’s right. And there are going to be areas that are emotional for them. In the way that for us, when someone casually says, “You know what, why don’t we just get rid of that line?” And you look at that line and think, “Yeah, fine.” Or, “You know what, why don’t we just get rid of that line?” You look at that line and think, “But that’s the line that I wrote that made me love this. That’s the line that made me feel proud to be a writer.”

We are attaching emotional weight to something that can’t bear it and shouldn’t have to bear it. Well, they do the same thing. So they’ve had fights. And when you come in and you sit in that room, just be aware when you say something like, “Well, I just have no idea why Joe is being mean to Sue.” That’s not motivated. You are taking a side in an argument that’s happened. Somebody is getting angry [laughs] and there’s nothing you can do about it except to be as impartial as possible. It’s not like you wrote it. So, you get that benefit.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. I find those conversations I’m always trying to phrase the possibility of what the next thing is going to be rather than crapping on what is there right in front of me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you can acknowledge that things aren’t working but don’t try to be specific about like, you know, this was a mistake or a fault or a problem. Rather it’s like, “Here are the opportunities for how we can get to this that we all want to get to.” Always talk about the movie you want the make, not the script that’s on the page.

**Craig:** And with that in mind, when we are asked to rewrite something, part of what we need to accomplish is rekindling the spark of the thing that got them all excited in the first place. Somewhere before you showed up, people got excited and they fell in love. And then something went wrong.

So, yes, you can say, “Look, here’s what isn’t working here but here’s what could be working.” But you need to recognize that once there was love. And you have to figure out what that is because what you love about it needs to connect with what they love about it. That’s how your movie will get made. That’s how your version of this will get made because, and this is maybe the most controversial thing I’ll say about rewriting.

Rewriting is not really the right word for what this is. When we say we’re rewriting, that’s like an employment term. We’re writing. Because, look, when we write something, we write a draft and then we rewrite our own draft. Fair. But when we’re rewriting somebody else’s work, it’s the first time for us. It’s not a re anything. It’s new for us. It’s a new write.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So the rest of the world can call it a rewrite, but it’s a new write. And as part of a new write, and this goes directly to the question, you have to be concerned about all the things you’d be concerned about if it were not a rewrite. That is, theme, character, narrative, tone, scenes. All the things that you bundle up to fall in love with, you need to bundle those up into this because it’s new to you.

**John:** Absolutely. There have been jobs where I’ve come in where I’ve just done incredibly surgical craftsman work to fix one little thing. And those I was literally just applying my skills to a small little bit. And they never felt like my movie.

But if I’m going in and doing a real draft, that is now my movie and I have to think about it on a fundamental level on answering all those questions. What does this movie mean to me? Who are the characters to me? What are the voices? And really start from scratch. That’s no slam on the previous writer. That’s just, you know, the process. It’s how you write a movie is to write it from the inside out.

**Craig:** No question. In many ways, when we take on what’s called a rewrite, what we’re really doing is adapting in the way that we adapt a novel. So I get a novel, I read the novel, and then the first questions I have are, “How faithful am I going to be to this novel? What parts of the novel should I keep and what parts should I not keep? What did I fall in love with? What’s great but probably not right for a movie? How could I change the ending to make it work better with the beginning in a movie?” You know, all those things.

Or should I touch nothing and just really do what the book — all those questions are the questions I ask when I get a screenplay because I’m adapting it. That’s how I think of it. I’m adapting it into a new work. Yes, there are times when you’re only there for a week or two and that’s not adaptation. You’re literally writing lines. “Give us five lines for this.” Or “Write a scene that does this.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when you are working on something that’s lengthier, for instance, I don’t know about you but even if it’s not a page one, and when we say page one, we mean we are keeping the rough idea of the prior movie, prior screenplay and just starting over. Even if it’s not that, even if it’s kind of a half a “rewrite”, I start a new document in my software. I can always go back and take things from their file and put it into mine. But I need to do the thing that I do when I’m writing, which is I imagine what’s the opening image, what’s the first thing, what’s the first person, what did they say, what does this mean.

I go through that same process. How do you approach that?

**John:** Exactly the same way. So anything where it’s a fundamental rewrite of something, you know, I guess a new write of something, I do start with the blank document. And then I bring over the stuff that’s actually working really well and I’ll look for the stuff that’s great. And if there’s stuff that I don’t need to rewrite, I will happily keep every little bit of it.

You know, the original writer made choices and often those choices work terrific. And if I can make those same choices, I will make those same choices. So I’ll make the same choices of especially character names. If those character names are right and those characters feel like the right characters for the story, they stay. If the locations and settings are the locations and settings that we feel like we want to make for this movie, all that stuff stays.

So often, it’s really the storytelling. It’s the order of how things are happening. It’s all the new stuff is what I need to do. And so, a lot of what’s in that current script I shouldn’t even try to bring over. And if I find that if I just try to rewrite within that other writer’s original document, it’s going to just feel weird and forced because I’m trying to park in too tight of a parking spot. I’m trying to make my stuff fit into their stuff rather than just make my own movie.

**Craig:** And it just won’t work. It’s important to acknowledge that there are times when, as part of our adapting choice, we are taking things from that existing script and porting them over because they’re consistent with our vision of what this is supposed to become. But it’s just as important to note that you need to give yourself room to be the writer that you are. You need that room. There’s no other way for you to express yourself freely and interestingly.

And after all, they didn’t hire you to squeeze little new things in between the existing stuff. They hired you because of your voice and your expression. So you have to essentially approach it as an honest broker but give yourself the room to write your version because that’s why you’ve been hired.

**John:** I think I’m very mindful of it. It’s like I won’t change something just for the sake of changing it. Something will change because I need something different to make this movie work. And I need to get from this place to that place in a different way. Or the way this works in my brain is different than the way it works in the previous draft. And that’s okay. I don’t feel a responsibility to anyone as much as the audience. Like, what does the movie want to be, and it’s my job to sort of be a conduit to getting us to that movie.

**Craig:** Well, that sort of brings me to some basic dos and don’ts because you’ve outlined a really good one. And I guess we’ll start it as a positive thing. What you do want to do is be an impartial judge. There’s no honor in saying I obliterated the other writer. And similarly, there’s no shame in saying I preserved the stuff that worked.

I think sometimes people that have a rewrite assignment feel like, “Well, they’re paying me money. If I just take this scene over then it’s cheating,” it’s not cheating. They don’t mind that. They don’t care. What they want is a movie that works. And believe me, you’re going to new write plenty of stuff.

Similarly, don’t be squeamish about what you have to do to get there. The greatest gift you can give the prior writer is a green light. And the deal is this. And there used to be a lot of strife between writers over this stuff, less so now because I think everybody’s been on both sides of the coin enough.

That writer got fired. They didn’t get fired because you got hired. They got fired. They’re done. Their script will not get a green light. Those are facts. Yours might but you need to give yourself the freedom to do what you think needs to be done to get there. So you can’t operate in fear and you can’t misinterpret respect for another writer with a preciousness about what they did, nor can you misinterpret my duty as a writer with, “I got to get rid of everything they wrote.” You just have to aim towards what’s going to get this movie made.

**John:** And I will say that my relationship with some of my favorite writers came because I was being rewritten by them or I was rewriting them. And we had that conversation when the handoff happened and we were grownups to say like, “I know that I’m not going to be the person to get this movie made. Maybe you can be.”

And when you approach it that way, like please take care of my child and see it to, you know, the safe shores of moviedom, that can be a real gift. And when you can have that conversation openly and honestly with the person who’s going to be writing next, that is a terrific joy because you get to first explain all the stuff we said before about who the stakeholders are, where all the bones are buried and sort of, you know, you guys know sort of what went wrong because something obviously went wrong. But something went right. And to sort of get to know what was it that was so fantastic that sort of got this whole process started.

And that’s true, I’ll say because, you know, she’s our podcast Joan Rivers. My first conversation with Aline Brosh McKenna was about this kind of situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And neither of us was particularly excited to be on that phone call but it was a good phone call to have because it made it clear sort of what was really possible with this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes people will say, “Do you really do the thing where you call the prior writer?” They don’t believe me. And I just, yeah, I do it. I do it. I don’t do it if there’s been 20 writers because then it doesn’t matter. But, yeah, I mean if there’s been very few, absolutely. Of course I do it. And it always works.

**John:** Yeah. Sometimes I’ll do the even more awkward thing which is when I’m being rewritten, I will reach out to go to that writer who’s replacing me. And that person is usually terrified that I’m reaching out.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But I assure you, I’m only doing it because I want them to succeed and I want them to know sort of what things are really happening. And I will say that with the advent of Twitter and social media and just general accessibility of emails, it’s much easier to make that conversation, that connection happen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was very hard in the days where I had to go through their agent and then it’s like, god, this is awkward for everybody. But it doesn’t have to be awkward for everybody now.

**Craig:** No, it doesn’t. It’s just a nice collegiate thing to do. It always helps. Some other dos and don’ts. Don’t change the character names unless you have good reason. That’s something you already mentioned. What’s good reason? I mean, I just don’t do it if I don’t have to.

Even if I don’t really like the name, I just don’t do it because, eh, it just feels cheap. You know, it just feels cheap.

**John:** If there’s some fundamentally bad or confusing choices, I will change a character’s name. Like there have been scripts that I’ve gotten where like two characters have the same first letters of their name and it actually is just genuinely confusing —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Then I will do it. But I’ll always think twice about doing it because I don’t want to be the guy who just changes names to make it seem like it’s a different character when it’s not really a different character.

**Craig:** Yeah. You change names if there’s a gender change. You change names if there’s a nationality change. You change names maybe if there’s a racial change or a class change. But, you know, if it’s the same person, don’t just go, “Ah, I just hate Denise. I just hate that name. It’s stupid. She’s, you know, Sophie now.” Don’t do that.

**John:** There have been situations where I’ve gone in on a rewrite and the character who was taking the place of that — taking that function was so vastly different than the character before, it was helpful to change the name just so that there wasn’t the baggage of that previous character being there. But that’s honestly one of those situations where you’re changing it almost as much as changing the gender.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s just fundamentally different characters serving the same function that I don’t really consider that being changing the character’s name. I put a different character in that place.

**Craig:** Right. That’s a different thing. So if you have, you know, a script where somebody is married and you say, “Look, the character of the wife is just not working at all. I propose an entirely different character.” Then you’re not renaming that character, you’re making a new character. That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really more about like, come on, why did you change his boss’ name? [laughs] It’s the same guy. He doesn’t even say it that much.

**John:** Here’s a good litmus test. If you’re changing all the names and mostly their dialogue is staying the same as it was in the previous draft —

**Craig:** Then you’re a dick.

**John:** You’re probably making a dick move.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’re a total douche. Similarly, another douche move, don’t think about the arbitration. It’s not a common thing, but every now and then somebody will tell me, “Well, you know, I just took this job and I’m going to be rewriting this thing. I wonder if I’m going to get credit.” I’m like, “Stop. Just stop.” It’s like, you know, when they bring a reliever out in the middle of the baseball game, as he’s walking to the mount, he’s not wondering like, “Well, let’s see, if this works out, who’s going to get credit for winning the game? I mean he went six innings but I might go three.” Forget it, just do your job. Just do your job. Don’t worry about the arbitration. Later on. [laughs] it will happen one way of another.

**John:** But, Craig, I will admit to myself and to you and to everybody listening to the podcast, there have been jobs where I’ve gone in for where I just know from the start, there’s just no possibility I would ever get credit. In some ways, that’s really liberating, to not even have to think about sort of like — I don’t have to think about the future. I can only just think about this work in front of me and doing the best work that gets this movie made. And that’s actually kind of liberating too because it frees from the burden of possibility and wonder and indecision. Like I know for a fact there’s absolutely no chance my name will be on this. And that is sometimes really good.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me that is the ultimate expression of not thinking about the arbitration because you don’t want credit. You’re not there for credit. There’s never going to be an issue. If there is an arbitration, you’re going to say, I don’t want it. Those assignments are nice sometimes because you get to feel like a ninja.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nobody will know, you know. I like that. A couple of other dos and don’ts. Don’t blame the prior script for your current problems. If you are rewriting something and you’re struggling, the last thing in the world you want to do is to say, “Well, you know, the script before me — I mean all this stuff.” You know, you took the job. Shut up and fix the script.

**John:** That’s why you have the job.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s probably the reason why you’re doing this job, is because the script had problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll tell you a little story without names. A little blind item story. So once I was hired to write something and then someone was hired to rewrite it. And that person, I heard from a reliable source, said well, you know — when the people were unhappy with his work, he said, “Well, I mean look what you gave me.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** I just filed that away.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then when he was fired —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I was brought back. And then —

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** There you go. It’s not a rational, supportable argument to make. If you take a gig to rewrite something, you’re saying you’re paying me and I can help, not you’re paying me and, “Well, yeah, but the script is bad. And he — ” Shut up.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. If you’re taking only easy jobs, you’re not really doing your job.

**Craig:** No. No. And also, if you take — it doesn’t matter whether it’s easy or hard, [laughs] you took the job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. Stop blaming the other script. Lastly, do be a calm voice. This is one of the few times in our business where we actually begin with a good hand because everybody is nervous and upset and something hasn’t worked and in you come to save the day.

You may not end up saving the day. But at least in this early moment, you have a good hand. People are looking to you. And this is the time to project back confidence and coolness. Nobody is blaming you for what’s there because you weren’t there. So as best as you can, try and be a soothing presence. You don’t want to sew panic. You don’t want to come in and say, “All right, so you guys — I’m going to be rewriting this but I go to tell you, it’s in bad shape. And I know that you need it for six weeks from now. And there’s just no way. This is going to be bad because still — because this is — ” No, no, no, no, no. Don’t take the job then. [laughs]

**John:** No. Don’t take the job. Run away.

**Craig:** Don’t take the job. Just you got to come and say, everybody, it’s going to be okay. I got this.

**John:** Yeah. So the advice we’ve just given you is I think really good advice if you are the writer who’s being brought in to work on a project that is not crazy town. And so if it’s like, this is a movie that’s going to be made or is it that, you know, it could be made but you’re the person who is going to get it into production.

If you have a movie that is speeding down the tracks at 1,000 miles per hours, some of the stuff may not apply quite as much because you’re on an insane trainful of explosives. And so we have friends who are working on those insane trains full of explosives. And I think you can aspire to the kind of things we’re about here. You can certainly aspire to be calm, you can certainly aspire to be gracious and generous and never trash the earlier stuff and be the hopeful problem solver.

But sometimes you’re just going to be the person who’s like chugging through pages and emailing them in because they’re going to be shooting them in two hours and it’s just crazy town. So I would say, if you are in one of those situations, just know that — just do the best you can and be the best, most generous respectful writer you can be, but also know that you’re in a war and it’s a war to sort of get this movie made.

**Craig:** You know, when you were talking about that, it occurred to me that one of the things that trips new screenwriters up is that they don’t understand that there’s one name for job, screenwriter, there’s five different jobs that —

**John:** Yeah, you’re right.

**Craig:** It’s the weirdest thing to say, yeah, you know, the same person that sits down and creates an idea and writes 120 pages and invents a world is the same person that has three hours while they’re on a plane to fix dialogue that’s being shot six hours from now. And then when they land, they got to get to a set and rewrite something to bring the budget down. Two different jobs, but often times, same person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you just need to be able to shift those hats around as you go between the various kinds of rewriting.

**John:** Yeah. And I would just say, don’t confuse those two roles and don’t try to be that crazy, mercenary person when you have, you know, three weeks or you have, you know, time. The gun is not always aimed at your head. You don’t always have to act like the gun is at your head and that it’s always a crisis situation. Most times, it isn’t that. And most times, you have days or weeks to get the stuff done and being that calm, cool presence is really crucial. I want to make sure I’m offering some sympathy to the writers who do find themselves in just those nutso situations.

Reaching way back so it’s not anything shooting right now, but like the first Charlie’s Angels had a bunch of writers who worked serially and so I know that each of those people who’s coming in was coming in to just crazy town. And so for them not to reach out to me individually to get my feeling on the script, that is totally cool. I knew what they are going into. How I met the Wibberleys is they were brought in do the second Charlie’s Angels and we had that great phone conversation and it was so useful because it wasn’t crazy town yet.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. You just have to kind of suss out, am I one in the line? Is this is a mill? You know, some of these movies turn into like, what I call, a weekly mill.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where they just start paying people’s weeklies one after another after another. Less so now in the 2000s, more common — it was the —

**John:** At some point, they got — the studios got really smart and they would make all services deals for writers who they thought could carry it to the finish line. And so then they would pay a flat fee to these writers and keep them as indentured servants on these runaway productions.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I think they also started to look at the quality of the patchwork of seven different writers on a movie and think, eh, big ticket items, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not quite knitting together. So yeah, but if you’re one of a procession, nobody cares. Everybody gets it. But if you’re not, yeah sure, give a call.

**John:** Give the call. All right, our next topic — this is something that occurred to me because it occurred to me this week is I just finished up a script that is hopefully a script that I will direct at some point in the future. And one of the things I needed to do is figuring out like, well, how much would this even cost? And so I went to a line producer friend who is fantastic and I asked her if she would take a look at it and figure out for me how much this might cost.

And so one of her first jobs is to figure out a production schedule. And so I want to talk through what a production schedule is and sort of what is involved in figuring out how long it takes to shoot a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, good idea.

**John:** So production schedules, the reason why you need to do it first is that your budget is so dependent on how many days it will take to make a movie. That’s probably the single biggest factor in how much a movie costs is how long it will take to shoot it.

**Craig:** Right, shooting days.

**John:** Shooting days. Time equals labor and labor equals money. And so if you are at Sundance Film Festival and someone raises their hand and says, “How much did the movie cost?” Everyone will shutter because you’re never allowed to ask that question. But what you’ll hear people ask is how many shooting days did you have? And people will happily answer how many shooting days. And shooting days is a useful proxy for how much the movie costs.

When I’m talking to a friend, he says like, “Oh yeah, we’re shooting it in town. It’s 30 days.” Like, wow, you are racing and that budget is much lower than I would have guessed for that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, the amount of pages that you can shoot in a day vary wildly, so, you know, television they’ll sometimes shoot all the way up to nine pages in a day. But they’re shooting certain kind of material that can be done that way. For feature films, big studio movies, page-and-a-half to three pages a day is about the normal thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Some pages take three days to shoot because it’s an action sequence and, you know, some pages take — you can get four pages done before lunch because it’s two people talking on a bench.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re doing it as a oner. So that’s what a line producer can kind of help figure out. But overall, yeah, if somebody says, “Oh, how many days did you shoot?” “42, 45.” Oh, it’s average. Okay, it’s typical. “How many days did you shoot?” “30.” Fast. “18.” Oh my God. “79.” Whoa. [laughs] You know, you —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Work around. I always just work around 50, seems like — that’s sort of the —

**John:** 50 seems like just a solid, you know, studio feature.

**Craig:** Yeah, 50.

**John:** And so Go was a movie shot in town, shot in Los Angeles and was 30 days. And that’s become sort of my benchmark sort of like it’s not a total indie, but it’s not a big studio feature either and so I sort of keep that as my threshold.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Nines was also about — it was 22 days and that’s not a crazy amount of time for a small indie feature. So talking with this producer, I sent her over this script, but I also sent over a list of kind of assumptions. And this is a helpful way for her to think about the schedules she’s trying to build.

So some of the assumptions that are useful for her to know. Which scenes do you think are practical locations versus sets? And the difference is when I say sets, that’s stage work. Those are sets that you’re building in a black box to do certain things. And that can be really useful for anything with visual effects, you can sometimes move a lot faster on sound stages. Cheaper movies tend to use a lot more location work, but also expensive movies use location work, too. You can get production value by using real locations and not having to build things.

If you look at most television shows, they have what’s called in days and out days. And in days means that they’re on their standing sets. They’re on the police precinct headquarters. They are at Central Perk in Friends. Those are the days they’re shooting inside the studio and that can be a huge difference for a line producer is just figuring out your schedule.

**Craig:** It’s kind of remarkable how much sets cost, just to build — because it’s not like they’re building a real house. I mean you can’t live in it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But it costs a lot, like just a wall costs a lot.

**John:** So to help people figure out like what is a set and what’s not a set, in the movie Go, almost everything is a practical location. So we’re in Todd Gaines’ apartment, that’s a real location. It’s a real apartment off of Western.

But there are certain things we had to build sets for because you couldn’t do it in a real location. So an example is Simon sets a hotel room on fire. That hotel room — the inside of the hotel room had to be a set because we had to have fire control there and be able to light it all on fire and put it all out.

There’s a sequence where Ronna tries to flush these pills down the toilet. We had to build that bathroom and the toilet because the real location wasn’t big enough. And it’s just actually very hard to get flushable things and make a bathroom big enough. Bathrooms are sort of weirdly a thing you end up building a lot because they’re hard to control.

**Craig:** Right, you can’t fit equipment into a bathroom. I mean more than anything, how do you shoot inside a bathroom?

**John:** Yeah, walls are your enemies.

**Craig:** Right. So on sets, walls can fly in and out. And this how you get stuff done. That’s half of the time you’re doing stuff like this is because of that. Sometimes you’re doing it because you can’t find something practically. Sometimes you can, it’s just too expensive or arduous. There are always — I mean in the end, they’re always trying to decide what’s going to be the most efficient way to do something in terms of time and money. And there are times when you get jammed and you have to build something you wish you didn’t have to build. But, you know, hey, look at it this way, at least, it’s cover. Every now and then, you need somewhere to go if it’s raining.

**John:** Yeah. And so that idea of rain cover becomes crucial specially later on as you’re budgeting to figure out like, what happens if it rains. And so Big Fish was a movie we shot in Atlanta. And it rained all the time. And so the crew could be out on location, it starts to rain and they could suddenly pull back to our sound stages which was built in these warehouses and shoot these interior scenes. And that was because it was cleverly constructed in a schedule that there’s always stuff inside that we could shoot if we needed to.

The next thing we’re talking about with the producer is locations and which locations in the scripts could we shoot at other places? So you may have experience with this with like your Hangover movies and also with Identify Thief, you had to decide like how much flexibility is there between going to the real places and faking it.

**Craig:** Well, so much of it comes down to budget. There’s also a general feeling of, well, why are people coming to this movie? This is one of the bummers. You know, everybody that writes a screenplay imagines in their mind the place. If they’re going a good job, the place is its own character, it has a vibe, it has a feeling. And a movie like Identify Thief which is a road trip, the terminal points of the trip are really important. And then if you have a travel movie like The Hangover Part II, which takes place in Bangkok, good luck faking that. You’re going to Bangkok.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s the point, you know. Now, on Identify Thief which cost, I don’t know, what fraction of Hangover II — I think it cost I think $30 million or something like that, all in. The original plan was that the road trip would be from Boston to Portland. I liked the idea of taking the Northern route because I hadn’t really seen that travelled in a lot of road movies. It was just a different look.

**John:** Yeah. I saw your movie and they didn’t take that route.

**Craig:** [laugh] No, they didn’t. So the initial suggestion from physical production, so at a studio, physical production is the department that handles budget-making and all the rest of that. So their suggestion was, what if it was from Miami to Orlando? [laughs] I kid you not?

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Then they expanded to Miami to Atlanta. And I was like, “Look, guys, Miami to Atlanta is a day. You can do that in a day. Forget Miami or Orlando. That’s not a journey. That’s just a day. That’s like saying, ‘Oh my God, we’re going on a road trip from Los Angeles to San Luis Obispo.'”[laughs] It’s like who cares?

So when all was said and done, they’re like, “Look, fancy pants, we’re shooting this movie in Atlanta entirely for tax reasons and budget reasons, so figure it out.” And what we ended up doing was starting the movie in “Florida,” which was not Florida. We faked Florida, you know, so we shot Georgia for Florida.

And then the other area was Denver because Denver is — I mean —

**John:** It’s generic.

**Craig:** It’s just generic. I mean that’s the thing, it’s like a generic skyline. People in Denver and people in Atlanta, I’m sure, looked at this and went, “What?” Everybody else was like, “Yeah, okay, I guess that’s American city.” I hate it. I mean I hate, hate, hate it because it just cheapens the movie.

And what happens is when people watch movies like this, they don’t realize it necessarily but they’re quietly going generic America, did they not care? No, no, no, trust me, there were fights and fights and fights. We, making the movies, care very much. The people spending money on them, they’re a little more calculating. And look, hard to blame them. They’re like, people aren’t showing up for the awesome cinematography of Portland. So yeah, we’re faking it for Denver. And that’s basically what happened.

**John:** And so that conversation starts right at the scheduling thing. So this is the email I sent through to the line producer said, “These are the locations that I think are important. There’s a section of the movie that takes place over there. I would be fine shooting that some place different all together. So I can tell you where it’s actually set, but I would be happy to move that somewhere else. Also, I’d be happy to break the interiors from the exteriors if that becomes a helpful thing, too.” So I just let her know where the flexibility was.

I had to tell her which characters were minors and how old they would be, not miners with a hat, but like young people —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that would affect how many days they could work. And I’m sorry, how many hours they can work per day. And that could be a real factor. And so for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, those kids were really young. And in the U.K., they could only work like four hours a day or something. And so they had to build their whole schedule so that they would have the Oompa Loompa stuff to shoot in the afternoon. So they have kids in the morning on stage, and their whole schedule is built around the Oompa Loompa numbers. And so that becomes a factor.

**Craig:** And don’t forget, you’re also paying — you’re paying for teachers because they have to go to school when they’re working.

**John:** Yeah. And the last thing I had to tell here was how much of the things that’s felt like visual effects in the movie were meant to be visual effects and how much was supposed to be done on the day in camera.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because it’s really expensive to be in production. But post-production is really expensive, too. And I wanted her to know what I saw being a visual effect and what I saw not being a visual effect. So those are some of the assumptions I had to send through in email with the script so she would have a sense of how to being scheduling this movie.

**Craig:** Well, I mean it’s all magic to me how they do it. I mean I know that it’s not magic [laughs], but — yeah.

**John:** So Craig, you’ve never had to physically make a schedule —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** For a movie, have you?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So I had to do it. I had to do it in film school.

**Craig:** Oh my God.

**John:** And so for my master thesis, we had to actually do a breakdown of a schedule. So I will talk through what that process is. Not that a writer will ever have to do this herself, but to know what the thing is really kind of magic. So back in the day, this is back in film school, this is, you know, the 90s, this was still done by hand. So you’d have these cardboard strips and in order to get the information to put on those cardboard strips, you’d go the script, carefully number each scene, you’d number each character and which characters were in which scenes, not just the characters who speak, but the characters who are present in a scene because those are the actors we’re going to need for those scenes.

Then you would measure how long each scene was. And you measure in eights. Craig, do you know why eighths of a page came to be?

**Craig:** No, why? Why did they do that?

**John:** You know, I’ve heard different explanations but I think it’s essentially, it’s very easy to conceive of half a page and when you get to a quarter of a page, like, “Oh yeah, I can see a quarter of a page.” And then at an eighth of a page — well, an eighth is about as short of a scene as could possibly be. And if you actually look at a script, an eighth of a page is essentially a scene header and like two lines of action.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s an eighth, and so that was a small as they decided they ever wanted to make a portion. But every scene is measured in eighths which is just nuts, but that’s just how it’s done.

**Craig:** It’s so annoying.

**John:** We all know as screenwriters that because of how we write screen description, you know, a scene that’s three pages long could be really short in terms of actual screen time or could be incredibly long in terms of screen time but we still measure in pages and eighths of pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s one of the first things I do when a movie is about to go in production and they issue that schedule. I go through and I’m like, “Hmm, let’s see. Let’s see if they’re right,” [laughs] and they’re almost right. But every now and then, I’ll go —

**John:** Yeah, they are.

**Craig:** “Hmm, you know — ” and usually, what it is, is that I think to myself, they’ve said this is two days, I bet it’s one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, they’re being fooled by the fact that it’s five-and-three-eighths, you know.

**John:** And back in the day when this was on cardboard strips, you would literally pad the strips. So you’d, basically, on each cardboard strip, there’d be a different color for whether it was day or night, interior, exterior. On that strip, you would write and code whether it was interior or exterior, who is in the scene, there’s like coding for which characters are in the scenes, where the scene is and sometimes you would even squeeze in like a description of what the scene was. You would have all these strips of paper of cardboard that were flexible enough that you could slide them into a binder and literally slide them up and down. And then you’re trying to group them together to maximize and sort of optimize how you’re shooting this movie.

So now this is all done with software. But it still mimics the way that it was done when it was cardboard strips.

**Craig:** You’re so old.

**John:** I’m so old. It was really fun to do it. I was really happy to do it once because, as you know, Craig and I both wrapped sign posts or wrapped strike placards once.

**Craig:** We did.

**John:** And I was really good at wrapping stuff with duct tape. I’m really good at like physical crafts and it felt fun in a very physical craft kind of way.

**Craig:** [laughs] Do you remember what mine looked like?

**John:** Mine were prettier.

**Craig:** I mean I have always feared arts and crafts class. When I was in school and I would get to arts and crafts, something would always go disastrously wrong. And you think like how could it go that wrong? All you had to do was just assemble the Popsicle sticks. You just had to glue the things.

I remember, we were given an assignment. Collect some local foliage, bring it into school and we’ll make a winter scene on construction paper. And so people brought in little bits of things.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And they glued them on and made little winter wonderlands. And I was like, “Okay, so I just gathered up a bunch of vegetation without any concern [laughs] whatsoever, sat down, started gluing it on. It all smelled. There was something about like the weeds I had picked up. Like they were smelly weeds.

**John:** Oh no.

**Craig:** It wasn’t marijuana, it was just nasty weeds. And then I thought, “Well, this looks terrible. I know what I’ll do. I’ll cover it in glue because glue is white and it’s like snow and it will look nice.” But when glue dries, it’s clear. So what it ended up being was just this horrendous pile of nasty street mulch covered in a crisscrossing of clear crust.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That is how I do with arts and crafts.

**John:** Like it could be art. You never know.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s a possibility you made art.

**Craig:** No, it could not be art. It was not art or a craft. It was neither.

**John:** So the line producer has all this information now broken down into strips, either real strips or in this case, virtual strips in her software. And there’s a specialized software. Movie Magic Scheduling. What’s the big one? I’m not sure what people are using these days. But then she’s trying to arrange a schedule. And she has a bunch of competing goals. And that’s where it becomes less craft and really an art and really knowing how to make a movie.

So she’s trying to keep her days together and her nights together as much as possible because it’s really brutal on a crew when they have to be shooting — it’s actually impossible for a crew. Like a crew can’t shoot all night and then turn around and shoot the next day.

**Craig:** No, you’re protective — like what it is, like 12 hours in between or something?

**John:** Yeah, that’s called turn around and so that’s, you know, going from night to day, you have to have time off. And so what you’ll find is that usually, let’s say, your schedule runs from Monday through Friday, you’re shooting five day weeks in town and you’ll start shooting early on Monday morning and then your schedule will drift a little bit later and later over the course of the week. And so your start times will be later and later each day until you reach what’s affectionately known as Fraturday, which is where you have a really late call on Friday and you’re essentially shooting into all of Saturday night and then driving home on Saturday morning. That is a pretty common schedule.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But you would never start your week as nights unless you were shooting nights the whole week.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then there are the dreaded splits. So splits are when you’re going to be shooting half day, half night. Nobody likes those.

**John:** It’s just the worst.

**Craig:** It’s just terrible. It’s just terrible.

**John:** Craig, have you run into situations where you’ve had to shoot interior at night, but as daytime? So I’ve been on movies where if you had to like blast —

**Craig:** Oh my God, are you kidding me?

**John:** Bright lights in through the windows to make it seem like it’s daylight but it’s, of course, it’s like three in the morning?

**Craig:** Always. And it’s so distressing to your circadian rhythm. You have no idea what’s going on. I mean people talk about how casinos don’t have clocks. And I mean a sound stage is the ultimate casino that way. It’s a huge windowless box where no noise or light can penetrate.

So yeah, you’re shooting on a set. There’s some huge ass light on a thing shining through a window blasting light and it’s — I’ve shot scenes that were morning scenes in the middle of the night. And morning is the worst because it’s like, your brain is really getting fooled because it’s the color temperature of morning light. You’re like, I should be waking up. I want to go to bed. This is all wrong. It’s terrible. It’s really bad for you. It’s bad for your health.

**John:** It is really bad for you, I agree. And for me, it’s always that I will be on the set and it would seem like daylight and then I’ll go out and realize like, “Oh, that’s right, it’s three in the morning.” Like it’s just night and it’s cold and you hear the crickets. And like, wait, what, what am I doing? And then the worst is always like driving home like as the sun is coming up, that’s just the worst feeling.

**Craig:** Well, it’s also a real problem because there have been deaths and no doubt there have been quite a few accidents that were less than fatal, but still serious. It’s just dangerous. I mean the way we shoot movies is so — and I understand why there was that flirtation for a while where big directors were drifting towards all mo cap, you know, Spielberg did Tintin that way and Zemeckis disappeared for a while and only did those, you know, like Beowulf and The Christmas Train. [laughs] I don’t know the actual name. I want to call it The Christmas Train.

**John:** Polar Express.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s called The Christmas Train in my house. Because you could actually have a normal day. You could show up, you shoot your time and you go home. It doesn’t matter what time the movie — if it’s a night scene, you’re still shooting it during the day. And morning, you shoot — and you have total control. And I understand that because the way movies are actually made is just distressing. It’s brutal. Every time I do it, every single time, I will stop at some point and think, there’s got to be another way. Nobody would believe that this is how we do this. It’s so dumb and inefficient. But I think it’s the way and I don’t think there’s another way.

**John:** I don’t know if there’s another way either. So this smart line producer, she is creating the fantasy optimized schedule and the optimized schedule will have less brutal situations like that. It’s only over the course of the production and things go wrong that the schedule has to shift and you run into those jam situations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she’s trying to optimize for not moving between days and nights or being smart about that. She’s trying to finish off all the work at a location because you don’t want to have to go back to a location. Once you’re done — ideally, you want to shoot all the scenes at a location and then move on.

But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe you want to have, if it’s a lot of scenes at a house, an interior house, maybe build that as a set and then it becomes your cover set for rain or for other disaster so you can always shoot something there in case something goes wrong out in the field.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, also you want to avoid the dreaded company move, which is when you have two different locations on the same day and they’re not right next to each other. So you’ve finished shooting at the first location and everybody piles all the crap up into their trucks and drives over to the new thing, just a day killer.

**John:** Yeah, that’s terrible. She wants to finish all the work with one actor, ideally, to the degree it makes sense you want to finish all the work with one actor. So if an actor has six scenes total in the movie and it’s possible to schedule those scenes together, you will try to schedule the scenes together so you can “shoot them out”. And there may be reasons why you can only get that actor if you can compress all his days down to a certain window of time.

There may be just budgetary reasons why. It can sometimes be very expensive to drop an actor and pick up an actor. There’s weird union rules about sort of how you do that. So sometimes you have to have an actor who just sits around a lot and that’s just the nature of it. But ideally, you try to get through all of an actor’s scenes in one chunk if possible.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** She will ask me and I will tell her how important it is to stay in sequence. So there are movies in which characters go through physical transformations where you actually need to shoot them in order. Most movies are shot wildly out of order. But for both performance reasons and for just like logic reasons, sometimes you have to stick closer to order.

In my movie, The Nines, Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy have wildly different hairstyles in the three different sections. They look very different. And so we had to shoot those basically in sequence. Once we started one of those chapters, we had to stay in that chapter and we couldn’t mix and match things. And that meant that we had to come back to some locations three times which was a production nightmare, but it was just the nature of the movie.

**Craig:** They hate stuff like that. They hate it.

**John:** They hate it.

**Craig:** They hate it.

**John:** The last thing which she may need to factor in is maximizing the use of certain equipment. So let’s say you have a techno crane, like a really fancy crane and there’s like three scenes that need it, there may be a reason why you want to board those together so that you can rent that thing for one day and be done with it.

Or if you have like a boat sequence or there’s some reason why there’s special equipment you need that might drive sort of how you’re doing stuff. Even like a camera package like, let’s say, you have a high speed camera that’s used for these two moments, you might want to put those two moments together so you don’t have to rent this incredibly expensive camera rig for, you know, two different days over the course of your shoot.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s a lot.

**Craig:** Yes, no. I mean —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Everything that they’re doing is to save money, everything. Sometimes they come to you and then they’re like, “Is there any way we could not have him wear his hat? It would save us $400,000?” [laughs] It’s like sometimes they have these little things and you’re like, “Wait, what? Of course not. Yeah, no.”

**John:** Wait, yes.

**Craig:** Burn the hat.

**John:** Burn the hat. You don’t care about the hat, whatsoever. Like who said there was a hat? Like there’s —

**Craig:** I mean exactly. But then sometimes they come to you and they’re like, “Is there any way they could all be 20 years older and in one room?” No.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They can’t.

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Yeah, sorry, the multiple classrooms of second graders can’t be one group of 25-year-old post collegiate — no. Yeah, they — it’s amazing the things they ask. And I’m always shocked by how much you — sometimes you can save so much with tiny little things. So I don’t blame them for asking.

**John:** No. So usually, a screenwriter will not have to get super involved with a schedule, but when it comes time to make a movie, you will see what that schedule is. And what I find so helpful about it is like it’s that first glimpse of like, how will this be made as a movie? It’s that first snapshot of this is what it’s going to take to move from what I have on the page to actually going into production. And you see it like, “Oh my God, that is so much more than I thought,” or like, “Oh, that’s actually much more achievable than I thought.”

In the case of Go, it was my first moment of horror/revelation, like, “Oh my God, I wrote a script that takes place entirely at night and we’re going to be outside at night for like 20 days.” And that was terrifying and it made me rethink [laughs] how I use night in movies that I want to be part of because it is just a debilitating condition to be outside at night all the time.

So I’m looking forward to what she says with this script and what the schedule turns out to be because it will be my first indication of how possible it will be to make the movie I have on the page and then she may be able to come back to me with some suggestions for the things that are making this crazy and impossible are these things and think about whether any of those things could change and where the flexibility is because it will make your life happier and easier.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly.

**John:** And on the subject of time, we went way over time. So once again, we’re going to kick to the curb two other great questions that came in from our listeners. But we will get to them in a future week.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’ll be real brief. My One Cool Thing is called Escape Room LA, the Detective. Escape Room LA is one of these outfits where you go downtown and they stick you in a room and they lock it and it’s full of puzzles and you have to solve all the puzzles to find the key to get out and you have an hour.

And the detective is one of the themes they have. I believe it’s their hardest one. And I did this with my wife, Melissa, and Alec Berg and his wife, and Megan Amram and her boyfriend, and David Kwong, and Chris Miller of Lord and Miller. This is a powerhouse team. I just want to point out, of this team, three Harvard grads, two Princeton grads, and a Dartmouth guy, okay.

**John:** So all idiots.

**Craig:** All idiots and we failed.

**John:** Oh, Craig.

**Craig:** And we were so — and it’s actually heartbreaking how we failed. We were flying through this thing. Like the record I think was something like 48 minutes. At minute 50, we had just one thing left to do. So we were close to even the record. And then we just died on the shoals of this one problem. And once it was revealed to us at the end, we were like, “Oh my God.”

**John:** So I think we skipped over a little bit of the set up of what this actually is. So they are locking you in a room and you’re trying to get out of the room?

**Craig:** And it’s full of puzzles. So all the clues are leading to other clues. They are leading you to unlock things. And the puzzles are all different varieties, there’s logic puzzles, math puzzles, there’s Morse code puzzles. There’s so many different ways. So you have to solve something like probably 13 or 14 major problems to finally unlock the thing that gets you the key to unlock the room.

And so much fun and it’s designed to be for anywhere up to 12 people. We were a little small. I think we were eight. But that’s a good —

**John:** But I have a hunch that 12 people wouldn’t actually necessarily improve it.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Maybe like that one more man problem actually like slows you down.

**Craig:** It will. And I think — yeah, I imagine every group of 12, one person is going, “Yeah, I’m lost, I’m going to sit down.” [laughs]

**John:** So Craig, after we wrap, you could tell me who the dead weight was in the group and how it slowed you down.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ll throw many people under the bus.

**John:** Sounds good. My One Cool Thing is a television program called You’re the Worst. It’s on FXX. It’s actually on its second season, but I just last night watched the pilot from the first season which is on Hulu. And I really enjoyed it. And I would highly recommend people watch it just because it’s such a fascinating look at how you do the anti-romantic comedy and sort of how you take the tropes and play against the tropes.

So the show is created by Stephen Falk. And the natural comparison is with Catastrophe which I think was a previous One Cool Thing which is another great show you should watch on Amazon. Like Catastrophe, weirdly, it involves this one American and this one British person. They’re falling in love. They seem like a terrible couple. Catastrophe takes place in London. This takes place in Los Angeles.

What’s so different about You’re the Worst is the characters in it seem like they are the sidekick characters in other romantic comedies. They’re like the hyperactive, terrible like slutty people in the other romantic comedies. Like you would have the upstanding, like the Meg Ryan, but then she has her slutty best friend.

**Craig:** The wacky friends.

**John:** Sort of the slutty best friends.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. It’s nicely done and does some interesting things and there’s moments where I worried it was going to just be pushing buttons to push buttons. But it actually manages to find some humanness underneath there. So again, I’m basing this off of just watching the pilot. But I would recommend people watch the pilot because it’s a very great exercise and sort of like thinking about how you take the tropes of a genre like a romantic comedy and really play with them.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll put that on the list.

**John:** Craig is not going to watch it. Craig won’t watch anything.

**Craig:** Put it on the list of things I won’t watch.

**John:** It sounds very good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Who is off ordering t-shirts right now. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did the outro this week. Thank you, Matthew. He got a new cello so you’re hearing his new cello. If you have a question for me or Craig Mazin, we’ll eventually answer your questions, ask@johnaugust is the email address you want. Craig on Twitter is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust. We are on iTunes, so subscribe to us there if you wouldn’t mind and leave us a comment if you would like to.

We also have all the back episodes available at scriptnotes.net. If you sign up there, you get the whole back catalog for $2 a month. And you can find those episodes in the Scriptnotes app which is available both for iOS and for Android on their respective stores.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [You Must Remember This: MGM Stories, Part 1](http://www.vidiocy.com/youmustrememberthispodcastblog/2015/9/14/mgm-stories-part-one-louis-b-mayer-vs-irving-thalberg-ymrt-56) guest starring Craig Mazin
* [Joss Whedon, Drew Goddard & Lionsgate Get $10M ‘Cabin In The Woods’ Suit Tossed](http://deadline.com/2015/09/joss-whedon-drew-goddard-cabin-in-the-woods-lawsuit-lionsgate-chris-hemsworth-1201526687/), and [Substantial similarity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substantial_similarity) on Wikipedia
* [Here’s why The Rock’s new HBO show, ‘Ballers,’ can legally use NFL logos without the league’s consent](http://www.businessinsider.com/why-the-rocks-ballers-can-use-nfl-logos-without-consent-2015-6) on Business Insider
* [Streisand effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect) on Wikipedia
* [Movie Magic Scheduling](http://www.ep.com/scheduling/)
* [Escape Room LA](http://escaperoomla.com/)
* [You’re the Worst](http://www.fxnetworks.com/shows/youre-the-worst/episodes) on FXX, and [on Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/youre-the-worst)
* [Catastrophe](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B00X8UKEEQ) on Amazon Prime Instant Video
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))