Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/dramedy-deadlines-and-dating-your-writing-partner).

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

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

**John:** And this is a special episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. It’s special because we have two guests in our room to talk about their experiences, Abby Kohn…

**Abby Kohn:** Hi.

**John:** …and Marc Silverstein…

**March Silverstein:** Hello.

**John:** …who are screenwriters and TV writers as well, mostly known for Never Been Kissed, He’s Just Not That Into You. Guys, welcome.

**Abby:** Thanks.

**Marc:** Thanks for having us.

**John:** Tell us about yourselves. You are a writing team. Have you always been a writing team? Give us some back story here.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Yes. We’ve always been a writing team.

**Marc:** We met at grad school at USC, mid-90s. Early to mid-90s. We had to partner, like second semester they force you to partner with somebody to make a short, and we did that.

**Abby:** Well, you can do, you can each make a five minute short you can direct and the other person can shoot it, and then you switch. Or — nobody else did this but us — you can combine your five minutes and five minutes and make one ten minute film that you co-direct. And nobody took them up on that option, but Marc and I did.

**John:** Oh, very nice. This was the graduate screenwriting program?

**Marc:** No. Production.

**Abby:** Production.

**John:** So, what worked in that partnership and why you two together versus other people in the same class?

**Marc:** I mean, I think initially in that scenario you couldn’t shoot something.

**Abby:** Oh, yeah. I don’t think Marc was confident with me being his DP, so therefore…

**Marc:** Right, I was way more technically savvy and she was much more of a writer really at that point.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** And so we had sort of complementary skill sets.

**Craig:** Did you know that when you looked across the room, I like constructing these romantic things…

**Abby:** Well, you know, we were a couple for [crosstalk].

**Marc:** We started dating, too.

**Craig:** Whoa, hold on, did you date prior to that moment, or did that moment…?

**Abby:** We met literally our first day of the graduate program, the first like get-to-know-you, or not even, it was just like an orientation. And we sat next to each other in that moment and I made some crack about the squeaking of the chair. Literally, that was the moment we met. And we were the only two, I think, in the program who had come straight from college, so we were the youngest in the program, and we kind of bonded in that way.

**Craig:** Gravitated towards each other?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** And we were dating within a month or so of that.

**Craig:** And did you sleep with each other after the dating or did that happen during the dating?

**Marc:** Oh, that all happened at the same time.

**Abby:** During, yeah.

**Craig:** And, now, just because I’m fascinated by this and I know John won’t ask these questions…

**Abby:** Okay, no, you bring it.

**Craig:** This is already the best podcast. You’re not together now?

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** We are not.

**Marc:** We are separately married.

**Craig:** Okay. I’m just going to jump to the fun stuff, and we’ll get back to craft.

**Abby:** We were engaged and we lived together and we worked together for seven years.

**Marc:** Seven years.

**Craig:** Wow. And then you decided, “Okay, that’s not for us.”

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** But, this survived.

**John:** The professional part of it survived.

**Abby:** It did.

**Craig:** Which is spectacular to me. So, obviously I’m just going to keep asking, because he really doesn’t care and he won’t ask these questions and I do care.

**John:** The thing is I do care, I just wouldn’t ask.

**Craig:** I’m that guy?

**Marc:** Yeah. That’s why you’re a good team for a podcast.

**Abby:** Totally.

**Craig:** I disagree, but, what were the challenges of something like that because I’ve talked to, I have a lot of friends who are in partnerships where they are married and they write together, and they’re married and that’s that. But, for you guys, when the romantic aspect of it ended, was there a moment where you thought, “We’re just going to break up?”

**Marc:** I mean, we didn’t have much choice initially because we under an overall deal and we were about to start a pilot, or shooting a pilot.

**Abby:** I think we were in pre-production on a pilot at the time.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Marc:** And we lied. Our agent told us to lie for… — We lied to the people we were working for for about six months, because we had a wedding date…

**Abby:** The pilot was about a young married couple and I think he thought it would be a bummer if like we were engaged and broke up during this making of this thing about young love. So, we, I guess lied about it for a couple of months.

**Marc:** They kept saying, because we had a date — a wedding date — and they’re like, “So, how is that going?” And we’re like, “Uh, we’re too busy. We’re just going to push it.”

**Craig:** Yeah, just pushing it a little bit.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, then through that process actually start to realize, maybe did it get better as friends?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Through that process I think because we were sort of forced to continue working, by the end of the making of that pilot we were like, “Oh, we can do this, this is fine.” Had our feet not been held to the fire in that way I don’t know what would have happened…

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** …but by the end of that, by the end of that it was fine.

**Marc:** It was. And I think the thing was it went on for seven years relationship wise because we were working together. I think if we were just dating it would have ended sooner.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marc:** But we didn’t know if we could choose. I don’t think we knew how to get out of one or the other or what was not working.

**Abby:** We were very enmeshed and we were living together and working…

**Marc:** And you just work all the time. You’re never not working. So, I don’t think we knew if we could do one without the other and then we were just forced to. And they were like, “Oh, okay, good.”

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** And now it’s great because we’ve been through literally everything.

**Craig:** Well, thank you, that satisfies all of my really creepy curiosity.

**Abby:** If anything else comes up you just ask.

**Craig:** It will.

**John:** Now, in working together, what is the relationship? Who does what parts of it? Are you in the room together to write everything, or do you write separately? What’s your process?

**Abby:** We have an office that we have together and we both come in pretty much every day. And our process changes depending on the thing that we’re working on. You know, we have worked on several things that are these multiple story arc movies, and so that was the first… — When we started working on some of those that was the first time ever we wrote simultaneously because things were, stories could be broken out. And other than knowing the intersecting times, and knowing we’d need to check in and make sure things were hitting at the same time, a lot of the stories could be written, they could be plunked out, and written, and plunked back in.

So, we wrote simultaneously during probably all of those kinds of…

**Marc:** But our normal process for like a linear screenplay is just to loosely outline together, kind of hash out the broad strokes together, but then one person will start, write five, ten pages, send it to the other person, I mean, send it across the room to each other, or email it to each other. Go back, rewrite, go a little further, back and forth, back and forth.

**Craig:** And just revising?

**Marc:** Yeah. Because we’re not really, the way we work, it’s not, like we can’t be like, “You take that scene four from now,” because we don’t even know what that is really.

**Craig:** Yeah, I get that.

**Abby:** And for comedy, too, I think having things that are called back and that seem funny because they really come out of character, it seems really hard to decide what those things are before you actually write that scene.

**Marc:** Well, and also, and even starting a scene. I don’t even know where to start the next scene if I don’t know where the other one ended.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Like so much of the rhythm…

**Abby:** I think that’s, too, the rhythm of comedy, it’s very hard…

**Craig:** I’ve never met any comedy team that did it differently, honestly. I write on my own usually, but when I’m writing with Todd Phillips that’s exactly what we do. We do, you take the first, you know, we outline — you take the first six, I’ll take the second six, then we swap back and forth.

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** And our outline is really barebones. Like we have…

**Marc:** It’s gotten less and less.

**Abby:** It’s less than two pages.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** I literally just tape it to my desk because among the other shit, and like there are chicken scratches all over it, but it’s usually two pages because we’re there. We’re in the office together. So, we go to the thing and then we talk about it as we go, even though we know what the major points are.

**Marc:** But we used to be way more detailed.

**Abby:** Sort of.

**Marc:** I feel like we were at least four or five pages in terms of knowing stuff, but now we kind of have just a looser roadmap.

**John:** Now, can each of you write individually when you need to write individually? Like, if something goes into production or one of you gets hit by a bus, do you feel like you can do that?

**Marc:** Yes. We’ve done it.

**Abby:** Yes. I mean, unless there’s like a scene about baseball, then I feel like no. But, yes, as long as there are things that I know, yes.

**Marc:** Yeah. We’ve had to do that. When you got married, I had to finish that one pilot.

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** How was that? Tell us about that? When she got married?

**Marc:** We went to the wedding…

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** But she was gone for a week.

**Abby:** It was during the honeymoon.

**Craig:** It’s so fascinating. Normally when you’re with somebody for seven years, and then you split up, and then they get married, and you’re like, “Oh, a little bittersweet. I will go to the wedding, it’s a little weird.” You’re just more like, “Ugh, I’m stuck doing…”

**Marc:** “I’m stuck doing work.” Yeah, I’m annoyed about a bunch of other things.

**Abby:** I think people have a hard time, like we are best friends. We spend all our time together. And we spend time on weekends together. And our families, we vacation together. We spend our time… — So, it’s like I think sometimes people, when you know our history, it’s hard to understand what that relationship is later. But his wife and my husband are good friends. Our daughters are like sisters. They see each other multiple times a week. It’s very close, so it’s not like now it is this professional thing where it used to be a personal thing. It’s still a personal and professional thing, just not a romantic thing, if that makes sense.

**Craig:** It does actually. I mean, it’s obvious how comfortable you guys are with each other. I mean, it’s very cool. It’s obviously a unique circumstance.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** I’m sure you get asked about it a lot. But it is… — I can only imagine that it makes the creative partnership that much stronger.

**Marc:** It does. I mean, there’s nothing we can — we don’t hold anything back. We’re not scared of saying anything to each other which is good.

**John:** So, let’s go back to USC. You guys are partnered up to make this little short film together. Did it turn out well, did it turn out poorly?

**Abby:** It was a learning experience.

**Marc:** That one was okay. But that was like non-sync 16mm, like brutal.

**John:** Yeah, I remember that at USC. A lot of hand-wringing, long looks, some twitches.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** Are any of those good? I don’t know if…

**John:** No, not really. None of them were good.

**Marc:** No.

**John:** Zemeckis made a good one.

**Marc:** Yeah, he did.

**John:** Way back in the day he made a really good…

**Marc:** The Lift? Was that that one?

**John:** The Lift, yeah. If you go to USC you get to see The Lift.

**Marc:** That’s when they show it to you, yes. And then you’re like, “I’ll never be able to do that.”

**John:** So when did you guys start writing together. Was that shortly after?

**Abby:** Well, that first project that we did was like in our first year of film school. And we were in the MFA program, which is three years. And in our third year we made another film together which we…

**Marc:** Which was a thesis.

**Abby:** Which was like our thesis. And we shot it on 35mm, and it was like 25 minutes long. And it was much more in our, in the tone that we wanted to write, and it was a romantic comedy.

**John:** It was building your wheel house.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Yes. It was called Fairfax Fandango, about a hip girl who lives in the Fairfax neighborhood who gets obsessed with her next door neighbor guy who happens to be an Orthodox Jew. So, it was like a little love story. And that really was the first thing we worked on together that is sort of more like what we do.

**John:** Was that short film helpful at all?

**Marc:** Yes.

**John:** So, that got attention?

**Marc:** It got everything.

**Abby:** It did. It did.

**Marc:** It was, I mean, pre-internet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it was First Look Festival.

**Marc:** First Look.

**Abby:** Yeah, it was back in the day when that thing at the DGA was packed, you know, with assistants, and we were both working as assistants at the time, by the time it showed. We were trying to like make back all the money we spent.

**John:** So, some context for listeners who aren’t USC Film School graduates. At USC when you make a certain level of student film, once or twice a year they show all the student films to people in the industry, so agents, and producers, and managers, and everyone comes to see it. And it’s a big deal. And it was a much bigger deal before…

**Abby:** It was. It’s a beautiful, giant theater, the Directors Guild, like really nice theater, nice sound, nice everything. And it was like standing room only in those days.

And like I said, we were both working as assistants and we had the kind of machine where you had to call into your machine at home. And we were living together at the time, and at our assistant jobs…

**Marc:** The day after.

**Abby:** …the day after it, and Marc called me from his assistant job to my assistant job. And he’s like, this is probably ten in the morning, and he’s like, “There are 25 messages.”

**John:** Holy cow.

**Marc:** He’s like, “I have to erase, it’s full!” And so he deleted them. And then he called back at lunch and he’s like, “There are 25 messages on the machine.” Like it just kept — It was, I guess, a different era where we just like…

**John:** Pre-email.

**Marc:** Yes. Pre-email, where I think in the program that they gave at the First Look Festival they had a contact number, which was our apartment, and that was it. So, we found our manager — who we’re still with — in that that time, right after we, yeah.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** So, moving from there to writing, being paid to write, what was the next step for you guys?

**Marc:** Again, sort of a weird step. We didn’t know what we were going to do; and we had an idea for a movie that we just kind of told our manager, like, “Let’s go pitch it.”

**Abby:** Like we thought we were pitching it him, like we’re going to write this movie now after our show.

**Marc:** We had no writing sample. We had a short and an idea. And he’s like, “No, the short has got enough,” so we did a first round of meetings, like generals, for like a month, with just all of those calls. And then we picked a handful of those people and pitched them the idea and we ended up selling it.

**Abby:** So, that was Never Been Kissed. That was our first thing that we did. And we sold that.

**John:** And you sold that to Flower, Drew Barrymore’s company?

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** We sold it to another producer who had a deal at Fox at the time. And then they come on once Drew wanted to do it, and it was Flower’s first film.

**Marc:** They had just formed basically after we sold it and when we were writing it. It was a quick process. That was crazy. We like — we sold it, and it was in production a year later.

**Abby:** And we had to write it.

**Craig:** Those are the best stories, the ones where… — You know, I have my theory that there are movies that will not ever be made and movies that you can’t stop from making.

**Marc:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So, it’s good to get one of those, “You just can’t stop this train.”

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Yeah, but we were, you know, it was a very — it was not an accurate representation of what is going to happen to you. After that first one we’re like, “All right, here we go.”

**Craig:** What’s the next one?

**Abby:** Right. Next year we’re going to have another one.

**Marc:** And we didn’t get a job for a year after that. Like it was assignments and all that like placing stuff and…

**Abby:** Oh, pitching to get those assignments.

**Craig:** The worst, right? The worst.

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, here’s a question for you guys, because I’m always interested in how people fall into the kinds of comedy that they fall into. You started with romantic comedies.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** And the first thing that you did after the independent work for the studio was a romantic comedy.

**Marc:** Right.

**Craig:** Did you think, “Okay, well, this is just, we sort of like romantic comedy, but we like this, this, and this, but now we’re stuck in romantic comedy.” Or were you always just sort of “that’s our thing.”

**Abby:** I feel like it’s not cool to say but that’s always been my thing.

**Craig:** It’s totally cool.

**Abby:** And people feel like they’re slumming it in romantic comedy and I can’t understand why.

**Craig:** You love it.

**Abby:** Because I love it.

**Marc:** But we love it when it’s good.

**Abby:** Well, of course. You know, the Jim Brooks movies that I saw, and the Woody Allen movies that I saw, those are the movies that I — to me — were the pinnacle. I mean, and being in film school at USC, I was definitely in the minority. That wasn’t, you know, those weren’t the filmmakers that were revered. But that was always what I loved, so, why wouldn’t I like aspire to do that thing, you know?

**Marc:** Well, and we also had, like in the Venn Diagram of our tastes, those movies were there. I’m a little more left of center and she’s a lot more commercial than I am, and we kind of meet somewhere in the middle. But we also weirdly shared when we got to film school in like ’93, like indie movies at that time were not dark. They were romantic comedies. They were like early Noah Baumbach movies.

**John:** Party Girl, yeah.

**Marc:** Yeah, Party Girl, Kicking and Screaming, Sleep with Me, Mr. Jealousy. Like, those are the movies we loved.

**Abby:** Like those are what we would go see on weekends and we both really, really liked them.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marc:** So, we wanted to write movies about people, and it just ended up being like for studios that’s romantic comedies. And indies got dark, so there was nowhere else to go.

**Craig:** But you guys, I assume, get sent a ton of romantic comedies that you read that are atrocious.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Terrible.

**Craig:** And does it ever get you down on the genre? Do you ever think the genre is lost? Is it still savable?

**Abby:** It doesn’t get me down on it, but I guess it bothers me that people don’t seem to make a delineation between the smart good movies, these are just — I mean, you can call it a romantic comedy, but it’s really a comedy about characters that are good, with a great story, and something that makes you laugh out of the characters.

I don’t feel like people often make a distinction between that and the formula, by-the-numbers rom-com that they know they can put out and get a certain amount of money with a certain amount of casting. And I feel like am I the only one who notices that there is a real divide, you know? So, that does bother me because I feel like a lot of stuff just gets lumped in together.

**John:** It ends up being we combine the “she’s pretty when she takes her glasses off” kind of movie and the Jim Brooks movies that you’re talking about.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Absolutely.

**John:** And it’s like that’s a very wide range of things.

**Abby:** Absolutely. And so I feel like there should be another genre set aside for the…

**Craig:** Good romantic.

**Abby:** Right, you could call it that.

**John:** Or a comedy that has a strong aspect of romance to it.

**Abby:** Right. I like to call it a character comedy, and there is romance to it as there are with a lot of the stuff that I like, but…

**Marc:** But it’s also hard to, just even from the stage where you start to where the movie ends up, it goes a long distance from where you wanted it to be.

**Craig:** Naturally.

**Marc:** And sometimes, especially in the studio system, movies just become what they are going to be, like what that marketing is going to be. It just becomes a rom-com because that’s what…

**Craig:** And then casting is huge.

**Marc:** Casting is the whole thing. And so no matter why, you know, we decided to… — I was reticent to do He’s Just Not Into You when we started. And then we talked about it and I was like, “Oh, this is cool. It could be like this is an anti-romantic comedy.” And that title is not romantic at all. But you write it, and it gets cast, and it gets made, and then it’s just a romantic comedy. That’s what it is.

**Craig:** [laughs] You can’t avoid it.

**Marc:** You can’t avoid it.

**Craig:** You can’t avoid your fate.

**Abby:** Yeah, I do feel like as we have written romantic comedies and they go out to directors, I do feel like there is a little bit of a “in the beginning of my career I’ll do those, but hope to elevate to something else.” And I truly do not feel that. I truly feel like this is my…

**Craig:** That’s what you do.

**Abby:** …this my passion. This is my movie passion.

**Craig:** I love that. I love that.

**John:** Let’s talk about romantic comedies, and the engines of romantic comedies, because tomorrow we’re sitting down with Aline Brosh McKenna. And I was looking at her movies and I would describe them as like “want-coms,” where you have a character who comes in and they want a certain kind of life for themselves and everything keeps pushing them away from that life and they’re steering towards that.

Romantic comedies tend to be two-handers. You guys are two people , so you can sort of [crosstalk].

**Marc:** And we both have two hands also.

**John:** So you can represent those two voices in the room.

**Craig:** Great point.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. One-handed people cannot write romantic comedies. Or, people who have no hands at all.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** A no-hander.

**John:** It just won’t work for them.

Well, what is the engine of a good romantic comedy, like of a movie that you like in the genre? What are the conventions you expect and what are the conventions you push against?

**Marc:** I mean, for us I can tell you the conventions that we get pushed against all the time, which is tough.

**Abby:** We also want to start them off more losery.

**Marc:** Yeah. Desperation. It’s such a double standard and we fight against it all the time. Guys, the lead males in movies, can be the most desperate people in the world and it’s funny. Like Steve Carell, and Jason Segel have built careers on being sad sacks, and that’s hysterical and great.

But we want, we’ve always tried — pushed — for female characters in that vein in the first acts, and also “stalkery” comes up. All those words where people really feel like it makes them uncomfortable when you try and portray women… — I mean, that was the problem with He’s Just Not That Into You, it’s like, people were uncomfortable but we just kept saying, like, that’s how it is. You know what I mean?

And the truth is if we could push it to where we wanted to you’d be way more uncomfortable.

**Craig:** Right.

**Abby:** And we’d be excited about.

**Marc:** Have you been in a hair salon? Have you listened to women talk? There’s that person in everyone’s office where you’ve heard that same story about that same guy 15 times in different scenarios. Like, it’s a real thing in the real world, but it makes people uncomfortable. So, that’s definitely something we’re always trying to explore is just the reality of that, sort of the opposite side of romance, the sort of desperate side of it. The need.

**Craig:** What is that? Because I always feel like, and I get this a lot, too, because I love characters that are wrecks, and I’ve been writing more movies lately with either female protagonists or two-handers, not necessarily romantic comedies, but even in the non-romantic comedy genre there is this weird thing where the studios are concerned about female characters being pathetic.

**Marc:** Yes!

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** That’s it. Pathetic.

**Craig:** And, I mean, I have a theory, and I want to run it by you guys because you’re the experts on it. And my theory is that traditionally studio films hold women up as a moral ideal for men. So, the idea is men are broken, women are fixed. So, even if you have a female protagonist the problem is not her, the problem is the men around her.

**Marc:** Right.

**Craig:** And so you can’t have a broken woman.

**Marc:** You can’t blame the woman.

**Craig:** But that’s not good drama.

**Abby:** No.

**Marc:** No.

**Craig:** The whole point of drama is that you are broken.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, my theory is right?

**Marc:** 100%.

**Abby:** I think so.

**Craig:** That’s the greatest compliment. You never tell me 100%.

**John:** No, no. Most he can get is 95%.

**Abby:** And also I think a little bit of it, a little bit of this thing that somehow we’re doing a poor social service by reflecting what we see and what’s funny. Somehow that’s bad for women, which I really don’t believe.

It’s not a guide book. This isn’t the lesson for how to be a woman. I’m simply seeing the things around me that I think people can relate to and are funny and reflecting them back, in I hope, a funny and relatable way.

**John:** Well, you look at Kristen Wiig’s character in Bridesmaids, that’s a prime example…

**Marc:** But that’s super frustrating to us, because unless you’re Judd Apatow you can’t get that done.

**Craig:** But I think it’s great that she did that to sort of say, look…

**Abby:** Totally.

**Craig:** …it’s super helpful for us, because, you know, for those of you listening who aren’t screenwriters yet, there is this game that goes on where you present your material to the studio and they give you criticism. And you say, “Well, but, here’s a movie that was a hit that contradicts your point.” And then they’ll say, “Well, that’s different.”

**John/Abby/Marc:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But it’s not different. It’s actually really the same. But it was great that that happened because you could sort of say, “Look, the whole point is I don’t care about the win, you know, I don’t care about the victory at the end.”

You know, I liked While You We’re Sleeping. I liked it. It was a good movie. But by the same token she was just this improbably beautiful woman…

**Marc:** Who works in a toll booth.

**Craig:** …who works in a tool booth. And the movie just said she’s alone.

**Marc:** Yes, for no reason. She has no problem.

**Craig:** You can’t walk down the street, I don’t care what you’re made up like, what you’re wearing, that woman can’t walk down the street at 10pm on a Friday night and not get hit on.

**Abby:** Right.

**Craig:** So, it was like a fairy tale. You know, all of his things were very fairy tale like. And, so, I think it’s great that you guys, you should keep pushing that.

**Marc:** We’re pushing. And we are. And we like broken people. Like, that’s the fun, and the thing we’re writing now, or just finished, we have been pushing that character to be as broken as possible. And it has stayed for now.

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Great.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Good.

**Marc:** And I think but the weird thing is I feel like to a certain extent studios only care about casting, really, and if they thought about it, that’s what actors want to play. They want to play things that are broken.

**Craig:** Completely.

**Marc:** They want to play characters that have a full, you know…

**Craig:** Especially the women I’ve spoken to.

**Marc:** Yeah, 100%.

**Craig:** They really do. Because they see like, no one questions Billy Bob Thornton as Bad Santa.

**Abby/Marc:** Right.

**Craig:** You know, where he goes, “Ha, ha, that’s hysterical.”

**Abby:** Right, right.

**Craig:** But, God forbid a woman should be drunk and a mess and you know.

**John:** You look at Charlize Theron in Young Adult, and every actress would love to be able to play that character.

**Marc:** 100%.

**John:** And it doesn’t have to be as dark a comedy as that was, but a character who comes from that place of her life, is messed up in a way that all men in comedies get to start at a very low place.

**Marc:** Yeah. And that’s what we see. And I feel like people get dark in relationships. And people get sad, and desperate, and things don’t work out. And it can be funny if it’s relatable.

**Craig:** Well, that leads me to a tone question, and that is do you find that comedy has gotten realer, because you guys have been doing it for awhile — has the tone changed?

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** I think it has. Yes, I think it’s gotten realer, in good ways and in bad ways. I feel like the overall tone is, “We want to approach real,” but I think there is a reticence to allow broad things into movies now that I think could still work and be funny if they were allowed to be in there. And I think people sort of recoil from things that might just be funny or might just be a little weird. And I think Bridesmaids succeeded in that way, too, which was super broad.

**Craig:** Apatow kind of famously put that one scene in there.

**Marc:** Well that, but even just like the airplane scene. I watched that scene and I was like, “If we wrote that for a studio they would be like, ‘Really, she’s drunk on the plane?'” It would read super broad but you let a really talented actress do it and it’s really funny.

**John:** Let’s talk television, because you guys have also written television.

**Abby:** We have.

**John:** And comedy, you’ve only done half hours? Or have you done hours also?

**Abby:** We’ve only shot three pilots, and all of those were hours. But that was also we were doing dramedy hours.

**John:** It was a slightly different era.

**Abby:** Slightly different era. There was maybe a little bit more opportunity for those then and now I feel like there’s even less. Even then there wasn’t a ton.

**Craig:** You mean like the Ally McBeal sort of thing?

**Marc:** Yes. But even less with that, because that still had an engine to it. That still had the law component.

**John:** Parenthood is probably a good example [crosstalk].

**Marc:** Which is a super throwback. They don’t really make those much anymore. But, yeah, so we did three…

**Abby:** Ours may be a little bit more comedy than Parenthood just on the tone meter. But, yeah, in that vein.

**Marc:** We did three in the early — so like right after Never Been Kissed, or right when that started shooting we thought it seemed like an opportunity to get in. We were working there, we just didn’t get a movie job for awhile.

And it was great, especially coming out of film school, it was as hands on as you want it to be. Whereas with Never Been Kissed we just wrote it and then they went off, we didn’t have anything to do with it.

**Abby:** Yeah, coming out of film school, when the biggest thing we had ever done was like my mom making frozen burritos for the crew and all of a sudden you get like here. I mean, literally, we pulled off the freeway, on our first day of shooting our first pilot — it was in Pasadena — we pulled off the freeway and I was like, “Oh my god, there’s something else shooting right here.”

And Marc was like, “That’s our thing.”

I was like, “Nooooo! That’s not true.” But it really was. Those were our fucking trailers — oops…

**John:** No, no, that’s fine.

**Abby:** I’m sorry. They’re our trailers. I mean, it was such… — Exactly, for kids who were a couple years out of film school to be involved in a production of this size was unbelievably great and fun and, you know.

**John:** I remember feeling really guilty eating craft service on the first set. It’s like, “Oh, but someone should — I shouldn’t eat all of this craft service.”

**Marc:** I remember off-handedly saying, I learned a lesson that first week, remember in the gym? And there was like a bunch of soda there. And I was like, “Oh, there’s no Coke.” And I just like walked away, because I don’t like Pepsi for some reason. And like literally half an hour later someone walked up with like a Coke. And he said, “Coke is over here now.” And I was like, okay…

**Craig:** It makes me so uncomfortable.

**Marc:** I know, I was like, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant like, “Oh, I don’t want…”

**John:** The worst is when you hear it being called on the Walkie. It’s like, “They really want some…” I’m like, oh, no.

**Craig:** I always say before I ask somebody for help I’m like, “Listen, if you have to go to the radio for this, don’t do it.” Because if you say, “Oh my god, have you seen so and so? My glasses are dirty. I have to get those wipes.”

“Uh, can we get eyes on wipes?”

“Oh, they’re driving up from,” you know, “with a box of wipes.”

**Marc:** But, so, yeah, we did three. The first one got on the air.

**John:** What was the show?

**Marc:** It was called Opposite Sex. It was the year of high school shows, Freaks and Geeks was that year, Popular was that year, our show was that year.

**Abby:** It was a show about an all-girls high school that goes coed and the first three boys that come into an all-girls high school.

**Craig:** That’s a great idea.

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** I went to an all-girls high school.

**Marc:** It was really fun…

**Abby:** It was really fun.

**Marc:** …but it was midseason and there was a president change at the network and it ended up getting burned off. But it was a great eight episodes to make.

**Abby:** It was a great experience. It was so fun. We shot at the Ranch at Warner Bros, which if people don’t know, it was like…

**Marc:** We built a campus.

**Abby:** Yeah. We built an outdoor campus and it was like being at summer camp. It was amazing. It was really, really fun.

**Marc:** And then we made two more, but by the end of the third, which was our best — we thought — and it didn’t get picked up, we were like… — I mean, they tell you, you know, a TV writer is king and you have a lot more power and all that stuff, which is true, but you get your heart broken. And you spend a year and a half on these things and then you just get killed.

And in some, our second one especially, by the end of it when we were shooting, like I don’t even know what this is anymore because the process is really brutal development-wise.

**Abby:** And the one that Marc is talking about, the last one we did, the third one was a pilot called Splitsville that we also did for Fox, which was about us and about our breakup. So, that one I think was really personal and…

**Craig:** And then they’re telling you things like, “We just don’t believe this. This couldn’t happen. We don’t like these people.”

**Marc:** “No, listen…”

**Abby:** We tested, as you do, you test shows. And so we had to test our show. Marc’s character tested amazing.

**Craig:** Noooo!

**Abby:** My character…

**Marc:** Oh no!

**Abby:** Reviled. And people were specific saying it’s not the actress it was actually the character.

**Craig:** Awesome!

**Abby:** Hate it.

**Craig:** A little part of you was like…

**Marc:** I was like, “I knew it!”

**Craig:** “Remember all those fights where I said, ‘No, I’m right.'”

**Marc:** “‘I’m right.’ I was.”

**Craig:** There are people with dials telling you that I’m right.

**Marc:** Their dots are dropping.

Craig; That’s right.

**John:** If in real life…

**Marc:** A fight dial. Can we test…

**Abby:** Right, when we’re pitching, we got our own dial and it was pitching better. So, after that experience it really was, I think for me especially, just a total heartbreaker. We had been told that the show was going to get on the air by people who clearly didn’t know, and we felt like it had so much opportunity, we were so happy with the tone of it, with sort of our comedy/drama, just heart of it. And so when that didn’t go I think it was time to take a little step back and focus more on doing movies.

I guess in movies I never really expect it to go. So, there’s not really that kind of pain. It’s a happy surprise when it does. And in TV, I guess, you’re just pushing towards the upfronts, and you’re pushing towards getting it made, and you’re pushing towards getting it on the air and it really does feel like a real blow, or at least it did for me. I called the actors to tell them it wasn’t going to air. I was crying and they were trying to tell me, “It’s going to be okay.”

**Marc:** “We’ve done this before.”

**Craig:** “Because you are awful. I tried everything I could to make you likable.”

**Abby:** Totally.

**John:** But it strikes me now that in the half hour world the kinds of things you were doing are really popular now. You look at the New Girl, you look at The Mindy Project, those are the kinds of things you hope you could see in features but they’re happening on television.

**Abby:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Trailblazers.

**Marc:** Yes. Which is why we’re doing another pilot this year. [laughs]

**Craig:** And now they’re like, “Eh, they’re kind of copycats.”

**Marc:** It’s going to feel that way, yes, for sure. But, we got, well, we wanted to and a good situation came up where we’re going to try again, ten years later.

**Craig:** If somebody said to you, “Look, we can wave a magic wand and you have a choice. You are going to be successful either way,” I mean you already are, but like permanently successful. But, “either movies, or TV.” What do you pick?

**Marc:** God, that’s a hard choice.

**Abby:** I mean, if I can also define the experience of movies, then movies, because like the experience we had on He’s Just Not That Into You was amazing. The director we worked with was great.

**Marc:** The only writers, yeah.

**Abby:** Yeah, we were the only writers, which I think you don’t get the chance to do very much, and so we really felt ownership of that project. We were close with the producers, who we also loved, and we were able to be just involved. So, if we could write movies and have that level of involvement and really feel like part of a team, then for me that would be the answer.

**Marc:** Yes. I sort of agree. I mean, I feel like a great TV show, to be able to do that would be super fun. But the lifestyle seems pretty brutal.

**John:** The lifestyle of a television writer is brutal. I’m friends with Damon Lindelof and like I wouldn’t trade places with him for anything.

**Marc:** That’s what I fear. And I fear, I don’t know, especially with the internet now, the audience and shows that people love, it’s such a love/hate thing going on. And you’re constantly feeling like you’re writing to very specific people and in success I feel like it would wear on you. Whereas like project to project, it’s nice to just do something else.

**John:** My fantasy would be to write features on sort of a TV schedule.

**Marc:** “You’re making this.”

**John:** “You’re making this.” Or, if you’re not making it, it’s a clear decision that you’re not making it, it’s done. Because it’s the endless, you just don’t know. You can just go on forever.

**Abby:** But there’s also a positive to that that like they could call from that studio where you wrote that script nine years ago saying, “Weirdly, some guy was looking over it and now Charlize Theron wants to do it.” Like, you never know. There is always — I mean, I don’t spend days at home hoping that, but there is always that possibility. Where with TV there is not. Nobody is calling me about that pilot I wrote nine years ago.

**Marc:** Which is weird.

**John:** Actually, they have started going back though…

**Abby:** A little bit. A little bit.

**Marc:** But they should. I mean, the amount they buy and the amount that is there.

**Craig:** It’s kind of crazy.

**Marc:** You think they could take one year and not buy anything and be like, “Let’s just make stuff we didn’t make before.”

**Abby:** [laughs] Totally.

**John:** Have you guys reacquired anything you wrote for TV? Because your Splitsville thing, it feels like that could be a movie if you guys tried to…

**Marc:** We talked about it.

**Abby:** We talked about it. We wrote a TV pilot, a half hour about summer camp that was on the cusp of going and didn’t. But that’s something we talk about. That’s something we talk about seeing if we could get that back.

**Marc:** Yeah, but we haven’t looked into it.

**John:** Has having — you both have kids now, right?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** We do.

**John:** Has that changed at all your perspective on the kind of comedy you’re writing?

**Marc:** [sighs] I mean, no. Yes and no. We did a rewrite over the summer that was more like parental/parentally…

**Abby:** But not for kids.

**Marc:** It wasn’t a kid’s movie, but it was involving, you would need to have had kids I think to really like it.

**Abby:** Like a comedy of…

**Craig:** You needed that perspective. Right.

**Abby:** A comedy of parenting kind of.

**Marc:** So, that was something we wouldn’t have had before. But I think our taste hasn’t really changed that much.

**Abby:** No.

**Marc:** And I don’t really have much interest in family movies, or like I know a lot of people who have kids are like, “I want to write something I can see with my kids,” and I don’t have that.

**Craig:** It’s so funny. I’ve had the opposite. I started writing, my first movie is a Disney movie. And when I had kids I suddenly realized, now I just want to write movies for adults.

**Marc:** Well, I also feel like you see more movies now for kids and you’re like, “I don’t want to live in that world anymore, because I’m watching them.”

**Craig:** That is absolutely true. It’s constantly running. I’m trying to get away from it as much as possible.

**Marc:** Exactly. Yeah.

**John:** So, Never Been Kissed was your first movie. You did a pilot. Next movie you got going was which one?

**Marc:** Well, the next movie that got made was He’s Just Not That Into You.

**John:** Oh, years later.

**Marc:** So, that was, I mean, it was ten years it took for them on releases.

**John:** So, it’s not clear I think to people on the outside is that you’re working that whole time. You’re getting paid to do stuff.

**Abby:** Well, we were under two overall deals for television, so we were three years at Warner Bros and I think two years at Fox.

**Marc:** Right. But then we also wrote a bunch of movies in that time.

**Abby:** And we did. We rewrote some movies, and we wrote some movies during that time.

**Marc:** And we had a movie, the next thing we wrote that we worked on for literally seven years.

**Abby:** Yeah. We had this movie, Date School, that was always threatening to go but never did. It was just one of those…

**Marc:** I mean, honestly, did seven drafts for different actors, six drafts for different directors.

**Abby:** Four different directors I think. [Crosstalk].

**Marc:** So, it was at DreamWorks…

**Craig:** That’s one of those movies you can’t — that will not be made.

**Marc:** It will never be made.

Craig; And then there are the other ones you can’t stop.

**Marc:** Well, no, here’s the thing. We wrote a draft, a rewrite, and it was not long after, this is really basic — There’s Something About Mary had come out like a year or two before. They got Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz to be in it, and Greg Mottola was directing, and it didn’t go.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Marc:** And once that happened, it was like…

**Abby:** It was never going to go.

**Marc:** …it was never going to go.

**Abby:** If it’s not going to go with that. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. If they can’t surmount the… — I mean, that’s pretty remarkable.

**Marc:** Right, so, and there were three or four other iterations of those, like of that, enough momentum.

**Craig:** What studio was that one?

**Abby/Marc:** DreamWorks.

**Craig:** DreamWorks, yeah.

**Marc:** And then now, and then Paramount. But then it became Paramount. Like we thought we could get it back and it was one of the weird ones that Paramount kept from DreamWorks, so, I mean, it’s never going anywhere.

**Abby:** So, yeah, I mean, yeah, we were working all during that time. Making the pilots. Writing other pilots. Writing movies. But…

**Craig:** Rewriting other movies.

**Abby:** Rewriting other movies.

**Marc:** Yeah, and we sort of felt like, well, we had one. Like, we don’t know how we’re going to replicate that again.

**John:** But when you were talking to your aunts and uncles over the holidays, it just doesn’t seem like it. “But you haven’t had another movie? Oh, I’m so sorry it’s not working out for you.”

**Abby:** Right, totally. Totally.

**Craig:** My parents do this thing to me where they’ll say, “So, what are you working on?”

I’ll say, “Um, this movie.”

“Oh, when’s that coming out?”

“Next May.”

“And then?”

So, it’s not even out and we’re already doing “and then?!”

**Marc:** That’s what we were just saying…

**Craig:** It’s like they’re just sort of like if you’re a carpenter, “Well, what are you doing?” “I’m making a table.” “And then?” “A chair.” “And then?” “A bureau.”

**John:** And you’ll still need four chairs to go with the table.

**Craig:** Right.

**Marc:** But, yeah, we were just saying to someone today, we had a movie come out in February, we’re like, “We’ve got a couple years now.”

**Abby:** “We can ride that. ”

**Marc:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Abby:** You just read it? Come one, two years.

**Craig:** Dine out for a long night out.

**Marc:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Marc:** Nothing else.

**John:** Well, thank you guys so much for talking with us.

**Marc:** Sure. It was fun.

**Abby:** Yeah, it was fun.

**John:** This was neat. Our sort of sit down…

**Craig:** Well, not only is it our first interview, but this is the first podcast — we’ve done how many of these, 57 or so? This is the first time we’ve ever been in the same room together.

**Marc:** Oh wow.

**Craig:** I mean, doing the podcast. We’ve been in the same room together for other stuff, but never the podcast.

**Abby:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Wow.

**John:** So, we’re always on Skype.

**Abby:** We’re part of history.

**Craig:** You’re part of history in so many ways.

**Abby:** Totally.

**Craig:** In so many ways. The least likable character in testing history.

**Abby/John/Marc:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m really hoping people write in.

**Abby:** Yeah, it’s the god’s honest truth, you guys.

**Craig:** “We liked John, we liked Marc, we liked Craig.”

**Abby:** I mean, it is totally the truth. And I feel I’m a likable person.

**Craig:** That’s the best part.

**Abby:** But I actually think I am when I’m so clearly wrong.

**Craig:** You should go into the room while they’re turning down the dials. “No, look at me!”

**Marc:** Likeable people can do unlikable things. It happens.

**John:** So, if people want to see your work, what do you recommend most they look for? What’s the definitive Kohn/Silverstein…

**Marc:** I don’t know if that’s been out there….

**Abby:** I think we haven’t written it yet. Or, if we’ve written it, it hasn’t been produced as such. But, um…

**John:** Would you guys direct a movie together?

**Marc:** Yes, that’s the next plan. I think there were parts of He’s Just Not That Into You that are close.

**Abby:** Oh, He’s Just Not That Into You is definitely the closest. But if I was going to say, like, I feel like there is still something that we have yet to say that will really define our tone, but that’s for sure.

**Marc:** In moments.

**Abby:** That’s for sure as close to it as we have.

**Marc:** The scene with Jennifer Connelly and Luis Guzmán.

**Abby:** Oh yeah.

**Marc:** Just that one scene. That’s it. That’s all we got.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Cool. Thank you guys so much.

**Marc:** Sure.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/mystery-of-the-j).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 63 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, I notice a change in your voice. I think you have location sound, is that correct?

**Craig:** I’ve got location sound. Wherever I go, [laughs], actually I bought a pretty nice headset/mic thingy because you know when we record and we’re talking what we — how we are going to do that, it is part of today’s podcast, but we have nice microphones, relatively nice microphones. But I can’t lug that around really.

So, I got this like headphone/mic combo thing of the sort that people use when they’re playing Modern Warfare and stuff, and it’s gone. Somehow someone in my house, some little person, has ferreted it away, so I’m using the — this is the built in microphone on the MacBook Pro.

**John:** All right. You’ve used it before and it sounds okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll be fine. But we should talk about our normal setup before we get into our actual business of the day, because people have been asking on Twitter, and I feel like every week I’m answering some sort of question about how we actually record this podcast.

So, usually Craig and I are not in the same room. In fact, the very first time we were recording the podcast live in the same room together was at the Austin Film Festival. Usually we are talking via Skype, which is what we’re doing right now. Usually you’re at your office in Pasadena. I’m here at my house in Los Angeles. And we are both talking into the same kind of microphone. I have this Audio Technica AT2020 something.

**Craig:** Yeah. The 2020. 2020? I don’t know.

**John:** I think it’s 2020, which is a good podcast microphone. It was recommended by Dan Benjamin, who runs the brilliant 5by5 podcasting network. So, we each have that kind of microphone. We each have good headphones. I have these Sony headphones that are sort of big cans that fit over my ears and they make me look like Princess Leia. And record.

And so the crucial things we learned early on as we were doing this podcast separately is that it’s important that we don’t have audio leakage, so that when we’re trying to put these two tracks together ultimately Craig is not talking — you don’t hear Craig talking on my side and you don’t hear me talking on Craig’s side. So, that’s part of the reason of good microphones and good headsets.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then the idea is we can hear each other while we talk via Skype, but we’re also simultaneously recording just our side of the conversation on GarageBand. So, we end up with two GarageBand projects, one that just has me talking, one that just has John talking, and then Stuart waves his magic wand and puts them together.

**John:** And actually figuring out which was the right application to put those together took some time, because originally we were just cutting the two tracks together in GarageBand, which worked, but wasn’t ideal. The best solution we’ve found so far has been the old audio editing app that used to come as part of Final Cut Studio, called Soundtrack Pro. And it’s fine. It doesn’t feel like quite a modern Mac app, but it’s getting the job done.

I think there’s room in this space for a better two-track editor to do what we’re doing, but it’s working fine for us right now.

**Craig:** So far so good. Eventually it will be awesomeness, with full stereo feel effects, surround, lasers.

**John:** All that stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And one of the things you actually learn about podcasting is you don’t want a big stereo split between the two sides. Every once in a while you’ll hear a podcast where they left it in a stereo that’s not a happy kind of stereo, so you hear one person talking in one ear, and one person talking in the other ear, if you’re in your car or if you’re wearing headphones. That’s really bad, so don’t do that. You want things mixed together so it’s happening in the center of your head.

**Craig:** Yeah. That would be annoying. I mean, a little bit — I don’t know if Stuart ever like slightly pans one of us one way and one of us the other way, but full split left and right is just stupid.

**John:** It’s not good. So, today I thought we would talk about, we’re going to do more of our Three Page Challenges, because that’s a very popular feature on the site. And so we would do some more of those, but before we got into those I wanted to do a little bit of follow up on stuff we talked about on previous weeks.

First off, last week we talked about Star Wars and Disney, and some of the speculation is like well who is going to make these new movies? What filmmakers would be involved? And we have part of that answer this week is that they’ve hired Michael Arndt to do treatments for the first three movies of the new trilogy, which I think is a really terrific idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, it makes total sense. I guess it wasn’t — I don’t guess, I know — it wasn’t something that I had premeditated. Premeditated is the wrong word. I had not foreseen this. But, once I read it, it made total sense. Michael Arndt, aside from being a really, really good writer, has shown that he can write across a number of genres. He can be both funny and dramatic. And, most importantly, he’s very, very familiar to Disney because he has been working with Pixar not only on Toy Story 3, but on Pete Doctor’s latest movie.

So, he’s part of their family. He’s an excellent writer. He’s got a terrific pedigree. An Oscar award, of course, never hurts. I mean, the fan boy in me would have loved to have seen them give Larry Kasdan a call, but of course, this is the first step of a very long, long journey.

I mean, I’m always rooting for a writer to take the ball and run it from a punt return to end zone. But, who knows what will happy. I mean, Larry sort of was brought in and other people worked on things. And let’s see how it goes.

But, I thought it was a very smart choice. And he’s a great guy.

**John:** He’s a great guy, too. That’s why I feel no scriptenfreude about his being hired. It’s, like, he’s actually a really good guy. And you and I met him I think for the first time together. Because I remember, so we were putting together this Fox writer’s deal which we got a group of nine writers together and we made this deal at Fox to write original scripts for them.

And Michael Arndt was one of the people who was suggested to us, so we met with him. I think it was at the Grill in Beverly Hills. And so we just sat down with him, and chatted with him, and he was just completely lovely and nice. And at that point he had written Little Miss Sunshine and was still working on Toy Story 3. So, it was kind of a case where, “Well, you’ve written this little tiny indie movie; I don’t know how much, you know, you don’t seem like a big Hollywood writer.”

And then he wrote an absolutely fantastic script for Toy Story 3. So, I feel like he’s a great choice for this.

**Craig:** Well, obviously you and I both understood that, you know, you buy low, sell high. [laughs]

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** And, see, we should be running a studio because we knew.

**John:** Exactly. Although I don’t think he’s written his Fox movie yet.

**Craig:** Well, neither have I, so there. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Done.

Second thing from a previous show, we talked about Karateka, which is the video game that Jordan Mechner and I did. We launched and we’re on Xbox. And so it was so exciting — this week, I could actually fire up my Xbox and see the game available for purchase and download. So, that’s been a good and weird and fun experience.

I had sent you the trailer for it, which is now up online. Adam Lisagor did an amazing job directing the trailer for our little show. And it was so strange to be spending time six months before release trying to figure out what this teaser trailer would be, but it was tremendously fun. So, I’ll have a link to that in the show notes as well, since it’s now actually out there in the world to see.

One thing that is different about Xbox which I’m discovering is we have an app that we’re releasing through the Mac App Store or the iOS App Store. You get stats — you can check stats every day to see how many people are downloading it and you can become sort of addicted to those stats. And it’s very clear how many you sell each day.

With this, you’re just sort of flying blind. And officially Microsoft gives you quarterly results on how your sales are going, which is not useful or helpful. So we’re trying to pull through faster numbers on that. But we’re ultimately going to be going onto some platforms that have more rigorous reporting, and so Steam, and PS3 and iOS. So, it will be exciting how that sorts out.

**Craig:** Awesome. Congratulations.

**John:** Yay! Also, a mutual friend of ours has a very big week as well. Derek Haas, who with Michael Brandt is a writing team, they created the show Chicago Fire which is on NBC which just got its back nine order.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. Now they get their full season of shirtless men fighting fires.

**John:** [laughs] So, the show was originally picked up for 13 episodes, which is very common, which you love to be picked up for 13 episodes. And you’re hoping to get that back nine. That back nine brings you to 22 episodes, which is in modern world considered a complete seasons. So, very exciting for them to be having a full season order, but Derek by himself also has a brand new book which is hitting stores right now, and is available on Amazon, called The Right Hand.

Have you read this book yet, Craig?

**Craig:** I have not read this book.

**John:** I have not read this book either.

**Craig:** I read The Silver Bear and the follow up to The Silver Bear, but I haven’t read this one yet.

**John:** So, this is a new franchise he started that is more CIA/espionage oriented. And apparently it’s pretty good. Publisher’s Weekly said this about it: “This hard edge contemporary spy thriller from Haas covers a lot of ground with a great narrative economy. Forceful cinematic scenes show off the lean grace of Haas’ prose. Cleverly placed plot twists and spy craft details help make this a standout. Readers will hopefully see a lot more of Clay,” the protagonist, the hero.

**Craig:** A name that’s also Derek’s brother’s name, Clay. By the way, the first time that, what, “grace,” “lean,” what was that? It was “lean graceful prose?”

**John:** Oh, it said “the lean grace.” It’s the first time he’s ever been described as having “lean grace.”

**Craig:** As being lean and graceful. But I will say this: Derek is one of the — first of all, one of my best friends in the world. One of the greatest guys in the world. One of the most relentlessly positive, optimistic, good people. I just love — I like watching good things happen to people I love. It’s fun. And he’s had a great week. So, congratulations Derek. We love you.

**John:** Aw. And my mom actually really likes Derek’s books. Because I’ve had one of Derek’s books, like the hardcover version, just randomly, and I brought it with me to Colorado and I left it there, and so she just read it. And she loved it. And she reads these kinds of books, so she’ll be very excited this is coming out.

So, that’s enough reviews of Derek Haas’ work. Let’s get to some reviews of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** So, Three Page Challenges for people who are brand new podcast listeners, because there will be some of those, is we have invited our listeners to send us three pages from their scripts, and it doesn’t have to be the first three pages but it almost always is the first three pages. And we will look at them on the show.

And by look at them we mean that Craig and I will read them, but you as the audience are welcome to read them, too. There will be links to all of these Three Page Challenges attached to this podcast, or if you go to johnaugust.com/podcast and look for this podcast, you can download the PDFs and read along with us and see what the hell we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Before we get started here, we have looked at 19 different installments one the show so far, 19 different samples. But, Stuart — God bless Stuart — Stuart has read 511 of these.

**Craig:** Good god.

**John:** So, there have been 511 accepted entries. And by that we mean people who have actually followed the procedure — and there will be link to how you actually can submit these things — they followed the procedure and put the proper header in and gave us just three pages and didn’t throw in extra stuff.

So, 511 submitted. Of that, 78 were submitted by women. And two by teams that are half female. So, it’s 80 out of 511, or approximately 15.7%.

**Craig:** Wow. It seems like it’s getting worse.

**John:** No, it’s actually better.

**Craig:** Oh, it is? Okay, good.

**John:** So, the second wave increased to 18%, so we did bump up. So, 18% is still not high, but it’s better than it was.

**Craig:** Remarkable. Okay.

**John:** Actually the first batch was 12%. The second batch was 18%. So, it increased 6% over the last wave.

**Craig:** How are we doing with Irishmen? Are we getting enough Irishmen?

**John:** I don’t know if we can break that out, but Stuart did notice an interesting pattern and I tweeted about it last night. And I got some possible answers, but I want you to tell me what you think is actually happening here.

Of the 511 entries, 119 of the submitted names start with the letter J. So, that’s almost 25%.

**Craig:** You mean the last name or first?

**John:** First name. So the Johns, Jacobs, Joshuas, Jeanines, Jennies. So, that’s over 23%, which is much higher than the USA percentage of J first names, which is 11.9%.

So, do you have any theories about why that might happen?

**Craig:** Well, maybe it’s a generational thing. I mean, I would imagine that most of the people sending these in are aspirational which would put them in their 20’s, and curiously both of my children have names that begin with J, and you have a name that begins with J.

So, maybe it’s generational.

**John:** It could be generational. I think we would need to look more specifically about, like, most popular names of the ’80s and ’90s. I think demographic, the male/female split may be part of it, too, because I suspect there are more men’s names that start with J. Not enough maybe to tip us in that direction, but maybe.

I would also look at maybe our readership base. It is international; we have a fair number of international people who are submitting. And so maybe there’s a reason why internationally Js are more common.

**Craig:** It could also be that Stuart is just lying. I mean, we always have to remember that Stuart is in complete control here and he could just be making it up.

**John:** He could be our Keyser Söze.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Our Keyser Söze. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** I’m stupid. I’m stupid. But, you know, we had some interesting pages this week I thought.

**John:** I agree. I was going to suggest we start with Dammed by Mark Cowling. But if you have one that you wanted to start with that’s fine.

**Craig:** That’s good. Today I’m on iPad, so I’ve got it.

**John:** Great. So, let me give you a synopsis of Damned by Mark Cowling. So, we open in Minnesota at midnight where a rust-speckled station wagon smashes through a padlocked gate in front of a church. A man races out of the car; his name is John Cooper. He pounds on the door to the cottage behind the church, waking up Father Sweeney.

He wants to be baptized ASAP and offers a handful of cash. In the church they’re just beginning the baptism when a nice lady named Mrs. Wilkins enters. Only she’s actually some kind of undead screaming monster.

We cut to three months earlier where we meet Kevin Harris, a photographer at a failing pet photography business. As the three pages end he is trying to strike up a conversation with a Goth receptionist.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Mm-hmmm.

**John:** Craig, talk to me.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know about you, but I struggled just to get through the first bunch of description. And it’s not that the pages were bad, per se, but this first chunk of description is a really good example of something that we’ve talked about before which is not punishing your readers right off the bat with kind of dense overwritten action.

So, the very first line to me kind of is a signifier. This is the very first line: “Barely visible through the heavy falling snow, St. Jerome Church sits some way off the road.” And, you know, we could just say, it says, “EXT. ST. JEROME CHURCH, MINNESOTA – MIDNIGHT. Snow. The church is chained and padlocked.”

But instead we have, “Barely visible through the heavy falling snow, St. Jerome Church sits some way off the road. A chained and padlocked gate blocks the path up to the small building.”

[sighs] Then…

**John:** Yeah. It’s a little Dungeons & Dragons description.

**Craig:** Very much. And then, “A rust speckled station-wagon veers violently off the road and smashes through the gate. But this exertion proves too much for the battered old car, which shudders to a halt.” This is just over-written.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not for a novel, maybe, but for a script I think this sort of thing is over-written.

**John:** I would agree. I’ll take back Dungeons & Dragons. It is a little bit novely.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So Derek could use it in his book, but it’s not good for here. I have a lot of certain nitpicks on ways to make for a better read, but I don’t want to sort of lose, bury the lead. I actually really kind of dug how this started out. I mean, I liked the idea of like waking up the father to get baptized right away. It had mystery. It had drama. It had suspense. You sort of know that the woman coming in is going to be some sort of monster, but that’s kind of okay.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And then when we cut to this earlier thing, I get it. A little bit over-written, and like I had some problems with the actual — the scene where we are sort of meeting our guy, because when you meet a guy who’s doing nothing that’s not a very interesting way to meet stuff. But it was specific in a way that I really dug.

And so I thought there was a lot of potential here, which is when I really nitpick and rip apart a lot of stuff it’s because I actually really thought this had a lot of potential. I liked — I had a sense of what kind of movie this was. And this was probably some sort of monster movie that had a sense of humor to it, which I love.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree. In fact, that’s precisely why I’m calling this out, because then once we got into the church and we got into the dialogue, the writer suddenly showed up. And it was alive. And it was fun. And I like the tone of it. You know, here’s this, and again, too over-written, you know, “Father Sweeney is avuncular.” Don’t use words like avuncular in screenplays.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know what avuncular means. I’m a smart person, but I would have to look that up.

**Craig:** Yeah. Father Sweeney seems like a nice lovely old priest, and this is guy is asking to be baptized, and then immediately Father Sweeney just like falls apart into a stream of F-bombs, which is fun, you know. Like, okay, this is actually an interesting person. They start to do this thing. We hear something outside, which our character obviously knows is not the wind, even though he says it is.

Then this woman comes in. I would recommend, by the way, not saying Mrs. Wilkins, because — so this woman walks in and the distracted priest sees her and says, “Mrs. Wilkins,” which is such a fake screenplay name. And, frankly, if he’s — if this is a small town and he’s a priest he might just call her Alma or something. You know, just so you don’t feel like you’re getting detached and into overly broad stuff.

She goes, she engages in this monstrous thing. And the character of Cooper who is getting baptized just turns to the priest and says, “Maybe you can speed things up a little.” So, there’s like a good — you got the tone. It was snappy and it was fun.

Then unfortunately we get a little broad here because we’re meeting what I presume to be the main character at his job, his business, which is called Yappy Snaps. And it’s a photography, it’s a pet photography studio, which I find to be overly broad. Maybe too broad for something like this when you have monsters, and villains — supernatural villains I should say — and people who react to them kind of in a quirky way. Maybe everything else should sort of be grounded. I don’t know; that’s just generally my feeling. A little picky thing.

“Slumped behind the desk in reception is NATALIE, an overweight goth who has made the very smallest possible concession to what is considered acceptable corporate attire.” Putting aside the fact that that’s a huge mouthful, what is the very smallest possible concession? [laughs] I mean, if you’re going to overwrite, be specific…

**John:** How do you visualize that?

**Craig:** Don’t make me guess what that is, because that’s all I can see is what I can see. And you’re right: Meeting a character who isn’t doing anything is a little — I understand the author wants to get across that this is a fairly passive person who is unhappy with his boring life, but then maybe engage in something that is a little more active to show that.

**John:** Yeah. Sort of starting at the end, with the Yappy Snaps, I don’t know that I even really necessarily need the exterior to get us there, but if we’re going to have that, fine. Once we go inside the studio, I would pan passed our photos of the dogs first, and then get to our guy. Because right now we’re meeting our guy who’s just polishing a lens, and then we’re like looking around at all of the stuff on the walls.

Probably better to sort of set the scene, meet the guy, and then have him do something, rather than just sort of sit there while we look at the scenery around him.

**Craig:** Exactly. You could also open with him, just looking at him setting up the lights and taking a picture, “Good, good,” and then he crosses over and we reveal that he’s got a little dog with a hat on or something. You know. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, some more nitpicking stuff. The first sentence here, “…sits some way off the road,” it’s “some ways off the road.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There’s a lot of sort of not careful proofreading here which was a frustration to me.

**Craig:** Oh yeah…

**John:** “…and smashes through the gate.” Things like smash, we tend to capitalize. Most screenwriters will tend to capitalize those things because those are big action words, and you like those big action words to let you know that something big is important. Because your reader will read that word even if they don’t kind of read the rest of the sentence. So, it’s a sound effect but it’s also a big thing that happens.

The writer is capitalizing half the character’s name, which just isn’t common.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, it’s John Cooper. Capitalize both JOHN and COOPER. Even if you’re going to call him Cooper for the rest of the time, just capitalize John Cooper. It’s weird to sort of only do half of it.

And at the end of this third paragraph, after the semi-colon he capitalizes the next word which is strange.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “A large amount of dried blood stains the cracked driver’s side window.” A large amount of dried blood sort of stops me. A large amount? It makes me think, like, well what is a large amount of dried blood? I’ve never really stopped to think about that. So, dried blood is all you need. You don’t need a large amount of it.

**Craig:** I agree. There’s a bunch of things, like for instance he hyphenates station wagon, which shouldn’t be hyphenated, but doesn’t hyphenate rust-speckled, which should be hyphenated. So, there are things like that. I’m not one of these people that freaks out about adverbs. There are writers who say, “Never use adverbs; they’re the devil’s work.” An occasional adverb is fine. But we are buried in them here. And adverbs do tend to slow you down, especially for screenwriting.

**John:** Now, you and I have both talked about the passive voice before, and defended the passive voice. And there are times where the passive voice is really helpful. I saw two cases where exactly the opposite is true here. In the second scene, “Finally a light is switched on and the door lurches open.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** No. You don’t need, “is switched on.” “A light switches on. The door lurches open.” Break those into smaller sentences for starters. But the passive is not helping you there.

Page two. “The heavy oak doors are flung open as if made of plywood.” Are flung open? “The heavy oak doors fling open.” “The heavy oak doors blow open as if made of plywood.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Again, being passive is not helping you here.

**Craig:** I totally agree. It’s a shame, because there’s interesting things going on. This is a great bit of advice for this writer, Mark. Don’t worry so much about crafting pretty sentences with your action. Just paint the picture for me in an exciting, fun, crisp way.

You know how Dana Carvey, Dana Carvey’s impression of George Bush, Sr. in large part rested on dropping the subjects from a lot of things, which I find also useful when you have a lot going on. You know, “Mrs. Wilkins throws her head back violently. Eyes bloodshot. Skin flaking. Produces an ungodly scream.” You know, just shorten, tighten, punchier to match what you want the scene to be. And these scenes should be tight, punchy, suspenseful, surprising, startling. So, if that’s the tone of the scene, that should be the tone of your description.

**John:** Yeah, this feels like quick cuts and Dutch angles. And let your sentences indicate that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Cool. Let us go onto our next piece. Who do you want to do next? We can do any one of these. Why don’t you do one that you have the synopsis for?

**Craig:** Tell me which one I’m doing the synopsis for? [laughs]

**John:** Either Margarita Night or Photo Op.

**Craig:** Photo Op. And who wrote that one?

**John:** Photo Op must be Nick Scott.

**Craig:** Nick Scott is Photo Op, yes. Yes. Okay, so in Photo Op we begin in an unnamed city somewhere in the Middle East. A photographer, a photojournalist is running down the street. We hear a rumbling behind him. He stops, turns, and then a huge crowd of protesters surges forward chanting in Arabic. He’s taking pictures. His cell phone rings. He ducks out of the way of this sea of humanity and he begins a phone conversation with his editor and boss, Vincent.

And Vincent is basically unimpressed it seems with the pictures that our hero, Caleb, is taking. He’s more interested in the fact that an actress is heading towards where they are. Oh, it’s Northern Algeria we find out. And they have a brief argument about what that means, but he has to go take pictures of this actress.

He runs back into the crowd to take photos and a bomb goes off and there is mayhem.

**John:** And a lot of gore.

**Craig:** A lot of gore. A lot of gore and mayhem. Yes.

What did you think?

**John:** Um, [sighs].

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** I wanted to love this a lot more than I did. So, first I want to talk about the description of our hero because it got to be so Ken-dolly that I… — I’ll read it aloud to people who don’t have it in front of them.

“CALEB MILLER (30s) races around the corner, hauls ass down the middle of the street. Stubborn, experienced, driven by determination. A beard covers his chiseled jaw.” And then later, “A backpack hugs his strong frame.” I just kept feeling like, I didn’t — I just got this visual description of him that made me sort of not relate. It felt very stock to me. I felt like I was looking at a Gerard Butler character, which is not a good first thing for me to be encountering. No offense to Gerard Butler.

I also got a little bit frustrated by, I understand the instinct to, like, “We’re going to pull this editor’s phone call up into the action so it’s like part of it,” but it’s not really part of it. It’s sort of halfway part of it. Like he’s ducked into an alley to have this conversation that I don’t really believe or buy while there’s all this mayhem happening all around him. And then we get back into the bombs and the explosion.

I don’t know where all this is going. I suspect that he is going to meet this actress and they’re going to have some sort of relationship.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** But I don’t care about that right at this very moment. If you’re showing me a crowd of people and humanity, my instinct would be to stick with that and get to this phone call in the aftermath of that and not try to interrupt this action with a phone call that is not successful.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, Nick Scott, here’s the bad news for you: I completely agree with John in every way. I mean, first of all, I didn’t like, I understood what you were going for with the setup which is this individual running down an empty street. It says, “The street is devoid of life, almost silent if not for a low RUMBLE in the distance.” Then this hero comes running up, stops, turns, and then waits, and then here comes this huge crowd.

That just seems fake to me. And I understand that you were trying to be interesting, frankly far more interesting is to just open, boom, in the middle of it. It’s absolute chaos. There’s this huge protest. And then suddenly we reveal someone is in the middle of it taking photos that doesn’t look like everybody else. And then he’s in the action, because here he almost seems like Superman. How the heck did he get out in front of this crowd? [laughs] Why, frankly?

I mean, the point is to sort of be in the action and take these photos, so it just started a bit fake. Certainly tonally though the first page until Vincent calls is very serious, very dramatic. Nick takes time to sort of call out a few people in the crowd to sort of paint the picture, which I liked, because we’ve talked about that before, so it’s not just an anonymous crowd.

But the conversation with Vincent suddenly becomes very light and kind of ’90s comedy, where the two of them are having almost screwball-esque banter about the value of his work.

**John:** Let’s read a little bit of this. So, I’ll be Vincent.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “Anything happen?”

**Craig:** “Not yet, but it’s gonna. Still no cops!”

**John:** “You’ll get the same old shots and file the same old story.”

**Craig:** “I knew you loved my work! Why the fuck are you calling?”

**John:** “Because I pay your bills and you pay mine. Got an assignment.”

**Craig:** “I’m working one.”

**John:** “Then where are my shots of the village? Or my interview with the militants?

**Craig:** “They’re coming.”

**John:** So, it’s that whole same old story — you love my work. I just don’t buy it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t buy it either.

**John:** I don’t buy that he’s taking this call and having this conversation right now when his job is happening right outside there.

**Craig:** I mean, if Vincent is his editor he sent him to Northern Algeria to take photos of a protest. He’s obviously interested in some of it, but on the other hand so disinterested that he’s going to just talk to this guy — first of all, it’s the middle of the night wherever he is. [laughs] But he’s just going to talk to this guy while the actual event is going on.

Here’s a thought, Caleb: Don’t answer your phone! [laughs] You’re in the middle of a near riot with all this stuff going on in an incredibly dangerous part of the world. You’ll talk to your boss later.

I totally agree with you. This scene should be very real. It ends in a very dramatic startling, depressing way that sets a tone for something that’s incredibly real and disturbing. You want to let that happen, see the emotional aftermath of it. I mean, this is the kind of scene where after this is done you find Caleb now at the bar where the ex-pats, or the foreign journalists are, having a drink in the relative safety of their bubble, and he gets a phone call from an editor who is saying, “I’m really sorry, are you okay? Yes. Listen, this is weird, but there’s this woman coming.”

And now we understand in the context of what I just saw how disturbing that kind of frivolity would be for him. But to do it before it? Just the whole thing is just all backwards and messed up.

**John:** I would agree. And another logic problem that just occurs to me on the second read is right now it is set up that we hear this rumble coming and then he comes in. Like, what could this rumble be? Oh, it’s the crowd of protesters. But the protesters have an Arabic chant, so they would have been chanting before this. So, it’s not there’s a herd of elephants coming. We know it’s a chanting crowd. So, they wouldn’t start chanting right when they came around the corner.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like a false reveal.

**Craig:** It is. And tonally I am concerned about where this goes, because I agree with you. Once we say that there is this broad, strong, large-framed, square-jawed, daring man who is about to encounter a famous celebrity, we know what’s going to happen, to some extent. And that’s fine. But I’m just worried how that’s going to fit into the tone of severed hands, crying children, blood and bodies.

I’m worried about this one.

**John:** I’m worried about the tone, too.

**Craig:** But I think frankly there is, for Nick, I think you just have to kind of be a little less clever and cute here and just tell the story in a more engaging way.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** How about I will do Kelli Bowlden now?

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** All right. So, we open with a voice over by Ali who is talking about how the world is overrun with beautiful people with perfect bodies. The voice over continues as we see women around Los Angeles and at the gym where Liz is working out. In an editing room Wendy is eating and watching a bouncing babe on a monitor. At Spirelli Surgery, Mrs. Stern, a woman in her late 40s, is in for a consultation. We finally arrive at Ali who is in her 20s, cute, classy, curvy, who works at a casting agency.

She talks on the phone with her male friend, Alex, who works as the receptionist over at Spirelli Surgery. And that’s what we got in three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know what? I liked it. And this is an example where I don’t get worried about voice over if the voice over is over things that are sort of interesting. And I thought that there was an interesting — we bounced around in an interesting way and the voice over was making an interesting point. And the point, essentially, is about how women are faced with these impossible examples, exemplars, of perfection — physical perfection — and the lengths that they go to for physical perfection.

When we landed on Ali, I sort of went, “oh,” because the thing is when we finally find her she’s eating a chocolate bar, and she’s eating it messily, and she’s dipping it into a jar of Nutella. And I thought, “You know, the tone of the beginning was sort of promising something that was pretty smart. The introduction of Ali feels really broad.”

And I’m not, frankly, a huge… — To me, sort of average girl bemoans hot women while she eats peanut butter and chocolate together, or hazelnut spread and chocolate together, is sort of the distal side of the bro comedy coin. It’s very cliché. So, I was kind of excited in the beginning. I got kind of bummed out there. Then I’m guessing the gay friend shows up, and now I’m really twitching a little bit. You know, if Alex isn’t gay then I’d be happy. But I’m sensing gay friend. [laughs] I don’t know if you were.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I’m just worried that we’re going to sort of head into cliché forest here.

**John:** Yeah. I did not enjoy this as much as you did I would say. So, we’re assuming this is a comedy, correct?

**Craig:** Oh, for sure.

**John:** Yeah. Was it remotely funny?

**Craig:** No, well, and it was trying to be with the Nutella and the chocolate, and that’s when I started getting worried.

**John:** Yeah. So, here’s the thing: This kind of a voice over…we’ll start by talking about the voice. So, voice over would need to do two things. First off there’s the content of the voice over, and I thought the content was a little bit obvious. She’s making the same point again and again. Like, “They’re everywhere. Staring at us with those ridiculously bright eyes. Judging us for being mere humans with non-airbrushed skin and unevenly lit, naturally colored hair.” Kind of awkward.

“Okay, sure, some women have the discipline to look good. Some just have the metabolism, which is really unfair, and some women have the funds to fake it.” So, it’s a kind of a Sex and the City kind of voice over, but not particularly clever. And my bigger concern with the voice over is that there’s not a voice to it. There’s not a specificity to who this young woman is who’s talking.

It feels like something you could read in any kind of magazine. I didn’t know anything about the character of Ali by the time I met her hearing this voice over.

Compare that to one of my favorite movies of all time which is Clueless. And Clueless has scenes that are kind of like this where it’s just a shot of like, you know, a bunch of high school kids walking, and there’s nothing funny about the shot, but her analysis of what’s happening in that shot is so funny that it’s an amazing thing. Like, you know, “I don’t want to betray my generation, but I don’t get how high school boys dress. It’s like they just pick up, find clothes off the floor and stick them together.” It’s a better written version of what I just said, but it’s very specific to her character.

And there wasn’t anything specific to Ali’s character that we got out of this voice over. And because it was just a boom, boom, boom of scenes, nothing actually could happen. Like it was three pages just to get to two people talking on the phone.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, basically I agree with you. If the kind of intro — which I agree was a little sort of flat and we’ve heard it before — had arrived at a perspective or a point that was interesting to me, then it would have been okay. But where it landed was I’m a chubby girl who dips chocolate bars into Nutella spread while sort of bitchily mocking the hyper thin models that are in the waiting office at this casting thing, which the male receptionist at the plastic surgery place gives me a call and has sort of a very — I’ve seen and heard it before — bitchy chit-chat about their clients.

So, it just didn’t — it sort of had potential. I just feel like we know where this is kind of going to have to go. I mean, so…

**John:** Let’s take a look at sort of the words on the page. So, on page one a couple things stick out for me. First off, often in scripts you won’t actually put the number on the first page, so that one can go away on the first page.

Right now it’s starting “OVER BLACK: ALI (V.O.) They’re everywhere.”

Then we “FADE IN: EXT. LOS ANGELES — DAY.” I think you get rid of either “OVER BLACK” or “FADE IN.” Because it’s too much. If you’re not giving us an image we know that it’s over black basically.

We fade in on Los Angeles — Los Angeles is such a generic thing to have as your first slug line. Like where we are in Los Angeles? What are we looking at? Because that first sentence description there is, “Perfect women have infested the world. Half shirts show off taut bellies and proportionately impossible breasts.” But what are we actually looking at? Are we looking at pictures of women or actual women? If they’re actual women, capitalize that so I know that we’re looking at, you know, essentially extras.

But, I didn’t even know what I was looking at, so it took me awhile to get even started there. And ultimately in the same paragraph we’re looking at billboards, and benches, and posters, so that lack of specific imagery was hurting me.

When we get to the next scene we’re at a gym, I’m just pointing out, “LIZ, 20s, 2 sizes skinnier than she should be, steps off.” She’s the number 2 rather than the word two. General sort of journalism kind of rules still apply here. Numbers that are less than 11, so up to ten, type them out. Other numbers you can use the numerals as long as it’s not in dialogue, but it feels really weird to have that 2 sitting there.

**Craig:** Particularly right next to the number of her age.

**John:** Yeah. On page two she’s trying to do a cut here but it doesn’t really work for me. It’s like we’re in the doctor’s office and “Dr. Spirelli nods, he can do that. A fabricated image of a BEAUTIFUL WOMAN smiles from a BEAUTY MAGAZINE cover.” Ultimately “A blob of CHOCOLATE drops onto the Beautiful Woman’s face.”

**Craig:** That did not work.

**John:** And that’s the cut to take us to the next place, but I got really confused, like, why are we eating chocolate in the doctor’s office?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It just didn’t really work as a transition that we have right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can’t do that.

**John:** I really…

**Craig:** Yup. [laughs] Yeah, you can’t do that. If you want a blob of chocolate dropping onto a beautiful woman’s face then he can do that “INT. CASTING OFFICE — DAY. A fabricated image of a beautiful woman smiles from a beauty magazine cover.”

You’ve got to put the chocolate dropping where the chocolate is dropping.

**John:** Or if it is truly a montage, and you’re sort of playing it like more of a montage, then we’re going to be able to do that, but you’re going to have those transitions — it can’t be the first time we’re doing that kind of transition, because otherwise we’re going to assume that that magazine is in that office there. And that it’s in Dr. Spirelli’s surgery office.

**Craig:** Right. And this would be tough to kind of montage out because there’s sort of like…

**John:** Anything that makes a reader read twice is bad.

**Craig:** No, it wouldn’t actually, you could do it.

**John:** How would you do it?

**Craig:** You could do sort of like, you know, “MONTAGE — VARIOUS.” And then big capital action line — “GYM” and then description “EDITING SUITE,” description, “SURGERY,” description, “OFFICE,” description. But , yeah, it just didn’t — that chocolate thing, absolutely, I was so confused by what was going on there.

**John:** Yeah, so “A blob of CHOCOLATE drops onto the Beautiful Woman’s face. We are actually at the casting office.” Even that might make it clear to the reader. The reader is not going to have to stop and go back and try to figure out again what happened there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I want to point out one nice thing on page two. “She’s more than a montage away from being comfortable wearing a bikini in public.”

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** That’s kind of nice. I like acknowledging sort of the genre, being a montage away from something.

**Craig:** It made me smile. And it was also a good way of — I understand her weight actually from that.

**John:** Yeah. On page three there’s an intercut here, which is nothing fancy, but I like that she actually knew how to do it. We’re intercutting between the two people having a phone conversation and the graceful way is just INTERCUT. So, you don’t actually necessarily need to spell out where you’re intercutting between. You just have the word “intercut” and we will get it as long as we’ve had two locations close to each other and you recognize that people are talking on the phone; “intercut” can be your very best friend.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is one of those areas where there were fewer issues with the specifics and more just that this felt very sort of episode of 90210-ish to me.

**John:** I would agree. The only other suggestion I have for her is Ali and Alex, two characters with such similar names, is going to get annoying and frustrating at about three more pages. Because when you’re just like looking at someone’s dialogue, if you’re going to have to remember, “Oh which one is the boy, which one is the girl?” I would go for a different name.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know even know how she can — Kelli, you know, you wrote an entire script where you couldn’t just type A and then have the character. You couldn’t even type AL and have character.

**John:** Yeah. Smart Type couldn’t even help you.

**Craig:** We’re trying to help you . [laughs] Also, if Alex does turn out to be quirky gay friend, I just feel, again, just be careful of cliché-ville. Because, again, it just feels like we’ve been done that road.

**John:** I would agree.

Let’s do the last of our Three Page Challenges today, which is Margarita Night by Steve Marcarelli & Billy Lalor.

**Craig:** Yes. Otherwise known as Hangover for Moms. [laughs] So, we begin with some 40 year-old women who are in the middle of a debauched night out. They’re at a bar. They’re getting loaded. They’re doing bad karaoke. Smashing windows with lawn jockeys. They’ve lost their pants. It gets uglier and uglier. And then in the morning one of the women, our hero, we suppose, Mel — Melody, goes by Mel — wakes up and she’s woken up by her eight year-old son, Robbie, who is exhorting her to take him early for cello lessons before school.

He is super duper responsible. She is super duper hung over and seemingly witless and does not know even how to make — or tries to make him breakfast, he already made it himself. He made her the coffee. And they go to drive and her car is gone. And she doesn’t know where it is.

The last little bit we see, we’re now actually at a radio station where an overweight, morning time, drive time disc jockey begins chit chat with his sidekick, The Roach, about women being trouble.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well…?

**John:** Yeah. [crosstalk] So, there were specific, I know, the writer had a voice and specific jokes. And not everything worked and there’s a lot to improve here, but I felt like I recognized the intention of what these pages were, where this was going. Some of it was a little too familiar, but there were some jokes that I really liked.

One thing I didn’t like: there’s literally an alarm clock slapping moment. No more slapping alarm clocks in movies. Stop that.

**Craig:** Moratorium.

**John:** Never needed. So, on the first page, right now, “An alarm clock GOES OFF and the sounds of a crass talk radio show fill the room. Mel MOANS. She SLAPS at the clock.” Robbie, “Mom.” We have Robbie’s description. “Mom, are you driving me to school?”

The first line of the scene should be, “Are you driving me to school,” because he’s already there, and that’s the question, “Are you driving me to school?”

I really liked on page two, “Where are my keys?” Robbie says, “They were in the front door.” I liked that that was just nice and specific. I like that.

The coffee beat gets a little bit cliché, like the kid is a little too perfect for this. He’s too sitcomy, overachieving kid because his mom is a wreck and a mess. But I liked the build on the joke of they get out and like the car is not even there. It’s well handled. I dug it.

**Craig:** Well, not so much for me. I think that the opening bit was nice and taut. There’s essentially a third of a page that shows a night going out of control, and it would be fun to see. And then when she wakes up in the morning, and the alarm goes off, we understand: she’s hung over. It was all fine.

Where it started to go off — and look, I’m going to talk in a larger way about this idea — but where it went off for me was this kid. Because here’s the deal: we’ve got two pages of an impossible eight year-old. And I’m going to guess that our authors Steve and Billy do not have children, because eight year-olds cannot talk like this, cannot act like this, cannot function like this.

A slightly older kid, a ten year-old, I think, or an 11 year-old, maybe. Maybe you got a shot. Eight year-old simply can’t do that. They’re in second grade and third grade. They’re not capable of this. And I also felt like the writers have missed an opportunity to imply that this is not the first time this has happened, and it’s clearly not on her side of the conversation it’s not the first time.

And in a way on his side, too, it doesn’t — he’s not shocked by this behavior. So, he’s seen it before, so in a way…

**John:** If he made coffee for her, no.

**Craig:** It shouldn’t be a surprise. I think maybe he just hands it to her might be more interesting. And sort of like this is the usual deal. You know, if I were rewriting this I would make it that the kid was waking her up and sort of saying, “Here’s your coffee. I basically have done everything. Please just drive me,” because we’ve been through this before.

So, I think shorter. It treaded water and it wasn’t like, I don’t know, I wasn’t laughing during that scene, so it felt like it should just be shorter and more interesting.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** And then the car is gone, which is definitely, you know, so we’re kind of drifting towards Hangover area, or I guess closer to like Bad Mom, or Bad Teacher, Bad Mom, Bad Santa, Bad Something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s really my issue is that I feel like this is a copycat. And it’s a copycat idea. I’m going to read a script called Bad Mom basically. And it’s actually called Margarita Night, which is closer to like Hangover, or there’s a lot of those out there.

I think that these guys have a pretty good grip on the rhythm and flow of how something of this should work, and I like that they’re taking a few chances. Frankly I’d be bigger and more outrageous. I think if you’re going to be outrageous, be outrageous. It felt a little mild, frankly, and a little PG as I read the first three pages.

And I’m not here to say to promote being gross, or sexual, or stupid just for its own sake, but rather just be realer. If this deserves a movie, I want to see a wreck, and I want to really see a wreck. But, I’m just concerned that this is just following the leader and not really blazing its own trail; that it’s kind of behind the curve a little bit.

And I had no idea what’s happening in this little final bit, but that’s fine, that doesn’t matter. I guess my final comment is this: For a movie like this, I want to laugh, and I’m not laughing. I’m sort of smiling, nodding, and going, uh-huh. Eh, that part was not a good reaction.

**John:** I get that. My hope for this, and the reason why I’m optimistic about it is I feel like there’s a movie that is 9 to 5 pushed into the Bridesmaids world. And I think there’s an opportunity for this to be that kind of movie.

I mean, if you think back to 9 to 5, we got those home life moments, and they were really good, but they were tighter than this. They were tighter and they were shorter.

As this is set up there is Ally and Mel, so it’s not a one-hander, it’s supposed to be a two-hander. We’ll see from both these women’s perspectives. I know we might be intercutting this morning. We might be seeing a little bit more of what’s happening there. I have hope in here.

And it was — I laughed at the keys in the door. I laughed at the car being gone. Well, that’s not actually fair; I didn’t quite laugh at the car being gone, but I was happy that the car was gone.

**Craig:** I liked that, too. I would also say, when you do this kind of Bad Blank genre, which has become a little mini genre, that you need to kind of embrace it in a big way, because she’s now endangering the welfare of an eight year-old child. And so, man, just make me laugh when she does it. In a weird way, be more outrageous. Be more screwed up. This kid should hold her hair while she pukes. [laughs] Do something that makes me really go, wow. Part of the humor is that this is their lives, that it’s not just — I’m not just waking up with one weird thing where they kid is like, “What’s going on? Where’s the car? Why were the keys in the door? I made you coffee.” But I’m not…

I want this to be part of the deal. And part of that also is changing the age of that kid. Eight years-old is just not going to work for this character.

**John:** I would agree with you.

Craig, that’s four of these.

**Craig:** I like this. We blew through them there. And you know what? All of them had something to recommend.

**John:** I would agree. So, Stuart, thank you for picking these four out of the 511 for us to take a look at today.

Now, Craig, it’s come to that time. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Uh, did I already do the fat-free peanut butter?

**John:** You already did the fat-free peanut butter. You know what? I should just remind you when I send you the email as we schedule the time for this, I should just put a little reminder in there. I should have a macro that just says, “Oh, and Craig, don’t forget your One Cool Thing.”

**Craig:** Yeah. God. What’s yours? Maybe I’ll agree with it.

**John:** When you were a kid did you forget your permission slip a lot in school?

**Craig:** Constantly. I constantly forgot my permission slip. Constantly.

**John:** That’s what this is. So, next time we’ll just pin a little note to you to remind you to do your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I thought your One Cool Thing was going to be, like, a permission slip app.

**John:** Oh, that would be great. Wouldn’t that be nice?

**Craig:** So, really, there’s no salvation for me. I’ve forgotten my permission slip again. All right, go ahead. What’s your One Cool Thing?

**John:** That’s fine. So, the fact that you didn’t do one this week makes mine like sort of extra sort of good little Girl Scout, which I feel sort of is my function in this podcast just to be like the one who does everything ahead of time.

And I’m also the person who is like lecturing people to get their flu shots. So, this is probably even more in that nagging territory. But, for most of my life I was not a flosser. I did not floss my teeth. And that’s just shameful but I just hated to floss my teeth and it was not fun, and I didn’t want to do it. And so I brushed carefully but I wouldn’t floss my teeth.

And so then every time I would go into the hygienist for stuff they’d say, “Oh, do you floss?” So I’d either lie and say, “Yes, I floss,” in the sense that I flossed right before I came here, which was the first time I flossed in maybe three months. Or I would be honest and say that I didn’t and then they would give me a little lecture and a little lesson on how to floss. Well, I know how to do it, I just choose not to do it.

The truth I’ve discovered over the last three years is that it’s actually not about technique or anything else, it’s just that all the flosses I was trying were terrible. And most dental flosses are just terrible. But there’s one that’s actually really good. And I feel like if you actually use this floss people would actually want to floss their teeth because it’s actually delightful.

So, the best floss that exists in my opinion is Reach Gum Care with Fluoride, Soft Woven Mint Floss. It is available at nearly any grocery store or drug store. It’s made by Johnson & Johnson. It comes in a white package. It has pink and black printing on it. And it’s terrific.

So, what’s different about this floss, it is not waxed. It is not thin. It is sort of two bits of string twisted together like a very light yarn. And it slides between your teeth nicely. It tastes really good. It actually gets all that gunk out between your teeth. And it is a delight to use.

So, my recommendation is dental floss.

**Craig:** Do you know I’ve never had a cavity?

**John:** That’s fantastic, Craig. You must have like good genetics, really strong teeth.

**Craig:** No question. Because in fact one of the side effects of never having a cavity is that I’m terrible about flossing. Frankly, I’m terrible about going to the dentist. I just sort of — it becomes one of those things. It’s like super thin people who are just born thin and stay thin just kind of eat what they want and they don’t really care. You know, they just have cake sometimes.

I have never even come close to having a cavity. I don’t have gum disease. I don’t have any. I just genetically got blessed.

**John:** That’s fantastic. That’s great.

**Craig:** So, I don’t need your floss, man!

**John:** I was going to point out that brushing your teeth is for cavities, gum disease is, the thing with flossing generally is that if you don’t floss people’s gums tend to puff up and then recede, and then there’s problems. And then you have to do horribly painful stuff to fix things. So, congratulations on your lucky mouth genes.

**Craig:** There actually is some benefit to your gums from brushing. I had a dentist once tell me that the most important thing brushing does is actually massage your gums. Because when you massage your gums you help them sort of naturally get some of that puffy infected stuff out. And have you ever done that rubber tip thing?

**John:** Oh yeah. The massage set?

**Craig:** She said if I were on a desert island and I had a choice between taking a rubber tip or a toothbrush with me, I would take the rubber tip.

**John:** I have definitely noticed on watching many seasons of Survivor is that they get really bored out there. But what they’ll tend to always do is like take little pieces of bamboo and pick out their teeth, because it does just make you feel much better and cleaner.

When you’ve got grit on your teeth it’s just never a happy experience.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are certain foods like seaweed salad and beef jerky.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Will always get wedged in between my molars, and I go crazy. And that’s the only time I floss, really, and I hate to say it.

**John:** What about corn on the cob? Corn on the cob you have to.

**Craig:** I don’t like corn on the cob. I don’t like corn.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? I don’t like it. And it’s a shame because it’s a weed that grows everywhere. But I don’t like it.

**John:** It’s a major American specialty. If it weren’t for the Native Americans we would not have corn on the cob.

**Craig:** How many people do you think we’ve lost just talking about floss and corn? Just out of curiosity, like 100,000?

**John:** Hmm. I don’t know. There should be some good metrics for that.

**Craig:** [laughs] Let’s see if we can get down to zero!

**John:** That would be fantastic. I will say, so, changing topics only slightly here. So, as you know this last week we’ve been studying sort of the metrics of the podcast and sort of how many people are downloading it. And thank you so many people for subscribing to the podcast, and downloading it, and listening to it.

But, podcast metrics are actually very, very frustrating. Because if you are listening to this podcast, you’re listening to it one of several ways. You might be listening to it on the website, and it’s loading up and you’re listening to it just there on the page.

You might be listening to it on your iPhone through the podcast app or through a much better app called Instacast which I’d recommend. I’ll put a link to that as well. But if you’re listening through the podcast app you might be listening in two different ways. You might have downloaded it to your actual iPhone, which basically one big file comes to your iPhone. Or, you might be listening to it sort of live off the server, and you’re like scrubbing your little finger through and listening to stuff.

And where that has thrown us off this last week is something like our numbers got just crazy and Ryan had to spend a lot of time going through and figuring out what it was. It’s like, it’s literally people dragging their fingers through on the little slider in the podcast app crazily jacks up your numbers in ways that are really misleading.

And so the numbers and the log is reported with such a granularity that like literally every time a person does that it shows up as a new person. And so we have to filter those out because otherwise a person who like skips through to eight different places in the podcast counts as eight different people.

**Craig:** Okay, so then here’s the question: How many people do you think, your best accurate guess? How many people are actually listening to this?

**John:** Next week I think we’ll know. So, we’re going back through old logs and figuring out sort of when it started, and then sort of figuring out how we could filter it out. And so we’re actually switching to a different stats package, because our files are hosted on Amazon right now, on Amazon S3, which has extensive logs that are challenging to parse.

So, we are sorting that through. I think next week I’ll have an answer for you.

**Craig:** Hopefully I won’t have to un-sing my song.

**John:** I think we’re over your 100,000 mark.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** But, here’s the thing: we’re not near that crazy number that I whispered into your ear.

**Craig:** That was crazy.

**John:** So, that’s better and good for us all.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** We were concerned about the exponential growth of the podcast. Essentially that we would take over the earth with the podcast. And, rest assured, we’re not.

**Craig:** [laughs] It was getting a little logarithmic.

**John:** Yeah. We had a little bit of a hockey stick curve, whatever you call that thing where…

**Craig:** Not that. Well, great. Maybe we should have Nate Silver look at it.

**John:** He’s not busy anymore, so we’ll just have him come in there and do it. Nate Silver who, god bless him, I really like that a math nerd sort of won the election. Every time I see him, though, I just want to wash his hair. His hair looks so dirty to me.

**Craig:** From what I hear, Nate Silver might not mind you washing his hair.

**John:** I’ve heard that, too. I have not heard any confirmation however.

**Craig:** I think it’s great. And I, of course I sit here thinking can you imagine the amount of money that has suddenly in the last week been offered to Nate Silver to just, “You know, could you please stop blogging this stuff for free on the New York Times and instead just let us pay you millions of dollars to do this for us?” I mean, this guy must have had so many offers just in the last week.

I mean, he was disturbingly accurate, and I wasn’t surprised because I believe in math, and I believe in statistics. But, boy, boy, man, he was right on.

**John:** Yeah. Which I like to see. Yeah. A hero or villain.

**Craig:** Yeah. Finally. Now we can say who the hero of the election is. [laughs] Excellent.

**John:** So, our standard wrap-ups on the show. If you have questions or comments about things we’ve talked about I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is…

**Craig:** @clmazin at Twitter.

**John:** All the notes for this podcast will be up at johnaugust.com/podcast. If you like the show, give us a little rating in iTunes because that helps other people find the show. And thank you so much.

**Craig:** Enjoy your corn and floss.

**John:** All right. Thanks man. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/were-all-disney-princesses-now).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh yeah? Well, I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 62. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And, Craig, one thing that is interesting to a lot of screenwriters is the fact that this past week Disney bought this company called Lucasfilm, which apparently have some project that people like a lot. It’s called The Star Wars. And apparently it was worth $4.05 billion.

**Craig:** Is that the one with Captain Kirk?

**John:** That’s what it is! I couldn’t think of which property. It must be Captain Kirk. The one with that and there’s like Cylons in it, I think?

**Craig:** And when the things burst out of your chest?

**John:** That’s the one.

**Craig:** The aliens.

**John:** Right now there are so many people who are smashing their listening devices as we say this.

**Craig:** “Worst. Podcast. Ever.”

**John:** So, that’s something we’ll want to talk about. Also, I made my first ever video game called Karateka that comes out tomorrow which is exciting —

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** — And finally we’re going to answer some listener questions. So, let’s get to it.

A lot of people have been talking about the fact that Disney buying Lucasfilm means that Lucasfilm obviously controls Star Wars and that Disney controls the Star Wars franchise, the existing movies which Lucas owns — he owns the new three, and there’s some other thing about how he owns the earlier stuff.

But, those characters are worth a tremendous amount. Also, Indiana Jones, not the right to make new Indiana Jones movies, but that character they can do stuff with in other media, which is very useful. Of course, the reboot of Radioland Murders.

**Craig:** And Howard the Duck. [laughs]

**John:** And Willow. Willow you could actually maybe do something with, but…

**Craig:** I don’t think so. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] But what’s also fascinating is, like, my daughter dressed up as a Jedi for Halloween and her little friend dressed up as Mickey Mouse. I’m like, “Wow, you’re both little Disney characters now,” which is so strange.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Leia is a Disney princess right now.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, most of the talk I’ve seen has been about the fandom or about the business of it all, but I want to talk sort of what it means for screenwriters. Because I think while I’m sort of excited by what could happen, and also a little nervous about what could happen in terms of these franchises, I’m not sure having one more giant tent pole is going to be a great thing for many screenwriters who are listening to this podcast.

**Craig:** I think this is going to be a big boom for screenwriters actually.

**John:** Well fantastic. I would love to talk about that. Tell me why you think it might be a big boom?

**Craig:** A boom and a boon. I think both.

Look, let me start by saying that this is maybe the single best acquisition any entertainment company has ever pulled off in the history of Hollywood. I think every other studio’s jaw must have dropped when they saw this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because if any of them knew that Lucasfilm were even up for sale, I can’t imagine how you pass on it. The Star Wars universe, frankly, is the closest thing humanity has come to creating a new religion since the great world religions. It is beyond an obsession for a lot of people. And it continues to be an obsession for every generation.

I can’t think of any other movie from 1977 that my kids like as much as Star Wars. I think that the universe is so broad and the applications for the characters in the universe is so broad, are so broad, that we are going to — yes, we are going to certainly see tent pole movies. But I think we’re going to see shows. I think we’re going to see videogames. I think we’re going to see animated movies. I think we’re going to see… — Basically content is going to be written inside of this universe in every possible way. Disney will leave no stone unturned.

All those television shows are going to need to be written. All the movies. All of the videos. The stuff that they’re going to put online. There’s just going to be a ton of content that needs to be written for this. And Lucasfilm has been an incredible bottleneck. I mean, there was a big deal that Clone Wars, you know, that was a big deal that it even was allowed to happen. Well, you know, all bets are off. I think there’s going to be an enormous amount of material that needs to be written, hopefully as much of it as possible at a high level. But I do think a lot of people are going to be employed.

**John:** My devil’s advocate take on this is that I feel that the concentration of the corporation’s assets into just these couple of marquee properties means they’re going to take fewer risks on other new voices and new… — They’re not going to try to make other new IP. They’re not going to try to make the next Star Wars because they’re going to make Star Wars. And so I think it can limit the chance to reach out to new writers, to new directors, to new voices to try to do new things.

Disney is the company that actually made The Sixth Sense. And I don’t see Disney making The Sixth Sense now because they’re spending all of their resources making the Marvel movies, making the Muppets, making Star Wars, making these big franchises they have to support, between making the Pixar movies.

So, I feel like it’s going to stifle — it’s taking one more actual real buyer out of there for a writer who is working on his or her own material.

**Craig:** Well, that’s true, but I think we do have to acknowledge that they had already made that decision. Prior to purchasing Lucasfilm, Disney was essentially removing itself from that business that they used to be in of making The Sixth Sense, or non-branded live action movies. They just don’t seem to be interested in it. And when they dipped their toe into that pond with John Carter, it got bit off. So I think that they’re even less interested in doing that now. It’s a different… —

Disney is simply a different studio than the other studios. They operate in a completely different way. So, I don’t know if this is necessarily going to take away business that wasn’t there. I think it’s going to add business — it’s going to add employment; I don’t think their appetite has increased or decreased from its zero state for new IP.

**John:** I do concede that, that Disney wasn’t exactly lighting up the spec market as it was. They bought some spec this last week, but it felt like that was sort of a fluke situation. They’re not in the business of sort of acquiring new stuff.

And if you look systemically across all the film industry that is a bigger issue that goes beyond sort of one merger or one acquisition is everyone is trying to make these giant tent pole project movies, which creates both a bottleneck of all of our resources being devoted to these things. Those giant marquee properties tend to be the ones that have the worst cases of sort of writer abuse. And they’re buying fewer original things because they’re trying to make Spiderman 17.

**Craig:** Well, hopefully this doesn’t turn into a bad situation for writers. I tend to try and look at things in the aggregate. Will people be employed? We talk a lot about how it’s harder and harder to be a screenwriter these days, fewer and fewer job opportunities. And while I make my living working in non-branded stuff, you know, I’ve never — I don’t think I’ve ever worked on something that was “branded,” like a Marvel movie or anything like that.

**John:** The Hangover is almost its own brand now, but it didn’t start that way and doesn’t have brand extensions beyond just being movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. Hangover started as a $35 million guess that was original IP. So, I don’t make my living in that area, but there are a lot of people who love the Star Wars universe and who actually do aggressively want to write in the Star Wars universe. And it would be nice to see them put to work. And I can’t imagine there won’t be some kind of Tiffany Network primetime series.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Or perhaps a cable series? I don’t know. But if I were Disney right now I would sort of be thinking, “Let’s explore the edges of this thing.” There is no reason to just concentrate on making three more movies about Darth Vader as an old guy, or whatever. I mean, he’s dead now, but, [laughs], sorry, spoiler alert.

You know, old Luke. You could do that, but you could also do an entire series that’s just about Boba Fett. I mean, who knows what they’re going to do.

**John:** Yeah. I think you reboot Pinocchio with Darth Vader as Geppetto and R2-D2 as Pinocchio. Done.

**Craig:** Lock it. Done.

**John:** Lock it. Done. Sold.

The only reason I keep wanting to play the devil’s advocate here is that this kind of deal is one of the reasons why it’s very hard to make Star Wars now, is that this “let’s take a big, bold chance on making a whole new thing” is even more difficult now than it was when Lucas went out to make Star Wars. And if we’re concentrating all of our resources on rebooting these franchises and sort of squeezing all the dollars out of these franchises, we may not swing for the fences on these things again.

I would have loved John Carter to be a big hit and that could be the next Star Wars. It didn’t happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. We no longer live in a time where things like that can sneak up on us. The only exception really is James Cameron, who does not make movies that often but when he does, regardless of what you might have thought of his last movie, it was enormous.

Now, did it create the kind of perpetuating phenomenon that Star Wars did? I don’t think so.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** But it’s hard to sneak up on these things. Now it seems that fiction books kind of lead into that. So, the Harry Potter thing is an enormous — that is a Star Wars-esque phenomenon.

**John:** Absolutely. Harry Potter is the biggest of those. But Twilight to a lesser degree, Hunger Games to a lesser degree. Those build into that kind of level.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The Girl who Played with Fire series, yes, but because it was a one quadrant kind of movie they couldn’t generate the huge numbers that you could with a Star Wars.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also want to point out before Star Wars there also wasn’t a Star Wars. Star Wars may be one of those 100 year flood kind of deals.

**John:** Black Swan. Yeah.

**Craig:** And at some point something is going to happen again, and it’s going to blow people’s minds, I think. But, there was never anything like it before. And we really haven’t seen anything like it since. Harry Potter is the closest you get.

**John:** I would agree. So, let’s get working on those things now. And so let’s create those things. But I feel like if your goal is to create that thing, you’re going to have to create that as a book series first, because I think it’s very hard to create that in a movie context with this environment. Unless you are one of those filmmakers who is just like, “Sure, let’s go for it; let’s roll the dice and give you all the money you want to do whatever you want to do.” And there are few filmmakers who still are those people.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think if Nolan had some amazing idea like that they would just let him do it.

**John:** Yeah. Peter Jackson to some degree. Tim Burton to some degree. They would say, “Yeah, sure, let’s try that.” But Lucas wasn’t any of those people when he got to do Star Wars. He was a risk and I don’t know that we’re taking quite those risks these days.

**Craig:** Well, you only look back to the arrangement he had with Fox to realize how much the business has changed.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** Where he ponied up some cash and in exchange got the merchandising rights, which obviously changed everything, for him and for the business in general. That doesn’t happen anymore. It’s one of those kinds of observer principles where because Star Wars exists there cannot be another Star Wars. But there could be another whatever the next thing is, you know. And that, too, will change the fabric of everything.

Who knows when it will happen? I tend to believe that existence inevitably leads to surprise. So, sooner or later something interesting will happen. I will make a prediction.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** I predict that California Adventure at Disneyland will eventually become Movie Land. And it will be a park dedicated to Marvel and Star Wars and Pixar.

**John:** That’s a very good prediction I have not heard before, but I believe it. If you even look at sort of the construction they’ve done on it in this last go around, they’ve made it much more Los Angeles centric. Yeah. I think that’s a smart choice.

So, topic two. On the topic of IP and original properties, I’m now involved with something that is someone’s original property, from an original creator. I would maybe even say kind of a little bit of a George Lucas of the videogame industry, Jordan Mechner, who I’ve worked with on Prince of Persia. Prince of Persia was a fantastic videogame that Jordan and I worked really hard and it became a kind of okay movie. Not maybe the movie we hoped it would be, but it became a movie.

And we have just spent the last two years working on a new property that’s not a movie. It’s a videogame. So, I sent you a video showing you some stuff about it. And I kept this secret from you, too, Craig. Right?

**Craig:** You did. You totally did. I had no idea this was happening. And it was a great thing to see because I, like you, played Karateka when I was — I played it on the Apple IIe.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I think we had the Atari 400, with the membrane keyboard.

**John:** Oh, I loved the membrane keyboard.

**Craig:** But, yeah, I played it on the Apple IIe and it was really fun. That was the early — it was sort of really one of the first videogames that I played on a computer. And it may be the first videogame I played on a computer as opposed to the Atari game system.

**John:** Yeah. And I remember just loving that game. And so when Jordan said he wanted to sort of reboot Karateka, the first decision was: Do you try to go to one of the big publishers and do it through a big publisher, like what he did with Prince of Persia, or is there a way we can just do it ourselves? Can we do it as an indie game?

And what Jordan is so smart about is figuring out new ways to handle death in a videogame, because videogames are always about sort of dying and then sort of starting and going over again. What we did for Karateka, which I think is really fun, is you start as the True Love who goes to rescue the princess. And if you don’t make it all the way there, you get thrown off a cliff. If you die you get thrown off a cliff and another guy climbs up and takes over from where you got killed. You start as a True Love, you get thrown off as a True Love, and the Monk comes up. And the Monk is a better fighter. And if the Monk gets killed you go with the Brute. And the Brute is basically impossible to kill, so the Brute can probably finish the game.

But, the princess is not going to be delighted to be saved by the Brute. So, death has a cost, but you can pick up the game and not feel like you’ve spent 30 minutes playing through the game and now you have to start over at the beginning again.

**Craig:** I like that. That’s smart.

**John:** It’s worked out well. Then the challenge became: how do you actually make this game? And so we ended up partnering with this company called Liquid up in Pasadena. And it’s been so much fun to be — technically I’m executive producer on this. So, I get the fun of checking in with them every couple weeks and seeing what’s going on and saying, “Yes, this feels like the game,” or, “That doesn’t feel like the game for some reason, so let’s figure out why that doesn’t feel like the game.”

And the process of making a videogame is very much like making a movie. You have these different people who have different specialties who are really good at their thing, and Jordan’s job as game creator and director of this game and my job as producer is to get them to do their very best work in the spirit of what the whole project is trying to be.

So, Jeff Matsuda who came through to do all the character design for us created this amazingly sort of cell-shaded world. So, then it’s a matter of finding the animators who can make that actually move and work in a game environment.

We have Christopher Tin who did the music, who did a fantastic job. So, we had the music done before we had much of anything else done, and we could sort of build the game to sort of fit what the music wanted to be. It has been a remarkable process.

**Craig:** Well, hopefully the game is good. Is it good?

**John:** I think it’s really good. The other process has been sort of getting it out into the world, so you take it on your little demo units and you show it to the people who are sort of opinion leaders. And I think our reviews are going to be really good. By the time this podcast airs we will have announced, and the first review should be coming out. And tomorrow it’s going to be available on Xbox, and shortly after on PlayStation, and then Steam, and then eventually on iOS for iPad and iPhone.

So, it’s been remarkable to figure that all out.

**Craig:** Well, good for you man. That sounds great. And hopefully it catches on. And it sounds like something I would play, because I did love punching that hawk.

**John:** Yeah. The punch the hawk is really the crucial aspect of it.

**Craig:** I’m going to play this.

**John:** You’re going to play it. I think you should.

**Craig:** You know what? I’m going to play it and I’m going to beat it.

**John:** You’re going to beat it. You’re going to beat it as a True Love and you’re going to stay up all night doing it. And I’m going to send you a promo code and a t-shirt.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want a t-shirt. Is the t-shirt the dude punching the hawk? Because it better be.

**John:** Yeah, it is. It’s the dude punching the hawk.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** You’re going to love it.

**Craig:** Perfect. Done. Sold.

**John:** Done. So, that’s Karateka. That’s available now, or tomorrow for people listening to this now. But we have six questions from listeners and I think we want to get to those.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I should mention before we get to the questions that I’m also working with Jordan Mechner. The two of us are trying to do a reboot of Leisure Suit Larry. So, that will be probably next month.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. Leisure Suit Larry.

**John:** The sleaziest…was it funny or sleazy? Or both?

**Craig:** It was both. Leisure Suit Larry was one of the worst videogames ever made. And, well no, it wasn’t really that bad. It was just so stupid because it was kind of porny. And it was porny at a time when porn was actually hard to get, you know, the way that cigarettes are hard to get now, but were easy to get then. Well, porn was hard to get then easy to get now.

And so when you were a kid you heard about this Leisure Suit Larry, everybody wanted to get it because apparently the game mechanics were that you would hit on women and if you did the right things and said the right things and took them out to dinner or whatever then eventually they would take their digital top off and you would see boobs.

And, man, I wanted that game. I couldn’t even get the game, so I couldn’t even get to the boobs because I couldn’t get the game.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was tragic. I think I was 12 and I was upset.

**John:** This is well before the publicized way of like landing the woman, The Game, where there’s like “negging” and there are whole systems for doing that, but it had its own mechanic for sort of how you pick up women?

**Craig:** Yeah. And obviously it was ridiculous guess work. And I just love the thought — it really does kind of cut to the heart of male sexuality that men sat and worked though a game that was fairly arbitrary in order to see badly pixilated images of boobs. [laughs] That sort of sums it up, doesn’t it?

**John:** That’s pretty fantastic. I don’t think I ever told you this, but one of my very first — it wasn’t a paid job because I didn’t actually do the job — but my first agent had sent me out on a bunch of meetings and one of the meetings actually came through, like, “Oh, they really want you to do this,” was this company that had made its money making these porn/porny sort of CD-ROMs. Remember CD-ROMs?

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** It was like a game that would come on CD-ROM. And so the ones they sent home as demos were like, you know, you played through this sort of virtual thing and then you could find these porn scenes. And it was like, uh, ah, okay. But they wanted to do a funny pool game kind of thing for CD-ROMs. They wanted me to write witty dialogue for that. And so that was one of the first things as a young screenwriter I got set up for a job. And I think they went bankrupt, or got raided by the FBI.

**Craig:** Well, there you go. [laughs] Generally if you do any kind of porn-related activity at some point you’re raided by someone.

**John:** Yeah. That’s kind of part of the thrill, isn’t it?

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, that’s why you get into porn, for the raids. [Sirens in background] Oh! We got a siren. We got a siren. Here comes a raid.

**John:** It’s probably Chicago Fire. It’s probably just filming scenes for Chicago Fire, because Derek Haas who is our friend insists on authenticity. So, they won’t do that thing where the truck is moving, the lights are flashing, but there’s no real siren. He insists on real sirens at all times, even if it means they have to loop the dialogue. He doesn’t care.

**Craig:** Oh, they also set fires.

**John:** They do. I think the authenticity where they’ll just go out to some neighborhood and Derek will just with his can of gasoline will set a fire, and then the actors will have to show up and fight the fire. I think it adds a verisimilitude that you can’t find in other shows.

**Craig:** You know what it adds? A je ne sais quoi.

**John:** I think if Derek were to do a medical drama he would randomly just, you know, start hurting people. And then the actor doctors would have to come through and figure out what was wrong. Or he would take real patients and bring them into his hospital.

**Craig:** And just make them worse.

**John:** He’s kind of a sadist.

**Craig:** Yeah, kind of. [laughs]

**John:** But, a person who is really a nice person, likely, is Steve from Oldham, England who writes in with a question.

**Craig:** He sounds like a right bastard! [laughs]

**John:** Right bastard. He gave me a pronunciation guide for Oldham, England, and I was like, I would have gotten that right. I was not going to say, “Old Ham.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, we’re not that dumb.

**John:** Yeah. Mm. Steve asks, “Is it okay to love your own writing?”

**Craig:** That’s a great question!

**John:** Smiley face. “My reason for asking — on the one hand it seems fashionable for writers to say how much they dislike their work by the time they finished it, but why? I just unearthed a script I hadn’t looked at for nearly a year. It needs a damn good rewrite, but a lot of the dialogue is sparky and funny. I laughed out loud as I read it. Then I felt embarrassed. Am I allowed to really like my own work?”

**Craig:** Of course. Of course.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** It’s nice at least that you let some time go by, so there’s a little bit of distance between you and the writing, because if you write something and then sit back and go, “Good lord, I’m wonderful,” then you’re perhaps a douche bag. But, yeah, if you put something away and then you come back to it a year later, we’ve all had that experience of reading something that we had written many years ago that was new to us as if someone else had written it. And that’s fun.

And it gives you a new sense of appreciation for yourself, because you do spend a lot of our time running ourselves down, wallowing in doubt and misery. So, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. I mean, I wouldn’t talk about it. Sometimes I see writers, both amateur and frankly professionals, engaging in this embarrassing behavior on Twitter, or Facebook, or some social media where they kind of get into this weird self praise. And I find that really off-putting.

But, privately, please.

**John:** Privately, absolutely. Or writers who retweet their positive reviews too often — no, that’s not good.

**Craig:** No. Yeah, that’s — I’m not into that. I think — I always feel like the audience kind of speaks and they tend to, they vote with their feet. And everybody knows what they’ve done and I kind of settle it for that.

You know, one really great review might be a nice thing to put up. But, yeah, you know, easy on the public self praise; it’s a bit grotesque.

**John:** Yeah. So, the converse I’ll say for Steve, if you read something and you hate something that you’ve written, that’s okay, too, to some degree. If you hate everything you’ve written, that’s probably a problem. That’s probably either you’re not writing that well or you’re so hard on yourself that you’re not going to — I feel like you’re not going to survive that long doing it if you despise everything you’ve written.

Or maybe you’re a really good judge of writing and you’re a really terrible writer. That’s possible, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, if you hate everything you write, what’s the point?

**John:** What’s the point. You’re not going to keep doing it…

**Craig:** Life is too short.

**John:** But, I would say in general, yeah, you probably should like what you’re writing, because as I often say, like, you should write the movie that you would pay $15 to see opening weekend. You should write the sentences that you actually want to read. And if you don’t like the sentences that you read, there could be a problem.

And the only times I’ve gone back through scripts and sort of despised them is generally when I’ve had to do so much work on it to please people who I didn’t agree with that it no longer feels like mine, and I can only sort of see the bad memories of having written that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But even when I look back at, you know, a couple weeks ago we looked at our first original scripts, and I’m embarrassed by some of it, but I don’t hate it. I recognize that that’s who I was back then, and I’m a better writer than I was then.

**Craig:** I hated what I wrote, but…

**John:** Yeah. But you wrote it with a partner and it was all his fault.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. He’s a jerk.

**John:** Someone else who is not a jerk is María Estandía from Mexico. ” Hi! I am 14 years old and since I discovered your show I have been wanting to write a script. I have written and directed some of my own short films and this summer I did a course on filmmaking. I always wonder if I should keep focusing on short movies or if I am capable of writing a movie script. Should I wait until I am older? Can you ever be too young to write a script?”

Absolutely not, María Estandía.

**Craig:** Yes, you could be too young to write a script, but the question is — that would be different for everyone. Look, no 14 year old has ever written a good feature length screenplay, as far as I know.

**John:** But maybe she could write her bad feature length screenplay at 14 and write a good one when she’s 16.

**Craig:** I don’t know of any good 16 year old written screenplays either. It’s actually a good question. What is the best screenplay by the youngest person?

**John:** As I was reading her question I was thinking back, do you remember Riley Weston?

**Craig:** The supposed 15 or 16 year old who was really 80?

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] So, Riley Weston, for our younger listeners, was a young woman who got a lot of praise because she got hired on as a staff writer on Felicity. She had a brilliant young voice and she was truly a teenager and everyone was singing her praises. And then it turned out she was like in her 30s and she just looked really, really young.

But I take María Estandía at her word that she’s actually 14, and I would say she should, you know, write, yes. I mean, first off, general rule: Never wait for permission to write something. Write whatever you want to write. If that’s a full length screenplay, write the full length screenplay. Will it be as good as it will be when you’re 18? Probably not. But you’ll have learned a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. The only thing I would suggest perhaps is to maybe wait a little bit and keep working on you short films because I don’t want you to be discouraged. Writing a feature length film is a very difficult thing. And adults who have written many, many, many feature length screenplays continue to make terrible mistakes as they go. It’s a very hard thing to do.

And I just don’t want you to try it think, “Oh god, I’m terrible at this. I hate it. It’s too hard. I’m bored.” Or, “People don’t like it, so I should stop.” So, maybe think about holding out for just a little bit, keep working on your short films. Learn the language of cinema. Learn how you translate words into images and sound. And with a little bit more experience under your belt, perhaps when you are maybe approaching 17, that age, and you have a little more life experience as well, maybe then take a shot at it.

I just don’t want you to feel bad when it doesn’t go well, because it is quite a bit to bite off.

**John:** Craig, you’re too sensitive. You care too much. I think that’s the… — I’ve diagnosed the problem.

**Craig:** That’s why I appear to care not at all. [laughs]

**John:** I just go back to, you know, there are the occasional Mozarts who are just really, really gifted quite early on. And the fact that you are 14 and you wrote a beautifully phrased question to us, but you’re from Mexico, leads me to believe that you are more advanced than your peers and possibly you will do a great job. And so I share Craig’s concern that you could burn out on things by getting involved too early, but I just look at Lena Dunham, who created Girls, and she was writing stuff when she was your age, and she was making films. And who knows if you’re that girl of Mexico, but maybe you are.

**Craig:** It’s true. I mean, here’s the good news: If you are, in fact, awesome, and really, really good, nothing we say here is going to change your path to success, which is assured.

**John:** Yes.

JJ writes, “I recently completed my first script and I’m facing the rewrite. I wrote it by hand and later typed it out. It’s 212 pages.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Oh, yeah. “And I had no idea it was so long. I’ve taken screenwriting classes, and it isn’t in improper formatting either. I would like to know how you and Craig go about rewriting things — things to look for in making a script better. Which scenes to cut? Which characters to combine? Other questions most writers face in their rewriting.”

So, first off, my sympathies on the 212 pages. I write by hand, but it’s being typed up while I’m doing it so I do have a pretty good sense of, like, where I’m at. So, I’ve never come in crazy long. But, I know people who do write crazy long.

**Craig:** I don’t know — the writer that I know who tends to write long and then reduce down is Scott Frank, but I don’t think he’s ever kissed 200 pages, much less beyond that. That is a larger problem. I think we need to talk about your process, in part because whether the writing in long hand has kind of allowed you to put your head in the sand, or you simply weren’t — you did not plan well enough ahead, you are not in control of your story if you’re writing a 212 page screenplay.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** You are not writing a screenplay. You’re writing something else. So, you need to reevaluate how you’re going about doing this. And also, frankly, that’s not really something you can “rewrite,” or, “Oh, I’ll just take out this scene and this scene.”

**John:** No.

**Craig:** There are huge issues there, I mean, huge issues. You have two movies. You’ve written two movies as one movie. Split them in half, maybe? [laughs] I’m not quite sure how to approach that problem.

**John:** Whenever I face a giant rewrite, or someone asks me this question about, “I need to do a big rewrite,” my suggestion is always — in his case he needs to go back to note cards and figure out what his movie is. I mean, he needs to sort of do fundamental like “What is that story I’m trying to tell in the course of this movie?” because he’s written too much movie.

But whenever I face a big rewrite, I open a brand new file in Final Draft or whatever, the editor of your choice, and type a little outline, a little thing like “these are the things that are going to happen,” and copy and paste in only those scenes that you absolutely feel like are going to completely be in your movie. And don’t try to sort of go through this giant document and cut it down. You’re making a new script with some stuff brought in from the other thing.

And if there is stuff that you know is going to change, just do little bullet points for like, “these are the new things that happen,” but don’t try to take this massive file and shrink it down. Take a new blank file and build it out. I think you’ll have a better outcome partly because you’re just not going to have the pain of selecting a bunch of stuff and hitting delete. And that’s very hard for a person to do. Whereas, page — it’s like you’re making something new; it’s great and there’s possibility and potential if you’re making a new script that is adapted from this monstrosity you wrote.

**Craig:** That’s great advice. And what I like about that advice is that it leads you to write towards something as opposed to away from something. And I see this all the time. People are writing away from things. “Well, the move is too dark, so I’m going to do a rewrite where it’s less dark.” That’s not — you’ll never succeed.

You have to write towards something. Always. And if you have a 215 page, or whatever you said, screenplay and your object is to write away from that down to a number, it’s just not going to be very good.

What I like about what John just advised you to do is that you start fresh and you write up, and you write toward, so it’s a positive thing. It’s the best way.

**John:** Cool.

Kyle in Los Angeles writes, “Hey, Craig, have you ever considered changing your middle name to something starting with A, or just A itself, in order to become Craig A. Mazin?”

**Craig:** I have not. [laughs] This has come up a number of times. It’s funny. I was actually talking with the Hangover boys the other day about what they were called as kids, you know, because everybody gets teased with their name. And Bradley was saying he was Bradley Pooper. And Ed, I think, I can’t remember what he got. And I guess Zach just had to deal with the fact that his name was impossible to pronounce and spell. But I’ve never have this problem, because when I was kid it was always Amazing Mazin. It was so easy.

I feel so blessed by that. I mean, my last name — the only annoying thing about my last name is that it’s ambiguously pronounceable, so a lot of times I’ll get “Mah-zin.” And I don’t even correct people anymore if they say “Mah-zin,” I just go along with it because I don’t really care.

But then it’s sort of fun to know that they will continue to call me that. But then perhaps one day we’ll find out they’ve been doing it wrong and I didn’t correct them, which I think is interesting. So, I like the fact that there is the Amazing Mazin thing. It’s fun.

No, although we did when my wife was pregnant with our daughter, our second child, and a lot of girl’s names end in A, she was like, “I don’t know; do we want to do something that ends in A because then you have the whole A-Mazin thing?”

And I’m like, “Yeah, and the problem is exactly?” So, my daughter’s name is Jessica and so she is Jessic-A-Mazin. But we call her Jessie, so it sort of goes away anyway.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** Do people know about your whole name thing? Have you talked about it?

**John:** Yeah. Have we talked about it on the podcast? So, my last name that I grew up with unpronounceable. It was a German last name. And it is one of those words, it’s M-E-I-S-E, which in German you would pronounce “Myza,” but everyone always pronounced “Meese.” And we actually pronounced it “Myzie,” which makes no sense at all, but everyone has always pronounced in “Myzie.”

And so my whole childhood was, the first 18 years of my life was listening to people mispronounce my name and having to correct how to pronounce my name. So, it was always the first six seconds of any conversation with any new person was, “That’s actually not how you say my name. My name is said like this.”

And when I decided I was going to move to Los Angeles for grad school, I’m like I had this one summer I was like, “You know what? I think I’m just going to rip off the Band-Aid and just change that name so I don’t have to deal with that for the rest of my life.” So I went and legally changed my name to August, which was my father’s middle name. And so I basically flopped, and I took — my middle name is now my previous last name.

So, changing your name legally is a giant hassle, but it was a giant hassle that was worth it in my case, because John August is simple and straightforward and it’s been unambiguous. The only times it runs into problems is Spanish speakers, I will say, “John August, like the month,” and they we will get to “Agosto,” and they’ll leave out the U. And that becomes a problem sometimes. But, it’s been — it’s one of the better things I’ve done in my life is change my name to something that was easier to say.

Now, it doesn’t mean that everyone needs to change their name if you have a strange last name. You know, Schwarzenegger did great. Galifianakis did great. And I could have just used a pen name, but for my situation it just felt easier to switch it.

**Craig:** Well, also it makes this podcast, I just think our teaming sounds better, because “Meise and Mazin” sounds like a joke.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** It’s ridiculous.

**John:** There’s the M&M problem.

**Craig:** Like there are only 12 letters in the alphabet when podcast day came around.

**John:** Yeah. And we got what we could get.

**Craig:** Exactly. We were stuck with each other.

**John:** Ugh.

Dean in Sydney writes, “When a writer’s agent talks about taking a spec script wide, what does that mean? And how are producers involved? I only ask because I always assumed the agent would be approaching the studio directly without producers, or that producers might vie for the script with one being taken to show it to the studio. How does that all work?”

That’s a good question. We never talked about spec scripts like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, taking it wide means that they go to pretty much every serious buyer out there, so all the major studios, plus the mini majors like Summit and Lionsgate, which is now the same thing, sorry, and the Weinstein Company, and I guess a few others. So, they’re going to go out. They’re not going to sort of slip it to one or two places where they think it would be a great fit. They’re giving everybody a crack at it, all over the same weekend, so it’s a big, wide bidding war, hopefully. Or, you’re just casting a wide net and hoping one of those fish bites.

And generally speaking studios want — studios know that a producer has to be on the movie. Somebody has to produce the movie. And so if you’re not producing your own movie, which is often the case with screenplays, with spec screenplays, because you’re not a producer, you’re a writer, then what you do is you go to producers that have deals at the buyer. And they take it in.

So, part of the choice is, “Okay, we’re going to go out wide. We’re going to send you spec script to Disney, and Sony, and Warner Bros, and Universal, and Paramount. Let’s go down the list of the producers that have deals at each one of those places and pick who the right producer is. See if they want to take it in.” And those things are now territories. So, “Okay, Rudin has it at Paramount. And Gil Netter has it at Fox,” and so on and so forth.

**John:** Yes. So, it’s the agent’s responsibility to figure out, “Okay, if we’re going to go out to the whole town,” the whole town being Hollywood, “and the buyers at once, we need to match up who is going to take it into each studio, which basically says, we’re going to send it first to this producer and say to this producer, ‘We will give you the exclusive right to take this into this one studio,'” or sometimes the producer can take it to more than one place at once.

The producer will read the script and say, “Okay, I get this. This is a movie I really want to make, and therefore I will take it into the studio and say, ‘I want to make this movie. Please buy this script from me.'” And then the studio decides if they want to buy this script or not.

That timeframe is often incredible compressed, so if a lot of people are excited about a certain script, that producer will have like 20 minutes to kind of read the script and say, “Yeah, I get what this is. Great. Send it into the executive at the studio and have them read it. And let’s try to get this thing.” And sometimes that gets fast and frenetic. And some things sell for a lot of money because of that.

The danger of going wide, and you used the term when you were giving your first answer, is the difference between “wide” and “slip.” And so slip means that you’re going to give it to one or two producers who you think might be the right producers for it. And you’ll give them a few days to look at it ahead of everybody else and say, “You know, we think you’re the right person for it. We think this is a good fit for you to take this to Warner Bros,” and give them a shot at doing that first before you go out in a wider way.

And it depends on the nature of the project or the nature of the climate, the mood of the town, what situation makes the most sense.

The two spec scripts I’ve taken out, my first script Go, and another script which we never sold, they were wide situations, and with Go it was one producer who had it for this little tiny distributor who actually got it set up, and so that worked out. But it wasn’t that classic sort of bidding war situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are interesting games that go on when you’re an agent with this screenplay stuff. If you have spec that you think could be, is something that everybody would want, you’re incentivized to take it wide. If you have a script that you think two or three people might love, but it’s a little more specific, you might want to slip it to someone ahead of time and say, “Look, take this off the table.” That’s their phrase.

Now, if you want to take it off the table, meaning no one else gets to look at this thing, you’re going to pay a premium for it, because now as the buyer you have to play the game theory of, “Well, there’s an intrinsic value to this script, but also there’s a value to no one else having the script and getting a chance to bid against me. So, I have an exclusive bidding window here. I want to bid enough to actually get it, but if I bid too little they’re going to think, ‘Well, I think if we test the waters with everybody else we could do better than that.'”

So, it’s all about game theory and how desirable the screenplay is. And there are a lot of options. This is what very good agents are very good at. When people say, “Well, you know, my agent read my screenplay and they didn’t love it…” Who cares? This is what agents are good at, not necessarily reading scripts and liking them but knowing who would like it, or something like it, and what studios are looking for. And then managing the sale process.

**John:** Let’s say you had a biopic that required — it was fantastic — but required very special handling. That’s a situation where you would probably go out and target a director who would be perfect for it. Or you might target an actor who would be perfect for it. So, you would go to Leonardo DiCaprio’s company and say, “We’ll slip this to you because we think it’s a big sale. We think it could be DiCaprio for Warner Bros, and maybe with these kind of directors.”

There are situations where it makes much more sense to try to, even if you are not really officially attaching that talent, to make sure that that’s the talent who’s bringing it into the studio, so they can see, like, “Okay, I see how to make this movie,” versus, “This is a difficult biopic about a blind violinist in the Ukraine.”

**Craig:** Yeah. And similarly if you have some talent attached that is particularly meaningful to a certain place, that’s a great example of a slip. So, you might think, “Well look, I have a screenplay that I’ve developed with Gore Verbinski. It’s a big action movie. I should go wide with that.”

Maybe. Or, maybe you slip it to Bruckheimer, because they have a relationship and Bruckheimer has the ability to take off the table for the right price.

**John:** And in that situation where the previous relationships would also come into play where it’s going to be weird to sort of take that movie wide without giving Bruckheimer the first shot, because he has the relationship and history with that guy and could have a lot of hurt feelings.

**Craig:** Exactly. So, then you have to calculate that whole thing. And if you are a screenwriter that has certain strong relationships, particularly in a certain kind of genre… For instance, if I write a spec screenplay that’s a comedy and I don’t bring it to Greenhut Films at Warner Bros, you know, I’m behaving boorishly. [laughs] You know?

If I brought it to a different producer at Warner Bros that would just be insane. You know, it just doesn’t work that way. I have a movie, Identity Thief is with Scott Stuber at Universal. If I write a comedy and I don’t bring it to Scott Stuber at Universal I’m behaving boorishly. You do have to sort of reward the relationships that have rewarded you.

**John:** Agreed.

Our last question today comes from Simon in Norway. He says, “I’m a young director from the cold north of Europe and would love to find someone who likes to write good scripts but don’t expect me to pay them large amounts of money. This would help me so that I can focus on what I do best, which is directing and filming, and could maybe help some script writers get feedback, someone who has to transform their text to a movie. Do you guys know a place where I can find young aspiring writers who I could work with to write a script that I could direct?”

So, I picked this question because he’s from Norway, which is sort of exotic, and it was both naïve but also relevant to I think a lot of our listeners, because I don’t think a lot of our listeners are probably the people who’ve written that script that they wanted to get made into a movie. And whether Simon from Norway is the right guy — a lot of getting your first movie made is pairing up this thing you’ve written with this guy who wants to make a movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the grand irony of our business is that it’s full of people who are desperate for someone to read their material, and full of people who are desperate to read material, and yet they don’t seem to be able to find each other.

That said, you know, leading with, “But I don’t want to pay you a lot of money,” okay, well, good luck. You tend to get what you pay for. But, that aside, what I didn’t like about this question was that there was no indication whatsoever about what kind of movie he wants to do. And I think if he knows what kind of movie he wants to do then he should start in Norway with sort of movies that are made there that he likes, and perhaps then seek out the people who wrote those movies.

Also, the question implied, “Look at what wonderful things I could do for this writer; I could show them what it’s like to have their…” Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know what? You need a script, buddy. You don’t know how to write yourself and you need a script. So, perhaps coming at it with a little bit more humility might not be such a bad idea.

But where to find writers? I don’t know. If you’re in the film community, you’re in the film community. You should know some people that know writers.

**John:** I would also point to: look who has won all of the recent awards in screenwriting. And so look at the people who won the Austin Film Festival. Look at people who won the Nicholl Fellowships. Look at those writers who are acknowledged and saying, “These are better than the other scripts who are in this pool.” Those should be some of the first people you’re looking at, because most of those scripts never sell, most of the scripts never get made.

And if you are a person who genuinely can make a movie, you should at least be reading those scripts, because if it’s not being that script, maybe you’re the person who can hire that writer to write something for you, because those people often aren’t really starting lucrative careers yet. And maybe you can be the person who gets one of their movies made.

So, that’s one of the places I would start. I would also go to film festivals. And if you’re a filmmaker in Norway, you’re going to be making a movie in Norway, you need to go to whatever Scandinavian or European film festivals are available and look for like, “What are the interesting movies that got made there or the interesting scripts that made it through screenwriting competitions there?” And see if there is anyone there you can match up with who might be the right fit for you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Particularly, if you’re not going to be able to pay a lot of money you are going to need to be able to — you have to be able to promise them that this is going to be a good experience, where you are going to make them a good movie out of the script they wrote. That they are going to not hate you. That this is going to be beneficial for everyone.

And maybe you actually have those abilities that didn’t sort of fully translate into this question, but I’d work on your presentation to make sure that they understand that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Remember, you’re not just looking for a screenplay; you’re looking for a creative partner. When the director and the writer respect each other and work together, great things can happen. When directors look for screenplays that they can then bestow their magical gift upon to bring to life, less so.

I think you have to really think about who the person is, too. And think about finding a real partner. At best the director and the writer are the nucleus of the film and trust each other more than anyone else. And rely upon each other more than anyone else, in my opinion. That is the best situation.

**John:** I would agree.

So, Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I kind of do. I mean, it’s not cool, it’s sort of tragic, but you know, Hurricane Sandy just torched the East Coast and in particular my hometown of Staten Island got hammered. So, it’s a terrible thing. And because — I haven’t lived in Staten Island since I was 13 years old, but that’s where I grew up, from 2 to 13, my formative years. And so in my heart I will always be a Staten Islander. And so, you know, it seems like because it’s an election year everything must be politicized, including donations of food and money to the Red Cross, which I just don’t understand.

But that aside, a donation to the Red Cross at this time would be a lovely thing.

**John:** We’ll put a link in the show notes for that. And I do share your frustration that it’s impossible for anything to be looked at outside of a political window in this time, except that this podcast is airing on Election Day, so it’s almost done.

**Craig:** Oh! Congratulations, winner.

**John:** Congratulations, America. You’re almost done.

**Craig:** [laughs] By the way, thank god. Thank god.

**John:** There are very few people who want it to go on any longer than it has.

**Craig:** I am almost… — If somebody came to me and said, “Look, we’re considering a constitutional amendment to increase the presidential term to eight years,” I would consider it strongly, even if I thought that half the time or more I’d be stuck with a president I didn’t like, just to avoid this insanity.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s out of control.

**John:** Wednesday morning they’re going to start talking about, like, “Who are the top contenders for…” Oh, no!

**Craig:** They will. It’s the way that Christmas keeps getting earlier [laughs]; it’s the same thing. It’s like the presidential election keeps getting earlier. And, plus, we have the post-mortems. Oh god, we’re going to have a month of post-mortems, and complaining, and accusations, and conspiracy theories.

I mean, you and I could write the script for the next 80 days almost to the word, I bet.

**John:** Yeah, it’s one of those, you know, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.” It’s just eternal.

**Craig:** It never ends.

**John:** Never ends. But one thing that does end is that my One Cool Thing which is a game that Craig and I have playing far too much of, called Letterpress. It’s a game for the iPhone. It’s by Loren Brichter, who created the actual original Twitter client, or Tweetie, which became the Twitter client, which was a genius client until he sort of took away some of its magic.

But he is back with a new game for iOS that is brilliant. It’s free. It’s $0.99 if you want to unlock so you can play multiple players at once. I would describe it as sort of a cross between Scrabble and chess in a way, where you’re trying to build these words but you’re trying to take over the board by the words you build.

So, in Scrabble you’re trying to make the words with the Qs and the Zs because those are worth more points, here you’re trying to make words with Qs and Zs only if its advantageous to sort of take over more of the board. And Craig and I have had some good games in this. We’ve had some close matches.

**Craig:** I’m trying to make a move right now. This is a game — this current game is one — I like this game because it could go on for a really long time, and you and I are super stubborn, which I love.

**John:** We also have a lot of Ds on the board left.

**Craig:** But this game I know I’m going to lose, [laughs], so I’m just, like, it’s a war of attrition now where I simply won’t go quietly. I’m going to drag this one out as long as I can.

**John:** So, how about this: In addition to all of the other stuff we talked about on the podcast today being in the show notes, I will put a screen capture of our final game in Letterpress so you can see how I defeated Craig in our last match.

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t know if you’re going to get a screen capture, because I may drag it out. [laughs]

**John:** It may play on forever. So, the letters that are unplayed as of this moment are X, V, and H, which…

**Craig:** Tough ones.

**John:** Which are challenging giving the other vowels we have on the board, but could possibly be taken care of. But, it’s a really terrific game, so smartly done, so well designed. And when it launched it had a lot of problems with Game Center, which got overwhelmed, Apple’s Game Center. And things wouldn’t get posted right. But it seems to be much more stable now, so I would highly recommend it if you’re not already addicted to it. It’s like Words with Friends but faster, and easier, and quite enjoyable.

**Craig:** Yeah. I love it actually. It’s fun.

**John:** Cool. So, you can buy that, but you can also download Karateka for your Xbox, starting tomorrow, Wednesday.

**Craig:** Oh, I just did my move, John. It wasn’t a bad one.

**John:** Oh, yeah, he just played Brawled. Brawled is a good word.

**Craig:** By the way, do you see the balance? I mean, it’s not quite good for me yet, but it’s slowly changing, I think.

**John:** As of this recording Craig is up 13 to 9, so.

**Craig:** Yeah, but it’s deceptive.

**John:** It’s deceptive because, yeah, I’ll be able to make that swing there. It’s very much like politics in a way. If one state goes from blue to red it’s really a two point shift because that was in your column and now it’s in my column.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** In addition to this screen cap being in the show notes, we will have links to everything else we’ve talked about. If you feel like giving us a rating on iTunes, that would be fantastic, because it helps more people recognize us. If you’re looking for us in iTunes, just do a search for Scriptnotes, and we’re that podcast called Scriptnotes.

If you want to talk to Craig or I about something we said on the show, Twitter is the best bet. Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. And if you have a question for us you can write into ask@johnaugust.com, and I get all the questions, and that’s what I read on the air.

Craig, thank you so much for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you for a spectacular podcast. And good luck with Karateka!

**John:** Thank you very much. I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/alt-universe-panels).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, episode 61, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** “In-ter-esting.”

**John:** Yeah. So, Aline Brosh McKenna will not let me live down the fact that I kind of swallow the T in “interesting.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Aline Brosh McKenna, who was our fantastic guest, who we need to thank again for last week at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** She was excellent. And I like it when we have other people on because I feel like they can notice things about you and me that we probably notice but never say to each other, you know, because we’re such good roommates. So things like “interesting.”

**John:** “Interesting,” yes. No spoiler, but we will have some more guests in the future, and we’ve actually reached out to some people, so I think it’s going to be a fun new addition to the new year of the podcast.

**Craig:** For sure. I thought the stuff that we did in Austin that is still in the pipeline is some of our best podcasting work.

**John:** I agree. Now, Craig, people may notice that you sound a little different, and that’s partly because you just woke up. We’re recording this at 7pm, but you just woke up because you are off on location making this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I’m off on location with Hangover 3 in an indeterminate place. We — boy — we had a hell of a night. So, you know, I think at one point we talked about shooting splits, which is what they generally think of as the worst possible production thing when you’re on a crew, because you’re not shooting all night, you’re not shooting all day; you’re shooting sort of half night/half day, and it messes everybody up.

But, yesterday we did a deal where we shot dusk, so we shot sundown, dusk, night, dawn, sun up, morning. [laughs] That will mess you up.

**John:** That will definitely mess you up. Sorry about that. Sometimes that’s the only way it works. There’s no other good way to get those shots that you need. And when you need that sort of in between light that is going to happen, those sunrises and those sunsets. — Curse the screenwriter who put that into the script.

**Craig:** Well, you know, there was much discussion of that. And it turns out it wasn’t me, on this at least. I think that the director and the DP had a plan to… — You know, I tend to write things like morning, although I have to say, until I had this discussion with Larry Sher, our DP, last night — and I didn’t know this — I always thought that dusk and sort of evening and sundown were the same thing. And dawn and sunrise were the same thing. But they’re not.

Did you know that?

**John:** No. Tell me the distinction.

**Craig:** Okay, see, and he made me feel so dumb about it. So, Dawn is the time right before the sun comes up, so it’s when the sky starts lightening but the sun hasn’t peeked out over the horizon. And dusk is the opposite. It’s the time right after the sun goes down but there is still light in the sky.

**John:** So, there is residual light but there is no direct light?

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Okay. Makes sense.

**Craig:** Learned something.

**John:** You do learn something new every day.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My day was going really pretty well today. I had a good notes call. The thing about writing for television is you have these notes calls where they read these documents and they call you. And there are like ten people on the phone call and you hope that everything goes okay. And this time it went really well, so it was great.

But then I was rushing to get sort of other stuff during the day so we could make this podcast scheduling work. And so I’m giving my 7 year old daughter her shower before we could record this, and like mid-shower she goes, “Papa, did you know that people flew planes into building?”

**Craig:** Ouch.

**John:** Literally, you’re going to do September 11th on me like when I have five minutes? And so we had the five-minute September 11th conversation.

**Craig:** Wow, I mean, I love it. I sort of feel like I want to play Name that Tune with you and see if I could do a September 11th conversation in four minutes.

**John:** [laughs] Oh, yeah. It’s tough. It’s important to have factual information, because she’s asking very specific questions about like, you know, “Well how did they get knives on the planes? Where would they hide the knives? Why weren’t the scanners better?” And all these things.

And so it’s a really strange thing, like, “Oh — that was 11 years ago.”

**Craig:** I know. I remember my son was just a baby. He was about five months old. No, that’s not right. I’m the worst dad.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** He was two months old. He was two months old, and I remember I was sleeping in a different room because, you know, Melissa would wake up and feed him and I just wanted to sleep that day. And I remember, and my sister woke me up, called me because she was in New York.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh, now, see now we’re turning into a September 11th podcast.

**John:** It’s a September 11th podcast. I will say that Rawson Thurber, who was my assistant at that time, called me and said, “Man, we’ve got to wake up. Some people just flew planes into the Sears Tower in Chicago.” And I’m like, “Really? That’s so odd.” It’s so odd that he thought of the wrong tower.

**Craig:** And the wrong city.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so you fired him that day…

**John:** I did.

**Craig:** …so, for him September 11th has a totally different —

**John:** And then he went off and made Dodgeball, so it was all good.

I thought we could actually do a little speculative reminiscing on today’s podcast, because while Austin was really fun, we could only participate in a limited number of panels there. There were like 60 different panels there, and we were only part of very few of them.

So, I didn’t even look honestly at the catalog for Austin Film Festival until I was on the plane flying back from Austin. And I was looking through it and I was like, “Oh, those sound like really interesting panels. I would love to have been on those panels.” But we couldn’t have been.

So, I thought today maybe we’d read the description of some of these panels and we could talk about what we would have talked about had we been on those panels. But it will actually be a much faster, more condensed version, because we don’t have to wait for moderators to ask questions or to go down the row of what people would say. Does that sound fun?

**Craig:** I like it; a very good, compressed way for us to embarrass all the other panelists there by just outshining them now.

**John:** I think it’s a nice choice. So, first panel we’ll talk about is Setiquette. “In addition to being able to write quickly and well, the successful television writer, or film writer, must also be versed in how to navigate the complex and often stressful social climate of the show. This requires a skill that empowers the writer to make quick and intelligent adjustments while being able to master the art of communication with actors, directors, and producers. Understanding and respecting the laws of social etiquette on the set, Setiquette, is essential for those who aspire to break into and stay in the writer’s room.”

The other panelists who would have been on this fantasy panel with us: Christine Boylan, who’s lovely; Matthew Gross, a producer; Kyle Killen; and Meta Valentic, who I don’t know who that is.

So, Craig, talk to me about Setiquette, because you’re making a film right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, so I deal with it every day. I can’t speak at all to television Setiquette, but I can talk certainly at length about film Setiquette. It’s quite rigid actually. Making a movie is very military. Everybody has their jobs. All the jobs have a rank. And everybody is busy and respects each other’s space.

So, it’s not just a question of etiquette; it’s even a question of union rules. You know, if you’re not a grip, don’t pick up stands. If you’re not an electrician, don’t plug stuff in. There are real simple things to do like that. But the most important thing is to have something to do on the set. If you do not, then you are a visitor and you’re in the way.

I try to not be on sets where I don’t have things to do. If I am there with something to do as the writer, then I think it’s just important for me to know the basic protocol. The biggest rule of Setiquette is: Do not direct actors unless you’re the director. Don’t even talk to them about the work. You know, if you want to sit in a chair during a turnaround and chit-chat about the weather or whatever, feel free. But simple rule of thumb: Actors need to be directed by one voice, and that’s the director’s voice.

So, if I have any thoughts or notes or suggestions, I relay them quietly and privately to the director. And another big Setiquette note is don’t talk to the director about directing things in front of other people. Pull them aside and talk to them quietly. So much of directing a movie is about maintaining authority and control of the set, because if you don’t, it just all starts to fall apart. It’s for the best of the movie. It’s not about fulfilling some sort of Emily Post definition of what good behavior is. It really is pragmatic.

Be respectful. Be kind. Don’t get in people’s way. And do not interrupt.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Those are some of the big highlights of Setiquette for me.

**John:** I would definitely underline that sense of, “if you don’t have a job on the set, your job is to stay out of everybody’s way.” And that honestly means kind of stay back; either you stay back, or you stay into a little place they’ve assigned you to stay, which is probably kind of near the producers who are watching at a video village. Don’t sort of wander around, because you’re just going to get in people’s way.

If you don’t have an assigned place to stand or be, somewhere near the makeup people is often a pretty helpful place, because they’re going to be close enough to set that they can actually watch what’s happening, but they’re smart enough to never be in anybody’s way. So, that’s a usually good bet, because they’re not going to be in the way of the grips, or the gaffers, or anyone else who is like hauling stuff to and from the set.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** A little bit I can talk about in television, having shot some TV pilots. If it is your TV show, it’s your pilot that’s shooting or your episode that’s shooting as the writer, many of the same rules apply, but you are going to have a little bit more active hand in saying, like, “That’s not what I think we need for this moment. We need to do that again.” You shouldn’t be directing the actors, but you’re going to probably be directing the director in the sense of like, “This is what I need for this because this isn’t going to make sense with that.”

And you are also going to be responsible for getting this to make sense in the editing room, so you’re going to have a little bit stronger sense there.

One of the things I think you brought up when we were just chatting in Austin is that you kind of have to be careful about things you ask for on a set. Because if you’re an important person on a set — the writer, the producer, the director — you say like, “Wow. I wish we still had more of those Red Vines,” and they’re out of Red Vines at craft service, they will get on the walkie talkie and it will be someone’s job to run out and get those Red Vines for you.

So, don’t casually wish for things unless you really want them.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, and by the way, one of the tricky things about being a screenwriter on a set is that we — it depends. Your job depends. It’s one of the only jobs I can think of on a set that varies depending on who the writer is and what the project is and who the director is. Because every other job is very rigid and very clear. Some writers are on set because they are asked to be there, and they need to be there, and they have a job there.

And some writers are there visiting. Some writers are there and think they have a job there, but are actually just visiting. And it’s important to know which one you are. And if you’re just visiting, you just sit like a visitor and be happy. If you’re there working, it’s a different deal, and you get to know people.

I will say that a great person to get to know if you’re a writer and you’re going to be spending a lot of time on a set, a great person to get to know is the video assist guy. Because generally speaking you’re going to be in what they call Producer’s Video Village; there’s a video village for the director where he watches the monitor, for playback, and then typically there’s a second video village for the producers, because the director doesn’t want people breathing over his shoulder while he’s working.

But, on the other hand, he wants the benefit of his trusted people to be watching the footage as well, to be able to confer with him after take five or take six to say, “Hey, did I get it?” And the video assist guy is the one who sets up your video village, and he can take care of you and let you know what’s going on. And it’s a good person to be friends with, I think.

**John:** I agree. I would also say make some eye contact, make some friends with whoever the sound recordist is, because you’re going to be asking that person for context — the little ear pieces that let you actually hear the dialogue that’s being recorded.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And invariably your batteries will run low. There will be something — you’re going to have to talk to him several times a day, so you might as well get to know his name.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And if you notice something strange in sound, often the director really won’t notice that, so you may be a second set of ears there that are helpful.

**Craig:** In fact, come to think of it, I’m going to make a little noise for a second. I’m sorry, because I’m doing this on my laptop. But our video record guy, John Trunk, who is the greatest — and what a great name, by the way, John Trunk. I’m sorry as I make noise here because I had to search his email. So, John told me that he has a friend who listens to us in Ireland — and here he is — and apparently is the biggest fan of our podcast.

**John:** That’s so great.

**Craig:** And he wanted me to mention his friend’s name. So, so now this is Setiquette. Here’s the way sets work. People take care of you, you take care of them. So, John Trunk, this is a shout out to your Irish friend, Darren Finnegan, Darren Finnegan. Hey, Darren, thanks for listening to us out there in Ireland.

**John:** Oh, so good. Now, another panel we could have gone to, it’s not even really a panel, but it’s here in the catalog so I thought I’d bring it up, would be a conversation with Marti Noxon.

**Craig:** Hmm. I’ve had those.

**John:** I’ve had those, too. And so “Take part in a conversation with Marti Noxon, a prolific television and film writer whose credits include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Grey’s Anatomy, Mad Men, Glee, and the recent films, I am Number Four and Fright Night.” That was moderated by Barry Josephson.

And so I actually had a conversation with Marti Noxon there because I got to go out to dinner with her and Kyle Killen and some other people who I sort of knew, or didn’t know that well, and got to sort of talk with them some. She’s great. And so, by the way, if you have a chance to have a conversation with her you should have a conversation with her.

I suspect that in the Driskill Ballroom she couldn’t have been quite as revealing about some of the shows that she’s worked on as she was with me. But she has really good stories. And it was fun to sort of hear when things go really well and things don’t go really well. Because when things go badly in television it’s such a uniquely, bad, wonderful crashing down of things, so it’s fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I get the sense in television sometimes things go bad but you have to still keep showing up. At least in movies when they crash and burn it’s over. [laughs] You don’t go back to the ruins.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. I mean, television is just a war, like it just keeps going on. Film may be a battle, but this is you’re going back, you’re going back, you’re going back. So, yeah, I’d recommend a conversation. But, at the same dinner that I had a conversation with her, I had a conversation with Kyle Killen who did the pilots for Awake and Lone Star, a very talented writer, who told me stories of when he was doing his shows for Fox, he lives in Austin but he was working on the Fox lot. And so he decided — originally he was staying with a friend who lived in Silver Lake which is a long drive from Fox. And ultimately he decided, “Well, screw it; I’m just going to stay in my office?”

And so he just set up air mattress. And so he lived in his office at Fox for several months while making those shows.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, the other secret he told me is apparently there is one shower on the lot in like this grips’ area, and so that’s where he would shower.

**Craig:** I don’t like that. [laughs] I don’t like going…

**John:** You don’t like showering below the line.

**Craig:** I don’t like going to Silver Lake, but then showering there is just outright ridiculous.

**John:** That just feels kind of crazy. The other helpful thing that sort of made me feel warm and fuzzy is he was saying when he was writing his TV pilots, people kept asking him for these documents, like his outlines, his pitch documents. And they said, “Well, where do I find them?” He’s like, “Oh, go to John August and he has the things he wrote for the show D.C.” And so he said that he used those as the templates.

**Craig:** Oh, see you have been sowing the seeds of greatest in so many for so long.

**John:** I’ve been trying.

**Craig:** You’re the Johnny Appleseed of screenwriters.

**John:** Aw. That’s so sweet. Thank you. It does feel good that people find helpful things.

Another panel we could have gone to, but we didn’t go to, was Writing for Video Games.

**Craig:** Oh, I would have liked to have done that one.

**John:** Yeah, so we’d meet some of the people on this. “With the success of crossover writers behind such game-changing titles as Call of Duty, Modern Warfare 3, FEAR: Extraction Point, FEAR: Perseus Mandate,” I’ve never heard of these.

**Craig:** Me neither.

**John:** “…and Fracture, it has become increasingly clear that video games area popular and lucrative new area for screenwriters. Learn to understand the industry and skills involved in writing non-liner stories for an interactive medium.” And on this panel we would have known Dalan. Is it Day-lan or Da-lan?

**Craig:** Day-lan.

**John:** Dalan Musson.

**Craig:** Day-lan Musson.

**John:** Musson? Wow. I just completely butchered his name. He is a very nice but very intimidating looking writer who we got to hang out with a little bit at Austin.

And writing for video games is fascinating, because it’s one of those things that I’m not going to end up doing a lot of in my life or my career, because I just feel like that’s not likely to come up for me often. But it’s, I think, where many of the next generation of screenwriters are going to be spending some of their time.

And writing for these huge projects where the script can be 700 pages because there are all these different possibilities of things that can happen. And you have to figure out a narrative flow that’s really a web, it’s not a straight line. It is so complicated. And some of them are going to do it really well and some of them are going to do it really poorly.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to play narrative video games, so I see a lot of video game writing from a consumer point of view, and a lot of it’s pretty good. The area where I feel they need to improve, frankly, is in direction, because for whatever reason the guys who direct these actors don’t understand pace at all, and oftentimes don’t understand emotion.

They tend to write very reportorially, so everyone is sort of laying out something calmly, usually because a lot of the dialogue takes place in gaps in the action. So, you’ll complete a chapter of action and now you’ll do a cut scene where people will come and talk to you to describe what happens next. And those scenes tend to then be very languid, and we’re all sitting here and chatting.

Rockstar is a grand exception to this rule. Not only do they write massive amounts of dialogue, but they actually understand how to write dialogue for action, or even when people are sitting around, how to make it intense. They’re very good at directing their actors.

**John:** I agree. I really loved StarCraft which I thought had some — granted a lot of it did happen in cut scenes, but the cut scenes were really well done, and then the way that tied into the missions that you would go onto felt really well done. The same Blizzard folks who did that also did the new Diablo, and I criticized that because it felt like you were just standing around and watching other people talk about the plot a lot. It was frustrating. They were like cut scenes.

**Craig:** That’s exactly what’s going on in Dishonored.

**John:** Yeah, I’m sorry about that.

**Craig:** Well, no, the thing is the actual game play of Dishonored is really well done. I like it a lot. I love the world that they’ve built. And they have very good actors doing the performances. It’s just that they put all of them in stand-and-talk situations and frankly they all talk at roughly the same pace with roughly the same intention and immediacy.

So, it just gets sort of kind of dronish. I think they need to think how to goose that a bit.

**John:** Now, another panel we could have attended but we were doing live Scriptnotes at that point was The First 10 Pages, a panel with Lindsay Doran. Wouldn’t it be amazing if we sat down for a conversation with Lindsay Doran? That would be great if we ever talked with her.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Join Academy Award-nominated producer Lindsay Doran (Sense and Sensibility) as she explains — using the first ten pages each from pre-selected Second Round feature screenplays — what producers and moviegoers look for in those crucial first 10 pages that either hook audiences or send them running for the hills.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. How true. And I can actually report back from her seminar last year, some of her tips, one of which is so obvious and yet is eschewed by so many: don’t make the first page a big block of text. Because — and her point was actually very simple — Lindsay has a way of portraying things that we might otherwise find offensive in very humane ways, and suddenly we get it. Because it’s a little offensive as a writer to hear, “Look, if you wrote a fantastic script and the first page had no dialogue but was kind of heavy on important, necessary description that was actually well written, still it would be tossed aside.”

It seems vulgar. But her point is: Listen, we’re people. We have a stack of scripts we have to read tonight. We have eight of them. We also have a husband, or a wife, we have children, we have lives. And so we pick up that first script and the first page looks daunting and we put it down, and we pick up the next one and there’s lots of white space and we start reading.

And her point wasn’t that that’s fair. Her point was that’s reality. So part of designing those first ten pages isn’t to punch somebody in the face with a big, huge fist full of Courier right off the bat.

**John:** Yeah. You want to make sure that, especially in those first ten pages, the reader feels like you just can’t put it down. They’re fascinated to see what happens on the next page, and the next page. And so planning for that is crucial. And you want to make sure that you are…yes, you have to do all the work of setting up your world and introducing your characters, but it has to be a great, compelling read in those first ten pages or you’re not going to get them to read to page 11, or to page 33.

**Craig:** Yeah. And she talked a lot about sort of grabbing somebody with something that is interesting, surprising them, be unexpected, make a really sharp character, make that first line of dialogue a challenge — anything really to sort of say, “This script unlike the other 2,000 you read this week might be good.”

**John:** Because here’s the thing: The first thing that a reader comes across that feels like, “eh,” is a reason for them to put it down. So, if the very first line of dialogue is like, “eh, whatever,” then they can stop. They get permission to stop reading. Maybe they get three things, like the third thing that feels like, “eh,” they’re going to set it down and they’re not going to care.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think writers need to understand, and it took me a long time to wrap my mind around this: People who read scripts, buy scripts, and hire writers are looking for interesting, unique voices that are breaking the mold of what they normally read, who are pulling them in and exciting them with something that feels fresh.

On the other hand, they don’t make fresh, interesting, unique voicey movies. Now, you may say, “Well then, explain the discrepancy,” and all I can tell you is they want people with fresh, unique, strong, interesting voices to make the movies that they think people will want to go see.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, don’t be fooled by the product into thinking that’s what you ought to be writing. It’s so important for you to understand that. And I’m not making a judgment on this. I’m not saying, “And that’s a great way of approaching the movie business.” I’m just telling you that’s the way it is.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing to always remember is that whatever script you’re writing, yes, you want to see that become a movie, but at the same time if it’s not a movie it’s going to be a writing sample. And so you want anything that has your name on it to be the best possible thing you could write. And the most interesting thing, and the thing that people are talking about, and the thing that will end up on the Black List.

**Craig:** Now more than ever.

**John:** Now more than ever.

Now, a panel that I did not get to attend but I heard many legends about this panel after the fact was the Popcorn Fiction panel. So, Craig, can you give me a recap of the Popcorn Fiction panel, because it sounded like it was not one of the calmer panels.

**Craig:** Well, [laughs], you know, part of the fun of Austin is that I’m there with my friends. And we spend all year torturing each other, and then we go to Austin and we get to torture each other in front of people.

All right, the Popcorn Fiction, let me just — it was the last panel of the weekend. We were all a little giddy, a little goofy. The panel itself was ridiculous. There’s no reason to have a Popcorn Fiction panel at the Austin Screenwriting Conference. It’s not about screenwriting. It’s about writing fiction. And, frankly, anybody that wants to submit a story to it can, because Mulholland Publishing has that, so you just submit it, submit a story if you want.

And there’s really nothing to say. But when you add a very volatile combination of myself, Derek Haas, and Jeff Lowell, who we basically spar 365 days out of the year with each other. And then poor Eric Heisserer and Christine Boylan, who was great, and her husband, poor Eric Heisserer, who just did not have the ability to control us. We were — we really lost it.

**John:** Really, who was going to be able to control you?

**Craig:** We attacked each other, attacked people in the audience. We had the best time. We laughed. It was great. It was just a free-for-all. It was madness. It was madness.

**John:** Could Aline Brosh McKenna have controlled you?

**Craig:** Well, Aline would have gotten angry and, yeah, probably control. You know, I am scared of her.

**John:** You don’t want to disappoint her, too.

**Craig:** I don’t want to disappoint her because I’m afraid of her.

**John:** Now a panel that we also did not attend but we actually got a good report back from, well not a good report, but a thorough report back from — Amazon Studios had a panel about Amazon Studios, and sort of what it means for writers and what it means for the industry.

So, neither Craig nor I attended, but a reader was generous enough to write up his notes from the panel, and that’s on the blog right now, so there will be a link to that in the show notes. Essentially — we talked about Amazon Studios on the podcast many times — their business model is that any screenwriter in the US, or the world probably, can submit their script to Amazon. They have this process by which they get a free option that can be extended into a very low cost option.

If they like a project, they can do iterations of it. It’s changed somewhat; they’re not having like any random stranger rewrite it, but it’s a very test-driven kind of process for it. And we have questioned whether it makes a lot of sense for most screenwriters to do it, and whether it’s a good thing for writers overall, and if it’s a good thing for the industry.

And it didn’t sound like much of what got said at this conversation at Austin would have changed my perspective on that.

**Craig:** Same here. The big change that happened for you and for me many months ago, or I guess about a year ago, was that they finally dialed into being a union production company. So, people who are in the Writers Guild could continue down a guild path with them, and that’s important.

What’s unfortunate is that frankly they just don’t make much sense for a real screenwriter or — you know, I always look at these things as if you’re good enough to win that, if you’re good enough to make it through that, you’re good enough to make it through Warner Bros., or Fox, or Universal, and you don’t need them.

The philosophical issue that the Amazon rep mentioned that I want to bring out is his notion of testing. He says, accurately, that when movies are completed they’re put in front of test audiences who not only score the movie but sit in focus groups and talk about the movie. And then the filmmakers go and try and fix it then based on the feedback, or maybe don’t get a chance to fix it at all. And his point of view is: Why don’t we do that at the script stage and then we won’t have to do it at the movie stage? And all I can say is: Dude, you’ve got to go make some movies because you don’t know what you’re talking about.

**John:** Yeah. That’s not how it works.

**Craig:** All we do during screenwriting is that. Constantly. It’s shown to so many people. It’s given to readers, it’s given to agents, it’s given to every executive, all the production, their assistants, then the actors. It is read by so many. There are endless comments. Endless feedback from it.

That’s not why the movies go wrong. Movies go wrong because a movie is different than a script. It’s kind of an ignorant statement from somebody that’s running a “production company.”

**John:** I’ve been thinking about where the Amazon Studios business model might make sense, and it occurs to me that, like, children’s animation — there’s probably something good to be done in that space.

**Craig:** I lost you.

**John:** Where you could do, like, a low cost partial pilot for something and see, “Do people like this? Is this the right kind of style for us? Are these the right characters?” Where you can do that sort of like it’s just sort of silly putty that you’re modeling, and you need to have like actual little kids watching something, because little kids can’t read scripts, or you can’t describe things to them.

There are probably models, probably for television, probably for young audiences, where I could see it working out for them. But feature films of the size and scale that we’re talking about, I just don’t see it panning out.

**Craig:** No, because the point isn’t that 100 people out of 100 like the screenplay. We don’t go to movies to read. It’s an entirely different thing. They just — so many people don’t understand that the screenplay is meant to disappear into the movie. The art of judging whether it will translate in the disappearance and consumption process into a great movie is a skill that so few people have.

And I’ll tell you, because it’s so specific, and it’s such a difficult skill, the notion that everybody is sort of walking around born with it is insane. We do walk around being born with an ability to like or dislike a movie. That’s the point. We’re the audience of the movie. But we’re not the audience of the screenplay. I would no rather be interested in most people’s opinions of blueprints as opposed to a building than I would most people’s group think on a screenplay in anticipation that that would somehow forestall problems in production. It will not.

**John:** And the argument that, “Well, we’re going to shoot scenes from it and that’s going to help us know whether people are going to like it” — no, that’s not going to work at all, because you’re going to shoot scenes with like different actors and with scenes out of context. And people are going to give their feedback on stuff. No. That’s not going to help them.

**Craig:** Of course not. And it’s just a scene. We don’t go to movies for scenes. Every bad movie has a great scene in it. Every one of them. It doesn’t matter.

**John:** So, television networks go through phases where they will shoot presentations rather than shooting a pilot. And so a presentation for people who don’t know — a pilot is a theoretical first episode of a series. So this is what we think the series is. This is going to be the first episode. This launches the show.

A presentation is like a pilot but cut down, so it’s a shorter version. So, if a pilot is a 45-minute, 50-minute piece of film, this is a 20 to 25-minute piece of the show. And they’ll do the shorter versions to save money. And so the idea is that, “Okay, it gives us a sense of what the whole thing is going to feel like without spending all the money for the whole thing.”

The problem is it hasn’t worked out very well for most shows. And I shot a pilot presentation for D.C. and we learned some things, absolutely, but what we mostly learned is that maybe we shouldn’t be making this show, and then when we tried to make the show it was frustrating. And then we had to go back through and like piece in the missing scenes from the pilot to shoot the rest of it. It’s kind of a frustrating mess.

And this feels like trying to shoot presentations.

**Craig:** Sometimes in our desire to save us, save ourselves from pain and woe we create pain and woe. There is — there are too many examples of things that initially seemed glum and turned around to be wonderful. You can’t evaluate something by dipping your foot in the pool. You make it or you don’t.

**John:** Yup. It’s also interesting that you don’t hear many stories of the movies that were disasters that turned out to be great big hits. You keep track of — obviously the ones that become the world class blockbusters, you hear of those, and you hear about the disasters. But the ones where you’re like, “Oh, that first cut was actually dreadful and they just worked, and worked, and worked, and then it turned out really well.” Rarely do you hear about those.

**Craig:** I’ve heard about them. [laughs] And it’s very common, frankly, in comedy because comedy is so reliant on a sense of trust in the filmmakers that they’re funny. So, when you run a first cut of a movie and half the jokes aren’t funny, the whole thing collapses. Airplane, the first preview of Airplane was a disaster. The first preview of Naked Gun was a disaster.

I remember talking to David, and Jerry, and Jim about it. They were just aghast. And they thought their careers were over and they didn’t know what they were doing. And then you just edit and take out the stuff that doesn’t work and suddenly they become two of the funniest movies of all time.

**John:** Yeah. When I say that you don’t hear about them, I think in popular culture you don’t hear about them. We hear about them because we are involved with the same filmmakers.

So, the first cut of Go I did want to kill myself. It was just absolutely — I was just praying that maybe they can never release this movie. Because at that point I was starting to get hired for things based on my script, and I thought if people see this movie I’m done. I’m dead for it. And it’s never going to work.

And then we just went back and we cut. We recut, we did some reshooting, and suddenly all of the stuff that wasn’t working fell out and the stuff that was working was better. And it was good.

$3,000, which was the movie that became Pretty Woman, is another situation with an incredibly difficult production and then sort of the opposite situation. I think they had an incredibly good test screening and people were like, “Oh, this movie is really funny.” And they’re like, “Oh, that’s right. We made a comedy.” And then it becomes this thing where now everybody is like, “Well of course, it was Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, how could it go wrong?” But she was nobody. He was a risk.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. I mean, the one that always comes to mind in terms of an audience hearing bad things is Titanic. There had been just enormous amount of buzz that Titanic was becoming the world’s most expensive movie, and it was difficult production.

**John:** Fishtar.

**Craig:** Well, Ishtar, and that didn’t happen.

**John:** I know. But they called it Fishtar.

**Craig:** Exactly. I’m sorry. Yes, you’re right. They called Titanic “Fishtar.” So, I mean, that tells you a lot. And you know what’s funny? I was talking about Waterworld today with somebody because we all think of Waterworld negatively because there had been so much bad publicity leading up to its release about how expensive it was and how the star and the director were at war, which is true.

The movie actually made money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know, every now and then we — every now and then it happens, but you’re right. It’s fairly rare. Usually bad process leads to bad movie, and vice versa.

**John:** So, the last panel we’ll talk about today which we did not attend is called The Throw. “Terry Rossio will lead a presentation on the Throw, otherwise known as the transition between scenes. He will discuss very practical, actual writing techniques, and show film clips to demonstrate good and bad throws. When shooting scenes and working with a director a lot of thought goes into the transition between from one scene to another, generally ending the scene is harder than starting one. And it is ideal for transitions to be seamless and logical. Take part in this journey exploring numerous types of throws and how to implement them in your own script.”

So, have you heard of this called a “throw” before, or is that something he made up?

**Craig:** I have never heard that called “the throw” before, I just call it “transition.”

**John:** “Transition.” I like it as an idea. Terry is a smart guy and he clearly has an interest in sort of sharing what he knows, which I’ve always respected that about him.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But I thought, you know, without knowing anything about what he actually talked about, I want to sort of speculate and sort of reverse engineer what he might have talked about.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So, I would agree with the thesis that how scenes end is in many ways as important as how scenes begin. And a problem that I notice in many new writers’ scripts is they have a hard time conserving energy across a cut.

Really and honestly, when screenwriting is working well every time you cut you should be gaining some energy from the cut. You’re taking the energy that you had going into the scene, and the fact that there is a cut is giving you a little extra momentum going into the next scene that sort of keeps building your energy.

When I read newer screenwriter’s scripts, too often I feel like I’m reading a play where characters are entering and exiting. And there is sort of like there is a ramp up to action and then there is action, there’s conversation, and then there is a ramp down, a sort of decrescendo as it goes in. You sort of feel like the lights would fade and the lights would come back up on the next thing. That’s not how movies work. And movies have the ability to have blunt cuts from one thing to another.

And figuring out where the right place to jump out of scene into the scene is crucial. So, some things that came to mind for me in terms of how I tend to look at getting out of a scene is trying to answer a question across a cut. So, the horrible example you shouldn’t try to do is, “Well then, who could have murdered him?” And then you cut to the guy with the knife standing there.

Or, “But who is Mrs. Dalloway?” And you cut to Mrs. Dalloway. But, more often it’s that you are asking a question that can sort of be answered in a very general sense by the next thing you’re cutting to. So, “How long will it take us to get to Vegas?” And then we’re on the road to Vegas. The fact that you’re cutting to the next thing is telling you that you’re looking for the answer to that question.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m very specific about my transitions. And I was glad to see that Terry did this, because I think frankly the reason most transitional moments in early screenplays are bad is because they are not transitional moments at all. That the screenwriters don’t even think in terms of transition. But ideally when you’re sitting in a movie theater you don’t notice that you’ve even transitioned per se; the idea that it’s the next scene isn’t something I want you to think about any more than I want you to think about the reel change mark.

I just want you to be in the story. And moving through the time that I’m creating with my intention and purpose, not thinking, “Oh, okay, that’s over. This begins.”

Obviously music across scenes helps a lot in that way. We’re always using music to pre-lap, and drift into the next scene to kind of create a sense of narrative continuity. But I like transitions to be alive in the scene. I like to use noise. I like to use the environment.

Sometimes two scenes have nothing to do with each other and so part of what you do is accentuate how jarring they are with each other by having a train go [TRAIN NOISE], just to startle you into the fact that you’ve shifted. You’re always looking to just feel like you’re not boring. You know, a boring transition is one in which one scene ends and another one politely begins.

**John:** The terms you’re using and sort of what you’re describing, it feels like you’re talking about things you would do at the Avid, and that it’s sort of the sound and shots and things like that. But it honestly does translate back down to how you’re writing on the page, which is if you’re ending on a quiet moment and then you cut into a train barrels down the tracks, that’s energy.

**Craig:** Right. And I do like those things. I write them all in. And, oh, here John, do you feel umbrage coming? Because it’s about to come.

**John:** Go. Umbrage up.

**Craig:** Are you ready? There’s this thing that some screenwriter guru baloney types talk about that makes me crazy. And it’s this deal that screenwriters shouldn’t be directing the movie. We shouldn’t write “we see,” or talk about where the camera is, or create noise. That is insane.

Our job is to make a document that reads in such a way that the reader sees a movie and hears a movie in their head. We’re not directing the movie through the script. We are directing our intention through the script. Frankly, movies would be better if directors — a lot of whom do this, but some just don’t — actually looked for the clues that the screenwriter had put in to manage those transitions.

But we must write that way. Anybody who tells you, “Dear podcast listener at home, don’t direct your script.” Of course, don’t be obnoxious about it, but if you have a moment that means something to you, put it in. Put it in and make those moments interesting.

The worst thing you can do is be boring. That should be the most fearful outcome for you.

Umbrage over.

**John:** Yes. It is a screenwriter’s goal to evoke the experience of watching and sitting in a theater which just 12-point Courier on the page. That’s a very difficult thing to do. But, that’s why you’re a writer. And it’s writing the same way that a novelist is writing in some cases where you’re creating a universe with just your words. And part of that universe is what it feels like and what it sounds like.

And even though you don’t have the ability to describe tastes and textures and things like that, you should almost kind of feel like you’re in that world. The most flattering thing I’ve ever heard someone say about my work, I think it was like, “Oh, I really loved watching that. Oh, no, I guess I just read it, but it felt like I’d seen it.” And that’s what you want.

You want the experience of, like, “Did I read that or did I watch it?” And it should be equally vivid because I’ve created those images in your head and I’ve made this character seem alive to you in those moments.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So other sort of simple techniques to look for is — I don’t want to say exit line too loudly because that’s sort of hacky, but look for what is the last line somebody says before the cut. And there can be cases where that’s going to be a joke, and that joke will help propel you to the next scene. And if it’s done right, that’s fantastic. There will be cases where it won’t be the joke line, it will be the line that comes after the joke that helps get you to the thing. Or you’ll put an extra little layer on it.

But looking for what is the last thing that said that’s going to get you to that next moment. Now, someone is going to say, “Well, I sat down at the Avid and you always end up cutting — you never end up doing sort of what you had on the page there anyway. You end up cutting out of scenes early or you do other stuff.”

Well, fine, you do other stuff, but you have to have a plan for how you think you’re going to get out of this scene and in this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I tend avoid orchestrating elaborate transitions on the page for precisely that reason. Transitions that are elaborate really then become tricks that everybody needs to work on in production to perfect and make happen. And you’re doing it with the hope that it will be just a super awesome transition.

But, then again, you also know in the back of your head, having made a bunch of movies, a lot of times you find that shorter is better, and there is a quicker and easier transition. So, I tend to write transitions that are actually very low key in terms of producibility. Very simple things to do.

Sometimes I also think a transition that might indicate something, even if the scene starts dryly from the next scene. Let’s say you and I are in a car. We’re talking. And you’re saying, “We have to go see mom. She’s not doing great.” And I say, “Oh, okay. I’m sure she’s fine, you know. I’m sure she’s fine.” And then our car just wipes through frame, and then we see a coffee cup. You know? And then somebody, and there’s sugar going in the coffee cup. Sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar, sugar. And then we pull back and we see an old lady just pouring sugar into a coffee cup. Way too much sugar for her. And she’s big. She’s a big lady.

And then she puts the sugar down. And then we realize that she’s sitting in a food court now. And everybody is busy with their families and she’s alone at her table like kind of a weirdo bag lady. That’s a transition to me.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** And it’s small, but I just think that if you can, in the moment of starting the scene you can actually do the work of the scene, you’re already halfway done.

**John:** Yeah. So much of how you’re coming out of scene is based on where you think you’re coming into the next scene. And so by setting up and establishing that shot with a coffee cup and all the sugars, you’re giving yourself a nice way into that.

The other thing you’re doing there is by mentioning the mother you are — you put that in our head that the mother is a character that we’re going to be looking for. And so when we see her, like, we’re excited to see her.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In Go, an example is Claire is sitting with Gaines in his apartment, and she keeps getting texts from Ronna. So, naturally the next thing we’re going to cut to is Ronna. And we’re ready to see her again because we’ve been reminded that she’s in this world and we’re curious about where she’s at and why she’s not back in the apartment.

**Craig:** Yeah. You see, one of the nice things about working on transitions — and again it’s why I was very happy when I saw that Terry was doing this, because it’s important; I think it’s important for screenwriters to see this — is that it also starts to remove bad options from you.

For instance, I know that I want to make a point about a character in this scene, so I guess they could be talking to somebody or somebody could be talking about them, or maybe they’re writing it — well, how about no more words. So, let’s just put the words away for a second and just describe in a moment, in a transitional moment what it is I want to get across. And then the scene really is about making me feel it with her.

Now, the scene isn’t about information. The scene is about emotion. Am I connecting with her? Is she making me angry? Is she making me sad? Much more interesting and fun to write that than “I live alone, don’t you understand sir? I live alone! I can’t afford this.” Ugh. Gun shot.

**John:** The last thing I’ll say on transitions is I’ve described it to other people and I didn’t have good words for it. And I think I was reaching for something kind of like a “throw,” but I always describe that the cut out of a scene sort of needs to slant forward. It needs to sort of fall into the next scene. And too often they just feel like blunt cuts, like it’s just like a stack of scenes. Like, “There’s that scene, and now there’s that scene.”

And it’s what we talked about in the Austin Film Festival podcast where scenes need to be connected with a “and because of that,” rather than an “and.” It’s like, you know, it’s the “so” that gets you to the next thing rather than an “and.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Very much so.

**John:** And it’s building.

**Craig:** If you end a scene in such a way that all the characters can sort of sigh and go, “Okay, that’s…well, I guess we said.” Why even — just go. Just leave the theater.

**John:** In grammatical terms, most scenes probably shouldn’t end with periods. They should end with some sort of punctuation mark that lets you continue the sentence into the next scene. So, some double dashes, some commas, some other stuff.

And even on the page, that’s why sometimes you don’t end up completing a sentence at the end of scene. You let it bleed into the next thing. You might bleed across the cut in a sentence. I’ll do that all the time.

**Craig:** And think about size. It’s a funny thing to say, but when I end a scene and when I begin, for the following scene on that transitional moment, I like to change the size of whatever it is I’m doing. If I’m looking at a face I want to look at park. If I’m looking at a park, I want to look at a small pin. I like changing sizes.

I think that’s another helpful way to kind of not make you feel like you’re just lost in a stack of scenes.

**John:** If you’re coming off a 1.5 page scene which is two characters talking sitting down, your next scene should not be two characters talking sitting down.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** You want somebody running through the scene on fire if possible.

**Craig:** Exactly. Or you want a jet plane from the ground, you know. I mean, look at the movies you like and I guarantee you will see very few scenes that move from the same size to the same size.

**John:** And sometimes those are just those one-eighth of a page, like “Tires screech as a plane lands at JFK.” And it’s like, “Well why is that there?” Because you need to change the energy, because you just came from this thing — you need the jolt of that to get you into the next thing.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, that was our Austin Film Festival that didn’t happen. But it was fun to sort of talk through some other extra panels.

**Craig:** Alt-universe Austin in which I didn’t get drunk and wasn’t hung-over for our live podcast.

**John:** You smoked a lot of cigars there, too, I noticed.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, it happens in Austin. You know, apparently what happens in Austin doesn’t stay in Austin. Apparently it ends up on a podcast.

**John:** [laughs] It gets out. I would say this was my most fun Austin podcast ever though, Austin Film Festival ever in that I talked with a lot more people than I ever talked with before in terms of sort of writing peers and hung out with more people. And it was just really fun. It was a good time.

**Craig:** It’s a great time. I try and balance my time there between friends I haven’t seen for awhile who are there with me and then just interacting with people. And I mentioned as much in the live podcast, the fact that we do this podcast now, people were walking up to me and saying thank you for this and we are very welcome. We love doing it.

And if you guys in Austin weren’t there appreciating it then it would be sad for us and we would just stop.

**John:** Yes. Craig, I know you’re really busy so do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do. No, I don’t; I take it back. [laughs] I don’t. I do, but I can’t talk about it. It’s in my head. Oh my god, it’s so cool.

**John:** So maybe by the time I’m done with mine you’ll have the words to express it.

So, my One Cool Thing this week is actually very appropriate for this sort of alternate universe Austin in that it’s called What If. And it’s this great website that is a physicist who goes through and answers questions about these hypothetical situations. And so he’ll actually do the math to tell you what would really happen if you were to do these things.

So, two example things I read recently. What if you exploded a nuclear bomb at the bottom of the Marianas Trench?

**Craig:** Hmm?

**John:** Yeah, it was like, “Oh, what would that do? Would it cause an earthquake? How bad would that be?”

**Craig:** Can I guess?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** If you exploded a large nuclear device at the bottom of Marianas Trench I suspect nothing would happen.

**John:** Very little happens. Because as powerful as a nuclear bomb is, the Marianas Trench is very, very big. And so it would create a giant bubble, but it wouldn’t cause a tidal wave. Because the disturbance is right there.

**Craig:** It’s so deep that the force that — the sideways and upwards force would just be dissipated underneath the weight of the Pacific.

**John:** Yeah.

Another question. If every person on earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time would it change color?

**Craig:** I’m sorry, if every person on the earth aimed a laser pointer at the moon at the same time would it change color?

**John:** Yeah. Would it change color — the color of the laser pointer?

**Craig:** I’m going to say no, it would not.

**John:** It would not. And so he goes through sort of some of the challenges there. At any given time not that many people on earth can actually see the moon, so that becomes a challenge.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But the issue is like laser pointers, even the powerful ones, they’re pretty powerful, but they’re not powerful enough to overcome the moon’s brightness or darkness which is the sun shining on it.

So, then he sort of amps up in a very good screenwriter way, it’s like, “Well what if we had a — well, we need lasers big enough to actually aim at the moon and light up the dark side of the moon. So, if it is a crescent moon then you want to light up the dark side of the moon, the part that is not lit right now.”

And the laser that would be powerful enough to make that glow would also incinerate the earth. The atmosphere would catch fire.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, we shouldn’t do it.

**John:** No. We couldn’t also generate enough energy to —

**Craig:** It’s funny. I remember years ago I worked on a script at Dimension called The Spy Next Door. And I think eventually they made a movie called The Spy Next Door that was a different company and a different script. And it was sort of a James Bond sort of comedy James Bond thing. And I needed a villain. And I always believe that your villain has to be a real villain with a real plan.

And I love Bond movies and I was trying to think of a good Bond plan. And for a while I was toying with the idea of blowing up the moon.

**John:** I had a whole thing where I wanted to blow up the moon. Everyone wants to destroy the moon. The moon sucks.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everyone wants to blow up the moon. You know, here’s the thing. I found a book on this pre-internet days when you couldn’t do this sort of thing. And I had to find a book. And there was actually a book called What If You Blew Up the Moon? [laughs] I think that’s what it was called.

And the whole book was just chapters of, “Okay, well what if we made the moon smaller? What if we made it bigger, what would happen? What if we blew it up? What if it crashed on earth?” And basically the deal is this: If you change the moon at all, we all die. You make it bigger, smaller, blow it up, move it backwards — it’s like everything just goes kablooey. So, I couldn’t do that one, so I came up with another one which I thought was actually kind of interesting.

My idea was that the villain found evidence of a large fault running underneath the United States in a place where we weren’t familiar. It’s a little bit like the New Madrid Fault, which they say famously could lead to a huge earthquake. And that back in the ’60s, the Soviets discovering this put a large nuclear device in that fault with the idea that they were losing the Arms Race and if they were attacked that would be their Doomsday device in retaliation and America would split apart.

And then they sort of forgot it, you know. [laughs] And so now it’s 1998, or whenever I wrote this movie, and someone has figured out that it’s still there, and they have the codes and they need another code. And if they do then they can blow up — Blow Up America!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of fun.

**John:** Yeah. I like it. It’s tough to find — a villain plot for a comedy is tough because an apocalyptic villain comedy plot is challenging because it has to be absurd yet have stakes so that it actually means something.

**Craig:** Yeah, unless you’re doing a spoof, you know, like Dr. Evil’s plan was ridiculous because he was spoofing the ridiculousness of James Bond’s villains who already larger than life. So, you have these levels of villains. You have Dr. Evil which is the most ridiculous. Then you have Donald Pleasence from, I think, You Only Live Twice, which is also quite ridiculous, [laughs], because he lives in a volcano.

But, serious ridiculous, you know. And then underneath that you have your, I guess, your Bourne Identity style villains and so forth.

**John:** Yeah. But I’m trying to think of who the villain could be in a comedy. That can be challenging, too. An apocalyptic comedy villain is a sort of unique set of requirements.

**Craig:** Yeah. I always like the villain in Naked Gun. Ricardo Montalban’s deal was that he was basically going to charge people to use — he was a hit man broker. So, he figured out a way to hypnotize famous people who have access to kill other famous people and charge money for it.

It’s ridiculous but he was quite serious about it.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a good choice. It offers comedy potential. It’s threatening enough that there are actually enough stakes that you could go through.

So, Phineas and Ferb, Doofenshmirtz often has the most absurd kind of things where like he’s going to destroy all the banjos in the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s interesting when they sort of talk about like evil and it’s like, “Well, yeah it’s evil.” It’s actually sort of like you would be really annoying but you’re not actually evil.

**Craig:** Doofenshmirtz Annoying Incorporated.

**John:** I like it.

Craig, did you think of anything more or are we all done?

**Craig:** Are you kidding? I could go for hours.

**John:** You could go for hours. But you can’t go for hours because you have to work tonight.

**Craig:** No, tonight we’re off.

**John:** Oh, this is your night off.

**Craig:** We’re on a weird schedule. So, tonight I’m off, but now what do I do? And, okay, you know where I am, so there’s plenty to do. [laughs] The thing is I really don’t want to do anything. So, I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do a crossword puzzle.

**John:** Crossword puzzles are good. All right, Craig, thank you so much for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir, and I’ll see you next time.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.