Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/wet-hot-american-podcast).

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

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

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

Today, we are going to be talking about abortion, religion, politics and which way is the proper way to hang toilet paper on the roll. Is it over the top or against the wall like a heathen? Craig, where do you stand on the toilet paper issue?

**Craig:** Before we get into that, I have to express my doubt that anybody would want to pick up any of our opinions and put them on a blog somewhere or on Time.com. That’s the nice thing about our podcast — no one listens.

**John:** That’s the crucial thing about our podcast is that absolutely no one listens. So no one will hear us today as we talk about the origins of the three-act structure, the weird situation with Legends of Oz, and hear us answer some questions. But probably most tragically, no one will hear our special guest on the podcast this week. He is the writer and/or director of really great movies, including Role Models, Wanderlust, Wet Hot American Summer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Mr. David Wain, welcome to the show.

**David Wain:** Hello, guys. I’m so happy to be here. It’s a real thrill.

**John:** Hooray. So you’re going to join us as we talk about these things, but kind of most crucially, we also want to hear about this new movie you have coming out that stars Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd which is kind of amazing.

**David:** It is amazing that I get to work with people like that, I will say that, and a movie I’m super happy with. It’s called They Came Together. It’s kind of a rom-com spoof of sorts, also in the weird particular voice of me and Michael Showalter who we did Wet Hot American Summer together before.

**John:** Oh, I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about Wet Hot American Summer. I want to talk to you about Childrens Hospital.

**David:** Sure.

**John:** I basically just want to talk to you constantly about all the things you do, if it’s okay.

**David:** Oh my god. I mean, let’s go. Let’s rock it.

**John:** Let’s go.

First we have a tiny bit of follow up from a previous episode, the episode before the Superhero Spectacular. I had mentioned that Big Fish was going to be playing at Liberty University or I thought it was Liberty University. It turns out it is Liberty University. And so somebody, one of our listeners wrote in. Marcus Jay wrote in with a link to an Atlantic piece about being gay at Liberty University, which is actually fascinating. So we’re going to put that in the show notes.

It made me actually kind of feel better about doing Big Fish at Liberty University because it’s a big diverse world and sometimes bringing in new opinions to a place that is otherwise a little bit cut off can be really good and useful.

**Craig:** That was a really good piece. And not that Big Fish is what you would call a gay musical, it’s just that it’s a musical, therefore —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To some extent, it is gay. But, oh god, I’m doing it again. There is another blog piece — I love musicals. But I thought it was a really interesting piece because he basically said really it wasn’t a big deal. That’s what it kind of came down to. I mean, the institution is fundamentally against homosexuality and here is a gay man at that place and he’s like, hmm, yeah, feels fine.

**John:** My husband went to Notre Dame and really the situation seemed kind of similar, maybe like 10 years offset but, you know, traditionally, the Catholic Church says like, well, we don’t think that gay people should be around. Yet, if you actually talk to individual people who are at that university, that’s not sort of what it feels like on the ground.

**Craig:** The Catholic Church may be aware that there are gay people around.

**David:** It seems like the winds are changing no matter what.

**John:** I would agree. The winds are changing and you can —

**David:** And it’s hard to resist the winds when they keep blowing in the same direction for a long time.

**Craig:** The most shocking thing to me, I don’t know if you guys saw this, the guy who was the long time head of the Westboro Baptist Church, apparently they excommunicated him because near the end he was like, “Ah, you know, maybe gay people aren’t that bad.” Even that guy. I feel like that — yeah, the winds.

**John:** Well, it’s also fanaticism. I mean, when you believe in something so incredibly intensely, anyone who — countless part of your group who doesn’t believe as intently as you do is a heathen, is — has to be thrown out.

**Craig:** Purity of thought.

**John:** Purity of thought. Weirdly, I was joking when I said we would talk about religion and politics and all this stuff, but we just did.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is what we do now.

**David:** Can we do 20 minutes on abortion now?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Fantastic. Is there a way you can feed that into your discussion of They Came Together? So tell me about this movie because… — So I actually met you I think for the first time in person or I may have met you way back at Sundance when you were there with The Ten.

**David:** Yes, we did.

**John:** I had a movie called The Nines which is the same year as The Ten.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** And that was not confusing at all.

**David:** [laughs]

**John:** But I think I first met you on the set of Childrens Hospital. I came to visit you and even then you had finished the movie and you were figuring out what you were going to do with the movie.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** And now it’s coming out. So tell us about the origins of this movie and what people can look forward to.

**David:** It’s actually kind of an interesting story that might be of interest to screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting. It might be good for this podcast. But Michael Showalter and I made this movie, Wet Hot American Summer, that came out in 2001 and after it — we were living in New York. And after that, we came out to LA to kind of meet the studios and try to figure out something else to do.

And we met with Shady Acres, Tom Shadyac’s company at Universal, and pitched them this idea which was very simple, just, you know, doing a spoof movie of romantic comedies. No more or less than that. And they were like, yeah, let’s do it. And so we wrote this movie that was that but it wasn’t similar to the more successful ones that had come out around the time, all the Scary Movie and so on. It was just weirder. And it also, you know, it was kind of a mix between Wet Hot American Summer and those kind of movies.

So it didn’t go. The studio paid us to write it but then it never got made. But the Shady Acres group was interested in trying to get it done, so we tried to do it at a lower budget. We tried to do it independently. In fact, one company was down the road with us to make a $10 million version of it and at the last minute, like right before pre-production, the head of the company watched Wet Hot American Summer for the first time, said, “This is not funny…”

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**David:** “You guys have no idea how to do comedy.” And he was about to pull the plug and we said, please, this is funny. So he did the first and only test screening that ever existed for Wet Hot American Summer.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** How’d that go?

**David:** Which was two years after it had come out.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god!

**David:** And it was a bunch of sort of older, you know, like 40s Latino and Asian women it looked like to me.

**Craig:** That’s your audience.

**David:** It really tanked, obviously.

**Craig:** Wait a second. I have to ask you. This sounds like Bob Weinstein to me. It just sounds so Bob Weinstein.

**David:** I’m not going to say who it was but it wasn’t Bob Weinstein.

**Craig:** Boy, it sounds like him.

**David:** It was an LA-based independent company that had recently come into a lot of money based on a couple of —

**Craig:** Hold on a sec. Just so to clarify how insane this is, we go… — For people that don’t know, when we make a movie, particularly comedy, before — while we’re in the editorial process, we show the movie to a test audience and they rate the movie excellent, very good, fair, poor, very good, whatever they want.

**David:** This is while we’re still making the movie.

**Craig:** While we’re making the movie. And the point is, the point is to see do they like it, can we make them like it more? And the studio uses it to decide should we really promote this or kind of promote this? Is this any good? That movie came out, it was, I mean, regardless of what it did at the box office, there was — there’s just a love for it. I mean, it kind of defines what it means to be a cult movie in that regard. I mean, people found it and they loved it. And even then, still this studio was saying let’s test it anyway. [laughs] That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

**David:** Well, in — just to contextualize, it did do horribly. You know, it basically tanked at the box office and then it was before kind —

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**David:** It was years before… — And, you know, Wet Hot American Summer has more awareness today and more screenings and more people probably watching and talking about it than it ever did. It was just — it’s been a slow build and now it’s probably, you know, now it’s considered by many to be this touchstone classic comedy but it really wasn’t at the time.

That said, it was the same movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I think it’s pretty damn funny. But —

**John:** So give us a timeframe here. So what years would this have been that you had —

**David:** This would be 2002. 2003 was around when we were pitching and trying —

**Craig:** Wow.

**David:** And 2004 I think maybe was when we were doing this other version, this other, and was going to shoot in Canada even though it’s like defined as the ultra New York romantic comedy and we were going to make a joke out of that and —

**John:** You should have shot in Montreal and like not changed the French signs.

**David:** Well, that was the idea actually, is we were going to have Canada everywhere you look and then, you know, pretend it was New York.

**Craig:** We tried to do that. Around the same time we were shooting, unfortunately hurting your chances, with Scary Movie 3 and we were shooting it in Vancouver and we really wanted to open the movie with one of like the Welcome to Vancouver sign but put up a subtitle, you know, New York 1930.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** They wouldn’t let, yeah, Bob Weinstein didn’t think that was funny either. [laughs]

**David:** Well, what happened was, I mean in fact, people — the reason the studio didn’t make it and the reason no one else made it was because everyone said the audience for romantic comedies and the audience for spoof movies are two separate audiences and they will never meet. And so we’re like, all right, whatever. And so, meanwhile, they then made Date Movie and they made Romantic Movie which were literally the same premise.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** Ours being, though, a totally different take on it I think.

**Craig:** We’re going to get the whole timeline from you. But just jumping in on this particular point, because I’ve spent some time in the spoof camp and —

**David:** Yes, I know.

**Craig:** See, I feel like that form of spoof is just dead, you know, like the kind that I was doing with David Zucker, it’s dead. And we could go into a whole discussion about why it’s dead and how I may have contributed to its death, but it’s dead. And I’ve been sitting around kind of waiting for a new model to come along and, you know, when I see the trailer for this, I think this might be it because it is… — Clearly, there are some classic elements of spoof in it, but there also seems to be a different kind of self-awareness and a different method of kind of satirizing a genre.

Can you talk a little bit about why your approach is different than what you’d call traditional spoof or even the current crop? Yeah.

**David:** Well, yeah, and I’m curious for you to see it. You know, having been in those trenches, I’m curious to see how you feel the differences are once you see it. But essentially for us, and this is not — wasn’t so much exactly by design as much as just following our own taste, it doesn’t make nearly as many or almost any specific references to specific movies or specific scenes. It’s much more about the genre and much more poking fun at really storytelling conventions as much as specific genre conventions.

And doing it in different ways that are sometimes weirder, more subtler, or more — and a lot of times, it’s just doing those kinds of pieces of banal dialogue that go into these things very sincerely and without even a particular twist on them. Just the notion of doing it in this context is the joke.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** You know, it’s not for everyone. And it’s, it was, you know, we did a lot of the similar kind of humor in Wet Hot American Summer which came out to some incredibly hostile reviews at first where people were like, this is so unfunny I don’t even know what to do, like I can’t believe… — I think reviewers were upset that they didn’t get it or somebody was getting something that they didn’t.

Meanwhile, what’s kind of amazing about this one is I think times have changed and Wet Hot American Summer is known by a lot of people. And we’ve been — I’ve gotten — the pre-release reviews of this movie has been far more positive than anything I’ve ever been involved in.

**Craig:** But you can’t possibly be shocked by that. You understand how these people work, right? I mean, you get the deal with reviewers and comedy. They’ve been told now, they have been informed that you’re cool and you’re good. You know what I mean? They follow, they follow. I mean, it drives me nuts.

**David:** I think you’re right. I know there’s an element of that. I also think that we did some things in this movie to make sure that people liked it more, which I can tell you about which are interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just go back for one second, just the nature of what this kind of spoof is versus another kind of spoof. It sounds like in order to appreciate the movie you have to understand not a reference from another movie but a reference to a trope. And so you have to see like they are doing this trope and they are commenting on this trope but not commenting on exactly that scene from When Harry Met Sally.

**David:** Exactly. But I don’t think you have to be super film literate in any conscious way to appreciate it. And I think that’s what we tried to pull off here is it’s not like a thinking man’s movie exactly. It’s much more just we’re doing this but we’re helping you understand the jokes just by the context, which I’ll explain how we did that. But I, and I think if this movie works for audiences, that’s why. And it seems to work so far.

**Craig:** That’s great. I mean, my favorite, you know, because there is even in what I would call traditional spoof there was always room for absurdist moments. And we tried, you know, we tried to do that. You know, again, we, not to keep saying the name Bob Weinstein, but we kept getting steered to a different direction. But —

**David:** One thing I’ll say about any kind of original comedy is it cannot be done by committee.

**Craig:** No.

**David:** Like you can’t have studio layers overseeing it. That will absolutely generally kill it unless somehow they’re all on the same comedic wavelength which would be incredible.

**Craig:** It’s…yeah. It’s a rough thing, but my favorite joke from the trailer is when they’re having the leaf fight which is a trope of just a goofy fight with leaves which we’ve seen before. And then they walk off happily and there’s a dead body under the leaves. And there’s that — that’s wonderful because that’s actually not even a commentary on the genre. That’s just a joke about, well, but there’s also — I’ve always felt that great spoof characters were absolutely idiotic. That they were almost bordering on sociopathic, that they would not even stop to notice a dead body because they’re just happy. I love that.

**David:** We definitely have, you know, especially the Paul Rudd main character in this film is, you know, as is kind of the deal with these bland everyman rom-com leading men, he’s borderline retarded. I mean he’s —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly right. I would constantly have to explain this that these people are —

**David:** Innocent to the point of being like brain dead.

**Craig:** Well, they’re like soap opera characters in that regard. They’re designed to be thin and I actually, and not to wander off again from the narrative of how this came to be, but I’ll do it. I’m also interested in — you can get to this when you want — the challenge that there is when you say you do a movie like Role Models which is about actual human beings. I mean, it’s a comedy and it has set pieces and all the rest, but it’s about humans. And when you do a movie like this where you’re actually not writing human beings, I want you to get into a little bit of the challenge of that.

**David:** Well, it’s, for what it’s worth, my comfort level over my career has been the latter because I started out in sketch comedy and I’ve done so many things that are considered meta or whatever. You know, Childrens Hospital and these are utterly absurd and often purposely cookie cutter characters. And so for me, leaving my comfort zone was doing something like Role Models where I had to constantly curtail my instinct to like blow out the fourth wall or to, you know, make an overt comment about the scene structure or something within the scene.

And we actually did layer some of that stuff into Role Models in much more subtle ways knowing that we had to keep it real. But I think that little, tiny layer that we did was part of what made a lot of people like Role Models. Here, of course, you know, everything was absurd.

This movie, everything is a joke. And it’s, you know, I do think it wasn’t so deliberate in the making of it, but now stepping back from it, the model really is ultimately Airplane.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I think what I find interesting about the spoof genre which I have now thought a lot about over the past couple of years making this movie is Airplane, for how iconic and classic and loved it is, hasn’t really been duplicated that much, you know.

**Craig:** No.

**David:** The successors have gone in different directions.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s true. Well, Airplane is also fascinating because it is in fact a spoof of one single movie. It’s just a movie that nobody saw called Zero Hour.

**David:** There is something amazing about that actually.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** And our movie is sort of in that vein too, like we’re really — some of the spoof targets we have we think of as these widespread, universal spoof targets, but then when we go to like talk about them with our collaborators and our crew, we realize it’s only like one movie that had this thing that we’re making fun of that nobody saw and we don’t care.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, no. Very cool.

**John:** So talk us through the movie got stuck and then how did you get it unstuck? How did it become a real movie that you shot?

**David:** What happened was, so after that went away, then we still kept it in mind over the years, but it never came together and I moved on to other things. And then I know that my wife, Zandy, was working on a web series with Michael Showalter, and they were just talking about this script that was something that kept gnawing at us. It’s something, you know, you write a lot of things, and they don’t get made, fine.

For some reason, we knew this should or we always thought it was funny. And so I pulled it out in bed one night with her and we started laughing so hard. The next thing you know, we decided to do a reading of it at the San Francisco Sketch Fest with a bunch of friends on a Sunday morning with an audience just to hear it out loud.

That went so well. Everyone went berserk. Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler were part of that reading. And they came up afterwards and said let’s do this. And that was in January. They had only four weeks free overlapping in the entire year which was June. And so we scrambled and basically found financing for a very low budget through Lionsgate and got the movie to be shot in 23 days in June.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. 23 days.

**David:** No, it was, and you know, my first film, Wet Hot American Summer which to me seems like the lowest budget kind of imaginable was 29 days.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, because it was all in one spot, so it’s cheaper.

**David:** And all in one spot.

**Craig:** This one you’re moving around and wow, that’s tough.

**David:** This is like a big — this has the look and feel of a big, big budget New York romantic comedy. 23 days. So I had to call on 25 years of experience of how to get this done in the most clever, effective, outside-the-box way to achieve this feel. Because we couldn’t do the normal shortcuts when you have a low budget, are to shoot it all handheld, shoot it all with a certain look —

**Craig:** You can’t do that because you’re modeling movies that cost $50 million.

**David:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I mean that’s really challenging. Plus also, you know, people think of action movies as being more expensive or time consuming to produce. But anytime you’re introducing physical comedy into a scene, that’s like doing an action sequence. It’s complicated.

**David:** Exactly. And we had plenty of, you know, in a way a lot of what we counted on was we had more visual effects than you’d imagine because we didn’t have time to or ability to build or go to sets and locations. And so it was — we did a lot of little tricks to get it done.

But what the biggest one was just to move really fast, not get a lot of takes, not have time for a lot of improv, have the very best actors and know that they were going to deliver it and work hard on the script to make sure that it was all on the page and know that we didn’t have time to dick around on set.

**Craig:** Well, that’s actually a question, you know, people think of improv and comedy in the same thought and that makes sense. But for spoof I’ve always found that improv is kind of deadly because spoof is so structured and so formalist.

**David:** Exactly right. And we realized that this movie was not a good candidate for that more rambling improvised loose style that so many comedies today have. It just wouldn’t have made as much sense. And so the kind of written quality was part of it.

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**David:** Now, there was plenty of improv too, like when people had ideas or just when stuff came up, of course, we follow whatever is funny. But probably a lot less so than you might think.

**Craig:** Well yeah, because like for instance in Judd Apatow’s films, part of the fun is watching somebody like Paul Rudd express themselves spontaneously. But in a spoof movie, Paul Rudd’s character can’t be that fluent, he can’t be that articulate. It’s really rigid. You know, he’s dumb. I mean they’re all really profoundly stupid.

I mean when she, his mother — I love the physical bit where she throws the drink in his face, but there’s only a tiny little drop and he reacts.

**David:** Right.

**Craig:** That’s only something you can do if you are in fact a fictional character. I don’t know how else to put it.

**David:** Exactly. I mean every — another way we put it is the entire movie is in quotes.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly.

**David:** But, you know, also, Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler are two of the greatest improvers alive, so we used that to the degree we could. But yes, and so what was interesting, here’s the interesting thing. So we shot this movie very quickly as I said. We cut it together over the rest of that summer and we had a two-hour cut which I thought was pretty tight where we, you know, cutting out everything that didn’t work and, you know, getting it down at the bone and I consider myself very brutal with the material and throw things out and whatever.

And we start screening it into the fall and it’s working okay, you know, particularly among people who are our friends and fans, they like it.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** Nobody’s going nuts for it. Then we do our, you know, we get to our official preview for a much more random audience in LA in a mall —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** And it tanks.

**Craig:** They usually do. Spoof movies’ first screenings, worst things ever.

**David:** Yeah. Crickets. So at this point the studio kind of moves their attention onto other things. I actually moved my attention onto other things to some degree because I had to. I was going into another season of Childrens Hospital. This is when you came to our set.

**John:** That’s right.

**David:** And we were sitting there around for a while thinking about what do we do, how do we do this movie? They’re not going to give us another dime. So we have no money to spend. And I took on the editing myself essentially on a laptop and just started looking at it and thinking about it and working with Michael and talking about what to do.

And we realized that, you know, studying the tests and just studying the movie that too many people whether subconsciously or not, were actually taking it at face value. They did not realize it was in quotes enough to like it.

And so we carefully devised this storytelling device which is Paul and Amy sitting with another couple, Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper, at a table at a restaurant telling the story of their relationship, which is its own trope.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** But within that setup, we also blatantly and overtly spoon feed to the audience what this movie is.

**Craig:** Right, she almost looks at the camera and says, “It sounds like a bad romantic comedy.”

**David:** Exactly. And so the whole setup is in almost these words saying to the audience, “This movie is a joke, don’t take it as not-a-joke. Just relax and laugh.”

**Craig:** Right, you’re basically teaching them, “We didn’t make a bad romantic comedy.”

**David:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** We made a comedy that makes fun of bad romantic comedies.

**David:** Or another way to put is we did it on purpose.

**Craig:** We did it on purpose.

**David:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes, this is intentional.

**David:** This intentionally bad romantic comedy. And so I’m telling you, better than I ever expected, it worked.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** The audience completely shifted and now in screenings you can’t hear the movie because they’re laughing from the very beginning to the very end, which is so gratifying. And also what this device did, which by the way we shot for almost nothing in one day, one three-camera setup, 34 different drops into the movie, it also allowed me to cut out every single thing that didn’t get a laugh.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing.

**David:** This device allowed us to skip over any part of the story — it didn’t matter — and then like I did this, and we realized how little the story matters in a movie like this. And whatever you did need to tell that wasn’t done in a funny scene, you can just say, and then I did this and I did this, and now here’s the next funny big thing that really does work.

So it allowed us to cut characters. It allowed us to — it really worked better than I ever imagined. And it didn’t cost us anything.

**Craig:** I love that story. You know, because these movies are designed to be stupid on some level, smart stupid, I don’t think people understand how much science goes into it. It’s just an enormous amount of science.

**David:** Well, I agree. And I think that the care and thought that goes into it over the course of years to then make something that looks thrown off and silly and fun is the key. And I think the ones that work really well, they’re not thrown off. There’s so much thought put into every frame.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re obsessed over it. I actually was talking to David Zucker the other day. And he, we’ve had this war for years about Top Secret because I love Top Secret. I think Top Secret is amazing. And he would always say, “You know, no.” He would say, “Top Secret is deeply flawed, we messed up, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, we should, the story, it’s too many stories jammed in and the ending is no good.” He just went on. But over the years he slowly started to let in the notion that maybe Top Secret is good.

And he said he went up, there was a screening in fact in San Francisco, and he went there and the audience loved it. And he said, “But, you know, I know how to fix it now.” And he said, “I want to reshoot. I think I could get the — I could fix the ending. And I’d just do it with body doubles and I can fix…” And he was deadly serious.

**David:** That’s so funny.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Deadly serious.

**David:** For some reason, I’m glad to say, I have this thing with the movies I’ve done. Well, so far I’ve made five movies and they’ve all got many, many flaws and many mistakes, but somehow I feel like when they’re done, they’re done and they are what they are, and I wouldn’t want to change them, you know.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, you don’t have the same level of autism that David Zucker has. I can already tell. You’re much more acclimated to humans.

**David:** But until it’s done, I’m going crazy and obsessing on every little thing. And I can’t —

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I keep having to open up and open up and open up. I guess once it’s like released in theaters and I just have — a switch turns and I’m like that is the thing and now it’s not mine anymore. It’s out in the world.

**John:** Because we’re a podcast that’s mostly about writers, some of what you’re saying seems kind of dispiriting, because like you went into this with a script that you loved and you shot a script that you loved and you were really happy with how it worked on the page.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** So to go through and basically restructure the entire story by this whole new device feels like, I don’t know, it could feel like a failure, but it’s honestly the way most movies work. Is that you’ve made these choices which were absolutely right for the page, but somehow how it all came together on the screen, it doesn’t work the way you anticipated.

With Go, I loved the way that Go opened in the script, but then when we shot it, it just didn’t make sense the same way. And people — it was exactly the same kind of problem where people weren’t quite sure what movie they were in. And so we shot a new intro and it really got people onboard.

**David:** I think moviemaking is far too complicated to know any — you can’t possibly know it all on the page. On the other hand, I do think that they should do more testing of some kind with a script before they start wasting film. But, you know, we did — we tried to know everything we could know before we got, but to me it’s not dispiriting. I think it’s an inspiring writing story because some of my screenwriting that I’m most proud of was figuring out how to fix this movie at the late stages and writing those, that framing device while editing it at the same time and having the benefit of knowing exactly the actual cut footage that I’m working around was a fascinating process.

And I’m so relieved to say that the movie that we now have, I am so proud of and so happy with. And I really had a lot of reservations about it until we figured that out.

**Craig:** Well, there’s no prize for getting it “right at the beginning.” That’s not the point of a screenplay.

**David:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and especially with this kind of comedy, which I really do feel is written in practically every genre there is at this point. And writing spoof was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s incredibly hard because you’re doing a normal comedy, you know, I don’t know, there’s a joke every page maybe or something. There’s like three jokes a page, mandatory. The characters, there’s never a point where a character can just be quiet or thoughtful. There’s no break. There’s no breath. The audience is well aware that you’re doing this.

It’s like you’re a pitcher and you’re saying, “Okay, here comes another fastball.”

**David:** You’re sitting there literally as an audience waiting for the next —

**Craig:** Waiting for the next joke.

**David:** Make me laugh again.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**David:** Make me laugh again.

**Craig:** Arms crossed, you know. And I’m sure you’ve had this experience too where you show them the movie and you think, well, I know that this joke is killer. This one, oh boy, let’s see what happens there. And the joke you knew was a killer is deadly. And then they just go crazy, it’s something that is barely even a joke to you at all.

**David:** My five favorite jokes from the screenplay that were the things that made me excited to make the movie are all cut.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** There you go.

**David:** I mean that’s just “there you go.”

**Craig:** There you go. You have to be — you have to have an ego strength to do spoof that is just unparalleled.

**David:** And one of my things that I’m most proud of is the ability to recognize those things and say, “You know what, I loved it all the way until now, and now let’s cut, you know.”

**Craig:** Absolutely. Oh no, the audience is your boss in spoof in a way that is just disturbing. But necessary.

**David:** But I will say and having been through this on many movies, you’ve got to be very, very careful about audiences as well because an audience might be crickets on one screening and the same exact cut might have a huge uproarious response at that same joke. And so it’s just you’ve got to be also careful. And sometimes, I’ve left in things just because I know they’re funny to me and I will never my change my mind about it. And, you know, it’s just —

**John:** Or that funny joke is actually cueing up a laugh, a bigger laugh later on.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** So if you take that out —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**David:** The organism is so complicated, it’s hard to — you can’t just blindly follow how loud the laugh is.

**Craig:** There are some jokes that aren’t meant for an audience to laugh at together. They’re meant for people to love five years later.

**David:** Exactly. And I’ll tell you when we did Wanderlust, it was, you know, a big studio situation and a very different kind of process where we did so many screenings. Sometimes we did — we did a couple times where we screened two versions of the movie side by side at the same time to two different audiences and then run numbers on that. And it got bewildering and confusing. So many different versions floating around, it was very hard to keep track of what the spine is of what we were doing.

**John:** One of the great things about doing Big Fish night after night after night on Broadway is we would have the audience there. And so we’re really doing exactly the same show. At a certain point the show was frozen. It was exactly the same show. And things would get laughs one night and not laughs the next night.

You start to realize there are certain key people in the house who if they started laughing would sort of make it safe for other people to laugh.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** And if you didn’t have those crucial key people in there it was tough. And you kind of wish you could seed the audience with designated laughers, just to sort of get stuff started.

**David:** It’s such a mysterious thing. And if you think about it, ultimately, what makes you have this involuntary physical response to something? You know?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s keep talking about this, but I also want to get to some of our real topics on the show today.

**David:** Yes.

**John:** The first of which is a listener sent in a link that was really kind of fascinating about not only film history but really the origin of the three-act structure. Basically this guy, David Bordwell, did a study looking at when did people first start talking about three-act structure. Basically looking through old memos, looking through old Hollywood stuff saying like is the idea of a three-act structure something that’s a pretty recent invention, like sort of a Syd Field thing, or has it always been there.

Did you guys get a chance to look at this blog post?

**David:** I did. I remember he wrote the textbook that I had my first film class at NYU.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** Very nice. Talk to us about your film education. So, you went to NYU as a film major?

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** What’s weird is I remember watching The State and like in my head I was like in high school watching The State but that’s actually possible because we’re about the same age. You must have started incredibly young. Is that correct?

**David:** Well, yes. I went to film school at NYU from 1987 and I graduated in 1991. In ’88 when I was a sophomore is when The State was formed as a comedy troupe at the college. And when everyone was out of school in 1992, by that time we were already starting the process of getting our show on MTV.

**John:** Wow.

**David:** It was a very lucky set of events.

**John:** So, when you were at NYU you were studying filmmaking, you studied screenwriting, and you learned about a three-act structure, right?

**David:** I did. I took several dramatic writing classes as part of film school, but I don’t remember ever getting the kind of straight up Syd Field or Robert McKee like really here’s the formula kind of thing in film school. I also, frankly, was spending most of my time in film school doing The State.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, not learning but doing?

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** The State was so great. And it’s so amazing that all of you guys have done so incredibly well since that time.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s been fascinating. It’s funny, John, I was sort of — I feel like I was watching The State in my old house in New Jersey, but I wasn’t. I was watching it here in Los Angeles. I don’t know why that is. What hypnosis have you — ?

**David:** It exists in a weird time period. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. But everybody from it, I mean, it is true. They’re all out there. They’re all — talk about an all-star cast.

**David:** They did one little sketch show at NYU my sophomore year. Most of them were freshman and I wasn’t in the group. And I saw it and I was like, holy mother of shit, these guys are incredible. And I tried to hook in and get into the group right then which I did, thank god. And, yeah, it’s just somehow these people came together and every single one has gone on to be fairly successful in the business.

**John:** Now, how did you move from doing sketch writing into a full on screenplay. So, was Wet Hot American Summer the first full-length thing you wrote?

**David:** It was the first full-length thing we basically finished. When The State started to fizzle in activity, Michael Showalter and I started writing a high school screenplay that was going to be a big high school epic. And that was around 1997. And we got a draft or two done, but we knew we had a lot more work to do. And we wanted to shoot something that summer, because we were anxious to do it. So, we decided to just write an outline and just get our friends together and go to some summer camp in Westchester and just shoot a summer camp movie because we knew it would be easy and we could shoot it all with the same clothes and it would be outside.

And just as we started writing it, it turned into just, well, A, no one — we couldn’t even get the financing for a hundred grand or whatever we wanted for that. And then it took us three years really to get the money. And during that time we kept developing it more and more and more into a real screenplay, so to speak.

**John:** And you cast some like terrible people who never did other stuff like Bradley Cooper.

**David:** Right. Well, yeah, both Bradley Cooper and Elizabeth Banks and many others just kind of walked in and auditioned for it. This was their first movie.

**John:** It’s a good time. So, as you’re writing this for a screenplay, sort of going back to this topic of like three-act structure and sort of how that gets sort of drilled into you, did you have a sense of this is the end of our first act and this is where things are changing? Because my recollection of Wet Hot American Summer is it’s just the arc of a summer and it’s not trying to do sort of big worst of the worst scenarios, but maybe it does.

**David:** Oh, it does. At least we definitely did have that in mind by then. It was — the way we wrote that was every character pretty much had their own storyline. And so it was an ensemble piece and there was, I think, ultimately maybe 10 to 12 storylines. And then each of those we did think of in a three-act structure. And I think we might have specifically been following the Robert McKee version of it at the time. I can’t remember exactly. But I do know that we thought about in those ways.

And like, okay, we made charts and we made graphs and we’re like here’s how this starts, here’s the inciting incident of this, here’s how this develops, here’s the climax. And then we meshed them all together into one day and then tried to come up with a climatic sequence at the end that climaxed each character’s story at around the same time.

**Craig:** Well, you guys in a weird way you were doing the Robert Altman model, which then you saw again in Magnolia. And it’s the disparate stories that interweave throughout, they kind of come together, separate again. And then there’s some kind of disaster, like an earthquake, or a plague of raining frogs, or Skylab falling that forces everybody to kind of experience the ending of their stories together.

**David:** It was totally deliberate because the movie that kind of changed my life that I saw when I was in college was Nashville.

**Craig:** Right. There you go.

**David:** And that was for sure a very conscious model. All those stories in Nashville are somewhat separate but they’re tied together by place and by time and then they all come together literally in this climatic time when this woman gets shot and kind of turns everything around.

And then also Dazed and Confused was such a favorite. And so those were kind of the structural tent poles that we looked at.

**Craig:** But tonally one thing that I thought was really interesting about Wet Hot American Summer was that you weren’t in the zone of say Meatballs which was more of a standard comedy where there was some serious stories and serious human beings or actual human beings, and then some broad characters. And you weren’t really doing what I would call a spoof in the traditional like Mel Brooks or Zucker and Zucker sense.

Every character was kind of nuts. You were already in that zone where you were kind of making your own thing where, you know, for David Zucker he always says, “There’s one person in the scene who’s crazy or stupid and one person who is sane and normal and they might switch during the scene or in a different scene.” But for you guys it was like everybody at once could be nuts, which I thought was great.

**David:** Thanks. For us it was a lot of just instinctual we’re doing this kind of a camp movie thing and we tried to source it as much in our own actual memories. It wasn’t really a spoof of camp movies because we didn’t think of that so much as a genre that we were so interested in getting. It was more of a spoof of what camp was like for us.

**John:** Well, that sense of where every character is kind of crazy in their own special way is something that really bled through to Childrens Hospital, because that’s my same sense of Childrens Hospital is like there’s not one normal person who’s like the voice of reason in that show. Everybody is nuts and everyone can sort of do whatever they need to do. It’s probably more heightened in Childrens Hospital than it was in Wet Hot American Summer.

**David:** We discovered that phenomenon in Wet Hot first which then has carried over into Childrens Hospital which is to say any given character can be malleable to serve the plot or comedic point to the point in a way that would just be absolute no-no in regular screenwriting.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. There’s a chaotic nature to the whole thing. I mean, that is informed by the way the cast did come out of sketch comedy. There is a chaos to it. There’s an anarchy.

And I can understand why critics or even theatrical audiences at first just couldn’t handle it.

**David:** And it’s fair. I mean, if you’re going to see certain kind of rules followed then you’re not going to like it. And I don’t even mean that flippantly. It’s definitely not for everyone.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not surprised that the movie kind of found this second life because I do feel like some comedies are designed for big rooms of people together and some comedies are simply, they’re too offbeat for that. And because the theatrical experience of comedy is one where it’s about commonality… — Everybody, or at least we would always say if 40% of them think this is funny that’s good enough. Then the people that aren’t laughing are forced to say, “Well, I guess other people think it’s funny.”

But when it’s challenging like this and kind of trying to redefine how the rules of it work, sometimes the best way for it to succeed is in the privacy of somebody’s home where they feel safe enough to kind of, you know, enjoy it for what it is and explore it.

**David:** And with a movie like ours, which I think that was the middle period for Wet Hot American Summer over the years where people discovered it, show it to a friend, pass it around. And now it’s come into this thing where there’s 7,000 people at Brooklyn Park watching it, all big fans, and that’s — everyone is having this communal experience now.

**John:** I watched your movie, I watched Wet Hot American Summer I remember out in Santa Monica at the Laemmle Santa Monica that doesn’t exist anymore. And I remember seeing it like opening weekend out there and loving it.

But I have a thought experiment though. You talked about what you did when they came together and you shot those new blocks, changed the setup of the movie, sort of what your expectation was. Was there a way that you could have setup Wet Hot American Summer that could have made it more accessible from the very beginning?

If you had a time machine and could go back and shoot something, do you think there’s a way to do that?

**David:** You know, probably there might have been, although part of what made Wet Hot, what I love about it is that it starts off in kind of a normal place and it just sort of slowly starts moving to the left. And not surprising that was not a formula for success. Many, many people have said to me over the years, “I saw your movie. I really didn’t like it. And then I saw it again and it became my favorite movie.”

**John:** Yeah. So, once you know what the movie is you like it, but while you’re watching it the first time —

**David:** It’s like a fine wine, I guess. You need to taste it and get the sense of it and then you can relax and like it.

**John:** So, David Wain, can you comment on this. So, I see stories that there is discussion of making a Wet Hot American TV show or something for Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah, the Netflix.

**John:** Is that something that’s interesting to you?

**David:** I can’t comment on it.

**John:** You can’t comment on that.

**Craig:** So, the answer to that is, no, that’s not interesting to me at all. I wish they wouldn’t do it. [laughs]

**David:** I can’t comment on it.

**John:** All right. That is fantastic. Let’s go to our next —

**Craig:** By the way, I will now speak for David for the rest of this. David, you just make little Morse code blinks at me. Yeah, you Morse code blink to me and I will tell them what you’re thinking.

**John:** Yeah, Morse code blinking is really effective on a Skype podcast I have found.

The next topic on our agenda is the Legends of Oz. And so I sent through this blog post about this which was so Legends of Oz was this sequel to the Oz movies, or sort of an extension of the Oz movies, an animated feature starring Lea Michele and a bunch of other people. And I knew about it before it came out only because a friend of ours was doing the posters for it. She didn’t work on the movie but she did work on the marketing of it. And so I knew that this movie existed.

The movie did not fare well at all and it was not a box office success. So, there’s this blog post which is going through and talking about the investors in the film. And I had assumed that this was, when she was first describing it it sort of felt like it was a made for video thing that turned out well enough that they were talking a gamble and releasing it theatrically. Turns out it was actually always meant to be theatrical. And they had raised this money with investors putting in $100,000, but individual people putting in $100,000 to make this potentially $100 million budget to make this film.

And the individual investors are really upset that this movie didn’t do better. They’re blaming Hollywood. They’re blaming some of the people involved in producing the film. So, I don’t know very much more about the actual Legends of Oz itself, but I think it was a good way to talk about the weird way we have to raise money to make movies.

And, David Wain, you’ve had to raise money a lot of times to make movies.

**David:** Well, I have to say that you sent me that story and I was fascinated by it just because it is such a weird story of that particular kind of — to me it was a complete Hollywood outsider guy who raised $70 million somehow $100,000 at a time thinking he could kind of hone in on the big budget animated movie market that is the Disney/Pixar world.

And I actually think it’s really interesting. And then there’s all this postulation, I was reading all the message boards, really why did it tank? And they were saying, “Oh, it’s a conspiracy. The critics were paid by the studios to trash it.” But to me that seems utterly ridiculous. However, it seems like it really was a marking thing because from what I can tell the movie is not good but many movies are not good. And many kids’ movies, particularly, are not good. It feels like it was fine. It was serviceable, or whatever.

And so it feels like what they didn’t do is put enough money or smarts into marketing it, or they could have been successful. I just think it’s interesting.

**Craig:** I mean, I read this stuff and the whole thing smells like a weird scam to me and not a scam that Hollywood perpetrated on small time investors but the people who were raising the money perpetrated on these small time investors. I mean, there’s a bit, so one of the investors referred to he put something on Facebook about the movie coming out on May 9th. “To all my friends that invested in this blockbuster, congrats. For those that had the $100K minimum handy but were too busy to take a look, you’re going to be so sorry.”

That’s the kind of stuff you read on like Penny Stock forums on the internet. It’s this — like, okay, we’re all in this together and we’re going to all get rich off of this thing. And so people who raise money for high risk investments will start to inspire this kind of religious fervor among all the people investing because either they’re all going to win together or they’re all going to fail together.

I mean, you almost see a little bit of that rhetoric, for instance when we all went on strike it was like everybody hold together, completely, or it’ll all fall apart. So, you’ve just got to be religious about it. And, you know, then when it doesn’t work, who are they going to blame?

And this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard: the idea that Hollywood doesn’t want serious new competition from individual investors so they’re going to pay critics to not like stuff. God, I wish that were true. I wish —

**John:** Hollywood loves money. Hollywood loves people coming with money.

**Craig:** It LOVES money. They’ll take money from anybody. Anyone.

**John:** The thing I would stress is the three of us on this podcast, but really anyone we know who works in the industry would never have invested in —

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** $100,000 of their own money in this project, because they would talk through what their plans were and we would have said like, “Uh-oh, that’s not going to work.” Or, the odds of that working are incredibly remote for this kind of system.

**David:** And no one who personally invests in movies ever invests in a single project.

**Craig:** Correct.

**David:** Especially if it’s a big budget like this, unless they’re just — the only ones who do are the ones who are saying I’m going to give somebody I know X amount of money just knowing that I’m tossing it in the toilet, just for fun or to do a favor for a friend or something, you know.

**Craig:** Look, here’s the biggest warning sign of all: someone is going to make a movie using the intellectual property behind The Wizard of Oz and the Frank Baum world and they’re asking you, an orthodontist, for $100,000. Something is really bad there. And in fact I don’t know if looking at a — I was just poking around doing a little research on all this, but apparently now some people are in fact talking about that there were deceptive practices in the raising of this money.

It just feels so scammy to me. I am just bummed out that people did that.

**David:** I read one thing by an animator who was like there’s no chance they spent even a quarter of this money on the movie. And so maybe it’s a Producers thing where you knew it was going to tank and now he’s keeping all the money.

**Craig:** Yikes.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t know what the actual reality is behind the situation. But what I kind of want to stress is that raising money for any movie is difficult regardless. I mean, if you’re going to a studio that’s actually fully funding something, that’s one situation. But when you’re trying to raise money for an independent film, this is a very big independent film, there’s always that weird boundary between being ambitious and being scammy. And trying to convince people like, “Well, this is the way we can make money back,” but at the same time having to be honest of like you’re probably never going to get your money back, because very few of these movies are really going to be so profitable that like the people who put in $100,000 are going to see a return on that, or even get their money out of it.

That’s the reality of this. And not even just shady Hollywood accounting. It’s just the nature of the business.

**David:** That’s just reality, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just reality. It’s such a speculative, high risk business. I mean, the reason that studios have lasted as long as they have is because they have massive libraries that generate profit with no costs required to generate that profit, so there’s this huge featherbed that they’re constantly landing in every time they whiff. And they whiff all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. They have to whiff. We’ve talked a lot about the theory behind the big, huge franchise bet is that if you get one hit and four flops you’ve actually gotten eight hits and four flops because that one hit is sequelized and then spun off into ancillary things. I mean, it doesn’t matter, if Lone Ranger doesn’t work it’s okay because Pirates did work. And there’s five Pirates movies, plus Pirates stuff, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To invest $100,000 in a single movie is a little bit like saying, “I’m going to have a Major League baseball career, but I only get one at bat, and it has to be a home run, or I get sent down.”

**David:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** It’s not a good track record.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s another headline that came out this last week which was our friend Eric Heisserer wrote a script that Amy Adams is attached to star in that got sold at Cannes. And it was a really confusing headline that came out because it’s a $20 million sale but the headline didn’t sort of say like what actually sold. And what happened was — I emailed with Eric — and it was a foreign financing deal, so essentially that $20 million is money to help make the movie.

And so I get frustrated when these headlines go up, like $20 million deal for something, and it makes it sound like it’s a spec sale. It’s just the way movies sometimes get financed. And they used to get financed that way all the time where you sell off the foreign rights and you sell off the domestic rights and by selling off those rights you have enough money to make the movie. It’s much more common than sort of this Legends of Oz or Kickstarter way to make a movie. It’s a natural way that these things sometimes happen.

**Craig:** Kickstarter.

**John:** Mm, Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Don’t get me started. Don’t get me started.

**David:** [laughs] I heard the head of Kickstarter at Sundance London giving a big speech and Q&A and I was thinking about you, Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] Thank you.

**John:** Yeah. I had coffee with him. He’s great. And I like that they exist. So, I was happy that at least Veronica Mars, the one thing we talked about on the show, did as well as it did.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** For that it made a lot of sense.

**Craig:** It did make sense for that, yes.

**John:** Yeah, but you’re not going to kick start Legends of Oz. Not $100 million.

**Craig:** Well, that’s what these people, I mean, the reason that Kickstarter annoys me is also the reason why it’s better than this. I mean, so there’s no chance of ever participating, truly participating, in the success of something as “investor” in Kickstarter because you’re not an investor in Kickstarter.

But on the other hand, the world of investment is full of people with bad intentions. And, look, I don’t know if — these are all allegations now about this guy and he may have done absolutely nothing wrong. This just may be a situation where a guy said, “Here’s something to invest in,” a lot of people just got their heads full of dreams. And really though, my god. I mean, I get it. It’s like, “They’re making a Wizard of Oz movie and it’s going to be like a Pixar movie? Sure.”

**David:** I mean, the fact is — the fact that the movie got made and came out makes it less of a scam than most.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right about that.

**John:** I would agree. Yeah. It would be very easy just to sort of never have it come out and blame it on something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Insurance loss.

We have some questions to answer, so maybe David Wain can help us out with our questions. The first one is from Hayward in North Carolina. He writes, “First, this is not a situation where I think someone stole my idea. There are no billion dollar lawsuits forthcoming.” Good.

“That said, what do you do if you’re halfway through a screenplay and you read an article on the internet discussing a movie coming out next year which sounds fairly similar to the one you’re working on? Not exactly the same, but the premise strikes you as being pretty close to the one you’re working on, especially when reduced to a log line where all the differences wouldn’t be as apparent.

“Do you scrap it and move onto something else? Or do you push yourself to finish it anyway with the hope of maybe using it as an example when seeking representation or writing assignment?”

So, David Wain, you had two other spoof dating movies, romantic comedies, come out in that time that you already had your thing written.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** How, I mean, talk to us.

**David:** Well, that definitely did, in fact, a friend of mine made that other movie called Not Another Teen Movie soon after. And, yeah, it did damper our aspirations. Seeing that happen, you know, you feel like, okay, there’s not going to be two of these. But I do think if you love a movie, if you love something you’re doing in a specific way, I would keep going with it knowing that maybe you might have to sit on it for a little while. Everything has a chance to come back. If that movie gets made and it’s not a success or it is a success, that could potentially work to your advantage either way if you time it right when to bring the thing back.

But I definitely, I mean, you know, yeah, there is… — I remember a friend of mine worked on this movie for quite a long time that he was writing as a spec and he was an established screenwriter, and then he read in Variety that somebody else was making basically the exact same movie and he said, screw it, and he moved onto something else.

**Craig:** You know, I always, what’s that — John, you’re really good at this, figuring out the names of fallacies. What’s the deal where you buy a car and then you think suddenly there are more of that car on the road?

**John:** Yeah, it’s like a validation fallacy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think we always are so much more attuned to what our idea is and the specificity of that idea. So, it’s natural for us to look at one thing or another and say, oh no, I’m done. But the truth is that’s not actually how the world works and, frankly, if Date Movie had come out last month and I were now seeing trailers for They Came Together I wouldn’t even really connect the too, because the way we judge stuff as we see it is so visual and so based on cast.

When we watch things, I think it’s the cast, and the look, and the vibe that jumps out at us much more rapidly and accessibly than maybe the log line or the idea, because we are trained, having watched movie after movie, to understand that ideas are repeated constantly. It’s the execution that attracts us to things. So, I would certainly counsel this questioner to stick with it and at worse, they’re right, they’ll end with a sample.

But, frankly, I suspect no one will care.

**David:** Also, the only caveat I would add is sometimes it depends, depending on the genre, how specifically is this other thing exactly yours. Is it in all ten plot points, or is it just the general idea? I’d be interested to hear that.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say that sometimes one other film is like a direct comparison, but if there’s like three other films kind of like it, well that’s a genre. So, suddenly, oh my god, there’s another vampire movie. Well, yeah, there’s lots of vampire movies. The fact that you’re writing a vampire movie doesn’t preclude that or a zombie movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Even if you were writing, there was the zombie teen romance that came out a couple years ago. If you were doing that now I think it would be okay. Where it gets a little trickier if you were writing something that is very specific and really twist-based and another movie comes out with that same deal and that same twist. That can be an issue because —

**John:** That can be an issue.

**Craig:** Because people do feel like twists are, because they’re so surprised-based you really can’t get away with, “Oh, he was dead the whole time.” [laughs] It’s tough to pull that one off twice.

**John:** Yeah. We know there’s an upcoming Disney movie that actually had that twist problem. They had to sort of very carefully work around that situation. What I will say, personally from my own experience, you can’t get much closer to this problem than I was writing Monster Apocalypse and then Pacific Rim came out which was so remarkably similar to what I was writing. It was like we couldn’t make the movie.

What’s fascinating is now Godzilla has come out and also made a lot of money and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s suddenly now just a genre. They were — too easy to directly compare the two movies, Pacific Rim and Monster Apocalypse, but if we have more movies with giant monsters smashing down cities, well, that’s now a genre. And suddenly mine doesn’t look as similar to that movie that came out.

**David:** That’s so interesting, when something evolves from copying something to just a formula of a genre or a form of a genre.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** I mean, we all know the word Kaiju now.

**John:** Yeah, which is awesome. Which is Japanese —

**Craig:** I guess. [laughs] I don’t know.

**John:** All right. Nate writes, “What is the difference between a green-lightable script that needs revision and a script that still needs revision and is not green-lightable yet?”

So, I’m going to rephrase this question: Why do some scripts get green lit even though they still say there’s work to be done on it, whereas other scripts that “need work” don’t get green lit. Do you have a sense of why that happens?

**David:** Because what’s written in the script is so not the factor that contributes to the green light most of the time.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Green-lightable is a tautology. It’s green-lightable when someone green lights it. All that means is that the people who are paying for a movie have decided, yeah, we want to pay for this. There’s a thousand reasons why they make that decision, some of which are good reasons.

**David:** And some of which might be that the executive is in a good mood that day.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** Really. It could be anything.

**Craig:** An actor shows up and wants to do it and they want to make a movie with that actor, so now we’re green lighting it. And fix it. Fix it before you shoot, you know.

**John:** Yeah. For some reason the train has started moving. And they’re going to keep going and they’re going to try to make this movie. And they will do the work that they want to do on the movie, work they could have done six months ago, a year ago, but suddenly now they’re starting to make a movie. And it may have nothing to do with the script at all.

**David:** I’m sure that both of you have been in situations where they’re like, “We love this project, we want to do it. Now we’re going to throw the script out and start over on that.” As if the script is just this minor afterthought in making a movie.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny — less now. It seems like in the last couple of years or three years there’s been this bizarre realization that maybe the screenplay counts and in a weird way I think it’s part of the result of the inflation of budgets and inflation of marketing costs. People say that the way that Hollywood makes movies everything costs too much and that’s bad. And on some levels it is bad. On another level they are way less cavalier about the screenplay than they used to be. When movies cost $20 million and video would make sure it was a profitable venture anyway, at that point they honestly would treat the screenplay like it didn’t matter.

**John:** I don’t know that that’s changed, Craig. I mean, you and I can both think of people working on movies where like they’re starting shooting soon and they are massively overhauling the script.

**Craig:** That is true. That is true. But, even then they’re massively overhauling the script because somebody whimsically decided to do it. They’re massively overhauling it because the script isn’t very good, or the script has a lot of problems.

I guess what I’m saying is there used to be a time when there would be a perfectly good script, everybody would be onboard with it. It was the product of years of development and careful consideration. And then a director would come along and say, “Eh, I want to do this and I want to do that.” And they’re like, “Fine. Do it. Because we don’t care.”

**John:** Okay. That’s maybe true. But, I mean, the frustrating thing for Nate’s question that we’re not really answering is that there’s really probably no difference in a script that’s green-lightable versus a script that’s not green-lightable.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The decision for green light is really rarely about the script itself. It’s really about sort of —

**David:** The elements around it. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we know this scientifically be true because there are scripts that do not receive the green light at one studio, get put into turnaround, are bought by another studio, and then made.

**David:** All the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. All the time.

**John:** Our last question comes from a different Nate. And he was actually at the live show. He was one of the people who was lined up to ask a question but wasn’t able to ask a question so he wrote in with his question.

“My question has to do with character motivation and stakes. Specifically let’s mandate that the character is ambitions and driven by a desire to succeed. Maybe he wants to be a famous movie star or the next Steve Jobs. Is the possibility of failure sufficient stakes, or does it need to be a more acute stake?”

Basically, what are stakes and what is enough stakes for something to be? Does it have to be a very specific thing that he’s trying to achieve or just an overall ambition or goal?

**Craig:** Well, I’m excited to hear what David Wain has to say about this one.

**David:** To me it has nothing to do — I mean, any screenplay can be about any stakes. It can be about something as tiny as like trying to get a piece of gum off your shoe, or saving the world, and it’s irrelevant. The point is that the stakes are important to the character and that you care as an audience about what the character cares about.

I think of Swingers and him making that phone call and how you’re just like on the edge of your seat freaking out and going no, no, no, just as you are when you’re watching Indiana Jones in exactly the same level of energy from an audience. So, it’s just about how you build and present those stakes. Right?

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I think that it isn’t enough to simply say this person has some kind of external ambition, to build a business or to become a star, or change the world, and failure is the only relevant negative outcome.

Typically we’ll see in characters, when David says “what they care about,” the character does care about the external thing, but it’s also extensible to internal things. There’s something relatable for me in the audience to that person, where I can say, “Oh, I understand why that matters to you.” Because most people don’t want to build a business, that isn’t their ambition. So, what am I connecting to?

I’ve never done a day of karate in my life, but at the end of The Karate Kid when he says, “I have to go out there and win because I’ll never have balance otherwise, I’ll never have balance with myself, with my girlfriend, with the world,” then you go, “Okay, I understand. You’re trying to figure out a way to find your place in this world.” And that’s relatable.

That becomes so much more important than whether or not you punch the guy in the face. So, there does have to be some sort of common, human desire there so that if he fails we understand that he’s not just failing at a business. He’s failing himself in some big way.

**John:** Yeah. I think what Nate is confusing here a bit is goal, what is the character aiming for, and stakes being like what happens if he doesn’t achieve that goal. And really defining so for the audience what the consequences will be if he doesn’t achieve that goal. And so sometimes within a scene you might have a goal, like he’s got to disarm this thing or this bomb will blow up. That’s a very simple kind of stakes. But in the overall course of your movie the stakes might be if he doesn’t build this dam then his daughter will see that he’s a failure.

I mean, it could be something more, you know, like make it clear to the audience what will be the consequence of a failure so we can actually feel the potential loss or actually see the loss if he doesn’t succeed, because sometimes the stakes should be manifest and the character doesn’t win. That’s always a nice choice in movies as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I’ll say that movies tend to have movie stakes in the sense of like this is a story that can happen once and the nature of why we’re watching this story is because of this goal and these stakes. In a TV series, the stakes are a lot different because you’re hopefully experiencing this character’s journey over many, many episodes and things will grow and change. And their goals will change and the stakes will change based on what’s happened to them.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And it’s one of the things that people should consider when they’re asking themselves the question of what they ought to write. I mean, should I be writing movies, should I be writing TV shows? And one thing that is specific to movie storytelling is the idea that you are resolving somebody’s problem. That the stakes ultimately do come down to character and specifically what gets finished for this character, whereas in television you can’t finish. If you finish the character your show is done, so the stakes do tend to be far more external in TV, I think.

I mean, there are obviously shows, wonderful shows, where the characters grow and change. But they don’t resolve.

**David:** Unless it’s the new genre of TV that does seem to have more finite endings sometimes, which I love.

**Craig:** Well, when the series ends it’s over. But like in Breaking Bad you watch Walter White have a ton of moments where most of the stakes are external stakes, but obviously there’s a lot of internal stuff where he’s trying to maintain his family unit. He’s trying to balance these two lives. He’s making these very difficult decisions about the people he loves and about himself.

But there is no final resolution until the very end. And in movies we’re basically telling one long TV episode and it ends. And you do need that resolution. Even if it’s — I mean, sometimes my favorite moments of, I guess stakes, resolution are the ones that seem so out of whack with what we would expect. That’s why I love the end of Tin Cup. I just think it’s one of the greatest endings of all time because it seems like the stakes are standard to a sports movie — a once great golfer who is down on his luck goes in for a Rocky style comeback. And he’s doing it. And then he approaches this moment where he has to face a choice: should I play is smart or should I go for the perfect shot?

And he goes for the perfect shot. And he blows it. And he blows it. And he blows it. And he blows it. And then he makes it. And the stakes of win the golf tournament, nope. You do not win a golf tournament, but you do hit a perfect shot. And it’s sort of like this is what I’m about. I thought that was, you know, that’s the kind of thing. It’s not enough to say, “Oh, I win or lose a golf tournament.”

**David:** Well that’s what Rocky was like, too.

**Craig:** Exactly. He loses as everybody seems to forget. [laugh]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, he loses. But in losing he finds himself. He finds honor. And so that’s another great example of why external stakes are always less compelling for me in movies than the internal ones.

**John:** This is the time on the podcast where we talk about One Cool Things. David, we should have warned you about this. Do you have a One Cool Thing to talk about?

**David:** I do. I do.

**John:** All right.

**David:** Am I going first?

**John:** You go first.

**David:** I just forgot the name of it. It’s this amazing iOS app that I just started using. You know, one of the things that I have now that I’m in California is all this time in the car. And I’ve always been trying to find a way to read screenplays while I’m driving, or read scripts while I’m driving.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh god. Get him off the road.

**David:** And this is my own thing. So, what I used to do was I would actually do a little tinkering in formatting. I would turn script into text and then I would turn the text into audio and then I would have to do a little text expander and find and replace to reformat it enough so that I can understand it well when it’s audio text. It was a pain in the ass.

Now there’s finally this app. And the app is called Voice Dream. And I guess it’s been around maybe a little while, but I just found out about it. And it really works beautifully. The voices are great. And you can just pull down something from your Read It Leader account, from Pocket, or whatever, or from your Dropbox, or from any number of other sources. It then brings it into that app so that you don’t have to start from, you know, when you’re just doing normal speak it on your iPhone you have to select the whole thing and then it loses your place if you get a notification and if you want to start it over from — it’s impossible for reading screenplays.

So, this one turns it into kind of an audio book.

**John:** That’s great.

**David:** And you can also double click on where you want to go and you can read a little bit regular and then you can pick up again with voice. It’s really, really great.

**John:** And does it work well with Fountain?

**David:** Yeah. It works great with Fountain.

**Craig:** How about that.

**John:** Great. Cool. I should have — I don’t know why we didn’t talk about this at all on the podcast, but David Wain is one of the premier champions of using Fountain to write scripts.

**David:** I love it. I love it.

**John:** And so he’s been on the betas of all of our apps, and Highland, and Weekend Read. So, thank you very much again for all the stuff you’ve done to help us move that format forward.

**David:** Well, I think the more people that use it the more it will get developed for and the more it will help my work. So, spreading the word is a selfish thing.

**John:** Cool. Craig?

**Craig:** I’ve always said that David Wain is very, very selfish. That’s his thing.

I have Two Cool Things this week. One very quickly, One Cool Thing, Ian Helfer, who has worked with David Wain a number of times. I went to 7th and 8th grade with Ian Helfer and he’s such a great guy. Do you guys work on anything together or what’s the story?

**David:** Yeah. He’s a great screenwriter. He hasn’t worked with me in any official capacity since Role Models. He came in and worked for a little bit. But, very good friend of mine and he works all the time with John Hamburg who we’re all buddies from back in college days and afterwards in New York. And, yeah, he’s one of my very good friends.

**Craig:** I love that guy.

So, my other One Cool Thing is a live stage reading that the Black List folks are doing. And it is of a script that made the official Black List of the best unproduced screenplays. And this one is a script written by Stephany Folsom and it’s called 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon.

And that script is about a White House public affairs assistant who basically convinces Kubrick to fake the moon landing in case something goes wrong. You know, that whole story that we didn’t really land on the moon, which some people, [laughs], basically you know I’m a pretty tolerant person. But if you don’t think we landed on the moon, I can’t talk to you. [laughs] I just can’t. I have to remove you from my life.

Regardless, this script is supposed to be pretty great. I haven’t read it, but they are doing a live stage reading of it. It will be at the LA Film Festival on June 14th, so they’ll actually have an interesting cast doing it and ticket info. So, look for information about that at the LA Film Fest website.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll also have a link to that in the show notes.

My One Cool Thing is this app for iOS, for the iPad, called Hopscotch. And it is a little programming app designed for kids, but really adults can use it, too. It’s very, very clever. I think on a previous episode I talked about Scratch which is this sort of programming environment that MIT developed for kids. This is like that, but actually a little bit more stripped down and I think a little bit more accessible for kids to get started with. You can build these little monsters and have them run around and interact with each other in ways that’s really, really smart.

The women who created the app are really big on sort of getting girls to code and it feels like a great way to sort of get your daughter to start interacting with code in a great way. So, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** I really do believe that coding should, I don’t know if it will, but it should become an actual piece of core curriculum in primary education. There’s no reason that we expect as a matter of course American Children to learn geometry but we don’t expect them to learn how to code. It just makes no sense.

**David:** I think it will eventually happen, although it might take awhile. But it’s inevitable. It’s like it probably took a long time before they said everyone should learn how to type.

**Craig:** Do they do that? I mean, is typing mandatory now?

**John:** They teach typing now.

**Craig:** Oh good. Good.

**John:** They do. And they sort of gave up on cursive and they teach typing, which I think is a good tradeoff. I think the way that you will stealthily get people coding is Minecraft. I think you build some more logic into Minecraft where there’s switches and do this and this thing becomes a chain of events. I think you sneak that into Minecraft which every young person already plays and you will get a new generation of coders. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** Well, I hope we do.

**John:** All right. That is our show this week. But before we wrap up, David Wain, we need you to plug hard your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And tell us when it’s coming out.

**David:** It’s They Came Together.

**John:** They Came Together. What day?

**David:** It is June 27th on Friday. It is in selected theaters and it’s also at the same time on VOD. And if —

**Craig:** Oh, you mean, you guys are doing day and date?

**John:** Are you guys at the Arclight in Los Angeles? Where are you?

**David:** Yeah. It’s day and date. So, you’ve got to go to the theater if you’re in one of those handful of cities that weekend, please. In LA it’s going to be Los Feliz, AMC City Walk, and Laemmle Playhouse.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Fantastic.

**David:** But also you can watch it on your TV that day if you choose. If you go to TheyCameTogether.com you’ll see a selection of some of the amazing reviews we’ve gotten, and a trailer, and clips, and poster. And Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, and a cast of incredible comedic talents including Jason Mantzoukas, Bill Hader, Christopher Meloni, Max Greenfield, Cobie Smulders, Michael Ian Black, Ellie Kemper, etc, etc.

**Craig:** Keep going. Keep going.

**John:** It’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** It’s pretty awesome.

**John:** How about Childrens Hospital? Is there another Childrens Hospital coming?

**David:** Childrens Hospital is starting to shoot actually in two weeks, the sixth season, and also the other Adult Swim series that I do the lead voice on —

**John:** Newsreaders.

**David:** Well, there’s that. That’s also coming out in a few months, I believe. And then there’s also June 15th, just in three weeks, is Superjail! Is premiering on Adult Swim at 11:45pm.

**Craig:** You know, this is really our first podcast after all these shows where we actually did a late night talk show style guest with something to plug. It’s really..it’s fun.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think we should honestly just do it. And I’m serious about this. I’m actually very serious.

**David:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We should never do this again except with David Wain. Like I honestly, like we should always have David on to plug his stuff.

**John:** Well, because you’re always kind of busy, so there’s always going to be something new to plug.

**David:** I can just come on at the end and plug.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** I just think we should always —

**David:** No matter who the guest is.

**Craig:** Like I don’t care if Tom Cruise wants to be on Scriptnotes. No. No. But David Wain can show up. He’s got — he’s just dropping by a block party. [laughs] And he just wants to mention that he’ll be there.

**David:** Come by. I’m baking cupcakes.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’ll be good. And that’s our show. So, you can find links to most of the things we talked about on the show today at the show page, johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for our episodes. You can also find the last 20 episodes on iTunes. If you’re there you can leave us a comment or a rating, that’s always lovely and nice.

If you want to go back to the old episodes, you can find them at Scriptnotes.net. You can go back to episode one and all the way up through to the present time. We offer subscriptions for $1.99 a month which gives you access to all those back episodes and occasional bonus episodes.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. Is edited by Matthew Chilelli. And if you have a question for us on the show, like the ones we answered, short questions are really good on Twitter. So, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. David Wain, what are you?

**David:** @davidwain.

**John:** Very nice. If you have a longer question, like the ones we answered today, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And David Wain thank you so much for being an awesome guest.

**David:** I’m a big fan of this podcast and of both of you and I’m really happy to be here. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. Have a great weekend.

**Craig:** Bye guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [David Wain](http://davidwain.com/), and on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0906476/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/davidwain)
* [Being Gay at Jerry Falwell’s University](http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/being-gay-at-jerry-falwells-university/274578/), from The Atlantic
* [They Came Together](http://www.theycametogether.com) is in theaters and On Demand June 27th
* [Wet Hot American Summer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005EYLFOW/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Caught in the acts](http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/05/18/caught-in-the-acts-2/), from David Bordwell’s website on cinema
* [Legends of Oz Investors Believe Hollywood Conspiracy Destroyed Film](http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/legends-of-oz-investors-who-each-paid-100000-believe-hollywood-conspiracy-destroyed-film-99641.html), from Cartoon Brew
* THR on [Amy Adams’ Story of Your Life selling to Paramount for $20 Million](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-amy-adams-story-your-704004)
* [Voice Dream](http://www.voicedream.com/), a text to speech app for iOS
* [Fountain.io](http://fountain.io/)
* [Ian Helfer](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0375043/) on IMDb
* Get tickets now for the [Black List Live! read of Stephany Folsom’s 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon](http://filmguide.lafilmfest.com/tixSYS/2014/xslguide/eventnote.php?notepg=1&EventNumber=9107&utm_content=buffer89d0e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) on June 14th, part of the LA Film Fest
* [Hopscotch](https://www.gethopscotch.com/), a coding for kids app for iOS
* [Childrens Hospital](http://video.adultswim.com/childrens-hospital/), [Newsreaders](http://video.adultswim.com/newsreaders/index.html), and [Superjail!](http://video.adultswim.com/superjail/index.html) (which returns on June 14th) on adultswim.com
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Mike Timmerman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/qa-from-the-superhero-spectacular).

**John August:** Now is the time of the podcast where we will open up for some questions.

**Craig Mazin:** Great.

**John:** Good questions out in the audience. We have two microphones. And so we will probably ping pong back and forth between them. We will do as many questions as we have time for.

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

**John:** Like 15 minutes.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We’re actually a little bit long, but we’re going to keep going. So, line up there if you have a question for us. If you have a question for the people who came up here and spoke before, we will get them up here to answer your question.

So, first gentleman at the microphone?

**(Audience Member) John:** Hi, I’m John.

**John:** Hi, how are you?

**(Audience Member) John:** And I just wanted to say thank you. I want to say thank you for showing up every week and we’ll continue to show up every week. And I made you guys some presents.

**Craig:** Aw!

**John:** Aw, presents! Aw, we like presents. Bring them done.

**Craig:** Aw. Thank you. My dog…oh wow, cool, hold on. These are cool. Look.

**John:** Ooh, they’re t-shirts and what do they say? They say Scriptnotes in black.

**Craig:** No, no, the Jon Bon Jovi of Screenwriting Podcasts. Thank you.

**John:** Very well done.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** In Gotham no less. Thank you very much for these.

**Craig:** That is awesome. And true. Thank you. That’s… — God, that’s so nice. Thank you.

**John:** And to the right.

**Art:** Yes, hi. My name is Art. I just moved to LA last Friday.

**John:** He moved from Virginia if I remember correctly.

**Art:** Yes. That’s right. I moved from Virginia. I’ve got a place to live sorted out. I’ve got a regular income sorted out. So, if you were in this position what would you spend the next year doing?

**Craig:** What? No. No, no, no, no, no. You’re going to spend the next year doing what you’re going to do, right? I already did that. You know, I did my version of that. I worked. I got whatever job I could and I worked really hard. That’s what you’re going to do and you’re going to write in the evening, but everyone’s thing is different.

**John:** Yeah. But he’s saying like what can he aim for. I think that’s —

**Craig:** High.

**John:** Aim high. Aim high and modest at the same time. Obviously some stability in your life is a great thing, so some sort of job that keeps you in rent is fantastic. You need to keep writing. You need to find other people who write. You need to find other people who make movies. And you need to help them with their writing and help them make their movies because you need to form a social network of people who are doing exactly what you’re trying to do.

So, events like this is a way to start. Classes are a way to start. Whatever is a way to start. Take some improv classes. Whatever, just so that you get to meet more people who are in your cohort of people trying to rise up and go through.

**Craig:** That’s a better answer.

**John:** What?

**Craig:** Better answer.

**John:** Yeah. It is.

**Craig:** It happens.

**John:** There’s Bon Jovi and then there’s the other people in the band.

**Craig:** Tico Torres.

**John:** Exactly.

But you need to do the things you need to do to pay your rent and then just never forget that you’re actually here to become a writer, to be making films, and to always sort of wake up every morning thinking like how am I getting closer to doing this thing.

And if you wake up ten days in a row and you’ve done nothing, that should be a sign that you need to be doing something new. Welcome to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Welcome to Los Angeles.

**John:** Over here.

**Male Audience Member:** First off, thanks for being awesome.

**John:** Oh, thank you.

**Male Audience Member:** And thanks to Aline Brosh McKenna for all the booze.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Aline. Woo!

**Craig:** Aline. She didn’t stick around.

**Male Audience Member:** To kind of piggyback off that last question, I feel like I’ve gotten to a point now in my circle friends, bless you, the work that we’ve done, it’s like we write every day. You know, we’re starting to get some traction. You’re starting to get some representation. Things haven’t really happened for you in a big way yet, but you’re starting to get the wheat from the chaff. But having said that, the notes that I’m starting to get and a lot of my friends are starting to kind of give, it’s almost you know enough to be dangerous.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Male Audience Member:** And at what point do you kind of stop taking notes, or do you stop taking notes and do you kind of just rely on what you’ve learned and your kind of own instincts.

**Craig:** You’re singling out something very important. What a good way you put it: You know enough to be dangerous.

So, there is something that happens when you get writers together who have gotten to a particular place but maybe haven’t gone all the way through the process of production. When you truly, when the scales from your eyes really for the first time. When you see your work produced and on screen and you go through that machine.

But you’re not there, so you have some information, you have some knowledge, and sometimes all the cross notes do is just deaden and flatten everything down. Sometimes the crabs are just pulling each other down into the barrel. And sometimes the people giving you notes just aren’t that good. Right?

So, this never goes away. It’s just that fancier and more expensive people give you these notes. And what you have to do is just be honest. Just be honest. That means honestly say that was thought-provoking. It doesn’t matter that you are — a hobo gave me a note, but it was thought-provoking. Nor does it matter that you’re the president of a studio. “Your note is dumb.” Now, you don’t say that.

**John:** You don’t say that.

**Craig:** Not like that. But just honestly accept everything, evaluate it honestly, and you cannot go wrong. Above all, if somebody is going after the thing that is the beating heart of what you’re doing, the reason you’re doing it, the passion, they’re not bad people, they’re just not right for this. Don’t listen to them because they’re just not — there are people that don’t like movies you like, right? That may be what’s going on there.

So, just be honest.

**Male Audience Member:** Cool. Awesome.

**John:** Thank you. I agree with what Craig said.

**Male Audience Member:** Great. Thank you.

**John:** Thanks. To you, sir.

**Brad:** Hi. I’m Brad. Big fan.

I was wondering, as a writer you want to write good dialogue, but this is action night and there’s always sometimes a chance to express something through dialogue or through action, so as a good writer you want to make good dialogue. As a screenwriter you know that it’s a visual medium and action goes a long way. What’s going through your head when you’re deciding whether to express something in dialogue or in action?

**John:** The breakdown between action and dialogue is every word counts that someone’s character says. And so if there’s a moment that can only be expressed by saying something, you’re going to say something. But generally I always try to do the pass where I sort of turn off the volume in my head and just like read the script as if no one is allowed to talk. Imagine that you’re watching it on a plane and you didn’t buy the headphones. And would you be able to follow what’s happening there?

You want to make sure that the movie makes fundamental sense visually. And then you get the bonus of like sound adds to it all. And that there’s a reason why these characters are talking and what they’re saying is actually fascinating.

The best screenplays you read, both the action and the dialogue are fantastic. And they’re complementing each other and they’re not in a way commenting on each other. They’re sort of happening at the same time in a way that’s mutually fantastic.

When you come to situations where characters are talking about the things you just saw, that’s a dangerous situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a really good question. Sometimes the answer is in character. There are characters that are verbal and that need to say things. And there are characters that aren’t and need to do things and are parsimonious with their words. And you have to know that, obviously.

But, in a general sense, it’s like music. So, everything is an instrument in the band of your screenplay and sometimes you just want that guitar there and sometimes you don’t. And the truth is you have to feel it. Every writer is different. Every writer has a different fingerprint.

I have no idea how many words are in Kill Bill that are dialogue, but a lot, right? Until suddenly there’s none. Right? And then it’s just so quiet. And then there’s a lot again. So, Tarantino has his own fingerprint that changes from moment to moment but then as a whole you get, right?

Every writer has their fingerprint. You just have to kind of write to find yours. And then you will, or you won’t.

**John:** He will. Come on, Craig.

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** It’s a hopeful night.

**Craig:** You know.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Brad:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Thanks.

You sir?

**George:** Hi, my name is George. I wanted to thank you guys for inspiring me to quit. [laughs] No, I’m sincere about that. You may have very well salvaged a life.

I just had so much invested. I left a career as a psychologist from Berkeley. Went to USC film school. Did well in the Nicholls. Landed a few jobs. Even had a film produced. And that may sound like humble bragging except for it’s been ten years of just struggle. And I’m about to turn 43. The only thing substantial in my life is my pug.

**John:** Pugs are great dogs. So, you’re doing well.

**George:** Pugs are great dogs. But, you know, sometimes you just need permission to let go —

**Craig:** Yes.

**George:** From professionals you trust.

**Craig:** Yes.

**George:** And inspired by the Dennis Palumbo episode, I’m going back to school to get my degree in clinical psychology.

**Craig:** Great. Good for you. Good. That’s fantastic.

**John:** Congratulations.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**George:** So, I don’t have a question. I just felt really compelled to thank you guys.

**Craig:** Well, thank you.

**John:** Thank you for sharing that too. That’s really, really good.

**Craig:** You know, I have to say that that needs to happen more often. That what I loved about that was that you had no shame attached to it. Everybody attaches this shame to wanting to do something and fail or wanting to do something and not achieve that thing. In fact, even just the idea of fail, right?

But it’s not shameful at all. There’s all sorts of things I’ve tried to do and I just haven’t been able to do them. And that’s okay. It’s perfectly fine. Just think of all the incredible things you’re going to do.

When I was in college I really wanted to get into the Nassoons which was the a cappella singing group. And I got called back. It was like really close and it was down to me and a guy and then they took the other guy. And I was so bummed out. And I saw one of the guys that was in the Nassoons like a week later and I was like, hey. And he goes, “Hey man.” I go, “I’m just so bummed about that.” And he’s like, “It’s not the be-all/end-all man.”

And I hear that dudes voice in my head all the time. Nothing is the be-all/end-all. Nothing is. It’s just movies. You know? It’s just movies. It’s fine. Good for you.

**John:** Yay! Sir, a question?

**Male Audience Member:** I want to say thank you just for having the podcast every week, to hear you guys talk about it, screenwriting, it’s like an education free and I love the free-99 price of it every week. It’s just great.

I actually had a question for David if that’s okay?

**Craig:** Yeah! Where is Goyer?

**John:** David Goyer, come over here.

**David Goyer:** Yes sir. Hi, thank you for coming out tonight.

**Male Audience Member:** I had a question about act structure for writing because I know you guys are working on Constantine for NBC coming up. And I’ve heard some writers say that some TV shows are going from four acts to five, or in some cases even more to get more commercials in. And I want to know if that affects the way you’re writing story at all. If you’re having even more acts into it, or if it’s not an issue for you at all?

And if you could tell me how many acts are in Constantine.

**John:** He’s working on a spec. He just wants to make sure it actually matches your show.

**David:** So, you’re referring obviously to television. Currently I think the NBC shows and most of the network shows, they say they’re five acts with a teaser.

**John:** Yeah. That’s six.

**David:** Which is six.

**Craig:** Six acts.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** And it sucks. I mean, because you’ve got 43 minutes and change to tell a story and divide it by six, so that’s roughly seven minutes. I don’t know, I didn’t do very well in math, but I think it is.

The thing that’s hard with that, and one of the reasons why I have a show on Starz where we don’t have commercial breaks and that’s a lot nicer. I think commercial breaks can be interesting to a degree but the six-act structure is really rough because you’re having to create this sort of artificial climax every seven minutes. And it just means like you barely have time to get into anything.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And sometimes you want scenes to just play. And you feel this sort of forced compulsion, too, because you want to make sure that they tune in after the commercial break, so you want to create — something crazy has to happen at the end of every act.

So, it’s rough. It’s a struggle. And I remember years and years ago it used to be there were four acts, and then it went to five. And five was kind of doable. And it used to be that you had 48 minutes instead. But six acts is really, really hard. And I mean I don’t want a lot of network television largely because of that because I feel like it puts a forced rhythm into the storytelling.

**Craig:** Oh, so we’re all looking forward to Constantine. This sounds really —

**John:** It sounds like a great show, David. You’re doing a really nice job. So thank you for that.

**David:** I think we’ve done a decent job. It’s a struggle. It’s hard. It’s a lot harder to write, I think, a network show than it is a premium cable show. On my Da Vinci, we don’t have acts. We don’t break anything into acts.

**Craig:** You just do the story as you wish.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** All right. Thank you.

**John:** Thank you, David Goyer.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** Thank you for the question. We have time for like four questions. So, if you are standing there and we did not get to your question, say I was the person who was in line and you’re going to email us. You’re going to email us your question and Craig and I promise to answer it on the podcast.

**Craig:** Promise.

**John:** Is that fair? We promise.

**Craig:** Promise.

**John:** So, I see there’s like five more people who we may not get to your questions, but if you want to email us you can and we will answer them. But we’re going to answer — did we say four?

**Craig:** Whatever you say, buddy.

**John:** We’re going to answer four questions and we’re going to start here.

**Paul:** My name is Paul. I just wanted to talk about there are these moments in film and in scripts that I sort of identify as a loving enthusiasm, that I greet these moment like a wondrous occasion because it’s just so — it moves me. Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption when he gets the beers to his coworkers, he doesn’t drink one and he says, “I gave up drinking.” That makes me want to put a fist through a wall because I love that choice and I love the humanity and I love that moment.

And then, John, you have a line, and forgive me if I butcher it, but there’s a line in Big Fish where Albert Finney’s voiceover says, “When you fall in love, time stops.” And that’s true. And that’s another moment where I want to break everything around me because I’m like, “Ah!” Because that is not presentational. That line is not presentational.

**Craig:** This is where you get to the question.

**Paul:** I apologize.

— That line is not presentational but it’s personal, it’s like someone talking at a bedside. So, I ask you guys — can you tell us what is a moment in your writing where you’ve had to stop and you feel genuine pride and emotion at something you created solely? And how do you break through with something that maybe personal and ambiguous and amazing to you, but the rest of the world might not see it that way?

**John:** Yeah. The experience of writing something, occasionally you will have those moments of like, “Oh my god, that was so good,” and you’re like, “Where did that come from?” And the very best writing I’ve ever felt I’ve done, it just sort of felt like it was always in there and I just sort of scraped everything away and it’s like oh my god underneath all the terrible writing there was actually a really good thing there. And who wrote that? That was really good.

Every once and awhile you do surprise yourself. And there are moments in like a couple of my movies where I feel that thing. There’s some moments in Frankenweenie where just how you talk about the loss of your dog, and sort of like they live in a place in your heart and they’re always there. There are those moments that are really fundamentally true to you that you sort of, “Well that’s the movie. That’s the expression of that idea.”

But it doesn’t always happen. I think sometimes we mythologize those few great moments and we sort of ignore everything else that makes good writing. Craig?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. You want to avoid that stereotype of the writer that has this kind of epiphany. Writing is rarely about epiphany. I wish it were more about epiphany. I’ve had some moments like that. I liked writing a moment for Melissa McCarthy where we talks, where she kind of reveals the truth about herself. I really liked writing the scene where Jason Bateman gives her her birth certificate and she learns her name.

I really loved that. I felt something when I wrote that. You know, are other people going to feel it? I don’t give a shit. I felt it. You know what I mean? And at that point I’m like, “Well, either they are or they’re not.” But the one thing they can’t take away is that I did, you know, that I felt something with that.

But, feeling things in those moments isn’t the Holy Grail. So much of it is about the nuts and bolts of crafting something that other people can deliver. Remember, you can feel it, you can put it on the page, but it’s paper. They’re going to have to put up lights, other humans that are much better looking than us are going to have to say the lines. People are going to tell them where to go. Editors are going to edit it. And then the music, you know.

So, I don’t aim for those things. But if they happen they happen. I don’t over celebrate them I guess I would say.

**John:** Great. Well thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Over here.

**Male Audience Member:** Hey there. Actually to Craig the question, but with having the panel here I thought it was really appropriate. As a game writer, they talk about transmedia and stuff like that. And with all the properties we have here, they usually want to make a game of it — Conan, Avengers, or Batman. But what I’d like to know is this gap that we have and it was appropriate that rebooting an IP. In games they do that often. You’ll have Batman but then you’ll have Batman the game. The writers don’t talk. We’re the redheaded stepchild of the industry.

**Craig:** Right.

**Male Audience Member:** And I say that only because I get older and my hair goes from blond to ginger, so I feel like I’m allowed to say the redheaded stepchild. But how do we bridge that gap? Where does the guild come in and say, “Okay, we’ve got these writers that do the film and we’ve got these writers that do the game.” How do we bridge that gap and truly make it transmedia? And it goes to Craig because we talked about this just before we started.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there’s two questions there. I mean, one is why aren’t screenwriters of movies talking to the videogame writers that are based on the movies that they’re writing. And the answer is they should be. I don’t know why. I mean, other than to say that the machinery of Hollywood is often inefficient or backwards. I mean, I don’t know — Marvel for instance, it seems like that’s a company that would get it, that would understand that in a world where —

**John:** In a world…

**Craig:** In a world where Modern Warfare can sell more in a day than any movie, that you would want to coordinate those efforts because gaming is vital.

**Male Audience Member:** Yeah. I mean, I sit in a room and I won’t have David there or anyone else. I’ll have —

**Craig:** Well, we can get David over there for you.

**Male Audience Member:** I talked to David about that, but apparently he’s really busy.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s got six acts to hit. [laughs]

**Male Audience Member:** Six acts and a new baby, too. But, you know, you’ll sit in a room and there’s like 24-year-old marketing people there. And then you have the guy from Mario Bros. who is there, you know.

**Craig:** Well, here’s what happens. The videogames get pushed off into merchandising, you know, which is kind of — it’s a ghettoization of what should not be the case. Videogame tie-ins, right, can sometimes be viewed as merchandising. But, look, that’s ultimately up to the people that are paying for it. They either get it or they don’t.

I mean, I would love — I don’t write movies, or I haven’t written movies that would connect to videogames, although, now I’ve written a movie that could be a videogame. I would love to be involved and that would be awesome, you know. The other question though is about the Writers Guild. And as we discussed, I would love to see writers of video games represented by the Writers Guild. A couple of problems. One, most of the companies are international. Our jurisdiction doesn’t cover international work.

But there are some that are local. So, the one I always keep picking on is Bethesda which makes Fallout and Elder Scrolls. And they’re so written. Those games are so evidently written. And I feel like the guild should just go and try and get those writers organized and get them some sort of basic protections. But they don’t.

**Male Audience Member:** So how do you guys feel? I feel the same way —

**Craig:** You don’t know how this feels?

**Male Audience Member:** What I do feel is working on IP that makes $1.5 billion and I get five free games —

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Yeah, that’s what we want. We want a piece of that.

**Craig:** I mean, it’s crazy. And just…ARGH.

**John:** Yeah. Leave Craig with his umbrage. But thank you very much. Basically we agree. We are not going to fix this tonight. We need the people who write for videogames, who write for movies to take the initiative to get these things happening, either on a guild level or an individual level to get representation. That’s going to happen.

**Male Audience Member:** David, I’ll be waiting for you outside so we can talk.

**Craig:** All right man.

**John:** Hello.

**Hunter:** Hey there. Hunter. Long time, second time, I guess. So, this was designed for your whole panel but we’re running late, so if anybody wants to. It used to be back in the day sequels were kind of a redheaded stepchild where they’d happen and they were sort of cash-ins and considered inferior. But today —

**John:** Stuart Friedel is so sad. Both of our Stuarts are like, “Why?”

**Hunter:** But today, I love weird old sequels, Exorcist II. But today there —

**Craig:** You like The Exorcist II?

**Hunter:** I saw it with no idea what the hell it was recently. It’s fascinating to look at.

**Craig:** Wow. It is kind of fascinating.

**Hunter:** Not good, but interesting.

But anyway, today their plan from beforehand is, like have sequels just actually gotten better and has that changed the way that one writes an original? And how does that interact with movies coming up like the new subgenre of either Lego Movie or the Magic Kingdom.

**Craig:** I’m not answering a movie about the quality of sequels. That’s for fucking sure. We better ask somebody else. What about the Captain America guys?

**John:** Captain America guys. Captain America, come up here. Talk to us about sequels.

**Craig:** Captains of America guys.

**John:** So, when you guys were working on the first Captain America did you have to consider at all the idea of like, well, what would the sequel be?

**Stephen McFeely:** Yes. Yes. Certainly if you know the movies at all, the Winter Soldier is a character that’s in the first movie. And so we had to sort of retcon and recreate an opportunity for him to come back because the comics — the way we were changing the story didn’t allow that. Cap and Bucky both sort of die at the same time and it didn’t give you an end of act two, you know, depressing moment.

But we didn’t assume it. You know, Cap was one of the least successful Marvel movies, so it was not an automatic green light. But you certainly plan for the possibility as long as it doesn’t screw up the movie you’re making at the moment.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s what I would stress. So, the movies that I’ve done that have sequels, like the first Charlie’s Angels. As we were shooting it, it was a nightmare to get the first movie made. But at the same time we were thinking like, well, if there is another movie what is that movie like? And it’s a chance to think about like as if — what would the second episode of this amazing TV show be? It wasn’t making a good episode at all; it was a terrible movie we made as a sequel. But we can think about what the ideal second episode was and to some degree that’s what —

**Stephen:** And we’ve tried to do that at the end of the second movie, if anybody has seen it. There’s sort of just a button where they go, “Right, what are we going to do? We’re going to do that next.” And then we’re trying to pay that off.

My hope is that —

**Christopher Markus:** There’s no third movie.

**Craig:** What happened at the end?

**John:** He’s just handing you a microphone.

**Craig:** Does he do that a lot where he just loses the will to live at the end of a sentence?

**Christopher:** He’s gone now.

**John:** Well, we have one last question and it comes from a man in his suit. Thank you for wearing a suit, by the way.

**Craig:** Man in suit. Man in suit.

**Brian:** I actually want to ask if Christopher and Stephen and also David could stay a sec. David, could you join us, too? Thanks.

**John:** Wow. We got direction from the audience. This is going to be good. There’s a lot of high expectation here.

**Brian:** I said please.

My name is Brian. Craig and John —

**Christopher:** This is nice.

**Brian:** Thanks. Craig and John, thanks. This is my first time actually seeing you guys live and everything. I saw — I was at the Austin Film Festival and I saw the panel there so thank you.

I think it’s kind of ironic that I was like the last one because I was in the military for ten years. I was in Iraq. I was in Afghanistan. I was —

**Craig:** Thank you for your service.

**Brian:** And I really did do the thing, I was in infantry the whole time, whatever. Actually it’s been nice the last couple years as Hollywood has expanded beyond compare of how welcoming — you know, they have veterans initiatives at all the studios, all the networks. They have a veterans’ representative for jobs and stuff. And it helps with those of us that move out here ourselves.

**Craig:** And you know the Writers Guild Foundation has a program as well that we’re supporting tonight?

**Brian:** Right. I was going to —

**Craig:** Oh, did I fuck it up?

**Brian:** No, no.

**Craig:** Okay.

**Brian:** No, I was going to say like every time I’ve met somebody I always say thank you because all those proceeds go. They actually just had it like two weeks ago.

**Craig:** The Foundation supports, basically working with veterans to help kind of get them going in their careers as screenwriters.

**Brian:** So, I just want to say thanks to start. Also, I wanted to give Andrea a thank you for, you know, she wrote World Trade Center, of course, which is a very distinctive movie. I mean, obviously 9/11 is why I went overseas and everything else. So, all I was going to say was I have a very unique background. I actually moved out here for music originally. Somehow I got whored into working reality television, so I survived working around Kardashians and Housewives and all that stuff.

**Craig:** Was that better or worse than Iraq?

**Brian:** I’ll be professional and hold back. Since I’m wearing a suit I guess. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Got it.

**Brian:** But, no, just about a year ago I really made a shift and I knew I wanted to produce and write but it was more — scripted is really where I knew I needed to be and so I took a step back, started coming to all of these events, took writing classes, all of that.

Just a two-part thing. I know David mentioned something about Constantine. I was going to say congratulations on the pickup, too. And then to you guys also on Marvel’s Agent Carter, of course, too. The question is TV versus film. You get more time to develop the world — I’ve heard, some of the things I’ve learned so far. You get to develop the world more in TV versus in film where it’s more of a character snapshot, or, you know, a specific situation or an event or something. How are you able to do that in television for the two shows that you guys have coming up? That’s one question.

**John:** Are you guys involved in Agent Carter? I didn’t know you were.

**Stephen:** We wrote the pilot.

**John:** Oh, well congratulations on that. I had no idea. I should probably read those trades. So, is this your first television experience?

**Christopher:** We wrote a pilot that didn’t go, well, it didn’t get filmed. And we’ve watched a lot of television.

**John:** Oh, that’s good. Yeah, watching television is really a crucial first step.

**Christopher:** Yeah, it’s been very helpful.

**John:** So tell us, are you excited about this opportunity to — are you staying with the show?

**Christopher:** We’re supervisory —

**John:** Oh, that’s really awkward that I just asked that question.

**Christopher:** Well, because it conflicts with the writing of Cap 3. So, eventually —

**John:** Eventually you’ll leave.

**Christopher:** Yeah, eventually we’re just not going to be able to do both of them. But, it’s only eight episodes.

**John:** David Goyer manages to do everything at once, so just do whatever he’s doing.

**Christopher:** Well, David Goyer is not human.

**John:** Yeah. David Goyer, here, take a microphone. David, talk to use about writing television versus writing film because you’ve done a lot of both. So, what should he be thinking about in terms of writing worlds in those two media?

**David:** Well, I mean, I think with the advent of basic cable and then DVRs, it just seems like more and more television these days is shifting into serialized storytelling or semi-serialized storytelling, and so in that case it really is becoming much more of a novelistic approach.

I know that when we broke the first season of Da Vinci it was eight episodes and we just said, okay, it’s an eight-hour movie. And Constantine is like a semi-serialized show. And so that aspect of it is pretty cool because you have time to do the slow burn and you have time to really watch a character grow and change. That’s one of the things that’s exciting for me about a great television show. You can see a good guy become a bad guy and vice versa.

And you can also get a second bit of the apple. And a character can surprise you and you can revisit it. And on the Da Vinci show we had a character that wasn’t a series regular that became one because we were excited by what he was doing.

So, on one hand that’s awesome. But then on the other hand it’s like sometimes it’s nice to be able to just say I’m going to tell this finite story. And like if you’re doing a TV show sometimes you have to — it’s like doing 40 sequels. And you have to keep topping yourself, and topping yourself, to a certain extent. And so there’s that pressure, too.

When we were going to the second season of Da Vinci, we were a little freaked out because we felt like we’d written a really great movie and now we have to write an even better movie. And so sort of each season it gets harder and harder. So, there are pros and cons.

**John:** Generally on the podcast we recommend people vigorously try to do both. And would that be your advice? If you’re starting out as a writer you should do both.

**David:** Totally. Well, these days, I mean, there used to be this sort of blood/brain barrier between feature writers and TV writers. And now people are bopping back and forth. I think it’s awesome. It’s just a different kind of writing. It’s like going from being a soloist to playing in a jazz combo, or something like that.

**John:** Guys, thank you very much. Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you for your question.

Links:

* [The Writers Guild Foundation](http://wgfoundation.org)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 144: [The Summer Superhero Spectacular](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-summer-superhero-spectacular)
* [Andrea Berloff](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0075696/) on IMDb, and [Deadline’s Conan announcement](http://www.deadline.com/2013/10/legend-of-conan-lands-andrea-berloff-to-script-arnold-schwarzenegger-epic-reprise/)
* [Christopher Markus](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321655/) & [Stephen McFeely](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321656/) on IMDb, and [their interview on LA Times Hero Complex](http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/captain-america-winter-soldier-writers-revel-in-marvel-universe/#/0)
* [David Goyer](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0333060/) on IMDb, and [his BAFTA Screenwriters Lecture](http://www.bafta.org/film/features/david-s-goyer-delivers-his-bafta-screenwriters-lecture,3931,BA.html)
* [Susannah Grant](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0335666/) on IMDb, and a [feature on her from Salon](http://www.salon.com/2000/04/13/grant/)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 99: [Psychotherapy for Screenwriters](http://johnaugust.com/2013/psychotherapy-for-screenwriters)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Wilson Kelly ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-summer-superhero-spectacular).

**Disclaimer**

**John August:** Today’s podcast contains explicit language. Also, there’s a Q&A at the end of the episode. We’re going to split that off as a second episode that will air a few days later. So, enjoy.

**Announcer:** In a world overrun with franchises, in a time of inexhaustible umbrage, one man must stand alone with another guy because it’s kind of a teamwork thing. To bring you the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular.

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin. Oh, thank you.

**John:** Thank you. And this is The Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular.

**Craig:** Yes. I had no idea that that was going to happen.

**John:** This is all a surprise to Craig.

**Craig:** Everything is a constant surprise to me. I had no idea that was going to happen. I didn’t know how many chairs were going to be up here. I’m totally unprepared.

Oh, no, wait, I’m prepared today.

**John:** You printed out your Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Woo! Printed out my Three Page Challenges. I have questions.

**John:** That’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. I hope those people showed up.

**John:** I think they did. We hope they showed up.

**Craig:** You don’t mind if I check my email?

**John:** Yeah. Check your phone. That’s good. We’re just doing a podcast here. It’s fine.

**Craig:** Oh. Hi!

**John:** Hello! So, we should explain to people listening at home that we are here at the Writers Guild Theater at an event sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation. Let’s thank the Writers Guild Foundation for having us all here tonight.

So, Craig and I are up on stage by ourselves at this moment. We’re going to have some fantastic people up on stage to talk about superheroes, to talk about the pages that people sent in.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s a big time show.

**John:** It’s a live Three Page Challenge. It’s going to be a very big show.

Craig, tonight we’re talking about superheroes, but really most scripts have heroes of some kind. What makes a superhero different?

**Craig:** Well, superheroes — I’m just giving you the answer I think.

**John:** Sure. There’s no wrong answers, except that there are.

**Craig:** There are. [laughs] Superheroes are humans usually, but occasionally human-like aliens —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Who wear costumes, and because they’re heroes not villains, they fight crime. And they are either — I know this because I played the Marvel role playing game, not that I was a dork or anything —

**John:** No, no. It’s well established. It’s canon that he was not a dork.

**Craig:** They’re either mutants. Or they’re altered humans. Or they’re aliens. Or they’re just obsessive, like Batman for instance, who is just mentally ill.

**John:** Yeah. He’s kind of crazy.

**Craig:** Right. That would be my definition.

**John:** So, your definition is a person who is, a hero who is more than just an ordinary person in a very special — there’s something about them that is special.

**Craig:** Like super.

**John:** Super. Super is a crucial part of it.

**Craig:** So, they’re a hero that’s super.

**John:** Okay, so more than an ordinary hero?

**Craig:** Super.

**John:** All right. Well established. But where did superheroes come from? Like if we go back through time how do we figure out where superheroes came from. We talked about archetypes on the last episode. So, what is the superhero archetype?

**Craig:** Well, we were talking about mythology the other day and I think that mythology is, you know, gods in the old days — like now God is just a concept or whatever Oprah says God is, or so on and so forth. But in the old days gods would actually — there were many of them and they would show up and talk to you and meddle in your affairs and help you out and give you advice.

And so those were probably the first templates, but there were also if you want to be really specific there were certain humans like Achilles or Hercules that were humans that were champions. Goliath. And the idea of a champion I think is probably where the superhero came.

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s a human but they’re more than just human. They’re touched —

**Craig:** They’re super.

**John:** Well, yes, they’re super. We’ve established that. But they’re touched by something god-like. So, if you talk about the Greek heroes, you talk about Hercules, he is literally like a half — he’s a demigod, he’s a half god.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, superheroes have been around for quite a time, they just haven’t always worn capes. They used to wear —

**Craig:** Thongs.

**John:** Sandals. Togas. Which brings us to our first guest because she’s actually writing one of those superheroes. Andrea Berloff is writing Conan —

**Craig:** Andrea Berloff.

**John:** Andrea Berloff, come up here.

**Craig:** Berloff. Here, I’ll move down.

**John:** Sit here.

**Craig:** Put you there. You can go there.

**Andrea Berloff:** Is this like between two ferns, it’s between two writers?

**Craig:** Andrea Berloff! Andrea Berloff.

**Andrea:** Hi.

**Craig:** You know what I’ve always wanted to say to you?

**Andrea:** No what?

**Craig:** Andrea Berloff, straight outta Compton. Crazy motherfucker named Berloff!

**Andrea:** Crazy motherfucker named Berloff. [laughs]

**John:** Andre Berloff, what is the deal with Conan? When someone says like, “Hey, do you want to write the Conan movie” and you’re like — ?

**Andrea:** Yeah!

**John:** Yeah.

**Andrea:** Hell yeah.

**John:** So tell us about that character. What is it about that character that makes you want to write him?

**Andrea:** You know, he’s just a guy who’s angry, he’s so angry, and so am I.

**John:** He’s a barbarian, in fact.

**Andrea:** He’s a barbarian and so am I. And I get to just be angry every day and get my foot — no, I’m kidding. But not really. He is who every little person wants to be. He wants to be the guy — he is the guy who is writing wrong, who is kicking ass, and who just doesn’t want to have a conversation about it. He’s just going to get the job done.

**John:** So, when you go in to talk about the Conan movie, first off, are you saying “Cone-in” or “Cone-an?”

**Andrea:** I say “Cone-an.”

**Craig:** Oh, it’s “Cone-an.” “Cone-in” is —

**Andrea:** “Cone-in” is O’Brien.

**John:** He hosts a talk show.

**Craig:** He’s that albino on TV. This is —

**John:** Yeah. He’s the one who sort of got screwed out of a late night talk show. Yeah.

**Craig:** Conan is Stuart’s real dad. Conan.

**John:** Oh, Conan.

**Craig:** Where is Stuart?

**John:** No, no, we’re going to establish Stuart later on.

**Craig:** Oh, okay, because I’ve got something to say about Stuart later.

**John:** All right. We’ve got a lot to say about Stuart. We have a Three Page Challenge here and Stuart is integral to the Three Page Challenge.

So, you go in to talk about doing a Conan movie, what are you saying? What is the thing that gets you that job in that room? What are you talking about?

**Andrea:** God if I know. I think, look, I think when you take on one of these iconic characters there is so much that you have to consider. You have to number one come up with a new story because it can’t just be, “Oh, I liked episode 47 from the 1978 series.” It’s got to be something exciting that’s both going to satisfy the fans and bring in tons of new people who don’t really know anything about this character. And why should I be watching this character.

So, I think for me it’s keying into the few sort of iconic things that the fans love, but then also bring in a lot of special sauce to it. And for me that’s really digging down deep in the character. And I don’t want to approach a superhero character any differently than I would approach any other character. They’ve got to have motivation and all the great elements that people who have MFAs know how to talk about better than I do. [laughs]

**John:** Well let’s talk about what are the iconic things that people expect in the Conan movie from your perspective. What are the things — if you don’t match this list then you’re not a Conan movie?

**Andrea:** It’s funny. I had things that I thought were iconic Conan things and then as I’ve been working on the project I get sort of feedback where I’m like people go, “He’s got to be punching a horse.”

**Craig:** He’s got to punch a horse. That was what I was going to say. You have to punch a horse.

**Andrea:** And a camel. Got to punch a —

**Craig:** Is he punching a horse?

**Andrea:** I can neither confirm nor deny about horse punching. However —

**Craig:** He should punch like an elephant. Like make it bigger.

**John:** How about a zebra? A zebra? Any other ideas or suggestions for animals he could punch?

**Craig:** You don’t punch a zebra. That’s horrible.

**Andrea:** A kitty cat. What if Conan — ?

**Craig:** No, no, you punch the horse.

**Andrea:** The horse. Right. So, my point is I feel like there are iconic things such as, you know —

**Craig:** Punching the horse.

**Andrea:** Punching a horse. Maybe spinning a wheel. That doesn’t mean that things are going to end up in the movie. I make no promises.

**Craig:** You mean that thing where he’s pushing the wheel like, “Argh.” Yeah, you got to push that wheel.

**Andrea:** Right. I make no promises however. But, you know, there are sort of these iconic moments, but more than that it’s a guy who just cannot stand people telling him what to do when he doesn’t —

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. Conan is an interesting character because, I mean, my memory of those movies and even reading some of the comics and stuff like that is that he’s not an angst-ridden character because Conan is set in a prehistoric time where there’s no angst. You know what I mean? Like Batman is super angsty. And we’re going to talk to David Goyer in a bit and Captain America gets really angsty about politics.

Conan doesn’t care about politics. Conan doesn’t vote, you know what I mean?

**Andrea:** No. No. There’s a right and a wrong and you do what’s right —

**Craig:** Conan really is just like that horse, like the camel spit at me, I’m punching the camel.

**Andrea:** Is in my way.

**Craig:** Right. So, what’s the — is it helpful in a way to kind of have a character whose motivations are simplified down to that sharp point of I want this, I’m angry at that?

**Andrea:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**Andrea:** Yes. Anything to not have to come up with more stuff and be creative I will take. [laughs] You know, it’s really great to have, you know, when he reaches a fork in the road you know which fork he’s going to take. He’s going to take the fork that is the proper fork to take. There’s no like, “I don’t know, maybe I should take…” No.

**Craig:** There’s no angst.

**Andrea:** There’s no angst.

**Craig:** Conan’s not Jewish.

**Andrea:** Craig —

**Craig:** How did they pick you for this? I don’t understand. It’s so interesting. I’ve known you for such a long time. I know —

**Andrea:** I don’t know what your vision is of me, but I am a tough woman.

**Craig:** I just imagine you like Yenta from Fiddler on the Roof, just like, “What? Conan, what, Conan?”

**John:** Now, Craig, we established that she came in with special sauce.

**Craig:** Oh, she had special sauce.

**John:** So, talk about special sauce. Talk about like going into that room to talk about like this is why we make this Conan movie versus all of the other Conan movies. Are you talking about the main context of other superhero movies or what are you talking about?

**Andrea:** Yes, but again, you don’t want to just be derivative of everything else. You don’t want to point to everybody else’s successful superhero movie and say, “It’s got some of this and it’s got some of that.” For me it went back to, again, the character. Here’s why this character is special.

And I’ve been writing this for Arnold Schwarzenegger who is the embodiment of that role, so it’s not this abstract, you know, “It’s got to be a handsome guy who’s really strong.” No, it’s Arnold, and so you have to be able to write to Arnold and use his skills. And so I think it’s —

**John:** That can be incredibly helpful. As writers, to have a limitation like that, like it has to be this person. It’s like all those other choices just melt away because like those other choices don’t make sense with Arnold Schwarzenegger. These are the things that make sense.

**Andrea:** And, you know, there are limitations. He’s not a 20-year-old guy, so you’ve got to write for Arnold. The story has to be created around Arnold, so that has a whole —

**Craig:** But the idea of the aging hero.

**Andrea:** I love it. That’s what excited me.

**Craig:** It always works. I don’t know how you would do this movie today but, you know, like Chuck Bronson movies, he was just an old guy. He was like, I think, I guess his revenge genre, I mean, he was already in his 50s. He was small. [laughs]

**John:** But he was angry.

**Craig:** He was angry.

**John:** Anger is a thing that doesn’t diminish with age. Anger can actually harden.

**Andrea:** But it was also the era in which those movies were successful. People were angry. Feel disenfranchised.

**Craig:** They wanted that guy. Yeah, they wanted like Bernie Goetz. But, there is something about the Conan mythos that also speaks to a very primal, simple, masculine fantasy. And I’m kind of curious how you approached that. And I don’t like asking questions like “as a woman” because it’s all like as writers, so forget woman/man. But how do you approach the concept of masculinity when you’re writing a character like Conan and your writing in a tradition where you know the Frazetta paintings of the boobies and everything. Is that something you go for?

**Andrea:** Who doesn’t like boobies?

**Craig:** Well I love them. But do you go for that?

**Andrea:** Well, I don’t know that I’m going for boobies. I don’t know that that’s my goal. But —

**Craig:** Have you tried it?

**Andrea:** But…I thought there’s so many ways I can answer that and none of them are really funny in the end.

**Craig:** We don’t need funny, just interesting.

**Andrea:** Just true.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Andrea:** You know, I don’t like to approach it… — Look, I tend to write male-driven movies anyway. That’s just where I’m most comfortable. And I always say I like to write male-driven movies because I understand women too well. And just as you said, the superheroes that are more complicated in terms of, you know, oh, should I do this, should I do that — I’m not into that. And I find that women characters, and I’m not disparaging women, I love women —

**Craig:** Me too.

**Andrea:** Do that. Women, you know, women process things a lot more. There’s an article in the New York Times today that a new study came out that showed that women take a longer time to make a decision because they want more facts. And men are very comfortable making the decision without all the facts.

**Craig:** Totally.

**Andrea:** Which I found really interesting. I was like, of course.

**John:** Conan. Yeah.

**Andrea:** I don’t know that we needed or an article.

**Craig:** Yeah, sometimes you just, I’m like I decided to punch the camel in the face.

**Andrea:** Right. And when you’re a writer it’s really nice to have that black and white stuff when in real life life is not so black and white and not so easy. So, for me I kind of love the more hyper masculine, if you want to call it that quality I can go. I love it. It’s fun.

**John:** This seems like a great time to bring up other writers who are working on this image of masculinity in a black and white world and the complications of that. Can we bring up Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Who write Captain America.

**Craig:** Let’s. Let’s bring them up. I’ll just keep moving people down. Hey, nice to meet you.

**John:** Thank you, sir. So, we’ve been talking about a barbarian. Is it safe to call Captain America a boy scout?

**Christopher Markus:** Hmm, I mean we rebel against it, but it’s the easy —

**John:** So, rebel, rebel, tell us. Tell us how you describe Captain America, because you’ve done two of these now. So, talk to us about —

**Christopher:** He’s the 90-pound man. Regardless of his body size, he’s a 90-pound boy who has been thwarted for a very long time. Well, about 23 years prior to his injection. And that he’s never had a chance to develop his insides, I don’t think. He’s a very nice boy. But he did not grow up as a handsome well built man. That makes a jerk. You know?

That’s a recipe —

**John:** Stephen McFeely, how do you feel about that?

**Christopher:** No, that’s a recipe for the bad guy in Revenge of the Nerds who, you know, wants to win the big ski race.

**Craig:** Did you say ski race?

**Christopher:** Ski race.

**Craig:** That wasn’t in Revenge of the Nerds.

**Christopher:** Maybe it was a yacht race?

**Craig:** No. But there was like an —

**John:** There have to be snow and mountains for a ski race. All right.

**Christopher:** It was a movie with a ski race. I’ve seen it.

**John:** So, you did the pitching, right, and he sort of just did the actual writing? [laughs] Stephen McFeely —

**Christopher:** I’m done here.

**John:** Stephen McFeely, talk to us about Captain.

**Stephen McFeely:** No, but the key to Captain, Chris is kind of right, that he was a hero before he was a hero. I mean, he was a hero before he was a hero. And he just needed his body to catch up to the spirit inside him. And it’s kind of…

— One of the things we figured out on Winter Soldier, the second movie, is that because of that tendency to think of him as a boy scout, the best way to get everyone on his side is to make him the underdog. And the easiest way to make him the underdog was to make the entire world corrupt that he lived in.

So, if you haven’t seen the movie, the idea is that everyone he knows and works with is a liar and is corrupt.

**Craig:** Kind of like screenwriting.

I want to ask you guys a question about politics. You know, screenwriting, I made that joke about Andrea Berloff being a crazy motherfucker straight outta Compton because she was one of the writers of Straight Outta Compton, the NWA story, which is as surprising as the idea that she’s writing Conan in a sense. [laughs]

Because, you know, Yenta. Fiddler on the roof.

**Andrea:** [laughs] Is there a point? Or you’re just going to make fun of me?

**Craig:** There’s a point.

**John:** He’s basically just going to nag on you for a long time before he gets to the question.

**Andrea:** And…?

**Craig:** I’m not just making fun of you. I’m making fun of you purposefully. You’ve thrown me off my complicated —

**Stephen:** Politics.

**Craig:** Yes, politics. So, the hip hop was, it happened and everybody thought —

**Christopher:** It’s just hip hop. It’s not “the hip hop.” I just wanted…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is it Captains America or is there just one?

**John:** is it Captain American?

**Christopher:** It’s the United States Man.

**Craig:** So, the hip hop started and people thought, okay, well this is cool but it’ll stop soon. And it didn’t stop. And the superhero genre in a way, the revival of the superhero genre has sort of reminded me of that because it came back with… — I mean, the Burton Batman kind of kicked off something for a while, but it wasn’t so great. And then I think Nolan came along and suddenly kaboom, everything went crazy. And it’s sort of here permanently.

And one of the things that’s happened with the superhero genre, because I do think it’s here to stay in some sort of permanent fashion, is that it has become, it seems to me, the predominant genre for screenwriters to talk about politics in America which seems kind of nuts. But it’s true. I think it’s true. And particularly with Captain America. How could it not be? It’s called Captain America, right?

So, my question for you guys is at what point as you’re now going through this and you’re writing the third one do you feel like, okay, this is actually something that we should be continuing with and going forward with, or is there any point in that genre where you feel like, “Um, can we now just do a Captain America movie that’s not about America?”

Do you know what I mean? Like do you feel jammed by that in any way?

**Christopher:** No, I could see like 12 movies in, because they clearly have in the comics occasionally, I think, just recently — it’s been a really long time on the Winter Soldier story and dredging up his past. And they brought a new writer on who sent him into another dimension with like dinosaurs. And it apparently works great, because he works — I don’t know how he explains his outfit in dinosaur world, like why are you wearing that?

**Craig:** To the dinosaurs you have to explain?

**Christopher:** Dinosaurs are not American.

**Craig:** Great point. Great point.

**Christopher:** But I think — we certainly don’t think of the politics first. It’s inevitable in the job he has and the clothes he wears and the friends he has that the politics will arise. But if we think of the politics first, the movie is going to suck.

**Stephen:** I mean, we’ve been down the polemic road before. We did the Chronicles of Narnia movies, and if you start with an agenda or a point of view.

**Christopher:** But it’s just a lion.

**Stephen:** It’s just a lion. You’re sunk. And so we start with character. Character, character, character. And in Cap’s case politics, particularly for the second movie, is the water in which he swims. And for the first movie we had to address why a guy would choose to have an American Flag outfit. That’s one of the reasons why we had to do a period movie because it made no sense for a guy to come out and go, “My first idea is put on a flag.”

**Craig:** I kind of love that guy, actually.

**Stephen:** He lives in a compound in Utah.

**Craig:** Yeah, cool guy.

**John:** So, I have a question for you guys. You guys write the Captain America movies which is fantastic. Congratulations on them. But there’s also this other movie that came in the middle called Avengers, which your character had a big role in. And so what does it feel like or what is the process by which like, “Okay, now we’re going to make your movie and all that stuff happened and you have to acknowledge it happened, but don’t acknowledge it too much.”

**Stephen:** Right. It’s like he’s cheating on you.

**John:** Tell us what that process is because it’s so different than any other process out there.

**Stephen:** It’s weird. We’re part of a larger machine that has a number of drivers up there, individual pods. You know, we read the scripts first, early, or as early as we’re allowed. And so we know it’s almost always Joss, like what has he done and where has he left him.

And invariably because you only call the Avengers together when you have a really big problem and the characters all meld together, but they’re not necessarily big arcs for each individual character. So, like we know where Cap ends up in Avengers 1 and then now Avengers 2. And it’s perfectly reasonable and we can use him going forward in Cap 3. And he hasn’t done anything that violates anything we’ve done.

**Christopher:** But it worked great actually on Winter Soldier because it stuck him into shield, which was exactly where it turned out was the most fertile for the character. Had The Avengers not happened and they just thawed him out, we would have had to probably deal with all the stuff we didn’t really want to deal with. Skirts are so short. What are these microwaves? It kind of allowed us to jump all the crap.

**John:** So, you guys are dealing with a character who exists in a world of many other heroes and it’s complicated and there are other things going on.

Our next guest is also dealing with that. Let’s bring up David Goyer. David Goyer, writer of Batman, and Superman, and lots of other characters. Constantine. Thank you, sir.

**Craig:** Just take a moment to look at David Goyer’s awesome Jewish Yakuza arms. Look at them. Look at them. Oh, yeah!

**John:** For listeners at home, they are covered in tattoos from the wrist on up. So, you can wear a shirt that buttons down and no one will know that you have a tremendous number of tattoos on your arm.

**David Goyer:** Well, that’s the deal with the, I mean, these aren’t Yakuza tattoos, but with Japanese sleeves you can wear a longs-sleeve shirt and be presentable to your grandmother.

**John:** Very nice. So, these guys have had to deal with a Marvel universe that is complicated and ongoing. You are in the middle of an increasingly complicated DC universe. Is it exciting, or terrifying, or both? What does it feel like to be in the middle of that process?

****David:**** Both. It was nice to do four movies that didn’t have that headache, you know. It’s complicated. And they very eloquently… — I’m limited in what I can talk about because none of the kind of combined —

**Craig:** Just tell us how it ends.

**David:** Yeah. None of the combined stuff has come out yet.

**John:** So, does Batman beat up Superman? Does he have kryptonite? Tell us all the secrets.

**Craig:** Just tell us who wins.

**David:** My situation is a little different because The Dark Knight films were their own universe completely. And I mean it changed the kind of perception amongst Warner Brothers in terms of how those films would be made. And I’m not the first person to comment on it. It’s kind of interesting, like when we were growing up — I presume you guys are somewhat the same age as I am — the Marvel comic books were slightly more realistically than the DC comic books.

And it’s weird that they, like in terms of the movie world until the Winter Soldier, they kind of flipped. It’s just a weird thing that happened.

**Craig:** That’s right. Well, it’s that character. I mean, I’m not a huge DC fan, but Batman is my favorite character. So, I’ve always gravitated towards — I mean, I’m a big X-Men, I loved the X-Men when I was a kid especially, but Batman I always thought was the coolest character because he’s actually just psychotic. He’s mentally ill. He’s not an altered human. He’s not an alien.

**John:** Well, but that was a deliberate choice. Because the classic character isn’t mentally ill. It was a very deliberate shift to make that, yeah.

**Craig:** No, for sure. I mean, Batman, like early Batman was just ridiculous. I mean, Vincent Price was the egg head. It was nonsense. And we would run around on the playground, [hums Batman theme], and that was silly Batman. But obviously everything changed with Frank Miller.

**David:** Yeah. Frank was, I think, the first one to really say this guy is fucking nuts. Can we swear?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, fuck yeah.

**John:** Apparently it’s going to be one of those dirty podcasts. So, yeah, there will be a little E in iTunes.

**Craig:** I mean, I called her motherfucker like three times.

**David:** I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.

But, anyway, I was just taking back to the… — Because of The Dark Knight films, those were separate but right or wrong Warner Brothers then sort of decided, well, we’re going to do these films but they’re going to be more grounded. And so that kind of led into Man of Steel and what not. But I don’t have quite the headache that these guys have had to deal with.

**Craig:** Well, that coordination of the Marvel pieces is really — it’s remarkable actually how well it works because all of us who have worked in Hollywood have watched —

**David:** But it also works because Marvel has true autonomy.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. But, if you think about it the people that run any studio, at some level there’s autonomy there. Somebody has autonomy there. Somebody has autonomy, right? I have to give Marvel credit for balancing all those pieces.

**David:** Huge credit. Huge credit. And almost flawlessly matched together.

**Craig:** Almost flawlessly. I mean, I haven’t seen the flaw yet. But I have an interesting question for you, because so you were there at the birth of this new era. So, you and Chris Nolan and, it was just the two of you on the first movie?

**David:** The first one was just the two of us.

**Craig:** Just the two of you.

**David:** And Jonah came in on the second one.

**Craig:** Right. And you guys really began this thing. I give you guys full credit for that. There is this phenomenon now where you compress the amount of time required to remake something.

**David:** To reboot, yeah.

**Craig:** So, I don’t how many Spider-Mans we’re up to. I think we’re on the 19th Spider-Man of the last four months.

**David:** No, the windows are getting shorter and shorter. It used to be that it was like, okay, there needs to be, I mean, ten years in between reboots.

**Craig:** Yeah, or something, right? I mean, so like you had Keaton as Batman in like, what, ’85 or ’86?

**David:** Yeah, between the last Schumacher Batman and Batman Begins, I believe it was eight years.

**Craig:** That was a really good one, that last Schumacher one. That one was good.

[Audience laughs]

**Craig:** What?

**David:** That was eight years.

**Craig:** “Everybody freeze!” Good line. Because he was cold.

**John:** Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger. You can use that again. You can make a recall on that. He’s done.

**David:** Was that the one that also had inline skating?

**Craig:** Yes.

**David:** So? That was cool.

**Craig:** Yes it was.

**John:** I sort of have a question for the whole panel, though.

**Craig:** Wait, hold on, he’s got to answer this question first. He’s got to answer this question.

**John:** Ask your question first so he can answer it.

**Craig:** What is the — I did ask it already.

**David:** Wait, what was the question? What’s the acceptable amount of time before you can reboot?

**Craig:** No. How do you deal with the fact that you’re remaking a character you just made? Right? There’s a new guy playing this part.

**David:** Oh, I guess that I’m one of the few people that have to do that. That was weird.

**Craig:** It’s weird, right? It’s not like, they did this with Bond.

**David:** I’ll tell you the one reason why it wasn’t as weird for me. Because I’ve actually written DC comic books. Like, I actually wrote Justice Society for four years with Jeff Johns. And so one of the things that they do in comic books all the time is reboot shit. And Crisis on Infinite Earths was like the first time they really rebooted the universe.

**Craig:** It was cool. I liked that.

**David:** But now they just in comic books seem to reboot Marvel every few years. And so in writing comic books I’d seen creators, whether it be people like John Byrne or Neal Adams or these people that do different interpretations of the same hero.

**Craig:** So it’s kind of that move?

**David:** Yeah. It wasn’t that weird to me. So, it wasn’t that weird to me to say, “Okay, this is a completely different take.” Like, if Batman Begins was a sort of fusion of Frank Miller and the kind of Denny O’Neil, Neal Adams’ Batman, it’s like the new Batman was — I’m just making this up, I’m not saying this is what it is.

**Craig:** Because you would get sued, of course.

**David:** Yes. But was like the Jim Lee Batman. Do you know what I mean? It was like a different take.

**Craig:** I do know what you mean. I get it. I get it.

**David:** Batman as done by Neil Gaiman is going to be a very different vibe than Batman —

**Craig:** That would be pretty cool.

**David:** Well, you know, Gaiman did do Batman.

**Craig:** Oh, he did?

**David:** Yeah. But I’m just saying, if there’s that — and I’m sorry. This is super geek. If I know I’m going into a movie running the Jack Kirby Batman versus the Neil Gaiman Batman, it’s going to be a completely —

**Craig:** You should put both those in the same movie and then we compress this down even more. Like now there are three Batmans and —

**David:** Grant Morrison would write that.

**Craig:** Okay. Very cool.

**David:** Like from different universes.

**Stephen:** I have no idea what you’re talking about.

**Craig:** What did you have for lunch?

**John:** So on the topic of reboots, and we have six writers up here, we’re going to reboot some franchises. So, I have six cards here and I’m going to hand them out. And you’re going to draw a card and you’re going to reboot a franchise. So, pick anyone you want. Anyone you want.

**Andrea:** Can we trade if we don’t like our franchise?

**Craig:** You know I’m chaotic. I’m chaotic.

**David:** Chaotic neutral.

**Craig:** No, not neutral.

**Andrea:** Was this planned?

**Craig:** No, chaotic evil.

**John:** This event was planned. Yes. We actually sold tickets. People bought tickets.

**David:** This isn’t a reboot. This hasn’t been done before.

**Craig:** So that’s a boot.

**John:** So, that’s good. It’s a boot. You’re going to boot.

So, randomly people got cards. You’re going to read this. And so I think what we need to do is we need to figure out what is the modern version of this. What is the movie version of the character that you got? And also probably who is the villain or the antagonist, depending on you have? Who are they facing off against in the movie version that you’re doing?

Can you go first? So, read your person and tell us about it.

**Stephen:** I have Spider-Man.

**Craig:** Oh, thank god.

**John:** Congratulations, Stephen McFeely.

**Stephen:** Can I just mail this in?

**John:** You can book Spider-Man. That’s awesome. So, tell us, what’s your Spider-Man about?

**Stephen:** Holy crap. I’d have to know the first thing about Spider-Man.

**Craig:** There’s been 14 Spider-Men.

**Stephen:** Half-spider, half-man.

**John:** He’s half-spider, half-man. Tell us what he’s going to do.

**Stephen:** And go! Oh my god. Oh, geez.

**John:** You’ve got a writing partner.

**Christopher:** This is how it works.

**Stephen:** Also like Captain America was a weakling before his powers.

**John:** True, absolutely.

**Stephen:** Didn’t grow up a stud.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Stephen:** But, I mean, I just don’t want to do that.

**Craig:** Use spider.

**Andrea:** He’s already done it.

**John:** So, reboot it. So reboot it.

**Stephen:** Alternate Spider-Man.

**Christopher:** But what is that? He’s Miles Morales, right?

**Stephen:** First of all, I would absolutely make him Latino, or African-American, or something.

**Christopher:** A chick.

**John:** Yeah.

**Andrea:** How about Spider-Girl?

**Stephen:** And then explore that. I mean, and see if you can’t, you know, the phrase I use a lot, make the water you swim in, you know, that kind of thing.

**John:** Oh, the water he swims in? I like that.

**Stephen:** Yeah, you know, well, so that the idea that he is —

**Craig:** Do spiders swim?

**Stephen:** Yeah.

**John:** On top of water, yeah.

**Stephen:** But, I mean, I’ve seen the, I mean, I just don’t — I’ve seen the high school kid who gets bit by a spider. So, yeah, fine. But like give me the different version.

**Craig:** Oh, like maybe like an old person gets bitten?

**Stephen:** Well, but seriously, Miles Morales would do it for me. That would be interesting.

**John:** What if it was like, you know, he was like the old, like he’s been Spider-Man for, like he’s 80 years old and he’s been Spider-Man the whole time.

**Stephen:** Oh, this is the Frank Miller Spider-Man.

**Christopher:** The Unforgiven, Unforgiven Spider-Man.

**John:** Unforgiven Spider-Man.

**Craig:** Unforgiven Spider-Man would be awesome.

**Stephen:** Yeah. And the venom is killing him, you know, so there’s a ticking clock.

**Christopher:** Took a long time to die.

**Stephen:** Yeah.

**Christopher:** He’s basically dying of old age.

**Stephen:** He never gave up his Symbiote.

**Christopher:** The spider is bitten by a high school kid.

**Craig:** The poison —

**Christopher:** And the spider gradually develops the powers of a high school kid.

**John:** Seth Rogan. Seth Rogan eats a spider. Yeah. They share a symbiotic relationship. It’s sort of like Fire Storm kind of thing? Yeah, it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** I like it.

**John:** Christopher Markus, who did you draw?

**Christopher:** I oddly drew the Hulk.

**John:** The Hulk. So he exists in your world.

**Christopher:** He exists in my world.

**John:** Yeah, so have you written anything for Hulk?

**Christopher:** I have never written any — I’ve never touched the Hulk. I swear. [laughs] I would have Edward Norton, he exposes himself to gamma rays. He gets turned into Mark Ruffalo. And then he has to fight Eric Bana. And whoever wins wins.

**John:** That’s not at all a good movie. Let’s help him out here.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty bad.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, Hulk is tough because Hulk is sort of Conan in some ways. He’s just …smash.

**Andrea:** Smash.

**Craig:** What about like a Flowers for Algernon kind of Hulk thing.

**Christopher:** That’s the whole problem.

Andrea. He has a gentle little mouse friend?

**Craig:** Like Hulk gets smart and stupid.

**Christopher:** The whole problem with The Hulk is that he, you know, everyone else becomes smarter and more interesting when they become a superhero. He becomes mentally deficient and —

**Craig:** Right.

**Andrea:** But why is he so angry?

**David:** Well, Hulk traditionally was Jekyll and Hyde.

**Christopher:** So it’s more like you expect him to sort of like crap his pants. It’s just, The Hulk. Maybe that’s what I do. He’s not angry, he’s just sort of incontinent and fat.

**Craig:** You’re not getting this job at all.

**Christopher:** He’s like, Hulk let himself go. He’s at a home. You know, he has to take the short bus. And then he makes a friend. And it’s over.

**Andrea:** Sounds great.

**John:** A thing that occurs to me —

**Christopher:** A bomb like all the other Hulk movies.

**John:** It occurs to me as we’re talking about reboots is that you have to sort of honor expectations for the character. You have to mostly do what you expect it to do. And you sort of change one thing in the world. And so Superman and The Dark Knight, he’s like a do-gooder, but he’s actually like a tool of the government and in a way that was really fascinating.

So, you take the world and you just change the one thing in it. So, what if he doesn’t become stupid?

**Christopher:** That’s true. But they’ve done that in the comics where —

**Craig:** I like smart Hulk. Smart Hulk was cool.

**David:** Peter David Hulk.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**Christopher:** It’s difficult.

**John:** It’s like Ocean’s 11 but with Hulk.

**Christopher:** Well, it’s a little hard to slip into a casino unnoticed. “Hi. I’m Mr. Jones. I’m just checking into my room.”

**John:** One of my very first jobs, I was working as an assistant for these two producers and they were trying to do She-Hulk. And She-Hulk is like the most fascinating messed up creature because she’s Hulk the whole time. She never changes out of it, which I think is kind of great. She’s just big and green.

**Stephen:** But she’s smart, right?

**John:** She’s smart. She’s normal. She’s like a lawyer.

**Christopher:** She has the worst, most demeaning character name possible.

**Craig:** It is honestly —

**Christopher:** You’re just the female version of the —

**Craig:** She-Hulk, the real name for She-Hulk was Slut Hulk. That was the whole point was like, “Let’s just make a green chick with enormous boobs,” and she’s Hulk strong but not Hulk massive, so like Hulk’s muscle tone —

**John:** Well, she does Pilates. She gets the strength without the —

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s real lean, stringy, and just hot.

**David:** She’s still pretty chunky. I mean, she was like Chyna from the WWE.

**Craig:** No, she wasn’t like — you put her against an R. Crumb girl and the R. Crumb girl has got bigger booty. No. She-Hulk was —

**Christopher:** What was it about we’re just not women or men, we’re just writers.

**Craig:** No, the She-Hulk, the whole point of She-Hulk was just to appeal sexistly to 10-year-old boys. It worked on me.

**Andrea:** As opposed to the other superhero comic books through all eternity.

**Christopher:** Boys were already sort of aroused by The Hulk but they were feeling weird about it.

**David:** Well, that’s where I’m going.

**Christopher:** Let’s give them a female one. It will take some of the pressure off this adolescent.

**David:** I have a theory about She-Hulk, which was created by a man, right? And at the time in particular I think 95% of comic book readers were men and certainly almost all of the comic book writers were men. So, The Hulk was this classic male power fantasy. It’s like most of the people reading comic books were these people like me who were just these little kids who were getting the shit beaten out of them every day, and they’re like what if I became a giant and could clap my hands and create a sonic boom? And so then they created She-Hulk, right, who was still smart. So it was like I think She-Hulk is the chick that you could fuck if you were Hulk. You know what I’m saying?

**Craig:** Right. No.

**David:** No, I’m just saying She-Hulk was the extension of the male power fantasy. So, it’s like if I’m going to be this geek that becomes The Hulk, then let’s create a giant green porn star that only The Hulk could fuck.

**Craig:** Yeah…or me.

**David:** If you were pretending you were The Hulk. Do you see what I’m saying?

**Craig:** What if I’m not The Hulk? Can I still?

**John:** No. No.

**David:** Then you would get destroyed. Your hips would break when you had sex.

**John:** Stuart Friedel’s whole family is here, including his grandparents, so thank you so much Friedel family for joining us.

**David:** Sorry.

**John:** We’re going to move onto our next person.

**David:** You said we could swear.

**John:** We can, yes. But we don’t need to go into like the long pornographic history of The Hulk.

Our next character? I got Storm from X-Men. And so Storm, so Storm is a really interesting character and I’m not quite sure what to do with her.

I do think that you keep her in Africa and I think you maybe start her young and you maybe do a period. So, it’s sort of like, you know, you can do something about either it’s — it could be about slavery. It could be about injustice now in Africa. But keeping it a young character. And honestly restraining her power down into like a Carrie level could be actually really fascinating.

So, you have this young woman who has incredibly control over the elements, but really can’t control her own thing could be cool. I don’t know. What else could we do with Storm?

**Christopher:** She has very positive power, you know, if you’re in a drought-stricken country.

**John:** Yeah. Well, she’s also sort of a god. We talked about in the origin story, she was worshipped as a god in some of the books.

**Craig:** I mean, we could have used her today, honestly. This was brutal.

**John:** Yeah. We’re calling out for a storm.

**Andrea:** I’d like to give her a nice stable relationship.

**John:** Ooh, I like that. Who does Storm date?

**Andrea:** Who does Storm date? Maybe Hulk? Maybe she’s the one who needs to stabilize Hulk. But, I mean, she’s a little stormy, right, she’s a little — and so is Hulk. And maybe together they can calm down.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** See, I was right about her, right? That’s very Yenta. She’s doing it.

**John:** The romantic comedy version of Storm and the fella could be really fascinating, too. I don’t know who the villain is in that story, but it could be the —

**Craig:** Divorce.

**John:** Divorce. Divorce is the villain. Yeah.

Andrea Berloff, who did you draw?

**Andrea:** I mean, it’s like ridiculous. I got Wonder Woman.

**John:** Oh, how did you get Wonder Woman?

**Andrea:** I don’t know. That’s why I asked you if it was planted.

**John:** I’m sorry. It wasn’t planned at all. So, Wonder Woman?

**Andrea:** So, Wonder Woman…I feel like there’s a few ways this could go. She’s Amazonian, right? She’s got to be upset about the degradation of the rain forests, I would say.

**John:** Now it’s sort of — it’s sort of more Greek Isles, but that’s fine.

**Andrea:** I know, but, right. So, I first thought maybe she’s going to fight like, you know, some deforestation sort of… — That said, maybe her —

**Stephen:** Fight some loggers.

**Andrea:** Fight some loggers. [laughs]

**Stephen:** But you need a super power.

**Andrea:** In my version I would like to be able to pass the Bechdel test, so I would have her maybe — like there’s an Amazonian mama that she has to report to and she has a lot of sisters. And together as a band they fight evil. And then she’s left alone in the modern world, and she doesn’t belong there, and she has to get back to the women that she belongs with. And, I don’t know where that’s going.

**Craig:** That sounds pretty good.

**Stephen:** I don’t know why — you could just do a whole movie in — what’ s the name of the place?

**John:** Themyscira?

**David:** In the past?

**Craig:** The Amazonian Island, Shangri La?

**Stephen:** The Amazon ladies.

**Andrea:** I don’t know. What’s it called?

**John:** I’ve said it like three times. Themyscira.

**Stephen:** “It’s only my damn podcast.”

**Andrea:** I can’t even hear you anymore, John.

**Stephen:** Honestly, I just heard the word and I’m like, I don’t know what he just said.

**Andrea:** Yeah, that can’t be correct. What is he saying?

**Craig:** Is that a restaurant?

**John:** The island is good — it’s one of those — they made the DC animated movies and in the Wonder Woman one the animated one is pretty good.

**David:** Why are you gesturing to me?

**John:** Because you’re a DC person. Because you have her in your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, you did it.

**Andrea:** Is it Atlantis?

**David:** I’ve also done Blade though.

**John:** You have done Blade. That’s true.

**Craig:** I love Blade.

**John:** Blade is good. He’s a vampire.

**Christopher:** And Nick Fury.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** I don’t take credit for that one.

**John:** David Goyer, who did you draw?

**David:** Martian Manhunter.

**John:** Ooh, you have the challenging one.

**Craig:** Overpowered. Overpowered.

**David:** How many people in the audience have heard of Martian Manhunter.

**John:** This is a good audience.

**Craig:** He knows he’s overpowered.

**David:** How many people that raised their hands have ever been laid?:

**John:** 100% of the audience.

**David:** Oof, well he hasn’t been rebooted, but he’s a mainstay in the Justice League.

**Stephen:** Is he going to be rebooted?

**David:** I’m not saying shit.

**Stephen:** Is he going to be booted?

**David:** Well, he can’t be fucking called the Martian Manhunter because that’s goofy. He can be called Manhunter.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** They have those.

**Stephen:** I rented that movie.

**David:** Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing, the whole deal with Martian Manhunter is he’s an alien living amongst us.

**John:** Is there another one of those in the DC universe?

**David:** Well, he came out in the ’50s and he had basically all the powers of Superman.

**Craig:** Overpowered.

**David:** Except he didn’t like fire.

**Craig:** Right. Oh god.

**David:** And he could read your mind. So, here’s the best part: he comes down to earth and decides, unlike Super man who already exists in the world now, that he’s just going to be a homicide detective and pretend to be a human homicide guy.

**Stephen:** But he’s green.

**David:** Yeah. But, no, he can change his shape. Instead of using super powers and mind-reading and like, oh, I could figure out if the president is lying or whatever, he just decides to disguise himself as a human homicide detective. Dare to dream.

**Craig:** That’s pretty dismal.

**David:** I don’t know. I would say — I wouldn’t call him Manhunter. I would set up a Day After Tomorrow and we discovered one of those Earth-like planets, you know, with Kepler or something like that. And you know how they’re talking about Scientific American like DNA faxing, where they can basically break down DNA and fax that information? So, maybe like —

**Craig:** Yeah. We send it there to that planet?

**David:** Well, no, we get the DNA code from that planet and then grow them in a Petri dish here.

**Craig:** We grow a dude here to solve our crimes.

**David:** No, but he’s like in Area 51 or something. And we’re just —

**Craig:** Just sitting there doing word searches and stuff?

**David:** Yeah, doing biopsies on him. And then he gets out and he’s really angry.

**Craig:** He’s pissed.

**David:** And then he fucks She-Hulk. He’s green! And he’s super-powered.

**Stephen:** That’s right. Because green people can only date green people.

**Christopher:** Goddamnit. I thought we’d come further.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s one area where we’re just not ready. Appropriately I got Lex Luther.

**John:** Ooh!

**Craig:** So, Lex Luther, who’s not obviously a superhero, unless you’re me and then he is, I think if you were to do a Lex Luther movie the temptation would be to sort of, “Oh, I’m going to feel bad for Lex Luther and I’m going to make Superman a dick and all that.”

I don’t want to do that. I love that Lex Luther is bad. I think that’s the best part of him. But also the bald thing, it’s so iconic, you do want something more — yes, I’m like the hairiest I’ve ever felt in my life up here by the way.

**Andrea:** Look at this stage. Look at this stage.

**Christopher:** How are your treatments going?

**Craig:** I mean, I feel like, wow. Shampoo has been working. No, I think that Lex Luther, young Lex Luther is bald because… — You guys know the story of like Phineas Gage? Have you ever heard that story, Phineas Gage? So, love that story. If you haven’t heard, there’s a guy in the 1800s, he was working on a railroad and basically there was a mishap and there was an explosion and a steel rod went here and out through his head and he survived. But it blew through his limbic system and this guy, Phineas Gage, who was by all accounts a really nice family man turned into a total asshole.

He was just a drunk and he was mean and violent. And he stayed that way for many, many years until he died. So, I like the idea of maybe this kid who gets a tumor or something, or is injured, and it blows out the part of your brain that basically gives you any kind of moral conscience and turns into like a perfect sociopath.

But he’s brilliant.

**David:** So, he’s a studio executive?

**Craig:** Right. So, you now have unleashed something that is truly terrifying, because even Lex Luther in all the Superman movies, he’s still a human. There’s something there. The fact, if you’re motivated by like money, for instance, that means you’re a human being. This guy is a monster.

**Stephen:** That’s cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s do that. Let’s make that — that’s so much better than what the fuck with your Hulk. He was shitting. He was just sitting there.

**Christopher:** It’s Lars von Trier’s Hulk.

**John:** [laughs] So I would like to thank our amazing panelists to talk about superheroes. Thank you guys so very much.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Andrea:** Thank you. Thank you . Thank you.

**John:** Get off our stage. All right. So, now is the time where we get to the Three Page Challenge. So, I want a show of hands in the audience — who here has read all of the entries to the Three Page Challenge?

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Wow. You people are almost as good as Stuart Friedel who has to read them every week.

Now, who here in the audience has a Three Page Challenge that they submitted that was one of those up there?

Oh my god. Thank you very much. Let’s have a round of applause to everyone who like sent in a script. That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Well done. Well done.

**John:** On the topic of Stuart Friedel, I think it’s important that we actually have Stuart — yeah, if we can have the actors playing Stuart Friedel stand up. The actors playing Stuart Friedel, where are you? There they are. There they are. Stuart Friedel, everyone.

**Craig:** Stuart Two. Stuart Friedel.

**John:** Stuart One and Stuart Two. Thank you very much.

**Craig:** So, you know, I met Stuart’s dad. Stuart’s dad, where are you man?

**John:** He’s over here.

**Craig:** Hey, Stuart’s dad! So, Stuart’s dad is so great. He comes up to me and he goes, “I just want to thank you so much for what you’ve done for Stuart.”

And I’m like, “Oh, that’s, you know, John, he does it, man. He’s done…”

He goes, “No, really thank you for what you’ve done. It’s just so nice what you’ve done for Stuart.”

And he kept saying that like Stuart is a drug addict or disabled in some serious way. You know, like you took him in when everyone else was like throwing their hands up, like we can’t handle this kid.

**John:** Yeah. I hired him away from a dangerous life at the Disney Channel. It was all like crack and hookers.

Tonight we have three Three Page Challenge entries which is always fun when we do them on the show. But we have the actual writers here, which is amazing as well. Plus, we have perhaps the most superlative person we could ever have to come up here and be a judge with us. Susannah Grant everybody.

**Craig:** Susannah Grant.

**John:** Hello. Here, you sit by me.

**Susannah Grant:** I’m not checking my email. I have them on here.

**John:** Oh, look at her, she’s got them on the iPad. So, let’s start with a superhero themed script. Let’s bring Bucky Knaebel up here to talk about The Clock Strikes Three!!! Bucky, come up here.

**Craig:** Hey Bucky.

**John:** Bucky, tell us about The Clock Strikes Three!!! So, usually we would do a synopsis, but tell us what — if someone is listening here and doesn’t have the script in front of them, what would they have read?

**Bucky Knaebel:** So, The Clock Strikes Three!!! starts off with three superheroes sitting in a diner, just BSing about their past exploits and all of the sudden a super villain, “super villain,” jumps in and sends them back into time. And they’re left back in the ’70s to try and figure out a way back home.

**John:** Fantastic. Is this a whole script, or did you just write these three pages for this —

**Bucky:** Whole script. It’s a short film that I plan on filming at some point, maybe. It depends on what you guys say.

**John:** No pressure whatsoever.

**Craig:** Well, let’s crush some dreams tonight. Let’s save somebody some credit card debt.

**John:** [laughs] Craig Mazin, start us off.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, you know, I think you’ve got a very promising concept here. I did a movie a long time ago called The Specials, 14 years ago, that was very much about superheroes sitting around in a diner talking. And so I think that that’s fertile territory and now more than ever.

But I’m going to — there’s like a couple little things here that I’m going to sort of not bother with. I’m going to talk about the big thing. And the big thing, I think, for any comedy, but particularly a comedy like this that’s a high concept and sort of broad comedy I think is that you have to ground the comedy in a world that’s real, or make the world crazy and make the job mundane, right?

So, in Anchorman the world is insane, but they’re doing a mundane job. Here they are something that is insane, essentially, and the world around them doesn’t seem quite right either. They’re not interacting in a way that feels grounded to their situation.

This is also a case of going too fast. You have a superhero, so here’s one concept: a team of superheroes that are kind of bored and sit around diners and don’t take their villains very seriously and kind of quippy. You have another concept: modern day superheroes go back in time to the classic era, or what I would call the classic era of ’70s superheroes. Those are two totally different concepts. And they’re happening literally within two pages of each other, so it’s very confusing.

I’m also a little concerned that it won’t be as funny as you want because to me if I send like David’s Batman going back in time and hanging out with like the jazzy cool cats of the ’70s with their skintight moose-knuckle bikini pants, that’s funny. Like, “What are you people doing?” And they’re like, “Hey, it’s cool man.” That’s funny.

But these quippy guys going back in time just seems like — I’m looking for what to hold onto and play the comedy off of. So, I’m going to leave it to these guys to sort of get into other things, but I wanted to lay that out there because I think that tonally it’s not going to work unless you figure out how to find that contrast.

**Bucky:** Right. Makes sense.

**John:** Susannah Grant?

**Susannah:** So, of those two options, which one are you going for?

**Bucky:** Well, in the story they don’t encounter any heroes in the past whatsoever. They actually just kind of solve their problems by inaction.

**Susannah:** [laughs] Okay. So, I’m going to talk about something that is valid for any movie, superheroes, non-superheroes, and that’s character motivation. It’s a really basic thing. You have a character I assume is the villain of the piece, the guy who walks in and sends them, creates the problem, sends them back to the ’70s. And this is sort of the going too fast thing. He’s only given two lines.

**Bucky:** Right.

**Susannah:** And I don’t know how — there’s a hint of resentment because they kind of belittle him, but for that character to make that big a choice that we’re going to watch an entire movie about the problem he creates, I need to be intrigued by him. I need to lean in and say, “Ooh, he’s mad,” and why is he mad? Take time.

It does feel rushed. And I know everybody is always saying about writing — economy, economy, economy — you’ve got to be fast. I personally think you’ve got to be long before you can be fast. You’ve got to take the time to find out what you’re saying and really like dig into who this guy is. And that might take five pages. And then you say, “Oh, that’s who he is. I found it on the fifth page.” And you get rid of the first four. But you’ve really got to take the time to sink in to who this villain is, why he’s doing what he’s doing, and why I should care about him.

**Bucky:** Right.

**John:** To me, I was reading this thinking like if this was the third episode of a series about these guys, that would be awesome.

**Bucky:** The clock actually shows up in the second, so he’s established.

**John:** So, he’s established. Do you perceive this as being part of a longer franchise?

**Bucky:** Like, a web series.

**John:** I think in those ways it could actually work. If we already knew who those characters were when they were sitting in the diner, then the guy could just walk in and we can start the whole plot. But as I was reading this just cold I didn’t know what is the relationship between these three people, like Pecos Pete sort of seems annoyed by this person, so why are they all at the diner together. I was having all of these questions. I was wondering what the world was like and it was harder for me to sort of — and suddenly there’s a plot happening. And now we’re in the past. And I didn’t know what the world was like before we went to the past.

**Craig:** This is the third episode of something.

**Bucky:** Ideally. Like written as a web series.

**Craig:** Okay. That would have changed everything.

**Susannah:** Forget what I said.

**John:** Make it really clever on those things.

**Craig:** Needed to know that, yeah.

**John:** But let’s talk some of the words on the page, because you do some things which work great and some things which don’t work so great.

Right at the very start, “We are outside looking in at what one might say is an exact replica of Hopper’s Nighthawks. Instead of Bogart-esque type characters, we see three superheroes at the counter.”

I love “we are,” I love “we see,” but we didn’t need them at all here.

**Bucky:** Okay.

**John:** Just tell us what’s there and we’re good and we’re going. And because this was the first time I was experiencing any of these characters, I really wanted more time spent on who those people are. Like tell me really what kind of people they are, not just what they’re wearing, but sort of who they are and sort of what their deal is. And it’s probably — when you shotgun three characters at us at once we have a hard time knowing how to sort them out.

Other stuff about what we saw on the page?

**Susannah:** Yeah, you know, what can be easier is if you give them something specific, to be working out, or arguing about. You have hints where you want their characters to be, but you haven’t given yourself the tools to really make something, make a meal of the scene with these guys. If they’re actually arguing about something specific, or trying to get something specific done. You’ll just have a lot more opportunity, a lot more tools there to show who these guys are.

And then the other question I had is I wasn’t clear if, I guess what you were saying, their relationship. Nighthawks is very specific and it’s lonely and middle of the night and melancholy. And then I didn’t feel how that was relating to the story you were telling. So, I just would say think really carefully about the environment you’re creating and make sure the choices you make are really specific to that.

**Craig:** Let’s capitalize our characters when we meet them. It just helps us to know that they’re there. I think regaling, maybe I’m wrong, but “is regaling his tale to two obviously,” I think it’s just regaling to obviously bored superheroes. I think that’s how that works.

Commander Alpha is blathering on and he’s boasting. And these other two are bored, Pecos Pete and Mauve Moth are bored. When two other people are bored I don’t need them to say things to indicate that they’re bored. I think actually there’s an opportunity for the two of them to be doing something else entirely because they’re just not paying attention to him. And they occasionally look up and nod, but maybe they’re in the middle of something. Are they into each other? Is one of them just trying to get somebody’s attention and not — I mean, there’s something interesting about a superhero that can’t flag a waiter down.

You know, there are opportunities for you to kind of —

**Bucky:** Make it funny.

**Craig:** Layer things in. Because this stuff is, you know, like one of the things that David Zucker taught me when I started doing spoof movies with him is that this stuff is wonderful because it allows you to do jokes. But the jokes have nothing to do with what the people are saying. That’s just talking that fills space. So, use that.

**John:** If she’s checking her email while he’s going on with this whole story then that’s something we can relate to, like, “Oh, this person won’t shut up.”

An example at the bottom of page one, The Clock bursts in and he goes, “Sup’ bitches. It’s time for your beatdown!”

And right now Pecos Pete says, “Oh no, are you here to slow down time? You realize that all that does is stretch out the span of us whooping on you.”

That second phrase is actually really good, but I wondered if that first phrase is delivered to the other superheroes at the bar. So, he’s going to slow down time. He’s going to slow down time. Maybe it’s like I’ve seen him before, he’s going to slow down time.

You realize — there’s a chance to actually get a real joke, sort of break that into two jokes and really let that land.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that character, one thing about that is I don’t know if he’s real or not. You know, when somebody like that shows up, because I’m still learning the rules of the show or the movie or whatever it is. Like, you know, in one of the Batmans, I think it was in the second one, there’s a Batman but then it turns out it’s not really Batman. It’s a guy that’s pretending to be Batman. He’s pathetic. This guy seems like that, like what are you doing? Where did you get that? What’s wrong with you?

**Bucky:** Well, you know, heroes are somewhat pathetic I think.

**Craig:** Well, that’s fine, too. But you have to help me get there. Because what I know walking in and what you’re using frankly for comedy is that heroes aren’t pathetic. So, I need to be taught now how this works so when this guy shows up we need to be taught that he’s an actual villain. Like, dude, we beat you up last week. We beat you up last night. He should have a black eye. You know what I mean? What is wrong with you? This isn’t even about — what is this about? You like getting beaten up, don’t you? I mean, like, something — we need to get a sense that he’s actually legitimately real or else we’re like what’s going on here?

**Bucky:** Okay.

**John:** I would leave this at I was really curious to see episode one of this. Because I feel like you actually, in your head you know who those three characters are and you know what their relationship is. There is a reason why those three people are together — that first episode where we’re seeing why they’re together and sort of what that deal is. And sort of like The Tick or those universes could be great and this just felt like it was too soon for me to get a complicated plot change. It’s too early for us to go back into the past when I didn’t know what the present really felt like.

Bucky Knaebel. So, I should say, Craig, you don’t realize this but Bucky actually asked a question on the show many years — how long, a year ago?

**Bucky:** Roughly, yes, a year ago.

**John:** So, he was the person who asked about sort of like I’m moving to Los Angeles with my family. Where should I live? And we actually had a long conversation on the show about where he should live.

**Craig:** Where did you end up?

**Susannah:** Where do you live?

**Craig:** Straight outta Compton!

**Bucky:** It was a total help, too.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**Bucky:** We live in the Valley now.

**Craig:** In the Valley?

**Bucky:** yeah.

**Craig:** Somewhere out there. Yeah, don’t get specific. We’ve got some weirdos out here.

**John:** You’ve got a whole audience of people who may want to steal your stuff.

**Craig:** They will find you.

**Bucky:** So, thank you for that. Thank you for this.

**John:** Thank you very much for sending in these pages.

**Bucky:** Please, thank you so much.

**Susannah:** Thanks a lot.

**John:** Awesome. Bucky Knaebel.

**Craig:** Good luck.

**Bucky:** Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** My pleasure. Stick with it. Stick with it. All right.

**John:** All right. Our next Three Page Challenge comes from Michelle Burleson with Kimchi Rhinestone.

Michelle, where are you? I see Michelle. Hooray!

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** So, some backstory. I had Stuart email everybody who was, well, all the winners, but everyone who submitted to say, like just make sure they’re actually coming.

**Michelle Burleson:** Very nice to meet you.

**John:** And, Michelle, you emailed from like the side of a road. You like pulled off at a car — come on, grab your microphone. Where were you driving from?

**Michelle:** Santa Cruz.

**John:** Santa Cruz, all right. So, same state. Yeah, it’s not too far.

**Michelle:** Somewhat. Different country, same state.

**John:** All right. Thank you for coming.

**Michelle:** Thank you for having me. Be gentle.

**Susannah:** Oh, yeah, absolutely.

**Michelle:** I’m just a girl.

**Craig:** Absolutely not.

**Michelle:** I’ll go She-Hulk on you.

**John:** Ah! She’s already wearing green.

**Craig:** This is all I ever wanted.

**John:** Your script is called Kimchi Rhinestone. So, Kimchi I know is Korean.

**Michelle:** Yes.

**John:** Rhinestone, I think of sort of like cowboy something. So, I’m reading that as a thing, so it’s going to be something-something about that. As your script starts, talk us through the three pages that people are going to be reading if they were reading this at home.

**Michelle:** Okay. She’s actually a character I created at the Second City and just decided to take her a little further. But she’s being abandoned, and this happens a lot. A GI impregnated a Korean girl, so that’s taboo. So, the mother is abandoning her at the Amerasian orphanage, which does exist, and abandons her in her father’s guitar case.

Then we go to, she’s busking on the street, she’s out of the orphanage. And their — the Halfies — I call them Halfies, because I’m one.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can get away with that.

**Susannah:** We won’t be calling them Halfies.

**Michelle:** Yeah. They’re citizens of no country. I’m not an orphan, but they’re citizens of no country. So, she’s busking. She thinks, you know, if I get to America everything will be better and she has this thing on her head about if I can just get to America. And then it goes to this American Idol type country show called America’s Honky Tonk Angel.

**John:** And that’s the end of our three pages is in the middle of this I’m going to rip open the envelope and we cut to commercial.

So, as I started to read this, I was sort of in three different worlds and I had a hard time grasping sort of what to expect to happen next. And that was the challenge I was facing. And I probably would have read page four and five and six, but I was really like, I felt the gears kind of grinding. It was hard for me to grasp what was really going to happen here. Because you say Honky Tonk Angel, I don’t know what that is. I don’t know what to even expect in my head.

And so I sort of think it’s country, but I was sort of confused. How did you guys approach these three pages as you were reading them? Susannah?

**Susannah:** I just wanted so much more breath in this. I was interested in everything you told me, but just now, just your saying that she has a dream that she’s going to go to America — put that in. Even the woman dropping her at the orphanage in the beginning, I was just like well where is she going, and who opens the door? There’s room to breathe in this.

And it doesn’t have to be long. Just give us a bunch of tiny little details that really tell us where we are and what we’re dealing with. And the same thing when she — you cut to her right on the street, right? But I was like, wait, where is she living? Is she living alone? Is she living with someone? Is this guitar case the guitar case?

And you have room for that. I said it before, but this idea that you need to be efficient seems to sometimes rob people of the — giving themselves the room to be really specific and flesh it out. Because I really want to know what’s happened to her, and what she wants, how she’s going about getting it and what the obstacles are.

You know, a kid dropped at an orphanage. But I just want to know everything. Everything around her.

**Michelle:** Okay.

**Susannah:** And I think you have tons of room to do it. Like what you did in three pages I think could take ten, you know, or eight. You have a lot more room and you need to tell me more so I’ll care.

**Michelle:** Okay. Thank you.

**Craig:** You said you build this character at Second City?

**Michelle:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, this is not a comedy though?

**Michelle:** No, the first draft was just a bunch of my sketches I kind of just all threw together.

**Craig:** Right, but from these pages I take it this is —

**Michelle:** She’s matured a bit.

**Craig:** It’s sort of an inspirational underdog story. Okay. So, I completely agree with Susannah and I don’t know what’s going on where people are hitting the gas so hard. Do we see her mother again?

**Michelle:** No.

**Craig:** One theory is we never see the mother. And that there is a… — This is why I like thinking about credit sequences in movies like this, too. That you begin with somebody coming across a guitar case in front of an orphanage, like the people that work at the orphanage just see a guitar case there and like, “What the hell?”

And then the guitar case goes donk, and they open it up and there’s a baby in there. And then you see images of what’s happening — because the other thing is the time that passes is not time you can afford to ignore. You need to educate people what it means to be Amerasian in Seoul in the ’70s and ’80s. They need to know.

So, that’s a big part of this. And it also — I need to know how she learned guitar. I need to see the moment when she picks it up for the first time. It’s the only possession, the guitar she has isn’t the guitar, because there was no guitar, right? Or there was a guitar? I can’t remember.

**Michelle:** There was a guitar. She kind of set it — the mother set it out and replaced her with it.

**Craig:** Okay. Got it. So, you see a closed guitar case and a guitar. That’s a cool opening image. Why is a guitar out of a guitar case. And then you open the guitar case and see a baby in there. That’s the only thing she owns in her life. And I want to see a little seven-year-old kid sitting there with the guitar and just going poink, poink, and then I want to see her at 13 going, [guitar sounds], right, and listening to music. I want to see something happening there. That’s what your story is about, you know?

So that by the time, oh, and then I definitely — here is what I definitely do not want to see.

**Susannah:** I know what you’re going to say.

**Craig:** On page three I do not want to see her so good, like boom and there she is, she’s awesome. No. I want to see her suffering, right? She’s literally out there for two seconds playing one song that by the way is too lyrically on the nose.

**Susannah:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. We all wrote on the nose, I think.

**Susannah:** But aside from that, it’s a wasted opportunity because we know this already. She’s singing about what we know. If you ever sing about something we don’t know, then you’re broadening our understanding of her.

**Craig:** I want to see that, look, the movie is about people that try and become professional artists. Follow a formula, which you can choose to follow or not, but I feel like you kind of want to here. And there’s that scene where they are being pelted. Nobody is listening to them. Nobody likes them. They are poor and they are hungry. And they’re being kicked around. And you’re suffering with them and they’re about to give up and then something happens.

And that something that happens is page 10 at the earliest, I think. It feels more like 15, or 20, and then suddenly your world explodes because that’s kind of the narrative that we have in our hearts, right? So, it’s all just racing here far too fast, because you have an interesting story to tell.

We will be always more interested in the human than we are in the circumstances. So, I would also just — my last little bit of advice, you’re inventing a show that doesn’t exist.

**Michelle:** Correct.

**Craig:** And does not exist because nobody would watch that show. Right? So, my suggestion is to think about basically being true to people’s experience. There are talent shows now where anybody can go on. Any kind — even if you’re not a musician. You’re a dancer, whatever, like America’s Got Talent or something like that. But that becomes even harder. Now you’re going up against the best of everything. And you’re just this kid from Seoul with no parents, but you’ve got soul, you know.

I mean, it’s cool, right? So, I would just say slow it down, tell the human story, let those beats happen as they need to. And you know what they are. You’ve seen the movies. And stay true to what you think people will go, “Oh yeah, that feels like my experience.” Because you’ve got so much potential here, you know.

**John:** There are some moments I really loved. So, we were talking about the America’s Honky Tonk Angel stage. At two and half pages in we cut to this stage and we’re just seeing that this guy doing the open. But I want to read a little bit aloud because I liked some of what you did here. “A center stage spotlight shines on two barely legal BLONDE SOUTHERN BELLES. They cross fingers. Hold hands. Fidget. Left foot. Right foot. Please God, please.”

Really nicely done. I know exactly what that is. I know what that feels like. You put us in the perspective of those characters. Really nicely done.

“Every mini rip into the envelope an eternity. Sweet torture. The Emcee flashes a salesman smile.” I know exactly what that is. But if that moment were happening and then as we pull back we see that we’re actually in Seoul and that’s happening on like a satellite TV screen —

**Michelle:** Mind reader.

**John:** I suspected we weren’t really in Tennessee at that point. That could be a really great moment. But right now it’s happening on page three and there’s like, well, I know exactly what’s going to happen in your movie. What we’re saying is the gas was just hit way too hard, way too fast.

**Michelle:** Gotcha.

**John:** And that may be part of the problem with what we do, Craig, honestly. I think sometimes this Three Page Challenge makes people feel like, “Well, we’ve got to cram so much into three pages.”

**Craig:** Yeah, no. No, no, no, no, no.

**John:** We just want to see really great writing. We want to be intrigued about the three pages. We don’t need to know what everything is.

**Susannah:** It’s just a tease. It’s a seduction. Think of the beginning of The Godfather. I mean, the beginnings of great movies just have you going, “What?!” I don’t know anything; I want to know everything.

**Craig:** Right. There’s mystery involved. And you create the spaces that you want to create. Emotions need space. And it’s interesting because John’s right. Look, you can write. There’s no question. This moment is really well written. But you’ve created all that space for these two characters that won’t be important on a show that isn’t connected to the thing I care about. And you haven’t created enough space for what it means to be a hungry kid with no parents and no identity. Right?

But you know that. I know you have that, clearly. So, that’s what I want you to do. I want you to just go and kick that ass.

**Michelle:** Thank you. I appreciate that.

**Craig:** My pleasure.

**Susannah:** There’s one other point I’d make which is that you’re writing a character who is trying to do something really, really hard in life. And there’s always a reason somebody is trying to do something really hard in life, so keep that in mind. That you need to know that and you need to communicate that somehow.

**Michelle:** Thank you very much.

**John:** Michelle, thank you so much for coming.

**Michelle:** Thank you. I appreciate it.

**Craig:** Good work. Good job. Good work. All right.

**John:** Our final script of the night, so people could vote on this. This is the first time in the Three Page Challenge where we posted all the three page entries. And how many people voted on their favorites in this audience. Show of hands who votes? Oh, actually a lot of people voted.

**Craig:** That’s a good amount of voting.

**John:** Great. Thank you for voting. Some people voted a lot. And, our winning entry got 32% of the vote. So, let’s meet the man who wrote that script.

**Craig:** And voted a lot for himself?

**John:** Perhaps. Mr. Paul Yoshida, come on down.

**Craig:** Come on down.

**John:** Paul, thank you very much for being here. Your script is called Zombie With a Gun.

**Paul Yoshida:** I did vote for myself a lot.

**John:** That’s fine. It’s absolutely fine.

**Paul:** Sorry everybody.

**John:** We totally didn’t really kind of block in any sort of meaningful way. Like you could get it around it. I was curious what was going to happen. How many times do you think you voted for yourself?

**Paul:** I don’t even want to say.

**John:** We’ll let Ryan and Nima run some numbers and figure that out. But, congratulations, and we enjoyed your script.

**Paul:** Thanks.

**John:** So, Zombie With a Gun, what’s Zombie With a Gun about?

**Paul:** Well, the three pages, it opens with this scumbag named Lou. He’s doing blow with a hooker in a motel. And they’re doing their thing. And then this mysterious guy shows up banging on the door. He has a hood on. You can’t see who he is. And then they kind of dismiss him as some crazy guy. And then the hooded guy gets back in his car and then just drives the car through the wall and then confronts Lou, the scumbag, and it turns out that the guy with the hood on is actually a zombie who has come back from life to kill the gangsters who killed him and his family.

**John:** Great. And this a script, is it all written, or just these three pages?

**Paul:** Yeah. It’s on the Black List website in case anyone is interested.

**John:** Nice. Franklin Leonard of the Black List is here tonight.

**Craig:** Hey Franklin, can he vote for himself on the Black List?

**Paul:** I already tried. It doesn’t work.

**Craig:** I like it, by the way. That’s a real Jersey move. I like that.

**John:** So, Paul, when we were up here talking before about superhero movies is that idea of one thing changed. And this very much felt like a one thing changed. It felt like the movie that Billy Bob Thornton could be in, except that like there’s a zombie. And you told us from the start that there is going to be a zombie because it’s called Zombie With a Gun. And I thought that was actually kind of cool.

It’s a genre movie. It’s actually sort of two genre movies simultaneously and sort of seems to honor both of those expectations of what those genre movies are. Susannah?

**Susannah:** Yeah. I love that, too. I think that’s a great idea. My biggest thought is that you’ve just got to get a little more specific with Lou, or a little more — just pull him out of, I mean, the blow and the Asian, it feels familiar. And Lou can be a great character. And he can be fucking whores, and he can be doing all the blow, but give me something about him that shows me that he’s a unique person on the planet. A unique tattoo. Maybe there’s something particular about his hooker that tells us what he’s into. You know, something. Just something that makes you say, “Oh, you’re not just run of the mill scumbag. You’re that scumbag.”

And then I’ll lean in, you know. I’ll want to know.

**John:** On the second line of actual action, “The owner of the truck, a scum-bag with “WHITE POWER” tattooed on his neck, INHALES a line of coke off a hand-mirror.” So, you said scumbag, and honestly then you titled the whole thing for us. I’m never going to think that this could be the hero of the story because you said he’s a scumbag. So, if you backed off that and found some little interesting details we might think like, oh, maybe he’s a good guy somewhere down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah, White Power. I get it.

**Susannah:** You know, a lot of people who have goodness in them can end up in a motel room with a hooker doing blow off a mirror.

**John:** If we thought it was Louie, then yes.

**Susannah:** Something landed him there. Something interesting landed him there.

**Craig:** I mean, Lou is not going to survive much longer, is he?

**Paul:** No. This is actually a flash forward. So, he kills him.

**Craig:** He kills him right?

**Paul:** Yeah. He’s one of the henchmen kind of.

**Craig:** It’s funny that you said, John, that you called out scumbag because I wrote don’t chew my food for me. I know how to put two and two together. If you say white power, and coke, and a whore…scumbag. I get it. I know.

**Susannah:** I’ll do the math.

**Craig:** You don’t need to tell me scumbag.

**John:** We’ve seen one or two movies.

**Paul:** I knew you would know.

**Craig:** But Susannah is right that every character has — this character is in the movie because he’s going to lead you to this very cool reveal. And the last thing that you want to do when you have a cool reveal back here is then just jab weakly setting up this big obvious thing. I want to be, like Lou should be cool enough where I could have a whole Rosencrantz and Guildenstern movie with Lou. Every character should be unique. You never want to go just Central Casting Thug, because this guy is doing really Central Casting Thug stuff.

I had one thought for you about the ending of the three pages. Oh, first of all, just little logic things. When a car crashes a motel room, you don’t have time to dive behind a bed for cover. The car is going fast.

**Paul:** Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

**Craig:** The car would have to be like [sound of car chugging slowly]. And then dive, right? So, it just misses them basically, you know? But, you have this really cool reveal that this guy with the hood shows him this picture and he goes, “I didn’t murder nobody.” “Yeah, you did, Lou.” And then he pulls his thing and it’s him in the picture, right?

**Paul:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But I was looking, and maybe it’s on the next page, but I was looking for that line where the guy is like, “Who are you?” Like he’s like, “You murdered Sean Walker.” “Who are you?” “I’m Sean Walker.”

**John:** Is that the next line?

**Paul:** Well, no, he’s more like in shock of like, “Oh, you’re dead.”

**Craig:** You want that. I mean, the whole person is basically like —

**Paul:** Right.

**John:** Craig, would you do an exercise with me?

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I think it could help if we read it aloud. If we read just the dialogue aloud?

**Craig:** Okay. Can I be the hooker?

**Susannah:** I want to be the hooker!

**Craig:** Oh, Susannah wants to be the hooker.

**Susannah:** No one ever asks me to be the hooker.

**Craig:** Well, one of us can be Lou, one of us can be the hooker, and one of us can be Man in Hood.

**John:** I’ll be Man in Hood.

**Craig:** Okay. I’ll be Lou.

**John:** And…

**Craig:** I will get physical, by the way.

**Susannah:** Oh, it’s one.

**John:** Begin.

**Susannah:** Oh, we’re just reading lines?

**John:** Just lines.

Savannah: You save me some?

**Craig:** This is comin’ out of your pay, you know…

**Susannah:** …Prick.

**Craig:** Alright, let’s fuck.

**Susannah:** Loud pounding. Who’s that?

**Craig:** Fuckin’ Christ…

**Susannah:** Is it the cops?

**Craig:** Wrong room, asshole! Now, where were we?

**Susannah:** Yeah! Yeah! Right there! [grunts.] Oh, Don’t stop! Don’t — !

**John:** The car smashes through the wall.

**Susannah:** P-please, don’t hurt me!

**John:** Leave.

**Craig:** What the fuck is this?

**John:** You pigs murdered them. Shot ’em dead in their home.

**Craig:** Bullshit. I didn’t murder nobody.

**John:** Yeah, you did, Lou…

Scene. So, you won’t get the finale on the podcast.

**Paul:** That was amazing. That was hot.

**John:** Part of the exercise there, no criticism of your performance.

**Susannah:** Oh, it was brilliant. I know that.

**John:** Yeah, we all acknowledge that Susannah Grant is who you should cast as Asian Hooker in your films. But I kind of thought that every line the Asian Hooker said was a little not awesome. And she was just saying things that Asian hookers kind of say in this movie. And maybe she should say other things. Or maybe not say anything. Because if you took off all her lines, you could —

**Susannah:** Maybe she’s a really weird hooker. I want to see a really weirdo hooker.

**John:** That also makes it more interesting for Lou if like there’s something interesting about her.

**Craig:** I mean, in general right it goes back to this whole Central Casting thing. You’re a hooker. You’re banging some dude for coke in a shitty motel and there’s a knock on the door. You don’t care. You don’t care about anything, right? You’re a hooker. You’re just like la, la, la, and he’s like, “Ugh, what?” And bonk, bonk, bonk.

**Susannah:** And you also don’t care if they stop or not.

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t care. Nobody cares.

**John:** They don’t care if it’s good.

**Susannah:** I also want to talk about the knock on the door, which is the guy who drives the car through the door, I mean, through the wall is not usually the same guy who knocks. And if you want to show us the guy is coming, just show us he’s coming. Just go outside the motel, see the car pull up.

**Paul:** Yeah, that’s cool.

**Susannah:** See the hooded guy get out. And they have no idea. Because the knocking and then driving, I don’t know what he’s — he’s polite, and then he’s —

**John:** I thought he was doing it to make sure that he really was in the room. So, he’s hearing a voice.

**Susannah:** Oh, okay.

**John:** And so there may be a way to acknowledge that he knocks on the door to make sure he heard the voice, and then he walked off.

**Craig:** Yeah, but then at that point I’m wondering why drive the car through there? Why not just kick the door open. You have a gun.

**Susannah:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, what you could do, for instance, is you’ve got Lou and this woman and then the Trans-Am pulls into the lot and then you see like that sad old guy that’s working behind the desk. And the door goes jingle-jingle. And the guy looks up.

The next thing that we see after another little bit of Lou is that car going through the door. We’ll know, okay, he got the name from the guy.

**Paul:** Oh, yeah, that’s cool.

**Craig:** You know, something like that.

**John:** Cool. Thank you, Paul, so much for submitting.

**Craig:** Good job.

**Paul:** Yeah, I’m a super big fan.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** Nice work.

**John:** And that’s it. Susannah Grant, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Susannah. Great job.

**John:** Craig, this was a long show. We needed to really warn the affiliates that we were running a little bit long. But this was really, really fun.

**Craig:** No, it was great. Yeah, hopefully we didn’t preempt whatever comes after us on the network.

**John:** Yeah, there’s hopefully not another thing happening. We need to think Aline Brosh McKenna for sponsoring our cocktail party, which was lovely. We need to thank Christopher Kartje and the Writers Guild Foundation for putting this event on. That was amazing.

**Craig:** Yes. Fantastic job as always.

**John:** And Matthew Chilelli edits all these episodes. He also did the intro music, which was a surprise to Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, like everything is a surprise to me.

**John:** Yeah, so it was a surprise for Craig. And I especially want to thank everybody who submitted those pages.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Because everyone is brave for doing them, but thank you again for putting your work out there in the world. It’s amazing.

**Craig:** Thank you guys. And thank all of you guys for listening and all of your very kind words in supporting us. We promise we’ll keep doing this long after you lose interest, I assure you.

**John:** And one last thanks to Milt and Rich, our sound and our lights, and everybody else who made this all work.

**Craig:** Thanks folks back there.

**John:** And thank you guys so much for coming.

**Craig:** Thanks for coming.

Links:

* [The Writers Guild Foundation](http://wgfoundation.org)
* [Andrea Berloff](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0075696/) on IMDb, and [Deadline’s Conan announcement](http://www.deadline.com/2013/10/legend-of-conan-lands-andrea-berloff-to-script-arnold-schwarzenegger-epic-reprise/)
* [Christopher Markus](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321655/) & [Stephen McFeely](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1321656/) on IMDb, and [their interview on LA Times Hero Complex](http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/captain-america-winter-soldier-writers-revel-in-marvel-universe/#/0)
* [David Goyer](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0333060/) on IMDb, and [his BAFTA Screenwriters Lecture](http://www.bafta.org/film/features/david-s-goyer-delivers-his-bafta-screenwriters-lecture,3931,BA.html)
* [David Goyer’s arms](http://cdn.wegotthiscovered.com/wp-content/uploads/13049.jpg)
* [Spider-Man](http://marvel.wikia.com/Spider-Man), [Hulk](http://marvel.wikia.com/Hulk), [Martian Manhunter](http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Martian_Manhunter), [Wonder Woman](http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Wonder_Woman), [Lex Luthor](http://dc.wikia.com/wiki/Lex_Luthor) and [Storm](http://marvel.wikia.com/Ororo_Munroe_(Earth-616))
* [Susannah Grant](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0335666/) on IMDb, and a [feature on her from Salon](http://www.salon.com/2000/04/13/grant/)
* The three [Three Page Challenge entries](http://johnaugust.com/umbrage), and [all 57 that were submitted](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive)
* [Intro/Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 143 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Claire, why Claire? What is the reason behind Claire Schaeffer?

**Craig:** Claire Schaeffer is a senior, a 12th grader, at Flintridge Prep here in La Cañada and she is a devoted fan of our show apparently. My son, I believe did a musical with her and she’s a fan of the show and so I promised Jack that I would give her a little shout-out.

**John:** Well, that’s very, very nice. I worried that there had been news in your life that I had missed out on. Huge life decisions had happened in between our weeks of normal recording the show.

**Craig:** You know that if I wanted to be a women, I would have just simply hurdled into surgery. I don’t…

**John:** Craig Mazin doesn’t stop and think. He just goes right for it. He finds the best surgeon and if that’s too expensive then he finds the second best surgeon and that’s the one he uses.

**Craig:** Sometimes the second best is the worst one. You know that whole theory of the most overpriced bottle of wine on a menu is the second most expensive one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because nobody wants to buy the most expensive one so they buy the second most expensive one. Everyone knows that so they jack the price of that one up.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Many restaurants will actually deliberately stick an incredibly overpriced bottle on there so they can keep moving the second most expensive one.

**Craig:** It’s a real-estate agent trick. They’ll take you to a house that they know is wildly overpriced just to completely throw you off so that when you see one that’s normally priced you think you’re getting a deal.

**John:** That’s so good.

**Craig:** It’s a world of lies out there basically. [laughs] It’s just lies. We’re surrounded.

**John:** [laughs] The screenwriting advice here is that if your script is a little bit long, make sure that people are reading really, really long scripts right in front of yours and then your 130-page script will seem like, oh, that’s reasonable.

**Craig:** Breath of fresh air.

**John:** Yes. It’s benchmark setting.

This is going to be one of those shows, Craig, that is almost completely random. You and I both have many tabs opened in our browser because there are so many little thing to talk about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And we’re going to try to get through all of them today. We’re going to talk about the first screenwriting book ever from 1912. We will talk about tropes and archetypes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We will talk about Barry Levinson and his unhappy credit arbitration situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’ll answer a question about managers. We’ll talk about film critics who are watching screeners rather than a big movie on a big screen. They’re watching a little movie on a little screen. We’re going to talk about keeping secrets from your readers, how you keep something on the page that’s different than what people might see on the screen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** We’ll talk about what happens to a Broadway show after it leaves Broadway which is the situation we’re in now with Big Fish which is really interesting and so different from anything in film or television. And, finally, we will do some more One Cool Things from the archives. We will look at which One Cool Things are still cool and which ones we’ve completely forgotten about.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** This is that show, that show with so much. And in all those things that didn’t even include the things we’re doing follow up on. So there’s still more.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s hydrate here. This is going to be rough.

**John:** While Craig is hydrating I will say that voting is open now for the Live Three Page Challenge. If you’re listening to this on Tuesday when the episode comes out, you can vote on Tuesday or Wednesday until noon for your favorite of the 57 entries for the Three Page Challenge, so they’re all at johnaguust.com/threepagelive, all spelled out, all one word. And you can see all those entries from different people. You can read them all and you can vote for up to three of your favorites. And one, two, or three of those will be discussed on the live show Thursday along with our special guest panelist judge, Susannah Grant.

**Craig:** Spectacular. Are there still tickets available for this event?

**John:** You know, it’s completely unclear. I watched the website this morning. We’re recording this on a Friday and it still showed the ability to purchase tickets, so if you’re listening to this on Tuesday and you’ve not otherwise seen me tweet that it is sold out, I’d say come, because they’ll be able — we’ll find a seat for you. So come to the show. It’s at the Writers Guild Theatre in Beverly Hills.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Yay. One of the interesting things about having all of these 57 samples all showing up at once is that they were just sitting in a folder on my desktop. And I thought, you know what, I wonder what screenwriting software people are using to write these different entries. And so I looked at all the metadata and figured it out. So, Craig, what percentage of these entrants would you guess were written in a Final Draft?

**Craig:** I have to say a number that’s going to bum me out, but I’m going to say 90%.

**John:** Ooh, it’s quite a bit lower than that.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** It’s about 54%.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s spectacular news.

**John:** So that 54% is when you add together Final Draft 8, Final Draft 9, and Final Draft 7. And so I kept them separated in little charts. There’s going to be a link to the chart in the show notes.

Essentially, Final Draft 8 was by far the most common thing; 18 out of the 57 entries were written in Final Draft 8. But a wide range of other software showed up there. So Fade In showed up there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Strong. Slugline was there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Screenwriter, Celtx, Highland, even some ones were written like TextEdit or Word were there too.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it was interesting that people were trying different things.

**Craig:** Well, that is. I have to say that number is exciting to me. I want to see that. I mean, listen, I’m sure the people at Final Draft are like, “Oh, my god, is this guy really doing this again to us.” But, you know, there’s no reason that Final Draft should have even 50%. Final Draft should have 5%. It is simply not the best available option out there. I don’t believe it is the best available option. But it is the most expensive available option. So that to me that should intersect around 5% of people that just bought it once a long time ago and don’t feel giving up.

**John:** I would say that, you know, 58 scripts is a very small sample size but it was an interesting sample size because I feel like the people who are going to be applying or answering in to the Three Page Challenge are going to be aspiring screenwriters. And aspiring screenwriters are people who probably bought screenwriting software recently or services in the case of things like WriterDuet or Celtx. So they’re honestly sort of in that next wave and if that next wave is not fully embracing Final Draft, that’s a change for that application.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** I can also say in sort of anecdotally because I sell one of the apps that actually is there, we do keep track of the rankings of the different apps in the App Store. So all the screenwriting apps that are sold through the Mac App Store we can look and see where they’re ranked in the productivity category. And actually we have applications that chart sort of how we do. And the last couple of weeks things have actually changed and so for the first time Highland is sometimes surpassing Final Draft in number of units sold.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Which is great. We are priced a lot less than Final Draft, so our actual total gross is a lot less but it’s nice that people are using it.

**Craig:** I think that’s great. I am happy to see competition doing what it’s supposed to do.

**John:** Yes, creating an ecosystem is a lovely thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We have a follow up from Matt Selman who is a writer who is an executive producer of The Simpsons.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he wrote in to say, “Hi, guys, Scriptnotes’ listener Matt Selman here. I was enjoying your bit on Alloy and fan fiction and vampires. It’s a couple episodes back. And I just had to chime in about a Simpsons episode we did on just that topic, sort of. I produced a show called The Book Job in which Lisa is disillusioned again to find that her favorite Tween kids books are just product pumped out by an Alloy-like publishing house. Then a lot of crazy Oceans 11-type stuff happens. It’s actually a show about the challenges of authorial creation, business versus originality, the perils of procrastination, and an attempt at justifying/invalidating the joys of group writing which is the majority of what I do when I’m not writing emails to you instead or finishing a script.

“Maybe your listeners would get a kick out of watching it or at least it merits a link in the show notes. Sorry, it’s only on iTunes for The Simpsons Season 23 or they can pirate it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] He wrote that and I didn’t add the whole, “Or you can pirate it” thing.

**Craig:** Oh Matt. First of all, Matt I believe is the showrunner of The Simpsons. He’s a spectacularly good guy. He’s a smart guy. And he is — I’ve come to know some Simpsons writers over the years, Jay Kogen who’s sort of all the way back from the beginning but guys along the way like Daniel Gould and so on and so forth and Matt is, he just fits that, the guys who work on The Simpsons are just smart guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They’re not funny and great writers who also happen to be smart. It’s all connected, you know. There is a culture of intelligence there and Matt is a terrific dude. He really is, just picture a nervous man. That’s Matt. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** What does a nervous man look like? Sort of thin, like kind of kooky hair, looks nervous.

**John:** So I first met Matt Selman because we were shopping for a new house and we were going to open houses on a Sunday which is usually when open houses are happening. And we were in one of these and there’s a guy who sort of recognized me and you could sort of tell when someone recognizes you because they make an eye contact and they make an eye contact again. And it’s like they’re like trying to make sure/confirm if they really did recognize you.

And so he came over and introduced himself and he said, “Oh, hey, I’m the guy who wrote that Simpsons episode that was based on Go or not based on Go but that sort of like used Go in it.” And it’s the episode called Trilogy of Error and it’s an episode where time keeps repeating on itself and sort of like how Pulp Fiction works and how Go works, and there’s actually one whole plot line which is very much taken from Go. And that was my first introduction to him was that he had written the episode that was sort of inspired by Go.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s just a good guy. I’m not sure where, I think I might have met him at a roundtable or something somewhere along the way, but I’ve just always loved him and he was very nice to invite me to a table reading that they did of an episode a couple of years ago. And that was just really fun to watch the cast do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was just fascinating. It’s just very cool. What an amazing institution to be a part of and a good guy, Matt Selman. So thanks for writing in, Matt. We’ll put a link in there. We don’t want people to pirate your show.

**John:** No. They should buy it for real.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you said about roundtables is actually very applicable because my next bit of follow up was at the live show we did at Nerdmelt where we did the crossover episode with the Nerdist Writers Panel, I talked a little bit about that I was going to go in on this panel. I was actually leading this sort of roundtable on a rewrite for a script and I was excited but also a little bit nervous about sort of how it was going to go and it was this week.

And it went really well, I think. And so I just wanted to talk through a little bit what that process was like because it was the first time I had ever kind of done one of these things.

I’d been in sessions that were much more like a little punch up where it’s just like what’s the new funny joke we can do here. This was after our first draft, and the writer was in the room, thank god, because I wouldn’t have really wanted to do it if the original writer weren’t there to keep going on to the next thing.

But the discussion, there’s a total of five writers in the room, was really about what are the possibilities of the next things we could do and really looking at what sort of what are the functions of each of the characters, how can this all work together. And so the day it was structured where I suggested that we actually just read the whole script allowed to begin with. And that’s sort of tedious. That burns like two hours. But I thought it was really important because otherwise there’s this chance that you’re all kind of reading a different script.

You’re all sort of reading the scripts you read a week ago or three drafts ago. It’s hard to focus on what specifically the movie is in front of you unless you actually sort of like read the movie that’s in front of you. So we all divvied up parts. We read the whole thing aloud, including all the scene description which is the worst part of the table read.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I was really glad we did it because for one thing it gave that writer a chance to really hear his work all together out there like and sort of celebrate like this is what was there and like the stuff that was really good was really, really good. And in some ways, I think, that can help us sort of move past it and sort of look at it like that was that and what are the opportunities we have sort of kept on going here.

The stuff that felt long reading was probably needed to be addressed and the stuff that was really, really good, well, what was special about what was really, really good and how can we use those characters, those situations to best effect. So it ended up being a pretty good situation.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s cool. I’ve never done that in, I mean, I’ve been to roundtables where there was a cast read through prior to it but in a lot of times if it’s early in the process there is no cast. And I’ve never done that. I’ve never done a reading. Usually we just start talking about the script and reactions and things, but, you know, I always feel like the — in the end those are difficult days for a writer to go through because you have everybody kind of coming out at it with all of their different opinions and feelings and you have to figure out how to parse out what makes sense and speaks to you truly and what just may be somebody’s opinion.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And that’s tough sometimes.

**John:** What I think is interesting about a roundtable that’s really driven by writers is that everyone who’s been at that table has had to implement these kind of changes. And so every time we talk about a possibility, we’re talking about it in a way of like figuring out like how do you actually write that, how do you actually get that thing to manifest; rather than sort of pie in the sky dreams, it’s like, what’s actually doable.

It’s like talking about building a building with people who build buildings. And so you really understand what is possible there. The challenge for me as like the leader of this group was to make sure that it didn’t all become like a volleying back and forth with the original writer who was there because there’s a natural instinct of trying to address your suggestion to the person who’s going to write next. And I try to make sure to try to stay a conversation among all of us, not just the guy who is going to go off and do the next pass.

**Craig:** Yeah, there is one thing about those roundtables that I don’t like and I try and guard against. And that is this strange thing where writers have almost, some writers have internalized a kind of very bland note style.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where suddenly they’re talking to a fellow writer like the world’s worst producer giving them these very obvious notes and pushing it towards formula. And I’m always careful when I’m in these things to never talk about things that I think are going to grind the edges off of a piece or to take away that which is unique.

If anything sticks out in a fascinating way but it seems like it’s not integrated, then maybe I’ll just say that. I’ll just say, how do we, this is a moment. This is the kind of thing that’s special about this movie. Don’t round that edge off, but let’s talk about maybe how to have it not feel like it’s unmoored from the rest of the movie. But I sometimes get dismayed listening to my fellow writers because it just feels like they’ve suddenly become the world’s worst director of development.

**John:** Yeah. It was interesting, I was happy to see this studio in this case, the writer I think initiated the idea of doing this panel. I was glad that the studio stepped up and did it because had they done another draft or two more drafts, I think there would have been some burn in and some burn out honestly on what was happening in the script.

And rather by doing it now, when it was still, it was formed but it was still fresh, it was, I think, much easier to look at the different ways we could go and to sort of chart a course because we hadn’t spent so much time trying to implement notes that were maybe the wrong notes. So I’m hopeful that it’s going to be a cool movie and it was a really good process, so I just wanted to — I’ll never actually say what the movie was or who the writers were, but they were actually fantastic. And so I was, I really enjoyed that process.

**Craig:** Awesome. Yeah, I love doing those things. I think they’re fun days.

**John:** Cool. So let’s move to our new stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the first thing is, and I can’t find a link of who sent this to me but thank you whoever sent it to me, I think tweeted this link to perhaps the first screenwriting book ever written. It is a 1912 book by Herbert Case Hoagland called How To Write A Photo Play. And I thought it was just great. And so there’s a blog post on it, so we’ll link to both the original text which is on archive.org but also my blog post about it. It was just so cool. I’ll read a little snippet from it. “To write a photo play requires no skill as a writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “But it does require a quote constructionist. It requires the ability to grasp an idea and graft, please using the botanical sense, a series of causes on the front of it and a series of consequences on the other end. An idea so graft it will surely bear fruit; and to learn the art of this mental horticulture is necessary. First, to understand in a general way how motion pictures are made and what is done in the studio, in the field, and in the factory. Let us learn something of these things and begin at the beginning, in the office of the scenario editor.”

What I loved about this paragraph was that it just, first off, it’s just like, “You don’t have to have any skill as a writer” is just fantastic. And also the term scenario editor. What’s so great about Hoagland’s book is that, so he was a scenario editor I’m gathering based on certain introductory pages of the book. They were just in a completely different system. And so when they’re talking about a scenario, they’re not really quite talking about a screenplay. It’s really just a series of shots that is going to tell a story. And because they don’t have dialogue, because they don’t have a lot of normal film conventions, it’s just different.

And, you know, so they say, like, you could write a scenario in 10 minutes but more likely you’ll spend a week thinking about it. And so it really is just a very different world and yet so many of the same kinds of things apply about simple things like screen geography or a sequence of events.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I just thought it was great.

**Craig:** Well, Herbert Case Hoagland reminds me of, I’m trying to remember the name, I think it was something Pritchard, the man who’s written the poetry textbook in Dead Poets Society. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Who, you know, has his chart of how to evaluate poetry. You can see here at the very beginning of Hollywood moviemaking the very well-intentioned desire to help creative people work in a very structured format. We’ve said it many times, screenwriting stands apart from all other artistic pursuits as something that requires artistic skill and creativity and yet is not meant to be actually appreciated by anyone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s not meant to be read. It’s meant to be transformed into a movie. It’s a very specific thing. And so naturally everybody is trying to come up with ways to help you do that. However, we also see here the birth of a terrible, [laughs], and apparently long-standing tradition of reductionist thinking when it comes to screenwriting and the overabundance of rules and caveats and “it’s really simple, press A, pull tab B.”

This is the thing that screenwriters have struggled with forever and god knows how many questions we get that are of a “should I pull tab A or when,” you know, these questions of ” is the midpoint break that comes before the second and a half act pinch point necessary for the downward motion of the reversal?” And you just sit there going, oh, my god, just tell a story. Tell a story.

**John:** There’s a moment in the book where it talks about sort of scene geography and it all has to do with hats. And so, basically, like, if a man puts on his hat and takes his coat, the next shot needs to be of him like arriving in a different house, because otherwise if he puts on his hat and coat and he’s still walking in the house, we’re like, well, why is he walking in a house. He should have left the house.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s absurd and yet at that time you have to think about sort of what these movies were like at this point, that probably was actually good advice to some degree because we just weren’t sophisticated enough to sort of understand how these things could work. It was all just shot by shot by shot by shot.

I also love that in the sense of like things never change. Here’s his warning about submitting your work to different places. He says, “Don’t send biblical stories to a manufacturer who makes the specialty of Western stuff. Study the needs of the firms producing pictures and direct your scenarios accordingly. On another page, the class of a story might be sought by the different studios it has touched up. And ambitious writers cannot do better than to subscribe to the Moving Picture World or some other trade paper and carefully study the comments on the films that appear week by week.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, so there is the beginning of chase the market. [laughs]

**John:** Basically it’s like, read the trades, chase the market, but he’s also saying, know your buyer which is absolutely true.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, sure. No, of course, and at that time, in an era where there was even less information than was available to us when we were pre-Internet, it’s true.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There were companies that just concentrated on one kind of picture and to send them a screenplay for a different kind would be pointless. But even so, you know, it’s just classic. It’s just because every stupid thing that people are currently trying to charge you money for,[laughs], it turns out that Herbert Case Hoagland wrote those stupid things already in 1912.

**John:** Yeah, and 1912 was really fascinating because like that’s really genuinely the very, very beginning of anything we want to consider a motion picture industry. I think Birth of a Nation is 1914 if I’m right. So it’s really, things are just beginning here. You’re moving out of the sort of the Nickelodeon time into the kind of full-length movie and that there was already this kind of book I think is just fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, like right there in the beginning there was somebody telling screenwriters what to do. [laughs] It’s just genius.

**John:** And it strikes me that a lot of times when you’re at the beginning of something, you know, you’re still kind of figuring out the rules of things, you’re figuring out sort of what stuff is like. And so, I could imagine like the early like how to make a webpage books would have almost exactly the same kind of things that seem really obvious or weird about like, you know —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t use blinking text and it’s like, well, you should never say that but of course you had to say that at that time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this, Hoagland had no idea what movies were going to become, and yet weirdly he sort of anticipated what aspiring screenwriters would be like and the questions they would ask.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the truth is what he did here is actually very impressive considering that it is 1912. What is sort of sad to me is that there are people in 2014 who are basically saying this stuff, the same stuff that is 102 years old.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But pretending that it’s interesting or insightful or worth spending money on. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just sad, sad.

**John:** As we close out here, I also want to, you know, point people towards archive.org because — so archive.org is the Internet archive. And basically, they take snapshots of websites over a period of time, so a lot of times if you go to a website and you can’t find, and you’re curious like what that website was like four years ago you can enter that same URL in archive.org and find what that was like. But they also have these other great sort of treasure trove of just old materials and things that have fallen out of copyright. And so I bless them for putting stuff like this up online where people can dig at it because it’s just great.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** Next up is a less happy topic, Barry Levinson and his arbitration with the Writers Guild of America. We don’t know of course all the details on this but we know that this is about the Philip Roth novel The Humbling. And Barry Levinson wanted to share screenwriting credit with Buck Henry and Michal Zebede or Michael Zebede. I don’t know how he pronounces it. And there was an arbitration. Barry Levinson did not like the outcome of that arbitration and left the guild or went fi-core in the guild. But just basically, Craig, how do you define fi-core?

**Craig:** Well, financial core is a state of what you would call a financial core non-member. You are no longer technically a member of the union. You can’t vote on collective bargaining agreements. You can’t vote in elections. However, if you’re working in a close shop state like California, you’re still subject to the collective bargaining agreement, which is why “quitting the union,” and going fi-core kind of isn’t worth it because in the end here’s what happens: you still have to pay dues. Your dues are reduced by the amount of expense that the guild puts out towards things that are unrelated to collective bargaining which isn’t much. So instead of paying what you and I pay, you’d maybe pay 93% of that rate.

**John:** But, Craig, then you wouldn’t get Written By magazine.

**Craig:** Ah, you don’t get Written By magazine which is a huge, yeah, that would be a huge bummer obviously, [laughs], for those of you wondering with what you should line your cat box.

**John:** I guess you could still buy it at the newsstand. So there’s some…

**Craig:** Yes, you could buy it at the newsstand. And there’s a big call for that. But the really ironic part of this is that if you go financial core you are still subject to credit arbitrations.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This doesn’t get you out of credit arbitrations. It’s kind of crazy. I’m not really sure how — I understand if you are incredibly frustrated that you would want to take action or do something. The problem is when it comes to this there is in fact nothing you can do.

**John:** Yeah. So George Clooney I believe on Leathernecks left the guild or went fi-core in the same way.

**Craig:** That’s the rumor.

**John:** Out of frustration.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s the frustration, but I don’t if that’s, I wouldn’t know the details in that situation either. And I bring, I sort of mention this because people asked me on Twitter about the whole situation and the arbitration. The only thing I would add to it is that having been through arbitrations and sat on arbitration panels basically been one of the people who’s deciding credit, I can almost guarantee that Levinson himself has never served as an arbiter because I think if he had he would have been really, really frustrated but he wouldn’t have gone fi-core.

Because having been an arbiter I can tell you it’s really, really hard and yet everyone I’ve ever encountered in an arbitration has worked really hard to do a great fair job. The arbiters don’t know the names of the people involved in the thing. You’re only reading writer A, writer B, writer C, writer D and things that might appear incredibly obvious to Levinson are not obvious to the arbiter because the arbiter is just looking at the words on the page. And that is a real difference.

I’ve been through arbitrations where I’ve sought credit and lost and been really, really frustrated and wished I could convince other people of the logic of like why the decision was wrong. And yet, having been an arbiter myself, I recognize that that’s just the way it goes.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, when you look at the situation here, it’s important to understand that we’re hearing one side of the story.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And if you do arbitrations, one thing that becomes very evident is that writers are delusional about their — not always delusional but frequently delusional about the nature of their contribution to a script. Because as an arbiter you get the scripts but you also get the writer’s statements. And many times I’ve done an arbitration where I’ve had three different writers, each of whom are stating very clearly that they deserve sole credit and it’s obvious. And you just shake your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you read the scripts and realize, wow, two of these people are nuts. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of them is correct. So we’re hearing one side of this. And here’s what he’s saying. He’s saying that he didn’t get credit and what he’s angry about is that he asked to see the arbiter’s statements which is our right if you’re contemplating a policy review board. You can see the arbiter’s statements. And when he looked at those arbiter statements, he didn’t like what he saw particularly in one of them that denied him credit.

He thought that this person had written a “muddled critique that made no sense. It was just way too messy and inaccurate and I asked the board to have this person read the stuff again because I couldn’t see how this was a qualified judgment and they said no.” Well, you know, Barry Levinson’s opinion of the quality of that statement is not necessarily something upon which one can turn a system of jurisprudence.

I will say this, here are some things I don’t know. I don’t know, first of all, I don’t which guild administered this. The Writers Guild West tends to administer most of these things but in cases where a number of the writers are Writers Guild East members, the East may run it. I know that the West staff is really good about reviewing the arbiter statements and making sure that they comport with our rules.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We don’t have a guarantee that an individual arbiter is going to be a genius.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** The staff does try and not call writers who they think are just bad at it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, they don’t want that either because they don’t want this. They don’t want a story like this. There were some comments on Deadline that were predictably way, way wrong, just factually incorrect. Some people seem to think that directors faced some sort of 75% threshold in order to get credit. Now, directors are essentially treated like everyone else, especially now, we did change a few rules, so there’s no — they would be looked at the same way everybody would be looked at in the situation like this. It’s an adaptation. Everybody has to hit 33%. 33% was Barry Levinson’s threshold which obviously is a guideline because there’s no such thing as a percentage like you’d actually figure out.

And two of three arbiters thought that he didn’t. Some people thought that the arbiters should be allowed to talk with each other and that it’s not fair that they don’t. They do talk to each other —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In a case like this, again, that was a change that we instituted. So if it’s not a unanimous decision, they talk. They have a teleconference in which anonymity is maintained and they discuss it. And if they can’t — if at that point they are still not unanimous but two of the three agree on something then that’s that.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He doesn’t like this decision. I get it. He thinks one of these arbiters was a knucklehead. He might be right. I don’t know. All I do know is that he’s gone financial core and that changes truly nothing, not even for him. I wish that he had thought to do what I did when I got a credit decision that I thought was terrible. I decided to run for the board. I decided to form a committee. I decided to change the rules. I did change the rules. I decided to do it again. I did do it again.

I actually did the work. Oh, and I served as an arbiter. And Barry Levinson apparently has decided that in his union, if he doesn’t immediately get what he wants or what he perceives as fair, the only recourse is to quit. And, frankly, I just find that to be babyish.

If you’re on a boat and you see a leak in the boat and everyone is telling you it’s not leaking, fix the leak anyway. Convince them. Don’t just jump off the boat and swim away. It’s stupid. It just doesn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I get frustrated sometimes with this attitude of like, “Oh, my union did this to me.” There is no union. There is just a bunch of people. That’s it. We’re all in this together or we’re not, you know.

**John:** Yeah. People do bring up the idea of like a director has different qualifications for it. And so, what I want to stress is that this is an adaptation, this is the rules are set up in a way that the director only has to hit 33% just like any other writer. What is different about a director in an arbitration situation is the director, correct me if I’m wrong, Craig, it’s an automatic arbitration situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah.

**John:** So, because he is a director or a producer on the film, it has to go to arbitration. There’s no sort of just like everyone just shakes hands and agrees on it. It has to be arbitrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was another thing a few people got wrong on the Deadline comments. There is no situation here where the writers could have all agreed amongst themselves. And that rule has been there since the very beginning and it’s a good rule and no one has ever really convincingly challenged its value. And the idea being if you have one writer who has the ability to hire and fire other writers, then it makes sense that you would want to just essentially require an arbitration to avoid situations where a powerful director who holds somebody’s economic life in their hands saying, “I think we should all agree that I should be credited here.”

**John:** Yeah, you don’t want that at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But in other cases where no one is production executive or a director on the project, you can actually all as writers talk and there’ve been many cases where I have talked with the other writers and we’ve figured it out ourselves and has not had to go to arbitration. And in many ways, that’s the best scenario where you actually just figure it out and people end up feeling happier about it because of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s exactly right. And even in situations where there is no automatic arbitration or there is an arbitration where there are five writers and four of them agree and one doesn’t, you can also write joint statements.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or statements in support of each other. There is no reason that this is necessarily as combative as people think. What ends up happening in these situations is everybody comes out of the woodwork and starts screaming about how this system is imperfect and they are absolutely correct. It is imperfect. The thing that I hear most from people who have gone through this and with which I completely agree is that we would be better off if we weren’t serving as arbiters for each other or at least or at least solely comprising the arbiters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We would be better off if there were some independent voices in there who were the kind of people that are routinely called as dramaturgical and literary experts in plagiarism cases or infringement cases in courts of law to help make these decisions because, frankly, knowing how to write a script is not the same Venn oval as knowing how to analyze components of literary contributions. It’s just a totally different skill. And, frankly, the other problem with our system is we’re busy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And with fewer and fewer screenwriters working, the idea that, you know, you’d want your jury pool to mostly be made up of people that are writing screenplays and active screenwriters and we’re busy and sometimes these arbitrations come in and they’re asking you to read eight drafts and a novel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it’s just — it’s a burden. They’re desperate, constantly searching for people to do these things. It’s rough.

**John:** I got two calls this last week about arbitrations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I couldn’t. I’m too busy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s also partly because it’s TV time. And so because the TV shows are being picked up and announced, those credits are having to be figured out.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s not a fun thing to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** All right, to our next thing. Several people wrote in with this kind of cool animated chart called the Periodic Table of Storytelling, or at least I thought it was cool. So basically it takes a bunch of tropes and ideas that exist in storytelling, various forms, largely cinema but also sort of general storytelling and kind of rearrange them into a chart that looks like a periodic table.

And the general categories which would be sort of the, you know, the columns on this chart are things about structure, settings, story modifiers, plot devices, heroes, character modifiers, archetypes, villains, meta tropes, production and fandom and audience reactions. We’ll put a link to it in the show notes because it’s a fun timewaster for awhile.

Two of the things I really enjoyed on this chart were Flanderization, and Flanderization is defined as, this is obviously Ned Flanders, but it’s when you take characters that are kind of normal and then over time you exaggerate qualities in him so much that he doesn’t resemble a normal person at all anymore. So in the case of Flanders, he was just like sort of the nice neighbor next door. And then they made him a little Christian, then a lot Christian, and then he ended up being sort of super-crazy Christian. And that’s just the arc that that character sort of took over time.

The other thing I liked was what they call the anthropic principle which in general the anthropic principle is that we are perfectly suited for the earth because if we weren’t perfectly suited for the earth we wouldn’t be here. Story-wise, the story equivalent of that is what we really call the “buy” is that like if it weren’t for this thing there wouldn’t even be a movie. So you’re willing to take as a given one or two things about the nature of this world because if it weren’t for these one or two things there wouldn’t be a story.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a cool chart. I mean, it’s very thorough.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s got a ton of stuff in it. I, from the point of view of somebody that tries to write things, I never really — these things I just find more amusing. It’s really, they are what they seem to be more than anything is a fan’s compendium of stuff they’ve noticed. But I don’t, I wouldn’t see any value here to somebody that was actually trying to write something.

It’s just more of a — it just feels like a very, [laughs,] I say Aspergers all the time. And I don’t want people to think like Aspergers is bad. Aspergers is awesome actually. I mean, people with Aspergers basically save our lives and, you know, figure out every bit of technology in our lives. But this is a little Aspergersy to me in a way that’s maybe not that useful.

**John:** Well, what I find useful is there are certain things on here that I will throw out in sort of casual conversation and then I will recognize that people don’t actually know what I’m talking about. So Chekhov’s Gun is an example of that and there’s a good entry on Chekhov’s Gun. And actually I should say that all the entries actually link back to TV Tropes which is a great way to waste about six hours of time just going through TV Tropes. Like Chekhov’s Gun which is a classic example of like if you establish a gun on the wall early in the story that gun has to go off or else everyone is going to be frustrated.

I think those are important things for writers to know and having a shorthand like Chekhov’s Gun is a good way of talking about like why something isn’t working right or why setting an expectation that is not fully met.

**Craig:** Oh, for sure. Yeah, look, Chekhov’s Gun was described by Chekhov.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there are things that are literary notions that have been given to us by great writers and I always think those are useful and we should know those things. But here, I think it may be a little bit lost in some other stuff. I mean, I got a little suspicious when the, you know, now they start combining these periodic story elements into molecules that are, you know, movies or episodes of things and the examples are Star Wars, Mass Effect, Dilbert, Avatar: The Last Airbender, My Little Pony, Here Come the Bronies, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann which I assume is something anime, Firefly, Death Note, Wall-E and Ghostbusters. That’s some hardcore cheese doodle stain nerdism there. And I love almost all of those things. Not the Bronies stuff, but I love almost all that stuff. I just feel like this is a bit too , it’s a bit too dorky for me I have to say. And I love chemistry. I love the actual periodic table. I love writing. This actually drifted into just too dorky for me. I apologize.

**John:** Well, let’s step away from that chart to another chart because I was up in Seattle this last weekend. And Seattle by the way is awesome. So if you live in Seattle, congratulations. You live in an awesome town. So at the Experience Music Project, EMP, the big museum, they have great music exhibits but they also have like a lot of other really cool stuff there and two of the ones we went through were archetypes of fantasy and then there’s also a sci-fi, horror section. These are all sort of down in the basement and they are fantastic.

In the archetypes of fantasy, they had very nice, both animated on screen but also sort of as you walk through displays set up talking about the different sort of archetypes of fantasy you see in everything from Game of Thrones to Harry Potter to The Wizard of Oz, like sort of all these kind of things.

And I’ll include a link to a photo I took sort of that shows a chart of how many, 20 different archetypes they have, from the night to the shadow, to the unlikely hero, to the hero’s muse. And when you look at it just as little charts it’s like, well, yes, okay, that’s a thing. But what’s so smart about the exhibit is they actually then took a look at like who are those kind of characters in actual stories.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it makes it real for people when they see like, oh, okay, that character is — like Robin Hood is that type, but also Han Solo is that type. And the sense of the commonalities we see across our sort of mythic stories. In some ways it may be a little bit more useful for the person who is writing a movie to really think about these characters and the kinds of roles they could play.

Again, not in a prescriptive way, like you have to have the barbarian face off with the trickster, but a way of thinking about what functions are your characters serving in your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, there’s lots of good stuff there out in the world that delves into this topic of commonalities between stories and narrative. I mean, narrative is just a — all narrative is is a symptom of being human. So, naturally there should be these archetypal things because there’s stuff in all of us that’s archetypal. You have fear, and bravery, and honor, and justice, and all these things that then emerge in the forms of people, flat characters, or complicated characters.

You should read those things. Look, everyone will tell you you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, you’ve got to read Joseph Campbell, and I always think, well, yeah, that’s great. You should. I mean, watch The Hero with a Thousand Faces, but — the thing he did with Moyer. But, read the myths. You know, when I was a kid I went through a phase where I just did nothing but read Greek myth.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was awesome. You read those myths and you start getting pure undiluted narrative because that’s what that stuff is.

**John:** Yeah. I went through a very hardcore mythology phase, actually probably a couple of phases. There was one in sort of early elementary school. It hit again later, and then sort of got into my Bulfinch’s Mythology in sort of late junior high/high school. And what’s fascinating about when you actually go back and really look at the myths is like there’s so much overlap and so many, like, you know, it’s almost like fandom or sort of like competing versions of how things fit together, like Demeter, and Ceres, and Persephone, and the underworld. It’s different kind of every time. And so there’s so many versions of what that story is. There’s no one completely archetypal true version of like what that thing is.

And in some ways seeing the multiple telling of it and how they different they all were sort of gives you permission as a storyteller to really think about what are the other ways I can tell this kind of story. And what is common between all of these versions of what is so different between all of these versions.

**Craig:** The New Testament is —

**John:** Oh, of course.

**Craig:** Is basically that. It’s Rashomon.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just that everybody agrees that Jesus was awesome. But Bulfinch’s Mythology is — that’s a book that should be on every writer’s bookshelf. Every writer should read Bulfinch’s Mythology.

**John:** At Barnes & Noble a couple weeks ago I bought myself, they have these really nicely bound special bound versions of The Great Tales of Mythology. It’s not a Bulfinch’s, but it’s a good mythology reader. And then the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which I’d never actually read through Grimm’s Fairy Tales and basically never fall in love because you’re going to die is essentially what you sort of learn.

**Craig:** They’re grim.

**John:** They are in fact grim. What’s also so fascinating about Grimm’s Fairy Tales I discovered is that almost, at least half of them in the first few sentences there will be like some throwaway random thing about his father was a bull, blah, blah, blah. And it just keeps going on. Or like there will be a curse that’s set up that’s never actually paid off. It’s really weird to sort of notice which of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales have sort of survived into modern culture and which ones are just like, “I’ve never heard of that one before and I can see why.”

**Craig:** [laughs] It didn’t work out. The Brothers Grimm collected these stories, basically German peasant stories. And I had a roommate in college, not Ted Cruz, but my friend Eric Leech whose mother was German and she had given him at one point a book, a German book of those old stories and along with these illustrations. And children were constantly being injured on purpose or as a result of their misbehavior.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** They would lose their fingers and blood would spurt out. The stores, I mean, Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were in a race to harm as many children as possible. [laughs] It’s horrible.

**John:** What I also found so fascinating about the Grimm’s Tales is that so rarely do you actually see — in Grimm’s Tales it’s actually kind of rare for its protagonist to take an action that saves him or herself.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** More likely it’s that somebody takes pity on them and then marries them. Or someone else basically rescues them in so many of the stories in a way that’s a little disappointing.

**Craig:** Well, they are there to serve a social construction that was, I guess, important at the time, or necessary to survival. But how many of those old stories involved stepmothers? Stepmothers were this enormous problem apparent, [laughs], that just asshole stepmothers.

**John:** I was looking in the introductory pages of this book, whatever the scholar was who was setting stuff up. He explains that stepmothers are actually sort of a bad translation of what the real concept is here. So, sometimes it was really just bad mothers, or second mothers, or stepmothers, or just other women who were around. But because in English we just have the word “stepmother,” we always take it to mean the woman who came in after mom died. And that’s not necessarily always what it was supposed to be in the Grimm’s stories.

**Craig:** Ah-ha!

**John:** Ah-ha! The same way that I think French has different words for like a cousin on your mom’s side and a cousin on your dad’s side. I may be making that up, but like different cultures describe relationships differently. And so we have the word stepmother, but there’s actually more subtle ways to talk about some of these things in other languages.

**Craig:** Well, look, as long as some kid gets his nose chopped off by a woodsman’s ax then I’m satisfied.

**John:** I am satisfied as well.

So, this last week, maybe it was two weeks ago, there was a New York Times piece called Memos to Hollywood. And the conceit behind it, which is not actually at all true, but the conceit behind it would be that A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis and other critics at the New York Times were writing emails to different people and they were just going to print what the emails were.

Well, one of them I found really fascinating because it actually touched on something that I never really considered. Or, I guess I considered it in the back of my head but never thought this could be real problem. So, I’m going to read one from Manohla Dargis. It’s directed to two directors. She writes:

“Do you know that, increasingly, your labor of love — the movie you spent months and probably years of your life on — is being reviewed by critics who are watching it on their computers? For years, the cost of striking and shipping film prints as well as renting theaters for press screenings led cash-strapped companies to simply supply DVDs to reviewers. Some reviewers have been happy to comply, and of course, the blurring between the big- and small-screen viewing, and the closing of theatrical windows, hasn’t helped. After all, if a movie is being released in theaters and on demand the same day, why bother watching it on the big screen ó or so the bottom-line thinking goes.

“These days, though, some companies don’t even bother to send critics DVDs: They’re only supplying Internet links that often have the reviewer’s name watermarked on the crummy-looking image, and even come with distracting time codes. So that moody shot that you and your director of photography anguished over for hours and hours? It may look beautiful, but there are critics who will never know, which certainly encourages them to pay more attention to the plot than the visuals. Viewers who bypass the theatrical experience and prefer watching movies on their televisions and tablets may not mind. Some directors, especially those whose talking heads and two shots look better on small screens, also won’t care; others just want their work seen however, wherever. But I bet there are directors who would freak if they knew how some critics were watching their movies.”

And, yeah, I think they really would. I’ve seen some of those sites, like I remember for Star Trek when we did — I did a panel at the Academy and we had a clip from the second Star Trek movie. And so they sent me a link that had like my name burned into it so I could just watch it ahead of time. If I had watched the whole movie that way I would not have liked it the same way I liked it when I saw it in the theater.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you are trying — if you care enough to send a movie to film critic I guess you care enough about their review, then you should send them a nice looking thing. That said, no one actually cares what they think. [laughs] The directors do, but the studios don’t.

When she says “cash-strapped companies are simply supplying DVDs to reviewers,” they’re not cash-strapped. They don’t care Manohla, they don’t care what you think. They don’t care what A.O. Scott thinks. They don’t care what any reviewer thinks whatsoever. They know perfectly well that when they have a movie that they think critics need to discover and love in order to get people to go, trust me, you’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice print. You’ll get a nice copy of it somehow or another. They’ll care.

But if it’s Star Trek, I mean, they couldn’t give a damn what you think. And, you know, these memos John —

**John:** Oh, I’m going to disagree with you strongly there. I guarantee you J.J. Abrams would not —

**Craig:** No, J.J. Abrams does. I’m not talking about J.J. Abrams. I agree, the directors would freak out. I’m talking about the people that are actually sending them, which is the studio, the bean counters, and the distribution and marketing and publicity departments. They don’t care. They don’t care.

**John:** I think that’s why this memo is directed towards directors. I think the fact is that a director might not even know that this is happening —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And this is pointing out that you really, in many cases you really don’t want that to happen. Now, I think there’s also some logic to some cases it doesn’t really matter. And there are movies that are coming out on TV at the same time and for those people maybe it’s fine to just provide the link because it may be the difference between getting your review and not getting your review at all. You probably want a review for a small indie film, something like, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Short Term 12. That’s the movie that you want to make sure it gets reviewed. You send a link, you’ll do whatever just to get them to watch the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and look, she points out — it’s a bit dismissive about movies that are talking heads, so apparently talking heads are bad unless I suppose it’s My Dinner with Andre in which it’s great. Look, you know, I read this — I read the whole thing. I read this whole thing. And I just kept laughing the whole time. It’s like two people that truly have no idea that nobody gave a damn what they think, going at length in America’s “paper of record” about how people should be listening to them. And they’re writing these memos to people that just don’t care.

We don’t care. I mean, listen, directors should want anyone, not just critics, anyone to see a nice version of their movie. Of course. And, you know, I don’t know — I know that these people go on these junkets. I’d rather frankly have a reviewer, if it were up to me, watch the movie on their own than watch it in a room with all of these other critics and their weird herd-like junkets as they convince each other that something is good or bad.

But nobody really cares. I mean, these people are writing these memos about superhero movies like anyone cares. [laughs] And then they’re writing letters to their fellow movie critics complaining about them. This is such a critic’s thing. Let’s just talk about stuff we don’t understand and complain about it. They literally don’t know what they’re talking about, John.

**John:** I was surprised you took so much umbrage here. Really. Genuinely. Because I was going to save that thing they read about the superhero movies for our superhero show. But, obviously now we can’t do that, so I’ll have to find another way to make you angry.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just…these people…they write:

To: Television

Cc: Movies

Subject: Get over yourselves

And then this nonsense about movie and television and how one, oh, “Current conventional wisdom holds that television has entered a golden age while movies are in a period of decline. Those are dubious notions…”

Nobody cares. Shut up. Just watch the television you like. And watch the movies you like. And stop talking about this nonsense. Nobody cares. These people, my god, is there any naval too small for them to not gaze at?

Thank you.

**John:** [laughs] Next, a question from Twitter. Bobby Bearly wrote in, and I don’t have his actual tweet so I’m just going to summarize what his tweet asked, which is, “How do you keep secrets from your readers in a script,” which is a question we haven’t really talked about on the show.

And so I think what Bobby’s referring to is there will be sometimes where there’s going to be a reveal in a movie, but the reveal in the movie isn’t going to make the same kind of sense on the page. And sometimes it will be about who a character really is, what somebody looks like, and that it’s really the same person the whole time through.

And so how do you do that in terms of what are the words on the page to show that you’re keeping a secret there. And are you in some way violating the trust of the reader by not being upfront about what was happening there?

**Craig:** Well, we’re supposed to violate trust to some extent. The existence of a movie is already the violation of a trust because you are portraying events to somebody as if they are happening in real time, or happening linearly, when in fact you who are presenting these things know exactly how this ends.

The entire thing is a betrayal of trust.

When it comes to secrets, tricks, gimmicks, twists, reveals, there are two things to keep in mind. The first is you cannot get away with the following statement: I know my movie seems really boring for 50 pages, but then when the big secret happens it will all make sense and be cool.

No. We were just bored for 50 minutes. You cannot use twist or revelation as an excuse for everything prior to that twist or revelation being boring. In fact, the reason that good twists and good reveals are so exciting is because they shock an audience who has been enjoying what they’ve been watching without it.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, The Sixth Sense, or Fight Club, very famous and somewhat recent examples of movies that have big twists, are remarkably enjoyable on their own terms prior to that twist.

**John:** Exactly. So, I think both Fight Club and Sixth Sense though bring up interesting issues about what you actually put on the page, because in both those cases — especially Sixth Sense — you want to make it clear that Bruce Willis is not actually touching anybody else.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And portraying that on the page can be really crucial and yet you don’t want to tip it too far. And so it’s one of those things where like with a camera you would do it a certain way. With just words on the page it’s sort of harder to show what the nature of that —

**Craig:** It’s tricky.

**John:** That physical geography is. The other case which comes up quite often is — and I guess this is Fight Club to some degree — but where you’re going to see like a shadowy figure and then ultimately down the road you’re going to reveal who that person really is. It’s the degree to which a screenplay is a plan for shooting a movie. Well, that character was in these scenes all this time and we shouldn’t see him. And so usually you develop some sort of terminology for what that thing is, what that character is, like the man with the gray coat. And then eventually you will reveal the man in the gray coat is actually this person, this other character who we’ve been seeing the whole time through. Like, Susan is the man in the gray coat. There’s going to be that reveal later on.

On screen we’re going to see that. On the page, sometimes that’s actually a little harder to catch. And so that’s one of those cases where if you’ve been conservative and not bolded or underlined things, this is the time to break out and actually bold or underline something so the reader is caught up with where a viewer would be, so they really can sense like, “Oh my god, they’re actually the same person.”

**Craig:** Yeah. You want to, as you’re going through we’ll call your — there’s the pre-twist and then there’s the moment of the twist. Your pre-twist stuff you have to make sure that when the reader goes backwards, and they often will — they’ll get to the twist and they’ll go, “What? Hold on a second.” Then they’ll go back because they think they’ve caught you in a mistake.

You want to have covered your tracks well. So, in Fight Club there’s a scene where the main character is acting as an interloper in an argument between Tyler Durden and Tyler Durden’s girlfriend. And then Tyler Durden is at the bottom of the stairs in a basement and she’s in the kitchen and, in fact, if you go back and look at how that scene plays out and how it would be written you would go, “Oh my god, oh, my god, it actually works with that.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you want to be careful about all of that stuff. The moment of the twist when you write the twist and you make the reveal you use the page. Give yourself page space. Let it really sink in. Make a deal of it. Use white space.

If you feel like putting nothing on that page except the reveal, do that. The page will show the emphasis. And use that space creatively, otherwise it’ll just be another action description. People will just literally go, “Oh, well I guess it’s as important as the fact that somebody walked into the room with his hat.”

**John:** Ah-ha! All right. We have a question from David Dunne who writes, “Part one, I don’t currently have an agent but my so-so manager of a few years has given me notes on a few different scripts and they sucked.” I assume the notes sucked, not the script sucks.

“He offered vague generalities, better this, bigger that, not feeling this/that, and virtually nothing constructive. I like this but take it further. Dig deeper here. This character is interesting but flat.

“So how much of his inability to give useful notes weigh in my decision to drop or keep him? If he were an all-star maybe I would overlook the shortcoming. We’re talking just so-so here.

“A related part of the question. A good friend sold a cable network show that’s going and he wants me on his staff. Should I drop the manager before joining, or if I keep him should he get a fee? How do you handle this in the most professional way?”

**Craig:** [sighs] Well, let’s run down the facts. Your manager is, as you call him or her, so-so.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All we have to judge is the behavior you’ve given us which is that his notes are bad, at which point my argument would be they’re not so-so, they’re bad. But either way it doesn’t sound like you’re getting anything out of this relationship. How important is it to have a manager who gives you good notes? It’s as important to you as it is. If you want a manager to get you work and you don’t care what they think about your script then it doesn’t matter. If you’re looking for somebody to help you grow and get better, then it does. And it sounds like that’s what you’re looking for.

You have somebody that’s offering you a job. And you don’t like your manager and you think they give you bad notes and this manager didn’t get you this job. My advice would of course be to fire the manager. [laughs] He’s done nothing.

**John:** When Craig Mazin wakes up in the morning he sits up, he says, “Fire your manager.” It’s your first instinct for everything, right?

**Craig:** I mean, normally, yeah. A lot of times people ask a question, like the prior question was about how to handle a secret in a screenplay. And my answer, my instinctive answer is, “Fire your manager.” But I control that.

**John:** [laughs] You do. But your second answer I thought was better in that case.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I want to go back and stick up for the manager just a tiny bit, but then ultimately I’m with you. Managers can serve two functions. There can be managers who are really good at helping you get your writing to the best state and they can sort of serve as a proxy for like what a producer might think. They could be reading every draft. They can sort of help you get your stuff in the best shape.

And there are some managers who do that who are really good. Not a lot of them, but there are some of them, and that can be useful.

A manager can also help you get work. And that sounds more like what you were using this manager for, hopefully, but in this case the manager didn’t get you work. It sounds like you weren’t working. It sounds like this friend is going to hire you on a show independent of what the manager did. So, I would also fire your manager. And then wait a few weeks and then sign on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. No brainer to me. I mean, he even says he’s not a super star. My guess is this is a marginal — there are so many of these people on the margins of Hollywood who, if you think about it, they’re posing as experts in the thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not. So, it’s a bit like you’ walking around with a festering wound and you like in a town where the way you know someone is a doctor is that they call themselves doctor. And these people call themselves managers. That word means nothing. It means that they can afford letterhead.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And we don’t even know if they can afford letterhead. That may just be credit card debt.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all emails now anyway.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** So, yes, we think you should fire your manager in the part one of the question. And then in the part two of your question, if you’re going to get this job staffed on a TV show, congratulations. Once you’re on board there that might be a great time to look for an agent because agents love people who work and who get hired to work. And if you are working on a TV show then you are by definition a working writer. And that might be a very good way for you to get started with an actual agent.

**Craig:** Correctamundo.

**John:** Our next topic in our big, multi-tab episode, I want to talk about Big Fish and sort of what happens to a Broadway after Broadway.

So, Big Fish closed right at the end of the year and in the time since then we’ve had the cast album come out. But we’ve also started to announce that there’s actually a bunch of stagings of Big Fish happening this next year. I think there are 20 announced so far. The biggest one for Southern California, Long Beach actually bought out all of our costumes and props and things like that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And so they’re doing a big production here.

**Craig:** Including the elephant butts?

**John:** I think they bought the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I’m not sure on the elephant butts. Those are pretty big, but they bought stuff. So, I hope they have that, too.

So, that’s going to be kind of more like the Broadway version of the show. So, it’s like what you might have seen on the main stage on Broadway. We’re also going to be doing, the only one that Andrew and I are going to be sort of directly involved in is we’re doing a new staging in Boston at the Speakeasy Theater which is a really stripped down sort of 12 chairs, maybe no sets kind of version. We’re both going in and rewriting stuff designed to bring it down to a much smaller cast, a much smaller orchestra, which is actually really exciting. I get a chance to do that, again.

What’s so odd about this process is that I’ve done film and I’ve done television, and in film and television once something is done it’s just kind of done. You might go to a retrospective screening of Go or you’ll be flipping through channels and you’ll see the Big Fish movie on HBO, which is there a lot, but you’re sort of done. And weirdly here you’re not just done because Andrew and I control copyright on Big Fish and so everyone who wants to do a future version of Big Fish comes to me and Andrew and says, “Hey, I want to put on your show,” and we get to say yes or no.

And we sort of made the decision to just say yes a lot, like a lot a lot. And so we’re licensing it to these bigger places like the Speakeasy and in Long Beach, but also there are high schools that are going to be doing it next fall.

**Craig:** That’s great. That’s great.

**John:** There’s religious groups that are doing it. There are churches. And I won’t see most of these productions, but it’s fascinating to think that these things are going to exist sort of independently of me. It’s kind of cool.

**Craig:** That is cool. I really like that you guys are opening it up to high school productions because both of my kids are big — they’re really involved in musical theater and they love it. And you do tend to get the same kind of thing happening in high school productions. And rarely do you get something that’s new, because if it’s new typically the rights holders want to kind of exploit the higher end of it, or they jack up the rates to such that high schools can’t really afford it.

For instance, Jack’s school was going to do Cinderella, which is an old play.

**John:** Yeah, it’s been out so it’s more expensive.

**Craig:** But now suddenly because it was revived they couldn’t afford it. They just couldn’t afford it, so they had to go to Once Upon a Mattress, which is about as overdone a high school production as you can get. I mean, it’s fun. Don’t get me wrong, and they did a great job, but Once Upon a Mattress is right up there with Fiddler on the Roof which my daughter will be in, [laughs], in a couple weeks.

So, it’s nice to see something fresh and new with modern music and interesting themes and storytelling, you know, and hopefully you can get out to some of those churches, John. [laughs]

**John:** I’m very excited. So, Liberty University is actually doing a Big Fish —

**Craig:** Wait, I’m sorry, hold on. You guys, the two of you —

**John:** Us. The two of us.

**Craig:** The two of you licensed your show to Liberty University?

**John:** We did.

**Craig:** I’m against this.

**John:** I didn’t even know that it happened until it happened. But I’m actually kind of excited. I honestly feel like Big Fish is the kind of show like we could probably run in Branson, Missouri for a good long time.

**Craig:** Well, you could. But, I mean, I just have to ask the question — I mean, was there at no point did you guys say, “We’re licensing our production to an institution that is just like off the charts homophobic?”

**John:** Uh, you know, it honestly happened, but like I found out that it was happening after I think the deal had already been signed. So, I’ll give you a little more backstory as to what the actual process is like. So, people can come to me or Andrew but we would ultimately say like, “That’s fantastic that you want to do it. Here’s where you go.” And so it’s a company called TRW who does the licensing for this show and a lot of other shows.

And so they’re ultimately the ones that are doing it. And so in our initial conversations with TRW about the places we were excited to see it, we really strongly — or I, I guess honestly I’ll put this on me — I strongly stressed that I really think the religious community will dig this show and will probably like it a lot. And so I said Utah and the South. And so they took me at my word and we have a staging in Orem, Utah and we have a couple stagings in the South.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** So, we have like Abilene Christian University and Liberty University. And then here is the thing: I’m not quite convinced it’s actually Liberty University. It’s the center that is next to their campus, but it may not actually be part of the campus itself. The website is not Liberty University.

**Craig:** Oh, well, those people love gay folks. [laughs] Oh, the people next door to Liberty University.

**John:** Oh, they love them. It’s just the best scenario.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, absolutely.

**John:** But in a weird way I feel — I feel kind of okay with that. It’s hard for me to explain why, but it’s just the show should work for people of , you know, across the board.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no question about that. It’s a very family friendly show and it’s a very kind of wholesome, I mean, the word wholesome comes to mind. It’s about small town America in the ’50s and ’60s, that kind of idyllic time that a lot of socially conservative people yearn for.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, there’s no question it will work for them. But, you know, hey, look, I guess one way to think about it is that you are quietly putting some gay into Liberty University.

**John:** I think there’s already plenty of gay in Liberty University.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you’re right!

**John:** So, just to wrap this up, so we’re finished on Broadway and while I would love to still be running on Broadway, it’s also sort of nice to put a little of it behind me on some stuff. We’re not quite done yet. We’re up for some Drama Desk Awards, which is great. I was especially — Kate Baldwin and Norbert Leo Butz who were so fantastic in the show, I was happy to see them get singled out for their great work.

And we’re actually up for best musical on Broadway.com, which is sort of the People’s Choice Awards of Broadway.

**Craig:** Oh, great.

**John:** So, there will be a link in the show notes. If you want to stuff the ballot box for Big Fish I won’t say no. And you can vote for Big Fish as Best Musical if you choose to.

**Craig:** You know, the People’s Choice Awards, that’s the only award I ever get.

**John:** [laughs] You and me, together at last.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** Let’s talk some One Cool Things. So, we’ve been going through, we had two earlier sessions where we talked through old One Cool Things. And we got up to number 80, so should we start?

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do it.

**John:** So, my number 80 was Unfinished Scripts which was a Twitter feed where it was sort of screenshots of terrible screenplays. And there is also Unfinished Screenplays which is the same idea. I’m not sure which one came first. They’re both kind of funny. I don’t really follow them much anymore, but I see them every once and awhile.

**Craig:** Yeah, mine was EyeWire which was a little web-based game that actually helped neurologists map the brain. I think they were rat brains, but still they’re trying to come up with a good map of that stuff. And I did that for awhile. It was fun. Then I stopped. But I think the idea was that you don’t play that every day. So, I had my time with it.

**John:** My number 81 was StageWrite for the iPad which was actually developed by the associate choreographer on Big Fish. And it is a way of keeping track of everyone on stage and sort of where they’re moving from set to set to set, to scene to scene to scene. And it’s great software for that. So, I don’t need to use it, because I’m not choreographing anything, but I see people using it still.

**Craig:** And mine was Kiva, which is a microloan website where you can essentially loan money to indigent people across the world, mostly in third world countries. And I still do that to this day. I basically have an amount that I just roll. And as people pay me back then I just roll it off to somebody else. And it’s a great thing to do. And I urge everybody to check it out at Kiva, I believe it’s Kiva.org. It’s super easy to do. And it’s a good thing.

**John:** My number 80 was Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger & Kenneth Cukier. It was a book I read. I liked it a lot when I read it. I liked it a fair amount when I read it and there’s been a lot more discussion of Big Data in the time since I remember reading that book. And sort of how much you can zero in on the individual person if you combine enough data sets and how that can be great but also troubling.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Motors Forum, along with the username FlasherZ who is an electrician. And I check in there all the time to get little bits of news and blurbs and stuff. Very useful. Very useful forum.

**John:** Hey, Craig, do you like your car?

**Craig:** It’s not really car, John. It’s everything. [laughs] It’s everything to me. Everything.

**John:** From your helpful forum I needed to point to my helpful forum, this is number 83, this Lifehacker post on using multiple audio inputs and outputs in OSX. And this came up because we had Derek Haas as a guest on the show and needed to be able to connect two microphones to my laptop and it was really confusing to figure out how to do that And god bless the internet that there was a little thing on how to do that.

**Craig:** Someone has thought of everything. Mine was the Animal Specialty Group which is an animal hospital in Glendale that saved the life of my dog who is currently prancing about in the yard as I speak. They are wonderful people. I hope to never have to see them again, but if I do they will be there for me.

**John:** My 84 was tips for singing the National Anthem which if you take nothing else is the lowest note you possibly can sing it should be the third note of the National Anthem. [sings] “Oh, say”…that say should be the lowest note you can possibly sing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** That way you have the range to be able to go to the top, hopefully.

**Craig:** The word that you should be afraid of is “glare.” And “the rockets’ red glare.” Glare will be the highest. If you don’t start low enough you will never get to glare.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Mine was BioShock Infinite. What a great game. I really enjoyed it. That — it’s funny, it ties back to our little twist conversation. There’s a huge reveal in it and frankly it was very complicated and I didn’t quite understand it at first. I needed to play through the game again really to appreciate it, which actually to me says they didn’t do that great of a job on that. It was almost too rich. You know, whereas the first BioShock when the twist happens everything suddenly kaboom in your head.

And yet also I have to say that the depth that Ken Levine provided through the game is — it’s essentially the most creatively and philosophically ambitious video game I’ve ever played on a console. It was really well done.

**John:** Mine for 85 was Ulysses III. It’s a Macintosh text editor. I like it but it’s not my go-to text editor. I use By Word most days.

**Craig:** Mine was That Mitchell and Webb Look on BBC. Those guys are awesome. I still will occasionally amuse myself by just watching clips of those guys. They’re very, very funny.

**John:** My number 86 was the Internet K-Hole, which was a collection of photographs that this photographer woman has assembled on a website. And you cannot just not look at it. It’s just great. And it’s photos from sort of a punk rock lifestyle over 40 years maybe. It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** Pretty cool. Mine is Slacker Radio. I use it every day in my car, also known as the Everything.

**John:** My 87 was Stag’s Leap, a book of poems by Sharon Olds. I still think about it. It’s actually a great collection of poems mostly about the disintegration of her marriage and just really brilliantly done.

**Craig:** Mine was ITER which is I think a French consortium coming up with a way to provide us with unlimited pollution-free energy. I’m pretty sure they’re still working on it. I’d love to see that happen.

**John:** Yeah, has that happened? That’s great. That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I think they are still working on getting some bugs out.

**John:** My number 88 was FilmCraft Screenwriting by Tim Grierson. Tim Grierson did a series of books on screenwriting, on cinematography, and other things. And I’m actually in the book on screenwriting and it was a well put together book. It still sits on my coffee table. I think I’ve read the whole thing. But, I read my little part, so that counts.

**Craig:** That’s good. I had nothing that week.

**John:** [laughs] My number 89 was Scandal Revealed episode 221 from Matt Byrne.

**Craig:** Oh my god, you had so many.

**John:** There were so many. It was a weird episode. I don’t know why — basically all my old assistants are linked to different things.

**Craig:** And I had just a fact really that the LA Times reported that studios donated film set materials to Habitat for Humanity which is very cool. And also this was the first time that Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang did their American Heart Association thing where they offered to read your script to raise money for research into heart disease.

**John:** Great. Let’s stop there. Man, we got a lot of these.

**Craig:** What do you say —

**John:** We bang out ten a week we’ll get through them all.

**Craig:** This is like — this podcast had everything.

**John:** Lord.

**Craig:** I got upset. We covered like 100 topics. I don’t know if we should continue. [laughs]

**John:** I think we’re basically done. Although I have a One Cool Thing for this week.

**Craig:** Me too. What’s yours?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is, oh, you’re going to love this, Craig. You’re salivating.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** You’re going to love this so much.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** It is the WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand.

**Craig:** I mean, oh god.

**John:** So, it’s not for me, it’s for Stuart. Because Stuart who works downstairs, he works on a laptop and I see him slouching in his chair. I’m like, Stuart, that’s not good. He’s like, “I know it’s not good.” And so I said Stuart if I get you a stand for your laptop so you can stand up when you want to stand up, would you like that? He’s like, “Sure.”

And so I got it and I bought this one off Amazon. It was really good. He uses it right now.

**Craig:** He’s just shutting you up.

**John:** Well, he’s standing up while he’s shutting me up, so that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** I think you get more work out of Stuart if he’s in pain.

**John:** Ha! Crippled over in agony.

**Craig:** Yes. My, by the way, I’ve been playing Monument Valley a lot. It’s really, really good.

**John:** Isn’t that beautifully done?

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous.

**John:** Actually you can’t kind of play a lot because it’s really short.

**Craig:** Well, so I play a chapter and then I just put it down. So, I’ve spreading it out. But my One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS, as often is the case, called Sometimes You Die.

**John:** I’ve played Sometimes You Die. I thought it was great.

**Craig:** Really cool. It is very minimalist. The game play is — basically it’s a platform of sort, except sometimes you die. Sometimes you have to die. And when you die your little body, which is just a cursor, it’s just a carrot —

**John:** A square block.

**Craig:** A little square block. Your body is left behind and you can use your past dead bodies to get to where you need to go. But where the game is really kind of fascinating is in the sound of it and the look of it and the text on screen. It’s essentially saying what are you doing, why are you playing this?

And so in that regard it’s very, very cool. I’ve enjoyed it a lot.

**John:** It reminded me a bit of portal, and not in the sense of like the fancy mechanics, but just the sense of kind of it’s talking back to you and it’s sort of — there’s a quality of existential doom to it that was actually quite fun.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think I played to the end but I’m not even sure if I’ve gotten to the end.

**Craig:** You haven’t because I did a little reading. I played to the end, too, but every time you play thought it you get a little thing. And the idea is that at some point you will have collected a couple of little super powers that allow you to play through the game without dying.

**John:** Ah.

**Craig:** So, I don’t know if I noticed when you played all the way through, now you’re allowed to turn your phone and your little carrot will — gravity will work on your carrot.

**John:** Ah, okay. So, now —

**Craig:** And then there’s another one later when you play through again where you get a pause button. So, there’s all these things that happen and the idea is eventually you can complete the game without dying.

**John:** That is genius. You’ve basically made a new game for me by telling me these secrets.

**Craig:** Voila.

**John:** And that’s our show. So, you can find links to things we talked about in the show notes which are at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. It’s also there where you can find transcripts for previous episodes. Just by the way, Craig, I had a listener who wrote into me on Twitter today who was thanking me for the transcripts because he’s deaf. And because he’s deaf the only way he can experience the podcast is through the transcripts. So, that was just really great that he took the time to write in.

You can listen to all of the back episodes, both on the site, the most recent 20, or the older ones you can find on scriptnotes.net. The ones that are on scriptnotes.net you can also find in the app, both for iOS and for Android. You search your applicable app store for those.

We have occasional bonus content things, so those show up if you’re subscriber to all the back episodes. Subscribing also gives you all back to episode number one when we didn’t know what we were doing.

We have a few of the USB drives left. They are at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Worseldine.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** And if you have an outro that you’d like for us to play on the show, send it to us. Send us a link. Put it on SoundCloud and send us a link. We’d love to hear it.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** If you have a question for Craig, you can find him on Twitter. He’s @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Longer questions like the one we answered today you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are on iTunes just randomly and you want to leave us a comment or leave us a rating, go for it. Knock yourself out. It helps other people find the show. And that’s it.

Craig, next time I see you it will be the live show. I can’t wait.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Hey, hey John.

**John:** What’s up?

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Next time is going to be live.

**John:** It’s going to be amazing. You can see Craig Mazin do that voice live on stage.

**Craig:** [creepy voice] Yeah. This is Craig. Yeah.

**John:** And he promises to dress the part, too.

**Craig:** [laughs] Always.

**John:** You don’t want to miss that experience.

**Craig:** Nothing is sexier than a 43-year-old man in J. Crew.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** All right. See you there.

**John:** Great. Thanks Craig. Bye.

Links:

* [Voting for the Live Three Page Challenge is open](http://johnaugust.com/threepagelive) until May 14 at noon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* John’s blog post on [which apps screenwriters are using](http://johnaugust.com/2014/which-apps-are-screenwriters-using)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 141: [Uncomfortable Ambiguity, or Nobody Wants Me at their Orgy](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy)
* Matt Selman [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Selman)
* The Simpsons, Episode 492: The Book Job, on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Book_Job) and [Amazon Instant Video](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006B318N8/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* The Simpsons, Episode 266: The Trilogy of Error [on Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilogy_of_Error)
* John’s blog post on [How to Write a Photoplay](http://johnaugust.com/2014/how-to-write-a-photoplay) and [the book on archive.org](https://archive.org/details/howtowritephotop00hoag)
* Deadline on [Barry Levinson leaving the WGA](http://www.deadline.com/2014/05/barry-levinson-quits-wga-over-sloppy-credit-arbitration-on-screen-version-of-philip-roths-the-humbling/)
* [The Periodic Table of Storytelling](http://designthroughstorytelling.net/periodic/)
* Seattle’s [Experience Music Project Museum](http://www.empmuseum.org/), and [John’s photo of the Archetypes of Fantasy chart](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/archetypes.jpg)
* Joseph Campbell’s [The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Collected Works](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1577315936/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), and his and Bill Moyers’ video series, [The Power of Myth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00A4E8E1O/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Bulfinch’s Mythology](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1440426309/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Memos to Hollywood](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/movies/critics-weigh-in-on-patriarchy-and-the-vanished-film-print.html) from The New York Times
* Big Fish’s [upcoming shows](http://www.theatricalrights.com/big-fish)
* Vote now (for Big Fish!) for the [Broadway.com Audience Choice Awards](http://awards.broadway.com/buzz/2014/5/5/votebway-vote-now-for-the-winners-of-the-2014-broadwaycom-audience-choice-awards)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* [WorkEZ Executive Laptop Stand](http://www.uncagedergonomics.com/workez-executive/) and [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B9HGHPU/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Sometimes You Die](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sometimes-you-die/id822701037?mt=8) for iOS
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Sam Worseldine ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))