Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/gorilla-city-and-the-kingdom-of-toads).

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

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

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

**Craig:** I’m not too bad. Hanging in there. How about yourself, sir?

**John:** I’m doing really well. It’s a beautiful afternoon.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re finally — it looks like we’re starting to peak out of the 100 degree misery.

**John:** This weekend — this last weekend was super hot. I guess by the time you’re hearing this podcast it was two weekends ago, but it was super, super hot. We were down at the San Diego Zoo, and the San Diego Zoo is amazing, but when it’s 102 degrees no zoo is amazing enough to make you really want to stay there.

**Craig:** One day, and maybe it’s today, I’ll talk about how I hate zoos. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Hate. Hate zoos. I’ve hated them since I was a child. We would go to the Bronx Zoo, which is one of the world’s great zoos. Hated it.

**John:** It’s a great zoo. I’ve been there.

**Craig:** Hated it. Hate the LA zoo. Hated the San Diego Zoo. Hate zoos. Don’t get ’em. Mystery to me.

**John:** I like zoos for kids. And, you know, we go to the LA Zoo fairly frequently. And the LA Zoo gets a lot of flack because it’s the hilliest place on earth. Like somehow topographically they managed to put extra hills in places where you wouldn’t think they could actually put a hill.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But once you learn how to manage the LA Zoo and you sort of go deep and then work your way back, it can be a very good zoo. I mean, it gets very hot.

**Craig:** Except for the part where it’s a zoo.

**John:** It is a zoo.

**Craig:** You’re just staring at animals that are staring at you.

**John:** It’s true. You are.

**Craig:** It’s just a zoo.

**John:** The second day in our San Diego trip we got to go to SeaWorld, which was much less educational than I would have gathered — like, it’s not really about the oceans or anything like that. There was no educational outcome. But you get to ride some rides, and my daughter got to feed some dolphins. So, it was a good time.

**Craig:** See, SeaWorld entertains you. They’ve taught dolphins to do things, not just look at you. [laughs] That’s why I don’t like zoos; they’re just looking at you.

**John:** I understand your frustration.

**Craig:** You get it?

**John:** I get it. I totally get it.

Craig, I have actual news. I sold a TV show.

**Craig:** I saw that. Congratulations.

**John:** Thank you. So, after talking about television and the wonderland that is television on this podcast endlessly it’s like, you know what, I’ll just do it.

And so I wasn’t going to do it at all this season, but then I had lunch with Josh Friedman, who is a friend and a neighbor, and he said, “You know, if you ever want to do a show that you would write the show and I could take over the show, that could be great.” And I was like, “Well, you know what? That actually could be great.”

And so by the end of the lunch I sort of knew what that show was, and we went and pitched it. And so I thought I would take just a little second to describe what television is like for that process, because it’s a lot different than what happens in features.

So, for a TV show, Josh and I talked and figured out what the show would be. Josh already had an overall deal with 20th Century Fox Television. And that is considered the studio for a show. And so his deal was there, so if I wanted Josh to be able to take over the show I obviously had to do it with Fox, which was fine because I’d already done a show with Fox once before. They’re good people. They’re smart.

**Craig:** Oh, sorry, I sneezed. I’m not…

**John:** You just totally sneezed in my story.

**Craig:** Well, because I’m allergic to it. [laughs] Something about it. I think because you said Fox and suddenly I went into anaphylactic shock.

**John:** Oh, yeah, I get it. That’s a common reaction among a lot of writers. Although I would say 20th Television, that part of Fox, is kind of generally well liked.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s the movie-studio-Fox people have big aversions to. And that’s changing, too — who knows.

**Craig:** And perhaps fewer issues with ongoing. There was a little news there. But I don’t mean to hijack your story.

**John:** That’s fine. So, we had to go in to talk to Fox. The only place I could do the show with Josh was at Fox. And Fox was the right choice for it anyway. So, we went in, you describe it to one of the executives, who likes it a lot. The other executive was out of town, so we had to go back in two weeks later and describe it to her.

And that pitch is very much like the movie pitch, except that where in a movie pitch you’re just describing, “Well, this is what happens during the course of this arc of this movie,” that starts the conversation. And then there’s like, “That sounds great.” And there’s a little pause. And then you have to describe where the show goes from there.

And that’s the huge difference between TV and movies is that you’re looking at sort of, what is the ongoing week-to-week? What is the engine of the show going to be? Where is it taking us over the course of a season, or five seasons? And that was fantastic and fun. I actually really enjoyed it.

So, once you have a good meeting at a studio, the studio makes a deal and they say, “We would love for you to write this show. And if we can get a network to sign onto the show, hooray, great, and we’ll make the show.” And so they then set up meetings with the networks that they feel are appropriate. So, I went out and we pitched it to Fox, the television network, ABC, and NBC. And so you go in, you sit in those rooms, and you’re going into those rooms not just as you — me and Josh — but also with somebody from 20th, or several people from 20th there to describe their interest in the show and what they see. And so the rooms are just a lot bigger than they usually tend to be in features, because it’s not just you-the-writer talking to the studio executive, or you talking to a director. There are a lot of people involved.

And what’s weird is, everyone — there’s a season for it. And so this is the time of year where you pitch one-hour dramas. And so every place we went for a meeting there were other writers there waiting to have their meetings. And so you’re all sort of — it’s like you’re going in to audition. I mean, you’re very much, like you are lining up. They’re waiting. “Okay, you’ve got the 2:20. Someone else has the 2:40.”

And so you see the same people again and again. So, I saw Liz Brixius at NBC right before she sold her show. There was this group of 10 writers who were doing this — they weren’t all writers — but there was this big giant posse of 10 people who were going in for a meeting for this Bruckheimer military comedy that they ended up selling, so good for them. But it was just so weird to see how much bigger the rooms are when you’re pitching a TV show.

**Craig:** It’s also interesting, I think people don’t get this, and I almost don’t get it in a weird way. So, there’s a big company, a big Fox company that Rupert Murdoch owns. And there’s a part of it that produces television shows. And then there’s a part of it that airs television shows. And you’d think, well, if the 20th Century Fox Television wants to spend the money to produce the television, wouldn’t they just then have Fox Broadcasting air the show?

And the answer is, no. [laughs] They actually sort of look at all the networks equally because they want the network that’s going to give them the best time slot and theoretically pay the highest licensing fee per episode so that they recoup their money faster and then go into profit faster.

**John:** Yeah. I think in the best of all possible worlds, if you had a show that you felt was the right show for you to make and the right show for that network to air, that’s lovely and great and everyone can be sort of in synch on things. But oftentimes that’s not the case. And so a really great new show this next season is The Mindy Project, which is Mindy Kaling from The Office. And so that was an NBC/Universal show, but NBC decided it wasn’t the right kind of show for them, so they took it to Fox. So, it’s NBC making a show for Fox. Fox is making a show for ABC. That’s okay and it’s good.

And I think there have been times where it has contracted a little bit and where studios would only develop for themselves, for like their sister network. But also all those executives end up moving around from network to network and place to place. And so the people that you’re pitching to at one of these networks may have already worked for one of these studios. So, everyone has these relationships anyway. So, it’s less — it’s not that it’s not competitive, but it’s less insular than you think.

**Craig:** Yeah. It used to be we had these rules called the Fin-Syn Rules, or Financial Syndication Rules. And they basically said that if you produced television shows you couldn’t be part of the same company that aired them over the public airways. And they got rid of those rules; people were concerned that they were going to essentially be anti-competitive so that suddenly if you were developing something for Fox Television, that Fox Television really wouldn’t make much of an effort to sell it anywhere else. They would just make a sweetheart deal with the Fox Network.

It turns out that’s not really the case. However, where writers have run into trouble with this arrangement is in syndication, where the company — if the show is a hit — the producing company, there have been a number of cases where it appears that they have made sweetheart deals with their own networks, or their own outlets to put the shows out there. So, a show on 20th Century Fox suddenly sells itself the syndication rights to run on FX.

**John:** The case you’re citing is really X-Files, which was Fox sold the rights to reruns of The X-Files to FX. And there was a question of whether they were selling it for the right price.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. And I remember that I think Bochco sort of engaged in the first major lawsuit. I’m not sure which of his series he was litigating on, but basically he was arguing, “Look, you didn’t really take this out and find the proper market price for it. You made a sweetheart deal with another division of this large company. And since my profits are tied directly to what you guys make in syndication, you’ve reduced the amount of money I will be getting off the show.”

And all those things always get settled, but that has been where the elimination of Fin-Syn seems to have hurt the most.

**John:** Now, these are all luxury problems, because this isn’t going to happen unless you have 80 or 100 episodes of your show that you get to sell into syndication. So, where I’m at in the process right now is there is a deal for a pilot script. And if they like the pilot script they will shoot a pilot. And if they like the pilot they can shoot a series. But the number of projects that are at my stage versus the number of projects that become actually series, well, there is a tremendous drop off.

So, I approach this with full optimism, but I’m not counting on my syndication deal kicking in quite yet.

**Craig:** Not yet.

**John:** Not yet.

**Craig:** But you’re partnered with a good guy. Josh definitely knows television, no question. So, I’m looking forward to it.

**John:** Josh did The Sarah Connor Chronicles, which I loved. So, he’s been great. Cool.

Craig, I don’t know if you’ve been checking on iTunes, but people keep leaving nice reviews for us on iTunes.

**Craig:** Oh, good. I don’t check it. But are there any bad ones? [laughs]

**John:** Honestly they’ve all been really good. And so one of them I wanted to flag because it was more detailed than some of the reviews.

I should say: Please do leave reviews on iTunes, because it actually does help a lot, because we’d love to move a little bit higher in the iTunes ranking. We’re in the 50s right now, and we could go higher than that.

But here’s one that someone wrote recently — it says: “At first, I found the podcast to be a little annoying. While John tried to make the podcast informative, Craig seemed to be using it as pulpit to express his personal pet peeves.”

**Craig:** True.

**John:** “I’ve since grown to like Craig. And while sometimes his judgment is too quick, he is mostly good-hearted and has a lot to offer. Even his opinions I disagree with I still find educational. So, my suggestion is if you feel put off at first, stick with it, Craig will grow on you. He’s a good-hearted guy, even though he may not seem it at first.”

**Craig:** That’s absolutely right. My wife can confirm that. Everybody in my life can confirm that. So, I know I’m an acquired taste. And I know that sometimes I come off abrasive, grumpy, cranky pants, because I am. I am actually an abrasive, grump, cranky pants guy. That’s who I am. Can’t help it. But it is really from a good, decent place. I do very much want to help.

More than anything I get frustrated watching people make mistakes I’ve made when, you know, it’s like you walk into a restaurant and you slip on a wet, soapy floor and you land on your ass. And you sit down at your table in pain and you see somebody else walking in and you just want to say, “Oh, watch out for the wet, soapy floor there, buddy.” And Hollywood is a big, wet, soapy floor.

**John:** You’re basically that plastic triangle sign that they stick down there when they mop the floors.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s right. I am Cuidado Piso Mojado.

**John:** What I love most about those triangle signs is the way they use them to fan the floor afterwards. Have you ever seen that where they mop it up and they use that as a fan to air dry it faster.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Probably actually works. God bless it.

This segues really nicely into our first question today which comes from Dan in Calgary. He writes: “I’ve been a regular listener and fan of your podcast since its inception and am curious about how you and Craig met and how you came to agreement on the podcast. To the best of my knowledge the two of you haven’t collaborated on any projects prior to the podcast. But, really, what do I know?”

So, going back to our history, I think I first met you in reference to really the website, clearly. You were going to launch your website. But we didn’t really work together on anything until the Fox writers deal. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. We had the same agent at the time. And I called you up just for website advice. That was 11 years ago, roughly. And, oh no, 7 years ago, sorry; because it was my daughter was about to be born, that’s what it was. It was about 7 years ago.

And we just sort of — we’re screenwriters. We run vaguely in the same circles. And then when John Wells did his Warner Bros. deal I got the idea that maybe we could do the same thing and you were my first call.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig and I partnered together. We Shanghaied a bunch of other screenwriters into this little pack and we went around and pitched this concept of this batch of 10 screenwriters writing spec scripts for a studio, and Fox was the one who bit. And after much, much detailed hand-wringing and negotiation we made that Fox deal happen.

And maybe one of those movies will get made some day.

**Craig:** Maybe one of them will get made someday. I have no problem looking at it as a marathon. Hopefully they don’t have a problem looking at it as a marathon. But that’s how we got to know each other. And then I kind of let my blog drift off because I had essentially run out of things to type. And you just called me up one day and said, “Hey, do you want to do a podcast?” [laughs] That was pretty much it. And I said, “Sure.”

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And that was a year ago.

**John:** A year ago.

**Craig:** A year of podcasting.

**John:** Good stuff. Our second question of the day, before we get to the meat of our show, is from Kevin in New York City. He writes: “You mentioned a lot last podcast a ‘weekly rate’ for writing work. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about what a writer is expected to do or not do if coming in only for a week or two.”

**Craig:** Good question.

**John:** So, this is a definition of “what is a weekly.” And a weekly is when you are brought into a screenwriting job, it’s a thing that I think only really happens in feature screenwriting, to do a specific bit of work, usually for a movie that’s going to go into production really soon or is already in production.

Weeklies only really happen for screenwriters who, I think, are produced, who a studio or producers and directors have some faith in that they can do the work that needs to be done and won’t break anything. And will make things better and make life happier and smoother for everyone else involved.

So, my first weekly was — God, I don’t know. It was many, many years ago, and I’m trying to think what it even was on. When did you start doing weeklies, or start doing that kind of work?

**Craig:** I can’t remember. I can’t remember the first one. All I know is they pop up occasionally, you know, a couple times a year, maybe three times a year. And typically — I mean, when we talk about weeklies, typically what we are talking about are production weeklies. Usually the movie has been green lit and so there’s quite a bit of pressure to suddenly fix some things.

And the studio will call you and say, “Listen, we need some work. We need some character help here. We need the first act to make a little bit more sense. Or we need to fix this ending. Take a look. Would you be willing to come on for a week or two and handle this?”

And generally you are paid quite well for those one or two weeks because it is high pressure writing. The movie is getting made. There is a lot of money that’s on the line. And you are asked to write very efficiently, very quickly, and very surgically. Again, these are, sort of the typical weeklies I think of, you’re talking not just to the studio or to an executive, you’re talking with the producer of the movie and you’re talking to the director.

And you are not only kind of cutting in between the things that are good to just get the stuff out that’s bad and put new things in that are good, but you’re also serving as a clearinghouse, frankly, half the time for disputes between the various parties, and sort of saying as a neutral third party observer, “Here, I think this is the way to go,” or “That’s the way to go.”

And you don’t have a tremendous amount of emotion invested. It actually can be a very good thing for a movie to have somebody come in and do a couple of weeks like that. They used to be far more common because they used to make far more movies.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But they still happen. I do them every now and again.

**John:** Yeah. I always say the job of a screenwriter in a weekly is you’re carrying the football for awhile and you are making sure that everything is sort of safely moving on to where it needs to go to next. And so an example is I worked on the movie Hancock, back when it was called Tonight, He Comes. And at that point you had Will Smith attached. You had Sony eager to make the movie. You had Pete Berg attached to direct it. You had Michael Mann producing it. Akiva Goldsman. You had — there were tremendous number of smart and powerful people involved in the movie.

And so I was going to come in to do just a very surgical bit of work on the third act. And one of the first things I had to go in and tell them is, like, “I think the script is fantastic. I think it’s great. I think there’s this little tiny thing that’s not working right, but please don’t think that the rest of the movie isn’t working because you’ve read it 1,000 times. But I’ve just read it once and I love it. And I really want you to make this movie. And this is how I think you can make this one section that I know is bumbling for you make sense in the way the rest of the movie works.”

Part of the reason they would give me that job versus another writer who might be able to write as well as me but didn’t have the experience is I had to go in and meet at Will Smith’s house with Michael Mann, and Pete Berg, and Akiva Goldsman. And usually there is one 800-pound gorilla, but this was just Gorilla City. And so they needed somebody who could sort of survive Gorilla City. And that’s a large part of your job in weekly is doing that. So that was a job where…

**Craig:** Well, you see, again, I hate zoos.

**John:** Oh, so that’s why you…

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is part — like I said — part of it is you have to figure out how to navigate between very important people, each of whom seems to have a vote or a veto. And it can be difficult at times. And sometimes they send you to the movie. And you know also in the back of your head that you are not to be seen afterwards, that this is very much hit man work. There’s no credit involved. It’s extremely rare that you would get credit for the work you do on a weekly.

You don’t go into it thinking about credit. You just go into it thinking, “I go in, I take care what I need to take care of, and I’m out.”

**John:** And I take these jobs — when I take them — because it’s great to get paid, but it’s also great to be able to work with filmmakers you want to work with, even if just for a short time, and also that sense of, like, make things a little bit better. Like, you recognize that this is a problem, I know how to solve this problem. I can solve this problem for you. And that movie, I think, will be a little bit better for my having been involved with it.

So, I just want nice things in the world. And so if I can help this movie get over its hurdle, that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s funny. Weekly work is often where you get the most gratitude back. And it shouldn’t be that way, but I understand why it’s that way. To me gratitude should be basically commensurate with effort and quality. And the hardest thing to do is to write a screenplay from scratch. A page one rewrite is also very, very hard. And sometimes you come in on a weekly and it is pretty clear to you what to do. And it is not writing an entire script. It’s fixing this, this, this, and this. And you can do it rather quickly.

And it’s like a magic trick. [laughs] Everybody gives you a lot of love over it. I like that part.

**John:** I do too. And rarely, but sometimes, you’ll break down a weekly down to just a daily, where like I did three days of work on The Rundown. And it was just to take care of some very specific little beats. But I took that job because it was a chance to write dialogue for Christopher Walken. And, like, who does not secretly fanaticize about writing dialogue for Christopher Walken in his sort of strange inflection patterns. And it was great, and it was fun.

And because that was for Pete Berg, and Pete Berg liked what I did, I was on his short list for coming in to do this work on Hancock.

**Craig:** That’s actually a good question. When I do weeklies — I’m just kind of curious what your business practice is. The fee you get for weeklies is quite high. If you were to take eight weeks — like say you typically write a script in eight weeks — you get a fee for that script. If you were to write on a weekly rate for eight weeks, it would be much, much more than that.

**John:** Much, much more than that.

**Craig:** So, you’re getting paid a lot per week. My business practice is to write for seven days per week. I give them seven days per week. And if I don’t use all the week, I prorate it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that what you do?

**John:** Usually it’s more that at the start of each week I’ll tell them, like, “This is what I can do in these days. And these are the days I can hand you these things.” And so I just sort of promise them delivery of this material in this amount of time. So, I’m not sort of not billing them for the days I didn’t work. I’m just saying this is what I can do in this week.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if that’s enough work for you for this week, let’s go ahead and do that. So, you bring up a really good point is that sometimes you are delivering stuff much more quickly than you would in a normal situation. So, like on Iron Man, I was helping out on that. And I was delivering pages every day, because everything was very much in flux and they needed to know that stuff was going to be able to add back up. So, I would happily turn in pages every day in a way that I wouldn’t have been delighted to be doing that if I’d been the principal writer on the movie from the start.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just feel like if you’re on a weekly and you are an A-list writer getting paid an A-list weekly quote, I just feel like you should be respectful. Because I do hear stories sometimes. I always get uncomfortable when I hear a story about a screenwriter that misbehaved because, you know, naturally I just think you’re making us look bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** 99% of the time the studio is misbehaving. I don’t want to engage in moral equivalence, but there are screenwriters that blow it. I mean, they miss their deadlines. They take a weekly rate and they turn in what would probably be two days of work.

**John:** Like they only touch the first ten pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I get so uncomfortable when I hear that stuff.

**John:** That’s not good at all. It doesn’t help anybody. This last year was the first year I ever did, like, it broke down to essentially an hourly, because it was just rewriting the introductory voice over for this one movie. And I knew, like, this is not going to — this is going to take me two hours to do. And so I was like, “Oh, let’s figure that out.”

And, again, at that point it’s essentially just a favor, because I want the movie to be better. I want the movie to have a little bit better shot. And so I did it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never done that. I guess a day is my minimum, but I guess if it picked up. I mean, well, you know, we do things like roundtables.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** I mean, frankly, like you and I did a roundtable together. And you spend what amounts to a day of work on something like that. But you get paid, whatever, $2,500 or something. And that’s really just a friend-of-the-court kind of gesture.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Gesture. Not a “friend of the court jester.”

**John:** Craig, let’s move into our main topic this time, which is Three Page Challenges. So, last week we announced that officially we are going to open it up to people writing in with new entries. And so far 70 new people wrote in with Three Page Challenge entries.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, you’re welcome to, if you feel like sending in your three pages for us to look at on the air, you can go to the show notes for this episode at johnaugust.com/podcast. And so we’re going to be going back to this, not every episode, but a couple times a month we’ll be looking at some of these new entries. And, let’s get right to it. So, we have four that we’re going to take a look at today.

**Craig:** Four!

**John:** Four! And I thought we would start with the Untitled Art Heist Movie by Henry Fosdike & Lloyd Morgan.

**Craig:** Yes, got it.

**John:** All right. So, here’s the synopsis on this movie. We start on black with a voice over by a character named Montana who says, “People still ask how I never get caught. The answer’s simple. Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.”

Then were in the Met, the museum. A ceiling panel falls, glow sticks drop. A lissome woman named Gem drops in. She’s our thief. In a control van nearby we meet a nerd named Fuse. Then a man named Santos parachutes onto the roof of the Met. Gem uses an aerosol can to reveal infrared beams. Santos cuts the alarm. Gem sprints to make it across the room. And that’s the end of our page three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Shall I start?

**John:** You shall start.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I got excited when I read the first line because I thought it was very good. There is this interesting voice over that you just cited there. But then I started to get unexcited.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The first problem I had was that the voice over continued. And I’m not a voice over Nazi. I’m okay with voice over — I have no problem with it. However, the voice over is disconnected. The first thing she says is sort of a thesis statement. “Art is not what you see but what you make others see.” That’s very interesting. The next line is, “There have always been rules. We live by rules. We play by rules.” Well that would be a different essay. And I feel like if you’re going to start off with sort of a declarative theme, stick with it, explain it, transition from it, do something. But there is a real grinding of the gears there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We have an art heist of the kind we have seen many, many, many times before. There is almost nothing unique to this one. You have — first of all, you have a nerd named Fuse. I really have a problem with this. I just don’t understand. I was watching The Italian Job, the remake the other night, and when you meet the mechanic his name is Wrench.

**John:** Ooh.

**Craig:** And I just feel like, why do that? Why? What’s the point? Give them names that aren’t what their job is, like an index card thing. So, I’m not a big fan of things like Fuse as the guy that deals with wires and such. I like that Santos is parachuting down to land on a rooftop, except of course it doesn’t make any sense. If you’re trying to steal from the Met, and you’re parachuting down over Manhattan, I think someone might notice. [laughs] Just guessing.

So, there’s a huge logic problem there. then we go inside where Gem is dealing with the standard trope of the invisible laser beams, although they’re not laser beams. They’re actually infrared beams, which will not illuminate from aerosol cans. They are invisible to the human eye. So, it’s a little bit of a technological glitch there. But, regardless, we get the point. But the real point is we’ve seen that.

We have dialogue like, “I’m in. Backup generator is live in 30 seconds. Move your ass, girl.” Uh…that’s sort of clammy.

**John:** Yeah. Clammy. We also have a countdown…10, 9, 8…5, 4….

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ve got a countdown, and guess what? She’s running towards the thing and sliding under the laser beams. So, you know, it’s not that it’s poorly written. Everything moved. There was good pace to it. It’s just that it was cliché.

**John:** Yeah. This is — actually, I need to preface this by saying I’m not a heist person. I will never write a heist movie. I don’t seek them out. So, it’s not my genre by nature. And part of the reason why I think it’s not my genre is that I always see this scene. I always see some variation of this scene.

To me, my test for like why these were maybe not the first three pages to start your movie is: if we started at the bottom of page 3, I would have filled in everything that happened beforehand. Just, we know what a heist movie is. And so we could start with her cutting the painting out, or whatever she’s going to do next, because I would fill all that stuff in.

You could have showed me the discarded aerosol can and I know everything that happened up to that moment. You could have shown me him cutting his parachute and I would have known that he parachuted onto the roof. Like all that stuff I felt like we were starting too early. And if we started in the middle of the action I might have been more with you.

The other problem I have is the voice over is from the point of view of a character named Montana. But we don’t meet Montana in the course of these pages. And so we don’t know if Montana is a man or a woman. We know nothing about her. I’m guessing it’s a woman, but I don’t know.

So, it felt really weird to have this disembodied, disconnected voice over that wasn’t helpful to me. And also this voice over is happening over black. And that’s one of — it feels kind of fine in a screenplay, but if you actually see that in a movie, that’s really not all that good or interesting just to have a black screen and have a person talking.

I would much rather see something interesting, even in a close up, and here that voice over than just a black screen.

**Craig:** I agree with all of that. I agree with all of that. I actually love heist movies. I think that the fun of heist movies, and this is why I like that first line so much, really is about the beautiful con artistry of it. Heist movies have a way of subverting our expectations. We are watching magicians do a trick. And it’s fun when I don’t know how they did the trick. Ocean’s 11, which is a fantastic screenplay by the great Ted Griffin, has a ton of surprises in it. I had no idea that the video those guys were watching was not the guys actually in the vault. I did not understand until he wanted me to understand that the video that the guards were watching was actually the thieves stealing from a fake vault that they had built on a stage and filmed hours and hours earlier. So smart.

And this has nothing like that. This is really just parachuting and, frankly, I feel like anybody with an aerosol can and a pretty good sprint time could have done what this person did.

**John:** Yeah. So not a huge success for us. I would also challenge, like, Untitled Art Heist Movie. Nothing makes me want to read a script less than something that’s called Untitled Art Heist Movie. Because you’re already setting it up for like, “Well, this is going to be a generic art heist movie,” and the first three pages feel like a generic art heist movie. So, giving us a title might have set our expectations a little bit differently.

**Craig:** I agree with that.

**John:** Because we’re talking about expectations let’s skip to the script by Jeffrey Stoltzfus, the one with Dennis Rudibaker in it.

**Craig:** I’m sorry. What was that name again?

**John:** Stoltzfus.

**Craig:** Stoltzfus.

**John:** I think?

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** I’m just pronouncing it the way I see it. I’m like the Siri that way. I’ll just plow ahead and say it the way I see it.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Here’s a summary of the script. So we open on Denis Rudibaker; he’s brushing his teeth. He’s described as having Ken doll looks. He lives in a nice house. He drives a BMW. Wears a Canali suit. He’s really polite at the bakery. He goes to work at an ad agency called Ad Think where he hands out coffee to his co-workers who love him.

In his office he pulls out a 357 magnum from his desk drawer and jams it in his mouth. That starts a series of flashbacks to a therapist asking him questions about his parents who abandoned him as a child. As a boy he is sent to live with his uncle, a science teacher who didn’t even pull down 30 grand a year. And that’s the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** What did you think?

**John:** Here’s why I wanted to talk about this second is: where our first movie was “this is the standard cliché of what a heist movie is,” this one starts as the standard clichés of like what a Jim Carrey big concept comedy is going to be. It felt like a high concept Jim Carrey comedy. Like, “Well he he’s a really nice guy, but then something crazy happens.” And so I liked subverting all of that happy bounciness but suddenly he jams a gun in his mouth and is going to kill himself.

That I really dug. And it felt — there was a feeling of confidence to it. And there was also smart, I don’t know, there were smart choices about what the writer is revealing about who this guy is. The Ken doll looks. Specifics on the car. His house. His suit. I would love more specifics, but I felt like this guy knew what the world was he was describing and what he wanted to sort of show us.

Then when he gets into the flashbacks, they were pretty well-handled. And our Dennis guy has voice over power, but the writer held off on giving us voice over power until the gun is revealed. So, I kind of dug it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I did like the — obviously there’s a big buy in here when this guy shows up and puts the gun in his mouth, and then we sort of freeze on this moment of potential suicide. And I did like the juxtaposition of it. I have a couple of issues though that I want to point out. And they are these:

Once you put that gun in your mouth, you are asking the audience to recontextualize what came before that, and that’s the point. It’s hard, frankly, to understand what is going on with this guy before that point. So, you’re right, it is a subversion of a kind of thing, of an expectation we have. But in retrospect, once we get the new information, we have to also be able to make sense of what we just saw, and that’s tough.

I’m not quite sure why he’s so cheerfully holding open a door for an old lady other than that the writer is misdirecting us. Similarly, he brings all this coffee to everybody, which I kind of though, okay, yes, in retrospect bringing people gifts is the last thing he does before he kills himself. Sure. His cheery, “Love that tie. Looking good. Have you lost weight?” is the kind of smarmy insincere talk that frankly is incompatible with what he’s about to do.

So, I would just say take a look and make sure that everything plays backwards as well as it does forward.

**John:** I would agree. I do feel like pages 4, 5, 6 would likely help us here and that we might get more clues about sort of what that — the recontextualization of those first three pages might be coming pretty quickly thereafter, but I do share your concern. Because some of the stuff feels so deliberately generic that it may not really make sense with more information that we’re going to get.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the only other issue on the flashbacks is that there’s a glib tone to them that is clashing, frankly, with the fact that he has a gun in his mouth. Either I’m meant to take that seriously or not. So, I like the content of what he’s saying which is, “I was the children of inattentive salespeople who abandoned me.” That is interesting content — “and who I ended up with” is interesting content. The glib tone is confusing me. I don’t know if this guy is really killing himself now. Am I supposed to care that he’s killing himself? Because he seems to be making time to be clever.

So, I wasn’t quite sure about that. And, lastly, he writes when his parents abandoned him, “One day they never came home. Didn’t even leave the door unlocked. I spent two days on that porch before somebody noticed.” I don’t believe that.

**John:** Yeah. It feels very, very arch. But I think this may be the kind of movie where that actually does happen. Where it is that sort of, you know, Coen brothers comedy of a possibility.

**Craig:** It’s possible. And if that’s the case then this tone bears out and is rewarding. So, I’m only flagging these things if it doesn’t quite feel right, because those were the things that hiccupped for me as I read this. But I did want to call out something I really did like, which was the way the writer was defining Dennis as, well, he wasn’t really defining Dennis this way, but the writer himself was saying, “Here is what his house is worth. Here is what his car is worth. Here is what his suit is worth.” So the writer is doing that.

And then at the end Dennis remarks of his Uncle Bert, who he’s sent to live with. “He didn’t even pull down thirty grand a year,” implying that Dennis has been infected with this kind of world view even if he doesn’t realize it.

**John:** Agreed. A few small things to point out, or just one small thing here. Bottom of page 2 is when Dennis starts, so he put the gun in his mouth, cocks the hammer, closes his eyes. Dennis, voice over, “Monday started like any other day. The gun garbles Dennis’s screaming.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** and then it starts going. Like, that — “The gun garbles Dennis’s screaming” I had to reread a couple times. Is he screaming this aloud? Basically like, “Closes his eyes. He makes a primal scream of pain,” or whatever. That description of the screaming didn’t work the way it was placed there.

**Craig:** I agree. It stopped me in the exact same way. And then once I figured out what was going on, I didn’t want it to be happening anyway. I wanted him to put that gun in his mouth and then freeze frame and start hearing voice over. Because the longer he has the gun in his mouth in live action and isn’t pulling the trigger, the less I believe that this is a real suicide. I want the tension of thinking, “Is he going to pull this trigger or not?”

**John:** I would also say, we don’t need the line, “Monday started like any other day.” I’d love to lose it because that feels clammy.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a tip. You don’t need it. I totally agree.

**John:** So, if the first line of voice over is, “I know what you’re thinking, but I’ve already tried the best shrinks and the best pharmaceuticals money can buy,” then we cut to the shrink, then I think we’re in a better place.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree.

**John:** Cool.

From here let’s move onto The Toad Princess by Virginia Lee.

**Craig:** I’m glad you picked that one next.

**John:** Aw. Yeah. So let me give you a quick description of the Toad Princess. So, we open in the courtyard of the Toad Kingdom which is paved with butterscotch discs and peppermint candies; lollipop trees and candy-bar benches line the path to the Queen’s candy-covered throne. It’s a kingdom full of anthropomorphic toads.

We meet a plump wingless fairy named Memory Lane. On her shoulder is the Toad Prince Mortimer. The Queen arrives, announces it is a special night for the presenting The Chosen One. By the light of a magical snow globe they await the arrival of Princess Makenzie, but she never comes. And that’s the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** So, this was — I presume this is meant to be animated. I think?

**John:** It might be? I don’t know. I could see a couple things — it could be like Alice in Wonderland where it’s sort of half and half.

**Craig:** Sort of a hybrid. It was written by Virginia Lee, who I presume is a woman. I will now just go ahead and stomp on third rail. [laughs] This was adorable. It was cute and adorable. And it’s not because Virginia is a woman. It’s because it’s cute and adorable. It’s full of candies, and peppermints, and talking toads, and little 8-year old fairies. Although I didn’t quite understand — she’s 8-years old but she sounds like an adult?

**John:** Yeah. I had issues with the fairy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not quite sure what that’s about. You know, it was — I love the world that was setup. I was really intrigued by the world. A little bit overwritten in the description. You know, “Servant Toads stand at attention, golden eyes twitching with nervous anticipation.” I think you could get away with “golden eyes twitching.” There’s a lot of stuff like that where “her honey colored skin shimmers in the moonlight.” A lot of moonlight and a lot of shimmering.

**John:** Yeah, a little too much poetry.

**Craig:** But you could tell that there’s an interesting and somewhat economical setup here, that we’re dealing with some version of the princess/frog and the princess story. And they need a princess to come and kiss the frog for something important to happen. So, I was interested in that. And I liked the idea that the fairy that they all rely on as their guardian is of questionable ability.

So, you know, and there were good visual things. She holds up a globe to the moonlight and let the kissing begin. It was all nice. I didn’t have any major issues here.

**John:** Yeah. I thought the visual ideas were really nice.

**Craig:** I just want to point out that this actually is cute. And I don’t want to get blamed for it.

**John:** Yeah. Quentin Tarantino could have written these pages and we would still have said they were cute.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So to the degree I understand the concept, I’m intrigued, I like it. It feels like, okay, it’s a retelling of the Princess and the Frog from a new perspective and that feels interesting.

I got really confused with the fairy. Is she a human-looking fairy and not a toad? If she’s the one thing who’s not a toad, then you really need to single that out. You have her listed as being 8-years-old, which is fine if she’s actually 8-years-old, but she’s not acting like she’s 8-years-old, so there’s a mismatch there. It’s just not as clear as it could be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Where I had some issues is how we first get into it. And let me read you the first paragraph and I’ll explain sort of what I’m facing. So:

“EXT. TOAD KINGDOM – COURTYARD – NIGHT
The desert moon shimmers across a beautiful courtyard paved with butterscotch discs and peppermint candies. Lollipop trees and candy-bar benches line the path to The Queen’s candy-covered throne. The courtyard is abuzz with activity. As we swoop down, we notice that we are in a kingdom of TOADS. A grand feast is in the works, and there is not an idle flipper in the place.”

I felt like we were having some camera problems in that — are we going really wide? Where is the helicopter shot here? Is the helicopter shot really wide and then we’re pushing in and getting into the details? It just felt like we were wide, we were close, we were wide, we were close. Give us the bigger picture first and then maybe setup the world a little bit. Are we at a castle? Because right now it’s just “EXT. TOAD KINGDOM – COURTYARD .” It’s like, what is that? Are we at a — there’s a throne, so it’s probably some sort of castle. I want a little bit more world, and then I want those details, and then I want to meet our Memory Lane, our fairy.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought just a little bit more finesse could have sort of landed me as the viewer a little more securely in our world.

**Craig:** That’s a good point. And also I was a little confused by “desert moon,” because it doesn’t seem like it’s a desert. It seems like you don’t build castles in the middle of the desert. It seems actually quite lush. So, I was confused by that. And also I was confused by the fact that there is not an “idle flipper” in the place, since toads don’t have flippers; they have legs.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think it’s worth being specific enough, like how anthropomorphic are these frogs? And do they stand on their back legs? Do they hop around? He’s evidently small enough that he can sit on the fairy’s shoulder. So, I just had some scale and size problems.

You can’t answer all these questions, but I just need to have a sense that there’s a consistent visual idea for how this stuff is going to fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Cool. Great job, Virginia. I was excited to see that. I would want to see that movie.

Last one is a script by Sandy McDougall. And here is our description:

So, we open in a dressing room where Jimmy Alexander, a man in his mid 50s is trying to take a dump into a woman’s purse.

**Craig:** [laughs] God!

**John:** This is Burbank, California, 1983. This is all part of a television studio where we meet Diane Dorronin, in her 20s, who is presumably his assistant. We also meet Brant Collier, 58, who is some sort of executive.

We then move to the soundstage, which is actually for a game show, and Jimmy is the host. Sunset Sutherland is the special celebrity guest. She is a cerebral palsy comedian. Jimmy makes lecherous remarks as the curtain opens, and that’s the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** Okay. [laughs] Uh…

**John:** I dug it. Obviously my first thought very quickly went to Anchorman in that it felt like we had that sort of ’80s setting. It was heightened. People were behaving really terribly towards each other. I kind of dug a lot of it.

I had issues on some stuff on the page, but I was intrigued and I would definitely be reading the next ten pages.

**Craig:** I unfortunately am on the other side of this one.

**John:** That’s great. I love debate.

**Craig:** I just didn’t think it was funny.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I thought it was in the shape of a funny thing, but the things inside of the shape of the funny thing just actually weren’t funny. Pooping in a handbag could be funny, I suppose, but to be the first thing I see from somebody, I’m so disoriented, so deeply disoriented. I feel like in broad comedy when people do insane things it has to be in juxtaposition to our expectation, you know. And this was not. So, I don’t understand — I’m lost in the tone from the very start.

I get further confused when it appears that, based on the discussion between Diane and Brant, this has happened before and they actually know what’s going on. So, now the world around the crazy guy is crazy, because that is insane.

Jimmy’s line when he finally poops in the bag and walks out is, “The missile codes were good, Mr. President. Target destroyed.” So, now he’s making sort of a clunky poop joke about the poop, which I guess is supposed to be a bad joke, but now it’s just a bad — I just didn’t get it.

And then they’re all waiting for him, but for some reason they haven’t done anything until he shows up on stage. So, when he shows up that’s when they start moving props into place, which was weird to me. And now as if this guy weren’t weird enough, his special guest start is kind of a movie version of Geri Jewell. I don’t know if you guys remember her, who was a standup comedian who had cerebral palsy.

And he’s into her. And I feel like, again, that’s a little bit of a tonal problem. If he’s the wacky one, I kind of want to see him juxtaposed against a normal person who would be on the show. And then you could bring in, once you’ve established his juxtaposition to the world, then go ahead and go for the Geri Jewell bit later or in a different context. Maybe Geri Jewell is hot for him.

But right now I just had nothing, there was no ground beneath my feet. And when they say “try and ground comedy,” in a weird way it’s the most important thing to ground comedy when the comedy is super broad like this is. And I like super broad comedy. But then I really need to know where the ground is beneath my feet or else I just can’t go on the ride.

So, that’s kind of where I was.

**John:** All right. I totally understand your concerns. I just disagree. I felt like I understood where the ground was on this and I was sort of with him, even though we don’t know a lot of information about him, I was with him. And I liked that as an opening first beat.

And I took the conversation in the hallway where they’re hearing him do this as like him trying to take a dump in general, not that he’s trying to take a dump into a woman’s purse. So, they were assuming that he was making bathroom noises because he was using the toilet. But I understand your confusion there.

And I like the Sunset Sutherland stuff. Where I did have some concerns about setup and sort of first page stuff, the title for “Burbank, California, 1983.” Let’s put that bold; let’s put that middle of the page. Let’s center that a little bit. It’s so easy to skip past that, and it so helps to sort of set the heightened nature of the story.

And the first time I read it I skipped over that. And I’m like, “Wait, where are we, when are we?” And then, “Oh, I saw it there.” So make that a little more clear and obvious. Also, right from the second paragraph here — “The walls hold decades worth of memories. Photos, posters, blown up covers of TV Guide.” Of whom? Of what? Like, whose dressing room is this?

And so if you’re going to tell us that these props exist, tell us what these props actually are, because otherwise, why are we staring at them? So, they need to be the posters and the photos of our hero, of Jimmy Alexander, if we’re in his dressing room. It might be more interesting that we’re not in his dressing room, that we’re in someone else’s dressing room. I needed specifics there.

**Craig:** When you read these, did you laugh?

**John:** I didn’t laugh but I smiled.

**Craig:** Well, that’s a problem. And I’m not trying to invalidate your opinion. I’m just saying that for broad comedy like this that goes for big, big swings, I think getting some kind of laugh is huge, when you’re making big swings like this. If you’re going to do poop, I feel like you got to do it. You’ve got to get a big laugh from it. Smiles aren’t going to be enough to carry you through, I think.

I actually don’t think that — I mean, this is not a writer where I would say, “Oh, you’re not funny; don’t write comedy.” I just think that there’s some comedy science that just needs to be addressed. But I think a lot of the pieces were there. I think it’s very inventive. Like the Geri Jewell thing is really smart, I just think it’s in the wrong place. You know, stuff like that.

**John:** Cool. Craig, that was four of these. That was fun.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like we whipped through them. I love it.

**John:** We did. I think we’ve being much more efficient and speedy in our experience.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, I should have asked you before we started the podcast. Do you have a One Cool Thing this week? Because sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.

**Craig:** This week I actually do.

**John:** Oh great. Why don’t you do yours first.

**Craig:** Well, this week I did my first of what will be four sessions mentoring a new screenwriter. And the program, it’s a mentoring program that’s run by the Writers Guild of America East. And I was asked to participate in this by Richie LaGravenese, who is a spectacular screenwriter, those of you who’ve seen Fisher King or The Ref, one of my favorite movies, among others.

And it’s really great because they take students whose professors have sort of singled them out and said, “Okay, I have a class of a lot of kids. This one, I think, actually has a shot.” So, you read their script and then you do four 90-minute sessions via Skype, and you just get into it. And you just start to do the work of talking about the screenplay, and their intentions, and what they want to do.

And my, what’s the word? Mentee? Mentoree?

**John:** Yeah, mentee.

**Craig:** Mentee. My Mentee is really great. I think she’s got a spectacular attitude and she’s got a terrifically sharp and unique voice. And so I’m really — it was very good. It was a good thing. I felt good about it in a way I sometimes don’t feel when I’m talking to people, because I feel like I’m wasting my time sometimes with people.

But, she — I think she’s going places. So, it was a really good thing. And I have in the past given the Writers Guild of America East a lot of crap because as a union they’re a bit of a squib. But this program is a very smart thing that they’re doing and, frankly, I wish the Writers Guild of America West would do something similar.

**John:** And these are writers who are not necessarily members of the Writers Guild East, but they are good up-and-coming screenwriters who have been singled out by professors?

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re students. They’re all students. They’re in school. I think she’s probably — I’m just going to guess she’s 20. She seems young. So, they’re not yet professional. They’re not close to professional. That’s not where their mindset is. They’re just trying to learn the craft. And I also like the fact that the screenwriting professors are open to this sort of thing, because it’s an important partnership, I think, between the people who instruct and the people who do.

**John:** Definitely. That sounds great. And so if someone is interested in being part of this program, they would essentially — it’s not like you can apply to it, it’s just that you get nominated for it by East Coast writing professors?

**Craig:** It seems like that, yes. To be fair I don’t exactly know the details, but since this was — I mean, for instance, I had to talk to her professor before I spoke to her. So, yes, it would seem like that’s the way it goes.

**John:** Cool.

My One Cool Thing all relates to I finally installed Mountain Lion on my main machine. Because people who have been following me on the blog know that I had issues with I couldn’t install Mountain Lion on my big Mac Tower because it was seven years old. And even though I really like the computer, it wasn’t able to be upgraded, so a lot of drama.

And so I ended up taking Ryan’s MacBook, and he got the Retina MacBook. And everything was working fine. I just wanted to make sure everything was working fine before I upgraded to Mountain Lion. But in the process of doing that I had to do another backup of my hard drive.

And I may have talked about this before on the podcast, but I just want to sing an extra bit of praise for sort of the bare hard drives you can buy now. Because people think of hard drives and they tend to think of, “Oh, you buy that hard drive that you plug into the back of your machine and then you have a stacked thing, and you use one and then you get rid of it.”

The best and most efficient way to use hard drives these days is just to buy the bare hard drive. And so this is the kind of hard drive that you would actually plug into a machine and never really see. They are just these metal boxes — metal and plastic boxes. What makes them so useful is that they’re super cheap and you can buy these external docks for them that you just pop the drive in. So, it sort of looks like a toaster.

So, I’m using one by NewerTech, which is like $79. But essentially you can just jam a hard drive in there, use it as a hard drive for backing up, for whatever else you need to do, and then you’ve not wasted money on all the other stuff that you would usually buy when you buy a hard drive, like the power supply, and the cables, and everything else. It’s just there and it’s handy.

So, with this backup, I can keep one backup here at the house. We have another backup that we store offsite. It makes it just super simple to create a backup and keep it there for when you need it. So, this is not my time machine backup, which is sort of the constantly churning thing which is always doing stuff. This is sort of all my files. This is an exact snapshot of my hard drive at a certain time and place.

And because I have been doing this for two years now, I can go back and I can reboot my machine in Snow Leopard or older operating systems, because I have a bootable backup on one of these drives.

So, my one cool thing is bare hard drives, which are incredibly cheap these days.

**Craig:** And welcome to Mountain Lion, sir.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty good. I had no huge issues. So, I wanted to wait a little bit to make sure that no one was going to have fundamental problems with apps I needed and, nope, everything has upgraded really nicely.

**Craig:** Whereas I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 6 yesterday because I could.

**John:** Yeah. And I upgraded my iPhone as well. And I mostly enjoy it. Maps is kind of a mess, but it will get better. It’s kind of a mess right now.

**Craig:** Yeah, it will be fine.

**John:** It will be fine. But yeah, I was happy and good.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you so much, John. We’ve done it again.

**John:** All right. Talk to you next week.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/producers-and-pitching).

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

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

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

Craig, how are you? How was your first week of production?

**Craig:** It was good. Everything’s humming along. And that’s all I can say. [laughs]

**John:** This is your day off though, right?

**Craig:** Yeah. A little bit of a day off today.

**John:** So, what people may not understand is that when you’re in production you’re usually shooting either 5-day weeks or 6-day weeks. You’re in town, so it’s a 5-day week?

**Craig:** Yeah, well, sort of. I mean, for a lot of the schedules that I get involved in sometimes you have — I mean, I haven’t done a 6-day week in a long, long time. That’s really a low budget kind of thing to do. But some weeks you do do six days, and then other weeks you’ll do four days, because when you’re dealing with actors, particularly in comedies, almost every — no, half, let’s say, of comic actors are also on TV shows. And you can’t always shoot inside of everyone’s hiatus.

So, sometimes you have to adjust your schedule to work with their TV schedule. So you end up with odd weeks. I mean, our weeks are mostly 5-day weeks, but they’re offset in strange ways. So I have weird weekends that aren’t actually the weekend.

**John:** Yeah. If you talk to people who work on movies or on TV shows, you often find that their weekend is like a Sunday and a Monday, or a Monday and a Tuesday. And some of that reason may be because they need to shoot locations that would be occupied during weekdays. And so they need to shoot those locations during weekends, Saturdays and Sundays. And so their schedule might be Tuesday through Saturday or Wednesday through Sunday. And it’s a busy, complicated life.

The other thing to understand is that typically over the course of a week’s production you might start like at 6am on the first day and you’re shooting 12 hours or however many hours you’re shooting. But your schedule sort of drifts over the course of that week. And so by the time you’re into your Friday or your Saturday you may be starting at like three in the afternoon and going to like three in the morning. And your turnaround, which is the time between when you wrap it up and where you start the next day’s production, or your weekend in that case, you may have really eaten half of that day because you shot so late into the next day.

**Craig:** Yeah. Production isn’t exactly the healthiest thing for your body. I mean, we have rhythms and we like to sort of wake up around the same time and we like to go to bed around the same time. And you simply can’t do that with production. Two reasons: One, as you mentioned, there are locations that sometimes don’t allow you to be in certain places. The other issue is that when we shoot at night you have to suddenly be nocturnal. And then there are splits where you shoot half of day, half of night.

And then the phenomenon you’re describing, the kind of call time creep occurs because there are rules governing how much time off, crew, everybody gets between when you finish a day’s work and when you start the next day’s work. And I think it’s 12 hours. So, if you go over your normal 12-hour day, and that often happens, the next day you just start that much later in the morning, and so, you know, when you have movies that are constantly going over, by the time you roll around to Friday you might be starting at three in the afternoon because you finished at 3am the night before.

**John:** Yeah. So it becomes complicated based on your locations, based on your actors, based on everything else. And as you get more experience with this as a screenwriter you may find yourself not writing so many night exteriors that sort of demand to be shot out at night.

My first movie that was in production, of course, was Go. And Go takes place entirely at night really. And that meant we were outside at night, all night, for 30 days of production. And that got to be a real drag.

So, I wouldn’t do anything different about Go, but other movies I’ve written in the future I’ve been very mindful of “Is this a movie I would want to direct,” for example, “that takes place so much at night, so much in exteriors?”

**Craig:** You know, it’s one of those things when you’re in the middle of it you think, frankly everything about movie production I’m constantly thinking, “I can’t believe this is the best way of doing this.”

And I start to understand why guys who have been around for a long, long time start to drift towards mo-cap, because for somebody like Zemeckis or Spielberg, and they’ve done all these movies, they’ve gone through this harrowing physical trial so many times. The thought of being able to just shoot a movie in an air-conditioned room without running around and standing in the heat, it’s very seductive.

But, the truth is I love writing stuff that happens at night because I find night to be just more cinematic. You know? I’m always writing stuff — I love it.

**John:** The best part of shooting at night is also sometimes things just are quiet, and there’s not a lot of hubbub, and you can sort of create your world yourself, and there’s not just distractions. You just do your thing. It can be a nice thing, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I don’t know, there’s a weird, there’s just a cool vibe at night. I don’t know for whatever reason. And the weirdest thing, you know, when you make movies you hear about this in pop culture, people know about this phrase, “We’re losing the light.” You know, you’re always racing daylight if you’re doing a day shoot and trying to get that last shot in before the DP says, “No, we officially have crossed into evening.”

But the weirdest thing is when you’re chasing dark.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know?

**John:** That was Go.

**Craig:** It’s just wild, yeah.

**John:** Because we were shooting these last little… I was directing second unit on Go, and we’d be shooting these insert shots like in an alley. And the sun would be coming up and you’re like, “No, no, no, hurry, hurry!” And just trying to block off the light. You’re trying to pick up flags just to make it a little bit darker here so you get his one last shot.

And you’re so exhausted. I remember thinking, like, “We should just build some sort of rocket that we could shoot at the sun to a make it dark.” And you can’t. That would not be a good — probably — thing for the world.

**Craig:** [laughs] I just like the idea that people would look up and riots would begin as everybody understood that the world was ending, the sun was not coming up, and then finally somebody would announce, “No, no, no, it’s okay; it’s just for the next 20 minutes because a guy somewhere needs a shot for second unit.”

**John:** Totally. It’s completely worth it.

Today, Craig, I thought we would talk about two main topics. The first is what producers do, and specifically what they kind of don’t do. And I also thought we’d talk about pitching and sort of how pitches work, because I’m busy with a pitch right now and I think I have some things to say about it. But we also have some follow up, so let’s start with some follow up.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** First up, a couple weeks ago on the podcast I was sort of venting about how, or at least my perception is that if you look through negative reviews of a movie, they’re much more likely to mention the screenwriter than they are in a positive review of the movie. And I didn’t have any scientific facts to back this up. There is just my perception.

And so I asked if there’s anybody out there who wants to do a study where they’re looking through all the reviews in Rotten Tomatoes for a subset of movies and figure out if that’s true or not, and I would really value that data. So, someone stepped up and did it. So this guy named Tim in Hollywood did it.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And so he just sent the report, which I haven’t looked through, so I’m only going to read you a little bit from his email. He says, “The report is enclosed, but the short version is: you’re wrong. The opposite is true. Critics are much more likely to mention the writer in a positive review, at least based on this data.”

**Craig:** Wow. Well that’s really encouraging. I mean, I’m glad we’re wrong. We’re wrong, because I agreed with you. That’s great to hear.

**John:** Yeah. So I will look through it and I will post it if it’s something that we can discuss and share with everybody else. But I just thought that preliminary finding was interesting. And I’m happy to be wrong. I think people who always want the facts to back them up, they don’t really want the facts, they just want validation.

**Craig:** Listen, you and I…very early on I understood shared one thing strongly in common, and that was our love for human fallibility, and fallacies, and broken thinking. I’ve always been fascinated with that. And obviously this is a great example of kind of the fallacy of the observer. You know, we see the things that are connected to us emotionally or meaningful and we skip over the things that aren’t. And so I love that. Good.

**John:** Good.

Second piece of follow up. Dave writes in: “In episode 33 someone asked about an immigration issue. I am still at the point of my career where I have a day job, and that day job is at an immigration law firm doing what is called 01 visas. 01 visas are for ‘aliens of extraordinary ability,’ basically successful individuals in the entertainment industries. In theory this is for Academy Award winners and movie stars, but I get in many people with as little experience as one or two credits for independent films.

“I know what a pain it is to get legal working status and how difficult it must be for that reader dealing with doubly uncertain futures, both as a screenwriter and a non-citizen, so I just wanted to reach out in case there’s a question you find yourself addressing again.”

So, thank you, Dave, for writing in. So what Dave is doing is he works at an immigration law firm, and the kinds of people who want to come to America to work in film or television, he’s the kind of guy who processes that stuff. And so if you find yourself having made a movie oversea and wanting to come to the US, that’s good news.

**Craig:** I get it. So if you’re Daniel Day-Lewis, and I presume he’s a citizen of the UK, and you need to come here to do a movie, you actually do have to get a work visa, and somebody has to actually tick off which box you are. And it turns out that somebody like Daniel Day-Lewis is an alien of extraordinary ability.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s great.

**John:** I like that term.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Another piece of follow up on HSX, which I think we talked about in the last podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So Hunter Daniels, he writes in: “Cantor Fitzgerald did try to make a real-life HSX a few years ago and it fail for a plethora of obvious reasons, but you left out one important fact. Cantor Fitzgerald actually owns and operates HSX. They’ve been using the game to develop the real world version for a number of years. I know because I was part of the beta testing when they got close to asking for regulatory approval.

“Also in regards to your contention that nobody looks at HSX and that it’s an inaccurate tool for box office prognostication: I would have to agree. See, Cantor Fitzgerald runs HSX at a profit because they do mine data from stock movements on the site and sell them to someone for market research purposes. A few weeks out from release, HSX is a very good tool for those who track US grosses.

“For example, the current HSX for Frankenweenie is $46.33, which works out to an expected opening weekend of $17.1 million. It’s not always accurate. For example, fan-boy movies like Prometheus and Scott Pilgrim will always be overpriced while African-American themed movies are almost always underpriced, but again, this actually mimics real world tracking data which is almost always wrong about black-centric breakouts and fan-boy bombs.”

**Craig:** Ah, okay. I mean, well that’s interesting to know that they own it. The fact that they sell that data doesn’t necessarily mean that the data is valuable. It just means that somebody is agreeing to buy it.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m still skeptical about the relative value of it. I mean, for instance, NRG, which is the largest box office prognosticator and tracker in our business may very well purchase information from HSX to help them perform their analysis. But, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to say that simply because someone’s buying it it means it’s worth something.

**John:** Yeah. Again, this does feel like a thing that someone could study and really figure out: how close were they to predicting box office? And I’m sure somebody has studied that. So if you have a great link that shows how accurate the prognostication is from HSX, that would help back up this assertion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

So, a question, not a follow up here. Micah from LA asks, “What are the rules pertaining to naming screenplays the same as previously published films? Or, to take it a step further, what if you have dreams of adapting your screenplay into a different medium like a graphic novel, but there’s already a graphic novel with the same name? Are there any copyright rules for doing this? One search for IMDb for a film called Heat and you see a bunch of different films, so I imagine it’s doable. I don’t want to bring litigation monsters to my doorstep. What do I do?”

So it’s really a couple different questions tangled together, first about how you name movies, and then about how you name other properties, and what’s protectable and what is not protectable. So, should we start about how movies get named?

**Craig:** Well, yeah, movie titles are actually governed by the MPAA, the same organization that handles the ratings for movies. It’s a trade organization. And so all the members of the MPAA, and you would want to be writing — I mean, I’m assuming you’re writing this for a studio and not for a little independent thing. But, all the members of the MPAA, the big studios, they just agree that this central governing body is going to kind of serve as a clearinghouse for titles.

And the rules about what title you can and can’t use are rather arcane, as you might imagine, because it essentially is kind of a Star Chamber thing. For instance, the very first movie that I ever wrote, I wrote with my then partner Greg, and we titled it Space Cadet. And Disney bought Space Cadet and they made Space Cadet, but as they were going to production as a matter of course they registered the title with the MPAA.

And the MPAA came back and said, “Oh you can’t. George Lucas actually has already registered Space Cadet. He’s going to make a movie called Space Cadet.” And I think Disney said, “Prove it.” Like you can’t just register a title and have nothing. I mean, but you know, if you can show some documentation that you’re working on, sometimes you can buy the title from people. But George Lucas said, “No, no, no. I’m definitely making a movie called Space Cadet,” which as far as I know he has never done.

So we had to change the name of the movie. But that’s really an internal battle between the studios. It doesn’t impact us as screenwriters. The only real rule of titling for me is don’t title it something that’s overtly misleading. Don’t title your screenplay Raiders of the Lost Ark 5, because that’s ridiculous.

But, it’s not our problem. It ultimately is the studio’s problem. Now, this other issue — what was the other issue exactly?

**John:** The other issue is if he wanted to do a graphic novel or something that wasn’t a movie, and he was concerned about a conflicting title. And so this really gets into understanding that copyright does not protect title. And some titles can be protected by trademark, but trademark is a whole other separate crazy barrel of fish.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And trademark is something that can protect a brand when it’s more than just a title for a graphic novel or for something else. It can protect like a toy line, or a line of licensed merchandise. And I just don’t know enough about it to speak.

**Craig:** Well the basic rule of thumb with trade… — See, copyright is something that’s hard. Either you have authored this unique expression in fixed form, or you haven’t. And then there’s proof in the documentation and the documents are compared. Trademark ultimately turns on a question of interpretation. And the interpretation boils down roughly to: Are you capitalizing on marketplace confusion? That’s basically the deal.

So, I trademark something, you can’t come along and use my trademark in a way that confuses the market into thinking that I’m doing it or you’re a part of me. This is why, for instance, when Apple was sued by the Beatles Apple, part of the deal, part of the settlement, was Apple Computer will stay out of the music business, because that’s what the Apple Publishing was in the UK. And they’re basically saying, “You’re confusing the marketplace. Apple here means music, so stay out of music.”

Then, of course, Apple went into music in a huge way and so on and so forth. But, that’s why for instance companies that have these — brand names that have become generically used like Kleenex…

**John:** Linoleum.

**Craig:** Vaseline. If they don’t aggressively protect and defend their trademarks they lose them, because basically the courts say, “You haven’t really been trying to stop marketplace confusion; in fact, you’re kind of capitalizing on marketplace confusion. You like that everybody calls petroleum jelly Vaseline. So, no, now everybody can.”

And so this is why as of late companies get super duper uptight about — like Pampers, I remember when I was a kid. Pampers, I think, at some point had to really struggle to not have all diapers called Pampers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, again, not a writers problem. We don’t have to worry about this so much. As long as you’re not being intentionally misleading, you are fine.

**John:** Yeah. You should be focusing on, like, what is the best title that feels right for your movie, and don’t worry that back in 1947 there was something else called that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because when you sell it, or when somebody publishes it, their legal department will step in and lay it out for you. And then you’ll make a decision.

**John:** A couple helpful suggestions. So, a project I setup fairly recently we haven’t announced yet, but when I turned it in they were like, “Okay, and now we’re going to make sure we can clear that title.” So what they’re really trying to do is they’re going to register that title with the MPAA and make sure that there’s nothing else that’s going to fight it, because they really do believe they’re going to be able to make a movie out of it pretty soon.

When I had the idea for the title, one of the things I could do was register the domain name for it. That doesn’t help me protect anything about trademark, or title, or the movie version of it, but it just means that I can have the URL for the movie, which is helpful down the road, just for promotional purposes.

For a TV project, you will hear the same kind of thing, where if you have a title they really like they will try to clear it. And by “clear it” they mean making sure that there’s no other competing TV projects this season or any nearby season that’s going to confuse people.

**Craig:** Exactly. I mean, you can’t, and even though Cheers has been off the air for decades, you can’t call your new show Cheers.

**John:** Yeah. Cool.

So, let’s get into some of our bigger topics here. And this is actually — a couple different listeners sent this in saying like, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And I’m like, oh, I didn’t even want to open the URL when I recognized what it was from, but it’s probably worth talking about.

So, there’s a blog called Scriptshadow, and my first interaction with Scriptshadow was when the man who runs the blog, Carson Reeves, had reviewed a project that I was currently rewriting. So he had read the script and written a detailed blog review of this script, this early draft by another writer, and I was the currently employed writer on it. It was, like, a pretty high profile project at that point. And so the studio I was working for went ballistic and got him to pull the review.

And that was the end of it, I think, from his perspective. From my perspective, his publishing this review of this other writer’s draft made my life horribly worse, because suddenly I was having to sign all these things about, like, I couldn’t send this script to anybody. I couldn’t show it to my agent. I couldn’t show it to my sort of trusted friends. I could only send it to this one executive. Everything had to be watermarked, and they got super paranoid about this.

And in a blog post I wrote up sort of my frustration, and so the blog post was called “Why Scriptshadow hurts screenwriters.” I explained that reviewing a script of a movie that hasn’t shot yet, hasn’t come out yet, is really damaging for both the movie and for screenwriters. It’s damaging for the movie because you’re trying to review something that’s still its fetal form. So you’re pretending that this movie is the way it’s going to finally be. But it’s not. This is just a plan for, “At this moment this is what we kind of think the movie is going to be.”

For screenwriters overall, it’s incredibly damaging, because I suddenly couldn’t go to the trusted people who I want to have read my script. What’s worse is that sort of forcing us to lock down the script, I can’t let anyone else read that script if it’s sort of stuck in development for awhile.

You have to understand that when you’re hiring screenwriters you are going to read scripts, their spec scripts. You’re going to read stuff that’s of movies that have been made, but you’re also going to read the stuff that’s in development, and that stuff does get handed around. And the rule is, like, just everybody be cool about it. Like you can pass the stuff around, just don’t talk about it that much.

This script I wrote for them I can’t show anybody now because they sort of had it on this crazy lockdown. So those were my frustrations with Carson Reeves’s Scriptshadow that is the back story that I needed to sort of setup for this newest blog post.

**Craig:** And just to echo your thoughts here: Reviewing screenplays that are in development is a stupid, counterproductive thing to do. It is anti-writer. And it will make movies worse. Please don’t do it.

You don’t review food as the chef is cooking it. We have drafts for a reason. You cannot write a final draft first. Anyone who actually writes for a living, who understands what writing, or painting, or writing a song, or sculpting something knows what I mean when I say it’s not done. We’re working — ING — on it. So if you put it on the internet like it’s done and review it like it’s done, you are hurting something that was not meant to be read or seen.

Please be respectful enough to just wait until it’s done. How hard is that? How hard is that? And I just find it so frustrating that people in their desperate need to be involved somehow, or to release a secret for whatever small burst of adrenaline that gives you, ruin something that somebody is working on. And they don’t all turn out great.

But, you know, the example I always give is The Sixth Sense, which is one of my favorite screenplays. He wasn’t dead the whole time until like the sixth draft. You know what I mean? You have to wait. Just wait.

**John:** Yup. It’s that need to be first, and that thrill at being first is why you — is that instinct to talk about it before it’s ready to be talked about. But I think your cooking analogy is exactly right. It’s not done. It’s still in the oven. Stop. And that’s maddening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stop.

**John:** So, anyway, that was my earlier rant, so recycling a rant from two or three years ago. So, the thing that people sent in this last week was about this guy Carson Reeves who has continued to read a lot of screenplays, and I guess to his credit I will say he’s moved his focus from reviewing in-development drafts at major studios to things that people send in, like aspiring screenwriters’ stuff. Things that would kind of show up on the Black List, that kind of stuff.

And I still don’t think that’s right. I think reviewing something that a writer has written without sort of their blessing to review it is a concern, but it’s not — this isn’t in the development chain. So, I’ll at least acknowledge that.

Now his new thing, so I’ll quote little parts of the blog. “My readers are asking me, ‘Why aren’t you producing. You’re finding material. You’re bringing it to the rest of the town. That’s one of the hardest and most important things a producer does — find material.’ Hmm, I thought, I guess they were right. I was finding material. I could do that.

“All of a sudden I looked at producing a whole new way. Therefore, what I’d like to do instead is find material through Scriptshadow, partner up with a much more established producer — say Scott Rudin — sell the script to one the studios with both of us attached, and then let him use his muscle and expertise to get it through the system. In essence, I would be more of a silent producer. I’m in it to learn because, let’s face it, I don’t know what I’m doing yet. I mean, I can help a writer whip the script into shape, but I can’t call Tom Hardy and ask him if he’s free in three months to shoot a desert zombie film.”

So that’s an excerpt from a much longer blog post which I’ll link to in the show notes. But I thought it was worth discussing because it raises some misconceptions about what producers are, what producing is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, first of all, John, you know, a lot of people say to me, “You have all these really cool thoughts about movies. You should write some movies.” And I thought, yeah, that’s right. I do have really cool thoughts about movies. I should write some movies. But, I don’t know how to write a movie. So what I should do is partner up with somebody that does know how to write a movie like, say, John August. And then he’ll write the movie and I’ll just be sort of be like a silent writer.

And then we’ll sell that screenplay to the studios with both of us on the title page, but I’ll let him use his talent and expertise to kind of get it there, and on the way I’ll learn.

**John:** And I know that’s meant in a mocking way, but I think he actually does think that way — I think a lot of people do think that way, too. It’s like, I get emails and the person is like, “Hey, I have a really good idea. Would you want to partner up on a script with me?” And I’m like, “…But! …But! …No.

**Craig:** No. Why? I don’t need to partner on a script with you. You know who I need to partner up on a script with? A writer who’s writing pages. And my point is here — ugh — okay.

**John:** This is really, just, so much umbrage, yeah.

**Craig:** So I don’t want to go crazy too early. I don’t want to peak here at minute 20, or wherever we are.

Look, yes, people are sending screenplays to this guy because they don’t have anywhere else to send screenplays to. Or, I should take that back: They have lots of places to send screenplays. Those places aren’t reading their screenplays, or they’re rejecting their screenplays. So they send it to this guy.

And I do think anybody that finds unfound screenplays and loves those screenplays and reviews them positively and promotes them is doing god’s work. For the life of me, I don’t understand what the value is in finding somebody’s screenplay that is unfound, not liking it, and trashing it, because I don’t really think you’re changing the universe at all there, you’re just complaining. But promoting, I get it.

Like the Black List is a really, really cool thing. And if Scriptshadow promotes, finds a great script and promotes it, and somebody picks it up and buys it, fantastic. But, sir, that’s where your value is and that’s where it ends. Producing has nothing to do with that, at all. There’s no finder’s fee here. Wouldn’t it be great if that’s the way the world worked? But, in fact, you haven’t done the work beyond just simply reading it.

There are people who kind of have offices in Hollywood and sort of do that kind of thing. They end up very tangential to the process anyway. And ultimately the people that do the real work of producing, which we’ll discuss in a second, just employ a lot of kids out of college to do what you’re doing, which is just to read stuff.

**John:** That’s exactly what I did as my first job. I got paid $65 a script to read and write up the report.

**Craig:** That’s what it’s worth.

**John:** He’s just writing coverage.

**Craig:** Right! That’s what that’s worth. That does not make you a producer. That just makes you one of a thousand people who read scripts and go, “Ah, this is pretty good. Let me now give it to somebody that does the work of producing,” which is not the same thing as just reading through lots and lots of scripts and going, “Well this one’s pretty good.”

**John:** So let’s talk about the work of producing. And, I think the way to think about a producer is it’s the CEO of a corporation. And that corporation is the final movie. And so it’s the person who says, “I see what this idea is. I can build this idea. Bring in all the necessary talent to make this into a great movie. And put it out in the world that everyone will enjoy it and it will continue to have a life 20 years from now.”

It’s the cradle to the grave, but not even really a grave because you’re going to keep it going, vision behind the movie. And he wants to do this tiny, tiny little sliver which is, “There already was something, I thought it was pretty good, and I handed it to somebody” — that’s what he wants to do and call himself a producer.

**Craig:** Everybody wants that. Everybody. I mean, like you, I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, “I have a great idea for a movie. You could just write it up. I just need somebody to write it, but I have a great idea.”

Well, the “I just need” part is actually 99.99999% of the job, just so you know.

**John:** So let’s talk about some of the more specifics in terms of what this — Scott Rudin — let’s just say Scott Rudin would be doing here. So, Scott Rudin was the person who was like, “Okay, this script came into my hands.” And so maybe Carson Reeves handed him that script. Okay, that’s great. You are a reader, but this reader handed him a script.

**Craig:** Right. Now what?

**John:** Scott Rudin has to say like, “Okay, reading this script I know that these are the ten different ways I can get this movie made. And I have to make decisions about who, like first off, what needs to change in the script. Is the script as good as it can be? Is it the script that it should be to make the movie we want to make?

“Next, who do I want to get involved? What studios make sense for this? What actors make sense for this? What directors make sense for this? In what order should I try and go after those writers and actors and directors and studios so that we can get to the next stage? How much should this movie cost? Where should we shoot this movie? Who should we get in all the different department heads to make the best version of this movie?

“Once we found who the director is, how can I protect this woman from all the vagaries that are going to come at her and sort of let her make her vision for what this movie is going to be? How do I step in when her vision for what this movie should be is not really the right vision for what I know this movie needs to be? And how do I serve that function?

“How do I deal with the marketing of this movie? How do I yell at the marketing chief when I don’t like any of the one sheets that they’ve presented me?”

**Craig:** “When is the movie going to be released?”

**John:** Exactly. “And is this the right data based on all the competing movies that might be coming out on that date?”

**Craig:** Exactly. “Is the final cut too long? Is the final cut too short? What scenes should we keep? What scenes should we lose?” It’s a never ending job.

It’s sort of like if you combine matchmaker and wedding planner into one gig, you know. The producer isn’t the person that provides the love. I always think of the writer and director and cast as providing what is the love of the marriage, but the matchmaker puts them together. The wedding planner makes sure that the caterer is there on time, does all the stuff you don’t see. Makes sure that everybody’s in place and the video is there, and the DJ doesn’t play the wrong song. All that stuff.

Movies are a massive undertaking. You’re turning this huge ship all the time. And at every stage there is something different you have to deal with. And at every stage there are different powerful people you have to deal with. And doing all of that — I mean, I wish there were more people that were good at it. There are a bunch of people out there that are good at it, probably fewer now than ever, before because studios I think very intentionally have limited the power of the producer to reserve more of it for themselves.

But, the least of it, I mean the least of it, is doing what the average $20-an-hour coverage person does.

**John:** Yes. So, here’s what I would say: If Carson Reeves were serious about taking that next step and becoming a producer, some of his instincts are almost kind of right, is that he does need to learn — he understands what he doesn’t understand, which is good. He’s like, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

He would need to find somebody who actually does know what they’re doing, but he would also need just to learn the job. And he would need to learn the job making a tiny movie and doing all of the stuff that he has to do. That sense of like, “I’m going to go from 0 to 60” is crazy. And that anybody would want to help in and involve him at this stage is nuts.

**Craig:** It’s naïve. And I think that, you’re right, there is something refreshing about his honesty here, but I want to point out this — there is something that comes out of the internet that I find fascinating, and revealing.

A lot of people who address what I’ll call Inside Baseball Hollywood Topics, like producing for instance, from the vantage point of the internet, come at it from a “we’re the cool new guys and they’re the old school guys, and we get it; we have this really cool perspective on it. We are the next generation.” The closer they get, suddenly the more they are interested in getting the hell away from the internet and getting over to that apparently old stale institution called Hollywood, because the truth is everybody that gets close understands pretty quickly in fact that’s where the real deal is.

That the internet is no more than really just a very good megaphone for individuals writing flyers, and actually making movies is still where it’s at. So, what I would say to anybody who’s on the internet who is kind of tangential in this way and wants to get involved in the real deal: Do what people who want to get involved in the real deal do, and don’t overestimate the value of your blog experience, which is essentially zero.

I mean, you are now definitely, I would say, anybody that does what he does is certainly qualified to be a reader at a studio, but again, that’s a galaxy away from being a producer. So, start by becoming a PA. Start by working for a production coordinator. However you want to get there, do it the old fashioned way, because that’s pretty much the only way that it works, as far as I can tell. You actually have to learn the gig.

**John:** This reminds me of an article I real this last week about Pauline Kael, who was a tremendously gifted and influential film critic. And what I hadn’t realized is that at one point in her career, like after she was a successful critic, she was brought in to, like, “Well, help us out on movies. Help us out — produce some movies for us.”

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

**John:** And it didn’t work out well.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because it’s a very different skill. And the skills that made her good at analyzing movies, the finished product of movies, and made reading her writing about those movies so rewarding, did not translate to the actual making of the movies.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** And that’s because it’s a very different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Analysis and creation are so dramatically different. And I guess the way I would put it is people who analyze know how to analyze; people who create know how to create and analyze.

**John:** Mm-hmm. And god bless analysts. God bless people who can figure out stuff. God bless Tim in Hollywood who went through all that data on movie reviews for me so he could prove me wrong. That’s great. But analysis isn’t creation.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct. But those who create must also know how to analyze, at least in Hollywood. And so I just feel like, I love the guy for sort of saying, “I don’t understand what producing really is, and I wonder what it is,” but this is a very naïve approach.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** The internet is really good at confusing people into overvaluing. I mean, look: If we’re to take these podcast numbers seriously, you know, eventually we’ll get to a million people listening to this. But, you know, it’s a podcast. [laughs] You know what I mean? We’re not on Sirius XM. We’re not Howard Stern.

**John:** We’re not.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That’s okay. I don’t need to be Howard Stern.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I think it would be cool. [laughs] Just a little bit.

**John:** So, switching topics. Next I really want to talk about pitching, because I have a new project that I’m taking out and pitching this week, and it’s actually been really kind of fun. And when I first started out doing this crazy thing of screenwriting, pitching was by far my least favorite part. I would get completely nervous. I’d freak out the night before and I was like sort of rewriting it and trying to figure out how much I wrote down beforehand and how much I was sort of delivering a canned performance versus sort of making it feel extemporaneous and free.

And it’s gotten much, much easier. So, I wanted to share a few things I’ve learned along the way and hopefully you can chip in with some good suggestions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** I always describe a pitch as imagining you just saw a great movie and you wanted to tell your best friend they had to see the movie. You had to convince them. A pitch isn’t going to lay out every beat that happens, exactly how it happens. You’re sort of going to give them the highlight reel. It’s sort of almost like a trailer for what your project is.

You’re going to start with, “This is the world, these are the characters; these are the big things that happen along the way.” It doesn’t have to be exactly in sequence. The logic doesn’t even necessarily need to be the same logic that you will use in your final screenplay. It’s just giving them the sense of, like, “This is what the movie feels like.” If they were sitting there watching the trailer, this is the experience they’d get.

A crucial thing I learned early on is that you will go in with a plan for, “If I need to pitch the whole movie and people start to ask for real details, I know it all. But I can also give them like the two-minute version, the five-minute version, the 10-minute version.” You have to be able to sort of telescope in and out a little bit, because you’re reading the room and hopefully they’re going to love everything you’re saying, but you look for that moment where like their eyes start to close a little bit and their attention is starting to fall off. You have to be ready to jump to the next thing and sort of get through it more quickly.

Craig, when you’re going into pitch a comedy how much detail do you know about the whole world? How much are you trying to create a performance for just that room versus sell the whole movie?

**Craig:** Well, I approach it pretty much the way you approach the job. I mean, to me pitching is really about saying, “I just saw this awesome movie; let me tell you what I saw,” and pitching it the way we used to — remember when we were kids and we came back from Empire and we were like, “Oh my god, you’re not going to believe it…” Because we didn’t respect spoilers back then. We were 9 and it was just so exciting.

“And then, and then, and then,” but that was all very plot-oriented, and I think now as I go into these things I try and tell the story as if I just saw the movie, but I also try and ground as much as possible inside of the character, and what the character is thinking, and what the theme is, and why it matters.

And I liked what you said about prefacing everything with a little bit of an introduction. And I like to introduce things by saying, “This is why I’ve always wanted to write a movie like this.” Or, “This is what I’m interested in.” I want to put the story I’m telling in the context of a personal passion, because I just think that immediately, that immediately dispels what — there’s a stink in the room. And the stink is cynicism, because when somebody’s coming into pitch, they’re there to sell you something. They’re knocking on your door with a vacuum cleaner set and they want to sell you something. And everybody knows it and it’s a little bit cynical.

And I like to kind of broom that stink out by saying, “Yes, sure, I’m here to sell you vacuum, but actually this is emotional for me, and here’s why.” Even for a comedy. There’s something at the core of it that matters to me.

**John:** You need to sell them on, “This is the movie I want to make.” “This is the TV show I want to create.” “This is the vision I have for it.” So, it’s not about, “This is the show I want you to pay me money for,” it’s like, “This is the movie or the TV show I want to see on screen in a year.”

**Craig:** Exactly. And that’s for everything. Even if the movie itself is a genre piece that most people would consider to be crassly commercial, you have to love it somehow, or else everybody is like, “Okay, well I get it. You’re selling widgets. And you’re calling it widget. And we’re widget buyers. Ah, I don’t know. I could I guess.”

**John:** I would also stress you have to really look at it from their perspective and try to make sure that you’re tracking the logic from their perspective. Like, what is the next question they’re going to ask. And sometimes you have to just let them ask the question. You have to sort of anticipate, “Well, they’re going to ask me a question about this now,” and so you need to be able to answer that question. Lay it out from the perspective of the characters. And so talk to them at the start — “these are the four characters we really need to pay attention to” — so they can listen for those and they can actually track what’s going on in your story through those characters.

And they can see like, “Okay, we’re here, and now we’re here, and we’re here.” And if you end up with one on of those stories that is complicated, where there are like these subplots and stuff, sort of bundle them together. And you can say, “Okay, let’s stick a pin in that for a second because I need to tell you about this.” Or, like, “Meanwhile back at the ranch,” so they can understand sort of where your story is flowing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And this requires some practice. It’s a good thing to pitch to somebody and just have them stop you every time they get confused, lost, or bored.

I also say, if I’m pitching something to somebody I’ll say, “By the way, at any point if you have any questions stop me. I’m not here doing a monologue. This isn’t Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain.” Because I find questions to be a sign of interest.

If you think about when you get bored during things it’s when you start having questions about them but you don’t have any opportunity to answer those questions, so suddenly you’re drifting, and the questions start to pile up. And once you have two or three questions that have piled up in your head while you’re patiently waiting to figure out what the hell is going on, you immediately start concluding that this just isn’t very good. It might be very good.

**John:** You lost faith.

**Craig:** There might be great answers. But give people an opportunity to stop you and ask.

**John:** Yeah. So, the last thing I’ll say about pitching today is what’s been weird about this week is I’ve had to pitch the same project to multiple places, back to back to back. And you can sort of get, I mean, you get a little bit frozen. This is sort of the performance you give each time. So, I pitched it three times in a row, and then I had like a week off and had to pitch it again. And I was nervous, like, “Am I going to be able to do the same thing again? How am I going to be able to recapture all of the same sort of enthusiasm?”

What I found most helpful is I have my little pitch document, which is like a two-page thing that sort of outlines what’s in there. And I went back through and I rewrote that, because I found that the process of rewriting it sort of got it reenergized in my brain in a way that I could sort of give the pitch again and it has new life and it has new details. And so it is interesting for me.

Because if you’re not interested in the pitch, they’re not going to be interested in the pitch. So, you have to sort of be able to kind of surprise yourself with the new stuff that you’re adding.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, there is for me every pitch, even if the content doesn’t change, every room is different. And if you watch actors working together — and I always say if you want to be a screenwriter take an acting class. There’s a class that’s actually worth something. Because you learn skills in acting class that not only help you write for actors, but it helps you just talk to people.

And the secret to talking to people, and that’s what pitching is, is listening. And the first thing I do, just automatically when I go in to pitch something is I just listen for a moment to what the room sounds like. Is it a quiet room? Is it an amped up room? Is it a feminine room, a masculine room? Is it bored? Is it ready? Is it receptive? Is it scared? Just read the room.

And just adjust. Every pitch is different.

**John:** That’s why those first three or four minutes of just nonsense chit chat are actually really important for just establishing a baseline for what the room feel like. If you have to come in and like, “Okay, go. Start pitching,” you’re not going to likely have a good outcome. But if you have those little like, you know, “So what did you see?” “What are you working on?” “Oh, where did you get this trinket on your coffee table?” Those kind of things can be a huge help in getting you set or going.

Or, just honestly the conversation about, like, “This is why I’m in the room today,” can be just a good way to get started. I do often tend to rehearse that first minute of conversation just so I can have it, it can be a little bit packaged so I can start speaking and get the flow going.

**Craig:** And above all make sure when you leave, whether they buy it or not, make sure that they know your answer to this question: Why should this movie exist? Why should this show exist? It’s not enough to pitch something competently and have it be interesting in a way. It needs to want to be. So, figure out how to get that across.

**John:** Exactly. The classic test I give people is: Would you pay $15 to see this? And if you as the writer can’t answer that question affirmatively, there is no way they’re going to.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, Craig, I have a One Cool Thing this week. Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Well, you know that the answer to that question is no.

**John:** No. My One Cool Thing is actually a very simple good one. Before we started this podcast you cracked open a Diet Dr. Pepper?

**Craig:** I did. It was delicious.

**John:** Yeah. Dr. Pepper is a really good beverage. But I gave up drinking sodas all together. I gave up drinking — Diet Coke was sort of my big one. Diet Coke, or actually Coke Zero, was my sort of go-to thing. And I was like two of those a day.

And then at a friend’s recommendation he was like, “You know, you should really stop that.” And I was like, “Oh, okay, I guess it’s possible to stop that.” So I did. I stopped it all together. But I still need like a little small caffeine fix, and so I was going for iced tea.

The weird thing about iced tea is it doesn’t can or bottle well. There’s something about it that, I don’t know if it’s the essential oils in it or whatever, but like I’ve never had a good plain iced tea. Because I want the plain iced tea; I don’t want the sugar/sweetened kind of stuff, the Snapple stuff, until I found one that is actually really good. So, it’s Tejava. Have you ever had it?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. It’s good stuff. And it’s not like the best iced tea you will ever have in your world, but it’s actually really good for being in a bottle, and it works out as a really good sort of pennies per ounce kind of equation. So, I’m just recommending Tejava, which is available anywhere. And if you are a person who likes iced tea but sort of has never tried bottle iced tea because bottle iced tea is generally terrible, you should give this one a shot.

And it’s all a credit to Stuart, who is just like, “I can get you this.” I’m like, “All right, let’s try it.”

**Craig:** You guys should start making your own sun tea, and then at last you will be an old lady.

**John:** I’d be such an old lady. The thing is I’m such the kind of guy who would make sun tea, who would have a little pitcher and every morning I would sit it out there on the thing and by the afternoon it would be there. But I don’t do that.

**Craig:** No. I mean, I’ve had sun tea. It’s actually pretty good. I’m not a huge iced tea drinker. I do not for the life of me understand this phenomenon of the sweet tea thing in the south. It’s just ruinous — it is both ruinous to your body and also frankly it just tastes awful.

**John:** It does taste — it’s like thin honey. It’s just not a good thing.

**Craig:** It’s gross. I don’t know what is going on.

**John:** I was in South Carolina this last weekend and it was that phenomenon. And so you had to distinguish between iced tea and sweet tea. It was just odd.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you really get the stink eye down there when you’re like, “Can I just get it unsweetened?” And they’re like, “Ugh, yeah, whatever, outsider.”

**John:** Yankee.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I’m like, “Okay, I’m not going to lose a foot in three years.”

**John:** [laughs] Oh.

**Craig:** You know, this is just tragic. It’s tragic.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, I’m going to offer you a One Cool Thing, which is that I think we should open up again the Three Page Challenge, because we haven’t officially been taking in new entries, but some of them have still been coming in. And so we didn’t really close it down, so I think we should officially reopen it. So, if you follow the links on this podcast with the show notes you can always find at johnaugust.com/podcast, if you follow the links there there will be a page to go to that will explain how you can submit your entry to the Three Page Challenge.

And next week we should do another batch of Three Page Challenges and help out some writers there.

**Craig:** Open the flood gates!

**John:** The flood gates are now reopened, so poor Stuart will have to read a bunch of Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Can I just make my One Cool Thing Stuart?

**John:** Stuart. I love Stuart.

**Craig:** He really — you know, people just don’t know that he really does everything.

**John:** Yeah. Well, he does all the editing. He makes the sound coherent. In this podcast he just had a Yeoman’s task because I did not, this was not one of my better podcasts, and so by the time it’s edited hopefully I’ll sound coherent.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those of you, you’ll only hear the edited version. In the unedited version, John spoke in tongues for ten minutes. And then just cried. He cried for 20 minutes. I sat and listened to him cry for 20 minutes.

**John:** It was one of our rougher podcasts I’ll have to say.

**Craig:** He was sobbing. [laughs] Still don’t know why. Look, John is touchy. I’ve got to tell you guys out there. I’m just telling you this is between you and me.

**John:** I have some trigger words.

**Craig:** He’s unstable.

**John:** But, if you want to see this in real live action where we can’t edit out all the mistakes, you can join us in the Austin Film Festival for our first ever live Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** It’s going to be awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So, almost for sure it’s going to be October 20, which is a Saturday at Austin in a big room. We think we have a special guest who’s going to be joining us. It’s going to be great.

**Craig:** It’s going to be spectacular. And if you haven’t already purchased your passes to the Austin Film Festival and Screenwriting Conference it is one of the very few of these things that I heartily endorse, because you’re actually hearing from real screenwriters who do the actual job. How about that? I think you get more out of it then you would a year of film school in, I don’t know, Kentucky.

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you next time.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/eight-reasonable-questions-about-screenwriting).

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

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

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

So, Craig, we’re pretty busy, aren’t we?

**Craig:** We’re pretty busy guys. I’m making a movie. You’re making a Broadway show. I saw that your… — Well, I mean, it’s going to be a Broadway show but right now it’s a Chicago show.

**John:** It’s a Chicago show. We announced finally — for Big Fish — we announced our out of town dates. So we are going to be going to Chicago in April for a five week run at the Oriental Theater. It’s just so exciting, because originally when we started the podcast I was sort of allowed to talk about Big Fish: The Musical; I wasn’t really allowed but I didn’t really ask permission. And then they sort of said, “Hey, could you stop talking about it?” So I stopped talking about it.

But now I can talk about it because it’s real. And we’re going to be in Chicago in April. And singing and dancing and making a musical.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And it’s really great. So, tickets are on sale for like big group sales now. But eventually individual tickets will be on sale. And there will be a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Very exciting. Yeah, I can’t say much at all about anything to do with Hangover 3 other than that we’re making Hangover 3. That’s the sum total of what I’m allowed to say. [laughs] And then I will say no more.

**John:** It’s interesting with Big Fish because I can now say like, “Hey, we’re going to Chicago and these are the dates.” And there’s so much more information…

Oh, I can also say that Norbert Leo Butz is starring as Edward Bloom.

**Craig:** I saw that. Very talented guy.

**John:** He’s phenomenally talented and so we’re so excited to have him as part of the show. But of course there are like a thousand other things I know that I’m not allowed to say. So, I can basically say anything that was already in the press release. And the press release — it’s so fascinating when you’ve read and approved the press release and then you see it with the news stories that come out from the press release, because they are sometimes more graceful, sometimes less graceful rewritings of what was already in the press release. And figuring out sort of how to prioritize the information for a given audience’s interest in what was in the press release.

**Craig:** I find that “entertainment journalism” is the shoddiest, least fact-checked form of what has already become a very shoddy un-fact-checked medium of journalism.

Journalism has suffered over the years, but entertainment journalism is horrendous. Like you say, you put a press release out on the world, and you would think, okay, there really is no need for a game of telephone here. There’s a press release. Just say what is in the press release or don’t. Or say some of it, or say none of it. But then they’ll just get it wrong.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. They’ll spell names wrong. They’ll just make stuff up. And then, because of the internet, if one mistake is made it is perpetuated a million times.

**John:** So not specific to this case really, although there is one sort of questionable case, but I hate when they do sort of lazy Googling. And so they find something and they’re like, “Oh, I’m going to throw this in so it feels a little bit more original.” And so they’ll throw in some random thing about the show which is not actually correct, or about a movie I worked on that is not actually correct at all. And that will be part of the official story from then on.

Or like they’ll throw in a credit for me and I’m like, “That was not mine. Why are you doing that?”

**Craig:** It’s so weird. I remember when we made Scary Movie 3, and this is back in 2003, sort of before the internet really went cuckoo nuts. And when Bob Weinstein announced that he was going to make Scary Movie 3, he said David Zucker is going to be directing it, Craig Mazin and Pat Proft and Kevin Smith are going to be writing it, because he had this idea that Kevin Smith would somehow be involved. But really I think Kevin Smith had said, “I’m actually doing something else — it would be fun to sort of, I don’t know, read the script at some point or talk to those guys.”

And it was smart for him to kind of use a name that people are interested in. But Kevin Smith actually never worked on the movie. And when I say never worked on it, I mean, I’ve never spoken to Kevin Smith in my life. He literally never did anything with it. And that was the last time his name was mentioned was the very first press release to announce that the movie was even being made.

He was still being cited as a writer in reviews of the film, just because they Google.

**John:** They Google.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s remarkable.

**John:** They do Google.

**Craig:** Remarkable.

**John:** But, you know what? On our podcast I think we can do better than lazy entertainment journalism and we can do proper fact checking sometimes. And we can do follow up. And so I thought we would start with two little bits of follow up.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, first, a personal follow up. Because you had in a previous podcast recommended a really — well, I’m spoiling here, but you recommended a really good documentary called Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which I saw last week. And you know what? It was really, really good.

**Craig:** I didn’t lie.

**John:** No. So I’m endorsing your endorsement. The one thing I wanted to follow up with you about though is when you were talking about it you were talking about Jiro’s pursuit of perfection, which is so true about the documentary. You see this guy, and he’s obsessing about absolutely everything about how he is making his sushi, and how he is seating everybody at the counter, and how he is making certain sushi smaller for the women than for the men because he’s just figured it all out because he’s been doing this for 75 years, which is crazy.

And you were trying to relate it to screenwriting, which is natural because we’re a podcast about screenwriting. But it struck me as I was watching, because you put that idea in my head, like perfection in screenwriting: You really couldn’t do a Jiro of Screenwriting, because everything that we do as a screenwriter, or really in most of the creative arts, every sentence we write is a brand new sentence.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Every project we tackle is a whole new set of challenges. So, Jiro has the luxury, or sort of the curse — he chose to make it a luxury — of doing the exact same thing every day. And because he could do the exact same thing every day he could optimize it and perfect it in a way that may not be a realistic goal for a screenwriter or any writer.

**Craig:** True. In fact, it sort of underscores why the search for perfection in screenwriting is so fruitless, because here’s a man who actually has controlled out every other variable other than make tuna sushi. And yet he still can’t perfect it.

We are constantly being asked to make sushi that doesn’t exist. And, also, other people are involved. And, also, we actually can’t do it because other people are doing it, because it’s screenwriting. So, inevitably — you know as they say a movie is written four times. It’s written, it’s cast, it’s shot, and it’s edited. The ultimate authorship of a movie is collaborative no matter what you do.

So, we are that much further removed from the possibility of perfection just by the nature of our process. It was instructive for me to watch somebody who you think almost maybe could achieve it because of the specificity of what he does, and he, too, was saying no, not possible.

**John:** But I do endorse the movie. And it was terrifically well made. And fun to see someone who could devote their life to a specific thing and not have it feel like a tragedy. Because as I first sat down to it, I was like, “Oh no, this is going to be a sad story about a man who wasted his life making sushi.” And that’s not how you leave the movie, which is nice to see.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good. I’m glad you saw it.

**John:** A second follow up thing is we had a question maybe two weeks ago on a writer who wrote in from Iran who had written in with a very specific sort of copyright question.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And basically saying that Iran doesn’t sort of respect or doesn’t protect the same copyrights, so what is he supposed to do? And so we had a reader writer in, which is what I hoped would happen. Alexia wrote in and she said, “For sure you do not have to be a US citizen to enjoy copyright on your work via the US Copyright Office any more so than you have to be a US citizen to register a trademark at the Trademark Office.”

And then she says, “I can speak to this from personal experience.” So she’s done this. I think she’s a European writer who’s registered at the US Copyright Office. She also goes on to say, “The idea of transferring copyright to a US-friendly person is iffy.” It’s one thing we sort of brought up, if you have a friend in the US, do you have them register it for you? “US Copyright Law actually has clauses in place to stop this from happening as a guard against exploitation. Generally speaking, copyright can only be transferred under a contract of employment.”

**Craig:** Right. I actually did do some offline research into Iranian copyright law. It is…it’s a little funky. I mean, law in general in Iran is a little funky because it is a theocracy bordering on totalitarian state. And so the way laws are implemented is a touch whimsical, as we all know.

They are not signatory I believe to the Berne Convention. So, while they may be members of WIPO which is a — I can’t quite remember the details. Their copyright protections are not as strong as those in other countries, nor are they as strong as those in the United States in terms of their treaty arrangements with other nations. Part of the issue with Iran is they don’t respect other people’s copyrights as well as they ought to.

**John:** Exactly. So, for the writer, who wrote in a couple weeks ago with that question, it seems like one solution would be to just get it registered in the US Copyright Office. You’re going to have protections under the Berne Convention for every place other than your home country, which seems crazy, but is probably helpful if you’re that writer.

**Craig:** Yes, I agree. For sure.

**John:** So, today, Craig, I thought we would answer eight questions. Some of them are big questions. Some of them are small questions, but it’s sort of a sampler platter of questions that a screenwriter might have about the craft, the profession, the words on the page. So, shall we try?

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m excited.

**John:** Great. So Sarah writes in. She’s a writer who lives in Los Angeles. “Recently a friend/assistant at a studio passed a video pitch onto me of this guy briefly describing a premise for a sci-fi film.” And actually in the show notes I’m going to send a link to this pitch, because it’s on YouTube or Vimeo or one of those.

“The pitch itself isn’t overly specific, but I was told from his video pitch that he was able to get a few meetings. Is pitching an idea via the web a good idea? Isn’t the probability of the idea being stolen much higher?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I knew you’d laugh here.

**Craig:** Here we go again.

**John:** Lastly, “Could this be the evolution of pitching? If so, I may be screwed because I don’t know if I could even sit in front of a camera.”

So, I watched his video and I’ll send it through to you to watch, Craig.

Essentially it’s a guy sitting at his computer or laptop describing this sci-fi project. Sometimes there are little popup windows to show specific images that he wants to talk about. But it feels very much like if you were in the room with this guy and he was like pitching you a project, that’s kind of what it feels like. And I was actually kind of impressed by it in that he was straightforward, it was direct. It felt like, okay, I can see what this guy is describing in his movie.

So, could you envision a scenario in which people are pitching movies via YouTube?

**Craig:** Absolutely. I think it’s inevitable. First of all, look at the generation that’s coming. They are the most exhibitionist generation in human history, and not because they are innately more exhibitionist, but because they have a channel for exhibition. And I see nothing wrong with it.

I’m not at all surprised that you liked it. The people who shouldn’t do this are people who frankly are not good in any room. For instance, Sarah is already uncomfortable at the thought of sitting in front of a camera. I suspect that she may be just as uncomfortable sitting across from three jaded executives who are hungry and just want to go to lunch.

But if you are good at pitching, why not? It makes total sense to me. Inevitably somebody will talk about the thing that makes me the craziest, which is the unfounded paranoia that somebody is going to steal your idea. It is less likely, frankly, that somebody is going to steal your — and let’s stop saying “steal your idea” because it’s not steal-able, it’s not property — but it is less likely to me that somebody is going to steal your unique expression if in fact you’ve put it on the web and dated it. Now there is blatant proof of your primacy of authorship. But please understand: Your idea is not something you own — I’m so sorry — so it cannot be stolen. There isn’t an idea that’s going to make your career. It’s not about ideas. It is about your ability to write.

**John:** I agree.

A few points I would make here. First off, the idea of a video pitch: Yes you could make a video pitch and put it on YouTube for the whole world to see. Where I think it might be a more likely scenario for a lot of these people is that you make this video and you send it so somebody but as a private video, so you’re not putting it out there for the world to see. Or you’re sending it to a specific person to describe what it is you’re trying to do.

And really it is an extension of what we’ve already seen happening for the last 10 years, which are these sort of rip reels or rip movies where you are trying to describe what a movie feels like and what a sequence feels like, and you go through and you pull sections from other movies to sort of give you the sense of feel for what the movie is going to be like. Directors have been doing this for a long time.

Joe Carnahan quite famously this last month or two did one for Daredevil and it leaked out online, or he put it out online, so everyone could see that this was the Daredevil movie that he was going to make. This is really the earlier version of that. This is saying what the idea of the movie is. If I were in the room describing it to you, this is what it would be like.

A second point: The reason why pitches are usually done in person is so the person can ask you questions. So, this same kind of thing could happen via Skype and that would be the same kind of thing. What I saw I saw in this YouTube video really could have happened in a Skype situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That I think is going to be incredibly much more common.

The third thing I would remind you of is there is this idea that Hollywood is sort of one way, and that you are always going to be — that a new generation is going to come in and have to pitch to people who are in their 40s, and 50s, and 60s. No, you’re going to be pitching to people who are your same age. So, if you are comfortable with being on a camera and talking to a camera or looking at things in a YouTube video, if that is something you’re comfortable with in your generation, the executives you’re going to be pitching to are going to be comfortable in the same way.

Everyone sort of enters into the industry at sort of the same age. So if it’s a generational thing that you do make YouTube videos then that is going to become the thing.

**Craig:** Sure. And finally I will point out that, as I’ve said many times, what we are selling primarily is comfort. We are trying to inspire confidence. And if you can do that through your video, they are going to look at you and say, “Not only is that an interesting story, but this person makes me feel comfortable. They seem like they’re in control of their story and they seem like somebody I could talk to in a room, and not a weirdo.”

Please understand: When you are out there and you are new, you are not simply competing against me or John; you are also competing against the thousands of people out there who have broken through the gates and been really weird. And so they’re just scared of weirdos. It’s a nice way to inoculate yourself against that.

**John:** And in a strange way, even if they are hiring a writer, they’re hiring you to write this thing so they should be concerned about the words on the page, a video is telling them a little bit more about like who you are actually are as a person.

So if they had a writing sample and they could see you pitching this thing, they could put them together and say like, “Oh, that’s a person I could probably work with.” And that could be really helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I like it. It’s a good idea.

**John:** Next question. Chris asks, “What do you and Craig think of HSX.com? If you haven’t heard of it before it’s a stock market esque game based on the film and television industry. If a film is green-lit its IPO is on the market, or it becomes an IPO on the market. The price of the stock is based on a one dollar to $1 million in domestic box office gross in the first four weeks. Additional options become available when the movie opens in theaters. I’d be interested to hear you guys discuss it.”

So, Craig, have you ever played HSX.com, or gone to the site?

**Craig:** I was a very early kind of high stakes player…

**John:** I kind of guessed that.

**Craig:** …way, way back when it first began.

**John:** I think I was still in film school when it started out, or an early version of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It goes back to the ’90s. I don’t know if you remember, for awhile they were in the old Ritz Furniture Building in West Hollywood.

**John:** I do. And they used to have a stock ticker that would go past.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Yeah. They’ve been around for a long time. It’s a fun concept. I find that their stock prices are rarely accurate to what I know, because in part, you know, the market for instance, the real stock market will build into prices things like, “Maybe this new car company’s car won’t actually happen and they’ll go out of business, so we have to kind of price that in.”

You and I will know for instance, “Okay, this movie that they’re not sure is happening is really, really happening.” So, sometimes the early stock prices tend to be too low, too depressed. They get things wrong all the time.

However, it is an interesting bellweather. I like to go on — for instance, Identity Thief, one thing I like is I went on to look at Identity Thief, and I don’t know what the price is right now, but they can also show you how many players are holding the stock long, that is to say they believe the stock will outperform the number that’s listed there, and how many are holding it short — they believe that the stock will underperform. And it was like 95% to 5% holding it long. That’s encouraging to me. It means that people are actually — that the people who play are optimistic about the movie.

I like stuff like that. In the end, nobody in Hollywood looks at HSX for anything. It is just a game. It is highly inaccurate. But, the people who play it are into movies and love movies. And I have no problem with that; I think it’s cool.

**John:** Yeah. I have not looked at it in a decade, so I wasn’t even sure it still existed until this question came through. It’s interesting if you’re interested in it. I don’t go to visit it. No one makes their decisions based upon it. All these kind of things like that, or Box Office Mojo, they’re interesting in those moments where that data could actually be helpful to you, or where you’re just thinking, like, “Well what is everyone else thinking about this thing?”

I have a movie coming out, Frankenweenie, October 5th. And like I’m curious what people think it’s going to do. But I’m not going to like — hopefully — stay awake at night worried about it, because it is just kind of guessing at a certain level.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now there was very briefly, I think Cantor Fitzgerald which is an investment house floated a real version of HSX where people actually could purchase real futures based on movies. And very wisely the legislature killed that. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, because talk about insider trading. We know so much about that stuff.

**Craig:** Exactly. It just would have been insane. I mean, just insane. Anybody that wasn’t in the business playing that would have been such a sucker and had such a kick me sign on their back, I can’t even believe they entertained it for a minute.

**John:** Yeah. Just deliberately tank a weekly rewrite to bring something down.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** We would never do that…

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** We have too much integrity.

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** Never.

**Craig:** Never!

**John:** Next question will be so short. Sam in Los Angeles writes, “Is there anything that can be done about cell phones in movie theaters? Are the people in the industry aware or is there any sense of what to do about it? I imagine it is of great concern to the movie industry as it’s ruining the exhibition of the movies they create. I had an unpleasant experience at ArcLight last night. There were cell phones all around me. Even though I tried politely to ask them to stop it didn’t help.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sorry, Grandpa. No. There’s nothing we can do about it. I mean, look — go to a movie theater where people don’t do that, I guess. I mean, I’ve never…

**John:** But that’s the ArcLight! That should be the ArcLight?

**Craig:** Are they respectful? I mean, people are respectful, generally. I’ve never been in a theater where people were going crazy with cell phones.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve been to those, but that wasn’t the ArcLight.

When I was working on Big Fish: The Musical — which I can talk about now — a lot of times I just go right from work to see a movie in Times Square. And that’s not the ideal audience to see a movie with in that they tend to be a heavily tourist crowd. There’s a lot of cell phones going on and you just sort of roll with it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But the ArcLight should be better than that. I don’t know, I would say, yes, ask with sort of authority saying, “Hey, can you get off your cell phone?”

**Craig:** You can ask. I mean, look — the bottom line is if somebody, [laughs] everybody knows they run a thing in front of the movie saying shut your cell phone off. So, if they’re not shutting it off and there’s a bunch of people not shutting it off, they’ve already decided they don’t give a damn. You’re in the wrong theater or you are at a move that’s for teenagers who just don’t care. It’s part of their experience, and I’m super sorry dude, but that’s life.

I remember going to see Commando when I was in high school. I went with my buddies. We went to go see Commando. And half the audience was drunk, the other half was high or stupid or all three. People were going nuts, and that was the point, it was Commando for god’s sake.

**John:** Totally. It’s Commando.

**Craig:** I mean, I can’t imagine people are going to see…like The Words is opening this weekend. I don’t think people are going to be on their cell phone in the middle of The Words. It’s not going to happen.

**John:** [laughs] “Yo! He stole that book!”

**Craig:** [laughs] By the way, well, maybe I’ll save it for my — I’m going to save it for my Cool Thing.

**John:** All right. Next question comes from Peter in Prague. I love that we have people in Prague. I kind of always pick the person who is writing from overseas because it’s just awesome.

**Craig:** It’s cool.

**John:** “In your podcast you often refer to a studio. How many studio execs are usually involved in the decision-making process and give you, or have permission, or are saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to move a project forward? How formal or informal are these sessions? Do you have to persuade them and fight for every word? Are you given a list of do’s and don’ts? What is that process like working with studio executives?”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s a good question.

**John:** It’s a very good question, Peter from Prague. And it shows some insight into how the US film industry works which is not how the overseas film industries work.

**Craig:** Right. Well, obviously it changes from studio to studio. Some studios are very committee like and other studios are a little more autocratic. There are levels at each studio, and roughly the level is you have a creative executive, there is a vice president, there is a senior vice president, there is the president of production, there is the chairman of the studio. And then floating above them is some sort of corporate master.

And depending on who you are and where the development stage is, you may be dealing with somebody low on the totem pole, in the middle or at the very top. It all depends on who you are, what the project is, and at what point in the development process it is.

The meetings themselves aren’t formal, per se; it’s not like you go in and defend your thesis in academia. All meetings ultimately are informal. It’s people sitting around a table talking through what they think. You rarely are given any kind of — a list of do’s and don’ts. There are notes which are the studio’s opinions and suggestions of what to change and what to keep.

Generally development is a very informal process. I find it to be an informal process.

**John:** Usually with a project you’ll have one person who’s your point person on the project. And if you are a newer, less expensive writer that person might be a creative executive, so a junior-ish person whose responsibility is to work with you, and the two of you will work together a lot. And then they’ll read the script and then it will go up to the next person who will give more notes. And the next person will weigh in with stuff. And I should also say there is often a producer involved who should be doing some of that work, too, and that can be convoluted, too. So you’re dealing with a producer, then you’re dealing with the creative executive.

But from the creative side, there is generally a junior person. There is a senior person, and that senior person doesn’t have green light power, but it is his or her movie. Like that person will get some credit for making that movie. At a certain point the decision goes up to a studio president who is going to be the green light person who will say, “Yes we are making this movie,” or, “We are not making this movie.” Decisions about big actors will go to that person.

And sometimes they will get involved in very specific story things on a movie. With the Charlie’s Angels movie, I’ve told this story before so I apologize, but we were at like a Friday 5pm meeting with Amy Pascal who was the President of Sony at that point. And she said, “Okay, we are going to cut $5 million out of this budget and we are not leaving until we do it.”

And so she sort of flipped through the pages and she ripped out five. And she’s like, “Okay, these are gone. Write around them.” And it was frustrating, but that was also sort of her job. She’s like, “I can tell this is an expensive sequence. We don’t need it. Take this out and that is the decision to make.”

A person at that level would get involved in a project that had challenges, that had some filmmakers who needed to be dealt with by a person at that level.

You often won’t get involved with the chairman of a studio or some really giant person who is sort of a corporate person until a first test screening, and then that person shows up. And that’s when, like, for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, “Oh, there’s Alan Horn.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because that person is showing up there. This is a movie we’ve made. He is here because the president of marketing is there, too. We have to figure out how we are going to sell this movie and that becomes an important process for him as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Good rule of thumb: The more you are being paid, and the more the movie costs, the higher level you’ll be dealing with, because naturally there’s simply more accountability to it. The one thing I would add also is that nowadays it is increasingly common — I think essentially it is the rule now that the head of marketing is part of that green light committee.

In some cases, in some studios, the head of marketing is part of the “should we even develop this at all” committee, because — as we’ve mentioned before — the cost of selling movies actually outweighs the cost of making a lot of them. And so marketing becomes enormously important.

**John:** Agreed. Next question is from Charles. It’s about sharing credit. So, Charles writes, “I decided to team with two individual screenwriters I met on a filmmaker’s social networking site with the idea of collaborating on something together. I came with the initial premise and through subsequent online meetings the premise morphed and the writing began. They each wrote a scene and then flaked out, so I kept writing. One of them read the first draft and gave me some notes. The other one never even read it. So, I’ve registered the script with the WGA under my name only because other than a block of description, a sentence or two of dialogue, and some ideas tossed around in the online meetings, they really didn’t write anything. If I was lucky enough and a company wanted to option or buy this spec do I mention the other two collaborators? Do I…”

**Craig:** You have to.

**John:** “Should I include them with any potential buyers?”

**Craig:** Look, this is a disaster, okay?

**John:** Yes. This is why you don’t do this.

**Craig:** Yeah. You really, really, you just don’t do this. It’s a disaster because the truth is you’re right, you’ve written 99% of this thing. And any of the discussions and the sort of pie-in-the-sky things, those are — that falls under producing, sort of. You know, writing is writing, it’s creating literary material. The fact that they have even a word in this script causes you a huge headache.

You may think, “Well, I don’t even have to mention it.” When you sign an employment contract you warrant in that employment contract under penalty of near death that every word in that script is yours.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And if they come after you, and they come after the studio, the studio will turn to you and say, “You screwed us. And we’re not covering your butt.” See, normally, when the cuckoo army shows up, when they hear that a movie is being made to say, “Oh, you stole my script!” You know, like in Hangover 2 some nut job said you stole my life, whatever that nonsense was. The studio — they pay for everything. You’re indemnified. They cover it. They’re like, “These are our guys, we’ll take care of them; we’ll deal with these lawsuits; it’s nothing — it’s silly.”

But if you actually did use somebody else’s stuff and put your name on it, brother, you got a world of hurt coming.

**John:** You do. So, I don’t have the right solution for this guy right now other than sort of like build a time machine, go back, and don’t do that again. If you really wrote every word — if you wrote 99% of this, go back and rewrite the 1% that they did write. Make sure that they don’t have any — that there’s nothing that’s theirs that is in there.

Now, you did talk with them originally about this idea and this movie, and I think you need to go back to them. I would go back and sort of retroactively say some sort of shared story, “This is how we’re going to collaborate on the story of this,” and make it clear that you wrote this whole thing, but you want them to be acknowledged somehow.

**Craig:** Listen. If I’m your lawyer I know exactly what I would say.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** You have to go back to these guys and offer them some amount of money, $500, $1, $1,000, whatever it takes ultimately to purchase them out as works-for-hire for you. And now you’re covered.

**John:** That’s a good… — See, listen to Craig.

**Craig:** But, it’s a negotiation all of a sudden. And, you know, any time people feel like they have leverage on you they’re going to squeeze. So, now all of a sudden you’re into a lawyer, plus you’re into them. It’s a disaster. You can’t — you guys: Never do these things. Never do this sort of thing. It’s just a disaster.

**John:** Yeah. And this would have been easier if he hadn’t already said that he wrote the whole script. But they now know that he wrote the whole script, so they know that they have leverage.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. If you do it before that, you say, “Listen, guys…”

**John:** “Listen, do you guys really want to do this? Let me just buy you out of this because I think I really want to write this whole script and you don’t seem that into it.”

**Craig:** “I’ll give you each a couple hundred bucks and some Starbucks cards and get out of my life.”

**John:** Yup. That would have been great. It’s not going to happen that way.

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** Here’s a happier story. This is a tweet from Kelly Gibler. She writes, “My script made semifinals for both Austin and Sundance. I want to get some representation. What should I do?”

**Craig:** Oh, didn’t we do the “how do I get an agent” thing?

**John:** No, but this is a… — I phrase this, put this under “capitalizing on some heat.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Because here’s the thing: It’s great that your script made semifinals. That’s useful. So, it’s a somewhat different situation than like, “I just wrote a script…”

So, here you wrote a script that’s actually pretty good. That’s a distinction between I think the general case scenario of like “I want to get an agent,” because maybe you’re no good. Well, she’s actually probably pretty good because she made semifinals. So, that’s great.

So, what does she do with this little bit of heat that she got off of making semifinals? Suggestions, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, hold on a second: We don’t know that she’s any good from semifinals. I’m talking now as a perspective agent. All we know is that she’s not super duper bad.

**John:** True.

**Craig:** You have to win one of those things for me to think that you have actual heat. I mean, there are a billion people in semifinals all day long. To me that doesn’t mean anything yet. I don’t think there’s real heat yet.

**John:** I would advise Kelly Gibler, me being the sunshine and rainbow part of this podcast, I would advise her go to Austin. Go to Austin because you’re a semifinalist. And go in Austin and see what Austin Film Festival is. And as you meet people there and as you meet agency managers, because there will be some there, be like, “Hey, I have a script that is a semifinalist.”

Talk to them about it. Don’t be overwhelming with it. Just happily give it to them. Get business cards. Send them your thing. Just try to schmooze it up as much as you can.

You can also do that online. I would say you are not going to get real agents probably to read your thing, but there are going to be some agents’ assistants at some of the agencies who are, like, they’re looking for somebody. They’ll read your script because you’re not just nobody. You’re somebody who has a little bit of validation because you made some level there.

If only it gives you enough incentive to feel like you can introduce yourself to somebody, that’s a good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ll be meaner about it, or just glummer I guess. I think you have to win. I don’t think semifinal means anything. I think you have to win. And even when you win, there is questionable heat. That’s how grumpy I am about the state of affairs of getting an agent.

**John:** I feel like I need to mention the Nerdist Writers Podcast every podcast that we do. But I was listening to one that had a panel of people, and unfortunately it’s very hard to tell their voices apart, so it could have been Kyle Killen or it could have been somebody else on the panel. But he was crediting his wife or his girlfriend saying, “She made me go to this party and she made me talk to the agent, and I was so nervous about doing it, but then he read it and he really liked it, and that got me started.”

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** And so sometimes you have to just be awkward and uncomfortable and make that first conversation and you never know.

**Craig:** It’s a funny thing. Actually I love that story because it proves, frankly, that actually just standing next to somebody telling them something interesting is worth so much more than finalist Austin Film Festival. And I say that as somebody that’s judging [laughs] the finals of the Austin Film Festival this year for screenwriting.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** But it’s not about — I mean, I think if you win it is important. But there is no replacement for eye-to-eye contact.

**John:** The other reason she should go to the Austin Film Festival, of course, is that we are going to be doing the first ever Scriptnotes Live at Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yay!

**John:** We have absolutely no details because we really don’t know anything about what’s happening with the Austin schedule. But, we’re going to be there and we’re going to be doing this kind of podcast, this kind of conversation, but with a giant room full of people.

**Craig:** Huge room. Sick.

**John:** It’s going to be exciting. I’m not going to be nervous. I’m just giddy about it. It’s going to be really fun. And I think we’re going to have an awesome guest.

**Craig:** [laughs] You’re giddy!

**John:** I’m giddy.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s great. I’m glad. One of us should be giddy about it.

**John:** Our next question is from Erin in Chicago. She says, “I recently completed an Associate Degree of Nursing. Near the end of my program I realized my passion is screenwriting rather than nursing. Coincidentally, also began to make arrangements to move to Los Angeles prior to finishing nursing school. I’ve heard you say that if you want to learn the industry your best bet is to get some sort of job in the industry. While you and Craig have been clear on your views on the necessity of film school, or lack thereof, the advice always presupposes that a person has an undergraduate degree, which I do not. Is it possible for me to find an industry job without a BA? Or should I start looking at colleges again?”

**Craig:** Oh god. Argh. This is where I want to be super supportive and give you the answer I’m supposed to give you per the manual of being supportive. But really what I want to tell you is: be a nurse, because it’s so hard. I get so scared at the thought of somebody who’s in nursing school — we need nurses. God knows we need them.

**John:** America needs nurses.

**Craig:** And they’re going to move to LA and they don’t have a college degree. And they don’t…

John, am I just too down?

**John:** No. You’re not too down. But I think we can take your frown and turn it upside down.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** And make it good. Here’s the thing, Erin: You have an Associate Degree in Nursing, and that’s awesome, and that’s very relevant to nursing. I think you’re going to have a hard time getting one of those classic industry kind of jobs with an Associate Degree in Nursing. Because it’s not like people have, “Oh, you have to have an Ivy League degree,” or something, but everyone you’re going to be competing with for those jobs is going to have, like, an Ivy League degree, or at least like a pretty good university degree there.

And so it’s not like people are looking at resumes that carefully, but they’re going to notice that you don’t have that. But, here’s what you do have with a Nursing Degree and the move to Los Angeles. You have a job. And a job is a really good thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I would say: Move to Los Angeles, be a nurse, take extension classes at UCLA where you’ll actually learn screenwriting, and just learn screenwriting. And learn if screenwriting is what you actually really want to do. And if it is what you really want to do, no one is ever going to care whether you’ve got a Bachelor’s Degree or Master’s Degree or whatever.

I have an MFA. No one has ever cared.

**Craig:** Seriously.

**John:** The degree itself matters nothing.

**Craig:** Exactly, like Diablo Cody.

**John:** Diablo Cody.

**Craig:** I don’t know if she has a degree. Who cares if she has a degree?

**John:** No, she’s awesome.

**Craig:** She’s awesome. And she wrote a great script.

Listen, this is really important. People will write into us and they’ll say, “I realize that my passion is screenwriting.” You don’t know what screenwriting is, okay? Because it’s a job and you’ve never done it. Your passion is writing. And you like the idea of writing screenplays, but that’s not what screenwriting is. Screenwriting is a job where you write and also get punched in the head a lot. And also are on set. And also are in meetings. And also kind of produce and handhold, and cajole, and hustle.

There are moving parts to this you can’t imagine yet. And so the thought that you’re now — not only is the pyramid…the pyramid preexists you, but you’re now digging down and putting another layer in which is, “Well, but before I can really start the incredible uphill climb becoming a screenwriter I first have to go to college now so I can start the uphill climb.”

And I’m like, oh god, I just want you to be a nurse and write. And John’s answer is perfect. I hope you take his advice. Move to LA. Be a nurse. Put money in your pocket. Pay your rent. Not freak out and worry. God knows you don’t want to pile on tuition loans at this point in your life — it’s crazy and pointless. And take extension classes. And read screenplays, and watch movies, and write scripts.

And if it happens, it happens. And if it doesn’t, you’re helping people and you’re earning money, thank god.

**John:** Those are good things. Has there been a great movie about a nurse? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but that’s not really what I’m talking about.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So write that great nurse movie.

**Craig:** Right. Or TV show. I mean, there is a Nurse Jackie, but that’s one kind of nurse show.

**John:** Well, yeah, I mean, ER is kind of a nurse show, too. But, yeah, come on. I would say be an awesome nurse. Keep your eyes open. Figure out what the story is about nursing. Write that movie and win an Oscar. Done.

**Craig:** Please. For everyone: Do not take on debt to be a screenwriter. That is a super stupid thing to do.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you. I think if you were getting a Bachelor’s Degree, that’s awesome, and making you a fully actualized citizen, I’m okay with some debt there. I will say like as an alumni of USC Film School, which is kind of very expensive, I shouldn’t say that you shouldn’t take on debt for it, but it’s questionable, I’ll give you that.

**Craig:** My point is don’t take on debt to be a screenwriter. There are degrees — some people are wealthy, and a liberal arts education for them is a luxury that they indulge in, and that’s great. Some people are not, but they do it because they foresee an improvement in their potential for salary. And so there is an investment. And it’s not simply debt; it’s an investment. I understand — it should pay itself off and then some.

But, there is no educational investment that’s worth making that requires debt to be a screenwriter, because the odds of you being a working screenwriter are very, very small. And also the thing that you’re going into debt for will not help you be a screenwriter, okay? But being a nurse…it’s wonderful.

**John:** Being a nurse is wonderful. So, being a nurse is wonderful. The only thing, my defense of film school, even for screenwriters but less so for screenwriters than other crafts, is that you are paying that money to enter into a cohort of incredibly motivated film people who will be your peers and allies for the next 20 years, which was very much my experience coming out of the Stark Program. The only people I knew in Long Angeles were my 25 classmates. And they have been incredibly helpful to me my entire career. And I would not be here without them.

**Craig:** But to me, I call that the two school exception. If you get accepted to NYU Film or USC Stark or Film, go. Because you’re right — there is a real potential for value there. If you are not, don’t.

**John:** Yeah. I agree with you there. Last question is from Kenneth. He writes, “I want to write a screenplay based on a foreign novella that was written in the 1930s. I contacted the translator of the translation I love and he said that it hasn’t been optioned, but he recommended I also find out if the original foreign text has been. I plan on doing that, but there’s a further complication. It was already adapted to the screen in the ’70s.

“So, in order to write a fresh adaptation do I simply arrange an option with the original text publisher, or will it be an arrangement with the company that owns the ’70s adaptation of the film? Since the book has already been adapted what do I do?”

So, I can start and you can correct me when I get something wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When in the ’70s they made that movie, they bought the film rights to that book. And so in buying the film rights to that book, they probably still have the only rights to make the movie version of that book. So you will not be able to make a new movie version of that book without negotiating with the people who made that film. You disagree?

**Craig:** Not necessarily true, especially if it was made in the ’70s. A lot of times the rights cycles were not in perpetuity. These days corporations are way too smart. They license everything… — Well, the way they license things, there are usually cycles to the licensing, but once they actually exploit the license by making the property, they get an exclusive right to adapt that property for that medium for in for eternity throughout the universe…

**John:** “All known or unknown…”

**Craig:** But in the ’70s it may have been that there was a limited rights cycle, even if you were to make the movie your rights to make a movie based on that property expired after a certain amount of time. So actually the first step: you would go back to the original text — the translations are essentially irrelevant — go back to the original text, original author, that publisher; find out what the situation is with the rights, if they are available for adaptation. Sometimes films are adapted in one country but the worldwide rights or the US rights are still available.

It can be complicated.

**John:** Yeah. I would amend this to say that you do need to go back to whoever owns the foreign rights. You want the foreign book rights, whatever that is, that’s the core rights there. I would not take them at their word that they have all the rights to something. There could be other encumbrances that you’re not aware of.

You don’t want to spend years of your life trying to do this thing and then have it be shut down for something that you can’t understand or control. And I say this as a person who just very recently went through a strange situation.

**Craig:** There are companies that do these title searches, right?

**John:** Yeah. So they can do a copyright search that would be helpful. But as much digging as you can do the better you’re going to be in the long run.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I say this from personal experience, two things that happened to me very recently were just like, “Whoa?! These are giant corporations; they should have figured that out and they didn’t.” So…

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure.

**John:** So Craig, it’s time for One Cool Thing. Do you want to go first? Should I go first?

**Craig:** I’ll go first because One Cool Thing did come to mind. And it’s The Words. It’s this movie opening, and by the time you hear this podcast it will be out in theaters near you. It’s called The Words. And I saw an early cut of the film and I loved it.

**John:** This film stars Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana.

**Craig:** Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, and Jeremy Irons. And so I really loved the movie. And it’s about writing. It’s about writers.

**John:** Isn’t it about stealing an idea? It’s about copyright?

**Craig:** And I sort of thought the whole thing is a really interesting meditation on how all writers feel, even in moments of inspiration, a bit like a fraud, because did they write it? Or where did it come from? And should I take pride in what I do? Is it mine? Did it just happen? It’s an interesting movie for writers.

Now, I have to say: Today I saw that it was coming out and I went, “Oh yeah, that movie — I really liked that movie.” And I checked to see what kind of reviews it was getting, and it was getting ripped apart by critics, and I was shocked. Shocked.

And I felt really bad for the filmmakers because I actually thought they did a spectacular job. Maybe I’m the only one. Maybe people out there will see this movie and say, “No, the critics were right.” I just think the critics were off base. I really, really enjoyed the movie.

And, yes, I’m friends with Bradley, and it’s not about, “Oh, Bradley Cooper needs more people to go see Bradley Cooper movies.” It’s a very small movie. I think it was made for like $4 million. I really loved the story. And I loved the way the story was structured. So, I don’t know, I thought it was a Cool Thing. I stand in defiance of the critics. I say it’s a Cool Thing.

**John:** So here’s the thing about the words for me is it stars Bradley Cooper and Zoe Saldana, who are beautiful people. So as long as it’s relatively well shot you get to look at beautiful people for 100 minutes.

**Craig:** Having sex at one point.

**John:** See? Come on. You sold a ticket right there.

**Craig:** She is…

**John:** She is stunning.

**Craig:** And I’ll circle back to Bradley, but she is stunning. I met her once, very briefly. I was standing outside with Todd Phillips at Warner Bros. We had a little spot where we would stand. He used to smoke. He doesn’t smoke anymore, but he would go outside to smoke and I would stand with him. And she came by because it’s this alleyway — it’s famous people alleyway. They’re coming and going all the time. And he knows everybody. I don’t know that many people, but I get to sort of secondarily enjoy meeting these people.

And sometimes you meet famous people and they are so beautiful on screen and then you meet them in life and you think, “Oh, you’re somehow diminished by reality.” She’s actually more beautiful in real life. She is unbelievable. I just thought she was gorgeous.

Bradley, [laughs], is also really, really good-looking. And it just makes me angry sometimes. I just look at this guy and I’m like, “What is the deal?” Like, “How did you get that hair? How did you get that face? This sucks. Why do I look like me?”

**John:** And then he breaks out his fluent French and you just want to kill yourself.

**Craig:** Oh, and then it’s just, “Come on, bro.”

**John:** So I shared a mat with Zoe Saldana because she used to workout at the same gym as I used to workout at. At first I wasn’t sure it was her because I agree with you that she is incredibly pretty and she’s one of these people who is actually noticeably pretty even outside of all the glam and all that stuff. But when you see people in workout mode, they’re smaller and they’re just doing their thing. And so they’re not able to carry themselves in their sort of beautiful mode.

So, I noticed her, but I was like, “Ah, she’s really interesting.” But it took me half an hour to sort of go, “Oh, …and that’s Zoe Saldana.”

**Craig:** I think this is your might be gay moment, like you might be gay if…

**John:** You don’t notice her…

**Craig:** You’re working out next to Zoe Saldana sweating…

**John:** No, I noticed she was pretty…

**Craig:** …and it takes you a half an hour. I mean, dude. She’s so…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, look, the truth is I’m 40% gay for Bradley. I really am. He was on the cover of, I don’t know if you saw this, he was on the cover of the Hollywood Reporter this week.

**John:** No. I don’t get that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, I saw a copy of it on the newsstand. And the picture of him, oh my god — it’s just not fair.

**John:** I remember Bradley Cooper from Alias, and he was always the one, like, “Why are you not being highlighted more?” He was comparatively the nice chubby guy on that show, which was absurd.

**Craig:** I know, but now…

**John:** Because he was the best friend. He had sort of no real function.

**Craig:** And he really is one of the… — There is something about male stars in Hollywood, the real iconic Hollywood faces, as they get older they just get better looking. It’s fascinating. It really is.

**John:** One of my theories with that is that we just become so accustomed to looking at their faces and knowing, like, “That’s a handsome person,” that our idea of what handsome is becomes that thing that they are at the moment.

**Craig:** I understand. Yeah. There is another thing though that happens with men. See, to me, masculinity is obviously — a part of being handsome is masculine features. And I think as men get older they tend to lose more facial fat…

**John:** They get harder.

**Craig:** …and there’s a certain weathered, masculine rugged thing that begins to happen and sort of accentuates the masculinity. And they just look manlier and manlier as they get older. Like, I see a picture of Brad Pitt and there is gray in his beard and suddenly he’s cooler looking all of a sudden. Whereas unfortunately for women it seems like the world perceives the opposite — as they get older somehow because I guess femininity is so closely linked to youth or something.

**John:** Yeah. You had brought this up in an earlier podcast, and I thought of it after we recorded it, my counter example, because you were complaining everyone was like, “Oh, for a woman in her 70s she’s so beautiful.” And you were like, “No she’s not.”

Helen Mirren I will say is actually the exception to me. And I know everyone sort of brings up Helen Mirren, but I think she’s genuinely sexy at her age.

**Craig:** Yes. You’re right. Helen Mirren, yes.

**John:** Because you see her in a swimsuit and you’re like, “Wow, she actually has an amazing body.”

**Craig:** Yeah. And I don’t mean to come off as a sexist. It’s just one of those biological things. The male brain — I tend to find younger female faces more attractive. Oh boy, here I go. Here comes the mail box. But, what am I gonna do? But, you’re right: Helen Mirren is beautiful. And there are older women that are beautiful, don’t get me wrong.

But in general, you look at these male stars like Clooney. Look at Clint Eastwood. I mean, Clint Eastwood is 80-something years old. And he looks almost skull-like at this point, and somehow that makes him really good-looking. That’s bizarre.

**John:** Prior to a few weeks ago I would have more gone with you there. How much do you not want to be Trouble with the Curve right now? The Clint Eastwood movie coming out.

**Craig:** You know what? I don’t think it impacts it at all. I really don’t. I’m serious. I don’t think that that — I mean, you’re referring to his strange speech to a chair.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I don’t think that people do or don’t go to movies because Clint Eastwood spoke. I mean, you think it’s going to impact the box office?

**John:** Here’s why I think it could impact the box office is because the moment that there’s another narrative, another narrative overtakes the narrative of the movie, it really I think hurts a movie. And my example for this is Charlie’s Angels 2.

So Charlie’s Angels 2, we have the three angels coming back, and, like, they’re bigger stars than ever, and Demi Moore who I — I fought for Demi Moore. I love Demi Moore; I think she’s awesome. But, the only thing we could actually get people to talk about in the two weeks before the movie came up was her relationship with Ashton Kutcher and her showing up at the premiere with Ashton Kutcher and Bruce Willis.

And so like we’re throwing this $2 million premiere for the movie and all the cameras are tuned out to these people who aren’t the stars of the movie. And that’s all the press we got was that.

**Craig:** And I get that. But here’s the thing: That story overlaps with the general movie-going interests than Oval. Because people who are interested in Charlie’s Angels 2 are also really interested in who Demi Moore is sleeping with or not sleeping with or whatever. But I don’t think it overlaps movie-wise.

And, also, don’t forget that there are a lot of Republicans out there and I think they tend to do — you know, the Republicans…

**John:** It honestly may be fine for it.

**Craig:** And the conservative movement tends to do well at putting people on busses to go to things because they’re in support of it. Don’t be surprised if churches show up to Trouble with the Curve.

**John:** We’ll see how it turns out. So, Craig, my One Cool Thing is a thing that I just can’t believe is real. So let me describe it to you. As we talked about at the head of the podcast, you are a very busy guy. Like, you’re making a movie, I have a movie coming out, and you’re going to be busy throughout the fall and into the winter, right?

**Craig:** I am.

**John:** I also know that you’re really big on deadlines. So, if you were out sick for a week that would be a really bad thing, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** It would be disastrous.

**John:** Yup. And so it’s a weird thing because I feel like because we work for ourselves there’s this assumption, like, “Oh, you can be sick and it would be fine.” It’s like, no, it’s actually kind of even worse to be sick by ourselves because we don’t really have sick days. And I guess if we’re not in a busy period of time it’s not so bad, but if we’re in a busy period of time it’s kind of awful. And especially if you’re on a weekly, I mean, I don’t want to ask you what your weekly quote is, but it could cost you a lot of money.

**Craig:** A lot.

**John:** A lot.

**Craig:** I’m not saying for me, [laughs], I didn’t mean to be bragging, like, “Yup, a lot.” I’m saying in general, yes, weekly…

**John:** Yes, it would be a lot.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s a lot of money — for the average screenwriter it’s a lot of money.

**John:** So, this is pretty amazing, and I don’t know why people aren’t talking about it more. It’s this insurance you can buy, so you can only buy it once a year, but here’s what the insurance does: If you get sick they will send somebody out to do your job for you.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** No. Listen to me here. They will do your job for you. So you will still get paid, but you also won’t fall behind.

**Craig:** That doesn’t work for us.

**John:** It actually works for us. That’s the most remarkable thing. Like you think, “Oh okay, that would make sense if you were a data entry clerk,” but it works for everybody. It doesn’t matter what your profession is. It works for everybody.

**Craig:** But how would it work? We’re hired for our unique ability. How could somebody…

**John:** You want to think that you are irreplaceable.

**Craig:** …AETNA to come work on your pages?

**John:** So you’re basically irreplaceable is what you’re saying?

**Craig:** Well I’m not saying I’m irreplaceable. I’m replaceable by you. But I’m not replaceable by a guy from State Farm.

**John:** Yeah, okay. But, I mean, it’s very hard to find somebody else to do your job. And so you really don’t want to be out sick for a week.

**Craig:** I mean, I definitely do not want to be out sick for a week.

**John:** So, here is what you do. So you go to this place and you pay them $30, $20 to $30, it takes five minutes, you fill out a little form, and then you won’t get sick.

**Craig:** I don’t understand. [laughs] Oh, because they come and do your job for you?

**John:** No, it’s even better than that. You don’t even get sick because they give you a flu shot. All you do is you go in, you get your flu shot…

**Craig:** Ah, I see what you’re doing.

**John:** Ah-ha! So you go in, you get your flu shot, and it’s basically not getting sick insurance.

**Craig:** You scamp!

**John:** I’m a scamp. So, this is really me pitching the flu shot, because people don’t get their flu shots and I don’t understand why people don’t get their flu shots. Do you like being sick? No, you don’t like being sick. So, pay your $20, go to Target. I went to Target this week and I got my flu shot. It was $28. It took me five minutes to do. They do this new special little needle thing so it doesn’t even go into your muscle, it’s just like in the surface of your skin. It is the easiest thing in the world.

And why don’t people get their flu shots? So, here’s the thing about the flu: Look, you’re probably not going to die of the flu. If you’re a grownup it is very unlikely that you’re going to die of the flu. But you could be out of work for a week. Being out of work for a week is terrible. You don’t want to be sick for a week. So don’t be sick for a week. Spend your $28 and get the flu shot.

**Craig:** You know, I’ve got to congratulate you. You suckered me in completely. I actually did believe that there was a service that would come and do your job for you for a week. I feel really stupid. I feel even stupider for arguing with you about it, but I’m glad that you did this. I’m glad you fooled me. I’m glad you exploited my gullibility, because you are absolutely right. Get your flu shot for sure. Get all shots, by the way. Please get everything.

**John:** Yeah. I know. And so I don’t want to — we talked before. You and I both believe in vaccinations and childhood vaccinations, and that can be a whole separate topic. And I’m not on a soap box. I’m not saying you have to get it. I’m just saying like why wouldn’t you get it? If there’s a 10% chance that you’re going to be out sick for a week, why take that 10% chance? That’s terrible. Don’t do that.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, there’s one reason you don’t get it, and that’s that it is part of a government sponsored conspiracy in conjunction with big pharma to inject you with mind-controlling substances.

**John:** Yes. So if that is your belief, don’t get the flu shot. Just don’t do it. And don’t write in with your conspiracy theories. But I would also say like on a movie like Hangover 3, do you think they’re going to get flu shots?

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** But they should, shouldn’t they?

**Craig:** I mean, well, the only issue is sometimes there is a reaction. Like you may have one grumpy day. So I could see where they might consider sponsoring a flu shot tent if it were on a Friday.

**John:** Maybe.

**Craig:** Not in the middle of the week. But, yeah, you’re right. I mean, it’s actually a pretty great thing. It’s pretty smart. And by the way, I’m getting my flu shot this weekend because of you.

**John:** Good. See? I’ve kept one person working in the industry. I’m a job creator. I am.

**Craig:** You are. We built this podcast. We built this. And you are a job creator.

**John:** If nothing else I increased productivity one iota in Hollywood just for my recommendation.

**Craig:** Somebody has to.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, thank you so much for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** This is an excellent one. I love the way it ended. I get to call you a scamp. Great podcast.

**John:** I’m a scamp. All right. So thank you and have a great week. And good luck with shooting.

**Craig:** Thanks, good luck with the…well, it’s not happening yet. But in April I’ll wish you luck.

**John:** All right. Thanks, sir. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/action).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 53 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, right before we started recording this you were going to tell me the history of “D’oh!”

**Craig:** D’oh! So, I said “D’oh!” or you said “D’oh!” because I hit the button wrong. And so you pointed out correctly that “D’oh!” as popularized by Dan Castellaneta, the actor behind Homer Simpson, is never actually written out as “D’oh!” in the scripts. It’s written out as…

**John:** Exasperated gasp or grunt?

**Craig:** Annoyed grunt.

**John:** Annoyed grunt.

**Craig:** Annoyed grunt. It’s always been “annoyed grunt.” No Simpsons script ever says, “D’oh!” And there was an interesting interview with Dan — an awesome guy, by the way, I don’t know if you’ve ever met him; the nicest guy in the world. And he, when they asked him to come up with something there for annoyed grunt, because there was nothing there, they didn’t even know, they were just thinking that it would just be some kind of annoyed grunt. He remembered that there was this actor, I believe his name is Jim Finlayson — I think it’s Finlayson — who is a Scottish actor who played the straight guy in a lot of old Laurel & Hardy movies.

And he would go, “Doohh!” and usually it was because the idea was that he was trying to say “damn” but you couldn’t say “damn” back then.

**John:** A-ha. Yeah.

**Craig:** So he would say, “Doohh!” [laughs] And so Dan Castellaneta sort of converted that into “D’oh!” and gave us this wonderful annoyed grunt that we have today.

**John:** Yeah, the world is better for having “D’oh!”

**Craig:** Oh for sure.

**John:** It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. Doohh! I like the old Scottish word, “Doohh!” It’s somewhere online. You know what? I’ll send you a link and you can put it up for the podcast. There’s actually a very brief clip of Jim Finlayson saying, “Doohh!” on YouTube. It’s quite educational.

**John:** Very good.

Craig, today I thought we would talk about action.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so I’m not talking about action like a genre, so we’re not talking Lethal Weapon movies, but action as stuff that characters do. So, anything a character says, well that’s dialogue. Anything a character does, that’s action.

So when you look at it at that level, really almost any script you’re going to write is going to be full of action. I guess maybe some genres, like a romantic comedy or like My Dinner with Andre, wouldn’t have a lot of action, but most movies are going to have a tremendous amount of action. It’s the kind of thing we don’t pay necessarily as much attention to because you never really get credit for it as a screenwriter.

**Craig:** That’s true.

**John:** If there’s dialogue people will say, “Oh, well somebody wrote that funny dialogue.” If there is a well-constructed sequence of action, no one really thinks about the fact that the screenwriter had to write that. But somebody did write that, and this is going to be talking about writing that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, there are certain movies where action is just sort of peppered in between things. And so, you know, a lot of comedies there will be action, but it’s mostly about the talking. Some genres, you know, horror movies, war movies, will have big set pieces that are all action. And writing those is incredibly draining and difficult, but rewarding when it’s done just right. So, let’s talk about making those awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. What should we do? How do we make it awesome?

**John:** Well, I think the first thing to think about is: think about reading the action sequences. And obviously the first thing a screenwriter needs to do is read a ton of scripts. And if you read a lot of scripts that have long action sequences, you’ll start to recognize what does not work on the page. And what tends to not work on the page is the stuff that makes you want to stop reading it. Either you stop reading the script all together or you just sort of skim the page and you don’t really read the action.

And if a person isn’t really reading the action in a comedy, it’s probably going to be okay, because that’s not really the meat of it. But if you’re writing a war movie and they stop reading the action, or a horror movie and they stop reading the action, you’re sort of dead. So…

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of the most frustrating things about writing action in the screenplay format. Because you’ve made two interesting points. The first point is that it is incumbent upon us as screenwriters to actually create the action that we intend to see on film. It may not work out exactly like that, but ultimately the — For instance, let’s take Die Hard: So he’s on a roof and he has to get off the roof because there is going to be a bomb going off and he sees that there’s a fire hose, a water hose for fire. And he takes that and he wraps it around his waist. And he jumps, and he goes down, and then the thing goes against the thing. And then it falls over…

**John:** It breaks.

**Craig:** …and he shoots his way through the glass. That’s an idea that the writer has to invent. So you are responsible for what’s on the screen. But, your second point: very well taken. You are responsible up to a point. The point where you have to stop being responsible is the point where it gets really boring to read. So we are forced to be both creative and incredibly economic in the way that we get those ideas across. It can be a challenge.

**John:** Yeah. So some suggestions I have for any action sequence or any bit of action that you have to describe: Keep your sentences short. Long sentences are more likely to get skipped and short sentences feel short; it feels like you’re getting right to it.

Keep your blocks of action scene description short. Three lines is probably a lot. You can vary them up — some can be one line, some can be two lines, some can be three lines, but if you have action blocks that are four lines, five lines, ten lines, people are going to skip them. They just will. So, as you’re going through your script and you see blocks of action that are more than five lines, see how you can break them up. See if there’s ways you can make them… either by cutting inside there or by just breaking them in half so that they not so intimidating for a reader to read.

Now, that’s not universal. Some writers love big blocks of action, and they get away with it. I read a David Koepp script that was like a half a page solid of action. But, in general, as I find the scripts that I’m actually willing to read, they keep those action lines short and tight. And they keep the blocks kind of small.

**Craig:** Yeah. Another tip is to think about how the text actually looks on the page. I get very OCD and finicky about it, particularly when the action leads up to something. Every action moment should be its own microcosm of beginning, middle, and end. And the end should be something that is surprising, and a revelation, and interesting, and moving us forward to the next thing.

You don’t want to necessarily have that thing drop off and end up on the top of the next page. You want it to pay off in that moment, and you want to use white space on the page to create suspense and tension. It actually works very well that way. Sometimes the best way to write action is to actually use more space, so take away some of the text and use some of the white page to really create impact.

And you can also — and I hesitate to say this because I don’t want people to go nuts with this — but I have seen some scripts where people use interesting formatting choices to kind of sell the action. I read a script from a young writer named Adam Barker, he’s very talented, and he did a very cool thing. There was an action sequence where someone is stalking somebody in the woods and our stalker has a bow and an arrow. And he pulls the bow back and he…

LETS…

IT…

FLY…

And “Lets” was its own line. And then “It” was kind of indented in. And “Fly” was indented even more. Like you could see the arrow flying just from the way he indented the words. Very clever. And it was fun to read. And it evoked — in its own way it evoked what his intention was, was for that arrow release to be a real release, instead of just, “He picks up the arrow and fires.”

**John:** Exactly. Remember, you’re always trying to create the experience of watching and hearing the movie in the theater just on the page. So, breaking those into three separate lines makes it feel like you’re really in that moment. You’re trying to create this hyper present tense as you’re working with the words on the page.

A script I did pretty recently, there is this very giant mechanical sound that preceded just really bad things happening, and so it’s a DWAAARRRM. And so for that DWAAARRRM I wrote it out as a big long onomatopoetic word. And that’s one of my rare sort of bold underlined words with double exclamation points at the end. But it’s saying, like, this is a really important thing. You are really going to pay attention and everyone is going to really notice this thing.

It’s important the first time it happens, but it becomes an important rhyming device, because later on in the sequence when you hear that thing happening you know stuff is about to get much, much, much worse. So, keeping in mind sort of how — not just how the reader is going to read that one page, but how you are structuring the sequence overall so that there is give and there is build.

And talk about white space, one of the most useful things I have found is using intermediate slug lines. So, a slug line is just a word over in the left hand margin, or a couple of words on the left hand margin, all upper case, that highlight a new moment within the action. So, it’s not that you’re moving to a different scene usually, but you’re going to a different moment in the action, or you’re highlighting a certain aspect of what’s going on there.

It replaces a lot of times, used to do “Angle On” or “Close-up Of.” A lot of times the slug line just by itself can give you that feeling of what the camera is doing next.

**Craig:** Yeah. I also like capitalize. And I don’t have a specific set of rules for when I capitalize or not, but sometimes in action if there’s something I want people to pull out of it, assuming they’re skimming, I give it all caps. He FALLS. “Falls” might be in all caps. Grabbing onto a ROPE. Swinging down and landing with a crunch, he looks up, BLOOD. And “blood” is in all caps. Something just to engage — you know, you can actually see this in children’s books. Children’s authors have gotten really good at figuring how to capture young readers’ imaginations just through the manipulation of text font size, style, and even though we don’t quite need that level of ADD-oriented writing for our readers, it’s nice to at least throw them some things so it’s not all just a stream of Courier.

Because, your script is the fourth script they’re going to read today, of twelve maybe.

**John:** Yeah. To clarify, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t be writing in Courier. You should write in Courier. Your script should only be in Courier. I don’t think I’ve ever read a good script that used anything other than Courier, have you?

**Craig:** I’ve never written a script that used anything other than Courier.

**John:** There was Gus Van Sant script at one point that like every line was sort of in a different font, and it was as crazy as it sounds.

So, you’re still using Courier. What we’re saying is that there may be special cases where you are breaking out the bold or you’re breaking out the underline. But those should be special treats.

If you need the reader to focus on something, you can give it upper case. You can sort of break the lines in a certain way that they’re going to be noticing that special thing. I’ll put down a script if I see page after page where things get, like, asterisked and double underlined and bold faced. If you are shouting that everything is important then nothing becomes important.

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. You don’t want to turn it into something ugly. And this comes down to taste. And now suddenly the writer has to be visually aware of what the page actually looks like.

There is sort of a trope that you can sort of tell if the script is bad just by flipping through it and looking at the way the pages look. And, it’s not always true, but there is something to it, that well-composed pages that have a… — You know, for instance, I don’t like pages to just have dialogue on them. And I see it all the time.

I’ll add action lines just to break up the dialogue, even if they’re not technically necessary, because I just don’t like the strips, you know?

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** There’s just something about the way the page looks that becomes more pleasing and inviting to the reader.

**John:** When you have a lot of pages that is just dialogue, it looks like a bobsled shoot, like you’re just going to shoot down the page and nothing is going to stop it. And you want something that just breaks it up in the right place. You know, actual people speaking does have give and take and starts and stops. And just adding that bit of sort of throwaway action that people aren’t really even reading the action, it’s just stopping them enough so that it has some texture to it.

**Craig:** And it reminds you along the way that maybe you’re missing an opportunity for something to be going on beyond two people talking. You know, Ted Elliott tells this great story about how he and Terry Rossio were hired to work on Aladdin. And it was their first animated movie. And so they wrote this scene where Aladdin meets the princess in the marketplace and she’s disguised as a beggar and he doesn’t know she’s a princess. And they wrote the scene, it was really good dialogue that they liked between the two of them.

And then the story artist showed them what it looked like and it was basically his face, her face, his face, her face, his face, her face. And they looked at each other like, “Oh no, that’s really boring.” And that’s when they decided to… — Then they said, “Okay, well we have this monkey; maybe the monkey is jealous? Maybe the monkey is doing something behind their back while they’re…”

And suddenly the scene became a scene. And that’s a great lesson to think about when you’re talking about live action, too. Sometimes just ping-ponging back and forth between faces is boring. And if you look at a script at you just see strips of dialogue, in your mind that’s what will be happening. Ping-ponging.

**John:** The point you’re making there is it’s crucial because we shouldn’t just be talking about action like this, action sequences. Action is what’s happening within the scenes. It’s all the stuff that the characters are doing. And so you had a scene that the dialogue was fine but you still have to be able to write all that action of what that monkey is doing that’s making that scene interesting and alive. And making sure that however you’re writing the action for the monkey is really interesting, but it’s not going to pull the reader away from what’s actually happening in the dialogue.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so finding that balance is really tough, so that it can both be about the dialogue and be about the background action that’s happening as part of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally they’re both interrelated and that’s how you get layering.

**John:** Yeah. Another sort of technique you can think about for when you need to write action is what I call parallel structure, which is that sometimes you can find — if you have a lot of sentences that start like, “He runs down the alley. He breaks open the door. He charges up the stairs.” You can often lop off your subjects of those lines. So, “He runs down the alley. Busts open the door. Races up the stairs.”

You can often use fragments once you’ve established what the subject of those sentences is going to be. It’s a way again of just making you feel very present in those moments by losing little bits of it. You can often still lose punctuation. So, a lot of times when you have action sequences, a couple action lines, especially if they’re feeding into some dialogue, don’t end the sentence. Give it like two dashes or a dot-dot-dot that feeds into the next line of dialogue.

So, just don’t stop things. Let them keep running.

**Craig:** Yeah. For sure. It’s rare that I put a period on the end of anything, really, I mean unless it’s sort of a final thing. You should just ask yourself what am I supposed to — what do I want the audience to be feeling right now? If I want them to feel anxious sometimes I’ll run a bunch of words together and take the spaces out from between the words, like the paragraph is on coke, you know?

There are all sorts of things you can do. You don’t want to overdo them. You just want to be aware. And you want to ask yourself is this action paragraph or action sentence conveying a sense of my intention or is it just boringly descriptive, or is over descriptive, is it prosy? That’s the other classic rookie mistake is to write action like you’re writing a novel, describing the shade of the light as it passes over the glistening due covering the flowers, the blah, blah, blah.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s not just an adjective problem. I find a lot of times it is people use really poetic verbs to describe some things that are like, wow, that just pulled me completely out of the moment. It’s too much — the sky is always being painted by things.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a little of that scene description can be lovely. Too much of it becomes really, really frustrating. I find characters also have a hard time walking in scripts. They’re always “approaching,” and “advancing,” and “skulking.” And sometimes that specificity is really important and sometimes people should just walk. Or sometimes people should just be where they need to be.

**Craig:** I like “crossing,” because at that point… — See, sometimes what I don’t like about the purple prose is that it is giving me the sense that the writer isn’t really into the movie. They’re into their document of the screenplay. And I want the reader to be into the movie. So, I like crossing because that’s in fact what’s happening.

“He crosses over to her.” We’re blocking now. We’re making a movie. Sometimes you do need to be more descriptive about how people move, but yeah, the skulking stuff and all that, it can get a little much.

**John:** So, general advice for all of these kinds of situations is to read a lot of scripts and read scripts of movies you like and try to find styles of stuff you like. For me, and actually for most writers I think of my generation, the James Cameron scripts were incredibly influential and incredibly helpful. So you read James Cameron’s Aliens script and you have a really good sense of what this world is going to be like and how it’s going to feel.

And the kinds of things we’re talking about — the keeping the blocks short, keeping sentences short, only talking about the camera when you really need to talk about the camera — that’s a very James Cameron kind of thing to do. And that was an incredibly important thing for me. The Aliens script, the Point Break script were both hugely influential.

But we have some different scripts that we can talk about today because we are actually going to do four samples…

**Craig:** Four!

**John:** …of the Three Page Challenge. So, it’s a groundbreaking episode in that we’re going to talk about four. And we specifically chose these samples because they’re about action. And so we can talk about what these scripts are doing terrifically well in action, and what they could do a little bit better in action.

So, we’ll talk about them overall and our impressions, but we’re really going to focus on the action in these scripts and what’s there and what could be better.

So, the four scripts that we’re going to talk about, if you want to read along with us they are all going to be in the show notes for the episode, so johnaugust.com, and podcast, and find this episode. And let’s get started.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** We’re going to start with a script by Ben Jacoby. And I’ll give you a little summary here of what happens. So, we open in an alley in Plav, Montenegro where we meet Terry Redding, who’s in his 40s. He meets up with Ian Morris, who is also in his 40s. Ian tells him that the target is upstairs and alone. So it feels like some sort of assassination or something is going on here.

We see Terry walking down a hallway. He passes some assault agents who are apparently on his side. From outside there are thermal sites that look through the brick wall and show that a man is sitting in a certain position in a room. Terry knocks on the door; there is no answer. He opens it to find General Aliyev bound to a chair. He’s dead, electrodes through his body, and there are these pipes that are pumping these colored fluids into him.

Terry realizes it’s a bomb. He runs for it. There is a huge explosion, blue flames that melt flash. At the bottom of page three we have an aerial shot of the CIA headquarters of Langley, and it’s snowing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I enjoyed it. I thought it moved along pretty snappily. I mean, there is a cool idea in it which I like, and I thought that the idea was revealed well. It was setup well and revealed well, so there is this concept: “We’re going to lure these guys to get someone and then we’re going to blow them up. But we know that they have thermal imaging and they can see if someone is alive or not, so they’re going to see this dead body in there and not fall for it. But what if we take this body, heat it up, and make it look like he’s alive with the very stuff that we’ll then use to blow these people up?”

So I thought it was actually setup well. There was good suspense. There was an explosion. I was a little confused by the nature of the explosion, which almost bordered on supernatural. Perhaps that’s intentional.

But, I wasn’t bored by much. I thought it was, you know, set the — I liked it. What do you think?

**John:** I liked it, too. There’s some really good stuff there. I actually really like the description of the explosion because it was sort of supernatural. It was clearly supposed to be a very unique kind of explosive device happening, and so I liked that the description took its time for that. And I liked the description of the machinery that was pumping the stuff through. I thought it was all really well done.

Just some style notes. This one, he uses bold slug lines, which is fine. If you like to bold your slug lines, go for it. And so there is no right or wrong bolding or not bolding it.

I thought he did a great job keeping his blocks of action pretty short.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I was never tempted to skip over stuff because I’m not making too much of a commitment to read two or three lines at a time.

I got confused by some stuff. On page two — I’m sorry, actually — On page one, “Terry advances down a dilapidated hallway.” Okay, “advances down” is one of sort of my, like, well he’s walking. I just felt like we could do better than “advancing” because it makes me think of, like, “What does advancing really mean?” I stop to think about it; and you never want me to stop and think.

**Craig:** Right. “Moves” would have been a perfectly good word there.

**John:** Yeah. “Moves.” “Makes his way down.”

“Pre-Soviet floorboards creak under each footfall as he passes ASSAULT AGENTS, one after another, nestled in nooks, Vector machine-guns at the ready.” Couple issues. First off, that’s a really long sentence that is bringing together a whole bunch of different stuff. So, are we focusing on the creaky floorboards, that it’s Pre-Soviet Russia, Assault Agents? I don’t know what Assault Agents are so I felt like I needed that broken into two sentences and, like, tell me who assault agents are. Are they soldiers with Kevlar and night vision goggles? I don’t know who these people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I was confused and, again, I had to stop and think about it. Oh, and there was a bit of poetry at the start that I wasn’t crazy about. “Gray autumn wind strokes the streets with dead leaves.”

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. I mean, don’t need that sort of thing. It’s not the end of the world but, I think… I mean, ultimately here’s what happens: It doesn’t get read. It becomes literally whitewash for your eyeballs.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the other thing I’d say: We can’t see wind. We can see dead leaves. And so if you really want the leaves blowing down the street, like, “Dead leaves scrape across the street as we reveal Terry Redding.” I mean, you can have those dead leaves there, but we can’t see gray wind, so give us the leaves if you’re going to do that kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** An overall general note: I liked sort of what happened in this teaser, but it felt like an Alias teaser to me. It felt like, okay, this is the first opening act thing and then we’re going to get to Langley and then we’re going to sort of start the story. I didn’t know anything about these characters, and I wanted to know a little bit more about what was unique or special about these people given these three pages. Just something more specific about them, because all the dialogue that we have here is very sort of standard boiler-platy for this kind of genre.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s true. Of course, page four could be spectacular and we could find out about these people and what happened. I hesitate to judge on that basis. I mean, yes, it’s true: many, many action movies open this way with guys on a mission and then something explodes. But, in terms of the way he crafted it, I thought it was well done. There is an interesting idea at the heart of it.

And I liked on page two, just to circle back to my point about white space, “Terry pauses. Deep breath.” Return. “HE KNOCKS ON THE DOOR.” All Caps. Return. “No response.”

I like that. He took the time on the page, and that creates anticipation. You know, what you can’t teach, what no one I don’t think can teach to screenwriters, is rhythm and dramatic rhythm. You know that this guy is going to walk up to a door. He’s going to knock on the door. And you know as the writer that on the other side of that door is something that is quite the opposite of what he expects, of what everyone expects. That justifies a sense of anticipation.

And that justifies writing it out this way. So there’s a good, innate sense of rhythm and how this should be executed. So, all told, I think it’s a good example of how to write action well. And good job. What was the writer’s name again?

**John:** Ben Jacoby.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** Yeah. Hooray. Congratulations, Ben.

Let’s move onto our next sample. This is by Trevor Hollen. And it’s a script, the title page on this was Everything Means Nothing to Me.

**Craig:** Great title.

**John:** It’s a great title. What a great title. It feels like a good dark anthem, or like sort of a punk rock emo kind of awesomeness. I like it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really cool.

**John:** So some description about what’s happening here. So, we open with a beaten up woman named Max. She bursts out of a warehouse, handcuffed to a dead man, which she drags behind her. There are some headlights. She looks up as brakes squeal. We cut to Max watching a movie at a theater. This is obviously, evidently before, because she’s not beaten up. Then we’re with her in the lobby where she looks at a poster for a movie called Streets of Fire.

She checks her phone. Two missed messages. The battery dies. She drives and she smokes. Then, earlier that night, we have a scene at Meltdown Comics — which I think is where they record the Nerdist Podcast —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** — where we meet a new guy named Johnny who shoplifts, and then he exits. We crosscut this with Max, and then we go back to Johnny, who is pursued by two guys. And that’s the end of page three.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it’s hard to critique this on the basis of the way that the action was written out. It wasn’t that the action was written out poorly per se; it’s just that I was bored. I mean, and I shouldn’t have been bored because it starts with this woman — she’s not dragging a body; she’s got a body slung over her back, which immediately stops me. It’s not easy, assuming this is an average weight man of 175 pounds — 175 pounds of dead weight over a woman’s shoulder as she’s walking is a little bit of a tough one to buy, especially because she’s tiny.

And then these headlights light up her face. She turns. Brakes squeal. Okay, and now we’re in this theater. I got a little confused. I thought, okay, this is actually set in the ’80s because she’s watching… — the Streets of Fire is going to be coming up, but then I know she’s got a cell phone, it must be a retro theater, I guess, that shows old movies.

Now she’s in the car. I’m not sure if the scene, Int. Max’s Car, where she’s driving and listening to South Pacific, is necessary. Nothing happens in it.

We go to Johnny. Johnny is reading a comic book. He walks outside. And now he’s being followed. We cut back to Max’s car; she’s still singing — not sure why. And then now these other people are following Johnny and, oh my gosh, here comes a truck, which I just saw on page one. I just saw trucks. [laughs] This is a different truck, by the way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If it were the same truck I’d think, “Okay, there’s killer trucks out there,” but there’s two box trucks on the first page. There is a pickup truck that is about to hit Johnny on page three. The whole “I’m about to get hit by a truck” thing is a tough one to pull off anyway because it’s a little bit cliché. To try it two times in the first three pages, you’re starting to push it.

**John:** When you first said that you got bored, and it seems like it should be really hard to get bored in three pages, but I kind of got bored, too. And it’s because I got confused. I got confused. I lost faith that my rapt attention would be rewarded.

I felt like the script wasn’t connecting, like the dots weren’t connecting, and I didn’t believe the dots necessarily were going to connect, especially while it’s sort of line to line. And it honestly starts at the very beginning for me, is that as I gave you the description I told you, like, this girl Max, but as it’s actually on the page, “Door flies open. MAX exits bloody as hell. Right eye is swollen shut. A (very dead) man is handcuffed to her left wrist and slung over her back.”

Okay, wait, so she’s a girl but the only way that we know that she’s a woman — Max feels like a man’s name — but we know it’s a woman because of “her left wrist.” But, why are you burying that here? Why did you let that go through… — You already gave us an image of her right eye being swollen shut, so we saw that in our head, but we think it’s a man. So, now we have to go back and replace that image in our head with a woman.

If you had just gave us like, “A young woman exits, bloody as hell. Right eye swollen shut. A man is handcuffed to her left wrist and slung over her back. This girl is MAX.” Then, like, okay, so we know it’s a woman first, and then we know her name. Then this would be a little bit more into this first moment that’s happening.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. That’s a really good point, John, because you know what: it’s funny — when I read that paragraph I just didn’t understand why, but you’ve put your finger on it, of why I stopped. My impression was that, “Oh, the author is being a bit clever here,” like, “Look, I’m just going to subtly point out she’s a woman this way.” And I thought, “Eh, don’t be clever, I hate that.”

But actually your point is the right one. I had to rebuild the image in my head. And that’s on the top of page one. That’s a bad feeling.

**John:** Yeah. Also at the top of page one. “FADE IN:”

“EXT. ABANDONED WAREHOUSE — NIGHT.”

Next line. “The Warehouse District of L.A.”

Okay, so you said warehouse twice in two lines. That doesn’t actually give me anything else. So, rather than sort of saying, “The Warehouse District of L.A.” that line could be something that gives me a sense of what this place is like. If you want to say that we’re in Los Angeles, that’s fine, but give us a sense of what this actual space is rather than just like “Warehouse District” because I don’t know what the Warehouse District looks like or feels like.

So, give us some color of light. Give us some dogs barking in the distance. Give us something else that gives us some color to it rather than just, like, giving me a thing that I don’t know.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** There was some stuff I did like, and I want to point that out. I felt like the writer had some interesting detail stuff that made me curious about the characters. I liked that her car stereo is ripped out of the dash, and so she’s listening to a boom box instead. That’s cool.

I like that we’re in specific places, like Meltdown Comics. But where I lost faith was we were cross-cutting between… — So we start in, it feels like, the presence tense, and then we move back in time, and we’re sort of catching up for awhile. But then we move to Johnny, that’s apparently earlier that night. And, like, okay, so we’re still moving back further in time, okay, but it’s not clear then — is he in the same timeline as Max at this point? And it’s only three pages in.

**Craig:** God, I didn’t even notice that. In my mind, literally in my mind, I just assumed that this was happening simultaneously. You’re right, it does say earlier. That’s insane; you can’t do that. You can’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** It’s unclear to me whether that “Earlier that night” means earlier than the very first scene we saw where she was dragging the body, or if it means earlier…

**Craig:** No, no.

**John:** …It should be earlier than the last thing we saw. And the last thing we saw was Max driving. And so, wait. Are we in a third time sequence here?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re apparently going… — Maybe this is one of those going…No, it’s not a going in reverse movie because it starts after, and then we go back, and then we’re moving forward because she walks out of the theater. I don’t understand what’s going on now. Now I’m really confused. I also have to say, you know, you don’t want to read the first three pages and think there’s two scenes I could just cut here because they’re not doing anything for me. This is precious real estate; everything has to be earned.

Wow, you’re right. That is earlier. Yeah, no, you can’t do that.

**John:** So, Go, my first script, my first produced movie, it opens with something that happens later in the movie, so we see Ronna in the ditch and she’s “18, bloody, and bleeding,” and so that’s a description of her. And so we’re like, oh, we know that something interesting is going to happen there.

And then we have Claire giving some dialogue, which sort of sets up the question of the movie. And then it does start moving forward in time. But it’s not trying to be incredibly clever or sophisticated at that point. It’s like it is setting up sort of a world, and then the story starts. And I just didn’t have faith that this story was going to be starting here because just a bunch of stuff was happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a bit of a confusion that’s going on in there. So, I think this one needs a little love, a little help.

**John:** Needs a little love.

Next, go to a script by Randall Knox and Jason Zahodnik called Dog Tags. So, some description on Dog Tags. We begin at an infantry camp in North Africa, 1942 — I love period movies —

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** — where a private slides a field report under Colonel Mason’s door. Inside the Colonel’s quarters we see a man in silhouette who is smoking. He looks through the field reports. A hand pulls out a handgun. Then a single gunshot. Only then do we realize there was a second man in the room and he’s staging this to look like a suicide.

We cut to a British transport plane roaring through the sky. Inside a few dozen soldiers. The copilot says they’ll be down in 20.

On the runway we single out a British officer, Jack Sherman, and an American military police officer named Richards. They introduce themselves to each other. The British Officer has, surprisingly, a southern accent. He’s here to investigate the Colonel’s death. And that’s the bottom of page three.

**Craig:** Right. Well, so this is sort of a prime example of overwriting action. Here’s the good news — I’ll lead with the good news. I really liked what was happening. I like the trick of what happened in the room. I thought there was a really good idea behind it. It was interesting. And I liked the final exchange between the guy who runs the outpost and the man who’s been sent to investigate this crime. It had good promise.

There are some dialogue issues. You made a point a couple of these, when we did one of these, remember there were three pages where the first line of dialogue was on the third page? There’s a little bit of dialogue on the first page. The second page is all dialogue-free. And then the third page, this copilot comes out and delivers very clunky dialogue. And similarly then Major Richards has clunky dialogue. And a lot of people announcing stuff that everybody in the scene already ought to know, that kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But this could be improved greatly by just thinning out the action descriptions to get to the meat of what we need to know.

**John:** I agree. I felt that the opening was overwritten for what it was. All we’re seeing is a private delivering a folder to his commanding officer. And so there was a lot of stuff sort of happening that didn’t really get us very much of anything.

So, if you want to setup a world, maybe we should have walked through the camp a little bit more, seen a little bit more of sort of what this universe was. But it felt like a lot of shoe leather just to get a folder underneath the door.

Then, once we were inside, I actually kind of dug the description of what was going on. It felt very Hitchcockian, that it’s a very limited focus in that the camera is looking at this, the camera is looking at this. One thing I would point out though: there’s a lot of “we sees” and “we hears,” and some people hate “we see” and “we hear.” I actually like “we see” and “we hear” when used judiciously. Here I thought there was a little too much of it.

**Craig:** I agree actually. Yeah, I’m a big fan of “we see” when it is called for. But, for instance, “We see a limp arm dangling from a chair,” you could actually just say, “A limp arm.” Or, “we see” is okay there, but I don’t know…

**John:** On page two, it starts with, “We hear him sigh as he sets his glasses on the desk.”

**Craig:** That should be, “He sighs.”

**John:** “He sighs.” And I would make the…

**Craig:** “He sets his glasses on the desk,” you know.

**John:** I would make — “A limp arm dangles” is fine, too.

To me, here is the criteria for when I think you are justified using a “we see” or “we hear:” If the cause is invisible, a “we see” or “we hear” may save you. It might say like, okay, “We hear a tremendous rushing of something,” or a lot of times I’ll use the “we” for if we are describing how the camera is moving. So, like, “We float over the camp as we slowly descend into something.” I’ll use the “we”s for that, but a lot of times — I would always look for if I can take the “we see” or “we hear” out, and it makes as much sense, then cut it out.

**Craig:** Yeah, I tend to use “we see” for things that I want the audience to be aware of but also for the audience to be aware that other characters aren’t aware of. So, “A man rises. Behind him, we see a killer with a knife.” Because if you don’t say “we see” sometimes it is implied that he might know that there is a killer with a knife back there.

But, everybody has their different cause for it, but in this case what sort of pops out to me about the way this was written — I’m not surprised that you liked the action description of the part in the tent, because aside from the fact that it was innately interesting, we are more forging of description of big ticket items: murders, suicides, sex. We are far less forgiving of long descriptive paragraphs of sleepy military camps while folks snooze.

And, frankly, the biggest crime of the first paragraph is that by overwriting about the moonlight and the smoking cigarettes and the quiet and the sleeping, is that he’s burying — the writer is burying an important thing that he has put in there, which is that artillery is going off in the background.

**John:** I completely missed it.

**Craig:** And the reason that’s important, is because I believe now that someone could get shot and no one would flinch because they just think it’s just an artillery. So, if I were doing this I would probably say, “SUPER: North Africa — 1942. A military camp. Rows of tents. Men are sleeping. In the background, pop, pop, POP. Artillery goes off. The men barely flinch. They’re used to it by now. A private walks across to…”

You know what I mean? Make that something, so that we get that it is important later. You’d be surprised, screenwriters, how often the rest of the producing world, the directors and ADs and prop don’t ever get that that was important. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? So you make it important.

**John:** Looking back at that first paragraph, which I’ll admit I did skim because it was seven lines long, I missed that the artillery was going off partly because it wasn’t capitalized. And we’re sort of past the stage where like, oh, all sound effects and have to be capitalized. We’re not doing radio plays anymore, so it’s not that that’s important, but the artillery is really important. That’s the most important thing that’s helping to set up the scene there, so that should be capitalized.

I also feel like all the other people that he’s passing, or groups of people, capitalize them too so that we see that there are more people in this world. Because just looking at that first paragraph, I sort of assumed that the private was the only person that we’re seeing in the whole scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just very quickly on dialogue — because I read it and might as well help you out here if I can: What the private said was fine. And then we get to this copilot. “All right, you lot. We’re twenty minutes, give or take a tick, from the base, so be prepared to get out and unload sharpish. We’ve got to keep the runway clear.” That’s a lot of talking from a guy who’s talking to seasoned — what appears to be — seasoned people, or at least people who know what their job is. It’s not like they’re jumping out of a plane for the first time or getting off a plane for the first time.

To me it could be as simple as “’20 minutes.’ Slams the door shut.” Do you know what I mean? “The guys all look at each other.”

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Then, when they land, Jack, our hero I assume, who is going to be investigating this, comes out of the plane. And there is a pudgy military officer, Major Richards, and he says to Jack, “Major Sherman, I’m Major Richards. I’m the head Military Police officer here at the base. Welcome to Algeria.”

I’m pretty sure that he’s been expecting him. “Major Sherman. I’m Major Richards. Welcome to Algeria,” would be fine. “I’m the head military police officer here at the base” — eh, that’s probably unnecessary. We should be able to tell from his stature or from something that’s not spoken that he’s in charge.

“Given how quickly you were flown out here, I’m sure you’re wondering what the situation is.” Perhaps maybe just, “You’re probably wondering what the situation is.”

And then Jack says, “Y’all have a dead colonel on your hands and you need me to confirm how it happened.” “Oh, so you’ve been briefed.” “No.” I like that. I like the fact that he hadn’t been briefed, but somehow he knows what’s going on. That’s kind of cool.

But just watch the overdone dialogue, particularly when you’ve done such a good job of creating silent, interesting stuff — meaning dialogue-free interesting stuff.

**John:** Agreed.

One more thing I’m just catching on page three: So we’re at exterior runway, “20 minutes, give or take a tick later,” which is kind of funny. The copilot was saying, “Give or take a tick later,” and he uses that, that’s fine. But the actual scene description here, “The plane touches down and taxis to a halt. The men inside file down the staircase and unload their cargo from the rear.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That’s — you both have the plane landing, taxiing…

**Craig:** And taxiing.

**John:** And the men have disembarked and gotten their gear. In two sentences. So that is fast. And while it’s true that once upon a time we used to do, “Atlanta burns” for like Gone with the Wind, and there wasn’t more description, it’s like…that is a tremendous amount to pack in two lines. So, I would question whether, do we need to see the plane land? Okay, let the plane land in a scene header and then let’s get right to the people that we want to pay attention to disembarking.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Don’t setup all the background action.

**Craig:** Yeah, the way that’s going to be in the movie is, “A plane comes down for a landing. Cut to…” I mean, whether you want to write “Cut To” or not, “The men are offloading the plane.” We’re not watching planes land and taxiing. You might as well write that they unbuckle, send their service items to the aisle, etc.

**John:** Yeah. There are movies where all that specific detail is really important. This is clearly not that movie, so I would say: edit it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** Our final action sequence for this batch is by David Stripinis. And let me give you some description here:

We start in a South Boston bar in 1984, where everyone is watching Mary Lou Retton win the Olympics. Fire trucks outside take us to a brownstone fire. One of the fire fighters, Kavanagh, is going through the house. In the nursery he finds a dead woman cradling a baby. The baby is still alive. Part of the house collapses, apparently trapping Kavanagh and the baby as we end page three.

**Craig:** Right. So, well, there’s a very, very, very generic thing going on here. It doesn’t start that way. I had hopes on the first page. There’s this bar scene; it’s very Boston. People are watching Mary Lou Retton. They’re getting excited. I understand completely what time it is because of that, which I thought was very nice.

And suddenly these fire trucks are going by, people run outside, and that carries us to this fire. Now, page two just comes from the generic fire book: men going through, saying things that firemen say like, “Get out of there,” and, “We’re out of here,” and, “No, I’m not leaving until I check this room. Someone is here.” “Get out of there.” Very, very rote.

And you have to be aware of the movies that have come before you and not simply just do exactly — I mean, that is the fire scene. Everybody has done that fire scene. But it’s not that it was written poorly — I mean, there are some interesting touches. A teddy bear that’s melting. That’s kind of cool.

So, in terms of action description, “Flames whip around a nursery. A large TEDDY BEAR melts, it’s polyester…” Now, “it’s” with an apostrophe is a problem. “It’s polyester guts oozing out.” If you had put a period there I would have given him a gold star. But he says, “It’s polyester guts oozing out like the lava of Kilauea.” So that’s what we call a mixed metaphor folks. [laughs] That is the definition of mixed metaphor. Try not to do that; it’s unnecessary.

And this man finds this baby, which is really horrifying. This is the other thing, is tonally I have no idea what the hell is going on, because we started with this kind of funny scene in a pub, then we go to a very standard B-movie firefighting scene, and on page three we are literally looking at the most horrifying graphic thing I’ve ever seen.

And if this movie rests on being super horrifying and graphic, okay. But truthfully, you have to be really aware when you get this graphic and gross. And you have to give it credit and you have to honor it. I mean, like in Silence of the Lambs there are moments that honor it, but they don’t come on page three. And you’re really putting people back on their feet with something this — that is, I mean, you’re going to get people walking out.

**John:** It’s a really gruesome image. I think it’s an effective image, it’s just really, really gruesome. And your point about Silence of the Lambs is key, because in Silence of the Lambs we have invested interest in Jodie Foster and these characters by the time the gross, gruesome stuff comes. So we’re not going to, like, turn off from the movie when it happens.

But here it is happening so early, like, oh my god, I don’t know if I want to keep watching that.

**Craig:** Well, also, there’s no reaction to it. I mean, in Silence of the Lambs you have people looking at photos and turning away and reacting and being human, even in small ways, because they are disgusted by what they see. This man looks at something that’s the grossest thing ever and no response from him whatsoever in the pages. And that’s the most important part is how the characters respond.

Just as a thought: in the beginning it seems to me that if you’re going to show this bar, you probably don’t need three-quarters of a page of bar stuff and then have trouble, unless you were going to interrupt it in an interesting way. For instance, they’re all sitting around, woo-woo, they’re all cheering for the Olympics, and then BOOM, something rattles the window and they all turn up and look. And then they move to the glass and they see in the distance, BOOM, another fire ball. And then three fire trucks go by. Something that’s a little more astonishing than — I mean, anyone who listens to this podcast hears three fire trucks going by on any given day. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. We don’t even look anymore. We just know that they’re going to pass by.

**Craig:** Exactly. They’re going to pass by.

**John:** I agree. To me that first sequence, I like that it is setting up 1984. I think Mary Lou Retton is actually a very smart way to tell us exactly when this is happening and sort of what our world is, but I want to get out of there right after the bartender’s first line, either with some explosion or just the passing lights that lead us to that thing to let us know that this is just to setup the world and the time and now we’re going to follow these fire trucks and we’ll be in a firefighting mode.

The dialogue is an issue, and I felt so many of these lines could have been in our podcast last week where we talked about those sort of, like, the lines that you keep hearing way too much in movies. “Someone’s in there. I’ve got a live one.”

**Craig:** Even “Pull your team out.”

**John:** Yeah, “Pull your team out.” That’s in every firefighter movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Get out.” Just, “All right, everyone out.”

**John:** Since we’re talking about action, I do want to talk about the action, because even some of the stuff felt a little cliché to me, the actual description of stuff happening was kind of nice. And that moment that was described was really gruesome, but it was well-described. Our block length is really short. I was never tempted to skim because most of these times I’m only committed to reading one and a half lines at a time. So, you’re going to get me through the page that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And a pretty good breakup of sort of dialogue — I wasn’t happy with some of the dialogue but I was happy that the dialogue was interspersing the action. So, it’s not just I’m going to commit to reading a line or a block of scene description, but if a page is nothing but scene description I will panic a bit because it is like, “Oh my god, I can’t read that whole page.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But because you were interspersing and you were doing other stuff on the page — in this case it is dialogue breaking up the page — I’m more inclined to actually read every word of it. So, that stuff I liked. And so to me it felt like a pretty good version of a scene that I’m going to probably see in Derek Haas’s firefighter show. But when Derek has his firefighter show I will know who these characters are ahead of time and will have a vested interest in their safety, and security, and what they’re doing in that scene.

Here I don’t because it’s the first time I’ve met this guy Kavanagh.

**Craig:** And I would be surprised if Derek’s show had this level of clamminess. “Get out of there.” “I told you get out of there, man.” You know, maybe it will, but hopefully not.

**John:** I think it can do better than that. But, at the bottom of page three right now Kavanagh is saying, “Sorry little guy. Guess I wasn’t meant to be a hero after all.”

**Craig:** Oh yeah. That’s brutal. Brutal.

**John:** What?! Maybe if you set up 15 pages before that his father never believed in him, or I don’t know, or where he’s going through training or something. But, like, what?!

**Craig:** It’s crazy. Who’s the screenwriter again of this one?

**John:** David Stripinis.

**Craig:** David. Okay, I like to talk to people by name. David, here’s the deal: This man just saw a burned alive woman with no eyes. Her eyes were melted away. He has found a live baby with a charred forearm. And injured babies are horrifying things for us to look at. He is facing death, and he has this very calm moment where he just sort of says, “Sorry little guy. Guess I wasn’t meant…”

I mean, no. Now here’s the thing: You don’t need that line at all. “He slumps down, back against the wall defeated. He pulls off his respirator.” That’s great. He’s giving up. I love it.

“The infant looks at him with a startling amount of clarity in his eyes. He looks back.” That’s all you need. No talking there. You’ve got to know when to talk and you’ve got to know when you don’t talk. And you don’t talk when you’re alone with a charred baby about to die.

You can get away with no talking there if you eliminate some of this other stuff. I would also argue, David, that you don’t need the whole “Get out” stuff. Because if you think about it, all you’re really doing is giving away what’s so shocking about what you’ve written. This should be quite the opposite. It’s a house fire, but it’s pretty standard. Everybody should be under control. We’re just doing what we do. It’s a fire. It’s dangerous. “How are we doing in there?” “Okay, just checking the last hallway.” “We gotta go man; this doesn’t look too good.” “Um, yeah, just give me one second.” “Boss says we gotta go now.” “Yeah, I said one second.” Opens up a door. There’s no one in there. And he walks over and he finds the baby. “Holy shit.” “We gotta go.”

And then suddenly out of nowhere, KABOOM.

It just would be so much more interesting than somebody explaining to us before we ever meet this guy, you’re about to die. Don’t you think?

**John:** I agree. Surprise. Because the minute we hear “Pull your people out,” it’s like we know the whole thing is going down.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And the whole “Pull your people out,” the whole thing is going down — that is usually used as surprised stuffing. It’s like filler surprise. It’s not really surprise. It’s fake surprise because we’ve seen it so often, but that’s what it’s there for.

You don’t need that filler. You have an actual surprise: A baby underneath a burnt-alive woman. Yikes. Yuck. So, I mean, use that.

**John:** Good stuff.

**Craig:** Gross.

**John:** So, again, I want to thank our four people who wrote in with their samples, because these were amazing and you guys were so brave to write in and let us talk about your work. And I hope it was helpful.

Most people who have gone through this process seem to have enjoyed it. I’ve gotten good feedback from the people we’ve reviewed before, so I hope these four felt it was helpful and useful in their further writing careers.

**Craig:** And I just want to add, for our four people who sent things in, I just want to add for them that I thought each one of them had something that was very encouraging. There wasn’t one of them this week that I thought, “Oh, you’ll never be able to do this.” So, is that encouraging? Did that sound encouraging?

**John:** That did sound encouraging.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Oh my god. I keep forgetting that we have One Cool Thing.

**John:** Yeah, that’s okay. I’ll just give you my One Cool Thing and we’ll wrap it up early.

My One Cool Thing is a movie that’s in theaters right now. It’s called Sleepwalk With Me. It’s by a guy named Mike Birbiglia, who is a comedian who starts in and co-wrote and directed this movie. And it’s really charming, and I would highly recommend it. It feels very much like Annie Hall as a structure, in that it’s a guy analyzing a relationship and talking to camera at times while the story is being told. But it’s really funny and really well done.

I first recognize Mike from he’s in Lena Dunham’s show, Girls. He plays the guy who — Lena does a job interview, and he’s the guy who may hire her. And they have a very funny just one-off scene. And the scene was so good just by itself that I’m like — he’s on my radar.

And, god bless him, he made a really good little movie. Ira Glass of NPR fame produced it and co-wrote it. And I highly recommend it. So it’s playing in like 140 theaters across the country and I think people will really like it. I think it’s going to be the one little movie this year that could really break out. So I would encourage you to see it if it’s in your neck of the woods.

**Craig:** Fantastic!

**John:** Great. Craig, thank you for a week full of action.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was, oh, I mean, I’m exhausted.

**John:** I know. Tiring.

**Craig:** Exhausted. Should we do another one? Should we stop the podcast and never do another one? Or should we keep going?

**John:** No, I think I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** All right, screw it. Let’s do it again.

**John:** Talk to you soon. Bye.