Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-live-from-new-york).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes Live in New York City.

**Craig:** Live! In my hometown!

**John:** Oh, yeah, so, [sings] welcome back.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s going to be a night of music.

**John:** It’s going to be a night of singing. So, Craig, why are you in town?

**Craig:** Well, my sister had her third kid.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I’m going to go visit my newest niece. And I’m also, let’s see, tomorrow I’m going to be on Seth Rudetsky’s show, On Broadway, SiriusXM. And then tomorrow night I’m seeing this show. It’s a struggling show…

**John:** Yeah. It’s a struggling little art house/black box thing.

**Craig:** It’s about marine life.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** Big Fish.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Big Fish. And a bunch of other fun things here and there.

**John:** Cool. Good. Show of hands — who here in the audience has already seen Big Fish. Has anyone seen —

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Oh my god! You people are just the best. And so I have a special discount code for Big Fish and thank you all for using that because that’s awesome and it gives me lots of cred among the producer types.

Tonight, we are going to look at the things that are on my little folded sheet of paper. This is all the notes I ever do for any show. But we’re going to talk about a couple different topics. We’re going to talk about this article that came out which was proposing that we should shoot pilots for movies, and whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** We are going to talk about Kickstarter and how much Craig loves Kickstarter. And we have special guest, because our show is much better when we have special guests. And if we can’t have Aline Brosh McKenna, another awesome choice is my very good friend, Andrew Lippa, the composer/lyricist of Big Fish. Yay!

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** But long time listeners will also know that there is always a little bit of housekeeping at the top of a show. So, we should go through our housekeeping.

**Craig:** All right. Let’s do it.

**John:** First off, if you are a person in this audience or a person listening at home in the audience who ordered one of the little USB drives with all of the backup episodes of Scriptnotes, that should be in your possession now. They all shipped out. So, if you didn’t get one, you need to email Stuart at orders@johnaugust.com and tell him, “Stuart, where’s my drive?” And he will take care of that.

Other people have asked, “You know, I didn’t get one of those little drives. I want one of those drives so bad.” Next week we’re going to start selling them again, so people can get those.

People also ask, “You know, I like that the most recent episodes of the podcast are on iTunes, but it’s only the last 20 are there.” So, now we’ve made them all available. The back 20 episodes are free on johnaugust.com or on iTunes. And then if you go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes, you’ll see links to all of the back episodes.

So, the old archived episodes, it’s sort of like a Netflix model where for $1.99 a month you can listen to as many episodes as you would like to listen to.

**Craig:** Two dollars a month. I mean, come on.

**John:** Two dollars a month. For two dollars a month you can listen to all of them.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t want to judge anybody for not spending the two dollars a month, but…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And, I mean, we’re still in debt. I just want to make sure that people know that no matter what we sell —

**John:** Yes. This is a money-losing proposition.

**Craig:** Always. That’s our credo and our promise to you. We’ll always lose money.

**John:** Yes. So, thank you for that. And so if you want to hear those back episodes you’ll either be able to buy the USB drive or go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and listen to those back episodes, because people need to catch up. And people like to binge listen to shows. And, why not?

**Craig:** Why not?

**John:** Why not? Now, Craig, one of your favorite things on earth, I know, is to support Kickstarter campaigns for projects. And where this first came up, it was one of the movies that was trying to —

**Craig:** All of them. [laughs]

**John:** All of the moves. Well, Spike Lee’s Kickstarter was not great.

**Craig:** I was okay with the Veronica Mars one, because that was such a specific circumstance. Warner Bros. has the rights to Veronica Mars. They weren’t going to let it out of right’s jail essentially and allow the filmmakers to do it unless Kickstarters proved that there was enough of an audience. That was the first and last reasonable one of these. Then along came…

**John:** Zach Braff.

**Craig:** Zach Braff. Which was just, “Hey, I’m a rich guy. Please give me money.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then Spike Lee, because I guess he blew it all on Knicks tickets, and his $6 million apartment. So, I’m not a big fan of…

**John:** No, you’re not a big fan.

**Craig:** …of people giving money to non-charitable organizations and getting no ownership in return.

**John:** So, I did something that I’m not actually so happy that I did. So, I want to sort of apologize to you and sort of try to find what the right word is for it. In a blog post I said that there was this musical from a couple years ago called The Yank! that was looking to raise money to do a cast album, because they were never able to actually to a cast album. They were an Off-Broadway Show that never transferred so it never got that cast album that they wanted.

And so I said, “Well, Craig Mazin loves cast albums.”

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** “Maybe it’s a Kickstarter.”

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And so where will he end up on this whole thing? And so in this blog post I sort of — I used you as — and we can’t quite find the right term for it, because it’s not a stocking horse. That’s not the right thing.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But, I used you in a way that was maybe that appropriate. I dragged you in on something that was maybe not appropriate.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so I apologize on that.

**Craig:** I like “Shanghaied.” I think you Shanghaied me.

**John:** I did. I Shanghaied you. I did. I basically clubbed you and took you on a boat to Shanghai.

**Craig:** Right. And as it turns out, in the internal war between my love of cast albums, and my hatred of Kickstarter, as always my hatred won.

**John:** Yes. So, here’s the backstory on this cast album. So, this show written by David Zellnik and Joseph Zellnik, who are brothers. And it was this sort of gay World War II love story thing. And Bobby Steggert —

**Craig:** You know, the usual.

**John:** The usual, you know, the mass market.

**Craig:** You’ve seen it, but whatever.

**John:** So, two of the actors who were in Big Fish are actually from that show. And they were going to be part of the cast album. And so they tweeted about the money they needed to raise. The two actors are Bobby Steggert, who plays Will in Big Fish, and Tally Sessions, who plays the mayor in Big Fish. They’re both lovely and wonderful. So, they tweeted saying like, “Hey, we’re trying to raise this money,” and they were like a couple thousand dollars short of their $35,000 goal for making this cast album.

And I said, well, you know what? I will tweet about it and I will promise that if they can hit their threshold that I will sing a song from Yank! on the live show of Scriptnotes here in New York City. That’s this.

**Craig:** And did they hit their threshold?

**John:** They hit their threshold. They exceeded their threshold. They have $36,000 they raised. So, there will be a cast album where somebody will sing this song so much better than I’m about to. But, there’s going to be singing tonight, so I figured I would just get it out of the way.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** And just do it.

**Craig:** I’m going to get offstage.

**John:** All right. Fine.

**Craig:** I’m going to leave you alone.

**John:** So, the other reason why I thought it was actually kind of useful for us to do this is for the past nine years Andrew Lippa and I have been having to sing Big Fish at a piano for investors, for directors, for producers, for everybody. And so we’ve probably done the whole Big Fish probably 150 times. Yeah. So, Andrew Lippa is a brilliant singer and really, really good. I’m not, but I’ve actually gotten much better just being sort of in his presence over time.

The way you present a show with just at a piano is kind of like this in that it doesn’t have to great. It just has to sort of approximate what a song might sound like. And that’s what I’m going to do is approximate what a good song might sound like. So, Dan Green, if you can get started.

[John sings I Keep Remembering You from Yank!]

So, buy the cast album at some point and listen to how it’s supposed to sound.

**Craig:** Can I just say…?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That that was really nice. It may be a reflection on my own sociopathy, but I just imagined you were singing it to me. About me. You know, if something should happen and you’d be alone on the podcast with no one to get angry at. No? [laughs]

**John:** It’s a random song. And what’s weird is like Craig you are sort of my podcast husband.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Andrew Lippa is sort of my Big Fish husband. And Mike is my actual husband. So, there are men in my life. So, yeah, I’m visualizing all of that to some degree. The men in my life.

**Craig:** This is kind of a big moment for us.

**John:** It’s kind of nice. Well, wait till you hear what Craig is singing at the end of the show.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, let me tell you. If you think that was gay, wow.

**John:** This gets much gayer.

**Craig:** I’ll show you gay.

**John:** This is the biggest, gayest episode ever and you are here for it.

**Craig:** The gayest episode of this podcast. It has to be.

**John:** It has to be.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** When I’m the least gay guy on stage, phew.

**John:** Oh, boy. No, Dan Green is actually much straighter than you are.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Good point.

**John:** Dan Green is getting married in a week!

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Congratulations Dan Green!

All right, our next topic. So, this was an article that someone had tweeted us this week and it was an article by Aaron Cooley arguing that we should really be shooting pilots for movies, because if you look at sort of all the terrible movies we make, we probably wouldn’t have made some of those movies or wouldn’t have made them the same way if we’d gone through the process that television goes through which is shooting a pilot. And you shoot a pilot and it’s like, yeah, that didn’t work. And so then you don’t shoot a series.

His argument being that you could actually shoot quite a few more pilots of these moves and realize what it is that you actually have in front of you and save the $250 million it costs to make The Lone Ranger. Craig, what do you think of that argument?

**Craig:** There are multiple ways in which it’s stupid, so I’m struggling to start with which one. I mean, so, just to clarify, his suggestion is that for what is a pilot of a movie, I think he’s suggesting you shoot 20 minutes or 25 minutes of the film, watch it, and then decide what to do. Which, to be fair to him, is in fact very much what they do in animation. They do animatics, pencil drawings, and just very crude. And the animators themselves will provide voice and they can watch reels, chunks of the film. And then at some point they make the decision — should we go forward and spend the big money to actually animate this?

Obviously when you’re making a movie, it doesn’t work like that. So, there’s the procedural reasons why this is never going to happen. And there is the actual reasons why it shouldn’t happen anyway, even if the procedural reasons went away. So, let’s talk about some procedural problems with making pilots for movies. [laughs]

There are sunken costs to making a movie that are not by the minute. It’s not a cab ride. You have to pay somebody to write it and you have to pay somebody to direct it and you have to pay, most importantly, people to act in it. They tend to not do like, “Yeah, I’m acting by the act.” They don’t do that. You need to pay them or they’re not showing up.

So, the great bulk of costs is actually built in before you ever roll a single thing. You need to build sets. You need to go on location. You need to crew up. There is just an enormous amount that happens. So, from a financial point of view there is that problem. There is also the problem that actors in particular, but directors also, because of the length of time they commit to a movie, they block out time in their lives to do these things. They can’t commit to anything if they don’t know if they’re actually going to be doing it or not. If I’m just making — am I making a movie for three weeks or am I making a movie for four months overseas and locations around. They have families and they have other offers on the table.

But let’s say all that went away. The author’s argument is that we could watch these 25 minutes and just like in television, which is experiencing this wonderful renaissance, studio executives would be able in their wisdom to help and make good choices. Now, I like a lot of studio executives, but no, that’s not in fact what’s going to happen. What’s going to happen is that they’re going to use the opportunity to meddle tremendously.

And when it comes down to this fundamental difference between television and film, in TV they make a pilot and they meddle with it. Sometimes for the best. Sometimes for the worst. But, no matter what they do to the pilot, if they decide to make the series they’re only committing maybe six, nine episodes, maybe 22. But you get episodes. You get multiple bites of the apple.

A movie is nothing but a pilot. That’s what it is. It’s one episode. So, they’re going to meddle as much as they possibly can because you only get one shot.

**John:** I will take the counter argument and say that we’ve actually already been doing this process, it’s just not called pilots. And I think we’ve actually done much more of it and I think this guy was just not aware of how much we do this.

So, for a director to land almost any movie, unless the director is actually really well established movie, now that director, he or she is shooting and cutting together a demo reel essentially for what this movie is. And so they are going out and they’re shooting stuff. Maybe not with the real actors. Maybe not with the real things, but even, you know, look at 300. That guy, he went out and had a shoot with his assistant like, “This is what it’s going to look like. This is what it looks like climbing the cliff with the capes and all this stuff.”

They actually sort of are doing that, it’s just not a formalized process. It’s in order to land the job the director is doing all this work to try to try to make this happen. So, I think we’re doing that. The development process overall, on a script level, we are essentially shooting a pilot just by continually rewriting the script and asking for all these changes.

What I’ve learned about in Big Fish, because Big Fish has been a nine year process getting up the stage, we did these staged readings which would actually be kind of amazing if we could somehow make them happen in features. Because what we ended up doing is we’d bring in actors, and hopefully actors we’d love to have, but sometimes actors who just were available. And for 29 hours, it’s a union rule, 29 hours, four days basically, you can teach them the script and they can perform the script at music stands.

So, it’s like a table read, but like a much better table read, like a rehearsed table read. And you get a chance to like hear what it sounds like. And you get to see what it s actually that you’re working on. And from there we could go off and do a lot more work and get things a lot better.

For Big Fish we did two of these 29 hour readings. We did a four week workshop in a rehearsal studio which probably wouldn’t make sense for a movie.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** If you were doing a drama, it would be great, but for this it wouldn’t make sense. And then we were able to make the real production which we did in Chicago. But, I look at stories like The Social Network where David Fincher would have the actors do like 100 takes and really drill them down. And he would say things like, “Well, in theater this is what you do. You’re going to rehearse.” And it sounds like the worst of everything. And if you actually were to just do a real rehearsal and test stuff, it would be a better option.

**Craig:** Well, his process is…

**John:** His process is to kill people.

**Craig:** …is maddening and [crosstalk]. But, to the extent that whatever, I mean, I think that the author is arguing that things should change from what they are now. I agree that there are certain elements that are pilot like in the system as it has always been.

And it is true that some directors will go out and sort of try and lobby to get a job, but they’re not making that movie. And more interestingly I should say that the movies that this guy seems concerned about are directed by people that don’t do that because they don’t have to. The truth is that he is — his heart is in the right place. He’s trying to mitigate risk. Everybody is trying to mitigate risk. What he doesn’t understand is that risk mitigation is the problem. It’s not the solutions. The studios are obsessed with risk mitigation. That’s why they make the movies they make.

So, I understand where he’s coming from, but to me , I actually feel that the answer is to go the other way, which is to accept a little more risk in the process and to let filmmakers just make their movies. Trust them a little bit more. Because it seems like the movies that are catching fire are the ones that are kind of surprising people a little bit, and not necessarily the ones —

**John:** It’s The Chronicles. It’s the things Rian Johnson makes. And if we were to just trust the talented people, life would be happier.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, I mean, and we see a lot of it. For instance, there’s this producer Jason Blum who makes all the little horror movies that cost like $3 million, like Insidious 2 just came out. So, it’s not just the art movies. It’s also popular fare. And they’re incredibly profitable. So, that movie made like $100 million or something. I mean, it cost $2 or $3 million. The Paranormal Activity movies. And what’s interesting about those movies is there’s no studio involvement at all. They just make them. And then they sell them and they’re fine.

So, maybe less.

**John:** Maybe less.

**Craig:** Maybe less.

**John:** Let us get to our special guest tonight who has been with me through this process of workshops and readings. The one and only, very talented lyricist and composer of Big Fish, Mr. Andrew Lippa.

He’s a hugger.

**Craig:** I like it.

**Andrew Lippa:** I’m gay. I don’t shake hands. Hello everybody!

**John:** Yay!

**Andrew:** It’s so exciting. You know that thing, the [sings Scriptnotes theme], that was the runner up for the theme from ET.

**John:** I know. And, so —

**Andrew:** [sings a Spielberg theme] It’s almost —

**Craig:** No, that was Close Encounters.

**Andrew:** I mean Close Encounters. Yeah, that’s it.

**Craig:** ET was [sings ET theme].

**Andrew:** Right. ET. [sings ET theme]. That’s right, Close Encounters.

**John:** It’s a John Williams [crosstalk].

**Andrew:** That’s the kind of day I’m having. Should we talk about the day I had?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can tell them a little bit. Andrew had an injury today.

**Andrew:** I had an accident, like an old man accident. I’m 48, which is not old —

**Craig:** It’s not young.

**Andrew:** And I fell in the bathtub —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m just trying to make it okay that you did this.

**Andrew:** No, it’s okay. Now I know the rules of the evening.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

**Andrew:** I feel in the bathtub reaching, trying to get a towel from above the door. And I fell and slammed down on the tub and I got a — I split my hip open. And I had to go get four — yes, the gentleman, thank you. That gentleman knows how serious this is. I had four stitches. Here, let me show you.

**Craig:** Wait, you said four or 40?

**Andrew:** Four stitches. And, you know, what’s amazing about — what’s amazing — and the best thing about the whole experience, and it was a good experience, was that — and I’m not kidding . Like I learned a lot about gratitude today. And I actually, like, there was a cab when I needed it and there was a place to go that isn’t an emergency room like those urgent care places. And thank god I have insurance, and I went, and I saw a doctor in 30 minutes. They cleaned me up and sutured me and I went off to meet with John August about Big Fish.

So, I’m really lucky.

**John:** Yay!

**Andrew:** So, it’s a lucky day. And it worked out.

**John:** We’re happy that you’re good. And so Andrew texted me sort of with the news, or did you call me? I guess you called me, yeah.

So, we have level of hierarchy of needs. It’s an email if it’s not too urgent. It’s a text if it’s a little more urgent. And if it’s a call then, oh my god, something is deeply wrong, to say like, “This is what happened,” and to tell the rest of the team because we had a meeting.

But Andrew and I over the course of the years have developed this sort of like — we have to be so ruthlessly honest with each other that I will like, “Andrew, do I smell?” And Andrew will sniff me and tell me if I smell before important meetings. That happens.

**Andrew:** There is a whole hierarchy of smell, too, that one could talk about. “Do I smell right now?” “Do I smell as a result of what I ate?” “Do I generally smell?” “Is my writing smell?”

**John:** Yes. But we have to be sort of truthful.

Now, Craig Mazin, when did I first tell you about Big Fish? Because we kept it a secret for a long time. Did I tell you before we started the podcast?

**Craig:** No, I don’t think before. But I remember it was pretty early on. And I remember that you were talking about it and I thought, oh, in my stupid mind I’m like, “Oh, this is great. I’ll be able to go see a musical in like a month or two.” [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And then you’re like, “Oh no, it will be out in like 20 years.” I’m like, oh, how long am I going to have to wait? But here it is. It’s here. I’ve been following it, I feel like I’ve been kind of like a proud uncle basically following along.

**John:** The strangest thing as sort of how Andrew and I got hooked up to work together is that it was not like — it was sort of a shotgun marriage. And so I had wanted to do a Big Fish musical. At the first test screening of Big Fish the movie I said I really think there is a stage musical here because these characters want to sing. So, let’s figure out how to do that. I told it to the producers, “Let’s figure out how to do that.”

And we sort of started and we sort of started talking about composers and what might be a good situation. And then Andrew completely independently had the same idea.

**Andrew:** I met Bruce Cohen who is one of the producers of the film and who’s also a producer, one of the producers of the musical, at a party in New York City. And I really hit it off with him and he’s a wonderful man. And it dawned on me that he had produced Big Fish. And I said to my husband, David, “This would be a really good idea for a musical. Should call I Bruce Cohen?” And he said, “Call Bruce Cohen.”

So, I called Bruce Cohen a couple of days later and I said have you guys thought about turning Big Fish into a musical? He says, “In fact, we have. And John August is going to write the book and let me — you’re at the top of our list of composers and lyricists,” which I didn’t believe. But, you know, he said, “Call John.” And I did. And I flew to LA and we went together for four days to write the first two scenes, neither of which are in the play anymore, but we did do that. And we played it for Bruce and for Dan Jinks. And they turned and looked at us and said, “Let’s make a musical.”

**John:** And then it only took nine years after that point.

**Craig:** Just a short nine years.

I have a question. I don’t know if you have like a path you’re following here.

**John:** Oh, no, go.

**Craig:** I mean, this is the question that — I’m standing in for the audience tonight as the guy who doesn’t really understand how musicals are put together specifically, although I’m a big fan of musicals.

**Andrew:** I don’t understand either.

**Craig:** Well, we’ll get to the bottom of that.

**Andrew:** Don’t have any preconceptions.

**Craig:** The question that I have from a writer’s point of view is we’ve got story to tell and we have two ways of doing it. We have conventional dialogue with some characters and then we have song. And the song can — sometimes the song is telling an emotional story and sometimes it’s telling plot. How do you guys negotiate who tells what part of the story?

**Andrew:** Well, let me modify the question for a second, because there are more than two ways of doing it.

So, there are the obvious two ways of doing it which is either in speech or in song. But, inside that, in the song itself there are two things going on. There is lyric and there’s music. And inside that, they can either work as partners, the music and lyric can work together to tell one emotional thing at the same time, or the music and lyric can tell two different stories at the same time depending on what you’re trying to get across.

And every song has a different purpose. You want to stay true to the theme of your show or the overall arc of what your show is about. Every song should relate to it. But, you’ve also got direction and choreography which tell the story very, very further deeply inside the thing that you’ve already made. So, sometimes you’ve made the thing and the director and the choreographer have a real profound impact on getting to the deeper level of what it’s about. And sometimes they come up with an idea that surpasses the original idea. And that’s why in some ways — and we’ve had that experience, too, in developing the show.

So, there are twenty songs that aren’t in the show that are available for purchase after the podcast.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] But again, running in debt.

**Andrew:** So, that’s just to start. There is much more than just the speech and the song going on.

**John:** I think it’s actually great to rewind time to our first time talking through the show which was the drive from LAX out to Palm Springs where we rented this house. We rented a house with like a pool and a piano so we could just work.

**Andrew:** That was my prerequisite. A piano and a pool.

**John:** Yes. He’s pretty hardcore about that.

**Andrew:** And John’s a terrific swimmer.

**John:** Yeah, okay. And we tried to play tennis and I’m just the worst at Tennis. I remember that.

We needed to talk through what the show was on like really fundamental questions like is Edward Bloom going to be one actor or two actors. In the movie it’s two actors, but we thought it’s probably one actor. Right? That’s probably one actor.

What is the act break? Broadway shows have an act break and it has to be at this incredibly crucial moment where you’ve achieved this great thing and yet there’s a big question. So, what would be that moment?

**Andrew:** What’s the tone? What’ s the tone now that you’ve added music as a component and poetry as a component. What’s the tone, the overall tone, of the piece. And how country do we get? And fantastic do we get? And what story did we really want to tell together first because as you know from Big Fish there’s the emotional family story, which is at the heart of what the whole play is about, but there’s also the fantasy sequences which have to fulfill a real grand sense of who Edward Bloom is.

**John:** Yeah. So, it ultimately came down to answering two questions that are at the heart of sort of every musical adaptation, which sort of they exist in a way in movies but are very specific in a music, which is the “welcome to the world of it all,” which is sort of the “welcome to the world” song. And then the I Want song, which is the character in a musical will boldly state what he or she is going for either as a direct goal or sort of that inner need. What is driving that character in a way that you never really see in a movie stated so clearly.

And so some of the first things we had to do was figure out, well, what does the world sound like? And how do we introduce the audience to what this world sounds like? So, let’s talk about the welcome to the world song.

Craig, from your experience, the examples of, what do you think about how a world begins?

**Craig:** In terms of Broadway musicals?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, I always think of Tradition from Fiddler on the Roof.

**John:** Absolutely.

[Pianist starts playing the song]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Tradition sort of really introduces the mama, the papa, the daughter, the sons. It also introduces the theme of the movie which is that we stick to traditions or else we get hurt. So, obviously, you know, you saw the movie, the play, so you know that the musical is going to be about, in fact, moving away from traditions. We meet characters. By name he introduces Yente the Matchmaker and so I think of that. I think of Hello from Book of Mormon. No? Nothing?

**John:** Oh, no I was —

[Pianist starts playing the song. John, Craig, and Andrew sing along briefly]

**Craig:** It’s an amazing book.

**Andrew:** It made enough money. Let’s stick to my songs. I want to go back to Fiddler.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** Let’s talk about Alan Menken, though. Let’s talk about Circle of Life. Remember Elton John’s Circle of Life.

**Andrew:** No, that’s Elton John. “Ingonyama nengw’ enamabala” to you, too.

**John:** Yes. So it’s —

**Andrew:** [sings a bit from Lion King]

**John:** The welcome to the world song will establish the musical vocabulary and what it is you’re in for in this show tonight, hopefully.

**Andrew:** Well, yeah, we need to go back to Fiddler for one second, because it’s the question of like who are we, what do we do, what do we believe, right? As opposed to here’s the story you’re going to see tonight.

**Craig:** Right.

**Andrew:** And in Fiddler on the Roof, the craziest thing about Fiddler on the Roof, and everybody talks about that as one of the great examples of opening numbers. A, it wasn’t their first opening. And it was the thing that Jerome Robbins said to them later in the process. He said, “Well, what’s this play about?” And they had to go really, really, really, really think about it.

**John:** I want to make sure you’re on your mic.

**Andrew:** I’m on. Can you hear me? Thank you. Oh, yeah, we’re recording this, right? This is for posterity. It’s a time capsule. Sorry. And for people who really study musicals and study the making of musicals, that’s like a seminal moment is that conversation about what’s your play about and what is the opening number. How is the opening number presented.

But the other thing that’s kind of nutty about Fiddler on the Roof, if anybody is really paying attention, Tevye comes out and who is he talking to?

**Craig:** Right.

**Andrew:** Who is he talking to? He goes, “A fiddler on the roof sounds crazy, no?” And he’s talking to us. He’s not talking to a character. He’s the narrator at the beginning of the play. And then later he talks to God. It’s really, if I were directing a production of Fiddler, it would be hard to keep that from being the thing that the actor believes he’s doing. Because you don’t really want to believe that he’s talking to an audience full of people because the rest of the play, that doesn’t really happen. He talks to God and he has various conversations with God.

And so it’s like voiceover in a sense. It’s somebody talking about something that I need to know in order to get into the story. And somehow we buy it.

**Craig:** Right.

**Andrew:** We just watch it. And John and I — oh, sorry, go ahead.

**Craig:** I was going to say, it sets tone also because what’s so great about Tradition is that there are serious parts. It ends with a very serious, you know, this is what keeps us from breaking our neck, but there are jokes. So, it’s teaching you how to watch the musical. It’s teaching that there’s going to be jokes but there is also going to be serious stuff, too.

**Andrew:** That’s right. And it also introduces you to the world. So, the world of Big Fish, we wanted everybody to meet Edward Bloom. And we thought the best way to do it was for Edward Bloom to tell a story, because that’s what he does.

And so we thought we could do the route of him talking to the audience, or we could do the route of him talking to somebody. And then we’re in a scene from the very beginning. In the original opening, it’s this piece where, John, do you want to come in on this.

[pianist begins playing]

**John:** So, he and his son, he’s talking to his kid, and he’s missed the kid’s baseball games. And he’s going to tell him a great big story about — “Let me tell you a real story. The story of the day you were born.”

**Andrew:** And eventually he sang. “By the time you were born, you were already a legend. You’d taken more hundred dollar lures than any fish in Alabama. For sure. Some said, that fish was the ghost of a man named Henry Wall, a thief who drowned in that river 60 years before. ”

**John:** “There are ghosts in the river?”

**Andrew:** “The rivers in Alabama are choked with ghosts. [Ghost howls.]” Crazy ghosts. We thought that would be fun. And then eventually, “Now I’ve been trying to catch that fish since I was a boy no bigger than you. And on the day that you were born, that’s what I do. This is the God’s honest truth. I happened there on that morn. It was just that way on the day that you were born.”

Now, we ended up cutting that number.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That number went with us to Chicago. And it wasn’t the right way to start the show as it turned out. And so we got to Chicago and this was — so Norbert Leo Butz is Edward Bloom and he’s fantastic and truly charismatic. And so it was Norbert and the boy. And then this giant fish swallows them all. And so you sort of see the jaws swallow them in. There’s all this story stuff happening inside.

**Andrew:** With projections. And we saw it demonstrated to us. Everybody gasped. Remember that day when they showed it to the cast? It was so cool.

**John:** It was fantastic. And so we’re like, “Oh, this is going to be amazing. This is so great.” And so it was just a father and son through the whole thing. And then it’s like, oh, it felt really empty and weird and it just did not work. And so Andrew Lippa and I went to the basement of the Oriental Theater in Chicago and it’s, “Fuck! What do we do?”

And so it was like, well, maybe we make it a whole company number. And so then we had to figure out like a way to sort of get everybody in there. So, essentially everybody is swallowed up at once.

**Craig:** Ah, the Ragtime method.

**John:** Yes.

**Andrew:** Yes. Exactly. “The Ragtime method. For three easy payments of $29.95, you can get the Ragtime method!”

**John:** So, we did that.

**Craig:** [laughs] He’s funny.

**John:** It’s funny.

**Craig:** He’s funny.

**Andrew:** Don’t get pregnant. Use the Ragtime method. Play this music, she’ll stay away from you for years.

[Pianist begins playing a Ragtime number]

**John:** Ooh!

**Craig:** Ragtime!

**John:** [Crosstalk].

**Craig:** [to Andrew] This is great. Do you want to do a podcast, me and you?

**Andrew:** Frankly, I’ve been waiting for Peter Sagal to show up.

**John:** So, we went down to the basement of the Oriental Theater and it’s like, “What do we do?” And so we just hit our head on some walls. So, we built this whole new thing, would still use the “God’s honest truth” as the underlying idea, but we’re bringing the whole company into it so everyone can have more to do, so it wouldn’t just be Norbert and son on stage the whole time.

**Andrew:** Now, this is what is known in theater parlance as a Band-Aid.

**John:** It is a Band-Aid. And the one thing we did introduce which became a very important idea was the idea that to get out of this fish you would — Edward would teach a dance that would cause the fish to spit them up and that’s how we got them out. That dance was called the Alabama Stomp, which was useful. So, that was a useful thing that came out of it.

And so we had to teach this to the cast while we were actually putting on the show every night, which was terrifying, making such a big change in a number, but it was useful.

**Andrew:** And they did it. And, you know, to use a baseball metaphor, they got tagged out by the shortstop. But that’s how far the number got. We got much further than the original number, but we didn’t quite get the whole point of what the play was about.

So, we went to work after Chicago to talk about what really is the opening. And John and I went through lots of different conversations and permutations of what the opening could be. And we kept going back to the idea that Edward Bloom needs to tell his son’s story. But the one thing that we realized was that if you talk about an idea, that’s one thing, but if you talk about a person, if you give something to somebody and say something to them, you can do this, or you are this, or here’s this thing for you, it suddenly made it much more personal than it did before. If he gave something to his son, we realize, oh, this could be better.

And what came out was this really long day. I had a meeting with Susan Stroman, our director and choreographer, the next morning in New York. And John was still in LA at that time in early June. And we — oh, it was a very long day and a very long night. And I got really frustrated on the phone and sometimes John has to play sort of therapist with me and he’s like, “Well, how could we look at this from a different angle?”

**John:** [laughs] And I talk Andrew off of ledges.

**Craig:** Wait, can I just say it’s okay now to do impressions of you on the podcast.

**John:** It’s fine. When they’re quality impressions, then it’s fine.

**Andrew:** [laughs] Oh, wow.

**Craig:** I think I get to your spirit…okay, never mind.

**Andrew:** Do I need, to should I leave?

**Craig:** Slap the back of my head.

**Andrew:** And so finally John said, and this is sometimes how it works. John spit out the very name of the song. He said, “Well, he wants to say this, and this, and this.” I said, okay, and I’m writing it down, I’m writing it down, and I said, “Keep talking.”

And he would say more stuff. And I could see like sort of the juices happening, making stuff up. And I’m like, “Keep talking!” And then he’d say more and I’d be like, okay, goodbye. I’ve got to go. I’m going to call you back.

And then I wrote this.

[Pianist begins playing]

He’s there talking to his kid. And he sings this to his child. “What if I told you you could change the world with just one thought? What if I told you you could be a king? Anything you desire, boy, anything on a plate, all within your power to create. I know somewhere I the darkness there’s a story meant for me, where I always know exactly what to say. I know somewhere some surprising ending waits for me to tell it, my own way.

“Be the hero of your story if you can. Be the champion in the fight, not just the man. Don’t depend on other people to put paper next to pen. You’re the hero of your story, boy, and then. You can rise to be the hero once again.

“Now part of an adventure is the people you meet. What if I said I met a witch,” and then the witch comes out and suddenly we’re introducing all the people in the stories that we’re going to meet the rest of the night. The witch. The giant. The mermaid. All of these people who have come out and then become part of Edward Bloom’s story and they all sing his idea to his kid, “Be the hero of your story and then you’re life is going to be better.”

And Susan Stroman in her miraculous way does this thing with fish in the pit. And I’m not going to give you anymore. And it’s so joyful and at the very end of the number, on our first night on September 5th, no one had heard this number except people making the show. And on September 5th, 1,400 people screamed at the end of the number with joy. And one Jew in the back wept, because I was so happy that it worked.

**John:** So, I think part of the lesson behind talking about the Welcome to the World song is that the original song wasn’t introducing us to the world especially well at all. It was sort of telling about this one guy and that there’s a kid, but it wasn’t introducing you to the world. Like it didn’t tell you this is the night you’re going to see. Our example was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.

**Craig:** Right.

**Andrew:** Comedy Tonight.

**Craig:** Comedy Tonight is perfect. Yeah.

**John:** Which is like these are the characters. Nothing up our sleeve. This is everybody you’re going to see.

**Craig:** “For those of you that don’t like pirates,” one of the great lines in the whole movie.

**John:** [laughs] So, you see the whole company and like they’re really good. And you get the big vocal moment, but it’s not trying to tell a specific story. It’s more just like this is the world of how it goes.

**Andrew:** And it turns out that if you look at all of the — if you look at a lot of opening numbers, the majority of them are like that. And what I’m very proud of is actually our play starts with a scene between Edward and Will.

**John:** Yeah, well what Andrew calls a “pesky talking bit.” Yeah, the pesky talking bit.

**Andrew:** Yeah, the pesky talking bit.

**John:** It opens on a small simple scene between the grown son and Edward Bloom. So, you establish who those physical people are so you know like it’s most about them.

**Andrew:** And there are four or five really solid laughs in that scene. And it’s very — it’s a perfect scene, John. It is. I’ve never said that to you before. And I’ll never say it again.

And then we go back in time and we teach the audience that that’s what we’re going to do, because one of the things Big Fish does is it really plays with time, unlike most musicals I’ve ever seen. And if you look at the classics, you look at the musicals with great opening numbers, or great openings, the ones I love the most are the ones that are scenes, that are people engaged in some activity, they’re I the middle of something, as opposed to the musicals where someone comes forward and says, “Hey, this is what we’re doing and this is what we’re about.”

That can be a very successful musical opening number, like Comedy Tonight, or Fiddler on the Roof, Tradition. But there are also numbers like Oh What a Beautiful Morning at the beginning of Oklahoma.

**Craig:** Life Is from Zorba. I always like that they’re having an argument about what life is. And you just find them having this argument and this one lady —

**Andrew:** The beginning of Phantom of the Opera is a four minute scene in an auction house and you have no idea who anybody is or what anything is. And someone — and there’s no music — and Phantom of the Opera, this really long-running show all about the music, supposedly, and it’s called Phantom of the OPERA, and it starts with no music. And there’s something so audacious if you think about the creators in the middle ’80s writing a new musical. And the successful composer like Andrew Lloyd Webber and the idea in the room is, “Let’s start the musical without music.” [British accent] “That’s a great idea. I love that idea.”

You know, it’s like, I think a lot of people would look at you and think you’re crazy. And that’s pretty audacious when you think about it.

**John:** Great. So, the other thing which is very unique to, I think, musicals is that I Want song. And so when Craig and I did our episode about The Little Mermaid, we talked about Part of Your World and what a perfect I Want song that is. You understand exactly what Ariel is going for, what’ she’s hoping for in life.

And so the I Want song is a fundamental part of pretty much ever movie musical and every stage musical you’ve seen where usually your lead character has come forward and said, “this is what I’m going for. This is my — we talk about want and need — it’s sort of both. This is where I see my life headed.

And so in Big Fish, we can talk about other examples.

**Craig:** Well, there’s so many.

**John:** What are great I Want songs? What are your favorite I Want songs?

**Andrew:** The Wizard and I from Wicked.

[Pianist begins playing]

**Andrew:** Very good. Thank you, Dan.

**Craig:** There you go.

**Andrew:** Did that really just happen?

**John:** Dan Green actually plays on Wicked.

**Andrew:** Ah. There’s Something’s Coming in West Side Story. That’s an I Want song. There are two I Want songs in Fiddler on the Roof. Matchmaker, which is really the I Want song, because it’s about the three girls are saying they want. And then the whole rest of the play is actually about them getting what they want. They get husbands, but they get them in different ways. The first one gets them by the traditional matchmaking. And he second one gets it by finding her own Jewish boyfriend. And the third one goes off with the non-Jewish guy, the Russian guy.

And then If I Were a Rich Man is the next one. And what’s curious about that I Want song as it were is that that is never fulfilled in the play. The thing that he says he wants, he wants to be respected, and admired, and sit in the Synagogue all the time and have money. The guy never gets that. He never gets it.

So, I Want songs don’t have to fulfill the want, you just have to express the want, because we need to know what the character is going after. And musicals, gosh, there are few examples — I don’t know, we might be able to think of one like maybe Next to Normal, what’s the I Want song? And I Miss the Mountains, is that the I Want song?

**John:** Probably.

**Andrew:** I don’t know. Early on, what do they sing at the beginning? I don’t know the show that well.

**John:** And if you think about musicals, the I Want song is generally the second or third song. So, usually we establish the world and then the character comes forward and says what he or she wants. Second or third song. If it’s the fourth song, there’s probably a problem. And that was a problem for us. Our I Want song was coming kind of late.

**Andrew:** Yeah. And we originally wrote — I wrote a song called A Story of my Own, which was Edward as a child singing to the witch, but it was a grown man singing as a child singing to a witch. So, already you’ve got a problem. And he sang about all these things he wants to do and places he wants to go. And it was a list song. He sang about going to Japan and riding kangaroos and meeting all kinds of people. And it turned out that it was just that. It was just a bunch of information that slowed us down from figuring out what the play was really about. Because the play wasn’t about that.

The play is about this guy wants to reconcile with — wants to be understood by his son. His son wants to understand his father. So, in the opening number, in “Be the Hero,” as that number goes on what we learn is that Edward wants his son to get on board his stories and get on board these ideas.

And then when we get to the son a couple songs later, the son who finds out — John, do you want to set it up actually? You’ll be good.

**John:** So, what we realized sort of post-Chicago is that we’re a two-hander. We almost function like a romantic drama except that it’s the father and son who want to — you want a relationship to happen between these two people. It’s a father and son who don’t get along and you’re trying to find a way for them to get along.

So, they both are kind of protagonists over the course of the story, but it was really Will who needed to have that X-ray vision and see what was inside his soul. And he had no song. He had no solo song where he could express what it was he was going for.

There was already a scene that happened in the play where it’s almost like a split screen where on stage left and stage right we have the doctor’s offices where Edward is getting his ultrasound and he’s finding out that his cancer has spread. And the other side of the stage, Josephine and Will are finding out that they are going to have a son, so she’s pregnant and they’re going to have a son.

And so that was a moment that was already in the play. But I was like, well, that feels like a singable moment. And this is honestly a thing that happened over the course of my life, since the time I — it’s been fifteen years I’ve been working on Big Fish. I had a kid. And so I know what that ultrasound was like. And I remember when I saw the ultrasound and I saw that I was having a girl, my brain raced forward. I could sort of see all these things about like what my daughter was going to be and what my relationship with my daughter was going to be. And the things I would teach her and how excited I was.

[Pianist begins playing]

And so I talked to Andrew about what that felt like. And, so I also said like Andrew I have words in other parts of the play, take these and work with them. So, I dictated a bunch of stuff and this became the song.

**Andrew:** [sings] “Stranger. I’m feeling stranger than I ever felt before. So much more. Different. Like something old is joined with something new. It still feels true. I’m passing through a right than every parent does. I’m walking on shared familiar ground. Yet every step I take is not a step that was. And lifelong, I like the sound, of stranger, a child I’ve yet to meet becomes my everything. My song to sing. Father. And suddenly the weight of it is real. What do I feel? I feel connected in a way I’ve never known. Line from dad to me to newborn song. So, from today I’ll never make a choice along. One for all. All for one. And when he’s born I’ll teach him to use his common sense. He’ll listen and he’ll learn he’ll excel. I’ll tell my son that life is lived in clear and present tense, not only in the stories we can tell. My father told me stories I could never comprehend. And every tale he claimed to be the hero. I’ve tried to understand him. But I wonder if I can. Because after almost 30 years, I still don’t know the man. I wish I knew the man. But he’s a stranger. My father is a stranger I know very well. A puzzling shell. Hopeful. What’s on its way may help us both to grow. But I don’t know. I don’t know when I’ll understand what made him wild. I don’t know why he has the urge to fly. I want to face him like a man and not a child, so I’ll try, I’ll really try. And in time my boy is sure to see brighter days for dad and me. We can do things better than before. So that strangers will be no more!”

**Craig:** That was good. That was good.

**John:** So, I got to hear that for the first time in the basement of the Oriental Theater. So, the last week that were there, we weren’t going to put any more changes into the show, but like we knew we had a lot of work to do ahead. And so Andrew was terrified to show the latest song, but I was like, you know, he had the first half of it. And so we were in the basement, just the two of us, and he plays the first half of it. And it was like, just give him a big giant hug.

And he burst out sobbing. Sobbing.

**Craig:** It’s a running theme here, isn’t it?

**Andrew:** Well, this is crazy, but the show itself is emotional. But there was this — we had opened, we had gotten really positive, really encouraging reviews. We knew there was a lot more work that we needed to do and that we wanted to do. And we were so grateful we had the time to do it. And so we didn’t stop. We didn’t take a break. We just were there. We were like, “Let’s work.”

And I worked and this is also like how the art is transmitted. John had a line at the very end of the play that this character said to a doctor in the hospital when Edward Bloom is in his final hours. And he said, “My father is a stranger I know very well.” And this idea emerged as a really cool idea. And so I as the lyricist went and I thought, well, what other meanings of the word are there? like what other relationships do we have or would this character have to the word stranger? And so initially — I wrote the first third of the song that I played for John that morning.

And I knew what I wanted to do was go from how I’ve never felt this way, you know, he sings, “Stranger, I’m feeling stranger than I’ve ever felt before.” And then he says, “My child is this stranger I’m going to just build my world around.” And I knew I wanted to somehow get to my father and get to my father is a stranger and he’s a stranger I know very well. And then the conclusion of the song is that we don’t even have to use that word anymore. The stranger — we don’t have to be strangers anymore.

And I knew I was heading down that road. And once I wrote that beginning it had the right — that’s the other thing is that not only do you have to write a song that’s appropriate to the story and the character, but there’s also a tone and feel issue. And lots of things get replaced in the show, like what Kate Baldwin sings right after this, she plays Sandra, and that moment went through several rewrites. A different feel because the energy of the show was getting — somehow got sad for too long.

And so she needed to sing something a little more positive, a little more up, and in fact we just made a cut in it last week. One section that when it was slow it was beautiful, when it was fast it sounded silly. And so we got rid of that fast bit and suddenly everything else around it emerged as terrific. And so that’s the great news about — we’ve talked about the difference between film and musicals for a long time, but in the editing room, you’ve got the opportunity to take at least, to find something that was done that’s the right thing and you edit it in the right way and you can get the right thing across.

Our version of editing is rewrites. So, we constantly are rewriting the show because that’s how we edit it. That’s how we get it to be better.

**John:** Yeah. This is one of our last weeks to work on it, but I put in 12 pages of changes today because it’s way of sort of refinements. It’s the things that you would usually do at in the editing bay if it were a movie, but it’s on pages here because it has to be what’s going in tonight. Like literally the show that’s playing there tonight has things in it that I’ve never seen before because it’s going in there tonight.

And any change you make has to go in the script. And so that’s been the strange part as a writer is that you just never stop writing.

**Craig:** Well, it’s kind of true for all of us, I guess. We only stop when they take it away, unless you’re lazy.

**Andrew:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But, I mean, it’s funny listening to you guys. Even though the medium requires so many different things, a different approach, in the end it seems like the struggles, the synthesis, the collaboration, it’s all common to what we all do. I mean, novelists, no, because they’re alone, weirdos. But, you know, for movies and for shows, putting on a show, whether it’s TV or film or Broadway, it seems like there’s a lot of the same stuff going on, a lot of the same challenges, and a lot of the same agita.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** So, we do this thing on our podcast called One Cool Thing where we each talk about one cool thing that we want to share and tell our audience here and our audience who is listening to the podcast about. Andrew, do you want to kick us off? Do you have a cool think you’d like to share, something you’d like to talk about?

**Andrew:** Last year I was in Basel, Switzerland visiting friends and we went to this restaurant that you didn’t get to order food. You ordered the phylum, so it was like meat, fish, vegetable for your appetizer and your main course. And I just thought that was the coolest thing ever. And I just found out about one like that here called Recette in New York City, in the Village. And you do that — you go and you don’t get to pick what you eat. You just tell them meat, fish, or vegetable and then they bring it to you.

**John:** I respect that because I think too often choices — you have that paradox of choice where it’s like I’m less happy now because I have those choices. If you just give me the prix fixe and I’m happy.

**Andrew:** I’m like that in the cereal aisle. I’m overwhelmed. That’s why I just stick to Honey Nut Cheerios.

**Craig:** I don’t have any of these problems. A menu is fine. I generally can pick, I’ll have this, the soup.

**John:** Soup.

**Craig:** Soup. I like that.

**John:** So, Recette, like rice but “ette” at the end.

**Andrew:** Says you.

**John:** All right. My One Cool Thing is actually a thing that people here or people who are listening at home can actually join us for is that there is this great site called Charity Buzz, which if you’ve never gone to Charity Buzz you should, because basically charitable organizations anywhere in the US, maybe outside the US, but really inside the US can put things up for auction. And so it’s the kind of things you would normally go to like a silent auction for, you know, a museum, or for some kid’s fundraiser thing.

But they’re really good things usually, like really good things, like special things. Like Tim Cook did this, like, you get to meet with Tim Cook and spend 30 minutes and pitch him ideas and stuff like that, which went for like half a million dollars or whatever. We’re not Tim Cook, but Andrew Lippa and I have agreed to do a fundraiser on Charity Buzz for my daughter’s school actually it’s a public school fundraiser, where you can get a backstage tour of Big Fish and we’ll sit with you and have a drink with you and talk you through things.

So, if you would like that opportunity, you go to charitybuzz.com. The links will be in the show notes at johnaugust.com. And click there and you can bid on that if you would like to see backstage at Big Fish.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Craig, you had a question about travel plans?

**Craig:** Yeah, so it’s a One Cool Ask/One Cool Favor. I’m going to be —

**Andrew:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I mean, this is not like, you know, spend $50 to be here. I’ve done a lot for you people! I’m asking for a little something. It’s not — you guys can’t help me at all, you here. So, relax.

**John:** What if somebody in this audience actually had your answer?

**Craig:** I’m going to be traveling to Vienna with my family soon and I thought for any listeners who are in — because we have a lot of international listeners. Any listeners in Vienna, why don’t you write in and, but no weirdos, thank you, so that may eliminate everyone. I don’t know. Write into ask@johnaugust.com and maybe we could do a little Viennese Scriptnotes meet up.

**John:** That would be kind of great.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be fun.

**John:** But there’s something that’s missing, Craig.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There’s one thing missing.

**Craig:** The gayest thing of all!

**John:** The gayest thing of all. So, a promise quite early on in the podcast that if we did a live podcast at some point Craig would sing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And you sang with a guitar once.

Craig; I did sing once with a guitar, but it wasn’t live. It wasn’t in front of 300 people. It wasn’t on Broadway. It wasn’t in front of Andrew Lippa!

**John:** You’re not really on Broadway. This is considered Off-Broadway.

**Craig:** To me, this is Broadway. I’m from Pasadena.

**John:** [laughs] So, you’re —

**Andrew:** Yeah, this is Broadway, that’s for sure.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m on Broadway.

**John:** Yes. But there’s no fire trucks, so where are the fire trucks, Craig?

**Craig:** I know, I know.

**John:** You’re going to sing us a song.

**Craig:** Yes. So, this song is from Falsettoland or Falsettos. Falsettoland. Falsettoland? Falsettoland.

**John:** It’s from a musical.

**Craig:** Yeah. William Finn, a wonderful composer/lyricist wrote this song called What More Can I Say. And it’s a very interesting one because it’s a man who, he’s married, he has a kid, and then he realizes “I’m gay,” which I guess happens occasionally. And he’s met this man and he’s in love. And he’s really truly in love for the first time. And it’s an interesting song because he’s singing it about his boyfriend while his boyfriend is asleep, so it’s actually very annoying — it’s hard to sing because he’s really quiet. But then he gets loud, which always makes me laugh because I think, “Ooh, he’s gonna wake up.”

But I guess he doesn’t. He’s a super heavy sleeper. So, anyway, I’m not professional. I’m no Andrew Lippa.

[Craig sings]

Thank you.

**John:** Oh Craig.

**Craig:** I know. I totally did like the American Idol thing where Simon is like, “You forgot the lyric.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, it was hard for me to remember all those words.

**Andrew:** The lyric forgot was right where it said, “It’s been more than words can say.” Do you realize that?

**John:** Oh my god.

**Andrew:** You lived the song.

**Craig:** You’re good. You’re good. See, he makes me feel bad, and you always make me feel good. I want to hang out with you .

**John:** [laughs] We’ve learned some secrets tonight. Ah!

**Craig:** Apparently the song works.

**John:** I need to thank some people who made this whole night possible. First off, I need to thank New World Stages for giving us this space, which is remarkable. Thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you New World.

**John:** This is normally the home of the Gazillion Bubble Show. And so usually there are bubbles all over this place, which is great. That’s why the floors are a little bit sticky, so if you’re wondering.

**Craig:** That’s why.

**John:** That’s why!

**Craig:** Got in there just ahead of you.

**Andrew:** If I had a nickel…

**Craig:** [laughs] He’s the best setup man ever, by the way. And he doesn’t even know he’s doing it. It’s so great. Can he be on with us all the time, please?

**John:** Yeah. I think we need — I also need to thank Dan Green, who we need to have Dan Green on this show all the time.

**Craig:** I know, yeah.

**John:** If we had a piano we could cut to. We’d be set. I need to thank Whitney Brit and Stage Entertainment who sort of organized this whole thing. Because literally it was just — it would be great to do a live show if someone wanted to make a live show happen, and she did. And Stage Entertainment and Michelle Groaner, thank you so much for making this all possible. God bless you.

And I want to thank our New York audience because Craig and I, seriously, we had no idea if anyone would show up.

**Craig:** This is so cool that you guys came. Thank you.

**John:** Because LA is like, oh, screenwriters, and it’s lousy with screenwriters. It’s not too hard. But you guys came out tonight which was just —

**Craig:** In your shirts. I mean, awesome. I saw so many shirts. Umbrage Orange. Very cool. Umbrage orange.

**John:** Thank you guys so much. I get a little verklempt sort of seeing that people actually would show up for something like this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s really kind of amazing and wonderful.

**Craig:** Yay!

Links:

* See [Big Fish on Broadway](http://www.bigfishthemusical.com/)
* If you don’t have your Scriptnotes USB drive yet, [email Stuart and let him know](mailto:orders@johnaugust.com)
* [Back episodes](http://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes) are available now
* The Yank! Original Cast Album [has been funded](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1046922831/yank-original-cast-album)
* Aaron Cooley asks: [Why don’t movie studios make pilots?](http://hollywoodjournal.com/industry-impressions/why-dont-movie-studios-make-pilots/20130920/)
* [Andrew Lippa](http://andrewlippa.com/), and [on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Lippa)
* [Recette](http://recettenyc.com/) restaurant
* [Bid now](https://www.charitybuzz.com/catalog_items/371106) for a Big Fish backstage tour with John and Andrew (and support a Los Angeles public school)
* [Let us know](mailto:ask@johnaugust.com) if you’re in Vienna and willing to meet up with Craig
* The [Falsettoland cast album](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000V9WJ68/?tag=johnaugustcom-20), and [on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsettoland)
* Thank you and congrats to pianist and soon-to-be husband [Daniel Green](http://www.danielgreenmusic.com)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/are-two-screens-better-than-one).

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

**Craig Mazin:** No, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 108, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Mm.

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

**Craig:** Impressed with your elocution. [laughs]

**John:** I’ve been criticized for my elocution, so I am trying to pronounce things a little bit more clearly, partly because it is four o’clock in the afternoon as we’re recording this rather than 10:30 at night. So, I am actually a little bit more awake than I’ve been for several weeks.

**Craig:** I don’t think you should let the nattering nabobs — One of my favorite expressions. Thank you, Spiro Agnew. — I don’t think you should let the nattering nabobs tell you how you should sound. I think you sound just fine.

**John:** Well, thank you very much, Craig. Your vote of confidence will inspire me. And, yet, I will still try to pronounce a little bit more clearly.

**Craig:** As long as it’s coming from you.

**John:** It’s coming from me. It’s a desire to improve myself, not from anyone else’s notes.

**Craig:** Good. Good. Fantastic.

**John:** So, Craig, this is our last Skype podcast before our live show on September 23.

**Craig:** Very exciting. And I’m to understand that we have sold out, or nearly sold out, or…?

**John:** I believe we sold out. I just got the email this morning that I think there were like seven tickets when I last heard, which were the newly released seats. And by the time this podcast goes up they will be gone.

**Craig:** Wow. Amazing.

**John:** So, if there is some possibility that we’re going to do a standby line we will tweet that. I don’t know that to be the case. I suspect that people who have tickets are the people who will see the show. But, I’m very excited to see the show.

So, it will be you, and me, and Andrew Lippa and we will be talking about writing things together which is interesting and different for me. We will be singing some songs at the piano. It should be a good, fun time.

**Craig:** That sounds great. I’m very excited.

**John:** Other bits of news I have for us. Highland, which is this app that I make, Quote-Unquote Apps makes, is releasing the new version 1.5 this week. So, if you are a person who uses Highland or curious about using Highland, it will be in the Mac App Store this coming week.

And it does some new things. It can always, just like it always did, it can melt down PDFs to plain text. It can open Final Draft files. But it can also do more things. It has a manuscript function. So, a certain famous novelist wanted to use it for writing books.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** And so we put that in there. Mr. Michael Chabon uses it.

**Craig:** Ooh!

**John:** We have the ability to do stage plays and musicals which is because I needed it. So, it’s been a very useful tool for me. I think it will be useful for many more people. And it can also automatically highlight your syntax, so if you are typing something with some notes in there it can put notes in a nice, pretty format. It can do section headers and all sorts of other fancy new things.

So, if you are interested in that, visit the Mac App Store today.

**Craig:** Amazing. What can’t you do?

**John:** There are many, many things I can’t do. I can’t do a backhand flip, or hand spring. I’m pretty bad at most gymnastic things. Even my cartwheel is poor, Craig.

**Craig:** Not surprised. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, can you do any of that stuff? Can you do any gymnastics? Could you ever?

**Craig:** When I was a kid I was very good at the somersaulting. I remember that. And now as an adult, I’m frightened to somersault.

**John:** Yeah, I can do it in a pool.

**Craig:** Oh, sure.

**John:** But I can’t do an actual —

**Craig:** I’m Superman in a pool.

**John:** Yeah. Without true gravity, it’s much simpler. But with — no, with bones and things that hurt, I just can’t do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, speaking of Gravity —

**John:** That looks so good.

**Craig:** Not that we ever talk about upcoming movies and stuff, but god, I can’t wait to see that movie.

**John:** I’m so excited to see that movie. And for people who have seen it, they tell me that it’s one of the few things like spend the money and see it in 3D because it’s actually amazing in 3D, which I can believe.

**Craig:** I’ve heard that.

**John:** Space looks great in 3D.

**Craig:** I’ve heard that. And I trust Alfonso Cuarón.

**John:** I do trust Alfonso Cuarón deeply.

**Craig:** Yeah. Trust him.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Today, Craig, two things on the agenda. I guess we are going to talk about this Disney plan to have kids bring their iPads into movie theaters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then we’re going to look at some Three Page Challenge entries and talk through how wonderful they are and how they can be even more wonderful.

**Craig:** That sounds great. I’m game for both of those topics.

**John:** Great. Why don’t you start us off with the Disney thing.

**Craig:** This is a fun one. So, Disney created a little bit of a mini firestorm this week. They announced that for the return of…is it Little Mermaid?

**John:** The Little Mermaid. Our favorite of the — well, one of our favorites of the Disney animated movies. We discussed it at length.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, perhaps because we talked about it here on the podcast, Disney is bringing The Little Mermaid back to theaters. But there is a twist. They are providing a free app that parents and children can download onto the iOS system, not Android, because Disney and Apple have a very close relationship.

And they are encouraging kids to use the app during the movie to kind of have an interactive experience with the film in the theater. Somewhat predictably, a bunch of grump pants people freaked out. [laughs] And the arguments go like this. Argument one: “Oh my god, this is a sacred space where we’re supposed to turn off all of our devices and not allow light in and all the rest. And this corporation is ruining that.”

Argument number two: “Oh my god, kids are obnoxious and awful enough in movie theaters and now they’re going to be even worse.”

And argument number three: “We are training a generation of zombies who will not understand what it means to watch a movie as it’s intended to be seen, but rather we’ll demand somehow to engage with the movie with apps. And no one will ever watch movies again. And it’s the end of cinema.”

**John:** Yes. Strangely, Craig Mazin, I find myself agreeing with those three points much more than I would have predicted.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** That I do think it’s actually a really bad idea and a bad precedent to set to have young children coming in there with the expectation that in a movie theater is an appropriate place to be watching a lighted screen. [alarm sounds in background]

**Craig:** [laughs] The Pasadena Fire Department totally disagrees with you.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** They’re like, [Craig makes alarm noises].

**John:** They buzzed me out.

**Craig:** They’re trying to buzz you out. I couldn’t have done better. Thank you Pasadena Fire Department. That’s the sound I wanted to make while you were saying that. I totally disagree.

**John:** Go for it, Craig.

**Craig:** I totally disagree. Look, here’s the thing. This is a movie that is 25 years old. It is a movie that has been seen a billion times. Every family that is going to attend this screening owns the movie. The children have already seen the movie. This is entirely about having some fun with children and representing something that they already know by heart. So, why not?

There is no way ever that Disney would be so stupid as to do something like this for a movie that wasn’t something that was already beloved and repeatedly digested by the audience. Because then they’ll never get to the place where it’s beloved and repeatedly digested by the audience. They know that. They’re not dumb.

This is sort of akin to like, I don’t know, you know, the way that every year they’ll show Nightmare Before Christmas at the El Capitan here in Los Angeles. And there’s a show beforehand, and then they show the movie, and then there’s a museum. And it’s just a big fun thing.

All the people that are grousing about this I suspect have probably at some point in their lives enjoyed a fun showing of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Come on. This is just Rocky Horror Picture Show for kids.

**John:** Here’s why this is not at all like of Rocky Horror Picture Show and why you are so wrong, Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** This is exciting.

**John:** With Rocky Horror Picture Show, or a sing-along version, which I support sing-along versions, that is audience participation where the audience is there together in a shared space to interact with the movie as a group. And where your being there live and in person with other people is part of the experience. This is putting kids back into, “I’m going to stare at my little screen while there is other stuff happening around me. I’m not going to look at the big screen. I’m not going to participate in what’s going on in front of me. I’m going to participate in what’s going on in the little screen in my lap.”

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** I think that is not a good precedent to set.

**Craig:** That is so Amish. I could hear the sound of the barn being raised.

Children interact with their iPads so much differently than I think we do as adults. It is something that they share. I watch them together. They hand it back and forth. They look over each other’s shoulders. It’s not about devolving the experience of this movie into just a zombie-ish staring at your little miniature screen.

And by all accounts, that won’t work anyway because the whole idea is you’re watching the movie and then you’re looking for something on the screen. It’s really just about turning a movie that is really old, really old, about I would say five or four times older than the average audience attendee, a movie that they’ve seen a billion times into something else. It’s just a different way of enjoying the film.

They’re not — Disney isn’t saying, “This is it, we’re not going to show the movie normally anymore.” So, I just think, I think the fears are overblown. It actually sounds like a lot of fun to me. I kind of want to go do it myself. And even though my kids are too old for it now, I think they would have loved it. And why should we be so scared of entertaining people?

**John:** Because I think we are breaking the seal and you are saying the next movie that you take that kid to, it’s like, “Well why can’t I have my iPad there? I was able to have my iPad at The Little Mermaid.” And so the good parent will say, “That was The Little Mermaid. That was a special case. This is not The Little Mermaid. This is not a special case.”

But, there are a number of good parents and a number of bad parents. The ratios aren’t quite even there. And so you will see more and more kids with glowing devices at movie theaters.

**Craig:** That is incorrect.

**John:** And it’s going to suck.

**Craig:** That is incorrect because this is especially designated as an iPad allowed zone. I have no doubt that the Disney people will very smartly say to every kid as part of the app and part of the audience thing that this is a special thing and that this isn’t something you do in the theater normally. They’re very good about that sort of thing. And, I also — and I also know that movie theaters and other audience patrons are very good about policing these things.

So, no, I don’t believe children will be bringing iPads anymore because of this into any other movie. And the slippery slope argument is — it’s a fallacy. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, I know slippery slope is a general fallacy. And, yet, I will ask Stuart at this moment to flag in the follow up file. Five years from now…

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** …we will discuss whether there are more children trying to use electronic devices in movie theaters.

**Craig:** I am totally in support of that.

**John:** And whether they’ve become an issue. Fantastic.

**Craig:** That is a great point. And I’m a big supporter of that.

In fact, two years ago to this very day Brian Koppelman — one half of the screenwriting duo of Koppelman and Levien, who are most notable for Rounders — two years ago he told me in a communication, a written communication — a written, dated communication — that the Jane’s Addiction song, Irresistible Force, was going to be a classic, on par with their best tunes. And I disagreed and he said, “Come talk to me in two years.” That’s what he said.

And today is, in fact, the two-year anniversary. It is not a classic on par with their best songs. And I let him know because I put it in my iCal and I’ve been waiting for two years. [laughs]

So, let’s put this in our iCal, Stuart. Five years from now John will say, “Craig…” Wait, I’m going to try and do my John impression.

“Craig. You were right.” That was as close as I can do.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, basically your impression of me sounds exactly like you.

**Craig:** I know. But, “Craig,” there’s a little short cut off name. Yeah. That’s the best. You’re actually hard to imitate without just slurring words and then you just sound drunk.

**John:** I just sound drunk. And I do want to point out to listeners that I often will take the devil’s advocate point of view in these discussions just so we can have discussions, but I actually kind of believe this in a way that surprises even me. That I genuinely think it’s a bad idea, partly because I am a parent, and partly because I like going to movie theaters and being in dark places and not being around all the lighted devices.

**Craig:** I am excited. I’m excited to see in five years that I was right.

**John:** Great. I’m excited for our Three Page Challenges today.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, let’s get to those. We have three. Again, if you are new listener to the podcast you may not know what the hell we’re talking about: Every few weeks on the podcast we invite listeners to send in three pages of their screenplay that we will then take a look at. We don’t actually pick them. Stuart picks them out of all of the entries that are sent to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you want to submit your own entry, there’s actually rules about this, and there’s like a special boilerplate language we make you put in the email when you send it to us so that you won’t sue us and you won’t get angry if we pick your piece apart.

So, if you are interested in submitting your own, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out, and there are the rules for how we pick these things. Stuart picked thee nice ones for us to look at today.

**Craig:** He did.

**John:** I thought we start with one by Erin M. Bradley.

**Craig:** All right. Very good.

**John:** And I’ll summarize this one for us.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** We start in a hospital corridor where we meet Mallory who is 42. She ‘s in a nightgown, cardigan, wedding band. And she’s talking with Dr. Verus, who is saying that she should reconsider, presumably like being discharged. And she does in fact leave the hospital.

We see her on a city bus, New England suburbia. She has sort of a panic attack on the bus. She takes a puff from her inhaler. The bus driver lets her out. There’s sort of a strange exchange with the bus driver who says, “Ain’t nothing for you here.” And as we read this I’m not sure quite how to take it, but she gets off the bus.

She goes to her house. She runs into a stray cat who scratches her. Inside the house we go through her kitchen where the faucet is dripping. She is calling out for someone named Peter, telling Peter that she’s home. But he is not there. And, in fact, when she goes in the bedroom there’s a conspicuous lack of photographs and personal effects. The closets are empty.

She takes a deep breath, reaches for the telephone, dials, and calls Dr. Verus. And then hangs up the handset and that is the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** A lot going on in these three pages. There is some good stuff in here. I think we’re looking at the paranoid mental illness/supernatural genre, which is a genre on its own.

**John:** Oh, that’s interesting. I did not pick up supernatural.

**Craig:** I’m sensing a whiff of it. But it could be — remember there was that movie with Halle Berry where it was like are you crazy or are you seeing ghosts.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Gothika. Anyway, it had a bit of a Gothika vibe to this. I think a lot was done correct here. What’s interesting is that then there were moments that lost me completely and I was requiring myself to reread multiple times.

**John:** Yeah, I felt the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, so right off the bat the — well, first of all, just as a minor spelling thing, fluorescent is actually Fluo-rescent. It is a word that whenever I type it I force myself to put that U in before the O.

**John:** I usually just wait for the squiggly lines and then realize.

**Craig:** Oh, see, just as a side note, I turn the squiggly lines off. I like writing without a net. I think it makes me a better speller.

**John:** Bold choices.

**Craig:** Yes. So, it’s institutional lighting, fluorescent bulbs flickering. She’s in a nightgown, cardigan, wedding band. She’s not — she doesn’t have bandages or IVs or anything like that. And here’s this woman in a lab coat studying her anxiety. So, I just get the vibe of a mental institution of some sort.

It was a little difficult for me to figure out what the space was like. They’re in a corridor. Across the hall, I didn’t know if that meant width wise. Is she at the end of the hall? I was just having trouble seeing what Erin wanted me to see here.

**John:** I think I had the same issue. Because it sounded like she was trying to be specific, and yet it wasn’t specific in a way that I could actually visualize.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Honestly, if it were a little less specific and a little bit more generalized, just whatever I formed in my head would probably be fine.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, Dr. Verus is with her. You know, that’s the sort of thing that would help us out here. “Hinges shriek as the door swings open.” This is the door that she’s been studying. She’s in a seat. I don’t understand what the seat is. And, I don’t mean to pick at these little things, but this is sort of indicative of the problems with the way Erin wrote this.

It’s not so much the intent or the content, which is interesting. It’s the style. So, even then I’m like so there’s just a seat in a hallway and why is she sitting in it? If she wants to get out of the door wouldn’t she be standing waiting to get — ? Little things like this.

She’s on the bus and she has a panic attack. Okay, fine, it was well described. I like the way it matched with the sound of the bus brakes. She hears the bus driver say something, “Ain’t nothing here for you,” that startles her. But when she turns to him and says, “What?” he doesn’t even look at her. He doesn’t even seem to have said anything. He just says, “Watch your step, ma’am,” as he opens the door.

So, the idea here is that maybe he didn’t say that at all. But the problem is she had him saying it off-screen. So, if I’m the director and I’m trying to make this moment where she has a delusion maybe that the bus driver said something, the problem is he’s never spoken before and his line is off-screen, so how do I know it’s him saying it? How do I know it’s not a guy that’s just right behind the bus driver? A little tricky there.

So, I wasn’t quite sure that that was done properly. She comes home, she goes in the house, I like the way she described the house. There’s the drip…drip…drip of a faucet and she’s giving us space on the page. Very specific about the unlit candle which I love the touch that the candle is called Caramel Pecan Pie, or pecan pie, depending on what part of the country you’re in.

Her hand is bleeding. I had to dig back like an archeologist to figure out why.

**John:** It’s from the stray cat. But it wasn’t clear at all that it was the kind of interaction with the cat that would cause bleeding.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And blood is a big deal in a movie. And if a cat is going to scratch you hard enough to draw blood, I need to see it there because it’s happening there. And then if you want to talk about how she addresses that issue a page later, that’s fine.

But there’s a good mood. I like the description here. And then we’re off and running. Obviously a troubled woman. So, a lot of cool things going on here. I just felt myself getting lost quite a bit.

**John:** Yeah. I want to circle back to the bus driver conversation because this is a thing that you’ll need to do in movies sometimes where something is deliberately ambiguous. But if it’s ambiguous, give the reader a sense that it’s supposed to be ambiguous. And so it’s fine to do a follow up line like, “Did he really say that?” Or sometimes you put that in italics or whatever. If it’s meant to be that you’re not quite sure what happened there, but hang a lantern on that so we know that it’s supposed to be that way. And that the reader isn’t misreading it. It’s actually meant to feel that way.

And you can’t do it too much, but if you’re going to do that it’s a helpful way of sort of letting the reader — making the reader feel smart. Making the reader feel like, yes, what you just saw is the way I intend you to see that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Granted, we don’t know what’s happening after these three pages. My first instinct was that we did not need the hospital at all. And that if we started on the city bus and she has her hospital band on and she’s freaking out, that’s actually a more compelling image to me than starting in a hospital.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s a very good idea. I think you’re right about that.

**John:** Thank you. But I enjoyed the overall feel of it and things like on page two, the drip…drip…drip, it’s like, well, you’re wasting pages to do that, but that’s actually kind of the way things feel in real life.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, single words on a line, that’s great and fine.

People often ask us about if you’re moving around inside a house do you have to do slug lines for each room in the house. No. You don’t. This is an example of a choice, a style for how you move around a house where it just goes living room, bedroom, hallway. If a character is moving through a space, you don’t have to break out each individual space that way. That can be a good choice for showing us a location.

Now, here’s the con for describing the inside of the house this way. Let’s say most of the movie takes place inside this house, this is going to become very frustrating if you didn’t actually break this into slug lines. So, here it worked really well because the character was moving through the space and we were just giving little small slug lines for where we are in this. But if you’re going to be spending most of your movie in this house you’re going to need to do real scene headers for the different locations, otherwise it’s going to get confusing. It’s just going to feel like a play, that we’re just in this one space the whole time. And the scene headers will help you structure and let us know really what’s a scene and where scenes begin and where scenes end.

**Craig:** Agreed. At the very least I thought what Erin helped us out with was not making the mistake of using these mini slugs to start paragraphs, but rather they rest on their own line. So, she’s appropriately breaking that up so we can follow with our eyes and we know we’ve moved into a different place.

Yeah, the “drip…drip…drip” thing is great also because it helps the reader get a sense of pace, that the facet isn’t going “drip-drip-drip,” it’s going “drip…drip…drip.” That’s good. So, these are the things that are well worth using the white space for.

You know, our little test of just looking at the way the page looks, these pages look right.

**John:** They do. And, you’d be more likely to read that page at a glance because like, oh, well there’s some white space. It’s not so daunting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If everything were jammed up tight — there’s nothing like flipping a page and seeing that there’s a big, giant, dense block of test, like, “Oh god, I have to make my way through this page.” These pages would be a delight to read.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, okay, I think that overall we were positive towards this and there are just some questions of orientation and clarification which is good.

**John:** What should we look at next? Unaccompanied Minor or James and the Wolf?

**Craig:** I don’t know. What do you think?

**John:** Let’s do Unaccompanied Minor.

**Craig:** All right, Unaccompanied Minor. I’ll go ahead and summarize this one.

**John:** This is by Jess Flower.

**Craig:** Jess Flower. So, we begin in an airport and we’re looking at the feet of a seven-year-old boy. He’s an unaccompanied minor. And he hops off the bench. He’s clearly alone. Walks with his little rolling suitcase with the face of Jack Skellington on it, which I love. And he checks the departure board and then he’s — and we see that he’s also with a flight attendant. And we’re just looking at feet now. No faces. No people.

We now go to gate B4 where we meet Kim, who is in her 30s, waiting to leave. And she’s been crying. Fixes her face. And then sees that there is his unaccompanied minor standing right near her, very close. He’s wearing a SARS mask, one of those little breathing mask things. And he just stares at her. She asks him if he’s with his mom or his dad or does he even understand English, because we see that he’s Asian.

And he says, “Nothing.” She tries to take his hand to lead him to the counter when the flight attendant shows up. She is also 30-something. Looks a bit worn. She checks to make sure that Kim is the person who is sitting next to this boy and explains that he is Korean and he does not speak English and that he is an unaccompanied minor and he is going to be flying next to her and she just likes to know who he is sitting next to.

She finds out that the boy is seven. And Kim expresses that she is impressed. The little boy reaches — also that she is a little bit afraid to fly herself. And the little boy reaches out and grabs her pinkie and gives a little smile.

**John:** And that’s our three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I liked a lot of the stuff here. And I like the idea of starting on just the feet and sort of you see this boy sort of piece by piece. And so you see his little shoes and you see his little rolling bag. And you’re gradually getting to know him.

I liked — I liked the idea of meeting this woman, Kim, and sort of her strange interaction with this kid. She doesn’t know sort of who this kid. She seems like a good person who is like trying to sort of figure out where she should take this kid when the flight attendant comes back and says — sort of gives the set up in terms of like this is the boy who is going to be sitting next to you on the plane. So, I am very curious what’s going to happen on the next ten pages, which is a very good sign on page three.

That said, I felt we got a little bit too much writing in that little first block. I felt like we were watching a title sequence. And maybe we were supposed to be watching a title sequence, but I got a lot of feet in that first section.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then when we got to Kim, I wanted more from her. I wanted some more information about her, because it felt like she’s a major character, but why does she only have a first name? I would love some sort of color line given to her because right now I don’t really quite know enough about her other than she was crying.

**Craig:** I think I like these a bit more than you did. Let me talk about what I thought should be amended slightly and then I’ll talk about what I liked. The thing about, that we all know, anybody with kids, or just if you’ve had the experience of sending your kid on their own, which I did once recently with my son who’s now old enough to do it. They’re never alone, ever, ever, ever.

So, there’s this thing where we understand that the flight attendant is the one who is essentially accompanying him. I believe that the rules are that if you have an unaccompanied minor you are actually allowed to, as a parent, go with them to the gate. So, there’s something a little off about this already in terms of facts.

But that aside, even if you wanted to go with a flight attendant because, for instance, the parents aren’t here, which may very well be the case, the flight attendant can’t ever be away from him. So, we start with just the boy and his feet. He even starts walking and then he’s joined by the flight attendant. Well, you know, now I’m a little confused because I don’t know is that just random or is she really with him?

When we get to Kim, she sees that suddenly this boy is there with her and the flight attendant is once again not there. And then the flight attendant comes back. So, she left him, which you don’t do either.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or, if she left him because she was working her job, she’s a flight attendant, we would need to see that she’s left him just for a brief moment and is looking at him and then we see Kim. Somehow or another we just need to explain the logic of this boy and his custody, even in a small way.

But here’s what I really liked. I love the specificity. We always talk about it. There’s this little boy. He’s got something sticking to the bottom of one tiny sneaker, which is such a nice little detail. And he’s wearing this mask and he’s got his Jack Skellington thing on the side of his luggage. These little things help me see the move and they also oddly enough create a mood of a little boy who has little boy things in a very grown up world where you are alone and you’re checking departures and you’re wearing SARS masks.

And I like the way that we that we learn things. I like that we learned how old he is. I like that we learned that he doesn’t speak English. I like that there was a little comedy in which Kim attempted to — she said, “Well, look for your Mamasan.” I mean, that’s kind of funny.

And then there’s little back stories that I feel like we’re building in. And here is why I disagree with you a little bit on Kim. I like actually that I almost know nothing, because I’m guessing that Jess Flower is going to reveal a whole bunch of things on this flight. I’m just guessing.

And so in a sense I like almost starting with “woman who was crying.” And now let me start to uncover things like last names, purposes, back stories, drama, and all the rest.

**John:** I didn’t even need like the full cheat and sort of like who she is or something specific. But I don’t know how she’s dressed. I don’t know, sort of, does she look like a business traveler, or she just looks like a casual traveler? I just wanted to have some picture in my mind for her. And I sort of had nothing. And so in a weird way I picked Kim Dickens as sort of like the actress who jumped into my head, which she might be fine, but I wanted some way to form an image.

Because I felt like I got a really picture of who this little boy was and I didn’t have a good picture for Kim.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s true. There may be a couple of details there that would help. But I thought the dialogue flowed really well. I thought it was good. Not quite sure what happened here with, “Uh…(looks at her phone)…yeah.” That parenthesis is misformatted. So, that’s the television way of doing it where you keep the parenthetical expression within the dialogue block and not on its own line. We tend to not do that in film. And by tend I mean we don’t do that in film.

**John:** Yeah. So all the other parentheticals were fine. So, I think it was just a random fluke.

**Craig:** It must have been a typo. Yeah, a fluky thing.

**John:** But I would say I actually did like this more than you think I liked this. I was genuinely intrigued. And one of the things I definitely noticed is I felt I could hear the music underneath it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Which is a strange thing to say, but couldn’t you sort of hear the little bouncy kind of thing that is underneath?

**Craig:** Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. It is a good example of how pages can do very little but do a lot. And they were confident pages and they were quite pages, but I learned a lot and I actually started — the best thing I could say about what Jess did here is that after three pages of learning how old these people are and the fact that they’re about to fly somewhere, I’m already caring about them.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that’s a great sign. So, good job I thought, Jess. It sounds like John did, too.

**John:** Yay. Our third and final entry in the Three Page Challenge today is James and the Wolf by James Smith. So, I wonder if James is the James in the story. Maybe it’s all autobiographical.

**Craig:** [laughs] I hope it’s not, based on page one.

**John:** So, our story opens, a Malibu, California beach. And we find “James Morris, 32, (devil may care),” waking up stark naked on the beach, hung over. There is a handwritten note taped to his chest. The note says, “It was great meeting you. Thanks for the car. I called you a cab. See you on the other side.”

He finds his clothes. Inside the pocket he finds a credit card, his New York State driver’s license. And then drinks the last little bit of whisky out of a bottle. Lights a cigarette, coughs, spits up some blood, and then he sees something in the distance, a nebulous figure approaching. He can’t tell what it is yet. We’re close on James — astonishment mixed with fright as we smash cut to Motor City Bar, Lower East Side of New York. The title over says, “One month earlier.”

**Craig:** Cue Stuart’s squealing. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, one month earlier…mm. And it’s a conversation between James and his best friend Ivan who is 32. And they talk about a 12-year-old kid who went swimming in a lake and probably had a crush on a girl. They’re just chatting. It’s sort of a strippy strip club, or at least you can tuck dollar bills into garter belts.

And they’re talking about this kid who ended up picking up a protozoa, an amoeba while swimming in this lake and went right up into his nose and sucked out his brains and presumably killed him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that is the conversation that ends on page three. Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** Well, not a bad idea to start a movie with a hangover, right?

**John:** Well, at least it’s fresh.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] I think that, a couple of things, nothing wrong with the way these pages were written in general. Things are happening here. Certainly painted a picture of this guy. He seems to be a total degenerate. Spitting out a little blood to me is something that, again, let’s just all agree together that blood is a thing, right? You don’t just casually spit up blood and go, “Eh.”

Is he dying, in which case he spits up blood and doesn’t seem to care, because that’s the same old thing? Or is he like, “Oh, I’m spitting up blood!” Let us know his reaction to the blood. It’s sort of important for us in the audience to know.

And then he sees something in the distance. We can’t tell what it is, but he seems to. And he’s, “Oh, no,” And then we smash cut to — personally I find that a weird place to smash but, but maybe not. Because when we come back to him I guess that thing is going to be running at him. But, that’s fine.

So, we do Stuart’s favorite thing, “one month earlier.” “Chryon”, which is a typo for Chyron, which is a retro —

**John:** An ancient term.

**Craig:** Yeah, an ancient term for subtitles.

**John:** For Title Over.

**Craig:** Yeah, Chyron was never used in film anyway. Chyron was only for television. It was a video tool. You know, those goofy old video titles. So, let’s not use Chyron or “Chryon.”

**John:** So, let’s give what the appropriate choices are. Title Over is fine. Super is fine.

**Craig:** Super. Subtitle. I guess subtitle is really more for dialogue. So, Title, Super, exactly. I usually do Title is what I say.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, we’re in this bar and it’s one month earlier. Sometimes it’s hard to go — a lot of times it’s hard to go from a person to a person when you do the “one month earlier” game. Because it’s just, you don’t know — even though we’re saying one month earlier, I just find it — I just find it TV in a way. And not to put TV down; it’s just small — it’s sort of like, “We only have one character in this movie. Let’s see where he was a month ago.”

Instead of sort of establishing a bar outside, seeing people walking around, setting the scene a little bit. You know what I mean? Then following Ivan in, having him sit down, and then we see James. And we reveal that James looks great. You know, find some information there to give us other than them just sitting.

They have this — this kind of discussion is a tough one to pull off. It’s a little purple. It’s a little pushed. It’s vaguely Tarantino, where two people are talking about something that’s very specific and really articulate and kind of the content is already very vivid about a kid dying. But we don’t know why they’re talking about it. It seems like such a weird and unrealistic random thing for two people to be talking about.

And while they’re talking about it he’s sort of hitting on this girl across the room, and doing coke, and tucking dollar bills into the garter belt. It felt a little fakey to me.

**John:** So, here’s an example of where I didn’t believe the dialogue:

**Craig:** “Pernicious protozoa.”

**John:** Yeah, and protozoa is capitalized. It felt a little, you know, like Oscar Wilde’s Tarantino I didn’t — not even really knowing these two characters — I didn’t believe that they were having this conversation. Because the world wasn’t pushed enough that we’re truly in Tarantino territory. I just didn’t — it didn’t click for me.

**Craig:** Even when you are in Tarantino territory, there is — and you’ve just decided to be the person that’s going to rip him off like so many people try and do, this is not the way to do it anyway. It’s just hard to — these pages — this time in a movie is so precious. I don’t want to hear this kind of rambling pseudo hip story. I want to know about this person. I want to know about what’s going on in their head.

And if it’s — I mean, for instance, let’s say Ivan is rambling about this stupid story about — not that the story is stupid, but the movie suggests Ivan’s story about this kid is stupid and boring. James is staring at this girl, sees her do some coke. He’s even more interested. She’s interested in him. And James is barely saying enough to follow along with this insane story. And then finally just says, “Dude, honestly, no one gives a shit.” Gets up and walks over to the girl.

I’m engaged, I’m learning. You know?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, if it’s two characters talking about a third thing and that third thing is supposed to be what’s interesting, that’s not a good use of page two.

**Craig:** Right. It’s not a good use of page two. And, also, either you want me to understand that the character — characters have intension. The actors, you know, we talked last week about intentions in a moment. Actors need to know where their attention is going. You can’t play being attentive to two things at once. You can’t. In real life, maybe theoretically some people can do it, but not really. Really we’re concentrating on one thing, and sort of concentrating on another, and that’s why people crash their cars when they’re texting.

I can’t tell if James is concentrating on this girl, or James is concentrating on the story. If he’s concentrating on the girl, then he story is hyper literate for a guy that’s not really, you know, and also why would he even be telling a story while he staring at the girl. That’s the sort of thing I’m talking about.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s take a look at sort of if you were to use that same story and you want to do what Craig is describing where one person is telling a story, the other person is not really listening. Don’t have it be a dialogue. I mean, literally just keep one person talking and don’t keep interrupting it because you’re just taking up a lot of time and space to do that.

So, if James started telling the story and just sort of plowed through it, and then let Ivan be the guy looking at the girl doing coke or whatever else you want to do — that can work. And that way we actually see what the intention of both people in that scene is. Like one wants to get the other one to hear the story. The other one wants to pay attention to that girl down the end of the bar. Then at least that’s interesting. There’s a conflict happening there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Back to page one. About two-thirds of the way down the page:

That’s at least two sentences too long.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** No one wants to read that much in a movie.

**Craig:** Correct. And not because we hate reading. It just stops the movie and thus takes you out of the movie. It’s a weird thing.

**John:** So, I would say the most you get by with is, “Thanks for the car. I called you a cab.” That’s all you need.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would also take a look at this first page and it’s essentially all two lines together. And so I made my way through the page. I didn’t have any problems. But if I’m just looking at the page from a glance, there’s nothing breaking up my vision. And I feel like I could kind of skip to any line in that page.

Granted, like no one is really talking in the scene, but some better way to break up the page could be very useful, even if it’s like a single word line to sort of break this up a little bit could be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m also a fan of one page one starting just a little bit down from the top, which I just like, where I don’t start page one right at the very tip top of the page, just to let people sort of ease into the page.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** Not a must at all. But I’ll give myself an extra inch at the top, a few extra returns at the top.

**Craig:** That’s interesting. Also, I have an issue with the blurry POV that happens in the middle of the page. You can kind of start with a blurry POV, but you can’t insert it. Because we’ve already seen the beach, we’ve already seen where we are. And so it’s just going to be odd to then be inside of his POV. We don’t need it.

**John:** Yeah. I agree. I mean, think of the opening of Lost. It starts blurry, but then it sharpens up. And that’s what you need.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, it’s sort of you start that way, or you don’t do it.

**John:** Agreed. One last comment just going back to the tile page. James and the Wolf, written by James Smith. I can’t look at that and not think, well, is “James” James? And maybe that’s deliberate, but maybe it’s not. And so if you as the writer are writing something and the lead character has your name, they’re going to associate that.

Just like, Craig, if you wrote a movie where there’s a guy named Craig who kills his wife and two children, people might be little concerned.

**Craig:** Does he get away with it?

**John:** [laughs] Ha! We won’t know until page 110.

**Craig:** Hmm. It’s funny. I totally agree. It caught my eye. And the other thing that — this is a marketing thing now, so let’s just put on our market notes hats. James Smith may be the most boring name possible. It’s not your fault. It’s — I mean, you yourself James Smith are probably a very exciting and interesting, unique person. But James Smith sounds like John Jones.

For you, since if you go on IMDb I’m guessing that they’re up to 20 James Smiths, many of whom are in the electrical department and so forth. You are a candidate for using your middle name. And normally I find that sort of a little pretentious and whatever, but especially if you have an interesting middle name, throw it in there. Throw it in there.

**John:** I fully agree with Craig Mazin on this. Craig, what’s your middle name?

**Craig:** Lawrence.

**John:** Ah, Craig Lawrence. That actually feels like a fancy writer.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s why I don’t use it.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Because I haven’t earned.

**John:** Very nice.

**Craig:** Do you have a middle name?

**John:** Well, I do, because you know that August is not my original name.

**Craig:** Right. You’re original name is Meise.

**John:** Meise.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** Ah-ha. That’s why I changed it.

**Craig:** Wait, is it M-E-I, or M-I-E?

**John:** M-E-I.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** It’s German. So in German it’s Meise [pronounced Mei-sa].

**Craig:** Meise. Yes. Meise.

**John:** And so that’s now my middle name.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** But my born middle name was Tilton.

**Craig:** Tilton?

**John:** And John Tilton is an okay name, but it’s not fantastic.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It feels small.

**Craig:** Yes, John Tilton feels — yeah, he feels like a fuddy-duddy, doesn’t he?

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Like the headmaster, Headmaster Tilton.

**John:** And I did consider taking, before I moved to Los Angeles, I was like, well, I knew I was going to probably change my name. And I considered taking my mom’s maiden name, which was Peters, but there’s already of course a very famous John Peters who is a producer.

**Craig:** Yes. And you could do better in terms of associations.

**John:** Yeah. So, I ended up taking my father’s middle name, which is August. He was Henry August Meise.

**Craig:** It’s too bad, though, because Meise and Mazin, that would be a fun podcast.

**John:** Yeah, the M&M Podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the Z sounds in there. It’s very close. Very close. But, listen, it was not to be.

**John:** In an alternate universe, that’s the podcast we’re doing. But this is the one we did today.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** I have a One Cool Thing. My One Cool Thing is this really great video I watched today on the Globe Theatre in England, they try to do historical recreations of Shakespeare plays the way they would have been encountered in their time. So, they try to do original dress, original kind of lighting, so it’s all done in sort of full daylight.

And one of the things that they have introduced is they try to use original pronunciation rather than just received pronunciation. So, most of the Shakespeare we’ve heard has been received pronunciation which is that sort of — well, it’s what we associate with Shakespearean drama sounding like. It’s very clear and articulate and very — it’s sort of big English. But that’s not the way it actually sounded back in Shakespeare’s day when the plays were first performed.

And so this video is really fascinating. It’s a father and son, who are both actors, who went back and sort of reconstructed what the original pronunciation sounded like based on what words really rhymed at the time of Shakespeare, and just the notes that writers at the time were making about how things sounded, like how Rs were pronounced and where the vowels where.

And so it is actually really fascinating. The talk about doing one play that they did both in original pronunciation and received pronunciation. And it’s five minutes shorter in original pronunciation.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** It flows more quickly and more smoothly. There are jokes which only work in original pronunciation like our word “hour,” like for 60 minutes, was “oar.” And so it rhymes with whore.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that.

**John:** So, there’s jokes and puns that only really work in the original pronunciation. So, I found it fascinating. And so anyone who likes words, or English, or Shakespeare, which is hopefully 100% of our podcast listenership, might enjoy this video.

**Craig:** Excellent. I have a follow up on a One Cool Thing and then a new One Cool Thing.

Quick follow up. Writer Duet, which I believe it was last week’s One Cool Thing, I mentioned that when I tried to load an entire script using Safari that the whole thing just slowed to a crawl. But I suspected that the developer would get on that.

Well, boy, did he, like within a day. And it works great now. So, I loaded in the whole script and on Safari it works great. So, really impressed. Writer Duet, they’re doing a great job over there.

This week’s One Cool Thing may get me into a little bit of trouble, but I don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** Craig Mazin does not care about trouble.

**Craig:** Don’t care. Many people know that I am a skeptic. Not a skeptic like, “Pfft,” but a traditional skeptic who believes in the power of evidence, demonstrations, critical thinking. And generally I am a strong and vocal critic of what I consider to be an entire world of flimflam, not limited to paranormal, ghosts, ESP, but also a lot of the “alternative” medicines and theories that are out there, homeopathy, and kinesiology, and all this nonsense that is just not true.

So, there’s a video that’s been around for awhile, but a friend of mine sent it to me and I hadn’t seen it in awhile and it’s just amazing. It’s an animated version — you know how sometimes people go on these rants and then somebody animates it and it just makes it awesome?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, I believe he’s Australian from his accent. A guy named Tim Minchin. And he does this amazing kind of beat poetry rant about an encounter he has at a dinner party with a woman who is very anti-scientific and astrological and alternative and so on and so forth.

And he’s so smart and he’s so clever and he’s so acerbic. And the associated animation is just wonderful. And there’s just some great stuff in it. So, I’m going to send Stuart the link so he can include it in the notes.

Look, if you love alternative medicine, and you love homeopathy, and you believe that science requires just as much faith as religion, don’t watch it. It’s just going to upset you. But if you’re like me, watch it. It’s amazing.

**John:** That sounds great. I will watch.

**Craig:** You will definitely watch it.

**John:** As we wrap up this episode, we are going to have an outro of original music that a listener sent in. And we’ve been doing that since episode 98. And I realized that, you know what, we should actually put all of those listener outros together in one track. And so we did. There’s now a post up on the site which we will put a link to that shows all the outros we’ve used so far.

And I just want to thank our awesome people for sending in outros.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Because they’re just really fantastic. And I knew we would have some really talented writers listening to us, but I had no- I had an inkling that we would have some really talented music folks listening to us.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so take a listen to some of the outros we’ve used so far. If it inspires you to write your own outro and send it to us, we would love it. So, you send a link to ask@johnaugust.com. And people have been sending links to SoundCloud which works perfectly. And so that’s a great choice if you would like to send us a sample of — or an outro that we could use on the show.

We just ask that the outros incorporate some way the theme which is, “Bum, bum, bum, bum, BUM.” And people have done a brilliant job so far. So, you can see what they’ve done.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’ve really done a good, I mean, they’ve all been really good. I’m very impressed.

**John:** Yeah. And that is our episode this week. So, if you like the show and are not subscribed in iTunes, you should probably subscribe in iTunes. Just search for Scriptnotes and we are right there. If you’re subscribing there and want to leave a comment, that is fantastic. We love those, too.

If you have a question for me, or for Craig, if it’s short Twitter is by far the best choice. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

If you have a longer question, we sometimes answer those in an episode. Write into ask@johnaugust.com and we will sort through the mailbag every once and awhile.

Next week, Craig, I will see you live in person for Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Live! Live! It’s going to be a fun, fun show. I’m very excited.

**John:** I’m very excited to have you here. And then in October I will see you live again at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Where we will be doing both a live Scriptnotes with you, and me, and Rian Johnson. And very likely a Three Page Challenge live for folks. So, if you are going to be coming to the Austin Film Festival and would like to submit a Three Page Challenge for us to talk about there, and possibly have you up on stage to talk with us about it, send it to Stuart. And follow the same instructions — johnaugust.com/threepage. All spelled out.

But flag somewhere in that email, “Hey, I will be at Austin and therefore could participate in the live show.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because we would love to see you.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Craig, thank you again for a fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you in New York.

Links:

* [Gravity](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/gravity/) on Apple Trailers
* Download [Highland v 1.5](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) now!
* [The Little Mermaid: Second Screen Live](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYpRQ5Mw2lM) trailer
* Scriptnotes, Episode 92: [The Little Mermaid](http://johnaugust.com/2013/the-little-mermaid)
* Jane’s Addiction’s [Irresistible Force](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVOi5Hdbd7Q) isn’t quite a classic
* How to [submit your three pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) (and let us know if you’ll be [in Austin](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/))
* Three Pages by [Erin M. Bradley](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ErinMBradley.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Jess Flower](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JessFlower.pdf)
* Three Pages by [James Smith](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JamesSmith.pdf)
* Screenwriting.io on [SUPER](http://screenwriting.io/what-does-super-mean/)
* [Shakespeare with its original pronounciation](http://kottke.org/13/09/shakespeare-with-its-original-pronounciation)
* [Tim Minchin’s Storm](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhGuXCuDb1U)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Jason Young

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/talking-to-actors).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 107 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I think you’ll be excited by this, but I went to my first Rosh Hashanah service this last week.

**Craig:** Ooh! And how boring was that?

**John:** It was actually not boring at all…

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** …because it was conducted at the Neil Simon Theater…

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** …by Andrew Lippa who is now an ordained interfaith minister.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, it was kind of awesome, but also really strange, because I realized as I’ve been around Jewish culture a lot since moving to Los Angeles but I’d never actually seen even on film a portrayal of what the Rosh Hashanah service was like. And it’s a little bit odd.

**Craig:** It’s a lot a bit odd. Did they blow the Shofar?

**John:** They did. The Shofar being the sort of curved horn thing, which you tweet, actually tweet is the wrong word for it. Really, it’s like you —

**Craig:** Oh John. “A curved horn thing that you tweet.” You are so Christian.

**John:** Oh, yes, [laughs]. So, what is the Shofar meant to represent? It’s not a horn. What would you call it?

**Craig:** It is. In fact it is a ram’s horn.

**John:** So therefore I’m correct and it is curved.

**Craig:** It’s just the way you said it. “It’s a curved horn.” It was just very goyisha.

**John:** All right. That’s fine. So, anyway, it’s a thing that you are meant to…

**Craig:** Blow.

**John:** …blow. But tweet is actually sort of the right word. It implies it’s a high sound. It’s not a high sound at all. It’s sort of a horn blowing sound, kind of.

**Craig:** Fancy that. [laughs]

**John:** But it is a very specific rhythm for this part of the thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And then that part of the thing.

**Craig:** Tekiah. Teruah. Yeah. There are I think three different ones. There’s [imitates horn sounds].

**John:** And it’s supposed to be nine, but you really can’t count.

**Craig:** And then there’s one that goes [horn sound again]. Basically goes until the old men run out of breath. And it’s like a competition to see who can last the longest.

**John:** Yeah. I found the whole thing just absolutely fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s silly.

**John:** But wonderful. And, of course, it was an abbreviated thing because we were literally doing this in the upstairs lobby at the Neil Simon Theater, just like an hour before they had to completely clear everything out so we could have our opening night. So, it was a really busy, jam-packed day. But it was a great way to start a jam-packed day.

**Craig:** Now, do you have people that are going to be observing Yom Kippur which is sort of the important part of the holiday?

**John:** Yes, we do. So, it’s going to be a… — We’re smack dab in the middle of the Jewish holidays for Big Fish, which is traditionally like not the time you would want to do this, but it actually worked out very well for us because we’re the only show trying to open now.

**Craig:** Oh, good. All right, competition.

**John:** Let’s talk about the show that we’re actually recording right now, which is Scriptnotes, which is mostly a conversation about screenwriting.

**Craig:** And things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** And so maybe that’s a Broadway show. But, and you, Craig Mazin, you stepped up today because two of our three topics are Craig Mazin topics.

**Craig:** I can do it. I just need — I just need someone to believe in me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] And we all believe in you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So, the topic that I would like to propose today is the difference between intention and motivation. And words that are often sort of combined but are actually probably more useful if we can keep them apart and really think of them as two separate things.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And the topics that you brought to us today are?

**Craig:** Today I want to talk about sort of a screenwriter’s guide to working with actors, because no matter what level you are working at you need to work with actors. And then just a sort of a techie thing, I thought it might be fun to talk about your “onset rig.” What you need as a screenwriter on set in terms of just stuff to be able to do your job effectively.

**John:** Those are good topics. I feel like we’re going to have a good, strong podcast today.

So, I wanted to do just a little bit of housekeeping first. You are coming to New York City yourself for the live Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we’re very excited to have you there. I kind of thought it was sold out, but they actually released the very back rows of the theater, so now we actually have — as we’re recording this podcast — possibly 40 seats. So, if you are still interested in coming to the October, sorry, September 23 recording of Scriptnotes Live in New York City, you should try to come. And you should try to get a ticket.

**Craig:** I just think it’s amazing that you can sell this — you, I mean we, I suppose — sell these things out. How many people are in this — how many seats are available?

**John:** This will be significantly bigger than the LA version. So, this is 300?

**Craig:** Oh, boy! Well we better have something to talk about.

**John:** We will. So, we’ll have you and me and Craig Mazin, uh, you’re Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** That’s me. That’s also me.

**John:** It’s very late. It’s late recording. There will be you, and me, and Andrew Lippa.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a piano.

And so we will be talking about writing with somebody and sort of that writing partner process, specifically writing musicals and that whole shared process, the nine-year journey of Big Fish. But there will also be some singing of songs. Andrew Lippa is actually — that’s what he does for a living. But I will do this because I made a bet that I would do this. And you will do this because you have a song you want to sing.

**Craig:** Is he going to be able to play my song?

**John:** Yeah, he can play anything, Craig.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** That’s not going to be an issue.

**Craig:** Is he good at the piano? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The guy who wrote the Broadway show, is he good at the piano?

**Craig:** Does he know how to work a piano?

**John:** Yeah. He’s competent at that.

**Craig:** He’s no Seth Rudetsky. That’s all I can tell you.

**John:** Oh, no. No one is Seth Rudetsky.

**Craig:** No one!

**John:** Second bit of housekeeping, there will be another opportunity to see me and Craig doing Scriptnotes Live at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The Austin Film Festival is at the end of October. We don’t know the exact dates of when our different events are going to be, but there’s two — at least two Scriptnotes things happening there. We are doing a live episode of the podcast. It will be you, and me, and Rian Johnson, which will be kind of great.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And they’ve promised us a big space this year, not a small space.

**Craig:** And not at nine in the morning. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Last time was at nine in the morning. That’s too early for our listeners. So, it should be a great fun prime time. So, if you’re coming to Austin and you’re coming to the film festival, come see us there.

We’re also talking about doing a second panel workshop thing that would be focused on the Three Page Challenges. If you have a Three Page Challenge that you would like us to look at and you are going to be attending the Austin Film Festival it would be great for you to put that in the email to Stuart saying, “Here’s my Three Page Challenge and I will be at the Austin Film Festival,” because we would love to be able to bring those people up on stage with us and talk with them about the three pages they have submitted.

**Craig:** Yes. That sounds like a lot of stuff in our immediate future.

**John:** Yes. A lot of live speaking. So, the topic I want to talk about today is the difference between intention and motivation. And I sometimes hear them used as the same term, which is fine. I’m not going to be prescriptive. You don’t have to use exactly the words I like to use. But I think they’re actually somewhat different concepts and I want to talk about how you as a writer might use these words to best effect.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** When you talk about a character’s motivation I tend to think of that as the big general who is this person in their world, in their life, and how is who they are in their world and their life and what their aims are reflected in your movie, or in your story.

So, a motivation might be attempting to make peace with his father. A motivation might be greed. It could be something like simple thematic kind of motivation, but it’s an overarching this is what they’re aiming for.

A lot of times in screenwriting we talk about what is the character’s want versus the character’s need. Motivation, you can think of it being the general umbrella category of what is the character going for. What is the character’s overall aim? Generally it is a character, but specifically in a story.

Do you use that term the same way?

**Craig:** I don’t at all.

**John:** Great. [Crosstalk]

**Craig:** I think of it as being a clear line. The way I like to think of that is motivation is why a character is doing something. Intention is what they want to achieve by doing something.

**John:** Oh, so we’re using these terms differently. I think it’s great that we’re having this conversation.

**Craig:** I think of characters, like for instance, I’m motivated by jealousy. My intention is to make you feel bad. Do you see what I mean? That’s sort of how I do it.

**John:** So, I use intention in a different way. And I use intention as a very granular what is a character attempting to achieve in this specific moment. So, intention to me is a thing that can happen in a scene or a sequence, but intention is a very specific “in this moment.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so what is this character’s intention as the scene is opening and how has the intention changed based on what has happened in the scene?

At any moment I think in a scene you should be able to freeze/pause, and look at each character in the scene and figure out what their intention is. And, if you can’t do that then maybe you need to rethink how the scene is working, because if a character is just there because they’re just there something is not ideal.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like to think about this weird line between why I’m doing something and what I want to achieve, because it’s a way to make characters interesting if you can — if the audience understands why they’re doing something and also can see how when it translates into “and therefore I want to achieve this,” something has gone wrong.

It’s interesting to watch characters be motivated by things and then have these strange intentions because of it.

**John:** Well, I would say another distinction I would try to make is motivations tend to be a little bit less concrete. They are bigger picture things and they’re not necessarily actionable. And intention should be more actionable.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And intention should be something you can see that they’re literally trying to achieve. And you can actually see did they achieve their intention or not achieve their intention.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There’s a test to it. Like are they doing what they’re trying to do? Even if their intention is like “I’m trying to relax and read my book on the couch,” that’s an intention. And if they’re being prevented in that intention they have reason to be upset.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, even if it seems like a passive intention it’s a thing that they’re trying to do as the scene unfolds.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Do you use a different term for what I’m talking about for like what they’re doing in a scene?

**Craig:** No, because I tend to think that these things can be looked at in a macro way and in a micro way, so within a scene there’s a motivation and there’s an intention. And within a movie there’s a motivation and an intention.

If you look at a character in a very big global sense, you can see plenty of movies where the intention doesn’t change at all, or changes multiple times throughout the movie — what it is the character is trying to achieve changes.

But, it is a rare movie where the motivation never changes and it is a rare movie where the motivation changes more than once or twice, because what motivates somebody is fundamental. And because it’s fundamental, we like to see what’s motivating somebody change. That’s part of what’s built into the arc, the so-called arc of the character is the why they’re doing things changes. “I used to do this for money, but now I’m doing it for love,” in a very big, broad way, right?

But, because it’s such a big deal to fundamentally change your point of view, to change it two, or three, or four times starts to water the character down to mush.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I like to think of characters as their big internal motivations changing at least once but not more than once, so once, right? I think that’s what I mean. Changing once.

But intentions can change a lot or not at all. And sometimes it’s interesting to watch a character whose intention remains exactly the same throughout the movie but the motivation changes for it. That’s interesting.

**John:** Yes. I would also say that a lot of times you think about this with like sort of very classic hero’s journey kind of stories, but Erin Brockovich is a movie that somehow leapt to my mind as we were talking through this is that Erin Brockovich, you know, if you watch her general motivation in that film, as my recollection of it, is she wanted to achieve — so she wanted to achieve something. She wanted to sort of rebuild and restructure her life. She had these things — she wanted to be a different kind of person than she was and be perceived as a different kind of person than she really was.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But her intentions moment by moment are often very much about the case.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And about like getting these people on this porch to trust her and to let her into their lives. And so it was a good example of writing that you can see the overall arc of what she was trying to do, and the actual detailed plot of what’s happening moment, by moment, by moment doesn’t feel like it’s actually hitting that thing, but it always is sort of hitting that thing. What she’s trying to do, literally getting into that door, or getting this next person to take her seriously is reflected in the bigger goal of hers, to be a different person.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree with that. And that’s where I think you want intentions to constantly be changing in relation to the sort of micro intention should constantly be changing. Watching characters shift tactics is a change in intention. Okay, my intention is to intimidate you. Okay, now my intention is to appeal to your better nature. Okay, now my intention is to make a deal with you. So, these exchanges make human interactions interesting.

But my motivation in that scene probably doesn’t change at all. My motivation is because I need this.

**John:** Yes. Your motivation will change as a result of many scenes or many encounters that have nudged you in that way.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, and again, it’s so tempting to think about, oh, intention is something that the hero has, or the main character has, but I really would stress that it’s something that you should be able to pause and look at everybody in that scene and understand what their intention is. Even like to some degree that guy who’s in the background past, sort of the extra who is going from this way to that way, well why is he doing that?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you’re just really trying to — really you’re just trying to make the frame not be so empty, but when you can possibly have a reason for why that background pass is happening, the world feels more real.

**Craig:** Agreed. Everything should be motivated. And you can tell sometimes in movies things aren’t motivated for what we call organic reasons that are reasons that are true to the story and the world around it. They’re motivated by external reasons like wouldn’t it be cool if…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …car went kaboom. And sometimes it is cool. But, better to see if you can’t make it cool and also motivated.

**John:** Yes. I’ll also say intention is one of those terms you’ll hear actors say a lot, because if you look at what an actor needs to do it’s trying to create the reality, moment by moment, of what the character is trying to achieve in this specific moment.

It’s like an actor in a scene can’t be responsible for the overall arc of the character and all that other stuff. That’s the responsibility of the script. What the actor can be responsible for is, “Is the way I’m interacting with people around me believable for this character? And believable for what this character is trying to have happen right at this moment?”

**Craig:** Well, that’s a good segue I suppose into discussing actors because you do hear that famous, “What’s my motivation?” or “What’s my intention?” all the time. And I think that writers are either scared of talking to actors, particularly when they’re famous and well-established, or they’re just clueless about how to talk to actors. And they don’t understand what actors do.

And, so they blow it all the time. I’ve witnessed it over and over. So, I figured we could talk today about how you and I go about talking to actors and helping them do their jobs better and maybe also, hopefully, they’re helping us do our jobs better.

**John:** I think it’s a terrific conversation. So, do you want to frame this in the context of you are the writer but not the director on the project?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. And it’s not that directors don’t have to deal with this all the time, too. They do. But there’s something interesting — there’s an interesting thing between writers and actors just as there is between writers and directors. There is an awkwardness that is around the fact that the writer has seen the movie, has created the movie, has done a thing that has brought everybody together to make the movie, and everybody is a little concerned about it, because there’s a lot of power in that act. And everybody understands that they now have to go and perform it and capture it.

And in doing so, things are going to happen. Even if everybody really wants to stick very, very closely to the script, things are still going to happen. And everyone, I think, initially is wary of a writer who is going to stifle or attempt to quash what could be some happy accidents. And so much about performance in particular is about being in the moment and natural which requires the opposite of a screenplay. It’s a very difficult thing to do — take something that is static and fixed and present it as dynamic and of a moment and extemporaneous. Very hard to do.

So, the first bit of advice that I have for writers when they’re talking to actors is something to think about before they talk to actors, before they walk up to an actor or before they even consider it. And that is to appreciate what these people have. You may not like the way they talk about your script. You may think that they don’t understand the script at all. You might be right. That happens sometimes.

But you also have to acknowledge that if it were you, the movie would be awful, and not because you’re not a big star that people didn’t know, but because you’re not a good actor, and because your face doesn’t belong on film. There are faces that belong in movies and there are faces that don’t. It’s not even a question of beauty. There are some remarkably odd looking faces that have had amazing characters. But there is a magic that is both internal and external to being a movie star.

So, stop for a moment and say, “Let me give this person the respect they deserve for having something unique that I do not have. And let me then also ask myself is it possible that maybe there’s a little bit of magic there that is not just the result of a roll of the dice but some craft, because it is craft. So, start from a place of respect.

**John:** Yes. My general advice that I’ve been using the last couple of months is assume good intention. And so whenever someday says something that’s like kind of offensive to me, I stop for a second and think, “Well, you know what? They probably meant that not at all the way I heard that and they actually meant that in a positive way.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I find a lot of conversations with actors can be like that way because they’ll say like, “This doesn’t make sense, or my character would never do this.” And, they’re wrong, because the character — I know the character really well. I was all the characters before they were those characters.

But, they’re saying that because they are feeling that they cannot actually achieve this thing here, or they can’t get from point A to point B in a way that is going to make sense for them on film. And if it’s not going to make sense for them on film, it’s not going to make sense in the finished product.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they’re asking you for help. They’re just asking you for help in a frustrating way.

**Craig:** They are. And sometimes you may find yourself feeling like, “Well, why am I always the one that has to sort of not throw a tantrum?” You can throw a tantrum if you want. It’s not going to get you very far in the world.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I don’t really think of these people as throwing tantrums. I think that when an actor says, “Well, my character wouldn’t do that,” they mean my character, meaning me playing this character wouldn’t do that. And they’re right. Their character wouldn’t do it. You wrote a character that wasn’t their character, it was your character, and now it’s their character. And it has to go through their brain, their mind, their memories, their abilities, their character wouldn’t do that.

There are two great fears that I remind myself I think all actors have all the time. One is that they don’t understand how they’re supposed to play something, which is terrifying the way that it’s terrifying for us when we don’t know how to write something. And the other great fear they have is of being embarrassed. And the embarrassment that you suffer as an actor is so much more profound, public, and visible than the embarrassment we suffer as writers.

So, when an actor, this is great — I’m glad you brought that up. Because when an actor says, “My character wouldn’t do this,” take it seriously. And then explain as best you can what you were going for without shackling them to what’s there. And just say, “Well, forget what’s there. Here’s what I was going for and here’s what my reasoning was. And let’s just have a discussion.”

A lot of times just by talking it through it comes around to the smallest thing. The smallest thing. And you walk away thinking, “That was all about that?!” Yeah, okay. So it was, but they needed that. And god knows we have enough of our own foibles that we can’t really afford to point fingers at others.

**John:** The other thing I would stress is remember that you’re talking to — you’re usually talking to them about specific moments and specific scenes. And your answer as the writer can never be, “Because we need this to happen here or to do this.” You can never talk in terms of the story, because the story is not interesting to the actor. The actor is trying to focus on what they do in this moment.

So, generally, you’re going to be focusing on what is the journey of this character in this moment, to the next moment, to the next moment, and it has to seem like the character is in control of all these things and that the character is not doing something because the movie needs him to do it.

**Craig:** And that’s bad writing anyway if that’s what you — you know, that’s embarrassing for you to say, “Well, I know it doesn’t make any — really, it’s not necessarily connected to character. We just need to because we need that thing/explosion to happen, or we just need you to say that so we can be able to walk through the door there. It’s bad writing.

**John:** Well, yeah, but no, it’s not necessarily bad writing. Because, to be fair, there are times where we are cutting out of scene on a specific moment because that cut was going to give us power to get to the next thing, but the actor doesn’t feel that because the actor sees like, “But I would say this, and I would say this, and I would say this.” And you’re like, yes, you would, but the scene has already cut by that point.

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve never really had an experience where that was going on. Sometimes when actors ask to go a little longer in the scene, I think it’s perfectly fine to say great, do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you know you’re getting the scissors in earlier, go nuts. [laughs] You know, to me, also, being a good editor and being able to edit in your mind will save you some battles that you don’t need to fight.

**John:** Yeah. But that’s honestly, that’s the luxury of being the empowered writer who is allowed to sort of say that, “Oh, you can keep going on.” So, if you’re saying like, oh, you’re going to keep improving after this point, but if the writer is now being expected to make a scene go longer than it would ever possibly be, and to have to defend that longer scene to the director, to the producers, to everybody else.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no, no. That’s where you go to the director and you’re just like, “Look, they want to just keep talking. You want me to just write this to make them feel good and we’ll just shoot a little bit of it?” Which, you can do.

I mean, I have to say, I’ve actually never had this come up. That’s never come up. I mean, usually because a responsible actor has read the script, knows what’s coming next, understands things. And that’s really also the director at that point should be stepping in to sort of defend his cut, because ultimately that’s what we’re talking about is transitions and cuts.

**John:** In general I found one of the most helpful processes to this part of getting the movie ready to with you have the script, you have the actors, is to get everyone in a room and read the script aloud at least once.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Because that way you know that every actor at that table has at least heard the whole movie once. Because otherwise actors will focus on the scenes that they’re in and really won’t have a good sense of what the rest of the movie is. And so not only will that make them understand why those scenes are those scenes, but they’ll also know like who everybody else in the movie actually is in a way that’s very, very helpful

**Craig:** Right. I do agree with that. I think every movie should have that read through, even if you just do — I think on Identity Thief we just did a read through really with Melissa and Jason. And that was fine.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** We didn’t need to do like all the side parts. As long as those two understood everything and that I was able to hear it and then go, by the way, the other thing is you have to, when you start to hear your actors, they’re now the cast. They will be those characters forever. Forever.

So, you have to listen now and you have to go back and you have to adjust to fit the way they are doing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And don’t be tight about that. Be okay with that. The intentions, the motivations as we discussed, don’t have to change. Your structure, all of the dramatic import is there. It’s just the expression of it, because ultimately — you know, there’s this really funny audio clip on the internet of William Shatner berating some poor director that he’s recording some voiceover for.

And so he’s doing this voiceover. It sounds like it’s for a museum or something about exploring the galaxy or something. And the guy says, “Well, I was kind of hoping you’d do it a little more like this, more like that.” And William Shatner goes, “Well, how would you like me to do it? How do you hear it?” And the guy makes the terrible mistake of doing it.

**John:** Oh, no, never a good idea.

**Craig:** And Shatner is, “Oh, is that what you want? Okay.” And then Shatner does an amazing impression of that guy doing it and it’s awful. And while Shatner is a terrible person for doing that, [laughs], he does have a point which is, “Hey, I get that it’s not the way you heard it in your head. I’m not in your head. I’m not you. I’m me. I’m the movie star. Maybe there might be value in the way I’m doing it. So, perhaps you can help adjust the way I’m doing it, but still make it the way I do it, because I’m me.” And I think there’s wisdom in that.

**John:** There is. One of the things that has been most interesting about Big Fish is that unlike movies or a TV show where obviously you’re going to film it once and that actor is that character, it’s all the same, ideally in a Broadway show the Broadway show should be the same Broadway show no matter who is actually playing those parts. And that’s been a fascinating thing is that we’ve had moments where an understudy has to go in, or someone else has to go in, or we just have to fill in for whatever reason. So, it’s that balance between tailoring it for one specific person’s voice and making it something that can be played by a range of people.

**Craig:** Well, it’s funny, my son and I have been listening to Fiddler on the Roof lately a lot. And so, you know, I started with the original Broadway recording, which for me is the superior recording with Zero Mostel. And then we started listening to the Topol version, which was the London cast, which I hate. But I know a lot of people like Topol. I do not.

And it is remarkable how you can see that the part was very difficult for somebody who wasn’t a — for lack of a better word — a New York Yiddish theater troupe kind of actor to do. The jokes are very kind of old school Yiddish jokes. And Topol is Israeli and just doesn’t get them. He doesn’t get the jokes, you know? It is interesting to see how that translates so oddly.

I mean, the other thing is I was watching — I finally got around to watching the movie version of Les Miserables. And there are just so many choices where I went, whoa, that was weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, forget the directorial choices, just the actors the way they performed it, the way they chose to inflect things and approach things. It was just like, “That was weird.” But, you know, when you sort of think about it, do you think, well, the idea here is this is my A cast, and eventually they will go away one day, if the show is a hit, and it goes on and on. Eventually they will go away and a second refreshed cast will come in like they have for instance for Mormon.

And the idea is that that second cast coming in should be essentially copying the first cast?

**John:** That is a very interesting question and sometimes you would love to have copying, where essentially one person sets the template and the next cast, person cast in that role, does the same thing and sort of hits the same beats and inflects things the same way and it’s just like you’ve slotted in the clone for somebody.

But other times that’s not the right choice and a different energy is a fascinating great energy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, two recent things I can say about this is I saw Wicked when it first opened ten years ago, it was still in previews ten years ago. And then we took our daughter to see it last week and I loved it both times. The first time I saw it with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, and this last time it was with new actors, and the Elphaba was a very different characterization than I remember from when I first saw it, when I first saw Idina Menzel do it. But I really dug what she did. She made some really strange sort of nerdy choices that were kind of great for it.

And the woman playing Glinda, she was terrific also, but I could not see that without seeing Kristin Chenoweth. I felt like Kristin Chenoweth and that Glinda role were fused in a way that is very hard to separate. And I’m sure you could do a Glinda that didn’t do any of Kristin Chenoweth’s stuff, but it feels like it would be really hard to.

**Craig:** Well, I wonder if maybe for musicals it’s a question of time as well. You know, like Mormon, this is the second cast. They’re still in their kind of — it feels like the first run of it, still. So, it’s kind of like, here, we’re letting those guys off the hook but we still have a few people that are in it like Nikki, oh geez, I’m blanking on her last name. I apologize. But she’s still there from the original cast, so it’s still kind of like the original show. So it just copied those guys.

But if it comes back, or if it keeps going, if it’s eight years down the road let’s just change it up because it’s going to get stale. And, of course, if you revive something, change it up just to be interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, anyway, that will be a good problem for you to worry about.

**John:** These would be luxury problems that we have to think about how we’re going to — what we’re going to do as we recast.

**Craig:** Luxury problems.

**John:** And, honestly, it is a thing that comes up because right now we have Norbert Leo Butz playing the lead, and he’s phenomenal. And he’s a terrific actor, and a terrific dancer, and a terrific singer, and to find somebody who could do all those things as well as he does is going to be terrifically challenging. But that’s, again, luxury problems.

**Craig:** Doogie Howser. That’s my vote.

**John:** So, let’s segue to our third topic here which is sort of on the set writing and sort of what that kit is because that’s all I’ve been doing the last two months is making those changes day by day and creating those pages for what’s actually happening. So, I’m curious when you’re doing the Hangover movies, what is your setup — ?

**Craig:** I got it so I got a real system there, because the Hangover movies take us to some strange places obviously, whether it’s hot and muggy and traffic-y Bangkok, or I’m in the middle of the desert somewhere. And the truth is the writing never stops, so there’s a couple of things that I think about. One is, what’s my equipment that I need, and two, what’s my process, so that I can be as efficient as all the people around me.

So, first, let’s just talk about stuff, because — this is probably less important for theater because you’re inside and it’s theoretically air-conditioning, but for movies you could be on rocks, you could be on water, you could be anywhere.

You want to have a very rugged laptop case, something that can take a little bit of a beating. You don’t need one of those Alienware moon laptops. A regular laptop is fine. But you do need some stuff. You probably want an internet connection. It would behoove you to have one. A lot of movie productions now have WiFi bases that they broadcast from the generator truck and elsewhere so you can hook into that. The signal is iffy a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the other option is to get one of those little Verizon USB thingies that pick up a cell signal. And hopefully you can have one or the other. You definitely want a couple of USB thumb drives. Those become super important when you can’t necessarily email stuff back and forth. You want a good portable printer. There are a bunch out there that are lightweight. You want to be able to print either wirelessly or back it up to print via a USB cable. And you’ll need some paper, of course. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy there, just some paper.

The printer should be small and it doesn’t need to be super fast because you’re never going to be printing out lots of pages. The most pages that will be printing out at a time? Probably three, because that’s about how many pages you’re shooting on a day, unless you’re shooting in India and then it’s seven, so it’s not that big of a deal. Right? It’s portable better than huge.

When you — if you are going to be an onset writer, then what you want to do is find your First AD pretty early on before the movie starts and say, look, we’re going to be doing some writing day by day. I don’t need much. All I need is this. I need a cart that I can put my laptop on. Obviously I need a chair from props. They make those little foldy chairs. I need in the morning just as a matter of routine I need the electricians to hook up power to the cart and I need a power strip duct-taped to the cart. So, it’s just a cart, a seat, and a functioning power strip. That’s all I need. I’ll take care of the rest. [laughs]

And they can do that. They can do that anywhere you go. Once you have your cart, your power strip, you can do whatever you need to do.

**John:** So, do you leave your portable printer on the cart?

**Craig:** I do. You can leave stuff on the cart and they’ll just pack it up on the truck and then bring it back the next day and they will appreciate the fact that it’s not this massive laser printer, but an eight pound piece of plastic that fits on the bottom of the cart.

All of your charging cables and all the rest of that you put back in your laptop bag. Your laptop you take with you. All that stuff you take with you. I usually leave — on the cart I leave the printer and the paper, the ream of paper. That’s it. Everything else goes.

The cart is usually the domain of the video playback guy, so be very nice to him and be good friends with him. Usually the cart is part and parcel with the producer area or a secondary thing. If you’re not going to be part and parcel with the producer area then you just need a secondary cart. That’s it. And you get one.

**John:** That’s awesome. Craig, I’ve actually learned a lot from that because I’ve never had to do that kind of stuff. And so the times that I’ve been writing on set I’ve generally been back in the trailer, because I’ve not been on the kind of things where I’m going to be generating a new page literally five feet away from where that thing is filming.

I’ve always been able to go back to my trailer to do stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I find that when you go away, just be going away you open the door to other people solving problems, and some of them aren’t people you want solving problems.

**John:** I hear you.

**Craig:** The fact that you’re there, present, typing — everybody lets you do it. [laughs] Then you print it out. Now, the other thing that I find very useful for film production is, and I would do this on the Hangover movies, before each day, when I would get in in the morning, you know, somebody hands you sides which is just your little miniature page printed up version of that day’s work. So, let’s say you’re doing scene 120 today and it’s three pages, so here’s three little mini pages.

And I watch as the director and the actors talk about blocking and all the rest and if there are any questions for me, I’m there if that should happen. Once that’s over, there’s usually at least an hour where they’re in hair and makeup and the crew is lighting the set, or the location. That’s when I go back to my cart, open up my laptop, and then I go into my document and I pull out the day’s work. And I make a new document that’s just Day This for that day, and that thing.

Because, I don’t have these little sides-y things in my computer. And I don’t necessarily want to be making constant changes in the master script, because a lot of this stuff you’re not issuing as official, “official pages.” So, I’ll do it just as a side document. And then at the end of the day I take the side document that was finalized and I paste it back into the master. And eventually I get to a point where I’m like, okay, if you want we can issue a whole bunch of changed pages or not. It depends on how that production works.

**John:** So, on scenarios like this when you are making some changes to this little document, is it mostly in consultation with the director before the actors come back to set, or is it once they’ve come back and they’ve started kind of playing around in the scene and you figure out who’s actually going to say what, when, and how you’re going to move stuff around?

**Craig:** Kind of a crapshoot depending on the day’s work. So, on some days they would come back in and it wouldn’t feel right and we’d take a break and Todd and I would sit and work on something. Some days Todd and I would work on things while they were in that hair and makeup session and get it dialed in. Sometimes we would just come up with some alt lines when we were doing coverage and so we would work on those.

So, you just stay flexible within the day’s work. And you’re always there to do what you need to do. And just be flexible. So, the last thing you want is to have anything getting in the way of you being able to deliver work to wherever you are, whether it’s on a boat, or on the top of a building. I’ve been on both of those, or, you know, in a field, or in a desert. I’ve been in those. You want your rig so you can do your work.

**John:** Now, I want to make sure that listeners understand that what Craig is describing isn’t actually typical for a lot of screenwriters in that I’ve never had to do that and I’ve had a lot of movies made. And I’ve been the writer on set on those movies to the degree that there was a set to be a writer on. But at most I would sort of like answer a question or talk about the next day’s shooting work. But was very rarely involved in any rewrites on what was actually happening that day.

**Craig:** You’re hearing of it more and more. I’ve been doing it like this for a long time. I don’t know why, it’s just for whatever reason this is how my life and my career has gone. But, for instance, I know that Chris McQuarrie did it on World War Z. And, I’m trying to think of somebody else who I know was in the trenches on a movie. I know Chris Morgan does it on the Fast & Furious movies.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, people are doing it more and more. And I wasn’t able to do it on Identity Thief. I would have liked to have been able to do it. But for that what happened is I would usually get calls about, okay, tomorrow’s work, or next week’s work. And so then I would send those so there would be kind of a — all right, well, when you wake up in the morning the elves will have made you pages. That kind of thing.

**John:** That’s usually the case of what I’m facing is that as something comes up in the schedule that’s about to shoot and there are issues about it, then I’ll have those conversations and do whatever needs to get done. But, for a movie like Go I was there for every frame shot, but it was literally like, “You’re going to shoot what I wrote.” And that sometimes works out very nicely, too.

**Craig:** For sure. I mean, the thing about the Hangover movies is they weren’t my movies. I was a Johnny Come Lately in the trilogy anyway. And I wrote them with Todd. So, really, it was about being a co-writer and a partner to him. And since he’s the director, he can rewrite anything he wants. [laughs] And he’s a writer. So, then it was just about sometimes the two of us.

And, you know, sometimes it was really hard and sometimes it was great. Sometimes it was fun. I remember one scene, I just remember the two of us sitting on like a piece of scenery on a soundstage with a laptop and it was one of those moment where you’re like, look at us, we’re like movie guys. And there was another day where we were struggling with something and we got in the golf cart and drove around Warner Bros. until we figured it out. And that was another, look at us, this is like right out of a movie about how they make movies.

Most of the time it was just me at my cart, with a cup of bad craft service coffee, banging away.

**John:** Yup. To give a quick version of what the theater equivalent of that is, so we go through two stages. Obviously we are writing, just me and Andrew Lippa, doing all our stuff and performing for the producers for a long time, but once we’re sort of — our equivalent of being onset is in the rehearsal hall which is where we sort of go through and we stage the whole thing just with temporary props and rehearsal clothes and not the real anything, and in that, you’re trying to get what you wrote to actually make sense on the stage, but there’s constant adjustments based on what’s actually going to be possible or when you can get somebody on or off.

For that, I have my little MacBook Air. There’s a printer down at the edge where I can print to and I will generate new pages. Usually we’ll put out pages at the end of the day, and so we’ll reflect what we have done that changed today, and what we want to change — the stuff that’s going to effect tomorrow — and so I will print out those pages. Director Susan Stroman and I will go through and we’ll agree that these are the real pages and that changes the master script. And that’s a big difference from everything that we do really in film and in television where because that’s now the template for how we’re going to make the show from here on out…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …everything has to be reflected in the script or else it just doesn’t actually happen. And it’s not just like the actors need to know their lines. That script is also what all the cues are called off of. And so if one line has changed, that could affect the music department, the lighting department, projections, everybody else.

**Craig:** It’s so different, yeah. Because in movies and in TV when you finish your day it’s like you’ve eaten food. It’s gone. It’s eaten. It’s not coming back. You’re not doing that again. It’s onto the next. And when you make changes in a show like this that’s meant to be performed over and over, it’s never eaten. It’s always there. Like an embalmed body, it’s always there.

I have a question for you. Do you ever feel this inner pull? Sometimes I feel it and I always shut it down because I think it’s bad news. But this little voice that goes, “Don’t you just want to be done?”

**John:** Absolutely. It’s the inherent unfinishability of theater that is both terrific and really maddening. Is that there’s no post-production because you’re never actually finished. And so we will open the show on October 6, and that will be the end of probably writing for this version that’s on the stage right now.

But then there will be immediate conversations about all of the other versions we have to do. So, god-willing, we wanted to stage this somewhere else, we’d have to be able to figure out how we’re going to do that. And every department will have challenges about how we’re going to do that. Are we going to be able to have this large of a cast? Are we going to be able to have this kind of set? If we don’t have this kind of set, what would make sense?

We have a giant USO number in the show. And will that make sense in Europe? Probably not. So, there may be some real fundamental changes that I’ll be making on the show and I’ll probably be writing some version of it the rest of my life. And that’s maddening to some degree, not just because, oh, I love this project, but having to continue to rewrite this project keeps me from writing the next thing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. And even just on a small basis, even on things that are finishable, there’s that feeling sometimes of let’s just do — let’s stop trying to do things to it. And, you know, there is such a thing as over-writing and there is such a thing as getting bored with your own work and hurting it by working on it too much. But more often than not the more willing you are to entertain even the craziest suggestion, the better off you are.

You just have to be willing to not look at that pain as pain.

**John:** Yes. I mean, the luxury we have is that we have a test screening every night. So, we get to know every night how is it working.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you can polish and refine it in ways that are very difficult to do in a movie. In a movie you can do your test screenings, and maybe you can do some reshooting, but like you’re not going to vastly change things.

We have vastly changed the first act from Chicago to here and it’s a much better show for it. And we could do that because we could do that, because we had the resources, we had the time, we had the stamina to actually like rip things apart and put them back together in a better way. So, that’s a great luxury.

So, I, too, am a fan of cheap printers. It’s really remarkable how cheap printers have become. The ink jet ones, the printer is essentially disposable because the ink cartridges cost more than the actual printer does.

**Craig:** I know, it’s sick.

**John:** But Nima Yousefi who now works for me found on Amazon this really amazing Brother HL printer that’s $70. It’s like a laser printer that’s actually surprisingly fast. So, I have that in my apartment here in New York and that’s the printer I use here as I’m generating stuff, so like we’re putting out new pages tomorrow so that’s been my test printer for that.

**Craig:** I can’t recommend the printer I was using on The Hangover because I hated it. I hated it. It was a Canon. It was crap.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I was angry at it all the time.

**John:** But there’s something lovely about putting something on paper once just to make sure it’s looking right. But most of what you’re going to end up doing is going to be emails and Dropbox. And that’s why an internet connection is so important.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a big help. I mean, if you, for instance, need to quickly — sometimes they’re waiting — sometimes what happens is you watch the scene, everybody works on the scene together, me, the director, the actors, we all come up with a version. And what I’m doing while we’re doing it is I’m writing it on the sides in pen. And then we get it, and we’re happy, and we’re good.

Now, okay, they’re all going to do five minute touch-ups, and then we’ve got to shoot. I’ve got to go type that so that they have it, so they can read it, because no one can read my scrawl and it’s only on one little thing.

So, now I type it up really quickly, I get it right. Now, how do I make, okay, it’s a scene with six people. It’s three pages. I’ve got to print out 18 pages. How quickly can I get that done, you know? So, sometimes it’s easier to just email it to the production trailer and have them run it over.

**John:** Yeah. The thing I found very useful about theater is that index cards are heavily used. And so on an index card if I change a line I will write it in pen on an index card and hand it to the actor directly if it’s something where we’re literally changing the line in front of the actor, or I’ll hand it to Stroman, the director, for like this is what the new line is so that before there’s a new page there’s at least a card that reflects what that new line is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Index cards are sort of one of the main forms of documentation in this part of the business.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So, Craig, I think it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And my One Cool Thing is, again, I feel like I’ve cheated on you a little bit because I did another broadcast. But I just did KCRW’s The Business, which is a great podcast. I know you don’t listen to other podcasts, but it’s a radio show and a podcast hosted by Kim Masters.

**Craig:** I’ve done that before.

**John:** Ah, in that case you’ve been in that little crazy basement at Santa Monica College?

**Craig:** No, I did it by phone. I phoned it in. Literally phoned it in.

**John:** You literally phoned it in. Dan Jinks and I went and did an interview with her about the business of making Big Fish and sort of like the whole process and how that all works. And I was reminded that I never actually I think hyped that podcast or that show on the air. And it really is a terrific look at sort of mostly how Hollywood functions. And she takes one or two topics each week and really sort of drills in with interviews.

She does this sort of news recap with John Horn of the LA Times. And then Darby Maloney who is the producer and editor of it just does a terrific job distilling stuff down.

You and I when we talk, it’s just this sort of raw, unfiltered, people blathering, but this is a much more carefully crafted thing. I would highly recommend it.

**Craig:** But our raw, unfiltered blathering is remarkably well organized. Do you ever read the transcripts of our podcasts?

**John:** Sometimes it really does seem like we were, you know, we planned it.

**Craig:** That we were reading off of sheets of paper. We’re really good at this, John. We’re really good at this.

**John:** Oh, we’re incredibly good.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Although, one listener did email in this last week pointing out that my elocution, my diction has taken a nosedive.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it’s honestly true. And I hear it myself even as I’m doing this now. I am so tired, Craig. I am zombie tired. And today was supposed to be — we’re recording this on a Sunday — was supposed to be my day off, but then we had six hours of meetings.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, it has not been a day off.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s terrific that you are using the euphemism six hours of meetings to describe your obvious alcoholism.

**John:** [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s all a desperate cry for help.

**Craig:** I had a six hour meeting with this bottle of rye. Uh, you’re a drunk. There’s no other possible explanation for “inneresting.”

**John:** Yeah, I’m drunk at —

**Craig:** All moment. Constantly drunk.

**John:** Either drunk or I’m from Colorado. Those are the two choices.

**Craig:** Is there a difference?

**John:** It’s attitude.

**Craig:** It’s altitude sickness. Well, I have a Cool Thing this week that was, as are so many of my Cool Things, recommend by a Twitter follower. But this one really has the potential to be awesome. It’s almost there. It’s not quite there yet, but they’re working on it. It’s called writerduet.com. It is free. And the idea of writerduet.com is to provide functionality that already exists in Final Draft and Movie Magic.

Well, what would be so cool about that, you ask. Well, the functionality in Final Draft and Movie Magic, that is to say the ability to write and collaborate with another writer via an online connection is offered but it doesn’t work in either software. It has never worked. It is insane. The way they’ve set it up and what they require is ridiculous. It will never work.

So, what one of those companies should have done but failed to do years ago was to setup a server and make it web-based and allow people to upload a script, an existing script, to that, or to begin to write an existing script in that service. And to do it collaboratively a la Google Docs.

And that’s what writerduet.com has done. They do accept PDF and FDX imports. I’m not sure how they’re converting the PDF to text. Perhaps they’re using some form of your Highland. I don’t know.

**John:** Perhaps.

**Craig:** Ripping you off. I’m sure you’re immediately hitting —

**John:** No, it’s absolutely fair. I think, I kind of believe they may actually be using Fountain as their underlying, because I have heard of the service. I will Google them after.

**Craig:** And it works. So, I tested it with my assistant and the two of us worked and it worked. And it was good. It’s a little slow, a little kludgy here and there. There’s some things that they’ve got to work out. And when I uploaded a full Final Draft script, a full 115 page script, my browser got really slow, to the point of just not being usable.

So, I mentioned that to the developer and he said, “Okay, got it. I’m going to work on that.” And I find that these guys do work on these things and they do make them better.

So, I think if you’re interested in something like this and you at least want to poke around at it, it’s the future, I think. I think this is where things are going to go. Writerduet.com.

**John:** Fantastic. I will point out that several writers I know do use Google Docs for exactly this purpose. And they just use Fountain. They use the plain text markup language in Fountain to do it. And that works great for them, too. So, it’s nice that there are multiple places trying to do the same things and try to do them a bit more smartly than the big behemoth apps.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for getting me through another podcast.

**Craig:** You did it. You did it, buddy. Hang in there. I’ll be there soon. And, [sirens in background], oh, and look, the sirens are here. That means it’s time to sign off and say goodnight.

**John:** All right, Craig, thank you.

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

**John:** Goodnight.

Links:

* [Shofars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shofar) on Wikipedia
* [Submit your Three Pages now](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) and let us know you’ll be at the [2013 Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [The William Shatner recording session](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfDHIqmUUMs)
* [Brother HL2230 Laser Printer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004H1PB9I/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* John and Dan Jinks on [KCRW’s The Business](http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tb/tb130909john_august_and_dan_)
* [Writerduet.com](https://writerduet.com/) lets you collaborate in real-time
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Kurt Kuenne

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/two-entjs-walk-into-a-bar-and-fix-it).

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

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

****John:**** And this is Episode 106 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I lived your fantasy last week. I got to go in and be on the air on SiriusXM On Broadway.

**Craig:** You’ve beaten me to the punch. My turn is going to be in a month, but I’m very excited. And you were interviewed by Julie James.

**John:** By Julie James who is a super fan of Broadway.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, sometimes you have those people who are like remarkable interviewers and you have deep insights on things, but it’s also great to have people who are just like ridiculous fans of a thing. And she’s a ridiculous fan of Broadway, so it was very fun to be interviewed with her and Andrew Lippa for a good 45 minutes. So perhaps as you are driving around this long Labor Day Weekend you had a chance to hear us.

We’re recording this before the Labor Day Weekend, so of course you didn’t hear it, but —

**Craig:** I haven’t heard it yet.

**John:** But if you can travel through time and imagine you may hear us talking about Big Fish.

**Craig:** Right. Julie James is the sort of person that could probably interview, I don’t know, the guy who mugged her and still seem pretty supportive.

**John:** She would be very up about it all.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s great.

**John:** You and I record our podcast ourselves separately with our own computers and our own little microphones and it’s a very stripped down operation. So, it was fascinating to actually go into a place that does this for a living and has a whole machine to do this stuff. Because I’ve done the NPR interviews and NPR is in the basement of a college and it’s professional but it’s also sort of downscale.

This is like in the fancy McGraw-Hill building There are these glass booths and basically there’s a window and then there’s a foot of air and then there’s another giant piece of glass, so like everything is just deeply soundproof. You could easily be murdered in one of these things and no one would ever hear you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it was just so fascinating to see. It’s essentially the same thing that we’re doing, just ramped to a much higher scale.

**Craig:** Yeah. And really what it comes down to is that the amount of money and effort that is required to take something from say 85% good to 100% good is a lot.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** That’s where all the, you know, in our little things of like my air conditioning coming on, or the bus outside, or we were just talking about little mic bumps and things, all that goes away. But, yeah, it’s very expensive to do it truly properly.

**John:** Yeah, but lovely. One thing I did notice is the same sort of across the board is they have the same headphones that I believe you and I both do have which is the — I’m going to look up the name of it — the Sony MDR-7506.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s what I’m wearing right now.

**John:** For the professional cans. I have to say, I mean, it could be a One Cool Thing, I guess, but if you want a good pair of headphones, just get these. They’re really good. And they’ll always sound really good.

Today on the podcast we are going to talk about a wide range of topics. We’re going to talk about these comments that Kevin Spacey made at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Because really when I think of television I think of Edinburgh, Scotland.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** He made comments about the present and future of television, which I think are worth discussing.

LA’s Mayor, Eric Garcetti, had comments about runaway production and what that means to Los Angeles and how it can be fought. So we’ll talk about that.

We need to talk about the upcoming WGA election.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s not even upcoming, it’s the currently upon us WGA election.

**Craig:** Yes, the imminent election.

**John:** Yes. And we’ve talked about this on every incarnation of the podcast, but this time you will really lead the conversation because I know nothing.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But first we have some follow-up. So, last week on the podcast, it was Three Page Challenges we did. And so one of them was by this guy Keith Eiler. This was the one that was set in space and had something with Oblivion in the title. And so he tweeted us to say like, “Hey guys, thank you so much for looking at my script on the show,” but he gave us references for what the title meant and for also what this one dialogue reference meant.

So, this is how his title came to be. It’s this Marcel Proust quote. And I’m going to start to read it and then we’re going to have a little discussion. This is a quote from Marcel Proust:

“What best remind us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.”

Wow. So, a couple things about that. First off, the underlying idea behind this longer quote — I just sort of gave you half of it — is that it’s those things you don’t kind of remember remembering are what are sort of most significant, and sort of like really capture that emotional memory of things, and that’s a really nice idea. And I think it’s a nice idea to have in a script. I think it’s a nice idea for someone to in easier ways say in a script. And it’s a nice thematic idea. I really like that as a thematic idea.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I found that quote to be impenetrable though.

**Craig:** Well, it’s difficult. You know, you’re translating it from French. And when we look at writers who wrote in English at Proust’s time, they tended to be impenetrable, too. There was a very purple prosy thing that was going on for awhile there. I’m glad it’s sort of gone. [laughs] It was almost like your quote needed to be really complicated in order to be any good. That’s one of the reasons why I was always I guess attracted to Nietzsche’s writing because even translated from German by the great Walter Kaufmann, there’s just a clarity to it.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s honestly why all high school students love reading Hemingway because they’re, “Oh, short sentences.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s the same semester you always have to read Hemingway and Faulkner and you’re like, “Oh my god, please just let me read two Hemingway’s and not have to go through a Faulkner.” Because Faulkner does that same thing which we just saw in Proust’s quote which is it’s a bunch of clauses strung together by commas. And by the time you’re in the fourth or fifth deep one of these it’s like, wait, what was the subject of this sentence? I can’t actually follow the thread because we’re just not used to having to dig that deep into sentences.

**Craig:** Right. And then people sometimes claim a certain merit in understanding these hard to untangle paragraphs. But, I’m not really sure that that’s meritorious. I mean, the sentiments though are great. And Proust, I guess, is most famous for his notion of sense memory, his Madeleine cookie and all that.

**John:** What I would also say in general, if this quote is an important part of the idea of your movie — Keith, awesome that you did not try to put that in the first page. Because I’ve seen so many terrible scripts where the first page would be that impenetrable quote, and when I get to that first impenetrable quote I’m like, “Oh my god, I don’t want to read another word, because it’s going to be all like this. It’s all going to be about that thing.”

So, let’s say if you have this idea of the things you don’t remember are the memories that actually carry emotional weight, and I may be butchering what the actual intent of that paragraph was, but that’s what we got out of it, is you’re going to need to find ways to thread that through your script in ways that characters can state them, that characters can, you know, once they come to realize. But a character can express that idea, embody that idea. You need to be able to find moments that can make that actually come to life. And space would seem to be a really difficult place to do that. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but that would be an extra challenge I would see if that is thematically the idea you want to get to.

Space is going to probably make it more challenging than less challenging.

**Craig:** It could, yeah. And I think also you just have to give yourself up to a certain amount of let’s call it non-linearity and irrationality. Because the purpose of the quote is essentially that our conscious rational, logical mind isn’t really processing the memories that matter. That this is going on in the zany or uncoordinated part of our minds.

So, it seems that the movie would probably have to end up being a bit more lyrical and a bit more poetic and non-linear than a traditional narrative. But, you know, just because you don’t want to sort of — it’s difficult to relay a sense of subconscious thought through a very conscious, ordered, intentional plot.

**John:** Exactly. I would agree with you. And since movies are about images and sounds, it’s not going to be as rewarding just to have a character say the modern English version of that. In a play, however, I bet you could have a character give a monologues that is essentially that point, or gets you to that point, which is incredibly powerful and moving, but that’s a play.

**Craig:** And you’re there with the person in the room.

**John:** Absolutely. And you’re watching them experience that thing at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let’s get to today’s work and today’s discussions. First off, let’s start with this Kevin Spacey video. You can see the video. You can see the transcript of it.

Essentially Kevin Spacey was speaking at the Edinburgh Television Festival and he is known for House of Cards, his most recent season, which is one of the acclaimed Netflix shows that sort of broke the model of how a television show is supposed to work in that the Netflix shows, including House of Cards, including Orange is the New Black — which I finally started watching — do not work under the normal pilot season. They’re not shot with pilots and then they go to series. They are just fully formed things that exist all at once and that you don’t have to watch them week by week. They simply exist in their entire 13 episode wholeness the moment they debut.

So, his arguments summarized is that this is how — this isn’t just the future of television but this is actually the current present of television and that if television does not adapt to it, if broadcast networks don’t adapt to it they will quickly be extinct. And I liked it because it was similar to points that you and I have made on the show before is that stuff is changing. If you don’t acknowledge that it’s changing you’re the dinosaurs who are going to become completely extinct.

**Craig:** Yeah. He makes, I think, a bunch of great points and then takes it one step too far.

**John:** Oh, Kevin Spacey!

**Craig:** Oh Kevin Spacey! So, the points that I think everybody makes in general that the notion of having an entire season on demand instantly for people who are subscribing to the service makes complete sense. We know that for sure. Even though —

**John:** Although we didn’t know that when it first happened though.

**Craig:** No. We didn’t know, but we now know it for sure.

**John:** The Arrested Development model.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s not particularly news because we know it. I mean, he’s involved in one of the shows that sort of proved it. But, we know it to an extent. In other words we know that people will do it, but they’re not doing it, and this will tie back to my bridge too far, they’re not doing it anywhere near the way that they watch the models of programming that Kevin Spacey sort of is saying are already outmoded. They’re not. [laughs] Not even close.

But we know, okay, it can work, at least on some level that can work. The best point he made, the most important point he made was the one about the stupidity of pilots and pilot season. And the argument is that the necessity of a pilot causes certain creative decisions to be made which are not ideal. They demand that the writers pack a whole bunch of stuff into one hour, or if you’re a sitcom, 22 minutes, including who the characters are, what their deals are, what their problems are, what the situation is, da-dada-dada. Right?

Everything is all there in the pilot. That’s why pilots suck more than anything. They are an unnatural demand on the writers. And his point was we didn’t want to write a pilot because we actually wanted the luxury of being able to reveal things as we chose, as we decided. And I thought that was a great point. And he connects it back to the insane inefficiency of the pilot system, which is remarkable.

**John:** So, two points. I would agree with you that his best point is that the existence of pilots forces creative decisions that are not good for television series. And that having written several pilots and having been through that development process, you are forced to wedge in so much that you would choose not to put in there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This last thing I did for ABC, Chosen, I definitely felt that where essentially like, “Okay, that stuff you have for episode two, let’s cram that into episode one.” It’s like, oh my god, there’s no room to breathe in this show anymore because they keep trying to pack in more plot and more “this is what the show is, this is what the show is,” because the pilot has become this marketing document for the network essentially saying like please pick up our show because this is how exciting it’s going to be. The pilot is completely atypical of what the actual series might be week to week, which is a huge problem.

What I would say though, an observation about the inefficiency of the pilot system, it’s probably hugely beneficial to the employment of writers. I think because we overshoot the number of pilots we make, I think a lot more people end up being employed writing pilots and getting the chance to make pilots than otherwise would be if we actually went to a full, okay, we’re just going to make series.

**Craig:** Yes. And no. Yes, in the sense that you’re right, strictly they are employed. No, in the sense that whatever you make to write that one pilot isn’t that much, and worse, by creating a system that is particularly inefficient for scripted narrative programming the networks find it much, much easier, I think, to punt and just put in stuff that’s much easier to develop, like reality, which you can make a pilot for cheaply and remake, and remake, and remake.

And it’s unfortunate because the real money for writers is when the show is a hit and on. And we’ve lost ground to non-scripted stuff I think in part because the pilot system is just so absurd.

**John:** I agree that the pilot system is absurd but I would still push back on some of these points. The inefficiencies is essentially research and development. Television does research and development the way that movies never do is that we say like, “Well, what if we made this show?” And so you get to see, well, what would that show be like?

The pilots are a very imperfect version of what that show would be like, but I think it gives us a lot of new and medium writers a chance to actually make their own thing, that would be much less likely if we went to a full “we’re just going to make 13 episodes of a series” situations. Because the people who get to make 13 episodes of a series of their own creation are the Jenji Kohans, are the people who have the power, and history, and clout to do that.

So, it’s going to be harder and harder for me, when I was doing my first TV show, to be doing my first TV show because it’s a bigger gamble to say we’re going to do 13 episodes of a show versus a pilot.

**Craig:** I agree with that. I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Maybe not demanding that pilots do the work beyond what a good first episode of a series ought to be doing. Where I think that Kevin Spacey takes the unnecessary leap, and you see this sometimes — people get really excited when something new comes along. They get so excited that they over swing.

Here’s the truth: House of Cards, while a success for Netflix, is a success question mark. No one really knows, I don’t think, how many people actually watch the show. More importantly, we do know this — a tiny fraction of say — A House of Cards audience is a tiny fraction of say Modern Family’s audience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The truth is that the network model that Kevin Spacey seems to think his show has already made obsolete is so vastly more profitable and more watched than the Netflix model. We don’t need to engage in these things where it has to be this or that. The truth is the network model still works in a fascinatingly successful way.

Similarly, people — while he points out is it still a film if you watch it on TV at home? Yeah, sure, it’s a movie, but people still go to the theater. So, while we open ourselves to change, and open ourselves to adapt to the technology that’s available to us and what the audience is telling us, we shouldn’t over-correct and just decide that everything that exists and is incredibly successful is now obsolete.

**John:** I would argue about whether you can blanket statement say that broadcast television is more profitable than Netflix or those situations because they’re actually very difficult to compare. The Netflix model is really very much like what HBO does. And when you talk to HBO and they talk about sort of how they make their money, they will tell you quite honestly, “Our research has found that if there’s one show that people want to watch on HBO they will keep subscribing to HBO.”

So, they don’t necessarily need to have a bunch of eyeballs as long as they have one show that each of their current subscribers or each of their hopeful subscribers really wants to watch and will therefore pay for HBO to watch.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s a remarkable luxury to be able to say, “We don’t have to appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans as long as we can get this number of people to be watching HBO because this show exists.”

**Craig:** That’s right. It is apples to oranges. But, just as it’s apples and oranges to compare the amount of money that, I don’t know, the paperclip industry makes to the computer industry, I think it’s fair to say the computer industry probably makes more money.

When you talk about big hit network shows that are rerun and go into syndication and are purchased on DVD and are watched by, I don’t know, 15 million people on a given night, and the ads that are sold, the amount of money is astonishing. Granted, it’s not what it used to be, but it’s astonishing. Netflix was a company that was nearly out of business two years ago. So, hard to say — it’s hard to say. All I think I can say for sure is that stories of network television’s demise are — how does the phrase go?

**John:** Greatly exaggerated?

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Yes. I would thoroughly agree with you on that point.

So, let’s go to a topic that you can lead the discussion on because I’m just ignorant — the WGA elections are happening right now.

**Craig:** Right now.

**John:** And so people should have a packet in their mailbox of candidate statements and ballots and things that they should be looking at. So, if you’re a WGA member, what kinds of things would you encourage them to be looking at?

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting year. This is, every two years there is an officer election. So, there is a board of 16 members and then there are three officers. On I guess even years it’s just eight members of the board are up for reelection. On odd years it’s the other eight members of the board, plus the three officers. The WGA West has an interesting constitutional clause that says that we can’t do what’s called white ballot voting. And white ballot voting is one candidate to vote for. The framers of the union felt strongly that there should always be some sort of competition. And there always has been, until this year.

So, this year we have Christopher Keyser, our incumbent president, running unopposed. And we have Howard Rodman, our incumbent vice president, also running unopposed. How is this possible? It’s possible because basically the people that were nominated to run against them declined. Essentially they turned it down. And at that point the Guild felt it had done its duty.

And so it goes. It’s a little strange. I mean, look, the truth is Chris and Howard were going to win anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, a lot of times what happens is they just put a straw dummy candidate up just to fulfill the constitutional. So, obviously you’re voting for Chris Keyser. You have no choice. I would urge you to anyway. And you’re voting for Howard Rodman, you have no choice. I would urge you to anyway.

Where things have gotten a little interesting is in the Secretary-Treasurer race between Dan Wilcox and Carl Gottlieb. Carl Gottlieb is a legend. He wrote — talk about two wildly different movies — Carl Gottlieb wrote Jaws…

**John:** I’ve heard of Jaws.

**Craig:** Carl Gottlieb wrote The Jerk. [laughs] Now, how is this possible that you could somehow figure out a way to write two of the most amazing movies of the ’70s in two wildly different genres? Well, Carl did it. And I am very proud to say that I served with Carl and that he is not only a gentleman and a brilliant writer and a legend, but Carl has probably the most institutional wisdom of any of the people that currently serve the Guild. He’s been involved forever.

He’s running against Dan Wilcox who I don’t think wrote Jaws or The Jerk. Dan has sort of lobbed this bizarre, I don’t know what is going on here, so Dan Wilcox wrote this statement basically saying the Guild doesn’t have enough meetings and the meetings don’t go long enough. Well, let me tell you something. Having served on the Guild, the best news of all would be that maybe they got rid of a few meetings, that the meetings weren’t 12 hours long.

These meetings were atrocious. When you get, you know, you’re talking about 19 people in a room, plus staff, slowly belaboring nonsense. It’s the worst. I think the fact that meetings are running more efficiently is wonderful.

He was also complaining apparently that some people weren’t showing up, but then he goes ahead and he supports Thania St. John who is running for reelection who has missed more meetings than anyone. I have no idea what Dan is talking about. I’ll be honest with you: he’s a nice man but I found him to be an unimpressive board member when I was on the board. He doesn’t particularly propose anything or change anything or do anything. He’s just kind of — he reminds me of the way I think Guild politics used to be but isn’t any longer.

I strongly support Carl. And, by the way, so do Chris Keyser and so does Howard Rodman. And Chris and Howard, by the way, are from either side of the Guild political spectrum and they get along great and they both support Carl. I think that that one is a slam dunk.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about what this elected board will be facing and addressing, because how close are we getting to contract negotiations, other issues that are going to be pressing on us in this next term?

**Craig:** One of the favorite rhetorical tricks that candidates will use is to say things like, “Don’t think that when you’re voting here you’re voting to say what the negotiations are going to be, the contract, because the negotiations are on this date and the contract is this date,” and blah, blah, blah.

You’re always voting for that. Because the truth is once you elect somebody chances are the incumbents will be reelected. Beyond that, while a particular board member may not be around for a particular negotiation, they’re there when the negotiating committee is appointed. There’s an enormous influence that you have. You’re always voting for negotiations. Never let anybody tell you you’re not. You always are. I hate that. It’s the worst lie. That’s the one that drives me the craziest.

So, yeah, this is entirely about negotiations. And, of course, given that we’re going to have the same president and vice president combo, I think we can expect a certain amount of continuity. There are certain candidates that I think would be terrific to continue or be new to the board considering that we are heading towards negotiations.

So, Billy Ray has been, I think he’s chaired the negotiating committee now twice. He’s essential. We have to reelect Billy. Billy is important. And, by the way, not every — there are 16 directors on the board and about three of them usually matter and the rest of them are just sort of voting along with the other three. Billy Ray is one of the important ones. Have to, have to reelect him.

I’m a big fan of this kid Ari Rubin. He’s a kid. I mean, I say kid because now I’m getting older and he’s probably thirty-something. He’s famed screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin’s son. And he’s just very enthusiastic and very much wants to kind of present a positive, I guess, energy from the Guild to the membership. You know, a lot of these people just get grumpy after awhile. He’s not yet grumpy. And I think he’s very reasonable. He looks at both sides of the issue, so I like Ari Rubin.

And Lee Aronsohn, I think, is well worth electing. Lee Aronsohn was Chuck Lorre’s right hand guy. I think he is sort of retired now, but he really understands the boots on the ground in TV today. And it’s just so important that we have people — and we have a lot of people on the board that frankly just aren’t really connected on a day-to-day basis to the way the business really works. Lee certainly would be.

And then I recommend strongly the reelection of David Goyer, again, who understands both screenwriter issues, and we have precious few screenwriters on the board, and television issues, and the business as it is currently.

And how could I not mention that Patric Verrone is running again.

**John:** There’s some institutional knowledge of a different kind…

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** …of Patric Verrone, who was the president of the WGA through — president or chairman of the board? I guess president.

**Craig:** He was president.

**John:** President, during the most recent strike.

**Craig:** Yes. Patric just apparently can’t get enough.

**John:** Yeah. A person I know personally who is running is Jonathan Fernandez who was actually in my picketing group.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I like Jonathan.

**John:** My picketing group at Paramount. And he’s fantastic, and smart, and considerate. And walks that sort of smart middle ground in that he was very involved during the strike but also very interested in having the strike be over. I know he came to you for counsel as well about…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** …sort of the issues that would be facing the board during these next two years.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think Jonathan Fernandez is terrific. Yes. So, I’m going to say my personal I’m voting for them: Chris Keyser, Howard Rodman, Carl Gottlieb, Ari Rubin, Jonathan Fernandez, Billy Ray, Lee Aronsohn, David Goyer. I am fans of all them.

And, by the way, when it comes to voting for the board, you can vote for eight people. You don’t have to vote for eight people.

**John:** It’s that classic thing where voting for fewer people in a weird way makes your votes count a little bit more because you’re not diluting your vote.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say my general criteria as looking for people to vote is trying to find people who sort of proxy my views on how things should be, but who also bring a diversity of experience and opinion to how to do things. And so as you say institutional knowledge for Carl Gottlieb is fantastic. Enthusiasm and new perspective is great for some of these younger members.

But, the WGA is also a collection of film people and television people. And we need to have both in there. And classically screenwriters have been underrepresented in board affairs.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So that’s why I’m excited to have screenwriters as candidates.

**Craig:** Not many of them, but yes.

**John:** But Goyer and Fernandez both count as that, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Goyer, Fernandez, and Billy Ray for sure.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. Let us go to a small intermezzo, a small — what do you call those little palate cleanser…?

**Craig:** A sorbet?

**John:** Sort of a midway sorbet. We got a question from Hillary Dixon Rust who is a gentleman. He asks, “Ever taken the Myers-Briggs test? If so, would you share your types?”

**Craig:** Yeah, I have. Have you?

**John:** Of course. I knew you had. Of course I have, too. So, the most recent time I took it I am an ENTJ. What are you?

**Craig:** [laughs] ENTJ.

**John:** Yeah. That doesn’t surprise me at all.

**Craig:** Look at us. Shouldn’t we be fighting or, I don’t know what it even means. Sometimes I’m an ENTP.

**John:** Yeah. I think I occasionally turn out to be a P.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I would say when I first took the test in college I was definitely an I. And that is one of the things, extroversion, really any of these scales, you can slide a bit on them and it’s going to be fungible. But it was a very deliberate choice to sort of force myself to be more extroverted.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And so the person I am now is not the person I was in college.

**Craig:** You know what’s so interesting about what you just said? I could have said and can say the exact same thing. It’s so weird to me. I was also, and I remember doing it in college and I was an I. And just so people understand the I/E thing, so Introvert/Extrovert, the specific way they’re talking about it is what energizes you, being around people or being on your own? And it did change for me. It really changed for me.

I am in the exact same boat. We’re the same thing and we’ve followed the same progression. How weird.

**John:** Yeah. And so things like when we hosted the live 100th episode of Scriptnotes or when we did the big thing at the Academy, that would have just absolutely terrified me and it would have caused panic. And instead it gets me really amped up and adrenalized and I love it. So, it’s a very different thing.

**Craig:** My introversion manifested itself differently. I just would have been angry and dismissive. [laughs]

**John:** You were surly, you’re saying?

**Craig:** Incredibly! But I’ve become so much more happy. Out of curiosity, do you know what Mike is?

**John:** Mike, I don’t know what his full thing is but he’s definitely on the introvert side — my husband Mike. And your wife, Melissa?

**Craig:** Melissa is, I think, an opposite of me in every — no, no, she’s an E also, but I think she’s like ESFP. I mean, she’s just completely opposite.

**John:** Completely opposite, yeah. She’s the other side of your Velcro?

**Craig:** Totally. Totally.

**John:** Yeah, it’s interesting. And so it’s great to have some balance in your relationship and the ability to do different things. And it’s also important I think for people to realize that those aren’t like, it’s not fate. It’s not destiny that because you’ve scored a certain way on this little test you took that this is how you must behave in life. It just sort of shows your general patterns on how you’re going to behave in situations.

**Craig:** And god forbid that you should take this test and then decide you have to act like the way the test tells you to act. That would be the worst possible outcome.

**John:** Yeah, please don’t do that.

**Craig:** Don’t do that.

**John:** So, back in college you were introverted but you also had a famous roommate. I don’t know if you want to get into your famous roommate now. It’s probably too long of a topic.

**Craig:** [laughs] No, I can do a very short version. My freshman year roommate, so the roommate that was assigned to me by Princeton University was Ted Cruz who is currently a United States Senator from Texas and putative presidential candidate. And I hated him. And I talked about it —

**John:** But now he’s one of your best friends on earth, right?

**Craig:** [laughs] No, I still hate him. And I talked about it with a reporter and it was awesome. I was called… — There are some corners of the internet where people just get wild. And politically I’m very much in the middle. I pick and choose from right and left depending on the topic. I’m not a — far from a leftish, far from a rightist. But I was accused of being a leftist, a Marxist, gay, bisexual. I like that it was both gay and bisexual.

**John:** That’s perfect. Well, they see your wife and your kid and say, “Okay, maybe once.” [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] They didn’t really know about that.

**John:** Oh, you have two kids, I’m sorry. Twice.

**Craig:** Yes, twice. I was a Marxist and a whole bunch of other stuff. It was pretty wild. People are nuts! Anyway, I thought it was fun in a weird way because I have been inoculated to a certain extent from the pain of public criticism, but these people are just cuckoo. I mean, it was actually funny.

But, Ted Cruz was my roommate. I did not like him at all in college. I actually asked that they give me a different roommate. I made it as far as November and I couldn’t take it anymore. And the university declined my offer, my request. So, I was stuck with him for an entire year. And then I haven’t said a word to him since.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Bad guy. Don’t like him.

**John:** Let’s transition from a discussion of national politics to more local politics which is the LA Mayor Eric Garcetti made comments, Variety picked up the story but other people picked up the story as well saying that it is a priority of the city government to stop runaway production or to try to keep more production of Hollywood features and television shows shooting actually in Hollywood where the film industry began.

This is obviously an evergreen thing that comes up. It’s an evergreen problem. I think the only thing I saw which was a little bit more specific from his comments was that we’re going to focus on the things we can actually hopefully win which is things like one-hour drama pilots and trying to keep them in town.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m deeply torn and conflicted about this because whenever I see the political solutions being proffered for runaway productions it’s always like, “Well, we need more tax incentives.” Well, that’s just an arms race and it’s an arms race that everybody loses because if California creates these giant tax incentives well, okay, first off, why are we doing it for this industry rather than other industries. But, you can look at sort of the tax incentives that local governments offer for retailers saying like, “Hey Walmart, please build a new Walmart here.” And so they build this great Walmart here and they close the other Walmart which becomes this wasteland. And it’s not good for everybody.

**Craig:** This is intractable. It is. And this article bummed me out because I got excited at first. And then I kept reading going, okay, it was like a kid opening up a gift and it’s just nothing but tissue paper. And then finally you hit the bottom of the box and you’re like, “Oh, god, there’s nothing in here but tissue paper.” There is no answer in this article.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. There’s like a receipt for something that is not actually in —

**Craig:** Yeah, gift receipts for a sweater that at this point you actually would want and you didn’t even get. So, the idea of these tax incentives is that a state basically says if you shoot a movie here then what we’ll do is we’ll collect a bunch of tax from all the people that work on the movie and then we’ll give it back to you, the production, so that employees work, essentially.

“We want our people working here in the state. And our feeling is if they work and they get paid, even if we give you back our state revenue from that stuff, that they will then go and buy stuff and that will just be better for our economy.” That’s the theory. And frankly I’m not sure that there is enough evidence one way or another to show that it works or doesn’t work. There are enough places doing it that makes me think it does work.

But, the problem is that there are so many places doing it that it becomes insolvable for California. First of all, California is the most poorly run state in the country. I really do believe that. Sacramento is horrible. I mean, I’m really involved in school funding issues and public school funding issues and California is ridiculous. It will continue to be ridiculous.

On this issue, I think this is a — stand in line, by the way, of how many things California bungles, including the fact that we’re saddled with this cuckoo nuts referendum system so now we have this multibillion dollar ridiculous high speed bullet train that nobody wants that is too expensive. I mean, it’s just we’re a dumb state and we’re getting dumber. And we’re also enormous and unwieldy. So, much like turning the Titanic, it takes us a really long time after we see the iceberg to figure out what to do.

You have all these other states that seem to be more nimble. And also, frankly, aren’t as worker friendly. So, when we say, “Oh look, let’s go shoot everything in Atlanta,” the way that so many movies are right now, it’s not just because Georgia is saying we’ll give you a bunch of money back. Georgia is saying we can give you a bunch of money back because frankly all these people that are working are working lower rates, not a lot of union stuff, right to work states where you don’t have to be in the union. It is a race to the bottom.

It’s a race to the bottom for the states and it’s a race to the bottom for the workers. The only people who are enjoying this and laughing about it are the studios. And they couldn’t give a damn.

**John:** I think you’re sadly kind of right. So, let’s talk about this from the writer’s perspective because in a weird way the writer seems to be the most insulated from this because, well, we can write anywhere. And a lot of us write in Los Angeles, or we write wherever, and it kind of doesn’t matter so much to us, except, it sometimes really matters for the project. So, I’m going to fictionalize certain aspects of this meeting so that people don’t figure out what I’m actually talking about.

But, a couple of weeks ago I went in to meet on this project, an adaptation that I really liked that I do hope to do at some point. And the original project is set in a specific location. And there are good creative reasons why the place where it is set should maybe not be the place where you would want to set the movie version of it. And in a general sense, there are reasons why you may want to move it just for good creative reasons.

One of the producers said, so we started to talk about good creative places to put, like rather than there you could set it on the east coast, it could be this, it could be a Bostony kind of thing. That could be really interesting. Yeah, that totally works. And one of the producers said, “Well, no, we should put it in Louisiana so it’s cheaper.”

And I nodded but didn’t sort of say yes or no. But that was a case where the suggestion came to make a fundamental creative choice, and really a terrible creative choice for this project based on where he perceived we could shoot the movie for less money. And that is exactly what you don’t want.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As a writer, or as a filmmaker, as anyone, a producer, anyone who cares about making the best movie, the best TV show, you should choose the location you shoot it in for what it actually makes sense to — for the project you’re trying to do. And so if you’re trying to do a New York set thing, great, shoot New York, and it’s lovely that there are tax credits here. But if you’re set in Los Angeles, or you’re set in California, or like it doesn’t matter where you’re set, don’t just go to Atlanta or Louisiana or that other place just for those tax reasons because it kind of hurts you on some levels.

**Craig:** They don’t care. I went through this on Identity Thief. It was —

**John:** So, Identity Thief was Georgia, correct?

**Craig:** Identity Thief was shot in Atlanta.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** The movie was obviously always meant to be a road trip. And I sat and I remember talking about it at length with Jason and with Seth Gordon about the kind of road trip we wanted to do. And the one that we wanted to tell, because it’s important, I mean, everything is intentional. And we sort of wanted to show a cross country road trip that we hadn’t really seen.

You know, for instance Due Date had just done a really good one from Atlanta to LA and they kind of cut through that southern swath and through the Grand Canyon. It was such a great look. And they got near the Mexican border. But what I hadn’t seen was a trip that I had actually done when I was younger, which is kind of a Boston to Portland kind of feel, that cutting across the top of the country, through the rust belt, and through dairy country, and then out through kind of big sky and all the rest of it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And ending up in the Pacific Northwest. And so much of what the characters look like and dress like and how they live, plus Boston is such a great town in terms of look.

**John:** Oh, it’s great.

**Craig:** And Portland is really interesting. And Portland is also interesting because of the communities that are just off it that are actually kind of trashy and depressed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I was screamed at. [laughs] I’m not joking. I’m not going to tell you who screamed at me. Screamed at. And when I tell you screamed at, I mean over the phone I was screamed at and I was told the movie has to be shot in Atlanta or it’s not happening. And the road trip, given that the whole thing had to be shot in Atlanta, the physical production people were quite convinced that we could fool the audiences by making a road trip from Miami to Atlanta. [laughs]

And I was like, that’s a day. First of all, everything looks the same. That’s the whole point. So, how will you know you got anywhere? Forget what it does to the characters and all the rest of it. And it was an enormous fight and in the end the best I could do was get to, okay, it’s a drive from Miami to Denver, but not really Denver, Atlanta. And then pay for a second unit to sort of fake our way through St. Louis.

It was depressing, because frankly what ended up happening was the Denver scenes were just generic because frankly Denver and Atlanta are kind of generic looking cities.

**John:** They really are.

**Craig:** So, that stuff was just sort of generic. The Florida stuff was generic. And the road trip was boring. You know, you didn’t get a sense of scope or feel or the bigness of what it means to be out on the road in the middle of nowhere, just big, big…it just killed me.

**John:** The only sort of big wide moments you had were some of those giant tree-lined highways. And you used those for like the times when they’re walking around a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s as much sort of scale —

**Craig:** It’s generic, you know?

**John:** So, I was pretty sure that Identity Thief went to Denver. And what was so weird is that We’re the Millers also goes to Denver. And it’s like why are there two R-rated comedies that are about road trips to Denver?

**Craig:** Because they shot We’re the Miller in Atlanta and they knew that Identity Thief had successfully confused enough Americans to think that Denver was Atlanta. Because most people don’t know what Denver looks like and most people don’t know what Atlanta looks like.

**John:** Oh, poor Denver.

**Craig:** I know! But, look, it’s ridiculous.

**John:** So, We’re the Millers at least did shoot some in New Mexico because there is a little bit of scenery at some places in We’re the Millers.

**Craig:** Right, because the story actually takes them into Mexico and you can’t fake that in Atlanta. But this is the thing, it just bums me out. It bums me out. And it’s not like we were saying we have to shoot the movie in Los Angeles. And it’s not like we’re saying we can’t shoot a big chunk of it somewhere where there are tax breaks. Nor are we saying, “Okay, the movie that costs $32 million, if we do it the way we want to would cost $52 million.” It wouldn’t. It would have probably cost $37 million.

**John:** It would have been just fine.

**Craig:** It would have been just fine. But they just…they kill…anyway, they screamed at me. [laughs] And I screamed back. It was fun.

**John:** So, one of the interesting things that comes up is that the half-hours never get that pressure to shoot — or almost never get that pressure to shoot somewhere else. So, Ugly Betty famously did move from Los Angeles to New York, but it was also set in New York, so I was willing to cut it some slack there. But New Girl, no one is telling New Girl, “Oh, you need to shoot in Atlanta.” That’s because comedies rely on having their writers right there. Because comedy is about sort of all that stuff you do on the set to try different things, to get things to be funny.

It’s a much more live process than the one-hours are. And so I guess we could make a whole bunch more half-hours and then suddenly we would have more production happening in town. It wouldn’t be the worst thing.

**Craig:** Also, those half-hours are set based, so they’re stage based. And there is an economics behind the stage rentals, too. I mean, companies don’t want to give away the stage space that they own for free, nor do they want them sitting empty. So…

**John:** So they want to lease it to their own productions and so they’re paying themselves.

**Craig:** They lease it to their own. They lease it to other. I mean, it’s kind of crazy how some of these shows end up where they end up. But, yeah.

**John:** They end up in a certain studio, on certain stages because that’s what was available when they shot the pilot. And suddenly like 12 years later they’re at this weird place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I remember Seinfeld was shot at CBS Radford.

**John:** But you look at Shonda Rhimes’s shows, and they could — most of them could shoot anywhere, but they’re better for shooting in Los Angeles because she and the creative team have the ability to impact the show because they’re locally —

**Craig:** Well, the other thing is when you’re talking about a long-term television show there are costs that begin to accrue when you’re dealing with an out of town production: putting everybody up and feeding everybody and flying everybody back and forth, and every guest start and every actor and all the rest of it. At some point it outweighs the benefits. But a movie, a one-shot deal, oh my god, they just can’t help it.

And the way they jam you on these locations — you want to know why comedies all look like crap, it’s not the directors or the DPs. It’s the locations. And Atlanta is a beautiful place the first time, or the fifth time, but not the 50th time.

I remember I was standing with — I went out to Atlanta. I’m standing where they were shooting the car chase for Identity Thief. And it was literally the same intersection where they had done a car accident scene in Due Date just a year earlier.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just like, ugh, god.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Well, we didn’t solve that problem.

**Craig:** No. And it’s not going to get solved.

**John:** It’s not going to get solved. I think my only bit of suggestion and hope is that maybe rather than focusing on tax incentives or sort of getting our A-list people to say, “We need more tax incentives,” is to get our A-list people to say, “No, screw it, I’m not going to shoot this thing over there. I’m going to shoot this here.” And maybe with more powerful TV showrunners and writer-directors, some of that will happen. It’s certainly not a guarantee.

**Craig:** It does happen for people who are powerful and for budgets that are larger. But, for so many it doesn’t happen.

**John:** It does not happen.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things.

Craig, mine is actually a collection of One Cool Things. This was a listener suggestion as well. You and I have been doing One Cool Things since quite early on in the podcast. I think episode 10 or so we started doing them. And a listener wrote in and said, “Hey, why don’t you put together a page of all your One Cool Things in one place so we can see them all?”

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** I was like, that’s a really good idea. So, Stuart and Ryan did that. if you go to johnaugust.com there will be a link to a little sidebar page that shows all the One Cool Things from the beginning of the show up till now. And we will be continuously updating it so you’ll see what I recommended and what Craig recommended.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** If there’s a link that works for something you can buy, we’ll try to do that. If it’s something you can buy on Amazon it will be to that. And those things you click through for Amazon we get like a small percentage so you’re helping pay for the show while you’re getting cool things. So, that’s this week’s One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That is a cool thing. My Cool Thing this week is something that you might have seen already. It’s been sort of making its way around the internet. Have you heard of or scene Slow Ass Jolene?

**John:** I am obsessed with Slow Ass Jolene to the degree that I actually took two of the tracks from Big Fish and did the same technique on them.

**Craig:** So, Slow Ass Jolene, someone took Jolene by Dolly Parton and slowed it down I think 25%. And it’s amazing. And it’s amazing for so many reasons. First of all, let’s give Dolly Parton credit for being one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever.

**John:** No question.

**Craig:** And Jolene is a heartbreaking song. It’s just heartbreaking. It is about as tragic a song as I can imagine. Maybe more so because it’s so understated. It’s not like, you know, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is really trying to be tragic. This song is just a quiet, simple woman asking — no, begging — another woman not to take her man. And it’s so understated.

And the interesting thing about Dolly Parton if you were to say to me what is the weakest part of Dolly Parton, as a package, obviously not the songwriting, and not her pitch. Her pitch is outstanding. The quality of her voice, which is just the quality of her voice, is a little tinny. It’s a little shrilly/tinny, and it’s very country. And it’s very pleasant. But, for instance, it’s why Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You turned the world around whereas Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You didn’t. Not just tempo and tone, but it’s the timbre of her voice.

But when you take her performance of Jolene and you slow it down 25%, first of all the true tragedy of the song really starts to blossom, and because her voice has been knocked down to like a male tenor, what you hear is how good of a singer she is. How good she is! She’s so good. And, of course, it goes without saying long before the era of the noxious auto tune and all that. It’s a beautiful song and whoever did Slow Ass Jolene is kind of a genius because it’s sort of this wonderful serendipitous representation of something that was pretty terrific to begin with.

**John:** I agree. And so we will link to Slow Ass Jolene. I’ll also link to on Kottke they had a post that did the same technique to a bunch of other songs you’ve heard of, including like a Prince song that became an awesome slow jam. And Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You, which is sort of bizarrely hypnotic when you actually take it down a notch. And if I’m brave I may even put a link into Fight the Dragons which is one of the title songs, sort of main songs in Big Fish.

I happen to on my hard drive have a recording of Andrew Lippa, our composer, singing the song to the full track, full orchestral track, and you do that, it’s a 12.242 reduction. It pulls it down two semi-tones, and it’s kind of great.

And so I sent it to Andrew saying, “My friend Leon did a cover of our song,” and I sent it to Andrew so he could listen to it, and he’s like, “Who is Leon? I don’t get this?” And he was fascinated. I was like, “No, no, that’s you.”

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s you!

**John:** He did recognize his own voice.

**Craig:** No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.

**John:** No. It’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, so Slow Ass Jolene.

**John:** Hooray. So, if you would like to listen to Slow Ass Jolene or any of the things we talked about on the podcast this week, links are always at johnaugust.com/podcast.

If you are listening to this show on iTunes and you happen to want to leave us a comment, or review, that’s awesome, so why don’t you go do that. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. And we’re here every week. So, we will see you guys next week.

**Craig:** Bye!

**John:** Bye, thanks.

Links:

* Listen to John and Andrew on [SiriusXM On Broadway](http://www.siriusxm.com/onbroadway) with Julie James
* [Marcel Proust Within a Budding Grove, Part two](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/496922-what-best-remind-us-of-a-person-is-precisely-what)
* The (http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/22/kevin-spacey-tv-golden-age) and [transcript](http://www.theguardian.com/media/interactive/2013/aug/22/kevin-spacey-mactaggart-lecture-full-text) of Kevin Spacey’s speech at the 2013 Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival
* [WGAW Announces Candidates for 2013 Officers and Board of Directors Election](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=5259)
* [Myers-Briggs personality types](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator) on Wikipedia
* [L.A. Mayor Declares State of ‘Emergency’ As Movie, TV Production Flees Hollywood](http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/l-a-mayor-declares-state-of-emergency-as-movie-tv-production-flees-hollywood-1200589182/), from Variety
* [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings) from Scriptnotes
* The New Yorker on [Slow Ass Jolene](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/08/slowed-down-dolly-parton.html)
* Kottke on [How to make your own slow jams](http://kottke.org/13/08/how-to-make-your-own-slow-jams)
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Latif Ullah