Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 67 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you?

**Craig:** Oh man, I’m good. We’ve got one more week of shooting to go so I’m hanging on. I’m kind of hoping that I don’t get that weird body let down thing when you — it seems inevitable after you shoot you get a week or two off and you get sick.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like your body was so tensed up, it’s like it couldn’t possibly get sick, so it sort of sequestered all the germs. And then once you possibly can get sick you just get super sick all at once.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I’m hoping that doesn’t happen because I get basically a week to relax and then, you know, vacation stuff and traveling.

**John:** I always found in college I would get sick right when I came home for Christmas. It was like I was able to get through the semester, make it to my finals, and then I would get sick.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it’s a great way then to avoid your family at Christmastime.

**John:** Perfect. And I love it. Now, what is your family’s tradition around the holidays? Do you do Christmas? Do you do Hanukkah? Do you do other stuff? I don’t even know.

**Craig:** I’m so glad you asked that question because it allows me to go on a mini rant.

**John:** I love it.

**Craig:** So, I’m Jewish. I’m not religious at all, but I’m ethnically Jewish, and I was raised in the Jewish tradition.

**John:** Ethnically Jewish or culturally Jewish? Is there a distinction between those for you?

**Craig:** Well there is, yeah, because Jews are both a people and a religion/culture. So, there is a genetic component to being Jewish. That obviously is affixed to me, and happily so. But culturally speaking, even though I grew up in a culturally Jewish home and in a vaguely religious home, sort of moderately religious — I suppose we were religious the way that most Christians are religious. Sort of Christmas/Easter type Christians. You know, we were Hanukkah/Passover type Jews. Or, I should say Rosh Hashanah/Passover type Jews.

But now I’m not religious at all. It’s just not part… — I never felt connected to religiosity in any way. When people talk about being spiritual I literally feel like an autistic person who doesn’t understand something like emotion. I don’t even know — I know what the word means technically. I have no actual connection to it.

I am the least spiritual person in the world. I don’t believe in such a thing. So, I’m not religious at all. [laughs] My wife is also not religious, but she comes from an Episcopalian background and we celebrate Christmas in our house because Christmas is an awesome holiday.

And frankly also from a storytelling point of view, the story of Jesus is an awesome story. It’s a great, great story with wonderful…

**John:** It has good Star Wars elements to it. It feels, you know, desert, and someone comes out who is chosen. It’s nice.

**Craig:** And then the idea of enduring terrible things as part of sacrifice to save others who had condemned you. That’s all good, rich stuff. Whereas Old Testament stories tend to be far more simple and odd, like, “You all lied. I’m killing you.” [laughs] “You’re all drowning now because I don’t like you.” Stuff like that.

**John:** Well, also the Old Testament stories are so sort of transparently interpretations of very classic myths. Like all those things existed for a long time, they were just sort of woven together to become the Old Testament, but you find the exact same kinds of stories in other cultures at the same time, too.

Whereas the Jesus story at least has a lot of new elements to it even though there were other outside savior figures. And you can find the roots of the Jesus story in other cultures as well. It is newish.

**Craig:** It’s newish. I mean, if you read the story of Krishna it will shock you how Jesus-y it is. I mean, the idea of a virgin birth, someone who dies for your sins. Someone is convicted unfairly and who is perfectly sweet and good, that did pre-date Jesus.

But, that said, the story feels like a more modern story in part because it is.

**John:** But also it has three acts. It has an arc to it which is unique and different. I mean, there’s a saga to it that doesn’t exist in sort of the other Old Testament stores which is nice.

**Craig:** It’s true. I mean, there’s a saga to Exodus. That is, I think, the most interesting Old Testament story because it has the plagues, it has an adopted child who grows up in the family that he then rebels against. And then there’s plagues. And finally the Pharoah relents. But then there’s a reversal because he decides, “No, you can’t leave, I’m going to chase you down and kill you.”

But then God comes with a pillar of fire. But then fascinatingly and anti-dramatically then they just wander around for 40 years.

**John:** Yeah. That’s not so dramatic.

**Craig:** It’s a really bad third act. [laughs]

**John:** So, like you, my family is — we celebrate Christmas and we do all that stuff. We’re not sort of actively religious. And so I always sort of never kind of wanted the Christian label on me, but then when I was in Africa years ago working with this charity group, everyone was like, “Oh, are you Christian?” And it’s like you’re just sort of Christian — if you’re not anything else you’re Christian. So, I’m fine sort of being culturally Christian. That’s why I asked the difference between ethnically and culturally, because I’m ethnically nothing. But culturally, yeah, I come from a Christian culture. So, even though I don’t actively practice any of those religious tenets on a weekly basis, eh, culturally I’m Christian.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think all Americans to some regard are culturally Christian because, for instance, I consider myself in a weird way culturally Christian as well, because I really love Christmas, and I like Easter. It’s fun, I like those things. But I’m not at all a spiritual or religious person in any regard toward any religion.

I will say that Hanukkah is dopey. Hanukkah is a lame-o holiday. It was an event that is of almost no religious or historic importance to actual Jewish people. When I say “actual Jewish people” I mean like actual students of Judaism. Hanukkah is incredibly minor. It’s on par with Jewish Arbor Day.

**John:** But it got elevated just because it was so close to Christmas and it felt weird that they didn’t have an equivalent holiday around that time of year.

**Craig:** It is totally manufactured in the way that Christians manufactured Easter out of pagan holidays. And so the bunny is a part of Easter because it was the Spring Fertility holiday and they kind of just glommed in. It’s the same deal.

And Hanukkah is just dopey. I mean, the whole thing is that there was a minor miracle involving a couple people who they got lights on for a little bit longer than they should have.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like your iPhone battery lasting a really long time.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Uh, let’s have a holiday.” It’s ridiculous. The whole eight-presents-over-eight-nights is ridiculous, because really you only get one good present and then a bunch of dinky ones. So, basically, really all they’re doing is spreading out the stocking stuffers over seven nights.

You know, it just — I mean, I understand why it was important for us as kids to have something, but you know, frankly, Christmas is so much more religiously significant to Christianity than Hanukkah is to Judaism that even as a Jew I’m like, “I don’t even like the idea of putting up the Menorah next to the Christmas tree in the mall.” You know, I just feel like, no, just do the Christmas tree.

If you want to be properly-Jewish, then at Passover and Easter — which are connected because, of course, the Last Supper was a Passover Seder — do something there. That’s important.

**John:** I hear you.

**Craig:** So, anyway, that’s my religious rant for today.

**John:** Cool.

Today I thought we would talk about perspective within scenes and sort of perspective overall in a story and sort of how screenwriters work on shifting perspective and telling a story with a clear perspective. And then get into three more examples — actually four more examples of our Three Page Challenge, because we’ve had so many good ones come through and Stuart picked out four new ones for us to look at.

So, that will be our agenda today.

**Craig:** That’s our day.

**John:** That’s our day.

So, a small update on the last podcast, I talked about how for this ABC pilot I’m writing I wrote it all in Fountain for the first time. And I used this beta of a new software program that’s coming out which is really good and I liked it a lot. And so just an update on that: So I finished, and so stuff is handed in.

And so I ultimately ended up using Highland to convert the Fountain to Final Draft so I could go through Final Draft, because I needed to do starred changes. And that’s one of the things that’s still problematic to try to do in Fountain or any of the sort of non — any sort of plain text thing — is when you need to mark what’s changed from one draft to the next draft, so if I’m sending pages through to Josh I can say like, “Hey, just look for the starred changes.”

That’s a thing that Final Draft is really good for. And so while I think these writing tools are really great and really helpful, I’m still very much acknowledging that there’s things that big professional applications like Final Draft are really good at. And starred changes is one of the things that it does really well. Screenwriter does it well, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Did you see that Fade In actually has built in Fountain exporting and importing I think?

**John:** Yeah, which is terrific. And where I find stuff missing, and I’m not talking about Fade In specifically, but as I was working with this draft in Final Draft I was making small changes, and so like literally just adding a few lines of dialogue, and I found it really maddening suddenly to have to use Final Draft Syntax for adding characters and stuff. Because I found myself typing I was like, “Well, that’s in parenthesis so of course that’s a parenthetical. Why are you making me go through and select it and tell you that it’s a parenthetical? It’s a parenthetical.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s one of the things that in my fantasy Final Draft would just have a little mode, a little tick box you could set that’s like, “In the Fountain mode,” and it would just be able to interpret. It’s actually very hard to.

**Craig:** That’s a really interesting one because it’s the one thing about Movie Magic I love the most. When you’re in dialogue and you hit parenthesis, or if you are — before you type, if you have parenthesis it puts it in parenthetical.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because their point is, and they’re right — how often do you have to type a parenthesis that isn’t a parenthetical?

**John:** Yeah. Or, how often is the parenthesis going to be in the very start of the line of dialogue?

**Craig:** Right. Just know open parenthesis means go command-4 into Parenthesis Mode.

**John:** Yup. Should be. So, anyway, it’s been interesting to sort of see that process sorting itself out.

And for people who are curious about Fountain we actually have a new Glassboard setup to talk over Fountain issues. Glassboard is a sort of semi-private message board system. So, if you have issues that come up in Fountain or questions about Fountain, myself and the other developers of Fountain are there to answer questions or talk about new stuff that can come up.

So, there will be a link to that new Glassboard for Fountain on the links for Scriptnotes at the bottom of this podcast. So, always just johnaugust.com/podcast and you’ll see a link for that.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, let’s talk about perspective because this actually came from you. You were talking about how with what you’re working on right now with The Hangover 3, there’s issues that come up sometimes about really conveying what the perspective is within a scene.

**Craig:** Well, it occurred to me because I’ve been — now that we’re getting close to the end I’ve been sneaking away from the set and spending time with the editors, just trying to kind of help get a few of the scenes together in shape for when Todd comes in and really starts working on his assembly. Because I’m there and I do it with him I know, “Okay, this is what he intended for this,” or “This is what he intended for that,” sort of like hopefully we can hand over an assembly-plus as opposed to just an assembly.

And one thing that I noticed is that a lot of times when editors are assembling all the footage, what they’re doing is following the lines. So, let’s say you have a scene where three people walk into a room to talk to one person. They will sort of follow the dialogue. But, of course, when you’re editing you have a choice. You don’t necessarily need to show who is talking. You could show somebody else.

And sometimes what ends up being missed is where the perspective of the scene is away from the dialogue. Sometime you’re writing a scene where people are talking but one person is staring at the person that’s being talked to. And that person is not saying anything. That person is falling in love; that person is growing angry; that person sees something in their hands; that person realized they’re lying. That’s what I mean by perspective.

And it started to occur to me that it’s something that we bake into our scenes a lot, but if you’re not you should be. And the notion that the scene, no matter what’s going on in a scene, ultimately the reader must be emotionally connected to a specific singular relationship — a person to another person; a person to an object; a person to an event.

And things should be going on around that. But there has to be a focal point of concentration for the reader and then ultimately for the audience. And it doesn’t have to be with who’s talking. Sometimes it’s not at all with who’s talking. And it’s important for us to think about where that perspective is and then come up with interesting ways to draw us out of it and switch it if need be.

**John:** So, the exact case that you’re bringing up is very classically what you want to do. The center of the scene, the most important person in the scene, the base of a scene, is not necessarily the person who has the most lines in the scene. And in many movies that will be kind of obvious, because if your hero is in a scene — if Indiana Jones is in a scene with other people who are doing more talking, well obviously it’s Indiana Jones’s movie, so we’re going to spend most of our time with him, so it’s really natural that we’re going to favor him in the cutting and in our head as we’re sort of shooting the movie in our heads. We always know that Indy is the most important person in that room.

With your movie, because you have multiple protagonists and you have a lot of stuff going on, it might not necessarily be clear who the important person is to follow in this thing and who should be at the center point of the scene. So, how would you bake that in on the page? What would you do to convey that? Are you just saying, like, hold on this person and throw the other dialogue in OS? How would you convey that on the page?

**Craig:** Well, you shouldn’t. I mean, in a sense you want to be able to shoot everything because you don’t know what you’re going to want to play off camera and what you’re not going to want to play off camera. But in action description you should do what you normally do, that is to say emphasize what matters. So, while one person is talking you could say, “While Jim rambles on, Sandra can’t help but keep staring at the man’s withered hand.” Okay?

**John:** Yeah, or “Sandra burns a hole through him with her eyes.”

**Craig:** Yes. Now, when it comes time, of course, you know, again, editors may make a mistake, but that’s okay. Everybody gets their first and second drafts, and the point is that the filmmaker, the director, should understand what the perspective of the scene is as well. But their understanding of it is going to come from the script and from their discussion with you, which is why it’s so important to emphasize perspective.

In fact, as I often do, I got angry [laughs] on DoneDealPro because somebody was saying, “How do I — I want to sort of describe how the camera is moving here.” And really it was about emphasizing perspective. And people were like, “Don’t put in camera directions. Don’t direct with script.”

No. No, no, no, no, no. Go ahead and put in camera directions if it’s important if that’s what’s going to convey the intention of where the perspective of the scene is. It’s important to know where the camera is going if it’s not doing what would be expected.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay? So, if we’re watching two people and it’s a spy thriller, and they’re having this discussion, and the intention is that we slowly pull back and away from them to reveal the back of a man’s head at another table listening, and he has a little thing in his ear and he can hear what they’re saying, it’s important for you to put that direction in.

Because it’s about figuring out what the perspective is and who we’re supposed to be with. I mean, think about the scene in The Godfather where Michael goes to have dinner with Sollozzo and Captain McCluskey. I think it’s McCluskey.

And his mission is he’s going to kill both of them. And he’s nervous because he’s never killed somebody up close like that before. He’s never committed murder like that before, even though he’s a war hero. And he’s sitting here in this restaurant, and the two of them begin talking — not him, the other two are talking — and while they’re rambling on we just stay with him and he’s just staring quietly. He even starts nodding in answer to what they’re saying, but we don’t even see them anymore because it’s all about that feeling you get in your head when you begin to swim in your own thoughts and you start to panic internally.

Well, you have to describe that on the page. You have to. And if you don’t, I think you’re missing the point of what it means to bake in the perspective of the scene.

**John:** I agree.

Now, as we’re talking about perspective, we’re talking about perspective within a scene. Also, a whole movie has perspective, and in the movie which characters are telling the story and which characters have storytelling ability.

One of the things I’m working on for the ABC pilot is we limit perspective very strictly to the four members of the family. So, every scene has to be driven by one of the four members of the family which is a huge opportunity and obstacle that we present for ourselves, is that we only have information that the four people in the family can see.

And when you setup those kind of limitations, you have to really think about like, “Well, how are we going to get this information across to the audience and which of our four people can have that information?” But, by limiting yourself to that perspective and letting it be clear that we’re never going to go off with the villains and see what the villains are doing, it changes the nature of it.

And the times when we sort of bend the rules and we can sort of follow this little bit of a conversation with people who weren’t originally in the scene, that’s nice; it gives you tension.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s good to — just the fact that it is part of how you’re approaching the show conceptually forces you to think about it. And I see sometimes when we read bad pages, a lot of times it seems like whoever is talking, that’s where the camera is supposed to be. And we just follow line to line, like a play.

**John:** And because we have limited perspective to these four people, obviously if there’s only one of our four family members in the scene, they are the most important person in the scene. There would be no question that someone else is going to be dominating that scene. It has to be our person. Even if our person is not doing the main talking, we know what it is. And it draws you in closer as an audience to those people because you’re seeing them all the time. You’re not going off and hanging out with other people.

**Craig:** Right. Good.

**John:** Cool. Great. Well, thank you for talking about perspective. Let’s get into perspectives on these four Three Page Challenges that we got in this week.

**Craig:** Awesome!

**John:** Awesome. What do we want to start with? Do you want to start with Hunter?

**Craig:** Hunter? Did you say Hunter?

**John:** Hunter. Hunter Altman.

**Craig:** Hunter did…is that the one with the swamplands of Florida?

**John:** Yeah. Why don’t you start with Hunter in the swamplands of Florida.

**Craig:** Okay. So, in these pages here, I don’t believe we have a title for this, we begin in the swamplands of Florida and we realize we’re in, it almost seems like the Everglades or something. An alligator surfaces and we move past the swamp to find an old, small old minor league baseball stadium. This is the home of the Swamp Gators and it’s pretty run down and pretty small-time. It’s at night. Everyone has left. Nothing there but the sound of the sprinklers over the fields.

And then we find groundskeeper Tony, who is 50s, and he’s cleaning up and he’s alone. He switches off the lights, hears a noise, turns back to investigate with his tiny little flashlight, and then sees something inhuman staring at him from the bullpen. The thing pounces on him and kills Tony.

**John:** And that’s three pages.

**Craig:** That’s our three pages. So, you want to start?

**John:** I’ll start. I like it. I thought Hunter has a very good ability to describe things. He uses that ability a little too much. I thought he had really good specific details about this place. I felt like I could sort of see it, and smell it, and live it, and breathe it. And for a horror movie, like, it’s kind of accepted that we’re going to be sort of a slow start. And you’re just going to be, like, painting the world. There was just a little too much painting for me. I could have just gone through and edited a little bit of this out.

But, he really has skills at sort of describing things, so good on him for that. My biggest issue with it was Tony, our guy. Because we’ve seen that trope of the groundskeeper who is there alone at night and hears a noise and goes out to investigate. It’s just so stock that I feel like you need to push back against that and give us something else more specific or more interesting to be doing here.

Because if you’re sticking with the idea that he’s a groundskeeper, okay, but give me something else. Is he hitting a few balls of his own at night because that’s the only time he gets to do it? Is he dying of emphysema? Is he cooking meth in the back room? Is he super Christian? Does he collect one kind of thing that he finds in the stands?

Just give me something more specific than just, like, he’s the guy who cleans up and then he finds some monster out in the fields.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with everything. I mean, to continue your theme, the initial theme of praise, good writing here. In particular the beginning, I really liked, “Around it, insects buzz, frogs croak, birds call. You can feel the sticky humidity just by looking at it.”

Well, what’s nice about that is I can feel the sticky humidity now just by reading that. So, that’s good. I felt there — I felt I was there. I liked the touch of how rundown the scoreboard was. But then I would say, okay, there’s only so many times you can make me read stuff. So, you have me read, “THE SWAMP GATRS THAK YOU FOR COMING. DRIVE HOME SAF,” which is bulbs burnt out — it was a nice touch.

Then I have to see the banner that says “1987 is The Year Of The Gator!” Then I have to read “Hit one over the Gator and win a free seafood dinner!” There’s a lot of reading going on. So, by the time I got to the bottom of page one with the sprinkler — the sprinkler sound was great, but then there were three more paragraphs describing what the stadium looked like and it was not required.

Yeah, absolutely, everything that happens on page two and three we have seen a billion times. The old disposable character gets eaten by something. And, you know, I understand to some point there’s only so much character building you can do there because the dude is about to get eaten, but I think John is right; you want to try and maybe give us some twist on the same old thing.

I would say that, a couple of suggestions for you, Hunter. One is on the bottom of page two, “He’s not more than 20 yards from the glowing EXIT sign, when he hears — [/] — SOMETHING. He’s not sure what. He turns back.” Well, someone’s going to have to record that later, Hunter, [laughs], so can you give us a little more, buddy? It’s got to be more than “SOMETHING.” Is it a clank? Is it a cling? Is it a growl? Is it a shuffling noise? Is it a drip-drip-drip? But it can’t be “SOMETHING” in all caps. That’s just malpractice.

**John:** That’s cheating. I agree.

**Craig:** And then, finally, the death itself comes exactly as you would imagine it. There’s absolutely no question that he’s about to get killed by a thing that he’s investigating, but it comes from the front of him, it doesn’t come from above, or from behind, or from below. There’s no misdirect. There’s nothing. It just sort of happens as it should happen. But I like the touches that you did. “A smeared brown trail.” I like the way his page is laid out.

Like if you look at page three — for those of you who are new writers, take a look at page three of Hunter’s pages. It is divided up perfectly. It’s the perfect proportion of scene headers, description lines, dialogue. Short. Punchy. Lots of good caps where it needs to be. That’s the way you should write. That’s the way it should look.

**John:** Agreed. Some of the dialogue wasn’t spectacular but I liked the breakup of the page a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, here’s what I’ll say about this trope is we have the maintenance guy, the minute he sort of calls out to, “Hey kid, park’s closed,” I would love to see that guy not go out and investigate but actually get out of there and call the police or call security. Just not do exactly what we expect him to do in this kind of movie. And I think to the degree you can surprise us, that’s great.

Also, in the middle of page two, this is — again, you need to go back through and really proofread. It says:

Well, we’ve just established this power box twice, I think. Or maybe there were meant to be two? It’s confusing and not necessary. And, honestly, think about the cut. And literally the cut would just be like you put in the key to unlock something, or you turn something off. You don’t have to sort of establish that there is something and then have someone do something to it. Just have them do something to something and that will establish that exists in the world.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s great advice. Think about the cut. Because that’s exactly what I was thinking about when I started feeling like there were too many things to read. Because, you know, I don’t want to just keep looking at signs. So, you get to look at one sign briefly. And, you’re right. The notion — for instance, another possibility is he goes, you know, “You kids, park’s closed,” and have him walk towards the bullpen and there’s a kid there. And they’re playing. And he gets rid of them.

And then he hears another thing, [laughs], do you know what I mean?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We have choices here of how to kind of subvert people’s expectations. But in these particular pages we just did the most expected version.

**John:** Yeah. And I should have said as we started this whole thing off is for people who want to read along with us at home, links to all four of these PDF samples will be at johnaugust.com/podcast for this podcast. So, you can pull them up and read along with us as we look through them.

So, the next one we’re going to take a look at is by Kevin Wolfe & Adam DeKraker. And, again, we don’t have a title on this, but here’s what happens:

We open in an operating room with a screaming pregnant woman. There’s two doctors, Juliet Abbas and Jonas, and they’re working on a delivery and they’re arguing about a C-section. As they cut the woman open Jonas gives an “Oh my god” as his eyes go wild in excitement. The EKG flatlines.

Next, we’re on a rooftop garden in Brooklyn with Ronnie Van Dam, a 30-year-old Hitchcock blonde. We see her condo building, her unit, her amazing kitchen. We see a New York Magazine cover that calls her the “Queen of Green.”

Later, as she’s cooking, she’s watching a syndicated talk show with Paula Cruz, whose first guest is Dr. Abbas from the first scene, who is a fertility specialist.

And that’s our three pages. Craig?

**Craig:** Well, you want me to start?

**John:** You can start.

**Craig:** Oh, boy. Okay. Well, look, the dialogue here on page one is pretty bad.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** First of all, the coming in mise-en-scene in this — in medias res, whatever the phrase is, in medias res.

**John:** As stuff is going on.

**Craig:** In the middle of it, sorry. It’s not mise-en-scene. It’s medias res. Coming in the middle of this woman, she’s screaming. This is the first line of the movie:

This would the first human being that ever said, “Stop! Please! Why are you doing this?” while people cut her. It’s just so wooden. I don’t understand what’s happening frankly in this operating room.

**John:** I know.

**Craig:** They’re doing what appears to be a C-section, however the woman is not anesthetized. I don’t know why. If that’s a point I think that needs to be called out. If it’s not a point then anesthetize her, for the love of god. “A steady drip of BLOOD trickles from the table and pools around their feet.” What hospital is this where that is allowed? [laughs] That doesn’t happen in hospitals, I mean, unless you’re in trauma surgery.

**John:** Yeah, but there’s nurses to pick that up. Is it just the two doctors and there’s no one else in the place?

**Craig:** Well, and also, blood doesn’t trickle from operating tables. You have suction. I mean, it just doesn’t work that way. I just doesn’t trickle like a horror movie and pools around their feet. I’ve never seen such a thing.

And then we have, you know, this dialogue. Dr. Abbas says, “Scalpel.” Dr. Jonas, who’s wearing wire-framed glasses, apparently that is super important in the middle of all this…

**John:** Yeah. I think he’s a Nazi.

**Craig:** Apparently. Pleads in a thick accent, “We need to slow the hemorrhaging.” Dr. Abbas says, “Focus on the delivery.” Dr. Jonas, “We can still save the mother.” Dr. Abbas, “Scalpel.”

Doctors don’t do this.

**John:** [laughs] And the woman is apparently still conscious to be hearing this.

**Craig:** Conscious. Yeah. [laughs] Not saying anything. Now she’s interested, I guess, in what they have to say.

**John:** So, it’s possible, is she being bound down to the gurney?

**Craig:** I don’t know!

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on.

**Craig:** I don’t know! And then Dr. Jonas places a scalpel into Dr. Abbas’ hand. So, now you have a doctor handing tools to another doctor which, again, speaks of complete ignorance of how surgery is done. And Dr. Abbas lifts back a flap of skin to reveal the womb. Dr. Jonas, “Oh my god.” Dr. Abbas is wild with excitement. But she drops the scalpel which hits the floor with a clang. Well, you don’t do that when you’re excited. you do that when you’re shocked or horrified. The others step back in horror. The EKG flatlines.

**John:** But the others step back in horror. Well, what others are there?

**Craig:** What others? Yeah.

**John:** There aren’t any others in the room.

**Craig:** Well, no, there’s “Four figures in surgical scrubs and masks huddle over a pregnant woman.” But two of them are doctors and the other two are just huddlers.

**John:** [laughs] Those mysterious huddlers.

**Craig:** But it gets worse. It gets worse from here. [laughs]

**John:** Why don’t we talk about this first page just because I don’t know if we want to go back through and look at these things twice. Here’s an example of the Dr. Abbas and Dr. Jonas — the character names and the headers over dialogue, get rid of the “Dr.”s because it actually makes it more confusing because it’s harder to tell them apart with those. So, those should just be labeled as “Abbas” and “Jonas.”

Now, so Dr. Juliet Abbas, we get Juliet is a woman, so that’s okay, fine. But “DR. JONAS (late 30s), wearing WIRE FRAME GLASSES, pleads in a thick accent.” So, I assume like, oh, Dr. Jonas, I guess is a man. But then the next paragraph of scene description, “Dr. Jonas places a scalpel into Dr. Abbas’s hand. For a split second, the light catches a TINY JADE TURTLE CHARM on her wrist.”

And that made me think, “Well, is Dr. Jonas a woman?”

**Craig:** Right, does she have a turtle charm?

**John:** Yeah. The “her” isn’t connected to either one of them.

**Craig:** This is an example of a mess. And, guys, I’m sorry — or ladies — I don’t mean to be mean about this, but this page is a mess. It’s a mess. You wouldn’t want to watch this the way you’ve written it. I don’t how else to put it. It’s kind of a mess. And tonally speaking it’s playing as high camp, and I don’t think that’s what you want, because then on page two we suddenly enter into a Nancy Meyers movie.

So, now I’m really confused because now we have this woman at a rooftop garden in Brooklyn and she’s the queen — we know this because a magazine tells us — she’s the Queen of Green, meaning that I guess she grows stuff. And she really wants to be pregnant. And I know that because in the elevator she looks at a pregnant neighbor and then she watches a show about pregnancy and has a reaction to the doctor saying, you know, “We can get people pregnant when they’re not pregnant.”

But there’s better ways to show me that somebody wants to be pregnant than that. That’s about the goofiest way.

**John:** Yeah, I also want to maybe make a new challenge to all screenwriters in the world: Let’s stop doing the thing where we show a magazine cover to establish who somebody is. It’s just so hacky to do that. Because you always have this fake headline that would never actually be on the magazine. It’s always people who never would be on the magazine anyway.

It’s just a terrible way to do things. It’s the air duct of backstory.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is the air duct! It’s the air duct of backstory and exposition. And, also, it’s so weird that they have at their own — like if you were on the cover of a magazine, to casually leave it around your own house is so weird.

**John:** I was on the cover of Written By Magazine, but I don’t leave it around the house just sitting out there.

**Craig:** No, it’s weird.

**John:** It’s weird.

**Craig:** And it would be even weirder to read it. And what happens is you start — something like that, just so that people understand. She comes in from her rooftop garden with her basket of stuff, her beets. Her basket of beets. She plops the basket onto the kitchen counter. “A carrot tumbles out and lands on a copy of NEW YORK MAGAZINE. Ronnie is on the cover with the headline ‘THE QUEEN OF GREEN.'”

Nothing can take me out of a movie more than a magazine cover with our character’s name on it with the fact describing that she’s the queen of gardening while a carrot that she just gardened tumbled onto it. Everyone in the audience will be thinking, “Oh, look what the movie’s telling us.” They’re not in the story at this point. There’s got to be a better way to get that information across.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Must be. And then this talk show, you know, again, while we’re calling for moratoriums can we call for a moratorium on the introductory talk show that tells us who someone is?

**John:** Yeah. It’s not good.

**Craig:** So, we have a talk show now. And the talk show host, “Welcome back, doctor. We always love having you here and you know why? Because we love babies!” Ugh.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Eh, I don’t know what to say about all of this.

**John:** I would say it’s just not especially promising. So, this seems to be some sort of like mad pregnancy thriller, I think. That’s a valid genre, sort of. It feels a little bit Lifetime-y, but that’s a valid genre to do.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just think this didn’t start off in a very promising way.

**Craig:** No, it’s just playing incredibly campy right now. And you don’t want to be campy, unless you want to be campy.

**John:** Unless you want to be campy, but this isn’t the right kind of campy. This doesn’t feel like it’s going…

**Craig:** No. This is feeling pretty goofy. I think you guys need to really take a step back and if you’re writing a movie that’s sort of like Rosemary’s Baby or Coma or something like that, find your tone. This stuff is really over-the-top right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Sorry.

**John:** That’s okay. We agree. I think they were brave to send it in.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** Thank you for sending it.

**Craig:** It’s the attendance award of Scriptnotes. You were brave for sending it in. [laughs]

**John:** Next up let’s talk about The Transcendentalist by Scott Gorsuch.

**Craig:** All right. Are you summarizing or am I summarizing?

**John:** You’re summarizing this one.

**Craig:** I’m summarizing this one. Okay. So, this story opens with the image of a small boy slipping down through water in a lake, fully clothed, apparently drowning, blood gushing from his head while a voice over asks, “Ever think about past lives? What you might have been?” As the boy disappears into the depths the man’s voice, voice over, “I didn’t used to.”

And now we’re back now, and presumably that little boy has grown up, we think, and he’s woken up with a shock on a bus. He looks sad, a little bit out of place. He walks to his house. There’s some furniture missing and it turns out his girlfriend has left him. She’s moved out, left him a note. He calls up his friend Steve to say, “Hey, can we meet for a drink? Lydia has moved out.”

The two of them share a couple of beers in a pub. They talk about the fact that she moved out. And talk about why it may be that David had sort of failed here. That’s our character, David. And those are our three pages.

**John:** They were kind of a dreary three pages. And dreary, partly intentional. I mean, you’re opening with a good image of a boy drowning. That’s bleak. You’ve got a guy on a bus, like a sad George Bailey. That’s kind of dreary. But I just felt like I was slipping into a dark and not especially inviting place reading through these pages.

And there were a lot of specific sort of problems on the page that I want to talk about, because we don’t get a lot of sense of plot here yet, so there wasn’t a lot to sort of get me there in terms of talking about story, but just the words on the page could be better and could help me out a lot.

Right from the very start, the small boy slips down through the water — SMALL BOY should still be capitalized, even if that’s a character we’re going to meet later on. If it’s an actual person, give us some uppercase there.

Capitalizing “Winter” mid way through the page felt weird to me. I know, technically I guess we’re supposed to capitalize “Winter,” but it felt weird to me. It stuck out.

And we do this weird thing at the bottom of page one where we’re outside the house and then we’re inside the house. And then he’s like, “Lydia, are you home?” And he’s been wandering around the house. But we never really got inside the house and so I kept waiting for like, “What, are we looking through the door? Oh, no, I guess we really are walking through the house.” Give us a new scene header there. So, “EXT. DAVID’S HOUSE – FRONT PORCH.” He can do the “‘Lydia? You home?’ No one answers.” Next, new scene header, “INT. DAVID’S HOUSE.” Then you can walk around.

And once you’re inside the house it’s fine if the style you want to use is that you’re just doing little slug lines for the different rooms of the house. That’s cool, that’s a valid style. But if you’re going from EXT to INT, those really are different places. Give us a scene header for those.

It has a really unrealistic phone conversation on page two. So, I’ll read it aloud here for you:

So, it just started weird. Like on one just starts talking into a phone. And so there wasn’t a sense of, like, he called somebody and acknowledged who it was that he was talking to. That’s not how phone calls work. And so you could slip a jump cut in there and that would be valid. If you just gave me like, “JUMP CUT,” I’d believe that some time had passed. But it didn’t feel real in the moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked the opening. I didn’t mind the dark, sort of glum tone. Maybe this is going to be a cool mumblecore movie, who knows. I mean, I really enjoyed the opening visual. I thought it was well-written. And I liked him being on this bus and I liked how sad he was.

And I liked the way that he found out initially that Lydia had left him. “He scans the room. There’s an empty silhouette on the wall where a painting had been and impressions in the carpet from a missing chair.” Those are really nice details.

“He thinks maybe someone has broken in. He snatches an umbrella, creeps into the kitchen.” By the way, I agree with you about the slug lines. We have to be INT here, “INT. HOUSE.”

He comes around it, now there’s a note stuck to the fridge. And then on the note we hear the voice over of her reading the note and that I did not like. Frankly, I don’t think you need that at all. I don’t think you need the note at all. And I totally agree with you about the conversation. Really I would have loved to have picked that up in the middle. So, in other words, “He comes around the corner and he sees a note stuck to the fridge.”

We don’t have to read the note. The next thing we should see is him already on the phone. “I know, I’m sorry about that. Been really busy.” So, it’s a little bit of a mystery what’s going on. And then he says, “Listen, Lydia’s moved out.” And then we get the answer when he tells Steve. Don’t give us information twice.

You have information? Play the mystery of it. You gave away a gift you had built into the setup of the scene, if you think about it.

**John:** So, here’s an even more drastic cut that I serves you even better. So, “No intruder. A very conspicuous note is stuck to the fridge.” So, can either pull it down or you can just leave on the note. “Cut to: INT — PUB.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s with Steve. And Steve is holding the note. Because right now the note happens about halfway through it and its this whole shoe leather to get the note out. Steve is holding the note and all he has to say is, “While you were at work? That’s harsh.” We know what happened then. And then you can have the conversation about Lydia. Like you don’t need to say her name before that point.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Or, or, let’s go even further. So, he sees this note. The next thing is he’s in a pub with his friend. And let’s go back to our discussion about perspective. His friend is rambling on about something we don’t care about while David just sits staring at his beer. Staring at his beer. Staring at his beer. Then he finally looks up and says, “Lydia walked out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** See, I mean, there’s 100 different ways of doing this, but this isn’t an interesting way. This is a very boring way of doing it. So, even in these things think about drama and think about teasing the audience along.

It’s great to leave them confused for 30 seconds. 40 seconds. A minute. You don’t want them confused for five or ten minutes, because then they’re not watching what they’re supposed to be watching. But confusion for a short burst that you can then satisfy is good to do.

The discussion that he has with Steve is boring. I don’t know what else to say about that. it’s just boring.

**John:** So, back to your issue of confusion and satisfaction: that’s what I want people to take out of this is that it’s great to be confused for about ten seconds and be trying to figure it out. Like basically you want people, your audience and your readers, to be curious enough to want to figure out what’s happening. “Oh, I figured it out!” And they get that little burst of dopamine when they’re like, “I figured that out. I’m so excited. I’m so smart.”

And you’ve rewarded them for figuring that little thing out, for figuring out like, “Oh, his girlfriend left him!” That’s great. And the trick of writing is anticipating how you’re going to get those little bursts of insight in your reader and your audience as they put the puzzle pieces together.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? Part of the fun of screenwriting is to keep the audience wondering if you’re in control or not. Because if you just lay everything out for them and spoon-feed them it’s boring. But if you let them think for 30 seconds, or however long, that maybe you don’t know what the hell you’re doing, and then you go, “No, no, no, no, no. See, I had you the whole time.” They start to trust you. And it becomes comfortable. And it becomes fun to watch, you know, because you know the movie is not going to let you down.

You’re not going to suddenly — because we’ve all had those moments in movies where we realize, “Oh no, I have no idea what the hell is going on, and neither do they.” Or, “They thought I would, and I still don’t.” That’s terrible. And it means that they’ve lost control.

**John:** Yeah. There’s a movie I was helping out on recently that really managed that problem where most of the movie was working really well, but there was this subplot which was just, like, from Mars and just didn’t fit in the rest of the movie. And so every time you cut to that subplot you’re, like, you lost a little bit of faith in the film because that does not make any sense. And if that thing that doesn’t make any sense is part of your movie, then your movie doesn’t really make any sense. And I don’t know if I trust this movie to get me to a solid place.

**Craig:** Right. Right.

**John:** So, our final script of the day is So We Had a Three-Way by Shawn Morrison, which is a great title. I just love that title.

**Craig:** Great title. Love it, too.

**John:** Let me give you a quick summary of this, and it’s going to be super quick because it’s almost all dialogue. We open at an Indian restaurant where 30-year-old married couple Daphne and Lucas Gilman are checking out the menus. We see that Lucas is a bit neurotic. He’s talking about should I have the Mango Lassi but he really wants a ginger ale. And he’s sort of talking himself into and out of things.

Daphne suggests they have sex in the bathroom. So, they go to the bathroom and they try to have sex. Lucas has a hard time getting aroused, partly because he’s nervous about touching the dirty walls. And there’s dialogue that’s happening as all this is going on. So, it’s really just a three-page dialogue scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked it.

**John:** I liked it a lot, too.

**Craig:** And that’s nice for me because you know I tend to get hardest on comedies, and this is certainly a comedy. But, let me talk about why I liked it.

First of all, how convenient for me that so much of this initial scene over their Indian food is about perspective. So, this is what I’m talking about. Lucas is going on. He’s rambling on about what he should order. Should he order the chicken? Should he get the Mango Lassi? Should he get the ginger ale, because I can always get the ginger ale but I can never get the Mango Lassi. And she is lost. She is not in the moment at all. She’s somewhere else.

She’s staring at her bread and she’s looking at the bread. And she’s looking at the bread. And then suddenly her face lights up. And the way that Shawn wrote this, I get that the perspective is between her and her idea, and not at all about this guy yap-yap-yapping. It’s an interesting way for her to reveal what she’s about to say which is “Let’s do it.” And he doesn’t’ understand what she’s talking about until she makes it clear, and then he doesn’t understand when. And then she makes it clear and she convinces him to do it.

Inside the bathroom we get the comedy of — we get a very real kind of comedy. And that’s the collision between an exciting fantasy that you think would be fun and the unfortunate realistic circumstances you’re dealing with to actually do it. And there have been a zillion movies where two sexy people go into an airplane bathroom and have sex. But airplane bathrooms are not sexy. And I don’t even know how you have sex in an airplane bathroom. And I don’t know why you would want to have sex in an airplane bathroom. It’s hard to pee in an airplane bathroom.

And so this is really about that. It was about juxtaposing sort of fun, spark-of-the-moment with the reality of it. And then also playing off the comedic differences in their personality. She’s obviously just like, “Let’s go for it, let’s do it.” And he’s a germaphobe who’s freaking out about the walls. And then layered on top of that you have additional comedy of two waiters just listening to dialogue off-screen.

And this is — from somebody that has to sit and edit comedy — it’s a gift to structure scenes where you can hear things through the wall like that, because it gives you such wonderful options when you’re actually shooting and editing. You can do almost anything. The waiters could hear anything they want to hear there.

But what they heard was interesting. And there was great — the way that she kind of escalates her talk was really funny. He starts worrying about the curry smell. It’s the little details that seem so real. I know this guy. And I get what she’s doing.

But what’s the best part to me was at the end of page three when she says — I’ll read this:

So, [laughs] she’s boasting about something, also giving him information that he didn’t know. Now he’s thinking about other guys she had sex with. And then when she finally delivers she’s terrible at it. This is all very good. I mean, this is really well-written. I thought they were great pages.

**John:** Let me back up to the first page. And I’ll read the scene description. “DAPHNE AND LUCAS GILMAN are the only people in the place. Daphne is 30, pretty, dressed like she’s from Vermont.” Which is great description. I don’t completely what that is, but it feels specific.

**Craig:** It’s like LL Bean, you know? I get it.

**John:** Exactly. “She idly pulls apart naan bread, mind adrift. Lucas studies the drink menu. He’s also 30 with a sensible beard and soft kind eyes.”

I get what that is. I can picture that guy. And then his first line of dialogue, “I hope their chicken is all white meat.” Tells you so much about Lucas.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** He’s just adventurous enough to go to the Indian restaurant, but he doesn’t actually really want to commit to the Indian restaurant. Now, the rest of the dialogue — you pointed this out, but I want to be really specific here — he gets all the first couple of lines but it’s broken up in a very smart way. And so:

So, by putting in that line of scene description it shifts the perspective back to Daphne. It also lets Lucas’s Mango Lassi thing all be one block and feel like one idea.

It’s just such a smart way to break up that thing which you could do all a one block, but the jokes wouldn’t play right if you didn’t have the scene description breaking that up.

**Craig:** Right. Because we wouldn’t know that we’re not supposed to give a damn about his Mango Lassi discussion. Without the breakup, without keeping perspective on her, we might think that this author actually wants us to care about this guy’s drink dilemma.

Interestingly, by the way, my take on Lucas from that first line was this is actually a hipster guy who goes to Indian restaurants all the time because he’s hipster and he eats adventurous food. He’s just also very fussy in a hipster way because he doesn’t like bad Indian food. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? I got like a whole other level off of him. I don’t know if it’s true or not.

**John:** I love a good, fussy, hipster.

**Craig:** Yeah. A fussy hipster with this beard and his eye. I mean, it was just all — I thought it was really well done. Three really good pages. I would definitely read more. And I also thought that these two together, and obviously we get from the title where this is going, and I like it.

**John:** Yeah. I like it, too.

**Craig:** I want to see what happens. And this is… — Okay, larger point about comedy, and I kind of brought this up a little bit before when we were talking about the Margarita Moms script, or Margarita Night. People will roll their eyes sometimes and say, “Oh, god, they’re doing a movie and the concept is this.” Yes, concepts are concepts. Okay. They’re going to have a threesome. It’s going to go poorly. It’s not going to be what they thought. It’s going to hurt their marriage, and it’s going to help their marriage, and they’re going to end up together okay or not. Whatever.

We all get where this is going. The point is it’s not where you’re going and it’s not what you’re doing, it’s who you’re doing it with and where they end up. And it’s the characters, especially in comedy, it’s the characters. And I like these characters. I thought Shawn did a really good job. Nice work.

**John:** Yay Shawn!

Yes, I mean, obviously we don’t know sort of what’s going to happen 20 pages from now, 30 pages from now. We have some sense of it by the title, but I’m rooting for this. I think it can work.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Great.

Now, Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Ah! See, I know those reminder emails are doing their job.

**Craig:** They are doing their job. Maybe that will be my One Cool Thing one day is your reminder emails. I opened up my One Cool Thing to Twitter suggestions, and you guys can keep bombarding me with those because I’m going to need them as we move forward.

But this week I found my own Cool Thing. And it doesn’t exist quite yet. It’s not going to exist apparently for purchase until the end of next year. But, I love it so much because it combines two of my great loves. One is medicine and the other is gadgetry.

John, have you heard of Scanadu?

**John:** I don’t know what it is. Tell me everything.

**Craig:** Okay, Scanadu is basically a tricorder. It is, if you’re a Star Trek fan; I don’t know if you are.

**John:** Oh my…yes!

**Craig:** So, Dr. McCoy would have his tricorder. He’d wave it in front of you and go, “This man has a blockage in his left intestine and he’s going to die.”

So, Scanadu is intended to be a $150 palm-size device. And it will scan your vital signs in under a minute and give you a diagnosis on your phone. [laughs] Now, you might say, “Whaaaat?” Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. It is going to be combined — so it’s going to do very simple things like it’s going to measure things like heart rate; electrical heart activity which is basically a little EKG; pulse transit time; temperature; heart variability; and blood oxygenation. And then transmit all of that to an app on your phone which will then be able to essentially comb through it and say, “You’ve got nothing to worry about.” “You got a little something to worry about.” “Oh my god, get to a hospital.”

But, it’s then going to be combined with two additional tools. Once called ScanaFlu and the other one called ScanaFlo. So, ScanaFlo is basically a pee strip. And it’s going to give you a ton of variations to measure your pee and tell you what’s going on, particularly if you’re a woman there’s a bunch of things like pregnancy issues and preeclampsia, and gestational diabetes. But also can look for everybody — kidney failure, urinary tract infections, and stuff like that.

There’s also going to be ScanaFlu which will use your saliva and test for strep, flu, both A and B, Adenovirus and RSV, which is a particularly annoying respiratory illness that most children will eventually get.

What’s so cool about all of this is that it’s basically going to handle a lot of the nuisance stuff that puzzles parents. Your kids get sick and there’s really that, “I hope this isn’t a bad thing. It could either be a nothing or it could be something horrible. I don’t know. Is it strep or do you just have a cold?” Do you know what I mean?

And it’s so cool to be able to put these tools in people’s hands and have them be completely non-invasive. I just kind of love it. And I can’t wait to have one. I want it! I want Scanadu, ScanaFlo, and ScanaFlu. That is something I will pee on every day.

**John:** [laughs] Just pee on your iPhone. That’s really what you should just do.

**Craig:** [laughs] Eventually.

**John:** Because the iPhone already has a little dot inside the headphone jack to know if it’s been submerged in water. You know that? If iPhone is submerged…?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, but you can just pee on your iPhone and it will tell you something.

**Craig:** That’s ultimately where we’re going. But I just love — and first of all, for $150, just to un-clutter pediatrician’s waiting rooms, you know, so that you can basically literally text your doctor and say, “Here are the ScanaFlu results. It’s strep.” And then they can write a prescription. You don’t even have to go in. It’s amazing.

**John:** Great.

So, my One Cool Thing actually exists. You can buy it today. I suggest you do buy it today. It’s an application for both the Mac and the iPad called Soulver. And so what Soulver does is somewhere between a calculator and a spreadsheet. And it’s really good for when you need to figure something out, or especially if you need to figure something out and sort of go back and change the variables later on.

So, it can do some natural language things where you can say like 15% of $60, or you can sort of build sentences they can sort of solve. I tend to use it on just different lines, just sort of setup where your variables are and then you sort of move things around.

I needed to use it this last month. We were figuring out stuff for Big Fish and box office stuff and number of seats. And there were a bunch of little variables we needed to sort of figure out. And you can stick those things in and then you just very easily change any of the variables in it. And I can save that and reopen it at any time. It’s great for those situations where you really don’t want to build a spreadsheet because it’s not like you have multiple columns of things. It’s just pretty simple equations, just there’s a lot of steps. It’s fantastic for that.

So, it’s available for both the iPad and the Mac. I really recommend it. I find myself using it at least two or three times a week. Soulver.

**Craig:** Soulver.

**John:** Yeah, it’s Solver, but just with a U in it.

**Craig:** Soulver.

**John:** Soulver. It’s soulves your soul.

**Craig:** Mm, nice. I’ll check that out. And, well, no, I’m not going to say anything about it. I’m going to try it and then it will be my next week’s One Cool Thing. There’s another app I’m hearing good stuff about.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** Yeah, from our Twitter brigade.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for another fun podcast. People who want to read along with any of these samples, again, go to johnaugust.com/podcast and you will see links to these PDFs. You will also see links to the other stuff we talked about like the Scanadu.

**Craig:** Scanadu!

**John:** And Soulver. And Fountain. And the Fountain Glassboard. And I will talk to you again next week, Craig.

**Craig:** See you at the next podcast.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/one-step-deals-and-how-to-read-a-script).

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 66, it’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So, Craig, are you writing right now or are you just doing work on The Hangover? What are you doing during your days?

**Craig:** Right now I’m just, yeah, right now I’m just on The Hangover. So, I am writing, but it’s sort of revising as we go, you know, so every day we start our day with the guys and we put the scene up on its feet and then we make adjustments and changes as we need.

So, I’m sort of doing on-the-set writing these days. But I don’t expect I’m going to do any writing-writing until the end of the year. How about you?

**John:** I’m good. I’m in the middle of doing my pilot for ABC. And it’s been good. It’s nice to sort of be able to buckle down and really get going on something. One thing I hadn’t anticipated, because it’s been a couple years since I’ve done television, is outlines are a lot more extensive now than they used to be.

So, for a one-hour drama they’re asking for an outline that’s like ten or 12 pages long, and it’s really pretty detailed. Like it’s really scene by scene what’s-going-on-in-each-scene, complete with suggestion of what dialogue is. And it’s kind of a pain in the ass to write those things.

But, I will say when you’re actually writing the script, it’s really, really easy, because so much of that thinking has already happened. So you know kind of what the structure of that scene is before you get to it. And so it’s just a matter of fleshing it out and making it really be a scene rather than be suggestions. So, that’s been kind of cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. I put myself through that torture on movies because I find that the feeling of not knowing where you’re going or not knowing what a scene should be is so distressing to me that I would rather the pain of a very thorough outline. So, when I’m outlining feature scripts usually I’ll get up to 25 pages of outlining, scene by scene. I just need to know it. That’s my thing.

**John:** With TV I had anticipated that there would be so much discussion and feedback on the outline stage, and I get why they do it because it’s a lot easier to talk about things as an outline. It’s a lot faster to read the outline. But ultimately on those phone calls at some point you do end up saying, “Well, this will be really good when it’s actually a scene and we’re not talking about one sentence in this paragraph.”

So, you have to balance that out. But on the whole it’s been kind of fun to try it this way.

The other new thing I’m trying this time is I’m writing the whole thing in Fountain. So rather than using Final Draft I’m using this unannounced Fountain screen editor thing that’s really good. It’s not something that we internally are developing — someone else is developing — that’s really good. And just today I was printing out pages for Stuart and I printed it out of Highland. And so it looked great. I made a PDF and printed it.

And so it’s been fun to try new tools for it and see sort of how that all works.

**Craig:** Yeah, I promised myself that the next draft that I write of something that’s on my own, that’s not collaborating with somebody else, I’m going to use Fade In, because I feel the need to branch out, shake things up a little bit.

**John:** Here’s my worry about Fade In, or some other brand new screenwriting software, is that what’s so good about this new app that I’m using is — it has been really stable so far — but if it were to crash and completely die, the file itself is just plain text. Like any text editor can open it. I can open in Highland or whatever. So, I’m less dependent.

I would worry that Fade In or any of these other applications might be using something with a format where if it just completely goes kerplunk, I can’t get the script out of there anymore.

**Craig:** Well, I feel a little safer in as much as I know the guy who created it, so I feel like I could just call up Kent and say, “You have to save this for me.” But, also I have the option of routinely exporting the file to Final Draft, it does that, or to any kind of — it’s a very importable/exportable system.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** I’m not too frightened. I’m a little frightened now.

**John:** I wish you good luck with it. Please report back as you get started on it.

**Craig:** I will.

**John:** Yesterday I was listening to a podcast called Systematic with Brett Terpstra and his guest on it was David Wain, the writer from The State and many movies, who also does Childrens Hospital, which is brilliant, which you should check out.

And so I’d heard this before from Rob Corddry when he was talking about Childrens Hospital is the writer/producers, they live on different coasts and they do all of their writing collaboratively in Google Docs. And so they just have a big Google Doc open and they all are typing out simultaneously. And because Google Docs can’t really handle screenplay formatted stuff it’s just sort of a rough jumble. They sort of want to use Fountain but they can’t quite use Fountain yet.

But, as each of them is typing, each of them types in a different color so they can see who is doing what revisions at a time. It’s clever.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, Final Draft and Movie Magic have this fake version of that. One is called CollaboWriter and the other is called, I don’t know, something or another, but they don’t work because basically any normal network setup sort of disallows this kind of back and forth because of firewalls and stuff like that.

Sooner or later someone, I think what will happen is ultimately Final Draft or Movie Magic will offer a cloud-based version of what they do, or you should offer a cloud-based version of what you do. That would then allow full and free collaboration in the screenplay format. That would be awesome.

**John:** Yeah. Brett Terpstra, who runs that podcast but was also a helpful person early on in the development of Fountain, promises that he’s working on something for Google Docs which I think would be fantastic.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Would be very, very helpful.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So, today I thought we would talk about three different things, sort of a hodgepodge. We’d talk about reading scripts, because we’ve talked a lot about writing scripts, but let’s talk about how you read scripts and sort of technology but also best practices for sort of going through and reading scripts.

I thought we’d talk about one-step deals and what a one-step deal means for screenwriters, why studios love them, why screenwriters don’t like them.

And then we would talk about Skyfall and probably get stuck singing the Adele song to each other for a few…

**Craig:** [sings] Skyfall, when it crumbles.

**John:** Such an amazing song. You said it was the third best Bond song.

**Craig:** You’re saying it is the third best?

**John:** I think you said on Twitter that it’s the third best.

**Craig:** I did. I think it is the third best Bond song, yes.

**John:** Okay, well we can discuss and argue that. Let’s get started with reading scripts, because when I first started out in the industry I read a zillion scripts and the first scripts I read were at USC. And USC had a script library. You could go and you could check out two scripts at a time. And scripts at that time were literally physically printed scripts. They were 120 pages. They had card stock covers.

The USC scripts, instead of having brads in them, they had those cool sort of screw together binder things, like there were little posts that went through the thing and held them together really nicely and strong. And it was just such an amazing resource, like, “Wow, we can check out these scripts.” And so I would check out Aliens, and I would check out all of these amazing scripts of movies that I loved. And that was just remarkable.

And now anyone with a computer anywhere in the world has access to many more scripts than they do before. But, people will often tweet me and say, “Oh, what do you use to read scripts?” And I’ll answer, I’ll answer “my iPad” or whatever. But the fact is I don’t read nearly as many scripts now as I used to. And I’m curious whether you still read scripts?

**Craig:** I do. But I, [laughs] — so I read scripts when I’m sent scripts to read. You know, “Would you like to rewrite this?” I’ll read that. Or, “Would you like to work on this?” I’ll read that.

And I will occasionally also read scripts for friends. So, Scott Frank sent me his script for A Walk Among the Tombstones which he is currently prepping to shoot, I think, in the spring.

Then, beyond that, occasionally I’ll read a script from somebody that says, “Hey, can you help me out and tell me what I should do?” But, I don’t read them recreationally because I hate reading screenplays.

**John:** Why is that? Why do you think that is?

**Craig:** Because screenplays aren’t supposed to be read. They’re supposed to be shot. [laughs] So, the problem is, it’s a weird thing: the screenplay is a literary tool to make a non-literary thing. An audio visual work. And so it’s kind of a bummer to read them. And it requires more mental exercise than reading a novel because prose is designed to help paint the picture for you. There is no expectation that there is going to be a movie afterwards. So, it’s more fun to read prose.

Reading scripts is a bit of a slog. And then, of course, the other issue is because so many of the scripts I read I’m reading with a purpose, you know, “What would you do?” “How would you fix this?” that it’s work. And I guess maybe the last thing I would say is because I spend so much time writing them — you know, you spend all day long cooking steak, you don’t want to eat steak for dinner.

**John:** I would agree with you. It’s like I know editors who will spend all day staring at screens cutting a movie and they go home and watch TV. I’m like, “How can you do that? How can you keep staring at screens?”

For me it’s that I can’t turn off that part of my brain that wants to fix what I’m reading. And so if I’m reading a screenplay, unless it’s absolutely perfect, I will be noticing all the things that I would want to change in it. I’ll be making the movie in my head and rewriting the script as I’m reading it which generally isn’t that helpful, or that good.

So, even if I’m reading a script that’s on the Black List that’s really, really good, it’s very hard for me to go into that and not find all the things that I would do differently. It’s just the nature of being in here. The same way I think many professional athletes have a hard time watching sports on TV. You’re used to playing the game, not watching the game.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, when you do read scripts though, Craig, how are you reading them? Are you printing them out? Are you reading them on an iPad? How do you read scripts usually?

**Craig:** Lately I’ve been doing a lot of iPad reading. The bummer about reading the scripts on the iPad — and this is going to sound like such a lame-o complaint, you know. Louis C.K. does this great bit about people complaining that they can’t get internet on their plane. He’s like, “You’re in a chair in the sky.” And so, you know, I feel embarrassed about this, but the iPad is a little heavy, frankly, to read a script on. It starts to be annoying for me.

Now, I ordered the iPad Mini and that thing is awesome. So, maybe it will be more comfortable to read scripts there. But I’ve been doing most of the reading on the iPad. I will read a little bit on my laptop. I don’t print scripts out ever anymore.

**John:** Yeah. I do most of reading — script reading — on the iPad now. I got my mom an iPad Mini for Christmas, and so when she was here for Thanksgiving I gave her the iPad Mini. I gave her the whole tour and talked her through everything. And I hid all the apps on the third page that she would never need to touch and I sort of simplified it as much as I could.

I loaded it full of photos of my daughter so she would have a reason to turn it on, even if she never used it again. But while I had the iPad Mini in the house I did pull up some scripts as PDFs and looked at them, and it’s actually a really good size for reading screenplays. It’s sort of everything I hoped that the Kindle would be able to do, in that it’s just a right good size, except it’s fast and you can look at PDFs and everything looks really good.

And it’s the luxury of screenplays that are 12-point Courier that they’re actually big enough that you can read them nicely and naturally in their normal size. So, I think you’ll enjoy the iPad Mini.

But which application are you using to read them in? Are you just opening them up in mail? Are you going to GoodReader? What are you using for that?

**Craig:** Well, it depends on the format. If I get it in Final Draft then I read it in — I have both your app and the official Final Draft app. I’m not sure which one I’m pointing to right now. If it’s a PDF I usually read it in, usually it’s in GoodReader.

**John:** Yeah, I’ve been sticking with GoodReader. Stu Maschwitz, who also helped develop Fountain, strongly recommends PDF Expert, which I’ve also tried. And it’s been sitting on my iPad for a long time. It just had such a generic icon that I never thought to actually use it. It’s a little bit better for annotations I found.

GoodReader actually works really pretty well, it’s just that it’s really ugly. To me it’s like the Movie Magic screenwriter of PDF readers in that like there are just so many things crammed into every little nook and cranny. It’s like, “Oh, we can add this feature. Let’s put a big button here.” It’s a little bit frustrating to use. So, PDF Expert seems to be a cleaner version of that same kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree. It is ugly. And, in fact, sometimes I’ve sent the script PDFs over to iBooks because that’s actually a nice interface. It’s very clean.

**John:** It is. Yeah. iBooks doesn’t let you annotate the way you might want to annotate, but if you’re just reading a script it’s really good for that.

**Craig:** Yeah, I never annotate.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t really annotate either. I know people who love to do that. I’m just not a big annotator. If I do feel like I need to make changes on a script I do like to print. I like to print my own scripts once before I send something in just so that I can catch the mistakes on paper that I never catch on screen.

I’m a big fan of printing two up on a page. And so you print smaller size, so it’s two — it’s a horizontal page and you’re printing two pages side-by-side. It’s just a way of saving some paper.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s interesting. Oh, by the way, I do the same thing. The only time I print a script out is if it’s my script before I send it in, because you’re right, there’s something about visually looking at each page that you catch errors that you wouldn’t catch on your screen. But when you do the sort of side-by-side version do you also double side print?

**John:** I don’t. I don’t believe in double side print. If I get a script sent from the agency and it’s already bound that way I’m fine with it, but otherwise I won’t double side print. I’ve just never found that useful or helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t do it when I’m printing for editing and corrections, but I don’t mind reading a double… — When I first saw them I was like, “Oh god,” mostly because I just get annoyed by these pointless —

Here comes the umbrage. Umbrage Alert! We should have like a signal, a siren, like drive-time DJs for umbrage.

— I get so frustrated by pointless gestures towards greenness. You know, like, “Oh, we send everything out on double-sided paper now.” Well, you know, paper isn’t really a problem anyway and you sent a guy here in a car. You had a guy drive in his un-smog-checked ’98 Tercel to drop your double-sided script off at my house. Just email it.

It just makes me… — The sanctimony of pointless gestures makes me nuts.

**John:** I agree with you

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. I think the better reason for doing the two-sided is that if you’re carrying a bunch of scripts with you they’re a lot thinner, and so it saves space when you’re shoving ten scripts in your bag. And that is a big advantage to double-sided for me.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** Now, the actual process of reading a script, because most of the scripts I end up reading tend to be for I’m going to be sitting down with this person and I need to be able to tell them what I thought. And so for instance at the Sundance Labs I’m sitting down with these filmmakers, and so I’ve read their scripts and I need to be able to talk with them about sort of the movie they’re trying to make.

And usually in that situation I’m meeting with five filmmakers over the course of a couple different days. And I’ll have read all the scripts like maybe a week ahead of time. And so I find like, well, I need to be able to remember what it is. And so as I first start reading the script, as characters are introduced I will flip back to the title page and I’ll write the character’s names down. And I’ll write the relationships to who they are just so that when I go back to the script I can actually remember “this is who is in the script.” And as I pick up the script again I can feel, “Okay, I can talk myself through this.”

If I have major notes that are about the script overall I tend to write those on the title page. If I have notes of things that come up along the way I fold down the pages and sort of scribble them on the page so I can talk to them about specific things that are happening in scenes.

So, that’s just some guidelines for reading scripts for your friends and reading scripts for people you’re going to need to give notes to.

**Craig:** I have a question for you.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** And it’s off the beaten path entirely of what you’re saying, but it’s not, it’s related. Have you ever done the Myers-Briggs personality inventory thing?

**John:** Of course I’ve done the Myers-Briggs. Come on! A test that shows me why I am the way that I am? Yes.

**Craig:** [laughs] Now, what did you come out as?

**John:** I think I was an ENTJ.

**Craig:** ENTJ?

**John:** Which at the time I wouldn’t have guessed I was an extrovert, but the last 20 years I’ve become much more extroverted.

**Craig:** Yeah, I wouldn’t, I mean, it’s a funny thing, like, introvert/extrovert. I know this is a side topic. Because I used to qualify myself as an introvert but I think that was really a pose. Frankly, I’m incredibly extroverted. You know, the definition of introvert and extrovert is like: where do you get more jazzed from, interacting with people or being alone? And while I love being along and I enjoy being alone, I definitely get more jazzed being with people.

And the only reason I ask is because you have such a very specific… — Your approach to the world is very process-oriented. You have a specificity of process that is remarkable. Because most people just don’t have, [laughs], they don’t have such a — like the fact that you’ve got literally your folds and everything. And I was just wondering, like, where does that fit into that whole matrix?

**John:** Yeah. I think there is some process in there that comes up. It’s also just a matter, though, an experience of being in the meetings where I didn’t have those kind of notes and stumbling, like, “Argh.” And then you look over and you see Susan Shilliday who has all of these pages folded down and she’s having these great conversations. It’s like, “Oh, I’m going to do what she’s doing.”

So, really it’s observation and copying more than anything else. So, I picked up the meme of how you do those kinds of things. And a lot of what we do as screenwriters, I think, is observing, figuring out how it works, why it works, and then copying it in a way that is useful.

**Craig:** Oh, absolutely. In fact, I was talking about this with Todd Phillips the other day because the two of us are so, I mean, frankly we’re OCD, I think, about screenwriting. And because when we’re making changes on the set, you know, the guys who just come in, we block the scene out, we talk through some dialogue, we want to make some changes. When we make those changes we also change the action lines.

And that’s silly on one level because the guys have already come in and done it. There’s really no point to that. It really is about the dialogue at that point because they’ve already gone through the motions. They know what the motions are. They know where to stand, when to move, when to pick things up, and when to shoot a gun.

But we still fix it because we are obsessive and I actually feel like that level of obsession is important. I feel like if you don’t have it, I don’t know if you can be a good screenwriter. It seems part of the fabric of what we do.

**John:** Yeah. I do understand your point because really once you know what you’re going to do, you’re going to shoot it on film and the script is basically irrelevant at that point.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like, yes, the editor may see it, but no one is ever really going to notice or care about that, but you will notice and care about that and you want the script to accurately reflect what you shot.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, to the point where we’re fudging things so we don’t spill over onto an A page, because we hate that. It’s just so weird.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, but I get that, too.

So, for people who aren’t screenwriters who’ve gone through production, when you’re shooting a script you lock the pages. And by locking the pages that means if you need to change stuff you can just print out the new pages and they will slide in. And so page 88 will always be page 88.

But if you add too much to page 88 that it would spill over to page 89, instead of going to page 89 it goes to page 88A. And Craig and Todd do not want that to happen if they can possibly help it. And I completely understand.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s annoying.

**John:** So, you will slightly cheat the margins on some dialogue blocks so that it won’t pop that next eighth of a page.

**Craig:** Oh, and see, and the funny thing is we also, [laughs], part of our obsession is that we refuse to do that. So, then we start, I mean, there have been times where the two of us have looked at each other and said, “You realize we’re now making the script worse because we don’t want an eighth of a page.”

**John:** That’s where you start removing the participle endings on verbs, so that things will shrink back down.

**Craig:** Or you start looking at your writing partner and you say things like, “Do we need this line? You know what, yeah, let’s not make the page break that makes us get rid of a line.” But, I don’t know, anyway, I’m sorry; I’ve taken us off into a crazy direction, but there’s something about the specificity of the way you were describing that just made me think — I’m loopy today, anyway. So, there you are.

**John:** Yeah, on Big Fish it really is actually important because we’re continually updating the script, and so if we do change something in staging I have to immediately change it in the script, and we have to change it in the score because it has to always match exactly because we are doing it again night, after night, after night, and with completely different people. And so theoretically we are creating these two documents, a script and a score, that anyone should be able to take and mount the musical.

And so it has been really strange where, you know, I’m like, “Well, I like the page the way it is, but I do need to change it now because it doesn’t accurately reflect what Edward is doing at that moment.” It’s been really interesting and strange to see how that works.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so when we were going through the workshop I was printing new pages all the time and every day we were having to put out revisions for things that were really trivial, like most people in the ensemble would have no idea why we were changing it, but we were changing it because it more accurately reflects what we’re actually doing.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah, OCD.

**John:** OCD.

The next thing I want to talk about is sort of an industry thing, which is one-step deals. And so, I can describe one-step deals, do you want to describe one-step deals? I mean, I feel like…

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a short — a quickie description — when we get hired by a studio to write a script they basically hire you to write a draft. And you’re commenced on the draft, you write the draft, you turn the draft in, and that’s called a step.

When I started working, when John started working, traditionally you were hired to do two steps, so that’s two guaranteed steps. You write a draft, you turn it in. They give you notes, you write another draft, you turn it in. And they must pay you for those two drafts.

Then there are optional steps where after those two drafts if they still want you to work on stuff there is pre-negotiated fees and each one of those options is essentially the studio can or cannot engage them. And they are also pending your availability.

What happened about, I would say six years ago it really started to crop up in a big way, was that the studios started doing away with the second guaranteed step. Suddenly they were doing one-step deals where you were hired and you only had one guaranteed step. So, after you turn your first draft in they can say, “Bye. And we’re not paying you for…,” and the second step became optional suddenly.

And the Writers Guild Collective Bargaining Agreement doesn’t guarantee you anything more than a minimum of one step. And so the studios went from this over-scale two-step guarantee down largely to a one-step thing. And that’s where we are today.

**John:** So, I will pretend to be the studio person who is defending or arguing for why one-step deals are a good thing, which is not my actual belief, but I will try to express it.

So, one-step deals are good because if a writer delivers a terrible draft we’re not stuck with that writer for a second draft. And we can move onto a new writer. Or, sometimes we just decide, “You know what, we don’t really want to make this movie so we’re not wasting any more of our money or our time on this project that we don’t even want anymore.” And so it’s a way for us to maximize our development budget by not spending any more for a script than we really want to spend. And maximizing our development time by focusing on projects we really want to make and not the projects that we’ve now lost interest in.

**Craig:** And, you know, that’s a perfectly good argument and I think it actually applies fairly well to writers who make a lot of money. I understand it. Where my rebuttal to you, studio executive guy, would turn on newer writers who are not making a lot of money. By limiting these newer writers to one-step, first of all, you’re not saving that much money because they don’t make that much money, and the second step is less than the first step normally. And also, I should add, that agencies typically add a little extra onto the one-step because it’s only one-step.

So, the amount of money you’re saving is trivial to you and your development budget is $100,000 for the first step and $60,000 for the second step. The $60,000 is not going to change your life. That’s about as cheap as a draft can be in this world.

The bigger problem for you when you limit everything to one-step is this, Mr. Studio Executive: You have ceded all control to your producers. The producer — knowing now that they only have one shot because there’s only one draft that’s going to be turned in and they don’t make money unless the movie gets made — will grind that writer down to a nub. They won’t just write one script. They’ll have to probably write three or four drafts for this producer who is obsessive about polishing this thing to a shine before they turn it in, because they only get one shot.

And while you may say, “Who cares? Not my problem. That’s the writer’s problem,” it is your problem. Because the producer is now overdeveloping this material, likely in a way you wouldn’t even like. So, what you’re getting is an overworked, committee-ized piece of crap. That’s problem number one for you.

Problem number two — and now Mr. Studio Executive I’m going to ask you to do something that you don’t like doing. I’m going to ask you to look into the future and I’m going to ask you to think long term now, not about today or tomorrow even though you’re worried you might not be in your job in a year, think about five or ten years from now. Part of the job of screenwriting is learning how to deal with studio notes. We write a draft, we turn it in. We get studio notes from people like you, sir, and then we engage in a dialogue and hopefully come up with a synthesis that results in a second draft that everybody likes.

If you take that away as a routine part of our job, no one is going to really learn how to do that part of the job very well. There are writers out there who are suffering because your method of employing them doesn’t let them learn how to do the job properly. Who will be the people writing your movies five or ten years from now if all you do is burn through a succession of people, giving them one step and yanking it away?

My argument to you is: stick with one-step deals on people who are making a lot of money per step. I get it. But if you’re dealing with people who are making close to scale, it’s frankly unconscionable. They end up working on so many drafts that they’re far below scale per draft when all is said and done. And they don’t even get a chance to do anything new.

Oh my gosh, I just came up with another problem for you, Mr. Studio Executive. All the writers that are doing one-step deals, because it’s only one step, you know what they’re doing while they’re writing your script? Looking for their next job. So, now you have an employee with divided attention. And you know how you guys have made it really, really hard to get jobs? So while they’re writing your one draft they’re also doing pre-writes for their next potential job.

It’s a big mess.

**John:** So, again, I’m still a studio executive guy. So, here’s what I like about one-step deals. I know that writer is going to work his ass off because he only gets the one shot. I’m sick of writers who are not delivering on the first draft. Well, you know what? They better deliver because otherwise they’re not going to get their second step. So, when I gave these writers second steps, do you know what they would do? They would sort of lollygag. They would take their time because they knew there was more money coming.

Now they don’t know there is more money coming. They know that this is their one shot and they better write a damn good draft or else, tough, hit the road.

Now, listen, there are times where I am going to, you know, we’re going to read the script and like the script may be close — it might not be exactly what we want but we can see what the movie is, and then we’ll obviously go onto the writer’s second step. We do that all the time.

So, for you to say like, “Oh, the producer is grinding him down,” well maybe that’s good, and maybe the person is learning a lot from all that experience of working on the script.

But what you’re talking about, like the writers are going to be looking for their next job? They’re doing that anyway. I get so sick of when I find out writers are reading books for other people, or going to other pitches on stuff, when I know that I have them. They should be writing my movie. So, that’s already happening, Craig.

**Craig:** That’s happening, but not quite under the compressed time scale. I mean, you can’t have it both ways, Mr. Studio Executive. I mean, either writers are working hard on your stuff in a compressed one-step manner, or they’re doing it in the same lollygagging pace as two steps. And if it’s compressed and they’re working really, really hard, then yeah, I do think then going out to find other things is going to impact their lives.

I should also point out that when you say they’re going to work really, really hard to give you a script that you like, what they’re going to do is work really, really hard to give you a script you like. They’re going to deliver the safest, most expected thing possible because they only have one shot.

What I guarantee you they won’t do is surprise you. They certainly won’t exceed your expectations because they can’t afford to. They’re going to have to deliver the safest possible thing. And if that’s what you want, that’s what you want. But I got to tell you: you look at the movies that do well, you’ll never be surprised by anything. You’ll never get that new franchise; you’ll just get the expected old same old, same old.

**John:** You know who I like to work with? I like to work with writer-producers. I like to work with the guys who, some of them came out of TV, they’re people who write but they also produce, because I can talk to them, and they have professionalism. And I can tell them what I need and they will tell me when they’re going to hand it in and it’s going to work.

Those are the people I like to work with. And I don’t know why there aren’t more people like that.

**Craig:** I don’t know why there aren’t more people like that either. I’d like to be that way myself. That’s how I view myself. It’s possible — I’m just thinking about some of the writer-producers I know, that all of them came of age in the era of two-step deals, when they learned how to deal with things. [laughs] And they learned what was real. And they were allowed to fall, and stumble a little bit and get up, because they were trusted. It’s hard to give trust when you don’t have trust.

It’s hard to work in an environment where you’re told ahead of time, “We don’t think that you’re going to make it.” So, if you want to engender trust, and you want to have people that understand how the process works, perhaps let them engage in the process past the point of one mistake, or one failure, or one trip or stumble. Certainly they won’t come back to you.

And when they do succeed other people will be knocking on their door. Why would they answer you and your call when somebody else who has trusted them is saying, “Yeah, we always trusted you. Come stay here.”

**John:** So, I’m going to resume being John August here again. My experience with one-step deals has not been great. I’ve done very, very few of them. And when I took my first one I had sort of heard all the standard warnings. And I was like, “Oh no, it will be fine because I like the people involved; it’s all going to work out great.”

And it didn’t work out great. And what ended up happening, which is I think what happens under most one-step deals, is it’s not really one step. You’re essentially writing, and you’re writing, and you’re writing, and you’re writing to please the person who you’re directly dealing with. And at a certain point you’re like, “Okay, you know, it’s done.”

And they would say, “No, no, but remember, we only get one crack to go into the studio, so let’s just keep working on it, let’s keep working on it.” Like, “Okay, I’ll do a little bit more, I’ll keep working, we’ve got this one step. I want to make you happy.” Because writers, we want to make people happy.

But eventually it comes to this point where it’s like it’s been six months and so I’m saying, and now my agent is on the phone with the producers, and we’re saying, “We have to turn this in.” It essentially becomes a situation where you just never deliver. And you’re pretty confident that the studio has actually kind of already seen it and they’re really sort of getting extra work out of you.

And what’s happened is you have poisoned this relationship that you had with these producers who you liked otherwise, but all your enthusiasm for the project has died because you’re writing to please this phantom studio who you don’t even know what they actually really want.

If I’d been able to hand in that script when I was supposed to hand in that script we could have said like, “You know what, is this the movie that we all want to make? If it’s not, let’s have a conversation and see if there’s another movie that we all want to make.” But because we never actually turn it in, it becomes this mess.

And so that’s my experience as an A-list writer. But it’s that way, I think, kind of for everyone working on these projects. You never deliver.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s the point. I mean, that’s why they do it. They’re trying to game the system. And even in your very accurate impression of a studio executive you’re cutting right to what they’re saying, “We trying to game the system. We’re figuring out a way where we can save money in the expectation of failure,” which is very corporate and classic risk management. And, you know, I don’t begrudge them their risk management, except for this: They’re in the wrong business if they think they can game risk. This is Hollywood. We’re not here to grind out 4% return on investment.

It’s show business and we’re gambling. And we’re gambling to try and find those breakout hits that cost $30 million to make $500 million. Or even we’re gambling on the big budget that’s $200 million that we think is going to make $500 million. This isn’t safe stuff where you’re, I don’t know, you’re pre-selling foreign so you cover your negative costs and the rest is gravy.

Get out of the business if you can’t handle a little bit of risk. And what they do is they try and eliminate risk by saying, “We presume you’ll fail. We don’t like writers anyway. We don’t trust any of you. You’re all lazy, so one step, and we’ll yank it from you. But we won’t really yank it from you because we know that the producer, who we may or may not even like, doesn’t get paid a dime unless this thing gets produced, so they’re going to work you. And we’ll see what we get. And if we like it we like it, and if we don’t we don’t. Really all we’re doing is trying to get a star to sign on, and then a director, and then we have a movie, and then we’ll hire a real writer to do it.”

**John:** Yup. And that rewriter…

**Craig:** It’s a recipe for disaster as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yeah, and that rewriter might be the writer-producer or someone else who comes in, like the finisher. And when I hear that discussion I really do think TV showrunners, that that person that the studio trusts to be able to deliver them the thing that they need to deliver. And that’s why I keep coming back, I think we’ve talked about this before: It’s frustrating that there’s not a feature equivalent of like the showrunner training program that the WGA has that teaches TV writers who are about to take over and run their own show sort of how to run your own show, which is this uniquely weird thing.

And I feel like the feature screenwriters who are getting movies into production who are doing that big giant tent pole work, that is a unique special thing, and I think we need to find a way to sort of teach people how to do that job and how to do the best version of that.

**Craig:** Well, this is where I have to kind of be guilty because, you know, Todd Amorde, who is one of our excellent Member Services people at the Writers Guild, has talked to me and to Billy Ray about creating that very thing. And I’ve been sort of after it for years.

And just the past few months I’ve been incredibly busy and I just haven’t had the time, I don’t know. And it’s been a little bit of a struggle to try and figure out how to structure it. So, maybe you and I can do this as a little side task and figure out how to structure a proper screenwriting training program, because I know it’s something the Guild wants to do.

And what I do do is every year…

**John:** You said “dodo.”

**Craig:** I said “dodo?” Yeah, I know. What I [laughs] — You know, this is one of the most human moments from you. It’s so unexpected when you’re immature. I love it. It makes me happy, it does. Because I always feel like I’m the goof, you know.

So, what I do do is once a year I do a basically two-hour seminar on surviving and thriving in development and production as a screenwriter. And it’s really about strategies. It’s not about the writing at all. It’s about dealing with people, notes, process, doing it in such a way that you actually — that your position as the writer improves through the process rather than when it normally degrades.

And that’s been very successful. I’m going to do it again, I think, in March. But you and I should talk about how to do a screenwriting training program.

**John:** It occurs to me that the different thing about the TV showrunners program is it’s really clear, like, “is this person going to be running a show?” and therefore like, “Okay, well then they’re in.” And the litmus test for sort of who-do-you-actually-pick-to-be-as-part-of-this-program is a little bit trickier.

My first thought, and I may reject this thought, is that you should actually just ask the studios, like, “Who do you want to see go through this program?” Because in a weird way they kind of know who they feel like is going to be those writers who they want to sort of go through there. And those are the people they may want — they may already have their eye on, like, “These are the young women and men who we feel are going to be the next batch of writers we’re going to be going to for this production work. And we want these people to go through it.” I don’t know.

**Craig:** It’s not a bad thought. I think that…

**John:** If you got studio buy-in I think it would be helpful.

**Craig:** The other challenge beyond the criteria for who participates is the television showrunner program has certain nuts and bolt stuff that really can be taught. How to hire a staff. How to deal with the fact that writers are now your employees. How do you fire them. How do you deal with assigning tasks to a room. How do you work as a go between. How do you deal with actor deals and casting.

There is so much going on. And for screenwriting there’s a bit less, but sometimes I feel like it’s almost trickier because we don’t have that producing title, typically. And yet I believe that if a screenwriter does her job correct she could be as powerful as, if not more powerful than, the actual producer.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. The topics are, you know, they are different, because you’re not going through casting. You’re not going through some of the other things that you would normally be going through. But it’s very much — it tends to be more anecdotal. I think you’d have to be bringing in a bunch of other screenwriters to talk through, “These are the scenarios I’ve commonly found. This is how you deal with the situation where the big, the A-list actor has brought you in on the project but the director really doesn’t want you there, and how do you negotiate that?”

Or, “There’s a conflict between the studio and the director and you are supposed to somehow bridge this impossible divide.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s the kind of stuff that you need to know how to deal. And while it can’t be taught I think it can be shared.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that’s a great idea right off the bat for a portion of this training would be “man in the middle.” How do you deal with being — because you are so right. And frankly being able to triangulate yourself is a very powerful thing to do. You become incredibly useful beyond the work that you’re doing. And frankly, I hate to say it, but it’s important. It’s not enough to write well; you need to be indispensable beyond that.

Because a lot of times nobody really knows what good writing is. Not always, but a lot of times. A lot of times what keeps you around, and what keeps you engaged in your primary mission which is to write the best movie you can, is to be indispensable in other ways as well. So, that’s a good idea for a class.

**John:** Great. Well, let’s move on and talk about a very big movie that John Logan wrote called Skyfall, which you just recently saw, and I saw like two weeks ago.

**Craig:** [sings] Let the Skyfall, when it crumbles…

**John:** [sings] Let the Skyfall.

So, I really enjoyed the movie. Sam Mendes directed it. Sam Mendes was supposed to direct Preacher and then he left Preacher to do the Bond movie. I’m like, “Well that’s a giant mistake because the Preacher movie is going to be awesome.” But you know what? The Bond movie was really, really good. I really enjoyed it. Did you enjoy the movie, Craig?

**Craig:** I did enjoy it. I guess I should ask first before I go into it: Are you a — I’m a big Bond fan. I love Bond movies. What about you?

**John:** I’m a big Bond fan, too. And I grew up with, especially the — for whatever reason the Sunday night before school started in the fall there was always a Bond movie on ABC. And so that was really my exposure to Bond was watching the ABC cuts of them.

So, the Spy Who Loved Me is sort of my entryway to it. So, my first Bond movies were the Roger Moore’s but then I did go back through and got all my Sean Connery’s and Lazenby’s. And so I think I’ve seen all of them.

**Craig:** Yeah. As have I. And very typical for guys our age to have started with the Roger Moore and then go backwards to Sean Connery.

I thought that it was a very successful Bond movie. I’ll talk about what I didn’t like, because it’s a smaller portion, and then I’m going to talk about what I really liked.

**John:** And let’s just put a spoiler warning here.

**Craig:** Oh spoilers. Yes.

**John:** We’re going to have some general spoilers here. So, don’t — you can skip ahead if you’ve not seen the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, I won’t give away too much. I’m just going to say I really enjoyed the character of the villain. It was a bit reminiscent of Sean Bean’s character from GoldenEye, the sort of disgraced former agent come back as a baddie. I did not like his plot. Even for Bond plots it was nonsensical.

I understood his goal. I understood his motivation. I just didn’t understand his method. It was bizarre and it existed solely to service set pieces, which were very good set pieces.

**John:** Yeah. It was the problem of, like, somebody who has a nuclear device and they’re using it to rob a bank. It just doesn’t — the scale of what he was able to do didn’t make sense with what he was actually trying to do. And, granted, that’s actually kind of a trope of the Bond movies overall, but I felt like if he had this personal vendetta he had many better ways to enact his personal vendetta. And we didn’t need — all the set pieces were kind of irrelevant for that.

That said, it was a Bond movie, so you cut it this giant bit of slack because that’s how these movies work.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree. There’s an element of camp to it and you forgive some of the Rube Goldbergian nonsense.

Here’s what I loved about this Bond movie. First, I loved — and maybe primarily — I loved the theme. And actually Bond movies typically are theme-less. This is something that I’ve got to tip my hat to Nolan, because I feel like Christopher Nolan has revived an interest in proper theme in big action movies. And the theme here is articulated by Albert Finney towards the end when he says, “Sometimes the old ways are best.”

And this movie was very much about the old ways and about the old Bond, and the notion that while we could sort of go on and chase the people that exist because of us, like say the Bourne franchise, which is sort of hyper-realistic, we’re not going to. You know what? We’re going to go be ridiculous Bond because that’s what we are. And ridiculous Bond is old school. He himself is dealing with aging issues. M is dealing with aging issues. The entire spirit of MI6 is called is called into question as being antiquated.

You have this new Q who is essentially putting down the entire thing as ridiculous and something that he could do from his bedroom. And so thematically the whole movie held together on a thematic level better than practically any Bond I’ve ever seen.

There were some great retro set pieces. The Komodo Dragon fight was like right out of the ’60s. I loved it. And the last scene where he walks into that classic office with the leather door and Ralph Fiennes now as M — boy, really into spoilers here — and Moneypenny.

And you know what I have to say, [laughs], and again I always feel like I get in trouble by being sexist, I just somehow, I was, like, how brave of them oddly to just embrace and not worry about people going, “Oh, it’s sexist.” Yes, of course, Bond is sexist. It’s a sexist franchise. It’s porn for men without boobies. Sometimes it has boobies.

But, there’s a female secretary that’s hot for him. And there’s a man in stuffy leather office who gives him assignments. And he goes and does it. And I love that. I just thought it was great and I’m very excited for the next one because of that.

**John:** I think the Christopher Nolan Batman movies is a good reference for it, because I think what it did, like the Nolan movies, is it took the irreducible elements of what James Bond is and rearranged them in a way that could make a new movie. And you’re not really aware of it through a lot of it. It just seemed like a really good, like a much better, more competent Bond movie. And then you get to that bizarre fourth act, which really is a fourth act.

The movie kind of should have stopped at London when the villain’s plot was foiled, and then we go onto Scotland and to all this new stuff, and all this back story which doesn’t really exist, in the film canon at least.

And we have this completely different movie that’s happening there and yet it feels kind of right. And we’re burning down the right things. We’ve already destroyed MI6. Now we’re destroying his history. We’re destroying his car. We’re destroying his mother, or his mother figure. We’re introducing Albert Finney who is just some other person who is sort of representing Sean Connery, I think, from the original franchise.

**Craig:** They even thought about casting Sean Connery.

**John:** Yeah, so I just really enjoyed what they were able to do. And it was one of those rare situations where you leave a movie excited for where it puts you next.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. In the way that — by the way, Casino Royale excited me. Because I thought Daniel Craig did such a great job, and that movie was really good. It was a really good Bond movie and I loved the physicality of it and the way that it updated it without losing its connection to old Bond-ness.

And then because of the issues involving MGM, they just weren’t able to capitalize on that wonderful start that Casino Royale had. And I feel like with this one they’re back on track and they’re set up for a great next movie.

And by the way, one other thing I should mention about the canonical issues, there was an interesting essay — and this is total Bond nerd stuff — but there had been this kind of debate. The question is: Is James Bond actually James Bond’s name? Or is that a code name that agents use, and in part would explain why there continually are new James Bonds?

And this movie sort of says, no, no, his name is James Bond. And you just are meant to understand that there are different people playing him.

**John:** Yeah. It’s almost the “no one recognized Bruce Wayne is Batman.”

**Craig:** Right. You just go with it and that’s that.

**John:** That’s part of the premise.

**Craig:** Yeah. I really liked it. And I do think that Skyfall, the theme song, is a really good song. It’s really good. And, you know, the wonderful tradition of great Bond theme songs, and we’d lost it. You know, we had lost it for so long. Bond songs were hits. And this is the first one in forever that’s a real hit.

**John:** So, I taught myself to play it on the piano. And it’s actually very simple, and it goes through the classic sort of it’s in A-minor, it goes through the classic sort of Bond chords in a very smart way to use it. But I did find it actually mashes in really well with For Your Eyes Only. Because For Your Eyes Only goes down to a single note, and if you transpose it so that single note is the [sings] “da-da-da-da,” and you can guild it back out to this.

So, it’s a really great song and it just made me happy for Bond themes again.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was great also in that moment where they pull the Aston Martin out to go back to the classic — or actually I think it was the moment where they blew up the car where you had the classic, [sings classic Bond theme], which I love, you know. And I love the way that Skyfall worked that theme in of the [sings classic Bond theme], that little chromatic thing that they do.

And it’s a great song. And even the lyrics are terrific.

**John:** Yeah. Adele’s, sort of marbles-in-her-mouth sometimes bugs me a little bit, more so than many other songs I sort of felt that, and yet I did kind of love it all the same.

**Craig:** I don’t recognize that she has marble mouth. Give me an example of marble mouth.

**John:** Marble mouth is just so weird. There are some words where it’s like if you didn’t really kind of know what she was saying, it’s like, “What word are you making there?”

**Craig:** Eh, yeah. Well, you know, singers sometimes change vowels to make it sound prettier. But, you know, I just like that Skyfall is where it starts. “Skyfall is where we start. A thousand miles and poles apart.” And just the whole idea of the crumbling down and Skyfall is where we…

**John:** Yeah. It’s the romance of apocalypse, which is great.

So, from that exciting news, we should get to our One Cool Things. I know your One Cool Thing is not actually cool at all, but it’s…

**Craig:** Well, there’s a cool part to it.

**John:** All right, so you go first.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, it’s One Tragic Thing. Don Rhymer died this morning at 3:30am. You know, when you guys listen to the podcast it will be probably a week later.

Don was a screenwriter and television writer. He worked from pretty much the second he landed foot in Los Angeles all up until maybe two months ago when he was just too sick to go on. He’s written — everything he wrote on, sitcoms like Evening Shade; he wrote big huge hit movies like Rio. And he was my friend, he was neighbor, he was my officemate. We shared an office for awhile and then I got the office next to his.

So, even now his office is next to me. Obviously the lights are out and he’s not coming back. And he battled cancer for years. And I’m saying this in part because he was my friend and I loved him and I miss him, and you want to talk about that when somebody that you care for dies. But there’s something instructive about it, too, and something good. And that is that Don lived a great screenwriting life, and if that sounds a little odd all I can say is he took the worst this town can dole out, and it doles out some tough stuff.

I mean, he was knocked around by some of the meanest and most ridiculous in this business, and he never fell down and he kept on coming. And he was the same way when he got cancer. Just indomitable and wouldn’t back down and wouldn’t quit. Nose to the grindstone. A true professional.

And we sometimes feel as if we feel we have the right to be precious about what we do. And I guess we do have that right, but when you have a family, and when you have kids, and a wife, and you need to provide for their future, you also have an obligation to them. And Don never forgot that. And he was a professional — a professional’s professional. And I’d like to think that I could have the kind of career and continue the way he did.

Never once did Don ever say, “This job is beneath me.” Never once did he ever say, “I’m too good to work.” Never once did he question anything. You got the feeling that they couldn’t get rid of Don if they tried. And not that they ever did.

I will miss him greatly, and once I hear from his family I’m sure there will be a charity that they’re going to ask donations to go to in lieu of flowers and that sort of thing. And once I have that information I will get it to you and you can put it online.

And I know he listened to the podcast, too. So, goodbye Don. I’ll miss you.

**John:** I never had a chance to — I think the only time I really had a chance to talk with him was at Christmas parties, and sort of like other sort of social gatherings of screenwriters. And when I found he had cancer, Don started a blog about his cancer treatments called Let’s Radiate Don. And so I’ll put a link up to that because it’s really funny. And you wouldn’t think that going through lots of chemotherapy and different surgeries would be funny, but he managed to make it really funny.

And so over the time he was getting treatment we had several emails back and forth and I just talked about how much I dug what he was doing. And I kept wishing him the best.

**Craig:** Yeah. That blog is sort of an example. I mean, the guy was a writer. And when you’re a writer you will write through anything. It’s your way of processing the world and your way of understanding what’s even happening to you. And I guarantee you that there were days when Don was in pain or nauseated or in despair and he was taking his time in his OCD way, the way you and I are, to edit those posts before sending them out, just to polish them off.

**John:** To find the funny and make sure…

**Craig:** Yeah. And that to me, that’s so honorable. It’s just there’s an honor, I think, in doing this kind of work if you do the work. And he lived that way. And so my hat’s off to him.

**John:** Well, Craig, thank you very much for a good podcast. Sorry to end it on a sad but also kind of hopeful note.

**Craig:** Yeah. And hopefully no one else will die within the next week.

**John:** Yes, that would be a very good thing. So, thanks so much and I will talk to you next week. Bye.

**Craig:** See you next time. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 65 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is our post-Thanksgiving episode. Craig, how was your Thanksgiving?

Craig: You know, it was great. I had Thanksgiving with my family over at Derek Haas’s house.

John: You were right up the street.

Craig: Yeah. I was very close to you. Thought about walking over to your house and handing you some turkey, but then I thought, “You know what? No. No. Give the man his privacy.”

John: Just this one day you’re not going to come by and harass me.

Craig: Just this one time.

John: So you had a good group of writers there because you had you and Derek. Any other screenwriters?

Craig: Nope. No, it was just us and the kids going crazy. How about over by you?

John: We had the Creaseys come over, also screenwriters, and Amy Higgins and Matt Watts, also writers. So, it was a good group. We had a total of 14. I made a turkey and all the trimmings. It was fun.

Craig: Excellent!

John: It was a good, fun time.

So, Craig, today I thought we would talk about, we’ve done a lot of work the last year on the First Three Pages and talking about sort of what should be in those first three pages, and people have been sending in those things and that’s been terrific. But I kind of want to talk about the next 117 pages, if we can do that, sort of all the stuff we might talk about if we were reading people’s full scripts and sort of the things we would be looking for if we were looking at everything beyond those first three pages, if you’re game for doing that.

Craig: Always.

John: Always. But first we have a bunch of little questions that have stacked up, so I thought we might burn through those and just do a bit of a sprint. Okay?

Craig: Sounds good.

John: All right. First, Mike in New Jersey asks, “I was wondering what the protocol for spacing in between sentences is. I’ve been told to use two spaces after each period, but I’ve also been told this doesn’t matter. I was just wondering what you guys would suggest.”

This has come up on Twitter also. It’s a simple answer.

Craig: It’s a thing. Well, you know, the whole two space thing came from old typewriters because it looked weird if things weren’t double spaced after the period. It looked like the sentence never ended. But I think, you know, you’re a font nerd. This problem went away with computers, didn’t it?

John: This problem went away with proportional-spaced fonts. So, the problem is that mono-spaced fonts, because every character is exactly the same width, the two spaces were helpful in readability when you were typing on a typewriter, it had like every character the exact same width. So, double spacing after the period was a standard thing you would do.

My belief is that if you’re still typing in a mono-spaced font for a screenplay, like Courier, it’s nice to do the two spaces. But I don’t think it’s a must in the mono-spaced font anymore. So, if you choose to use two spaces in a mono-spaced font, great, like Courier. But if you’re using any other font, any other sort of normal font, stop doing the two spaces.

Craig: Yeah, I grew up on two spaces because I learned to type on actual typewriters, which obviously don’t exist anymore. However, somewhere I would say about six years ago I made the jump to one space because I started reading a lot of scripts that were in one space, obviously still in Courier, and they just looked better to me. And I wasn’t having a problem following where the sentence breaks were.

It was a very difficult thing to break myself of because I had become so used to the double space after the period. But, I did it. And now I am a single space aficionado.

John: One thing which is interesting that’s happened with the advent of the web is HTML by default sort of sucks white space down to a single space, so if you double space on a web page it is going to break that down to a single space regardless. So, I think people are a little bit less mindful of it, because when you’re typing into some web forms and things like that it all just does kind of go away, and you don’t really notice the difference anymore.

If you are doing a script and like maybe you started writing with a period and two spaces, and like your writing partner does space/one period, it’s worth it to go through and fix all of those things because it’s going to be weird if you’re flipping back and forth. Your friend there is to do a find and replace. So, don’t just search for a space, search for a period-space and go through and swap all those out. Or search for a period-space-space, and substitute those in for a period-space. There are ways to do it so you can get back to sanity.

Craig: Yeah. I remember going though this. The issue with the period-space is that if you had something like Mr. Smith it would become Mr. space-space Smith.

John: Yeah. So what you can do in those situations, if you really want to geek out on it, is search for R-period-space, and change that to something different. Like change that to like four asterisks in a row or something. And then do all of your other things, and then remember at the end switch four asterisks back to R-period-space.

Craig: Oh, nice. Love it. You know, it seems like the sort of thing that you would write an app for. [laughs]

John: There is actually some talk of some script cleaning apps down in the future, because what we do in Fountain which is the plain text screenwriting language, it’s very easy to build those kind of utilities because you’re just dealing with plain text. And so it’s very simple for us to go through and clean up that kind of stuff.

Craig: I love it. Great.

John: Question number two. Joseph in LA asks, “With all the contests and sites that technology has made accessible, like the Black List, or tracking boards, do you see yourself shifting your views in whether living in LA and working in the industry is really that vital to an aspiring screenwriter’s career? There have been some tangible results with Kremer signing to CAA off the Black List, Ashleigh Powell who sold a script to Warner and recently gained reps off the TrackingB Contest,” a site I never heard of.

Joseph asks, “I live here in LA, I grew up here, went to college here, but I’m considering moving just to live somewhere else for awhile. But I’m fearful that doing so would mean giving up on Hollywood. What do you guys think?”

So, there’s some valid points to this in that there certainly are people who are getting attention from Hollywood not living here, so like through the Black List or through other places they’re getting noticed to some degree here and they’re getting stuff started.

I’d be curious if you followed up on these people and sort of how they’re going in their careers, are they ultimately moving here? I kind of think a lot of them probably are, for a couple reasons. You are going to be taking a zillion meetings starting off. And all those meetings with people are a lot easier to schedule and easier to manage if you’re living here in town.

I would also say you are looking at the results of these — the two people you’ve cited here — people who signed based on success on these boards or these sites, but most people who have success didn’t go through these sites. They went through sort of more conventional ways in which they were interning at places and they swapped scripts with other assistants and they did all the normal stuff.

You’re not hearing those things, you’re not noticing those breakout stories because they’re just so common. You’re hearing these stories because they’re so uncommon I would also say.

Craig: Yeah.

John: A third point that Joseph actually brings up in his question which I’m going to summarize out is: you don’t see this happening in TV. And I think the reason you don’t see it happening in TV is that TV is staffed by going into rooms, and meeting with people, and TV is written by people in rooms.

Many feature writers now have both TV lives as well. That’s very hard to start or run from any place other than Los Angeles. Rob Thomas, who is starting to do it now from Austin, which is great, but Rob Thomas has run a lot of TV shows. Starting out, you’re never going to be able to do that.

Craig: All good points, yes. Certainly if you do manage to succeed with one of these gateway services you’re going to end up here anyway no matter what.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, the real question is: Do I have to move to LA if I haven’t yet made it? Because we, you and I, always say that part of making it, part of the process of making it, is being where it’s made. So, we’re suggesting to people, yeah, you should be in Los Angeles if you want to be a screenwriter, a professional screenwriter, but aren’t yet one.

And even in the case that he cited, I think the guy who got his script going off of the Black List I think was here anyway. He was working as an intern for the Black List at some point even. But, you know, these things have happened before without these services. Diablo Cody managed to get her start from afar and then came here. There have been people who have done it. Andrew Kevin Walker was in New York. But, yeah, I mean, they’re kind of few and far between. And, frankly, I don’t think the business is particularly interested in these kind of aggregators as their quality control.

I think they’re pretty happy with the quality control they have. Sometimes these things do pop through, but look at Amazon, frankly. If you want to talk about probability and odds and all the rest of it, god knows how many scripts have gone through Amazon. Well how many have come out? Any?

John: Zero.

Craig: One?

John: Not that we know of; not one has gotten made.

Craig: I think that what happens is people — people keep asking this question because they don’t like the answer we give. But that answer remains. We are humans. This is a human business like all businesses. If you want to work in technology you should be in Silicon Valley. It’s technology, the stuff that makes it possible to live anywhere and work from anywhere, and yet still they want you in Silicon Valley. What does that tell you?

Ultimately these things are managed face-to-face through human contact. Even having meetings on the telephone is deleterious to the quality of the meeting. So, yeah, sorry; move to LA.

John: Yeah. Sometimes, every once and awhile, like lightning will strike somebody sort of out of the clear blue sky, and that’s why it’s a phrase, “out of the clear blue sky.” Well, lightning struck that person and it’s just remarkable that lightning struck them because it wasn’t even like a big thunderstorm happening.

Craig: Right.

John: But most of the time people who are struck by lightning, it’s because they were out in a thunderstorm. And so if you want to get struck by lightning I would say go to where there are a lot of thunderstorms, and that tends to be Los Angeles. To a smaller degree, New York. And to a much smaller degree, Austin.

That’s just sort of how it’s working these days.

Craig: Yeah, if the phrase “the exception that proved the rule” meant what everybody thinks it meant, then this is where we would use it. [laughs] Because, you know, everyone thinks “the exception that proves the rule” means that…

John: No, the exception tests the rule.

Craig: Yes. Yes. You should put a link up to what “the exception that proves the rule” actually means.

John: Stuart, find a link.

All right, Mark Andre in Victoriaville, Canada writes, and he writes in sort of the kind of English that is clearly a person whose first language is not English, so I’m going to sort of translate it from English-to-English so it’s more clear. He writes, “You talk about writing out numbers on your website, but I didn’t find my answer. My question is, say there’s an address on a door. Can I just use the numerals, like 1, 2, 3, or do I need to write out One Hundred and Twenty Three?”

Craig: Oh, god, no. 123 is fine for addressees. Sure. Even if it’s 2 Elm Street I would put the number for an address.

John: Yeah. So, let’s talk about numbers in writing and the special case of numbers in dialogue. So, generally numbers in writing, most of the sort of journalistic guide for it and what you’ll often really find in books, too, is numbers less than ten you write out the word. Numbers greater than ten you’re more likely to use the numbers for it. And that also applies for scene description and action that you write in your screenplays.

I’ve often said though in dialogue in screenplays I strongly suggest you consider writing out the whole number, because you just don’t know how an actor is going to say some words. And sometimes you really want them to say something a certain way. You want them to say “one-twelve” rather than “one-hundred and twelve.” And there’s a real reason why you may want them to do that. So, write it all out if it’s in dialogue, most cases.

Craig: I totally agree. I remember — it’s a great rule of thumb — writing things out in dialogue the way you want them to be said. And I learned that lesson on my very first script. We did a table reading, and at table readings they will bring the actors they’ve cast, but usually they haven’t cast all the parts, typically the little ones. And so they just get actors to fill in that day.

John: The day players.

Craig: And there was a line in it and it was — the character I think was supposed to be the head of NASA. And he was saying something like, “You’re going to be through space at 900 miles per hour.” And what we had written in the script was “900 mph.” And the actor got to that line and said, “You’re going to be rocketing through space at 900 mmph.”

John: Ha ha.

Craig: And I sat back and I thought, “Oh god, he’s so stupid, and yet it’s kind of my fault.” [laughs] It’s kind of my fault. So, a good rule of thumb: When you are writing dialogue write out everything, unless it’s like some crazy long number. Write it out.

John: So, in your example, did you mean for him to say “M-P-H,” or did you mean for him to say “miles per hour?”

Craig: I meant for him to say “miles per hour.” Or, I mean, even if he had said, “MPH,” that would have been so weird because nobody ever says, like, “60 M-P-H.” So, I just assumed that it would say, when he would get to “60 mph” he would say, “60 miles per hour.” Totally wrong assumption, the kind of assumption that an idiot makes when he hasn’t written a screenplay before.

And it was a good — I never could have seen “mmph” coming. That’s just dumb. But then again, you know, it happens and the more specific you write things out the better. Because you’re right, “124,” “one hundred twenty four,” “one twenty four,” all different ways.

Plus, frankly, it’s cheating on length.

John: It’s going to take longer to say it.

Craig: You know, every extra word is length.

John: All right. Our next question comes from Adam who writes, “I’m an editor by day, cutting short interviews with stars, directors, and writers for new movies for a cable network. In the last two weeks I’ve done this for two very high profile studio movies which were based on novels. In both cases the author of the novel says in his interview that he was brought on to rewrite the screenplay before production, but was not given credit as a screenwriter because of the WGA.

“Also in both cases the author implied that he felt he deserved credit. This seems unfair for two reasons. One, the novelist did some amount of screenwriting and he’s not getting any credit for it. But more importantly, two, the credited screenwriter’s potential future employers are led to believe that he wrote this movie all by himself, which he did not.” Our thoughts?

This is one of those frustrating things where you don’t know what the specific circumstances were. You don’t know sort of how much this author really did. Whether this author had it in his contract that he or she got to go back and tweak things because of the nature of it. And I’m not trying to slam on Nicholas Sparks, but this feels sort of Nicholas Sparks-y.

You don’t know what the actual situation was. I can talk to you about, Craig can even talk more knowledgeably about it, is that the credits on a movie are determined by the WGA based on who really wrote the movie. And there’s a whole process for that. And so it’s not about excluding the author. It’s about who really wrote the movie and wrote the majority of the movie that we see up on screen.

Craig: Yeah. First thing to point out is authors always have their name on the movie. They get a “Based on the novel by.” So, that’s a source material credit and that’s something that the WGA has agreed to with the studios — that’s within the studio’s discretion. And I cannot think of any case where, I mean, even the worst deal that a novelist makes for the movie rights to his or her novel will include the right to be acknowledged for the source material.

So, their name is on the movie. Their book exists in the world. It’s no secret that the movie was based on a novel.

What is important to understand is that all “Screenplay by” or “Written by” in terms of the screenplay means is the screenplay was written by somebody. So, if I come along and I write a screenplay of say The Shining, “Written by Craig Mazin” just means the screenplay of The Shining was written by Craig Mazin. It’s not casting any aspersions on the author of The Shining who will, of course, get credit, “Based on the novel by Stephen King.”

If Stephen King should come on after me and rewrite me, the Guild asks the question, “Did the amount of work they did on the screenplay rise to the test of authorship?” We don’t always get it right. I have to tell you, I think that given the evolution of the rules that has occurred over the last few years we’re getting it right more often than we used to.

But, frankly, it is not at all unfair. Sometimes people come in and do some rewriting and frankly they simply don’t do the kind of substantial rewriting that would rise to the test of authorship. Our credits are unique; they are not employment credits.

Some people say, “Well every writer should have a credit on the movie because, you know, the craft service guy has his name on the movie.” Yes, that’s true, but the craft service guy’s credit just means that he was employed as a craft service guy. Our credits as “Written by,” it implies authorship and it’s different. It’s simply in a different category. That’s why our credit confers things like residuals and separated rights. And the credit for craft services does not.

So, that part, I think, I can see why maybe it would rub you wrong. I mean, the fact that the authors are complaining just means that they’re authors because everyone thinks that they deserve credit on everything, of course. That’s part of our birthright as writers.

Your second point is not valid…

John: No.

Craig: …and here’s why. You are concerned that the industry won’t know who did what. They always know. It’s the funniest thing. The studios and the agencies know who did work on the movie. They know who impacted the movie. And when the credits don’t reflect that, they don’t forget, in fact, they seem to know it even more in a weird way.

You will hear phrases like, “Well, they weren’t credited but they did a ton of work.” Nothing escapes anyone. I hear this all the time. I hear it from studio executives who will — sometimes studio executives will say the credits were just wrong. This person did it. And they all talk to each other. And every time a writer goes in for a job the studio will call other studios where they worked to hear how it went. There are lists of writers who have recently succeeded and writers who have recently failed. And success and failure in the studio context has nothing to do with who actually got credit.

It has everything to do with who made them happy.

John: Yup. Definitely. One last point about the original authors and determining credit is if these situations did go to an arbitration, those arbitrations are done anonymously. They’re anonymously in two different ways. That is, the people who are the arbiters who are figuring out who deserves credits, none of them know each other’s names. None of the people who are submitted material know who those arbiters are.

And, likewise, we don’t get the names of who the writers were on the project.

Craig: Well, that is true, however, the writer does submit a statement, and in that statement they can identify themselves as… — Well, I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. Can you identify yourself as the author of the source material? They’ll probably disallow that because it would make you not anonymous.

John: The only reason why I know why it can happen, the author can identify himself, is that I went through a really strange arbitration where I was an arbiter. And so I’m going to talk about this in such a general way that no one will ever know which one I’m talking about. This isn’t a movie I worked on; this was where I was just volunteering to serve as an arbiter. And the original person who wrote the book was Writer B and was able to explain that he was Writer B.

Craig: Mm, there you go.

John: And the only reason it came up was there were notes — in addition to the actual book that he or she had written, there were additional notes that became material; it became a whole issue about sort of when he was actually employed as a writer in the movie. It was a mess like these things often can be.

But, being the original novelist doesn’t give you extra bonus super powers in this thing. It’s about who wrote the screenplay and who wrote the bulk of the screenplay that we’re seeing. And Craig’s original point of like, you wrote the book, that book has your name on it. And because you wrote the book you have a credit saying, “Based on this book,” and that’s a large part of it.

So, those are some quick questions. I thought we would spend the rest of the time talking about sort of what we’ve learned from the Three Page Challenge up to this point. So, we’ve gotten more than 500 entries to the Three Page Challenge which is just crazy. And those are like actual real ones that people put in the right boilerplate and they submitted stuff properly. And Stuart has read all of those which is nuts.

Craig and I, we’ve done maybe 30 on the show, but Stuart has read about 500 of them. So, Stuart did a great post on the blog this week. I don’t know if you saw it, Craig, but where he sort of went though and talked about the things he’s learned from reading these 500 scripts.

Craig: I didn’t see that. I’m going to read it.

John: You can read it right now. I’m going to give a little summary here, but you can take a look at it if you want to.

Craig: Calling it up.

John: So, some common trends he noticed was floweriness, which is — what we often talk about when we read the samples — the sort of more novel writing than screenwriting, where people will use poetic language to describe things which makes you think — it’s ambiguous sometimes. And ambiguity is wonderful for poems; it’s not a good choice for screenplays.

He talked about clumping, and clumping is the word he was using to describe when you’re reading down the page and suddenly you can see like, “Oh my god, that’s a really big block of text there and I don’t know if I want to read it.” And so, you know, make the page feel like you want the movie to feel and don’t give us those giant chunks of text that we’re going to be scared to read, because you know what? We might skip them.

He found most of the formatting was actually pretty good, and actually I would agree; most of the ones we’ve read have been properly formatted in a general sense. One thing he notices that I hadn’t noticed is that a lot of people are uppercasing names every time that character appears rather than just the first time they appear in the script. So, that’s no good.

The reason why in feature screenplays you use uppercase on the first time you mention a character’s name is that it makes it really simple to flip through the script and figure out which scene a character first appears in. If you do it every time, or every scene the character appears it just becomes soup; we can’t tell when a character started appearing. So, that’s a useful thing. It lets us know that this is the moment where the character is first appearing in the script.

Craig: Right.

John: The other things which should get uppercased — sounds, like important sounds; really important elements that you really need to draw the reader’s attention to them. And, so, you use uppercase judiciously when you really need to attract the reader’s attention to something.

People have different personal styles. Some people use a lot more uppercase than I like to use. Some people will also use bold, and italics, and five asterisks, and a lot of explanation points. That’s not my style, but this doesn’t mean — there are some very successful writers who do that kind of thing. But uppercasing is pretty consistent, so do that.

One thing Stuart pointed out which I hadn’t noticed but I think is a good thing to notice, the first time you mention a character on the first character introduction, give us their age. Do those little parentheses and give us their age, because sometimes it can be ambiguous when you say someone has salt-and-pepper hair. It’s like, “Well, does that mean he’s like a prematurely gray twenty-something or is he a 60-year-old who is looking really good?”

An age is helpful. And you don’t have to give us an exact age. It’s fine to give us, like, “50s.” But it just gives us a sense of who this person is.

Vary your character names. And this I did notice in one of the scripts that we went through on the Three Page Challenge.

Craig: I remember that one, yeah.

John: And there were two characters with almost exactly the same name. So, every time you saw a dialogue header, a character dialogue header for them, like, “Which one is this? Which one is this?” Don’t do that to us.

You know, you have 26 letters in the alphabet. You’re not going to have 26 major characters in your script, so why don’t you just pick one letter for each character and try not to duplicate if you can possibly help it?

Use descriptive names for minor characters rather than Guard #1. Guard #1 doesn’t help you at all. It doesn’t help you as a reader. It doesn’t help you as a director who’s thinking about how to cast this role. So, if you say like, Lanky Guard or Chubby Guard or pretty much any adjective Guard is going to be more helpful than Guard #1. So, those were things Stuart pointed out.

Craig: Really good observations. Yeah.

John: The rest of the post we’ll put a link to it. He also, along with our friend Nima, did sort of a meta analysis of all the pages. So, they put it through a little processor and they’re going to have more results on some other stuff they discovered.

One of his first hypotheses was that people weren’t using enough white space on the page. That’s probably not actually true. His metric for it was he was comparing the first three pages of what got sent through to us versus the first three pages of the Black List winners of the last couple years. And the white space is actually more on our samples than it was on the Black List.

Craig: Interesting.

John: So, his hypothesis is flawed.

Craig: Yeah, I mean, you don’t want to hammer people with big chunks, but it’s funny — good writing solves almost everything.

John: It does, yeah.

Craig: Good writing will solve all of your formatting issues and mislabeled uppercase things. But, these were all really good tips. Really simple things. You know me, I’m not big on rules and things, but there are some simple rules that we all follow, like capitalizing a character the first time we see them and stuff like this. I think these are all very good simple, practical things to consider as we go through, makes it easier for you guys to get past Stuart.

Although, I have to say, he spelled “legalese” like “beagle.” It’s L-E-A…hmm.

John: Oh, did he do that? Oh, Stuart.

Craig: Yeah. It’s actually kind of adorable. [laughs]

John: Aw.

Craig: Well, because it does remind me of a beagle. I’m sorry, I’m so ADD.

John: You’re picturing a beagle with a law degree and briefcase, aren’t you?

Craig: I really liked it. This is a very well-written article that he did here. This is a very well-written sort of discussion. This should be sort of almost required reading.

God, it’s amazing. Honestly, John, I feel like… — I’m going to tell you something. I went and I lectured at UNLV when I was in Las Vegas shooting on The Hangover. And the professor asked me upfront, “Where did you go to film school?” And I said I didn’t. And he was like, “Oh.” [laughs]

And, you know, I just feel like if we do this right, and by “we” I mean just in general, people in the business who give back through these kinds of things — podcasts, and blogs, and essays. I just feel like eventually these film schools are going to be in real trouble.

Because I look at a thing like this and I think this is a free lecture that people currently pay a lot of money for except now they don’t have to because it’s right here. I mean, Stuart kind of just did a little master class on very simple presentational guidelines.

John: I think we could be a very good substitute for seminar, or for sort of one of those little three-week intensives. What we can’t do that a film school can do is give you a class full of other people aspiring to do exactly what you’re aspiring to do.

Craig: True. That we cannot.

John: And that’s what I got out of film school more than anything. Like, you know, I’ve talked about it before. The Stark Program that I went through, there’s only 25 people a year. And those people, like, I fought with them and saw movies with them and shot their movies. It was crazy, and horrible, and wonderful, but I owe them my career. And so that’s the thing you get out of a film program or being in NASA or wherever else, you’re surrounded by a bunch of people who are trying to do what you’re trying to do.

And that’s the best of film school.

Craig: Hmm. We’ve got to figure out how to do that.

John: Yeah. That’s tough though.

Moving on with sort of what we learned from the Three Page Challenge, we had a question from Matt Price who wrote, “I’ve noticed one more than one occasion you guys have said, in regards to Three Page Challenge script, ‘I know where this script is going,’ as if this was a compliment. Other times you’ve criticized a script with, ‘I don’t know what this script is about.’ But, three pages in, isn’t it a good thing that we don’t know where this script is going? Shouldn’t the story be surprising? I’m sure I’ve misunderstood what you guys mean when you say these things. Can you clarify that critique?”

Craig: Huh. Well, I’m trying to remember my frame of mind when I said it. I think there are times where you know where a story is going and it’s not a compliment at all because it just seems like a very predictable road story we’ve seen before, and that’s no good.

Sometimes I know where a story is going but I’m okay with it because I can tell that it’s the kind of story where the plot is less important than the characters and their journey, and the theme, and the details. Some wonderful movies are centered around incredibly cliché plots. But that’s okay because it’s not about the plot, you know?

I mean, look, let’s take As Good as It Gets. Guy meets girl; guy loses girl; guy gets girl. I mean, it ends with the two of them together and he is the most improbable character for that. It’s kind of a cliché romantic comedy in that regard plot-wise. They go on a road trip in the middle for god’s sakes.

But, it’s how they got there and the details along the way that were wonderful, so frankly the answer is sometimes it’s an insult, and sometimes it’s not a compliment, it’s just an okay thing.

John: I think when I say that phrase — and I’m sure I have said it on multiple occasions — I generally mean I don’t know what kind of movie this is. Like, I’m not clear quite what the genre of this movie is. I’m not clear of who the characters are or how I’m supposed to feel about this movie. I’m not clear if this is a comedy or a drama. I’m not sure what your world of this movie is.

Think back to my movies. Like Go is a movie that goes in a thousand different places. It should be very surprising sort of what happens, but I think in those first three pages you sort of know where the world of this movie is and that grocery store, which is not where we’re going to center most of the action, you realize like, “Okay, it’s about these kinds of characters, these young people who say these kinds of things, who are ambitious in this sort of narrow and weird kind of way.” So, it’s like you get what kind of movie this is and how it’s going to feel.

And when I’ve said that about three page scripts, that I don’t know where this movie is going, it’s because I’m not sure what to expect when I flip the page again. And that’s not the right kind of feeling.

Craig: I agree with you on that. And it’s funny — I was watching Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels last night. It was on and I really like that movie. And that movie is designed in such a way specifically to prevent you from seeing what comes next. It’s a puzzle box of a movie that plays tricks constantly because it’s part of its charm, it’s part of its intention is to continually confuse the plot and send it weird ways.

But there’s no question about what kind of movie it is. And if you were to read the first three pages you would get it. It’s a stylized kind of criminal/heisty movie in the general Tarantino vein. And you’d say, “Okay, I’d like to see where this is going. It seems like it’s going to turn into kind of a criminal farce,” which is what it is.

Sometimes we read pages and we think not so much “we don’t know where this is going” but rather “it can’t go anywhere that’s interesting.” Because we’re looking at the seed and we’re saying, “Based on this seed the plant is going to be a weird looking plant that isn’t a plant.”

John: Yeah. If we read those first three pages and they’re just really flat, and it’s generic, and there’s nothing that sparks us about those first three pages, when we say, like, “I don’t know where this is going,” it’s like it’s really a nice shorthand for like “I don’t really kind of care where this goes next because I’m not interested in it, or I’m not intrigued by anything I’ve seen so far.”

Craig: Right.

John: So, let’s talk about the “what happens next” and let’s talk about the next 117 pages frankly of these scripts. I think we picked the Three Page Challenges because you had actually done something like that on Done Deal Pro before, hadn’t you?

Craig: Yeah. I started doing, I think I called them Four Pages or Five Pages. I can’t remember how many. But I just had people start to post these things. And they didn’t have to be the first. They could be anywhere; I was allowing them to even take them from the middle of the movie if they felt like it. And then I would just sort of go through.

And I did it in part because I wanted people to believe that much could be gleaned from that. I think that there is a natural writerly narcissism that says, “Well you can’t know if I can write or not based on two or three pages.” Yeah I can. For sure I can. I think anyone can, frankly; any reader really can.

And I wanted to be able to encourage people that deserved encouragement. And also sort of just reality-check people that deserve reality checking. And, in fact, there was one guy — only one — who put up three pages that I thought were so good that I wanted to read the rest of the script. And I read it and it was really good and I got him a manager. And I think he’s actually working now.

John: That’s really nice.

Craig: Look what I did! His name is Adam Barker. Really, really good…

John: His name is David Benioff.

Craig: …it was a really interesting few pages and it was just evident from those pages that he knew how to write. And when I read the script I talked with him at length about it because the script wasn’t — it needed work, it needed help, it needed love, but it was also — it needed the kind of work, help, and love that I see from anybody. When Scott Frank gives me a script and says, “What’s wrong with this scene?” It’s the same thing.

The difference between a writer giving you something and saying, “Why isn’t this working?” and a not writer giving you something and saying, “Why isn’t this working?” Well, one of these is a cake that you baked a little bit too long and one of these is just a bowl full of ingredients that are poorly mixed together.

John: I want to talk about why we do the Three Page Challenge rather than reading like 120 pages. There’s a couple reasons. First off, you and I just theoretically wouldn’t have the time to read 120 pages. And it’s just a giant commitment. And it really is a commitment in the way that like dating someone is a commitment versus having a little, you know, kiss in the hallway. And these three pages are just like that kiss in the hallway. And so it’s like, “Ah, yeah, there’s something promising there,” but you’re not sort of going out and doing the full romance.

If we were to somehow do those full things I want to talk about sort of the kinds of things we would be looking for and some of the things we would notice, sort of the way that Stuart noticed in his post about all the 500 pages. What are some common themes we probably would be talking about if this podcast were to be about reading the whole script for these things?

And so I’ll start with just some things I thought of, but you chime in with things you often say when you read scripts.

Craig: Go for it.

John: First, it always comes to: Are the right characters in charge of the plot? And this is something I see time and time again when reading newer writer’s screenplays is that they have this hero who is perfectly nice and likable, but the rest of the characters completely run away with the script. And so everything that is important that needs to be done gets done by one of the other characters. Anything really funny that needs to be said gets said by one of the other characters.

And the other characters tend to become much more interesting and much more important than your actual hero because they can be. So often the hero just becomes this little pawn that sort of gets pushed or pulled through the screenplay, and sort of this hapless victim of the screenplay rather than a person being in charge of the screenplay.

And so I feel like if I was reading a whole 120-page script in one of these cases I would be finding those problems again and again where your hero is just the guy who happens to be in this story rather than the person who is in charge of this story.

Craig: That’s a good one. One of the first things I will look for and notice missing is philosophical meat. What is this movie about beyond the motions of the characters and the circumstances? Let’s say you’re writing a movie about two cops — is it just about that? Is it just about them solving the case? Who cares? That’s an episode of a TV show. Who cares? What is this movie really about?

And it’s amazing how many scripts I read where it’s frankly about nothing at all, and that’s always a bummer.

The other thing I look for is layered writing. I find that sometimes I read scripts where the scenes are just about action. Then there’s a scene that’s just about character. Then there’s a scene that’s just about relationship. Then there’s a scene just about theme. Well, really, the plot should serve the character which should serve the theme, which should serve the plot, which should serve the relationship.

It should all be layered and harmonic.

John: Another question I would probably ask with these scripts is: Why is this story happening now? Why are we choosing to make a movie about this character and this situation right here and right now versus six months earlier or six months later? What is unique about this situation?

And I think it’s one of the things that distinguishes a movie idea from a TV show idea is that is this a story that wants to be told in two hours? And this is this character’s main story in their life. Like this is a great use of this person and our time to focus on this story, versus a TV series which is like, “Well, here’s a whole bunch of promising things, and here’s a good universe and a good world, and we can spin a thousand stories out of it.”

This should be like, “Well this unique set of circumstances created this one story that we’re going to follow.” And so often I’ll read scripts where it’s like, “This is all lovely, and I believe these characters basically,” but when I say this doesn’t feel like a movie I’m saying it doesn’t feel like it has to be a movie. It feels like it can be almost anything else and therefore it really isn’t a movie.

Craig: Right. That’s a good one, for sure.

The other thing I notice probably more in comedy scripts is an unsupported premise. And if you can’t get the audience completely onboard with the premise tightly and logically then the whole thing just feels like an exercise in wankery.

I was working on something a couple months ago where just the premise wasn’t there. The whole movie was sitting on nothing. It was just a short little two week thing. And, by the way, everybody acknowledged it. The other writers, they were like, “Yeah, we tried to do that but there was an issue.” And the studio — everybody sort of said, “Yeah, this thing is kind of leaning on air.”

Well, you can’t build a house on air. And it was a nice house. [laughs] But there was no foundation. And I’m pretty adamant about these things. I get very serious about it and I just say, “Look, you’re going to spend all of this money to make a movie and the problem is you will lose them on minute ten. And never get them back. They will never stop thinking about it.”

John: Yeah. What you’re describing is really the logic that you approach the movie with. It’s like, “Wait, does this even make sense for why this is a movie?” And a related concern that I always comes up with is the internal logic. Is there consistent internal logic in your story? Are the characters behaving in a way that’s both emotionally believable, like the characters are acting consistently? The way they would behave on page 20, that same kind of character would act the same kind of way on page 80? Do I believe that the same characters are still in the same story? Or are they just saying that thing, or doing that thing because you need them to move the plot along?

They’re not acting in a way that’s consistent. Have you established rules in your story and then are you following those rules? Or you’re just breaking those rules whenever you feel like breaking those rules because it’s more expeditious?

Craig: And usually when you see characters behaving inconsistently, violating rules, violating the basic tenets of their character, it’s because the characters are not distinct enough. And the characters aren’t real. And so that’s the other thing you see a lot are characters that all sound a lot like each other, or characters that feel pre-fab, borrowed from other movies, retooled and dropped in. And that’s a sign that you’re in for a bad ride.

Really in the end people go to movies for characters more than anything else.

John: Another question I would tend to ask about the full script is: Have you actually served me a meal? And by a meal I’m saying did you start at a certain place? Did you start at appetizers, move to the salad course, move through the entrée, and then gotten us to cheese plate and dessert? Have you gotten through the whole thing?

Or, did you just serve me a bunch of appetizers? Because some of these scripts, they just sort of like throw things at you, like, “Oh here, you can try this, you can try this, you can try this.” And it’s a whole bunch of different appetizers served back, to back, to back, but it never actually gets into the meat of what it’s trying to be. What we describe as second act problems are really kind of entrée problems. It’s like there’s just not enough there as your main — there’s not meat there. And you’ve never really gotten into it. You just kept throwing appetizers at us.

And that’s especially noticeable in action movies where it’s just like there are a bunch of action sequences that happen, and it’s like, “Well, a bunch of stuff happened but I’m not sure we really got any place.” The most recent Bourne movie to me felt like tapas, where it was just like a bunch of really good small plates, but they didn’t actually relate to each other in any useful way.

Craig: Yeah. You do see a lot of endings that seem far away from the beginnings in terms of space and stuff, but not far away from them enough in terms of character and emotion. I want the character to be almost the opposite of who they were in the beginning, in a big way, in some real way. I want something big to have happened so that they would be disgusted or not recognize who they were in the start.

And a lot of times these movies make these — scripts rather that I read — make banal movements. You know, “I will start dating again.” Well who cares? You know? [laughs]

John: Yeah.

Craig: The tricky thing about these scripts is that you want to find ways to pull audiences into universal truths set in very not universal situations, because I don’t want to see somebody go through my day. It’s boring. I want to see them jump off a building, and go through explosions, and deal with whatever they’re going to deal with, but ultimately I want them to be doing it because of something that I do recognize as important in me, and we all recognize is important in us.

And I feel like sometimes people forget that part. The motivations become rather specific to that character, not universal, and therefore sort of tawdry.

John: Yeah. What you’re talking about, like, “I will start dating again,” like if that’s the realization at the end of this two-hour movie, “I guess I’ll start dating again.” What?! That’s a realization for like the end of a half-hour sitcom. That’s not a movie. That’s not a movie journey.

And I think what you’re talking about is really: Was the character tested hard enough so they can actually prove and get to someplace in the end? And so often I read these scripts, and I understand the sympathies — you love your main character, so you don’t want to hurt your main character, but you need to hurt your main character. You need to make things as difficult as possible for your main character.

Too often I’ll see these situations where, “Wow, that seems impossible — you have to break into that building, and do this, and that,” and like, “Oh, and now these people come and help me do that.” It’s like, why are you adding these people in to helping you do that? The character should have to do it themselves. And they should get caught. And it should get like much, much worse for the character. And you don’t ever make things bad for the character.

I mean, I think you should, you know, I’ve never read a script where I said like, “Oh, I thought they were too hard on their hero.” I want characters to lose their hands. You want bad things to happen to them. And if it’s not that kind of movie then in a comedy you want them to be as humiliated as possible. If it’s a love story you want them to be ripped apart from the person they love for as long as possible to make their reunion meaningful.

And too often I read scripts that aren’t anywhere in the ballpark of how difficult they should make things for the characters.

Craig: I feel like comedies should be the most tortuous for the main characters because that’s where so much of the comedy comes from anyway. But, yeah, I mean, that’s the point. You’re God and the character is Job. Trial by fire. This is the worst thing that could happen to them but it’s the thing that must happen to them. And it must happen today. It can’t happen yesterday, it won’t happen tomorrow. It has to happen right now.

And if they fail, we hear this from executives plenty, “Make sure the stakes are high.” It doesn’t have to be the world exploding, but I have to care if they fail.

John: Yeah. And here is the danger: So when we say like we have to make it as difficult as possible for them, that sounds like an externality applied to them. It’s true, like something else is probably making things difficult for them, but they also have to choose to run into that burning building. You have to make sure that your character is still in charge of making the choices that are making things more difficult for themselves.

And so sometimes they’ll make a bad choice and they’ll suffer the consequences from it. Sometimes they’ll make the right heroic bold choice, but that is going to make things more difficult for them. And so it’s not just about planes falling from the sky or some sort of external calamity. It has to be something that they’re doing that’s making the situation more difficult for themselves.

Craig: Yeah. And sometimes it’s the smallest thing. But whether you’re writing a drama or a comedy you must be writing drama. Always. You have to find drama and you have to understand what drama is. Sophie’s Choice is the smallest thing. It will not change the world.

John: No.

Craig: She has to pick one kid or another in a moment and then live with that decision her whole life. And the world didn’t change. Nothing changed. But it was dramatic. It was so dramatic because as humans — and this is why it’s a great story — we connect with it immediately and emotionally and we’re there. And we’re in it and we can feel it inside of us. It feels awful. And if you can’t find drama, whether it’s big or small, in a goofy comedy or in a weepy movie, you’re dead.

John: And because Sophie’s Choice has become sort of a cliché of a Sophie’s Choice, but it’s an irrevocable choice. And that’s the other thing that you see so often in scripts that aren’t working is that characters make a choice but they can easily just undo that choice and there’s no consequence for them to sort of go back to their previous behavior, their previous lives.

That’s why I always like “burn down the house.” Make sure they can’t go back to that safe place they were at in the start of the movie. They have to keep pushing forward and they have to keep pushing on. And every time they make a choice, never let them unmake that choice.

Craig: Right.

John: That’s sometimes, yes, that is you as the writer creating a situation and building a choice that is irrevocable — that’s good. That’s your job as the writer.

Craig: It’s dramatic. All of this is drama. All of it.

John: Yeah. So, these are some of the things I would have said of this hypothetical script if we had read it. Anything more you want to add?

Craig: Oh, just that the writer of this hypothetical script is the worst.

John: Just the worst. Brave, first off, so brave for sending in his script and letting us read the script.

Craig: [laughs] So brave and so delusional.

John: [laughs] And thank you, Stuart, for reading 500 screenplays so we could pick this one to talk to.

Craig: Seriously. I owe this guy a beer.

John: Yeah. But, that was fun.

Now, Craig, this week I did actually email you to say, like, hey don’t forget your One Cool Thing. “Did you remember your One Cool Thing?”

Craig: I did. I totally did.

John: Hooray.

Craig: Should I go first?

John: You can go first or I can go first. Your choice? Mine is a little Christmassy.

Craig: Oh, so is mine.

John: Great. You go first.

Craig: Okay, well mine is sort of inspired by Thanksgiving but then I realized it applies for Christmas as well. And my Cool Thing is brining. Now, did you make your turkey?

John: I did make my turkey.

Craig: Did you brine your turkey?

John: I did not brine my turkey. But I’m fascinated to hear this discussion because I want to know.

Craig: Brining is the key to turkey. So, here’s the issue with turkey: There are multiple problems cooking a turkey and you can see that when you eat it and it’s dry and gross.

So, one problem with turkey is that it’s huge, so it takes a long time to cook. The longer you cook meat, the drier it gets. The second problem is that the breast meat cooks much faster than the dark meat, so in order to get the dark meat at a temperature that won’t kill you, you end up desecrating the breast meat, and so you end up with the syndrome of like, “Oh, this is pretty good dark meat, although I’m not really a big fan of dark meat. I really like white meat and this white meat is just saw dust. What happened?”

Enter brining. Brining is brilliant. So, here’s what you do: You take a turkey — and you can do this with chicken, or pretty much anything — take a turkey and you put it in a solution that is roughly 5% salt water. And you can use Kosher salt — most people use Kosher salt because it doesn’t have a lot of the anti-caking agents and things that they put in regular table salt. And it comes in big boxes and it’s easy to dump in water.

And you can put some other things in there. You can put some sugar or spices in if you want. And you take your turkey and you put it in this solution. And imagine you’ve got one of those five gallon coolers. So, you put enough water in to submerge the turkey completely. You put in enough salt to hit about 5%. And there are guides online to show you how many cups of salt per how many liters of water. And then you put in a bunch of ice to keep the whole thing refrigerated.

You seal it up and you leave it in there for anywhere from they say 12 to 24 hours. Here’s the magic of science. What happens? The salt water penetrates into the muscle tissue and saline does two things. The first thing, the most important thing, is that it begins to slowly denature the proteins. Proteins are complicated molecules. Have you ever seen pictures of proteins, like the molecule structures online?

John: I have.

Craig: Yeah. So they’re like really big and they’re like all clumpy and turned around and that’s why protein is really good at making muscles and hair that’s curly and stuff like that. So, the saline gets inside and starts to slowly unravel them and loosen them up. And by loosening them up, and even partially dissolving them, they begin to create more space between the proteins. They essentially — it’s like taking a tightly knotted rope and slowly working it so it gets nice and loose.

So, now, what do loose fibers taste like as opposed to dense fibers? They taste tender. We translate that in our mouths as tender. So, that’s the first thing it’s doing: it’s tenderizing the meat. The second thing it does is by creating all this space, and because the turkey is at a lower saline level than the salt water, it allows all this moisture to go into the turkey, so the turkey starts to act like a sponge and increase in moisture.

Now you think, “Oh, I don’t want to eat a sponge.” You won’t. Because what happens is the turkey will gain maybe 20% water volume through the brining process. But the cooking process, which is so drying, will cause it to lose about that much. So, what you end up getting is the moisture that you should have had from the turkey in the first place, plus this nice, tender meat that has a little bit of saltiness to it, just a little bit, which you like — people like a little bit of saltiness to their food anyway.

Brining is the key. I’m telling you, it’s the most amazing thing. So, you leave it in there for 24 hours, take it out, rinse it off, get all that salt off the outside, pat it dry. Good to go.

John: So, I do not brine my turkeys, but I’m familiar with some of your techniques and I think they’re fascinating. A few footnotes and observations. What kind of turkey were you using? Were you using a normal store-bought turkey? Were you using an organic turkey? Which turkey were you using for this?

Craig: I didn’t make the turkey for this Thanksgiving because I was over at Derek’s, but in the past I have used — I try and use a Kosher turkey because they tend to not have a bunch of — you know, sometimes when you get the store-bought turkeys they’ve already kind of put weird stuff in there.

John: Because what I was going to say is some of the store-bought turkeys, I don’t want to say Butterball is a bad brand, but part of the reason — they kind of already do the brining for it because they can sell it as a more expensive turkey because they’ve increased the water weight of it.

Craig: They’ve kind of done it, but they haven’t done it well.

John: They haven’t done it well, which is true. But I think if you were to try to brine again a Butterball, a kind of crappy Butterball turkey, you might have mixed results. The second point is that you bring up like all that time in the oven is what dries out the breast meat, and that brings me to sort of how I have cooked turkey these past few years and it worked well last night, was you don’t do it low and slow in an oven. You do it in an incredibly hot oven.

And we cooked a 21-pound bird in about two hours and fifteen minutes. So, it’s a 500-degree oven, which sounds ridiculously hot, and it is really, really hot; you have to be careful you don’t burn yourself. But you put the bird in, incredibly hot. The bird is at room temperature, you put it in, incredibly hot, keep the oven door sealed so no heat gets out. 45 minutes, you need to tent it over or else it’s going to get too dark. It’s a really nice pretty golden color.

And then it’s out of the oven so soon, the breast meat doesn’t have a chance to dry out the way it otherwise would. And it worked and it got nice and hot. You need to let it rest so that all the juices can sort of get back to where they need to be anyway.

That’s one of the classic problems of turkey anyway is people are waiting so long for the bird that the minute they pull it out of the oven they try to carve it and all the juices have been sort of circulating, they just fall out on the board. And that’s why it dries out, too.

Craig: That is absolutely true. And I’ve read about the high heat cooking method, and that is a good method. And a lot of people will sort of interrupt that sort of three-quarters of the way through and tent the breast with foil so that the legs and the thighs can cook while the breast sort of doesn’t get pelted as much.

The other thing I’ve done is the whole deep friend turkey thing, which is dangerous, and crazy, and awesome. [laughs] But, because you’re a man of science, and because I know how left brain you are, I strongly recommend to you and to all of our listeners, Cook’s Illustrated…

John: Fantastic.

Craig: …and their associated cookbook, The Best Recipe, in which they approach everything from a scientific way and sort of say, “We have decided after cooking 4,000 turkeys this is the best way.”

John: So, what’s great about Cook’s Illustrated is every article about, like, how to cook everything is all about the technique. It’s like, “So, I went through this thing, I had these frustrations.” I went back though these recipe books and I kind of think it’s all made up. I think that they sort of create a narrative after the fact for like, “Here’s a really good recipe, let’s make up a story about how we got to this recipe.” But it is fun. And like, you know, “Confused, I went to our science editor who talked me through sort of how this protein reaction was working, or why adding sugar at this stage did stuff.”

Still, it’s great fun. It’s really well-illustrated. It’s called Cook’s Illustrated. There are no pictures; it’s all drawings. You should check it out if you get a chance.

Craig: Yeah. It’s awesome.

John: So, my thing is also a cool illustrated thing. It’s called Ticket to Ride. Craig, have you played Ticket to Ride?

Craig: I have not, but it sounds like another game that I should try.

John: You will love…

Craig: I’ve had mixed results. I did great on Ski Safari. You repeatedly kicked my ass in Letterpress, so I guess maybe this one. Maybe this will be the trick.

John: Ticket to Ride began its life as a board game. It came out in 2004. And it’s a German-style game, which doesn’t mean it’s in German. It means that it’s one of those games where it’s more about strategy than open conflict. So, it’s not like Risk where it’s a zero sum game, or Monopoly. It’s sometimes you’re actually kind of cooperating with the other players in order to get what you want out of it. And there’s some resource management involved.

It’s not as difficult or sort of strategically challenging as Settlers of Catan, but it’s sort of in that universe. If you like Settlers of Catan you’ll love this game.

Craig: Yeah, that one frustrated me a little bit.

John: So, the idea behind this is, in the basic game you have a map of America and it’s like 1910 or so. And you have all the cities. And there are these rail lines connecting these. And basically you’re trying to build rail lines between the different cities. And so these cards show which two cities you’re trying to connect, and then you have to — you’re drawing these other cards in order to build the trains from place to place.

And so you’re trying to get these routes before other people get these routes. But you don’t know what they’re actually trying to connect and you get different points for different things you do. It’s really ingeniously set up and incredibly well-designed.

And so I’d seen it in a bunch of game blogs and everybody would talk about how amazing it was. And so I bought it on Amazon just on a whim and I stuck it on a high shelf figuring whenever my daughter was old enough we could play as a family.

And she’s seven and she’s really good at games so we broke it out last month. And we’ve been playing it a lot. It’s really, really well done. And so if you have a kid who’s seven and into games they can play it.

It takes about 45 minutes. It’s not too involved. And, there is an iPad version which is not surprisingly addictive in that you can play by yourself, against computer opponents, or you can play it one on one against people on the internet or in the same room. You can just play it off of Bluetooth or WiFi. And so, you know, at bed time Mike and I will be each on our iPad playing a game of this. And it goes super fast because all the physical stuff gets taken out of it and you can just go — pure strategy.

So, I highly recommend it. The reason why I say Christmas, it’s a really good gift for Christmas, like if you know somebody who likes board games who hasn’t played this yet, they will probably love it. And so I feel like it would be a really good thing to get for Christmas with your family if they like board games and haven’t played this — they’d probably dig it a lot and it’s a good fun time.

It’s for two to five players for the physical game, and the iPad version is either solo or you can pass and play and do other stuff, too.

Craig: So, because Settlers of Catan, I wouldn’t play with say my seven-year-old, or almost eight-year-old daughter, or my 11-year-old son. It seems a little…

John: I wouldn’t be surprised. I think your 11-year-old might be able to handle it at this point. Like Settlers of Catan is overwhelming when you first try to do it, but then you actually realize, “Okay, it’s strategy.” So, the rules are really simple; figuring out how to actually get through it, how to optimize can be tough.

Craig: And is that the case with this as well?

John: It is. Similar kind of game. And what I like about the German-style board games is that if you’re really good at it you’re more likely to win. But if you’re not actually all that good at it you’re not likely to get squashed. They’re sort of set up in a way that being ahead actually has a bit of a penalty to it. When everyone can see that you’re ahead they’re going to try to block you or stop you from doing things.

And so no one sort of clears the board. No one takes over everything. And it doesn’t have that punishing aspect of Risk or Monopoly where one person is completely dominant and the other person is worse. Here, the person who wins might get 120 points and the second place person might get like 105. It doesn’t feel like you got killed.

Craig: I like that. Risk or Monopoly are sort of drain-circling games where once you start losing it’s just a slow spiral to death.

You know, my kids play Mario Party on the Nintendo and it’s kind of brilliant how you truly cannot predict who is going to win that game until maybe the last two minutes of it. Because they’ll give you points for being in last place. [laughs] They’re so good about it. They’re so smart. So, I like that idea of sort of not knowing… — Sorry, by the way, which I play with my kids, you know, a classic board game. Sorry is so good at that.

You think you’re winning and then you’re not.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s cool.

John: Sorry though is ultimately up to chance. Like, did you get a bunch of good rolls?

Craig: Yeah, there’s no strategy whatsoever.

John: There’s no strategy.

Craig: Frankly, it sounds like this game would be a good use of the Simplex Algorithm.

John: I’m sure the Simplex Algorithm could be used to maximum effect.

Craig: Yes.

John: Yeah. So, Craig, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you.

John: A fun podcast and we’ll be back at this next week.

Craig: Woo! And remember, folks, brine those turkeys.

John: Brine those turkeys. Take care.

Craig: Bye.

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

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

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

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

**Abby Kohn:** Hi.

**John:** …and Marc Silverstein…

**March Silverstein:** Hello.

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

**Abby:** Thanks.

**Marc:** Thanks for having us.

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** No. Production.

**Abby:** Production.

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Gravitated towards each other?

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Abby:** During, yeah.

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

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

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

**Marc:** No.

**Abby:** We are not.

**Marc:** We are separately married.

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

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

**Marc:** Seven years.

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

**Marc:** Yes.

**Craig:** But, this survived.

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

**Abby:** It did.

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

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

**Craig:** I’m that guy?

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow.

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** No.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It will.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** And just revising?

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Like so much of the rhythm…

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

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

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** It’s gotten less and less.

**Abby:** It’s less than two pages.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

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

**Abby:** Sort of.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes. We’ve done it.

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

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

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

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

**Marc:** We went to the wedding…

**Abby:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

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

**Marc:** No.

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

**Marc:** Yeah, he did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Which was a thesis.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

**Marc:** It got everything.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Marc:** First Look.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** The day after.

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

**John:** Holy cow.

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

**John:** Pre-email.

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

**Craig:** Awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** No.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Exactly.

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

**Abby:** Right.

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

**Craig:** What’s the next one?

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** Yes.

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

**Marc:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** It’s totally cool.

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

**Craig:** You love it.

**Abby:** Because I love it.

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

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

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

**John:** Party Girl, yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Terrible.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Yes.

**Abby:** Absolutely.

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

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

**Craig:** Good romantic.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Naturally.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** You can’t avoid it.

**Craig:** You can’t avoid your fate.

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

**Craig:** That’s what you do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Great point.

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

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** A no-hander.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**Abby:** And we’d be excited about.

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

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

**Marc:** Yes!

**Abby:** Yes.

**Marc:** That’s it. Pathetic.

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

**Marc:** Right.

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

**Marc:** You can’t blame the woman.

**Craig:** But that’s not good drama.

**Abby:** No.

**Marc:** No.

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

**Abby:** Right.

**Marc:** Yes.

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

**Marc:** 100%.

**Abby:** I think so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** Right.

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

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

**Abby:** Mm-hmm.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Great.

**Marc:** We’ll see.

**Craig:** Good.

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

**Craig:** Completely.

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

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

**Marc:** Yeah, 100%.

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

**Abby/Marc:** Right.

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

**Abby:** Right, right.

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

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

**Marc:** 100%.

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

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

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

**Abby:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**Abby:** We have.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No, no, that’s fine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Uh, can we get eyes on wipes?”

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

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

**John:** What was the show?

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

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

**Craig:** That’s a great idea.

**Marc:** Yeah.

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

**Marc:** It was really fun…

**Abby:** It was really fun.

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

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

**Marc:** We built a campus.

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** “No, listen…”

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

**Craig:** Noooo!

**Abby:** My character…

**Marc:** Oh no!

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

**Craig:** Awesome!

**Abby:** Hate it.

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

**Marc:** I was like, “I knew it!”

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

**Marc:** “‘I’m right.’ I was.”

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

**Marc:** Their dots are dropping.

Craig; That’s right.

**John:** If in real life…

**Marc:** A fight dial. Can we test…

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

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

**Marc:** “We’ve done this before.”

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

**Abby:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Trailblazers.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** God, that’s a hard choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** “You’re making this.”

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

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

**Marc:** Which is weird.

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s kind of crazy.

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

**Abby:** [laughs] Totally.

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

**Marc:** We talked about it.

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

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

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

**Marc:** Yeah.

**Abby:** We do.

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

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

**Abby:** But not for kids.

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

**Abby:** Like a comedy of…

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

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

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

**Abby:** No.

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Exactly. Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Oh, years later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** So, it was at DreamWorks…

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow.

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

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

**Marc:** …it was never going to go.

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

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

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

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

**Abby/Marc:** DreamWorks.

**Craig:** DreamWorks, yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Rewriting other movies.

**Abby:** Rewriting other movies.

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

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

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

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

I’ll say, “Um, this movie.”

“Oh, when’s that coming out?”

“Next May.”

“And then?”

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Abby:** “We can ride that. ”

**Marc:** Yeah. Exactly.

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

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

**Marc:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**Marc:** Nothing else.

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** Oh wow.

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

**Abby:** Really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Abby:** Wow.

**John:** So, we’re always on Skype.

**Abby:** We’re part of history.

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

**Abby:** Totally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s the best part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Marc:** In moments.

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

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

**Abby:** Oh yeah.

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

**Craig:** Awesome.

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

**Marc:** Sure.