Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/uncomfortable-ambiguity-or-nobody-wants-me-at-their-orgy).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 141 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Not bad, not bad. Turned in a script last week; went really, really well, so that’s good. I get two weeks off now before I start my next thing.

**John:** And what are you going to do with your two weeks?

**Craig:** Well, let me tell you. Job number one for these two weeks is to kind of flush my system out. Like I don’t know about you but as I’m writing something I tend to eat worse and worse.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, right afterwards there’s a nice two-week period where I really try and flush my system out. Now, I don’t do any of these crazy — what do they call them, cleanses?

**John:** Yeah, apple juice, lemon peel, little cayenne pepper.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, here’s the story with those. They don’t clean anything. There is absolutely no good science behind that stuff whatsoever. Your liver is super good at cleaning your blood. You don’t need a cleanse to clean anything. You know me. Anytime I see the word toxin or energy, I get all itchy, but I’m just eating much less and I’m doing a lot of reading. So eating less, reading, and catching up on some video games.

**John:** That’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, Craig, Have you staring playing Hearthstone on the iPad? Do you know what that is?

**Craig:** I don’t know what that is. No.

**John:** So it’s a card game that’s sort of like the Magic: The Gathering, but it’s all the Blizzard universe kind of things and it’s totally addictive. And so I recommend you fall into a deep K-hole and play Hearthstone.

**Craig:** All right. Well, right now, I’m catching up on my console games so I’m playing — I’m just finishing up the Arkham Origins DLC Cold, Cold Heart. And I have already started playing the South Park Game which is awesome.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Love, I mean, the actual game play, eh. The game play actually stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But what’s great about it is in addition to all the normal South Park fun stuff, they’re very smartly making fun of some video games that I’m very well familiar with. There’s at one point you’re wandering in an alien ship and you keep finding these little audio logs and as you play them the person who’s recorded the audio logs keeps commenting on how he doesn’t even understand why he’s making audio logs.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And he’s found other people’s audio logs and he keeps listening to their audio logs thinking that he’ll learn something important and he never ever does and he just keeps…but yet he still listens to the audio logs. [laughs] It was a great tweak at BioShock.

**John:** What’s so fascinating about that trope of audio logs is that very rarely do you actually see a character over the course of the narrative recording an audio log and yet there are all these audio logs. So when exactly do they record these?

**Craig:** Right. Like, why are they recording them? I mean, the first audio log was, [laughs], he’s on the ship and he’s just saying, “I don’t know why I’m doing this. The aliens are coming there about to break the door and why am I wasting time recording this, I don’t know.” [laughs] It’s pretty great and then why do they leave them around? Yeah, no, audio logs are absurd. But they also did a really nice job of parodying, in a kind of a very straight way, nearly copying the music from Elder Scrolls.

**John:** That’s nice.

**Craig:** Yes. It’s good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. Those are smart guys, those South Park folks.

**Craig:** They are.

**John:** Today, on the podcast, we are going to talk about Game of Thrones. We’re going to talk about some Bryan Singer situation. And we’re going to talk about the numbers of women employed by the WGA —

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And minorities and older people. We’re going talk about this situation where the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries is now writing Vampire Diaries fan fiction which seems absurd but it’s actually because of work-for-hire law and it’s just really an odd time that we’re living in.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** We’re going to answer a question about craft. We’re going to go through our old One Cool Things. So we have a lot today.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Big show.

**Craig:** Big show, big show.

**John:** First though, follow up. So we have our live show coming up on May 15th. The cocktail party hosted by Aline Brosh McKenna is all sold out, but there are still some tickets left for the show itself.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** So if you’d like to come see —

**Craig:** What?

**John:** I think there are.

**Craig:** I can’t believe it.

**John:** Well, we’re recording on a Thursday. So by the time this podcast airs, we don’t know if there are still tickets but there might still be tickets. But the special news for people who have tickets is we have an extra guest who wasn’t even a part of the original package. Susannah Grant is going to be joining us for the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** And she’s amazing. So she’s the screenwriter of Erin Brockovich, Charlotte’s Web. She’s the director of Catch and Release. She’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So she will be up there on stage helping us figure how these three pages could be even better.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s great. I mean, I can’t believe that these tickets haven’t sold out. First of all, let me just reiterate, we are the Jon Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So that makes no sense. I’m glad that people bought the cocktail party things.

**John:** Yeah. The expensive ones.

**Craig:** Yeah, and we promise to talk to you guys and not each other at the cocktail party. [laughs] We promise. But, yeah, these other tickets, how much do they cost?

**John:** 20 bucks.

**Craig:** 20 bucks to see David Goyer. 20 bucks to see McFeely and Markus. 20 bucks to see Susannah Grant. I mean, forget us. I mean, how much is those people.

**John:** They’re pretty amazing.

**Craig:** It’s just 20 bucks, yeah.

**John:** It’s just 20 bucks and like you pay $20 for any one of those people, but no, you get them all together as package.

**Craig:** You get them all together as a package and the money goes to the Writers Guild Foundation which is a charitable non-profit organization that supports screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting all day long.

**John:** That’s what they do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, they help veterans. They help young people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, for the Three Page Challenge, how are we going to do it? So last week on the podcast I said there would be a special way that people will submit for it. That is up and running as of today. So here is how you submit to it. You go to the same URL you’ve always gone to, johnaugust.com/threepage. When you get there, you’ll see that there’s now a form. And with that form, you will click some boxes and enter your name and information. You’ll click a box that says Attach File and you will attach your script there. It could be Fountain or a PDF. And you will click Submit.

And when you click Submit, it will magically get whisked into the system and the database from which we will call our entrants for just this live Three Page Challenge, the one that we’re actually going to do on May 15th. If the system works well, it’ll become the real system for Three Page Challenges from now forward.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** But we’re just trying it out for this one-time deal.

**Craig:** And if your script is picked, pages are picked, do we let them know ahead of time?

**John:** We will let people know that they’re in the final contention for that. Essentially, if you are going to be submitting under the auspices of this live Three Page Challenge, we’re asking, like, are you going to be there?

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so we’re only going to be looking at the ones of people who say they’re going to be there. What’s special about this one event is all of our listeners will get to read those three pages as well. So not only the final ones are picked, the listeners are going to help choose which one is going to be discussed live.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** So for one week starting today, Tuesday through next Tuesday, so starting on Tuesday April 29th through Tuesday May 6th, for that one week you can submit your scripts.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** That next Wednesday, for one week, you can vote on which one of those entrants you really want to see up there on stage. So you can read them both on the site. There’ll be links at johnaugust.com so you can read those samples. And I don’t know if there’s going to be 10 or 20 or 50 but there’s going to be some there.

We’ll also, if we can, put them on Weekend Read, so if you’re on your iPhone, you can read through them on there as well.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Technology!

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** While I was talking about Weekend Read, there’s a new update for Weekend Read, so people should update their app if they have it. There’s also an update for Highland. So if you’re on your app store, click on those.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Cool.

Let’s get to our business at hand. So I love Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I’m just a huge fan of not just the show I watch but just the fact that it can exist because it’s so incredibly complicated to make and they do such an amazingly good job. And I watched this last Sunday’s episodes which was really two Sundays ago for people who are listening to the show and the minute I saw this scene I said, “Well, there’s going to be a conversation about this one specific scene.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and I [laughs]…so I was little taken aback by the fact that there was a conversation about it and we’re talking about the scene where —

**John:** We should say, I guess we should say there’s a mild spoiler here but it’s actually not.

**Craig:** No, you know what —

**John:** On the order of spoilers for Game of Thrones this is incredibly minor. This isn’t like a death of a major character.

**Craig:** And it’s two week later, so forget it, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s like keep up or don’t. So Joffrey is dead of course and he’s lying in state so to speak in the Sept…Septum? Septom? Sept?

**John:** I think they call it a Sept.

**Craig:** Yeah, the septum is the thing in your nose.

**John:** And I think is it called Sept because there are seven gods? Is that why it’s called a Sept?

**Craig:** Maybe. Maybe so. I don’t know, but that’s where they are.

So he’s lying there and Cersei, his mom, is there and Jaime Lannister comes in. That’s Cersei’s brother and, of course, Cersei and Jaime incestuous lovers and Joffrey their incestuous son. Everybody else is cleared out of the room and basically Jaime comes on to Cersei and she says no and then he rapes her right there next to the body of their dead incest kid. And I thought, “All right!” you know, like, “Here we go again, Game of Thrones getting sick,” but people really got upset.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And they got upset for a bunch of reasons. And I wanted to talk a little bit about it because it kind of ties into I think this interesting phenomenon. It’s a very human thing of what I call narrative directionality.

So some people got upset because they didn’t like the idea that Jaime Lannister raped his sister. Just forget the fact that he was a good guy now as opposed to before. They didn’t like that he raped his sister and I just thought, well, but you were okay with him up to this point when he pushed a kid out a window callously and didn’t even seem to care —

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** When he was going to kill Ned Stark for no good reason. I mean, this is a bad guy.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, oh, and the fact that he had sex with his sister and had an incest baby and then lied about it and knew that his sister was aborting the babies that she’s having with her actual husband. I mean, this is a terrible person by any definition of behavior.

But people really got upset about the rape part. And, you know, my feeling was that what was underlying this was that they were, and in the book it’s not rape. It’s sort of — it turns into like a weird consensual kinky sex bit.

And so they were saying, “Well, in the book it’s not rape but in the show they chose to make it rape so it’s that choice and that’s super bad.” But, you know, again, it’s like, well, forget that there was a choice between the book and the show. The book had Daenerys Targaryen raped repeatedly by her husband that she was forced to marry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then she started to like it and then she fell in love with him. Nobody had a problem with that either apparently.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this, they have a problem with it. And I think their problem is this: Jaime Lannister’s character was starting to go through this process where he was seeing things differently and behaving differently in a way that people thought he’s getting better and this fits into a very clean narrative direction. A bad person starts to change their evil ways. And what that moment did was reverse that directionality and say, no, actually, he’s still the same guy that did all that stuff. And people got really angry I think because the narrative turned left on them like that. And for me, I actually kind of think that’s great.

**John:** Yeah, there’s a lot to sort of unpack here. First off, you described it as being rape. And so when I first saw the scene, I’m like, oh, one of the first points of controversy will be was it rape or was it like bad consensual sex. And I think it’s better just to call it rape and just like discuss it as a rape and not just that they’re two really screwed up people and therefore that’s sort of the nature of their relationship.

**Craig:** Oh, no, it was definitely rape.

**John:** Yeah, and it was rape because of specific choices of what she was saying and her trying to push him away and —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s call it rape and like not even sort of open that.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** But I would say the first day after the episode aired, that was a lot of the discussion like was it rape, was it not rape. Let’s just call it rape.

About directionality, I want to stick up a little bit for the sense of people’s ownership of the Jaime Lannister character and the arc they believed him to be on. And that’s understandable why you are starting to identify him as being a heroic character rather than a villainous character. And that’s natural. I think it’s okay to feel a little betrayed by him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And by proxy, this shows creators, because they had given you good reason to believe that he had made a change for the better. He was a crippled man who had learned the errors of his ways, who wanted to do better by his sister/lover and everyone else around him seemed to be doing the right kinds of things. So for him to change course in that moment felt wrong.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it’s not wrong though. I guess —

**John:** No, I’m saying, it felt wrong —

**Craig:** It felt wrong.

**John:** I can understand why it felt wrong to the viewer.

**Craig:** I am with you on the point that I think we’re supposed to feel betrayed and disappointed by him. What I was confused by was the extension of that to Dan and Dave because I thought, frankly, what this show does better than most every other show I’ve seen is repeatedly confound and thwart our desire to see a natural narrative path occur from wherever a character is in a given point in the show. I mean, starting with the beheading of Ned Stark and going onward from there, I mean, there’s a great moment in that episode I believe where The Hound says to Arya, you know, essentially I see the world for what is, how many Starks need to be beheaded before you start.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And it kind of, like to me, that was the theme of the show like, hey, this is the way — we don’t — this isn’t the kind of show where somebody who casually murders children and then quips about it as they’re falling to their, what should have been their death, that person doesn’t have some mid-life, good golly, I’m going to be a sweetheart kind of changeup. No, he’s a bad person.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And bad people have moments, but, you know.

**John:** Yeah, I agree with you that the moments between Arya and The Hound and sort of their — to the beats of their storyline in that episode were basically you were a fool for thinking that I changed. I didn’t change. I’m going to steal this guy’s money and keep moving on, because that’s who I am.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** And, you know, he wasn’t wearing like the scorpion jacket but it was essentially that sort of scorpion quality of like, you know, this is what I am.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s that trope of like, I am genuinely irredeemable.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** I think what’s different about Jaime Lannister is like you have a handsome guy who looks like he should be a knight hero and he’s sort of dressed like a knight hero. So it feels like a greater betrayal that he is doing it. Whereas The Hound, well, he’s ugly, so of course he’s going to ultimately be evil and do that thing.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I just think that if the people that are complaining about what happened there go and watch the first episode and look at the way that Jaime Lannister delivers his line, “The things I do for love,” after he pushes that kid out the window.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I think you can’t reconcile — that’s an adult. That is a grown man who is clearly got a sociopathic streak a mile wide. The fact that he’s been humbled and the fact that he can have a friend and that he maybe sees things differently vis-à-vis himself and his family, that’s doesn’t change the fact that he’s just an — he’s an awful person.

**John:** Yes. So what we’re really talking here I think is ambiguity, is that it’s frustrating sometimes as a viewer just to see this thing and say like, “No, but I want this person to be good or bad. I want this person to easily be placed in one box and I want this situation to be clear to me.”

And what Game of Thrones is saying is like, no, we are never going to make it clear and easy for you to say, this is a good person you should be rooting for. This is a bad person you should be rooting against. We’re always going to make it difficult for you.

**Craig:** I agree. And I think in this sense what they’re doing with things like this is very important. Because what happens in the way we experience narrative is we accept that there are certain rules in place to give narrative a structure. And then, every now and then somebody comes along and breaks it on purpose. Sometimes people break it because they’re just bad and they don’t know what they’re doing and everybody rejects it.

But sometimes people break it and they’re yelled at and it’s not understood or appreciated. But then, now the line about how flexible a character can be presented in narrative changes. Because it starts to make it freer for everybody else to say, “You know what? I actually think this person can do this and I think it becomes narratively interesting because there’s a context for it. Now, we’ve seen it before.”

So the first time, what is it, Rites of Spring was played people rioted because it was atonal. [laughs] But now that just seems bizarre to us. But I think that these things are important. When they are done with expertise and they’re done — and listen, this is not to say, just so that everyone is really clear, in no way am I defending what this character did. I mean, that was terrible, you know, but again he’s a murderer and a sociopath. So it didn’t shock me maybe the way it shocked other people but I’m not — I was a little surprised at how many people, because it was rape suddenly got super upset but didn’t get upset about the rape of Daenerys and didn’t get upset about the fact that Jaime Lannister tried to kill a kid.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But the rape here was the thing that really got them going.

**John:** If I’m being honest, my not loving the scene was largely because I didn’t necessarily believe that it was happening right beside the body of Joffrey. And that to me just felt a little soap opera-ish in ways that the show usually isn’t. And so, it wasn’t that this rape happened, that it happened in that moment right there. I just didn’t fully believe it. And that’s just my own personal response to how that situation was created. But I think that’s actually not the important thing to discuss. I think what we’ve been talking about of the nature of what he did is really the meat of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. I do think that that location was directly taken from the book, so they —

**John:** Yeah. That’s true.

**Craig:** It’s interesting to see how they drift from and stick to the book. But in any case, so I guess I’m sticking up for the showrunners on that one.

**John:** Sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s switch to our next uncomfortable and ambiguous situation, which is that on April 16th a guy named Michael Egan filed a lawsuit against Director Bryan Singer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Describing abuse he said began when he was 15 years old. So we’re recording on this on a Thursday. I’m sure there’s been a thousand developments since we recorded this. So it probably doesn’t behoove us to get into too many details about the nature of this one allegation. But more to talk about sort of like what it is like to have this lawsuit happening now when Bryan Singer’s movie X-Men: Days of Future Past is supposed to be coming out. The nature of power in Hollywood gets questioned. The nature of relationships in Hollywood gets questioned. And sort of the big bag of hurt that this kind of accusation unleashes.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is not a good thing. I mean, we’re — part of the problem, this is a little different than some of the allegations that you’ll see sometimes because people do claim all sorts of stuff. I mean, you and I talked about how every movie gets accused of stealing some, you know, another idea or something like that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this is — even when you’re talking about situations of assault and sexual assault which is always a very messy and tricky thing, sometimes these things don’t pan out. In this case, it’s a little disturbing to me that part of the deal here is that Singer apparently was associated somehow with this guy Marc Rector-Collins who has already, I think, been to prison for this sort of thing before or had been indicted or convicted or something. So there are some shady players involved here and this one I think is not going go away anytime soon.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t a crystal ball to tell you what’s going to happen. I can only look back at the past. And so, I can sort of share my own personal experience with the edges of this and sort of what’s been discussed because this one allegation came out.

So I don’t think I’ve ever met Bryan Singer in person. But I did encounter him for the very first time when I was an assistant. I was answering phones for producers and he called to invite my boss to a party and I don’t remember whether my boss was going to go or not. But he also, just on the phone, Bryan Singer invited me and I think just correctly surmising that I was a 20-something year old gay guy who might want to come to party at his house.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** I didn’t go and that’s great and fine. But, in the years past and the decades since then, I would be at parties and Bryan Singer would show up with this posse of really good-looking guys who were about 20 and I —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This allegation of this guy was like he’s 15 and like I don’t remember seeing anybody that young, but it was sort of a thing and like everyone knew that like Bryan Singer would show up at a party with this group of guys. They’d swarm for like 30 minutes and then they go onto the next party. And that was just the thing that happened.

So a lot of the real meat of the story is more about like this posse of guys and sort of with that lifestyle was versus the nature of what actually happened in this one case. And I want to make sure that whatever the criminal or civil — whatever happens with this one thing is judged based on that one thing and that it doesn’t become this sort of indictment of this swarm of 20 year olds around him.

**Craig:** Well, sure. Yeah, I mean, it’s not illegal to have sex with 20 year olds. It’s illegal to have sex with, whatever, 17 year olds, I don’t know. [laughs] I should probably, I should look into that.

**John:** Yeah, well, there’s a complete age consent issue and there’s also the ability to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those are two incredibly important things that anytime you’re talking about sexual abuse, rape, or anything like that you have to keep in mind were the people participating in the situation able to give consent.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Based on age or based on everything else.

**Craig:** And in this case, there are allegations that some of the people were not of age to give consent at all and other people were under the influence of drugs and were coerced either by drugs that they weren’t even — they didn’t even realized they were ingesting — or by threats of violence in some cases I believe. This is not the first time that Bryan Singer’s name has been mentioned in connection with something like this.

He got in to a bit of hot water over a situation when he was making the movie Apt Pupil as I recall. There were some underage kids in a locker room scene and, [sighs], you know, look, I’m not a big believer in where there’s smoke there’s fire, so we can’t, we don’t know. All I know is this: there’s enough stuff around this one to make me nervous that — if I were Bryan Singer I would be very nervous right now.

And here is the other issue is that it’s spreading now to these other people and, you know, people can take a swing at somebody. When you start taking swings at five people, six people, seven people, my guess is you’ve got something behind those punches because otherwise you’re just going to, you know, what lawyer is necessarily going to start going that nuts, you know?

**John:** Well, yes and no. I do, and again, this is probably pretty early days of this so we don’t know sort of how many people they’re going to start pointing fingers at. The issue is, to me, basically you ask why now and sort of why did this person — why is this person coming out and saying, making these accusations about things that happened many years ago? Is it because Bryan Singer is suddenly a much bigger name because he has a big movie coming out and that it’s more lucrative to make these accusations now when there’s a much better reason to make them all go away? That’s going to be the natural question that sort of comes up out of sort of why this thing happens right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m really confused by that too.

**John:** I don’t —

**Craig:** Because, I mean, Bryan Singer has had big movies out between the time of the allegation, you know, when he said these incidences occurred and now. I don’t know why now, and frankly waited past the statute of limitations. The whole thing is odd —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But disconcerting. I will say this: I have never encountered any kind of weird sexual situation in Hollywood because I’m a married guy, right. I mean, I’m — so there’s just, there was never any — and I’m me. [laughs] Nobody wants me at their orgy, okay.

But I do know that this sort of thing does happen. This sort of thing happens between men and women. It happens between men and men. It happens between women and women. And there are a lot of bad people in our business.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who have appetites in which they indulge and they feel entitled. And there are waves of young, impressionable, naive, desperate people who are here in this town looking for mommies and daddies and looking for fame and fortune.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And this tale is as old as Hollywood. I can’t speak to whether or not any of the people that have been accused are guilty or innocent. But I can say there are guilty people out there and I would love to see things get cleaned up because sexual abuse in Hollywood is pervasive I believe and it is just awful. It is awful that it exist and frankly it’s awful that we all kind of walk around knowing it exists but never being able to do anything about it.

**John:** Okay. Well, let’s talk though about like how would you actually implement these changes? Is it — do you basically start figuring out who the bad people are and stop hiring them?

**Craig:** Well —

**John:** Because, I mean, you and I off mic could make a list of like these are terrible people, and maybe do you stop hiring them because you are worried about the kind of PR disaster that this clearly has the potential to be. Well, even when we talked about like Orson Scott Card many, many episodes ago, we talked about that weird thing like you never want somebody involved as a creator to become like this negative anchor on your movie and that’s what we’re talking about here.

**Craig:** Well, I think that it’s — the tricky part is you don’t want to black list people and you don’t want to go on witch hunts, because suddenly, you know, let’s say this all turns into something very, very real and Bryan Singer ends up in prison. Now you’ve got, you know, what are you going to have a witch hunt of every gay director in his 30s? I mean, you got to be careful about this. But on the other hand, I actually think the only thing that can stop this is for these people to be exposed and stand trial and if they’re guilty go to prison because they’re doing criminal things.

Listen, you could be a sleaze. If you want to be a legal sleaze all day long, I don’t have to like it but, you know, it’s not —

**John:** But, Craig, a lot of, I mean, with this bad behavior we’re talking about though, maybe we should distinguish these kinds of bad behavior. There’s actually, genuinely criminal things where you’re doing things with underage people or people who cannot give consent because of drugs or coercion or whatever else.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But what about sort of the 18-year-old actress from Iowa who gets sent out for an audition with a skeezy producer/director or whatever and feels kind of coerced into —

**Craig:** Well…

**John:** Coerced is the wrong word.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** But we got to make sure that, I mean, there’s — I mean, again, there’s uncomfortable ambiguity here about like what is just like recognizing a bad situation and how do you deal with sort of skeevy producers and directors even if they’re not actually breaking the law, do you still hire them?

**Craig:** Well, it’s —

**John:** Interesting, even if they’re not found guilty , there’s till that PR disaster. That’s really what I’m talking about. It’s like —

**Craig:** No, I hear you. I mean, look, if you think that somebody is a ticking time bomb for activity that will impact your business negatively regardless of its legality, yeah, I would say, you probably should think twice before hiring them. Even if you’re just amoral. From a business point of view you should think twice about hiring them for sure. In terms of where the line gets drawn on the behavior, I think that our criminal justice system is fairly conservative in this regard. There’s a, you know, innocent before proven guilty. There’s got to be evidence. You get a lawyer. There is a trial. So if it’s not illegal, then it’s not illegal, then you just have to make a decision about whether it’s distasteful and embarrassing and detracting to your business. And you also have to be careful that you’re right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That you’re not simply acting on rumors. This business, in particular when it comes to gay men, less of gay women but gay men, this business since the beginning has just had this enormous percentage of closeted gay man who had to live kind of completely in secret in this way. And there is a culture of secrecy about it. And cultures of secrecy which are born out of necessity serve as a shield for then bad people who do bad things. Now, granted straight people have done probably I would say a larger proportion of the bad things. [laughs]

**John:** I would say a greatly larger proportion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I think the stereotype of the skeevy producer or director and the, you know, the girl just off the bus from Iowa, it exists for a reason because we see it happening all the time.

**Craig:** Right. That’s every day.

**John:** And maybe because it’s so commonly out there, we can sort of recognize the warning signs of it a little bit more easily. I am, I think I am generally in a macro sense most worried about the witch hunt aspect of it because even if it’s not a publicly-declared witch hunt , it’s that slow — it’s that reticence to hire anybody. You wonder like could there by some problem here. And the person who comes to mind is Lana Wachowski, because back when Lana Wachowski was Larry Wachowski —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You know, that was a big transition. And there’s a lot of reasons why you could worry that that was going to be a time bomb situation. It ended up not being a time bomb situation and things kind of turned out just fine. But I’m worried that you could create a culture in which you feel very nervous about hiring The Wachowskis because of this Bryan Singer situation or some other potential law suit out there.

**Craig:** You know, my point of view is that Hollywood is a fairly progressive place. One of the more progressive industries in the world. And when it comes to somebody, something like, someone who’s transgender, now at least in 2014, so who is transgender and who’s transitioning between genders, I don’t think that’s embarrassing at all for anybody.

I think, frankly, that people sort of line up to be first in line to say I support this person because we don’t look at it here, at least In Hollywood, we don’t look at that as anything wrong at all. I think where most reasonable people agree is that sexual coercion, sexual assault, rape and statutory rape, that these things are criminal and that they are not connected to gender issues.

I mean, listen, poor Lee Tamahori, remember his story

**John:** I don’t remember it well, but I recognize the name.

**Craig:** Lee Tamahori is a director and he was arrested for basically soliciting, I think, in drag on Santa Monica. And, you know, this was I think like 2000 — I want to say it was like 2005. And it was really embarrassing for him. And it clearly impacted his career in a way that Eddie Murphy and Hugh Grant’s careers were not impacted, I should point out.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I think were that to happen now, I think it would be a different situation. I agree with you. Look, the last thing we want is a witch hunt. But also the last thing we want is to allow… — Listen, there was a culture going on. We know this because the guys that ran that Digital Entertainment Network, this guy Mark Collins, director, and a couple of these other guys, they fled the country and then got extradited and there were criminal charges. And one of them, I’m sure of it, I seem to recall was convicted.

There were bad things going on. And there are bad things going on. And so we have to balance witch hunter-y against, but I… — Listen, man, I have a daughter, you know? If I heard that somebody I knew professionally had sexually assaulted a woman, so we’re talking now heterosexual sexual assault, I mean, they’re out of my life, for sure.

Now, I also know as you do the odds of us not knowing somebody like that without knowing is zero, right? I mean, we have worked with somebody that we don’t know has done this. Has to be, right?

**John:** We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it.

**Craig:** That’s right. We have worked with a Jaime Lannister without knowing it. And I hope that all of the Jaime Lannisters get a light shone on them, because this is the worst, you know. It’s a terrible crime. And if Bryan Singer is not a Jaime Lannister, I hope he is exonerated. And if he is, I hope he goes to prison. I mean, you know, other people will make the X-Men movies. We’ll survive.

**John:** Yeah.

All right, next topic. Also on April 14th, or I guess two days before the Bryan Singer, the WGA released a report. I think it’s every two years they do this report. How often do they do the report?

**Craig:** I think they do it every year.

**John:** All right. This report was on sort of a representation of women and minorities and older people among writers in Hollywood. We’re going to put a link up to the executive summary, but some of the statistics were about female writers accounted for 15% of feature film work in 2012, the latest figure tracked in the survey, down from 17% in 2009. So, it dropped two points since 2009.

Minority writers remain stuck at 5% of film jobs, unchanged from 2009. But the survey shows minority writer earnings declined over the same period, even as paydays for white male writers increased. So, it was not a bundle of good news.

There was actually some good news in the TV side where women’s numbers had increased somewhat.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, looking through this, so if we’re looking for good news and there is not much here to celebrate. So, sort of good news, I guess, is that things didn’t really get that much worse. I mean, statistically speaking the percentage for instance of women working in film went like this from 2008 to 2012: 16, 17, 17, 16, 15. That 15 may just be an outlier. It may be up to 17 again next year.

And the numbers were very steady across the board for television: 28, 28, 27, 28, 27. And total overall employment is actually like one tick higher than it was in 2008. And it’s basically 24% to 25%. So, did it get much worse, no. I guess can we say that it’s good news that the bad situation stayed roughly the same bad? No, that’s not so great.

The one other bit of sort of good news is that there’s not much of a significant gender earnings gap in television. There is a slight gap, which obviously we don’t want to see again. Well, you know, it’s significant. In 2012 median television earnings $112,000 and for white males it was $121,000. That’s a difference of $9,000. That is significant, but it’s not — you don’t look at that and your heart doesn’t sink to the floor.

And what’s also interesting is that as male earnings went up, white male earnings went up, the female earnings went up as well. So, the lines kind of followed each other.

**John:** Yeah. It’s one of those things where if you actually look at it on the chart you’re like, oh, that’s not so bad at all. But then when you actually look at it like the actual numbers, it’s like, oh, women are still getting significantly less.

**Craig:** No, there is a clear problem there.

**John:** Really, the gap remained the same, it’s just that the numbers overall were the same.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess my theme of the good news is a bad situation stayed roughly as bad as it’s been. Yeah, I mean, for film the gap has narrowed somewhat significantly since 2008. The gap is much wider in film than it is in television which doesn’t surprise me because the income disparity in general in film is much wider than it is in television in terms of writing.

**John:** My takeaway from looking at this overall report, particularly in features, I felt like one of the realities is like there were fewer feature jobs. Overall the whole pot of future jobs, there were fewer of them. And that women and minorities probably seemed to take the biggest hit of those fewer jobs.

And so they took a disproportionately large hit I guess I should say. And also when there is more competition for fewer jobs, it becomes harder to push quotes up. And so if you are one of them women who got the job, or minority who got that writing job, it becomes harder to push your quote up higher because there’s a thousand other people who could do that same thing.

Another thing I thought was interesting was this statistic that since 2008 writers aged 41 to 50 have replaced younger writers age 31 to 40 as the age group who enjoyed the largest share of film employment. So, it went from younger writers claimed 37% of all employment to just 33% of all employment. That got flipped in 2010. So, writers age 41 to 50 were 39% of film employment. Writers age 31 to 40 dropped five percentage points to 32%.

So, it’s basically good news for John August and Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, it’s good news for John August and Craig Mazin, two white men working in film in their forties. I will say that the bad news for the studios here, if they’re concerned at all, and this is a point that I’ve made to them when we’ve gone out with the guild to talk about the professional status of screenwriters is that they’re not doing a very good job of training the next generation of screenwriters.

First of all, there’s this myth that twenty-somethings, everybody wants twenty-somethings. Nobody apparently wants twenty-somethings. You want to talk about a group that’s discriminated against? Twenty-somethings.

So, traditionally — and frankly if you look at these numbers, I really have to question the guild’s commitment to this notion that age 40+ is now a protected class, when frankly 40 to 60, that’s the largest earning class in the guild. And that the class that is hammered and needs promotion is the under-30 group. They are —

**John:** Well, Craig, let’s talk about how many people could really fit in that cohort though of the under-30. Because let’s really realistically 25 is about as young as a writer you’re going to get, so there’s really only five years of that.

**Craig:** Well, if you double the percentages —

**John:** It’s still really low.

**Craig:** It’s still much lower than 51 to 60. And I think what we’re going to see is this trend that you pointed out here of the flip between the 30s and the 40s, that’s like guys like you and me going from our 30s to our 40s, which is exactly what happened in 2011.

Because I don’t think the studios are doing as good of a job as they used to bringing people up, bringing them through, and bringing them along. I think, frankly, you’re looking at a bunch of people that are just dropping out in their 20s and 30s because there is not a living to be made as a feature screenwriter.

**John:** Well, I would also argue that a lot of those people who would be the 25-year-old feature writer are now 25-year-old TV writers, because that’s where the jobs are. And so perhaps the feature jobs —

**Craig:** Not according to their chair. It suggests similarly terrible numbers.

**John:** Let’s see. I’m looking at my television one.

**Craig:** Well, for the 30s they’re solid, but still your 40 to 50, that’s the highest numbers.

**John:** That’s the bulk. Right.

**Craig:** And the under 31s is, again, dismal. I mean, that’s a pretty remarkable thing. I have to say like of all the — and let’s add onto that number, because that’s the one that really jumped out at me. That a lot of the efforts that have been made to bring woman and minorities into professional writing positions have been made in the last five to 10 years. Which means a lot of the efforts are going to be for newer writers who are in their 20s, so you’ve got this triple problem where suddenly you’re in your 20s and you’re a woman and you’re a minority, or you’re a minority, and you’re in this like jammed up class that’s just getting hammered out there.

Why? I guess — let’s take a step back, John. What do you think is going on here? Do you think that there is an explanation other than just flat out sexism, racism, ageism?

**John:** Oh, I think you can’t ever have just one explanation behind things, but I think there are fewer candidates than they want for some of those things.

So, let’s take, oh, I’ll talk about my experience dealing with a producer of a big TV show. And we were talking about hiring directors, but hiring writers is really the same situation. And she said that they actively really tried to hire female directors for the show and the first season they were able to get two on. And they brought one back the second time because she was great.

And that one female director was so good they could never get her back again. And they tried other people — they had a hard time finding candidates that they thought were actually good enough to do this.

That’s on the buyer side. But, you can also — there’s also the challenge of you have to want to become a screenwriter, or a television writer. And in some ways there is a self-perpetuating cycle. If you’re a young woman who doesn’t believe that she can make it as a TV writer, or as a feature writer, you may never try to make it as a feature writer or a TV writer. And that can take the numbers down, too.

We saw it to some degree even in the Three Page Challenges, looking at sort of what percentage of people who submitted to Three Page Challenge were men or women. And it was surprisingly there was a huge disparity of men to women writing in for that.

**Craig:** Right. And I think you see that also in the Nicholl Fellowship that I think they get roughly about 30% submissions from women, which is obviously out of whack.

I mean, look, it may be that that number is depressed because women are negatively influenced by the fact that they are a minority in success, or it may be a depressed number because there just may be less interest. We don’t know.

Look, if you’re a woman and you’re interested in screenwriting, that’s not a very satisfying answer, but of course you might be one of the 30%.

**John:** Yes. Well, because the minute I say what I just said, there’s a natural response to it, it’s like, but no, I’m one of those women who wants to be this thing and you saying that I don’t want this thing is negative. I’m like, I’m actually saying exactly the opposite.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I’m saying that in some ways in my conversations with people who are trying to make hiring decisions, they are often saying that we are really looking for women or minorities for these things and we’re having a hard time finding them. And so be that there need to better programs to get people trained to do those things, better mentorship of writers to writers, specifically women writers to women writers to try to make sure all those connections are actually happening, I’m saying that, yes, there is a problem. I’m just saying that the problem isn’t necessarily that these people aren’t willing to hire somebody; they just may not be able to find a person they feel is qualified to hire.

**Craig:** I agree. There is no real clear path to figure this out.

**John:** I’m going to back up if I can to page ten of that report, because if you actually —

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m looking at that now. The employment rate by age group. Yeah.

**John:** So, it’s really interesting. So, yeah.

**Craig:** I’m puzzled, because so here it’s saying, all right, employment rate by age group is the highest in the twenty-somethings, where in 2012 it’s arguing that 80% of the twenty-somethings got employment versus a lower percentage. But, how do they figure that out exactly? How do they — ?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Employment rate is defined as a percentage of current guild members who are actually employed. Okay, well that’s a very misleading thing. Because I would imagine that the current guild membership is probably skewed more heavily in the older ages, which means that the percentage of people employed would be lower because there are fewer guild members in the 20s. This is a bad graph.

**John:** Okay, I can see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** You know what I mean?

**John:** It’s because the guild has so many —

**Craig:** Current members between 30 and 60, right. So, if there are very few current guild members in their 20s, so yeah, if there’s like, you know, 40 of them that get work —

**John:** So, if you are a guild member in your 20s you’re likely a working guild member in your 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You’re actually actively working. I guess that’s true.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a bad graph. I think the graph that matters is the share. Because if you look at share of film employment, there’s no reason frankly… — Like I grant you, forget 20 to 25, but if you look at 25 to 30, there’s no reason that 25 to 30 year olds should be employed at such a lower rate than 30 to 35 year olds even, you know?

That’s a little odd to me.

**John:** I’m trying to read through to understand what share film employment actually means. Does it mean out of 100 jobs how many were occupied by people of a certain age? Or total amount of dollars earned in film? And it’s really unclear from this.

**Craig:** I would imagine it has to do with how many jobs, like how many workers worked. You know, like how many jobs out of the available jobs went to twenty-somethings. How many jobs out of the available jobs, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m guessing.

**John:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** That’s the problem with these statistics. They get a little crazy.

**John:** Yeah. But what’s so fascinating about those two charts is if you look at them you can draw completely opposite conclusions about where the real problem is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you were saying the real problem is that we’re not doing enough to help the younger people. The other chart makes it seem like the younger people are doing just great. It’s the older people who are —

**Craig:** Yeah, that other chart sucks. [laughs] I will tell you there is a chart that, I mean, you want to look at the only chart that matters? How about money? Let’s just look at money, because that’s the only thing that matters in terms of like what’s actually happening for people. Average earnings by age group.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Under 31s are way — I mean, you want to talk about a disparity. Like we’re here talking like, man, there is a 10% gap between men and women. Absolutely. There is a 100% gap between twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings in television. And there is similarly a very large gap as well in film. The 40-somethings like you and me, their median earnings in film in 2012 were about $90,000 and for twenty-somethings they were more like $50,000.

**John:** 50.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely shocking. And I will point out to you, and this is why sometimes the guild makes me nuts. They will never mention this because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Their narrative is… — And do you know why it doesn’t fit their narrative? Because there are so few twenty-somethings and because the grouchiest people, forgive me for being stereotypical, [laughs], but the old people are grouchier.

Like me and you, right? We’re part of the old people now. And they’re grouchy.

**John:** I do find it fascinating — we’re looking at figure 13 in the chart if you’re following with us. And so there’s, I don’t know if you call it an S-curve or what you want to call it, but essentially earnings peak in that 41 to 50-year-old, and they go down 61 to 70 they’re at the lowest point back down to where the twenty-somethings are.

But then it actually rises again. And if you’re 71 to 80, because I think basically if you’re 71 years old and you’re still getting hired, you’re getting a big paycheck.

**Craig:** You’re the best. Like basically you —

**John:** You’re Alvin Sargent.

**Craig:** You are exactly right. Yeah. And frankly there are so few screenwriters in that cohort that Alvin Sargent has a huge impact on this graph. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. One Alvin Sargent. He’s the entire dot there.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, but this is to me, when you look at these graphs the thought that the Writers Guild actually considers white men in their 40s to be a protected class somehow is insane. And frankly speaks to who runs the guild, which would be men in their 40s and 50s.

I look at this report and I mean I recognize women and minorities, we got a long way to go there. A long way to go. But I’m also looking at twenty-somethings because I feel like the bottom is just not there anymore.

**John:** Well, also the women and minorities who we need to get started in the film industry are largely those people in the 20s.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, you help that whole cohort up, you’re going to help people.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Craig, how often should we do this kind of report? How often should the guild do it?

**Craig:** Well, you know, my feeling because this report is expensive and it uses our dues, my feeling is I think if we did it once every four years or once every five years we would be fine. And by that I mean even collect the data, because it doesn’t change. The data simply doesn’t change in any significant way. Look at figure 8. This is median earnings for employed women, minority, and white male writers. And it’s just the same crap. From 2002 to 2012 it’s the same.

And my issue with the guild is that they shell out cash to do these reports to make themselves feel better. Frankly, they could do it once every ten years. Hell, at this point you could probably do it once every 20 years, because all they do is they put this out there and go, “Isn’t this terrible?”

But, hey, how about, I don’t know, like doing something about it. Like creating a program. Why doesn’t the guild take the money they’ve thrown to these reports and just start doing specific training or sponsoring positions or, I don’t know, something. Try something else other than just putting the same damn graph out every year going, “Oh, dear, no.”

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to take the counterpoint that I think you need to do it more often than that because it just becomes too easy to forget about all together. So, the good thing about this report coming out is it creates a moment of conversation about the problem itself.

And so I totally hear you in terms of the spending a tremendous amount of money on it, so perhaps a better way to do smaller, much cheaper reports that don’t try to be as comprehensive or cost so much, but that remind us of the actual nature of the problem.

**Craig:** Well, I’m with you on that. Look, if this report were followed by action, and then that action was subject to a follow up report to test for efficacy, I would be all for it. And I feel like sometimes the guild hates to try things because they think that they’ll fail. I don’t mind failure. That’s part of the scientific process. And this is a scientific problem. Sociology is a science.

So, try something. See if it works. If it does, keep doing it. Do it more. If it doesn’t, try a new thing. But you have to try something. You can’t simply just collect data for the rest of your life and bemoan the fate of everything. I mean, geez, if I were a black kid, I’m 22 years old, I want to be a screenwriter and I’m looking at these reports going back all these years I’d think, well, so I can pretty much assume the next 10 years will be the same. Why wouldn’t they be?

**John:** Yeah. There’s no reason.

**Craig:** Yeah. This trend is pretty steady. It’s bad.

**John:** I think you’re probably right.

All right, our next topic. This is based on a Wall Street Journal article that we’ll have a link to in the show notes. But it’s about The Vampire Diaries and the woman who wrote The Vampire Diaries. So, this is a little snippet from it:

Lisa Jane Smith started writing her first book, “The Night of the Solstice,” when she was in high school, and was around 20 when MacMillan published the novel in 1987. The book, a middle-grade fantasy novel, was a commercial failure that sold around 5,000 copies. But it captured the attention of an editor at Alloy, who asked Ms. Smith if she’d be interested in writing a new young-adult series, concocted as “Interview with the Vampire” for teens.

So, basically she wrote this book about a high school girl who is torn between vampire brothers. She wrote it as a trilogy in nine months for a small advance of a few thousand dollars. What she apparently didn’t realize is that she was writing it as a work-for-hire and that became a huge issue because down the road as The Vampire Diaries, actually many years later as The Vampire Diaries became a TV series, they decided to have someone else start writing the books for The Vampire Diaries and shut her out.

The strange twist that happened recently is, so Alloy made some sort of deal with Kindle for Kindle World, which is their fan fiction thing, so that writers who wish to write fan fiction for The Vampire Diaries can and they can sell their fan fiction through the Kindle World store. So, Lisa Jane Smith, or LJ Smith, started writing paid fan fiction for the series that she herself created, which is just bizarre.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s just a weird — I think it’s just a fascinating case study in like what it is like to be a writer now and sort of just the importance of understanding what rights you control or don’t control as a writer.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, look, on the one hand this is actually a wonderful story because the way technology has advanced it’s actually given an opportunity to a writer that would simply not have existed. She just would have suffered the indignity of this had her career been shifted back twenty years. When you are hired under work-for-hire, what it means is you’re being commissioned to do a work by somebody else.

And this, by the way, only exists in the United States. As you are commissioned to do that work, you are considered an employee. You do not own the copyright on the work. The copyright is controlled and owned by the commissioner. You and I when we write screenplays for studios, it’s work-for-hire. So, we don’t own our copyrights. We are typically compensated quite well and we also get the benefit of the union because we’re employees, so there are certain terms that are collectively bargained and residuals that approximate royalties and things like that.

But in the book business, I would imagine it gets pretty bad.

**John:** It could.

**Craig:** Because I don’t believe there is a union, like a true federally-chartered labor union that organizes writers who are writing novels on a work-for-hire basis. I don’t know what she got paid. She might have been paid very little. I’m kind of shocked that she didn’t know the nature of the contract. Some lawyer must have understood it and explained it.

But the other fascinating part of this is that these companies realize that there’s money to be made in allowing fan fiction to occur. So, fan fiction exists sort of on an underground basis and these companies realized, well, if these people are going to do it, you know the deal with fan fiction is if you want to actually take it to the next level, like for instance E.L. James did when she wrote Fifty Shades of Grey, at some point if you want to sell the stuff you have to change the names and you’ve got to change certain details so you’re not infringing on the copyright of in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, Twilight.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it turns out that Twilight is some weird touchstone for S&M. I don’t understand why, but it is. [laughs] Like a Mormon lady wrote this thing that everybody else looks at and goes S&M. Whatever.

So, things have to be changed. But these companies that own these properties, and they have to own them. See, that’s the key. If an individual author wants to do this, like let’s say Stephanie Meyer did say I want people to be able to write Twilight FanFic, she can individually license that right to Amazon and then get money for it and then people can go ahead and use the real names and the real places.

But in the case of something like The Vampire Diaries, because the company was commissioning these works as a work-for-hire, it’s their — they can do that. And now it’s open the door for the actual writer to write these things again. And the fans of her work are really passionate and they’re very excited about reading what they consider to be the real sequels to those books, and not the ones written by the other authors.

**John:** And Alloy Entertainment still gets paid for it.

**Craig:** They get paid.

**John:** I think because of the deal with Kindle Worlds, like they still — they actually own the copyright on it, which is also crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s interesting to me that the deal with Kindle World is that the company or the copyright holder, which may be an individual author, licenses the right to Kindle World for their user, for Kindle World users to write fan fiction, approved fan fiction, with the character names and all the rest. But, then if the FanFic writers want to do that, they have to sign away their copyrights back to the company?

**John:** Yeah. There’s something crazy like that. So, Alloy is still making money off of that, which is crazy.

**Craig:** Wow. And so what’s now, I really get it, because now what’s going on is these companies are going, “Well, why should E.L. James make $40 billion? We should be making the $40 billion.”

**John:** So, Craig, I have a question for you. Let’s bring it back to us. So, let’s say you write a spec script and it becomes a movie, it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. You write Raiders of the Lost Ark and it becomes a worldwide phenomenon. And people want to start writing fan fiction for it and put it in this kind of situation. Do you think that you have that as one of your separated rights? Or is that something that they own as part of their separated rights?

**Craig:** It is not one of our separated rights. Yeah, no.

**John:** So, they can license that and be making money off of people writing fan fiction.

**Craig:** Absolutely. We have, our separated rights are quite limited. And the closest thing we have to something like this is the right to a novelization. Under certain circumstances we have a right to publish our screenplay, under certain circumstances. But, no, they can absolutely… — Listen, they can remake your movie and they can have somebody else right a sequel to your movie, no problem. And I can easily see a situation where they went ahead and licensed this stuff to Kindle World, said go ahead, write your own sequels to this stuff and you can use Indiana Jones’ name and we’ll own it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, which I think frankly if they don’t do it I’ll be shocked. I’m sure the studios are looking at this now and thinking, “Why shouldn’t we do that?”

And to everybody out there, don’t do it! [laughs] Okay? Don’t write anything that is a work-for-hire ever unless you’re getting paid a lot of money and it’s under a collective bargaining agreement. Just don’t do it. I mean, works of fiction —

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You know, works of fiction. Just don’t do it.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. I think it’s going to be fascinating because it’s going to happen. And it will be really curious to see what the first incarnations of that are. And I also think there are some interesting challenges to put, because we do have the ability to write the novelization. And to what degree can you stretch the ability to write the novelization to mean to write essentially literary derivative works of that original creation.

Actually, I’ll run through — I was going to do a Go coloring book, and so I engaged with my lawyer to figure out like can I do that? And basically like is it an illustrated screenplay? And we ended up not doing it, but it was a really kind of fascinating test case like whether I still owned those rights as part of my separated rights.

**Craig:** If they can argue that it is something like a graphic novel or a comic book, then the answer is no because that falls under the heading of merchandising. And so a coloring book I think they would easily argue is merchandising and, no. [laughs]

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** We have a very — our separated rights you can —

**John:** And who would determine that? Is it their list of arbiters, or how would they figure that out?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean essentially if there were a real challenge. I mean, first of all the guild’s lawyers would have to agree with you. Because the injured party would be the guild. And so the guild’s lawyers have to agree with you. And I’ve found that quite often they don’t agree with writers. You want them to sort of naturally want to advocate and push the boundaries. The legal department at the guild, one of my big gripes is that they are far more concerned about their case load and winning cases than they are about taking chances and pushing the ball down the field.

I understand they’re always concerned about setting a negative precedent, which I understand.

**John:** Exactly. They just don’t want to lose because losing can cost them more.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s go to a question. We have a question from Henry Fosdike who says, “Chatting with other writers, we find that we all have those words we just can’t seem to break away from. He nods is my curse, for about 40 or 50 times in the first draft. Other friends struggle with synonyms for walk, pace, trudge, trundle, or to explain a character turning on the spot. He spins, turns, twirls. I’d be intrigued to hear which words crop up in your drafts a lot.”

**Craig:** Oh, good question.

**John:** I would say my first instinct is to sort of go back to the Hemingway of it all, and like Hemingway famously didn’t want to use anything other than He Said for dialogue. You don’t try to put synonyms for that. Just like basically use the generic word that sort of gets rid of it.

But, I do find myself sometimes a little bit frustrated by, particularly when you have to write a lot of action. You start to recognize that walks, heads to, spots, notices. I started using “clocks” too much, like just to recognize something. And it’s like I stopped using clocks.

How about you?

**Craig:** Well, my philosophy about this is that it is far less important for us as screenwriters to dwell on this than it is for novelists because our work is not meant to be read by the consumer or the audience. It’s meant to instruct our dramatic intention of people making a movie.

So, there are certain words that I give myself full license to use because I understand they have a function like seize, crosses to. I like crosses to as opposed to walks to. Nods is really just about somebody shares a look with. I do a lot of that. Smiles. I’ll do smiles, really just to say that somebody is kind of listening and paying attention and absorbing it in a certain way as opposed to another way.

There are a bunch of things I do like that, but they’re really all there just to give a — to let the director and the cast know, oh, there’s a moment here where the actor is going to respond or react. And that’s all it is. Just holding a place there so that you don’t think that you’re not supposed to respond or react, that the writer is saying now cut to this person. It’s almost like an editorial thing, you know.

I don’t have any sort of, I mean like clocks, maybe I’ll throw that in once in a script or something if it’s really appropriate. But I try and keep it to very bland, vanilla kinds of things like that because I want them really to be editorial input and not purple prose. There’s not much sense in evocative action descriptions because, you know, no one is going to hear them.

**John:** Well, let’s throw this back to listeners. If you have a phrase you’re sick of seeing a thousand times in scripts or that you find yourself using too much and you’re trying to avoid, just tweet that to us because we would love to see what those are.

**Craig:** I will give you one that I’ve worked on a lot. Chris McQuarrie has this theory that every time you use an exclamation point it’s a failure, in dialogue. So, I’ve really been trying to cut back on any use of an exclamation point ever.

**John:** Yeah. And all your double exclamation points, even those?

**Craig:** I actually never — occasionally there is the —

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever used a double exclamation point.

**Craig:** How about an interrobang?

**John:** I have used, not the true interrobang, but I have used an exclamation point/question mark probably three times in my career.

**Craig:** Yeah. Nine times out of 10 you actually can get rid of the exclamation point. And basically texters have ruined exclamation points. 13-year-old kids have ruined exclamation points for all of us.

**John:** Well, they have. Also I find in emails sometimes now you can’t just say thanks, period, because it sounds negative.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, it sounds like you’re a dick.

**John:** “Thanks.”

**Craig:** Yeah, like it’s sardonic. Like you’re eye-rolling in a thanks. Yeah, everything has to be, “Thanks!”

**John:** “Thanks!” Yeah. A little up talk.

**Craig:** Right. A little up talk.

**John:** Let’s go to our Old One Cool Things. So, if you want to follow along with us, every week on the podcast at least I have a One Cool Thing. Craig sometimes has a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so last week we started going through our list of old ones to talk through which ones are actually still cool, which ones we barely remember even mentioning before. So, if you want to follow along with us, we are at johnaugust.com/onecoolthings, all one word. And I think we were at number 61 last time.

**Craig:** Yeah. We got to 61. Oh, I don’t think you got to 61. Maybe you did.

**John:** So, my 61 was What If? which is still a great blog to follow. There’s going to be a book coming out, so we’ll link to the book, too. Basically it’s scientific explanations, answers to questions like what would happen if a baseball thrown at the speed of light hit the earth. And it really talks through the physics of that and has great illustrations.

**Craig:** Excellent. Let’s see, number 62, mine was Red Cross donations to Hurricane Sandy relief, which I think they probably capped those off now.

**John:** I think so. Mine was Letterpress for iOS which is still a great game.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t play it as much now, but for awhile there it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah, it was 3s before there was 3s.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Mine for 63 was Reach Gum Care Soft Woven Mint Floss which is still the best floss in the world.

**Craig:** I didn’t have one that week, probably because I was stunned by that one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Then, let’s see, we didn’t have one for 64. 65, mine was brining which I swear by still to this day and you should all do it.

**John:** Ticket to Ride is still a great board game, but the iPad version is incredibly solid. The multi-player for like local people in a room is also terrific.

**Craig:** The next week I had the only one and that was Don Rhymer’s cancer blog, Let’s Radiate Don. Sadly Don did pass away last year, but I think about him all the time. My office is still next to the one that he occupied. And he will remain cool for all of time.

**John:** I agree. The week after that I had Soulver which was a calculator kind of thing for iOS and for the Mac. I do use this occasionally, but I don’t use it as much as I sort of thought I would use it.

**Craig:** Mine was Scanadu which I think is still possibly vaporware that’s like an all-purposes medical device that would attach to your phone and tell you if your kid had a fever, or an ear infection, or something. I think they’re still working on that.

**John:** I had Karateka for iOS which was the game version that we made of Jordan Mechner’s Karateka. I also had Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan. Both are still really great. So, full disclosure, I actually tried to make the movie version of Mr. Penumbra and we couldn’t actually get it to all happen. But I got to talk to Mr. Sloan over a couple weeks about that and it’s still a great book and I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** Excellent. Mine was Seth Rudetsky’s Seth TV. And Seth TV, he is the best. He is the best. And I got to meet him. And I was on his show. And bravo, he is the greatest.

**John:** Bravo!

**Craig:** Bravo! And you should definitely if you care about music at all, you should take a look particularly at the things he does called Seth Deconstructs. They’re fantastic. They are sort of the Scriptnotes of Broadway.

**John:** I had a thing about Coffeescript which is my favorite scripting language, like for quick and dirty programming stuff. It’s still the thing I go to most whenever I need to actually write some code.

**Craig:** And mine was Poutine, the national food of Quebec, which continues to be incredibly delicious.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Starred changes, which is basically I don’t think people necessarily understand this, at least they didn’t understand it in Broadway, is the idea of putting asterisks in the margin to show what is different from this draft to the next draft. I think it’s genuinely useful. It’s a thing we are working to try to get into the Fountain spec.

**Craig:** And mine was the Tesla Model S.

**John:** Ah, you loved your car so much.

**Craig:** So, you saw in the news I was on the PCH there naked in my Tesla Model S. Anything that happens with the Tesla Model S I get 4,000 tweets. People, you got to understand something: I’m not Elon Musk. I don’t make the Tesla. I’m not driving every Tesla. Everyone is like, oh yeah. There are I think 60,000 Teslas on the road and I’m merely one of them. But I do love it so.

**John:** My One Cool Thing was Pat Moran from The Credits. I really don’t remember this all that well, but I’m pretty sure Pat Moran was talking about sort of what a casting director does. I love casting directors.

**Craig:** Well, the next week I had the Easton-Bell pitcher’s helmet. They are still working on this. And there have been more incidents in Major League Baseball, of pitchers getting hit. No one in the head. There’s been a couple in the face that this would not have helped, but the whole idea of this helmet is to prevent brain injury. So, they’re working on it. I’m hoping it gets out there.

**John:** Let’s do five more. Mine was Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which was a best-selling books, so it’s like I’m not the first person to tell you that it’s really, really good. But it’s really, really good. And I was so excited this last week to see the trailer for David Fincher’s movie adaptation starring Ben Affleck who is perfect casting for that. I’m really curious to see how that movie is going to play.

**Craig:** Excellent. My next week was a canker sore drug that helped mice lose weight without diet or exercise. I have been just drinking that stuff. And, [laughs], I don’t know if it works or not. But it’ll take them years to test it.

**John:** Mine was Dungeon World, the role-playing game, and we played it. We played it a bunch.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was awesome.

**John:** It’s good. It’s a good lightweight system. Lots of really smart things.

**Craig:** We haven’t finished that game.

**John:** Yeah. We do. You basically got to the part with the gnomes and then Malcolm Spellman had to leave because of his dog. But there’s still stuff.

The week before that I had Apple TV. Apple TV remains great. I’m really curious what the next iteration of that will be.

**Craig:** As am I. I had — really, I had? No, this is backwards. I was going to say, I had Homeland on Amazon Instant and Blu-ray? I’ve never watched that show. My wife watches it.

No, I had Waking Mars for iOS. You know what? Very beautiful game. I actually never ended up playing much of it. I got a bit bored.

**John:** Mine was Homeland, which I still just love, although I’ve only seen the first two seasons, so I need to get to the third season here pretty soon. But it’s one of those great shows to catch up on and see that it really was as good as everyone was saying.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** My One Cool Thing this week is a movie that people should see in theaters if they have a chance to see it in theaters because I dug it. I saw it with Kelly Marcel. It’s called Under the Skin. It is written by Walter Campbell, based on a book by Michel Faber, directed by Jonathan Glazer who did Sexy Beast.

The IMDb description of it says “an alien seductress preys upon hitchhikers in Scotland,” which is kind of true but actually not really what the movie feels like at all. And so I went into it thinking it’s going to be like Species but like classier. And it sort of is. And yet what ends up becoming to me is sort of amazing meditation on sort of life beyond good and evil. Because she’s not actually — she’s not evil in any classic sense. It’s just she’s just a predator. She’s like a lioness who’s just out there. Even though she looks, Scarlett Johansson looks like a beautiful Scarlett Johansson human being, she isn’t at all. And her performance is fantastic. The way the movie sort of limits to her perspective is great.

I dug it. And there’s moments in it that are Kubrickian in just the most remarkable sense. So, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** I’ve heard it’s awesome. I’ve got to go see that. I might go —

**John:** Oh, and it has a great soundtrack as well. So, beyond that you’ll probably want to get the soundtrack because I’ve been playing it nonstop.

**Craig:** I’m going to go see some movies this week I think. I’ve got to say that. I still haven’t seen The Grand Budapest.

**John:** Oh, you have to see that.

**Craig:** I know. I know! That’s why I said —

**John:** And I was the guy who didn’t like Wes Anderson and now I’m fully —

**Craig:** I’ve always liked Wes Anderson, so I’m really stupid for not seeing it.

My One Cool Thing this week is CarboLite. CarboLite is a fake frozen yogurt that has eight calories an ounce. I have no idea. I assume it’s manufactured in some Gotham City chemical factory. It’s manufacture in an ACE Chemical Plant where the Joker —

**John:** Smilex?

**Craig:** Yeah. It fell into a vat of Smilex. My wife and I call it Plastic Cream because we’re pretty sure that that’s what it is. It’s — I can’t understand how they make it. Sometimes it’s disgusting, and sometimes it’s quite tasty. Either way, it’s like eating yogurt except that there’s nothing there. It’s the weirdest thing. And it’s not sold in too many places, but if you can find it give it a try. They have lots of different flavors, but basically the flavors come down to this: brown and white. [laughs] And they’ll tell you that this week’s brown is Chocolate Pudding. And next week’s brown is Nutella. And this week’s white is Vanilla. And next week’s is Angel Food Cake.

Yeah, it’s brown and white.

**John:** So, is this something you get in the supermarket or something you get at like a Yogurt Land?

**Craig:** It’s at a yogurt store. And it’s never at Yogurt Land because they don’t have it. So, it’s usually at some sort of independent yogurt store. There is a place in La Cañada called Penguins that does it. There’s a place in, you know the Ventura and Laurel Canyon shopping center with the Daily Grill? That place underneath it does it.

It really is like eating the future. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** God only knows what’s in it. God only knows.

**John:** We’ll see if we can find a link to it, but it reminds me of this SNL sketch, That’s Not Yogurt, and these guys are eating this delicious white thing. It’s like, “Wow, this yogurt is really tasty.” And the announcer keeps going, “That’s not yogurt.” No, well what is it? Really, I’m concerned. I want to know.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s no way you could possibly be allergic to anything in CarboLite because I believe it’s all completely inert. [laughs] It is a horror show, but I kind of love it.

**John:** When you see Under the Skin, there is this viscous goop in it, and maybe that’s what CarboLite actually is.

**Craig:** I mean, just the name alone. CarboLite. Isn’t that what they — oh, that’s Carbonite. They froze Han Solo in Carbonite and then when they melt Carbonite it turns into CarboLite.

**John:** I was mortified because on the new page for Highland’s release we talked about how your scripts are no longer frozen in Carbonate, and I let that slide. But, no, it’s Carbonite.

**Craig:** It’s Carbonite.

**John:** And someone wrote in to say, “Uh, uh, uh,” and we got it fixed.

**Craig:** Carbonate is right out. Wrong.

**John:** Wrong. It’s like silicon and silicone. It’s not the same thing.

**Craig:** It’s totally different.

**John:** That’s our show this week. You can find links to the things we talked about in our show notes at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes, which is also where you can find transcripts for all of our back episodes. If you want to listen to the back episodes you can do it through scriptnotes.net, which is where we have all the back episodes listed there. The subscription for $1.99 a month, you get free access to all of those and occasional bonus episodes.

You can also get them through the apps. We have one for iPhone, for iOS, and Android. So, check your app store.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Adrian Tanner. If you would like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Wow. This was a good show.

**John:** And that’s it. It’s a good show. It’s long, but we got a lot done.

**Craig:** You know what? Listen, man, we’re given them more for their money.

**John:** That’s really what it is. Your zero dollars got you about 90 minutes of show this week.

**Craig:** Oh, god. Well spent people.

**John:** Well done. All right. See you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

LINKS:

* [HearthStone](http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/)
* IGN on [Cold, Cold Heart](http://www.ign.com/articles/2014/04/25/batman-arkham-origins-cold-cold-heart-dlc-review) Arkham Origins DLC
* [South Park: The Stick of Truth](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006IOAHPK/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Get your tickets now](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* If you are attending the show, [submit your Three Page Challenge here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) and [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [Game of Thrones season 4, episode 3](http://www.hbogo.com/#series/browse&assetID=GOROSTGP42365?seriesID=GOROSTGP31734?assetType=SEASON?browseMode=browseGrid/) on HBO Go
* LA Times on the [Bryan Singer lawsuit](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-xmen-director-bryan-singer-accused-of-1999-sexual-assault-20140417,0,5240173.story#axzz30Dlb8J5C)
* The [2014 (and past) WGAw Writers Report Executive Summary](http://www.wga.org/subpage_whoweare.aspx?id=922)
* [Alvin Sargent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Sargent) on Wikipedia
* [Vampire Diaries Writer Bites Back](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495491652398358), from The Wall Street Journal
* [Interrobang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interrobang) on Wikipedia
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* Preorder xkcd’s [What If? book](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0544272994/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Under the Skin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_the_Skin_(2013_film)) on Wikipedia
* CarboLite [nutrition facts on MyFitnessPal](http://www.myfitnesspal.com/food/calories/carbolite-frozen-yogurt-467427) and Yelp on [where to find it in Los Angeles](http://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=carbolite&find_loc=Los+Angeles%2C+CA)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Adrian Tanner ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/falling-back-in-love-with-your-script).

**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.

Craig, I’m going to try to speak a little bit more slowly and distinctly this week because I don’t know if you listened to the live show, the Crossover Episode we did, but I was speaking about 10 billion miles per hour. I could barely understand myself speaking and I’m not sure what it was. I think that someone may have put speed in my water. It was crazy. I was a crazy person.

**Craig:** Well, there was one point where you said something and you’ll hear me say, “What?” And then you repeated it and it still took me a second to figure out what you were saying. I think you get amped up when you’re in front of a live crowd.

**John:** It’s the live crowd that does it and we’re going to have another chance to see me in front of a live crowd on May 15th. We’re selling tickets for our big live show, our Summer Superhero Spectacular with amazing guests. So those tickets went on sale last Thursday. And as we’re recording this there are still tickets available. There’s also tickets for a cocktail party. So please come join us for that if you’d like to. There’s a link in the show notes for that.

**Craig:** And we saw an email from our friend Christopher at the Writers Guild Foundation. He said that we sold, I think, something like nearly half of our tickets in the first hour.

**John:** Which is pretty darn good.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, just reiterating that you and I, what are we, John?

**John:** Are we like a big deal? Are we…?

**Craig:** We’re the Jon Bon Jovi of screenwriting podcasts.

**John:** Oh, okay. I can’t believe I forgot our tagline. Well, here is why I always forget the Jon Bon Jovi of podcasts is because it’s something you believe. It’s a thing I don’t really understand, but maybe that’s what makes this all work.

The other thing we’re going to be doing at the live show is a Three Page Challenge live with people who’ve sent in their scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now, we’re going to do it differently and we’re not quite sure how we’re going to do it but I know it’s not going to be a thing where you email Stuart your script and then he has to read them all and picks them. It’s going to be something more like there’s going to be a page you can go to. You’re going to click submit. You’re going to attach your script and hopefully even people will vote on which projects are going to be part of the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Okay. So a question for you then.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Let me play the role of listener.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I have submitted a Three Page Challenge to the big festering Stuart pile. Should I resubmit to this new thing to get a chance at being picked for the live event?

**John:** Yes. So I will say that you should not send again to Stuart. You shouldn’t send to that normal address because that is not for the live show. For the live show there will be a special application process only for people who are going to come to the live show themselves.

**Craig:** Ah-ha, there’s the qualifier.

**John:** So if you have submitted previously and you’re coming to the live show, by all means you would submit again. But if you are not coming to the live show, then you should not submit to this thing because it’s a different thing.

**Craig:** Right. And we need you to be there. The whole point is that you sit in a chair, an actual hot seat. It won’t be hot until you sit in it.

**John:** Well, we are going to do our live guests first so they could be warmed up. You could be sitting in the chair that David Goyer sat in or that Christopher Markus or Stephen McFeely.

**Craig:** Have you spent any time with any of those gentlemen?

**John:** [laughs] I spend time with all those gentlemen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I like them.

**Craig:** I like them, too. But they’re not going to put out any kind serious heat, not the kind of heat that comes from being the focus of the Three Page Challenge.

**John:** I would take that headline to be “David Goyer will not bring the heat.” That’s I think your prediction.

**Craig:** David Goyer, cold butt.

**John:** [laughs] I think David Goyer’s ass is the least of your concerns. If you are going to come to a Three Page Challenge on Scriptnotes you are going to submit by some process. We will announce next week on the show about how that’s going to be because we’re still figuring this out. But I think it’s going to be a good fun time.

**Craig:** You know the coolest thing about Goyer is that he’s all tatted up. He’s all sleeved up. So the funny thing is David is like — he’s like a mythological creature, like a griffin or something, the body of this and the head of that. He’s got the head of an accountant and the arms of a guy that works in a carnival.

**John:** Yeah. You would think that David Goyer wrote Sons of Anarchy. I mean, when you see his arms, you’re like —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, he clearly writes on Sons of Anarchy. But no.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He writes superhero movies.

**Craig:** He’s got Sons of Anarchy arms and 1980s sitcom writing staff head.

**John:** It’s the male equivalent of like a head for business and a body for sin.

**Craig:** That’s right. Party in the back and business, whatever.

**John:** Speaking of ‘of.’

**Craig:** Of ‘of.’

**John:** Of, speaking of ‘of,’ speaking of prepositions.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I’m going to transition to talking about the other thing I just did in that WGA Theatre which was a live panel with Kelly Marcel, Linda Woolverton and Scott Neustadter which was great. So we did that on Saturday. And if you want to listen to that, it’s not really a Scriptnotes episode. So when we have these kind of bonus things that sort of they’re like a Scriptnotes but they’re not really a Scriptnotes. We put them up on the app. So if you have the Scriptnotes app or if you go to Scriptnotes.net, you can listen to that episode. So that’s for people who are the premium subscribers who want to listen to all the back episodes.

Every once in a while there is some bonus content. This is one of those every once in a while bonus content things.

**Craig:** That right there is reason that people — how much does it cost for the premium thing?

**John:** $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** Okay, I mean, so for 2 bucks a month, you get access to something like that. I mean, that’s a great line up of writers. Kind of a no brainer.

**John:** So if you want to listen to that, you can find it on the Scriptnotes app. You can find it in your app store for both the iOS and for Android. So, Craig, today, you’ve brought a topic and I’m so excited about your topic because I think it’s a perfect thing for us to talk about on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was thinking about this idea and sort of keyed off of something that you were suggesting that we’re also going to get to later, a little bit of the conundrum of how you get started on things. But as I was thinking about that I thought, you know, it’s so common that when we do finally figure out what it is that we want to write, it’s so exciting because it’s new. And we are full of this passion and energy to tackle something new. The sky is the limit. The possibilities are endless. It’s all quite fresh and compelling.

But at some point along the way, whether it’s in the middle of writing the script or as you’re beginning to actually create your draft, or if you’re on your 12th rewrite you’re going to lose that spark. A little bit like being married. You got to kind of tend to it or else these things can fade.

So I wanted to talk a little bit today about some practical tips for staying in love with the thing you’re writing.

**John:** That’s an amazing topic because actually Kelly Marcel and I were talking about that in front of the live panel, because there was literally a dinner I was at with Kelly where just in the process of describing this rewrite I was doing, I did kind of fall back in love with it. And it wasn’t until I actually spoke aloud what I was hoping to do and sort of saw her enthusiasm that suddenly like I wanted to get back to it. So let’s talk through some strategies there or do you want to start with sort of why you fall out of love with things.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s natural. It’s only human. We can’t stay at some sort of pitched level of passion with something. We’ll burn out. Our brains are, you know, it’s literally neurological. For instance, if somebody plays a tone, a pure tone at a set frequency, it will start to fade in volume to you because our brains are designed to pick up changes in things. Steady, fixed, unchanging input starts to become noise.

It begins to disappear to us. And similarly, the passion that we have is a result of something changing in our minds, we found a new thing. But eventually, because it’s kind of in a fixed state, all that adrenalin will go away and the passion will go away and the excitement will go away because it’s just like a pure tone in our head and we’re kind of attenuating.

**John:** Well, as you started a project, that project was new and exciting and all those notes were new. Like, it was the first time you were hearing it. It’s like, this is so exciting. But then as you keep going, you’re working. You’re just doing work. And it’s changed from being that pure tone to being — you recognize all the flaws in it and it’s just not new to you anymore.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s fundamentally, of course, it’s that way because you’re looking at the same thing on the page again. So it becomes very hard to, you know, if you’re going back for a rewrite, well, I have what’s there. It’s there. And sometimes you’re going to mess with it because you’re going to mess with it because you want to change things. But also, it’s not new or exciting. It’s not that shining white in the distance.

**Craig:** Which, again, analogizes quite well to a marriage because over time anybody, any two people that could somehow live in this vibrant state of new love or infatuation or something, if they were to stay like that after 20 years, we would have to lock them up. Something would be seriously wrong with them. They would be inhuman. It is only natural to start to become accustomed to certain things, but there is a great reward in looking past a kind of superficial, you know, “I’m used to this,” and reconnect with the thing that mattered.

And what you just described when you were talking to Kelly and she was reflecting back this kind of excitement to you that you maybe had lost is exactly my first tip which is to bring in a third party. Not to extend that to marriage but, I mean, I guess for some people that works. I’ve certainly asked and got nowhere. I don’t know if you’ve ever bothered asking. I’ve asked. It’s amazing how fast the no comes on that one.

So bring in a third party. Of course you’re bored with the thing, with the story you’ve told yourself a billion times silently. But when you start to tell it to somebody else a couple of magical things happen. One, you start to see them getting excited and that re-excites you. And the other thing is that simply by saying it out loud you will start to fire all those nerves again in your head that made you excited about it the first time. You’ll start to feel the drama inherent to it. It won’t feel old. It will feel new again.

So if you started to fall out of love with what you’re doing, sit down with a friend and by the way I would recommend a good positive friend. Like Kelly is great because she has, I think, a natural enthusiasm for narrative. There are writers who are frankly a little bitter or a little judgy. And if you start to talk to them, what you might get reflected back is all of their weirdness. Now, granted sometimes people just don’t like it, but then there are other times when people are just weird. And so you want to find somebody that you trust and who’s enthusiastic and passionate and talk to them about your idea, just start telling the story. Just say, “I want five minutes to just tell you something.” And see if that doesn’t kind of relight your fire.

**John:** Two things that come to mind with this. First off we’ve talked about how when you’re making a comedy and you’re editing a comedy, so often you’re like, “I have no idea what’s funny anymore because I’ve seen the same joke in the editor about 50 times.” But then you show it to an audience and people start laughing, you’re like, “Oh, that’s actually funny.” And this is really the small version of that, by stating your idea out loud, by talking about your thing, you’re actually getting this engagement going and realizing, oh, that thing, it actually does have some worth. People like it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And what you’re describing, that syndrome of rediscovering that a joke works because you’re showing it to people that haven’t heard it 20 times but have never heard it, I’m kind of putting that under the tip of save your babies. We’ve all heard kill your babies and we understand that it’s important to guard against self-indulgence and not to presume that just because you imbue significance into a piece of your story that the audience will. But it’s just as important to safeguard against the opposite which is to just get tired of the things that you once loved and thus just start mutating them or eliminating them without giving other people a chance to experience them for the first time.

**John:** Yeah, this is the criticism we often make of development executives is they’re reading the same kinds of drafts again and again and they get bored with things because they saw before so they’re always looking for, like, “Well, we don’t need that anymore,” because like they’re used to it. To their eyes, we can cut that. You can kill that because we don’t need it.

Well, you actually did need it. You just don’t remember why you needed it. You don’t remember what it felt like that first time you read the script. And so , yeah, again, fresh eyes are so helpful.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** A thing I wanted to say about sort of bringing in a friend, a positive friend to see it is often you’re probably going to take, hopefully, you have good writer friends and we all know that there are some writers who are positive and cheerleading and there are some writers who can be super negative. But there’s that middle ground where you need to sometimes just say upfront to the writer, “Look, can you read this for me and like I don’t want sort of all the notes and criticisms. I sort of just mostly want to talk about the things I’m excited to do next.”

Because people can do that. I know I can do that and I can ask a lot of times if somebody is giving me a script to read, “Hey, do you want like the typos and the things that are logic errors and all this or do you want me to tell you that it’s awesome and why it’s awesome?” And that’s fine. That’s absolutely a valid way to approach reading a script just saying like, I’m excited to tell this person why their script is great.

**Craig:** Yeah, when you give something to someone, it’s fair to give them the context. Say, “Okay, well, look, I’m looking for help on this. I’m looking actually for you to tell me, okay, what’s working and what’s not working,” or “I’m giving this just so that you can see what I’m doing now.” And it also good to say to somebody, “Look, I kind of need a boost. Can you read this and sort of pick me up?”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s all great. I think that when someone is telling me something that they’re doing, not showing me a screenplay but just telling me, my default is to be encouraging.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** My default is that I just don’t see the point frankly in saying, “Well, I don’t think that’s going to be very good.” Based on what? Based on your weird, negative suspicion that they are either going to muff it or that what they’re describing isn’t really as good as they think or anything like that. I just feel like, you know, my attitude is anything can be done well by someone. And so if somebody tells me something and it’s yet to be in fixed form, I want to just love it and I want to kind of encourage them because that’s what we need.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** Another tip. It’s sort of an obvious one, and again, we have to be a little careful about not overdosing on our medication, but taking a break can do wonders. Sometimes when you fall out of love or lose that spark or that passion, you just need a break. You need a couple of days. Maybe you need a week. It’s okay.

**John:** Yeah, my husband and I, we take vacations away from each other once a year and it’s a very good idea, because if you’re just with the same people having the same conversations every day, you take them for granted. And so then, if he’s gone for a week, all those conversations stack up and it’s actually really nice to have those conversations again.

So the same with your script, sometimes you need to take, just set it aside, come back to it. Usually, we say that in the context of you set your script aside so you can see all the flaws. But maybe you’ll set the script aside and come back and like remember, “Oh, these are the things that are actually terrific about it.”

**Craig:** Exactly true. My wife and I have always had a good balance of together/apart. That we can find ways to give each other a ton of space and independence. But then when you do come together and you have those moments or sometimes for us it’s the break is just being together but in a different place alone. You’re just recontextualizing things.

And sometimes when you’ve lost the spark, just go write somewhere else and I will tell you there is nothing wrong with indulging in the romantic fantasy of the writer in the cafe if you’re not normally that person. There’s nothing wrong with going to write on the beach. There’s nothing wrong with going to write in your backyard or on the front lawn or anywhere that makes you feel like a writer and gets you excited again. It’s totally cool. Think of that as the equivalent of porn. [laughs]

**John:** Well, I think what you’re bringing up though is it may not be that you have fallen out of love with the script, but you’re just actually sick of writing. You’re sick of your process of getting the words down on the page. And so it may not have anything to do with this particular project, it may just be because it’s actually a drudge to sit down at your desk and write your thing. So maybe working somewhere else for awhile will get you excited again.

**Craig:** Yeah, the process itself can make everything seem drab and humdrum, so see if you can shake it up either with a break or a recontextualization. Another tip is if you’re working on something and you’ve lost your passion and connection with it, watch something or read something that is related, either related thematically or in terms of the setting of the movie or the kind of movie. And allow yourself to admire what they did right, but also notice what you think you’re doing better.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you realize, hey, this girl I brought to the dance, she ain’t that bad kind of thing. She’s okay.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. On this podcast we talk about the plus-one problem, or sort of crap-plus-one, which is like it’s a dangerous habit of watching something terrible and saying, like, “Well, I’m not as bad as that thing is.” And so we’re not saying to do that all the time but it’s a useful practice when you start to doubt yourself is to look around you and see like, well, what else is out there. And sometimes you’ll be inspired because, like, “Ah, I can do what that thing did and I can be that great kind of movie,” or “I know I’m doing better than this. And I’m going to just keep pushing the bar forward.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it also gives you a sense of where your movie will exist in a continuum of movies like it or stories like it and you can go, “You know what? What I’m doing is interesting and unique. It is like these things but different than these things. I can see where it will fit.” It starts to make it realer for you again and it gets you off your butt.

**John:** So a related suggestion which is something that I often bring up when I talk to writers at the Sundance Labs because they’ve usually been working on their project for a long time, and sometimes they’re brains are just frozen, especially if they’ve had like three days of detailed meetings with other writers. They just can’t think anymore.

So an exercise I’ll do is I’ll say, “Okay, I know you’ve written this charming, quirky comedy, but let’s imagine this is a thriller. What would this be like as a thriller? And what would this feel like if it were a thriller?” And we just walk through, like, the kinds of things that would happen if this movie were a thriller rather than comedy. And they’re like, “Okay, now it is a historic tragedy. Let’s talk through that.” And just by not forcing yourself to think of your movie in the way it exists now but like under wildly different things, it can sometimes just un-stick you a little bit and get you thinking about it in a different way. And even if it doesn’t give you an actual actionable idea, it can just sort of free you up a little bit and it gets you more excited about digging back in on the thing you actually wrote.

**Craig:** Exactly, exactly true. And there’s another thing that I think concentrating on that early spark can do for you even if it has faded. We may lose a little bit of the heat and maybe you’ll never recapture that first exciting bit of like, “Oh, my god, I’ve got this great idea and suddenly I’m flooded with ideas and flooded with characters and dialogue bits,” and it’s not yet real so you’re not beholden to anything that’s kind of like boring and every day like how to make a structure and what scene comes now, right? We may never get back that, but don’t forget that early stuff because in those early bursts you will see the things that matter the most at the end.

When you’re done with the process, it’s the stuff that got you excited in the first place that is the core of why you’re doing this and the core of what must be protected and expressed in your screenplay and dollars to doughnuts it’ll be the thing that the audience responds to as well. And it all happens in that first big bang explosion.

**John:** Yeah. One of the things I sometimes do early on in the process but I think it’s also great for sort of falling back in love with it is to write the trailer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s really, just imagine like what is that trailer for the movie I have made and what is the coolest version of that? And how are you going to market this movie? And if the answer is like, no, there’s no way to do it, then maybe that’s a problem. But more likely there are some really cool moments that you have in your script that could make the cool trailer. Imagine that trailer because that is ultimately what someone else is going to be intrigued by.

And so, it’s kind of dressing up your movie to be sort of unrealistically attractive at a distance. And so, what does that look like? What does that trailer look like? That can be a useful way of sort of getting back into it.

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah, I do the same thing. I think that when we have an initial burst of passion about a movie, at least I do the same thing you do. I start to imagine what the trailer will be like. I mean, I don’t see it clearly but I can see things happening in bits of stuff exploding and so on and so forth. And that is not unlike what happens when we first meet somebody and we start to like fantasize where it all goes, and now we’re old and our grandchildren gather around us. It’s all a normal part of kind of falling in love with the idea.

And so, on the one hand, you could sort of write it off as this irrational exuberance, to cite Alan Greenspan, but on the other hand there is something of great value in that that you shouldn’t forget even if it detaches itself from the emotional rush and all the things that it does to your limbic system. There is intellectual value in there too. There is stuff that dramatically, I think, you’re going to want to keep sight of.

And lastly, I would say for people that have fallen into a little bit of a loveless rut with the idea that they once loved, just understand it’s normal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It happens to everybody. And it doesn’t mean you don’t love it anymore. It just means that you’re going through this sort of a natural maturation of feeling for this thing and don’t freak out.

**John:** Yeah, I think we all know couples who are so intensely like crazy Romeo and Juliet in love with each other. And then they, but of course they don’t die, and so they stay together for awhile. But then like when it’s not Romeo and Juliet and everything is not turned to 11, they break up because, like we just lost the passion. It’s like, well, yeah, or maybe you just actually kind of matured a little bit or maybe, I’m not saying that you shouldn’t stay together but I’m also saying like you kind of bailed on it because it wasn’t like it was in the first week and, well, of course, it wasn’t like it was in the first week.

**Craig:** Right, what could stay that way?

**John:** Exactly, like, you would self-destruct, spin apart like a centrifuge. So I agree, it’s a natural part of the process and I think on the show we’ve talked about there are a lot of things that are just truths that you kind of only can really understand when you’ve lived them, which is that the first cut of your movie you will want to kill yourself because it will be awful.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Every set of notes will have one thing that’s just crazy, and like a crazy idea that will destroy your entire movie. Those are just givens. Those are going to happen. And this is another given is that like you’re going to hit a part of the process where you just don’t love it anymore and you don’t love this thing that you’ve made and that’s natural. And you’ve just got to push through it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think that you actually still do love it, it’s just that you’re not obsessed with it. You’re not infatuated with it. You’re not overwhelmed by all the things that ping around in our heads when we first conceive of something and we get like a real head of steam. But you want to really love your idea, write it well with discipline and, you know what I mean, and care and all the rest.

**John:** So while we’re talking about creative marriages breaking up, the other thing that breaks up creative marriages is the outside force. And so in real life marriages it’s the other woman, but in creative marriages between you and your script, it’s that other idea.

**Craig:** It’s kind of heteronormative of you by the way.

**John:** I know. It is. It’s that other, I don’t that I used any girl terms in that, did I?

**Craig:** Yeah, you said the other woman.

**John:** I did say the other woman, yeah.

**Craig:** You are being heteronormative.

**John:** I’m sorry I —

**Craig:** And on behalf of the LGBTQ community —

**John:** [laughs] I’m so apologetic to have used it. Actually, I have a lesbian relationship with my script so that is the other woman out there.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s just everything about that, I just want to do a podcast about that, about your lesbian relationship with your script.

**John:** Oh, by the way, I played Gone Home which is —

**Craig:** Oh, so great, right?

**John:** So great. And it’s so related to that topic for reasons we won’t spoil.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** That other idea that’s out there seems so provocative for the same reason that a fling/cheating on your spouse seems so great because you’re only seeing what the possibilities are there. You’re only seeing the great stuff and you’re not seeing all the bad stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you’re so familiar with your spouse or you script that you know all their flaws, you know all the ways that they’re not perfect, and you know sort of, ah, the things that drive you crazy about them. That other thing out there is bright and shiny and new and flawless as far as you know.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, of course, there’s a natural instinct to pursue that. And there are times where, yes, you know what, maybe you have done everything you can to make this one thing work and you’re going to move on. I guess, that does sort of fall apart here because we are sort of serial monogamists, I guess, when it comes to writing screenplays.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there’s times where, like, yes, you should be done writing that script and you should go pursue that other great idea. But a lot of times that great idea, take a note of it, remember it, but stay working on your main project.

**Craig:** That’s right. I mean, listen, there are bad marriages. There are some marriages that just deserve to stop. And there are times when you’re not simply falling out of excitement with your screenplay. You’re looking at it and you’re thinking, I don’t like you at all. I’m getting nothing from you. I don’t want you to be in my life anymore.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ideally, that doesn’t happen too often. Ideally, you develop your instincts to a point where you don’t begin the marriage of yourself to a script until you know it’s going to be okay. But you’re right. When these other things pop up, go ahead and look all you want and really noodle on some index cards and put it off to the side and just understand that when, yeah, like our screenplays are basically like spouses that keep dying on us.

But like you stay married until they croak and then you turn to the next one. But there are people who I think flip from project to project because… — We had somebody ask us a question at the Nerdist crossover that sort of keyed this for me. You know, like I have seven different things going on and I think a lot of that has to do with being distracted by the new man or woman or transgender or a gender non-specific —

**John:** Just say person.

**Craig:** Non-specific gender.

**John:** Person.

**Craig:** I’m really trying man.

**John:** You’re trying.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m trying. Look, I think, at least one of us is trying. That’s for sure.

**John:** Ah-ha, yes. Well, yeah, I guess it is essentially a fear of commitment. The reason why he’s not able to lock down and pick one of these things to write is because of the fear of commitment. And at the first big 100th live show I remember somebody asked the question , like, “Well, which of these things should I write?” and I said, “It’s the one with the best ending,” which was really another way of saying, “Write the project you think you are actually going to finish that you can see through to the end.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And that’s ultimately what a commitment is, is you’re going to commit to finishing the script and making it the best it can possibly be.

**Craig:** Yeah, because there are rewards for commitment. I mean, commitment isn’t a sexy thing. Sex is sexy. But the commitment gives you rewards that are, I think, they’re more substantive in a sense because you get to finish and you get to follow it through and then deliver it to other people. And it becomes meaningful to other people. No one will ever find any meaning or entertainment in the thing that you loved and then abandoned. No one.

**John:** Agreed. So let’s talk, let’s shift gears and talk about, that was sort of the middle of a relationship that we’re talking through. Let’s talk about the early part of a relationship, because there were two videos I saw recently that I thought were really great about capturing how you find your way into a script, which is really that beginning of that relationship, like how do I know how to even really begin here.

And the two videos are, one is by Tony Gilroy and one is by Michael Arndt. And they’re both on johnaugust.com and they’ll also be in the show notes. And they’re both great. And what I loved about them is they had very different approaches to how you get started on a script.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I want to start with Tony Gilroy, because Tony Gilroy who did the Bourne movies, he did Michael Clayton.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He’s just the best. I think he’s fantastic. So he was giving a talk for BAFTA and their little BAFTA screenwriter series. And on the two examples he gave, one was from Bourne and one was from Michael Clayton, he didn’t kind of know what the movies were but he wrote a scene. And he wrote a scene that essentially was the kind of scene he wanted to be in the movie. And it wasn’t until he wrote that scene that he had sense of like what it was that he was trying to write.

And so the case of Michael Clayton, it was a scene that I remembered but I don’t think of being the showcase number of the scene, of the movie, which was where George Clooney’s character goes to Denis O’Hare’s house and Denis O’Hare has just run over somebody. And Denis O’Hare is talking about what he wants Michael Clayton to do for him. And it’s a great scene but I wouldn’t necessarily know that it was the show stopper for me, but for Gilroy it set up what that movie was going to feel like to him.

**Craig:** Right. And similarly, he wrote a scene in Bourne where Jason Bourne expresses that he does not know who he is but he knows what he can do. And the things that he can do and the circumstances that are evident to him suggest that who he is is a dangerous person and possibly a bad person which I think is great.

**John:** Yeah, it’s a scene in a cafe where he talks through like, “I know where all the exits are.” And she goes, “Of course, you know where the exits are.” He’s like, “I know the numbers on all the license plates in the parking lot. I know the easiest ways to kill somebody.” Like he knows all these specific skills.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that to me really is the Bourne movie. It’s such a great encapsulation of who that character is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s hard for me to imagine that whole Bourne franchise existing without some version of that scene.

**Craig:** Well, that’s right. And what I loved about what Tony was saying was that where he starts, the kernel, the thing that kicks off the explosion could be something that he observes or reads or sees or thinks. But how he knows it’s a movie and how he understands that he can write the movie is by thinking about character and what is fascinating about this character in a way that is resonant to anyone who understands or is interested in human behavior.

And for Bourne, it makes complete sense. The movie will be on one level about a guy who has amnesia and is being hunted and has to fight and kill his way with his secret skills to survive and figure out how this happened to him.

But on another level, the reason that we like those movies and that we go to any movie is because it connects with something inherent in all of us, something universal. None of us have woken up one day not knowing who we are but being able to beat up two guys and shoot somebody dead from 500 yards.

What we identify with there is somebody who’s trying to figure out who they are in a world that’s only giving them circumstances, but not substance. That’s universal. So I loved what he had to say here because I thought that that’s something I try and do now more than ever is to key in on something at the heart of this character that is universal and has nothing in sense to do with the specifics of the story but has to do with their inquisition into their own lives or into the lives of others.

**John:** In both cases you have a lead character who is establishing who they are in their specific world and what they want. Because if you actually looked at the very start of Michael Clayton as a script, it actually doesn’t start with George Clooney’s character at all. It establishes sort of the plot franchise of basically what’s happening, the premise of what’s happening in the story. But that scene that he wrote is the first description of sort of what a fixer is. And so it’s basically telling whose character it is and what their job is. So this is Michael Clayton. This is what his job is. This is Jason Bourne and this is what his job is or at least what his skill set is.

And so it’s not necessarily establishing what the plot of the movie is going to be. It’s not the A plot of it but it’s the trajectory of this character in their world. So with George Clooney we have a character who is a fixer. He fixes people’s problems and very naturally he finds himself in problems that he can’t himself fix or has to find a fix for himself.

**Craig:** And therein is the movie, because in both circumstances Gilroy is giving us two superheroes, one of whom is legendary for being able to fix anything, and as the movie Michael Clayton bears out, does. And the other movie is about a guy who is perhaps the best assassin on the face of the planet. And yet, they are both deeply troubled and in these scenes where we find out who they are, all we’re hearing really is about their limitation.

What Bourne is saying is I know all these things but I don’t know who I am or why I am or what I’m supposed to be doing or even if I’m a good person or a bad person. And in the scene that Gilroy shows for Michael Clayton, what we’re seeing is Michael Clayton frankly being at a loss not sure what to do, being screamed at and showing us, revealing to us with a lack of dialogue how tormented he is frankly by his position.

**John:** Yeah, I think weirdly the video that we’re going to link to, they cut that little scene with Michael Clayton a little too short, because if I remember that scene correctly, I think after Denis O’Hare goes off on his long rant about what actually happens, I think Michael Clayton does sort of come back and say like, “This is what we’re going to do.” I think he is the one who had to say like, you know, you’re going to grow up and you’re going to do this and really talks him through. We see his competence.

I want to try and make this actionable though for other writers who aren’t Tony Gilroy, because if you’re Tony Gilroy, you already know how to do this. What I think the general take home from the Tony Gilroy advice here is you have your character. Your lead character start talking and is talking about their life. And you basically try to find that character’s voice and a way to articulate who that character is in a scene and doing that before, for Tony Gilroy, before anything else actually happens.

And I will say my own personal experience this has helped tremendously. So Go, my first movie, there were lots of little scenes that I wrote for that that had no movie around them. I basically wrote these little scenes and I sort of wanted a movie that could hold these scenes. That was useful. This thing I just turned in, I knew in general what kind of happened but 11:30 at night I got out of bed and just wrote, hand wrote a scene that is the first scene of this project because it was exactly a character talking through what her situation was —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And trying to figure something out. And in retrospect it was very Michael Claytony because she was talking about who she was and how things were changing and she wasn’t sure what she should do. So basically she was asking for advice, but in asking for advice she was telling us where she was and what her capabilities were.

**Craig:** Yeah. So you’re zeroing in on the advantages that this character holds because they are a hero and they will prevail so they must be there. In evidence this is not, we don’t learn these things somewhere down the line. Even The Karate Kid, he learns moves but he doesn’t learn courage. It’s there. But then we also connect that early on with what they’re missing.

**John:** Well, one thing I want to say about sort of in arguing for the Gilroy approach is that trying to write the scene before you’ve written anything else is I think it may be a good way to fall in love with your project. I think it may also be a good way to know, can I even write this? Like if you don’t have a clear enough idea of who the characters are that you could just write a scene where they’re talking about themselves, then maybe it’s not really the idea you’re going to be able to finish.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I can imagine there’s going to be lots of things that you’ve done all your cards and then you actually start to try to write a scene, you have no idea what these character sound like.

**Craig:** Right, you don’t have to — look, you have to write a scene with your character, but what you do have to love is your character. I think a lot of new screenwriters and some even screenwriters that I know, what they think about are the things that happen. And what I liked about Tony’s approach and I try and mirror it myself now more than ever is to think about the character because that’s all I care about. I think that’s all people care about in the end is the character.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he does such a good job of getting inside that and frankly he offers a warning, a fair warning to anyone out there considering being a screenwriter. If you do not feel that you are insightful, not just generally insightful, but particularly insightful about human behavior, this is not for you. It’s not going to work.

**John:** Yeah. He actually very specifically is saying that he doesn’t think you can teach anyone to be imaginative.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** We can teach, we can kill it and you can magnify it, but you can’t sort of teach it. And so if you are not inherently imaginative, there’s not a class for that. There’s not a way to sort of get there.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And so if you weren’t a person who dreamed up stories beforehand, I don’t think anyone is going to get you there as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** Well, there are various ways to be imaginative and to express your imagination. Visual artists are remarkably imaginative in ways that I’m not. I know I’m not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But to be a screenwriter and to tell stories in television or movies about human beings or even about animals that are acting like human beings, you need to understand human behavior. It’s not enough to be able to paint a gorgeous pallet or to be an aesthete. You need to understand what makes people tick, and then you need to be able to create somebody that is as flawed as the people we meet every day, and fascinatingly so.

**John:** Well, speaking of flaws, I think it’s a great way to get to the second video which is by Michael Arndt. So this was something that was originally a bonus feature on a Blu-ray for Toy Story 3 and someone put it on YouTube. I found it. I asked Michael Arndt like, “Is it okay that I link to it?” He said, “Sure, go for it.”

It’s this video he did talking about how to set the story of Toy Story 3 in motion and sort of the struggles they had. And to me this very much felt like a case where maybe because it’s the Pixar way, they sort of had to figure out everything first before he was allowed to write it. And so it ended up being a very agonizing process to figure out what could happen to sort of get the story kicked into gear. Ultimately, it’s really about flaws and it’s finding what the nature of the flaws were in the relationships between these characters, what the fears were that could get them started.

So again, it is character-based but it wasn’t where he wrote one scene and that became the launching pad for the whole story. It was all very carefully considered on an outline level before he got to go off and write stuff.

**Craig:** I’ll be honest, I appreciated the video and I thought that everything he said was accurate but I didn’t love it because I thought it was missing a fundamental part that I also see in the Pixar movies, and that fundamental piece was theme. It was the sense of an individual’s personal philosophy. That seemed to be missing. He focused quite a bit on the idea of what an individual’s passion was.

But, Luke Skywalker in the beginning of Star Wars he’s not sort of joyously living each day through passion. Frankly, he’s sort of an aimless wanderer who just wonders if there’s something better out there. And while that story is fundamental, almost to the point of mythologically so, it’s still — there is a good theme resonating through it. So, for instance, he talks about Toy Story and doesn’t really get into what I think those movies are about and he expresses quite well that, listen, he wrote Toy Story 2. I don’t mean to say he doesn’t understand those movies. He clearly does. But when I watch Toy Story, I do see a character who, as Michael says, is his passion is being Andy’s favorite toy and that that passion is also connected to his flaw which is jealously guarding that position.

But what he’s not talking about is that the movie on a level beneath that is about an individual whose function is to serve as a friend and he does not know what it means to be a good friend.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that stuff, so I wanted more of that and it wasn’t there. I liked the video and again I thought there were a lot of great signposts along the way. But it did veer a little bit too much into the “here’s how you tell a story, do this, do this, do this.” Not all stories work that way.

**John:** Yeah, and he actually says at the end of the video like not all stories work this way. And in his email to me he did stress that like he was fairly happy with the video and yet it was created for this Blu-ray thing for sort of a very general-purpose audience. So it wasn’t as screenwritery as he would love it to be.

**Craig:** Well, there you go.

**John:** Yeah. So I think he understood those same flaws. What I think is a nice contrast though with Gilroy is that it wasn’t a case of, I write one brilliant scene and then I figure out the rest of the movie around it. Here, pretty much the Pixar process is you figure out the whole movie and then you start writing it. And some writers that works great for and other writers not so much.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Some people can really see the whole movie before that dialogue is written. We’ve all talked many times about James Cameron’s things which are scriptments and they’re very detailed outlines that don’t really have your dialogue in there and yet they really work. And so it’s entirely possible to do that. In my experience though, it’s not until I have those characters talking that I really genuinely believe that they can exist. And honestly, once I hear them talking, I may make some fundamentally different story decisions —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Because I now know who those characters are.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I mean, first of all, you can write a scriptment and you could be incredibly well prepared before you start writing a screenplay but you still need that moment, that genesis moment before you can do the scriptment, which is very much my, I mean, I don’t really do scriptments much.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I need a genesis moment. I mean this Cowboy Ninja Viking movie, so the graphic novel is about a man who is like a Jason Bourne kind of guy except he actually doesn’t do anything. He essentially has multiple personality disorder and these three characters in his head are the ones that do everything. And for me in just thinking about the idea when I went in to meet on it in the first place I said, “Here’s what I think the movie is. It’s not — this is a scene. It’s the beginning. It’s one scene but it informs what I want to talk about.”

And it’s a kid who’s a very scared little kid who gets beaten up and these friends come to his aid and they just destroy the people that hurt him. They hurt them very badly, in fact, one of them has to get pulled off this kid because he’s going to kill him. And then our little hero boy realizes he did it, but he doesn’t remember doing it. He just sees that there’s a knife in his hand and his knuckles are bloody. And he’s terrified.

And to me, I go, okay, I understand the movie now. I understand that this is a story about a guy whose heroes are his villains. And he’s not in control of the things he does and in fact there is something terrible in him that he simply fragmented away from himself and put in to other people and that needs to be resolved. The movie of course is an action movie where there’s villains and our heroes have to beat them up and stuff. But then I go, okay, I understand why I’m doing this.

**John:** Yeah. Now, so the Gilroy approach though, Gilroy would write a scene where the character, where your boy was saying that, saying some version, the best version of the boy saying that.

**Craig:** I don’t, to me, I’m not as reliant on dialogue specifically as Tony puts forth in his BAFTA speech because I think sometimes there are these incredibly evocative scenes that don’t have a word in them, but what I was able to do when I came in and met on that project the first time is describe that scene in detail because I had seen it in my head and if I felt like writing it, I could have written it. I just don’t like to write things and hand them before I have the job. But yes, I had it. I had that scene and then I wrote it and it’s there. It’s still there. We have these little scenes that somehow survive the thrasher and that’s always been there.

**John:** Yeah. Well, great. So we’ve talked about finding your way into a script, how to stay in love with your script, how to keep that, how to rekindle that spark and keep your passion for a script alive.

But let’s talk through our passion for things that we thought were One Cool Things and see if they are still One Cool Things.

**Craig:** To see if we’re still married to those One Cool Things.

**John:** Yes. So starting with Episode 35. Do you have the page open right now, Craig?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Do you have the page open?

**Craig:** [laughs] I didn’t realize there was going to be homework.

**John:** There’s homework.

**Craig:** I’m going to it. It’s johnaugust.com. And then I click on One Cool Thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay

**John:** If you go to that page along with Craig and do the work. If you scroll at the very bottom, we’ll go from the bottom to the top. So we started at Episode 35 with One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And Craig’s first One Cool Thing was the Franklin Ace 1000.

**Craig:** I’m staring at it right now.

**John:** Still cool?

**Craig:** The coolest.

**John:** Great. My One Cool Thing was the Musicnotes version of Jar of Hearts, basically, that you can — Musicnotes is a great service for downloading sheet music. I still use it probably once a week.

**Craig:** Fantastic. So far we’re good.

**John:** We’re good. You just want to quickly bang our way up the list?

**Craig:** We’ll just go yes or no.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. So for me iScore, totally.

**John:** Old Jews Telling Jokes, no, I’m sick of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. 1Password, use it every day.

**John:** Ski Safari, not playing it anymore but it was a good game first time.

**Craig:** Will read your script fund raiser from Joe Nienalt and Daniel Vang, I believe we might have save lives. Super cool.

**John:** Key Ring thing I still use. Basically, it puts all your bar codes under one little thing. It’s great.

**Craig:** [laughs] I had nothing for the next one?

**John:** You didn’t. I had the UC Verde Buffalo Grass which I’m looking at right now. It is great. It is a pain in the ass to get it growing but then it’s so low maintenance it’s wonderful.

**Craig:** My next was the trailer for the movie Flight which is awesome and John Gatins was nominated for an Oscar.

**John:** Yes. Stencyl, I’m not using it anymore but I think it’s still good. I know it’s still under active development. It is a game development tool for Mac and iOS devices.

**Craig:** My next one was MacBook Pro with Retina Display and that is my main ax.

**John:** New York City Subway by Embark, I still think it’s a terrific subway app.

**Craig:** The Baseball Codes, I’m still reading this book. It’s like I snack on this book all this time later. So, yeah, I guess, I still think it’s great.

**John:** Mine was ScanCafe which is the place where we sent off all our photos to get scanned. It’s fantastic. I strongly recommend ScanCafe or another service. Just, if you have a bunch of negatives, send them some place, get them scanned so you’ll actually have them and be able to look at them.

**Craig:** PB2 Peanut Butter Powder, I haven’t eaten that crap in a long time. [laughs]

**John:** The Cambridge Ivory Wirebound Notebook, it’s still good. It’s not my — I’m not using them daily though.

**Craig:** Audio Essentials, I don’t even know what that is.

**John:** Hooktheory was this book on how cord changes work and it’s actually still been incredibly useful and I’m doing a lot more stuff with key changes and it’s just been terrific.

**Craig:** E-cigarettes, boy, I was ahead of the curve on that one, huh?

**John:** Yeah, but you’re not smoking them anymore, are you?

**Craig:** Eh, occasionally.

**John:** Oh, there’s ambiguity in there.

**Craig:** Occasionally.

**John:** Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, this thing was a piece of crap. So it worked for about like two months, but then it eventually ran out of charge and a couple of months later I tried to charge it and it would just refuse to charge. And so it’s now in the recycling.

**Craig:** Oh, Nexus 7. Jiro Dreams of Sushi will forever be the coolest thing about sushi.

**John:** It’s a great, great documentary.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The World in Words podcast, I’m not listening to. I’m sorry I’m not listening to it. I’m not.

**Craig:** Inrix Traffic App, use it every day.

**John:** AquaNotes are the little things you can write on notes in the shower. I used it for a little while and then I’ve stopped using it. So I’m not sure it’s worth it.

**Craig:** We both did Jambox somehow, I don’t even know what that is.

**John:** Oh, Jambox was the speaker system, the little Bluetooth speaker system.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, okay.

**John:** So I use them a lot. We use them all the time for just audio around the house. It’s great like you just take into the kitchen, plot it, listen to some podcasts, listen to some music. It’s great.

**Craig:** What do we do like a couple more so that we don’t — this will take hours.

**John:** This will take hours, so we’re going to stop at 60.

**Craig:** Okay, great. Okay.

**John:** So mine, well, the easiest one ever, the Los Angeles Public Library.

**Craig:** Is that still cool?

**John:** It’s still relatively cool, though my daughter has gotten through the stage where she reads like a thousand books. Instead she reads like thousand-page books. She just finished Harry Potter Five.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so we don’t go there as often anymore.

**Craig:** Does she like Fablehaven books or that’s a little younger, I think, than your daughter.

**John:** That’s young for her.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see. My next one was the simplex algorithm which I still don’t understand. People have tried to explain to me. I’m useless.

**John:** Mine was the trailer for Derek Haas’s The Right Hand and the book itself. I remember the trailer. I didn’t read the book. I’m really sorry, Derek. I don’t know why I haven’t read the book.

**Craig:** Wow. You made it your cool thing and you didn’t even read it.

**John:** Mine for Episode 53 was Sleepwalk With Me which he end up being a guest on the podcast.

**Craig:** How prescient was that?

**John:** We’re smart.

**Craig:** Very smart. My next thing was The Words. I love that movie. I really do.

**John:** So I still haven’t seen the movie but I ran into the filmmaker and it turned out that that was actually one of the projects that was at Sundance a gazillion years ago.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** And so I knew him from there.

**Craig:** Which filmmaker was it? There’s two.

**John:** Really boisterous guy.

**Craig:** Was he short or was he tall?

**John:** Tall. Tall and thin.

**Craig:** Yes, that’s Klugman.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, it was Jack Klugman’s nephew I think or something.

**John:** That’s great. That’s crazy.

**Craig:** Yeah, a good guy.

**John:** Mine was the HealthMap Vaccine Finder. I have no idea what that is.

**Craig:** Yeah, sorry.

**John:** Then I had Tejava ice tea which I drink every day.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I had a three-episode run where I didn’t do anything.

**John:** Yeah, three episodes you did nothing.

**Craig:** I just gave up.

**John:** Fifty-six was the Voyager Q Quad Interface Dock and hard drives.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** These are the little, it looks like a toaster and you shove a hard drive in it.

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

**John:** I still use those every day. I think they’re great.

**Craig:** Okay, that’s cool.

**John:** Oh, my god, you still didn’t have a one.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Jordan Mechner’s the Last Express for iOS. I will be honest, I did not finish the game on iOS but I thought it was a really nice.

**Craig:** You thought it was cool. Well, my next one was The Room which was super cool and The Room 2 was super cool and I love it.

**John:** Absolutely right. Moom is a utility for the Mac that I use every day for resizing windows.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. My next one was Nogales, Arizona, and I still think fondly about how great the people of Nogales were when we were shooting Hangover Part 3.

**John:** Mine was the Kindle Paperwhite which I still use a lot. I love it.

**Craig:** And then on 60 mine was the Austin Film Festival which I attended last year and I will attend this year and I will attend every year until they tell me, “You’re no longer relevant. Go away.”

**John:** Mine was Screenwriting.io which we still keep up to date.

So Screenwriting.io answers all the really very simple basic questions and it’s designed for like, if you’re type something into Google about a screenwriting question like how do I format this kind of thing, very likely the first answer will be something on Screenwriting.io. So Stuart keeps that up to date so people can ask questions if they have a basic screenwriting question. Stuart.

And Aline’s was The Man Repeller Blog. That was, Aline was on the show that time and she had The Man Repeller Blog. I don’t know what that is.

**Craig:** Do you think it’s still out there. I’m clicking.

**John:** We’ll ask. We’ll ask.

**Craig:** I’m clicking. It’s still going. It’s still going. Yeah.

**John:** Nice. Cool. All right. That was 15 or 25 of the choices from One Cool Things. We’ll do some more on a different week.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** We have a question that comes from Kate Powers. And she says, “I am the same Kate Powers who asked at the Holiday Writers Guild Foundation Scriptnotes for guides about taking meetings with folks who dismiss my experience as a bad fit for their projects.” And so, do you remember her? So I think she was going for staffing season and she’s been staffed on these, I think it was she was on these like murdery shows and she’s going for something light or something like this —

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And she was kind of paranoid about like how people would perceive her, but she said we gave her awesome advice, as always.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** “Not long after taping, I co-wrote an episode of the now filming the second season of Rectify and now I’m in the thick of getting to know you coffees and drinks of agents and my god I’d be freaking out so much worse if I didn’t have the calming influence of your podcast.”

**Craig:** Aw.

**John:** “Should I make a ringtone that’s just Craig saying, ‘Your agent works for you,’ okay?”

**Craig:** Ha!

**John:** That’s actually, it would be nice.

**Craig:** It would be nice.

**John:** She says, “On the subject of specing, have you or any writers you know encountered a spec project based on your own work? That is, a fan writes you and says, ‘I loved what you did in blank so much, I took all the names and places and events and turned them into a graphic novel, an opera, something else. Would you like to see it?’ Whether you have first-hand experience with this or not, I would love to know your thoughts and Craig if he has them on how to best respond to this information. It seems heartless not to respond at all and to take it as purely naughty, you shouldn’t do that, legal approach with someone who identifies as a fan seems wrongheaded. Is there a way to walk that line so the original author doesn’t get into trouble.”

**Craig:** Uh…

**John:** So do you get what she’s saying here?

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** So she’s made something —

**Craig:** I’ve had stuff like this. I mean, particularly —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, oddly around the spoof movies I did with David Zucker. People loved it, sort of do their own fan spoof movies and use the characters from, they love this, the Anna Faris character and the Regina Hall character and they would send me things sometimes and while they are fans, I’m very respectful, and I would say thank you and that’s so nice, but I would just sort of stick by the general I’m not allowed to read stuff rule because the truth is people could be writing things with your characters and then one day you might be writing something else with those characters and then they’re going to go, “Hey, you stole my thing.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, unfortunately, I do counsel it as sort of wall yourself off from reading that stuff because it’s a rough world out there.

**John:** We’re in a very strange time where obviously fans want to feel ownership of the things that they love and so if they’re doing like a super cut of your movie intercut with another movie, that I’m not so nervous about. It’s when they’re taking and creating a new original content with my characters that I start to get a little bit — I feel a little bit weird about it. Of course, we’re a time now we’re like that becomes its own art itself. Fifty Shades of Grey is of course Twilight fan fiction that became its own thing. And so it feels weird like if Stephanie Meyers had read it and then —

**Craig:** Not, that’s not, oh, you mean Stephanie Meyers who wrote Twilight.

**John:** Twilight, if she had read that and said like, “You know, you can’t take my characters and do this,” and yet who knows. Or if J.K. Rowling reads any of the sort of fan fiction about the stuff. I would say, I think there’s a way to respond to it saying like, “It’s so great that you love that, it feels weird for me to be looking at stuff with my characters, my situations. Once again, I love that you love it,” and not sort of commit yourself to that you’re going to watch it or that you support it. It’s just saying that like, “Thanks for thinking of me.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s fair for us to protect the space in our heads from that stuff. I just read an interview with Vince Gilligan where he said essentially that he doesn’t look at any of the forums or many, many discussion groups that popped up around Breaking Bad, not while he was writing them, not now, because he just, in a sense, human thought is viral and it can kind of get in your head.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the point is just ideally your expression would be limited to what you want it to be and not be infected by other people’s positions or points of view particularly when sometimes the very fact that you’re hearing it is less reflective of the quality of what you’re hearing but rather more reflective of the volume of what you’re hearing if that makes sense.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely makes sense. One last thing about this question is, we’ll put a link in the show notes to this, a fan whose name I’m not going to be able to find quickly enough but he made a video of me and Craig talking about a previous One Cool Thing —

**Craig:** I mean —

**John:** Which was this little stove I made.

**Craig:** Why did he make me so fat?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** I’m like so fat.

**John:** Well, because you have to caricature something and I guess he did your eyebrows too. You have giant eyebrows and you got a big gut.

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, like my eyebrows are like Brezhnev eyebrows and like I’m just obese.

**John:** But I’m sort of like I’m a very tall-headed weirdo who then becomes a zombie. So I get off a little better than you but not crazy better.

**Craig:** A little bit, yeah, but he’s got like toilet paper trailing from my butt. I mean, I really was like a huge goofy monkey to this guy. I don’t know why. [laughs]

**John:** What’s so strange is I assume he’s never been to my office, but like he actually, like the door where you would have come out of the bathroom is exactly where the door actually is.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** So maybe he actually has been here and that’s a little terrifying to think about.

**Craig:** He may be in there right now. Mm-hmm. That was very nice that he did it, though.

**John:** It was really cool. I liked that people —

**Craig:** It was cute.

**John:** Want to spend, like, that took hours to do.

**Craig:** I know. That’s the thing, like, I actually do appreciate that. I mean, I have to look past the fact that he just, [laughs]. I remember I did a movie once with Jeffrey Tambor and I had the — I’ve done three movies with Jeffrey Tambor but I had the story boards up for this scene and the story art, storyboard artist, for whatever reason had kind of drawn Jeffrey Tambor really chunky and he’s not. He’s not an overweight man at all. And so he was sort of walking by and then he stopped and he saw these storyboards and he went, “Excuse me!” [laughs]

**John:** A final question comes from Gary in Orlando Florida. He writes, “Can you do a mini podcast talking about your journey into getting the t-shirts made. I’m currently looking at doing some screen printing at home of some of my art and putting it on Etsy. I know you’ve obviously had a higher production budget but I would love to hear about it. Thanks.” Because I can give this in a 30-second version.

All the t-shirts we’ve done, the Scriptnotes t-shirts, the other special Fountain t-shirts, all that stuff, we’ve basically been doing through the same place. And so, Ryan Nelson makes our art. We have a t-shirt printer here in Los Angeles and we’ll put a link in the show next to that. We take it down there. We talk to them what we want. We sort of already have our colors picked. They can buy any colored t-shirt we want so we can be very specific about color tones, but you really do need to see stuff in person.

So I would just say anything you buy online you’re never going to be quite sure. Ryan goes down there in person and makes sure he works with them. We’d like our printer. Basically, we order all the t-shirts at once. That’s the thing, it’s like it’s so much cheaper to figure out how many you need and get them all at once because if you try to do a piecemeal and add like 10 at a time, it will cost you so much more.

And so the secret to our t-shirt business which has been relatively successful and relatively sane is know your quantities ahead of time. Do it like production is one phase. Shipping is one phase and then be done with it. If you’re trying to ship and print all the time, you will do nothing but print and ship.

**Craig:** My secret is to have you guys do it.

**John:** Yes. Craig did lend us his assistant one day to help fold t-shirts when we had too many t-shirts.

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

**John:** Oh, do people want more t-shirts? This is just a general question. I guess, you can’t actually answer because it’s not a two-way podcast. We could make more t-shirts but I’m not sure we’re going to make more t-shirts. So if you really, really want more t-shirts, that’d be a great thing to tweet to me or to Craig or to send in.

**Craig:** I wish we could have a hoodie like with a little logo on it or something.

**John:** That’d be kind of nice. So tell us what you’d love to see, because I honestly think we sold fewer t-shirts the second time than the first time even though our listenership is up so much. I think it’s because the people who really wanted a Scriptnotes t-shirt were satisfied with the Scriptnotes t-shirts.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re good.

**John:** They don’t need 15 of them.

**Craig:** What about intimate apparel?

**John:** Ha! Perfect.

**Craig:** I love that phrase.

**John:** That’s what everybody wants.

**Craig:** Yeah, intimate apparel.

**John:** Mm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Gym shorts.

**Craig:** That’s what Intimate apparel is to you apparently.

**John:** Yeah, it is. When you’ve been married as long as I have, that’s intimate apparel.

**Craig:** I know, gym shorts.

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that Craig will love when he actually gets to playing it. It’s called Monument Valley. It’s a game for the iPad. It’s just terrifically well done. So Craig had mentioned before The Room which was a puzzle game for the iPad. This is a puzzle game too but it’s really more of a —

**Craig:** Like a platformer, right? Kind of?

**John:** It sort of looks like a platform originally. What’s so brilliant about it though is you’re this little girl character who really needs to walk from one place to another place but the world itself, it’s sort of M.C. Escherish and so like you’re walking and suddenly you’re walking on the side of a building and things are sort of crazy. Actually, if you think back to The Room, you know sometimes you get towards the end of one of the boxes, one of the levels and it’s sort of like that shape, the glowing shape will appear.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And you have to rotate it so it all lines up right.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s like that. So sometimes like a walkway will connect based on how you’re rotating it. And then she can walk across that walkway.

**Craig:** Okay. That’s smart. Yeah, somebody sent that link to me, and visually it was very reminiscent, almost disturbingly close to Journey which was the independent game that came out for the PlayStation. I was a little put off by that to be honest like, it looks like they kind of ripped off Journey, I mean, the character, at least the character basis. But if the game play is great then I’m in.

**John:** The game play is really smartly done, great music, just enough text so that there’s some sense of story. It was really cleverly done.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** And you can actually finish it. It’s not like one of those infinite platformers. There really is an end. It’ll take you three hours or so but you’ll get to the end of it.

**Craig:** Oh, I like finishing things.

Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a little gadget that you can stick on your key chain. It’s called Charge Key by a company called Nomad. It’s quite brilliant. It’s this little flexible sort of rubbery, plasticky thing. And on one end is this very slender USB thing that you can stick into any standard USB port. And on the other end is a charger for the iPhone, not the old-school iPhone but I guess everything from iPhone 5 on or something.

**John:** What is it called? Lightning connector?

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess that’s what’s called, the lightning connector, right. So it’s called Charge Key and boy does it work. And so the thing is sometimes you’re somewhere and you want to charge your phone. You just don’t have a charging cable but there are USB things everywhere like in every office.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sometimes in your car, and now you don’t need a cable because it’s just sitting right there in your key chain, at a place, flexible, slim profile. I think it cost like 25 bucks or something and I got one for myself and my wife.

**John:** That sounds like a great idea.

**Craig:** She will not use it and her phone will run out of batteries. Every time.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** Let me ask you a question, John.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because now I’m starting, it’s been a long time since I felt umbrage but I… — When you call Mike, does he answer the phone?

**John:** Very rarely do we call each other. We’re more of texting kind of situation.

**Craig:** Okay. Somehow, he responds? [laughs]

**John:** He does respond.

**Craig:** I cannot tell you how many times I call my wife or I text her and there’s nothing for like two hours. And then I’ll come home and there she is just sitting there. And I’m like, “What did — did you not get the text or the…?”

“Oh, my phone is at the bottom of my bag and it’s on vibrate and…oh well.” Or, “No, it’s out of batteries because I turned the camera on and let it run for…” I mean, I swear, I swear, what do I do? What do I do?

**John:** I don’t know how to deal with those kind of women problems. The first thing is it never occurred to me, but of course there’s a difference because like we’re always going to feel our phone on vibrate because it’s in our pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s in our pocket. But here is the thing, women have pockets too!

**John:** Well, not all of her clothes have pockets.

**Craig:** Well, yes.

**John:** I’m going to defend her here.

**Craig:** Decent point.

**John:** But I’m also going to put a link in the show notes for a really great article about sort of preserving battery life on the iPhone because it is weird how some people like, “My phone will die halfway through the day.” And other people are like, “I very rarely have issues with that.”

**Craig:** I never had problems with it.

**John:** And so it turns out that one of the biggest culprits is Facebook’s location feature. And so if you turn that off, you’re going to be at a happier situation. People have that instinct to like close out apps, that doesn’t save you any power and actually causes you to use more power because every time you relaunch the app it’s having to do a lot more work. So let the phone do its thing about sort of putting those apps to sleep. But basically location services are a huge drain which I already sort of sensed like if you try to use the Find My Friends feature, that drains your battery quickly.

**Craig:** I’m going to grab my wife’s phone which will be easy to do because I know where it is, it’s at the bottom of her bag, on vibrate.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m going to turn that thing off so that the phone will have battery for days so that she can also not answer it.

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** Gym shorts. I should get her gym shorts.

**John:** [laughs] That’s what you should get her.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have so many solutions for real-life marriages and for creative marriages —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Between you and your script.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So you can find links to the charger thing, to how to conserve your battery life, to Monument Valley, and many of the other things we talked about today in the show notes. You can find them at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for this episode and for all the back episodes of our show. If you want to listen to those back episodes, you can find those at scriptnotes.net or through the app. So the Scriptnotes app, you can look for it in iTunes or through the App Store for the iOS and also for Android at all the places where you would find that.

We have a couple of the USB drives left if you still want those. Those are at store.johnaugust.com in addition the few last bizarre sizes of t-shirts. I shouldn’t say bizarre sizes.

**Craig:** Yeah, now you’re just a body fascist.

**John:** I’m a body fascist. I would say there is a few select sizes of t-shirts left.

**Craig:** Oh, man, I hope people write letters.

**John:** Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Mathew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Chris Belle who is a.k.a Mr. Stone Bender. We have some great outros but if you’d like to send us an outro we would love it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can figure it out. Basically, as long as it includes [hums theme] in some version, you’re great, you’re set.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** If people have a question for you, Craig, how should they reach you?

**Craig:** Well, they can reach me on Twitter. I am @clmazin.

**John:** I’m @johnaugust. For longer questions, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And that’s our show.

**Craig:** Good show. Solid.

**John:** That’s was, I think it was a solid show.

**Craig:** Tight.

**John:** It was nice to be back doing it at our normal space, not a creepy basement underneath a comic bookstore.

**Craig:** Boy, that was scary down there.

**John:** And it really, I mean, someone’s died back there. I don’t know how recently but someone’s died.

**Craig:** Someone’s dying there right now. Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Thanks, Craig. Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye-bye.

**John:** All right, bye.

LINKS:

* [Get your tickets](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/) for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular
* The bonus panel is available to premium subscribers at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-rewriting-and-refocusing) or through the Scriptnotes app for [iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scriptnotes/id739117984?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johnaugust.android.scriptnotes)
* Tony Gilroy’s [BAFTA/BFI screenwriters lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kv3DcXIUaRw)
* Michael Arndt [on setting a story in motion](http://johnaugust.com/2014/michael-arndt-on-setting-a-story-in-motion)
* All our [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* Scriptnotes, Episode 124: [Q&A from the Holiday Spectacular](http://johnaugust.com/2013/qa-from-the-holiday-spectacular)
* Scriptnotes listener Tom LaBaff [draws Scriptnotes](https://twitter.com/TLaBaff/status/454819091669594114)
* [Imprint Revolution](http://www.imprintrevolution.com/) prints our shirts
* There are still select shirt sizes (and a few USBs) left at the [John August Store](http://store.johnaugust.com/)
* [Monument Valley](http://www.monumentvalleygame.com/) is available now for iOS, and soon for Android
* [Nomad](http://www.hellonomad.com/), makers of Charge Key (and Charge Card)
* [The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain](http://www.overthought.org/blog/2014/the-ultimate-guide-to-solving-ios-battery-drain)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Chris Henry ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

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

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

**Ben Blacker:** My name is Ben Blacker.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes/Nerdist Writers Panel special crossover episode.

So, we are recording this live at the sort of special Nerdist place at the back of the Meltdown Comics place.

**Ben:** The Nerdist Theater here at Meltdown Comics.

**John:** And so for people who are listening to this at home you might not understand that it sort of feels like, I don’t know, some kind of weird under the subway church kind of thing. There’s like a lot of pillars in the background. There’s a lot of dark faces. There’s those special little light bulbs in glowing cages over us. It’s nice. But it’s a little odd.

**Craig:** It’s appropriate.

**Ben:** We always say it’s like recording a podcast in your mom’s basement.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** No, this is not what my mom’s basement looks like at all.

**Ben:** No, no, not yours specifically. [laughs]

**Craig:** No, I mean, she’s not a criminal. This is a disturbing space. [laughs]

**Ben:** This is from the Hannibal set.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Pretty much. I mean, yeah. What’s that song, All the Pretty Horses? Yeah, I want that, yeah, that guy.

**John:** So, this is a crossover episode and crossover episodes are actually fascinating things, because it’s that idea where you take a story and you start it in one medium or one vessel of story unit and then you transfer it over to another one. So, we’re actually going to do this as two back-to-back episodes, but in different whole series.

So, crossover episodes, we think back to Mad About You and Friends would do crossover episodes. Comic books do crossover episodes.

**Ben:** Like when Richard Belzer’s character appeared on the X-Files. Remember that? His character from Homicide.

**John:** And so it’s unsettling because it makes you feel like natural boundaries between this and that are not being respected. And so you have Lisa Kudrow play Phoebe and her twin sister at the same time — it’s all very disturbing. But it can be good.

**Ben:** You think it can be good, Craig?

**Craig:** No. Because, you have to ask why — this is a lovely crossover. I like this one.

**Ben:** Before we get into this lovely crossover, I actually have a question for you guys. Craig, are you trained in improvisation at all?

**Craig:** No.

**Ben:** Because you’re good at the “No, but…”

**John:** You’re supposed to say yes!

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**Ben:** He does the “No, but…” It’s not “Yes, and…” It’s “No, but…” And I have a great respect for it.

**Craig:** I do the “No, but…?”

**Ben:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, good, so I’m doing it right?

**Ben:** You’re doing it correctly.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** See, Ben, you can’t make him feel good. That’s going to ruin the whole dynamic of things.

The other thing which we should do at the start of a podcast is introduce our guest. And this is Ben Blacker who’s the host of the Nerdist Writers Panel. Hey, Ben Blacker.

So, we are crashing his place to talk about some feature things, some screenwriter things, some comic book things. Thank you very much for being with us here today.

**Ben:** Thank you for being here. I feel like this has been generations in the making.

**John:** It really has been. How long have you been doing your podcast?

**Craig:** Since Austin, right? We started talking about this in Austin.

**Ben:** Yeah, we actually met in Austin. I’ve been doing the Nerdist Writers Panel for about 2.5 years, something like that.

**John:** Which is ancient history in podcasting terms.

**Ben:** It is. Yeah. And then you guys started around that time, too. I remember we both kind of popped up around the same time. And then we were the only players in the game.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re still the only players in the game, man. Everybody else pretending. They’ve got nothing! It’s us and you. That’s it. Is there any other good one?

**Ben:** There actually is.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**Ben:** It’s just started. Are you familiar with The Children of Tendu podcast? Have you heard this? It’s great. It’s two TV writers, Javier Grillo-Marxuach and Jose Molina. And they are doing kind of what we all started doing right at the beginning which was being very nuts and bolts, very basic.

So, it’s a great jumping on point for a lot of people. You know, where ours has a deep mythology. [laughs]

**John:** A very deep mythology. And one of the things I sort of wanted to get into is you guys talk a lot with TV writers. You don’t talk so much about feature writer people. And we mostly talk feature stuff, although we get into some television. But there are things that are just very different about the experience of writing for features and writing for television.

And I want to sort of dig in a little bit on that, partly because sort of selfishly in the way I would sort of talk about my own life, they’ve asked me to come in and run a room on a feature. Basically it’s a feature that’s going to be going into production and they want me to sort of go and sit with a bunch of other writers to work through for a day on that movie.

And usually feature writers are off by themselves and they do things. So we scribble away on our scripts and then we bring them to the executives, or to the studio people, to the director, and talk with them there. But, TV people are dealing with other writers all the time. It’s a different thing for us to do.

You’ve done more writing on features with rooms, right?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, there’s — in comedy you will more typically run into a team situation. It’s not quite like a television room. In sitcom rooms there are a lot of writers. On a comedy usually you’re talking about the director and a writer and then maybe a couple of other people that might be there as producers or helping out.

**Ben:** But when you’re thrown into or hired onto a comedy writer’s room, usually the script already exists, right, and you’re doing some sort of punch-up situation?

**Craig:** No, I mean, well there’s two kinds. I mean, there’s the kind where you write a movie from the start and you do have other people in the room with you that are listening and kicking around ideas.

What you’re talking about I think is more like a roundtable, where I’ll get called for — comedies or non-comedies, it’s both kinds of movies — where they’ll do this thing before they’re going to make a movie they ask seven or eight screenwriters to come and sit in a room. And after they’ve read the screenplay just talk it through in a simulation of what they ought to have been doing themselves as studio executives, but somehow failed to do.

So, we will go in and we’ll help out in that regard. Sometimes it’ll turn also into, like, hey, I’ve heard some alternate ideas, lines of dialogue, and things like that. It used to be that that was all it was. It was just get a bunch of comedy guys in a room and just start pitching jokes.

**John:** And it’s really the punching up. Basically finding other great jokes for these moments. Like what are some other gags? I’ve done those before. I’ve done those with you.

**Craig:** Yeah, but those have kind of… — It’s weird. They’ve sort of fallen out of favor. And it’s kind of evolved into more of a, “Hey, what do you think about the characters, and the plot, and the pacing, and the narrative and the rest of that?” which I think is good because frankly in my experience having gone through these things, there are some jokes and some things you get that are really funny in the moment, but they don’t belong in the movie. Maybe a joke, or two. I’d much rather hear what other writers thought about the characters and stuff like that.

**Ben:** I’m really curious about the first one you described, because I am totally unfamiliar with that for feature writers. I mean, I jokingly often when we have feature writers on the podcast I refer to them as “lonely weirdos” who sit in their rooms by themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ben:** But I didn’t realize that there are rooms —

**Craig:** No, well this is the case where not that lonely weirdos, but we’re still weirdos.

**John:** We’re lonely weirdos sitting together at a room in this hotel for a day to talk though stuff. And what’s fascinating is that so much of the process of breaking any story or figuring something out or solving problems is looking at all of the alternatives behind things. And it can be very useful to have other brains there to do stuff.

What’s odd about it in feature land is ultimately one writer is going to go off and do that again. So, the thing that I’m coming on to do, that screenwriter who wrote the original draft is still going to be there. So, I’m trying to figure out the best way to sort of be supportive of him, of everything that he has done to this point, and also get them to the next stage.

**Ben:** So who else is in the room in this sort of situation?

**John:** So, that’s one of my questions. I don’t know who —

**Ben:** Do you have to put that room together:

**John:** I put that room together. And I’m looking for Craig’s advice on this, too.

**Craig:** Well, you know, when I did the spoof movies with David Zucker, it was David, and Jim Abrahams, and Pat Proft, and myself, and a guy named Phil Dornfeld who is sort of like a younger producer type. And then occasionally we would have another writer named Scott Tomlinson who would come in as well. And then we had a producer, Bob Weiss.

So, there were a lot of writers in the room together. Now, ultimately I ended up writing. And I do think it’s important. Ultimately one person has to end up writing. And you figure out the credits and who is a writer, and who is a producer, and all that. You try and figure that out ahead of time and then don’t care about it, just move it aside.

But, you do need one person kind of focusing it through their keyboard because there needs to be some sort of continuity of style and shape and pace more than anything. Different writers have just different fingerprints of pace. But, that’s how we did those.

Now, that doesn’t really work, I think, on other kinds of movies. I mean, those movies were joke books. What’s the nature of your movie?

**John:** It’s an animated movie. In animation it’s more common that you’re going to see these kind of things happening.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so I remember going up to give a little speech at Pixar. And they were giving a tour around and they were describing this other movie. It’s like, “Yeah, we’re going to do a three-day offsite to work on this one moment at the end of the second act.” And I’m like, I would kill myself if I had to spend that much time looking at one specific little moment. But it’s been incredibly successful for Pixar to have that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ben:** And I would imagine those actually do run more like a TV writer’s room where it is six, seven people and in the room throwing ideas around. Someone is putting it on the board. Someone else is taking notes. And then it goes off to one writer.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, what I found so good about your podcast when you have — recently you had a bunch of TV writers on talking about how different rooms work and how sometimes it’s really everybody together in a room and there’s little magic tiles that they’re moving around, like whiteboard tiles that they’re moving around. And other times it’s people are going off and just coming in and pitching their episodes.

It got me thinking about why do feature writers become these little lonely weirdos, because there’s nothing necessary about it had to be this way. And we’re in a comic book store, so I think it’s actually fun to imagine scenarios where it would all just turn out differently. Sort of like Red Son where Superman has landed in Russia and he was like the Russian hero.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** You haven’t read Red Son?

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** All right.

**Ben:** Someone go get him Red Son.

**John:** Or Marvel Zombies. That’s sort of more your —

**Craig:** Who?

**John:** Who…There are other ways this could have worked. And so I think it may be fun to do some sort of what-if’ing on what would be different if things didn’t become just one screenwriter working on a project at a time. Because there was a studio system. There was a studio system where they had the writer’s room. But I don’t see that as being —

**Craig:** I prefer this way.

**John:** Why?

**Ben:** The weirdo loner working alone?

**Craig:** I prefer the weirdo loner thing, even as somebody that’s worked with other people, I personally prefer the weirdo loner thing. In part because, and it may just be a reflection of how I’m changing as a writer and how I’m writing different things. But I think that it’s very hard to do your most honest work when you don’t have the space, even if it’s temporary space, to write and think whatever you want and to express it however you want. It is the only protected space there is before the wolves come. And when they come it’s just waves and waves of endless wolves. I’m sure there’s a comic book describing this.

But, so I like the idea of I get my one lonely chance. And out of those lonely protected moments, sometimes the most interesting things happen. So, I like that part of it. I also really like then expanding it very incrementally to just writer and director, which I think is a great combination of people.

And then you slightly expand to a producer, if you trust that producer, you know. So, I’m not in any rush to get back into a big room to be honest. Maybe because I’ve done it a lot.

**John:** But let’s take the counterpoint here. Like let’s assume that the writers were getting together and were working on things. Maybe part of the reason why it works in television is television is fundamentally writer-driven. And so if writers work together on making features, if there was a group of writers working it, isn’t it possible there’d be a writing showrunner who is really sort of behind the scenes, the powerful person there?

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, the thing is that in television the format, the requirement to create multiple episodes of something with a continuity between characters and basic idea essentially suggests that there was a mastermind who wrote a pilot and now they are instructing craftspeople to make versions of it, knockoffs essentially. That’s what episodes are. And for movies that is the pilot. It’s a one episode TV show. That’s what a movie is.

And, look, I give my scripts to my friends and I have them read them and I get great feedback from them, but that’s different than sort of putting together a group of feature writers. I mean, we type things up —

**John:** Is Marvel essentially doing that, though? You look at essentially the Marvel series and sort of how that universe is being sort of combined and sort of managed, it does feel like it’s a writer-driven —

**Ben:** And there is certainly — Kevin Feige is the showrunner of the Marvel universe of movies.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Yes.

**Ben:** But then you have two guys who are in charge of Captain America and two guys who are in charge of Iron Man.

**Craig:** Yeah. And what will happen in features is that sometimes they’ll create a writing room in sequence as opposed to in parallel. So, very powerful producers who have a stamp on the material because they own the underlying material that’s valuable or they just have a sensibility. We’re talking about Jerry Bruckheimer or Kevin Feige and Marvel, they can kind of plug in and plug out writers as they wish because ultimately they are possessing some kind of master plan of there will be this many Pirates movies and this many…

But, you still want Markus and McFeely to have their private moment as a shared high of mind unit where they go, “Okay, now I’m going to make something. But we’re not going to have a room full of people sitting with us while we do it.” That room will come, but I like that. I like my private little…

**John:** So, David Goyer is a person in the DC universe who is doing I think probably the most of that kind of organization of things. So, you have Constantine which is, you know, a DC property which has sort of all the magic using kind of people there. You have the crossovers between the movies. There’s that sense of, you know, distantly reaching for something where they can be sort of combined.

But I wonder if you can apply this to things beyond just these giant super movie tent poles. I just wonder if there is, you know, back in the days of United Artists where, you know, I wonder if there is a writer-driven studio that could actually run that way.

**Ben:** I don’t know that it needs necessarily to be writer-driven, although having only worked in television I can say that I think there is something incredibly valuable about the collaboration that comes from eight smart people in a room, even if there are only six and two are duds. Still, eight smart people in a room putting together this thing, because ultimately one person does go off and take it and make it his own.

That said, by the time that person — or at least in my experience, by the time that person goes off to take that episode, which I love the idea of it’s just a knockoff of episode one, it’s broken within an inch of its life.

**Craig:** Sure.

**Ben:** You know, there’s very little imagination there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Ben:** But, the imagination you do get to do, which is how do these two characters talk to each other, or what do they specifically say to each other —

**Craig:** Right.

**Ben:** Is really fun. And I think the reason that TV has developed this way, obviously, is it’s practical. You need to do — it’s a moving train.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a churn in television that is remarkable and that beast must be fed. And there is simply no time to allow any individual to kind of wander off the reservation.

**Ben:** But it reminds me of this thing I’ve been hearing about a lot lately where the group mind is smarter than the individual, no matter how smart the individual is.

**John:** The wisdom of crowds.

**Ben:** Yeah. Exactly. And I’ve been hearing too much about it lately. But, you know, look at all of the great television we’ve had in the past five years.

**Craig:** Yeah. But now let me rebut. Not a huge fan of crowds, or as I call them, mobs.

Yes, crowds can be very smart and often if you’re looking for efficiency crowds will deliver you efficiency. What they don’t deliver you is the bizarre and they don’t deliver you the unexpected or the surprising. In fact, they’re designed to suppress that. When you’re talking about say a show like Breaking Bad or Mad Men, these are outliers coming from people who were outliers, creating something that frankly shouldn’t have worked and just kind of did to everyone’s surprise.

And a lot of times people make things that should work and do work, except that nobody watches them, which is a shame. But Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad in every sense of the word. The people that wrote for him were essentially servicing his vision and doing so brilliantly. There were great writers — Moira Walley-Beckett, and Tom Schnauz. These are terrific writers. But he made that, you know.

And that you don’t get from a crowd. You’ll never get from a crowd.

**Ben:** Let me rebut.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** No.

**Ben:** Vince did make that, but arguably he just set a template for that where he could then bring in brilliant people to play in that playground. You know, he had a plan to get from A to B but he didn’t know how he was going to get there. And it takes that group mind to come up with the —

**Craig:** Absolutely. I’m not suggesting that… — The people who write on a show write on a show. They create moments that Vince would not have created on his own. No question. I don’t mean to take anything away from them. All I mean to say is that there is a prime mover in the Aristotelian sense. And you can’t get the prime mover from a group. You can only get it from an individual.

So, if you look at the history of Apple, the people that were working on the Mac, I mean, some of the most amazing people, brilliant people who each brought something incredibly vital. But there was a prime mover. And we can argue about which one it was.

**Ben:** I absolutely agree.

**Craig:** Team Wozniak.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** But I guess that’s my point is that there is a time and place for groups, but I wouldn’t let them encroach into the area of innovation, because ultimately they’re not well tuned for that.

**Ben:** Yeah. You don’t want a group writing a pilot, because that’s going to be a pretty shitty pilot.

**Craig:** That would be bad, yeah.

**Ben:** Yeah.

**John:** That would be challenging. But my question for us is then could a J.J. Abrams or a Joss Whedon or a Vince Gilligan make movies the way you make television, essentially oversee the writers making things? Is there a reason why that couldn’t work?

**Craig:** I think there is, yeah. Because there is a self-contained story and even in writer’s rooms where people can pitch in on one story, then they go off and they write their story. This is one story. And at some point you’re going to end up with this patchwork.

**John:** But I wonder if we’re essentially — so many of the movies that we encounter have multiple writers on them except they work sequentially. And if you honestly had hired those writers at the same time and sat them down together and had them work, solve these problems together, you might end up with a movie that you would not have sort of the mind of Frankenstein so much.

**Craig:** It’s possible. But also when you’re writing with people what happens is there’s a natural kindness that is sometimes a bad thing. Okay, well we’re not going to just simply steamroll over your ideas; let’s figure out how to work together as a team. When you work in succession, you come in, you’re like, “All right. I’m just getting rid of huge chunks of this. I don’t like it. I’m going to replace it with something that is not only different but thematically consistent with everything else I’m going to write.” So, there is a wholeness to it.

You’re right, though. Once a studio goes down the line of hiring the 12th writer to work on a little piece, they have essentially created the writing room.

**John:** But without letting the writers talk to each other.

**Craig:** Correct. And that’s a terrible thing.

**John:** And so that’s why when I get brought in on a project, one of the first things that I try to do is talk to the original writer and the most recent writers to say like, “What is actually going on here? And is there stuff that is back there that was actually better that’s been buried underneath all of this stuff? And I see the crazy decisions in the script. Tell me why this is here, because this doesn’t make sense.” And it’s generally like that was one executive’s pet thing that had to sort of stay in there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so much of what gets screwed up in features right now I think is because there weren’t writers talking to each other from the very start.

**Craig:** I agree.

**Ben:** Without burning bridges, can you think of instances where you have had that conversation and had something illuminated that you could then bring out in the draft that you were hired to do?

**John:** Let’s think about that. I’m trying to think of which ones won’t be upset that I say it.

Well, very classically — oh, actually the second Charlie’s Angels is a great example. The second Charlie’s Angels, the short version of the first Charlie’s Angels, I wrote that for Drew and then McG came on board and we started shooting. And shortly before we started production one of the producers came to me and said like, “We really want to do a roundtable with a bunch of writers to do a comedy punch up.” And I said absolutely not. Over my dead body will you do this. And they did it anyway and I was not happy.

So, I left the movie but I was busy doing other things, and 12 writers did come in and did like a day’s work here, a day’s work here, a day’s work here. But it’s because we had a cast that was very demanding. There were a lot of moving pieces. And everybody was — all the writers who worked on it are friends. They’re lovely and everything turned out great. And then I came back in and like really cleaned up a lot of stuff at the end.

To do the sequel to Charlie’s Angels, first off I went to each sort of party member and said, “Okay, last time was crazy. Let’s not be crazy this time. And specifically let’s not do all the things you do in a sequel. So, let’s not have Cameron dancing in every scene. Let’s be tasteful — ”

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** “Let’s do some playful, teasing sexuality, but not like gratuitous sex stuff.”

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** And so there was a list of things and I made each of these people like sign the bottom saying like we’re not going to do these things. And it became the checklist of things we ended up doing, because it happens in a sequel.

**Craig:** I like that — some of those were good, though.

**John:** The writer handoff thing, at a certain point I just couldn’t take it anymore. And so Simon Kindberg came in and did some work. And the Wibberleys came in and did some work. And that’s how I actually met the Wibberleys, who are great friends now, was when they called me and said like, “What the hell is going on here?” I was like, let me tell you what’s going on here. And that was actually a great experience. All of us became friends because we were working on this train wreck of a movie and trying to make it not be so crazy.

So, even when we were recording the DVD commentary for the sequel, the Wibbs and I, we were trying to figure out what is the deal with the ring there. Like how did the ring end up happening? It was from your draft? We had no idea sort of how some of these things got into the movie.

Had we all been together in the room at the start, you know, some of the same problems would have probably happened, because people are crazy, but I think there also would have been — I think the writers as a whole would have been more powerful because there would have been more of us together united. That’s my hunch.

**Ben:** I want to make sure we have time for questions from the audience. You guys have questions? So, I’m going to ask these guys at least one more question. While I do that I want you all to make a lot of noise and if you have a question come up and stand by this black pole right here. And we will get to as many questions as we can.

So, what I want to ask you guys, and I don’t know that this has been addressed on Scriptnotes — and tell me if it has and I’ll just go listen to that instead of answering — do you guys like writing? Do you enjoy the writing process?

**John:** No, I don’t. I generally don’t. I really don’t like it. And I will do whatever I can to avoid writing. I love having written. I love like, “Oh, look at this thing I wrote. I want to read that again. That’s awesome!” But, no —

**Ben:** That is like the dirty secret of writers, by the way. We like to write — read the stuff that we wrote.

**John:** But I do like to imagine — I like the imagination of it all. And so it’s really fun to be looping the scene in my head. I’m like, oh, that’s really fun. But then to actually get it down and get it perfect on the page is a lot of work. And it’s because it’s a thousand decisions and each word you choose in that sentence, it’s like what’s the next word? Well, that’s ten more thousand choices for the next thing. So, it’s really taxing and nobody likes that. It’s exhausting.

**Craig:** Yes. I mean, I hate starting writing. Hate it. Every day when I start I hate it. I’ll do almost anything to not start writing. But if I know in my mind what I’m supposed to write and I have some clarity and I finally start writing, somewhere after the nausea begins to fade I do slip into this very lovely state, fugue state. I don’t know, whatever you want to call it.

**John:** There’s flow. And sometimes flow happens and it’s great. Like when you’re in that, oh, I can just keep going, and going, and going.

**Craig:** And I do really like that.

**Ben:** Can you maintain that?

**Craig:** Well, for a bit. You know, you can maintain it for a bit. And usually it’s connected to the idea of a sequence, which is one of the things we’ve been talking about with trying to reimagine the screenplay format, because it has nothing to do with location. It’s about sequence. And when you’re in the sequence and you’re watching that sequence you are experiencing on some very bone level what you want the audience to experience, which is tension, and confusion, and then realization, and relief, or sadness. Whatever the hell it is. But you get into there and you do it. And it is very nice.

I like that part. I just hate starting.

**John:** Yeah. When you’re really in flow it sort of feels like you’re not actually writing stuff down, but you’re erasing — the words were already there and you’re just erasing the stuff that was over them. It’s like, oh, the words were already there and you have like one of those magic pens that reveals what was actually there. That’s when it’s the best.

That doesn’t always happen and you can’t sit around waiting for that to happen because it just won’t.

**Craig:** You’ve just got to start.

**Ben:** So, yeah, what are your methods for kick-starting? Is it just writing garbage?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. No garbage. My method are just you loop the scene until you —

**Craig:** How dare you. [laughs]

**John:** You loop the scene until you see it. And then I do what is called a scribble version. And so it’s not garbage, but it’s the quickest, dirtiest version of what it looks like, often just handwritten down so that I get this looped version in some sort of memorable form. And then you start to make the better version of that, so you’re polishing that idea.

So, the scribble version is often just the dialogue and enough of the action to sort of show what is there so you can piece together.

**Ben:** Handwriting, it sounds really invaluable, too, because it’s so temporary, right? You know you’re not committing to this thing because it’s not going in your document —

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t handwrite anything. My hands don’t even work anymore.

**Ben:** Sorry. How do you kick-start? How do you get through that nausea at the beginning?

**Craig:** You just do. You do it. This is the discipline. It’s a job. People are paying you, or you wish to be paid one day. You have a wife or a husband. You have children, or a dog. You’ve got mortgage or rent. This is what adults do.

And so I’ve had this discussion with my son a number of times about his homework and it’s not always — we don’t always get to do what we want to do. And there are rewards for getting through an initial pain. And I know that those rewards are greater than the avoidance of that initial pain. I just have to do it. And then you do it. And it never goes away, so make your peace with it.

**Ben:** And very quickly before we get to these questions, another just quick process thing. Do you listen to music when you write? Do you listen to anything when you write?

**John:** I generally don’t listen to music while I’m writing, but when I start on a project, when I’m sort of putting it all together I will make myself sort of the soundtrack of what that project sounds like. So, in iTunes I’ll put together all the tracks that sort of remind me of it. It’s just a good way of kicking your brain into thinking, oh, I’m writing a movie that would have this soundtrack and that’s really helpful.

But rarely do I actually have that music playing while I’m writing stuff.

**Craig:** I will if I’m writing something that is specifically without dialogue. It’s an action sequence or just a bit of expository. Like, I have the scene in the Cowboy Ninja Viking where we’re sort of drifting through this abandoned hospital. And there’s a great song by Pink Floyd called If. And so I would just play it while I was writing. I sort of had it on loop while I was writing because that’s what I want to be in the movie, you know.

That’s nice. But never — if people are talking in the scene, why would I want music on? I can’t hear them.

**John:** Yeah.

**Ben:** All right. Let’s get some questions here.

**Action Details:** First off, thanks for being awesome.

**Ben:** You’re welcome.

**Action Details:** Mostly there. So, I had a quick question —

**Ben:** This is my house.

**Action Details:** I wanted to talk to you a little bit about action sequences. I know neither one of you are really specifically action guys, but I’m thinking of something like The Bourne Identity where you’ve got a character that’s responding to his situation and the geography of the position that he or she is in. You can get really bogged down on like, oh, here’s how this building looks, and here’s how these stairs go. What’s the kind of percentage that you go to with how you’re explaining the action and how you’re explaining the surroundings as well?

And how do you not fall into the pitfall of like, oh, then there’s 27 steps, and then he goes around the, you know?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, there’s a YouTube video I did where I took an action scene and rewrote it sort of real time to sort of show sort of how I would do that on the thing. Because you’re exactly right. Your instincts are right that you need to create this sense of what it feels like without being so specific and pedantic about every little detail.

If you’re trying to track every punch thrown it’s just going to be awful. So, you need to be in a weird way poetic about what the fight feels like, what the action sequence feels like, and let the people who are actually going to do it figure out what that is. I mean, always remember that a screenplay should give you the sense of watching a movie, but it doesn’t have to give you every last little detail. The same way you’re not describing every bit of costume. You’re not describing every bit of an action sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah. I try and apply — because I’ve been writing more action lately. And I try and apply a need-to-know basis rule. What does the reader need to know so that they can make sense of the scene. The important parts of the scene, the only important part of an action scene are the choices that the hero is making in relation to the action that reflects on who they are and how they are changing, growing, defying something, beating — whatever it is.

That’s what we’re connecting to. We’re much less, when we’re reading a script, we’re much less interested in how gorgeous that car pirouette is, because we can’t quite see it. So, need-to-know. I need to have a general sense of geography. I don’t want people to not have any idea where this person is. And I need to really key in on the moments where choices are made and I need to support those choices with the information that clarifies them to the reader. All that matters is that you’re getting your dramatic intention across.

I guarantee you, you already know what is essential. And you already know what isn’t. Now, we sometimes — we like to play with our Legos and get all get all excited about the building. Just concentrate on your dramatic intention. I think the rest of the stuff will fall away.

**Action Details:** I thank you all of you for doing your podcasts.

**John:** Thanks.

**Craig:** Oh, thank you.

**Killing Babies:** In the first part of this podcast you were talking about how as feature writers you go into writer’s rooms sometimes like on television. You have television writers how sometimes they have to kill that baby for the sake of a story. But as guys who are going to rewrite features, sometimes not even talking to the guy who wrote the original draft, sometimes you have to kill someone else’s baby whether you like it or not.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**Killing Babies:** Do you sometimes struggle with that decision where this guy wrote something amazing but for my vision of this it doesn’t work?

**John:** Yes. The answer is absolutely yes. Sometimes you will recognize that there was intention, this person had this vision of the movie and these moments happen in their version of this movie, but that movie is not going to get made. No one is making that movie. They’re trying to make this movie and this movie is going to have these needs and it’s now this way.

And it can be based on who the director was, what the casting is, what the studio is, what other movies are out there. There are some reasons that have happened why that other movie isn’t getting made. And so that’s why I try to reach out to the original writer to let them know that I’m on their side. I’m not a contract killer in here to do something terrible. It’s just that that’s the reality of where we’re at.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always talk to the prior writer. I wouldn’t necessarily say I’m on their side, because I’m kind of not. I mean, I’m on the movie’s side.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where you are.

**Craig:** And there are times when there’s something in their script that I really love, and I really work and work to try and keep it in there until I realize it’s just not fitting anymore, you know. And so I try and be respectful of anything that I think is going to be good. And if it’s not, then it’s not. And I have to give myself the opportunity to make that choice. And should it come to pass that somebody then comes in after me, well, they’ll be doing the same thing.

So, yeah, it sucks. What are you going to do?

**John:** I like that you say you’re on the movie’s side. You’re also on the audience’s side. And you’re really looking at like I’m imagining this final vision of the movie and I’m sitting in the theater watching it. What is the best experience for that audience member? And you’re as responsible to that person as you are to the writer, or to the director, or anybody else.

**Multiple Partners:** Thanks John and Craig. My question is about —

**John:** And Ben.

**Multiple Partners:** My bad. Thanks Ben.

**Craig:** His name is Ben.

**Multiple Partners:** My question is really about we have so little writers and writing partners. In the music world you have people that have multiple projects. You know, they’ll play drums in one band and they sing in another band and they have multiple things. And I find myself in that situation in screenwriting where I have multiple projects. I have writing partners that are very different and I also have a solo project. Is this common? Is this something you see happening? What are some implications for this?

**Craig:** It’s not common.

**John:** But I think it could become more common.

**Craig:** It could. Look, you always have to be weary of dilettantism, you know, of sort of — I’m the sort of person that just likes to snack on lots of little things. And the new is always exciting. New men are exciting. New women are exciting. It’s always exciting, right?

So, you know, you can get caught up in the new shiny thing and suddenly you realize I’ve got 12 things that are all 20% done. I think that writing takes extraordinary focus, even bad writing takes extraordinary focus. If you find that you are finishing things and you find that you are in productive relationships and you’re able to balance them all, god bless you. If you don’t, then I think you need to consider cutting back and focusing, because it is a rare person that can handle multiple relationships and multiple projects, a little bit like multiple families with multiple children. It’s super hard. You’ve got to lie to the one wife. You’re on the road. You call the one the wrong name. Dude, it’s a mess.

**John:** I think your band analogy is actually really interesting, too. Because a band, yes, it can make an album. But an album is a lesser period of time than writing a whole screenplay. It’s a more contained process. But also it’s really performing. You’re out there entertaining people. So, I know funny people who are in multiple comedy groups and that’s great. That makes a lot of sense, because they’re dropping in. It’s all about that live performance and doing stuff together.

But really writing, especially writing something as long as a feature, I think you’re not going to be able to do your best work on all those projects simultaneously. You’re going to have to make some choices. But I will say in general I think there are going to be more cases where writers are teamed up with different people on different things and that’s going to be really confusing and complicated for the Writers Guild stuff which really perceives things like you’re a team or you’re not a team. And they want you to sort of be one or the other.

**Ben:** Are you writing just features?

**Multiple Partners:** Features and television.

**Ben:** Yeah. Because as soon as that television pilot sells that you wrote with one partner, that’s your partner on television stuff.

**John:** You’re married.

**Ben:** They’re pretty specific about that.

**Craig:** True. True.

**Multiple Partners:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Cool shirt.

**John:** Great shirt.

**Team Umbrage:** Oh, thank you. Actually I identify more with Team Umbrage, but orange looks horrible with my skin complexion.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m with you, man. I get it. I feel the same way. You realize that I got screwed on that, right? I mean, you know that I got screwed.

**Team Umbrage:** All right. Well, I guess I have two questions if I may. But the first one is that you often, Craig, mention that you ruminate a lot in the shower and you think a lot about —

**Craig:** That’s a word.

**Team Umbrage:** You know where this is going, right? No, but I guess my question is what does your water bill look like?

**Craig:** It’s substantial.

**Team Umbrage:** Substantial, yeah. I figured.

Okay, no, but actually I have a serious question. So, we talk a lot about film and television and as someone who writes specs mostly, or at least that’s my experience, I can imagine, what features look like, or like what that process, like the lonely writer process.

But anyway with television, to me it’s just like I can’t imagine what it’s like. So, if you guys could — like if you were Vince Gilligan, just to narrow the scope here, right, and you’re writing Breaking Bad and you’re the mastermind of this first episode, the pilot episode. But then like do you have an outline for what’s going to happen in the next five seasons? And you show that to the executives and they’re like, okay, we like this first episode, and we like this outline. Or is it more like we just create this episode and then it’s over?

**Craig:** No, you generally do need to provide them — I mean, there are different words for it. Sometimes they call it a bible, a show bible. In order to purchase a show, unless you are Vince, which I honestly think they would just give him a blank check. But if you’re just a regular person and you’re trying to sell them on a show and you have a script for the pilot, they’re also going to want to know from you — prove to me at least with some summaries that this is actually a show you could write many, many episodes of. Because we’re not in the business, I mean, even in basic cable we need episodes. We need episodes to sell. And certainly in network their goal is 100.

So, you need to be able to prove to them that you have multiple story ideas that will, in fact, pour out of this concept. And you need to give them a general sense of the arcs of the characters over the — I mean, sometimes they even ask you for up to two seasons worth. I mean, they understand that at that point you’re just lying anyway, [laughs], but the point is at least, okay, in theory you can write this — you can write a whole mess of episodes based on this concept. You will need to show that.

**John:** Jordan Mechner and I did a pilot called Ops for Fox and we ended up writing two separate pilots because of changes in regimes and things. But on the website you can also see the documents we turned in with those, because that actually shows the other sort of episode summaries of like other future episodes. Because it wasn’t a heavily serialized show, but they needed to see like what kind of things were going to happen week after week.

So, had we actually gotten to series we weren’t committed to like those would have to be those episodes. They just needed a sense of what was going to be possible. Had we sort of gotten the series order we would have brought writers in and we would have really broken stuff apart and board what we wanted to do, but they need to know what else is possible there and sort of what directions you’re heading into.

**Ben:** And I would add, maybe this goes without saying, but it needs to be evident from your pilot that this series can have more than just a pilot. They need to know what episodes two through 99 look like.

**Team Umbrage:** Okay. Thank you.

**Ben:** I would also add —

**John:** I would also listen to Ben’s podcast, because they talk about this a lot.

**Ben:** That’s what I was going to add.

**Team Umbrage:** Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**Pitching:** Hi guys. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about pitching and more about going in and pitching on something that a lot of writers are going in and they want to see who has the best take. Or if you have an original idea as opposed to a spec, going in and saying, “Hey, what about doing something like this?” I don’t know if that’s how it works or whatever.

**Craig:** It can.

**John:** It can. It can. So, classically a pitch is really that second thing. You would think a pitch would be like I have this great idea for a movie and so I’m going and I’m pitching it and so I’m setting up the whole everything in this.

The sweepstakes pitching is more what you’re describing in that first scenario which is where you have — there’s a project that’s out there, so an adaptation of a book, an existing property, Slinkies, or some sort of like — “We’re going to make the Slinky movie. Come in and pitch us a take on the Slinky movie.”

And that happens. And so you have to decide, like, am I going to be one of the 15 writers going in on the Slinky pitch and that’s really tough? Because how am I going to differentiate my pitch from every other pitch. How are they going to remember mine versus the other one?

The very first thing I, my paid writing job, was kind of that situation, though. It was a book called How to Eat Fried Worms. And it was by Thomas Rockwell. And it was me versus all of these really funny Simpsons writers with their funny Simpsons episodes. And my writing samples for this was the Natural Born Killers novelization and a romantic tragedy, so I was like the worst person going into it.

But everyone was pitching their things, and so I brought in worms. And it felt very stunty, but I really wanted people to remember like this is what we’re actually talking about. It’s like taking worms out of the dirt and eating those. I didn’t eat them in the room; I wasn’t that gross.

But, I was going in there and I spent weeks working on that pitch and I could have not gotten it. And that’s really the danger of sweepstakes pitching is you have a bunch of writers spending a tremendous amount of time and almost none of them are going to be working on it.

**Ben:** What did that pitch actually look like? You come in, you throw down a box of worms. But how did the pitch actually sound? Do you remember?

**John:** Every pitch should have the spirit of I just saw an amazing movie and let me tell you what it’s like. And this is sort of what happens. And when you try to convince your best friend to see a movie you’re not going to tell them every detail. You’re going to really set up the world. You’re going to set up the main characters, sort of how it all begins, the complications along the way, and then you’re going to wrap it up nicely.

And so after establishing the world, the tone, I described sort of how the world — we were showing the movie from sort of a three-foot tall point of view rather than a five-foot tall point of view. Just that sense like it’s not adults looking down at it. It’s all from this side and adults are sort of a little bit above everything else.

I described that and then I also — then I dumped out the worms on a plate a brought so they could writhe around and people could see like “and this is what we’re sort of getting into are these worms.” And talked them through the beats. But I did it like three times for different executives and things like that. I only brought the worms once.

**Craig:** Pitching is — sometimes you pitch an original idea. It’s rare that they will hear new writers pitching original ideas because they just don’t want to waste their time because 99.999 out of whatever that number is, it just won’t be very good. At least that’s what they think.

But you will, yeah, there are times when you have to go pitch on a job. The only thing I can add to what John said, because it was all very good, very insightful and very good advice, is that people respond to things that they don’t tell you they’re responding to. They’ll tell you that they respond to story and content. What they’re actually responding to is passion and your ability to inspire confidence in them and comfort them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That’s — and they can’t tell you that because then they — it’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it? But that’s what they respond to. And so part of the game for you is to figure out what you are passionate, where the passion is for you in your pitch. And push that.

And then also to understand how to be comforting to a person who has to spend a lot of money on something they cannot control but for which they will be held accountable.

**Ben:** Just like we had talked about, you know, people can tell when there’s passion in a script. If you can make them feel something with that pitch, that goes a long way.

**Craig:** It does. It does.

**Expectations:** Hi, okay.

**Craig:** You should have let her touch them.

**Ben:** I am married!

**Expectations:** I have a question. I just started with “I.” Wow.

**Craig:** By the way, everyone did. I don’t know if you noticed that. Everyone did.

**Expectations:** So, it’s about an episode, the one with Mike Birbiglia, and I sort of had a follow up. I was just listening to that recently about having that one moment that you’re working toward that as the writer you’re the only one who knows what that is. And my question was sort of about expectations and how that plays in. And how often when you’re writing are you actually thinking about that moment in your head and whether or not it’s important if that moment is satisfying the expectations of the audience or completely defying the expectations.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Well, it depends on what the moment is. But there are times when you have a twist. A big reveal. A thing that recontextualizes everything that comes before it. And you need to be sure that as a craftsperson that you are leading the audience precisely where you need them to be in a way that retroactively makes sense and also then you go, oh my god, everything is not — I realize now that it’s like one of those things, am I looking at the old woman or the young woman depending, you know, it’s the optical illusion. You need to have both that somehow function at the same time.

However, there are times when you realize, you know, I built a little too much into this twist for what it’s revealing. That in fact I’m kind of losing some good story meat here because I’m playing hide the ball so much.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you have to kind of evaluate on a case-by-case basis. And sometimes it’s okay to say, “I’m going to kind of give that away,” because the valuable part of it isn’t that it’s recontextualizing anything. The valuable part of it is that somebody is starting to catch onto something but is going to be in denial that it’s true.

These choices are up to you. There’s no one answer. It’s good that you’re thinking about it. I think that’s what you have to do is really make sure that you are thinking about that twist and that it makes sense and is valuable for your script because if it isn’t, oh my god, you got to get rid of it.

**John:** The real challenge of all writing is you know what’s going to happen next and you have to at the same time not know what’s going to happen next. And so you have to be able to read the story and experience the story without any sense of what’s coming down the road.

So, in general expectation is your best friend because people will approach a story with a set of expectations about the genre, about the kind of thing this is. And because they have those expectations you get a lot of things for free. So, if you’re writing a western you don’t have to explain horses and saddles and cattle. Like all that stuff just comes for free. Or even that the railroad is trouble. We get all that. You only have to do the work to explain what’s different in your world, and that’s if the railroad people are the good people in your world, you have to sort of do that work.

But expectation can also help you with surprise. And so all the things that you get for free with those expectations, sometimes you can use this to your advantage to actually like pull a surprise. And you get one or two or maybe three surprises in a script where like no one saw that coming. But if you did that all the time people would lose trust in you. People would be like, “I don’t know what this is. I give up.” That’s a really careful thing to balance.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s about making — and when I say twist I didn’t mean to imply that everything, or just the big moment where you know that this person is going to get run over by a car. It’s not a twist. It’s an event. But that when you pervert the audience’s expectations, that you’re doing so meaningfully. And then you, having shattered their trust in your storytelling, in a good way, now give them the replacement that should ideally be better. Writing those kinds of things, that’s good advanced screenwriting stuff. And people blow it all the time.

So, don’t blow it. [laughs]

**Ben:** We have time for one more.

**Research:** Can you guys talk about doing research when you’re inspired for a project? Do you look to other movies? Do you look to articles on the internet? And can you talk about when you’re just looking at Wikipedia articles and you’re going on a sink hole versus actually, you know, finding out information that’s relevant?

**John:** Yeah. Research is a great way to sort of waste time and not write. It’s a really great time, because it feels like you’re working — I’m doing research, but I’m actually just sort of in a Wikipedia K-hole. But I will say what’s great about research and the reason why I never farm off research on somebody else is because that process of researching is sort of creating the questions in my head that I sort of want to answer. And it’s leading me down all these paths, making me think of stuff, or just the weird turns of phrase that I find there are great, or that random image I stumbled across, that no one would know, would click for me, are really, really useful.

So, research is fantastic when it’s helpful. But it’s just so easy to make that a distraction like, oh, before I start this scene I need to watch the whole Godfather trilogy again. Well, that’s a great way to not write.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, if you want to jerk off, just jerk off, you know. Right?

**Ben:** Right. That’s how we end every podcast.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the official, this is it.

**Ben:** Talking about it.

**John:** [laughs] Oh no!

**Craig:** Oh. Um. Research to me is something that I do in the moment. I don’t usually let a story be led by research, rather the other way around. So, I’m writing something and I think, okay, I need a cool place. I need like a really interesting slummy place that I haven’t seen before that’s dangerous, but I want it to be in Europe. Where’s the weird slum in Northern Europe? And I’ll just start looking around. So, that’s good, but it’s purposeful and it’s goal-oriented. It’s a very specific thing that I need to satisfy. And then, okay, I’ve got my answer and off I go.

You know, maybe early on in a project you can kind of give yourself a week or two to do research if it’s that kind of movie, but I think John is write. Usually people are just stalling. Don’t be a staller.

**John:** Because this is a crossover episode, we’re going to cut this part short so we can move over to yours.

**Ben:** We have more time.

**John:** Well, I’m excited to do this. So, let’s do this.

**Craig:** Don’t get in his way, man.

**Ben:** You know what we didn’t get to do? You didn’t get to plug your live show.

**John:** That’s what I’m going to do right now.

**Ben:** I’m so excited for it, John.

**John:** It’s very, very exciting. So, you people are the first people except for the people who heard it yesterday — you are the first people to hear about our next live show. And so the Writers Guild Foundation came to Craig and I and said like, “Hey, how about you do another live show?” And we said that sounds great. And like how about we use the little room at the WGA theater at the WGA building. And Craig said…

**Craig:** No, I hate that room.

**John:** And what do you say about that room?

**Craig:** It’s the multi-purpose room.

**John:** The multi-purpose room, yeah. Craig said it’s where dreams go to die.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, it is the most institutional, dead room. It’s got that pediatrician office carpet. It’s like a slightly melted square. It’s the worst. You cannot enjoy or experience any vitality in that room. Well done, WGA. Well done.

**John:** So Craig said hell no, but like in every good negotiation by saying no sometimes you get them to come back and they like, “Well, but what if…” And so they’re giving us the big WGA theater in Beverly Hills. And so we are having that on May 15, which is a Thursday.

**Craig:** Now we’ve got to fill that thing.

**John:** Yeah. We’re going to fill that thing. Don’t worry about that.

**Craig:** He always thinks we’re going to fill everything. He’s amazing.

**John:** I’m the optimist of the podcast.

**Ben:** You guys will all be there, right? They’ll come.

**John:** Well, I think you’re going to come when you know our special guest. So, our guest —

**Craig:** This crowd might appreciate these —

**Ben:** You guys have 10 more minutes for plugs, right?

**John:** Yeah. So, we’re billing this as Scriptnotes, the Summer Superhero Spectacular, because our guests are Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely of Captain America and Thor.

**Ben:** Oh, listen to them on the Nerdist Writers Panel next week everyone.

**John:** Don’t listen to that show, no. Listen to them live!

**Craig:** If you guys want like a lesser experience of those people, fine.

**Ben:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** If you want the real, you know —

**Ben:** If you want them raw you go to the Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** But also…

**John:** But also David Goyer of Batman movies, the Batman Versus Superman.

**Craig:** We’ve got Marvel and DC clashing.

**Ben:** That’s a crossover!

**John:** it is a crossover episode live on stage. By the way, they also have the Superman movie and the Captain America movie are scheduled for like the same weekend, so we’re going to solve that on the stage and get that all sorted out. So, that’s going to be done and dealt with. And you know what it’s done and dealt with? Because the writers got together and figured it out. And that’s what we’re saying —

**Craig:** I’m going to get those guys to punch. You guys show up, I swear I will get them to fight.

**John:** I think there should be some whole-hand boxing is really —

**Craig:** Have you guys ever seen David Goyer or Markus or McFeely? That fight could go on for hours because there’s no upper body strength there. It could be so entertaining, just like a constant this. I’m going to get them to fight. Or, now apparently they’re going to fight me.

**John:** Yeah. We’re also going to do our Three Page Challenge, but live. So, we will be going through the three pages. We will have those people up on stage. We will tell them what we thought. They will tell us what they were actually planning to do. So, it will be terrifying. We’re going to have a special guest judge up there with us to help us out.

**Ben:** Is it me?

**Craig:** Who’s that?

**John:** It’s a surprise.

**Ben:** It’s not me.

**Craig:** Did you tell me?

**John:** No, I…

**Craig:** Oh, you haven’t figured it out yet.

**John:** But we’re going to have somebody awesome up on stage with us.

**Ben:** I’m available you guys.

**Craig:** Hey, Ben, I’m sorry. John is talking.

**Ben:** That’s fine.

**John:** And there’s one more thing. So, we’re going to do a cocktail party beforehand. So, there’s going to be a cocktail party, so if you guys want to come join us for that, there’s a special ticket you can get for that. It’s like a very limited number. Aline Brosh McKenna is hosting that for us.

**Craig:** Yes she is.

**John:** So that’s going to be great. So come. Tickets go on sale for all of this this Thursday, April 17th. Yes, Thursday April 17, 10am.

Last time we had troubles with people and time and stuff like that. So, it’s Thursday the 17th at 10am is the live show.

**Ben:** We will all be there.

**John:** All right. So…

**Craig:** That’s almost true.

**John:** So, Ben, we have a thing on our show. You don’t have any rituals really on your show.

**Ben:** No, we always end the show in the same way.

**John:** Maybe I never made it to the end.

**Ben:** You never made it to the end?

**Craig:** I didn’t even know you had a show until today!

**Ben:** Craig, you’re going to see some fisticuffs.

**Craig:** Awesome! Oh, this could take awhile, too.

**Ben:** You guys do your thing first. I still haven’t thought of anything.

**John:** All right. So, we do One Cool Thing. So, my One Cool Thing feels especially appropriate for the space that we’re in because it is a book called Alternative Movie Posters by Matthew Chojnacki. And it is really a great book. So, I love when people go back and retroactively make a poster for a movie that I love and just go a completely different style. And so this is a book of those.

I love that idea so much that I actually started a Tumblr called Unsheets that I kept updated for like three weeks and then just sort of gave up on. But this guy fortunately made a whole book. And so now I can feel free not to do it. It’s a really great book of just amazing posters. Of course, a thousand versions of The Shining, but other really great things, too.

**Craig:** There’s always versions of The Shining. This isn’t related to the Polish One Sheets is it, because have you seen those?

**John:** Yeah, they’re great.

**Craig:** Unbelievable. So disturbing.

**John:** There’s also African One Sheets where they just make crazy posters for movies that are nothing like the actual movie.

What’s your One Cool Thing, Craig?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is this app, Entrain.

I hate jet lag. I’m becoming obsessed with how much I hate jet lag. I don’t want to travel anymore. I don’t even want to go — I’ll go north and south now. That’s it. And partly I hate it because of jet lag. And the scientists have figured out this method. I mean, they’ve always kind of known the best way to trick your body out of jet lag as quickly as you can and it has to do with not only when you should be exposing yourself to light and not, but also when you are exposing yourself to light in your normal day.

So, there’s this app called Entrain. It’s free. And basically you plug in where you are, when you normally wake up, when you normally go to bed, where you’re going, and it also figures out do you spend most of your time in bright light, so for instance you’re a healthy person that works outside, or do you work here in what is essentially a cavern?

And then it tells you, and then it asks you where you’re going to be, and then it figures out. Now, depressingly it’s like, okay, if you want to do this right you have 300 hours of adjustment. It’s kind of — in that way it’s annoying because really we just want to go there and be happy. But I thought it was pretty smart, so check it out, Entrain, if you’re ever going anywhere that is not north or south.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Which I don’t recommend.

**John:** My favorite experience of jet lag is actually coming back from Europe because you end up just getting so tired at like 8pm. It’s like I can just go to bed. And like going to bed at 8pm is such a great luxury.

**Craig:** Yeah. Until you wake up at two in the morning hearing sirens in your head. And you’re like, what happened?

**John:** That’s most days for Craig.

Ben, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Ben:** I sure do. But before I get to it…

**Craig:** Stalling. Doesn’t have one.

**Ben:** I’d like to remind folks to hear the second half of this podcast that they should go to Nerdist.com, click on the podcast link, and then click on the orange Nerdist Writers Panel logo, because that will take you to all of the Nerdist Writers Panel podcasts. Also go to Facebook.com/NerdistWritersPanel.

**John:** Great.

**Ben:** My One Cool Thing is this. I have recently — my writing partner and I have recently begun writing comic books. And it’s a lot of fun. And it’s like screenwriting and unlike screenwriting. And it’s really an interesting experience. And thus I’ve taken a deep dive back into comic books, after not reading them for a few years. And the best thing going right now, and you guys, please make noise if you are reading this, is Matt Fraction’s Sex Criminals. Have you read this book?

**Craig:** Wow. You just out-nerded the nerdiest group of people in the world.

**John:** Well done Ben Blacker.

**Craig:** Unbelievable.

**Ben:** Listen, it’s an Image Comic. It’s so great.

**Craig:** I don’t understand that joke. [laughs]

**Ben:** You’ve seen The Walking Dead, right?

**Craig:** Oh, yeah.

**Ben:** All right. It’s those guys. Sex Criminals is hilarious and weird and romantic and funny and a little scary and definitely disturbing. And Matt Fraction has a lot of things going wrong in his brain. But it’s about a couple who find each other in the first issue who whenever either of them reaches orgasm time freezes. And they use that to go and rob a bank. [laughs]

**Craig:** Why wouldn’t they just use them for more orgasms? I don’t understand like —

**Ben:** Because when they’re ready to again time starts again. So, they have to maintain that for a little while. Yeah, it’s fucked up. But it’s great in a way that you totally would not expect. And I am a horrible prude from New England and I thought I would hate this thing and it is the best thing I’m reading these days, including novels.

Yeah, I read novels.

**John:** Ah-ha! There’s a little mic drop there. Great. So, we got some Sex Criminals. We got some sleeping apps. And we got some alternative posters.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** You could combine them all.

**Ben:** That’s a hell of a weekend.

**Craig:** I say we kick this table over and walk on out of here.

**John:** You have that and some cough syrup and you have a good weekend. So, that wraps up this part of the show and so I’ll just do the standard boilerplate stuff when I get home.

**Ben:** You can do it now.

**John:** Okay, I’ll do it now. If you would like to listen to more episodes of Scriptnotes, I was seeing if Craig even knows how to do it. You can find us on iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes right there. You can leave us a comment while you’re there. If you want to have a transcript of this episode or any episode they are always online. So, just go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and you’ll see all the transcripts are right there.

We have an app for your phone.

**Craig:** For iOS and for Android.

**John:** That’s correct.

**Ben:** A Scriptnotes specific app?

**John:** Ben, you don’t even know we have an app? All right.

**Ben:** I have a flip phone.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** We actually have an app for the flip phone.

**Ben:** I have a princess phone.

**Craig:** Yeah. We have an app for that. Yeah, we have an app for, hi princess. Yeah, if anybody is still rocking a Treo we have a fully functional Treo app.

**Ben:** What happens with this app?

**John:** So, the best thing about the app is you can get to all of the back episodes. Because we only keep the most recent 25 episodes on iTunes, but the entire back catalog is there. So, it’s a great way to get to the back catalog. If the first 100 episodes are your thing, we also have some USB drives that you can have all the 100 episodes of that. Those are at store.johnaugust.com. And that’s this part of the show.

**Craig:** If you want to ask, have any questions or comments, you can email John and myself at ask@johnaugust.com. But for shorter comments or questions —

**John:** You’re doing very well, Craig. You really are.

**Craig:** John is @johnaugust and I am @clmazin.

**John:** And you @benblacker, correct?

**Ben:** Yeah, I got my whole name. Early adopter.

**John:** Nicely done.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** Sweet. And thank you very much for this part. So, this is a crossover episode so we need to think of some sort of cliffhanger to go from one to the next.

**Ben:** Did you guys watch Scandal last week?

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Find out the answer on the next episode!

Links:

* [Nerdist Writers Panel](http://www.nerdist.com/podcast/nerdist-writers-panel/)
* [826 LA](http://826la.org/)
* [NerdMelt](https://www.nerdmeltla.com/) at [Meltdown Comics](http://www.meltcomics.com/blog/)
* The [Children of Tendu](http://childrenoftendu.libsyn.com/) podcast, and [on iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/children-of-tendu/id833831151?mt=2)
* [Superman: Red Son](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1401201911/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) and [Marvel Zombies](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0785185380/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* John’s Scriptcast on [writing better action](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPHIb1RweeI&list=PLa3qqbMuNy-q05OxwIqEfxTTHA0lDV0K3)
* [Ops](http://johnaugust.com/library#ops) in the John August Library
* Scriptnotes, Episode 121: [My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’s Screenwriter](http://johnaugust.com/2013/my-girlfriends-boyfriends-screenwriter)
* Tickets for the Scriptnotes Summer Superhero Spectacular will be available April 17th on the [Writers Guild Foundation’s website](https://www.wgfoundation.org/screenwriting-events/scriptnotes-summer-superhero-spectacular/)
* [Alternative Movie Posters: Film Art from the Underground](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0764345664/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Matthew Chojnacki
* [Unsheets](http://unsheets.tumblr.com/) on tumblr
* Fight jet lag with [Entrain](http://entrain.math.lsa.umich.edu/)
* [Sex Criminals](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1607069466/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Matt Fraction, and on [Image Comics](https://imagecomics.com/comics/series/sex-criminals)

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

**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.

Craig, you’re at home, your son was using up all the bandwidth. We’ve had some challenges but I think we’re doing better now.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically I just yelled at him and now everything is fine.

**John:** That’s great, great parenting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last weekend I had a parenting challenge and we actually did something new where I asked five questions on a piece of paper and had her sort of fill out like what she thought was like the right amount of screen time, what she thought would be the right consequences of these kind of actions, and drew up a little agreement. And so far so good. Better.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if it’s a gender thing or if it’s just an individual thing. With my son, I find that what seems to work best is a kind of a military precision with him. So generally speaking to help guide him we don’t discuss the why he’s doing things or why it’s wrong or what it’s supposed to be. Instead it’s just very like, here’s the rules, this and this and this. And he says, got it. [laughs] Then he just does it.

But we do have this interesting thing we do where sometimes at night he’ll write up a little something where he expresses his feelings. It’s easier for him to just write it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then he gives it to me and he goes to bed because he doesn’t want to talk about it. And then I read it and then I write back a response. It’s very parental and nice. And then I slip it under his door and when he wakes up in the morning he reads it. And in a very kind of father-son way that works really well for us. We are allowed to be kind of vulnerable and sweet with each other that way.

**John:** Yeah. I do the exact same thing with my daughter, so it’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Oh, good.

**John:** So our parenting advice for the episode would be to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we have a show chock full of other stuff today, so let’s get to it.

We’re going to talk about the Writers Guild and producers who have reached a new agreement. And so we will have Chris Keyser on to talk about that.

We are going to talk about screenplay formats and not just our sort of new format but sort of how we got to the current screenplay format and some of the alternatives that have already been out there and sort of what they look like and their pros and cons of that.

And then I also want to talk about the process of assembling a first draft, because I just today shipped in a brand new first draft of something and it was a completely different way than I had ever written before. So I want to talk about that process.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But before we get to Chris Keyser I have a little bit of follow up. James in London emailed us two episodes ago about Courier Prime and how the underlining wasn’t right. Do you remember that?

**Craig:** Yeah, I do, yeah.

**John:** And I was like, well, you’re wrong because I underline things in script a lot. And I think the underlining in Courier Prime is really good. The underlining does actually, like the Gs carve out in the underlining, which I think is a good thing.

He emailed us back to say, “I have since looked further into the matter and I feel I owe you an apology. The difference in underlining is due to changes in Final Draft 9 and not the fonts. I have attached a couple of screenshots showing the difference.”

**Craig:** Oh! Ha, that’s weird because they did spend three years on that.

**John:** So I will describe for our listeners sort of what the difference is. Like the underline is weirdly, bizarrely thin in the Final Draft 9 version. I don’t have an answer for why it is that way. But actually it’s a Final Draft 9 thing and he was not being crazy, we were not being crazy. It was a Final Draft thing.

**Craig:** How many times they —

**John:** Final Draft.

**Craig:** Do we say, oh it’s just a Final Draft thing?

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So on Wednesday this past week the Writers Guild and the studios reached a tentative agreement for another three years of contract, which is great news. Press releases don’t work very well on radio, so we’re so excited to have Chris Keyser, the President of the Writers Guild of America, on the show today to talk us through what is new in the deal.

Chris, welcome to the Scriptnotes podcast.

**Chris Keyser:** Thanks, guys. Thanks, John. Thanks, Craig.

I haven’t seen you in over a day, John.

**John:** It’s been a very long day without you.

So I was on the negotiating committee, so I got to see Chris in action sitting at the table right next to me as we were negotiating this deal and this contract. And you went off and shot a whole pilot in the meantime too, so.

**Chris:** I did. And now I’m editing it. So I’ve stepped out of the editing room and — but I’m glad to talk to you guys.

**John:** Good, fantastic. So what should writers know about this deal and sort of what has happened over the course of this negotiation?

**Chris:** There are actually a lot of things that I think this negotiation accomplished. Most people I think will look at it in that it’s two separate things. One is a whole bunch of stuff that we got that came off of what people will think of as the DGA pattern, a pattern that in fact we had a lot to do with because there were conversations that went on for a long time between the WGA and the DGA about all the stuff that had been negotiated. And then separately the new provisions on options and exclusivity which are the first time for those issues to be discussed in the MBA. And actually I think potentially a big step forward.

So we should probably talk about one and then the other. And I’m happy to do whichever thing you want to do first.

**John:** Let’s do the basics, because a lot of stuff going into this negotiation was about talk of really rollbacks.

So I think far in the distance as this negotiation was approaching, there’s a sense like, okay, it’s just going to be a very standard negotiation. We’re going to end up doing a lot of the same things the DGA deal did. It should not be complicated.

And then the first proposals we got from the studios were actually not what we expected.

**Chris:** No, they actually contained about $60 million in rollbacks which seemed outrageous during the time of unprecedented profitability for the companies. Nevertheless, that’s where we began. And so that’s coming off of an initial list of rollbacks and then a decision on the part of the studios, the companies not to come in for any early conversations but just to arrive on the first day with those rollbacks on the table.

We began on our end with a letter, as you probably all remember from the co-chairs of our committee, from Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray, essentially informing our members of what those rollbacks were. And I think that was a really important moment in the course of the negotiations. It put the companies on notice that we were not taking this lightly. I think it energized the membership in a way.

And we went into the room with interestingly I think a little bit of momentum. I don’t know whether it was a strategic mistake on the part of the companies. You’d have to ask them how they felt about it in the long run. But I think though it looked like it was a potentially dangerous moment and it could have been. There were many days sitting in the negotiation room when we were still at risk of some of those rollbacks actually trying — being imposed on us if we could not get out of them. But instead, what it turned out to do was to kind of invigorate us on our side and put us on the offensive almost from day one.

So first off, all of those rollbacks were off the table and those rollbacks included some major — would have — major concessions first of all in pension and health — mostly in health. Also some rollbacks on the screen side of the business that would have decreased the salary of screenwriters by raising the low budget minimum. So that was actually a very dangerous moment for us at the very beginning.

But all of that stuff actually went away. And by the way, those were the highlighted rollbacks. But the truth was as we got into the deal there were also a bunch of hidden potential rollbacks that we actually were able to avoid as we went and negotiated a number of the different specifics.

**John:** One of the things I found most interesting as I was sitting there learning about this stuff is that when we say the DGA deal, I sort of assumed that all the unions had kind of agreed on what the levels were for things. Like on the future side, what we describe as being a low budget or medium budget or high budget, I assumed those would be common across all of the guilds. And they’re not at all.

And so when the studios try to say like, oh we want to have the low budget and the medium budget things be similar to the DGA things, that can be really, really bad for our side because we may have much better definitions for what those terms mean than the DGA does.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think it — and you’re talking specifically about the rates for basic cable where the budget breaks for basic cable are different between the WGA and the DGA deal. So what ended up happening was we were looking at getting what’s called an outsized increase in the script minimums for hour-long dramatic basic cable series. And the question was, were we going to do it on our old budget breaks or would we be asked to adopt the DGA budget breaks. If we did that, we would have lost much of the gains that came with those minimums because the shows would not actually fit over those budget breaks.

But we held firm. So what ended up happening is it doesn’t look like a remarkable gain because in fact what we got — I mean, in terms of the budget breaks because the budget breaks are exactly the same as they’ve always been in the WGA deal. We do have, in fact, one of the gains we made was a 5, 5 and 5% bump in script minimums for basic cable dramatic series without a change in the budget breaks.

So that’s a good result of the negotiation that will not be clear in the materials that were put out for the negotiation.

So the DGA made a deal off of its contract and we made a deal off of our contract. And our point of view was you can’t change our minimums. That’s a rollback. And they didn’t get a rollback. We shouldn’t get a rollback either. So we didn’t. We both ended up with gains over what was existing in our current contract.

**Craig:** I want to take a step back for a second, Chris, because we’re going to go through all the points of what this deal means for us. But for the sake of context for people listening, there’s kind of a meta victory baked in to all of this. And that is a victory of prudence. I don’t know how else to put it.

The companies came to us with this jerky first offer. And there are so many ways to take the bait there. And quite expertly you and David Young and the negotiating committee and Billy Ray and Chip, you all chose the path of no bait. We’re not taking the bait at all. We’re not going to antagonize. We’re not going to throw a tantrum. We’re going to very calmly tell our membership. But basically, we’re not going to take the bait.

And they blinked. And I think it’s important for people to understand that there’s no fun victory in any of this. You never get to punch this guy in the nose and see him go down and then just dance around him. It’s always some quiet unseen victory. Those are the only victories worth having in these things.

**Chris:** Right.

**Craig:** So you guys did a really good job right off the bat of not taking the bait. And I think that the prudence paid off in a huge way. There is this saying that some used to promulgate years ago that the guild never won anything good without a strike. I would submit this negotiation as the perfect rebuttal to that. We got a lot here.

**Chris:** When the companies put out those rollbacks on the table and we came in with that firm undeniable response, I think they rightly believed that we could go back to our membership and take a strike vote. And that we would get a strike vote. That’s what the truth in the room that we were not going to put up with, in a period of unprecedented economic success for those companies, rollbacks in our P&H or for our most vulnerable members at this point, our screenwriters. That continued into the conversation about options and exclusivity throughout all of which I think they rightly assumed that they were sitting on a tinderbox.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** We didn’t explode anything but we made it very clear what was at risk if we didn’t get some deal on this.

**Craig:** It’s a great example of walking softly and carrying a big stick because, yeah sure, I’m sure they were probing with the theory that we were all just battle-weary still from 2007. And why not see if we can get away with something crazy. And so they do what they do and you guys had the perfect response.

I was really happy to see the term — we used to traditionally always get these 3% bumps in minimums. And for people that write in features, minimums are sort of irrelevant because it’s sort of an overscale business and most of us — most people who work in screenplays get more than scale. But even if you do get scale, 3% isn’t going to change your life.

But in television it’s the basis for residuals. It’s a really important term. And we would always get 3% and then suddenly it became 2%. And now I’m happy to see that it’s coming back for 2.5% and now 3% — back to 3% again.

**Chris:** Yeah. David Young calls it breaking the 2s and it was a very high priority for us. I’ll just quote him again, something — a quote that the negotiating committee heard over and over again. I think anyone who went to any of the outreach meetings, I think he quotes Einstein — whether it’s actually an accurate quote or not, who cares: that the most powerful force in the universe is compound interest.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** So 3% every single year, year after year actually makes an enormous difference in income for writers both from their minimums they get paid but also in residuals. But in addition to that, I think that we believe that it drives eventually overscale income that as those minimums rise and at some point double over the course of a decade because of it, so too does above scale income rising. We all know that one of the pressures right now is on downward pressure on above scale income, not just for screenwriters but also for television writers.

And it’s a tough thing for us to take on because it’s not actually within WGA’s purview. But we do effect it indirectly by guarding our 3% bumps in minimums. And I —

**Craig:** Right.

**Chris:** And I agree with you. It was an important gain in this year’s negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** An unusual thing about this negotiation is generally the parties sit down, they negotiate for a long period of time and hopefully by the end of this negotiation they reach a conclusion, a deal. And this time, it didn’t happen. So we got through a bunch of it and then we announced to the members that we were taking a break and that we were coming back to focus on one specific issue which was options and exclusivity.

So can you talk us through what options and exclusivity really mean, who is affected by it, and sort of why it became an issue this round?

**Chris:** Yes. It’s a little bit of a long story and that would actually happen in the negotiations as well.

Options and exclusivity became an issue because of traditional television schedule, the 22-episode television schedule or more — 22 episodes or more television schedule which had writers writing on the same schedule essentially from the beginning of June until sometime in March or April. And then taking something around a two-month break before they were either hired again when their show came back or not or had the chance to go after a different job the exact time as everyone else.

It has begun to be replaced by a new system of short orders which meant that increasingly television writers were finding themselves working for eight or 10 or 12 episodes on a series much less time and for much less pay. And then waiting under both either exclusivity or an exclusivity and an option deal with their studios, and I’ll describe what that means for a moment, unable to get work sometimes for six, nine, 10 months in a row because you — as people know who write cable programs, you may be in a room, write all the episodes. It may be some time before all the shooting is done and then some even more months until that series airs. And then who knows how long until the studio and the network decide they’re going to pick up the show again and put you back to work.

So what ended up happening was writers had small amount of pay over a small period of time attached to which they had a very long period where they were effectively unable to get other work.

Why were they unable to get other work? One of two reasons. One, because some people had exclusivity agreements which meant that they were actually not permitted even when they were not writing to go write for anyone else. The studio that had them under contract essentially had a lock on them.

But even if they didn’t have an exclusivity deal, they had an option on them in first position for when the series came back which meant that anyone who wanted — and it’s not that they weren’t free to go look for other employment in television — could only look for employment in television in second position. So I’d go to another show and say, “Hey, I’ve got some number of months off. I’d love to be on staff on your show.” And that other show would say, “Yeah, but we don’t know when your first show is going to come back on the air and they’re going to take you out of our writers’ room potentially somewhere in the middle. And we can’t afford that. At the very least, why would we hire you as opposed to somebody else who’s free and clear?”

So effectively, what was going on is that people were working for short periods of time and being held under an option to that same studio for long periods of time without pay. At some point, that becomes an untenable financial situation for people. They can’t actually make ends meet. And what’s more and the argument that we made is it’s fundamentally unfair.

**John:** So I have friends who were in exactly that situation where they were sort of in limbo because the TV show they’d been writing on had shot. It was waiting to find out whether they were going to get another season of the TV show. And during that time, they were stuck. They couldn’t write on any other shows. They weren’t even supposed to go out and do feature work during that time, which seemed crazy. And you don’t know how long that’s going to be.

So to literally be taken out of the market for such a long period of time is so damaging to writers, especially young writers, people who are just first-time staff writers. They suddenly can’t work anywhere else.

And so these are the kind of writers who end up having to go get other jobs because like literally like Starbucks kind of jobs because they cannot work in the actual industry for which they’re supposed to be employed. It was incredibly frustrating to me. But I think it’s also frustrating for television. I think it’s bad for television.

**Chris:** That’s right. I mean, it’s difficult in a couple of ways. First of all, I think you were alluding to this: Imagine somebody who beforehand was writing 22 episodes a year, that kind of experience. And now, they’re — maybe they get eight episodes in a full year and maybe the next year they don’t get that because their show doesn’t get picked up. And so you end up with people instead of who have hundreds of episodes under their belt by the time they want to run a show or move up the ladder and become co-APs or whatever it is, they now have episodes that measure in the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s because that’s all they can add up to if you’re only doing a short order every season at best.

And so it’s very bad for that reason. The other reason why it’s bad is because — and we actually felt that the studios would respond to this and maybe they did even if they didn’t say so out loud — is that a marketplace where all the writers are tied up not working is bad for every television show that doesn’t have the dibs on that writer.

So if you, John, have a new show and you want to staff, you may well find out that there are five or six writers who are not currently writing but they’re not available to you.

The second argument really is that for every show, every studio that isn’t holding a given writer under contract, they’re at a huge disadvantage by this tight labor market because, for example, I said like say you, John, you have a new show that gets on the air and you’re looking to hire a writing staff. And in fact, there are many writers who are not currently working but they’re not available because they’re all sitting doing nothing because they’re under option to people who aren’t using them currently. How much better it would be if the labor market were freed up and that people who had shows and needed writing were able to hire those people? And those people would then be able to choose which show to work on.

In the long run, that benefits everybody. The companies certainly never expressed the feeling like this would in the long run be down to their benefit. But I actually feel like it’ll be beneficial to everyone to have a labor market in which people can work whenever they’re available.

**John:** I strongly agree.

Chris, can you talk us through what is new and different in this options and exclusivity agreement, because I think there’s some confusion as if, you know, we didn’t actually give up anything that was already in the contract. None of this was ever covered by WGA contract. This is sort of brand new territory for the MBA.

**Chris:** That’s right. This is the first time ever that options and exclusivity have been covered in the MBA. And like everything in the MBA, these are minimums which is to say that they only set a floor from which we can negotiate even better deals for ourselves and our individual contracts. There is nothing in the MBA that gives the companies the right to have an option over you or to exclusivity. They need to negotiate for that. The options and exclusivity provisions that are in the new MBA restrict the company’s ability to negotiate for options and exclusivity in the following way.

If you are a writer who earns after January 1st 2015 under $200,000 a year or after January 2016 under $210,000 a year, the companies are not permitted to negotiate options and exclusivity clauses with you. Instead, your treatment is governed by the MBA. And this is what it says. First of all, there’s no exclusivity anymore for any of those writers. So when you are not actually working, you are free to work for any other company. You want to go out and write — you get a chance to do a rewrite on a movie during your hiatus, you are free to do that and they cannot say to you, “No, we get a first look at your services.”

Second thing is about options. So the companies have a 90-day period after when payment is due for your writing services during which they still have a hold on you. This is roughly the same as the kind of hold that they might have had at the end of the 22 episodes, 22-episode order.

But beginning on the 91st day, you have the right to go out and look for any job you want. The requirement is that when you get a bona fide offer, you bring it back to the studio and they have two choices. Within three days, if your show has already been picked up, only if your show has been picked up, they may exercise your option and put you on that show and you need to begin being paid to write within 14 days. Or if your show has not been picked up, they leave you free to go. And you are then permitted to go and get another job in first position. And the company with which, the studio with which you originally work then retains second position.

So in other words, once your job is over, once that second job is over, if your original show gets picked up, they can come back to you and say, “Okay, we want to put you on that show under the terms of the deal that you negotiated.” Effectively, you are free to go get work in essentially any situation after those 90 days are done.

**Craig:** Unless they pay you a holding fee.

**Chris:** That’s right. So that’s the other thing. The other thing they can do is they can, after that 90 days, they can pay you to extend your option. And that holding fee is one-third of WGA minimum for either Article 13 or Article 14 writers plus pension and health. That’s fundamental for us because what we said was the right, which is not just the right of writers but of all human beings, is to actually be able to apply their trade, to go out and make money for the thing that they do. We don’t work for free nor do we forgo employment for free.

So beyond the reasonable period at the end of a season, of a show, there’s no reason why a writer should say you may hold me without either compensating me or, like I said, I wouldn’t put it that way, you can’t hold me without compensating me. And if you do not compensate me, you must let me go. The argument we made in the room over and over again, it was made very powerfully by a lot of members of the committee, was that anything less than that is a form of servitude. And that we would not live as indentured servants of the companies.

**Craig:** Well, one thing that I think is revolutionary about this — beyond the fact that it’s addressing an area that had not yet been addressed by the Collective Bargaining Agreement — is the idea, is the philosophy behind the idea that this applies to people who earn less than X. And in this case, X is $200,000 per contract year. Unless I’m incorrect, my memory of the MBA is that the only other place that there was anything like this was in relation to pseudonyms that we have a right guaranteed by the MBA to use a pseudonym unless we make more than I think it’s $200,000 or $250,000 on a project.

But what’s so brilliant about this is that one thing that we’ve always struggled with and what the companies throw in our face all the time is that this is a mature contract. And it is a mature contract. It’s — I mean, this is the product of — we’re coming up on 70 years now of negotiated settlements and it is a mature contract where we are literally arguing over whether we should get raises of 2.5% or 3% and so on and so forth. And we all know that certain residual formulae are set in stone. But this is shining a light. And I think this is the future of our guild and our negotiations with the companies.

And that is to say let us agree that certain areas here are mature, but let us now carve out exceptions and protections for new writers who are being paid what I call close to scale because those are the writers who are suffering the most from these kinds of practices. It’s harder to argue as some did.

When I was on the board people were still fighting the DVD battle and they were saying, “Well, we’re losing millions of dollars.” And I was listening to millionaires telling me that they were losing millions of dollars. And it was true.

But what was also true is that they were millionaires. And I really like the idea that we’re forgoing this need for a universal benefit for all union members and saying we’re okay to settle for getting the goods for the people who need it the most. To me, that’s what a union is for. And I think this is a big deal. I just think philosophically from an approach point of view, there’s a lot more to be mined from this tactic than there is from saying everybody deserves it or nobody gets it.

**John:** Well, I think it’s also — it’s looking structurally what are the biggest problems facing actual working writers. And you can’t be a working writer if you’re not allowed to work. And that’s I think a great place for the guild to come in and take a look at it.

But I would stress, though, it’s not necessarily just the people who are making below $200,000 or $210,000 in the second year of this that are going to be affected because I think the people who are above that level, their agents, their representatives are going to go back and say, “Hey, I know we’re above this cap but we want those same protections that the people below the cap have.” And some of those people will get it and some of those people won’t get it. But I think it sets a standard or a pattern for how you talk about options and exclusivity for even people who are making —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Significantly above that level.

**Craig:** Sure. I agree. Yeah.

**Chris:** I think one of the problems that we’ve had is, look, it’s obvious, is that individual agents negotiating for individual clients have been unable to exert the leverage to avoid onerous options and exclusivity clauses in contracts. The philosophy of this is that there are some writers who are beginning, who make less for whom the job of negotiating this individually through their agents is an impossibility. Much like negotiating a minimum salary for those people would be an impossibility. They’d be under pressure to — downward pressure to accept less and less and less.

But having set a floor below which the companies cannot go, we hope to provide an opportunity for the agents of better paid writers to make an argument that said, “If you’re paying my staff writer and my story editor and not holding them under option, you’re not going to tell my co-producer and my producer that he or she needs to be under an onerous option.” We put the power back in the hands of the agents where that also belongs.

**Craig:** Chris, you and I have had a discussion about the free rewrite problem, whatever name we want to give it, that’s really what it is. And one thing that I’ve expressed to you before and I’m kind of hoping that maybe this is a little bit of an illuminated path to it is the idea of carving out a protection in the MBA for writers that are earning close to scale, particularly when it comes to one step deals.

I’d love to see a term where we were okay with going in there and saying, “We’re negotiating for a two-step deal guarantee. But not for everybody, just if you’re making this or under.” And I think there’s nice precedent now for that kind of work to be done.

**Chris:** Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s where we have to go after we hang up. It’s high on the list.

**Craig:** Great, good.

**John:** So Chris, talk to us about when the things in this deal go into effect because it’s not all at once.

**Chris:** No. In general, the terms of the deal go into effect May 2nd of this year. That’s when the new three-year term begins. Options and exclusivity are effective January 1st 2015. That’s because it actually is a very large change in the way business affairs has to do business. So it gives them, the companies, a bunch of months to actually get their houses in order. And actually for us to begin to educate writers and agents about how this is going to work.

**Craig:** It makes sense too because the term is based on a contractual year income and that hasn’t happened yet. It’s a little strange to look back at income that was accrued under a contract that didn’t have that provision.

**Chris:** That’s right, that’s right.

**John:** So before any of this goes into effect though we have to ratify this contract. So what is the process for that? What do writers need to do or WGA members need to do?

**Chris:** Well, they can either vote online or in the old-fashioned ways. And all of the packet of materials will be going out — I apologize, I don’t know exactly what day but in the next day or two. The contract has been recommended by both the guild — the Board of Directors of the West and the Council of the East and by the negotiating committee. So all that’s left is for the members to vote and I hope to ratify the contract.

And so you’ll get the material in the next few days. And I believe the voting deadline is the end of — it’s like the 29th of April. Don’t hold me to that. It could be just a day or — it can’t be a day or two later because it needs to be ratified or we need to turn it down by the date on which the contract expires which is May 1st. So voting needs to happen.

And I — look, it’s the same argument that we make all the time. I think a good turnout and I hope a good turnout that votes in favor of this contract continues what I think the negotiation began to suggest to the companies which is that we are, after all these years, and an argument I think that I’ve made and you’ve made, John and Craig, we’re actually much more unified than the companies might have perceived that we were or the world continues to claim that we are.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Chris:** And one — another piece of evidence of that and that means people voting.

**Craig:** I think for me, by far the most important factor and the most beneficial thing for us when dealing with them is our leadership and how they view our leadership. And again, I have to say they took our leadership this time around, which includes the two of you, seriously because our leadership behaved in a serious manner. Not in a loud manner but in a very serious manner. And if they feel they’re dealing with serious people, in their minds they know if serious people turn to the membership and say, “Hey, everyone, this is bad,” everyone will believe them and become instantly energized.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We don’t need to be marching around with pitchforks until such time as a reasonable man asks us to.

**Chris:** Yeah, I think —

**John:** That’s a very good point.

**Chris:** I think that — yes. Look, I mean it’s self-serving for me but I will agree with — one of the things that we are susceptible to and I think a fallacious argument is that ignoring the fact that science gives consent in fact and that the assumption that when our members are not active, they are inactive because they don’t care, I think many of them are inactive from time to time because they have many other things going on.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Chris:** They have their lives that are complicated both in a work sense and every way else. And if they feel as if things are going in the right direction, then they’re less likely to actually feel the need to actively engage. I don’t take that always as being a negative. Sometimes I think that’s a quiet sign of competence.

**John:** Chris Keyser, I would like to thank you personally for your quiet confidence during this whole negotiation. It was great to see this. And I really thought the team was terrific, including David Young who I had not really encountered before but just did a terrific job negotiating that contract. So my personal thanks to you for a really great negotiation.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean I’ll back that up. I would say, Chris, and this is self-serving for me because I’ve supported you strongly from the start but I think you’re going to go down as one of our great presidents. I really do. I think that you have accomplished not only an extraordinary amount of good during your time, which is of course not yet over, but you have set an example and kind of put forth proof of an argument of a way to do this that is better than the way it has been done. And that is extraordinarily valuable for us as a union going forward.

**John:** Well, Chris, we’ll let you get back to you cutting your pilot and thank you so much for joining us on here to talk about the deal and congratulations. And everybody, remember to vote.

**Chris:** Okay, thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks, Chris. Thank you.

**Chris:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

[*Intro tone*]

**John:** So Craig, we we’ve talking a lot about our potential new screenplay format and I thought today we could spend a few minutes talking about sort of how the screenplay format came to be and sort of what some of the other alternatives that have existed out there are. And it’s a little bit of a history lesson but also alternate history lesson of the way things could have gone.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I’m going to start with — actually, a guy wrote in — emailed us. His name is Stokely Dallison and he wrote, “I suspect you may have forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter. In my view, it’s a wonderful comfort to adopt the same format as thousands of scripts that have come before. Every script the same font, the same spacing, the same three holes with two brass brads. It feels good to be part of something relatively old. It feels good to know that my script, however inadequate it might be, looks the same as all the great scripts that have come before.”

And I thought that was actually a really charming thought —

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Because I remember writing that first script and it’s like it just seems so weirdly magic that I — oh everything — it’s got to look just like a real script and the esoterica of the screenplay format is both something that sort of keeps people away, but once you sort of get inside it’s like, oh, I know how to do this. There’s something about that format and it does feel sort of special. And so whatever we do, we have to acknowledge that there is something special about it.

What’s interesting though is what we take as being the screenplay format is actually fairly recent. And there are other ways it could have gone and there are other ways — you’ve seen movies that were written in completely different ways.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so there’s not one magic way for it to work.

**Craig:** No. Well, I have to say that, first I hear — I can’t tell you how many times I will hear somebody say, “Well, you’ve probably forgotten what it’s like to be a new screenwriter.” No, I haven’t. No. [laughs] I don’t think there is a screenwriter alive who still doesn’t feel like a new screenwriter on some level. And certainly we don’t forget what it’s like. I do want to just put that out there. Never think that we’ve forgotten magically the pain of becoming a screenwriter or starting out.

There is something that’s comforting about being able to write in a format that makes your screenplay look professional. But unfortunately that’s not really important. And I would argue that a lot of new screenwriters will obsess over those things in order to avoid the other things that are unique to their screenplay like, you know, the content.

**John:** So let’s take a little history trip and figure out how the screenplay came to be. Because when the first movies were made, the first screenplays were really just a list of shots. And if you think about it, these are silent films. So literally you are just making a shot list and just like a train comes, close on a man’s face. And that’s sort of what the original screenplays were like, were just a list of these shots.

And it was almost — it was basically a set of instructions for like what the order of the shots were going to be. And if there was going to be a title card, there wasn’t really dialogue, so it could just be a title card or like one of those intercut cards that show like some line that someone is supposedly saying. But that’s as much as there would be.

It’s Thomas Ince who is often credited with sort of being the father of the modern screenplay because he’s also the father of the modern studio. He was the one who said — he bought a bunch of land in California and he’s like we’re going to make a bunch of movies. And in order to make a bunch of movies, he wanted to make sure that he could basically hand a blueprint to anyone, any of his directors, and say like this is what it’s supposed to be. Shoot exactly what I’m giving you.

And so our idea of a screenplay being the blueprint for a movie is really credited to him. And so a bit of trivia, if you actually are down in Culver City, there’s a street of Ince. There’s the Ince Gate —

**Craig:** Ince, yeah.

**John:** To the Culver Studios or one of the studios down there. You will actually see the word Ince down there.

**Craig:** Wasn’t he the guy that got murdered on a boat or something?

**John:** I’m sure there’s a fascinating story. Like all of old Hollywood is great and wonderful. And so —

**Craig:** Right. Everybody was constantly being murdered.

**John:** Well, this was the frontier. This is like a brand new town. It was all —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was all made up from scratch. So he’s the guy who sort of I think is generally credited with being the guy who said this is a plan for making the movie. It’s typed out this way. It’s basically those shots.

Now I still, remember, he was essentially making silent films. And as we started adding dialogue in, that’s where the scripts became a little bit more like a play because you actually have to have people talking to each other.

So scripts going back to even like Casablanca, they written in what’s called a continuity style, which is sort of like a shooting script. It’s basically a sequence of shots. And even when there’s dialogue, it’s really about the shots. And it’s as if you’re sort of directing on the page. It’s like — it feels like a director’s plan for what it is that you’re shooting.

This evolved over time to what is called the master scene format. And I don’t even — I mean, I’ve been writing scripts for a long time but I didn’t know that the way we were writing our scripts is called the master scene. Have you seen that terminology?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never heard it before, but I did see it in the example that they used for an early master scene format screenplay. It’s The Apartment by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. And they wrote that in 1959. And that does look very much like the screenplay format we use, if not exactly like the screenplay format we use today, which by the way I have to say, so on like one hand you’re right that it’s not like the movie business was founded on this format that we currently use. On the other hand, we have been using it for at least 55, 60 years, which implies that maybe it’s time for, you know, a change.

**John:** Or that we got it exactly right and nothing needs to change at all.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well, let’s talk about The Apartment, because actually I was really struck by it. And there’s going to be links in the show notes to sort of all the scripts we’re talking about. So The Apartment, it really looks like a modern screenplay. Like if someone dropped it on your desk, it’s like, well, this is a screenplay.

But it’s considerably different from the continuity style of script. It’s literary. It’s kind of designed to be read. It’s not designed just as for a director to know what shots there are. It’s designed for a person to be able to see what a scene feels like just on the page. There’s a lot description about sort of — there is screen description. It’s really talking through what the characters are doing, what things feel like, what things looks like. And in a weird way, I think this is a good point that this site that we’re going to send you to makes, is that it actually gives the director more leeway.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** And so rather than calling out every shot, it’s describing sort of what the scene is like, and sometimes the suggestions were sort of like how it’s shot. But really, it’s going to be a director to figure out what those shots are in there to tell the story. So even though the writer gets to have a more free rein and more words to describe the scene, the director actually gets a little bit more leeway for figuring out how to shoot that scene. It’s a significant evolution.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can see in the Master Screen format — that’s what they’re calling it Master Screen format?

**John:** Master Scene format.

**Craig:** Master Scene format that everybody is starting to approach filmmaking in a more artistically free way. It is being unyoked from the factory. Early Hollywood was a factory. They would just burn film and lights and people would stand in spots and they would make movies in a matter of days. I mean, it was just — they would just churn them out.

And so it was really an ADs’ business if you think about it, you know. I mean, that what we currently think of as a first AD, they are the people on the set who are scheduling, figuring out how many pages you’re shooting in the day, marshaling the crew, making sure that the props people and the this and the that and everything is in place.

ADs were kind of the early directors, in some regards were like that.

**John:** They were.

**Craig:** And then as you see the influence of European cinema and also the increasing freedom, the artistic freedom of Hollywood, which I think was just naturally building on itself, getting bored with the kinds of stories they were telling and trying to find new ways to tell them, started to — and also probably because of the influx of playwrights into the process because of the demand. You can see now that the format is allowing both the writer and the director the freedom to tell a story in a creative way.

**John:** Yes. So if you look at the Master Scene format, which is really what we think about the modern screenplay format, it’s very tempting to read the dialogue and skip over everything else because the dialogue tends to be the meat of what is happening in modern screenplays.

You can get the gist of what’s going on by reading the dialogue. And so the dialogue is centered. And your eye kind of goes — falls to the center of the page. And all the scene description and the transitions and the scene headers stay towards the edges. But that’s not the only way that it can happen. And one of our listeners, Matt Markwalder, sent through a bunch of examples of Kubrick scripts which are wildly different and actually sort of do the opposite.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think and probably in direct response to how people read scripts, he decided to do a completely different thing. So in Clockwork Orange, first off, everything is double spaced. And dialogue has wider margins and action is sort of put over to the right. And so the action is deliberately sort of minimized and sort of put over to the side, but in a way that you tend to sort of read it. It’s like the line length is really, really short and your eye goes to it. Whereas dialogue tends to be bigger, wider blocks of things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So an example, I’m skipping to page 28 of A Clockwork Orange. Scene 22. INT. CAT LADY HOUSE. That feels kind of normal. “The cat lady enters and dials a number.” That sentence is centered in two lines in the middle of the page. So it’s like it looks in sort of the area where you would normally expect to see dialogue, that’s where that line is. And the cat lady has this long speech that’s double spaced and goes all the way to the margins of the page. Is just a really interesting way to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, and then he changes it up because then when you get to Full Metal Jacket, it reads like a novel. He’s just in — he’s burying dialogue and action description into flowing paragraphs, not really breaking them out or formatting them any differently than each other.

It’s almost as if Kubrick decided I’m just going to format my screenplay the way I feel the movie is. I’m going to let the formatting reflect the tone and the vibe of what I’m going for which is awesome. And I suspect that when the entrepreneurial screenplay market really took off, the need for screenplays to be uniformly formatted became really important because now it was a commodity. And you had to formalize it. But I regret that. And I would love to see people have the freedom to write their screenplays however they choose to get across the vibe of the story they want to tell. I think that’s very powerful. And I think you and I are going to do it.

**John:** [laughs] So in Full Metal Jacket, for those who aren’t looking at this on the screen right now, the dialogue is actually in quotation marks. It just looks like a page of normal text really. It’s a very —

**Craig:** It’s like a book.

**John:** A completely different way of doing things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I also want to take a look at some of the other types of scripts that are out there that aren’t screenplay formats or at least normal screenplay formats. The most obvious one which is similar but different is the three-camera comedy, or the multi-cam comedy. So everything you see there has a laugh track to it on television tends to be that. So I’m looking at the page from The Millers.

**Craig:** The Millers, the show, the TV show, yeah.

**John:** So in multi-cam, action is basically on the same lines, has the same margins as we sort of expect in a screenplay format, but it’s all upper case. And it’s usually minimized. They don’t try to write as much in there as you would otherwise. Everything is double spaced. The whole page is double spaced. Character names, where they expect to be. But the dialogue blocks are a little bit wider. Parentheticals fall within the dialogue block themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s really different. One of the things I do sort of enjoy about multi-cam and you can see sort of why they do it is partly because you’re scheduling things sort of on the fly so quickly. Skipping to page 37 of the script I’m reading at. INT. NATHAN’S HOUSE. KITCHEN LATER, D3, D3, indicating day three. And this is a thing you’ll commonly see in TV shows indicating what day or what night it is. But underneath that line, in a parenthesis is, “(Nathan, Debbie, the Sarge),” and what it’s showing is like who is in this scene.

**Craig:** Who’s in the scene, yeah.

**John:** And that’s a really useful bit of really kind of metadata that is useful to have especially as you’re trying to schedule this thing. Who needs to be there, what characters even if they’re not speaking in the scene need to be there in the background.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is useful information. And obviously a sitcom’s script is formatted in part to serve the need of a churning production that is weekly and involves live theater essentially for most of them. But I have to say just aesthetically I find it ugly.

**John:** I find it ugly, too, but that’s what I’m used to. It’s what your — it’s what you grew up with. And I’m sure to people who are used to multi-cam, they don’t find it ugly at all.

**Craig:** I guess I would say that what I find ugly about it is that it is the most formalized, that even screenplays allow you a little more leeway about how you approach things. But it’s so rigid in that sitcom format. And, you know, my instinct now is to see how we can allow screenwriters to express a movie on the page in a way that is more idiosyncratic to the story they’re telling and how they want to tell it and their dramatic intention.

So I’m probably just reacting to that because it’s very rigid.

**John:** It’s very rigid. So actually it’s interesting because in stage plays there actually is a wide range of sort of how those stage plays look. And so something I found in Big Fish is that I was looking at other books for musicals and it’s like, oh, there isn’t really — there’s much less consensus about how those things are supposed to look.

Typically, in plays you will find action will always be put entirely in giant parentheticals, which I find maddening and really not attractive to look at. But it’s a common way to do it in stage plays. Dialogue can be sort of where we expect it now, but blocks tend to be a little bit wider. Are lyrics all the way to left, are they inset differently? Are they all upper case? That all changes.

But of course there’s another way you can do plays, which is just to have — which is more like sort of the reading plays that you and I are used to where a character name is, you know, upper case, bolded maybe even with a colon after it. And their dialogue just goes after it. Since plays are mostly people talking, that could be an efficient way to show that on the page. And it may make more sense to really let the page be dominated by the dialogue because the action is going to tend to be much more minimal than it would be under the screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, the key thing — the thing that’s going to unleash us all is this getting away from pagination. The more I think about it, I just know we’re right. I just know it.

**John:** So let’s talk about what those fundamental units are, because the fundamental unit could be a scene. It can be a sequence. It could some sort of other unit. But there needs to be some area of story by which you can say like, these are the outer perimeters of what this moment is because if you look at the Kubrick scripts, it’s very difficult to tell sort of where we are at in those things. And sometimes I wouldn’t even know like are we in the same location? Have we moved to a different place in time? That’s challenging to figure out in some of these Kubrick scripts.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. No, I’m not an anarchist about this sort of thing. I do think that, you know, if you are — granted if you’re directing your own material, the only person that truly needs to understand it is you and you’ll explain it to everybody else around you. But for those who are writing screenplays for other people to read, I think sequences — sequences. I think letting the dramatic action delineate where the pieces begin and end is the way to do it, not location.

**John:** So the Coen brothers’ scripts, I don’t know if you’ve actually read any of them on the page. They tend to get rid of scene headers altogether. They tend to be, you can see that we’re in the new place or new time. But they’re not using the classic sort of nomenclature for sort of what those are. That may ultimately be the way to look at this is that as you’re moving from place to place you’re showing us where we’re at, but it’s not formalized in those scene header ways. So we don’t think of those scene headers as being — we don’t give them more importance than they deserve. And right now, I think they get way too —

**Craig:** They’re so important. Yeah.

**John:** I think they get elevated too high.

**Craig:** I mean, honestly, you pick up a screenplay, if you were from another planet and you came here and you picked up a screenplay you would think that the most important part of storytelling is whether you’re inside or outside.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the dumbest thing. And half the time now the way we shoot movies, it doesn’t — you’ll say, you know, EXT. OUTSIDE OF INTERGALACTIC FEDERATION BUILDING. That means you’re inside on a stage. There’s no inside or outside. I mean half that stuff doesn’t even matter anymore. How do you write exterior/interior on a script for Avatar? Explain that. I mean what’s the point?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I totally agree. I think the slug line thing is the weirdest thing. It forces us into categories of time. A lot of time I’m not sure if I’m supposed to say morning, afternoon, dusk, noon, or just day. What does day mean? I don’t even know what day is. What’s day?

**John:** Yeah, and how specific are you allowed to be about what time of day you’re at? Do you need to clarify if you move to a different day. Like I just like The Millers script indicated it was day three, like that is a useful bit of information yet does that need to be reflected on the page right at that moment? Perhaps not. And maybe there’s a different way that you can indicate that, so that it’s part of the metadata for that sequence, but doesn’t have to be written down the road.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. Because I’ve had this conversation with a number of ADs on a number of movies where they will sit down with me and say, “Walk me through the days of the week or the month on this? Let’s actually…” And in fact, I remember on Identify Thief, Seth and Jason and I sat down one day and really dialed in the days of the week, so we knew that this thing actually made sense and that it wasn’t taking either two days or 12 days. Because we didn’t, you know, if you have four nights in a row and then say you had a three-day road trip, it just doesn’t quite work.

So at some point, you do that. And if you want to — if we have a format that uses technology and allows us to flexibly include a file that they can pull up as they wish, that just shows a day, night, time passage summary.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That would be really cool. But I don’t need to look at it while I’m reading the script.

**John:** Exactly. So that’s a useful bit, just like costume changes. It’s one of the first things when you have a costume designer comes on to a movie is really doing that day/night breakdown to make sure like, are they still in the same outfit as they would be in the previous scene? And sometimes I will get involved with that because I need to sort of clarify like no, no, this is a different day. Like they could have changed clothes, they would have changed clothes between this time. Or no, they have to be wearing the same thing because they literary came right from there to there and it’s going to bizarre if they’re suddenly wearing new clothes.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. In fact you’re zeroing in on something that’s really interesting about the current screenplay format, is that it overemphasizes some things, and ignores other things entirely. And what ends up happening is we go — right before you shoot a movie, right before you begin principal photography, the entire production gathers together all the heads of the department and most of their keys under them, and the director and the producers and hopefully the screenwriter is there as well. They should be. And everybody goes page by page and they ask questions.

And a lot of those questions will shock the hell out of the screenwriter because they’ll think, oh, I thought that would be obvious, but it’s technically not in the script, so yes, they don’t realize that they’re coming home in the same outfit that they went to work in, you know. But if we could help guide those things because the format allowed us to flexibly do so, that would be really cool.

**John:** Yeah. So I think that it becomes a matter of you write your script, you write what is going to be a thing. Let’s not focus on sort of what it looks like. But you’re going to write your thing and you’re going to figure, you’ll write your script, Hollywood script/screenplay. Don’t worry — we won’t worry about margins or sort of other stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But then you figure out what are the sequences? What are the units of story that are important? And within those units of story then we can sort of have those, you know, if this were the web, each of those units of story would be essentially a page and there could be extra metadata associated with that page. So you could have all the information that is about who is in the scene, day or night, where this falls in the timeline of the actual story.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the situations where we’re in multiple locations, you can address those facts that you’re in multiple locations over the course of the sequence. So those intercut phone calls which are always a challenge, that can all be part of that because it’s — there’s a fundamental story unit that’s together.

**Craig:** What a waste of space when you have two people talking. You have interiors and exteriors, blah, blah, blah, intercut, nonsense words you don’t — it’s like, duh. You just write, you know, he calls her up. She’s sitting in her apartment. They have a discussion, on the phone. Everybody knows how phone discussions work, but somehow screenplay formats are like slogging like Frankenstein through the mud. It’s like we all know how to write our name, but if you need to program in Basic, you go 10, print name, 20, go to 10. You know, it’s just it’s so clumsy and unnecessary and we need to be free of it, John, free, free.

**John:** So the other thing I will say is, you’ve written some animation and I’ve done a lot of animation, is you recognize that they ultimately number things as sequences. And it will be a bunch of what we would consider scenes. They will consider one whole sequence. Almost more like what we think was as reel, they will think of as a sequence. And it’s a much, ultimately a much smarter way to address it because they’re not worried about sort of like this location, that location, whatever. It’s about this unit of story. And that’s probably a smarter way for us to format.

**Craig:** Yes, for sure. I mean, you start writing. Let’s say you’re writing in our new format. And when you reach the end of your first sequence, you indicate it’s time for a new sequence to begin. You might naturally say, well, how will I know when that sequence is over? You’ll know. You’ll know. [laughs] Because you’ll just know. It’s so obvious. And it will just be similarly obvious when the next — it’s like, oh god, we got to do it, John.

**John:** We got to do it. So this is actually a great segue for our last topic of the day, which is I just delivered like literary two hours ago delivered the script that I owed and so I turned it in.

**Craig:** Congrats.

**John:** But this is the first time I went hardcore on a way that I’ve kind of been working, but I went much more hardcore on it this time, which is that I wrote each bit separately. So I didn’t sit down with one file and write from the beginning to the end. I only wrote separate scenes or sequences, whatever you want to call it. And I just wrote the pieces.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I skipped all over the, you know, the story of this episode and wrote the pieces I wanted to write, I had a really good outline and I assembled it all at the end. And so I want to talk through sort of how I did it this way. And, you know, I think it’s actually useful for what we’re doing in terms of like what a format could do that could help us down the road.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So for this time, I used WorkFlowy which was a One Cool Thing from before which is an outline or it’s an online outliner that I really just love. And so even right now, I’m looking at WorkFlowy because I keep show notes for the podcast in it. But I just made a pilot and I wrote the, you know, these scenes that were in it. Basically these are the events that happened. And I rearranged them and so it was equivalent of my index cards. But I would sort of have a list of basically these are the scenes, these are the things that are happening over the course of it.

And then as I had more details I could fill in underneath those scenes. I sometimes would start writing dialogue. I’d write the important stuff that needed to happen in those things. And when I chose to write one of the scenes, I would just open up a brand new file in Highland and just type it. And I’d write it and when I was done, I would save it, I would scratch that off the list and keep moving on to the next one.

What’s so good about this is, well, once I start on a first draft I’ll go someplace and barricade myself and write drafts by hand. And I’ll do that so that I can’t go back and edit. This was sort of the same idea, is that I would write something and then I would not go back to it and futz with it. I would go on and write the next thing. And I would write the next thing. And I wouldn’t go back through and sort of start at page one and keep building forward. I actually got a lot more done I think because I wasn’t going back and tweaking all those things I’d written before.

**Craig:** You know me, I’m a big go-backer, tweaker, you know, but that’s just my flow. I like that feeling. It just makes me — I’m happy, you know, and whatever makes you happy and whatever gets you through the process. What I very much am addicted to, I don’t know, it’s probably the wrong phrase, but I’m committed to is the notion of thoroughly outlining the movie before I start because I feel like if you do it and I do think in terms of sequences when I’m outlining as supposed to locations which is an indication that we should be writing in terms of sequences and not locations.

It helps you place all of these things within the context of character and theme and all the rest of that stuff as opposed to just, there’s a car chase. Yeah, but what happens in the car chase that makes it relevant to the character beyond, you know, chase man and get him, you know, that sort of thing.

So I like outlining a lot. But there — look, there are writers who don’t and still get there on their own and do it well. I just think that when you’re putting a first draft together, you are entitled to do whatever you need to do to get there. That’s basically my feeling. You get to use anything that supports you through the very difficult process of making something out of absolutely nothing.

And just as long as you can accept that this is — there is no end to your first draft. There is simply ceasing and then returning to it. Do what you need to do.

**John:** So in this case, I ended up with a folder full of essentially 40 — 30 to 40 scenes. And classically what I would then have to do is I’d have to open up a new document and open up each one of those individually and sort of copy and paste them into one big thing and sort of get them all arranged properly.

So being the person that I am, I asked Nima to write me a new little app called Assembler.

**Craig:** Of course you did.

**John:** And because that’s what I do.

**Craig:** It’s what you do.

**John:** So Assembler is a thing which we might end up releasing or we might not. It looks ugly right now, but it did the job. Essentially, what Assembler does is it takes a folder full of little files, little text files because that’s all Fountain is little text files. And you choose a folder, it pops up, and you can just drag the order that you want the files to be assembled in. You hit a button and it assembles them and opens up in Highland. And so I had simply an assembly.

And I think that assembly is a really good way to think about that sort of pre first draft. It’s like it’s all the basic scenes, but they’re not necessarily nipped and tucked in the right way. So it’s — it wasn’t my first draft certainly, but it resembled what the script was going to be. All the scenes were there. And then I can sort of go through and then really do that detail work of making sure that this scene is really leaning into the next scene and tumbling into the next scene in ways that was useful and meaningful. Even as I was writing, I knew what had come before, I knew what was coming after. But I want to make sure I was making great word choices that were going to send me into the first line of the next scene. All that stuff.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that was a great way. So I went from that first assembly to this first draft in, you know, four days and felt good about it because I knew all the bits were there and so I could really focus on making everything that’s best and not sort of like struggling to get those last little bits done.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s interesting. I think what I’m doing is an analog version of what you’re doing. I’m just doing it with index cards.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** That I’m basically breaking down my pieces into index cards. And the index cards typically are sequences. And that’s how I’m sort or organizing things. And what I’m doing — when I’m doing those index cards, is there’s a depth sort of textually there’s a depth because there’s a little summary on the card. And then what I like to do it is I like to have another card next to it that’s the what does this mean? Why is this in the movie? Why did this deserve to be in the movie card?

And then underneath that, the woman that sits with me and helps me, you know, takes all the notes and puts this all together for me, she’s also then writing down a whole bunch of notes related or thoughts, bits of dialogue, concepts, purposes, points, characters, et cetera that are related to those index cards.

So by the time I’m writing my draft I have this interesting assembly of headers and what’s and why’s and then details for these sequences in a non-digital, semi-digital format. And then I just start to write. It’s funny, even though we have — they look so different, there’s something very similar about the process.

**John:** I would agree. As she’s assembling this stuff, or as you’re sort of putting these things together, is that ever one file or it is just still a bunch of cards?

**Craig:** Well, we have one file that she kind of master, she sort of has this master file. And then a lot of times as I’m heading into a section, I’ll say, well, all right, let’s — now, we are on page 60. And I know that I’m about to head into this sequence where, I don’t know, the soldier is going to fly into the temple with his parachute and do a thing.

So let’s talk about it again. Let’s just run through what was there before, but now let’s rediscuss it in light of what has led up to it now through the writing. And so she’ll take that portion out of the master document and build a new thing that’s just like, okay, here’s what you’re doing for the next few days.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** And then I’ll add more detail and layers into that. That keeps in mind what’s come before it recently. And then I’ll use that. Like it will sort of sit next to me.

Sometimes I don’t even look at it because just the fact that I’ve talked it through, now I know it. And I know what to write, you know?

**John:** There’s a story that John Gatins told before, so I apologize to listeners if I’ve told this story on the podcast before, but I think it’s such a great illustration of the trap you can fall into when you just kind of start writing, is that there was a guy who was hired to paint the stripe down the middle of a road. And so the first day he had his little bucket and his paint and he painted a mile and he came back and his boss was like, “That was really good, you painted like a whole mile. That was terrific.”

And the next day, the boss comes back to see his work, he’s like, “Oh, you painted another half mile. Okay, well, that’s great. Still pretty good. That’s better than most people.” And the next day, he came back and he’d only painted a quarter of a mile. And so the supervisor said like, “What’s going on? Like why did you slow down so much?” And he’s like, “Well, I have to keep walking back to get to the paint.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that can actually be what the situation you find yourself with a script, is that if you’re starting at page one every time and just like, write, sort of rewriting it to get up to the next page, and then rewriting it to get up to the next page, every day you sit back you’re going to have spent a lot of your creative energy rewriting those first couple of pages and you’re going to probably make less and less progress through your script. So yes, I bet those first pages are going to be incredibly tight because you went through them a bunch of times. But you’re not actually moving the ball forward.

So, you know, what I’m describing in terms of not letting myself, but just doing separate sequences and not letting myself assemble the whole thing is to keep myself from doing that, because it’s just a bad habit I’ve noticed.

So before I would write pages by hand and fax them through to my assistant who would type up the pages and stick them in the folder. And I would do that until I got to where I felt like I was probably halfway through the script and then start assembling and then start doing it. This was just the most hardcore version of that where I wouldn’t let myself assemble it at all until I knew I actually had all the scenes written that I thought I needed and could put them together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I do see it differently than you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** My feeling is that, I guess I stick to my loose, rigid, you know, I have loose, rigid scheduling and I have loose, rigid rewriting. And that is to say there’s this much time to write it and I’m going to use that time. How I use it? That’s my prerogative.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I allow myself the — I’m okay with spending 40% of my time on the first 30 pages if I feel that that’s what’s going to help me efficiently write the last 70 pages. As long as I am productive I feel like I’m allowed to be productive in any direction I want to be.

Where I agree with you is the idea that you’re going to fastidiously whittle every word. Well, you can do that but just be aware that it would be really helpful if you were an awesome genius. And it would really helpful if you didn’t need money or to kind of work a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So if you wanted to just write one astonishing script every five years, I’m okay with that, you know. I mean, look, Rian Johnson is not prolific.

**John:** No, he’s not.

**Craig:** But, you know, but when the script comes out and he makes the movie, it’s really good. So that’s cool, too. As long as you are, I guess the way I would — I would just hand it to the writer and say you know if you’re being productive or not.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Listen to yourself. And if you’re just rewriting to avoid writing then stop.

**John:** I agree. As we close this out I will say this is the first time I ever used Highland from start to finish on something. It was the first time working on a long script on Highland. And it was really good and illuminating in the sense that I recognized the pros and cons of Highland. So the new build that’s going to be coming out probably by the time or shortly after this episode airs actually reflects a lot of the stuff that were sort of happening while I was writing this much longer script because as something would break or something would annoy me, I could yell down to Nima and have him fix things.

And so one of the things, a situation which happens in all apps, but was particularly frustrating to me in Highland this time is you’re deep into the script, you’re on page 40 into the script or something and you need to refer back to something that happened earlier on. So how do you go back there and then find your place, find your way back to where you were at?

So assuming you’re in the middle sort of page 40, but you need to find something earlier on, how do you get back to where you were on page 40?

**Craig:** Well, I’m the worst because I’m a scroller.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] So, I, you know, I have — most major programs have some sort of outliner available to you, but I just scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll because I can kind of like see as the pages are flying by roughly. I know where to land. So it’s not efficient, but I’m a scroller.

**John:** So the thing which we put in this next build which I really love and found myself using a lot was called Markers. And so it’s really something I took from Final Cut Pro which is the video editing software. And a marker is something you can just drop and then you can find it again. And so you hit Control M and it puts a marker wherever you are. And then you can go wherever else you want to go in the document and the Control option then will take you back there.

So you can drop as many markers as you need. It’s like a little shortcut to get back to that place you’re at.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So if you end up scrolling back and like did a little something, you know, on page 20, but you need to get back to where that thing is, Control option M it will take you back to where you were before.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s cool. And I would love to sort of see the ability, you know, we talk about our new format and obviously we’re not talking about an application to read that format, but rather we would hope that applications like Highland and others would take advantage of what the format would offer.

And I would love to see sort of tabbed sequences. That would be great. You know, so when I’m working, I could just go up and go, okay, I’m going to go back to the car chase. I’m going to go back to the beginning, I’m going to back to the middle, wherever it is.

**John:** So Final Draft 9 has an aspect of that. It’s not great. But you can add sort of the information that gets you there. Slugline already does have a really good version of that. So in Slugline you drop little hashtags and those become your sections. And so you can do things for individual scenes. And it shows you an outline view that you can hop to anything in the script at any point. So it may be worth taking another look at that because it’s really — that is really good. It’s a kind of thing that they did great.

**Craig:** Is it — yeah, I mean, like you know, for instance Fade In has the outline that’s sort of running along the right side of the screen. So I can just jump, you know, from that. But there’s something about — I like what you’re saying about Slugline where it’s I can basically say, they’re chapter headings and they’re like little — it’s almost like a little Rolodex-y kind of thing along the top of the screen —

**John:** That’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s smart. I like that.

**John:** It’s on the left side of the screen, but it’s the same idea.

**Craig:** Oh, I like it on the top

**John:** So you can either have it show all your section headings or if you have notes, it will show you the notes and you can jump to wherever those notes are.

**Craig:** All right. Good.

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing this week. Mine is a book. It is called The Way to Go by Kate Ascher. And it’s a book that I think you will love, Craig. I think, you know, most screenwriters will love because screenwriters are curious.

And so what Kate Ascher did in this book and she’s done two other books that are sort of similar to it, is she looked at how planes and trains and cars work. And it’s like a big illustrated book, almost like kind of like one of those kids books where they talk through like, you know, how engines work. But this is like really sophisticated details. So it gets into like lots of details about like the modern air transportation system and sort of like how cargo containers are constructed and how things fit together, how locks work, how the Panama Canal works. And so it’s this great, incredibly well-illustrated book that sort of shows how stuff works for transportation. So I think it’s something you will enjoy.

**Craig:** There were those — I think it was David McCullough was the guy that did the books where he broke out the buildings for you.

**John:** It’s very much in that style.

**Craig:** Yeah, I love that stuff. All right, and it’s called The Way to Go?

**John:** The Way to Go.

**Craig:** All right. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a character. It’s a little random, but I watched Pitch Perfect last night. I hadn’t seen it before. I really, really liked it a lot. But my favorite character in the movie is the character of Lilly. Have you seen Pitch Perfect?

**John:** I saw Pitch Perfect. And I love Pitch Perfect.

**Craig:** Do you remember, Lilly?

**John:** Is Lilly Rebel Wilson?

**Craig:** No. Although Rebel Wilson was hysterical.

**John:** Oh, is Lilly the one who wouldn’t sing and then finally sings at the very end?

**Craig:** Lilly is the one that’s super-duper quiet and really, really weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I’m just obsessed with this character. So her name is Lilly. And the actress is Hana Mae Lee. And Kay Cannon is a very nice lady and a very good writer. I just love her name because it’s Cake And really. It’s like Kofi Annan is like Cake and On.

Anyway, so Hana Mae Lee portrays Lilly. And she is just the strangest thing. She barely speaks. She has this tiny little whisper. That’s why I did my little name that way. And in the movie does one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen any character do in any film including Lynch films. I mean it was the weirdest.

So Aubrey, this character Aubrey is the very controlling head of the group. And she’s so tightly wound that she has this problem where when she gets really upset and really emotional, she pukes, which is funny. And at one point in the movie, she gets super-duper angry at everybody and she just pukes like a ton. And it’s gross. And you’re like, okay, it’s just like one of those scenes in a comedy where somebody pukes and it’s like, ahh.

[laughs] And then at some point, they start fighting and Lilly trips and falls and lands in the puke.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then lies back in the puke and calmly begins making like a snow angel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And it was so shocking to me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I just — I just stared at it. And I watched it like three times because I couldn’t believe they did it, and I’m not even sure why they did it. And nobody in the movie really comments on the fact that she did that. But she did it.

And so anyway, I love her. And I just want to read a few lines because she doesn’t say much. She just says these individual tiny little lines. One of which is, “I ate my twin in the womb.”

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** And one of which is, “Hi, my name is Lilly Onakuramara. I was born with gills like fish.” And then she says — they’re discussing the fact that Aubrey had puked the year prior, and they’re like, “Oh, we don’t want to have what happened last year happen again.” And Lilly says, “What happened last year and do you guys want to see a dead body?” [laughs]

It’s so weird. She’s such a strange subversive character in the middle of this very mainstream comedy. So my One Cool Thing this week is Lilly.

**John:** That is awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Great. And that’s our show. So you can find links to the things we talked about at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. There you can also find transcripts to all the back episodes. You can also find the actual audio for episodes online both through the app, we have an app for Android and for iOS devices so you can listen to them there. And you can also subscribe and get to all the back episodes, back to episode one where we barely knew what we were doing.

**Craig:** Barely. Now we slightly more than barely know what we’re doing.

**John:** Yeah, we still have Skype issue sometimes. You can also buy the first 100 episodes on a few of our last remaining USB drives. That’s at store.johnaugust.com.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Blake Kuehn. It’s great. It’s sort of this ’80s awesome kind of tribute thing. So thank you, Blake, for that. If you’d like to write us an outro, there’s a link in the show notes for how you can do that.

If you have a question for me, you can write to @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions go to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s our show.

**Craig:** That was a big, huge, long, great show.

**John:** It’s a huge episode.

**Craig:** Yeah, huge.

**John:** And cutting back and forth in time and so it’s —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** This has been almost 90 minutes of —

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** No, it’s been 100 minutes of our taping this show.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, we need to charge people for this one. That’s it.

**John:** That’s it.

**Craig:** Yeah, see you next time.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [Courier Prime](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/courierprime/)
* WGA President Chris Keyser on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0450899/) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Keyser)
* Deadline’s January article on [Chip Johannessen and Billy Ray’s letter to WGA members](http://www.deadline.com/2014/01/writers-guild-producers-pension-health-contribution-cuts-new-contract/)
* [Thomas Ince](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_H._Ince) on Wikipedia
* [Sample pages](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/four-alternate-formats-final.pdf) from alternatively formatted screenplays
* Screenwriting.io on [multicamera script formatting](http://screenwriting.io/how-are-multicamera-tv-scripts-formatted/)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/)
* [The Way to Go](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1594204683/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Kate Ascher
* Lilly Onakuramara on [the Pitch Perfect wiki](http://pitch-perfect.wikia.com/wiki/Lilly_Onakuramara), and [a YouTube compilation of some of her best moments](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdG6v7gkxm4)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Blake Kuehn ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))