Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/scriptnotes-holiday-show-2015).

**Malcolm Spellman:** This is Malcolm Spellman. I’m a guest on Scriptnotes this week. I swear a lot, so don’t listen to this podcast in the car with your kids, or the old folks in your family, or they’ll hate you. Craig and John August made me say this. Merry Christmas.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 228 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and…

Audience: Things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** We have some pros. Yeah. Craig, welcome to our third holiday special I believe.

**Craig:** If you say so.

**John:** All right. So, people who are listening at home don’t have a sense of where this is. So, can you do some really great scene description so people reading at home get a sense of what this movie feels like?

**Craig:** Interior.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Generic auditorium. Stadium seating. The crowd is — the theater is packed.

**John:** Which is nice, yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone looks vaguely writerly. Not too attractive, but not horrifying, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** A lot of J.Crew and Gap.

**John:** Yeah. I would agree so.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the two hosts are at the front of the stage welcoming their audience to what’s going to be a really great night. So usually on the podcast we can have like one guest, sometimes two guests. These live shows, we can cram up to four guests into an episode, and that’s what we’re doing tonight.

We should just start with our first guest because —

**Craig:** No banter?

**John:** Well, we can banter.

**Craig:** That was it. Okay, first guest.

**John:** That was our banter. We just started. We didn’t plan this at all. But we should start with our first guest because he’s probably been our most popular single appearance guest —

**Craig:** Disturbing.

**John:** In history.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this gentleman, he first appeared in Episode 185. He is a producer on the television program called Empire. And he’s the one and only Malcolm Spellman. Malcolm Spellman is right here.

So, Malcolm, you have your name big up on that screen right behind you. How is that? How does that feel?

**Malcolm:** I’m winning.

**John:** You’re winning? How does it feel to have your name in the credits every week on a television program like Empire, like a huge hit?

**Malcolm:** Fifteen years working, three credits, two of them on Empire is good. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It does feel good.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, it took a long time.

**John:** So, welcome to our show here. And part of why I wanted to have you here is because I have so many things I want to ask you about because I have just no sense of what your opinion is going to be. And so I have a list of like random topics. It’s like, “Ask Malcolm about this topic and it’s going to be great, is my hunch.” So this is our last episode we’ll be recording before Star Wars comes out. So I want to know, what does Malcolm Spellman think about Star Wars?

**Malcolm:** Hey, I’m really, really excited about it. And, you know, it’s one of the most important movies for me. it’s a visceral memory, you know what I’m saying? They fucked up the last three, so I’m primed up. [laughs] I’m primed to be there.

**Craig:** They did fuck up the last three. [laughs]

**Malcolm:** They did. They did.

**Craig:** They, by the way, I like that we’re saying they, like it wasn’t one guy.

**Malcolm:** So, no, I’m excited to get in there. I think it’s the most important. And similar to Marvel, it is a mythology for movies. Like it’s super specific. Everyone’s imitating whatever but it’s the most important one out there.

**Craig:** Did you see this thing in WIRED? They said something like, “We will not live to see the last Star Wars sequel. There are going to be so many of them, assuming this works,” that’s kind of incredible. Like it’s never going to stop now.

**Malcolm:** Do they know your relationship to number nine?

**Craig:** My relationship?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was my idea. That?

**Malcolm:** With Rian, but —

**Craig:** Oh.

**Malcolm:** It was funny like when — he’s friends with Rian Johnson and when that —

**Craig:** Wait, you’re friends with Rian Johnson.

**Malcolm:** Yeah, but he’s better with you all, you know —

**Craig:** Okay.

**Malcolm:** You guys. You know how it is.

**Craig:** He’s Swedish. A little Swede.

**Malcolm:** I’m his black friend. [laughs]

**Craig:** You are. By the way, you literally are like totally —

**Malcolm:** Everybody is. Everybody. [laughs]

**Craig:** Like from top to bottom.

**Malcolm:** But I remember when it came around, I actually was with him before any of you guys. He was taking me to a Godzilla screening and he was blushing and levitating. And then you realize when you’re talking to him — again, that’s why I’m saying about, important to the mythology, there isn’t anything else out there like it, you know what I’m saying? And, yes, so they’re going to keep pimping until it’s done.

**Craig:** Don’t you think like if Star Wars had been, instead of a movie it had been written down as a story 2,000 years ago, we all would be going to Jedi church.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s actually better than the Bible. It’s more exciting, I think.

**Malcolm:** Definitely better than scientology. [laughs]

**Craig:** Scientology makes no sense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Scientology, they literally make you pay like you want to see a sequel, you have to pay for like extra —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is. It’s mythological.

**John:** They want you to pay for the sequels on Star Wars movies but like you get to experience it for free and like —

**Craig:** Wait, wait, we have to pay for those? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. There’s no Netflix equivalent of scientology, I believe. You can’t just sort of like, you know, buy once and watch it forever.

**Craig:** You can’t get a subscription to jump right to Xenu. You got to really work.

**John:** Yeah, again and again.

**Craig:** Meanwhile, we’re literally in the middle of scientology world — I mean, they could, right?

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Absolutely. Or like Stuart and his parents, like you can actually like just get their subscription to Netflix and not actually pay for it yourself. [laughs]

Can I have a show of hands here in the audience —

**Craig:** Stuart!

**John:** Who is watching Netflix or another streaming service using their parents’ login?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Wow. See, I had a hunch. We have a connected audience.

**Malcolm:** That’s why we’re broke. [laughs]

**Craig:** Alan, we’ve got a problem.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’ll talk about that when you’re —

**John:** Yeah, indeed.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So it’s great that people are watching these shows but they’re not —

**Craig:** They’re sponging.

**John:** They’re sponging a bit.

**Craig:** Off their parents.

**John:** Off their parents. How dare they.

**Craig:** It would mean I’d have to talk to my parents.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s totally worth the subscription.

**John:** Malcolm, I have another question if you’re ready for another question.

**Malcolm:** I’m ready.

**John:** Okay. So we were talking about the Marvel Universe and so now they’re busy getting ready to do Black Panther and they have a director on board —

**Malcolm:** Ask me the black questions, right? [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to ask you the black questions. I want to know your opinion on —

**Malcolm:** It’s going to define my career. [laughs]

**John:** I want to know your opinion on hiring a sort of targeting, you know —

**Craig:** It’s the black question. It’s happening.

**John:** Targeting minority filmmakers to make the one minority character in a franchise.

**Malcolm:** I think it’s all part of a growing narrative, you know what I’m saying? So obviously, this discussion of diversity and black folks and black filmmakers particularly has become more and more relevant and important. And because of shit like Empire and Black-ish, whatever, and we’re winning, they’re like, “Oh, fuck.” And you look at something like Creed and that’s immediately where you’re like, I hate to say this, no white people were going to think of that story, you know what I’m saying? They just wasn’t because they don’t — none of them was going to imagine what the fuck is Creed’s son doing. And that is why you need —

**Craig:** I’m sorry. That is undeniable. There isn’t one of you white people in here that would have thought of that. It’s a fact.

**Malcolm:** It didn’t happen in how many years.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. It was always like you were closer to probably like Rocky’s — like remember when he had a robot? The robot would have happened first.

**Malcolm:** Absolutely, absolutely. And that’s, I think, a great example of why Marvel doing this, whether they’re following a trend, I’m sure the reason they’re doing it is because they don’t want to get shit because, you know, they didn’t have any black filmmakers involved with the project. But the ancillary benefit of that will be that you get this perspective which is the most potent voice in pop culture.

And we forget that because we haven’t been able to do our thing in this medium. And everything else, we kill it and make it hot for everybody. And now they’re about to discover, like you look at what happened with Creed and there’s a good chance Coogler will do the same thing for Black Panther, like add something new and vital —

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** To the shit. So I was —

**Craig:** I mean, I honestly think that maybe there is a part of them that thinks we better do this to avoid some kind of pity.

**Malcolm:** I agree.

**Craig:** I think though, I mean, don’t they just smell money? I mean, isn’t that — you know.

**Malcolm:** They’re mostly scared.

**Craig:** Really?

**Malcolm:** They were just going out to all the black folks. They were like, “We just don’t want to get yelled at.”

**Craig:** Oh, because if we make Black Panther, we can’t make it with a white guy actually.

**Malcolm:** That’s right. And what they will discover is, “Oh, shit, this dude had some original ideas that no one else was going to have and gave it a freshness, you know what I’m saying, and they’re going to win with it.”

**John:** Right. So you are our TV friend. So John Landgraf who runs FX Network had a famous quote this last year. He said like, “We’ve reached peak TV. There’s too much television.” As a person who makes television, is there too much television out there?

**Malcolm:** It definitely feels like that, but it’s growing. There’s more people getting in with people more — like the real players are just emerging. Like Google wants to get involved, you know what I’m saying? [laughs] And SoundCloud and Spotify.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** I just had this big meeting with the digital folks at the agency and there are ways like you know how we were coming up — the last five years whatever was feeling like how is anybody making money off this shit, right? They now know these people are making money. And they were saying Apple has this really detailed complex layout on how, like they know who’s going to pay this much in the first window. In the second window, who, for free, will let you feed them all kinds of ads and stuff.

I just watched a standup comedy show on YouTube and I spent $1 on it, right? I think once that gets cracked open, there’s going to be a whole — like once you can start billing a show to your cell phone bill for $1 or whatever, there might be so much more money out there than anyone can fucking imagine.

**Craig:** I think there is.

**Malcolm:** That all this shit can be supported.

**Craig:** I think there is. And what I think about sometimes when I look at the landscape now and I see, I don’t know, hundreds of channels just through the wire and then God knows how many if you include just things that are on the Internet, and the fact that people are still making money and then I think back, once there were three. How much money were those — oh, my god.

**Malcolm:** I know.

**Craig:** They must have been making so much money. It’s like the fact that they ever canceled anything is insane.

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why would you even cancel it? Don’t show anything. It doesn’t even matter.

**Malcolm:** No. They were making so much money it made them stupid. They were like, “Fuck, let’s don’t keep all this money right here.”

**Craig:** It’s so true. It’s so true. It made them stupid and it also made stupid people think they were smart because they thought it was them. No, anybody, anyone, you could have shot someone and put their dead body in a chair and NBC would have made money in 1963.

**Malcolm:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** That’s the new primetime special. It’s called “The Dead Body in the Chair” and it’ll get good ratings.

What is TV though? So you had a meeting with these digital folks of your agency. What are they even talking about with TV? Because like the digital stuff used to be like, “Oh, that’s the extra bonus. Like it’s the webisodes for The Office.” But now, like what’s the difference? I mean, if you’re making money somehow, that’s — if these people who are in the audience who are aspiring writers, what do you tell them? Should they be trying to write for, you know, Fox like you are or should they be trying to write for, you know, YouTube?

**Malcolm:** I think, well, what it feels like is right now, most of these companies are still thinking — like Netflix and Hulu, they’re still called digital companies even though they’re doing traditional formats, right? But that shit is about to change. Like I think it’s about a year or so away. I’m working with some folks on trying to change it. And once that happens, I think it’s going to all happen organically, right? I think the big gap right now in digital that I see, I almost don’t want to say this shit because I’m like, man, fuck, I might get rich off of it but — [laughs]

**Craig:** Well, if you say it in front of me, I will absolutely get rich off of it.

**Malcolm:** I think like what hasn’t happened yet is people like us, right, who are doing well and creating — when I say high-level, whatever, right, I’m saying the shit people pay for. Whether or not you guys like the shit we work on or whatever, that’s what I mean by it, right. The people who are creating high-level content are all like, “Yeah, fuck, digital could be awesome but I’m not passing up.” I know what your quote is, you know what I’m saying, I’m — you’re like —

**Craig:** How?

**Malcolm:** Because you’ve been bragging motherfucker. You be like, “Malc, guess how much money I just made.” [laughs]

**Craig:** I forgot about that. That’s how.

**Malcolm:** So there’s no way they’re going to really get you, right? Not yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** But what’s going to happen is there’s going to be people like me who aren’t quite where you’re at but make more money than the average person going there. And if I go in there and do high-level shit, and when I say high-level I mean the same level what you’re getting on FX and HBO, but it’s whatever format I want and it’s funded, that’s when you’re going to start getting to the shit where it’s like, well, what do you do with a 15-minute pilot, right? You put it on fucking YouTube and if you got hot motherfuckers in it, it gets 30 million fucking views and if you’re charging people $1, you’re like, “Oh, fuck,” you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** We should mention that there may be some language in this podcast.

**John:** There’s a possibility, so —

**Craig:** If you’re in the car with your kids.

**John:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** But I think that’s the new frontier. I think there’s going to be some people like me who are going to be willing to, for creative freedom and the potential for huge upside, pass up — because, you know, I’m in that weird level where it’s like I’m not getting Mazin/John August money, but I’m getting enough money that it might make me feel a little bit scared to go in here and do this shit for free.

**Craig:** Right.

**Malcolm:** But if I do it — you know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Well, but the upside to it, I mean there’s ownership opportunities —

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**Craig:** That happen at those levels. I mean, I think there are a lot of people that make a lot of money that it’s guaranteed money, it’s employee money, but then who do take these risks. I see it all the time. And then, you know, some people can do both. They can say, “All right, well, I’ll do a job but now I’m going to try something that’s mine.” And I think that’s really exciting. I mean, there’s more opportunities now than ever before.

I mean, for people out here thinking about television, I mean, would it be fair to say from your perspective, as somebody that’s, you know, now at the top of the heap of a network which is still a thing, that it doesn’t make any sense to write for a network or write for a not-network but rather to write something that’s exciting and see who grabs it.

**Malcolm:** By the time you get done, yes, that will be a thing. That’s going to be the big breakthrough. Like if your fucking idea had to come in at 17 minutes to be perfect and awesome, people are going to start reading that shit and there’s going to be people like me out there or whoever who are like, “Oh, I know what to do with this.”

**Craig:** It’s amazing how long the structure has lasted from —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just the fact that there’s a season that’s based on when they used to roll new cars out. That’s why we had the whole, you know, September — and then the 30-minute/hour format is back from old days.

**John:** It’s arbitrary. Malcolm, what you’re describing sounds amazing but it doesn’t sound like a thing that just a writer does. It sounds like you are going to create stuff. And so it’s not just like writing a script. It’s not writing a spec for somebody. You actually have to make the thing that’s going to be — like the reason you have ownership is because you’re going to make the final product.

**Malcolm:** That’s right.

**John:** You’re just not writing the script, so —

**Malcolm:** Yes.

**John:** It’s taking ownership of the whole process. And that’s a lot to ask of somebody. People just want to like throw Courier around on a page and that doesn’t sound like it’s enough to be that new kind of television thing.

**Malcolm:** But I think it’s going to be move so quickly that entities will exist by the time — I mean because you’re looking like how fast does it take to mount this stuff, is entities will exist that know what to do with it. Meaning, if you just write some stuff in Courier and the people I’m working with have now got four or five projects going that are proving to be lucrative or whatever, I can’t write everything, you know what I’m saying. You’re going to look around and be like, “Oh,” you know what I’m saying? I think exactly what we grew up doing is going to happen. And the digital space is just going to be way more free and open.

**John:** We’ll hope. Tonight’s theme is basically all creators who created TV shows. So we’re going to have answers to some of these questions for people who are doing the kind of stuff that you’re talking about doing. And we should get to it, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. So we have to get rid of Malcolm is what you’re saying?

**John:** We have to get rid of Malcolm.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Malcolm, thank you very — you’re going to come back at the end.

**Craig:** All right, Malcolm.

**John:** Malcolm. Our next guests are the co-creators — well, Malcolm, he’s like family. He’s not a guest. Are the co-creators of Another Period. We’re going to show a clip from this but I want to set it up because it’s even better if you sort of know the setup on this. This is about the Bellacourt sisters. They are trying to enter high society. They have invited Helen Keller over to boost their standings on high society and they’re trying to impress the Marquis de Sainsbury who’s keeper of the social register. And so keep this all in mind as you watch this clip from Another Period.

**Natasha Leggero:** And it takes place in 1902.

**John:** Oh, 1902. You’ll see that by —

[Video Plays]

**Female:** More cocaine wine?

**Male:** Yes.

**Female:** A little bit more won’t hurt.

**Male:** Any lady in Newport society needs to know how to hold her liquor.

**Female:** Well, I can hold my liquor better than anyone.

**Female:** Me, too.

**Male:** Oh, my goodness, that sounds like a challenge. Shall we see who can drink it the fastest?

**Female:** Oh, yes. Yes. Helen, other person. Let’s race.

**Male:** One, two, three go.

**Female:** Wait. I have to tell Helen we’re doing a contest.

**Female:** Ahhh. You are all piles of trash. I am a mountain of gold. I won. I took the egg. Argh.

**Female:** I won, you dumb haybag. You don’t count.

**Female:** Second place. Why am I always second place?

**Female:** You’re not second place. Lillian’s second place. I’m first place. I won.

**Female:** No one asked you to play, whore. You’re fat. Other person? Other person? I’m the one that taught her to communicate. Without me she’d be nothing. You’re nothing without me, Keller. Nothing.

**Female:** I love you, Annie.

**Female:** That’s a Ming vase, you deaf bitch. We only have 17 of those.

**Female:** I wasn’t totally sure what was happening. But I knew I wanted to stab someone.

**Male:** Let go of my sister. You heathens. What is this, Baltimore?

**Female:** Intruder.

[Video Ends]

**John:** Can we welcome up Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome.

**Riki Lindhome:** Hi, guys.

**John:** Good lord, how did you make — this show is — oh, I love your show so, so much.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**John:** And, Craig, have you watched the show?

**John:** He doesn’t watch anything.

**Craig:** Nothing.

**Natasha:** He’s been sending us emails all week with his favorite lines.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** I’m like, “No, this is my favorite line.” So I don’t watch shows, as you guys know, and John said, well —

**Natasha:** That’s a thing? You just don’t watch shows? [laughs]

**Craig:** It’s not like on purpose. I’m just lazy as fuck and —

**John:** He plays Fallout 4. That’s basically —

**Craig:** I do. I play Fallout 4. Look, it started bad where I was talking about crossword puzzles with Natasha and she was like, blech. Now we’re talking about Fallout 4, it’s like —

**Natasha:** No, you were talking about crossword puzzle like chat rooms.

**Craig:** That’s cool. I don’t know why anyone’s laughing. So I started watching this show and I’m obsessed. I mean, honestly, in a fair and just world, they would be talking about the show the way they talk about Mad Men. I’m serious. I’m dead serious.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Because I have this thing having gone through in my life times where I was working on pure comedy. Just comedy that is completely pure. It is the hardest thing to do. In fact, I want to —

**John:** Yeah — !

**Craig:** That’s fucking pathetic. [laughs] So I want to actually start by asking you guys a question about process because — so your show is, I mean, I guess you could say it’s loosely a parody of Downton Abbey but not really. It’s kind of its own thing.

**John:** Can you tell us how you pitched the show? Because I mean, it’s so specific and the voice and the vision is so specific. What was the genesis of your show?

**Riki:** Well, we had a few glasses of wine. [laughs]

**Craig:** Cocaine wine.

**Riki:** No, just regular wine.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Riki:** Natasha and I, we decided we wanted to make something. I mean when —

**Natasha:** Yeah. You know, we had this idea for this like fake reality show about these like dumb idiots and then I had this other idea about this other thing that took place in 1902 and Riki was like, “Well, why don’t we combine them?” And so we did that. [laughs]

**Riki:** But we kind of knew the idea was too weird to pitch. And so we went out and made like a 15-minute short. We spent real money and made a real short. And there was actually a scene from the short in the pilot.

**Natasha:** And I had read a book about Newport at the turn of the century before they introduced income tax. Like 90% of the wealth in America was all in Newport, Rhode Island. So it’s like a really fascinating place. And if you go there, you can still like go to all these house museum tours and see the whole world there. And people were living like it was bananas.

**John:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** And it’s American history because everyone loves — you know, Downton Abbey, it’s not our history, so.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, I think it’s a brilliant choice actually because there’s something inherently funny about wealthy aristocratic Americans because Americans don’t really — it’s not like we deserve it, you know. We’re not nobility.

But I want to ask you guys about the relentless and exhausting nature of writing stuff like this because your show is, I guess it’s what, like 25 minutes, I mean when you take out commercial and stuff?

**Natasha:** No, it’s 20.

**Craig:** It’s 20?

**Natasha:** Yeah, it’s so short.

**Craig:** Twenty minutes is a lot.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because it’s 20 minutes, every page is like five or six jokes a page. But more importantly, you never get a break because nothing can be ever taken seriously in the show, that’s the magic of it. So there’s no point where anyone can just stop and be reflexive or —

**Natasha:** Nope.

**Craig:** I mean, how do you survive the pace of it, of writing it?

**Riki:** You’re making it sound so hard.

**Craig:** Maybe it was just hard for me. [laughs]

**Riki:** No. [laughs] I mean, we work really, really hard at it. I would love to say like, “Oh, it’s just natural and we just come up with this stuff.” But we, like, kill ourselves to make this show. We think about it from the moment we wake up to the moment we go to bed.

**Craig:** Right.

**Natasha:** But it’s also the rhythm of a show that’s inspiring to us. So we want to be doing something fast-paced and funny and finding the funniest people we can to try to make that happen.

**Craig:** The cast is amazing.

**Riki:** We got so lucky. And that was part of it is we had all the cast, we had their pictures at the end of the writing table and we would be like, “Okay, Brett Gelman is so hilarious. What’s the funniest stuff he does?” And we’d watch clips of Brett and we would write specifically for him and then it just makes it easier and fun.

**Craig:** That’s my part, by the way, if he croaks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Riki:** You’re Hamish?

**Craig:** I’m stepping in. Yeah, for sure.

**Riki:** Hamish, the outwoodsman?

**Craig:** yeah.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs] Slash abortionist?

**Craig:** Yeah. Slash Jew hunter. Don’t forget that one.

**Riki:** Yes, yes, yes. [laughs]

**John:** I would love to see the show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you shot this sort of presentation pilot. So it’s 15 minutes and is it sort of like the first episode that we saw? Was it like the pilot or just different scenes from the show? What did it feel like?

**Natasha:** We hadn’t really done any of the downstairs. We were just doing the upstairs. And then I think Comedy Central wanted to see more downstairs. And then we all got very inspired by the downstairs people because —

**Craig:** They are amazing.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Garfield.

**John:** Garfield and Chair.

**Riki:** Yeah, it’s —

**Natasha:** With Michael Ian Black and Armen Weitzman and Christina Hendricks and —

**Riki:** Yeah, Christina Hendricks is hilarious in the show.

**Craig:** She’s really funny. And you never know. Sometimes those people aren’t. Those people like dramatic actors —

**Natasha:** Those people.

**Craig:** The dramatic actors sometimes don’t fit in with that kind of comedy. And she does brilliantly.

**Riki:** She was so game to do anything. She had so much physical comedy. She was just totally fun.

**Natasha:** And I think she used to do comedy before.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**Natasha:** You know, or like in theater or whatever in college.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** So David Wain is on your show and is also from Children’s Hospital. He’s been a guest on the podcast before. But Children’s Hospital is a show that it’s like every episode is just completely brand new and there’s no continuity episode to episode. But you guys actually have a lot of continuity. So talk to us about figuring out how to be funny in an episode but also have arcs that sort of cross episodes. What was the plan? Did you know that Chair’s back story would be revealed in episode 6? What was the plan?

**Riki:** Yes. We map out the entire season. We have the luxury, I guess. Some people don’t like it but I think it’s a luxury to write the whole season at once before we start filming. And then we cross-board every episode. So we shoot all 10 episodes kind of at once.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Riki:** Yeah. So if we have an actor in two episodes or five episodes, we can shoot them out in two days or three days or whatever.

**Natasha:** That’s why it has to be kind of fast-paced because you have to be able to jump plot lines, if you have to. [laughs] Like figure out —

**Craig:** But it’s incredibly helpful, I would imagine, that you can — I mean, I guess part of it is you’re forced to by budget and all the rest of it, but that you know the whole season. That means you can go back. And I assume you do a lot of backwards, retrofitting, because it really does feel so well-machined. I mean, there’s so much craft in it. I’m really amazed by the show, I got to tell you.

**Natasha:** Oh, that’s so nice.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**Riki:** Thank you. We love it, too, but we’re biased, you know. [laughs]

**Craig:** Like I don’t believe your —

**Natasha:** No, it’s sweet. This is a very sincere, serious podcast. I love it.

**Riki:** But, yeah, we map out the whole season and we really think about every character and their arc and where they’re going to end up in episode 10. And then we have it, you know, just all up on our little board and then —

**Craig:** Sorry, I really love the show. That the character of Garfield is insane. Every character is either insane or so stupid as to be profoundly retarded.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** Or both. Your character particularly —

**Riki:** I’m both.

**Craig:** Is both profoundly retarded and insane.

**Riki:** Yes, and violent.

**Craig:** And violent.

**Riki:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** And yet, I actually managed to care. Like when Garfield comes back, I cared.

**Natasha:** Well, Garfield’s nice.

**Craig:** But he’s also crazy. I mean, he’s insane.

**Natasha:** Right.

**Riki:** I mean he’s best friends with a towel.

**Craig:** He puts the potato — yeah. And then the potato is like the new thing. Like that’s his new towel.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, you don’t have to see the show. You get it now, right?

**Natasha:** He might be the only nice person in the whole show.

**Craig:** Peepers has his moments. He is a man of honor.

**Natasha:** Right. That doesn’t mean he’s nice, though.

**Riki:** Peepers has his principles.

**Craig:** Yeah, he has principles.

**Riki:** I wouldn’t say he’s nice though.

**Craig:** Actually, he’s quite mean.

**Riki:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So can you talk to us about the music because one of the most striking things and the reason why I love the Comedy Central, the blip at the end is because you have like this sort of heavy, hardcore rap soundtrack underneath it all. So there’s obviously a Downton Abbey influence, the upstairs, the downstairs, the striving for society. But then at what point do you figure out like, oh, we’re going to have cutaways like on the Kardashians, we’re going to drip — nail drops throughout it. When did that come? Was that part of your presentation? Was it always in the script?

**Natasha:** I don’t know. We always kind of like saw it that way somehow and then we asked Snoop Dogg to do the credit.

**Riki:** Natasha did the Roast with him, so —

**Natasha:** And so he did it and so him singing the song, like it kind of made it feel this reality vibe that we wanted and —

**Riki:** It just made us laugh so much when we had the cold open and then it would go into this hardcore rap song. We were like, “That feels right.”

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Riki:** And so we just kept it going. And then when we had little bumpers at the end of each act, it’s like we just — I don’t know, it’s just funny, I think more than anything. You know, there’s no deeper meaning behind it other than that it made us laugh. [laughs]

**John:** All right. It feels like an incredibly challenging show to shoot. So is this shot here in town?

**Riki:** Yeah, in Silver Lake.

**John:** In Silver Lake, great. So —

**Craig:** Oh, I live really close to Silver Lake. So I’m just saying, if the guy dies —

**John:** If you need an extra in the background or a double.

**Craig:** Or if somebody kills him.

**Natasha:** It’s this old mansion in Silver Lake.

**John:** Right. And so, you’re basing out of there and you cross-board and cross-boarding means that you have all the scripts, you figure out what scenes you need and you’re shooting all those scenes with those actors no matter what episode they’re in.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** But do you just go mental? As actresses, do you go crazy with the responsibility of like, “Here’s what I need to do,” versus also, “I’m creating the show and responsible for the writing,” how do you balance all that?

**Riki:** Well, we have to work really hard. On Sundays, I memorize my dialogue for the whole week and I have someone come over and drill it with me so that I don’t feel, you know, like the last minute trying to memorize. So I have it down by the time we start our week. And then usually like two to five minutes before each scene, I’m like, “I need some time.” Like I need to just relax. I need to like be in a free space for a second. I can’t answer any wardrobe questions. I get no fires. Like someone else has to put them out in the next, like right before the scene. And that seems to help.

**Natasha:** That’s interesting because I feel like I use the energy of the stress and maybe just lash out as my character.

**Craig:** That makes absolute sense because your character — I mean, so your character is kind of a monster.

**Natasha:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** And your character is nuts and incredibly stupid. Her character can’t read.

**John:** Yeah.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s like one of the basic —

**Natasha:** But that was common in the turn of the century. They thought if a woman read college level books it would shrink their ovaries.

**Craig:** There’s also the constant referral to weird like late 1800, early 19th Century or 20th Century understandings of medical science. I mean, the scene where the tension — like Chris Parnell plays Dr. Freud releasing their tension with this fucking vibrator, it’s —

**Riki:** That’s from the turn of the century. There’s so much real stuff in our show you wouldn’t believe it. Like cocaine wine was real.

**Craig:** Cocaine wine was real.

**Riki:** Like so many things are real, but yeah, Freud masturbating women to relieve hysteria happened. And so, of course, we’re like, “Oh, let’s all get masturbated together.” I don’t know if he did a group session but —

**Craig:** Like, you know, the mom’s there with her daughters and —

**Riki:** As a family. [laughs]

**Craig:** As a family, right. It wasn’t enough. She needed like a dildo machine. [laughs] This brings to mind a question.

I don’t have to tell you guys that we live in a time where people get in trouble constantly. Not for massive violations of taste but minor violations of taste at times. You guys kick the door down. You light stuff on fire. You don’t care. This show, while it’s lampooning racism and sexism and classism, it’s also like parallel with it. It’s like making fun of it and it’s with it.

Has there been a lot of backlash? Are you getting in trouble or you good?

**Riki:** I can’t believe how little backlash there’s been. We have a rape scene in episode 2 where —

**Craig:** I know.

**Riki:** One of our male characters gets raped and we were like just waiting for the, you know, backlash. We didn’t get it. You know, everyone on Twitter has got an opinion, but like it wasn’t like a mass, you know, hundreds of people. You know, there’s always one or two people who say something but —

**Craig:** A mass, by the way, is not hundreds of people. It’s like 100,000 people.

**Riki:** Sure.

**Craig:** Like if you say smoothing about like, I don’t know, a female superhero character —

**John:** As an example, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, as an example, you might get a thousand people that hate you in the news feed. But —

**Riki:** Yeah. I mean, we had a puppy hanging scene.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. The puppy hanging scene is great.

**Riki:** There’s so many —

**Natasha:** Yeah, like at least they PETA people can come after us. [laughs]

**Craig:** Somebody just —

**Riki:** I know. We have —

**Natasha:** I mean, they’re desperate for something to talk about.

**Riki:** Your character dressed in Mickface which is making fun of Irish people —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Riki:** It’s white makeup with freckles and a red wig. [laughs] And she did an anti-Irish song in her pageant.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**Riki:** And nothing. I don’t know. People don’t seem to get mad at us. I don’t know why.

**Craig:** I also love how the show brings in —

**Natasha:** Oh, because we’re in those fancy costumes.

**Craig:** I know. The customs basically do it, right? Like that covers everything.

A lot of times, though, in the show they’ll bring in characters that are historical of the time, roughly. So her character’s former lover is Ponzi, the guy that invented the Ponzi-scheme. And he’s basically trying to get money. He’s a total cad. He left her at the altar. And he’s back and she talks about how she spent a summer with him making love when she was 11. And there’s a picture of Ben Stiller man with 11-year-old girl and she just like — no letters, nothing. It’s amazing.

**Riki:** Nothing. [laughs]

**Craig:** And you guys are bulletproof. I love it.

**Riki:** I don’t understand it.

**John:** Maybe it’s the period that may help you though because it feels like, “Oh, well, it’s a period show.” It’s like, of course it’s different mores for that time. Yes, you’re making a joke —

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** I be if you tried to do the same joke that was meant to be set in present day times, people would be less comfortable with it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think they’re just magic.

**Natasha:** Like when I started doing standup, I realized if I wore a dress and gloves I could be meaner. And people wouldn’t get as mad. So maybe that’s kind of part of it.

**John:** Can you talk to us about the difference between writing for yourself as standup and writing for a character that you’re playing or for all these other characters? Is the process of coming up with a joke, of coming up with how you would actually get that idea across different based on who’s going to have to say that line.

**Natasha:** Yeah. Well, it’s very collaborative, our show. And we really think about every person and what they would be funniest doing.

**Riki:** Yeah, this is not a show where the leads take the — or the writers take the best lines. Like we make sure everyone is funny. We will do our best to make sure everyone is funny. [laughs]

**John:** Do you have table reads before you shoot? Or is that even possible with the block shooting you’re doing?

**Natasha:** It’s not possible, but we do have them.

**Riki:** Yeah. It really —

**John:** All right. Yes. Yes and yes.

**Riki:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah, yes.

**Riki:** But it’s also not possible, but yeah, we do have them.

**John:** And talk to us about improvisation because it feels like it would be much harder to improvise in a show that’s taking place in this period of times where and it’s also so serialized. Characters can’t go off and just do anything. Do you do those, you know, random last takes to try to get other —

**Natasha:** There are certain actors that we let do that like Tom Lennon and Mike Ian Black and David Wain and Brian Huskey are kind of made to do, you know —

**Riki:** 1902 dialogue.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**Riki:** But most of us are not made to do that because we lose the affect. Or we’ll be like whatever or we’ll say something modern.

**Natasha:** You can’t say that. Like when she called her whore, it’s because her name is Hortense. Like you wouldn’t just call someone whore, right?

**Riki:** But Tom Lennon would be like, hot pudding, it’s a scandal. And you’re like, what does that mean? You know, you’re just like, okay.

**Craig:** Something like it was like butterscotch or scotch bucket.

**Riki:** Scotch frog hat.

**Craig:** Scotch frog, yeah, like what the fuck does that mean?

**Natasha:** He could do that for hours.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** Just act surprised in 1902.

**Riki:** Yeah. We said some line to him and he goes, “What Christmas?” And it just sounded normal. And we’re like okay. But I personally cannot improvise like that, so I don’t.

**John:** Where are you guys at with a second season? What’s going on right now?

**Natasha:** We’re writing it.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** So it’s definitely, it’s going. It’s going to happen?

**Riki:** Oh yeah, we start filming in January.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Just down the street from Craig.

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah, so —

**Craig:** And have you settled on all of the cast for the —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Settled? Settled on that?

**Riki:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No Jews? No, like a Jew character? Like a funny — okay.

**Riki:** I mean I don’t know if we’ve thought of it that way.

**Natasha:** Are you an actor?

**Riki:** We’re not like no Jews. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, I am. I am an actor, of course. I’ve never done any acting, but right now —

**John:** Yeah. Craig Mazin just grew this beard by the way. And he will shave his beard —

**Craig:** Why would I — no, no, this is very —

**John:** It is a period beard.

**Craig:** I just want to be in the show.

**John:** We want you to have 18 seasons of your show.

**Riki:** Thank you.

**John:** So please keep writing your show.

**Natasha:** Thank you.

**Riki:** Yeah, everybody watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. You guys really should watch it.

**Riki:** Maybe we’ll get more people to be mad. It would be nice to have a controversy because then it would get more attention.

**John:** Absolutely. So reference like green female superhero and you’ll get a lot of controversy. That’s our advice to you.

**Craig:** I’ve got in so much trouble. You don’t even want to know because I don’t wear dressing gloves. And boy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** You guys should all access your parents’ cable provider and put in the number and watch it on Comedy Central on their website.

**Craig:** Yes, you guys go home and do this.

**Natasha:** It’s not on Hulu anymore.

**Craig:** Another Period, awesome, awesome show.

**John:** Natasha and Riki, thank you so much for coming here.

**Natasha:** Thank you.

**Riki:** Thank you for having us. Thank you.

**John:** Craig has a mild crush as you can see on —

**Craig:** On the show.

**John:** He has a talent crush. We also have a bit of a crush on this next show as does a lot of America. It is a show on Netflix. It is called —

**Craig:** Oh, you don’t know?

**John:** I know what it’s called but I want to see if —

**Craig:** Master of None.

**John:** All right. And we want to show you a small clip of this program so you can see what it’s about.

[Video Plays]

**Alan:** I got to say, out of the 15 X-Men movies that I’ve seen, that was definitely top nine.

**Aziz:** Yeah, there was, like, 30 heroes and 40 villains. There are just too many people in these movies now. Text from my dad — “Please come and fix my iPad. Now it won’t stop dinging.” Does your dad always text you to fix stuff?

**Alan:** I don’t think my dad knows how to text. He also hates talking in person. He averages, like, three words a week.

**Aziz:** Our dads are so weird. I told my dad I got to call back on The Sickening.

**Alan:** Oh, the black virus movie? That’s great.

**Aziz:** Thank you. I told him. He’s like, “Uh, okay. Can you fix my iPad?” How about, “Hey, son, great work,” or, “Hey, son, I’m proud of you”?

**Alan:** I have — I have never, ever heard my dad say the word ‘proud’. It’s always like, “That’s it? So that’s all you’ve done?” Like, if I went to the moon, he would honestly be like, “When are you going to Mars?”

**Aziz:** Yeah. “Oh, Brian, you went to the moon? That’s like graduating from community college. When are you gonna graduate from Harvard, AKA, go to Pluto?”

**Alan:** I just feel like Asian parents, they don’t have the emotional reach to say they’re proud or whatever. Have you ever hung out with a white person’s parents, though? They are crazy nice.

**Aziz:** Yeah.

**Alan:** I had dinner once with my last girlfriend’s mom, and by the end of that meal, she had hugged me more times than my family has hugged me in my entire life.

**Aziz:** Yeah, dude, most white families, they’d be so psyched to adopt me.

[Video Ends]

**John:** All right. Let’s welcome the co-creator of this wonderful program, Mr. Alan Yang. Sir, congratulations.

**Alan Yang:** Thanks, man.

**John:** I remember talking to you, we were both wearing aprons. We were at this crazy meat-filled event where they were roasting things. And you’re describing the show that you’re going to make with Aziz. I was like, that sounds cool.

**Alan:** Yeah. I wear that apron everywhere, though. Yeah, so it’s been kind of a long time gestating and evolving since we came up with it, but yeah, it got made. [laughs]

**John:** It got made, congratulations. So when you described it, you said it was going to be an eight episode — sorry, 10-episode series for Netflix and it was all going to be in New York and it was going to be Aziz and sort of individualized stories. He said it was Louis-like. And it’s that but it’s also so much more. It feels like it’s such an amazingly 2015 show.

**Alan:** Yeah. You know, we put kind of a large priority on making it hopefully feel different and fresh and hopefully original too, you know. So we kind of have this rubric of, “Hey, if you could see it on another show, maybe push harder and do another topic or do it in a new way or make it stretch over a longer time period.” Just anything we could do to make it feel original. And we had this idea from a long time ago where any characters we wanted for the episode, just the ones that we needed, we would use. So we wouldn’t have the same repertory cast in every episode because you know in real life, you know, if the three of us are buddies, we still don’t spend 24 hours a day together. So like not every story I go through involves you and Craig.

**Craig:** John and I do spend 24 hours.

**John:** Yeah, it basically is that.

**Alan:** Yeah, so you can have an episode with Aziz and alt person or Aziz and his parents or whatever and you might not see Eric Wareheim or Lena or whoever.

**John:** Cool. Give us a sense of your back story because I don’t know sort of how you got — I know you’re from Parks and Rec, but I don’t know you from before then. So how did you get started in this?

**Alan:** Yeah. So I majored in biology in college and that was just a rocket ship to comedy, just like right into — [laughs]

**Craig:** I did that, too. I did that, too. Were you pre-med?

**Alan:** I wasn’t really anything. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and I loved writing and I loved comedy growing up, but that didn’t really seem like a real possibility, right?

I grew up in Riverside, California which is like an hour from here. And, oh, someone from Riverside, sorry about that buddy. [laughs] But yeah, so it’s just — I read a study that said it ranked all the cities in America in terms of how Bohemian they were by sort of a metric of how many people worked in creative fields or, you know, did kind of, you know, things that we do I guess. And number one on that list was LA because there’s a lot of entertainment people so they counted that as artistic for some reason. And the last place city on the entire list was Riverside which is crazy, which is like it’s an hour from here but I guess if you wanted to do something creative, you just get the hell out of here.

**John:** So you started at the bottom and worked your way up here.

**Alan:** Yeah. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s like that Drake song. [laughs]

**John:** Your life is a Drake song.

**Alan:** Yeah. So I went to school and, you know, I was doing biology and I kind of hated everyone. And I didn’t really like — like I felt like I didn’t fit in. But I found a couple of things I liked to do. And one of them was I played in a punk rock band which is really fun. And so I got out of the campus and was able to tool around. And I started writing for this comedy magazine. And the comedy magazine was called Harvard Lampoon.

**Craig:** Did you say Haverford Lampoon?

**Alan:** Yeah, it’s called a Howard Lampoon. I went to Howard University.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Alan:** No, it’s a —

**Craig:** That’s the best way to work at Harvard ever. I was working at…Harvard Lampoon.

**John:** I was in Boston and yeah.

**Alan:** Yeah. So it’s an oftentimes horrible magazine that is not funny at all, but there’s a lot of funny people there. And basically, all I wanted to do was hang out with funny people and be funnier. So I grew up, I was watching the Simpsons, and Seinfeld, and SNL, and Mr. Show and I was like, wow — when I started working on The Lampoon I was like this maybe is a job in some way. Like I didn’t know that it was a job.

So after I graduated, I moved out to LA and just started writing scripts and was broke and unemployed and trying to get an agent. So that’s how that started.

**John:** So my perception of The Lampoon folks who move out to LA is they basically like just load in a van and everybody moves out to an apartment and just start working together. Was that the experience?

**Alan:** The van part is not accurate, but what’s great about it is you just don’t feel so alone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** So you move out. And there’s not that many people on the magazine, so my year for instance, there were probably six writers or something, five or six writers. So yeah, a few of us moved out to LA and what you do is you move out here and you just don’t – you’re all broke together, right? So you feel less like a crazy person and, you know, I respect the hell out of everyone who does it and comes out alone because that’s really scary and intense and it’s a huge risk and that’s tough. But it was cool to have like a couple of buddies who could be your roommate or you could go have a beer with or something when you’re all struggling growing up.

**Craig:** I was struck you when you were talking, you were saying you grew up with The Simpsons and Seinfeld, so I’m guessing you’re quite a bit younger than John and I are, but the show has this really interesting ’70s vibe to it. And even like the credits remind me so much of like Woody Allen. So I assume this is intentional?

**Alan:** Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. You know, again, that was another thing where we just wanted the show to feel different. And one of the things we had been doing recently while we were coming up with the show is watching a lot of these ’70s comedies, you know. Hal Ashby, you know, obviously The Graduate, Elaine May, Heartbreak Kid.

And what was really cool when watching those movies was just the realism and how they let scenes breathe and how it wasn’t necessarily, you know, 100 jokes a page, like a lot of these sort of network comedies are.

**Craig:** I like those.

**Alan:** Well, yeah, those are great. Listen, like there’s no better show than 30 Rock, right? It’s an amazing show, but we just didn’t want to necessarily do that show.

**Craig:** Right. But you like that pace?

**Alan:** Yeah. It was like, you know, we have scenes where there are no jokes.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** We have scenes where there are ton of jokes. We have scenes that are a little broader. But for the most part, we were trying to do things that felt a little bit like a conversation that you might have with your friends.

**Craig:** Well, speaking of that conversation, there’s something really interesting. You know, so I’m watching, you know – I watched these episodes of your show and pulled out — like there were a lot of moments like this where I thought, I wonder if you and Aziz ever found yourselves in this weird dilemma where on the one hand, part of what the show is is presenting this perspective of what it means to be Asian-American in Hollywood and you’re sharing a unique perspective. That’s part of the unique voice. On the other hand, you don’t want to feel like, “Oh, now I’m representing four billion Indian and Chinese people and that that’s what I have to do.”

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like do you ever feel like, “Okay, we’re kind of ping-ponging back and forth between these two things. We want do it, we don’t want to do it.”

**Alan:** Yes and no. So that’s actually — that’s a very astute question because you do feel that way, right? You feel like, “Man, there is one show with an Indian guy as a lead like in the world right now?” [laughs]

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** Like this one, right?

**Craig:** So we can probably —

**Alan:** Yeah, so you feel responsibility be like, you know, you don’t want to — but the number one thing is we just want the show to be good, right? So you want the show to be good and this is a thing I actually talked about with my friend last night who’s half Asian and I’ve worked in really, really fun rooms and very, very open, very, very progressive like really, really fun places. I don’t think I’ve ever worked with another Asian writer. [laughs] You know, it’s like I’ve been working for 10 years, you know. So you’re always — so if it ever comes up — and you know on my last show on Parks and Rec, it was a very diverse room, you know, oftentimes majority women or at least half women which I thought was great.

But there were times where, oh, we had one black writer like my old roommate, Aisha Muharrar, was a writer there. And we had an issue where it’s like, “Okay, is this offensive and like, we have to ask Aisha?” Like you don’t want to ever put a person in that position, but you have someone who is black or someone who is Asian and you’re going to ask them. So it’s just a tricky place.

And what we ended up doing was, anytime there was this sort of interesting or controversial or an issue that might be offensive or sticky in that way, we just have the debate. We would all yell at each other in the room. And our room was, you know, some Asian people, some Indian people, some white people, too. [laughs] But oftentimes, we put that conversation in the show. We would just put it in the show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** So, you know, there’s some literal like transcriptions of arguments we had in the writer’s room —

**Craig:** I love that.

**Alan:** And they just go in. Yeah.

**Craig:** I love that. Because there is a certain fearlessness to your — and that’s kind of what’s required especially for comedy, even when it’s comedy of this — which is very — you know, this tone is a really unique tone. I think the second you start kind of, I don’t know, crafting it and being careful about it, it feels like it’s fake.

**Alan:** Yeah. We weren’t in the business of like, “Well, we don’t want to offend people.” Like we don’t really care about that. [laughs] It was like —

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think what’s working about your show and Another Period, even though the tones are just so vastly different, is they’re both incredibly specific. They’re not the same version of the everyone in a kitchen set kind of show. It’s a very specific way of looking at this world and characters who want things that are not the common things we’re expecting to see characters want.

**Alan:** Yeah. I think there’s a fallacy that it’s like, “Well, we have to make this character sort of as generic and relatable as possible like an everyman.” I think Aziz wrote a good piece in the New York Times or something where he was interviewed where he said the everyman isn’t always like the most common person in America. It’s not always a younger white guy or, you know, whatever. When you get relatable is when your specific emotions and motivations and characters, you felt that so strongly yourself that you know how to put it into the script. And when you do that — I think we discovered that while we were writing the show, it’s like, “Well, these characters are us.” So we know how we felt when that happened and a lot of these experiences are ours, you know. A lot of that stuff in the parents episode, that stuff all happened with my dad. You know, he killed this chicken when he was young. And I’m an ungrateful shithead.

But yeah. So that’s real. So that’s real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And so I knew how to write that. So when you’re able to do that, the specific becomes universal and it becomes relatable.

**John:** You’re also able to write a version of yourself saying things that are like the kinds of things you would say, but specifically to that scene to what point you’re trying to get across and so it’s not an everyman because it’s you.

**Alan:** Yeah, exactly. So, you know, my white ex-girlfriend or whatever, her mom loved me. [laughs] Like, you know, that’s why that’s in there. But it’s like, you’re right, you know, when things become personal, I think that’s often times when they become really good especially in comedy.

**Craig:** I’m kind of curious. I’ve written with actors before. You’re in a really funky little situation here. I mean I’m sure it’s — I mean these two are both acting, so they can’t really — they can kind of neutralize each other if one is like this scene is about me. But your co-writer, your co-creator is the star of the show.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he is also not just the star of the show, his character, Dev, is basically it’s him. I mean his parents are his parents, right?

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So have you ever looked Aziz in the eye and said, “Nah, Dev wouldn’t say that.”

**Alan:** [laughs] In those words, no.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Alan:** But, you know, in the writer’s room, he needs someone to tell him — he does need someone to tell him no.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** And he respects that. I mean we’ve known each other for so long now. You know, we met first season Parks and Rec so we’ve known each other for seven, eight years or whatever. Yeah, I’m not scared of that guy. [laughs] But, you know, and it’s good because when we have conflicts, that makes the show better generally.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** You know, and it’s like we’re such good friends. You know, we hang out so much outside of work. And we’re going on a trip to Europe tomorrow. [laughs] But that means also like I can yell at him on the set. Like if it’s like, “Hey man, like I don’t think — I think you should do it this way.” And then ultimately, usually we shoot it both ways and we see it in the edit room or whatever.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** Or in the writer’s room, I think it’s good for a person in his position who has such a strong point of view and who generally knows what his character would do. You know, I put 100% faith in that. But at the same time, there’s so many other concerns when making a show like how the story is shaped and the structure of the episode works and what the series arc is.

**Craig:** Right.

**Alan:** All those things need to be taken care of as well. And so, you know, we have conflict but we always resolve it amiably and I think it’s generally worked.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Awesome. Alan Yang, congratulations on your show yet again.

**Alan:** Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Awesome man.

**Alan:** Thanks.

**John:** And stay put. Now, can we have everybody back up here because we’re going to do our One Cool Things. All right. So traditionally on the podcast, we do the thing at the end of the show called One Cool Thing and Craig always forgets his One Cool Thing and we sort of stall for a time and I do mine first. But tonight because it’s a holiday show, I thought we would do sort of a secret Santa kind of One Cool Thing.

So what I asked everybody to do is to put their One Cool Thing on the back of a card and it’s going to have someone else’s name on the front of the card and that’s who’s going to get that gift of the One Cool Thing. So we’re going to pass these out. So hold on one second.

**Craig:** [laughs] Malcolm is so excited for this. That’s a show I would totally watch, by the way.

**Malcolm:** It’s so John August.

**Craig:** Like you and August together is going to be an amazing show.

**Malcolm:** Grand closing.

**Craig:** It would be so great.

**John:** I will read aloud what someone is giving me and then I need to figure out who is giving me this gift. My gift to John is the magical power to give everyone in America at least one Muslim friend or at least a barber or a dentist or something, so people are a little less scared. You’re welcome, John.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that wasn’t me.

**John:** No. I don’t know, Malcolm Spellman. Did you give me a Muslim friend?

**Malcolm:** No.

**Craig:** Are you kidding me? You thought that was Malcolm? Oh my god, never. Malcolm doesn’t want anyone to have anyone —

**Natasha:** That is clearly someone who went to Harvard.

**John:** Was that you, Alan?

**Alan:** Yeah, it was me.

**John:** Oh, I have a Muslim friend. Thank you very much, Alan Yang.

**Alan:** Great hand. Great hand.

**Craig:** She nailed it.

**John:** How do I get a Muslim friend? Is there like a —

**Alan:** Yeah. I don’t know, I didn’t really understand the assignment but, so I just wrote down a bunch of words.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** No. But, you know, that was just a thing that I was thinking about the show a little bit because I knew I was going to talk about it. And one of the things we realized when making it was like, man, like, for all these episodes we did research like when there is an episode about old people and we had — we spent the day with a bunch of older ladies in New York and I had lunch with them and learned stories.

And it’s like, man, the more you meet people and like they become your friends or at least your acquaintances, you’re a little bit more empathetic. You just know them a little better and whatever, not to get political — I don’t really care about politics. But, you know, if they didn’t let Muslim people in America, Aziz’s parents wouldn’t have been able to come to America. And he wouldn’t have been born.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And I wouldn’t have been able to do the show with him.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** And you guys wouldn’t have gotten to hear me say all this amazing shit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Alan:** So that would have been a huge tragedy. [laughs]

**Craig:** It all boils down to you.

**Alan:** Yeah. Like it’s basically about, do they get to listen to me or not.

**John:** Yeah. Well thank you for the gift of understanding.

**Alan:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Thank you very much. Riki, what did you get?

**Riki:** I got a KRUPS F23070 Egg Cooker.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** You got to know who that’s from. It sounds like a robot talking, so who could it be from?

**John:** Yeah, it’s me. [laughs]

**Craig:** That literally sounds like robot talk. KRUPS 01243 Egg Cooker.

**John:** So here is why I’m giving you this specific egg cooker, because it’s the best egg cooker. So over the summer, we were staying at an Airbnb and the person showing us around was like, oh, and there’s an egg cooker. I’m like, “Well, that’s ridiculous. Who needs something to cook hard boiled eggs? You just boil water and you have hard boiled eggs.” But it was like I woke up early one day, I was like, “I’m going to try the egg cooker.” And it’s amazing. So essentially, it cooks seven hard boiled eggs at once and like cooks them perfectly. So you don’t have to like set a timer. You don’t have to do anything. It’s just like you have hard boiled eggs.

**Natasha:** How many hard boiled eggs do you eat a day?

**John:** I eat one a day. So you do a whole bunch at once and just keep them in your fridge.

**Natasha:** I eat like one a year.

**Riki:** It would be the first egg I’ve ever cooked, so —

**Alan:** It’s been a decade.

**Riki:** I don’t cook eggs at all.

**Craig:** I eat one a year.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** It’s egg day.

**Alan:** You celebrate egg day. Yeah. Yeah, June 20, right? June 20th?

**Craig:** It’s egg day! Yay.

**Alan:** You guys don’t celebrate that?

**John:** I think you’d actually genuinely enjoy it.

**Riki:** I think I might. I mean, I think I might. I’ve never cook anything, so it would be a welcome change.

**John:** Yeah. I mean it’s easier than using a hairdryer. Like it’s how simple it is to make.

**Riki:** Wow. But then I would have to buy eggs as well.

**John:** Yeah. Or you can have —

**Riki:** It’s like another step.

**John:** Or you can have someone buy you the eggs.

**Riki:** True. [laughs]

**John:** True. All right. Natasha, what did you get?

**Natasha:** I have a question, though, do you peel it? Like you just eat it with toast or do you just like carry it around with you, the egg?

**John:** I would advise you to peel the egg before you eat it because like the shell is crunchy and —

**Natasha:** But you just bite into it like that and eat the dry yolk and just eat it?

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Yeah.

**Craig:** Bite into it, eat its nutrients.

**John:** Or rip it open. Yeah, it’s delicious, it’s healthy.

**Natasha:** Okay, cool.

**John:** Natasha, what did you get for your Secret Santa gift?

**Natasha:** I got Postmates. Well, I think this person probably also like me and Alan didn’t really understand the assignment. So I feel like this is maybe from Malcolm and he just discovered Postmates. And he wants me to know about it, too. But I already know about it. But thank you.

**Malcolm:** No. I’m the king of Postmates. Like —

**Natasha:** You can order from many different restaurants at once.

**Malcolm:** I’m on the level where I order that shit while I’m driving home at the same time.

**Natasha:** Yeah.

**John:** But I don’t know what this at all. So talk us through. Sell us on this.

**Malcolm:** It changes everything.

**John:** All right.

**Malcolm:** They are — it’s Uber for everything else particularly food. So any restaurants you want in LA, you just tell them, you know, you do your order, whatever, and they bring it to you and it’s not like — the difference between this and delivery is when you order food from delivery, they’re stopping at other people’s house, your food shows up cold. They order your shit for you, go pick it up, bring it straight to your house. And again, once you get really good with it, that’s when you start ordering in your car at a red light. You try to —

**Craig:** God.

**Natasha:** And also —

**John:** How did Malcolm Spellman die?

**Natasha:** We should also be clear, this is an app for rich people.

**Alan:** Yeah. It’s like $40. [laughs] No, it is good.

**Natasha:** And also, one of the other amazing things about it is you get things delivered that don’t deliver. So it’s not just like your Domino’s Pizzas is hotter. It’s like —

**Craig:** What about like say, egg cartons? Do they do the eggs?

**Natasha:** Your Mr. Chow’s crispy rice sushi.

**Craig:** So it’s like a messenger service for food basically.

**Natasha:** For restaurants.

**Craig:** Or for restaurants.

**Malcolm:** But they’ll go pick up your ink cartridge from Staples, all that shit.

**Natasha:** Oh really?

**Malcolm:** Yeah.

**Alan:** Any object. It’s great. It’s an object delivery. Yeah. Or you push the limits.

**John:** Alan, will they bring me a Muslim friend?

**Alan:** Oh yeah. [laughs]

**John:** They can do it, because that’s an object —

**Alan:** Here’s your Muslim friend and the egg cooker, John.

**John:** Fantastic, it’s all —

**Alan:** One car.

**John:** Backstage, we were talking about actors who do voiceovers for commercials. I feel Malcolm Spellman might be the right voice for this delivery service.

**Alan:** Yeah, he’s got a great voice.

**John:** You’d buy it from him, wouldn’t you?

**Craig:** Oh yeah, this place will pick up your shit.

**Malcolm:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That was a pretty good impression.

**Malcolm:** Charges on Postmates.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**John:** Alan Yang, what did you get for a Secret Santa gift?

**Alan:** Oh yeah. I got, I would follow him on all social media as a Christmas present.

**Natasha:** I didn’t understand the assignment.

**John:** So do you follow him on any social media?

**Alan:** Do you not follow me, Natasha?

**Natasha:** Well, I thought like if you are were on some deep —

**Alan:** Oh no, no, you think I’m — you think I’m young person, I’m not that young.

**Natasha:** Oh okay, I thought you were on like Snapchat.

**Alan:** I am on Snapchat actually. [laughs] You’re right.

**Craig:** You are that young.

**Natasha:** Okay, so I’ll —

**Alan:** I should make up a bunch that don’t exist.

**Natasha:** Are you on Periscope?

**Alan:** I’m not on Periscope. I don’t do any broadcastings. You’re on like Twitter and like what do you —

**Natasha:** Of course, I follow you on Twitter.

**Alan:** Instagram, of course. Yeah.

**Natasha:** But Instagram, I don’t follow you. But I’d like to.

**Alan:** Follow me, man. Some great pics up there.

**Craig:** Christmas is getting weird.

**Natasha:** I’m going to do that tonight.

**Alan:** I can’t wait. I can’t wait for that follow. This has actually have been a good moment for me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Alan:** I get an additional follower. Everyone follow me, AlanMYang. [laughs] No, it doesn’t matter.

**John:** Alan is going to spend half an hour on any person, trying to get each person in this audience to follow him.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** But Alan’s aesthetic, I bet his Instagram is good. I bet it’s kind of anal-retentive.

**Alan:** Yeah.

**Natasha:** But you have some good like, you know, visuals up there.

**Alan:** Yeah, it’s not bad. It’s not bad. It’s not great. It’s not bad, though. [laughs]

**John:** Malcolm Spellman, what did you get from Santa?

**Malcolm:** Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done. I’m going to guess Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Malcolm:** I’ll tell you why I knew it was Mazin, ‘get things done.’ If you know this dude, the authority in that.

**Craig:** Yeah, you got to get things done. Quite a great book. It’s not appropriate for you because you don’t cook anything, you order your shit from Postmates, but if you were to chop a vegetable for once in your fucking life, it’s amazing, Cook’s Illustrated is my favorite because they’re, you know —

**Riki:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Why? I mean I just feel so degraded.

**Natasha:** No, Cook’s Illustrated. I just never heard of that. Sounds cute.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the best. They’re like the scientists of coking. And they give you all these tips of the best ways to cut things like how do I cut this. Oh, we figured out after a thousand cuts of a pepper, this is the way you do it. And the way you’re nodding —

**Natasha:** No, that’s cool. I have no talent in the kitchen, so I’m just — I’m inspired and intrigued.

**Craig:** Then it could help you if you ever did try because —

**Natasha:** Oh, no interest either, but —

**Craig:** Just making sure.

**Natasha:** But I appreciate it in others.

**Craig:** If you fuck something up, there’s a whole chapter on how to fix your fuck up.

**Natasha:** Oh, that’s cool.

**Craig:** So it’s wasted on Malcolm.

**John:** And I really think that could have been the title of the episode, Wasted on Malcolm.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it should be the title of every episode.

**John:** Yeah. We had fantastic guests and a fantastic venue, but we did not have a fantastic recording. And we lost Craig’s gift. Craig did not get to open his gift and discuss it. And it was a pretty great gift you got.

**Craig:** Yes. So I got my gift from Riki Lindhome and it was something that I’ve already put on the show as my One Cool Thing which is the Hamilton soundtrack. And so Riki and I bonded over our obsession and memorized love for the Hamilton soundtrack and then — you see, this is why people need to come to the live show because the two of us then did an impromptu version of the opening song. We made it through a good like 30 or 40 seconds of the lyrics of the opening song. [laughs] Just together, doing a duet, it was lovely.

**John:** I have a hunch that our technical glitch was actually the Broadway League sneaking it and shutting it down so that it could not be recorded because that’s, you know, Lin-Manuel Miranda is like he’s very adamant that he’s not going to want bootleg recordings. And you guys were so magnificent singing that song.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That he had to stop it.

**Craig:** Well, I get it. I don’t want to — look, I don’t want to mess with Mr. Miranda. It was something to see, man. It was something to see.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And unfortunately then after that, we did have some pretty good questions and answers that got eaten, so —

**John:** Yeah. And often, we tape the questions and answer and put them through as a separate episode in the premium feed, so we won’t have that for this time. But there were some interesting questions asked. So I thought we’d just summarize kind of the things we talked about and do the short version of what those were.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So the questions that came up at the microphones were about writing staffs because we had these great TV people there and they were able to answer questions that Craig or I could not normally answer.

A question about the diversity on writing staffs and sort of spring boarding off what Alan Yang had said about being like the Asian guy on the staff. And so the question was like, well, what if you are the black guy or the Muslim guy, what does it feel like to be the person who has to answer the questions of like, is that offensive?

And so Alan actually had a really interesting answer about how in Master of None, stuff would come up, there was specifically a situation where the women on the writing staff were describing what it felt like to be a woman at a restaurant who wasn’t introduced and they had a big discussion, a big argument kind of in the writer’s room and that made it into the script.

And so he was arguing in favor of diversity on staff just because you got that diversity of opinion and that diversity of opinion was what led to this some really great dialogue and scenes in the show.

**Craig:** Yes. So he was sort of saying that rather than assign or not assign the role of representative of race, gender, sexual identity, whatever category, that rather it was just, let’s have a discussion. If a discussion is a debate, let’s have a debate. Then let’s actually portray the debate which on his show, I think, is very doable. On a lot of shows, it’s not quite like that because the show maybe isn’t about relationships in that sense.

But having the debate, I think he was basically saying having the debate is worth it. It’s actually more important to have a debate than say to isolate individuals and say you are now the arbiter of what is acceptable for this topic or that topic.

**John:** Absolutely. Okay, next up. Riki Lindhome fielded a question about how she assembled her writing staff. And we actually asked all the show creators how they assembled their writing staffs. And Riki Lindhome said, well, I would read the first three pages of the script and if I didn’t like the first three pages, I would toss it aside and start reading the next one.

And to be clear, Riki Lindhome does not listen to the Scriptnotes podcast, so she has no idea about the Three Page Challenge. She was just speaking honestly of like how she put her staff together. And I thought that was actually great because it’s such a testament to this is why your first three pages are so important because if they don’t like three pages, it’s not that — they’re not going to read page four, they’re not going to read page 20. They’re just going to stop reading and they’re going to go on to next one.

So be it a TV spec or spec script you’ve written, you got to hook them so quick.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, there’s a test that you and I apply when we do our Three Page Challenges here on the show and mostly because I assume 99 percent of the people sending them in are not professional working writers yet. The test that we’re applying is basically, “Can you do this? Do you have the fundamentals down? Are you making certain rookie mistakes? Are you making blatant mistakes?” Our test isn’t, “Is this wonderful?” Our test isn’t, “Is this really great?” Our test isn’t, “Would I hire you?”

Now, for Riki and for Natasha, when they’re looking at potential people to work on their show, you’re making a show. These are the people that are your life-support system. So they’re not looking to see if you’re avoiding problems. They’re looking to be inspired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think specifically, Riki said something like, her test is, “Do I care?” Not just, “Is this good?” but do I care about it? Do I remember it? Do I want to tell other people about what I just read? That’s on a whole other level of existence. That’s about being inspiring.

So just be aware. I want people to be aware that when we do this, don’t think like, oh, if they can get through those guys that they’re, you know, they’ve got it made. We’re kind of only doing a very fundamental first pass look at these things. What’s waiting for you out there is Riki going “Mm-hmm.”

**John:** Mm-hmm. Doesn’t care. So it’s really, we’re setting a pretty low bar, like, “Do they clear this low bar?” Like, this person seems like they can kind of do it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we’re also taking a lot of time to talk through various things on the page that tripped us up. Riki is not. She’s just basically like, “Did I laugh? Did this click with me? Do I want to meet this writer?” And that’s a very different kind of standard than what we’re doing when we’re doing a Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** So it would be fascinating to have somebody who does a lot of staffing come on and be a guest on a Three Page Challenge because I bet it would be brutal.

**Craig:** Oh, well, because they don’t really do anything like what we do. I mean, there is that, you know, the book, Blink. I mean, everyone is using Blink when they’re doing this. There’s too many — I mean, I think Alan said they get 300 scripts, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, so staffing season is like this swarm of piranha in the water all trying, you know, to grab this one tiny little thing to eat. So everyone is getting inundated by these scripts. I think they open them up and, I mean, she says three pages, I guarantee there’s some where you don’t even make it to half a page. Because just, you have that blink moment you’re like, “Nope, not for me.”

**John:** Yeah, I don’t think we’ll ever do this but a fascinating exercise would be to take a big bucket of the scripts that come in. And sit down with somebody who does this for staffing and just all of us spend an hour just like going through and reading those first three pages and at the end of it discuss which of these scripts would we even want to read page four.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, and you could also, while you’re doing that with this person, have them take — give them a red pen and have them make a little mark on the page where they stopped reading.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Because I think that would actually be fascinating to see.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sobering.

**John:** Yeah, after we did the Q&A we had a few announcements. And so I need to have those announcements down so that everyone who wasn’t in the audience can hear them. First off is that on Monday of last week, so a week ago, as you’re hearing this podcast, I sat down with Ice Cube and Andrea Berloff and F. Gary Gray and the filmmakers behind Straight Outta Compton. And so that was a special Q&A in Hollywood. And so I got to ask them questions. So it was about a half an hour of Q&A with those folks and it was great and it was — I loved that movie. I loved sitting down and talking with them about it. So if you are a premium subscriber, you can listen to the audio from that. It’s up in the Scriptnotes premium feed. So you can subscribe to that at Scriptnotes.net and listen to that. We should have one or two more writer interviews up there before the end of the year as well.

We also had a very big announcement about our next live show. Craig, tell us.

**Craig:** So this is something that we’re doing for a charity organization called Hollywood HEART and I admit that at the time that we did the show last night, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what the charity did. In my mind I knew it wasn’t about actual cardiac health. But there was a representative there from Hollywood HEART who came up afterward to explain that it’s about helping kids here in Los Angeles. And it’s a terrific organization.

So we have wonderful guests. This is going to be a live show on January 25th. We’re doing it downtown. And who’s coming? Well, we have Jason Bateman, star of screen and also a filmmaker in his own right now. And we also have the screenwriter of the small movie that is coming out. It’s like a prestige movie coming out in December. It’s called —

**John:** Yeah, it’s one of those sort of “remakey” kind of like, you know, some people may have heard of it.

**Craig:** Right. It’s called Star Wars: The Force Awakens?

**John:** Yeah, I think so. I think you got it right.

**Craig:** Or is it “The Force Awakens”.

**John:** Either one I think would work. It’s translated from French.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you could try it either way.

**Craig:** Star Wars, and his name is Larry Kasdan. He also in the past, he has written another Star Wars film called The Empire Strikes Back.

**John:** I saw that one. It was really good.

**Craig:** And then he wrote a side movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**John:** Yeah, we discussed that movie. Do you remember that, a zillion years ago, we discussed that?

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right.

**John:** We did a whole episode on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

**Craig:** Yeah, yes. And he’s also written Body Heat. And he’s also written Big Chill. And he’s also written The Bodyguard. And, and, and, and — perhaps the greatest living screenwriter. I like to call him that.

So Lawrence Kasdan, co-writer of the — what will undoubtedly be the biggest movie of all time — Star Wars: The Force Awakens, will be with us on January 25th along with the very funny, very brilliant Jason Bateman. That’s a show you definitely want to come to and the proceeds do benefit Hollywood HEART. If you want tickets and you want to learn more about Hollywood HEART, go to HollywoodHEART.org/upcoming.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And that’s how you get tickets and so forth.

**John:** So this ticket apparently includes cocktails as well. So, come on, it’s bargain.

**Craig:** It includes cocktails?

**John:** That’s what it said on the thing. I’m only going with what I saw on the website.

**Craig:** Wow. So, just to be clear because I said it was about kids, I think that’s a little vague. It’s specifically, it’s designed to nurture creativity and community through the arts and it’s targeted at at-risk kids who either have HIV or AIDS or who are homeless or who are in foster care or the judicial systems. These are kids that are definitely in trouble. They are in trouble and they’re using the arts to kind of help get them out of trouble. And I’m a big believer in effective charity. That’s my, you know, like I get very angry when I see ineffective charity because it feels like such a wasted opportunity. I know that this is a great way to get through to kids who are in trouble. It’s a great way because the arts are part of everyone’s life. It is instantly attractive especially to kids. So I think this is a great idea. There is a camp that they run. So you should totally buy tickets for this. I mean, if you don’t buy tickets for this, you’re just a bad person.

**John:** [laughs] So the carrot and a stick, the guilt, the love, all of it together.

**Craig:** Everything.

**John:** The Craig Mazin special holiday gift.

**Craig:** I just hit you with everything I could.

**John:** The last announcement was that on the previous show we talked about how an upcoming episode will have us talking about advice for things that are not screenwriting-related. So advice about anything. So we’ve gotten more than a hundred questions in about that.

**Craig:** Wow, my god.

**John:** But keep sending in those questions. And we will plow through them and we will answer as many of them as we can on a future episode. I’m really looking forward to that. Off air, I’m going to talk to Craig about a potential guest to join us to help answer those questions.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Ah. But we should wrap up this episode with a lot of thanks. So we need to give thanks to the Writers Guild Foundation. Its wonderful volunteers who helped staff that event and Chris Kartje for putting it all together. Thank you so much. LA Film School for hosting us. Leon who did all our tech stuff. We had clips up there. We had clips on a big screen. It was like we were a real show. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Like a real show.

**John:** Matthew Chilelli, as always, did our intros and outros and edited this episode. And Stuart Friedel, our producer, our long-serving, long-suffering producer was there along with his parents and his grandparents who got to hear Malcolm Spellman —

**Craig:** Oh, my god, that’s so great.

**John:** Swear so much. Yeah. And so —

**Craig:** Oh, my god, Bubby was there. She must have been like, “Oy”.

**John:** “Oy”. Yeah, so —

**Craig:** Even the way you say “Oy” is Christian.

**John:** I know. I can’t help it. I come from a Christian heritage.

**Craig:** You do.

**John:** I knew where they were sitting in the audience but as I looked up there I thought I still saw like the paper on the seats. So I thought like, “Oh, well, the grandparents didn’t come.” But it just turns out they were so small that the paper on the chair backs behind them was still visible.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s so cute.

**John:** So cute. So it was a cute fun night. We had amazing guests. So in the show notes at johnaugust.com you’ll see the links to their Twitter handles, their other bio information about them. You’ll also see links for most of the things we talked about on the show that we could squeeze into the links. As always, subscribe to us on iTunes if you’ve not already subscribed. That helps us a lot. Leave a comment. We were not one of the top podcasts of 2015 for some reason, so let’s make that a life goal for 2016 to be one of those top-rated podcasts on iTunes.

If you have a question for me or for Craig, write to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a place where you can write your question about, you know, non-screenwriting advice for our special episode. On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And thank you everyone who came out to our live show and thank you all for listening.

**Craig:** Go buy tickets for January 25th.

**John:** Cool. Thanks, guys. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Malcolm Spellman on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1173259/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/malcolmspellman), and [Scriptnotes, 185](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Natasha Leggero](http://www.natashaleggero.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1641089/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/natashaleggero)
* [Riki Lindhome](http://www.rikilindhome.com/) on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1641251/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rikilindhome)
* [Another Period](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) on Comedy Central
* Alan Yang on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1520649/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/AlanMYang)
* [Master of None](http://www.netflix.com/title/80049714) on Netflix
* [Harvard Lampoon](http://harvardlampoon.com/), and [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Harvard_Lampoon)
* [KRUPS F23070 Egg Cooker](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00005KIRS/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Postmates](https://postmates.com/) will deliver you stuff
* [AlanMYang on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/alanmyang/)
* [Kitchen Hacks: How Clever Cooks Get Things Done](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1940352002/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Cook’s Illustrated](https://www.cooksillustrated.com/)
* 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)
* [Scriptnotes, Bonus: Straight Outta Compton](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-straight-outta-compton)
* [Get your tickets now for Scriptnotes, Live on January 25](http://hollywoodheart.org/upcoming/) with [Jason Bateman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Bateman) and [Lawrence Kasdan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kasdan), a benefit for [Hollywood HEART](http://hollywoodheart.org)
* [Scriptnotes, 73: Raiders of the Lost Ark](http://johnaugust.com/2013/raiders-of-the-lost-ark)
* [Email us](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) or tweet [John](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) or [Craig](https://twitter.com/clmazin) for advice on things that have nothing to do with screenwriting
* Thanks to the [Writers Guild Foundation](https://www.wgfoundation.org/) and the [Los Angeles Film School](http://www.lafilm.edu/) for hosting us
* [Intro/Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/feel-the-nerd-burn).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 227 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we have a brand new Three Page Challenge where our listeners have submitted pages for us to take a look at and we will offer them our honest feedback. But before that, there’s an elephant in the room that we have to address.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Craig, I think part of the reason why our podcast is successful is that you and I have relatively equal levels of fame or sort of people don’t know who we are to equal degrees.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that all changed yesterday as we are recording this because on December 3rd, The Daily Show featured a story about your best friend —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Who is now running for president. His name is Mr. Ted Cruz. Let’s listen to what they said.

**Trevor Noah:** With a man of Cruz’s accomplishments, there’s bound to be some professional envy. [laughs] To truly know a man, you go and talk to the people close to him, from back in the day.

**Craig:** Ted Cruz was my roommate. I did not like him at all in college. And, you know, I want to be clear because, you know, Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics. But truthfully, his personality is so awful that 99% of why I hate him is just his personality. [laughs] If he agreed with me on every issue, I would hate him only 1% less.

**Trevor Noah:** Ooh. 1% less. Nerd burn. [laughs] Do you know how much you have to hate someone to do the math on it? [laughs] As you can see, before I met Ted, I didn’t hate him. And after I met him, well, the data speaks for itself. [laughs]

**John:** So Craig, I mean, the data backs it up. You are now a much bigger star than I am.

**Craig:** Well, you are in there. At one point, you go, “Yeah.” [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I have sort of like my, “Uh-huh.”

**Craig:** I think what’s so funny about this is that all of this was said by me a long time, years ago.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there was an article that Frank Bruni did in The New York Times a couple of days ago that dredged it up. And that created this bizarro domino thing where then it went on The Daily Show where — and then he said that it was a nerd burn and —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He kind of called me a nerd, which I am. I’m a complete nerd. I just didn’t realize it was so evident in that remark. Anyway, and then, Jezebel kind of jumped on board and did a very lovely thing about it. And it turns out, if you want to be beloved in this world, just, you know, don’t like Ted Cruz. [laughs] It’s really not hard.

**John:** Absolutely. I remember when you actually spoke that one time. You just said like, “This is the last I’m ever going to say about it.” And that’s fine. So you don’t have to say anything more about sort of that person.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s so interesting that the weird way that stuff you said years ago can cycle back through and create like a new moment of a new blip. Because even like my agent said like, “Hey, did you see this thing?” Like how many people today, Craig, have said like, “Wow. I heard you on The Daily Show last night?”

**Craig:** My phone was blowing up, as the kids say, or maybe used to say and probably don’t anymore. It was bananas. And, you know, of course it’s like, every three seconds you get an email, “Did you know?” “Yeah, I know.”

**John:** Yeah. He knew.

**Craig:** But the funny thing is, you’re right, I don’t actually want to become — I have turned down requests from The Times and from CNN and from POLITICO, and from dah-dah-dah-dah-dah all week long because I don’t want to be that guy.

**John:** You’re not that guy.

**Craig:** Just like showing up to talk about something just because people are paying attention. I have things to say about stuff I truly know about and that’s this. So we do our thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t need to be that guy.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And let’s be Scriptnotes. So while you were busy being famous, I have a couple of things that came out this week. [laughs]

First off, we have Highland 1.9. Highland is the screenwriting app that I make that a lot of people love. We have a 1.9 version which is out just today, as we’re recording this, which fixes a few last little bugs and things. 1.9 will probably be the last version on that whole thread because, the other big news which I’m announcing right here, is that Highland 2 is in beta testing. And we are starting to invite new beta testers in to try out Highland 2. It is a completely new build of the app that does a lot of very new things. I sent Craig a version to test, but he’s not had a chance to test it yet.

If you are interested in testing out the new version of Highland, we are bringing in new testers every week. And so, you just go to, quoteunquoteapps.com/highland, and there’s a place there where you can register for the beta test or just follow the show notes. But, Craig, I cannot wait for you to try this because I think it will do a lot of the things that you’ve been yearning for in a screenwriting app for quite a long time.

**Craig:** Yeah. It sounds great. And I’m going to look through it. I mean, you know, the big learning curve for me for Highland is just the idea of writing in markup or markdown. I guess it’s markdown.

**John:** It’s called Fountain. It’s basically you’re writing in plain text and letting the app do the work for you. The app will do the work for you in a much more fluid way than I think you’re used to.

**Craig:** I just have to learn the — which I think I already kind of inherently know, you know, like asterisking for italicizing and stuff like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I just got to learn those things. But I mean, I’m definitely into it. It sounds great. And I think it’s the future. I do.

**John:** Yeah. So a lot of the things that you’ve been yearning for in an app, the ability to, you know, put images in, the ability to sort of just break beyond the normal screenplay format, this is the thread that’s going to take us there, eventually, I hope. And it’s also the biggest change we made, the biggest pivot we made is while it still writes for screenplays, it writes in Fountain.

I was listening to a podcast that B.J. Novak was a guest on. And so, apparently, our guest, B.J. Novak, who was on our last Christmas show, apparently he does other podcasts too which I’m appalled by. But he was on this other podcast and he was talking about how he writes in Word. And I just found that just appalling.

**Craig:** You mean he writes screenplays in Word?

**John:** He writes screenplays in Word but he also just like writes his books in Word. He writes everything in Word.

**Craig:** Oh, is that bad?

**John:** Well, Word is kind of like, it’s way too much of a thing. It’s like trying to take the space shuttle to go to the grocery store. It’s like it’s the wrong tool for the job.

**Craig:** I know. There’s so much there. Right. And I never use it but it’s there, so I just use it.

**John:** Yeah. Something like, “Do you need to mail merge” No. You never need to mail merge. I mean, it could do it if you wanted to mail merge.

**Craig:** I never, never need to mail merge.

**John:** So, Highland, this new version of Highland and Highland 2, we are a full Markdown Editor, so we can actually do all the just normal plain text stuff you write in, so like all the stuff I wrote for NaNoWriMo, I wrote in the new Highland 2. For the last screenplay, I wrote in Highland 2, the beta versions, the bleeding, often crashing versions. But it’s been great and there’s a lot of new things that beta testers will get to explore and try that I’ve never seen in any other app. So I’m curious for you to give it a shot.

**Craig:** Okay. I will take it for a spin.

**John:** Cool. In our last episode, we did follow-up on Whiplash. And here’s more follow-up on Whiplash. So listener Brad Morticello wrote in with this link to an interview with Michael McCullough, who’s a psychology professor and director of the Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory at the University of Miami. And specifically, you and I had discussed whether revenge is emotionally-driven or intellectually-driven. I had said like there’s no such thing as intellectual revenge. And you said, “No, the Jewish people have a whole version of it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** What was so fascinating, what I liked about this article is McCullough was talking about how there’s probably an evolutionary reason for revenge because it seems wasteful to pursue revenge because you’re not actually getting anything out of it.

But McCullough makes a really interesting point. He says, “The desire for revenge goes up if there are people who have watched you mistreated, because in that case, the costs have gotten even bigger. If you don’t take revenge, there’s a chance that people will learn that you are the type of person who will put up with mistreatment. That is the kind of phenomenon that you would expect if there’s a functional logic underlying the system that produces revenge.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s exactly right. I mean, there is a revenge which is a completely irrational Ahab versus the whale kind of thing. But I think most revenge, most pettier revenge is, “I’m not going to let that guy walk all over me.” And underlying that is because then everybody will walk all over me.

**John:** It’s kind of the common advice they give to people who go to prison the first time. It’s like, if they punch you, punch them back in a big public way even if you get really hurt. Like, don’t let everyone know that you’re a bitch.

**Craig:** I really, really have to studiously avoid going to prison.

**John:** Yeah. It’s going to turn out very poorly for you, Craig.

**Craig:** Without question.

**John:** Umbrage is not the trait that’s going to get you through that. I mean, I think you got some street smarts but I also think that you could get yourself into some real trouble.

**Craig:** Well, just the whole idea that — I don’t like it. I don’t want to go. I’m following the law as best I can. Here and there, when I bend or break it, it’s usually in the misdemeanor zone. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I think my best strategy for prison is to be the guy who can fix the warden’s computer. And so, therefore, I’ll be an asset that people will protect because I’m the one person who can do that thing.

**Craig:** I really don’t think you’re going to prison.

**John:** I don’t think I’m going to prison. I’m trying to stay on the straight and narrow, best I can.

**Craig:** Well, that’s what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that you’re trying at the very best.

**John:** I’m doing my very best. [laughs]

Going back to the revenge thing, I guess McCullough is speaking to the public revenge. The private revenge is an interesting, different thing where you’re taking revenge on somebody and they don’t even kind of know that you’re doing it or no one else can see it. I think the plot of Munich could be argued as being a revenge plot. You’re not claiming responsibility for it. Maybe you’re making it clear enough that the people who are behind it would know that you did it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Munich, to me, is actually an example of very rational revenge-taking because it’s entirely about sending a message, “This will never work out for you. We will take forever to pay you back.”

**John:** Cool. Two last bits of follow-up for me. One Hit Kill was the game that we launched for Kickstarter. We shipped out all our backorders to Kickstarter. It’s a big card game with big fantasy monsters and cuddly rabbits. We now actually have it for sale. So it’s actually for sale at onehitkillgame.com. Eventually, it will be on Amazon but if you would like it before Christmas, the one place you can get it is onehitkillgame.com.

Also, you can buy through The John August Store, the Writer Emergency Packs. You can also find them on Amazon. In both cases, your best bet is if you’d like one of those things, get it before December 15th because just our stocks are running low. And it’s also getting very hard to ship stuff out. So, before December 15th, if you would like to order either the Writer Emergency Pack or One Hit Kill which are now available for purchase.

**Craig:** I like that pronunciation, One Hit Kill.

**John:** One Hit Kill. Writer Emergency Pack is a really strange thing because, obviously, we’re a big Kickstarter and so we shipped about 8,000 units out to our backers from Kickstarter. But we’ve had days on Amazon where we shipped 1,000 units in a day, which is just nuts to that —

**Craig:** Is it to one mass buyer or —

**John:** No. No.

**Craig:** Just randomly —

**John:** A thousand single orders.

**Craig:** And then you’ve had days where — I mean, that’s way out of the ordinary?

**John:** Yeah. And so those big blips are because Amazon will put us on a special. They’ll put us on a lightning deal.

**Craig:** Oh, got it.

**John:** And so we’ll blow through like a thousand in stock at one time. But the problem is that it also, like, we don’t have that many decks there to ship out. And so, we’ve been scrambling this week to get more boxes of those Writer Emergency Packs there, including just looking around the office, like, how many decks do we have in the office and how can we get them to Amazon.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It’s a weird problem. In making movies, so rarely do the physical logistics become a problem, and especially now even with digital distribution. So, it used to be that you had to literally like ship prints to movie theaters. And that was a whole big thing and prints used to break. Now, it’s all “beep-beep-beep” and it gets, you know, digitally shipped off to the different projectors. And that whole logistics train is gone.

**Craig:** And we never deal with it in production. I mean, there are people who obviously handling logistics in production. There’s waves of them, but not on us.

**John:** I don’t know if you’ve seen any stories about The Hateful Eight. So Hateful Eight, some screenings are in the 70 millimeters —

**Craig:** Yeah. In glorious —

**John:** Which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Glorious 70-millimeter.

**John:** Great. And so, I think it’s wonderful that we have the opportunity to still show 70-millimeter prints. But showing prints is a science and an art. And there was one screening that a lot of people were at, including a lot of early press, that had a problem and had a physical technical problem and focus issues and other strange things because it was film and because it wasn’t handled just right. And it’s a thing we don’t think about anymore. We don’t think about damage prints. We don’t think about focus and hair in the gate and all the other stuff that used to be a real problem with film.

**Craig:** I know. It’s all gone. Gone.

**John:** All gone. From the mailbag. Olivia writes in, “I have recently been faced with a note that is an arbitrary decision made by the director, and that will make the story more predictable and the characters less consistent. I’ve carefully laid out all my arguments and suggested several alternatives but the director isn’t budging, the producers are deferring to him. Now, I either do what the director says or walk away from the job. I can’t afford to do the latter. I need the money. And more importantly, I need the relationships. So what do I do?”

**Craig:** Oh, Olivia, welcome to our world.

**John:** Yeah. Congratulations, Olivia. You’ve crossed into the place of a professional screenwriter.

**Craig:** One of us. Gooble-gobble. This happens on every movie, every movie. So when you say, “I don’t want to walk away because I need the money,” I would retort. You don’t want to walk away because you’ll never stop walking away. This happens every time.

The only comfort I can give you is this. You have the ability to do the very best you can to make this mistake as minimal as you can in terms of its impact on the quality of the movie. Sometimes, when you do it and people read it, everyone goes, “Oh, no, no, wait. Olivia was right. We just didn’t know.” See, we forget as writers because we do the math in our head so fast.

And most other people don’t. So, then they get the script. They read it and they go, “Oh, this doesn’t work.” And you’re sitting there thinking, “I told you it wouldn’t work.” But what we don’t understand is they just couldn’t see it in the way we can see it. And I get that, you know. Everybody has different skill sets.

So, sometimes that happens where by doing the work, you’ll actually make it go away. Sometimes, you do it and the movie comes out and it’s like, “Okay, the thing that was the hill I was going to die on turns out to — I mean, it’s still there. I don’t like it.” I mean, there’s something in The Huntsman I don’t like because they took it out and I wished they would put it back in because in my mind, I’m like, “Oh, you’ve ruined — ” but probably, no. [laughs] Probably people will be like, “Oh. Yeah. I wondered about that. But then, you know, I got to the stuff that I came for and not that.”

**John:** There’s a very famous Broadway director who was staging something and he’s a powerful director but not powerful enough to change the book or change — essentially, he couldn’t get rid of this one thing he wanted to get rid of, this one song, I think it was. And so, he called it his like “cocktail song.” And basically whenever that moment in the show came, he would leave the theater, have himself a cocktail, then come back in and rejoin it.

And I’m not saying that you have to live with things that you’re going to despise in the movie but I think you would probably rather have your movie made and have this one moment that’s not ideal than not have your movie made. So that’s one way to rationalize and think about it.

The other way I’d approach it is don’t do the bad version of it just to point out how bad it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, because that will backfire on you.

**John:** It will backfire. Do the best version you can do to implement the note and actually make the whole project work as well as it can. You might also write that and also on the side write, “And here’s a version that doesn’t do that that would also work,” and give them parallel drafts so they can actually see what the difference is. That extra work at least shows that you are committed to helping them make the version of the movie and to offer them alternatives. But you are going to be facing this the rest of your career. And I hope it’s a very long career.

**Craig:** By the way, Olivia, this isn’t the last time it’s going to happen on this movie.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** And you’re going to get to a place when the movie is shot and done and now you’re watching it and the producers are watching it and now people are saying, “Well, what if we do this, what if we do that?” And you’re about to face a thousand more of these. This is kind of the deal with what we do. And it’s terrible and yet also part of what we do, so you have to accept it to some extent.

Down the line, you’ll read a review where somebody will blame you for the mistake that you fought against with all of your heart and soul. An additional indignity. It’s part of what we do. All I can tell you is that we, John and I and everybody that does what we do, Olivia, we’re with you. What else can I tell you?

**John:** Emotional solidarity.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Do you want to read the next question from Curtis?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, because it’s for you. So Curtis asks, “On this week’s podcast,” when he means last week’s podcast, “you mentioned having briefly controlled the rights to The Man in the High Castle but that they were taken away from you when Ridley Scott decided he wanted them. How does that work?”

**John:** So when you are off to pitch a project to a network or a studio, something that had some underlying rights, if there’s a powerful producer involved, sometimes you’ll actually lock down and secure those rights in some meaningful way. But more often, it’s just sort of a handshake. It’s essentially like, “Yeah, okay, you can take this in to this place. And that’s fine, that’s good.” And that is how a lot of Hollywood works.

Even on like a spec script situation, you’re saying, “Okay, producer A, you can take this script to studio B.” And that is how it all works. There’s not contracts drawn. It’s just basically a handshake and nod saying like, “Hey, you have the rights to do this thing.”

In the case of The Man in the High Castle, for a period of several weeks I had that where I had conversations with the estate and the heirs about sort of how it was all going to work, what the nature of the story was I was going to tell. In my recollection at least, it was on the morning I was supposed to go into HBO I got the call saying like, “You know what, they decided they actually really would rather stay with Ridley Scott who had done Blade Runner.” And I can’t fault them. Ridley Scott is a bigger deal than I am.

**Craig:** Yeah. The thing to understand is we don’t really buy rights. You know, the companies do that. So we will go and pitch these things. John never really had the rights. He never owned the rights. Ridley didn’t take property from him. He just had an agreement that they would sell the rights to a studio that hired you to adapt it.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. So when I say I had the rights or when Ridley Scott had the rights, in both cases, there may never have been paperwork drawn. But essentially, the heirs were leaning towards one place. And so if I had gone into HBO saying like, “I had this whole big thing and blah, blah, blah,” they would have been gone to these heirs and said like, “Hey, do you want to do this thing with John August?” And they said, “No, I think we’re going to stick with Ridley Scott.”

**Craig:** Right. So at that point, why bother?

**John:** Yup. And it’s at that point you cancel the meeting with HBO.

**Craig:** Aww.

**John:** Aww. This next one has a visual component but I think we can get through it. This is a question from Joe who asks, “Do you ever adjust the line breaks in dialogue so that it wraps better?” So instead of, so imagine this is a line of dialogue, “Give me the medallion and all of this ends,” or “Give me the medallion and all of this ends.” So essentially asking, do you ever hit the character turn earlier so that in blocks of dialogue words stick together better? Craig, do you ever do that?

**Craig:** No. I call this shift-returning because that’s how you do it, you shift-return. You stay in the same element but you put in the break. I’m not that finicky. My feeling is if everything is within its own block of text, then it will be read continuously by people. And the way we read is not consistent with what Joe is thinking about here. We don’t actually read that way. We read in chunks, including the line break chunks. We kind of move ahead. So that part doesn’t bother me. I will absolutely be obsessive about how the page ends.

So if I want something, if there’s a big reveal and I want it at the bottom of the page, not “And then” and then turn the page, babababa, I will adjust that because I think page turning is a thing. But no, I don’t do this. Do you do this?

**John:** The only times I could think of doing this is when I have lyrics in scripts. And I will shift-return in order to get those lines. If a lyric is too long for the line, I will force it to break in a certain place so it’s a little bit more natural and better fits the meter of what the song is.

**Craig:** No question. Yeah, I mean, because lyrics are really poems, so I will shift-enter lyrics all day long. But for regular prose, no.

**John:** Yeah, not for regular prose. I’ll also say, if I’m doing lyrics in a screenplay, I will give myself the latitude to cheat the right-hand margin and let it go longer so that things can stay together as a line, because everyone sort of knows what you’re doing and it’s not really cheating if you’re just trying to keep one lyric together on a line.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I mean, lyrics are a special case. But for action descriptions of the kind that Joe is describing here, I just think that that’s a level of specificity that will not be rewarded, ever.

**John:** Yeah. And you’re just going to drive yourself mad thinking about like, “Well, how should this line break?”

**Craig:** Truly nuts, yeah.

**John:** Truly nuts. And not to mention that whenever that line of dialogue goes across a page break, you may be messing up some things about that, too.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** But Joe doesn’t rewrite anything. He writes, “It’s done.”

**John:** One and done. He’s a top-down world-building perfectionist. So Dustin Box, who works for me, who’s a designer but also is a big fan of the podcast and writing in general, he was listening to our world-building episode from last week. And he was thinking about how some people, that it may be related to the way that people approach screenplays sometimes is they think that it has to be once and perfect. And so they’re going to write this one screenplay and it’s never going to change. And, basically, I’m going to write it from the start to the end and then the screenplay is going to be done.

It’s not being aware of the fact that it is an iterative process, that it’s not supposed to be perfect the first time through. You’re going to keep going back to it. And by its very nature, you’re going to be, you know, rethinking things and discovering things about — writing that scene at the end is going to make you discover something new about the beginning of it.

And so he was drawing the comparison between what we do in a top-down world-building versus ground-up world-building to trying to write the whole screenplay at once versus figuring out what the screenplay is from the bottom-up. And I think what we often pitch on the show is like really looking at the screenplay from one character’s journey one time through and only building as much world as you need for this character to tell his story.

**Craig:** Yeah. The annoying thing about screenwriting is that the only way to get through it is to feel like you’re doing it right but then also hold in your mind simultaneously the knowledge that you’re not doing it right.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And you just have to manage to be split-brained in that way. Because how do you write a scene not right? There’s no way to do that. You have to convince yourself that this is it, but then have just the wisdom to know it’s not.

**John:** I was talking to Justin Marks at a screenwriters drinks this week. And he was talking about the work he’s doing on a project and he had, at a certain point, realized, “I just need to get something on paper that will give people the ability to plan for what’s going to happen next and know that I will have the opportunity to go back and make that thing better.” And finding that balance between making something absolutely perfect and making something good enough that people can do their jobs is a really tough line. And figuring out where you’re at in that process can be so tough.

Television, you’re often having to shoot things that aren’t perfect. You just know they’re not perfect.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s the nature of the game because you could spend 10 years on it and make it perfect, but then you’ve been cancelled for nine years.

**Craig:** So, congratulations —

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** On your perfect cancelled show. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s get to some perfect scripts. Let’s get to our Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I was very excited by all of these. But I’m going to start with Jody Russell who wrote End Times Boy. And so on this podcast, I’ve decided that we are going to make our assumptions about people as default female. So Jody could be a man or a woman but I’m going to say Jody is a woman because default female will be our guess here.

**Craig:** I now realize that, yes, there are men named Jody, some baseball players. But, no, I just presumed.

**John:** Wasn’t the kid on My Three Sons also a boy Jody?

**Craig:** Oh, I just know Fred MacMurray.

**John:** And also, Lena Dunham’s cinematographer from Tiny Furniture who also did the first seasons of Girls is also Jody. It’s like, “Oh, she’s really good.” It’s like, “No, it’s a he.” I’m like, “I’m an idiot.”

**Craig:** No, you’re not. I mean, because I think primarily by the numbers, Jody is —

**John:** By the numbers, yeah.

**Craig:** Jody is female.

**John:** Wonderful. I will summarize this one. So this is Jody Russell’s End Times Boy. So we open in an abandoned house. We’re in the hallway. We hear rhythmic breathing. We see two people in respirators, just two faces. They head into the kitchen. Glass is crunching under their feet as they survey the kitchen. They’re searching for stuff. They open up a cabinet. They find three cans of sardines inside. One of the boys pulls out his mask and you can see that it is actually a boy. This boy is Sam. He’s 10 years old, caked with grime and dirt. Eli, who he’s with, says, “We shouldn’t stop.”

Once they get outside and get away from the house, they pull off their masks and gear. So you see that Eli is older. Eli is 12 years old. Eli says, “At least there weren’t any bodies.” And so they get to a chain-link fence and they end up back at a shambled chicken coop where there’s a man named Old Ben who’s only in his 40s. So 40s is not that old, I just want to point that out.

Old Ben, voice wet and raspy, asks if they got anything. They say they got two cans of sardines. They actually got three but they say they got two. Old Ben is pissed at them. He says, you know, “You’re holding back on me. Give me that fish.” Ultimately, Sam pulls a gun on him and we exit the scene with Sam pulling the trigger on Old Ben. And that’s the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Well, so I’ve been playing Fallout 4 lately. This felt like mother’s milk to me. [laughs] So this feels appropriately post-apocalyptic. Loved the opening image of two faces in these respirators. That’s such a great like, yeah, I’m going to just keep saying video games like Borderlands and Fallout. Such a good look. And then you have the abandoned house and people scavenging, which is classic post-apocalyptic stuff.

Love that it was a kid. I mean, that’s always exciting when you see a kid do it. You’ll probably get that sooner rather than later because of the size but it’s still always shocking when you see children in these kinds of situations. Wasn’t quite sure why Eli was marked as off-screen when the line before says that his masked face is hovering behind Sam, so he’s not off-screen. The fact that his mouth isn’t visible because he’s talking through the respirator doesn’t mean he’s off-screen.

They take the cans. I love this line, “At least there weren’t any bodies.” So lines like that are so good. They do so much work for you. They tell you what was going on before the movie began. They tell you about the way of the world. They tell you about how kids are in this world. They tell you a lot. It’s very good.

**John:** Yeah, that should have been the first line of the script. No one should have spoken before that line.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we shouldn’t stop is an unnecessary thing. Although, that also kind of tells you something, too, that there are bad people out there.

Old Ben. I like that Old Ben was 40s because I think that in this world, if you make it to 40, you’re old. He’s injured. He’s dying. There’s a pretty decent exchange here where he’s trying to get — it goes on a bit. I thought it could have been quite a bit shorter but I liked his character. I understood his character. Didn’t quite understand the characters of Sam and Eli here in terms of their voice. I mean, I understood why they were doing —

**John:** I couldn’t differentiate them. And so as I went right through it, I was trying to hear what was different about them and I really couldn’t. At the end of the script, I couldn’t remember which kid pulled the gun on him.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I should know that.

**Craig:** Right. So there wasn’t really a differentiation there in their voices which we could have used. Now, let’s talk about these last two lines.

So Eli is nicer. Now, understand that John and I, I think, can both see that Eli is the nice one and Sam is the tough one, but it’s how they say things when we say voice. Like, how does the rhythm of their speech differentiate? That’s what’s missing. Eli says, “Just give him one, Sam.” Sam cocks his pistol. Now, it’s a little tricky. Sam stares down the barrel of a 22 pistol into Old Ben’s watering eyes. I wasn’t sure who was aiming the gun at whom at that point.

**John:** I was going to say the same thing. Stares down the barrel, to me, feels like the opposite way around.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like if I’m looking at the gun, then I’m staring down the barrel. Because actually, I see the barrel as being looking inside it, so he’s really saying like looks over the top of the barrel.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. Exactly.

**John:** Yeah. Down the barrel means you’re looking into the hole.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s the way. And then I reread it again and went, “Okay.” Old Ben says, “You damn little monster, I’ve kept you alive.” And Sam says, “Now you’re dying too slow.” Now, this is an example of two sentences that do not go together.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is a thing that people have to learn one way or another and it’s experience, I think. And this is dinky little craft stuff that anyone can learn. This isn’t talent. And it’s basically matching lines. If you want to do the setup and the pay-off line, they’ve got to match. They have to match tense, they have to match theme, they have to match senses.

“I’ve kept you alive.” “Now you’re dying too slow.” The second line is for somebody who’s saying that they did something quickly. This is not an appropriate response to what he says. It’s a non-sequitur, essentially.

**John:** Exactly. And matching lines, ideally, the contrast should be that last word. Like, you know, it’s alive or dead, fast or slow. That’s a natural way. But also matching verb and verb tense, I think I’ve told this on the podcast before. But I remember we were shooting Go, my very first movie, we were in a supermarket, it’s like three in the morning, and we had shot the scene with Zack and Adam. So we were shooting both sides but we shot the master and now we’re going in for coverage.

And one of them changed one of the lines slightly. And it basically changed from a past tense to a present tense and the script supervisor hadn’t noticed they changed it or hadn’t worried that they changed it. And so I heard it and I’m like, “No, no, no, no, no.” And at the time I got back to the set, I had my contacts on and I heard that they changed the line. They were shooting the other matching close-up but he was still saying his original line.

**Craig:** It didn’t match.

**John:** It wouldn’t cut together. So I had to say like, “Either have to go back through or we’re going to have to change what you’re saying because like you’re not answering the same conversation on both sides.”

**Craig:** And this is that thing where people don’t hear it but we do. And I do believe the audience senses it. So there’s tense issues and there’s word issues. “You damn little monster, I have kept you alive.” I have, in the past, kept you alive. Sam says, “Now you are,” now you’re, “Now you are dying too slow.” This is present tense gerund. [laughs This is ongoing action.

So the tenses don’t match at all. And then ‘alive’ and ‘slow’ are not complementary at all. Now, I’m not sure, I mean, you can come up with easy-peasy bad ways of answering this, “You damn little monster, I’ve kept you alive.” And Sam, I mean to me, there’s no complement to that. I would just have Sam say, “Yeah, thanks,” and then shoot him, you know. [laughs]

When you do these matchy lines, if they don’t match, they’re clunky as hell and no good. If they do match, there’s a ton of pressure on them because everyone senses how written they are. Sometimes you’ll get this note, “This line feels written.” Well, uhh, yeah, they’re all written. [laughs] But it feels written. It’s almost too well crafted.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So this one unfortunately falls into the clunk category.

**John:** Yeah, a clunk for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I enjoyed the overall setting and sort of the painting of these pages but I had a lot of problems of stuff on the page. And so I think it just, in service to Jody and to everyone else who’s actually reading the pages, and I should have prefaced this by saying if you would like to read the actual pages that we’re looking at, you can go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes or /podcast. Look for this episode, this is episode 227, and download the PDF so you can read along with us.

Because while I enjoyed so much of Jody’s writing here, there were a lot of problems on the page that would have slowed down and stopped people from enjoying them as much as they could have. So, first line of actual action, “Breathing — almost rhythmic.” Great, that sounds wonderful. He uses a single hyphen as a dash or —

**Craig:** She.

**John:** I’m sorry. She uses a single hyphen as a dash. I apologize, Jody. Dash, dash. If you’re in Courier, use two dashes, just get it long enough because otherwise it looks like a minus.

Third paragraph. “They look towards a closed door at the end of the hall. The larger mask turns to the smaller one. The smaller one moves forward.” At this point, I’d urge you to stop thinking about just the masks and like the figure, person, whatever, because I kept thinking like, “Wait, did the mask turn?” It’s a person that’s turning. So build these people out as little bit more of bodies first.

Throughout this, there were some good sound effects but they weren’t capitalized. And going to uppercase isn’t mandatory, but it is really useful and it’s a tool that’s in your tool box as a screenwriter to capitalize things, to give us a sense of the sound that they’re going to hear.

So “Glass crunches around a pair of small hiking boots shuffling in,” that crunches would have helped that line a little bit to uppercase that. Later, “More shuffling now closer toward the cabinets,” that would have been great.

Craig, how do you feel about, “Inside the cabinet sits three puck shaped cans”?

**Craig:** Not a big fan of that what do you call, like inverted —

**John:** Yeah, the inverted sentence. Also, technically, inside sit three cans.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Just prior to that, there’s a moment where it appears they’re trying to be quiet. And so they “Reaches and nudges open the cabinet door. The cabinet door creaks back, snaps on a busted hinge and crashes to the counter, clangs onto the floor.” Good.

**John:** React.

**Craig:** Exactly. So that of course you can see on the day, the one who opened it and made it fall is going to look over to the other one who’s staring at him like, “You idiot.” You want that.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s another moment right before we go from the hallway into the kitchen. So right now it’s written as, “The smaller one moves forward.” But rather than smaller one moves forward, like why doesn’t it like the smaller one gestures, “You first.” Like, actually have the characters make choices or do something right from the start. You have the opportunity, so like let us see what the dynamic is right from those very initial scenes.

**Craig:** Right. And you could also have it where the larger one hesitates, nervous, the smaller one moves ahead, not scared at all. As long as you give us a sense that this is meaningful character-wise, otherwise it’s just blocking.

**John:** So after they’ve first seen the sardines, “He grasps the rim of his goggles and pushes them back.” But that he isn’t connected to anything. He doesn’t refer to any one person. The last things we’ve seen that have taken action have been these objects. So you need to say like, “The smaller figure — ” remind us who it is that we’re looking at.

**Craig:** Right. The smaller scavenger grabs the rim of the goggles. It starts getting into a — [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. The larger figure pulls up his goggles.

**Craig:** His. See, his. It’s the same problem. At some point, you run into to this pronoun problem.

**John:** But it’s fine. You’re going to see it’s a boy soon enough in the next sentence.

**Craig:** Right, but starting with, “He is,” rough, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. “A young boy’s eyes but the eyes of an old soul.”

**Craig:** Whoops.

**John:** Whoops. Repeating the word ‘eyes.’

**Craig:** You don’t repeat words.

**John:** Old soul eyes, I’m not a huge fan of. But a young boy with the eyes of an older soul, I guess.

**Craig:** Correct. You can’t have a young boy’s eyes and also the eyes of an old soul. So you can be a young boy with the eyes of an old soul.

**John:** It’s a four-eyed boy. Post-apocalyptic.

**Craig:** [laughs] But you see, I have to say that Jody did a really nice job in this first page because I could hear it and I could see it.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I loved the way that she broke up her actions. It was so readable, lots of good crunchy words that I love. I like words like ‘pouty.’ Just good yummy words like that. Goggles are great and respirators are great.

**John:** I thought she had a very good vision of what this was going to look like and feel like. And I’m just urging her to spend the time on the craft to get those words and periods and spaces to help her paint that picture even better. Space after Sam (10). He snatches the cans deftly. Deftly snatching is like if you’re trying to get them away from something else but like you just take them.

**Craig:** Yeah, adverbs are always — they need to fight their way into a script.

**John:** Next page. ELI (12) chubby faced, hyphen between those probably, with rubicund cheeks and a gentle gaze. Rubicund? Rubicund? I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Well, rubicund, is that a word? Yeah, doesn’t that mean —

**John:** Rosy? I guess. Rosy cheeks?

**Craig:** Rubicund I thought meant like chubby.

**John:** Chubby, but it was also, he was chubby-faced in the previous words.

**Craig:** Well, let’s see who’s right. It’s ruddy. So it’s a color thing. Rubicund is a color.

**John:** It’s a color. Ruby.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** If John August and Craig Mazin don’t know what your word means, it’s probably too fancy a word for a screenplay.

**Craig:** Ruddy.

**John:** Ruddy cheeks. They halt at a dilapidated chain-link fence. Can a chain-link fence be dilapidated?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah for sure.

**John:** Okay. Broken down, rusted. All right. So those are the things I urge her to look at, things like not much loot tho, T-H-O. You could bother to spell that out. You’re not creating a special lingo. There’s not a reason why you’re saying the short version of word that we’re going to hear the short version of it.

**Craig:** I’m starting to get a sense that maybe Jody is British.

**John:** Possibly.

**Craig:** Because I think rubicund, and tho, that kind of spelling, I feel like it might be a Britishism or maybe an Australianism.

**John:** Could be, could be.

**Craig:** So anyway I thought, Jody, you’ve introduced your characters in two ways twice. One is that there’s a larger one and a smaller one and then later one taller and chunky, the other smaller and wiry. That stuff we will have already seen.

**John:** Yeah, we got it. So introduce them once.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So bottom page 2, Old Ben asked, “Anything?” “Some cans of fish.” “Only two of them.” So Sam is the one who says, “Only two of them.” If that’s going to be a moment, then have Eli clock this that Sam is lying because there actually are three and we saw that. It’s like let us know that he’s telling a lie or at least the other character is recognizing it because otherwise it’s just going to pass. It’s not going to be acknowledged.

The same thing with quiet. So Eli says, “Quiet, quiet. We can split it, it’s okay.” And later on he says like, you know, “Please be quiet.” But they’re not acting in a way that makes me believe that they’re trying to be quiet. They’re saying they need to be quiet but I don’t see them worried about other people coming over or that they’re going to attract things. So I think the quiet is deliberate but I just thought he’s like telling him to shut up.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that is deliberate. So the idea is let’s keep our voices down, there are bad people out there or bad monsters out there. So Eli needs to be looking around, keeping an eye on the horizon, always checking, quiet, quiet so we understand what he’s referring to. Generally speaking, when you are going to lie, you don’t volunteer a lie. You lie because you have to. “Anything?” “Some cans of fish.” How many cans of fish? Two.

**John:** Two.

**Craig:** You don’t volunteer. Only two. Because that seems clunky.

**John:** I think part of the reason my quiet got confused is on page 3 Eli raises his hands trying to quiet him. So if you’re trying to quiet somebody, are you trying to calm them down, are you trying to get them to lower their voice and that might have been a great moment to flag to me like they’re keeping their voices low. And then I would know like, “Oh, the stakes have just been raised because other people could be listening to this.”

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I think that is about description, about painting intention. So you just have to apply that test all the time. Will people know what my intention is with these words? Is it clear? Is it not? And that’s a game we have to play every day, line by line. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose, and we have to go back and make it clear.

**John:** Yeah. My last little niggly thing would be, “Staring down the barrel of a twenty two pistol.” A 22 or 45, those are things that you tend to actually use the digits for and not spell out.

**Craig:** Yeah, .22.

**John:** Yup. That’s how it is.

**Craig:** Yup. That’s how it is.

**John:** I was interested reading what was going to happen next, so good job on that. I was concerned about stuff I saw on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah, but promising stuff there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, I’ll go for Celebrate & Behave by Mark S.W. & V.P. Walling. Now —

**John:** I don’t get that. What’s S.W.?

**Craig:** Okay. So his name is — well, I don’t know if he wants us to say his name. Can we? I guess so. Yeah, I’ll go ahead. Just based on his e-mail address, it’s Mark Skeele Wilson. So Mark S.W. stands for Mark Skeele Wilson. But it’s interesting. So he abbreviates his middle and last name and then the other guy abbreviates his first — or woman, because we don’t know. I’m going to assume V.P. Walling is a woman.

**John:** Yeah, the default female assumption.

**Craig:** Like however they to want to do it. Celebrate & Behave by Mark SW. and V.P. Walling. So we open on a black screen and then it’s illuminated by the spark of a cheap plastic lighter. Then blackness then spark again. And we see now a small white pill that is slowly melting and sizzling on tinfoil. And the lighter illuminates as well the youthful but weary face of Michael Walton, a 38-year-old man who is sweat, jitters, and sad eyes. And then we go to black again.

It’s now morning. Michael awakens in his tent. He’s in a tent. Very bright sunlight. Looking for pills in his pill bottles but he’s all out. He gets out of his tent into a forest clearing to go pee and he’s confronted by a brown bear with a cub. And the script tells us that this is Alaska. He falls backward and as the bear moves in on him and he tries to scare the bear off. To no avail, there’s a gunshot.

The bear leaves quickly. The cub sort of stares at him for a while and then heads off. And Michael sees Ray, a 60-year-old man, decked out like a hunter and he’s obviously the one who fired the shot. Ray says, “That was a warning shot.” Michael says, “Thanks.” And Ray says, “It wasn’t for her.” Uh-huh, they know each other. Ray then leaves.

Next, we’re at bourgeois cabin where Michael pulls up in his beat-up truck and all of his stuff has been thrown out all over the yard. And the cabin door is locked. The people inside slam the windows and curtains shut. They don’t want to talk to him. Somebody named Joey is inside but doesn’t want to talk to him. And so Michael gathers up his stuff including an urn with ashes from Danny Walton, Beloved Son & Brother who died in 1996.

Lastly, we are in downtown Sitka which is a town in Alaska. Michael drives into town, pulls up in front of a storefront that says, “Dr. Michael S. Walton, OB-GYN.” And there’s a notice on the door on orange paper saying, “Government notice – premises closed due to ongoing investigation.” And then spray-painted in fire engine red on it misspelled is the word “Faget.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that is Celebrate & Behave.

**John:** I have such tiny little niggly things that I feel silly pointing them out. I thought this was a really promising start. I greatly enjoyed starting this way in this setting I’d never seen before with a character I’d never seen before. I don’t know what’s going to happen next but I’m curious what’s going to happen next. I like that there’s a bear. I like just so much of it. I think I would happily read another 15 pages of this script. How did you take this?

**Craig:** Very similarly. So I remember Lindsay Doran paid me a compliment once and it meant so much to me. Because I was talking about pages and like, you know, “It’s feeling like it might be a little long.” She goes, “It’s not long. You have all this wonderful white space in your pages. You know, it’s like milk. There’s all this milky space.” She loves white space and I love white space, too. And so also do Mark S.W. and V.P. Walling and to their credit. So everything is nicely paced out. They’re not rushing through anything, and they’re getting a lot done here.

There’s this wonderful encounter. The bears, it’s great because there’s something really kind of curious and Coen-esque, Coen brothers-esque about that cub just like, “Hmm, I know you.” I was confused. I understand I am supposed to confused but slightly — well, there was a confusion on a confusion which made me a little annoyed. I don’t mind multiple confusions as long as they’re about different things. My one little picky thing here is I meet Ray and I don’t know who Ray is. I know that they know each other. And I know I’ll find out eventually but I don’t know what’s going on with Ray.

Then he goes to this cabin and there’s somebody named Joey. And I don’t know who Joey is and I don’t know what the story is with Joey. So that was a confusion on a confusion of the same exact kind. So I got a little, eh.

**John:** And I would say there’s a parallel kind of confusion where you both have the ashes, where like there is related to some dead person, and we’re going to go to an office which is closed but has information about some person who’s not there anymore. So there was a little more of that than I would have necessarily loved right there at the very start.

**Craig:** Yeah, especially because I think the implication here is that he is the Dr. Michael S. Walton, that his practice has been closed due to an ongoing investigation because he’s a drug addict but we don’t know his name yet. So we have a Ray who isn’t identified by name. So here are the people we meet. We meet Michael, I don’t know his name. We meet Ray, I don’t know his name. And me meaning I’m in the theater, forget reading the pages. I know Joey’s name but I don’t know who Joey is and I don’t see Joey. I know Danny Walton’s name. I know he’s dead but I don’t know who he is and I don’t know his relationship to Michael because I don’t know Michael’s last name because I don’t know his name. Then I see Michael Walton, I go okay so somebody related to Danny Walton if I know how to read and I remember that, got in trouble but I don’t know that this is him. So that stuff could be helped.

**John:** It’s entirely possible I think the very next action line is him pulling out his keys and opening up his office and then I would probably kind of think, “Oh, this is his office. This is this guy and that’s his name.” But we have to stop where we stopped and that was the bottom of this third page.

**Craig:** It is possible. I don’t think that’s what happened because he’s looking at the sign from across the street and he hasn’t gotten out of his car. It makes me feel like he’s going to just keep driving.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** But one thing that is hard to do in life, easy to do when you’re writing, hard to do when you’re shooting is have a car pull up across the street from a storefront, you have somebody stare at it and then have them read a tiny paper that they can’t possibly be able to read. So the deal is that obviously the camera can go close but if you’re implying that that guy is seeing it then we feel something is off because he can’t. I mean he can see a sign, he just can’t read the words from across the street unless it’s massive.

**John:** Unless it’s massive. And those are things you — they’re not hard fixes but I think they should be fixed. So I, like Lindsay Doran, love white space and I loved the white space in this page. I did actually yearn for one extra return and let’s see if you agree with me here. So middle of page one, Ext. Forest Clearing — Continuous. Michael crawls from the cramped tent door, confronted by the harsh summer sunlight. He starts to pee then looks up to see a huge brown bear with cub.

If you had just given me one more return, I would understand like there’s a tiny jump cut there and he’s not pissing on the very first step outside the door. I wanted a tiny bit of space and break between those two things. Because I felt like he was pissing on his tent.

**Craig:** Oh, really? Okay. [laughs] It kind of flowed for me. Just because, I don’t know, there’s that thing that happens when you walk out of a tent in the morning, the first thing you do is whip it out and pee. [laughs] It’s just natural. It just happens.

**John:** Which is, I’ve camped my whole life so I do get that but like stumbling a few steps and starts to pee and then do it. Just like it happened so fast. I thought it actually hurt the bear reveal because I wanted the pee to be like that pee moment and then like have the bear.

**Craig:** Well, but then again, we want that “A single gunshot” on the bottom of the page there, the way he has it.

**John:** It’s so good. I can’t say that it’s necessarily better. I do wanted to single out “The bear raises up, up, up on his hind legs,” and so those get more capitalized as he goes. And he parallels that structure as he tries to make himself be bigger to scare it off but the gunshot works great. Like the previous script, I’ll point out that dashes in Courier should be two hyphens, not a single hyphen. It just helps sell it a little better. So it’s not a minus sign. These are small things.

**Craig:** Yeah, the only other thing I would say is and this would get you your line return and not lose “Bam! A single gunshot” from the bottom of the page, I would delete this is Alaska because I don’t care. What I care about is that a man is peeing and there’s a bear next to him. When he pulls up in his beat-up, rust colored ’97 Ford pickup, just add with Alaska plates. Now I know where I am.

**John:** Yeah, I didn’t mind the “This is Alaska.” It gave you a breather between like holy crap there’s a bear and stumbling back but I see your point, too.

**Craig:** I would rather — if it’s important for the reader to know it’s Alaska, it’s important for the audience to know it’s Alaska. Show the audience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But good stuff.

**John:** Good pages, really exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our final one from this batch of Three Page Challenges is by Matthew Gentile. Would you say Gentile or Gentile?

**Craig:** I would say Gentile.

**John:** Gentile. It could be Gentile. It could be Gentile. His first name is Matthew so we’re going to go default female again. [laughs] So it’s a woman named Matthew just like Ryan Reynolds’ daughter is named James.

**Craig:** Really? That’s like that model James King.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. And his wife’s name is Blake so it’s all in keeping. No, we’re going assume that Matthew is a gentleman. Our story starts in 1984, Los Angeles. The title over says exactly that, Los Angeles, 1984. On Beverly Hills Street, rain is falling as we look up at a skyscraper. We meet Jake Hughes, a young man in a fitted suit, silhouetted as he exits the skyscraper. Looks around, picks up a pay phone, puts in his two quarters. As the phone rings, we hear his heart beat and he’s kind of calming himself before about what he’s about to do. We have a cut to six months earlier. Uh-oh, cut to six months earlier.

**Craig:** Stuart!

**John:** Stuart!

**Craig:** You think that Stuart, it was just like I imagine that Stuart is reading along and then he gets that and he goes “Ah!”

**John:** His heart. [laughs]

**Craig:** His little hearts stops.

**John:** So for people who are listening for the first time, this is sort of a trope on the Three Page Challenge is like, you know, it’s half a page and suddenly it’s jumping to an earlier time cut. Essentially the opening a story was someplace later on in the script. Stuart does not deliberately pick those. What we’ve heard from Stuart is that so many of these pages that he gets have that thing that it’s just representative so.

**Craig:** I believe him.

**John:** Regardless, our time jump here takes us back to a mailroom. It’s six months earlier. The doors burst open, Jake rushes into a safe. He opens up the safe, pulls a film print from the safe, and he picks up a phone and dials a number. Then we hear at the other side of the phone call, a person named Neil with a Californian accent. They talk. Jake says he’s in the mailroom. “Stay put, don’t let that print out of your sight,” Neil says. They have conversation. Basically, Jake is doing a favor for Neil and he’s going to write him a killer evaluation for HR. Jake is very excited about all this. Neil says he’ll call back. Jake then calls Stella, his girlfriend, and says that he was roped into doing one last task for his boss and Stella at the bottom of the page three says, “But my graduation is in two hours.” That’s the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** All right. So let’s dig into this.

**John:** Take it off.

**Craig:** I don’t think that what I saw here is worth three pages by and large. Let’s begin with our cold open. It does not deserve to be here and then show us six months earlier. Generally speaking, when you do this and it is tropey and we’ve seen it a billion times, what you’re looking at is something incredibly dramatic. I’ll take like John Wick did it. So John Wick opens with a car driving into a dark parking lot and smashing into a pillar and Keanu Reeves gets out and he’s bleeding, he’s been shot, and he lies down, he prepares to die. Then we go, six months earlier, okay. How did he get into that awful, awful situation?

This opens with a guy putting quarters into a payphone. I wonder how he got into that situation. Who cares?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, it just doesn’t deserve what we’re doing here.

**John:** Well, here’s what I’ll say. I’ll say that that kind of time cut we’re doing, the audience has an expectation that like, “Okay, because we’ve seen this in so many other movies,” there has to be a big reason why that’s such an incredibly important moment and there’s nothing you’ve given us in that first moment that leads us to believe that it could be an incredibly important moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean we get that he’s making an important phone call but that’s not the high drama that is required to pull the old six months earlier Stuart gambit. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Similarly, the space that’s burned up here doing it is a bit overwrought. Geography-wise, I got very confused from the start. Here’s the first paragraph. “Rain falls as we look up at a skyscraper. Move down and pull back to reveal a payphone across the street, looming in the foreground.” The payphone is across the street and it’s in the foreground?

**John:** I think it was a big crane shot that was aimed up then pulls back to reveal the building and then moves so that the payphone is in the foreground and he’s going to rush in to that payphone and do something.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So I think he was trying to create the drama of like what that moment is like he gets to the phone and puts in the quarters.

**Craig:** You don’t want your crane shot to end up on a payphone that’s just sitting there. If I’m looking up at a skyscraper and there’s a ringing and I’m coming down through the rain and pulling back across the street and now there’s this payphone that’s ringing for no one, okay.

**John:** Yeah, that’s some drama.

**Craig:** Okay, I get it. That’s why I’m looking at the payphone. There’s no reason to look at this payphone. And then he runs across the street and he puts some quarters and okay. So anyway, you get the idea there, Matthew. I just don’t think that that’s worthy of the old Stuart gambit.

Now we go back to the movie proper. Another problem. The opening showed Jake running frantically across the street to the payphone. We go back six months earlier and what’s Jake doing? Running frantically towards the safe. [laughs] This is just what Jake does. He runs frantically towards things.

**John:** Jake runs and he talks on phones.

**Craig:** And he talks on phones. So that doesn’t work. You need a contrast if you’re going to do the Stuart gambit, a big contrast. He opens up the safe and inside there’s a film print. What is a film print?

**John:** I don’t know what a film print is. Is it a film can? Is it like meant to be 16 millimeters, 35? How big is this thing? Is it a reel? Oh, my gosh, maybe he needs to take it to The Man in the High Castle.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. Is it one of those like old film, like those little film containers that you’d put 35-millimeter in for a personal camera? Is it a reel of movie film? I don’t know because I don’t know what film print is. Also frankly film prints and safes feels very just super old fashioned. I know this is a period piece but — anyway, so in 1984, I would imagine a video cassette but if it’s still pictures, if it’s still images then I could see that little film roll container. Anyway, I don’t know what it is. So that’s a problem.

He calls Neil. Now here’s what it says, “Many voices will come over the phone during this story. The first is a man in his late 20s with a Southern California accent, Neil.” Now, a couple of things, Matthew. One, when I read that I presumed this story meant the story that I’m about to hear on the phone like many voices are going to be on the phone for what’s coming right now because I haven’t read your script yet, I don’t realize and later I piece it together that there’s going to be a lot of phone stuff in the movie. So I got totally thrown. I was like, okay, I guess there’s going to be a lot of people talking on the phone. A Southern California accent, I defy you, defy you to make that a real accent that people know.

**John:** Oh, come on, it’s The Californians.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a real — exactly, that is not an accent. [laughs]

**John:** “I took the 405.” I can’t even do the fake California accent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Take 405 to…” Anyway, no one talks like that. So they have this conversation. Throughout the conversation, Neil who’s on the phone, is indicated with OS. Personally, I’ve seen this happen. It’s not a deal breaker. I like to put in parenthesis, phone.

**John:** Yeah, I put on phone, yeah.

**Craig:** Or on phone, exactly. Because OS really means they’re in the space. The camera is just not pointing at them. They are off screen.

**John:** Yeah, and it’s not just that they’re not in a single. It’s like they deliberately should not be shown on camera at this moment.

**Craig:** Exactly. So this would really be more of on phone. But in that way, right next to the character name, Neil says, “Good. Stay put. Do not let that print out of your sight.” Jake says, “I won’t let it out of my hands.” That’s like repeating. This is not real to me. That’s not a real response, “Do not let that print out of your sight.” “I won’t.” Not I won’t let it, let it, let it, okay. Then Neil says, “As soon as I get Russell’s exact address, I’ll call you back, he lives in Westwood.” “Okay, I’m right here.” “Just letting you know, I’m going to write you a killer evaluation for HR.” “Really?” “Yup. With your track record, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were the first of your class out of that mailroom.” This doesn’t feel like it’s appropriate for what’s going on at all.

When you’re doing something wrong for personal gain, the person on the other end, it’s like this guy is talking like he’s never heard of a wiretap in his life. Nobody just spills this baloney like this so overtly. It’s got to be, “I won’t forget this. Trust me, this is going to work out really well for you.” Neil isn’t a real person right now. He’s just saying this stuff that I don’t buy. Jake says, “Thank you.” And Neil says, “Well, let’s not start sucking each other’s dicks just yet.” That’s from Pulp Fiction. You can’t use that line. It’s from Pulp Fiction. Mr. Wolf said it. That’s that, can’t do it. “Sure.” ‘Talk soon.” Like what a casual conversation. [laughs]

And then here’s what it says, ‘Neil cuts the call. Jake dials another number. It rings.’ “Bunny, it’s me,” says Jake. And then that was the dialogue. And here’s the action line. “We hear the voice of a young woman and Jake’s girlfriend, Stella. I’m thinking, “Oh, Bunny and Stella are on the phone together.” [laughs] Like we hear the voice of a young woman and Jake’s girlfriend, Stella. No, we hear the voice of Stella, Jake’s girlfriend whom he calls Bunny so you’re going to need to say, we hear the voice of Stella. Jake’s girlfriend. His pet name for her, Bunny, is his pet name or something. Otherwise —

**John:** Or AKA Bunny.

**Craig:** AKA Bunny, exactly. Like these are the phone conversations I just don’t want to see in a movie and don’t have time to sit through. “Bunny, it’s me.” “Hey love, I’m leaving.” “I’m at the office right now.” “What? Why?” Just argh, just do it, just get into it. [laughs] “Bunny, it’s me. I got roped into making a quick drop off for my boss.” “I know, I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m not happy but” — there’s no sense of sweatiness, no sense that he’s doing something wrong, there’s no urgency.

**John:** So it’s the difference between how people speak in the real world and how the slightly optimized version of how people speak in movies. And just once you sort of come to accept it, this is what Craig basically just pitched is, “Bunny, it’s me.” “Hey, love. I got roped into making a quick drop off at the bosses.” “Look I’m not happy about it either but don’t worry, we’ll be on time, all right?” And then if her first real line is, “My graduation is in two hours,” then that’s funny. That actually tells you something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So cutting will make that just so much sharper.

**Craig:** Yeah, nobody’s speaking as if they are in possession of the facts they’re in possession of.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** She’s not talking like somebody whose graduation is in two hours, really, hey love, I’m leaving. If her graduation is in two hours and he’s not with her, why isn’t she like, where are you? You know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he’s certainly not talking like somebody that just committed a crime. Neil’s not talking like somebody that just roped somebody into committing a crime. So I had multiple issues here with Assist by Matthew Gentile. I think that I would say to Matthew, I wouldn’t get discouraged here. It’s not like I read these and I go, “Oh, Matthew can’t write.” I just think that you’ve made a lot of classic rookie mistakes and you just got to get them out of your system.

**John:** Yeah and you got them out here so next thing is going to be better.

**Craig:** The next one will be better.

**John:** It’ll be better. I want to thank all three of our brave writers and everyone else who writes in with their Three Page Challenge samples because they’re so useful and instructive and they give us things to talk about because it’s so hard to talk about screenwriting when you don’t have screenplays in front of you to talk about.

So if you have a screenplay, three pages of which you’d like us to take a look at, the first three pages is usually the most helpful. It can be a screenplay, it can also be a pilot. We’ve done those too. You can go to johnaugust.com/threepage and that is where you’ll find a page listing how you submit your scripts. There’s a little form you fill out. You click and say that it’s okay for us to talk about it on the air. You’ll attach a PDF and they end up in Stuart’s inbox. And Stuart sorts through them every once in a while and gives us these scripts to take a look at. So again thank you to these three people for letting us talk about their scripts on the air and to everyone else who has written in with them.

**Craig:** Absolutely. You guys are very, very brave, so thank you and hopefully we are of some help.

**John:** Yep. It’s time for One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time.

**Craig:** Time after time.

**John:** It’s a fantastic pop song from 1984.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The Washington Post — I’m sorry, actually Wall Street Journal did an article about how they wrote that song. So she wrote it with Rob Hyman and it just charts through sort of the process of writing a song. And having written many, many songs, I found it really fascinating sort of how songs come together because this was a case of there was sort of an idea that got thrown out, it was originally a calypso number and you can see all these influences are still in that song even though they made fundamentally different choices. And things get pieced together, it’s iteration, there’s bursts of sudden inspiration but then it’s also the hard work of figuring out like what does this song actually really want to be.

So this is one example for a really good song, Time After Time.

**Craig:** Rob Hyman, Philadelphia guy, was one of the main members of a group called The Hooters.

**John:** Oh yeah, I know The Hooters.

**Craig:** Remember The Hooters? So they did, ‘And we dance like a wave on the ocean romance,’ and they also did, ‘All you zombies hide your faces.’

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** But I’m always fascinated by these guys that then just like go sideways like, you know, Someone Like You, the big Adele hit, that’s co-written by a guy who was the main songwriter for what was it called Supersonic, I can’t remember the name, but the guys that did ‘Closing Time.’

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah or Linda Perry quite famously 4 Non Blondes who is now a big singer-songwriter.

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**John:** A big songwriter for other people. My other One Cool Thing is Secret Hitler which is a game that is on Kickstarter right now.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It is from Max Tempkin and the Cards Against Humanity folks. He has created a game that I got to test play quite really on and it’s really fun. It’s a game for 5 to 10 to ten people. We played it with 10 people so it’s our office and the Exploding Kittens office and we all got together and played it. It’s really fun. And Craig; you would love it because it’s all about manipulation and lies and how to convince people that you are not who you clearly are.

**Craig:** I mean that’s — I wake up doing that.

**John:** Yeah, so you’re a natural at it.

**Craig:** So this is like a card —

**John:** No, so this is — it’s a game — have you ever played Mafia —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Or Werewolf?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s that but it’s more sophisticated in a sense that it’s set in sort of pre-World War II fascist-leaning in Germany and so you’re either the liberals or the fascists and so you get a card saying who you are. So either you’re a liberal or fascist or Hitler and —

**Craig:** Oh you can be Hitler in this game?

**John:** Yeah, so it’s essentially the fascists are trying to elect Hitler as Chancellor and in that they win if they do that.

**Craig:** So it’s like oh we did it, we won and six million Jews are going to die. [laughs]

**John:** So what’s so fascinating about the mechanic of it is that like Mafia or Werewolf, there’s reasons why you will lie and cheat to sort of manipulate people and make people think that you are clearly on their side when you’re not on their side but it becomes so much more complicated because you’re trying to pass these policies. And there’s an element of randomness which is like you might have no choice why you had to enact this fascist policy but everyone will then think that you are fascist.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** So we quite enjoyed it and yet I will say it strained some friendships so —

**Craig:** Oh really? It’s one of those type of games?

**John:** Yeah it’s not as bad as sort of the Diplomacy which of course is the game that destroys friendships.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** So great, it’s beautiful. So it’s not that. It’s only about an hour. With 10 people, it’s a little bit more than an hour but it’s really well done so if you’re curious about the game, it’s on Kickstarter, it’s cheap and you should consider backing it.

**Craig:** Used to play Diplomacy with my friends in high school and it was — it really was — it only works when you play with people who are smart and who just acknowledge right up front that winning a game is more important than anything else. [laughs] And so you can respect it.

**John:** Yeah totally.

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is rather large and corporate but I used it today and it was like, “Oh God this is so ridiculously awesome.” [laughs] And I feel bad about it in a way because there must be abuse on the other end of it but Prime Now — have you used Prime Now?

**John:** Yeah, it’s like the same day delivery?

**Craig:** I mean it’s not even the same day delivery; it’s like delivery in an hour.

**John:** How does that even work? I’ve never done this.

**Craig:** So Prime Now — so if you’re an Amazon Prime member which, you know, lots of people are, you download an app so you can’t make your purchases through the desktop, it’s only through their app. You download their app and their selections are rather large and it’s basically items that they have in key depots in major centers. So where we live, sure. There’s a minimum purchase amount of I think $20, not that crazy but yeah you can’t have them fetch you like paper clips. But you type in like, okay, like today, I put in I want low-carb tortillas, Aquaphor skin care, and Diet Coke. [laughs]

**John:** That is so revealing and diet coke and not Dr. Pepper?

**Craig:** No, I just went for Diet Coke because I have that my son also loves that. He likes that more than Diet Dr. Pepper. I love Diet Dr. Pepper. And then boom it’s there and it’s crazy.

**John:** That’s Insane.

**Craig:** It’s crazy. And you put a tip on, you know, for the delivery guys so it’s not like Amazon Prime where there’s no tips because they’re using UPS, whatever. They’re using their own employees but it’s nuts.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the scary part is they’re just — they’re assaulting these boundaries that we’ve come to expect between I want something I have something. They keep chipping away at it until the point where it’s like, you know what I want, oh it’s already there, I didn’t even say it. [laughs]

**John:** So my question is, what is the uniforms these people wear and can you see the little shock collars that they get zapped if they don’t actually deliver there fast enough? [laughs]

**Craig:** This is what I’m worried about like I just — I hope that they’re not — you know, because Amazon, eh, not the best rep when it comes to this stuff. [laughs]

**John:** Well, I’m the one who’s selling thousands of units of Writer Emergency Pack through Amazon so I really can’t be complaining about your low-carb tortillas.

**Craig:** You know, there was this great article about the Amazon warehouses.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, you know, so part of the article is like this abusive internal. [laughs]] But the part that was fascinating to me other than the human misery of it, just the logistics aspect of it was that one of the great breakthroughs they made with Amazon is that typically a warehouse would be designed where you put like products all together —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which makes since right? Okay, we sell 80 vacuum cleaners, put them all in row AB12 where you go if you need a vacuum cleaner. And then some genius over there was like, no, put them nowhere near each other. It’s like the keyboard model of QWERTY like the keys will stick together. Fling them all over the place, this way when you get to an aisle and you’re looking for a vacuum cleaner, there’s only one there, you can’t mess up. You can’t pull the wrong vacuum cleaner off the shelf.

**John:** Right. Yeah, that sounds fair. I mean I’ll say Amazon did screw up when we first started selling Writer Emergency Packs and they would send 12 instead of one because they looked at the inner cartoon. [laughs] And they thought that the whole inner cartoon was one unit. So that may be a breakdown. But essentially Amazon also does things where like you don’t go to the shelf, the shelf comes to you. And so the little robots pick up the shelf and move the shelf to you and turn the shelf so you basically just reach forward and grab the thing and put it in the van.

**Craig:** At some point Amazon’s going to create a service for Amazon employees. [laughs] So that you can hire a guy to go get your things so that you have your thing as the Amazon guy so you could send the thing to me.

**John:** And the New York Time piece or was it New York Times or New Yorker or New York Magazine? One of the New York publications had a long piece about the corporate jobs at Amazon are not any better — I mean they’re better in the sense that you’re not in a terrible warehouse and risking, you know, overheating or dying.

**Craig:** Yeah, but those — like their evaluation system was, ugh.

**John:** Yeah, because we have that same kind of evaluation system here in our own office where you can anonymously talk about the other employees and sort of rate them and how they’re doing but only I see them and then I punish people.

**Craig:** I mean, don’t you know that everyone’s talking about Stuart?

**John:** It’s usually Stuart’s fault. [laughs]

**Craig:** Oh Stuart, poor Stuart. [laughs] Six months earlier…Ah!

**John:** Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo.

**John:** And you may see one or both of them at Scriptnotes Live which we are recording this — God, it’s tomorrow as people are listening to this, which is insane.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** There’s a link in the show notes if you follow the link in the show notes. It’s possible they’ll release more tickets on the day, who knows.

**Craig:** But currently we’re sold out.

**John:** I think we’re sold out.

**Craig:** Like Jon Bon Jovi?

**John:** Like Jon Bon Jovi. It’s one of the situations where we’ll be sold out but then because they were holding that stuff for us, sometimes they release those, who knows.

**Craig:** Oh I see. I don’t have any friends.

**John:** I don’t have any friends. But our show should be great and it should be fun and that will be next week’s episode if you are going to be listening to our show next week. I hope you are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If you would like to subscribe to our show, please join us on iTunes. Just click on subscribe in iTunes. Search for Scriptnotes first, that helps. You’ll see two things on iTunes, you’ll see the Scriptnotes app through which you can download all the back episodes and of course, Scriptnotes the Podcast, subscribe to that and leave us a comment because we love to read your comments. Maybe we’ll read comments for our Christmas episode. We’ll just read nice things people say about us. [laughs]

**Craig:** That doesn’t sound self-serving at all. [laughs]

**John:** But what we would love for you to write in with is your questions about things that are not related to screenwriting, so a very long time ago we did one random advice episode.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** I think it’s time to do another random advice episode.

**Craig:** We should totally do that.

**John:** So that’d be a fun thing to clear the cobwebs out at the end of the year. So if you would like our advice on a topic that has nothing to do with screenwriting about I don’t know, work, relationships, food, diet.

**Craig:** Don’t forget our specialty: female reproductive health.

**John:** That more than anything we want to answer your questions about female reproductive health. Write into ask@johnaugust.com. That’s the place you can write in with all your larger things. But you can even ask one of those questions on Twitter, so I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Our outro this week is composed by Roman Mittermayr. If you have an outro that you would like us to consider for our show, write to the same address, ask@johnaugust, and give us a link to where we can find the file. Craig, thank you again for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

Links:

* [The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, December 3, 2015](http://www.cc.com/full-episodes/95di1k/the-daily-show-with-trevor-noah-december-3–2015—idris-elba-season-21-ep-21032)
* Craig in [The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/02/opinion/anyone-but-ted-cruz.html?_r=0) and on [Jezebel](http://theslot.jezebel.com/fuckin-craig-mazin-an-appreciation-of-ted-cruzs-colleg-1746278435)
* [Download Highland 1.9 now](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) and [sign up to be a Highland 2 beta tester](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2-beta/)
* [Does Revenge Serve an Evolutionary Purpose?](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/revenge-evolution/) from Scientific American
* [One Hit Kill is now available for purchase](http://www.onehitkillgame.com/)
* [Projection Problems Plague 70mm L.A. Press Screening Of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘The Hateful Eight’](http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/projection-problems-plague-70mm-la-press-screening-of-quentin-tarantinos-the-hateful-eight-20151203) from Indie Wire
* Three Pages by [Jody Russell](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JodyRussell.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Mark S.W. & V.P. Walling](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MarkSWVPWalling.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Matthew Gentile](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/MatthewGentile.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* The Wall Street Journal on [How Cyndi Lauper Wrote Her First No. 1 Hit, ‘Time After Time’](http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-cyndi-lauper-wrote-her-first-no-1-hit-time-after-time-1448985798)
* [Secret Hitler](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/maxtemkin/secret-hitler) is now on Kickstarter
* [Amazon Prime Now](https://www.amazon.com/primenow) offers one hour delivery
* [Email us](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) or tweet [John](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) or [Craig](https://twitter.com/clmazin) for advice on things that have nothing to do with screenwriting
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Roman Mittermayr ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-batman-in-the-high-castle).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 226 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program, we will be discussing epic world-building, from Gotham City to Narnia, and why screenwriters need to be careful when building out whole universes. This topic was suggested by Rawson Marshall Thurber who is a friend of ours and a former guest. He was a guest on our 100th episode of the show and also on the Christmas show.

**Craig:** I just like hmph-ing him.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. As a, “How he dare suggest something like this.” But you’ve actually found yourself doing some world-building recently. I was thinking I saw the trailer for The Huntsman which felt like it was a build-out of a fantasy world.

**Craig:** Yes, very much so.

**John:** And apparently, Charlize Theron has bitten into something very black because her mouth is very black in that trailer.

**Craig:** I got to tell you, she’s so good in the — ooh, she’s good in that movie.

**John:** Oh, that’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s good in it. She’s good.

**John:** Before we get to world-building, some follow-up. On December 9th, we have our live show. There might be tickets. I think they’re releasing a few more tickets that we’d held back, so you should go check it out and see if there are still some tickets available for our live show because we’ve actually added an additional guest, Alan Yang of Parks and Recreation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And more recently the Aziz Ansari show, Master of None on Netflix. He will be joining us to talk about that show and other awesome topics. We may even have a musical guest because in previous shows we’ve had — well, Craig has sung. We’ve had Rachel Bloom sing, from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. So it wouldn’t be a Christmas show without a little bit of music. And I think we have the music guests figured out for the show.

**Craig:** I think we do. I think it’s going to be awesome.

**John:** It’s going to be great. So you should come join us for that. So in addition to Alan Yang and Craig Mazin and myself, we will have Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome from Another Period. And who else is on our show? Oh, Malcolm Spellman.

**Craig:** How can you forget?

**John:** You can never forget Malcolm Spellman. He will not let you forget that he’s there.

**Craig:** Nope.

**John:** Nope. Segment bit of follow-up, NaNoWriMo, the National November Novel Writing Month, is now drawn to a close. So people have asked, “Hey, John, how did you? You were going to write a book during November.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I did not finish the book but I got at about like 13,000 to 15,000 words done and I’m really, really happy with what I wrote.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So it qualified as a success for me.

**Craig:** That’s a full Derek Haas novel right there.

**John:** [laughs] Indeed. As long as I put up my font pretty big, it’s going to be a great book.

**Craig:** [laughs] You’re funny. How many words is a novel? Like 100,000 words or something?

**John:** No. Actually, a 50,000 word novel is a small novel but Derek’s is probably between 50 and 60. That’s my guess, his most recent one.

**Craig:** Okay. So you got a good third of a novel there almost or fourth.

**John:** Yeah. I think I probably will finish it at some point. There’s going to be discussion about sort of when the best time is to finish it. And depending on some stuff that may or may not happen in the next week or two, people will understand why I had to sort of stop. But it was good. It was actually a really great process.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** Hooray. We have a question from the mailbag. Daniel wrote in to ask, “When it comes to an established writer, what is better for their career — a movie loved by critics that bombs at the Box Office or a Box Office smash that is ripped to shreds by critics? Which scenario helps the writer’s reputation with the studios and helps the writer be considered for more work in the future?” Craig, what’s your thought on that?

**Craig:** I have seen this question asked so many times. This is like everyone’s favorite party question for screenwriters. The answer is yes. That’s the answer. If you’re an established writer, I’m presuming that the premise of the question is you’re working. But even if you’re not, it doesn’t matter to me. If you have a Box Office smash hit, that is wonderful for you in terms of your reputation with the studios because of course their main goal is to make money. They don’t care if critics don’t like a movie. If the audience likes the movie, then they’re happy and they’re happy, so that’s always good.

If you write a movie that is beloved by critics but bombs at the Box Office, that can still also be very good for you. I think it’s more important that the people who see the movie who — I mean, because the question is framed what’s better for you at the studios. The people at the studios need to also like the movie. There are movies that critics love that I’ve talked about with people at studios and they’re all like, “We don’t think that’s a good movie at all.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But a lot of times, there’s overlap. And if there is, then, yeah, they would very much consider that person for other work at their studio. It would be different work. It wouldn’t be work that probably is of the kind of critical, darling Box Office bomb. But all of it’s good.

I think if you write a good script and the movie connects somehow, you’ve done a good job. These questions are I think more important for directors in a weird way than for writers. More often than not, the biggest thing that we’re judged on is did you write a script somebody agreed to produce? That’s the big one.

**John:** Yeah. Everything Craig said is exactly right. I think what is interesting about Daniel’s question is it supposes that the studios have the same information that someone who’s looking up stuff online has about the writer and how the movie turned out. And the studios actually have much, much more information. So the studio knows whether that movie which was a disaster was a disaster because of the writer or it was a disaster because of things that happened along the way. So the studio has information about what that process was. The studio also has a real sense of who really wrote that movie. If there were multiple writers, where the bad things came to be.

By the same token, if a movie is a huge success and this writer is the person who wrote it, that won’t necessarily guarantee them a chance down the road to write the next thing because they also know sort of like it was a success despite the writing or it’s a success despite sort of the involvement of those people. And so there are people who have, you know, $100 million movies who, as screenwriters, do not necessarily have the strongest careers because they’re not given a lot of credit for having taken that movie across the finish line to $100 million.

**Craig:** It’s a really good point. There’s so much going on that people don’t know about. And so for instance, one of the big things that determines whether a movie is a success or not is who’s in it. Simple as that. Who’s cast in it? Well, the writer is not casting the movie. When is the movie released? How was the movie marketed? What is the title of the movie? There’s a lot of things that can go wrong. Was there a similar movie that came out that sort of stole the thunder? All these things can happen.

When we write a movie and the movie is green-lit, it means we’ve done a very good job. And when I say we write a movie, yes, there may be multiple writers in the chain of things. But ultimately, one writer, sometimes two, will get the bulk of the inside baseball credit. And they’re the writers that convince the movie studio to make the movie or convince the big actor to sign on or big director to sign on.

And when that happens, you’ve won. You get the credit for doing a good job. Everything that happens after that is, to some extent, placed on the shoulders for better or worse of the director and the cast. The star and the director are the ones that take the hit or get the most uplift from the movie succeeding one way or the other.

**John:** It’s important to remember that your jobs that you get as a writer are not rewards for previous successes. They are bets on whether you can write the next movie that is going to turn out very, very well. And so they’re basing those bets on, “Well, what has that writer done beforehand?” And so, did that person write a really good script? Did that person write a script that was able to attract this kind of talent and able to make a really huge movie?

Those are the reasons why you are getting hired to do a job. So, from my own personal example, my first movie that got produced was called Go and it was successful. It wasn’t a huge Box Office hit but people really, really liked that movie. And that got me a lot of jobs on things down the road. And so Charlie’s Angels was my biggest hit sort of after that time but I had a lot of other work before then because of that first movie, Go, which people could see whatever they wanted to see in that movie. And it was very, very useful for me. And that was a case, an example of a movie that had good critical reaction, but more importantly, had good reaction in the town and people wanted to like that movie.

**Craig:** I think that when people ask this question, the unheard argument that’s going on behind the scenes is two people debating, “Should I write something that people will want to go see? Should I write a franchisee kind of movie? Should I write this little tiny movie?” Someone’s saying, “Stop wasting your time with little tiny movies,” and someone’s saying, “Stop selling out on these big, huge soulless tent poles.” And the answer to those people is, “Shut up. Shut up and write what you want to write.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Nobody is going to make or break their career based on the genre choice of their first screenplay or how they’re trying to get in. Write the thing that you will write best. For a lot of people — I would argue for most people — that’s going to be genre fare, popcorn fare, mainstream studio fare because that’s the bulk of the movies we consume as human beings. And that’s a lot of what inspires us.

For some people, for fewer but a significant amount, it’s going to be quirkier fare, independent fare, or more narrow-focused fare that is perhaps a lot more meaningful to them emotionally. And that’s what those people should write. I think that people want an answer and the answer is there’s no answer, stop having that argument.

**John:** Only the corollary I put with this is that I think having a produced film is incredibly valuable. And so, you could have a script that was a Black List kudoed script, you could have a script that people really love in town but having a movie that actually shot, even if it wasn’t quite as good as that script, it will be incredibly helpful. There’s something about having your movie produced for the first time that makes it feel like, “Okay, you’re a real produced writer,” and that people have a faith and a trust in you that your words can actually be shot, that they may not if you’re an unproduced writer.

So the follow-up question for this might be, is it better to have a good script that never shot or a good script that turned out poorly? It’s better to have the good script that kind of turned up poorly because then at least you have a movie made.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know which is easier. I don’t know if it’s easier to get a mainstream studio film made or to get a smaller, narrower focused movie made. I actually suspect it might be easier to get the smaller movie made just because there are more avenues in smaller budgets and there just seems like there’s a lot of them. They just, you know, aren’t necessarily seen the way that studio films are.

It’s harder than it has ever been in the history of the planet to get a studio film made. So if your theory is, “I’m going to write a big studio movie because that’s what gets made,” that’s fine. Just be aware, they make — it’s interesting. Like I was talking to, I shall not use a name, but an individual that runs a studio.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the individual said, “When you remove the number of films we have that are already in the pipeline because they are based on property we own or sequels to things, and then you ask how many slots left do we have here to make other movies,” this individual said, I believe for — you know, it’s all planned out ahead but for, say 2017, the number is two.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Two. That’s two movies that they don’t already have planned and know about. And there’s five studios [laughs]. The odds are very, very, very, very low and people say, “Why is that particular person writing a sequel to blah, blah, blah?” Because that’s what they’re making.

**John:** That’s what they’re making.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. That’s actually a great segue to our big topic of the day, which is world-building because the kind of movies that big studios are making are these big constructed universe things, oftentimes shared universe things. If you think of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you think of everything that Disney does, you think of sort of the big superhero movies, they are alternate universes. They take place in a real world that is not our real world. And so I want to talk through that process of world-building and some of the pros and the cons and things to think about if you were a screenwriter approaching that kind of scenario.

So, just defining terms. World-building is generally the process of creating fictional universes in which these stories take place. And so these stories could be novels, they could be feature films, they could be TV series, they could be video games. Increasingly, they’re sort of all of the above. And the work for who actually creates a universe is very different based on sort of how it comes into being. So we’re going to talk about both creator-driven universes and also sort of these shared universes.

The author John Harrison has a great quote. “It’s the attempt to exhaustively survey a place that isn’t there,” which I think is actually very nice. It’s like world-building is you’re trying to create an atlas for a world that does not possibly exist.

So pretty much everything that a screenwriter writes is going to have some degree of world-building. And back in Episode 135, you and I talked through world-building in the context of comedies and also in the context of True Detective. And so those were scenarios where it’s pretty much the real world, you just made it a little bit more specific. You added a little bit of texture. So it’s sort of like the low-fi version of world-building.

But for today, I really want to talk about these epic big world-buildings where you’re figuring out everything, about the culture of the geography, sort of the physics of your universe, whether there’s magic in your world, and what that means from a screenwriter’s perspective. I thought we might start with talking about a place that we’ve all been but never really been, which is Gotham City.

**Craig:** Yes, the ever-changing Gotham City.

**John:** So this is a great video. This is actually what Rawson had sent through. It’s by Evan Puschak who does YouTube videos as The Nerdwriter. And he does this really good video that’s tracking the evolution of Gotham City, from its start in Detective Comics to where we see it now with the Nolan films and beyond. What did you think of the video?

**Craig:** Well, I thought it was great. I mean, if you are a fan of Batman, and I happen to be, and you’ve followed along, you and I are children of the ’70s so my introduction of Batman was in fact the campy, ridiculous television show. And you see from that through Frank Miller and Burton and Chris Nolan. To me, it’s not a particularly startling point that’s being made here. It’s actually fairly obvious. That doesn’t mean to diminish it. It’s just it’s so evidently true that Batman and Gotham City reflect each other and they change to match each other, depending on how you alter your take on the character.

**John:** What I liked about the video is it pointed out the iterative nature of Gotham City, is that like Gotham City didn’t spring into being all as one thing. Like originally, Batman took place in New York City and then it became its own specific city of Gotham City. And it changed and iterated as new people came on board. And as the needs of what the storytelling demanded, the city changed to reflect those needs.

So you have Frank Miller’s very dark version of Gotham, a city falling apart, which has definitely influenced sort of our modern understanding of it. But if you look at what Tim Burton did, I think Tim Burton, maybe I wasn’t giving him enough credit for sort of his vision that he brought to the Michael Keaton Batman films is that like it’s a city that sort of has no zoning controls. Like everything is built in like this crazy — overbuilt, just crazy degrees.

And so we think of that, “Oh, that’s Burtonesque,” but it’s also very specific and it’s very Batman-ish. It’s the city that’s out of control. And it’s a city that exists so that its hero can exist because without Gotham, there’s no Batman; without Batman, there’s no Gotham. This city has to have this beating heart of crime so that Batman can fight it. And we sort of see that reflected in sort of all the other variations of it.

And so while Gotham City was ultimately created for Batman as it originally stood, it is now this sort of shared universe. So you can sort of see like this is the kind of character that exists in a Batman world. And you could even make a TV show called Gotham which is just about the city and not about Batman itself.

**Craig:** Well, there’s something interesting in the origin story of Batman that I think drives a lot of what happens with Gotham City over time. Batman is rich. Gotham City is necessarily full of crime because it’s a superhero story about a vigilante that fights crime. So, how do you create a world in which you have a billionaire who is so wealthy that he can have both a mansion and a massive underground complex, and an arsenal that kind of rivals any first-world [laughs] power’s arsenal?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And also, ghettos and slums and streets teeming with people who are so desperate, they’re going to shoot wealthy people for a necklace and kill Bruce Wayne’s parents. Right there, you have this piece of the puzzle which is a disparity of income.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And well long before anybody was saying 1% and that was a slogan, Tim Burton, I think, really did the biggest, the most important bit of Gotham design. You know, and I’m not sure how much of it was intentional or not. I know that when he designed Gotham, he was thinking about gothic. And so you have these huge statues, a lot of huge faces and things. But I remember watching it thinking, “So much money. It must have cost so much money to make this city and yet, everyone is so poor and miserable.” And then when I go see New York, I’m like, “It must have taken so much money [laughs] to make this city and everyone’s so poor and miserable.”

And that’s a great aspect of the world. It’s an aspect of the world that is very human and relevant to us all. And all of the iterations of Gotham have some form of that or another in different ways. Tim’s was very gothic, very art designed and very pushed, whereas Nolan’s is a little more a Blade Runner-ish feeling to it. It’s a little more retro future-y. Maybe my favorite Gotham is the Gotham of the Rocksteady video games.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, because it feels the most like an actual city, but then there are these things here and there that are so creepy. That city is like a real city but with a serious mental problem.

**John:** So, I think what you’re hitting on here is that in most of these constructed universes, in most of this world-building we’re doing, we’re trying to create recognizable aspects of a world that we normally would be in, but we’re just pushing them in different directions. And you were citing, what is different about this world and what is the same?

And so, people can use their expectations of a place in a helpful way as they’re experiencing the stories we’re telling there and yet, we can also change some things. So even if we go to Game of Thrones, you go to Westeros, there’s things that definitely feel like familiar parts of our world, but they are assembled in very different ways. And so, we will travel to different countries in Westeros and recognize some cultural things that seem kind of like our world and yet, they are specific to Westeros.

**Craig:** This is going to come up over and over as we go through our various worlds that we all recognize, the notion that we are creating analogs to the world that we live in will happen over and over and over again to the point where it becomes clear that unless your world is an intentional contrast and comparison to our world now, it’s not going to do the trick for us. We need it. We need the relation. And where we find joy in the worlds that we see on screen that people have built is in the connection. Where we intend to feel something between us in it is when it feels constructed to the point that it is not recognizable or relevant.

**John:** Yeah. Well, let’s start our journey talking about another billionaire with an arsenal. Let’s talk about Tony Stark and the Marvel Universe. And so —

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** He is Batman but he’s not Batman. He comes at this universe from a very different perspective and yet he has many of the same toys, his city is an actual city. It’s New York City and it’s designed to be more recognizable. Things are not pushed quite so far, but he as a character, is pushed quite far. And he’s, you know, at least in this Marvel Cinematic Universe, is one of the sort of linchpins of this really interconnected soap opera of characters who we can recognize aspects of modern life, but they are very clearly comic book characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Marvel shared universe is fascinating. I was a Marvel guy as a kid. Were you a Marvel guy or a DC guy?

**John:** I was a DC kid as a —

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting. Interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, I like DC, too. I always think of DC as the more religious, mythical of the two.

**John:** The Greek gods.

**Craig:** It’s a little bit more god-ish, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas Marvel was always, to me, it’s basically a telenovela. It’s absolutely soap opera. It’s cheesy soap opera. Oh, god, I’m going to get letters now. I mean, I love it though.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the point is, what Marvel does to create their universe is they’re ever expanding the universe but they make everything interrelated. Everybody, ultimately, ends up knowing everybody. Everybody’s sleeping with everybody. People are breaking up. They’re changing their personalities. They’re flipping sides from hero to villain and villain to hero. It’s like professional wrestling. And that’s why so much of it’s so fun. There are very basic mythological religious elements to the Marvel Universe. I mean, they have the infinity gems. I mean, they’re always like creating layers of awesomeness. [laughs] It’s what —

**John:** Yeah. And you look at Thor, you have things that are truly mythological characters.

**Craig:** Correct. You have Galactus who eats planets. And I believe Galactus’ sister is death or time [laughs] or one of them, I’m not sure. And she existed before the universe was even created. So they’re always like upping the ante. Like you have those characters, like The Watcher, all of these guys that are so — the Beyonder. That’s one of my favorite things about the Marvel Universe is that — and we’ll see, this comes up again very clearly in Tolkien in such a different way. When people build successful worlds, they never finish the map.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you think of the map of the Marvel Universe, you get to an edge of it and then you go, “There’s something beyond that.” There’s always something beyond it. Whether it is Dr. Strange goes into limbo and all that. There’s always something bigger. So, you never lose the sense of discovery within the characters living in that universe.

**John:** Well, even if the physical geography reaches a boundary, its temporal geography keeps changing because some people will go back in time or there will be alternate timelines, or there will be alternate whole universes in which these characters have a different experience. And so, that is another thing that is true, especially in the comic book versions. But even now in the cinematic versions, if you look at the X-Men universe and they’ve rebooted it and sort of halfway rebooted it so that the characters have some memory of what happened before and what didn’t happen before.

But I think what’s crucial as we look at the Marvel Paper Universe and the Cinematic Universe is that it is iterative. And so, they don’t build it all at once. And there wasn’t sort of one big council meeting where everyone said like, “Okay, let’s figure out everything about our universe and these are the rules and we’re going to stick to the rules.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Instead, they had to figure out what do we need to figure out to tell this story and then what else do we need to do. And as they’re working through comic books, it’s like what are we willing to bend or change or retcon in order to make this whole other thing make sense, to make this whole other thing possible?

And we’re going to be talking about the difference between sort of top-down world-building, where you figure out sort of everything at the start and sort of work your way down versus bottom-up world-building, which is where you start with a character, a story, and just build out as much as you need around that character or story for it to make sense.

**Craig:** It’s very tempting, I think, for people to consume worlds that have been built from the bottom-up and then turn around and think, “I’m going to do that from the top-down.” And it’s really, really hard. I mean, there are some wonderful worlds that have been made top-down and we’ll discuss them, but Marvel is a great example of something that has been built up a little bit like Tim Burton’s Gotham without zoning laws.

So, you start with very simple characters doing very simple things and then everything is piled up on itself until there’s this enormous complexity and inter-textuality and the soap opera is massive. Did you have that book — oh, you were a DC guy. I had the Marvel, I think it was called the —

**John:** Compendium?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was the one that listed every character [laughs].

**John:** Yes. No, it’s great.

**Craig:** It’s awesome. And I just laugh because I got that in, I want to say, 1986. That book now must be like — well, it’s not a book anymore, I’m sure.

**John:** It’s sort of a Wikipedia kind of thing.

**Craig:** I know. I’m sure somebody’s published it as a book because it must be beautiful, but it would be massive.

**John:** Yeah. I’ll put links in the show notes to both DC and Marvel have sort of encyclopedias, like illustrated encyclopedias that I found incredibly useful because a minor character will come up, it’s like, “Who is that?” And when I was doing Shazam!, I had to sort of go through it and figure out like what is this? Who is this character and how can they possibly fit into our universe?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s go from this sort of top-down perspective of Marvel and sort of how everything is constructed to something that did start as being very ground-up, which is Star Wars. Obviously, most people probably listening know that the back story of Star Wars and that it was a very different script originally, but George Lucas sort of kept tweaking it and refining it until the script that became the movie that we all love is very much a sort of from the ground up kind of story. And while there are some big epic forces, not everything was built into the first Star Wars. And he didn’t actually have the answers to all the bigger questions of the Star Wars Universe. He was telling the story of Luke Skywalker and the people around him and the places around him that were important for his story.

**Craig:** Do you think, I have my answer, but do you think George Lucas knew that Luke and Leia were siblings when he made the first movie?

**John:** I do not think he knew that because I —

**Craig:** There’s no way.

**John:** There’s no way. And some people would argue that of course he knew it because I think we want to believe that the creator has the answers to everything at the very first moment. But as creators, I can guarantee you that we don’t know those things.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The reason why I believe that is like, there are just certain things you would never do that way if you knew they were going to be brother and sister.

**Craig:** Exactly. He certainly wouldn’t have them kiss and do that whole thing. But also, I don’t think he knew that Darth Vader was Luke’s dad.

**John:** I don’t know that either.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. Here’s why I don’t think so, and this is an interesting thing about world-building. You build your initial world and you build it in a way that would make sense for you and the audience. In a galaxy where the Empire is dominating the galaxy, but then the simple farm boy is going to rise up to lead a rebellion, the odds, the bizarro coincidence that the guy running it is the dad of the kid and that he was literally over that planet when the — that just seems crazy.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But we love the movie so much that it actually then makes complete sense for the second movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It makes utter sense. Of course, you do end up with things like [laughs] Sir Alec Guinness saying, “Well, I said that Darth Vader killed him and in a sense, he sort of did. In a sense.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] You know, it’s like that’s — to me, I always laugh at that line because it was like, “Uhm, yeah, well, you know, I changed my mind.” [laughs] That’s what happened.

**John:** But on the sense of like a creator needs to know everything about the universe and the world from the very first moment —

**Craig:** We can’t.

**John:** We know that’s not true because of Lost. And like, Lost is an incredibly complicated show that I loved, but everyone involved with it will tell you very frankly that when they shot the pilot, they didn’t know the answers to most of the questions. They were actually just like figuring out like, these are really fascinating questions and then when it came time to actually make the series, they had to figure out like, “Okay, well, what are the answers going to be?”

And so the difference between the pilot and, you know, the series is they actually had to find the answers to those questions. And that’s not a fault on the people who created the pilot, J.J. Abrams and everyone else involved, it was just that’s how you pursue interesting things is to ask a bunch of questions and then figure out what those answers could be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that when Lucas made the first movie, although he clearly intended it obviously to be situated in a longer series because he called it Episode 4, for god’s sakes, the world-building of Star Wars is again very analogous. For me, it’s very analogous to a western. Feels very much like a western. Mos Eisley is Dodge City. That bar they go into, I mean that’s the bar scene from how many westerns, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Even the guns felt very western. I mean, lasers can be designed in a million different ways that felt western. There were bounty hunters —

**John:** Look at how Han Solo is dressed. I mean it’s all —

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. He’s dressed like saloon doors. Like his vest is saloon doors. So it feels very western to me. C-3PO and R2-D2 are classic western comedy sidekicks.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And then there are even damsels, Leia, at various points, is the damsel in the series. Han Solo was a damsel at one point. You know, like —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Both sides become damsels and have to be rescued. There are scoundrels and the rust bucket-y ship is like the old horse. Anyway, the point is, it was so new and so shocking, and yet, so not new and so familiar. The lightsaber is a sword.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s just a sword. And we love swords. Movies love swords.

**John:** They do just love them.

**Craig:** You know, they love fistfights and swords because that feels like the most human and intimate form of combat. So, it was all new and yet so familiar. A wonderful job of building that world in a way that we can relate to it. And then when it caught fire, a wonderful job of expanding it in such ways so that you realize there were so much more going on than you could imagine.

**John:** Absolutely. So, let’s talk more about some sort of single creator creations. And the most sort of epic of them, I can imagine, is probably J.K. Rowling with the Harry Potter Universe. And so, this is a case where — because she is writing this as a book, she can be incredibly specific about like this is exactly how everything fits together. And you read the first Harry Potter and it doesn’t mean that she has the answers to everything, but she knows exactly what the universe of her story is and it’s a case of like, she can tell you — she has a good sense in her head of what butterbeer is like and how that spell actually functions. And this is a case where novels give the chance to build out worlds in ways that I would say feature films and even television series are a little bit more limited —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Your perspective on this?

**Craig:** I mean, I am obsessed with Harry Potter. I think it’s a true work of genius. I would argue that Tolkien —

**John:** Yes, sure.

**Craig:** Is the king of the thorough single created world because he not only wrote those books, but then he wrote Silmarillion. I mean, the dude literally traced everyone back to the beginning of time. I mean, he created essentially a religion, it’s just that it’s fake, unlike the other religions that are, of course, entirely real. [laughs] But J.K. Rowling’s work certainly is impressive and I think that unlike Tolkien’s work, her work felt as if it was created whole from the start.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That she knew, and I believe this is true, I mean there’s that legend of her riding that train and coming up the whole thing all at once, that she knew essentially here’s the story I want to tell, this is the world, this is the character, this is the bad guy, this is why the bad guy’s the way he is, this is why the good guy’s way is, this is how they’re related, this is how it’s going to end, this is roughly the span of it. She had it all from the start. Whereas a guy like Tolkien began with — well, first of all, creating a language, for god’s sakes, I mean, he was a —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Linguistics professor, but then, built out from The Hobbit and then expanded and then built out from The Lord of the Rings and expanded it even more. He was more of a bottom-up guy. I feel like she top-downed that thing in a way that, honestly, I find dangerous to recommend to anyone —

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Because unless you are her and she is singular, I don’t know. I can’t imagine that working out so well. I mean, god, she just did an incredible job. Everything worked.

**John:** Yeah. So I think the reason why I share your fear that it’s incredibly dangerous to approach things that way, I think there’s a lot of unwritten books and movies that started top-down and never got finished, because once you start filling out the geography and writing the languages and doing all these other work to sort of create up this whole thing, you may never actually make the product. So, you may never actually finish that work because you’re so busy figuring out like, you know, what is the name of that little city over there on the far edge of the world? It reminds me, I’m not sure if you’ve ever encountered this guy before, Henry Darger. So Henry Darger is this sort of obscure American, I guess you’d call him a writer but he’s really was like a reclusive shut-in hermit. He did In the Realms of the Unreal. And so he built this incredibly elaborate fantasy world for these girls, the Vivian girls, and they’ve been trying to make a movie of his life for a long time because he clearly envisioned this whole other second world, but he never really — he never had an ability to write or connect this with an actual — as something that somebody would want to read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He was never able to actually tell it in a way that became something that somebody could sit down and read. So you look at Harry Potter and yes, J.K. Rowling has built this incredibly vibrant detailed universe, but she also could tell the story about one kid going through it. And the Harry Potter universe exists and it exists to tell the story of Harry Potter. And everything else is wonderful around it but it’s meant to be sort of a one-shot through the Harry Potter granted she’s doing some other stuff in the universe right now, but the initial series was for that one character. With Middle Earth, I don’t honestly know the backstory of whether Tolkien created the universe for Bilbo Baggins as the Hobbit and then built out the rest of it or whether he built out the universe and then had to find a character to explore this universe and that’s how Bilbo came to be.

**Craig:** I think that it was a little bit of both. Tolkien’s obsession was with the disappearing English agrarian lifestyle. And particularly, post-World War II, the sense that there was a way of life that had been lost to industry and to destruction. And so, his creation was both to make a world that was the kind of world he wanted to live in, but also to then create characters that represented what he thought was the worst and characters that he thought were the best. It’s not a mistake that — although, it’s a tradition to have the smallest and weakest to be the hero, it’s not a mistake that the hobbits live in these little thatched countryside homes that are very English-ey and very comfy and cozy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And warm tea and they’re simple people, you know. They’re simple, good, English, countryside folk. There was a connection to something that was human there. When you talk about this guy that made this world, that is scary to me and I feel a tension in me because I know there are a lot of people out there who have an affinity for building a world. It’s fun to create your own language, it’s fun to create your own society and cities and maps and all that stuff is great, but that is a certain part of your brain. I think most people who have that part of the brain don’t have the other part. Which is the part where you have an instinct for what is humanity. And J.K. Rowling has both in spades.

**John:** Well, and I don’t know they’re necessarily exclusive in so many people. What I worry about is the people who are so excited about world-building are the people who sort of want everything to make sense and want everything to be logical, who want to sort of — who want to believe that there’s an alternate cosmology where everything is fixed and sensible. But that’s not necessarily the same brain that is going to be able to tell a story of a character struggling to make its way through this universe. And so I think so often, it’s so tempting and honestly so much easier to build out all of the fantasy stuff because the actual real hard work is writing the story —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That the character is taking this journey just once and that’s a challenging thing to remember. And also, the danger is, if you built out all that stuff first and then as you’re writing your story, if that character can’t experience all that stuff, well, you feel like you’ve wasted all that other work building out the rest of that stuff. And that’s the danger is sort of overbuilding for what you actually really need. And, you know, if George Lucas had built out everything in Star Wars before he was telling the story of Luke Skywalker, would Luke have gone to more planets? Would different things have happened? Would he have —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Got the reveal of Luke’s father in the first movie? It would be very tough to limit yourself down just the small things that make sense for your one story if you knew what everything else was.

**Craig:** Well, as I mentioned earlier, Tolkien have this thing about maps and part of what he did very intentionally was not finish the map. So for people that are building worlds, it is tempting to, as you said, essentially dial everything in so that it is perfectly complete. Nobody writes three quarters of software. They write the whole thing and it finishes and it works.

But when you’re creating a world, you need to unfinish it. You need to. There needs to be mystery there, because, ultimately, your characters will need to go beyond the map, at which point, you have the ability to — or people come in from off the map.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so you begin a sense of discovery. Otherwise, you’re just waiting for your characters to go visit some place that’s already there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Even in a place like, for instance, Westeros and Essos which is George R. R. Martin is, I think, right up there with J.K. Rowling in being able to both create a full believable, complicated world and also, understanding the way humans behave. Even though it seems like we have seen it, we haven’t seen everything at all. I think we’ve seen what we’ve been able to see —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And one great thing about that show and what Dan and Dave have done so brilliantly is, and you can and see it in the credits —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** As the show expands, the map expands. Go back to the first season, watch the first episode, look at the credit sequence and see how much of the map you see. It’s really important that you just don’t see the whole thing at once. You’ve got to give yourself discovery and exploration and fear.

**John:** So let’s look at how characters experience these fictional worlds that we’re creating and there’s basically two ways you can think about it. There is the situation of like Westeros, where those characters were born into that world and we as an audience are catching up with them just to recognize what’s the same about their world and what’s different about their world. So in Westeros, the fact that winter, when it comes, is incredibly long-lasting. That there was magic in their world, there’s not very much magic in the world. So we’re having to do the work of catching up with the characters who are well ahead of us.

And then, there is portal stories. And portal stories are things like Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books. Those are the ones where they’re like they are normal humans just like us, who crossed through some magical barrier and end up in this strange other world and have to figure out the rules of that world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In some cases, those are easier because the characters can just ask the questions to catch us up on sort of what we missed out on. Harry Potter, I think, sort of splits the difference where Harry Potter is a special kid but he’s experiencing the magical world for the time along with us. And so that’s a sort of a halfway in between those two options.

**Craig:** Yeah. The live-in-it world I think is harder, because your ability to deal with exposition is very limited. Everybody is already there.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So nobody should be asking questions that are obvious. Although again, even when you are creating the I-already-live-in-it world, it’s really helpful to begin with we don’t really know everything about our own lived-in world. Again, I’ll refer to the first episode of Game of Thrones, where the White Walkers appear. Then, they don’t appear again for seasons. But the very first episode, someone goes. “I don’t believe in that stuff, that’s not real.” But we just saw it. So we know that the people living in their own world don’t know their own world as well as they should. Very useful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The portal world is the easiest version because it’s a fish out of water story. And you’re supposed to be confused. That’s actually the fun of it. You know, Alice in Wonderland is absolutely baffling. Not only to Alice, but to us. That’s the point. It gets to be baffling and we get to be her. The Narnia world is one that we are supposed to be baffled by it at first, but then ultimately, rings a bell on us because we’ve gone to church a lot.

The Harry Potter world is, I think, it actually deserves its own category. I think you’ve got your I-live-in-it world, you’ve got your portal world and then, I think you have the world beneath our noses.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Which comes up quite a bit. It’s actually right here, right now, in our timeline, in our world, we just can’t see it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Did you ever read The Littles when you were a kid?

**John:** I did. I love The Littles.

**Craig:** The Littles were great. So The Littles were a family of tiny people that lived in the walls of a house of people that were I think The Bigs [laughs] who were normal size people. And the idea being everybody’s got those people in their walls, we just don’t know it. And that’s fun. I like that world. And you can see it sometimes it works great in comedies like Night at the Museum is basically the world beneath our noses that we don’t see.

**John:** I think we also see it in dramas and like, in a lot of crime stories. It’s that sense of just right below the surface there is a mafia-controlled universe that you’re not actually aware exists or that there is world of hackers that is just behind that door where everything is very different than sort of how you can imagine things working right now. So, there’s ways in which you’re creating a secondary world that’s existing within our worlds. Basically it’s a cultural world that you’re not aware of because it’s deliberately keeping itself hidden and secret away from us all.

**Craig:** Even when it’s not simply cultural but circumstantial, like for an instance in The Matrix, the ultimate the world beneath our noses because it turns out that the world we see isn’t real and that there’s this other world. Even then, culture is really what it’s about, that the culture of that other world, the real world, is the one that is fascinating to our hero and that’s what our hero has to struggle with and come to grips with to reconcile it with the rest of the world. The idea of a hidden world is to say, when you walk out of the movie theater, look around with maybe a clearer eye.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At what you see. And that’s fun, too. Like, you know, even Harry Potter. I always felt that at its heart, Harry Potter was really about the world of misfits and people that didn’t fit in. That the world muggle is so useful. I mean, you know, now —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s expanded, so people — like, if you work in musical theater and you meet somebody that is a mortgage broker, well, that guy is a muggle.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] You know. I mean, even for us who work in Hollywood, even people I think that are executives in Hollywood, they can, you know, go to Thanksgiving and there’s their, you know — their friend who is a lawyer. And it’s like, well, you’re a muggle, I’m in Hollywood. That’s what to me, that’s why that movie or that series and the books really work is that it was a celebration of the oddball.

**John:** So, when you first described world-building, you said that it often has analogs in our normal, daily experience, but also, it tends to have an allegory. And there’s a reason why you’re building this alternate world because it makes it simpler to discuss some sort of theme or message that you’re trying to communicate that would be very hard to do if you’re just doing it in a normal real world setting.

So obviously, C. S. Lewis and with his Christian themes, goes through that. Harry Potter, as you described with, you know, that sense of the outsider, the nerd, the muggle conflicts. But I also think of like The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. It’s like it’s looking at sort of the commoditization of women’s bodies and sort of what it’s like to be in a society where women are valued only for their ability to reproduce. And so, I think a lot of times, you see people leaning towards these alternate worlds and often it’s science fiction but sometimes it’s just, you know, very small science fiction in order to discuss themes that would be hard to really dig into if you had to have all of the normal real world trappings around it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that attraction to allegory is what makes religion so effective for so many people. I mean, if an alien came to this planet and I handed him the Bible and The Silmarillion and I said, one these people think it’s fiction and one of this people think it’s real. I think the alien would be at a loss to figure out which one’s which. I think the alien would probably pick The Silmarillion because it actually is more consistent. That’s the power of allegory. That is the power of world-building.

Ultimately, the biggest mistake I think, is to build a world pointlessly. Look at what Lucas ultimately pins all of Star Wars on. The force is your humanity, your human sense of instinct, morality, right and wrong, connection with the world around you and the intangible and spiritual. And Darth Vader and the empire are entirely about technology and yet, Darth Vader also has this dark side of the spirituality. So, it all comes down to the spiritual over the mechanical. And really, I would argue that the hero, protagonist [laughs] here come the letters —

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** Protagonist of Star Wars episode 4, 5 and 6 is Darth Vader.

**John:** All right. So it’s Darth Vader reclaiming his humanity?

**Craig:** Yeah. Darth Vader is the most at war with himself. He has both this enormous connection to humanity and, yet, has become himself almost completely technological. He is more machine than man. And, you know, Luke definitely goes through changes but, I mean, he’s basically a good guy and then he has to believe and then he believes and then he continues to believe and then he believes some more.

**John:** Yeah. Luke has a very common Joseph Campbell kind of hero story that like he has the trials. He’s the called adventure, the denial of the call, the trials —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So he did all that stuff. But I would agree with you that it does seem to be a show about a series that tracks a man’s journey from darkness back to light from this fascist, soulless machine to humanity.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the first movie, if you just look at that one movie and that movie was made unto itself, Luke is definitely the protagonist. But if you take a look at those three movies and you think of them as one big movie, well, who in the third act climax makes a decision to sacrifice themselves in order to save the day?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the answer is the hero. I mean, what does Luke do at the end? Nothing. He basically says, change.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, Darth Vader changes and is redeemed.

**John:** So, all this talk of sort of dark, fascists, and their stories, gets me thinking about The Man in the High Castle. Maybe, we can wrap it up here. So The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick’s great, great short book that posits what would happen if the Axis powers won World War II. And so, as the book opens, the East Coast of the United States is ruled by the Greater Nazi Reich, it’s ruled by the Germans. The West Coast is ruled by the Japanese. Hey, have you read the book?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You’ve ever read the book?

**Craig:** No, I didn’t.

**John:** So, the book is fantastic. And so, true back story here, I actually controlled the rights of the book for about two weeks. And so, there was — I had a discussion with Philip K. Dick’s daughter who was controlling the rights to the book. And I got the rights to the book and I went in to have a meeting at HBO to set this up as a series at HBO and this was seven or eight years ago. And the day that I was supposed to go in to set up the series, they pulled back the rights from me because Ridley Scott wanted the rights to the book. So Ridley Scott is now the producer who has the series on Amazon. And it’s really good. Frank Spotnitz wrote it and so, I feel very lucky because I get to have this thing in the world and I didn’t have to do all the hard work of writing it. But —

**Craig:** It’s very charitable of you. [laughs]

**John:** I’m nothing if not charitable. But here is the thing that is so fascinating about Spotnitz’s version is that he had to take this book, which was really, really good and figure out how he wanted it to be told in a greater, you know, 10-episode series.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And what’s great about this for our conversation is it takes place in an imaginary world. It takes place in a constructed world in which, you know, the what-if scenario, what if the Germans and the Japanese won? But it’s also about the constructed scenario of what if Germans and Japanese won, because this is no big spoiler, the MacGuffin of the series is these films which depict an alternate scenario in which the Germans didn’t win or the Russians won. They basically keep finding these films where different things have happened. And it was just a great exploration of like what it is to construct a world that is sort of continuously being deconstructed around itself.

So, I would highly recommend people take a look at it. Not perfect, but just really, really fascinating. And what you brought up about Darth Vader, you actually see — because you had spent so much time with the Nazis, you actually see that thing kind of happening, where you have a character who seems like Darth Vader at the very start and the journey of the series looks like it will be him finding something to believe in, beyond sort of fascist machinery.

**Craig:** I think that this is where things are going. It feels very modern to me that when we build worlds now, it’s not enough to just go, look, here’s a crazy other world. I didn’t see Tomorrowland, that’s definitely a world under our noses world, or — no, I guess a portal world.

**John:** It is a portal world.

**Craig:** It’s a Portal world.

**John:** They have a little pen and they go through it.

**Craig:** Yeah, and they go through a portal. I didn’t see that. But when I saw the trailer for it, I thought, okay, I get it. But I also understand that there’s not necessarily anything more to it than that’s that other world. And I’ve read many, many screenplays — I got sent a screenplay recently to rewrite and it was a classic sort of portal thing. And it’s getting very familiar. And it’s kind of fun to see now, for instance — I mean, the kings of meta, Lord and Miller and what they did the Lego Movie —

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Was to say it’s a live-in-it world. Nope. It’s a world beneath our noses world. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that was fun. So I love the idea that you’re in this alt history world which we’ve seen versions of before and ultimately, here’s the problem with the alt history world: that the fatal flaw to any alt history world is it’s alt history. And so, it’s not real. It’s not our world. That’s the point, is that the Nazis lost here, right? So, how is this relevant to me? Because maybe, there’s more going on than just alt history. And that maybe there’s a connection between the two and a chance to perhaps set history right. Then it starts to feel relevant. It starts to feel — I start to get engaged. So I think that’s very modern. And I like that a lot.

**John:** Yeah, so I’m very excited about the series. And it does definitely have — the things that don’t work about it are I think are largely because of the challenge of world-building where you have to both incorporate the things that were so great about the book and also find your own way to tell your own new stories. And so the characters they actually created and added to it, I think are actually more successful in general than the characters who came from the book because the characters came from the book, they feel there’s a little bit handcuffed by what they needed to do in the book and they’re not necessarily the best characters — the ideal characters you’d want to explore this world, they sort of get a little bit dragged through it and plot sort of overtakes them. And so, it’s not their own inner drive to — their own inner curiosity. The Obergruppenführer — I’m going mispronounce it.

**Craig:** What kind of German are you?

**John:** I should be able to do this. I actually had German, but I can never remember how you pronounce. Basically, the Nazi commander was played really well by —

**Craig:** Obergruppenführer?

**John:** Obergruppenführer.

**Craig:** Ober.

**John:** Obergruppenführer.

**Craig:** I think it’s Obergruppenführer.

**John:** Played by Rufus Sewell is fantastic and it’s fantastic because I think he exists in order to explore certain themes that are very specific to this TV creation, not to the original book. And so, I do recommend it for people and especially, push through our friend Phil Hay, his wife Karyn Kusama directed, I think Episode 8 —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s phenomenal.

**Craig:** Well, maybe what we can do for listeners at home and in their cars is summarize some of our tips on how to be effective word builders.

**John:** And maybe when not to be effective world builders.

**Craig:** Yes, yes.

**John:** So I would urge screenwriters in particular, to start from the bottom-up. To look at what is it about your character that demands the world to be a certain way in order to tell them the most interesting story, because if you’re starting with a giant universe that is completely different, you’re going to end up focusing on the universe more than your character.

**Craig:** Agreed. I would also say to begin by asking yourself the question, do I want this world to exist within and of itself? Do is want to be a portal world? Do I want it to be a world under our nose? Why? It should be important and related to the story — kind of story you want to tell so that you don’t go down one path and then realize you want another one. And I would also argue that when you’re building your world, it needs to be analogous to ours. One way or another, everything needs to be somehow analogous. That’s where the fun of it is.

**John:** I would say, if possible, change one thing. So, rather than changing everything about your universe and your world, just change the one thing. So Harry Potter is a world in which magic is real and that is sort of the fundamental thing on which everything else hinges. So, don’t try to sort of change everything about your world because then people just get kind of confused. And as you’re thinking about this in terms of a project you might be pitching, it’s going to be very hard to pitch something where everything is different. But if one thing is different, that’s very, very helpful. And try to write The Matrix and try not to write Jupiter Ascending. Which is Jupiter Ascending, I felt that they tried to change so many things that you are about three quarters away through the movie before the plot kicked in.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess my last bit of advice is if you find yourself falling in love with the detail crafting, just remind yourself that that is one part and the less important part and that you have to also be just as much in love with the humanity of your characters and the universally relevant things through which they’re going.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Or what you’ll end up with is what that guy did. [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is this fascinating series of plans for a city that will never exist.

**John:** Indeed. All right. Time for our One Cool Things. Mine is very simple, but also very fun. It is the EcoLog 590D. And this is a machine that is designed to cut down a tree, strip off all the branches and cut it into logs. And that doesn’t sound so exciting, but when you actually look at this YouTube video of it, you will think it is the most amazing thing because it looks like some sort of construction from like one of the Terminator movies. Like, it basically this big arm that reaches in, saws off the tree and destroys the tree and cuts it into a log. But it does it so incredibly quickly and efficiently. So, it’s like 20 seconds from like this is a tree in a forest to like this is a stack of logs. It’s just remarkable.

**Craig:** [laughs] Why do they call it — the EcoLog is the most ironic name ever.

**John:** [laughs] It just makes it extra good that it’s called an EcoLog.

**Craig:** Oh, my god. You know who would really love that is J.R.R. Tolkien. He was a huge man of chopping trees down.

**John:** Absolutely. If the orcs had EcoLogs —

**Craig:** Oh, my god.

**John:** Everything would be very, very different.

**Craig:** It certainly would have been a shorter movie.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Well, my One Cool Thing is last week’s outro. Who did that? What the — what?

**John:** That was amazing. So Craig doesn’t pre-listen to most of our outros. But this one was just great. Last week’s outro was by Jon Spurney and sort of the meta theme of all of our stuff. And lord, it was just great.

**Craig:** [laughs] Our quirks.

**John:** It felt like — it was sort of our own Too Many Cooks in a way.

**Craig:** It was. It was just — it was so well-done and so thoughtful and I — it’s one of those — every now and then, I’m reminded that people listen to the show. [laughs] And that was one of the moments. I just thought it was great. It was funny and it was really well-done and so, that’s my One Cool Thing for sure. I want to play it again. I know that we have a different outro this week by Rajesh Naroth, but I want to play that one again.

**John:** All right. So let’s just play it again. So, our outro is by Jon Spurney. If you have an outro you would like to us to play on the show, you can send us a note at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send questions like the one we had today. On Twitter, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Or, you can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes and you can find us there. Leave us a rating. That’s also where you can find the app that gives you access to all those back episodes. You can find those back episodes also at scriptnotes.net. Our show is produced as always by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli, who’s doing hero’s work on a Sunday. So thank you, Matthew.

**Craig:** Thank you. Thank you.

**John:** Because Craig was traveling, but we are all back now. There still might be tickets for our December 9th live show with a bunch of special guests, so click right over there now. You’ll find links to the tickets and to everything we talked about in today’s show at our show notes, johnaugust.com. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** All right, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Huntsman: Winter’s War, Official Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_W65ndip7MM)
* [Buy your tickets now for the 2015 Scriptnotes Holiday Show on December 9th](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-with-john-august-and-craig-mazin) with guests [Riki Lindhome and Natasha Leggero](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period), [Malcolm Spellman](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat), and [Alan Yang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Yang)
* [The Evolution of Batman’s Gotham City](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HF-wVFTR0fg) by The Nerdwriter
* The [Marvel Encyclopedia](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1465415939/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and [The DC Comics Encyclopedia](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0756641195/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Development of Star Wars, as seen through the scripts by George Lucas](http://hem.bredband.net/wookiee/development/)
* [Henry Darger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Darger) on Wikipedia
* [The Man in the High Castle, by Philip K. Dick](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0547572484/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), and [season 1 of the TV adaptation on Amazon Prime](http://www.amazon.com/The-New-World/dp/B00RSGFRY8/)
* [Middle Earth and The Perils of Worldbuilding](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA6MQHNM2yE) by The Nerdwriter
* [EcoLog 590D](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CnAPD39cUQ)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/only-haters-hate-rom-coms).

**Craig Mazin:** Hi. This is Craig. If you’re in the car with your children or at home with your children, you may not want to play this episode too close to their delicate little ears. We’re going to be using some bad language, some R-rated language. John asked me to do this warning this time because he was concerned that usually when he does it, people think at first that I might have died, but I didn’t. I’m alive. Now get your kids out of the room.

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 225 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we have Tess Morris, the writer of Man Up, and she’s here to talk with us about romantic comedies. And we’re so excited because we just saw her movie and it’s really great. And so everyone can see her movie but we can also talk about the thing that her movie is which is a romantic comedy and it’s not a shame to be a romantic comedy.

Craig, you just watched it so I know you have so many things you want to say to Tess.

**Craig:** Fresh in my mind, the tears have just dried on my freshly bearded cheeks.

**John:** Yeah, people might have a chance to see that beard on December 9th. We’re doing our live show in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Hi, I’m Segue Man. Natasha Leggero, Riki Lindhome, and Malcolm Spellman will be our guests for that show along with some other folks who are not quite confirmed yet, but who I think are going to be fantastic.

People have been writing in with questions, questions like is there a Three Page Challenge at this live Scriptnotes? No, there’s not. Do I need to reserve a specific seat? And my belief is that no, it is general admission. But the most important question is, where can I get a ticket? And the tickets are available at the Writers Guild Foundation website, wgfoundation.org. They are $20. The proceeds benefit the great programs of the Writers Guild Foundation.

So you should come see us because as we’re recording this, we’re more than halfway sold out. So we might be sold out by the time you listen to this. You should probably pause the podcast right now and get yourself a ticket to the live show.

**Craig:** Fools, fools for waiting.

**John:** They are fools.

**Craig:** I mean do they not know that we’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting?

**John:** Yeah. I mean the younger people might not even know what that reference is but, you know, they might think that is important.

**Craig:** Hey, kids. We’re the Jon Bon Jovis of podcasting. If that doesn’t motivate you, you’re right, we’re old.

**John:** Yeah, Wikipedia that. In the mail bag this week, a couple of questions came in about Amazon Storywriter. Do you know what Amazon Storywriter is?

**Craig:** Not only do I know what it is. I went and actually fiddled with it even though you suggested on Twitter that I never would, I already had, by that point.

**John:** Congratulations, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So what did you think of Amazon Storywriter? Or do you want to describe what it is for people?

**Craig:** Well, as far as I could tell, I mean I didn’t go in-depth, but it appears that Amazon has created their own screenwriting software. So it’s basically a word processor that formats automatically in our screenwriting format. All the standard stuff. It’s Courier. It’s got all of your basic elements. And it works pretty much like they all do, combination of tab and return.

And it’s free and it’s Cloud based so everything saves on their servers and then you can then very easily pipe it through to their Amazon Studio thing for submissions. Also, it does export to FDX which is the Final Draft format. This whole thing by the way, side note, Final Draft I believe, I believe that company is going to die. The format will survive and I hope that we eventually kill that format too because it’s nasty, but the format will survive.

Anyway, back to this. It actually worked quite nicely. I mean, it’s not fully featured in terms of revisions and production work and all the rest of it but it was quite elegant. It worked very nice. It was smooth, looked nice.

**John:** Yeah. So you say it uses tab and return but really it’s more like — it’s based on Fountain, which is the format that I co-created the syntax, so you’re just typing in plain text and it’s interpreting what you’re doing and figuring out what the different pieces and parts are. And that part actually worked reasonably well.

**Craig:** Wait, Amazon stole your shit?

**John:** Didn’t steal it. Actually, it’s a public format that we created called Fountain.

**Craig:** They don’t have to even acknowledge that they took it?

**John:** No, no. That’s what open source is. It’s like it’s out there in the world for the world to use. And so their implementation of it is actually pretty good except they left out some kind of important things like bolds or italics or centering.

**Craig:** Yeah, I noticed that I couldn’t bold slug lines, and also I couldn’t, like there’s no way to automatically set it. So for instance, I like to have two line breaks before a new scene header, and it didn’t seem like that was automatable.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not automatable yet. So it does some of the stuff that Highland does where you can throw a PDF at it and it will melt it down and bring it out as plain text so you can edit. So that’s kind of nice. It’s just trying to do a lot of things that Highland is trying to do or that Slugline is trying to do or really any of the other screenwriting apps are trying to do and it does an okay job with it. It’s all online. It’s free-ish.

I don’t really think that many people are going to use it in any meaningful capacity. Though I think you’re going to have a lot of people who write like two scenes in it and then never touch it again. That’s my hunch.

**Craig:** We’ll find out. I mean listen, you know, my whole thing is, I’m basically rooting for whoever Final Draft is playing against so if it doesn’t hurt anybody, I’m all for it. I mean I still think that there are better options. I get very squirmy about the Cloud based option. Just the idea that it’s only Cloud based, I know that you can export it and save it locally but I don’t like it so much.

**John:** Yeah, we’ll see what happens. Next bit of follow up in the mail bag is from Pam. And Pam writes, I have this one-woman crusade. It’s futile, but I persevere nonetheless. I would love if people would stop using the word dick derogatorily. My dad’s name is Dick. He’s an amazing, wonderful, caring man. One of the most important people in my life. Whenever I hear people using the word dick pejoratively, it hurts me on his behalf. You guys use it a lot especially this [laughs] — that’s the voice of Tess Morris breaking through, not even —

**Craig:** [Laughs] Tess, you’re not even on the show yet. You have to wait for your spot.

**Tess Morris:** I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

**Craig:** I’m glad you’re here.

**Tess:** Sorry.

**John:** It feels like it’s been increasing exponentially in film lately actually. Craig, what is your opinion of the word dick?

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** It’s one of my favorite words. It’s weird but this whole thing is basically delusional except for this one moment of awesome clarity where she says, “I realize it’s futile.” Yes, Pam, it’s futile. The word dick exists simultaneously as both a pejorative for penis or a person who’s a penis-like person.

**Tess:** Thanks for clearing that up, Craig.

**Craig:** Right. Or it is short for Richard. Your dad’s name is Dick. I know a lot of guys named Dick and they’re cool guys. And I mean Dick Cook was a beloved executive at Disney. Everybody loves him still. And the thing is, if your dad, trust me when I tell you, whatever pain you’re feeling on his behalf, he’s heard it way worse, way worse. If he’s made it all the way to this stage of his life, I’m assuming that he’s at least middle age, if not older, and he’s still going by Dick, this is a hardened man. He’s going to be fine. He knows the world isn’t going to stop using the word dick. That’s crazy.

**Tess:** My dad’s called Richard.

**John:** Oh, yeah. And is he okay?

**Tess:** He’s fine. He’s absolutely fine. But also, I think one of my favorite quotes ever from a film is 37 Dicks from Clarks, you know. “Was it 36 dicks?” When he finds out how many dicks that his girlfriend —

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Has and he just can’t get it out of his head, can he?

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And it always makes me laugh.

**Craig:** I think that dick is a great counterbalance to some of the pejorative words that we toss on people that are related to female genitalia. Dick is our kind of cool balanced way of saying, no, no, no, if you’re called either male or female genitalia, we’re saying we don’t like you.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to Pam’s dad. I feel like —

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** The challenge is how we —

**Craig:** You mean Dick?

**Tess:** You mean Dick.

**John:** Yes.

**Tess:** We don’t know Dick.

**John:** We don’t know him at all. And so Pam —

**Craig:** Some of us know him more than others.

**John:** Pam’s objection to us using the word dick pejoratively, well, it’s been used his entire life anatomically. And the anatomic thing is probably actually worse or sort of more annoying than pejoratively because I think when we’re saying dick, we’re saying like don’t be a dick.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** It’s quite a British word I must say. I don’t hear it that much.

**John:** Oh, yeah? We use dick all the time.

**Tess:** Yeah, I hear it much more at home.

**John:** Craig and I are both Anglophiles. So we try to be British.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Where did it come from? I mean what is the dick?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Tess:** What is it? We should find out.

**Craig:** You know what I love is, in England, I love spotted dick. I mean I don’t love the actual food. I just love that it’s called spotted dick.

**Tess:** Yes. Yeah.

**Craig:** Sounds like a venereal disease. I love that.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a pudding or dessert as you call it.

**Craig:** It’s a pudding or dessert. Exactly. Like would you like some spotted dick? Absolutely not.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**Craig:** Nobody, by the way nobody, I don’t care how much you love dick, if it’s got spots on it, you don’t, you just don’t. By the way, Pam’s realizing now this is backfired terribly. Look, Pam —

**Tess:** Pam’s regretting it.

**Craig:** It’s just funny. What are you going to do? Funny is funny. I’m sorry that you’re hurt. You need to get over this. You need to accept that this is the world and nobody is going after your dad. And I think if you talk to your dad about it, he would probably say, “Pam, I love you. You’re awesome. Thank you for caring about me but it will be okay. We’re good. We’re good.”

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Tess:** I like that this is how we started though.

**John:** Yeah, this is very important, your introduction to the podcast was discussion over dick.

**Tess:** Thank you. My laugh about dicks.

**John:** Last week’s episode, we talked about Whiplash. And so we had a bunch of listeners writing in with different things. One of the questions was good and maybe you will have an opinion on this as well, Tess. We talked on the podcast about there was a scene that was around a big dining room table and how scenes around tables are actually much more difficult to film than you would think they would be because you have to match so many eye lines and angles that it actually just takes forever to do.

And so listeners wrote in to ask, what are other scenes that you think would be really easy to shoot but end up being like really difficult to shoot?

**Tess:** Ooh, that’s a good one.

**John:** Craig, do you have any thoughts about scenes that are deceptively difficult to shoot?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you listed a couple of great ones. I mean the ones that are I think most deceptive are montages of any kind.

**Tess:** I was just about to say a montage, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, because a montage is like shooting 20 minutes. It’s basically the work equivalent of shooting 20 minutes of finished scenes for 30 or 40 seconds. And of course the stupidest, meaning the most work inefficient montage of all time, I still maintain was Allen’s flashback in Hangover 2 where he remembered all those events, but as they were all children so we had to film a montage twice but with children.

**Tess:** I think the easiest montage is probably the Rocky montages, though. I imagine that they were not stressful to film.

**John:** No. But I think looking back at your movie, Man Up , there’s one —

**Tess:** Two montages.

**John:** Yeah.

**Tess:** Montage, montage.

**John:** Yeah, montages.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** Montage.

**John:** Deux montage.

**Craig:** Deux montage.

**Tess:** [Laughs].

**John:** So I was thinking there’s a montage in which they’re bowling and that’s actually a fairly — and you’re shooting a scene, so it’s a bunch of different little setups.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** But you’re all in one place. The really killer montages are things that look like it’s just two-eighths of a page on your script but you’re going to a whole bunch of different locations.

**Tess:** Yeah, we did that for the second one. The first one was the bowling one that we shot that the first week of filming as well and we just played loads of loud rock music and got Simon and Lake to, you know, get on down. But the one when she does the triathlon through the streets of SoHo, that was quite tricky.

**Craig:** And that one looks so, it’s just like, okay, she’s running down a street, she turns down an alley, swims through some bachelorette party girls, then asks a guy for his bike then bikes on over. It’s like, yeah, it goes by —

**Tess:** No.

**John:** That was probably two nights of filming.

**Tess:** That was, I think it was two nights, we had to obviously shoot — Lake had a stunt, well, also a funny story. The bit where Simon like legs her in the taxi with her, she’s our taxi driver, a stunt taxi driver actually crashed into the car in front of him during filming.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Tess:** So that delayed things slightly.

**John:** It does. So montages are a time suck. He goes to over the window is my example. So like you’re in a scene and then like characters just move around in a room. You’re like, oh, the characters are moving around the room, but you don’t realize until you actually need to film one of those things is that like once a character has moved over from this place to that place, all the other angles in the room have changed and, you know, you may be crossing a line. There’s complicated things that may have happened because those characters have shifted their position.

And it may be the right choice to have those characters move around, but it’s taking up extra time. That’s why you sort of, you know, instinctively love to have characters just like find a place and park.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**John:** Because it saves you time and geography problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’ll sometimes and this is something that DPs will, it’s fun watching DPs and first ADs fight because of course the first AD is like shoot it as fast as you can and the DP is like, “I want it to look great.” A lot of times for things like this, you know, you have a scene of people in a room, and that’s your master and then you start covering it, but if somebody moves and changes position, well you need to — now you need a new master, and new coverage. So what they’ll do is they’ll lay down some track and as the person moves, they’ll move the camera along the track and so they’re repositioning their master as they go and then they try and do on the opposite side the same thing so they can reposition their coverage as they go.

Sometimes it doesn’t work and then yeah, you’ve screwed yourself especially if somebody goes to the window and looks out the window.

**Tess:** Oh, no.

**Craig:** Oh my God, now you got to be outside looking up at them looking out and you got to see their POV, you got to be pointing it down. Ugh.

**Tess:** Talking of tracking in two shots. What nearly didn’t, well we did — our DP, he’s called Andrew Dunn. He’s incredible. If you look him up on IMDb, he’s just got the most brilliant, eclectic CV. And him and our director, Ben Palmer, knew that they wanted to shoot everything with two shot, absolutely everything so we got all those little comedy reactions that you really need obviously in a romantic comedy, but we nearly didn’t get Waterloo Station because it was so tricky to film there. And then our DP went down there with the director and just was like, “Okay, we can do this, but we’re going to do it at 3AM in the morning with 50 extras and we’ll have a tracking thing and we’ll just move with them the whole way through right up until she’s under the clock.” So otherwise it would have been like with — I think us and Bourne are the only two films to have shot in Waterloo Station.

**Craig:** I know, it’s actually amazing because when — it’s such a different scene.

**Tess:** What are you talking about? Bourne is very similar.

**Craig:** I mean, I just love the total — I mean — but it’s the same setting, and it actually looks different because it’s a different scene. I don’t know. It’s just a funny thing.

**Tess:** Well, he goes up all into the scene.

Well, he’s all angles. Like everything in that scene is all sniper angles. Like either it’s you’re looking up where the sniper is going to go or you’re looking down at the sniper and this thing is all eyes and misconnections and straight aheads and so.

**Tess:** We didn’t need a sniper. Yeah but I like that that might go down in sort of Wikipedia facts.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The two movies shot there. The last thing that comes to mind for me that seems really simple but is actually really complicated or at least requires complicated decisions is anything with driving. So usually with driving, you have two choices. You can have a real car, or you can green screen it. And so green screening it saves you a lot of time because you can park it on a sound stage, and just shoot whatever angles you want to shoot and then just like put the windows in in post. And a lot of things do that these days and they do it so well that you don’t really notice.

**Tess:** Yeah, I mean nowadays you don’t know the difference, yeah.

**John:** It looks so much better.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So that’s often a good choice and sometimes it just means like not moving around. So the other choice is to put the car either on a trailer or really drive an actual car and mount the cameras to the car and that can look more realistic but it also limits your ability to move around in the car. The thing you also realize once you actually have to start putting cameras on actors in a cars is that there’s a limited number of ways that you can get both actors into a shot or to sort of cut back and forth between reactions. So that’s a reason why don’t you see movies that have a lot of time in the car.

Or you see rare exceptions of movies like that Tom Hardy movie which was entirely in the car.

**Tess:** In the car, yeah. I always think about Thelma and Louise, and I think about those driving shots because I always wanted to know how they did that. I’m sure there is a behind the scenes document.

**John:** But there’s a really good reason why they were driving a convertible.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** They could get shots —

**Tess:** Keeps it open, yeah. But it’s also very cool as well.

**John:** It’s very cool, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Most of your road trip movies at some point or another, I mean, nowadays, you will do a lot of it with green screen. It saves you a ton money and time and effort. You can go so much faster. It’s brutal shooting processed cars where either they’re on a flat bed or you’re driving ahead of them and the actor is actually driving just because you got to do an entire take. You need a run of road. You have to have the cops shut it off. There’s noise. But, there’s nothing like it for the reality of getting in and driving and getting out, you know. So you build an enormous amount of time for those things and enormous expense beyond it. Driving, to me, is number one. The thing that seems the simplest and is the most annoying.

**Tess:** It’s almost like a movie is quite hard to make isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah, you think so. I think writers never quite appreciate.

**Craig:** Well, here’s another question that we got in from Brian from Syracuse. And he writes, “After following along with this week’s script to screen exercises involving Whiplash, and hearing you guys quickly discuss how both scenes really underline the dramatic arguments posed both in the micro sense of the individual scenes and in the macro sense of the entire film, I was wondering if it might be possible for you to elaborate a little more on the subject and maybe provide a couple of examples how these types of scenes pertain to your own films. Do you usually have the dramatic argument of the entire film and then look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses or accentuates this argument/conflict?” Brian —

**Tess:** It’s a long question.

**Craig:** Yeah. But you know, like he put a lot of thought into that question. I appreciate it.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s a good question.

**John:** I would say that in my experience, I won’t necessarily know what the dramatic question or argument of the film is as I’m starting to write it, but it’s there already. Like, it’s the reason why I’m writing the movie and it’s sort of central to the DNA of the movie. And so that if I’ve picked the right movie and I’m approaching it from the right way, that central question — that central theme kind of permeates every scene regardless. And so, if a scene isn’t about that central question, it’s just not going to last in the script, it won’t last in the movie.

**Tess:** Yeah. I would say, it usually takes me the first draft to find my axiom — my central axiom.

**Craig:** Good word.

**Tess:** Thank you. I know especially because I write mainly romantic comedies, you are sort of always wanting to look for the bigger question for your leads or your leading lady or leading man. So I think — yeah, at the moment, I’m writing something, I remember I got my axiom about two drafts in which was when is the right time to meet someone, is there a right time to meet someone, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I think mine comes about as I get into the — probably the same as you, really. I have to get into it a bit.

**Craig:** I think I’m a little different than you guys.

**Tess:** Of course, you are, Craig. You got to be different.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I mostly just ask what you two do and then I think, “Do the opposite.” I do try and start before I begin crafting scenes, I do need to know. It doesn’t have to stay this one. It can change and evolve. But I need to at least begin with some central question because I need to know that my character believes the opposite of that central question. And I need to start designing scenes — and he said, like, do you look for a way to include a scene that specifically addresses? Yeah. I try and design scenes to test the character and lead them towards the truth or punish them for —

And by the way, your movie does this beautifully. Like, every time — like, I always talk about two steps forward one step back. Your character moves towards something, the possibility of an entirely opposite way of living, and for a moment it’s working and then you punish them. This is exactly how I approach these things. So I do need to kind of know. And over time, the question might change and thus the scenes might change. It’s just hard for me to start unless I have something there to build off of.

**Tess:** I mean I have — I think with Man Up, because I wrote that on spec. And I really did know, probably from the very beginning, I knew what I wanted to say about life. But then I need to — what I have to do — Philip Seymour Hoffman had a really good quote which was that writers need to fill up and then they can kind of write. And I think I sort of — I have to take a few more years to fill up again, to write again, if that makes sense. Because I sort of put everything into one script. It’s not very financially a good thing to be.

**John:** That’s not a viable strategy.

**Tess:** Yes. It’s not a viable strategy.

**John:** I was watching a friend’s cut of his movie. And it was a very early cut and so it was a place where a lot of stuff was still fungible and could change. And this idea of stating your central dramatic question, that’s I think my underlying note for him was that I had never heard any of the characters articulate what the movie was about.

**Tess:** Yeah, But you sometimes think as well, I mean I’m so into that. But I do sometimes think as well that you have to — when you’re just starting your first draft, I think there’s also opportunities to not be so sort of like regimented with yourself as well. Because I think newer writers sometimes say to me, you know, “I know exactly what’s it about.” And I’m like, “Oh, you know exactly what it’s about and you haven’t even started to write it yet.” You know, like, I think sometimes, especially if you’re writing in a comedic sense as well, like it can suddenly jump up at you what you actually were trying to say within a scene and then you go, “Oh, great. Now, it is thematic. Hooray.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think it’s fair to say, “I know exactly what it’s about for now.”

**Tess:** Yes, that’s totally fair. Yeah. But then allow yourself the freedom to you know —

**Craig:** Always. Always.

**John:** I think what I’m trying to articulate is that it’s good that you know what it’s about. But if you’re not letting any of your characters speak to the theme —

**Tess:** Oh, yes.

**John:** Or speak to what it’s about or actually ask the question, or take actions that invite the question, then maybe you’re missing an opportunity.

**Tess:** Yeah. Sometimes I put the actual question in. But then you realize that you’ve put it maybe in the wrong scene or at the wrong time. And then you’ll get to the point where you go, oh actually now I can have them say that.

**John:** Yeah. We talked in the last episode about how sometimes you will overwrite a little bit knowing that you can always pull it back.

**Tess:** I overwrite so much.

**John:** But it’s very hard to sort of put stuff back in the movie if you didn’t actually shoot it. And so having a character state the central thematic question may be a really good idea. And if it becomes too obvious, you can always find a way to snip out but it’s going to be very hard to stick back it in.

**Tess:** We thought long and hard about whether he should actually — anyone should actually say the phrase, “Man up,” in Man Up. And then I went for it but I went with the man saying it to the woman rather than the way around. But it was a real sort of thing about do we actually say the title of the film?

**John:** So everyone clapped when —

**Tess:** Yeah, everyone cheered, like, “Yay — ”

**John:** “He said the title.”

**Craig:** They did it. They know they’re in this movie.

**Tess:** They know they’re in the film acting.

**Craig:** Are you familiar with the Book of Mormon?

**Tess:** I haven’t seen it, you know. And I need to see it. I’m probably the only person in the world who hasn’t seen it.

**John:** I’m probably the only person in the world who has not seen Hamilton.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to see Hamilton.

**Tess:** I’m obsessed with that.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s the greatest.

**John:** Man up.

**Tess:** But you haven’t seen it yet?

**Craig:** Man up is the —

**Tess:** Man Up the musical which I would like to do, obviously, next year because I think it could work really well as a musical.

**Craig:** You want to do Man Up as a musical?

**Tess:** I’d love to do it as a musical. Do you want to do it with me, Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t know. I like it as a movie. I don’t think —

**Tess:** Yeah. Give it five years.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t see — I don’t think it needs music.

**Tess:** No, that’s true. But I just like the idea of doing it. Come on, humor me.

**Craig:** Let’s just make a new musical.

**Tess:** That’s true. Okay.

**John:** There’s a dance fight in Man Up and that would work very well on the stage.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And you know, it’s quite a chamber piece of a film, two-hander.

**John:** It’s a heightened chamber piece, and that’s a musical.

**Tess:** It is. Thank you.

**John:** Aaron writes, “I really appreciated your most recent episode discussing Whiplash. I totally agree about your take that Fletcher obviously offers Andrew the performance slot in order to embarrass and ruin him. But would Fletcher really put his reputation further on the line to ruin Andrew? Especially since Andrew was nowhere on the scene anymore, not at the conservatory, not playing clubs, nobody knew who Andrew was, and certainly nobody in the music community.

“He would be ruining a non-entity who already seemed to have given up. And yet Fletcher decides to get his revenge on this guy in a public performance at New York’s largest jazz festival in an ensemble he’s conducting. Sure Andrew would look terrible, but Fletcher is the person standing at the forefront of the crowd. He’s already lost his job, his reputation remains intact enough that he was asked to lead this ensemble performance, and now he’s out to give a crap performance. I just had trouble seeing him as that selfless in his vengeance. To sacrifice himself and his reputation in order to embarrass someone nobody knows.”

I thought that was a really interesting point. I never really thought about Fletcher’s choice to set up Andrew at the end. We’re spoiling the movie Whiplash for you.

**Tess:** Spoiler alert.

**John:** It is really an interesting idea that like Fletcher is going into this knowing he’s going to publicly embarrass himself, but he’s going to get a lot of blowback from that himself. If things go as disastrously as it seems like they’re going to go.

Tess; Yeah. I mean I don’t remember feeling — I remember just feeling so like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards in a good way after I saw that film. You know what I mean, I don’t know what you guys said about it last week because I unfortunately haven’t listened yet, but I will listen obviously.

**John:** Leave the room immediately.

**Tess:** Leave the room immediately. No. But I mean, it’s so visceral the whole film. There are things that you can pick apart. I understand why he’s questioning that. But in my heart of hearts, it’s such a film about being bullying and this whole journey that actually because he is such a bully, I kind of do believe that that’s sort of part of his awful journey. Do you know what I mean?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way — let me offer our listening audience some certainty. There is absolutely no way that the intention there was that the character of Fletcher rigged the whole thing to bring some great performance out of Andrew. He absolutely did that.

**Tess:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** He did that to humiliate Andrew and punish him because he truly believed Andrew had cost him his job and he was a revengeful bad person. And you can tell because Simmons’ performance shows joy, true sadistic joy at ruining him.

**Tess:** Yeah. Exactly, yeah.

**Craig:** And then also shows absolute shock when Andrew comes back and starts doing what he’s doing. And then epiphany when Andrew becomes something. And that is not the performance of somebody who goes, “Good. This is what I wanted to happen.”

**Tess:** It’s so incredible that performance because you still like him. It’s bizarre, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah. So I loved Aaron’s phrase of selfless vengeance. I just think that’s a great, you know — it honestly was circling back to the question of the central dramatic argument. Is there such a thing as selfless vengeance? Because Fletcher is not acting in his own best interest at the moment. Like vengeance is actually kind of never in your own best interest. A rational person would never probably seek vengeance.

**Tess:** Rare. Well, Craig is —

**John:** I mean, is vengeance only emotional or can vengeance be intellectual as well?

**Tess:** I think it can be intellectual. I think you can play the long game in terms of vengeance.

**Craig:** You see, what’s going on here, John, is that you have a full Jew and a half of a Jew.

**Tess:** Oh, God. Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** Both of us are like, no, no, long term vengeance is part of our culture.

**Tess:** It’s part of our life.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s what our parents did to us. I think that vengeance is always selfish. It can be self-destructive, but it’s selfish.

**Tess:** I think in the creative sense it can be very liberating. You know, write who you know, not what you know. So you know, I think there are times when it can be incredibly helpful. But it shouldn’t be to your own detriment or anyone else’s detriment. You know, you should just be secretly vengeful.

**Craig:** Well, we all know as writers that it’s fun to write characters who are looking for vengeance. And we also know that characters who are obsessed with revenge either die in the fire of their own self-destruction or finally let it go. We all know that’s kind of that’s the deal.

**Tess:** Yeah, it’s the journey.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s the journey. And I’m amazed all the time at how many times I will meet writers who behave in ways that they would never allow their characters to behave. It’s like they haven’t learned those lessons at all.

**Tess:** It’s bizarre behavior, but we are all weirdos, that’s the other problem isn’t it? Most writers are —

**Craig:** You have no idea.

**Tess:** We have issues. So we write about them and then we pretend that we’re okay afterwards.

**Craig:** We’re not.

**John:** So Tess Morris, tell us about your issues. Maybe that’s a good segue into —

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Talking about romantic comedies. So our special guest who’s not said a word yet in this whole episode —

**Craig:** Yeah, who’s just rolled over tradition, steam-rolled.

**John:** Is Tess Morris, she’s the writer of —

**Tess:** Hi, I’ve been here for a while, yeah.

**John:** She’s the writer of Man Up, a new romantic comedy which you can see on demand now everywhere.

**Tess:** Yes. In theaters this weekend, wider, this is my pro language that I’m using.

**John:** Yeah, nice.

**Tess:** Thank you. In about ten or 12 cities, I think, LA, Grand Rapids, which really excited me.

**John:** Grand Rapids, Michigan. Come on.

**Tess:** Houston, Dallas. Yeah, but on demand as well on your special iTunes box.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Tess:** To purchase.

**John:** This is a romantic comedy starring Lake Bell and Simon Pegg. And it is just delightful. So I saw it at the Austin Film Festival.

**Tess:** I was so excited that you sat behind me but I was also obviously really nervous. I was like, “Oh, shit. John August.”

**John:** It was really quite funny. And Craig just saw it through the magic of Internet connection.

**Craig:** But I knew that it was going to be good because my wife, Missy, went with you, John.

**Tess:** She did.

**Craig:** To see the movie and she loved it, loved it, loved it, and cried a lot.

**Tess:** She’s a big laugher. I loved her a lot.

**Craig:** Yes. She’s a big laugher, she’s a big crier. That’s why I married her, for the emotional extremes.

**John:** And the critics seemed to have laughed and cried in appropriate numbers. And it’s certified fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so congratulations on that.

**Tess:** We are certified Fresh.

**Craig:** I don’t care about that. You know that I actually hate that.

**John:** Do you have questions for Tess about what it’s like to get reviews like that?

**Craig:** No. I have no interest. I don’t care. I hope that you choke on those reviews. No.

**Tess:** Oh, you know what, we only remember the bad ones as well.

**Craig:** Well, of course the only review that I care about is my review.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** My review.

**Tess:** It’s the only one I care about for you, Craig, about Man Up, as well.

**Craig:** It’s the only one of my reviews that you care about is my review.

**Tess:** Yes, your own review.

**Craig:** Well, I loved it.

**John:** So Tess, as you were introducing this movie at the festival up on stage, you talked about how this was a romantic comedy and people shouldn’t talk shit about romantic comedies.

**Tess:** Yes, I did.

**John:** So tell us about romantic comedies and what do you even mean by romantic comedies?

**Tess:** Well, it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because ever since I wrote this film and it got made, I’ve become like the spokesperson for defending the whole entire genre. My big thing with it is that people sort of dismiss it so quickly. Like no other genre in the history of film. It’s quite a strange phenomenon that people are all, “I don’t like romantic comedies.” Or “Rom-coms are dead.” Or “Rom-coms are alive.” And et cetera, et cetera.

And I find that incredibly frustrating because there have been some brilliant ones in the last sort of 10 years or so. And I think also what happens is when they win awards, they’re suddenly not romantic comedies. So Silver Linings Playbook and As Good As It Gets and those kinds of, you know, brilliant movies.

I mean when you talk about romantic comedy, you’re just — you’re talking about something that has probably I’d say 72 percent — 68 percent comedy ,and the rest is romance. If you take your central love story out of the film and it falls apart, then you don’t have a romantic comedy, you know well you do have a romantic comedy on your hands rather. And I just adore them as a genre and I always have and I like all the ones, the hybrids. Like I love Romancing the Stone, the ones that are like the action rom-coms.

So I wonder if Long Kiss Goodnight is technically a rom-com? No, it’s not — her and Samuel L. Jackson, it’s not, that was a stretch. But yeah and I mean I love Sideways which is a rom-com between two men and I love Bridesmaids which is a rom-com between two women and Muriel’s Wedding. And I think like people sometimes forget that they’re watching one, and the art of a good one is that you don’t realize sometimes that you are as well. So yeah I’ve become sort of like this strange irritating person that constantly is like “I like rom-coms” and get annoyed when people you know say that they don’t.

**Craig:** I think you’re making a terrific point because I don’t — I personally love rom-coms, I mean and I really agree with your point that what we think of as romantic comedy is across almost every comedy genre. Identity Thief is a rom — it’s like an asexual rom-com, it’s like a platonic rom-com.

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And I happen to love the genre and I miss it. I don’t know what went wrong exactly but and maybe we can figure out why —

**Tess:** I think I can tell you, yeah. I can tell you what went wrong actually.

**Craig:** Okay, what went wrong?

**Tess:** Well and it’s — and this is not me talking, this is me using the voice of Billy Mernit who’s a good, brilliant friend of mine and also wrote this book called “Writing the Romantic Comedy” which I’m addicted to and obsessed by because it’s the one book on screenwriting that I’ve read that just really inspired me and unlocked lots of structural points for me and thematic things. But I had a big chat with him about this. And he works for Universal actually, is a story editor, and he was saying that essentially what happened in the sort of late 90s, early ’00s, is that they had these huge hits with you know, the kind of Katherine Heigl set of vehicles and made loads of money, the studios made a ton of money.

But then they essentially killed the golden goose because they then started to make identical versions of those films, just probably like they do with most genres but for a longer time period with romantic comedies, which caused everyone to say the romantic comedy is dead which only really people started saying in the late ’90s early ’00s, before then, you know you didn’t really talk about it like that because they have such a rich history of movies that are romantic comedies. So I think there was just this you know, lazy time period where everyone started to say that and now people just resort back to that whenever there’s a new one they go, “Oh the rom-com is alive,” or something bombed at the box office, “It’s dead.” It’s like, give it a break.

**John:** Christopher Orr had an article called Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad, and the sub-head is, the long decline from Katharine Hepburn to Katherine Heigl, which I thought was —

**Tess:** It’s a great — it’s click bait — it’s a great title, great headline, but it’s not true.

**Craig:** Good anger. Anger.

**John:** Anger. We like that.

**Tess:** Can you feel it?

**Craig:** Umbrage. Umbrage.

**John:** We’ve got dual umbrage in this episode.

**Tess:** Vengeance.

**Craig:** Vengeance will be ours.

**John:** But he actually raised some interesting points in terms of what has changed. And one of the points he brought up was that actors will sometimes do one romantic comedy and they’ll just stop —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Because they don’t want to be pigeon-holed as doing that, so you look at Will Smith in Hitch, who was fantastic in Hitch.

**Tess:** He’s great in it. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a great romantic comedy and he will not do anymore of them. You look at Julia Roberts and she made her start in romantic comedy but didn’t want to keep doing that so they want to do serious roles and —

**Tess:** Although I read an interview with her recently that said if she read a good one for a woman who was whoever old Julia, lovely Julia is now, I’d happily write you one, because I love her. Yeah, I mean I don’t know whether that’s because they feel like they don’t have as much integrity. I mean comedy as a whole thing and you all know this, both of you from writing yourself, that it doesn’t ever get the kudos that any other line of craft does.

**Craig:** No. It’s crazy.

**Tess:** And I would argue that to write comedy is far harder that to write drama overall.

**Craig:** Because you’re right.

**John:** So, a theory I want to posit is that part of the reason why it’s looked down upon is because almost definitionally a romantic comedy is going to have one woman in it, and like one prominent actress who has a major role in the movie. And we sort of don’t want to write for women anymore — or we don’t want to make the movies for women anymore.

**Tess:** Yeah, but I mean It’s so weird because I’ve done so many interviews about Man Up and someone ask me the other day, “Oh is your character a hot mess?” And I was like, “Oh piss off, she’s not a hot mess. She is a messy person.”

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** Who’s just going through some stuff and I think —

**John:** And she’s literally a very messy person —

**Tess:** Yeah literally a messy person. And I think also like you could switch the roles in Man Up and very easily either/or could play you know man or female roles. I do worry when people sort of think that there aren’t still stories about sort of romance to tell, because especially in the modern world.

**Craig:** I actually feel like were telling romance in every genre now. Part of what’s happened is everything — it doesn’t matter what it is.

**Tess:** And actually it’s too much, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, like no matter what the genre is, even if it’s like a wrestling movie, there has to be some sort of love story.

**Tess:** Or a Marvel movie.

**Craig:** Yeah by the way exactly, superhero movies like Ironman has to have Gwyneth Paltrow in a romance story. And we put romance into everything.

**Tess:** You know what, someone said to me recently that Superman wasn’t about his love for Lois Lane, and I got so angry.

**Craig:** Right well from the start —

**Tess:** That’s all that the film is about.

**Craig:** By the way that’s all Superman is about like —

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I’m going to get some more angry letters, I don’t like Superman. I like that relationship. And I think It’s a really good relationship story and I don’t care about his powers but —

**Tess:** But it’s not a rom-com to be fair.

**Craig:** No, It’s not a rom-com, but I do think that we actually are more interested now, it seems to me in writing comedies for women that we have been in a long, long time. There are really prominent female comediennes that are stars now, whether it’s Tina Fey or Melissa McCarthy —

**Tess:** Kristen Wiig, yeah.

**Craig:** We’re getting a lot of them and — but were not doing the traditional romantic comedies in the sense maybe there’s a vague feeling that they’re old fashioned but I disagree. I don’t think they — I think that they are old-fashioned only in the sense that movies used to be awesome and like I thought what Man Up reminded of is a good — a movie like the kind they used to make and that’s not to say stodgy or old but —

**Tess:** No, no I take that as a huge compliment because that’s what I — the screwball kind of element and the kind of classic structure and whenever I read the bad reviews which I obviously I always do. Whenever I read the ones that say “Oh God It’s just like so obvious,” I’m like, no, you’ve totally missed the point like we’re embracing all the tropes because that’s what any good genre film does, embraces them but then turns them into — gives them your own sort of angle on it. So —

**John:** Let’s talk about the tropes because I think that’s actually one of the things that people sort of single out romantic comedies for, it’s like “Oh these tropes,” and we sort of slam on these tropes. So let’s talk about tropes. The meet-cute, is that —

**Tess:** Yeah, yeah I mean like — I mean there’s technically you know, seven —

**John:** Oh my gosh, there’s seven tropes —

**Tess:** Well they’re not really tropes, actually that’s wrong they’re more like the beats of a rom-com.

**Craig:** Can I try? I don’t know them I just want to take a stab at it.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m going to start with a woman who is single and vaguely unhappy with her life.

**Tess:** Can be a man as well. Woody Allen.

**Craig:** Correct, I’m just going with the — I’m going to do the female version.

**Tess:** Do it.

**Craig:** She has given up on — she’s tried to — she’s gone through bad relationships and is about to give up.

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** There’s a meet-cute — so far so good — there’s a meet-cute where she or he runs into a person and they have sparks but they aren’t — the circumstances are such that they can’t just say fall in love. There are circumstantial things that are keeping them apart, obstacles.

**Tess:** All together. Yeah.

**Craig:** Good exactly. But they then start to — they go through a honeymoon phase where things are kind of exciting and they both think is it possible that this person, nah, we’re just friends, it couldn’t be, so they’re like kind of moving towards and away from each other out of fear because there’s a problem — the problem that they had in the beginning of the movie isn’t resolved. There’s a lie that one of them tells —

**Tess:** Correct.

**Craig:** They get caught in the lie, they break up, and in the breaking up they return back to the world they started in, but no longer find that world satisfying and then one of them goes running.

**Tess:** I would give you a B-minus.

**Craig:** Okay, the B — by the way B-minus is not a bad grade because I never — I mean, you know — what did I — tell me where I went wrong and tell me what I left out.

**Tess:** No you didn’t, It’s all there really, I mean essentially what you’re talking about in terms of the girl who’s single — I’ll talk about Billy Mernit’s beats because that’s how I write. And he talks about the chemical equation which is the thing that in all writing you’re looking for your leading characters, what they’re missing in their life, what they are not doing. So in Man Up she is not getting out there, she is not putting herself in a position to meet someone. She is closed down, shut down. Yeah, then you got your cute-meet. I mean, in the history of time cute-meets are the hardest things to find original ways for your two leads to meet each other.

And I always love it, I always try and think about how do — like say you said to me how did you meet your partner, and I said, well I stole his date from under the clock at Waterloo Station. If that’s going to make me laugh, then that’s a good cute-meet. And then what you’re talking about in terms of your — Billy calls it the sexy complication turning point.

**Craig:** That’s nice.

**Tess:** Which is your end of act one, which is when — really in a romantic comedy you’ve got to find emotional obstacles to keep your two leads together. And really at the end of act one, in lots off these films, they’re not the great examples of it, they could just walk away and the film could end. Sorry, I don’t fancy you anymore, bye.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** So you have to find either a plot driven thing but obviously what’s much better is an emotional obstacle or thing —

**John:** So either literal handcuffs or emotional handcuffs.

**Tess:** Exactly. Very good analogy, John August. And then you keep them together all through to your midpoint which is in terms of romantic comedy, you want to, in the smack bang of your middle of act two, you want to send them in a different direction to where they thought they were going, emotionally speaking.

And then they kind of start liking each other, but then you’ve got to get into the end of act two, your swivel second act turning point where someone makes the wrong decision. Someone always makes the wrong decision in a romantic comedy. It can be both of them and actually in Man Up, both of them don’t Man Up at the end of act two. And then all is lost from there onwards and you just have no idea how you’re going to get these two people back together and then in — you know When Harry Met Sally kind of did the brilliant run.

Weirdly now when I think about it, probably if you wrote that montage into a script now, someone would go “Nah,” wouldn’t they?

**Craig:** Of course, they say nah to everything.

**Tess:** And then he has a flashback so all of the moments in the film. And then he realizes that he loves her and then he runs.

**Craig:** Right, someone’s always running. I got that right.

**Tess:** Yeah, but you know what, they can be running metaphorically, they can be actually running. In Man Up, he does do an actual run, but I tried to sort off find a unique way without spoiling it for him to do that run.

**Craig:** Yeah and you did.

**Tess:** So it wasn’t just traditional —

**John:** Well you were calling out the trope.

**Craig:** Right exactly, you’re acknowledging, oh this is where they run, so we’ll give you a little something like a present.

**Tess:** Yeah. I mean you know, were quite on the button with the beats in Man Up, but hopefully, and I was saying to John actually when I first got here, when I wasn’t actually here, when I was pretending not to be here. I really — I sort of like love the fact that we are unashamedly saying, here they all are, you know, that I have no sort of fear in admitting. And I also think when you watch it again and this is not a plug to watch it twice, but the second time around, it’s a very fast movie the first time you watch it. When you watch it again, you can relax a bit more and understand some of the — you know catch some more of the jokes and more of the humor. So I think the first time you watch it, you can be like “Oh my god what is happening?” It’s like one night of kind of you know craziness.

But yeah and I mean I love — I just get so bored and tired of people sort off saying — the amount of times I get emails going would you like to talk about defending the rom-com for this, this, this? And I’m like yes.

**Craig:** You know what? It’s like —

**Tess:** I will talk about it.

**Craig:** I mean, I feel like the movie is a great defense. And what you’re describing when you say —

**Tess:** That’s my exhibit A.

**Craig:** Exactly, thank you. If you said look, I have a collection of tropes, and the job is not to throw them out, the job is to execute them in fresh new ways —

**Tess:** Yeah and hide them.

**Craig:** Well that’s what we’re supposed to be doing anyway.

**Tess:** I know

**Craig:** All of us.

**Tess:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s the point. So to me, I loved how traditional it was, and proved that a traditional romantic comedy still works because in the end — you know Lindsay Doran has this great remark, she says that movies are about what we care about at the end of movies, is relationships. And if you watch a movie, no matter what that movie is, the last scene is almost always about the relationship even if the movie is about robots blowing each other up, the last scene is the boy and the girl, or the boy and his car, or something, and it’s about the relationship. And you know the last scene — she always points out the last scene of Dirty Dancing. Everybody thinks Dirty Dancing ends with —

**Tess:** Oh, let’s talk about that.

**Craig:** She — you know, everyone says, “Oh, how does Dirty Dancing end? With her leaping?” No it doesn’t. It ends with Jennifer Grey talking to her dad.

**Tess:** No. To her dad exactly.

**Craig:** The relationship.

**Tess:** When I’m wrong I say I’m wrong.

**Craig:** Right. And so what Lindsay says is, what’s interesting is, they make these movies for boys and men about robots exploding, but then they put in this little relationship thing at the end to sort of say, okay, but also, you like movies about relationships. She said, when we make movies so called for women, that are about relationships, we’ve kind of said you’re smart enough to know that what you’re here for is the relationship. That’s the part everyone cares about anyway. The exploding robots, meh.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? So romantic comedies are the purest form of that, I love that.

**Tess:** They are because like my favorite thing in the world, I love people, like even if I meet someone that I don’t like, and I’ll be able to use them at some point in my writings, so I’m like I’ll talk to you, even if you are dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. Dick. But like I sort of feel like — especially like when people sort of say, oh, you know Lake’s character in the film, because she is very, you know, it is very autobiographical. I’m not going to lie. But like — but she’s a person, not a woman, if that makes sense you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Tess:** And I think that’s the key to sort of — I mean, I know lots of men that have seen Man Up, and I get random messages on Twitter all the time sort of going “God, I really love that film,” like you know, I really like this and I love Simon’s character in it, and Simon Pegg is so brilliant in it and actually very underrated actor, I think genuinely in terms of like his actual dramatic chops. I mean obviously he’s not underrated comedically, but he’s very vulnerable in the film, and he’s very, you know, effed up, and all those sort of things. I’ve already sworn. I don’t know why I did an “effed up” then. I could have just said it, couldn’t I?

**Craig:** Say it.

**Tess:** Yeah they’re two people and no one really wants to be on their own, do they, in life, whether you want to be in a relationship or just be with your friends or be with your family, you know, that’s what life is about for me, being with people.

**John:** So one thing that occurs to me though about the nature of a romantic comedy is that, the — you can have a central dramatic question that is about sort of like, can men and women be friends, you know what is the duty to think — you can have central dramatic questions that aren’t necessarily specifically about that relationship, but the fundamental plot question that the audience is going to expect to have answered is like, will this couple end up together?

And the answer in romantic-comedy generally is yes. And so the challenge of the screenwriter is like how do you believably keep them apart?

**Tess:** Yes. You know your ending already, so in life, in writing, you’ve got to be so full of questions, I mean, that is just a part of the job, do you know what I mean? So it always really fascinates me when people, with romantic-comedies, they don’t think they need that, they think they just need two people who are they/aren’t they — it’s like, no, you’ve got to have these huge, big emotional things that kind of are running through it.

**Craig:** That’s, I mean to me, all the differences that keep people apart that are circumstantial, I think of as MacGuffins, they are the glowing stuff in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. I kind of don’t care about those things. I always care about the things that are internal to them, and their fears that are keeping them alone, or keeping them apart from this person, that if they only could take a risk with, things would go well. Why I think, to me, the joy of a romantic-comedy is not in wondering, will they/won’t they, because the answer is, they will.

**Tess:** It’s how they. It’s how they.

**Craig:** It’s really, it’s being reminded, this is why men should always go to romantic-comedies with their significant others, is because it’s reminding everybody of the joy of falling in love, and the value of falling in love, because over time, I mean, you know, John and I have both been in monogamous relationships for years and years and years and years.

**Tess:** All right, don’t rub it in.

**Craig:** Sorry, you can’t maintain a heightened level — and you talk about this in the movie, a heightened level of passion for all that time. If you did, your brain would explode, and you would be mentally ill. It’s just not possible.

Going to romantic-comedies, revives it, it makes you look at the person you’re with, and makes you remember the risks you took with them, and it also reminds you of the value of what you built together because in the end, when you watch a movie about somebody stopping the world from exploding, that’s never my job, but at the end of a romantic-comedy, when I see a man and woman come together and make an agreement to mush their lives together and build a thing, and I always love in romantic-comedies when they’re old couples too, like in yours, it reminds me that I did something really good.

**Tess:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s worth it, you know. I think that’s the value of the —

**Tess:** That’s the job, isn’t is? I mean actually, it’s funny because someone was asking me the other day whether they think that Nancy and Jack, the two leads in Man Up, stay together. And I actually said, “No.”

**Craig:** You’re terrible.

**Tess:** Well no, I said no because I feel like the film is actually about putting yourself out there and taking chances. That’s part of her mantras within the film, and it’s something that I struggle with myself, you know, I’ve been single on and off now for bloody years, and I go into a very closed in kind of environment and I don’t want to kind of like take any chances.

And I think the film for me, is trying to say to people like if you do something, enjoy it, and see where it goes, but don’t try and maybe over-analyze it and worry about, okay, is this the man I’m going to marry and is this my life I’m going to have? So I love that they get together in the end, obviously. I would always get them together at the end.

But strangely, with Annie Hall, when they are not together at the end of that, I actually love that film, but that’s the only thing I find slightly dissatisfying, although you know, arguably, from the beginning of the film, you know that they’re not very well suited.

**Craig:** Well, I mean that movie, you know, the original title of Annie Hall was Anhedonia.

**Tess:** Yes, good fact. Nice fact.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Tess:** Fear of what?

**Craig:** Fear of pleasure.

**Tess:** Fear of pleasure. Exactly.

**Craig:** And so it really was a meditation on — definitely more Woody Allen in the —

**Tess:** Exactly and then it became her story, I mean you know.

**Craig:** That’s an existentialist movie, it’s in a weird way, people talk about it as a romantic-comedy. I don’t think it’s a romance at all. I think it’s actually an existential drama crisis movie.

**Tess:** Well, I think it is a romantic-comedy, but I think it’s fascinating that once the title changed to Annie Hall, you don’t really think about him as much in that film as you do about Diane Keaton. And I think that’s what turned it around, you know, he then probably hopefully realized, ah okay, this is actually much more about the breakdown of a relationship between two people that are a bit mismatched.

**Craig:** I do think that your characters, they get married, and they grow old together —

**Tess:** That’d be nice.

**Craig:** And then when one of them dies like at 92 —

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** The other one just sits down in a chair and dies like 10 minutes later.

**Tess:** Like six months later? Oh, 10 minutes? I was going to give them a little bit longer.

**Craig:** Yes, because that was just the way it was going to be. I believe that. I believe it in my bones.

**Tess:** Well, I have to believe to write it. Otherwise —

**Craig:** Exactly. And I think by the way, that you’re going to have this.

**Tess:** Thanks, Craig. You know what though, I’m fine though, like I think that like being single, I keep an edge.

**John:** Yes, absolutely, you get more writing done when you’re single.

**Tess:** It keeps me writing, yes.

**John:** Here’s a question for both of you. Do we think that romantic-comedies are by their nature dual protagonist stories, or can you have a romantic-comedy that has a protagonist and just an antagonist who does not change? Do both characters have to change?

**Tess:** Well Trainwreck kind of did that recently.

**John:** Yes, so Bill Hader’s character just barely changes.

**Tess:** He clearly doesn’t change. I would argue, actually I would — I liked it as a film, but I would have quite liked him to have a little bit more of a sort of journey, to use that word.

**Craig:** Yes. I think that the best of them, I always feel like there’s one protagonist. The dual protagonist thing to borrow a Tess Morris thing, I always feel it’s like 68, you know, 32. In this movie, it’s Nancy who is the protagonist.

**Tess:** Yes, she’s — I mean it was originally much more her, actually, and then I turned it more into a two-hander and brought Jack’s character in a bit sooner.

**Craig:** So I’m going to argue against sort of that because if you look at what Nancy is actually doing, especially in the bar scene where she’s like getting him to actually stand up to his ex-wife and that like, he is a character that has the most growth. He does the most things over the course of a lot of the movie to change.

**Tess:** He does, yes.

**Craig:** So ultimately, she is the person who has to do something at the end. He is the guy who does the big romantic run at the end, so he fulfills that Harry function.

**Tess:** Well, it depends where they meet as well. With When Harry Met Sally, they meet in the first scene, you know. And they’re together, they’re in every pretty much every single scene together about bar five or six or whatever, and I think with Man Up, it’s Nancy’s story for the first 12, 13 minutes, and then it’s entirely both their sort of journeys, but obviously she has more, I think it begins with her. She is the catalyst for the things that happen in the film.

**Craig:** I also think that, I mean you’re right, there’s the quantity of change that happens for Simon’s character, for Jack, but the profundity of the change, and the resistance, he’s already somebody who feels he’s defined as passionate, somewhat plastic in that nature, he’s emotional, he’s honest, he’s free with his feelings, he just needs to get over something. She’s bottled up to me that it’s like it’s the — he can make 12 changes over the course of the movie, but for her to uncork is like the hardest thing because it’s so — see, my problem with the single protagonist, and this is another thing I actually think hurt romantic-comedies is that for a long time the model was one person meets another person, the main character is flawed and can’t see that this other person’s perfect for them.

And they continue to fail in front of that person until finally, they succeed, and that person is essentially fixed in place as a moral ideal that you’re just waiting for them to grow up enough to earn. And that’s not quite satisfying for me as a moviegoer.

**Tess:** All my favorite rom-coms I would say are dual protagonist, you know, As Good As It Gets, and Silver Linings, actually, which is a great example of like something that begins with Bradley Cooper’s character, and then she just comes along and changes his whole life. And there’s a great sort of sub — I read a thing recently about how in the first scene when he meets her, when he says to her, you know, I find you — you look nice, I’m just saying that, I’m trying to get back with my wife, it’s not that I’m trying to come on to you, and actually, that’s the moment he falls in love with her, the first time he sees her.

**Craig:** Right.

**Tess:** And then she just bowls in and they have that brilliant kind of Hepburn/Tracy-esque kind of sort of dialogue between each other. And then it becomes their film, like once they meet, it should become a dual thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** To wrap this up, so romantic-comedies, we’re saying they are not dead. We are saying that the things that people identify as being formulaic about them, are the tropes that are common to the genre, but you could say the same things about the tropes in any genre. And so we don’t slam on superhero movies for having those tropes and genres, I guess because they’re wildly successful.

**Tess:** Can you imagine if everyone got upset about set pieces in superhero movies.

**Craig:** How about like, how about the part where they discover their powers and don’t have control over them at first? How about the part where they make their suit for the first time. God.

**Tess:** I love it when they make their suit. I’m like, how are they going to make their suit?

**Craig:** Who cares? So boring, I’m so done.

**Tess:** Yes, sorry, John.

**John:** So we’re also saying that romantic-comedies are comedies which we are expecting to see one or two characters grow and change, but you can say that of course with any movie.

**Tess:** Any movie, yes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Tess:** And I think sometimes when people really hate a genre, I’m suspicious of them as a person.

**Craig:** Me too.

**Tess:** I’m like, “You hate romantic-comedies? Have you got no joy in your life that you — ” I mean I get a bit like —

**John:** That’s why I think you actually need to question them on what they’re defining as romantic-comedy because I think what they really mean to say, like I hate Katherine Heigl movies. It’s like, well, that’s fair, it’s fair to hate Katherine Heigl movies.

**Tess:** That’s fine, yes. I mean, I had an argument with someone recently about How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days. They hated it like with a passion. I was like, you know what, dude, it’s fine. I quite enjoy that film when I’m a certain kind of mood, but this kind of like association that it’s a chick flick, that I’m going to sit there in my track suit bottoms, well, I don’t know what you call them. Do you call them track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Sweat pants.

**Tess:** And eat a massive bag of Maltesers. Do you have Maltesers?

**John:** I have no idea what you’re saying.

**Craig:** Here it would be sweat pants and a pint of ice cream

**Tess:** Yes. Like don’t get me wrong, I love Bridget Jones, she’s a fantastic creation and always has been, but like we’re not all just doing that. I might do that when I watch Con Air, and that doesn’t mean, you know, it’s what is making you feel a certain thing, and I don’t know.

**Craig:** Also, why are we apologizing for things that are true? Like there are moments in movies when men are depressed and they do male depressed things.

**Tess:** Yes, and they’re allowed to do that.

**Craig:** They’re allowed to do it. Nobody goes, “Oh my god — ”

**Tess:** Exactly. In Sideways, no one went, “Oh,” which is one of my all-time favorite films, no one said, you know, “Oh god, he was so unlikeable.” The whole point is that he’s brilliantly unlikeable, you know?

**Craig:** We just did a whole episode on how angry that gets me —

**Tess:** Did you?

**Craig:** Unlikeable. The worst note. I believe it’s the last episode that you didn’t listen to.

**Tess:** I would say it’s the worst note particularly when you’re talking about female stuff when they go, “She’s just not likeable enough as a woman.”

**Craig:** For all genders, even if we’re dealing with genderless aliens or androids, it’s the worst note.

**Tess:** Do you think they got that note in Marley and Me.

**John:** The dog’s not likeable enough?

**Tess:** The dog’s not likeable enough.

**John:** Can we see the dog smile a little bit more?

**Craig:** Yes, people are going to want it to die.

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah. CG that smile in.

**Craig:** You know what that dog is?

**Tess:** What?

**Craig:** That dog’s a dick.

**Tess:** He’s a dick. [laughs]

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. Tess, we should have warned you about One Cool Things.

**Tess:** Oh shit.

**John:** So you could be the third to go. You could say something that’s cool about your time in Los Angeles, because you’ve been here for a couple of weeks. My One Cool Thing is a profile of Nick Bostrom who is a scientist and a philosopher. He writes a lot about AI and sort of doomsday scenarios. And so the profile I’m going to link to is in The New Yorker.

And the things he was talking about are really interesting, but I thought it actually more interesting as a character profile, so just sort of digging into sort of what it’s like to be that sort of scientist guy who’s warning you about doomsday. It’s the character who in movies would be played by — I’m trying to think who is —

**Tess:** Kevin Spacey?

**John:** Kevin Spacey, yes, somebody like that who would be like, you know, I told you this is going to happen, this is going to happen. But the actual character that they outlined here is actually really fascinating and I think worth looking at.

**Tess:** Liam Neeson may be more —

**John:** Liam Neeson might be — Jeff Goldblum would be —

**Tess:** Yes.

**John:** Goldblum is sort of the classic —

**Tess:** You didn’t stop to think whether you should.

**John:** Exactly, indeed, so be it Day After Tomorrow or Jurassic Park, he’s the guy who’s going to warn you about that. You’re playing god.

**Tess:** I’m with him. I’m with him.

**John:** What is so fascinating about this profile though is it goes into sort of this early decision to sort of like, you know, I am going to change my life completely. And sometimes we’ll see this in movies, but it’s so rare that you see this actually happening in real life where like you sort of have an epiphany and sort of like wrote like this is how my whole life is going to change and sort of did that.

And so a really interesting character profile, and also some good science in there as well.

**Tess:** Some good science.

**John:** Some good science. And if you like what they talk about in the fermi paradox stuff part of this, I’m also going to put a link in the show notes to this really great Wait But Why article on alien civilizations and what the fermi paradox is

**Tess:** Can you see my face? I’m just like what is he talking about?

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like you’re talking about crisps. I have no idea. And track suit bottoms?

**Craig:** Crisps. Crisps. I want Crisps. Look, you know what I think about all this. We’re living in a computer simulation.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’re not real either.

**Tess:** No.

**Craig:** End of discussion.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Did you say, “Thank you?”

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** Like I had put you at ease with that horrible proposition.

**Tess:** I felt suddenly like really relaxed.

**Craig:** That’s the opposite of what I wanted. You were supposed to start gazing up —

**Tess:** No, because I’m worst case scenario person. It’s the way I live my whole life in a state of panic, so when someone just says like, well, it’s over, it’s going to end, I’m like, “Oh, okay. Well fine. Good.”

**Craig:** Great, yeah. I get take a nap now.

**Tess:** Yes, that’s good, excellent.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing, I would have done it last week, but I did the whole blood brain barrier business last week, so this week, my One Cool Thing, how could it not be Fallout 4?

**John:** You’re enjoying it, Craig?

**Craig:** A little too much.

**Tess:** Is this a game?

**Craig:** It is a game, well done, Tess Morris.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Fallout 4 — everyone else knows what it is, so I will just say this, the crazy thing about Fallout 4 is that it is exactly the same as Fallout 3. I mean, with like one tiny change that’s actually kind of semi-fun, it’s the same damn game, and I don’t care, I love it.

**Tess:** Is it shooting?

**Craig:** It is shooting, but it’s mostly, it’s quest-based, so people — yes, so you have missions and you go on and you find things, and sometimes you have to kill people, sometimes you have to talk to people.

**Tess:** Like the Fall Guy, then?

**Craig:** Like the what?

**Tess:** The Fall Guy, the show that was on in the ’80s?

**Craig:** Not at all like the Fall Guy. Literally not anything like the — so think of the Fall Guy —

**Tess:** There’s no Jacuzzi that you jump in at the end with some ladies?

**Craig:** No. It takes place in post-apocalyptic Boston.

**Tess:** It’s nothing like the Fall Guy.

**Craig:** It’s more like Mad Max than The Fall Guy.

**Craig:** Thank you. It’s more like Mad Max. But I don’t know, whatever it does to me and my brain, because I love following storylines, I can literally feel the dopamine squirting out of my brain while I’m playing it. When I’m done, I can feel the lack of — I know I’m taking drugs, I know it. I know I’m smoking crack when I play this game. And it’s disrupted my sleep this week, but it’s been great.

**Tess:** It’s been great. Like MacGyver?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Goddamn it.

**Tess:** Good storylines, though. My One Cool Thing, now I’ve had two minutes to think about it.

**Craig:** Is it either The Fall Guy or MacGyver?

**Tess:** It’s the A-Team.

**Craig:** It’s A-Team? I love that you watched all those.

**Tess:** Oh my god, of course. So my One Cool Thing, since I’ve been living here, I’m coming back because I love it so much, but I’ve had my little six weeks here, and I’ve been living in Los Feliz — you say Los Feliz?

**Craig:** You can say both, actually.

**Tess:** What would you say?

**John:** I say Los Feliz.

**Tess:** Los Feliz. Los Feliz.

**Craig:** You did it right.

**Tess:** Los Feliz!

**Craig:** Never that.

**Tess:** Never that? So I’ve been living there which I love because I can walk everywhere, because I’m British, I love to walk, so I’m like, brilliant. And I discovered the Vista Cinema since I’ve been here which I think is the coolest cinema I have ever been in. And it’s just at the bottom of Hillhurst and Sunset and I just — it’s like my dream cinema, I mean not only was True Romance, I think the opening sort of scene is filmed there, but it just has everything I need.

You do cinemas so well here when you have that kind of old-fashioned sort of like art deco-y kind of sort of thing. And I got quite drunk with a friend when we went to see Spectre, and we arrived so late, so we couldn’t sit together and we were like, oh, god, what’s going on?

And then they brought out some folding chairs for us.

**Craig:** Oh, how nice.

**Tess:** So we sat drunk at the back, and then realized it was two-and-a-half hours long. Let’s not even —

**Craig:** But you know you can walk out at the last half hour, and —

**Tess:** At one point, I did turn to my friend, I was like, should we go? And he said, I think we need to see it through, we just need to see it through. And I had sobered up by then, so it was fun, but anyway, I just love how there’s just one film on there, once a week, and it’s just got a beautiful atmosphere to it, and I just — if I could be in there every night, but the only thing is that they have only one film a week, that’s the only thing. So I can’t go every night, but I just love it.

**Craig:** You could go every Saturday night.

**Tess:** I was like a pig in shit when I was in there.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** What a great guest.

**John:** Tess Morris, thank you for joining us on the podcast this week.

**Tess:** Thank you. It’s on my bucket list now, I’ve done it. I’ve been on Scriptnotes.

**John:** So is it no longer on your bucket list?

**Tess:** I’ll just keep coming back. I’ll just keep annoying you.

**John:** The buckets confuse me.

**Tess:** Yes.

**Craig:** John can’t handle it.

**Tess:** His whole face just went, what, uh?

**John:** I’m so confused. My programming won’t allow for this.

**Tess:** I won’t allow for this.

**Craig:** Literally, you divided by zero, just froze. You can find us at johnaugust.com, for show notes, where we talk about a lot of things we have discussed on the show today.

On Twitter, I am @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin. Tess, are you on Twitter?

**Tess:** I am @thetessmorris.

**John:** She’s @thetessmorris on the Twitter. If you have questions like some of the ones we answered on the show today, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. If you would like to listen to back episodes of this whole program that we’ve made, you can find us at scriptnotes.net, you can also find us through the app. There’s a Scriptnotes app on the applicable app stores.

While you’re in iTunes, you should subscribe to Scriptnotes because why not? It’s free. And you should leave us a comment which actually helps us a lot and helps other people find the show. So thank you for doing that.

You should come and join us on December 9th for our live show with our special guests. And if there’s still tickets, hooray. Well, or, I don’t know, but you should come to the live show on December 9th.

Last but not least, we have a few of the USB drives left of all the 200 back episodes of the show, so you can find those at the store at johnaugust.com, and we will send you one with all 200 of the first episodes of Scriptnotes.

Our outro this week is by John Spurney, and it is a really good one. So John Spurney, thank you very much. We’re not even going to talk over it because it’s so good. And Craig and Tess, thank you so much.

**Tess:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks, guys.

Links:

* [Buy your tickets now for the 2015 Scriptnotes Holiday Show on December 9th](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-holiday-live-show-with-john-august-and-craig-mazin) with guests [Riki Lindhome, Natasha Leggero](http://www.cc.com/shows/another-period) and [Malcolm Spellman](http://johnaugust.com/2015/malcolm-spellman-a-study-in-heat)
* [Jon Bon Jovi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Bon_Jovi) on Wikipedia
* [Amazon Storywriter](https://storywriter.amazon.com/) and [Fountain](http://fountain.io/)
* Scriptnotes, 224: [Whiplash, on paper and on screen](http://johnaugust.com/2015/whiplash-on-paper-and-on-screen)
* Tess Morris on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2208729/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/TheTessMorris), and [Man Up](http://www.manupfilm.co.uk/) on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Up_(film)) and [Rotten Tomatoes](http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/man_up_2015/)
* [Why Are Romantic Comedies So Bad?](http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/03/why-are-romantic-comedies-so-bad/309236/) by Christopher Orr
* CinemaBlend’s [30 Best Romantic Comedies Of All-Time](http://www.cinemablend.com/new/30-Best-Romantic-Comedies-All-Time-43134.html)
* The New Yorker on [Nick Bostrom](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom)
* Wait But Why on [The Fermi Paradox](http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html)
* [Fallout 4](https://www.fallout4.com/age-gate), and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B016E70408/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [The Vista Theatre](http://www.vintagecinemas.com/vista/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jon Spurney ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))