Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/ghosts-laughing-at-jokes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 136 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, no funny voice this week?

**Craig:** Uh, that wasn’t a funny voice?

**John:** Oh, no, that sounded like your normal voice.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean, [creepy voice] you mean this voice, John?

**John:** Yeah, no, that wasn’t the voice I wanted. I was looking for something, I don’t know, something British maybe, I don’t know. I was expecting something different. I don’t know why.

**Craig:** What are you looking for buddy?

**John:** Yeah. You’ve got a whole trench coat full of voices and you just pull one out.

**Craig:** I’ll give you what you want. Sexy Craig is back!

**John:** Sexy Craig needs to go away forever.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig! Oh yeah!

**John:** So, I think it’s because of your voice last week that I had a mild stroke. And when I said the dates for this Writers Guild Foundation event that I’m hosting a little panel on with Kelly Marcel and Linda Woolverton, I said July 12, which is completely wrong. It’s April 12. And I often get dates wrong, but that’s like really, really wrong. So, it’s April 12. It’s a Saturday.

So, if you are interested in coming to see me, and Kelly, and Linda Woolverton, and a bunch of other screenwriters, there’s a link in the show notes to that.

**Craig:** “Sexy Craig needs to go away forever.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You don’t mean that.

**John:** I think sexy Craig might have a better use inside your own home than on this podcast.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig goes where he wants.

**John:** Ah, that’s the danger of sexy Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] He’s so dangerous. Sexy Craig honestly is nothing but trouble. Nothing but trouble.

**John:** Yeah. You feel like sexy Craig is probably the younger brother who sort of like started smoking a little too early, started drinking a little too early because the parents had kind of given up on him a little bit.

**Craig:** Hey man. I don’t need them to tell me what to do.

**John:** Exactly. The parents I feel are actually kind of old at this point and they just really can’t control him.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig doesn’t need parents.

**John:** Sexy Craig was born in the wilderness.

**Craig:** He was born fully formed. He knows what he wants. He goes out and he gets it. He doesn’t need advice. He doesn’t need guidance. He guides you.

**John:** That’s right. He’s the master of his own fate and destiny.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sexy Craig is a real sociopath, by the way.

**John:** Craig, this week I got to do something kind of amazing. I am going to qualify it down as kind of amazing. I very rarely, and I want to ask you about this, how often do you play the sort of “I work in the industry and I have a certain profile and therefore I’m going to ask permission to do a certain thing.” How often do you sort of play that, like, screenwriter card?

**Craig:** Oh my god, like zero.

**John:** I never do it at all. But my daughter’s favorite show in the entire world is Lab Rats on Disney XD, which if you don’t have a young kid you have no reason to know that this show exists at all. But it does exist. It exists on Disney XD and it is a show about these four — well, there are three bionic kids and one unbionic kid.

**Craig:** Yeah, my daughter watches it.

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s the kind of show that an eight year old watches. And it’s not my taste in a show, but my daughter absolutely loves it. And so Stuart, Stuart Friedel, who everybody on the podcast knows because Stuart is the producer of our show, he used to work for Disney. So, he said, “You know, I can totally get you in to see a taping of Lab Rats.”

And so I finally said, “You know what? I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it for my daughter.” So, on Monday we went and saw a taping of Lab Rats. It was kind of fascinating.

**Craig:** That doesn’t count as like pulling rank or throwing your weight around. I mean, you know, that’s no big deal.

**John:** Maybe not such a big deal. Except that they don’t really have an audience for their tapings.

**Craig:** Oh, you were observing a taping? I mean, I honestly thought that where this story was going was that you were going to say that I was waiting to get into an event and they weren’t letting me in and I said, “Do you know who I am?” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I thought this was going to be a “don’t you know who I am?” moment.

**John:** Oh, Craig, that’s every day for me. I’m pretty much always throwing my weight around that way.

**Craig:** Stomping your little foot.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the thing. It’s because Stuart knew the people that it was very easy to sort of make those first phone calls. But because it’s not a show that normally tapes in front of a live studio audience, it was a little bit odd to go visit the set. And they weren’t used to having a lot of visitors. But they were actually terrifically nice and wonderful and helpful. The producers are Chris Peterson and Bryan Moore who created the show.

It was also just a fascinating time to sort of see what that whole universe is like because you and I don’t do that at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like you’ve never written multi-cam, have you?

**Craig:** The very first stuff I was trying to do were multi-camera sitcoms. But I never actually got a job, you know. So, I watched some tapings. I went to some tapings.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve been to some tapings, too. And so it’s a show without an audience but it still has a laugh track. And so I was always curious like how do they do that? Do the actors just know to pause because that thing is supposed to be funny and therefore they’re going to fill it in with wild applause even though it doesn’t deserve wild applause?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It turns out the answer is they have this group of like six or seven people who sit in these sort of lawn chairs and watch a monitor and laugh. And these are people who I think are probably paid as extras whose whole job it is is to watch the show and laugh, take after take, and laugh the same at every joke as if it’s as funny the first time. It’s such a bizarre job and it’s such a great — I wish Ricky Gervais were still extras because it’s exactly the kind of thing you would want to see him do.

**Craig:** I’m honestly stunned. [laughs] I can’t quite absorb what you just told me. To reiterate, if I may, the show is not shot in front of a live studio audience. Obviously a laugh track is put in after. But rather than just leave some spaces and put the laugh track in as they desire, they have commandeered human beings to pretend to laugh over and over and those people do that?

**John:** I would clarify to say they are actually laughing, whether it’s genuine or not genuine. They provide a full voiced laughter that is apparently helpful for the actors in their timing to sort of know how things are supposed to feel.

**Craig:** I guess. But the thing is, A, no, it’s not natural because they’re adults. [laughs] I mean, look, I actually really enjoy the fact that there has been this resurgence of multi-cam traditional sitcom format on Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon does some as well because those were the shows you and I grew up with watching.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Laverne & Shirley, and Happy Days, and so on. And so I like that my daughter can watch them and she really enjoys them. But she’s not laughing out loud at them. Nobody really laughs out loud at them with rare exceptions.

**John:** Every once and awhile my daughter does laugh out loud at them.

**Craig:** Okay. Every once and awhile.

**John:** In some ways it’s a strange thing because I think it teaches kids that certain things are funny that actually aren’t funny. I do wonder about the dangerous quality of that laugh track.

**Craig:** There is that. But I guess my point is that adults surely wouldn’t be laughing out loud at that. Granted, when you go to a live sitcom taping, because it’s live theater and you’re in the moment, you do tend to laugh. And they do have to remind you to continue to laugh if there’s a retake, which they try and not do over and over. I mean, a lot of a sitcom is just shot, you know, okay, we’ve got it. We’re moving on.

But, there’s just six people. It’s not a big crowd. It’s just six people. They have to laugh. And I’m just a little surprised that the actors wouldn’t be completely creeped out by the fact that there’s this fake laughing going on.

**John:** Yeah. But they’re three seasons in and they’re all 17 years old and this is their job. Two years ago they were living at the Oakwood auditioning for things. So, it’s not a bad gig that they’re in right now.

I think the reason why they can’t have a normal audience for this is because they’re so — you’ve seen the show probably. There are so many stunts and effects that they can’t shoot like a normal multi-cam can, so they are doing things like four or five times and they’re having to do specific like wiring of stuff, so they couldn’t do a normal audience.

But it is just strange.

**Craig:** That’s weird. Yeah. Hey, if it works for them, god bless them.

**John:** Our mutual friend Melissa McCarthy is on a multi-cam right now. She’s on Mike & Molly. And so she’s describing how they do pre-tapes for certain things like car scenes they’ll do a pre-tape. And they’ll anticipate sort of where the laughter would be naturally, but on the day they actually film the show in front of a live studio audience they’ll just sit on apple boxes without like any of the set around them and just do the same scene again so they can get the laughter, get the jokes timed right.

**Craig:** And they’ll see where humans would naturally laugh.

**John:** Yeah. But there’s really nothing natural or human about a Disney XD show. And I’m not sort of denigrating them, and bless them for having me come over. I don’t really want to sound like I’m throwing them under the bus.

**Craig:** Why would that — that’s not denigrating.

**John:** It’s a strange thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, for you to say that there is nothing less natural, [laughs], what was it? Nothing less natural than a Disney XD show?

**John:** I may have said nothing less natural or human than a —

**Craig:** Or human, yeah. There’s nothing negative about that at all. [laughs] They did you a favor!

**John:** They did me a huge solid, so I am just being sort of a jerk now. But it was fascinating, this is a show about androids. Sorry, they’re not androids. I’m sorry, they’re bionic.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There is something actually inherently non-human about them, so maybe that’s what makes it all work.

**Craig:** Listen. Whatever production tricks they need to do to get through the day, that makes sense. I just find it so odd. I mean, I would have never thought of that.

If somebody were to say to me do this show and you can’t have a live studio audience, but you do need to figure out the timing of the laughs, I suppose I would just say, well, I think since I’m controlling where the laughs go, and there isn’t a live studio audience to cue me where they would naturally go, it’s entirely arbitrary per my decision, so why don’t I just get a thing to playback laughs live on the stage and not have people do it over and over?

**John:** Yeah. Why don’t you actually just like push a button for where the laughter is, where you think it’s going to go.

**Craig:** Right. Have you ever seen one of those guys with their machines? Those guys are gone now. Everything is on a computer. But when I started in the business way, way back in the ’90s, there was a guy who would show up with this special patented machine and he would plug it into your mixing board.

**John:** A sweetener.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he would select the laughs. And there are stages of laughs. Little — everything from titters to guffaws and awes, and oohs, and all that. And actually the creepiest thing about it was I remember, I was talking to that guy and he goes, “You realize all the people you hear laughing on TV, they’re all dead. They were recorded in the ’50s.” And so a bunch of 50 and 60-year-old men and women in the 1950s were just recorded laughing and doing all these reactions. And they’re all gone now, so it’s like ghosts laughing at jokes that they wouldn’t even understand about iPhones. [laughs] It’s so weird!

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Today on the show we’re going to do a Three Page Challenge. People love the Three Page Challenge. And we have three new entries for the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Oh, I wish I had a thing right now so I could go, “Ahhhh.” Yeah, after everything you say I’m going to give little laughs.

**John:** Maybe Matthew Chilelli will add in a little laugh here or there. But, actually, this is sort of an interesting segue because one of the things I realized as I was watching this, I asked the guy who had written this episode like what are your scripts like, are you writing them like a single cam or like a three-camera, because there is no reason why you should kind of write it like a multi-cam, but they do write it like a multi-cam, so they write it in that format that I find so odd where dialogue can be all caps and parentheticals are in part of the dialogue. They’re not set aside as their own separate line.

But I recognize fully that my thinking it is odd is just because it’s not what I’m dealing with on a daily basis. And so a good transition to us talking about some follow up on what a screenwriting format could look like or should look like and what some of the priorities would be. Because we actually had some people email us and tweet at us this week following up on our last conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah. There was a little bit of a discussion in our last podcast we talked about how you and I have this instinct to move away from slug lines as the scene dividers and talk about sequences as the primary chunk in which to parse out a screenplay.

And there was a little bit of discussion back and forth, and it’s true that initially when we started talking about this we were saying, “Oh scenes are the thing,” but I think you and I realized fairly quickly that scene is a strange word because it means different things to different people. And I’m going to agree with a lot of people who are like, “Hey, slug line doesn’t define scene.” That’s correct.

It does, I think, in current format to some extent, maybe to the detriment of the screenplay, it does define the scene. When you’re shooting people say, “Well, what’s the scene number?” And they’re referring to something that’s connected to a slug line. Interior or Exterior, location, time of day. And what we’re saying is that’s useful information to have, and that’s important to have, but that’s actually not a great way to split up the work. A better way to split up the work is to think of a sequence and a sequence is a group of scenes that are organized around a certain narrative movement.

And when I even say a group of scenes, I mean to say bits. You know, bits. And those bits may actually cut across slug lines as well. For instance, in one of our Three Page Challenges today we’ll come to a part where there is a bit, where a kid is upstairs and then he’s downstairs. And there is a missing slug line in there. And I missed it. But that doesn’t mean that the scene isn’t really one scene.

**John:** Absolutely. I think when we get to that Three Page Challenge you’re going to see what we’re talking about. I agree with you that I really like that our listeners have challenged and pushed back on some of our assumptions, because that’s exactly what you sort of need to do at this early stage of talking about what could be new or better.

Right now when we talk about scenes, ultimately you and I are still in two different worlds. We’re trying to write a movie and we kind of know what a scene is in a movie. It’s this chunk of a movie that it’s about this thing. And usually it’s often characters in a certain place in a certain time. And then that scene — you kind of feel like that scene is over and then you’re onto the next scene. And so location and time is often a useful way of describing the boundaries of it.

But we are always running into situations where you have people on two sides of a phone conversation and that ends up sort of being kind of two scenes, or is it one scene. Or you have people who are moving through a space and you’re trying to decide do I break this out as separate scenes, or is it continuous. And all that stuff is really just weird text baggage being put on something that’s very natural when you see it in a movie, but it’s really weird on a page.

And really what we’re talking about — and I don’t know if we’re going to end up on scene or sequence as being the right sort of defining block for it — but, yeah, we’re talking about what makes sense in a story purpose as a scene, not what necessarily needs to make sense on a budgeting or a strip board kind of thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A lot of what is in the modern screenplay format is there as much for the AD or the line producer as it is for the reader. And so things like INT/EXT as a shorthand for are we inside or are we outside. The location and trying to be really consistent about the name of that location so you’re not calling the same place three different things. Well, it’s not maybe the best experience for the reader, but it’s meant to be sort of consistent for the person who has to figure this stuff out later on.

**Craig:** That’s right. The slug lines are there to help you figure out how to shoot the movie out of order, because you are going to shoot it out of order. But, of course, we read it in order. So, we have this strange format that straddles out of order and in order. And as you were talking it occurred to me that I guess one of the defining characteristics of this useful bit of parsed out storytelling that we’re trying to describe here is continuous time.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** That there is a section of storytelling that occurs in continuous time. So, if somebody is inside and then they walk outside and then they get in their car and then they pull up, and there is not a jump — or even if there is a jump but the jump just exists to compress, it’s about a sense of continuous time.

**John:** There are cases in screenwriting where it’s discontinuous time, but you’re continuously at a place or you’re continuously on a certain idea. And you really, I mean, yes, sometimes you really call this more sequences where you’re going back and forth between a lot of different things, but it’s really all one idea. You’d really call that one scene.

**Craig:** I agree. Or one sequence. Exactly.

**John:** So, yes, in both cases our reliance on that single line of scene header to describe what’s going on and what this feels like as a movie is really hurting us, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s why sequence is the best word. Because scene is borrowed from stage anyway. And it probably made a lot of sense when they first started shooting movies and everything was on a stage.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it was just you enter, you talk, you leave. We really do need to switch to this notion of sequence and leave this word scene behind. Scene doesn’t even describe what the slug lines are doing anyway. All the slug line is is just an indication of location and time of day.

**John:** Absolutely. What people may not be aware of, in the origin of screenwriting the first screenwriters were largely women. And the first screenplays were essentially just a list of shots. And so they were this list of sort of like how you’re going through things and basically shot, by shot, by shot this is what you’re seeing. And it evolved into this format that we have now which is sort of like halfway like a play, halfway like a radio play. It’s its own weird beast, partly because of how it started.

And I think it doesn’t necessarily do a great job of describing what we’re actually making right now. So hopefully if there’s going to be something to replace it it would do a better job of describing that.

One of the things which people who haven’t been through production are probably also not aware of is there’s a stage in production where you take a script and you break it down. And by breaking it down you’re going down to scene by scene. And by scene I’m talking about that sense of this is the location, this is the time, this is how many pages or eighths of a page is occurring in this block of shooting.

And one of the functions that so often an AD or a line producer is doing is writing a synopsis of that scene. It’s basically like a one sentence or two sentence description of what happens in that scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As a screenwriter I often, if I’m heavily involved in production, I will often ask for that and go through and rewrite that quite early on. And I’ll rewrite what the synopsis of those scenes were, because so often I’ve seen the purpose of the scene horribly misrepresented. And so it’s like they’ll describe it as being like “Susan confronts Tom about this” when it’s actually not what happens in that moment, so people can get confused. But that idea of a synopsis for a scene I think is actually a really interesting idea as an element to be part of the screenplay format from the start.

And it’s actually a thing that exists in Fountain. We have a thing where if you start a line with an equal sign that’s called a synopsis line. And it’s just a way of — a shorthand for what happens in that moment. And that can be very useful for writers. So, essentially almost that kind of what you would write on an outline or what you would write on an index card for a scene could be part of the actual document itself.

**Craig:** I think that that ability is in Fade In and Final Draft and Screenwriter. They have these kind of summary little things that are attached that you can tag onto, but what’s interesting is that none of it is really formalized, you know, because we’ll do all this stuff, but you’re right at some point it just goes through the meat grinder of an AD going, “Okay, how many pages is this? How much time do I need to shoot it? Is it a day or two days? Is it inside? Is it outside? Where is it? What time of day?” And, yeah, some brief often ham-fisted description of the action just so people…

I don’t know if you’ve noticed this. I’m fascinated. I cannot do it. It’s funny, Todd Phillips and I would talk about this all the time. We’d be on set and somebody would walk up to us and say, “Hey, listen, for scene 72 did you guys mean…,” and we both are like, “Don’t — we have no idea what that means. None.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Zero.

**John:** I do that all the time in production. Because they’re only looking at numbers.

**Craig:** And they actually memorize it. And they all do it. It’s incredible. I feel so stupid. I mean, it’s like some guy will come up to me and he’s like, “Hey, are we doing 85 tomorrow?” And I’m like, uh, how did you do that? [laughs] Where? What?

**John:** What’s fascinating is that once you start production, from production through the end, that actually is a meaningful thing because editors are looking at those scene numbers, too. So, like everyone else can talk about scene numbers, but weirdly the people who wrote the script generally have no idea what those scene numbers are.

**Craig:** None.

**John:** Which is crazy. But maybe that’s reasonable, too.

**Craig:** Well, we’re the ones that put it in. It’s just that we put it in for everybody else. But in our minds we’re, you know, we’re just thinking about the movie.

**John:** We’re thinking of the movie. We’re thinking of how you get from place to place. How you transition from that moment to the next moment.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, a couple wrote specific tweets that I thought we should address on the air. So, Alyssa Brick wrote, “Is there a danger that people could hide bad writing behind good AD presentation in a new format?” I think absolutely. There is a danger that in some ways you could forget about the writing and sort of like the importance of the writing by having all of these other gimmicks in there. And somebody else had written in with some pages of a script that they were working on that I just, I don’t know what you thought about it, I thought that was a mess and I would not be interested in reading that or seeing that. I wouldn’t want to be handed those pages and say like, okay, here’s the movie.

Did you look at those?

**Craig:** I did. They were fascinating. The problem was that the writer used every possible thing. It was a bit like, I mean, I like mustard and I like ketchup, but I don’t want mustard and ketchup and salt and pepper and this and that. I mean, they just went kitchen sink.

There were ideas in there that I thought were at least nibbling at the sort of things that could be helpful, but I do agree with the implication here. The last thing we want to do is basically imply, oh, you’ve just got to go and puke a bunch of insanity onto a page to flimflam us.

By the way, I don’t think it’ll ever work.

**John:** I don’t think it would ever work. And here’s why I thought those pages didn’t work specifically for me is that even if you’re adding more stuff into a script page than would normally be there, the experience of watching a movie is essentially linear. You can’t pause and take everything in. It’s going to keep running forward. And so, you know, a script ultimately has to be very linear because that’s the experience of watching a movie is very linear.

So, if you’re throwing out a bunch of stuff that has like two column charts and then like all these other stills in there and you have — if I’m spending like five minutes looking at this page trying to figure out what’s going on, that’s not the experience of what a movie can actually be. And that’s not going to be a great experience. So, while it’s great that you have all of these resources, I think you actually have to look at sort of what the experience of watching the movie is going to be like and how can you reflect that in a document. Because the experience of watching a movie is nothing like that page, I would hope.

**Craig:** I agree. And in fact one of the things that I think we should think about as we invent our new format is to use the flexibility of digital format, so that the reader has a choice of when to call up extra information. It’s not imposed upon you. The page isn’t a scattered pastiche of text, and image, and sound, and all the rest, but rather I understand that there’s a small icon next to a description. I can click it, a window will pop up, show it to me, and then I can make it go away.

It’s at my command, as I wish.

**John:** Yeah. So, Mr. Bowers wrote in saying, “Have you guys seen Scrivener?” Which I have seen Scrivener. “It’s very close to what you describe as your ideal new screenplay format.”

No. And I think you tweeted back saying that Scrivener is an app, it’s not a format, and I think that’s a really crucial distinction and I want to make sure that as we talk about this that that sort of comes out clearly, because I think if there’s any one app that does a bunch of this, that does all this stuff, that’s not the solution. The solution — because we’re not trying to replace Final Draft. We’re really trying to replace what screenplays are like.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And that’s a much broader thing and that’s existed before Final Draft and everything else that generates these kind of documents, too. So, it’s really a system for like how you could display this kind of information. And what I think has worked so far about Fountain is it’s not trying to be one company and it’s not trying to be one app and it’s not trying to be one thing.

It’s about there is going to be buy-in by a bunch of different people. So, in many ways I think what you and I are talking about is incredibly utopian and would probably never actually really happen, but it might steer a conversation in an interesting way and some of these ideas could come to pass.

**Craig:** I think it’s going to happen.

**John:** All right. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a go-getter.

**John:** The last thing is people tweeted back saying, “Oh, you can’t get rid of one page per minute,” and so I want to have one last little bit of discussion about the one page per minute because there is a step that, again, I don’t think people realize because they haven’t been through production is that before you actually start shooting a script there’s what’s called a script timing. And that’s where a person with experienced production goes through the script literally with a stopwatch, reading through it and sort of feeling out how long each thing is supposed to be taking, often in conjunction with the director, timing it out to really get a sense of like how long the finished product would be.

Because you and I both know that there are scripts that are 140 pages that come out at 100 minutes and scripts that seem incredibly short that come out very, very long, especially in episodic, the different shows will have a completely different style, so a show that is really rapid fire like Gilmore Girls, their scripts were like 80 pages long for a show that was going to be 42 minutes because they spoke a thousand miles per hour.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I wouldn’t be surprised if True Detective was kind of the opposite where those scripts weren’t a full — wouldn’t feel like a full hour, but it’s because of the pacing of it that it wouldn’t be that. So, there is a stage called script timing which is actually designed to do exactly what we’re talking about. Even if we’re not doing this one page per minute rule, someone is going to time it out. You’re going to know how long something is.

**Craig:** No question. I still believe that you get a sense of how long a script is from reading it. And if you were to hide the page numbers from me, or hide pagination entirely and I just read it, I would be able to give you some vague sense of how long I thought the movie would be. And that would be, I think, more accurate frankly than some paginated page number.

Look at The Social Network. I mean, very famously Sorkin wrote massive — I mean, the opening scene, I don’t know how pages that it’s paginated. 15? I mean, it’s wall-to-wall dialogue but it was meant to do at a very rapid pace. And it certainly didn’t take the amount of time that the one page per minute would indicate.

Similarly, when I was doing spoof movies with David Zucker, I understood that they were done at breakneck speed. And that it was really more like 45 seconds a page if anything. The people that are clinging to this one page a minute thing I think are just afraid.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They feel, it’s like we’re taking their woobie away. But the woobie is not real.

**John:** The woobie is not real.

**Craig:** No. There is no woobie.

**John:** Craig, you brought up a topic that I think was great and incredibly apropos, so I would love you to take over this. This is about when it’s okay to work for free.

**Craig:** Yeah. This has coming up a bit lately and there’s a little bit of a confusion about it. And so I just wanted to lay the groundwork for people in terms of what the rules are, which I think frankly parallel what is best for us as screenwriters. This is not always the case. In this instance it is.

So, per the WGA and our agreement with the companies, so called “spec writing” is forbidden. And you’re like, “Well, wait a second, we write specs all the time.”

Okay, let me explain. The deal is that you can write on your own. You control the material. You own the copyright as you wish. You can write a spec screenplay, you can write a novel, you can write anything you want. And obviously no one is paying you for it because it’s yours.

You can do this even in conjunction with a producer, because remember producers don’t employ us. Producers are employed by the studios just as we are. If you were to sit down with a producer and they say, “Hey, we have an idea and we’d like for you to write it. And you could write it on spec and then we would go out and try and sell it.” You are perfectly free to say yes. And I don’t think there’s any issue with that, because you control it. That’s the most important thing. You have the copyright on it. It’s yours. You wrote it.

You don’t feel like selling it? You don’t feel like selling it for a certain number? It doesn’t happen. It’s entirely under your control.

The kind of free writing that is unacceptable is free writing that occurs as a condition for employment or free writing that occurs as part of employment. So, if somebody says to you, “We would be interested in hiring you to write this. Write me ten pages to prove that you can.” That’s a huge no-no. It’s against the MBA and it’s also something that we just shouldn’t do as writers. It’s unprofessional.

If you are hired on something and the employer says, “We know we’re supposed to pay you now for the script you just turned in, but we don’t want to. We want you to write another draft of it.” That is a no-no.

Now, there is a flexible area where producers are asking for this and this is the whole free rewrite conundrum. We’ve gotten into that before. But the biggest issue to just keep in mind is that you cannot, cannot write to get employment. You can’t accept writing as a condition for employment. They’re not allowed to ask for it. They can’t even ask you for a summary or a lead behind or an outline or a treatment. And, frankly, as writers I would strongly suggest that you not do it, that you not give them that in order to get a job.

They will put that on as a condition and one of the things that we’ve been talking about with the studios is to say to them, “Look, not only is that against the rules, but it’s going to blow up in your face because…” and this has happened now a bunch of times. Somebody is going to write one of these things to get the job. They’re not going to get the job. And now you have somebody out there with material that you don’t own. And you’re going to make a movie and as we know there are similarities and they’re going to come back and they’re going to get you, because they’re going to say you stole it.

So, anyway, that’s the basic dividing line and hopefully that clears it up for people in some way.

**John:** In some way. I think the take home from this is that there’s nothing wrong with free writing if it’s your writing. If you are writing for yourself a spec work that you are doing for yourself where you’re writing a script for yourself, yes, and that’s one of the most wonderful things about being a screenwriter is no one can stop you from writing, unless they have some exclusivity on you, which is a crazy thing, which we’ll get into at another point. But essentially no one can stop you from writing and that’s the gift you have as a writer.

One of the other gifts is you can say you want to work with somebody on a project, you can do that. And a producer who is not a guild signatory who is not a person who would be hiring you in general, you could agree that you’re going to write this thing and collaborate with this producer on getting this thing to its final best form, but it’s still yours. You’re going to own this. And you can choose whether to sell it or not sell it.

It’s when you are going into a buyer, a person who is going to pay you money to do stuff who chooses not to pay you money to do stuff, but rather is just going to have you write for free and if they like it then maybe they’ll buy it. That’s the problematic situation.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, where it gets complicated and where you and I both know people who have run into this situation is that conversation of like, “We would be really interested in something like this,” and so it’s like, uh, so are you telling me that you want me to spec — not telling me but they’re telling the young writer — are you telling me that you want me to spec something that’s in sort of this ballpark? And they can’t really quite say that, but they talk about the kinds of things they’re interested in and it becomes this conversation that is essentially asking you to write something for free.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, but the difference again is if you really like, yeah, you own it. They don’t want it, go sell it to somebody else, assuming that it’s something that anybody would want.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The trickiest of these for me is when a producer comes to a writer and they control a property. They have an option on a book, for instance. And they say we’d like you to adapt this on spec to see if we can go set it up somewhere. I’m not a big fan of that.

**John:** Yeah. Because it’s really clear to see how this can go wrong, essentially they decide they don’t like your script, they drop the option on the book, and suddenly you have a script that’s based on material you don’t own or control. And you can’t sell this project.

**Craig:** Precisely. So, the idea is when you’re writing on spec you need to write in an unencumbered way, so that you own the material completely. The only other thing I would say is if you really loved some underlying property that a producer controlled, it would be fair to say, “Fine, I’m going to write this on spec, but I need us to sign an agreement. And that agreement is that if you’re going to set this project up, you’re setting it up with my script.” And usually they won’t, [laughs], they won’t agree to that. And that’s why I like asking those questions because suddenly they have to show you who they are.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The leverage you have as the writer is the ability to say no. And there are times where you’re going to need to say no, or at least ask the questions that will lead you to a no.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenges this week. We have three that Stuart picked. So, Stuart, I want to just stand up for Stuart here for a second. Stuart read 70 Three Page Challenges yesterday. They had sort of backed up for awhile. And so when I asked him like, hey, could you grab some for me and Craig, he went through 70.

**Craig:** I am impressed, Stuart.

**John:** So, these are the three he picked. And some of these may have been from before this last batch of 70, but if you are new to the Three Page Challenge let me talk you through what happens here. So, we solicit our listeners to send in three pages of their script. It’s almost always the first three pages, but there’s no rule that it has to be the first three pages. But if you’re going to do that, there are rules that you have to follow.

And that is go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and we will ask you to have certain boilerplate on the email. Send only the pages. Don’t send anything else. Just send the pages. We’d love to have your name. We’d love to have a title page is great and helpful. But it’s just these three pages. And we talk about them on the air, a very small fraction of the people who send pages in actually are discussed on the air, but we really thank everyone who sent them in. And we especially thank people who are brave enough to hear us talk about their pages on the air because you guys are heroes.

If you want to read along with these pages, there are PDFs attached to this episode. So, go to the show notes either on your app device or at johnaugust.com and you’ll see the show notes and these Three Page Challenges attached.

So, what should we start with, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you know, I just noticed. I was looking at our three submissions today and I feel like Stuart hides little themes.

**John:** Well I think I picked up a theme, but what are you going to say?

**Craig:** I think the theme he hit today was single word punchy title.

**John:** Yeah. All these are — the three scripts this week are Reactor, Bruiser, and Paragon.

**Craig:** Paragon.

**John:** They all kind of feel like they could be ABC shows. Like Scandal. Betrayed. Or Revenge.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s right. Revenge. Well, we can start with any of them. I’m holding, well, I’ve got all three of them. Do you want me to summarize this first one here?

**John:** If it’s one that I’m not ready to summarize. Do you have Chris Sandiford?

**Craig:** I have Chris Sandiford right here. Reactor.

**John:** Reactor. Yeah, I want to talk about this one, so let’s go for it.

**Craig:** Okay. So, Reactor. We open up high above the clouds at night in moonlight and then we descend down through the clouds to realize we’re in a violent thunderstorm.

On the ocean below there is this big Maersk E-Class Ship, big cargo ship, and there’s a heavy cable, like a toe cable that fires from the sky and hits one of the containers on the ship.

Inside the ship we can now see that a helicopter is attached to this toe cable and it’s using this toe cable to sort of pull itself into the ship.

And then we go into the helicopter where Colonel Drumm is advising his pilot and some guy using a laptop to essentially take it easy and try and land thing.

We go onto the ship’s bridge where a crewman is watching his radars fizzle out and then he notices that there’s this helicopter that’s coming in. He gets on the radio to the captain who is in the mess hall eating spaghetti and basically says there is an unidentified helicopter and there are three guys with weapons coming out of it.

And we then go to the engine room of the ship where a crew person is alerting Emilia Alvarez, an engineer, that there are hostiles outside, emergency protocol. We think that she’s just working on the engine, and then it is revealed to us but not to the other crew person that in fact she is assembling some very fancy looking grenade launcher.

**John:** And I took it that she’s actually a hostile.

**Craig:** It appears that she is a hostile. Yeah, a saboteur.

And so that is Reactor by Chris Sandiford.

**John:** So, my take on this is this is essentially all action setup. And so this wasn’t like, you know, oh we’re getting to know who these characters are. We’re not getting to know the world. This feels like the start of an action movie. It feels like the start of a Die Hard or some sort of like big set piecey kind of action movie taking place on the seas.

And I actually kind of dug it for what it was doing here. There are some things that didn’t work. I thought some of the dialogue didn’t especially ring true. I don’t like Spaghetti Captain. I don’t like on page three we have, “Then, with respect, Captain, get your ass in gear! These guys have weapons!” That’s how you’re talking to your captain? That feels kind of odd.

But I liked the overall sense of scale and size and drama. I felt like I knew what kind of movie this was after these three pages. And was excited to sort of see well what is this set piece going to be like.

**Craig:** Well, I agree that there was a good sense of pacing to it. I mean, it was an example of how to introduce elements and reveal things cinematically. These are very cinematic pages. We’re watching everything and that’s great.

In a general sense, tonally this feels out of time. It feels old fashioned to me. This feels a bit like a Steven Seagal movie.

**John:** I was going to say Steven Seagal. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mid-’90s. I think we’re past this. Even video games, frankly, are past this. This feels like a cut scene from like the first Splinter Cell, not something that you would see now. So, there was a kind of an old fashioned sense to it and it was not helped at all by the characterizations that Chris gave us.

Even the names. We’ve got Colonel Drumm. “Easy, ace.” And in fact, Ace says, “Aye, Colonel. This storm is something else.” All of the dialogue is very cornball, frankly. I really got puzzled, very puzzled by the interaction with the captain.

I’m just going to read this exchange. This crewman, he’s seeing this thing that — I mean, they’re on a ship in the ocean and there’s a helicopter that’s towing itself in that he does not recognize and his radars are gone. And they’re in the middle of a storm. Captain, for some reason he’s eating spaghetti, fine. The guy turns an alarm on and then calls the captain and says, “Bridge.”

And the Captain says, “This had better be good!” Why? Because it’s spaghetti time and everybody knows don’t bother the captain when he’s eating spaghetti? They’re in the middle of a storm. There’s an alarm.

“Sir, we’ve got a chopper more to the bow,” which isn’t true because it was actually more I think to a container, but fine. “You expecting anyone?” It’s already that kind of vaguely, quippy Michael Bay Armageddon-y kind of dialogue.

And the captain says, “Alarms are for emergencies, crewmen!”

I don’t know. I kind of feel like some strange helicopter that’s moored itself to your bow in the middle of a storm is sort of notable. And then, yes, the guy with the assault weapons come out and then the crewmen says, “Then, with respect, Captain, get your ass in gear! These guys have weapons.”

And then the captain slams down the receiver, turns to the other three crewmen in the mess and says, “OK, listen up!” This almost is bordering on spoof. Assuming that there’s a kind of a modernization of the dialogue and a little bit more of a professional veneer to — not professional screenwriting veneer, but professional crew person veneer to how these people behave.

What I did like was the visual of a helicopter towing itself in. I would have loved those people in the helicopter to be more serious. I like the idea of crew members going, “Whoa, what the hell is that?” And I thought it was a good reveal to see that there is this engineer who is listening to headphones and seems to just be oblivious, actually being part of the sabotage crew.

**John:** Yeah. So, where I thought this could have really benefited from is just a little bit more mystery. And so more sense of like as the audience we’re watching these two sides and we’re not sort of sure who to root for. Because I guess right now I’m not sure who to root for. But honestly if you were to take out all of the dialogue I think you have a much stronger, more compelling scene.

So, if we see this helicopter landing and we see like just quick barked commands behind like what people are doing and mounting this ship, and then if we didn’t really see, if we didn’t know much about sort of what the captain situation was — honestly, just give us less. I think you could take out almost all the dialogue in here.

And then we’re watching this thing, it’s like should we be rooting for the people in the helicopter who are boarding this ship? Should we be rooting for the people on the ship against the helicopter. Is this an invasion? Is the ship evil? Is the helicopter evil? These are all kind of fascinating question and I feel like holding back on this a little bit longer would have been great.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** I mean, even right now I don’t quite know who I’m rooting for, but I’d like to really have that heightened more.

**Craig:** I agree. My suspicion is that the helicopter guys are bad guys, but I don’t know, then they’re military. It seems like they’re acting like bad guys? I couldn’t tell.

The other advice I would give on just the plotting, just logic, is you’re a helicopter and you’re going to do this very fancy maneuver to land on this ship. And obviously you’re up to no good. Why would you start landing in a spot where they could see you? I mean, there’s this guy tapping on a computer to shut their radars down. But yet they’re just landing in front of a window. You know, it seems like it would be a good thing to show that these people are a little more competent than that and are revealed only because something goes wrong or the ship gets rolled by a wave or something.

**John:** Yeah. And if we’re going to have a guy on a laptop there may be a better way than “guy on laptop” honestly. It would be more exciting to see the physical action of what you’re doing to take down that radar thing. A person doing something is almost always more exciting than a computer doing something. So, if it’s a physical person taking something down or breaking something or changing something, that could be great to see as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Guy on laptop in helicopter above turning radars off below, again, just feels like a cheesy misunderstanding of how computers work. And you used to be able to get away with that sort of thing, I guess, but less so these days. People do demand a little more technical verisimilitude.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, if it’s the thing where like you’re tossing something out the radar that makes it look like a lightning strike but it wasn’t a lightning strike, that you’re doing something to physically knock it out feels probably a little bit more rewarding.

A couple other things I noticed, sort of words on the page. Right now we’re starting “EXT. SKY — NIGHT. FROM A GREAT ALTITUDE WE SOAR over a thick blanket of endless CLOUD,” I think it’s clouds, “bathed in enchanting moonlight.”

I don’t think you need the “EXT. SKY — NIGHT.” The first line is telling you that we’re in the sky, so I think you’re just redundant. And I love starting a script without that scene header slug line when we don’t need it. It was a little too written for me.

**Craig:** A little purple.

**John:** It was a little too purple. And it’s like, “Thick blanket of endless bathed in enchanting moonlight,” and then we’re going through the fluff and into a violent thunder storm. Let’s just start at the thunder storm. It’s a thunder storm. Let’s be in the middle of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re going to end up there anyway when they cut the first part.

**John:** Yeah. You are. You’re totally going to be there.

**Craig:** You just are. You see the company logo and then, boom, you’re in the middle of a thunderstorm. It’s a cool way to start.

**John:** So, Chris Sandiford is evidently British because he spelled “storeys,” which is absolutely fine. Nothing wrong with being British. But I will say a general bit of —

**Craig:** [laughs] I think there’s something a little wrong with being British.

**John:** Just a little bit wrong.

**Craig:** I can think of somebody I know who is British who is just a little wrong.

**John:** Oh, but she’s wrong in just the right ways.

There is a general style note. Let’s talk about numbers in scripts. Because we’ve talked about how you shouldn’t really write numbers in dialogue, you should spell them out. Let’s also spell out numbers that are starting sentences. And numbers less than 10. I mean, I’m sort of talking MLA style here. But here “20 storeys,” spell out the twenty. Don’t give me numbers for that.

Later on another page he does “4 men” with the number four to start things. No, spell those out. Numbers ten and above, I would say probably better to use the numbers for those. But the smaller things, use words because they’re easier to read. It just feels more natural.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Chris, I think I’m a bigger fan of these pages than Craig was, because I was — I was honestly sort of skipping over some of the dialogue moments because I was so excited by the skill and scope of which this ship was being setup and sort of what this action was going to be.

**Craig:** All right. What are you going to do now?

**John:** I can do Paragon by Aaron Kablack.

**Craig:** Kablack.

**John:** Sure. Like Kaboom? Kablack.

**Craig:** Like Slotboom. Kablack.

**John:** Yeah. I think you’re right.

**Craig:** We never heard from Slotboom, did we?

**John:** I don’t think we did. I can check through the mail. But I don’t think we heard back from Slotboom.

**Craig:** I don’t think she listens to the show.

**John:** All right. She just sent in pages randomly.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s too cool, man. She’s Slotboom.

**John:** Yeah, I submitted my pages but I didn’t bother listening. That’s how cool I am.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. Whatevs.

**John:** That’s the title of the script. It’s called Paragon. As this story begins we’re in an elementary school hallway. And we start with Ashley Ayers, and she’s being slammed against the lockers by Wanda, who is 10. Ashley is only 7 years old.

Wanda is going to beat her up for narcing on her that basically she was cheating off the test. Ashley ducks the blow, gets on top of Wanda, starts beating her up. And she’s fighting hard.

Cut to principal’s office, where we see Ashley with her mother, Blair. The principal says, “This is the fourth time this year. I’m sorry, but we have no choice but to suspend Ashley. Again.”

We’re in the car. We’re driving home. Ashley says it’s not her fault. Her mom says, “We’re going to deal with this when your father gets home.” A comment about whenever dad does get home. Some setup about how he works for the news station.

And then traffic starts slowing down more and more and more and suddenly people are running past the windows, concerned. A distant wail of sirens. More people sprinting past. And suddenly a whole bunch of people are sprinting past the windows, getting away from something as we reach the end of our first three pages.

Craig, go for it.

**Craig:** Well, this is the first thing, “INT. ELEMENTARY SCHOOL HALLWAY — DAY. The back of 7-year-old ASHLEY AYERS’S head SLAMS into a locker door. Her barrettes CLACK off the metal.” And here we were off and running with problems.

**John:** Yeah. There are a lot of problems in that first sentence.

**Craig:** A lot of problems. I mean, problem number one: I don’t think you know many 7 year olds, because this is not — the whole — all these pages were not appropriate for a 7-year-old character to be behaving the way this little girl was. First of all, the fight between a 10-year-old and a 7-year-old seemed way misaligned. The kind of dialogue, the fact that she calls her a bitch. And they’re back and forth and the severity of the fight just seemed way off for a 7-year-old.

I mean, I know 7 year olds. My daughter is 9, so I can remember all the —

**John:** Yeah. 7 year olds, they’re second graders.

**Craig:** They’re second graders.

**John:** They’re kind of tiny.

**Craig:** They weigh 40 pounds soaking wet. They’re sentences are all ka-jumbled. [laughs] They’re little girls.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re really little girls. I mean, a lot of them are still like learning to read and stuff, you know. So, just the age was nuts.

Her barrettes clack off the metal? I got really just like, huh? How?

**John:** Because here’s the thing — there’s a physics problem of like if her head is slamming against that, well that slam is going to be louder than the clack. It felt weird. And so I get the instinct behind the barrettes. It’s like it’s trying to make her younger by giving her barrettes in a way, like reminding her that she’s still a little girl. But, it doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** I think being 7 would be the tip off. Also, let’s just be realistic. It’s impossible to shoot that. You literally can’t shoot a 7-year-old girl having her head slammed against a locker. How exactly does that work on the day, you know? So, really I guess my first thing is just say to Aaron I think you mean an older girl here. Everything that happens here seems to be asking for an 11 or 12-year-old girl.

**John:** Yeah. 7 year old girls haven’t been suspended multiple times.

**Craig:** Absolutely not.

**John:** It’s actually really hard to get suspended from school in second grade.

**Craig:** It’s really, really hard. And, frankly, if you’re fighting that much in second grade, you’re just mentally ill. [laughs] Little girls in second grade aren’t doing this.

**John:** I want to stop for one second and say like assuming that all these girls are older and that this is a fight that actually should happen, which I don’t think probably should happen, the actual beating up and the fighting was handled relatively well. I got that that slugging and stuff was kind of fine. It just didn’t make sense for this little girl at all.

**Craig:** The fight in and of itself was fine. I’ve seen it before where the girl gets on top of the person and starts punching and then they pull her off. The back and forth discussion I found very mundane. It was sort of just paper thin. Mean girl who’s super mean bullying tiny girl. Frankly, if Ashley has in fact gotten into fights this many times to the point where she was suspended this many times, pretty sure everybody would kind of give her a little bit of a wide berth. I certainly would.

We then get a scene in the principal’s office where we meet the mother. And the principal delivers some exposition. And he says, ” I have no choice but to recommend suspension.” To whom? You’re the principal. Go ahead and suspend her. Suspend her.

**John:** So, Craig, you’re familiar with stock photos?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I feel like they’re stock scenes. I feel like you could actually just go to like iStock Scenes and just buy this little thing that you can just copy and paste into your script. Because I think I’ve seen this exact scene. I mean, I actual can picture the people in the photos that would go with this thing about like this is what it looks like when you get suspended. Your kid being suspended is such a trope. I mean, it’s not even a trope. It’s sort of a super trope.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes. Super trope.

**John:** It sort of demands to have some sort of weird spin put on it, but there’s no weird spin here at all.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s like Clip Art. These things, we’ve seen — the mean, motivation-less bully, and then she beats the bully up. She gets blamed by the glum, 50s, central casting principal. And then, frankly, we’re going to have another scene that’s Clip Art where the little girl is saying it wasn’t my fault, the mom doesn’t get it. And then the little girl starts making these pointed comments about the absentee father. And then the mom starts making very on-the-nose comments that are defensive, including a reference to his job.

It just felt so out of place.

**John:** Yeah. So, for people who don’t have the pages in front of them, let’s do the scene together.

**Craig:** Let’s do it. Would you like to be mom or daughter?

**John:** You be Ashley, I’ll be Blair.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Craig:** I mean —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like even the sigh you put in, it was like, because the problem is this isn’t — people don’t talk like this.

**John:** People don’t talk like this.

So, here is what’s so fascinating though is like these pages would drive me crazy, but then on the very bottom of page three suddenly like there’s a whole stampede of people going past. And clearly this is not the movie you think it is. There’s something strange is happening here and it’s going to be, you know, something remarkable and probably supernatural is happening here.

So, there’s a bigger thing. And so it made me think like well maybe this is all meant to be sort of like, you know, stupid sort of template scene stuff to set up the banality of this kind of movie. And then it’s going to go someplace else. But it’s not played that way at all.

**Craig:** I don’t think so. Yeah, I don’t think this is intentionally off. And even this bit at the end where the action begins is Clip Art because I’ve just seen — I just saw this in World War Z. I’ve seen it in every zombie movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re in a car and suddenly there are sirens and people are running and are heroes are confused.

**John:** Yeah. So, World War Z, I mean, obviously this made me think so much of World War Z in terms of everyone running past, and it made me think back to like that opening scene in World War Z is not awesome. It’s sort of a Clip Art scene. It’s like that pancake scene. And it’s not like the best moment of everything, but there’s something to be said for something that like really lowers your expectations in a certain way. Like you’re just like — it’s just like so kind of common. And then like something supernatural happens. So, there’s nothing wrong with having some really natural, normalistic stuff, but this isn’t normalistic. It’s just —

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** It’s far too familiar.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, the opening scene in World War Z is — nothing happens in it. It’s just a family waking up in the morning and they are really happy with each other. They’re just a super self-satisfied American golly gee family. But, it does feel realistic. It feels, like you said, naturalistic. It feels like a happy family.

They didn’t jam any exposition down our throats except for one little tiny bit where we get the sense that he used to work for important people and now he doesn’t anymore. But this feels very after school special. And then zombies are going to show up.

So, I just think that — I am concerned, Aaron, about your grasp of tone and character. And I want you to take some time. Unless this was intentionally meant to be this way, I think you need to do a little remedial work, frankly. And watch some movies that are of your genre and really examine how people are set up and talk to each other.

And above all ask yourself am I — is my job to mimic stuff I’ve seen or is my job to offer something unique?

**John:** You know, actually fascinating. If this were to be intentional, I mean, even if like after the fact this sort of odd tone was deliberately intentional, wouldn’t it be fascinating to have like Ashley’s voice over, like almost like a Veronica Mars kind of voice over where she’s commenting on it or something. Like where she had this sort of beyond her years sense of who she was in this place? I feel like there’s something you could do with sort of exactly these scenes where if she had a voice over that was playing against it.

Sort of like what I think about for both Clueless and Heathers where there is this sense of like the world is sort of deliberately a little bit fake, but it’s —

**Craig:** Pushed.

**John:** It’s pushed. But it’s because these characters are able to talk directly to you that you sort of go with it. I mean, Brick, Rian Johnson’s Brick is also the same kind of way. It’s not a realistic world.

**Craig:** But we’re made to understand that. In other words, you know, we’ve talked about how the beginning of a movie teaches you how to watch the movie. And so Rian understands how to teach you to watch that movie. The problem when I’m reading this is I just think, this isn’t teaching me how to watch an interesting kind of movie. It’s just copying other movies.

And, frankly, if you’re going to copy movies, copy better movies. Because the other thing is sometimes I think it might be frustrating for people to say, “Well, look, you know, I saw a movie in the theater, maybe even one that you or I wrote. And that wasn’t very original, or that scene felt ripped off.” And I guess my point is for those people to say that’s the end. That’s the end result after maybe somebody else rewrote it, maybe somebody had a different way of shooting, maybe people got involved. Maybe actors got notes. Production problem. God knows what.

The entire process of going from page to film is a degrading process to quality in general. It’s corrosive. It’s very hard for the best to remain at that level, the best of what you can do to remain at that level. So, all the more reason to start as good as you can because it’s going to get worse from there, not better.

**John:** For sure. Well, it also goes back to that sort of plus one fallacy, which is like if it’s better than the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Well, that’s not anything to aim for at all.

**Craig:** Nobody is going to — yeah, what they’re doing is they’re actually buying brilliant screenplays and then turning those into crap. [laughs] So, you can’t start with crap.

All right, well, so our last three pager is entitled Bruiser and this is written by Jessica Wiseman.

So, we begin in William P.’s House. William P. That’s abbreviated, P. He’s 13 years old. Comes into his room, good-looking kid, starts tossing his backpack and his book bag and his gym bag aside. He’s on the phone talking to someone named Rajeev and telling him to stop freaking out. He gets on the computer and he’s basically saying to this Rajeev, and we only hear his side of the conversation, something about who cares if it’s cliché, people love that. Can we get a picture of an eagle.

It’s like he’s advising somebody who is designing something for him. And he takes a soccer ball out and starts juggling the soccer ball. He’s apparently very good at it. And then he hears a noise from downstairs. He comes downstairs. We don’t see him. We just hear him, because we’re in a different room. Heads downstairs. And he’s surprised by somebody that he knows but isn’t expecting to see. There’s an off-screen scuffle. And then William enters into a room. His nose has been bloody. He’s trying to calls somebody but he can’t.

Two people in black hoodies run in, pin him down. William is begging. Call my parents. Don’t hurt me. And another person enters the room whose face we cannot see. I assume it’s from behind. And William knows them and is asking them please to stop. This was all just fun. And the person slams his face with their boot. We cut to black.

Next day we’re in Nate’s house mourning. Nate, also 13, preppy kid, reading a book about politics. And his mom is giving him breakfast. And apparently Nate is going to be running for some sort of class office or something. Mom talks about getting together for family time. And he asks her if she has any cash she can lend him.

**John:** Yup. And so three pages. I was really excited to read page four and five and six. Of all the things we read this week, this was the thing that I was sort of most excited about. I thought it was hardly perfect, and there are some things — there’s a lot of stuff to talk through with this. But I was excited to see it.

Let’s start with what we talked about earlier in the show which was that sense of when you’re moving between two places but it’s really unclear on the page where you are. And so this happens for us on page two.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He leaves the room, but it’s not really clear that he leaves the room. And it’s not clear that we have stayed behind in the room. You have to be clear about this people. So, that’s one of those cases where it’s appropriate to say we stay behind as he leaves and we hear him off-screen, because right now the only indication that he’d left was that he’s O.S.

**Craig:** O.S. Right.

**John:** Yeah. So right on page two. He hangs up the phone and immediately walks out of the bedroom door to check on the noise. We hear him start to descend the steps to the living room. Well, tell us that we’ve stayed behind, because otherwise we’re going to think we’re going to move with him. He’s the only character we’ve seen.

We’re not used to, as readers or as an audience, staying behind empty rooms unless you’re telling us that specifically we’re going to do that because it’s just not a thing we do in movies without a good reason.

**Craig:** That’s right. I mean, we need some kind of indication of geography here. And, frankly, I’m not a big fan of even staying in the room anyway and then coming back to the room. It’s an odd move, but I guess it could work.

**John:** I liked it. Actually I liked it a lot because it sets up tension. Because it’s an unusual thing to do. So, we know that there is something wrong but we’re not quite sure what’s wrong. And then he comes back in and he’s been bloodied and apparently it’s probably a continuous shot, so that’s going to feel great.

**Craig:** That’s my problem with it in a way is that I have an angle — I’m just imagining I’ve got to shoot this. I have an angle on this kid in his room and then he leaves and I’m stuck with that angle. So, when he runs back in I’m stuck with him just running back in. It almost feels like my camera has become a webcam or a point-of-view camera like a security monitor, because I’m locked into that angle. And in my mind, what I kind of wanted was for him to leave the room and then I’m downstairs in a living room. And I hear something off-screen and then he runs into this new room, just so I could reorient myself.

But, regardless, listen, that’s a choice, but geography is a choice and you need to get it across very clearly.

**John:** So, I think she made an interesting choice. It just wasn’t clear. It was confusing to the reader and therefore she lost a lot of the power of her interesting choice by not making it clear to the reader.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But I actually really liked the sequence that happened here. I liked —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** — William P. I liked that he was clearly focused on something. And you see him like — he pulls a soccer jersey out, smells it, but puts it on anyway. He’s talking to some guy on the phone. We’re not sure even what he’s talking about, but he sits — he’s working on stuff beyond his years. He senses that there already could be trouble before he hears the first sound off-screen.

I thought all of that was really well done. And I like a 13-year-old getting the shit kicked out of him. That’s surprising. And so that happens on page two and you’ve got me for another ten pages based on what happens there.

There were some surprising formatting errors and so while we were talking I actually looked to see what app made this PDF, because there are things which felt really like strange mistakes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And consistently done incorrectly.

**John:** Yeah. So, this was made in Final Draft, so this person was using a normal app but maybe hadn’t read a lot of other screenplays, because there were things that were sort of odd.

When you have a parenthetical under a name, the convention is that that parenthetical is lower case. And so all of these got upper cased for sort of no good reason.

At the bottom of page two, for whatever reason, “You gotta stop this. This…this was all just…fun. You know?” It’s centered rather than being dialogue.

**Craig:** Right dialogue is always left justified.

**John:** Yeah. Always left justified. So, just some odd things. Then, when we get into page three, she makes a choice to have the mom character be I guess almost like a Peanuts character with like a wah-wah-wah, so it says —

**Craig:** Peanuts or penis?

**John:** Peanuts.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Sorry.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] I thought he said Penis character, John.

**John:** Have you seen the trailer for Peanuts?

**Craig:** Yeah. I did see the trailer for Peanuts.

**John:** You know, it wasn’t awful. I just don’t know what that — I know what it is. I guess it’s like the specials in a way, but just like a better version of the specials.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen Peanuts moving around. I mean, I love that they used the Vince Guaraldi, yes.

**John:** [hums]

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’m positive. I mean, you know, hopefully it’ll come out nicely. I mean, I did like that they didn’t — it wasn’t like uncanny valley. It was a very subtle 3D-ification of the artwork.

**John:** So, on page three, back to the script, the unseen mom, so it’s referenced a plate of bacon, scrambled eggs, and a glass of orange is set in front of him by his unseen mom. So, by using the passive voice and saying unseen mom, you’re establishing like that you’re never really going to see her and that it’s all from this character’s perspective. I guess. It just feels like I got a little bit nervous about sort of how locked focus we’re going to be on not having adults be in this world. But it felt a little bit strange to me and it felt a little arch on page three.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, I agree — I think where I was happy was on page one most of all. There’s a big chunk of action at the top and I liked it. It was good description. And it was the sort of description that I felt didn’t cheat. I just liked it. Even the part that was kind of cheaty was more hypothetically cheaty. He probably has older women cooing at him all the time.

**John:** She actually wrote “older woman cooing at him all the time.”

**Craig:** Yeah. That is true. There are a bunch of those in here. And I like what he was saying — what I liked is that William P. is really cocky. And he’s talking like an actual kid talks, which was great.

I wasn’t thrilled about him suddenly doing soccer ball tricks while on the phone and doing this because that felt very — that was an indicating movie, like he knows how to do soccer. And then the ball ends up on his head, which first of all is just annoying to shoot, but also more importantly it just felt forced.

Then we already discussed the moment where he gets attacked. Wasn’t thrilled with his dialogue once he got caught. Less is more in that circumstance. And I feel like this comment comes up all the time when we do these Three Page Challenges. Think about how many words you would be able to form and speak when your heart is racing and you’re physically hurt and you’re afraid for your life.

**John:** Yeah. I thought her scene description on him was really nice there. So, “William’s face is soaked with tears. Snot mixed with blood streams out from his nostrils.” That feels really appropriate.

I agree that less is more, and so don’t have a giant block of dialogue ahead of that. I wanted to get to that moment. And so break up your stuff. Just do something different.

**Craig:** I think that when people are hurt and they’re not action heroes of a kind of archetypal sort, archetypical sort, that they tend to regress. I think that, “I’m sorry, it was just fun,” is all he could probably be able to get out. And that’s the only part that matters anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I think less is more there. I did not really love this next scene. Again, felt a little like, okay, so it’s a kid reading a book on politics and he’s running for class office. And everything he says is sort of, I mean, “Chris Matthews doesn’t say anything about eating bacon as a key election strategy,” feels very, very contrived and not true. It’s like it’s too much.

**John:** Yeah. I agree.

**Craig:** It’s too much. The mom off-screen I actually think can be a cool choice. What I would say to you, Jessica, is that if you want to have somebody off-screen that’s unseen, what you’re telling us is that our focus should be on this kid. And if our focus is on the kid, give me more from the kid. Let me know what’s happening. Show me more than just quippy comebacks and a discussion of breakfast which is irrelevant. And show them either studiously not listening to her, not paying attention, or show me what he’s reading. Show me him, because you’re making a choice that he’s lost in something and I want to understand why.

Because right now he’s lost in something but he’s not, because he’s responding to everything she says. He’s eating. He’s talking about Gus, about bacon, and then about cash. And that last line indicates that he’s up to something.

**John:** Yeah. And I like that he’s up to something.

Getting back to the mom being off-screen, I’m counting up lines here and she has a lot more dialogue in the scene than he does and it just feels weird that — here’s one of her blocks of dialogue: “Well, I guess he would know better than me. Your dad is getting off work early tonight and he wants to know if you’re up for some family togetherness time, maybe bowling?”

That’s a lot to be sticking on an off-screen character while we’re just sitting here watching this kid with a book.

**Craig:** Right. I mean, to me, there’s an interesting choice here. If you have this kid and he’s reading this book and food gets put down in front of him while this mother is talking, and I wouldn’t have her talk about what he’s doing. I wouldn’t have her talk about the campaign or anything. She could be talking about other things. “Remember, I’m going to be gone from this to that.” We don’t see her. We just see him looking at the book. And he’s looking at a passage in the book or something about it that matters that we’re hip to. And she’s just rambling, rambling, rambling, rambling. And he’s not eating. He’s not drinking. He’s just focused.

And then at the end he sees something and then he goes, “I’m going to need some money.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He wasn’t listening to her at all. He’s on his own track. So, if you’re going to make this choice, Jessica, you have to match the storytelling to the choice.

**John:** Absolutely. Jump back over to the first page. I like so much of it, I just felt like there was a little bit too much scene description overall. So, you were talking about getting rid of some of the soccer moments of it all. I honestly felt that the first paragraph just went on too long. So, that whole thing about older women cooing over him all the time, you need to cut off that line shorter, but it just got to be too much there. And it took me too long to sort of get to his action.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, either that or maybe just paragraph break it, because everybody — I mean, I liked the content, but six lines in a row right off the bat is a little bit of a ugh…

**John:** And it shouldn’t be, but it is. And it’s just the reality is whenever we’re faced with a paragraph that is six, or seven, eight lines long, you’re just going to go, [sighs], and I’m going to dive in and read that paragraph. Versus a two or three line paragraph, just churn right through it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Well, thank you again to these three people who sent in their Three Page Challenges which are great. And I think Jessica, I would love — I have a suspicion that the rest of your script is probably really, really cool. And I think she can really write. I think these other guys also had some really promising stuff in their scripts to. So, thank you again for sending them in.

**Craig:** Yes. Thank you. and thanks for facing the firing squad as it were.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, my One Cool Thing this week combines two things that I suspect you love and that many of our listeners love which is technology and fire.

**Craig:** I love technology and I love fire. How did you know?

**John:** Because you are an…

**Craig:** I’m an open book.

**John:** Yeah. Because you’re Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As you recall this last week, or two weeks now when the podcast comes out, we had a little earthquake. Not a big earthquake at all. But weirdly we had just actually done all of our — every six months we do our sort of earthquake shopping and we sort of go through our food supplies and throw out the stuff that’s about to expire.

We have like a whole set aside stuff for food supplies. But one thing that I’ve been thinking about is like I really want to get a little camp stove so in case we lose power here at the house we can actually just boil water and cook food and do the normal kind of stuff.

And so I was in the market for a camp stove and I found this little thing called the BioLite Stove. Have you seen this at all?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So, it’s a wood burning stove. And it’s kind of nice it’s a wood burning stove because you can fill it with anything that burns, basically stick it inside, but really wood, cardboard —

**Craig:** Flesh.

**John:** Pine cones, anything you want to stick in there is great.

**Craig:** Human hair.

**John:** Yeah. It’s about the size of like a Folgers coffee can. It’s about that size.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** What’s clever about it is that it actually has attached to it is a battery pack that has a fan. And so what the fan does is it blows extra air into it. You know sort of how you blow on a campfire to get it started, it burns much hotter, and it really gets going. Well, this fan is blowing on it all the time. And it blows much hotter. And because of that it’s much hotter than sort of trying to boil water over a campfire. It’s a good hot flame.

And so we were able to boil water in ten minutes, like a big pot of water in ten minutes, and it was really impressive. What’s clever about this battery pack is that it has a heat exchanger in it so as the fire is burning it’s actually recharging the battery.

**Craig:** Ooh. It’s a perpetual motion machine.

**John:** Well, it’s not perpetual motion because you’re having to burn fuel, but it’s burning sticks and twigs.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** And you can also charge USB devices off of it.

**Craig:** That…now you’re talking.

**John:** See, that’s the technology thing that I thought you would really appreciate.

**Craig:** When shit goes down, and I’m dismembering people in my front yard, I want to be able to take a human hand, the hand that tried to strangle me and that I severed, [laughs], I want to take that man’s hand, put it in a tin can, light it up, and get on Twitter.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, when civilization falls apart Twitter may not really work so well, but you could at least play some Threes.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** You can pass some time.

**Craig:** I will tell you that even when everything goes down there will still be porn out there.

**John:** Oh, there has to be.

**Craig:** Has to be. Porn never goes away.

**John:** So, I’ll have a link to this in the show notes because I was really impressed by it. So, the downsides of it is it’s still essentially a fire, so we were testing it out at lunch yesterday and so I wanted to make sure it worked really well, and it did work really, really well. But your clothes smell like smoke because you’ve built a little hot campfire.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it has that drawback. But, the fact that it can burn anything is kind of amazing.

**Craig:** That is amazing.

Well, I’ll tell you my One Cool Thing is something that I could theoretically attach to your flesh burning tin can. I’m obsessed with the idea of just putting human parts into this thing. It is — did you play Infocom games when you were a young man?

**John:** I did. Zork.

**Craig:** Zork. So, for those of you who are annoyingly young, or too cool, Infocom was an early videogame company and video is really stretching it because they created text based games. There was no artwork whatsoever except for the game boxes which were totally misleading.

So, an Infocom game was basically a text adventure. They would describe where you were and then you had choices to make — move east, west, north, south. Pick this up. Show this. Hand this to this person. Buy a thing. Limited text commands. And you had to move through an adventure. And in these adventures you could die and have to start over, which was super annoying.

And some of them were notoriously hard, verging on impossible. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy probably the most notable example. So, when I was a kid you’d have to scrimp and save to buy an Infocom game. Well, there’s no an app called the Lost Treasures of Infocom.

**John:** Ah-ha!

**Craig:** And it has not all of them, but most of the games. It’s got all of the Zorks, which was like essentially Dungeons & Dragons. It’s got Ballyhoo and Border Zone and Cutthroats. And it’s got Trinity, which is a great one. And Infidels and Planet Fall and Leather Goddesses of Phobos. All of these games that I remember.

And you buy the app, but I think they give you Zork for free. But for $10 you get them all.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** You get all of them. And the nice thing about text based games is that it plays so well on your iPad or your iPhone. I mean, it’s such a goof. Because I really don’t like — when they try and duplicate analog controls on the iPad or the iPhone, I don’t like it. So, anyway, if you remember those Infocom games and you love them, $10 you can have them all. And they come with hint systems and, you know, I don’t know.

**John:** And also now we have the internet, so when you really get stuck you can just go to the Wikipedia article and figure out what you’re supposed to do.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And I kind of like these apps more than anything because I feel like I’m literally laughing — not literally — figuratively laughing in the face of my younger self. Like, ha-ha, stupid. I have all the things you wanted. All of them, for $10.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On this futuristic thing.

**John:** Yeah. If you’d only waited you could have had them this whole time.

**Craig:** Right. All of your whining, I have them all!

**John:** I do remember a couple of years ago, do you remember they sold, what was — like the old Atari joystick, but it actually had all of the games built into the joystick. Itself.

**Craig:** I bought it.

**John:** Yeah. And I played it for awhile. And then at a certain point I realized like, you know what, the other games I have are much better.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re terrible. But that — to me that’s a great example of I’m just buying this to insult my past.

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** Like look at what I can have.

**John:** A giant middle finger towards nostalgia.

**Craig:** Yeah, look what I can have that’s cheaper, smaller, and I don’t even want it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** I put it in recycle.

**Craig:** What will the future bring?

**John:** Who knows?

That’s our show for this week. So, you can find links to the things we talked about in the show notes at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also where you can find transcripts for our previous episodes.

You can listen to all of the back episodes, both on the site and through the Scriptnotes app for iPhone and Android. Check there. And, if you want to listen to all of the first 100 episodes, we still have a few of the USB drives left where it has all 100 of them on. So, you can just buy the USB drive and we will mail it to you and you will have them all.

You can find that store.johnaugust.com. We also have a few random weird sizes of t-shirts left. If you have a question for me or Craig you can find us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. He is @clmazin.

Scriptnotes is produces by Stuart Friedel who picked those Three Page Challenges. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

And longer questions go to ask@johnaugust.com. And our outro this week is provided by Jeff Harms. So, thank you to everybody who sent in the outros because they’re amazing. So, we have a big stack of great outros now that will last us many weeks.

**Craig:** I love those. I just love those. I just think people are so creative.

**John:** Awesome. So, if you want to hear all of the outros, in the show notes there is a link to all of the outros that have ever been used in Scriptnotes and it’s just a good sort of fall into a hole and listen to them for 45 minutes because there have been some great variations.

**Craig:** Word.

**John:** Word. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Word! Thank you, John. Bye.

Links:

* Get tickets now for John’s [WGF panel](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/first-draft-feature/), From First Draft to Feature
* [Lab Rats](http://disneyxd.disney.com/lab-rats) on Disney XD
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script formatting](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* Three Pages by [Chris Sandiford](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ChrisSandiford.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Aaron Kablack](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AaronKablack.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Jessica Wiseman](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JessicaWiseman.pdf)
* [How to submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage), and [Stuart’s post on lessons learned from the early batches](http://johnaugust.com/2012/learning-from-the-three-page-challenge)
* [BioLite Woodburning Camp Stove](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BQHET9O/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00BQHET9O&linkCode=as2&tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [BioLite KettlePot](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00FYX4TW8/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00FYX4TW8&linkCode=as2&tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Lost Treasures of Infocom](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/lost-treasures-of-infocom/id577626745?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jeff Harms

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/world-building).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hey, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 135 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** I’m all sexy, John.

**John:** Oh, no, you cannot keep doing that voice. That voice has to stop right now.

**Craig:** Because it’s making you uncomfortable?

**John:** Yes. Even through Skype it’s just making me really uncomfortable. Can you imagine if people did that to you in like real life?

**Craig:** I think it would be spectacular. And I’m kind of puzzled why people don’t do it more often to me.

**John:** There’s a lot of things that puzzle me. But we won’t solve all those questions today, but we will talk about some things that are good for us to talk about. Craig, we’re going to finally talk about True Detective.

**Craig:** Yes. Finally we can because the finale aired and we can’t get yelled out.

**John:** Exactly. So, we’re going to do that at the end of the show, so it’ll be the last topic so you can — if you’ve not seen True Detective and you don’t want to listen to us talk about True Detective we will get to that point and we will say, “Now we will start talking about True Detective,” and you can just stop listening. And then you won’t be spoiled for anything we’re going to say, because we’re going to spoil everything.

**Craig:** Everything.

**John:** But also today we’re going to talk about the situation where you have written something and then you see it in a movie and it’s like, wow, that is so much like the movie I just wrote. We’re going to talk about that and specifically how it’s often not related at all. Sometimes just ideas are out there and there’s a good example that just came across our desk.

And you also wanted to talk about world-building, didn’t you?

**Craig:** Yeah. That was something that someone brought up on Twitter and I thought, wow, that’s a really good topic and one that I think I can kind of quiz you about because I think just based on the movies you’ve done you’ve had more experience with that than I have.

**John:** Cool. So, we’ll talk about all those things.

First off, though, we have a bit of news. I will be hosting a panel on Saturday July 12 at the Writers Guild Foundation — for the Writers Guild Foundation and the Austin Film Festival. Our own Kelly Marcel will be with me and Linda Woolverton and we’re going to be talking about moving from the first draft to the final feature film, that whole how do you get from inception to a completed thing. This is part of one of those whole day WGF things they do. I think when you and I did that Three Page Challenge thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s that same kind of event. So, it’s a whole day where you’re buying a ticket for the whole big thing, so you can’t just buy one little section. You have to buy the whole thing. But if you would like to come see me, and Kelly, and Linda Woolverton on July 12 you can do that. There will be a link to that in the show notes.

My second bit of news is that Weekend Read just came out as we’re recording this, so it’s out in the App Store right now, and among the other things it includes is all the scripts to Rian Johnson’s films. So, he was nice enough to give us all his scripts.

We have the entire first season of Hannibal. Plus, we have the transcripts to every episode of Scriptnotes is now inside Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Whoa!

**John:** So, if you have not gotten Weekend Read, if you have not upgraded to Weekend Read do so now because it’s free and it’s in the App Store.

**Craig:** Great deal.

**John:** Great deal.

**Craig:** Great deal.

**John:** You had some follow up I saw in the notes.

**Craig:** I did. Yeah. We had a discussion I think in our last podcast when we were answering lots of questions. And we had a question from one listener about — well, actually, I don’t even recall what the question was that led me to the answer I gave. But we got a follow up question or response actually from one of our listeners named David Maguire.

And we will get these very nice letters every now and again, but this one I thought actually was worth sharing with everybody because one of the things that I’m always trying to put out there in the world is that your individual problems as a screenwriter are not in fact uncommon. Most of us share them, if not all of us. And I like this letter so much I thought I would read it. And so David gave us permission to go ahead and read it.

And he wrote, “Hey John and Craig, I’m an avid listener of your podcast and love that content you provide. Being an aspiring screenwriter your words are weighted for me and provide guidance for how I should move forward. Gushing aside,” and, now this is me — feel free to gush as long as you want. You know, when you guys write in, do it. Just gush.

**John:** Just paragraphs. Just gush.

**Craig:** “Hey, how you doing, I’m Craig Mazin.”

**John:** Craig’s a gusher.

**Craig:** Oh, so gross.

“Gushing aside, I wanted to comment on what Craig said during your last episode, Lots of Questions. He was answering a letter from a screenwriter who had just had surgery,” oh that’s right, now I remember. This was the very tragic question that we got.

“The screenwriter just had surgery, lost a relationship, and was deciding to focus on his screenplay and have that be his golden ticket. Craig said that you shouldn’t put all of your hopes in one script as it creates — and I am paraphrasing — an unrealistic expectation and stress. I found this bit of advice to be really what I need.

“Recently I found myself going to a pitch slam down in LA.” John, you’re familiar with these pitch slams?

**John:** Yes. I love a pitch slam, don’t you?

**Craig:** I mean, I super love it. [laughs]

**John:** I don’t love it at all.

**Craig:** No, me neither.

**John:** My sarcasm might not be coming through. I find them incredibly frustrating. But, maybe they’re helpful for some people, so keep reading.

**Craig:** For those of you out there, you show up at these things and you pitch stuff really fast, just lines of people, and it’s kind of like speed dating for screenwriting, and frankly I find the whole thing very disturbing.

“So, having no real idea of what that experience would be like, I went down there with an idea, no complete script, and a hope that my charm would wow them. Sadly, that did not work. The first session I watched said unless you have a near finalized script you shouldn’t be here. At that point I felt about two feet tall and foolish, but wanting to have the full experience I sucked it up and went to the pitch slam only to be rejected at every table except for one.

“A small production company told me that they didn’t want my half-realized drama and that they did action movies or horror movies, or even family-friendly action movies as they were more profitable. He gave me a card and said call him. I get home and I start trying to pull a story together under the idea that they are interested and want to work with me. So, I need to make this script a reality.

“After quickly outlining I got to start writing and I can’t — I just can’t seem to be happy with the script. That discourages me. And then that discourages me even further that I can’t get something out and I feel like this opportunity is slipping away. But Craig’s advice helps alleviate that stress and worry. And I suddenly realized that I like to write not so that I can make buckets of money, but because I like to tell stories. So, while it may be awhile before I get the action story figured out to a point where I feel comfortable with it, at least I’ll know I’m writing it for me and not for money.

“I’m sorry to drone on,” well, that’s never stopped me or John. “I’m sorry to drone on but I just wanted to say how appreciative I am for you guys and your show. Thanks, David Maguire from San Jose, California.”

And thank you, David, for writing. What a brave thing for you to write. And, also, pinpoint something that never goes away. It doesn’t matter where you are at any stage of the game. And that is this feeling like you have to write something to make somebody else happy so that you’ll be a writer, so that you’ll feel better about yourself. And unfortunately down that pathway is much danger and trouble. Trouble, I think. What do you think, John?

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s also a classic example of putting your self-esteem in the hands of somebody else. In this case the “somebody else” being that person you’re pitching to, or this person who expressed some interest in your idea and said like we’ll do it this other kind of way and then we might like it.

The minute you sort of hand off how you feel about yourself to somebody else, you’ve really weakened your position. You’re unlikely to have good outcome if you are putting how you feel about yourself in somebody else’s hands. And that’s a good lesson for work, but it’s also a good lesson for life. I think a lot of times in our personal relationships we tend to put way too much pressure ourselves and other people for how we’re going to perceive ourselves. And that’s not helpful and it’s not good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well put. You really don’t want to give anybody that gun. And they will play the game where obviously it’s to their advantage in some ways to have some sort of power over you. I think what a lot of buyers don’t realize is that by doing that they have probably made the person they want work from that much worse of a writer.

It’s very hard to write for somebody else. We have to find a way to find common ground and an agreement with somebody else and then we write for ourselves. There’s no way around it.

**John:** And what I would stress is that you never really outgrow this. You may become more aware of when you’re doing it, but you won’t stop doing it. And that’s both as being the person who is putting yourself in these positions where you are fixated on what someone else is going to think. That still happens to me. It happens to me every — not every day, but every week. And especially the stuff I’m working on because I really want people to love it. And there are certain people who I want to love it.

Sometimes I’m just more aware now of not trying to please the people who kind of don’t matter in a strange way. So, to me that’s like I’m not going to knock myself out to please this junior executive on something because while she may be lovely she’s not the real opinion leader in this situation.

But I also find it, and tell me if you find this also, Craig, is that now more people are sort of working with you and for you, sometimes you recognize they’re trying to please you. And I don’t ever want to make someone feel like pleasing me should be their end all goal in life.

And so as we work on stuff there may be times where people are bringing us things and I try to always stress to them that like this isn’t working for me here right now, or this isn’t quite what I’m looking for. That doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. That doesn’t mean you did bad work. It’s just not what I need right now.

And that’s a useful thing I’ve tried to do more of as I’ve been working with other folks is to make sure that they understand that in no way should this reflect how I think of them as a person. It’s just like this is not what I need right here at this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m the same way. I have no problem saying, listen, I don’t want to spend the time writing that because I don’t know how to write it or my heart is not in it. Somebody else’s heart will be in it and they’ll do something great.

You know, every time I pass on something I say, “I’ll see you at the Oscars with this,” [laughs] because I always feel that I passed on it, someone else is going to do it. They’re going to do it brilliantly and I’ll watch them at the Oscars. And I’ll be happy with it because it wasn’t for me. We can’t be everything to all people, nor should people feel the same towards us.

I will say that when it comes to listening to people, I don’t really — I never really concern myself with who matters. I only concern myself with who is right. If somebody — I don’t care who it is. If the lunch lady gives me an insight that I think is going to help me make my script better, I’m going to take it.

So, what I’ve done is I’ve tried to just tune out the fact that these are all people that I should somehow be pleasing and tune in just the content of what they’re saying. And then making decisions on the content, as if I were receiving these things over the wire as anonymous messages — what about this? What about this? What about this? And I go, well, no to that, no to that, yes to this, no to that, no to that.

**John:** Absolutely a great point. And you have to consider — when I’m saying like which notes I’m sort of I feel fine ignoring form sometimes a junior executive at this point in my career, it’s that there are sometimes you get feedback that you’re going to have to do something with even if it’s just to reject it. For certain other stuff I just let it sort of roll past and I don’t even sort of pay attention to it as much anymore. Because I’m always aware of the end of this is to get to something — to get to a great movie. And so if that note is helping me get to a great movie, I’m delighted to hear it.

If it’s going to be a note that’s going to get in my way of making a great movie, unless it’s from somebody who I really need to worry about, I don’t worry about it so much. And in people’s normal life, before they’re dealing with that, it may just be your friend who read the script who just didn’t get this one thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s good to listen to it, but that doesn’t mean you have to address everything that everybody says.

**Craig:** That’s right. In the end you have to be the one doing it and this is — I’m sure you’ve had the experience of writing something where you realized at some point I am not writing this for me anymore. I’m writing this either to make somebody stop yelling at me or to make somebody else happy, but not me. And it’s gross.

**John:** It’s gross and yet sometimes it’s necessary, because sometimes you recognize that you are link in the chain and you are not the final arbiter of what’s going to happen. And you have to make those decisions about whether to keep working on this in that capacity.

**Craig:** Right. Great.

**John:** Well, one thing we’re going to work on in a small capacity, in a five-minute capacity, we talked on the last show about this idea of what would a screenwriting format look like if we were to start from scratch, if we weren’t beholden to everything that had come before and wanted to do something from the ground zero. What would it be like?

And so you and I emailed back and forth this week, but you proposed like let’s just talk about it on the air. And I think it’s a great thing to talk about on the air, yet I don’t want it to take over the entire show. So, my proposal is that we will talk about it for exactly five minutes and then we will stop.

**Craig:** What if we don’t take up the whole five minutes? [laughs]

**John:** If we don’t take up the whole five minutes then everybody wins.

**Craig:** Then we vamp.

**John:** All right, so tell me when to start.

**Craig:** Start.

**John:** Go.

**Craig:** Okay. So, one thing that we’ve been talking about is getting away from the idea of pagination entirely. Thank you Final Draft. You inspired us. The idea being that until you are actually on set and handing out sides, which is something that happens at the tail end of a minority of development projects, everybody is reading the screenplay on some sort of device: a laptop, or a tablet, or a phone in this case.

So, one thing we wanted to do was get away from pagination because it’s irrelevant to that. We wanted to get away from pagination because it sort of is an old school physical object thing that no longer has meaning on a computer. We wanted to get away from pagination because the rule of one-page per one-minute is nonsense. And everybody knows it’s nonsense. Even if you think it’s real, you’re still stuck between screenplays that run roughly between 90 to 130 pages, which means that the page length is pointless anyway.

And we wanted to find something that is more useful in terms of how to actually break a screenplay up into pieces that matter, not 8.5 x 11 pieces, but purposeful pieces. John?

**John:** So, when we’re talking about breaking into purposeful pieces, the natural breaks would seem to be sequences and scenes. So, a sequence is a collection of scenes that tell a certain portion of a story. And a lot of times when we’re talking about a sequence sometimes they’re comprised of very short little scenes. So, if it’s just a few lines — a scene header and a few lines — it’s not really a scene in and of itself. And so sequences may be a good logical way of thinking about the breaking down of stuff.

The goal would be that even if you’re writing the document all as one flowing thing it can easily be broken apart into these pieces. And so as stuff gets moved around it can be recompiled into a full document again if someone wants to look at it as a full, more like a conventional script.

**Craig:** Right. So, the idea of the sequence is that we get away from orienting the screenplay around scenes based on locations. The reason that that happens is because in production people need to know is this inside or outside. Am I building something? Am I waiting for the sun to go up or down? And all the rest of it.

But in development that’s not quite as important. What is important is sequences. That’s actually the building block of storytelling, not whether I’m in a house and then I walk outside. If it’s all one motion and it’s all one sequence, narrative sequence, then that really is the building block. So, we want to get away from scenes in a weird way. We don’t have a problem with the idea of locations, but the word scene isn’t serving us as well as we think sequence would.

We also want to be able to deliver a format that is modern. So, music cues are clickable and playable while you’re reading. Sound effects are clickable and playable. Locations are clickable and visible. We want to be able to give people who are reading the context that they need.

If you describe something and there’s a great YouTube video that explains it perfectly, click it. And show it and watch it.

**John:** Yeah. So, what we’re ultimately describing here I think is a database that consists of the text elements of what the written screenplay is like, but also keyed up to each of these scenes or sequences can be additional information. And that already kind of exists.

As a film goes into production it is broken down. It is literally broken down into little strips, little bits of scenes that you would shoot. And that kind of information is stored along with that. So, it’s a different person that comes in and does all that work, usually the first AD and the line producer do all that work of breaking it down into these are the key components of what happens in this sequence and then storyboards are generated off of that based on those scene numbers.

That kind of stuff is there. It would be a way of here’s the text part of it and you can also flow through and see everything else that goes with it. And there should be a smart way to do that. If you are not bound by paper, that’s a thing you could very easily do.

**Craig:** How much time do we have left?

**John:** We have one minute.

**Craig:** Okay, great. One last thing. People are going to get freaked out by this get rid of pages thing. And I understand why.

First of all, we’ll have a solution for production. We understand how to do that because we work in production. But putting that aside for now, what people get scared about is how long is the script — what does that even mean? It doesn’t matter how long the script is. All that matters is how long the movie is.

Let’s first accept that, A, we don’t know how long the movie is going to be based on the script. We see that all the time when we turn in 100-page scripts and we hear that it’s actually a two-hour movie. Or when you turn 130-page scripts and we hear that it’s actually an hour and a half.

So, don’t worry about that. And also, I have to say, I think that we now have an inherent understanding of how long a movie is going to be based on just reading it. We get it. We have an internal clock running of our own. What matters is not some arbitrary number length, but how our interest is held. As such, by getting rid of pages we can also start doing things like using better fonts instead of stupid Courier.

**John:** Yeah. Which gets into the actual formatting on the page, which can be part of our next conversation because we’re down to 10, 9, 8…oh, we also have a way to do logical pages so we can still calculate page length if we have to. And 2…and…

**Craig:** And better revision marks. Excellent.

**John:** And we’re done.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That was five minutes.

**Craig:** Terrific.

**John:** So, Craig, let’s get onto our new topics for this week.

Now, I had a blog post that was up about two weeks ago where it was actually a first person post. And a guy wrote in saying about his experience where he lives in China someplace and he had watched a trailer for a movie and went, “Oh my god, that’s the premise of this movie I wrote.” A script he’d written that had never gotten any traction. He sent it around by never got any traction.

So, he watched this trailer and is like, “Oh my god, what am I going to do?” And he was writing to me really with the question of should I watch this movie? What do I do? I’m freaked out. And so in the time between when he saw the trailer and I answered his letter he watched the movie and said, “It was bizarre watching it because it was the same premise but like kind of every choice they made along the way was vastly different.”

And so this thing where he originally thought like, I’m going to sue, he realized like, well, that’s crazy town. So, a thing came up this week that I thought was really fascinating so I wanted to read some things aloud. So, I’m going to read you the premise of two TV shows.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And I want you to try to keep them straight. So, TV show number one: “This series follows the residents of a small town whose lives are upended when their loved ones return from the dead, un-aged since their deaths. Among the returned is Jacob Langston, an 8-year-old boy who drowned 32 years earlier. Having somehow been found alive in China, he is brought back to America by an immigration agent. His surprise return inspires the local sheriff, whose wife presumably drowned trying to rescue Jacob to learn more about this mystery.”

That is the first TV show.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, having heard that —

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** A second TV show: “In a small mountain town many dead people reappear, apparently alive and normal. Teenage road accident victim Camille, suicidal bridegroom Simon, a small boy named Victor who was murdered by burglars, and Serge, a serial killer. They try to resume their lives as strange phenomena occur. Amongst recurring power outages, the water level of the reservoir mysteriously lowers revealing the presence of dead animals and a church steeple. And strange marks appear on the bodies of the living and the dead.”

Two separate TV shows. Do you recognize either of these premises?

**Craig:** Well, to me, I immediately think of Pet Sematary.

**John:** Yes, oh yeah, Pet Sematary, the great Stephen King.

So, these are two TV shows that are currently on the air, which is what’s crazy.

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t watch TV, so —

**John:** One of them is called Resurrection and it’s on ABC. The other one is called Les Revenants, it was a French show that is now being aired on Sundance as The Returned. I dare anybody from a distance to tell those two shows apart. They sound really similar, don’t they?

**Craig:** With the exception of the occult baked into the second one? Yeah, I mean, basically it’s a small town where dead people are returning.

**John:** Yes. There’s water imagery in both. There’s a returned kid in both.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, here’s what’s crazy — the French show, Les Revenants, is based on a 2004 French film, so that’s back from 2004. They made a TV series that was based on this old French film. Resurrection, the show on ABC, is based on a book called, confusingly enough, The Returned, which is by Jason Mott, which is what the Sundance show version of the French show is called.

**Craig:** Okay. That is confusing. They’re sharing titles now.

**John:** So not only are they similar premises, but the title of one book is actually the title of the other series in English.

I bring this up because if you were to look at these from a distance you would say like, “Well, clearly one is based on the other.” They’re largely the same idea, and yet they’re not at all the same idea. Like there’s no lawsuit happening between these two because they’re actually separate ideas, and yet they’re so incredibly similar.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Well, as always, the idea itself you can’t sue over anyway, so the question is what is unique about how they spool out. And this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. In the slightest.

**John:** And yet every time I see one of these things about somebody is suing Tom Cruise for Mission Impossible 3, that’s exactly my idea. Well, like, was your idea as specific as the dead returning to life in a small town and everyone is freaked out by their loved ones coming back? That’s a pretty specific idea. And then you add in like, oh, these people drowned, there’s water imagery, and the same kind of sheriff. And that seems incredibly specific and it seems like, well, no two people in a vacuum could have come up with the same idea, but they did.

And you even said it. The first thing you thought of was Pet Sematary.

**Craig:** Yeah, of course. If you want to go back further, let’s go back to the bible when Jesus comes back from the dead. Coming back from the dead is not special. Coming back from the dead is a deep-seeded old, old animal-brain desire of humans.

Death is confusing to us. It is a repudiation of the logical sense of the world. It is absurd. Naturally people have sought to cheat death forever, and so the theme of the dead walk again has been done billions of times in so many different ways. And you just start looking down a list of things and you realize not only is it common, it’s like you can’t get rid of it. Frankenstein. And every ghost story. People are constantly coming back from the dead. Reincarnated, and da-da-da-da.

It’s natural. You write something. Writing something is an act of — an extraordinary act of ego. I dare to create something and put it in the world, create something unique. It is my expression. And it is therefore somewhat expected that the person would allow that ego to slop over to, “And nobody else could have possibly done it.”

**John:** Well, here’s the thing, it was an original idea to you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It was the first time you’d ever had that idea.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so in our solipsism it always seems like, well, it’s the first time I ever thought of that idea, so it must be the first time anyone ever thought of that idea. And even if we kind of know that’s logically unlikely, it still feels kind of right because we can only have our own experience.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There’s a Slate article that I’ll also link to in the show notes that they talk though the other shows that is surprisingly very much like.

There’s a 2002 Japanese film called Yomigaeri where the dead are mysteriously resurrected in the city of Aso and then investigated by a representative from the Japanese Ministry of Welfare as they attempt to reintegrate into society.

There’s also In The Flesh, a BBC 3 series in the fictional village of Roarton, Lancashire.

And there’s Babylon Fields, which is a CBS pilot a few years ago that now NBC is doing a pilot that is a similar kind of idea.

So, that’s just an idea that’s out there. It’s like an asteroid hitting the planet idea. It’s going to keep recurring.

My frustration over New Girl and that whole crazy lawsuit, like, “Oh my god, it’s a girl and there’s three guy roommates.”

**Craig:** That was the worst.

**John:** It just drives me crazy. And I just thought this was a great demonstration of sort of how the same idea can occur multiple times.

**Craig:** Not only in what we do, but in science. I’m trying to think, it was Newton and I think it was, was it Leibniz? Two people separately at the same time came up with calculus.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Which is insane.

**John:** Which is crazy.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** It happens.

**Craig:** It happens. Look at what happened at the beginning of the AIDS crisis. The French team and the American team both working on trying to isolate the cause of AIDS and both sort of oddly simultaneously in a weird way coming up with HIV. Granted, that’s a complicated story, but these things happen. There’s a time for ideas to come forth. They are affected by all sorts of things. We don’t walk around in isolation. We pick up cues from the world.

But more importantly I want to single in on something that you said which is you having an original idea doesn’t make it the only possibility that someone else can have that idea. If two people think of something apart from each other, in isolation from each other, it is original to them. And that can happen. And we shouldn’t think that our idea is so — do you know how hard it is to come up with an idea that not one of the other, I don’t know how many humans have lived, 80 billion humans. I mean, really?

**John:** Well, it’s misleading because while it’s entirely possibly to come up with an original sentence, the pure number of possible sentences in the world is essentially infinite. Like you could come up with an original sentence, but an idea is both so amorphous and so specific.

The elements of this thing, like I’m going to combine these elements in a way that no one else will ever think of — well, no you’re not. I mean, it may be that no one else has published that idea yet, but someone else has sort of come up with those building blocks.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** A good example is let’s take baby names. Because what’s always so surprising to people is like how did that name become so popular, like where did that come from? And if you ask any individual parent they’re like, oh, it just suddenly came to me. Like I have no idea why that name came to me, but like why is it now in the top ten of all names?

Well, it’s because it was out there in the universe. It was going to happen. That’s why suddenly there are Madisons. There weren’t Madisons before. Why did it show up? Because it showed up. It’s the thing that it snowballed and it happened.

**Craig:** Splash.

**John:** Well, Splash, that’s actually a bad example because Madison is probably coming from Splash.

**Craig:** Yeah, but then again, it’s like, okay, so they named her Madison because he looked at the sign for Madison Avenue and then people pick up on that. But a lot of people who name their kid Madison, they’re just naming their kid Madison because they might have heard somebody named Madison somewhere who then is derived from Splash and so on and so forth.

And it’s okay. I mean —

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** Honestly, if you’re going to come up with an idea that is interesting to millions of humans, it needs to be universal. It needs to have some piece of borrowed tradition. I mean, look, this particular example, you’re talking about dead people coming back to life. Perverting and overcoming death, right off the bat — you just start with death. Okay, well, there’s 14 million ideas. All right, well what about people that used to be dead but now they’re back. Now you’re down to like four million ideas. It’s just so — it’s such a typical area for drama because it’s dramatic.

Death is dramatic. Sex is dramatic. Violence is dramatic. Love is dramatic. Children are dramatic. Parents are dramatic. How could we possibly ever come up with one of these things and think to ourselves and no one has ever thought of this before? The idea isn’t what matters anyway. It’s what you do with it.

**John:** I agree. And really what this comes down to is your premise is based on the world is normal except for one thing, which is really what this premise is. You’re going to find a lot of overlap.

And I think that’s a great segue to our second topic which is world-building, which is how do you build the universe in which your story takes place, whether there is one thing that’s different or everything is different like some of these shows have happened.

Some of these shows create these universes that are so amazing and different and detailed and complex. And yet they have to have some grounding in our understandable emotional reality or they don’t make any sense at all. You can’t make heads or tails of them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let’s talk about some world-building.

**Craig:** Well, what interests me about the phrase — I think first of all let’s define our term if we can. Every time you sit down and you write a screenplay you’re world-building. You are — even if you’re telling the most mundane mumblecore story of two people in Brooklyn having a series of discussions over coffee, you’re building a world. You’re populating it with people. And you’re picking where you want to go.

But, where I think the term is typically used and where it’s valuable is in a story where you are creating a world that is not like ours. You are — it is a fantasy world or it is a science fiction world, a vision of the future, or a vision of long, long ago. So, part of the value for the person watching the movie is that they are entering a world that is not like ours. That even the mundane things in this world like buildings and language and weaponry and religion have changed dramatically, or are dramatically different from ours, and that’s part of the fun of it.

So, for instance, if you were to write Lord of the Rings, or if you were to write Star Wars, or if you were to write Her, you’re world-building. And that’s something that you’ve done because I know you did Titan A.E., which was science fiction and world-building, right?

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. And pretty much all the Tim Burton movies have a huge world-building component.

**Craig:** Exactly. Right. All the Tim Burton. Because Tim Burton likes to basically say come into the world of Tim Burton.

**John:** Exactly. And even to some degree I would say the Charlie’s Angels movies, they take place in this heightened sort of it’s always sunny, shiny California universe that is very specific. And there are things that can fit into a Charlie’s Angels universe and things that can’t fit into a Charlie’s Angels universe, the same way certain things can fit into a Lego universe or Muppet universe and couldn’t in other universes.

So, yes, anything that doesn’t take place in a really readily identifiable place, there’s going to be some component of world-building.

**Craig:** And so when you sit down, John, and you know that you’re telling a story in a world that you have to build, my guess is you have at least some basic understanding of what the dramatics of the story are. They will involve human beings who have problems — problems are really built. Problems are problems we’re all familiar with. But when you think about designing this and building this world, how do you go about doing it?

**John:** I think it starts with a visual ideal of what it would look like to be inside that world. And what it would look like both with your eyes, but what it would feel like to be inside that world. And with the changes from a normal world to this world, how would everything else flow out of that? And so if you are in a universe where Corpse Bride, where you’re in the land of the dead, and everything is incredibly colorful, everything is sort of the opposite of sort of what you think death is supposed to be like. What is a restaurant like there and what would they serve.

You’re having to figure out all these details. And you start — that’s actually the most fun part of any screenwriting for me is all that figuring out what the world is like. The challenge is that you figure out these details and most of them you’re never going to use. Most of them are things that are just over on the edges and you will never actually see any of those things, because really the experience can only be what could our hero encounter or interact with.

If you’re in WALL-E you’re going to see everything from WALL-E’s point of view. So, WALL-E is interacting with trash. And, well what is the trash? Where does trash come from? What is the world like? What does WALL-E do when he’s not working? Answering all of those questions is letting you build your character’s story, but also define the limits of what we’re going to see about the world and the universe.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that when I watch a movie that has built a world sometimes it’s the small unremarked upon details that bring me the most joy. I remember when I saw Star Wars as a kid, when they go to the Cantina in Mos Eisley, just the way the drinks looked and everything, the glassware, you know. That there were these little things and world-building really is a — when they talk about film being a collaborative medium, it’s not as collaborative as people think. I always think that really it’s a directed medium. That people — the writer and the director — create a set of marching orders. And then it is an executed medium where people serve that.

But when you talk about world-building, everybody gets to kind of pitch in and design things from costumes, to hairstyles, to — I mean, everybody noticed the pants in Her. That is a nice built detail that nobody ever says, “Boy, I really like the way these pants turned out in the year 2040.”

**John:** To me an even more specific detail in her that was just so spot-on terrific is that Joaquin Phoenix is walking around with Scarlett Johansson’s character in his pocket, the little camera in his pocket. And so that she can see he has a little safety pin in his pocket, in his shirt pocket so that the camera is up high enough so that she can actually look and see what he’s seeing. It’s such a small little detail, but it’s so terrific and important. It’s not remarked upon in any way by the movie, but you say like, “Well why does he have a safety pin there?” It’s like, oh, so that the phone is high enough that she can see. It’s such a smart little detail.

**Craig:** Yeah, which also goes to the notion that you don’t want to overkill it. That when you build a world you are asking people to enjoy the things that are different, but not to the extent where nothing is the same. You can start to fall into a silly place where forks don’t look like forks anymore. And doors don’t work like doors. And you realize that the movie has just become obsessed with the notion that everything will be changed in the future.

Her went the other direction and said actually, no, you’re still going to open your mailbox with a key. And if you want to do something in your pocket, you’re not going to put a magneto Levitron phone lifter. You’re just going to use a safety pin. That didn’t change, you know?

**John:** I remember there was an episode of Buck Rogers and the 25th Century with Gil Gerard and they were eating food. And they have like little magnetic forks to eat their food.

**Craig:** Ugh, bingo.

**John:** It’s like that’s not an improvement. It’s clear like that didn’t make anything better the way you’re doing that right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” syndrome. It’s a good way to approach the future. And you see it sometimes where people just go nuts, you know. I mean, the fact that, look, in the future doors can go whoosh — or they can just open. And if you think about it, opened doors just swinging unhinged, it’s really useful.

Or, if you needed to save space and you were on a spaceship, just sliding the door like a pocket door would also be very useful.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But why would you have this incredibly complicated system where doors go whoosh, whoosh.

**John:** Yeah. Unfortunately on radio I don’t think people are seeing probably how you’re moving your hands for that.

**Craig:** You know I’m going whoosh, whoosh. [laughs] Yeah, you know what I’m doing. Everybody knows what I’m doing.

**John:** I know what you’re doing. The way that it’s not like a pocket door but it’s actually moving past each other in a really complicated —

**Craig:** And on its own and it’s electronic and you know that it’s a guy like, “Oh my god, the door on deck seven, the whoosh door, it’s not swishing.” “Oh, okay, well we got to get the guy to come and he’s got a backlog, so it’s going to be a few days, so you’re going to just stay in there.”

**John:** Obviously when we talk about big fantasy or sci-fi films, there’s an aspect of world-building which is going to be a conversation between the director and all the different designers, from costume, production designer. All those things are going to be influenced by it.

But since we’re mostly a podcast about screenwriting, let’s talk about what it’s like to be building a world on a page, because where you see this going wrong sometimes is where those first five pages are incredibly dense with like all these details crammed at you about sort of what this world is like.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the ones that have done it well, to my reading, have introduced you slowly to what this world feels like. So that the world starts in a way that lets you know the general sense of where this movie is going, what kind of universe we’re in, but it’s not hammering you with details. And so lots of readily identifiable behaviors, readily identifiable characters from the start. And then if they need to show you a big thing about how the world is different, they might not do that on page one. They might give that to you a little bit along the way.

Even The Matrix, which is about as complicated and confusing of a world that you could find, it starts in a more grounded way as you’re first meeting Neo, so you understand that there’s some basis of reality underneath all of this.

**Craig:** That’s right. And similarly when you have movies that take place entirely in a built world, like say Star Wars, there are points of reference, because you’re shooting here on this planet. Okay, Tatooine is a desert. It’s a small oasis town in a desert. Very good.

What’s happened now is we can make anything because of computers. So, there is a tendency I think sometimes for people to just go nuts and describe everything because their minds are blowing up with all of these interesting ideas.

I agree with you. You have to parcel it out carefully and meaningfully so that people don’t think they’re just reading a brochure for some house you’re trying to sell them, or a city you’re trying to get them to move to.

I have to say this is also frankly where a change in format would be enormously helpful. Text is a very clumsy way to describe a picture, which I believe has been calculated to be worth 1,000 words. It would be nice to just be able to click something and go, okay, I understand what they’re going for here. That would be useful.

**John:** I feel Frank Herbert’s Dune, I mean, Dune is a dense book and there’s a lot in Dune that is sort of world-building. It’s establishing this complicated world, the complicated rules, and the environments and all this stuff. A challenging thing to do as a screenplay because you’re going to have to be efficient about how you’re getting through this.

And so you want the audience to be able to make some leaps with you about sort of what world this is. Tatooine is a great example from Star Wars, because it’s mostly kind of like a little small tiny desert town. You can use a lot of your expectations about what a little desert town would be like, or a little desert dwelling would be like. And you don’t have to be introduced to every single new little thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And they’re not choking you with all the details.

The other thing I think writers are especially responsible for is figuring out what the character’s voice in your created world is going to be. And you may not specify that people are speaking with some sort of Irish brogue, but you’re making word choices about the ways people speak within your world. And that can be a crucial thing, too.

If you’re making a Lord of the Rings-y kind of movie, there’s an expectation that characters are going to speak in that sort of kind of English way. That sort of almost like received pronunciation Shakespeare kind of way. You kind of get that for free if you want that. If you don’t want that you’re going to have to make a deliberate choice that it’s not that and deal with the sort of reader pushback that you’re going to find from that decision.

**Craig:** Yeah. The other thing I’ll mention is for those of us who write comedies, there are times when you need to world-build in a comedy. And in comedies you tend to not get quite as much credit for building some elaborate “original world,” in part because we like funny things to be in contrast to ordinary things. It’s harder to laugh when the world around you is so outlandish and creative.

I’ve never seen Pluto Nash, but just from the trailer I thought I’m not sure how any of this is going to be funny in this elaborate space station. It’s just too fancy and frankly kind of ambitious of a setting, no matter how well or not well it was executed for me to be laughing at the mundane things that happen inside of it.

With that in mind, one great example of comedy world-building is Defending Your Life by Albert Brooks. And he was building heaven, which is something that other movies have done. And his choice was to build that world against the expectation and just set it basically as kind of a lovely hotel resort for middle aged to senior citizen type people, you know, with buffets and lounge acts. It was kind of like a mid-level Vegas hotel, which was brilliant.

**John:** Yeah. You’re bringing up Pluto Nash. The funny sci-fi film I can point to is Galaxy Quest. And what Galaxy Quest so smartly did is it didn’t rely on sort of what real science fiction would be like. It relied on what we already knew about what a science fiction TV show should be like. And so therefore it could work with all this stuff that we already had in our database for like this is what a TV show version of what a starship show should be like. And it could push back off of that.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, Galaxy Quest, among its many brilliant choices, Bob Gordon wrote a fantastic screenplay there, among the many brilliant choices was that when the aliens come to abduct or choose the heroes of the movie who played these characters on a Star Trek like show, the spaceship, their actual spaceship, they built it to the specifications of the show.

So, it wasn’t a built world. In fact, it was a very familiar world to us that was designed to look exactly like something that was fake. So, they could react to that and we didn’t feel like they were in a fancy ship, because they weren’t. They were actually in a very silly looking ship that was essentially created by tropes with which we’re all familiar.

**John:** Comedy is essentially expectation and then surprise. So, in comedy you have to have expectation about what’s going to happen next, and then a surprise that either something was said that wasn’t what you expected, or an event happens that isn’t what you expected.

If everything is brand new you kind of can’t have expectation. And therefore you kind of can’t be surprised in a way that’s funny. And that’s usually a huge problem with science fiction comedies.

**Craig:** Yeah. The word grounded comes up constantly when you’re making comedies. And even when we did spoof movies, when I did spoof movies with David Zucker one of the things that he was very adamant about and properly so is that if you’re going to spoof a scene from a movie the set needs to look just like that movie. It doesn’t need to be some funny version of that set. It needs to be just that set. And then funny things happen in it. You need to be grounded.

**John:** So, as you talk about sets, as we sort of wrap up this world-building thing: in general if I’m doing something that is a complicated production that is existing in a very different world than what I’m normally in, I will spend some time, you know, a couple days, although you can fall down deep k-holes and just go far too far with it. And just look up the imagery of the kind of thing I want these worlds to be like. And so you get to have a sense of style. Like this is the kind of universe this takes place in.

So, for Big Fish I did have some of that visual imagery of this is what this kind of fantasy nostalgic south of the past would be like. For other projects I’ve put together kind of a look book of this is the universe of what this world is like. And that’s incredibly helpful for you as the writer to be able to remember like, okay, that’s what I was going for there.

And even if you see that imagery, you can then start to think like what words would I use to describe what I’m seeing, because those are going to be the same kinds of words you’re going to use on the page to evoke this feeling for the person reading the script ultimately.

**Craig:** No question. Until you and I revolutionize screenplay format.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Which we’re going to do, by the way. We’re doing it.

**John:** We are. But first we should talk about a show that has done a great job of world-building this last season on HBO. And this is the time in the podcast where we’re going to talk about True Detective. So, fair warning, we’re going to spoil everything if you’ve not seen the show.

So, True Detective, Craig, I thought it was just a terrific show. How about you?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. The execution of it was not quite like anything I had seen before. And going back to our discussion of originality of ideas, two odd couple — odd couple detectives on the trail of a serial killer. Oh, you know, I don’t know —

**John:** Yeah, that’s tropey, tropey, tropey.

**Craig:** I mean, good lord. And they’re in the south. And I think I’ve seen that a bunch of times. And then there’s infidelity and, yup, yup, seen it, seen it, seen it, seen it. Even the notion that what’s behind it is a large conspiracy of powerful people and satanic rituals — done, done, done, done, done.

But what this show did better than any other, I thought, was create these two characters and let you — give you license to care more about those characters and where they were in their lives and the choices they were making than you did about the mystery itself.

Granted, I think some people didn’t. I think some people were just obsessed over the mystery to the point where the show could have not possibly satisfied them.

I thought that Nic Pizzolatto — Pizzolatto? Am I saying it right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Pizzolatto. And Cary Fukunaga made an amazing team. Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, brilliant performances. Best I’ve ever seen from them. Just a beautiful, beautiful show to watch. And as a student of Nietzsche, which I know you hate, I saw Nietzsche throughout the whole thing. I mean, this Nic Pizzolatto clearly a student of Nietzsche. No question. No question. And a smart student.

**John:** So, I was late to the show and sort of caught up. And so by the time we got to episode five or six I was watching it in real time. And I found it just fascinating. And fascinating in the sense of like when I first saw the promos for it I’m like I don’t know why I would watch this show, because I don’t watch procedurals, and it’s basically it felt like — from a distance it felt like a cop procedural staring Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, both of whom I like but I’m not going to go racing to go see, set in Louisiana which I’m just so sick of Louisiana. I have no desire to see Louisiana again. And it felt tropey, tropey, tropey, trope.

And so it wasn’t until everyone told me like, “No, no, it’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant.” And it’s really when people talked about the — when I decided I had to watch it was when people talked about the big shootout sequence, the sort of incredibly long tracking cam shot — the tracking shot that does all that that I know I had to catch up. Because I refuse to let this be another Breaking Bad where I’m behind everybody else on it.

So, what’s fascinating though is let’s go back to the reason I didn’t want to watch it is because on an idea level I’m like that doesn’t sound interesting to me at all. And where True Detective succeeds is in execution. Execution in acting. Execution in directing. But especially execution in storytelling, so I really want to focus on the decision to have the start of the show, at least the best parts of the show, the first six episodes, with the framing device of the interview.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As we come into the show we’re seeing this murder investigation happen where there’s a dead woman, and there’s a tree, and there’s a crown and all that stuff. We’re seeing the same detectives interviewed and we’re not quite sure if it’s even about the same case. We literally see the video camera footage. Like what is happening here? And we start to piece together that these two detectives are being interviewed years later about these events and that they are going to be essentially narrating the story of their own solving of this case, or their own investigation to this case, which was just genius. And it was just so incredibly well done.

Every time we cut from the present day storyline — which was the interviews — to the past and back, the show gained narrative speed. And we did the show where we talked about long takes, I remember there was a blog post I did about long takes. There’s an amazing amount of scene-setting and world-building you can do when you have these very long takes, but there’s also a tremendous amount of power in cutting. And this show knew exactly when to cut and when to pass the baton between the past and the future. That tension between the past and the future was as much a narrative theme as anything else in the show.

**Craig:** I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone do it quite the way they did it on True Detective, so maybe exclusively until now movies would start with people and they’re remembering something and you flash back and you see it all happen and then you come back again to present day and they finish up and it’s a nice conclusion to the whole thing. And that’s fine. And that can work really well.

What was so terrific about the way they did it here where they kept it going through six episodes is that they were short-circuiting something that we’re all accustomed to watching and pulling out of narrative which is character development. They were showing you the end. They were saying this is how it ends. This guy is a drunk and a mess. And this guy is without a wife and a bit of a stopped up unfulfilled man. And that allowed them to play around with things in the past in a way that made it a little more meaningful. If I know that Matthew McConaughey ends up as a mess, watching him walk around perfectly shaven and coiffed and in complete control of his environment is far more interesting now. And I also don’t have to watch the breakdown. I just understand that I’m watching it now.

I’m seeing it and he doesn’t, which is great. Love that.

**John:** So, one of the key things to understand about True Detective is, again, at its best it maintained very vigilant POV, so every scene is not only involved but is driven either by Matthew McConaughey or Woody Harrelson’s character. You don’t get any scenes that don’t have them in it with very, very rare exception.

But by having the past and the future there’s really essentially four characters. There is the characters in the past and the characters in the present day, or the near present day, who are being interviewed. And it is the tension between the older and the younger versions of themselves is often as fascinating as anything else. The things that you see them promising in the past and how those promises are unfulfilled in the present are so rewarding, because your brain kicks into gear and tries to fill in all the missing pieces about how these things could possibly relate. And you see in the present day storyline during the interviews there is narrative tension within those scenes, too.

It’s not just that they’re narrating story. They’re trying to figure out information from the people who are asking them questions about what’s really going on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You start to realize like these interviews aren’t happening simultaneously. They’re trying to find out information about each other in the present day storyline as they’re talking to these interviewers.

**Craig:** Yeah. And where it got, I think, where the series hit its dramatic climax and the climax I guess of its efficacy was in the episode where they finally got to the shootout in the woods. This was something that they had been talking about for some time, even early in the episodes both detective that are being interviewed keep asking the ones interviewing them — I assume you just want to ask us about the shootout in the woods. It’s the biggest thing that ever happened to them in their lives. And they’re not asking about it. “Not just yet. We’ll get to that.”

So, we know there is some crazy shootout in the woods. Where they finally got to juice all of the power out of their two-timeline structure is when we finally see the shootout in the woods and we hear present day McConaughey and Harrelson narrating past-day McConaughey and Harrelson and we realize that the story that they’re telling these guys is not at all what we’re watching. In fact, we’re watching something completely different.

**John:** It’s a complete fabrication. And it’s a fabrication they agreed to tell the same way so that they could keep their story straight.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And it was an ingenious way of sort of getting us through that moment because it was a moment that had enough narrative tension stakes anyway. It’s the first time people are actually shooting at them, and yet you’re also fascinated by the present day storyline where they’re telling these conflicting versions and you want to see if they can actually keep their stories straight.

**Craig:** Exactly. Because we’re learning, even as we’re watching this incredibly entertaining thing and this incredibly dramatic thing that also includes plot points, we are learning that these two men — separated by time and some enmity we don’t yet understand because of the incident in 2002 — they have each other’s backs still to this day, separate and apart from each other. That’s fascinating information that we’ll finally understand.

In that sequence, every now and then you watch something and it makes you feel something beyond just an emotion but rather you feel an intense narrative satisfaction. And for me it was when I was watching that and they’re describing it and I certainly had no idea what was coming. And I had no idea that they were going to be lying. And they start describing it and what I’m watching isn’t what’s happening, but in a very subtle way. Just like, “Well he went this way and I went that way,” but they’re not quite going that way.

And I, for a second I think did they make a mistake? And then four seconds later it locks in and I go, “Oh, oh, this is going to be good.”

**John:** Yeah. And it was good! It was great.

**Craig:** And I knew it was going to be good because as soon as I realized what was happening I thought, A, it’s great that they’re lying and not narrating what actually happened. But also it’s going to be good because whatever does happen is something they have to lie about.

**John:** Well, I also remember once I realized that the lie was happening you start watching that sequence again thinking like, but wait, they’re going to say there was a shootout but like no one actually fired a shot. How are they going to deal with that? And then you see in real time like McConaughey has the idea of basically staging the whole crime scene so that it looks like there was a shootout even though there wasn’t a shootout. It was all terrific.

Now, let’s talk about satisfaction because I think I was one of those people who wasn’t entirely satisfied by how the show ended. And I think it raises a whole question of like in some ways it didn’t used to matter how shows ended. We didn’t even used to have a sense that a series was supposed to end. But this is a rare case where everyone knew that this was going to be just a one-off thing, at least with these two characters. This was going to end.

And I think our degree of satisfaction was weirdly influenced by the way that this was released. So, this was released in a more conventional sense here in the US that it’s once per week. And so the expectation or build up from the Sunday to the next Sunday about like, oh, what did this episode mean, what is going to happen in this next thing, who is the Yellow King, which is never really resolved, is Rust really behind these murders. All these theories could percolate which sort of revved up the excitement and probably certainly revved up the ratings.

And you like in some ways I think lessened the likelihood that most people would be happy with it. If this were a Netflix show where they put all eight episodes in one block that wouldn’t have happened.

**Craig:** You might be right. The show became a victim of its own success, to some extent, because people began to obsess in between episodes about what everything went. And it reminded me of Lost mania where the numbers showed up and people were finding references and going crazy. It was a very similar thing when people quickly seized on references to the book, The Yellow King, or The King in Yellow, I should say. And everybody just wanted to hyper drive about this, as if this show would somehow give us an insight into the cosmology of our universe that we weren’t capable of understanding ourselves, which is insane.

I actually think that the show did show us the Yellow King. Maybe I’m the only one, but in the end when our detectives are going up against the ultimate bad guy, Lawnmower Man, in that room — or near that room — there was this kind of a statue or diorama made of skeletons and wings and it looked like he had built himself a god. And it was yellow. The skulls were yellow. And I just thought the Yellow King is this creation of a mad man. And my guess is that he wasn’t the one that created. It was created a long time ago. That they had built an idol to worship.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s a totally reasonable expectation and I think it would have been easier for most people to come to that if they’d seen the whole thing without that build up from week, to week, to week. That build up from week to week to week is what made it a phenomenon. I think if it had come as a chunk like Netflix would have people would have still loved it and it would still be absolutely as good of a show, but I don’t think it would have become the phenomenon it became with that week, after week, after week.

**Craig:** You might be right. I mean, some of the conjecture out there was mind-boggling to me. Obviously simple, sort of Shyamalan twist style guesses that Rust Cohle is the killer. Or one writer I know kept insisting to me that they were the same person and that we would find out they’re the same person. Like that’s simple not possible.

**John:** The Fight Club? Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s not a Fight Club. They didn’t do it. And then there were deeper ones. People who — and I love the internet because people are like, “You’re all stupid. You don’t understand this, and this, and this, and see the stars on the beer cans and…and the girl with the dolls.” And, you know, again, anybody that was hoping for this show — and it’s funny, the show even comments on it that we have this need to find stories to give us meaning to the secrets and mysteries of the world. And the show kept telling us, don’t — you’re not going to find that in the bible. You’re not going to find it in books, you’re not going to find it in culture. We try and impose the order of narrative on the world and the world continues to defy it.

Now, was the ending brilliant? No, but I only think it wasn’t brilliant because it didn’t have enough episodes to be brilliant. You know, the ending of Breaking Bad is brilliant because no matter what anyone’s quibbles are about it, and few people had some, in the end it connected us to an emotion. And the emotion was earned between Walter White and the only thing he ever created that made him feel like he had been alive. This was his work of genius. This was his masterpiece, his imprint on the world, blue crystal meth. And he did it.

And that relationship was something that we needed to have five years invested in for us to give a damn about it. This show, eight hours of TV. And I thought very smartly they ended the show with these two men and finally showing the strongest of them, the one who never cried, the one who seemed to understand everything not understanding anything. I thought it did a fine job. It simply could not deliver what I think people suddenly wanted. I loved it.

**John:** I think that’s a fair perspective on it. It’s so hard not to play the “I wish they would have” with it where you sort of play the game like if they’d known what they actually had before they started shooting the whole thing, I think there’s a way they could have reminded us about the relationship between those two characters and their young versions. Basically I really missed the young versions in those last two episodes.

And that the tension between the past and the present was essentially all kind of forgotten. Or the times we tried to reference it, it was just two characters talking and not talking about especially interesting things. Whereas we used to be able to see it. And so I would have loved to have had some more moments — a reason to have some more moments with the younger versions of those characters to remind us of the journey that we went on with them. That we saw them from these younger selves to where they are now.

I feel like the realization that McConaughey’s character comes to at the end, which is basically like he thought he had the answers in the sense of there not being any answers and now he’s not even sure of that could have come home even more if I’d seen the younger version of him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The confident younger version of himself.

**Craig:** I agree. Once the show lost the past and situated itself entirely in the present it gained an immediacy that demanded, you know, it demanded more than those guys just talking. We didn’t mind watching them talk and drive around in the past because we understood that it was in the past and things were going to happen and the past doesn’t recall itself on our time schedule.

But once they were in the future I got very antsy with them in the car. Like shut up. Go. Do something. [laughs] You know?

**John:** Also it was the only time in the series where for an extended period of time we broke POV and stayed with the killer’s perspective. And while it was terrific, it wasn’t the best thing we’ve ever seen. And it wasn’t our two guys. And so I honestly felt like we did a better job — the show did a better job of that arriving at the farm with him in episode four or five, or whatever it was, that shootout worked better because we didn’t know what we were getting into. Versus just breaking all the POV and just going in there and seeing what Lawnmower Man’s life was like.

**Craig:** That said, it did give us I believe the greatest euphemism for weird, creepy incest ever. “I’m going to make flowers on you.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Wow. “Don’t you want to make flowers on me?” Oh, that’s just great. Yes I do. Yes I do.

**John:** They’re making flowers. So, anyway, that ends our talk about True Detective. It really was an amazing accomplishment and congratulations to everybody involved in making True Detective.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so my criticisms are only because it was just remarkably good and I feel so lucky to be able to have television like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have no criticisms. I take it as it is. I thank you for it as it was. And can’t wait for season two.

**John:** Cool.

Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is actually something a listener sent in and we had been talking about, you and I were playing Dungeon World, which was a great sort of non-traditional role-playing game, or a stripped down role-playing game. Someone wrote in — I forgot who wrote in — but someone wrote in to suggest this thing called Fiasco by Jason Morningstar.

And Fiasco is like a role-playing game but without a DM or GM. There’s no one leading it. It’s just the rules are all in the book about how you do it. But it’s a narrative storytelling game where three or four people get together and rolling dice and following these sort of rules and orders you create a story that’s kind of like a Coen Brothers movie, it’s all about like sort of small time capers gone bad. And so it can be in a small southern town or at a station in the Antarctic or in the Old West. But it’s all about sort of like things going wrong. And it looks like an incredibly fun game.

So, I’ve not actually played the game through with other people, but I’ve read through the book and sort of seen what I can do. And it’s a very ingenious idea and it makes really smart choices about how you set up a world — very applicable to our discussion today — and how you create complications for your characters. And so I really recommend it to anybody who is telling stories to sort of see how this is doing it. I mean, this is being done with dice and yet it creates some really interesting situations and conflicts.

It’s called Fiasco.

**Craig:** Maybe we should do it. Should we do it?

**John:** We should absolutely play it. So, my fantasy would be to get Kelly Marcel over here and play it some afternoon.

**Craig:** Kelly Marcel is the spirit of Fiasco.

**John:** Yes. She’d be fantastic.

**Craig:** “This is a total fiasco.”

**John:** “It’s a fiasco.”

**Craig:** “It’s a fiasco.”

**John:** Yeah, we could do something in London. It could involve — it could just be like a Guy Ritchie movie.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like Guy Ritchie movies. Hmm, all right.

Well, mine is far more mundane. I am in love with this new Mac OS email client called Airmail. Did you use Sparrow like I did?

**John:** So, I use Sparrow for all the questions that come in. I use it for certain accounts. So like all the ask@johnaugust accounts, I look at those in Sparrow. The rest of the stuff I use normal Mac Mail for.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mac Mail is fine. Mail.App is fine, except that lately it’s been annoying. It has certain behaviors I don’t like, one of which is occasionally it’s just glitch. I mean, there’s an acknowledged issue with receiving mail sometimes and sending mail. Sometimes you have to quit and restart to get it to do what you want. Also, I really don’t like that the delete key defaults to trashing emails as opposed to archiving it, which I think for IMAP it’s better to archive.

And so I used Sparrow for awhile, but then Sparrow got bought by Gmail or Google I guess technically, because I guess Google just wants to eat its guts and put it into its own system. But as such it just stopped getting developed and it’s never a good thing to use deprecated software. And then along comes this app called Airmail which is essentially they’ve taken Sparrow and just spiffed it up and started redeveloping it. And it looks great, it works great. Delete does in fact send mail to archive.

Setting up accounts was really easy and it’s gorgeous. It’s just well-designed. And lo and behold it’s available in the App Store for $2. What?!

**John:** That’s nuts.

**Craig:** $2. So, it’s kind of a no-brainer. They have a Twitter account at @airmailer, because I assume Airmail was taken, so they’re @airmailer. But the app is called Airmail. I love it.

**John:** Cool. Great. Well, that’s our show for this week. So, you can find the links to the things we talked about in our show notes which are at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also where you can find transcripts for all of our back episodes.

You can listen to all of the back episodes there or through our apps. So, we have a Scriptnotes app for iOS and for Android, so just check your applicable app store and find us there.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. Yay Stuart. And edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Blake Kuehn. And if you’d like to write us an outro we’re actually kind of running low on outros, so send it to us. So, you send it to ask@johnaugust.com. And we love links from SoundCloud which is great for us. Just make sure it’s publicly available and that we can download it and tag it as Scriptnotes.

But we’ve gotten some great ones even when I put up the call yesterday for it we’ve gotten some great new outros. So, thank you for that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig, he is @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Longer questions or things like what we read from the guy at the start of the show you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And that is it.

Craig, thank you so much for a good show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. [creepy voice] Hey, John, hey, thanks man.

**John:** You’re making me very uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Yeah, hey. How you doing? [laughs]

**John:** All right. Cut.

LINKS:

* Get tickets now for John’s [WGF panel](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/first-draft-feature/), From First Draft to Feature
* [Weekend Read](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/weekend-read/id502725173?mt=8) 1.0.2 is in the App Store now
* Slate on [Resurrection vs. The Returned](http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/03/07/resurrection_the_returned_and_they_came_back_what_s_the_difference_video.html)
* [True Detective](http://www.hbo.com/true-detective) on HBO
* [Fiasco](http://www.bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/) by Jason Morningstar
* [Airmail](http://airmailapp.com/) for OSX
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Blake Kuehn ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/so-many-questions).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 134 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, last Sunday I got to go to the Oscars. Actually, it’s two Sundays ago now, but I got to go to the Oscars.

**Craig:** You got to go. You got to go.

**John:** You got to go to the Oscars. If you get a chance to go to the Oscars you’ve gotta.

**Craig:** You got to.

**John:** And so I went and it was really fun. It’s actually surprisingly easy. You would think that it’s a big hullabaloo and it would be all sorts of complicated, but it’s actually not. You like drive your car up. They take your car. You walk in and you’re there. It was surprisingly easy and fun.

**Craig:** That does sound a lot easier than I thought. I mean, I remember stories of lines of limousines, but I would imagine a lot of that is for the red carpety people, right? So they all get like a backlog of red carpety people.

**John:** So, what you don’t see on broadcast is that there’s a red carpet, but there’s essentially two red carpets that are running parallel. So, you actually see the normal people like me going into the Oscars. We’re in the background. We’re also wearing tuxedos. But it’s actually slightly elevated from the rest of the red carpet, and so there’s sort of two tracks. And I was on that track that didn’t have to sort of stop at all these places. And so you’re able to sort of walk right in.

And you see people you know. It’s actually a good lovely time.

**Craig:** Did you see Adele Nazeem?

**John:** I did see Adele Nazeem and she was just fantastic. No, I didn’t see her before the show, but I did some other nice friendly folks who I’d seen before. I saw a friend who was in from New York. That was great. A couple years ago when I was there I accidentally stepped on Anna Kendrick’s dress as she was like walking down the post-red carpet going into the theater. And she was unhappy with me.

**Craig:** I would imagine.

**John:** But I think she’s actually a really nice person.

**Craig:** What did she do? Did she hit you? [laughs]

**John:** She did not hit me. But I think it was when she just first became like the star people recognized, I think it was right after Up in the Air probably, and she was there for that. But she was perfectly lovely.

**Craig:** I was really excited about that whole Adele Nazeem thing — which by the way John Travolta curiously mangled Idina Menzel’s name prior to her performance of Let it Go. And What is most fascinating to me about that is that there is no good explanation for what happened. [laughs] None. Barring a mini-stroke I cannot explain why he said what he said.

**John:** I know. I’m waiting for the giant conspiracy theories behind like why he meant to say it. The thing that I think is so remarkable about it, first off, I love Let it Go. I’m so happy that it won. I’m so happy for Jennifer Lee, our former Scriptnotes guest, for her Oscar for that.

What is kind of great and brilliant about that is we remember that and we don’t necessarily remember her performance of it so much because it wasn’t the best performance she was capable of doing of that song.

**Craig:** Well, she seemed a bit nervous.

**John:** Nervous, but I also think there was some sort of technical thing that we’re not quite clear on that I think she couldn’t either hear the orchestra quite right? She was rushing. They were never quite in the same place.

**Craig:** I will say this, though. For somebody that seemed nervous or was dealing with technical issues, and actually I didn’t even think they were rushing. I thought that they basically sped the song up on purpose because they’re trying to, I guess, fit in another three minutes of an interminable pizza delivery bit.

But, she still, boy, can she hit those notes. She has just an incredible voice. And afterwards I was thinking to myself, you know, I have a very small investment in this new musical If/Then that is opening in previews right now and it’s an Idina Menzel show. And I just thought, oh, this is good. This is going to help because now everyone is talking about Idina Menzel.

**John:** [laughs] It’s true.

**Craig:** Adele Nazeem.

**John:** I think that’s the conspiracy theory is that Travolta knew. He’s also an investor in If/Then, I bet. And he knew that he needed to do something to really ground the name of Idina Menzel and by butchering her name awful.

So, I think in many ways Idina Menzel should be incredibly thankful to John Travolta.

**Craig:** She is.

**John:** And I think thankfulness is something you really wanted to talk about with the Oscars this year, too.

**Craig:** The Oscars have always been a sore sport for screenwriters in part because we so frequently aren’t thanked. And yet, I don’t know, that’s the prosaic gripe of the screenwriter. But, you know, we watch the Oscars and typically the writer is thanked.

This year was the worst. The writers of Dallas Buyers Club, Borten and Wallack, were not thanks by McConaughey, nor were they thanked by Leto. Neither actor mentioned the writers that wrote the characters and the words, which is just startling to me. I don’t — and look, who knows, maybe they just didn’t get along. Maybe they didn’t like the writers. Maybe they didn’t like the writers. Maybe, who knows what happened. Who cares? It’s just simple professional gratitude to go ahead and if you’re going to thank everybody — now that — so those may have been sins of omission, who knows.

It’s a little depressing for us considering how important our job is to both the movie and the success of the people winning awards for those performances. But where it really got weird was this whole John Ridley/Steve McQueen business.

**John:** So, to clarify this, John Ridley did not thank Steve McQueen. Steve McQueen did not thank John Ridley. When John Ridley was going up to get his statuette Steve McQueen clapped for him and the camera was at this moment that has now become a GIF. Because it’s just the most fake clapping you’ve ever seen and it’s kind of amazingly brilliant.

I don’t think we really do know what the nature of the beef is between them. We don’t know quite what happened. But there was some miff. They didn’t get along and we do know that for a fact because we know of other friends who’ve been around them during awards season. It was not a happy collaboration.

**Craig:** No. There is some discussion that there was a dispute over a credit. A lot of people were sending me questions about this saying, “Well why didn’t the WGA handle this?” And some confusion about that related to the fact that 12 Years a Slave wasn’t eligible for WGA award. And here’s what we do know at least about that: John Ridley is a financial core non-member of the guild. That means that he essentially resigned his guild membership I believe during the last strike. And as a result he’s not eligible for WGA awards.

However, if as a financial core member — sorry, a financial core non-member you write a screenplay for a WGA signatory, in this case New Regency, you’re still required to write it under a WGA contract and the credits are still required to be handled by WGA arbitration. So, then the question is what is the dispute about? Didn’t the WGA just settle the credits? Well, we don’t know the details here but there are disputes that can happen prior to the WGA every getting anything on their desk.

For instance, and I’m not saying this is what happened, I’m just saying this is a possibility for any situation. A writer writes a screenplay, the director sits down, they have a big long discussion about it, and then they decide here’s some other stuff that should happen. And somebody writes that other stuff. Let’s say it’s the writer but maybe the director is sitting in the room and they’re talking about it and the writer is typing. At some point there may be a dispute over, well, whose name should be on the title page of that draft? And if the writer says, “Mine only, you didn’t write that,” and the director says, “Well, I kind of did,” that’s the kind of dispute that can occur. And either that dispute is handled before the WGA ever sees anything, or the WGA is asked to deal with that as part of a pre-arbitration investigation, or participating writer investigation is what it’s called, which may have happened in this case.

**John:** Yeah. The fact is we don’t know. And so there was a lot of speculation saying like, “Oh, so this was WGA arbitration. This is what happened.” And we don’t know that that actually occurred at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I would say in a general sense this kind of writer and director don’t get along so well and there is some hurt feelings on both sides about sort of what the nature of this relationship was. That’s actually not uncommon at all. I mean, fortunately it’s not super common, but it does happen. And you and I both know situations where this has happened.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The unique thing here is that this is an award season movie and these people had to be around each other all this time, even though they didn’t get along they both had to promote this movie they were both invested and proud in, even though they themselves weren’t best buds over this nature of the situation. So, the fact that they were able to keep it out of the press up through the Oscars is kind of good for them.

And in some ways I think that shows professionalism to not go blurting about their hurt feelings to the press all this time.

**Craig:** Well, it certainly shows that somebody was in charge.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Obviously the studio did a very good job of saying this is the minimum standard of good behavior we’re going to demand from the two of you. But I did hear some stories that were, if true, very sad. I mean, look, there’s no side to pick here. I don’t know either of those gentlemen. But it’s just sad stories about Ridley not being able to sit at the same table as everyone else.

I mean, I found it curious that Lupita Nyong’o in her acceptance speech also did not mention the screenwriter and yet mentioned the editor and the cinematographer. It seemed almost as if she had been instructed to not do so. It was ugly. Ugly stuff.

**John:** But maybe it’s also just proof that you can make something beautiful even if the process to get there wasn’t beautiful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I was really impressed by the movie. And I was actually really impressed by Lupita’s speech overall. And I thought it was actually incredibly savvy for an actress to thank the editor because —

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** Really all actors need to give a big basket of awesomeness to their editor because that is where the final performance is put together is in that editing room and a great editor can create a performance that’s spectacular that wasn’t necessarily there on the day. A bad editor can destroy a beautiful performance and so it was smart of her to thank that.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** But I was actually surprised that you weren’t sort of more incensed overall by the omission of the writer’s names because I came in here expecting a little bit more umbrage.

**Craig:** Oh, no, I have more. [laughs]

**John:** Oh, okay, sorry. I didn’t want to move past the umbrage.

**Craig:** I have more. Oh, for sure.

Look, I don’t want to focus it all on Jared and Matthew because, look, they did something that other actors do. I have just general umbrage for the world of speeches that don’t acknowledge the writer. I think everyone’s speech should thank the writer. And why? Because we are first. You cannot figure out how to costume the actors if the writer hasn’t created the character, including very often the setting, the time period, what they kind of dress like, what they look like. You can’t do anything — you can’t find a location, you can’t produce a set, you can’t light it, you can’t shoot it, you can’t act it, you can’t cut it, the sounds. Every single person’s job is touched by the writer, every single one. The writer should be the first person they’re all thanking.

And it makes me crazy, crazy that at the very least the people who are speaking the words that the writer wrote specifically aren’t thanking us, but frankly I think the writer should be thanked by everyone. Everyone. I can’t help but feel that the writers aren’t being thanked because our existence somehow makes people feel insecure about what they’ve accomplished. And I want to just give everyone a big hug and say stop that. Stop it.

I don’t feel diminished by the fact that somebody had to perform this character. I can’t do it. I can’t do that. I don’t even know what lights, I don’t know how the lights work. They talk about these lights and I go, “Oh my god, it’s freaking wizardry that they know that you’re supposed to put a filter in a thing and put a light there instead of here.” I don’t understand any of it. And I’m okay with that. I love and respect everything that people do to make a movie happen. Why is it that other people should feel insecure and diminished by what we do?

Is it because we’re first? Is it because the screenplay has primacy? Maybe so. I will say this: the process for an Oscar-winning movie ends at the Oscars. And at the end of that process people get up and they accept awards for their role in making a movie. But you know how the process begins? We can’t pay a dollar to make a movie until we get a good script in.

“Well, we’re not going to be able to get a director unless we get a good script. Well, we can’t get an actor unless we get a good script.” And what are the actors, and the directors, and the financiers all say, “Well, it’s all about the script.” They’ll just say that. They will say it casually at the beginning of the process, verbatim. It’s all about the script. They say it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world, because it is. And then at the end of the process the script is gone. The writer is gone. And that has to stop.

How was that?

**John:** There was some umbrage there. I would want to also just have a discussion about what you may say up at the podium. And I think there’s basically two tracks you can choose when you’re up there accepting an award. If you are going to talk about how grateful you are for this journey, you’re going to thank the people who gave you the award. You’re going to say something about what it means, or something about sort of an aspiring message. I think that’s an absolutely valid choice. And I think you can go down that route and then take your statue and start to walk the wrong way off the stage and then get redirected and head the right way off the stage, like everyone does. and that’s absolutely great and fine.

But I think the moment you mention any filmmaker by name, anybody who was a part of making this film by name, you mention the director, you mention the producers, you mention this. That’s when you have to mention the writer. So, you can go two different paths and I think they’re both okay — mentioning none of the actual creative team. Fine. Mentioning the creative team. Great. But if you’re going to mention the creative team you have to include the writer, otherwise you’re just a dick and don’t be a dick.

**Craig:** Well said. And with much greater calm.

**John:** [laughs] That’s my function in this podcast. That’s my role.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Today, Craig, our theme is going to be answering questions because we have so many questions stacked up. But this should be old hat for you because just last week or a week before you did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, for people who don’t know Reddit is a thing. And it’s a thing that people can go and ask questions and discuss things and one of the main things people do on Reddit, or things commonly done on Reddit is a Ask Me Anything. Or a person says, “I am a ______.” I am screenwriter. I am a plumber. I am a whatever. Ask me anything.

And you did this, Craig. Tell me all about it because I’ve never done one and I’ve been fascinated sort of how it worked and why you did it and tell me everything.

**Craig:** Well, I’m trying to remember why I did it. I went on Reddit for some reason. You probably remember why because I remember you emailed me like, “Uh-oh, I hear you’re on Reddit.”

**John:** I should clarify like when I said, “Uh-oh, you’re on Reddit,” because I actually read the Reddit screenwriting thread and it said like, “John August doesn’t like Reddit.” And so to clarify this it’s not that I don’t like Reddit at all. I was worried for your safety and sanity of engaging with the many-headed thing that is Reddit.

So, I like Reddit. I think Reddit is a good thing. I was just nervous about you and the combination of Reddit could have been dangerous.

**Craig:** Sure. I think you’re just generally nervous about me and the combination of anything and for good reason. And I like that you’re looking out for me. It was very big brotherly of you. But everybody seemed very nice. And one of the moderators said, “Look, we do these Ask Me Anything things,” and I had seen versions of those before in other places. And I thought, yeah sure, you know, I’d be happy to do that.

And so the way it works is they create a topic and they say, “Okay, Craig Mazin is going to be doing an Ask Me Anything,” and we pick a time so everybody knows when it is. And they want you to be available for awhile and once you see the volume of questions you realize why. And then about 12 hours before your allotted time you make a post and start the thread, the official, and it follows a format.

“I am John August. I am a screenwriter. Ask me anything.” That’s roughly the format of the subject. And then people start lobbying questions in and the questions build up in a big reservoir. And then when your time arrives you start answering the questions.

**John:** So, here’s my question, to interrupt you already. So, when they say that the questions start to arrive, is it basically that they create those little threads and then you’re just popping into those threads and answering the questions? Or is there a separate pool that it happens in?

**Craig:** No, no. So, you start the thread. You begin the thread by saying, “I’m John August. I’m a screenwriter. Ask me anything.” And then people are replying to that threat. So everything is linear, I mean, it’s threaded if somebody replies to a reply, but basically everything follows from your topic header.

**John:** Great. So the branches of a tree.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And eventually you’re going to go in and put an answer underneath those little branches, right?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And the other thing that’s, it’s not, I don’t suppose it’s unique to Reddit, but they popularized it as a method of filtering things is that they have up-voting and down-voting. So, the thread can be up-voted, oh, I like this thread. Or, down-voted, this is stupid.

And similarly so can questions and so can answers. And so you can see in sort of real time what people’s interest is. And I really did intend to answer any question, ask me anything, even if people were going to be mean. And nobody was mean. I mean, there were hundreds of questions. I think it was something like 300 questions and everybody was really nice, both nice and respectful, but also they had great questions. They had really good questions. And so I did my best to answer as well as I could.

And the nice thing is that they keep those things there, archived, so you can always go and read it yourself on a later date.

**John:** And for anyone who wants to read it you can look for the link in our show notes.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Anybody who wants to see that, every episode, every podcast, has links and a whole episode title. This is episode 134. And so you’ll just go there and you’ll see a link to Craig’s thing. So, at johnaugust.com/podcast you’ll see the link to his Reddit there.

**Craig:** I think you should do it. It was very fun. It was very easy. And the moderators there are very pleasant, take good care of you.

**John:** Fantastic. I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, readers can also submit questions just to us in general and we get a lot of questions and the mailbag gets kind of full. These are questions that people have written into ask@johnaugust.com. These are the longer questions. Short questions you can always just Twitter to Craig or me. Craig is @clmazin. I’m @johnaugust.

But these are the longer questions. The first one is from Jim in Milwaukee who writes, “Why are there so many ‘Mystery Hollywood Insider’ accounts on Twitter, like MysteryCreative, MysteryStaffWriter, FilmCriticHulk. I’m sure there are more. They are frequently disgruntled with the way the Hollywood business is run and will go on micro tirades that span tweets and tweets. But aren’t these people in a position to make changes? And if so, why are they not publicly airing their grievances? Feedback and concerns are often encouraged by superiors in civilian jobs, but these anonymous accounts make it appear that Hollywood discourages even big time execs from rocking the boat.

“Do you know who these insiders are? Or are they really just aspiring writers/directors/millionaires that follow these kind of things?”

So, let’s talk about these mystery accounts, because Film Critic Hulk is one, but I’ve seen some of the other ones, too. And sometimes they definitely seem like they know what they’re talking about.

**Craig:** They do. I don’t think it’s yet justified to suggest that any of them are so called big time or in charge. I think that it’s unfair to suggest that these people are in a position to single-handedly change the business. Or, they may not even be in a position to significantly impact it at all. They may be working for other people who have that power.

I understand why if you were say the vice president of development at a studio, which sounds fancy but isn’t really that fancy. You’re working for a senior vice president who is working for the executive vice president who is working for the president who is working for the chairman, or chairperson. I can understand why you would want to influence the people that you worked for who could read your opinions anonymously, not tar you with them, but be affected by them. I get that.

I just think that unfortunately anonymity comes with a price and that is that you could just as easily say, yeah, or maybe I just don’t really know who you are and you could be an assistant and I kind of don’t care what you think.

**John:** I would approach it from a different perspective, because to me these kind of Twitter accounts, they’re not anonymous in the way that comments on like a Deadline Hollywood post are anonymous, because these are cultivated personalities that are consistent over time. So, even though you don’t know who the person is that person has a consistent world view because there’s a whole time line that you can look at, so you can see sort of what they’ve done over the course of their span. You get the sense that they’re one person. They’re one person talking.

It reminds me a little bit more of like the American Revolution pamphleteers, where even if they were writing under a pseudonym, they were representing one person’s perspective and one person’s voice. And so I think pseudonym versus anonymous is kind of an important distinction here because a lot of times these people are airing genuine grievances, but they’re the kind of grievances they would never be able to air as their own individual because either it would cost them their job or it would cost them their relationships that they rely on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, in some ways they are exposing the reality of what the situation is or sometimes their frustrations in what a situation is without it specifically having to reflect back on the people they’re immediately working with and for.

That said, anything you would read by one of these things you would have to take with a giant grain of salt because you don’t know specifically who those people are and you don’t know — they may be grinding an ax because of a very specific little thing and you don’t know what that reason is why. The same reason why when you read Nikki Finke you have to always remember that like she has these certain things that are just her fetishistic objects of fascination or hatred and that they may not have a basis in anyone else’s reality.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s fair to say, both for positive and negative, because you’re right, I know that there is mystery creative exec, and mystery exec, and mystery screenwriter. And I like reading a lot of the things that they have to say and I agree with a lot of the things they have to say. One of them I remember at one point went on a bit of a self-admittedly drunken rant and some of that stuff seemed a little funky.

I guess the only caution I would give is that it’s just one person’s opinion. The act of publishing an opinion, just as our act of recording our opinion doesn’t make it any more right than one that is unpublished or unspoken. It just means it’s broadcast. So, evaluate everything for what it is. There is no particular authority behind it beyond how compelling their comments are.

**John:** Yeah, I would agree. On the scale of authority from completely anonymous commenter, to someone who is regularly using their own name to write articles, it falls into this sort of middle ground. And all you have to base this on should be what they’ve written before, how much you believe what they’ve written before. And that could be your only basis for sort of how much you’re believing in what they’re writing right at that moment.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Next question comes from Mosa Dawas in Milton Keynes, England. I hope it’s Milton Keynes.

**Craig:** It is Milton Keynes. Yes.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Milton Keynes, I think that was where the parking lot or as they would say in Milton Keynes — car park — I think it was a Milton Keynes car park in which the bones of Richard III were —

**John:** Oh yeah, it’s all coming back to me now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Milton Keynes.

**John:** Nice. Mosa writes, “Is it okay to use the N-word in a screenplay if you’re white? Django Unchained is almost imploding because of the use of that word and so are the people watching it. So, can I use the N-word? Do I have some kind of writer’s right? Am I protected by something that allows writers to use racial words in a movie?

“I’m not a racist. I’ve never used that term before. And I’ve always been afraid to include it in a screenplay when a white guy says it, or even if a black guy says it.”

**Craig:** Well, the word I think we need to discuss first before we get to the N-word is imploding.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because I’m not sure that that word means what you think it means. I like Django Unchained. It’s not my favorite Quentin Tarantino movie, but then again that’s like saying it’s not my favorite slice of pizza. I still love everything Quentin does. And it’s a word that is part and parcel with that time and that subject matter.

I didn’t notice the audience imploding. [laughs] Nor did I notice the box office imploding or anything like that. This is my opinion on this issue and perhaps John you feel differently. We’re writing characters. We’re not writing autobiographies. We are creating characters and some characters and some characters are terrible people. Some characters are racist. Some characters are sexist. Some characters are homophobic and they’re going to use these words because that’s what those people do. And if you’re going to write truthfully then you will put those words in.

I don’t think that a writer should be censored if the character is racist. It will seem false to an audience. If Quentin Tarantino had made a movie about slavery and no one had used the common parlance of the day, I think everybody would have just felt that it had been — that it was no longer true to its time. The whole point of these things is verisimilitude. So, I think that we are not only entitled but required to create true characters.

**John:** So, I’m going to raise the more difficult situation and something I’ve actually encountered is what happens when you’re not writing a racist white character who is using that hateful incendiary word, but you’re writing African American characters who would use that term amongst themselves in ways that is natural and common?

**Craig:** You have to do it. Because it’s true.

**John:** So, I will say that in my own personal experience, and this is just my own experience and I don’t know if this is true for all white screenwriters in my world: In times where I have used, not even that word, but used vernacular that is specific to a black audience, basically things that a black person can say that a white person wouldn’t say, or that would feel really uncomfortable for a white person to say, I have been called to the mat for using it. I’ve been called to the mat by an executive for using it.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And essentially been told that I can’t say that. And the exact same African American writer could use those terms. And that’s only once or twice, but it has happened. And it may be partly because of the nature of the films I’ve been writing versus the films they’ve been working on where it’s become a factor. But it was jarring for me the first time I encountered that. And I’ll see if I can find — if I find a link to it I’ll put it in the notes. But at some point an African American writer either did a magazine article or a blog post where he talked about sort of being the guy brought in to write this dialogue essentially.

**Craig:** That’s disgusting.

**John:** Which is crazy.

**Craig:** It’s disgusting for everyone involved.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean —

**John:** I would be curious to hear from people that have experience with it beyond staff of a television show. If you have a show that has a variety of characters of different backgrounds, how does it work in that situation where — do certain writers get — are allowed to write certain words for certain characters or not? I’d be curious how that all works together, too.

**Craig:** I think that one factor that needs to be acknowledged is rating. Because to me we know that language is considered part — when they’re determining ratings. And hard core racial epithets are like F-bombs. They are shocking words and they’re words that we try and limit when we’re showing movies to children, wider audiences, family audiences, etc.

So, it obviously isn’t okay, I mean, if you’re writing — for instance Ride Along is in theaters now. It’s PG-13. There’s no N-word in that movie. There is no, I simply don’t believe that if Ice Cube’s character wouldn’t use the N-word casually the way that black people will use — not all black people but some black people — will use with each other. It would be truer, of course, for that circumstance I would imagine. And I guess. I’m saying that mostly because I’m really familiar with his music and he’s never held back.

If it’s PG-13 you just don’t do it the way that, look, Ice Cube’s character would also drop the F-bomb a lot. That’s what regular workaday cops probably do. But if it’s an R movie and those characters would say these things then you just have to write it truly. And if somebody said that to me I would just say, “Look, that’s insane.” Should we now hire a man to come through and rewrite women when they write male characters? This is nuts.

The whole point of writing is that we can become other people and do this. We’re not sanctioning behavior. We’re not sanctioning murder. Ted Tally is not a murderer. Ted Tally doesn’t eat livers with fava beans and Chianti.

**John:** That you know.

**Craig:** That I know of. [laughs] So, I just find it grotesque Hollywood stupidity. I understand that it makes people nervous. That’s the point. The one bit of advice I would give to a writer who was going to use an epithet that does not describe him or herself or their own identity in any way is to be very deliberate and to be aware and to be ready to make a defense. This is not language to be used casually.

**John:** Sounds good.

Next question comes from Melissa in North Carolina who asks, “If you woke up with your credits and contacts gone and were armed with only a first-timer comedy script, where would you head?” Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** Black List.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It seems like I would, because it wasn’t available when I was starting out.

**John:** So you’re talking about Blacklist.com (blcklst.com) which is the site where you can put up your own scripts and have them read and covered.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** I think that’s an option. I think the Austin and Nicholl Fellowships, those are certainly good choices, too. But I worry that sometimes on the podcast we’re focusing so much on like well these are the three things you should do when really it’s the general — yes, you have this script, but of course your script is actually your career. And I think in some ways you need to find other people who are writing comedies, you need to find funny people, you need to do all those other next steps which are not just about this one script.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And it’s where we sort of talk about sort of you kind of need to where they make movies which tends to be Los Angeles mostly, or New York, and find people who are making movies and kind of get into that world because this one script… — Let’s say I wrote this one comedy script. I would need to find people to read it who could read it and like it and tell me if it was any good. And I’m more likely to find those people in a film town than in a non-film town.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s correct. And the other option to consider is making a website to promote your screenplay. Make a little trailer if you feel like doing something like that. Or, if you’re not comfortable with that or don’t think that you have the ability to make one that would be impressive, put up the first ten pages. Give people a teaser. Give them an appetizer.

I have never, from the beginning, I’ve never been concerned whatsoever about getting ripped off or my ideas stolen or da-da-da.

In fact, you’re far less likely to get ripped off, I would imagine, if you’ve publicized the first ten pages.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And who knows. If they get passed around, if people really like them, you might grab onto something. It’s easier now than it was when you and I began.

**John:** I agree. One other choice you could do is send those first three pages to me and Craig.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right.

**John:** The kind of thing we do, the little Three Page Challenge, you need to show your work. And so many episodes we do the Three Page Challenge. If you’re new to the podcast and haven’t heard it, just go to johnaugust.com/threepage — all spelled out — and there’s rules for sort of how you can send those in. We look at the first three pages and maybe you’ll find out that we think it’s great. And if it’s great then maybe other people will pay attention to that, too.

**Craig:** I think for sure we can say very safely that there are decision makers and buyers who listen to our podcast.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I hear when I go on meetings people — I’m always surprised. “Oh, I listen to your podcast.” If you and I both go, “Oh my god, this is awesome,” and we want to read the rest of it, people will notice.

**John:** Yeah. I would say if you and I both really like something, people who actually do this for a living will probably at least click through and read those three pages and form their own opinion. And whether they choose to pursue that writer down the road, who knows? But it has happened and I think it will keep happening.

But I will say the people who have actually started working based on having sent through those three pages, I don’t think it was just us. It was because their scripts were really good. And so by the time we covered them on the podcast and looked at their three pages, other people had already noticed like, “Oh, this is really good.”

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re not the ones who are going to convince everybody that your script is good. If your script is good, if not us, somebody else — somebody will notice.

**John:** Our next question comes from Joe Sikora. This is actually a question that has been sitting in the box for a really long time and I just kept forgetting to add it. So, Joe, I’m finally getting to your question. “In your Not Just Dialogue podcast you an Craig touched briefly on the concept of ‘lens selection’ in screenwriting. I’d love to hear you guys talk further about this topic. Effective ways for narrowing/expanding the focus, how to write close to a character. Other aspects of that concept. I’ve never heard it phrased that way before and I’d love to hear you guys elaborate.”

So, I think we kind of made it up in the moment.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** But really what it comes down to is point of view and perspective. And there’s point of view and perspective that applies to a whole piece, so when we talk about True Detective, that limits its POV, its perspective to its two main heroes. And there are no scenes that don’t involve one of the two heroes with rare exceptions. The same thing with Groundhog Day. When we talked about Groundhog Day, that movie has very strict POV.

But you can also talk about it, and I think this lens selection idea is really talking about POV within a scene, within a moment. And sort of like how close are you to the character, how much are you seeing the world through his or her eyes versus a big wide lens that’s showing you everything around them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think of this more in terms of sizes. I mean, lenses can be used — you can shoot somebody close up in a long lens. You can shoot somebody close up in a wide lens. So, lens is kind of the wrong choice. It’s really about size.

And I think in terms of wide, and close, and extremely close. And we know that when we shoot these scenes we’re shooting all of it at all sizes. That’s coverage. And editorially choices will be made. The reason that I call it out is because sometimes you want to make it clear that somebody is in the same frame as something. It’s very useful in comedy. You want to know that you’re not cutting between something that’s happening and then its effect. You want to watch it all unfold.

It’s similarly important to indicate your intention of performance. If you get very close to an actor. If you say “Close on Jim. He looks up, smiles, and says, ‘I’m going to kill you.'” We don’t have to write in “softly.” The reader will do the work for us and realize that this is a moment of quiet intensity because we’re that close. Nobody is yelling really in close up. It just doesn’t work. It’s harsh.

So, there are choices like that you make to just kind of indicate — you don’t do it frequently. I only do it when I feel like the size is something that’s happening that is indicating a change in the moment, in the scene, etc.

**John:** I would say the scene description itself often gives you good sense, without saying “close on” or “wide shot,” it gives you a sense of what’s important. And so if a scene starts that’s really talking about the world, the background, we’re seeing sort of like sprawling streets filled with throngs of humanity, India at its busiest, and then we spot a guy cutting his way through. We immediately understand that, okay, that could be the important person, but we’re trying to set up this whole world. And the background is really important.

Versus if you just come into something — come into a conversation that’s two people talking at a table and you don’t really set up the rest of the people around them. We as a reader get the understanding that like no one is going to sort of walk up into this scene and disrupt it. It’s about these two people and we don’t have to be paying attention to the rest of the restaurant around them.

So, I think that’s a kind of lens selection, too. The second description is more that we’re tight on a long lens. It’s about the close intimate connection between these two people. And what Craig said about we have a sense even what those voices would be like. They’re not having to like shout over everybody else at a bar.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is a quiet moment about these people and those words and it’s not about the scene around them.

**Craig:** Yeah. Similarly sometimes you want to show that somebody is having an internal process and you want to be close to them for their internal process. You can’t see somebody’s gears turning in a wide shot. So, there’s a whole party going on, “Close on Tina. She’s listening and we get the sense that she — when we see tears welling up in her eyes she wipes them away and shakes it off.” That’s something where you need — I want to direct the reader so that they understand that I’m with her now. Everybody else is kind of going away.

The other area where sizes helps we’ve talked about in our transition episode. If we’re calling out a size change to make a contrast as we bridge the tail of one scene and the head of another it can be useful there.

**John:** A thing I just wrote today involves a very big wide crowd scene that it’s important to establish that everyone is there, but it’s a very slow push-in on one person who sort of stays behind as people are filing out. And there’s a secondary voiceover that’s actually part of another scene. It was important to set it up and to write it that way, because it makes it really clear that everything around this was important, but ultimately it’s going to come down to this one person and this is the one person you need to focus on.

That’s an example really of this kind of lens selection choice, that what seems like a big wide thing is ultimately going to come down to one person.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Next up we have John in Portland who writes, “What’s the deal with CONT’D in dialogue,” and continued to mean CONT’D. “It’s generally used to indicate the first line, a line of questions, a continuation in some sense of a character’s previous line. But I’m trying to figure out exactly how to use it. How much does context or a writer’s choice figure into it? For one thing, I tend to feel like dialogue lines are not in some meaningful sense connected any way than using CONT’D on the second line is misrepresenting a situation. I feel the same way when more than a couple of action lines separate the dialogue lines.

“Yet I noticed in the screenplay for Gravity, for example, Sandra Bullock’s character has long sequences where she’s the only person speaking that almost all of her lines in those sequences have CONT’D, even when the lines are separated by half a page of action.”

**Craig:** Right. Uh-huh.

**John:** Let’s talk about this. It’s actually an interesting conversation. When to use it and when not to use it.

**Craig:** Well, in the case of the screenplay that the questioner read, Gravity, the reason that you’re seeing that is because the writers, the Cuaróns, ticked the box in their software that says Automatically Add Character Continues to Dialogue. So it’s just automatically doing it.

And, you know, I’ve actually been thinking about this lately because I traditionally have always ticked that box and just done character CONT’D and lately I’ve just been wondering should I? I mean, why is it even there?

**John:** Yeah. I’ve kind of stopped doing it, too. So, let’s talk about the theory behind why the CONT’D exists at all. And there’s a good reason for it in the abstract. So, a lot of times you will have a character start speaking and then there’s a line of dialogue and then the character is going to say some more things. The CONT’D helps the reader and ultimately the actor and everybody else who has to participate understand that it’s really a continuous line of thought that that line of action is just in between.

Because sometimes what you’d otherwise find is that the actor doesn’t realize they have the next line. You’re used to, if there are two characters in a scene, they are ping-ponging back and forth and so that continue is an extra little flag to say like, “No, no, not, the same person is going to keep speaking.” That’s the instinct behind it.

And so the automatic character continues is one of those, well, it seems like a helpful thing. We’re going to do that there and then you’ll never have to type CONT’D again. But sometimes, and I think Gravity might be a great example of this, that it just feels kind of odd that a whole bunch of stuff has happened and suddenly we’re pretending it’s a continuation of a previous thought.

**Craig:** It’s particularly odd if you have one character doing all the talking, or one character delivering a long speech. I think I might just stop doing it. I have to look and see how it feels on the page. The one thing you don’t want is to kind of signal — when you just see your character’s name and not CONT’D, it is a hint to the reader that this character is beginning a thought. But as you said, sometimes you don’t want them beginning a thought. You want a sense of continuity.

I don’t know. I have a feeling it has fallen out of favor.

**John:** I think it’s fallen a little bit out of favor, too. In Highland we don’t have automatic continues partly because it’s just not the nature of Fountain to do that, but partly also because I think it’s falling a little bit out of favor.

I should also say there’s another kind of CONT’D which I’m going to differentiate between here. There is when dialogue hits the bottom of a page and there’s more dialogue that’s going to bleed onto the next page. The convention is that you do a (MORE) at the bottom of that page and a CONT’D with a character name at the start of that page, which is just to indicate this is all one dialogue block that got split on a page break. That’s a special case and I’m sort of happy to have that one there. I think that’s useful.

**Craig:** I see. And that one I turn off.

**John:** See, the reason why I think that’s useful is that modern screenwriting software tends to break at the period in a very useful way so that a full sentence happens at the bottom of a page. But at the top of a page I like to know that it’s still the same thing. Because I’ve been in table reads where the actor got confused like, “Oh god, I’m still talking.”

**Craig:** Well, you’re right. And I think why I’m comfortable turning that off is because I really try and avoid that from happening. I really try and avoid an individual dialogue block being split over a page break.

**John:** And not to characterize all the things you write, but you’re probably not writing huge monologues that are going to —

**Craig:** Well, I am now. [laughs]

**John:** Now you are. Ha-ha!

**Craig:** There’s a crazy long one in this script that I’m doing now for Universal because it’s not a comedy. And generally in comedy you don’t — every now and then you get a nice long speech in comedy and it’s awesome, but yeah, in this one there is one long story that a guy tells. And I just, you know, I just worked it out so it didn’t split over the page.

**John:** Because obviously you always have the choice if you’re controlling your page breaks, you always have the choice of breaking at a certain point, throwing in that scene description line that will naturally break it the way you want to break or doing something else.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s what I do.

**John:** But I would say there’s not a right or wrong answer. I think feel free to turn off the CONT’Ds if it’s useful. I also find it a little bit strange sometimes where, especially with the automatic CONT’Ds, sometimes you have a character who is doing voiceover and they have speech in the same scene. And the voiceover counts as a CONT’D which it’s not supposed to, so sometimes it’s more confusing to have those CONT’Ds there.

**Craig:** Yes. That is very annoying. You know, this brings to mind something. You and I both listen to the podcast, what’s the name of the podcast that Marco and John and —

**John:** Oh, ATP, so Accidental Tech Podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. They did a review of our, at this point now, infamous podcast with Marc Madnick of Final Draft and one of the things, I think it was John Siracusa mentioned was that he thought that the current screenplay format was stupid. And at first I was like, ooh, no it’s not. But then I thought, well, actually it is. And it’s not totally stupid. It’s not as stupid as he thinks, I don’t think, but it is certainly not — I think it’s fair to say this: if you were to start fresh now in 2014 it wouldn’t be this way.

And then I thought you and I should figure out what the new screenplay format should be.

**John:** Well, Craig, this is where it gets a little bit awkward because many people listening will recognize that I’ve spent kind of ten years doing that to some degree.

**Craig:** No you haven’t. What you’ve done is you’ve created a method to do it that then gets funneled into the standard screenplay format.

**John:** Okay. So, you’re talking about a different way of reflecting what needs to happen in a movie and in no way is designed to be translated back into the old way of doing it. But just a new way of reflecting the goals of how the writing on the page is supposed to be put down so that it can be filmed.

**Craig:** That’s right. When we hand a screenplay to somebody I’m saying right now when you hand a screenplay to somebody they all look the same. And I’m saying we should come up with a new way so that when you hand a screenplay to somebody it looks totally different.

**John:** So, I think some of the fundamental questions would be what is dialogue. And is dialogue the kind of thing which should be reflected by a character’s name and then what they’re saying? Or should the character’s name be in a bracket out to the side of it reflecting all the things that they’re saying? How fancy do you want to go with this?

**Craig:** Well, I think the first thing is to really think about how screenplay pages are used. And what we’re missing in our toolbox as we’re creating them. What we have to kind of — I guess the challenge is to find those pressure points where what we want to do keeps bumping up against what we’re supposed to do in terms of formatting. Who knows, we may go through it and go, oh my god, this really was the best of both worlds. We had it, you know.

**John:** I’m sure it’s not the best of all words. What I will say, if we want to go in this rabbit hole I’m happy to dive down this rabbit hole.

**Craig:** Yeah, rabbit hole!

**John:** We’re diving. Because this is actually, we had a long conversation about this both online and around the lunch table today about essentially this kind of topic which is to some degree I think our — by attempting to maintain fidelity with pages, or even the concept of pages, we are fundamentally moving away from what our goals should be.

Because you don’t actually — movies don’t have pages. Movies have scenes. And so should the basic fundamental unit of screenwriting be a scene and not a page? And if it were, would we make some different choices? Well, we probably would. And that could actually in many ways could be good choices.

Because you think about other literary works, none of them are obsessed with pages in the way that we’re obsessed with pages. If you go to Stephen King and say like, “I read on page 205 of The Stand…”

**Craig:** Right. What version?

**John:** “205 doesn’t mean anything to me.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Hardcover. Paperback. Kindle.

**John:** It means nothing to him. The only reason it means something to us is because we’ve existed in a system where it was so important to be able to generate those pages and swap out those pages at will that we had to sort of firmly decide that this page was this page, was this page forever and for always, or put out a whole new script.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But, really the scene should be the fundamental, I would argue, the scene should be the fundamental breakdown of the screenplay because that’s ultimately the thing you are going to film. And so if it was a scene-based format a lot of things would change and could potentially change for the better.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll have to figure this out. Because I think that the brave new world of screenwriting, and I’ve talked about this with Kent Tessman who designs Fade In, codes Fade In. What I think needs to happen, what I already want now is a screenplay format that allows me to be audio/visual. I want to be able to have a slug line go away and instead just show something. I want to be able to show an image if I want. I want a song to be able to be clickable. I want stuff like that.

I want to be able to play around with the format and use what’s already available to us in almost every other format. You know, the web page is nothing like a newspaper page, at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And why are we — forget newspaper page. We’re stuck with a convention that comes from a Smith Corona.

**John:** Yes. And so right now we are still laboring under that construction and that construction has pages in the way that a web page doesn’t — isn’t even a page at all. A web page is just a continuous scroll, or if it is broken up it’s broken up into semantically meaningful divisions. And so there is a reason why you’re moving to the next section. And there’s probably a way to section screenplays in a much more clever way than we’re currently doing. And there are ways to link into other media in ways that it’s probably very, very useful.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** The challenge is that the web was designed for the web and screenplays were designed for paper. And there’s still going to be that transition period where they’re kind of in two worlds. And so our lunch time conversation was is there a way to figure out what a logical page is, an algorithmic page that is measured completely independently of fonts and pixels and margins, but is actually just like completely content-based?

**Craig:** Well, I’m with you on the idea of the scene. Because to me the screenplay should be divided into chapters. And the chapters are scenes. If you’re going to change a scene you pull that chapter out, you put the new one in. You’ve already solved the problem of where did all the pages go, because no scenes are ever that much longer than four or five pages anyway.

Similarly on the day you’re shooting a scene.

**John:** You are shooting a scene.

**Craig:** So, you don’t need to have, in fact, it’s annoying — our current format is annoying because when you get your sides, which is what we call the pages that we’re shooting on that particular day, the PAs will have to X out the stuff that’s on the first half of the first page, which is the tail end of the prior scene, and get rid of the stuff that’s on the last page, which was the tail end of that scene. It’s annoying.

Plus, you get these A and B pages, which are stupid, because you’re trying to keep the whole document a certain size. And instead you should just — everything should — forget page numbers. It should be chapters. It should be scenes. Similarly, a good new screenplay format would make it incredibly easy to immediately see this scene as outside, whether you are reading the second or third page of the scene or the first. EXT.blah-blah-blah. Come on, it’s so lame.

**John:** [laughs] Well, I would say the transitionary solution for that is essentially what we have always done with scheduling scripts is that if a scene is outside day it’s a certain color, and if a scene is another thing it’s a different color. But what I think I’m most excited about this idea of really a scene-based format is that if you make a change in a scene, just that scene has to change. And it can automatically update in everybody’s scripts and we don’t have to worry about sort of what page things were on. It’s just the new scene. It’s the scene we’re shooting right now.

**Craig:** Bingo. Exactly. And if you take a scene out, you take it out. And if you put one in, you put one in. And pages do not matter. The whole thing accordions up and down as you need it to do because you’re not locked in on this nonsense, you know? It should be based on scenes, not page numbers. Oh, what will Final Draft do then? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Oh, no! Another nail in the coffin.

Our final question today is from Eric who writes, “I find myself at a crossroads in my life right now and could really use your help and advice. While I did start a script last year, 2013 turned out to be a rough year. I lost months to a gout diagnosis followed by a kidney stone.”

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** “There were complications from surgery. They removed the stone, limiting my physical activity. To top it all off, a few weeks ago my 12-year relationship ended. As you can imagine, these are the kind of things that lead one to reevaluate their priorities and goals in one’s life. As for the relationship, we still care about each other but have things we need to work on in our own lives. For me, it’s about finishing my screenplay.

“To that end, I’ve gone to stay with a friend in Seattle and focus solely on that task. Assuming the script doesn’t suck I’m seriously considering moving to Los Angeles in the spring to pursue my writing career. I’m 35, which puts me at a difficult situation. I can’t afford to move out there without a job or take a bunch of unpaid internships in the hopes of moving up the chain quickly.

“I have a fair amount of experience that should help trying to get a job, but I’m not sure where to start looking. What is the best place to search for legitimate paid jobs in the realm of writer’s assistants, assistant editors, readers, etc? Should I stick with mainstream sites like LinkedIn, Monster, or Craigslist, or are there industry listings I should be trying to get access to?”

So, I left the whole question in here because just the interesting sort of like — the bad stuff happens kind of aspect of it all. And then sort of the more practical how do we do this next thing of trying to get a job. He’s a person who recognizes that if he comes to Los Angeles he’s going to need to find a job quickly.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if either one of us are employment placement experts in this circumstance. We don’t know what your needs are and we don’t know any of that. It is certainly a difficult task as a 35-year-old man or woman to get employment as an assistant because there are just teeming shores full of 20-somethings fresh out of college who also want those jobs and who fit that platonic ideal of what that assistant is going to be. And you can call it ageism or, I don’t know, but it’s just life.

I mean, that’s sort of the way it goes. It’s hard to compete. It’s very hard to compete with a 22-year-old if the nature of the job is to, A, be humble, and B, be tireless. We are not — as we grow older we grow more proud and less tireless, more tired. So, that’s a tough one.

**John:** The huge advantage to me I think of being in your early 20s is that your expectations are so low for what you actually need. You can eat the ramen five nights a week. You can sleep on the couch. You can work 20 hours a day. And you just can kind of do that because you’re 20 and that’s the place in life that you’re at.

When you’re 35 and you have a kidney stone that you’re recovering from, and gout, and a relationship that ended, your life is just in a very different place. And so you’re unlikely to find any success trying to do that path of what a 20-something year old would do. So, don’t do that path.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I would say you need to find, look for peers who have done kind of more what you’ve done. Bob Nelson who wrote Nebraska, he’s kind of what you are more like in the sense like this was his first movie made, but he was just working really hard and for a long time and wrote a bunch of scripts. And eventually wrote a script that people really liked a lot. And suddenly he’s maybe a movie with Alexander Payne.

That’s fantastic. That’s not saying like that’s going to magically going to happen to you, but I think he was very smart to build himself a life that could support both living and a writing career.

**Craig:** What was he doing to support himself?

**John:** I think he was working in like public television. I’m completely kind of making it up. I hosted a Q&A with him but we didn’t talk so much about sort of background, we just talked more about process. But he’s great and inspiring, I think, for any writer, but also for writers who are starting their career later.

So, I would say our general advice is always been on the podcast, well, you need to move to Los Angeles, you need to do all this stuff that people do. And I’d say that’s probably still true for Eric in his situation, but I would say it’s a little less true in the sense that most of those people we’re giving this advice to can just change everything in their lives and move to Los Angeles. And they’re going to start a life somewhere, so they should start it in Los Angeles.

You may have a life there that makes more sense. Or, if you’re coming here you may need to start a life that’s more about making a living than sort of starting your career.

**Craig:** Yeah, Eric, you have managed to support yourself I presume up until this point which means you have some skill that people pay money for. And one consideration is to move to Los Angeles and do that. There’s no easier job to get than the one that fits the job that you’ve been doing. And writing, don’t make the mistake of thinking that you’re going to be able to write three hours during your gig as an assistant. You won’t.

So, you’re in a situation where you have to write in the evening anyway, or write in the morning before you go to work. So, one thing to consider is just doing what you’re already doing and use the comfort that that gives you financially to support this other pursuit.

I will caution you about one thing psychologically. You’ve just been through a trauma. You’ve been through a physical trauma and you’ve been through an emotional trauma. And when we go through these traumas, and we all do sooner or later, we do tend to reevaluate our lives. That in and of itself isn’t always — how should I put it? The fact that it’s post traumatic doesn’t make it more valid. The observations you’re making about your life are not more valid because they’re being made in the wake of a crisis.

It’s just that you’re making them. You may not actually have the clearest point of view on yourself now. Your self-evaluation may be clearer and more productive when you’ve healed a little bit more. So, that’s just something to keep in mind. And the other thing to keep in mind is this. Writing a good screenplay will not solve your problems.

I just don’t want you to look at this screenplay as your savior. It will not save you from any of the issues that you carry around. And if you try and turn it into a signifier for personal success or growth, you’re going to struggle to write that screenplay. And you’re really going to struggle when people read it and just casually say, “I don’t really like this part,” which his part and parcel of writing. But for you it will be like, “Ooh, god, but this is the thing. This is why my life is better. And if it’s no good then my life is…”

You just don’t want to invest that level of personal identity and significance into the screenplay. A screenplay is not going to define you. All of the screenplays will not define you. Rather you are defined by other things and then that whole hopefully well integrated human being then goes and writes screenplays.

**John:** Agreed on all. So, Eric also sent a Three Page Challenge, and that was separate but part of this whole thing. And I didn’t want to do them together, because I didn’t want, for exactly what Craig said. I didn’t want your self-esteem and sort of your life choices and everything about the rest of this question to be hinging upon whether Craig and I thought your three pages were fantastic or not so good. Because I think our advice is still the right advice no matter how good your three pages are.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because your three pages may absolutely stink, and that doesn’t mean that the next three pages aren’t brilliant or that the next time you sit down and write a script is brilliant. Everybody — everybody has written a bad screenplay. Some people only write bad screenplays. [laughs] Some people write one bad one and then get really good. Some people write half and half.

**John:** Some people write one great screenplay and then they write a bunch of crap and it’s really frustrating.

**Craig:** That is a particularly sad circumstance, but how we feel isn’t telling us what we are, nor is it telling us how we’re going to feel. Similarly, how we’re writing today isn’t going to predict how we’re writing next year or three years later.

So, you just don’t want to put all of your emotional eggs in the basket of this document.

**John:** Absolutely. Craig, I think it’s time for us to do some One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, my One Cool Thing is actually a YouTube video or a series of YouTube videos you can look at where this guy, this musician took a bunch of old floppy drives and hard drive and built controllers for them so that they play music. So, you know essentially that whirring sound that a disk drive makes?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** He found the ones that were tuned a certain way and basically tuned them so they can play all sorts of different songs. And it’s kind of amazing. It’s one of those sort of — it’s not really found art, but it’s just taking the noises in the world around you and organizing them in a way that can actually make music. And I thought it was just fantastic. So, I will have a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** That’s cool. Does he do Let it Go?

**John:** I did not see a Let it Go. But I have a strong suspicion there will be a Let it Go.

**Craig:** One is on the way.

My One Cool Thing is One Cool Thing that I tweeted before all the people tweeted it to me. For once I was first. And it is Spritz.

So, and once I started reading about Spritz I started reading about a lot of similar applications that do similar things. The idea here is to make you read faster. Not to make you read faster, but to help you read faster.

So, Spritz is an interesting one. Their theory basically is that there’s a certain focal point of every word that’s general speaking slightly to the left of center of the word that allows us to read it fastest.

And then what they do is they take text and they flash it word by word but they keep moving the words around that point, so there’s like a red line. And the words will shift to the left and the right to accommodate their best focal point. And you just relax. You stare at the red line. The words start flashing by. And you’re able to read faster, so the theory goes, than you would be able to on your own. And there’s a bunch of these things out there. Spritz is the one that sort of caught everybody’s attention now.

And I’ve tried it out and it’s pretty remarkable. What I don’t know yet is can I read a book this way, or will I become epileptic and just kill myself. Out of curiosity I went to go test how fast I actually read normally. And there are little apps that let you do that. And I’m actually a pretty fast reader on my own. So, I don’t necessarily think like, wow, this is going to change my life. It may just annoy me. But, you should test and see how fast you read on your own. I feel like if you’re reading somewhat slowly on your own, which means nothing. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid. It’s just how your brain processes visual information, then this might actually help you a lot.

It’s pretty cool. Did you —

**John:** I tried it out. I tried it out about two weeks ago. I saw the link even before you tweeted it.

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** I had seen it. Because Ryan Nelson in our office, our director of digital things, like two years ago had said that he was looking at something that was very much like this and loved it. And there was a script I had him read which he actually funneled through it. And he had a pretty good experience with it.

I think there’s lots of issues for why screenplays maybe kind of exactly the wrong format for it.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** But I think the central difference between traditional reading, which is where your eyes are scanning across the page and this is like this is forcing you — it’s force-feeding you the words. And it’s just going to keep going though. And I was able to crank up to 500 words per minute and really follow it because it’s like it just beams directly into your brain in a way that’s really good and really useful for certain things, but certainly can’t be used for everything.

And some of the experience of reading a screenplay is you kind of have to slow down enough so that you’re actually hearing the characters talk and you’re actually hearing voices. And that may not be so great for this. It may not be great for a novel.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can’t read a screenplay with this because the nature of these things is that they don’t differentiate what the words indicate. They’re just giving you words. So, yes, prose you can stream it, but in a screenplay it would be almost impossible at speed to tell whether or not you’re reading action or dialogue.

**John:** Yeah. So, I’m not spilling any trade secrets to let you know that we’ve talked about doing this for Weekend Read. Because essentially Weekend Read we have taken a PDF and we’ve melted it down to just the pure text, so we have the real text that we can feed through there. So, we’ve done some experimentation and we would need to find a special way to sort of indicate this is the dialogue and this was the character who is saying all these words to you at this moment.

And it’s possible. I mean, certainly an iPhone is a great screen for it. An iPhone is just the right size for it in many ways. But I don’t know that’s going to necessarily be the right thing for us.

**Craig:** Well, and also, I really don’t want people speed reading my screenplay.

**John:** Well, that’s the thing. I would love a speed reader as long as no one speed reads anything I write.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a selfish kind of thing.

**Craig:** I mean, the truth is I would never use this for a novel. I would never use this for anything that is fictional work. I have no problem reading an article. That’s all I did. I tried reading some articles like this. And it was fast. But you know, I realize also then when I didn’t do that and then I just went over and just read the article, that the way I read is I kind of chunk groups of words together. I’m processing groups of words, not individual words. And that’s how I’m comfortable reading in groups of words.

And because I’m already reading pretty quickly I think, I don’t feel like this is something that’s that attractive to me. It’s impressive as a demonstration, but certainly for a screenplay, let’s put it this way: if you’ve paid somebody to write a screenplay, or you are deciding for yourself or for somebody else whether or not they should commit their career to helping make a movie of the screenplay, this would be insane to use.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because speed is not the point.

**John:** I think in many ways my fantasy use for this was in history class where I had such a hard time forcing myself to read through my history book, this might have been a way that I could have just like forced the information into my brain in a way that could have been useful.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I suppose then the question is if you have to force it in there, why bother —

**John:** Should you bother?

**Craig:** Yeah. Why bother at all? [laughs]

**John:** That’s why I dropped history. That’s why I dropped second semester of AP US History.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** That is our show for this week. So, if you have questions about things that Craig and I have talked about you can find us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. If you have a longer question for me or for Craig, the email address you want is ask@johnaugust.com.

Johnaugust.com is also where you will find the show notes for this episode and all the other episodes of Scriptnotes. If you are listening to this on an iPhone you can find the Scriptnotes App is actually in the App Store. That’s where you can listen to this episode or all the back episodes. You don’t have to use the app, but you’re welcome to use the app.

If you’re in iTunes, you can leave us a comment or a rating on the Scriptnotes page on iTunes. That’s always useful and helpful.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel who is our long time assistant and who is awesome. But this is the first episode that is edited by Matthew Chilelli who has written many of our best outros and is now taking over the editing duties for the show.

**Craig:** He’s really good. I like listening to his outros. They’re really good.

**John:** Yeah. He seems pretty clever that way.

**Craig:** Somebody should hire him.

**John:** Someone should. Oh, wait! We just did.

**Craig:** Hmm, how about that?

**John:** And I think that’s it. Craig, I will talk to you next week.

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

**John:** All right, bye.

LINKS:

* [If/Then](http://www.ifthenthemusical.com/), a new musical starring Idina Menzel
* The Wrap on [the rift between Steve McQueen and John Ridley](http://www.thewrap.com/oscars-rift-fight-john-ridley-steve-mcqueen-12-years-a-slave)
* [Craig’s AMA on Reddit](http://www.reddit.com/r/Screenwriting/comments/1z8m5z/im_craig_mazin_im_a_screenwriter_ama/)
* Accidental Tech Podcast [episode 54](http://atp.fm/episodes/54-goto-fail), in which they discuss our [Final Draft episode](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft), and their follow-up on [episode 55](http://atp.fm/episodes/55-dave-who-stinks)
* [Floppy Music (Tainted Love)](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nOMX3deeW6Q)
* [Spritz for speed-reading](http://www.spritzinc.com/#)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jakob Freudenthal

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/groundhog-day).

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

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

**John:** And in lieu of doing a normal Scriptnotes this week we want to talk about a director, we want to talk about a writer, an actor — a filmmaker who made a movie that was incredibly influential to both of us — and so this is going to be one of those episodes we’re going to just talk about one movie the whole time. And this is Craig’s idea, so Craig, what is your idea?

**Craig:** Well, we lost one of the greats. Harold Ramis passed away about a week ago. And not only did Harold Ramis direct and write, he was an actor, he did everything. And he was for anyone who writes comedy he was the giant of my generation.

**John:** I agree. He was incredibly influential. But let’s just talk through some of his credits as a writer and then going into him as a director. Caddyshack. Meatballs. Groundhog Day, which we’re going to talk about today. Multiplicity. He was the guy who sort of started off with this idea of like the slob comedy, the slobs against the —

**Craig:** Slobs versus snobs.

**John:** Yes. He was always the rebels against the institution kind of comedies. And then progressed into the movie we’re talking about Groundhog Day today, which is basically I think the template of what so many comedies tried to do afterwards. Without Groundhog Day you wouldn’t have a lot of these other movies.

**Craig:** No question. To give him his full due, in terms of his writing, and we are primarily a screenwriting podcast, Meatballs, Caddyshack, Stripes, Ghostbusters.

**John:** Ghostbusters.

**Craig:** Back to School. A lot of people don’t know that he wrote on that. And, of course, Groundhog Day. And also Analyze This and Analyze That. Just incredible. Just incredible. And then as a director he directed Caddyshack and he directed National Lampoon’s Vacation which was written by John Hughes, I believe. And he directed Groundhog Day.

And just a remarkable man who I think until Groundhog Day was underappreciated. I think that it’s easy maybe in the time of comedies — comedies are rarely properly appreciated in their time. It was easy to think that Ramis was part of this gang of guys that made slobs versus snobs comedies and they were broad and they were over the top and they were outrageous and drug-fueled. And all that is true.

But there was a humanity to all of those movies, particularly when he and Bill Murray collaborated that frankly is as rich and valuable as any of the humanity that you get from the great dramatic films. And Groundhog Day, I think, practically everyone would agree is the peak, is the peak of that.

**John:** With Groundhog Day you’re taking the idea of one of these sort of grownup man-child people who has just not progressed enough and giving them a chance to practice to the point where they actually grew up and become the man they really should be. And that feels like an important evolution in comedy overall, but certainly the kind of comedies that he was making and the kind of comedies that we aspire to make.

It also created, I think, a template for what a high concept comedy could be, which is basically you have a man in a predicament and these are all the things that are going to go wrong. He is uniquely the one person affected by it. And over the course of this adventure has to learn to change. And that idea of like here’s a man in a normal situation, goes into a crazy situation, and as a comedy we are going to arc until he gets through it.

So, without Groundhog Day we don’t have Liar Liar, we don’t have Multiplicity, we don’t have so many of these comedies. We don’t have a lot of those Adam Sandler comedies, too, where it’s one guy in an extraordinary, high concept comedic conceit.

**Craig:** Yeah. It certainly set the tone for what I would call the modern version of that. There’s a long comic tradition of this. In a sense It’s a Wonderful Life is a great prototype for this kind of movie, with a bit of a comedy and a bit of a mock-ish film as well. But a supernatural interruption of a normal guy’s life causes him to examine his life. Heaven Can Wait predates Groundhog Day.

There are many examples, but interestingly Groundhog Day is probably the best of all of them because everything is right in it. And when I say everything is right — you have to start initially with Danny Rubin’s idea. There are a ton of big supernatural life interruption ideas out there. And some of them are really interesting. For instance, what if you couldn’t tell a lie? What if you were god for the time being?

But there is something about you’re going to live this day over and over, which is an idea that had been explored a number of times in other areas, that lend itself so perfectly to this genre that said you put a million screenwriters in a room and you’re going to get 999,999 lesser scripts than Groundhog Day.

**John:** Well, that essential idea of you are repeating the same day again and again is kind of a Twilight Zone idea. And there are a lot of ways you could do this that is basically a thriller or is Memento. There’s a version of it that’s that.

So, to be able to see the comedic possibility in that and not just as a single joke but as an ongoing progression of growth for a character is really smart and is part of the reason why this movie works.

So, we should say, Groundhog Day is credit to Danny Rubin, story; screenplay by Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis. Directed by Harold Ramis.

And I think we should just start talking about the movie, because this is will be one of those things where we actually go through the whole thing and really talk through it. And as we kind of come upon these realizations about sort of how this movie is working, let’s talk through them.

Sound good?

**Craig:** Yeah. Sounds great.

**John:** So, this is a Columbia Pictures and I always love watching old Columbia Pictures because you sort of see the evolution of the logo. I love the evolution of all film logos.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know.

**John:** And there’s a piece which I’m going to link to on the evolution of the Warner Bros. logo that came out this week which is actually genius. You sort of see like how the shield came to be and how it stayed the shield for so long and then it became that weird WB for awhile. And then it got back to the shield.

This is a Columbia Pictures logo and it’s the pre-Annette Bening Columbia Pictures.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because there’s a moment in time where it was shifted to the woman, Columbia looked like Annette Bening. And this is still the old one.

We come up on blue skies. We see Bill Murray in front of the weather map. And so right from the very first frames we’re seeing who Bill Murray is in front of the blue sky weather map. Essentially he’s fake. He’s faking the weather. He’s having a good time with it. He’s really jovial on-camera. And then very quickly we’re going to see that he has a completely different off-screen persona and he doesn’t get along with anybody.

**Craig:** Right. He ends the telecast, his news broadcast, by announcing that he will — as he has done before — he’s going to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania because Groundhog Day is coming up. And his co-anchor says, “Oh, yeah, that will be your third year in a row?” And he looks at her, “Fourth. Fourth.” And we know, oh god, he doesn’t want to go at all.

Here’s what’s so fascinating about this section. This is what happens prior to Phil, his new producer Andie MacDowell, and his cameraman Larry, played by Chris Elliott. Here’s what happens before they hit the road to Punxsutawney. Phil does his weather broadcast. It’s quite funny. And it’s perfectly charming Bill Murray. He sits down next to the news anchor to finish the report and we get the sense that he’s actually not thrilled about what he has to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He has a very brief discussion in which he says he plans on staying in Punxsutawney for about three minutes, whatever the minimum is. He hates going there. He looks at his new producer, Rita, who he’s intrigued by but yet states very clearly, “Ain’t my kind of girl,” because she looks like a nice girl. And that’s it.

Then they’re on the road. Here’s what is so interesting to me about how this movie begins. We don’t see him alone at home. We don’t know how he lives. We don’t know anything about his life. We never learn if he was married, had a girlfriend, dog died, nothing. He just meets Rita. Her character is established as such: she’s giggling in front of the blue screen and that’s it. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We don’t know any backstory of his relationship with his cameraman Larry. There are a thousand studio notes that I can see piling up right now that Ramis and Rubin decided to not do. They just said, screw it, it’s Bill Murray. He’s a bit of a jerk. There’s Andie MacDowell. She’s very sweet and nice. Let’s go.

**John:** So, one of the first lines of dialogue in the movie is, “Somebody asked me today, Phil, if you could be anywhere today where would you want to be?” Which is, of course, establishing the entire premise of the movie we’re about to see. It doesn’t feel like it’s establishing, but it is.

On the podcast we’re often doing the Three Page Challenge and everything we’re talking about here — this was three pages. This was at most three pages.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’ve established all of this stuff about that he’s going to Punxsutawney, that they’re in Pittsburgh, he’s going to go to Punxsutawney. He doesn’t want to go to Punxsutawney. He’s been there way too many times. He doesn’t think this producer is anything worth noting. And that he’s a very different person on-screen than off-screen. It’s a tremendous amount of work packed in here.

What’s also fascinating to me is we started credits over a blue sky and a blue screen.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** And then we stopped, we took a pause off the credits, and then we’re going to go back into credits and we’re going to have a song called I’m Your Weatherman playing as we’re driving from Pittsburgh to Punxsutawney, which is again very classically sort of establishing your world. This is what it looks like. This is going from the big city to the small town. Because without it, without that driving sequence we would not have a sense of how small Punxsutawney is and that it really is a drive, because that drive is going to become an important factor later on in the film.

**Craig:** That’s right. We have, on page three or four we’ve already left our old comfortable life behind. We’ve begun our adventure. One interesting thing to note that we’ll come back to at the end is that the initial credits pre-weather sequence, pre-intro of Phil are time-lapse, it’s time-lapsed photography of clouds moving rapidly across the sky.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, we arrive in Punxsutawney and Phil is, as they’re approaching, Phil is doing his thing with Rita. He is being a jerk. And she’s picking up on the fact that he’s a bit of a jerk. What we’re learning about him and this is why — sadly, this was the last collaboration between Ramis and Murray. No one quite knows why. But, at this point you could see that they had evolved to an almost shorthand where Murray could essentially say, “Here’s what my character is. It’s this version of Bill Murray.” There’s a few of them. This is the arrogant jerk Bill Murray.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we get it pretty quickly that the thinks he’s god’s gift. He thinks he’s better than everybody. He thinks he’s too good for his surroundings. And, frankly, even thinks he’s too good for Rita.

They pull up in front of the Pennsylvania Hotel where he throws a little bit of a tantrum on not staying here, “I don’t want to stay here, it’s terrible.” And she surprisingly says, “Actually I booked you a nice little bed and breakfast. You’re not staying here. I’m staying here.”

And he’s quite pleased with that. And off he goes to his bed and breakfast which becomes — and we’ll have no idea at this point in the movie if we’ve never seen it before — becomes home base for the entire film.

**John:** Yes. So, we arrive in Punxsutawney at 6 minutes and 30 seconds into the film, establishing that hotel sequence and him going to the bed and breakfast. Establishing the borderline sexual harassment happening, like, “You could help me with my pelvic tilt,” that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That kind of banter between them. But then we are into the bed and breakfast. We don’t really even establish the bed and breakfast. He basically shows up there and then he’s waking up.

**Craig:** Very smartly we do not establish anything but that bedroom.

**John:** Yes. At 7 minutes and 35 seconds the clock flips over to 6am. Sonny and Cher sing I Got You Babe. There’s really annoying radio banter, which even the first time you hear it is really kind of annoying and cheesy, talking about the National Weather Service. There’s a big blizzard coming. And it feels like the way many movies would start, which is basically like the day has started. Now the day has started.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I just want to point out that there’s a great lesson for all of us, no matter what we’re writing, from the way that the morning wakeup occurs. Danny and Harold understood as a circumstance of the story they were telling that every aspect of this wakeup moment had to be very carefully considered because they were going to repeat it multiple times.

As such, you can tell that it’s been imbued with great care. The choice of the song. The choice of the clock, the style of clock, the way it flips over, the time itself. The banter between the radio guys, their words which later will actually be thematically interesting. All chosen very carefully.

And I just want to point out is the side advice for us all, for me, and for you, and everybody listening is the truth is all movies eventually become Groundhog Day. They will be watched over and over and over. You might as well try and imbue everything with that amount of care because they knew that you were going to have to watch that scene five, six, seven times within one move, but all scenes will be watched five, six, or seven times if you get what I’m saying.

**John:** Yes. Well, also I would say as a filmmaker you’re always kind of making Groundhog Day because you’re going to have to witness those scenes a thousand times, in filming them, in editing them, in watching them on the screen in front of an audience. So, another good reason to make sure all those scenes are excellent.

Now, what we wouldn’t know if we were going into this movie blind is that everything we’re seeing here has to work in the moment, the first time we’re seeing it, and has to have a special resonance when we’re seeing it the second time through.

So, we’re establishing the pattern of what the day is supposed to — the default pattern of what the day is going to be. And so unless Bill Murray changes something, this is exactly how the day will play out. So, he’s going to get dressed, he’s going to go downstairs, he’s going to have an interaction with the bed and breakfast house — the woman who runs the bed and breakfast.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, many movies would have established her the night before, here we didn’t. Here, the first time we’re seeing her is down there at the moment. It’s a chance to learn a little bit more about him, how he’s just kind of a jerk. He’s just on that edge of like you kind of fundamentally don’t like him.

**Craig:** Yeah. He asks her for an espresso. She doesn’t really know what that is. He mutters some stuff, “You probably couldn’t even spell it.”

There’s a sequence of things that happen here prior to him arriving. So, you know, he wakes up, he gets dressed while he’s listening to this idiotic banter. And then he —

**John:** Oh, the hallway. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And basically there are four things that happen that they chose very carefully that represent what it means for Bill Murray in the morning. I mean, we know there’s wakeup, but then they wanted four things that they — again, we are going to see over and over and over. He bumps into a very cheery man in the hallway. Then he has a discussion with Mrs. Lancaster, the innkeeper. And the discussion is mostly about nonsense except for the final bit where she asks him if he’s going to be checking out. Then as he’s walking he encounters two people — one, a homeless man that he does not acknowledge, and then Ned Ryerson.

Ned Ryerson, who is a former high school classmate that Phil does recognize, he is incredibly annoying. And at the end of that encounter he steps in a slushy puddle.

Those four things are wonderful. They’re brilliant because they are mundane. Even the Ned Ryerson bit is sort of mundane. But they are picked so carefully and cleverly because they are repeatable in interesting ways.

And if I may just add one other thing. In comedy we’re always talking about pushing against something. That you have a character that has to have something in the world to push against. And what Harold and Danny did so well was immediately start constructing things around Bill Murray that he must push against. They in and of themselves are not that wacky, or funny, or interesting. It’s him pushing against them that’s interesting.

**John:** And they’re all actually distinct. So, the guy in the hallway is like so cheery, he’s kind of alarming. The woman downstairs, Mrs. Lancaster, she’s perfectly nice and she’s trying to make just normal chitchat and he sort of blows her off. Ned Ryerson is an important distinction because he’s really annoying and obnoxious. And so it creates some sympathy for Bill Murray’s character from us because he’s just really annoying. And we’ve all been in that situation with like the overbearing guy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in a weird way it puts us back on Bill Murray’s side.

The one thing I will say as people are hopefully going to rewatch the movie, one strange little discontinuity I noticed is after all that conversation about the coffee, and so Bill Murray does make himself a coffee, you see him take the coffee and the coffee does just sort of disappear at a certain point.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there’s another scene later where he pours himself coffee and then just doesn’t even take it. But we can imagine he tossed it or something.

**John:** It happens. So, even in like great films you will see little things like that, because they’re just so trivial that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t affect your enjoyment.

**Craig:** I really do think that the people that run these gaffes squad websites need to have their head checks for some sort of personality disorder.

**John:** Then we arrive at Gobbler’s Knob which you know they just had a delightful time every time they got to say Gobbler’s Knob.

**Craig:** I know. And then but also big points for not making dick jokes about Gobbler’s Knob.

**John:** No, they just stick it there. And there’s a fair number of sort of background jokes. Like when they first pull into town you see Heidi 2 on the billboard. And then we actually go there. I always thought it was just a background joke, but then you actually —

**Craig:** Yeah. They go to the movie.

**John:** They revisit it. So, this becomes a crucial set. And you can imagine they were probably there, god, they probably spent two weeks, or many days, at sort of the Punxsutawney Phil thing, which is basically this is Bill Murray meeting up with his producer and his cameraman to film the Groundhog Day, the same thing that’s supposed to be happening every year. And so we have the whole crowd. It’s establishing the details and making sure the details work for the first time and can work every time thereafter.

And so that every time you’re coming back to one of these moments it has to be distinct.

**Craig:** That’s exactly correct. They create — one thing that’s fun about this movie, touching on what you said earlier, is that it invites the audience into an experience that we as filmmakers have all the time which is reliving these moments over and over and over and over. We begin to soak in these environments, which is why when you make a movie you obsess over choosing the right locations and the right places. And when you can’t it’s so disruptive.

A side story. Marc Forster made a movie and I can’t remember which one it was, but there was a scene that takes place in a laundromat. And he found the perfect laundromat and then they couldn’t shoot there because of a permit issue. So, they had to settle for a different laundromat and he just can’t watch the movie. [laughs] It’s like that — it just makes him crazy because of the laundromat thing.

Well, so you can imagine how these guys felt when they were picking these locations. Not only would they have to relive them over and over but so would the audience. It’s perfect. Right? And what’s perfect about it is that Ramis did something that is rarely done well and that is a small town movie. It’s very hard to create a small town that doesn’t feel fake, that doesn’t feel corny. You get a good small town vibe from Back to the Future. You get a good small town vibe from this.

And one thing that this nails is that town center, Gobbler’s Knob, a place where all these people can meet and come together. And they’re having fun. They’re happy. Rita, Andie MacDowell’s character, is happy. She’s excited. She’s been up — he just gets there two seconds before he’s supposed to do his report. She’s been there for awhile, talking to people, hearing their stories. These people are fun.

She’s representing already something about herself in this town that is so foreign to him. And all he wants to do is finish this thing and get out of there. And they pull the big rat out, as he keeps calling it, pulls the groundhog out and unfortunately the groundhog has seen his shadow and there will be six more weeks of winter. Ah-ha.

**John:** Now, I found watching this again — I found the whole bit with the groundhog himself a little bit strange, because they didn’t try to do the whole shadow thing at all. It was really the groundhog was whispering some secret to the mayor.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That felt like they were sort of bending the rules, at least of my expectation about what that moment is supposed to be, not having ever really watched it. But that whole like groundhog speaking his secret language thing felt kind of odd to me. It didn’t hurt my enjoyment of the movie, but it was just not what I was expecting that to be.

**Craig:** I don’t know how the actual Groundhog Day ceremony goes, but here’s why if it does go that way that’s why they did it. If it doesn’t go that way, here’s why I think they made a great choice to do it the way they did it.

The worst thing in high concept supernatural comedies which is a genre, body switch movies, for instance — the worst thing is the moment of magic. It always makes me feel goofy. I love Liar Liar. I just never like the fact that the kid makes a wish and blows out the candles and then there’s a woosh and a tinkling.

This movie, they avoided that completely. And I think if an actual groundhog had wandered out of his hole and seen his shadow. It would have almost —

**John:** It would have felt like that was the magic.

**Craig:** Yeah, like the groundhog did it. You know? [laughs] And this movie is brilliant in its refusal to explain or acknowledge why this phenomenon occurs. And that helped.

**John:** In a general sense, why is the day repeating? It’s because he hasn’t grown up. He hasn’t learned his lesson. There’s no other mystical reason behind it. It’s because he needs to stay in that moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. What we get the sense of eventually is that Bill Murray simply is living wrong. And the movie — oh, and this movie has been dissected on the philosophical basis a billion times. The movie is about what it means to live well, what is the purpose of life given that it is essentially repetitious in nature and absurd and then eventually ends. How should one live best?

And while we’re at this point in the movie we’re not aware that that’s where the movie is taking us, we sure know one thing: Phil is not living well. And so whatever it is — whatever reason it happens — I often say that in high concept supernatural comedies we’re basically doing our version of a bible story where god reaches down and changes something and forces you to deal with it. And in dealing with it you become stronger and better.

**John:** Yeah. So, we do the live report, the filmed report from Gobbler’s Knob. They’re back in the van. They’re driving. At 15 minutes and 26 seconds the snow starts falling. The road is closed ahead. We’ve established that Bill Murray had predicted that there would not be snow and that therefore they would be able to get back, but he was wrong. He has an argument with a cop on the highway saying, “I make the weather.”

**Craig:** Not a great day player.

**John:** Not a great day player.

There’s a moment where all the long distance phone lines are down. There’s a payphone, which of course people would now say, “What’s a payphone? What are long distance lines?”

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Essentially he’s trying to call home. This was a moment where I really had — I guess it’s important to establish overall that the long distance lines are down so that you don’t believe he could just reach out to some other person or some other friend outside of this bubble universe that they’re going to create.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It felt a little stutter-steppy to me, but essentially I ended up going with it. And so essentially ultimately our little town is going to be sort of cut off from the rest of Pennsylvania because of this storm, even though it’s not that bad of a snowstorm in our little town itself.

**Craig:** It is essential logic stuff. And, of course, we live in a time now that’s very frustrating for high concept writers because technology has blown through so many of the convenient barriers we can put in place. But it’s important to know exactly this, that the town has become an island. When he relives every day he will be reliving every day in one spot. One spot he cannot get out of. There will be no one else to talk to. There will be no Skype. There will be no plane that could come in.

He will live this day, in this place, without fail because, of course, he has agency, nobody else does. Everybody else is going through their day almost like figures in a cuckoo clock that come out every hour, you know. They’re going through the motions of existence. He’s not. He can do whatever he wants.

So, I thought it was necessary to do that. And the nice thing is it feels stutter-steppy in the moment because it feels like unnecessary who cares. Great, the highway is closed, and oh great, the long distance lines are down. Later on — we’ll never stop to think why doesn’t he do this or why doesn’t he do that?

**John:** Yeah. What they’re essentially doing is taking away the question.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They’re basically making it so that you’re not asking the question. And they’re partly — they’re taking the curse off of it with a joke, which is he’s on the operator saying, “I have to get through. There’s got to be a line. Can you get me on — an emergency line. I’m a celebrity. I’m a celebrity in an emergency,” and like the two things should trump all things.

So, it feels like it’s meant to be just a comedic beat when it’s essentially trying to take away some logic questions down the road.

**Craig:** There’s good craft there. They’re covering up their exposition with a joke. And they’re also helping it out a little bit by building it into his character and using it to show how desperate he is to not be in this place that he will now be in forever.

**John:** Yes. At 18 minutes and 25 seconds time loops. And the clock radio hits the morning and we are back at I Got You Babe.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The same radio DJs. The same moment. And so this is classic — this is the definition of a high concept/supernatural comedy moment where you realize that the universe has changed. And he is living the same day again and has to figure out what the rules of this new universe are.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in these moments, these are the fun ones. So, when you’re writing these things you know that there’s a — you get this period of disorientation which is fun to show. And you want to see your character reacting like a proper human that is shocked and concerned and freaked out. And letting them experience that with the audience, so they in the audience can experience disorientation.

The hard part is going to come after when you have to now navigate the treacherous sea of episodicism. And we’ll get to that in a minute. But right here they do it pitch perfectly. They do the fun part pitch perfectly. His response is to be concerned, puzzled, and to reach out for help, in a panicked sort of way. Nobody believes him. And then he does — Ramis appears in the movie at this point. He does exactly what a normal human should do. He goes to see a doctor who gives him X-rays. There is no tumor, there’s nothing.

He goes to see a shrink who is of no help at all. And then it happens, again.

**John:** Craig, you skipped ahead.

**Craig:** Oh, I did?

**John:** Actually, you skipped a whole loop. So, the first loop is actually just, “Did you ever have dÈj‡ vu, Mrs. Lancaster?” “I’d say the chance of departure is 80 percent.” Rita gives him a good hard slap on the face. He tries on the phone again, talking to the operator, who basically must have said like you can try it again tomorrow. And he’s saying, “What if there is no tomorrow?”

And we really just kind of jump cut through a lot of the day. At the very end of this day as he’s going to bed he breaks the pencil and sticks it inside of the clock radio.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is great.

**John:** And then he wakes up the next morning and the pencil is intact, which is again establishing the rules that like he cannot alter this universe at all. Everything he does will be undone again which is essentially the futility of existence manifest. There’s nothing he can do. He’s truly stepped in there.

So, this is where we get to the Harold Ramis and to the other folks. The first new set we see is at 27 minutes in, which is the Tip Top Cafe, which his another recurring set. We meet the waitress. He sort of tells Rita that he’s not going back. He basically for the first time tells Rita what’s going on.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we go see the doctor, Harold Ramis. X-rays. We see the psychiatrist who is really a couple’s counselor, so they’re playing some jokes here. And his going to the bowling alley with the morons. So, the morons who we established at the diner.

**Craig:** Right, okay. So, great, you’re right. I did rearrange some of the stuff. And I love — the pencil thing is really important because it’s the prove it for himself. They’re answering these questions that I think we don’t even know these are questions we ask, but, well, how does he know he’s not dreaming? How does he know this is real? How does he know…?

And apparently they shot a scene where Phil goes kind of nuts in his hotel room and trashes the whole thing and then passes out, falls asleep, and he wakes up in the morning, the hotel room is fine. And Ramis opted to delete that and just go for something far more elegant, which is the breaking of the pencil. It’s just creepier when he sees it.

But, no, you’re right. So, then he has his desperate attempts to seek help from a friend, medical attention, psychiatric attention. It doesn’t work. And that’s how he ends up in that bowling alley and that’s when he comes to realize something very important to himself and his condition. That is that there are no consequences.

**John:** Absolutely. So, and he gets to that no consequences thing by reflecting back like on this one perfect day he had where he was on the beach with two beautiful women and he’s like why couldn’t I have had that day over and over and over again.

**Craig:** “That was a good day.”

**John:** That was a good day. Why can’t I have that day? And, of course, the lesson will be like you need to make today that day.

But through these morons that he’s driving home, these drunk guys he’s driving home, he’s recognizing there are no consequences. And that feeds us into or first of really only two set pieces, things where you’re actually spending some money and driving some cars around.

So, this is where he’s risking life and limb. He’s smashing mailboxes. He’s driving on the railroad tracks. I’m not going to live by their rules anymore.

**Craig:** Right. And so this is the first big character choice that I think Rubin and Ramis have to make since the beginning of the movie. The beginning of the movie they make a character choice that I’m going to have a guy who is as Rita will explain a wretch. He’s a self-absorbed arrogant wretch who’s living life wrong. And then we put him in this position and he does not behave in any way other than selfishly as this condition arises.

In this moment they have a choice. What’s the first — once you get over the denial that it’s happening and you accept this is happening, what is your first response as a character to it? The first emotional response? And the first emotional response they give this guy is, “Oh good, I can just be — I can indulge my worst aspects with impunity. It is the ultimate childish reaction to what we will understand later is a gift.

So, rather than change he gets worse. And this is where the next sequence — well, describe the next sequence and the things that he does and I’ll point a little interesting something out.

**John:** So, at the end of this first driving sequence, the cops arrest him, he gets put in jail, and he has a real question of like, huh, will this change how everything works? And, of course, he wakes up the next morning and there’s no jail and like no policemen came looking for him.

Then he feels sort of strangely happy. He feels too empowered. And so he punches Ned in the face. He lets someone else step in the puddle. He gorges on foods at the restaurant in front of Rita. Like I don’t worry about anything anymore.

**Craig:** Right. And she delivers that wonderful poem, The Wretch.

**John:** Yes. Which felt, you know, I love this movie — every time she had to do poetry felt forced to me.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I love Andie MacDowell in this movie. Even though her character is fairly thinly drawn in the sense that it is a compendium of facts that Phil learns. What I love about her is that we’re actually learning about her through Phil. So, our experience of her seems odd because it’s the way his experience is. He’s collecting facts and information, trivia, and attempting to build a human being out of it.

But eventually we come to get this vibe from her. It’s hard to describe. I thought she was great and curiously great, you know, because it wasn’t like a bravura performance by any stretch, but she’s —

**John:** Well, I would say this and Sex, Lies, and Videotape are the two films where we really think of her as being, you know, that’s Andie MacDowell. That’s who you sort of want in your movie.

But I would agree that he’s collecting a compendium of facts because partly it’s because we are limited to POV to Bill Murray’s character, to Phil. There are no scenes in the whole film that don’t have him, except for one, which I’ll point out later on.

But he is driving, so we’re only seeing his point of view. I could imagine though a version in which Phil was watching her being awesome with somebody else, or sort of learning about her by not just facts but seeing her interact with other people which could be meaningful. That’s just an alternate version of how he could come to actually realize how incredible she is.

**Craig:** Right. I liked the poetry thing, also, because she pulls out this very remarkable thing. She recites a poem. And he barely notices. He barely notices that she spat out a poem whole, which most people would stop and go, “Whoa. How did you do that? How do you know about that poetry? Oh, I see you studied…”

Nothing. Not interested. Too busy shoving his face full of cake. And in this sequence, what I’ll call his impunity sequence, note that Phil using his powers — so punches out Ned Ryerson. He uses his powers to collect information about a woman named Nancy that he then has sex with because he’s leveraging that information as if he knows her.

**John:** It’s the first time he’s using the power of the loop to do it. So, he’s asking her questions like, “Hey, didn’t we go to high school together,” blah, blah, blah, and gathering up all this information knowing that he’ll remember it the next time. He can use that to start the conversation the next loop.

**Craig:** Exactly. He uses his awareness, his practiced awareness of the rhythms of the town that keep repeating over and over to steal a massive bag of money from the back of an armored truck. He shoves his face full of food because he’ll never have to worry about gaining a pound.

He does whatever he wants. And note that when we talk about lust, greed, gluttony, sloth, the dude is making his way through the list of deadly sins.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** He is absolutely wallowing in decadence, true biblical decadence because he’s untouchable. And he then makes the inevitable and critical mistake and also best thing which is to now extend that power to a wooing of her. If the child can have everything he wants, surely he can get the thing he wants the most. And that’s her.

**John:** That’s Rita. So, to his credit he does say — we’re 44 minutes in — he does ask Rita about herself. For the first time he actually asks her about herself. And he seems kind of interested in sort of what it is that she’s after. But then they have a conversation at the bar and this is the first time in the movie just jump cuts a scene from day to day to day, staying in the same set, same moment.

So, this is where she orders a drink and he takes note of what the drink is. And the next time he orders the same drink and keeps building. And so you sort of see the escalation of how he is — being able to anticipate every one of her moves and therefore become fascinating to her.

**Craig:** That’s right. And what we’re watching is a man in pursuit of something cheating. He’s cheating. It’s pure and simple. He’s asking her questions and getting answers that he users later on to test. He will order a drink that’s the same drink that she gets because he knows because he’s done it a bunch of times. But then he makes a toast to the wrong thing. He buys her the wrong food. He fixes that. He is cheating because he’s not interested in being honest. He doesn’t love her, he just wants her. So, he is collecting whatever he can to manipulate her all for the purpose of possessing her.

**John:** He’s putting on a performance with the goal of getting her to bed.

**Craig:** And here’s what’s so fascinating, and this is why I think this movie resonates beyond its concept. He’s willing to get slapped in the face 50, 60 times, it doesn’t matter, because he’s moving inexorably towards having her. But, you can see what’s tripping him up. Why does he fail?

Well, he gets her into his room. And he tells her, “I love you.” And when he says that we can think, well, it’s just another lie he’s telling that backfires terribly because from her point of view what do you mean you love me, we’ve known each other for a couple of days. Of course, he’s known her now for months and months.

So, is he lying? No. You get the feeling that when that comes out it’s like there’s this good guy in him that said something, that violates the careful practiced seduction, the cheating seduction of this woman. That’s the thing that trips him up and he can’t recover. There is no way from that point forward through his multiple efforts — no way for him to get past the slap in the face.

And now we arrive at maybe what I think people think of as the defining section of this film and tonally why this film is special.

**John:** Let’s pause there for one second because I know what you’re getting to, but I want to point out one very clever thing they do right here. So, this perfect date that happens, and so we sort of see him building into it and then we come to them at Gobbler’s Knob, at night, they’re building a snowman, the kids are throwing snowballs. He throws back in just the right ways. They collapse in the snow. They start dancing to But You Don’t Know Me, again, a perfect song choice for that.

And she says, “This has been a perfect day. You couldn’t plan a day like this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is, of course, telling. But when she says know and he’s trying to get her to say and she’s like, “I could never love a man like you,” we see him try the same date again and fail.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we see him racing through — he’s manic.

**Craig:** Oh, desperate. Desperate.

**John:** And he’s desperate. And so we see him doing the same things, but doing them worse.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And it all falling apart. And that leads us into this montage. And then we get to our moment.

**Craig:** And that’s a great, I’m glad you brought that up, because the second snowball fight shows that he’s lost.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, Phil is a guy that has been, even though life has taken him out of control by making him relive the same day, day after day, very predictably he has managed to control that also. So, now he is using the repetition to his advantage to sleep with women, and to steal money, and to punch people out, and eat what he wants. And he’s attempting to control his relationship with Rita as well to get to the place where he can finally sleep with her.

And now that he’s said I love you to her and he’s in love with her without even realizing he’s in love with her, he’s lost — his ability to rig the game is slipping away from him. He is desperate. He’s a man who realizes there’s a chance that this will never happen. There’s a chance that I will live here now forever and never get you. And what was seemingly heaven has turned to hell.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And this, of course, parallels our regular lives. We don’t live the same day over and over and yet we sort of do. And there comes a point where we’re confronted with the absurdity of it.

Religion aside, I think everybody sooner or later has a moment where they ask, “Is there a point to this?” And the answer that comes to them is no. And if I’m trapped here and will always be trapped is there any possible way to make this stop? And the only answer is —

**John:** Yes, he literally says, “And I have to stop it.” He becomes convinced at this moment that the groundhog is the cause of all this.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s — by the way, brilliant choice. Because what you don’t want to have this character do is say have some long, tragic, talky, mopey scene where he buys a gun and a bullet and writes a sad note and then tries to kill himself. No, no, no, he thinks there’s utility yet. The way out is for me and this groundhog to go.

And so he kidnaps the groundhog. There’s a big car chase. And Rita and Larry watch as Phil makes the choice to drive off the cliff, end his life, and the groundhog’s life, Woodchuck, in the hope that either he will wake up and it will be tomorrow, or at least this torture will be over.

**John:** Yes. And of course he’s wrong.

**Craig:** He is. And we see his dead body.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s the one moment we break perspective.

**Craig:** Ah, there’s another one.

**John:** Oh, okay. So, he dies in that crash and we go through a montage where he tries different ways to kill himself. We see the toaster suicide. We see the truck. We see him jumping off the building. And so I thought the first break of POV was — the only break in the POV was Andie MacDowell and Larry the cameraman, they pull back the sheet and we see his dead body on the slab.

**Craig:** No, there is another time. And it’s meaningful.

**John:** It’s meaningful.

**Craig:** But, yes, it’s proving it to the audience, he’s dead. The guy died.

**John:** Truly dead.

**Craig:** Ooh, and then “So put your little hand in mine” and he’s awake again. And now, now this movie goes dark.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s wonderfully dark. And this is where a great comic actor can deliver dramatic commentary about the human condition better than the best dramatic actor, because it’s safe with them. I don’t want — if I watch Meryl Streep try and kill herself I either want her to kill herself or I want her to survive and then I just want to cry a lot and watch her recover slowly. But Bill Murray can try and kill himself and somehow it’s still funny.

It’s funny in the darkest, sickest way because, you know, death —

**John:** It’s when a clown dies.

**Craig:** When a clown dies. Death is funny. Not ha-ha funny, but absurd funny. That’s what comedy is. It’s tying into how stupid life is, and wonderful. And so his first death is hysterical. I mean, again, Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis were so smart the way they escalated things.

First it’s a “we’re going to have a goal by killing myself and the groundhog.” Next, when he realizes, oh well, that didn’t work, he gets the toaster oven from poor Mrs. Lancaster and heads up into the bathtub and electrocutes himself. It’s funny. The way he does it is funny — just ka-tunk, ka-tunk on the thing and drops. That doesn’t work.

Next, he steps out in front of a truck and he does this thing that I have been obsessed with.

**John:** The hands up and surrender, that one?

**Craig:** That he puts his hands up and then he just makes a little talkie talkie motion with his hands. Like he’s beeping along with the truck horn. I’m like he’s so disassociated from existence at that point. It’s like he’s a ghost at this point. And he gets run over. And, no, he’s awake again. And he throws himself off a building. And it doesn’t work.

And now what do you do?

**John:** Well, you’re 1 hour and 4 minutes into the movie. And what does he do? He has a little revelation. He says to Rita in the diner, “I am a god. I’m not the God, I’m a god.”

**Craig:** Which again it’s just so great. [laughs] That is such a Harold — I don’t know if that was in Danny’s original script. That feels like such a Ramis line to me. It feels almost like a Ghostbusters line.

**John:** Yeah. Absolutely. Where it’s like I’m saying something huge and then I’m going to slightly diminish it, but in the way I’m slightly diminishing kind of —

**Craig:** “I’m not the God, but I’m a god.” [laughs]

**John:** So, he tells Rita about what’s going on. And it’s not the first time he’s actually told Rita that he’s reliving the same day. He did that before, but he tells Rita stuff about everyone in the diner, including stuff that we don’t know, which I think is really important. He’s pushing beyond the boundaries of just our experience with the movie to tell about this young couple, and she’s having second thoughts. And he seems sincere at the same time, too.

He actually seems to care a little bit more than we’ve ever seen him before.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so she says, “Okay, well as a science project how about I just stay with you the whole day.” And he agrees. And it becomes their first day date that is not manufactured in a way, where he’s actually being honest with her about what’s going on.

**Craig:** That’s right. There’s this moment in Shogun. I love that novel. Have you ever read Shogun?

**John:** I’ve never read Shogun.

**Craig:** Ah, it’s great. I mean, it’s trashy but it’s wonderful. And there’s this very cool moment where the feudal Japanese tradition of ritual suicide and the hero, who is a Dutchman that’s now living in Japan to become a Samurai himself, experiences something where he realizes he has to stop an injustice. And if the people who are in charge won’t stop the injustice then he’s going to kill himself because he cannot live with the dishonor.

And he doesn’t. He takes the knife out and he doesn’t just think about and then they say, okay, no, no, no. He starts to plunge the knife in and his hand is stopped by another Samurai. And they say, “Okay, you’ve proven your point. We’ll not do it.” But he meant to kill himself. And he stands up and he’s a bit drunk and they explain this happens. When this sort of thing happens, when you decide to let go of life and all of your burdens and commit to a release, an honest release, that you are essentially reborn.

And in his failure, his multiple failures to kill himself, what we see now with him in the dinner is he’s not eating tons of stuff. And he’s not stealing money anymore. He’s just honestly talking to her without wanting anything else other than another human to feel what he’s feeling.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He’s not yet at the point where he can empathize with the people around him. But he is at the point where he can be honest with her. And she picks up, out of all the things he knows about her — that she doesn’t like fudge, she likes dark chocolate but not white chocolate — that’s the thing that she picks up on immediately is that he’s being honest.

**John:** Yeah. She spends the day with him. We see them in bed. She’s not — nothing sexual — just lying on shoulder, trying to stay awake before this damn thing happens. They do a funny joke —

**Craig:** Cards in the hat.

**John:** The cards in the hat, but also midnight. Basically she’s convinced it has to happen at midnight. “It’s 12:01, we broke the curse.” It’s like, no, that’s not actually how it works. And we as the audience have never really been quite clear what it is that resets it, but he wakes up every morning at 6am.

**Craig:** At 6am. And they’re also playing around with our expectation that, oh, this is it, he’s really nice to her and she’s hanging out with him. The movie will end.

**John:** Yeah. Not even close.

The other sort of crucial thing here is that he finally — he’s being honest in general to her, but he actually confesses feelings, he’s sort of in monologue form while she’s fallen asleep next to him about what it actually feels like to be in his situation. And it’s one of the few sort of moments of introspection that he really gives us, or at least says aloud.

**Craig:** What he’s doing here in this moment is loving in an actual way. He has come to understand there is no prize. There’s no prize for this. He’s starting to love her with no expectation of anything in return, even if she were to love him back. In that moment she won’t at 6am.

And to let yourself love somebody that you know will not love you back the next day, well, that’s something. And we’re watching it happen with him. And as he starts to allow himself to love somebody unconditionally, he becomes emboldened to start loving everyone unconditionally. And now his life begins to actually change.

**John:** Yes. So, some of the visible changes we see, he brings coffee to Gobbler’s Knob to the crew who is waiting there. It’s actually weirdly the worst acting moment of the movie I feel like. There’s this awkward scene with Chris Elliott that doesn’t quite work, but works textually in the sense that he’s actually making a change.

He wants to be a better person. And so he goes, he gets piano lessons. Again, they find a funny way to get the piano lessons happening there. He basically says like, “I will pay you $1,000 for a piano lesson so the kid can go out.”

**Craig:** And by the way, did you notice who the piano teacher was?

**John:** Who was the piano teacher?

**Craig:** She’s the woman in the very beginning, well not the very beginning, but the first time he wakes up at 6am, I guess the second day, so it’s the first repeated day and he wanders out and he doesn’t know where all the snow is. And he sees some of these people moving and he says to a woman, “Where is everyone going?” And she goes, “Gobbler’s Knob. It’s Groundhog Day.” That’s the piano teacher.

**John:** Oh, great. Honestly if you can find a day player who is good, why not use them twice?

**Craig:** And set them up and show them — you know, all these people that you’re just ignoring are going to become an important part of your life.

**John:** I agree. He’s nice to the stairwell guy. We see him continue to practice the piano. Obviously piano practice is a great metaphor for by working hard and continually trying to do better you will actually get better at this thing. We see him learning how to make ice sculptures. He gives Phil Ryerson a long uncomfortable hug.

**Craig:** Ned. Ned Ryerson.

**John:** Ned Ryerson. It’s a really great choice.

**Craig:** “I’ve missed you so much.” [laughs] I mean, Stephen Tobolowsky, talk about a guy that came in and just had to nail it, had to nail it, and nailed it. I mean, forever. He has a Groundhog Day forever himself which is being Ned Ryerson. Just incredible.

**John:** But within this sort of like change for the good montage there’s actually a really sort of dark thing slipped through which is the old man who seemed begging from the very start, he sort of takes a shine to him and sees him later on in that night and sort of just takes him to the hospital and the old man dies. And there’s nothing he can do to keep the old man from dying.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And recognizing even as a good person the futility of life, that there is an end to everything.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, in this section we see Phil starting to live the right way. He is living unconditionally. There is no reason to learn the piano. If you’re not learning it to have sex with a woman, what are you learning it for? To play for whom? Why?

Because. Because there’s a joy in learning it. There’s no reason to help an old man that will die every single time. Just as there’s no reason to help anybody because we’re all going to die. But he does because it feels good to try. It feels good to try to be good to the people around you even if their flat tire will be flat again tomorrow. That living and loving other people is its own reward.

**John:** Yes. So, ultimately this is pushing us up to a sequence which has been suggested from the very start that there’s this big dance, this big ball that happens at night, but we’ve never seen it. And so we will finally see it.

We arrive — oh, actually this is the other time when we change perspective.

**Craig:** Yes! Yes!

**John:** Ah! Craig Mazin, you’re ahead of me.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We actually arrive at this big event with Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott and with the piano playing. And we, of course, know that has to be Phil playing and of course it is Phil playing and he’s up on stage. And everyone there loves Phil because Phil is just an awesome guy who has done amazing things for everybody in this town today.

**Craig:** Right. So the moment, the second off POV moment is we’re in the bar and we’re with Chris Elliott and Nancy, the girl that Phil had seduced with his time traveling trick. And, you know, of course Chris Elliott is getting nowhere with her because he’s a goof. And then Andie MacDowell, Rita, shows up and says, “Hey, has anyone seen Phil?”

And Nancy says, “Oh, Phil Connors. I think he’s in there.” She’s apparently met him that day. And now what’s so great about the perspective shift is it allows us to see Phil through her eyes. We’ve been basically watching her through the male gaze the whole movie and now the movie flips around to an interesting female gaze, even the idea of the male charity auction.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a bachelor auction so that women get to bid on guys.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And she ends up bidding on him.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, that section is entirely — now for the first time in the movie we get to see Rita as a human being separate from Phil’s gaze looking at this man. And it’s so smart that they did this. Because what they’ve been holding back from us, what Danny and Harold held back from us, was her perspective of him. So, why would we ever believe she could love him if we’ve never seen him through her eyes? And now they give us that moment.

**John:** And he gets to say the lines, “I’m happy because I love you,” which is an important idea. So, basically this day is perfect not because he set it up as a perfect rouse for her. This wasn’t sort of done for her. It was done for himself and for everybody else. And that’s what sort of finally gets them connected.

**Craig:** Well, he’s living a day. So, his day, some of the things that happened on this day: he helps three old ladies whose car has a flat tire; he catches a boy that falls out of a tree; he saves the life of the town mayor, it seems, who is choking.

**John:** And lights the cigarette of the woman behind him.

**Craig:** I know! And lights the cigarette of the woman behind him! Exactly. And what’s wonderful is you start realize, oh my gosh, he does this every day. That now he lives every day, and he says to the kid — he catches this kid who falls out of the tree. He goes, “Thank me.” The kid doesn’t thank him. He runs up, “You never thank me. See you tomorrow.” And why is this a perfect day? Because it’s a day he’s okay living over and over. This is a day he’ll look forward to. If you live this way it’s all right that it happens again, and again, and again.

Just like marriage. If your marriage is good it’s okay that you wake up next to the same person day after day. It’s what you want. And we feel that now at last. And we also feel that he doesn’t care that it’s going to happen again. He’s not trying to get out of it anymore. He’s trying to stay in it, just as we should all.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a little bit of Candide to it all which is basically you can keep trying to do all these different things but ultimately you may want to just come back to tend your garden and live life delightfully in the smaller place rather than sort of keep trying to change everything around.

**Craig:** When you say Candide I immediately want to sing Glitter and by Gay.

**John:** Of course you do.

**Craig:** [sings] Glitter and Be Gay.

**John:** Because you’re a natural soprano, Craig Mazin.

It was also, of course because I’ve been mainstreaming True Detective this whole time, I kept coming back to the idea that True Detective is really a remake of Groundhog Day.

**Craig:** Time is a flat circle.

**John:** Time is a flat circle.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah.

**John:** And the POV shifts, honestly, because True Detective for this last episode has been lock step POV with our two guys. And some of the other women characters, especially the women, seem bizarre because of that, but it’s because of the locked perspective.

**Craig:** Yes. And this notion of your life repeating is ancient. I mean, in Nietzsche, I know you hate it when I talk about Nietzsche, but he wrote famously about the eternal occurrence, which I don’t think he meant in a cosmological fashion, but the idea that we just live over and over. Obviously this goes back to reincarnation and the idea of living over and over until you somehow find a spiritual — let’s not use the word perfection, because I think that that’s a trap — but a spiritual evolution.

And he experiences this with her and they make one last great, great choice that in this beautiful day where Rita watches as all these people come up to Phil and thank him honestly for saving their young marriage, and for saving their lives, and for helping them. At the end of this day they’re comfortably together in his room and he’s okay with the idea that if every day ends like this that he’s happy to live every day like that.

The morning comes and it’s a new morning. And they play a joke where they play the Sonny and Cher song and then they go, “Oh, god, we’re playing the same song.” And we go, oh my god, the spell is broken. And the last great choice is that Rita says, “You just fell asleep last night.” They didn’t have sex. He got nothing. He only gave. The whole day he just gave. And now he gets his reward to live. And where does he choose to live and with whom?

**John:** He says, “Let’s live here.” But before he says that he says, “Today is tomorrow.” Or, no, “Today is tomorrow” which is I think a great line.

**Craig:** Great line.

**John:** And then they ultimately decide, “Well let’s live here,” which I think is a reasonable — a really good choice for sort of the lesson that we’ve learned here. He now knows and loves all these people. And the movie decides to just — it cuts out. I mean, many movies would have gone a little bit longer and there’s arguments to be made for staying or not staying, but they don’t want you to sort of ask those next 15 questions. And so ending the movie is a really good way to sort of not ask those next 15 questions about, you know, well what does she want? Well, she wants to be a producer, she wants to do other things, she wants to do all this other stuff.

No. You can talk about that as you’re driving home.

**Craig:** Yeah. What are their jobs? Who knows?

The last image, I think, of the movie is clouds. But this time they are still. At peace. And from a structural point of view, let’s point out something. This is something we could talk about in another podcast, although I should bring it up now, I guess. And that’s this idea of predictability. We’re constantly, “Oh, it’s too predictable. Predictable.”

Hey, what’s more predictable than a movie where a guy lives every day over and over and then finally falls in love and gets a new day? So, predictable. We want that. This is good predictability. We’re desperate for it by the time it comes. We just want it to be earned. And we don’t mind the fact that it happens the way it’s supposed to happen because it’s structured so gorgeously.

**John:** The difference is execution. So, there’s expectation but there’s also execution. And it’s executed incredibly well. And it’s looking at exactly what are the moments that can happen and how to do the best possible versions of those moments. And everything was tuned and refined very carefully and very thoughtfully about how we’re going to get these moments to play just right.

You’re example of trashing the hotel room is a great example of that, because he’s going to do other destructive things later on. So, if you had done a giant destructive thing then it wouldn’t have really worked. It wouldn’t have had the same impact later on.

**Craig:** Right. Driving the car into the mailbox, which is his first act of destruction, wouldn’t have been so transgressive. I mean, it was more fun.

A lot of times, this is the basis of my talk at Austin that I did and I’m going to do it again at the Austin Film Festival. You could put this movie and Finding Nemo side by side. And notice some very clear thematic character structural similarities. A character has a philosophy. And they would prefer to remain precisely in the condition s they’re in, exercising that philosophy forever.

Something disrupts their ability to stay where they are. And all they’re trying to do is cling to that philosophy to get back. Where they end up is a place where they lose their faith in that philosophy. But they don’t yet have something new that they can properly believe in. And so they’re lost, and in this case throwing themselves off of buildings and in front of trucks.

And then they slowly begin to find this other way to live, but not until they act in a way that is selfless in accordance with that way to live. Same thing in Up by the way. Not until they act in a way that says I’m okay if I get nothing for living through this philosophy. In fact, I’m okay if I get hurt by living through this philosophy. It’s worth it.

Not until that point are they free to live happily ever after. Not until — Carl can say, “All right, you know what? I’m not going to. I’m here at the cliff and I can put this house down. But I’m not. Instead I’m going to go back and save the kid.” That’s not the end. The end is when he lets the house go. The end here isn’t when Bill Murray realizes, “Oh my gosh, I don’t have to be a jerk. I’m going to learn piano. I’m going to help people.”

The end is when he gets her in his bed and he’s okay to get nothing because he has no expectation that this has any purpose beyond just living well. So, it’s a great example of how to create structure around a character’s evolution from thinking one thing to the very polar opposite of that thing.

**John:** Agreed. It’s a terrific movie.

Craig, it’s been a pleasure talking it through with you.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I should say this was always on our list of like when we do the next one of these movies we should do Groundhog Day because Groundhog Day is a classic. It was a great choice to do it this week and celebrate an amazing movie and an amazing filmmaker who gave us a tremendous number of fantastic movies.

**Craig:** And I should add that I know a number of people that worked with Harold. I got to talk on the phone with Harold Ramis once, many years ago. It’s funny to say that having a 20-minute conversation with a person is one of the highlights of your life. But it’s one of the highlights of my life. Because he is… — I think Harold is an example of the best version of what I wish I could be. [laughs] You know?

And from the funny, broad, insane movies to the more thought-provoking ones, just a brilliant man. And by all accounts — certainly my own brief encounter with him, but by everyone else’s accounts — one of the nicest men in the business. And I hope that that’s a lesson that other people can take into heart as well that the nice guys often finish first.

So, rest in peace Harold Ramis. We’ll miss you.

**John:** Indeed. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Chicago Tribune’s [Harold Ramis obituary](http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2014-02-24/entertainment/chi-harold-ramis-dead-20140224_1_harold-ramis-chicago-actor-second-city)
* Ramis on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Ramis)
* Groundhog Day on [Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000SP1SH6/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groundhog_Day_(film))
* [How to Write Groundhog Day](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0072PEV6U/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Danny Rubin
* [Warner Bros. Logo Design Evolution](http://annyas.com/screenshots/warner-bros-logo/) compiled by Christian Annyas
* [Shogun](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0440178002/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by James Clavell
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jonas Bech