Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin. [laughs]

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

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

**John:** And inside jokes that no one else will ever know.

**Craig:** [laughs] You guys…

**John:** So, Craig…

— You guys, you missed some good comedy there.

**Craig:** You missed, uh…

**John:** And Craig cursed a lot, because he doesn’t curse on the actual show, but he cursed a lot in the intro here.

**Craig:** Yes, much, much cursing.

**John:** So, Craig, on Twitter after I posted the last podcast I said, hey, if you want to leave a good review — any review for us on iTunes. Not a good review, any good review, I would be reading aloud the ones that were marked most helpful. And, in that sense of like, oh, could be constructive feedback. I kind of was kind of fishing for more good reviews.

And then you and I were looking through this list to try to figure out like oh we were going to read these things. And kind of embarrassingly they’re all five star reviews. And they’re all kind of — it was going to just feel a little braggy to read them aloud.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I guess I’m happy that people like the podcast. I would invite constructive feedback. And it was really my goal in sort of putting that out there on Twitter is if people have constructive feedback or things they want to talk more about, or ways we could improve this. But, I was going to read them aloud and now I’m not so sure it’s going to make sense to read them aloud.

**Craig:** Yeah, probably not. I mean, I will say I’m very, very grateful for the things I read on there. I was pretty shocked and surprised. I mean the Internet is kind of famous for hating. And, [laughs] it was just love. It was nothing but love, which makes me uncomfortable. So, thank you to everybody.

**John:** Today I thought we could talk about feedback, both why we solicit feedback and sometimes why we don’t really want feedback.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I should warn listeners that this might be little bit more meta of a podcast. Less nuts and bolts about the craft of screenwriting, and a little bit more about what Craig and I do, my website, Craig’s website that he gave up, which I think is a fascinating part. So we can start right there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s true. I built a…

**John:** You don’t have that site anymore. Well, that site is still up there technically. It’s called ArtfulWriter.com, and there are still useful articles there, but you are not actively maintaining it. Is that correct?

**Craig:** That’s right. Yeah. I started that back in 2005, I think. So it was fairly early on in the whole bloggy phenomenon. And the idea in the beginning was just to talk about some of the things that you and I talk about quite a bit on here, some of the non-crafty things. I thought there was nowhere writers could go to actually learn how this whole thing worked in terms of the union, and the companies, and the business end of screenwriting.

And for awhile I just tottered along in anonymity and it was lovely. And then the strike came. [laughs] And suddenly this dinky little blog was getting profiled in the Wall Street Journal and 80,000 people a month were showing up, and it became nightmarish. Nightmarish.

**John:** You were seen as an opinion leader for an unpopular opinion I would say. Or not necessarily an unpopular opinion; there was a valued opinion and you were seen as one of the leaders of one of those opinions and therefore it attracted a lot of attention and a lot of disagreement on your site.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s fair to say. I was essentially the loyal minority. I was in dissent. And many, many people who I suspect drove around in cars that said “Dissent is Patriotic” came home and then told me that I was an idiot, [laughs] because I was ruining their thing. It was pretty remarkable actually.

The level of hypocrisy was astounding at times. People would use analogies… — These were people who were otherwise very stridently against say, for instance, the war in Iraq but would say things to me like, “You’re supposed to be a soldier, and soldiers don’t question their leaders.” It was nuts.

**John:** So on a typical blog post I remember you would be getting 50, 75, 100 comments back very, very quickly. It was sort of like how Nikki Finke gets a tremendous number of comments. But, you actually required people to register with their own names, so you could actually see who was making these points. That didn’t seem to stop people from making very long, very passionate points on your site.

**Craig:** No, they could use handles.

**John:** Okay, but they did have to register. I remember having to log in. Was that not the case?

**Craig:** They could register but they didn’t’ have to use their real names. They could use a fake name. And occasionally I would notice that certain people just because you can, you know, when you run a blog you have access to some of the information that comes in when people comment, specifically their IP address. And you can see, oh look, these 12 people who are screaming at me are actually one person, and then I would boot them for that, you know.

And I would boot them for being mean to each other, which they would do a lot. There were threads where it would get up to 300, 400 comments. But, you know, that really wasn’t why I stopped. I mean, that stuff all sort of fell off after the strike was over. And, frankly, I think it fell off also because history proved me correct I say with no false humility or false arrogance. It’s just factually correct.

I was right about almost everything. And there wasn’t much to argue about. So, I got bored. I just got bored. I’d been doing it for five, six years, and I always told myself if it ever felt like homework I would stop because I wasn’t like you; your method is to write a lot more smaller pieces. My thing was to sort of do longer essays. And so I would try and do one a week. And then it became one every two weeks. And then just frankly it got hard. And more than anything I ran out of stuff to sort of explicate in essay length.

So I just stopped. And it was a lovely feeling of stopping. And then you came calling and this couldn’t be easier. I just talk now.

**John:** It’s a half an hour of conversation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I will say part of the reason for why I was interested in doing the podcast versus strictly just doing the blog is I got a little bored, too. I certainly got bored with comments. And I went through this whole Sturm und Drang with comments on my site where I took them down for awhile. I put them back on, but I sort of deemphasized them.

I just didn’t care to be the host of that party anymore. And I wanted to have my opinions. I didn’t sort of want to have everybody running around my house and touching my stuff anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So as I’m looking now at sort of the next thing we’re going to do with the site, I have to make some decisions about are those comments going to stay, are the comments going to go. And I really am of two minds about it, because I do enjoy feedback when it’s helpful, constructive feedback. I just don’t know that having that feedback attached to my point is the best place to do that. I feel with Twitter or email or everything else that’s a better way of actually getting my attention of something that’s going on in the world.

And yet there are some situations where someone can add a clarifying point to the end of a post and it’s genuinely helpful. And that’s a thing that I don’t actually have to go in and modify myself because somebody has added that in. So, I’m trying to decide what the right next step is for me, for the site, for what I want to do.

**Craig:** Well, people who don’t run popular websites with lots of commentary could never fathom this: Comments are exhausting. The writing of the material is the fun part because you are expressing yourself, and frankly, you are the person who had the will to do it. So, you decided that you were going to create a website. You decided you were going to write a long piece. And in the case of you, and to some extent me, we also wrote things people were interested in reading. So, we weren’t anonymous blogs in the corner of the Internet; people noticed us. And so they showed up. And then the comments happen.

And the comments on the comments. And the fights in the comments. And the stupid comments. And the racist, and insulting, and nonsense. Just waves of nonsense. And you can’t help but feel like it’s reflecting on you. I mean, there’s that one school is, well, let’s just be completely libertarian, laissez-faire about it: everybody post whatever you want, and I don’t care, and I don’t touch it. The problem is you get defined by that. The way that, frankly, I think Deadline Hollywood is defined by its atrocious commenting.

And I didn’t want that. And early on I was really encouraged by how good the comments were. But then suddenly it was like you hit that weird tipping point where it goes from a little thing to a cool thing to a fascinating gathering of likeminded people who maybe don’t agree on everything but have the same demeanor, and then all of a sudden it’s yahoo time. And everyone’s there and it’s like a bad house party. It is the end of Sixteen Candles and the house is wrecked.

And that’s what happened to me. I don’t blame you. I mean, I’d boot ’em. Who cares? Look, if people want to say things, like you said, have them tweet you or something.

**John:** The house party analogy is apt, because you get tired of picking up the plastic cups.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And just like, you know what, go have a party in your own house and maybe I’ll come by and visit your house. Send me an e-vite that you’re having a party at your house and maybe I’ll come by and visit. But I’m not going to like keep inviting you over to my house for things.

When you first start a blog it’s very lonely. And you don’t really know if anybody is reading. You can sort of look at the Google Analytics, and it’s like, oh there are some numbers. But when you first start getting feedback, someone says something about the post you made, it’s really flattering. And that attention can be flattering. And so then you can also sort of game yourself. So, it’s like, well, I know how I can get more people to leave a comment, more people to see this thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that becomes dangerous, too. One of the posts that sort of sent it over the edge was I did a post called No Trombones which was…

**Craig:** I remember that one.

**John:** So I went on my screed about, and I do truly believe that we do people a disservice by putting the band instruments in little kid’s hands. If we’re going to teach them music we should teach them piano, or guitar, or drums, and if they want to move on and study other instruments later on in their life, in junior high/high school, fantastic. We can still have marching bands. But, giving a little kid the clarinet is not providing them a future of music. It’s limiting them to one specific role in a bigger thing.

So, I wrote that post. It went kind of viral. I got 1,000 comments, almost like death threats, like how dare I say anything bad about trombone. And I got tired of it. And it wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it was systematic of what I was feeling about my frustration with comments.

**Craig:** Yeah. People also don’t understand that when the commenters start going after each other, what will happen sometimes is you’ll go to dinner with your family, and you’ll come back and suddenly there will be an email like, “You have to do something about this. Somebody just libeled me.” And I’m like, wait, what?

So, I’ll click over and see, oh god, 300 comments just happened in the last hour and I have to read them to figure out what’s happening and who’s, because god knows I want to ignore it, but the problem is it’s on my site. I’m hosting it.

And I’m like I already have children, you know? I don’t need this. And then, of course, on top of that there’s a weird thing that happens where you suddenly realize I’m spending money and time to provide a service for people to attack me. [laughs] Why? Why am I doing that? I don’t get it.

There was one woman during the strike, a lovely human being, who commented that she wanted to punch me in the heart, [laughs], which I thought was great. I just thought that was great.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The specificity of that is really what sets it apart.

**Craig:** And the proportion. I just thought that she kind of got the proper way to respond to a debate over a poorly run union strike. That was the idea was punch people in the heart. That made sense.

But people questioned my credits. I was accused of plagiarism. I was accused of lying. I was accused of nepotism. Obviously I was a company sellout, and a hack, and a loser, and an idiot, and unfunny. And it just went on and on and on. And I have to tell you, I’ve got a pretty thick skin. And it wasn’t like any one comment made me go, “Oh, no, I feel bad.” It was just the sense that I was wallowing in filth all the time. Like I had to take showers. Yuck. I don’t want to read stuff like this. It’s gross. These people are gross.

So, you’re site doesn’t have quite that level of madness, but it’s…

**John:** I don’t. And largely because I’ve been talking about more things related to the craft and not so much about the industry. I don’t create so many targets for myself.

But just this last week I did post something which was a follow-up on something we talked about on the podcast. We had a reader, a listener — my default is to say reader when I should say listener — a listener named Biff who wrote in…

**Craig:** Biff.

**John:** …with his perspective on being an established screenwriter who’s finding it very frustrating and then changes in the industry. And a listener named Cordy wrote in an email with his perspective as a younger, newer writer who is sort of working his way up and finding the same kinds of frustrations. And so I posted Cordy’s thing as a first person, which is my term for when an outside person comes in with a post that’s really from his or her voice.

And so it’s one of the rare posts recently that actually generated 50 comments. And I was like, I dread it. And so I just now today read through the comments because I’d see that they were there, and I’m like I don’t really want to read these. But people were leaving comments and I guess because the ball started rolling and more people started commenting and responding. And some of them were meaningful. And I kind of wish they had come as an email rather than as a comment, but I thought, it’s still feedback, and I thought we would talk through some of it now because it’s an important topic.

**Craig:** Well let’s do it.

**John:** Let’s do it. Adam writes: “There’s something I don’t understand about this recurring complaint that script assignments are hard to land. To my ears it sounds like writers are saying either a) ‘I’m ready to write a script if someone else comes up with the idea and hands me a check to write it;’ or b) ‘I want someone to pay me for my own idea before I actually take the time to make a script out of it.’

“Either way, it’s a bizarre complaint. Granted, the industry may have worked that way once, but based on the reports from the front lines, it doesn’t work that way now. Now you need to write the story first and then get someone interested in it. This is not such a strange business model; you only have to look across the desk at the person to whom you’re pitching to find an example: Studios don’t get paid in advance for the movies they make…”

**Craig:** Ugh, what an idiot this guy is.

**John:** “…they have to make them first and then try to sell them to the public.”

**Craig:** So stupid. Yeah, you know, that’s absolutely true. That’s a great point. You know, novelists also don’t get paid to write their novels. They just write their novels and then they sell them and then they get paid. But novelists also hold their copyright. We’re employees, okay? You can’t have it both ways, Biff. Right?

If the studios want to hire us and everything is a “work for hire,” even the stuff you wrote on your own in your house is a work for hire commissioned by them, they own the copyright. They are the legal authors. We don’t get royalties. We get these negotiated residuals which every three years are up for dispute. We don’t get protection so that we can’t get be rewritten. We don’t get moral rights. We get nothing of that. Okay?

So the deal is this: if they want to treat us like work for hire commissioned writers, not commissionable but commissioned writers, employees, then yeah, we kind of do get to complain about the way they employ us, Biff.

**John:** Well this isn’t Biff, this is Adam.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** Biff was the good guy that you liked.

**Craig:** Biff, you’re cool. [laughs] Sorry, Biff. You’re awesome.

Adam, smarten up, dude. Look, I get this vibe all the time from these guys who are like, “What are these writers complaining about? So they want to get paid before they write?” Yeah. You know why? We’re professional writers. My plumbers like to get paid, too. They like to know I can pay them before they do the plumbing. I have to agree to the price. It’s not like they come in, they unclog my toilet and then I go, “Nah, I didn’t like the way you did that. Bye.”

**John:** Here’s the faulty logic in his own analogy. He says: “This is not such a strange business model. You only have to look across the desk at the person to whom you’re pitching to find an example.”

Well, actually no. If you look across the desk at the person you’re pitching to, that executive, he’s not getting paid based on what movies get made. He’s getting paid a salary.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He’s an employee of the studio. And so he might not keep his job if he’s not able to make some movies, and hopefully make some movies that make money; although, strangely, many executives are able to keep their jobs for a very long time after making a very terrible movie.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But, you’re exactly wrong, Adam. The person you’re pitching to is an employee of the studio and is getting paid a salary not based on which movies actually happen or don’t happen. You’re not going to tell that executive, “Oh, okay, I’m not going to pay you anything for the next three years. But if any movies happen, then I’ll pay you then.” That’s not a viable business model for them, too.

Now I will say, producers are increasingly kind of in that bind, where produces are having a very hard time getting paid anything until movies go into production. So they kind of are working on spec.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** The same way that writers are frustrated to be on spec.

The other example I’ll bring up is a Broadway musical based on a movie. I’m gonna talk about Newsies. So, Newsies is, the plot of Newsies — to the degree that there’s a plot in Newsies — is the newspaper boys rise up to say, “No, you know what? We’re not going to keep paying for these newspapers on the idea that we have to sell them later. We should be able to buy…” Actually, this is a fault analogy now that I think more about it.

[laughs] Well, they’re basically doing spec work, though. The Newsies, the news boys were required to sort of like, yeah, if you make some money, great. If you don’t make any money it’s not our thing. Well, no. If they are in your employ and you are setting the terms for how they’re going to be working, you do actually have to pay them.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re right about producers. Producers are stuck in a weird place where they don’t really get paid and all the work is on spec until the movie gets made. And, in fact, that is increasingly the result of studio antipathy towards producers. The studios, the corporations, in their bean counter ways have sort of looked out and said, “These guys are middle men. We don’t need them anymore.”

Now, as a writer you might be surprised to hear me stand up for producers. I won’t stand up for producers. I won’t stand up for the producing industry. I’ll stand up for good producers of which there are few. But the good producers deserve to be treated better. The bad producers, and there used to be about a billion of them all snorting coke in their little bungalows — yeah, good riddance. See you later.

The point is, while they’re called producers, they aren’t directing the movies or writing them, so you can’t… — I know for sure you can’t make movies without scripts. And I know for sure you can’t make movies without directors. And I know for sure you can’t make movies without actors. So pay them.

And, Adam, all I can say is good luck at your desk job at, uh, wherever you are. You sound like such a little tool. You work for like a guy in business affairs and you’ve absorbed that whole rhetoric and I’m here to tell you, bro, ain’t that way.

And by the way, beyond that, the people who really do pull the levers at these companies on the business end don’t agree with you either. They also know how important we are, and how important it is to take care of us. That’s not where the issue is. The issue is above their heads in the board rooms.

**John:** An anonymous socialist writes…

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Yeah. “When people respond to this kind of thing with ‘You gotta make your own opportunities! (as the internet is sometimes wont to do) I wish they would be more specific. I am willing to do webisodes if someone knows the secret to monetizing it, etc. But this is my job, it’s how I pay my rent, and I can’t do it long-term for free anymore than someone who manages a cheese shop or something.”

Which I think is largely the point we’re making. I kind of provocatively titled this post Is Screenwriting Dead, which, again, I felt a little bad doing because I know it’s going to draw a lot of eyeballs.

**Craig:** Eh, do it. Do it.

**John:** Do it. But it’s also going to draw a lot of comments. But I wanted to differentiate between… I’m not saying that the craft of screenwriting is dead, or asking the question, because clearly we’re still going to have screenwriting. We’re still going to have, people will still write scripts. The question is whether the career of screenwriting can continue to last if we’re getting rid of the actual people being paid and employed to do it.

The problem with writing specs is that you have no idea if that spec is going to sell. And spec is really another word for gamble, like I’m going to gamble, I’m going to gamble on this idea that this idea will sell to somebody. That someone will read this and say, “Well this is fantastic. I need to buy this. I need to make this into a movie.”

And so the argument is going to be that corporations are gambling too by taking a chance on writers and stuff like that. Not really. Corporations are investing. This is investment. Corporations are buying up, ideally, a range of properties. They’re deciding which ones they’re going to make into movies, and the ones they make into movies, some of them are going to be hits. That’s investment. That’s picking a range of stocks.

Whereas you as the screenwriter, if all you’re doing is specking you are sort of buying only one stock and you’re putting all of your money into that one stock because that’s the only script you’re going to be able to write for quite a long time. To say, like, oh, well your business model should be, a screenwriter’s business model should be “I’m just going to write a spec, and I’ll sell a spec, and then I’ll sell another spec, and then I’ll sell another spec,” well, some of those are not going to sell. Some of those are not going to become movies.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And you are not going to be able to do this long-term unless you have a trust fund. And we’re back to trust funds.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] If it really is going to be that kind of model you’re going to have to have people who have some other source of income that they don’t actually need to be doing this which isn’t a model.

**Craig:** It’s not going to be that model. It’s just not going to be. Look, that model kind of almost sort of existed for a little while in the ’80s and ’90s. The truth is, when someone says, “Writers should just spec stuff,” they’re being ignorant of the business. The business doesn’t want your specs. It’s not like it used to be. They don’t want your spec.

The reason to write a spec now is to turn them onto your writing so that they can come hire you to write what they want. They don’t want your spec. They want what they want. Even while movies with silly underlying properties that aren’t story based crash and burn around us, they’ll keep making properties based on books, and they’ll keep making properties based on video games, and they’ll keep making properties based on old TV shows. And it’s never going to stop; that keeps going. A lot of the original material you see in Hollywood frankly comes from people that sort of negate the risk of the originality. And when I say risk of — I mean from the corporate side it’s risky.

So, when Todd Phillips comes in with an original idea, or Judd Apatow comes in with an original idea, it’s like, “Okay, well that’s not…” The point is we know that that is going to be done and it’s okay. Those guys have a track record. When Chris Nolan does it, it’s like, it’s okay. Inception? No problem. That’s okay.

**John:** If anyone other than Christopher Nolan tries to do Inception, no way.

**Craig:** Forget it. Forget it. They don’t want it. [laughs] They don’t want it. They don’t want it because they don’t even know how to make it. That’s the point. Their big panic is, how do we make something if we don’t have a great director and we don’t have a vision. So, when they just get a script they’re like, “Okay, cool…” — I mean, yes, it happens. I know now people are going to go, “What happened three weeks when we got…” Yes, correct.

But, the point is it’s the exception now, it’s not the rule. You can’t build a career around specs.

**John:** If someone else had written the Inception script, some Joe Smodcast wrote the Inception script, people would read it, and people would like it I bet. I bet it could place on the Black List. People would say, “Wow, that’s a really interesting script but it’s far too expensive and no one will ever make it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the truth is, no one would ever make it.

**Craig:** They wouldn’t. They wouldn’t make it. But what they would say is, “We want to make a movie with this actor based on this property.”

**John:** The guy who wrote that would be called in to have many meetings over town. Will Smith would fly him out to wherever the set is and he would sit in a long meeting with Will Smith. And Will Smith would pitch him this idea and he would spend six months developing this idea with Will Smith that might end up being a movie. It probably wouldn’t end up being a movie but he’d get paid for it maybe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Yeah. So, I mean, good things could happen. But that script would not get made.

**Craig:** Right. Look at Chris McQuarrie. This is one of the best writers I know. And Chris McQuarrie broke into the business with this amazing original script…

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** …for The Usual Suspects. But, you know, even a guy like Chris McQuarrie, like right now for instance he is the writer and director of One Shot, which looks spectacular by the way. I think it’s going to be really cool. But it’s an adaptation of a novel, you know? Because that’s what the studios are making and Chris is smart enough to go, “Okay, I mean I could keep bashing my head against the wall to try and get more Usual Suspects out there, or I could apply my craft and skill to adapt a novel that’s actually difficult to adapt and adapt it beautifully and direct it.”

So, that’s where the business is. I mean, look, you don’t have to like it, but you can’t sit there like that one guy that refused to leave his hut on Mount St. Helens. [laughs] You’ve got to react. You have to adapt. And I think sort of planting your stick in the group and going, “Specs are nothing,” is so old man; it’s so like 40-year-old man in 1983 to me.

**John:** I want to go back to one point that Anonymous Socialist made. “When people say make your own opportunities — I’ll do webisodes if someone knows the secret to monetizing it.” I have full sympathy for that. And I get frustrated by the, well Kickstarter, we’ll do a Kickstarter and we’ll make it all happen with that.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And here’s the thing: like somebody will be successful and do that. And things will get made. And god bless Ed Burns who has been able to make his movies on his terms for his budget and his price. That’s great. And I think it’s wonderful that new models are succeeding, but they’re not going to succeed for enough people for everyone to be able to make actual movies that people see in theaters.

So, I’m saying, like, yes, please write for any screen you want to write for. Don’t be precious. Experiment with new things. But the idea that, oh, that the future will take care of all that for you, technology will take care of that, the internet — the internet will do it! — is naïve and doesn’t speak to any understanding of not just the way the business is now but sort of how business overall is, or how economics works.

You say like, “Oh, well we’re going to make these. It’s going to cost us $10,000 each to make these little webisodes and we’ll put them on YouTube and then, money!”

**Craig:** Right. No.

**John:** And in the end, who knows what that is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And some very smart people have not been able to make this work. And so certainly it’s possible that you will be the person to make this work, but please allow for the fact that it very well could not happen, too.

**Craig:** And let’s also remember, anything that makes it easier for you to break in makes it easier for everyone to break in. It’s not just you that can do this. It’s a thousand other guys with a thousand other ideas. The Internet makes it harder. I really do believe that. It makes it harder. There’s so much noise, so everything just becomes cheaper and more fleeting. The Internet is great for right now, today, this week, an awesome video that everybody’s talking about, and no one will be talking about it tomorrow. Nobody.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s danger. Danger.

**John:** This project that we have coming out… — There’s a project we haven’t announced that we have coming out in the fall, and we shot a promo video for it. And so the question is, how close to launch should we release the promo video for it? And we really came down to we should release the promo video at launch. Like, at the minute you can actually do the thing, the minute the thing is actually available to purchase, that’s when you release the promo video. Because otherwise there’s no sense that you’re going to be able to hold onto any of that enthusiasm you’ve built up.

That idea of like, “Oh, it’s a long lead kind of this, and we’re just going to carefully sneak in and do stuff –” No. You have your one shot and it needs to be immediately purchasable/downloadable right then and there because otherwise the next face-eating man zombie is going to be running down the street in Florida and you’ve lost any attention that you had.

**Craig:** That guy’s cool. I mean, he’s dead now, but he’s cool.

**John:** Yeah, I have not clicked any links. And by the time this podcast airs it will be old news. Thank goodness.

**Craig:** But, by the way, there’s an even cooler guy. So, the man goes and eats another dude’s face which is obviously the result of some kind of PCP or Bath Salts psychosis. — I’m fascinated by this Bath Salts thing. — But then the next day a dude in New Jersey, I think, literally woke up and said, “What could I do to get face-eating guy out of the news cycle?”

So, police are called to his apartment where he has stabbed himself repeatedly in the abdomen. He pulls his own intestines out and throws them at the police officers. He threw his own intestines at them. And, lived.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not fair.

**Craig:** Which makes me think that we’re actually a lot more sturdy than we think. I mean, if you can take a handful of colon and just whip it at a dude, and the worst that we could say is, “You know, it was a rough week there in ICU, but you’ll be all right, buddy. You’ll poop again.” Smart. Remarkable.

**John:** [laughs] It is remarkable.

On that, let us wrap this little podcast up. My One Cool Thing is actually something that’s very sturdy, sort of like the human body when you remove its intestines. So, my One Cool Thing is US Verde Buffalo Grass. I don’t know if you’ve heard of what this stuff is?

So our front of our house, we took out the front lawn because we’re sort of on this hill and there was really no good reason to have grass because you couldn’t enjoy the grass, and it was taking a tremendous amount of water to water that grass. So we put in native plants in the front. It looks nice. It’s wonderful. But in the back we actually have some lawn area where a kid can play soccer or kickball or some elaborate sport she just invented that involves kicking the ball and then doing math, because she’s that kind of kid.

But normal grass is sort of a huge water drain. So, we ended up putting in this new stuff called UC Verde Buffalo Grass. And it’s actually kind of amazing. So what they did is they took Buffalo Grass and sort of refined it, and refined it, and refined it, and sort of cross-bred it with this different thing. So they came up with a Buffalo Grass that takes very, very little water but really resembles normal grass. And so you can buy it, and if you’re putting in a new lawn someplace, or you’re working on your old lawn and thinking about something new, I’d really recommend it. It’s worked out very well.

The caveats for it: it’s not the kind of lawn that you can roll out, nor can you seed it. You actually have to buy these little plugs. And you just buy these little sort of one-square-inch plugs and you have to plant them. And you plant them six inches apart, and so that’s tedious and it takes a long time. But once it grows in it has been really, really good. And we basically don’t have to water for like months during the year, which is great.

**Craig:** Does it feel like normal grass?

**John:** It really feels like normal grass. It looks like normal grass and it feels like normal grass. As it is first growing in it’s a little too soft, like you could sort of push through to the ground a little too easily. But now that it’s grown in denser it’s really, really strong. And the roots are much deeper than normal grass which is why you don’t have to water it so much. So, it’s been a good investment.

**Craig:** I like that. David Zucker is very environmentally conscious. And a few years ago he did that ridiculous — I mean, I can’t stop making fun of this — that ridiculous thing where he got the fake grass, you know, the synthetic grass that’s basically like fancier Astro Turf.

**John:** Recycled plastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s basically plasticy Astro Turf. So they got Astro Turf to leave that sort of terrible highway motel carpeting and to look like real grass, but the problem is, you don’t water it at all, but the problem is it heats up and just burns everybody that steps on it. [laughs] And it’s the dumbest thing ever. It kills me. I just think it’s so ridiculous.

**John:** But where I will… — We don’t have any of the plastic grass. Where I will say friends who’ve put in the plastic grass is where you have a place where grass just can’t grow because it’s too shaded by a tree. That’s actually kind of a great place for plastic grass.

**Craig:** Sure. That’s fine. I buy that. Although, you know, there’s other options there.

**John:** Yeah. There’s shade-living things.

**Craig:** Yeah, there are. There are shade-living things. There are wee people that appreciate the shade. If you give them toadstools they will come. They will come. And they will grant wishes.

**John:** The other good thing about this grass is it seems to be very dog pee sturdy, so your dog can pee all over it and it won’t do weird things. It won’t die.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** That’s a nice thing. Any cool things on your side?

**Craig:** Ah, man, you know, I’m just full of hatred, bro. I’ve got nothing but bile for the world. I felt, this was good though. I like this… — This podcast helped me expel some of it. That Adam. Not Biff, but Adam.

**John:** [laughs] Hey, do you think you’re going to keep your site up and running for perpetuity or would you take it down at some point? Would you restart it?

**Craig:** You know, I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t even know what to do with it because on the one hand I think, oh look, it’s like a weird mausoleum of stuff that happened. And I certainly wrote a lot on it. And there are things on it that weren’t sort of topical. I remember, for instance, I did a piece on just dealing with pressure which was sort of a useful thing.

But I don’t know. What do you think I should do with it?

**John:** That’s a good question. And let’s put that out for the listenership. If you have suggestions for what Craig should do you can do a couple different things. You could leave a comment on this post on the site, but that’s really the worst thing to do.

**Craig:** We don’t like comments.

**John:** My suggestion would be to tweet Craig. He’s @clmazin.

**Craig:** Yeah, @clmazin.

**John:** So tweet Craig and tell him whether he should keep his site up or down or do something different. I’m on Twitter, @johnaugust. Just @johnaugust.

And a few sort of housekeeping notes for the show. A lot of people aren’t aware that we are one of the few podcasts you’re going to find that actually has a full written transcript. A couple days after the podcast airs we post a transcript of the show. So if you go to the actual post at johnaugust.com, there will always be a link to it so you can see it there.

I had lunch with another writer who said, “Oh, I love your podcast. I never listen to it but I read the transcripts.”

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** So bless him.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** And, I should also say that anything that we mention in the podcast, or almost anything we mention on the podcast that seems at all interesting or relevant, there will be a link for it in the show notes. And so the show notes are always at johnaugust.com. You can see things about UC Verde Buffalo Grass and stuff that Craig mentioned. What did you mention this week? What would your show notes be?

**Craig:** A lot of hatred mostly.

**John:** And there will be a link to Craig’s site which may be taken down soon.

**Craig:** Hey, have we mentioned, you know, the thing that we’re gonna do?

**John:** Oh, that thing in Austin?

**Craig:** Yeah. Have we talked about it?

**John:** Yeah, we totally should do that. So, tell them.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, so John and I are both attending the Austin Film Festival or at least the screenwriting conference portion of the Austin Film Festival. You’ve been there many times I assume?

**John:** Four or five at least.

**Craig:** So we’re both longtime participants. Great, great thing. I feel like there are so few things you should ever spend money on, but Austin is great because they really do get an amazing breadth of screenwriters. I mean, last year I was there with Larry Kasden, and Scott Frank, and John Lee Hancock, and Haas and Brandt, and Alec Berg. It was just amazing.

And this year among the other things we’re doing there, John and I are going to be doing a live podcast, live. I mean, not live in the sense that you can listen while we’re doing it, but we will be in a big room full of people doing it. And it should be fun, and raucous, and maybe a little drunk.

**John:** We will have a special guest who I don’t think is quite confirmed yet. But, if we have this special guest I think that would be quite amazing. And it’s been a goal of ours for awhile to try to do a live podcast. And we’ve talked about venues in Los Angeles that we could do it, and we haven’t quite figured that out. So Austin is a good trial run because there’s already a bunch of people who want to hear. People talk about screenwriting.

So, that will be our first trial run. But, I will say if people, listeners, have suggestions for a place here in town that we could do a live show, we’d still definitely be into that. We talked about the Writers Guild Theater. The challenge with the Writers Guild Theater is it’s kind of huge and kind of expensive. So if you have a place that’s not so huge and not so expensive, that could be great. If you have a place that could serve alcohol, that might not be a bad idea either.

So, we’ll still keep that in mind. But I think the Austin Film Festival will be the first live Scriptnotes. So, there will be people in the room. We’ll record it. We’ll put it up just like a normal episode. But there will be people —

**Craig:** And if you are thinking about spending a few hundred bucks to learn from actual screenwriters… — Oh, and I should also add some great producers, too, like Lindsay Doran… — They just get great people there. It’s really worth your while. And it’s in October.

**John:** If you’re going to attend one film festival as a screenwriter, I’d probably go to Austin.

**Craig:** Sounds right to me.

**John:** Sundance is lovely. And you’ll see a lot of movies at Sundance. But the sessions you’ll go to in Austin are probably the most useful for an aspiring screenwriter.

**Craig:** And they do have movies there, too. The Duplass brothers I think premiered a movie there last time. It’s pretty cool. Awesome.

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

**Craig:** John, thank you right back. And I’ll see you next time.

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

**Craig:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

Craig, this weekend I encountered something new for the first time; something kind of amazing and transformative.

**Craig:** Oh, I want to guess, but I’m not gonna.

**John:** Okay. First of all, there were actually two transformative things that happened in the same location.

A TV writer was throwing a Memorial Day party at his house, and he had one of those pools that had like the current in it.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Have you seen these yet?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** Kind of like wave pools.

**John:** It made a normal pool seem impossibly lame.

**Craig:** So the idea is that you swim for exercise and it just keeps pushing you back.

**John:** Yeah. It’s pretty amazing. Or, if you have a bunch of kids there, they will basically get into the current and get thrown all the way back to the back of the pool, which they love. Who would not love that? It’s like sky diving but in a pool.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s pretty awesome.

**John:** But the more relevant thing for our podcast, which is not about swimming-related technology…

So I was talking to a mom and she had a fifth grader, and so I was making sort of the standard parent chit chat that you do, like, “Oh, so what is your fifth grade daughter into?” And she said, “Oh, she’s really into filmmaking.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting. So what kind of stuff does she do? Does she have a camera?”

“Oh, she’s mostly into LPS.” I’m like I have no idea what LPS is. So I ask, I’m a curious person, so I ask what LPS is. LPS stands for Littlest Pet Shop.

**Craig:** Okay?

**John:** Littlest Pet Shop is a serious of collectible figurines, sort of like tiny little bobble-head figurines, little animals, adorable little animals. And so the culture has formed, so you take these little animals and you stage scenes with them, and you film them and you post them on YouTube.

And so I’m thinking okay, but no-no, they are elaborate staging things of like ongoing series or often sort of like verbatim reenactments of TV shows which I was like, “Well this is really fascinating for you to tell me this. I’m going to leave now so I can Google this immediately and discover what this whole phenomenon is.”

So I’ve been looking them up and they are actually kind of amazing and fascinating because it’s this whole subculture of you take these little figurines and you’re making these movies, and it’s not like the Lego — you’ve seen like the stop-motion Lego stuff which is impressive —

**Craig:** Yeah. My son makes those.

**John:** Which is impressive in its own right. But here the culture is not just that… — You’re not doing frame-by-frame; you’re moving the little pieces, the little guys, at the time and your painting your fingernails so they’re really beautiful while you’re manipulating the little bobble-heads for these characters.

**Craig:** What the hell? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. You’re doing very girlie things like, you know, Popular. So, anyway, I was enraptured and amazed that this was happening. And it’s stuff that’s being done mostly on iPhone cameras. What a good time that we live in.

**Craig:** And is it mostly kids doing these things or are there —

**John:** Hopefully it’s mostly kids doing these things.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** But I remember taking a class in college about post-modernism. And we spent the whole semester talking about what is post-modernism. And there in 30 seconds is a definition of this is what post-modernism is. This is taking two culturally not related things and squishing them together in a way that is creating something new in an impossibly weird but kind of fascinating way.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like the whole Brony phenomenon.

**John:** Totally. Bronies.

**Craig:** Right. Which just puzzles me to no end.

**John:** Yeah. Well someone thought of a cool word and it became a meme that expanded beyond that.

**Craig:** It’s so, so weird. It’s so weird.

**John:** Anyway, so I’ll post to the show notes links to some LPS videos. But just YouTube “LPS.” Anyone who’s listening to this not in driving time has probably stopped the podcast to go Google and YouTube some of these videos.

**Craig:** Eh, or they’ve just crashed. Not because they’re distracted, because they just want to die. [laughs] ‘Cause they don’t want to live in a world with this. I will not YouTube these things.

**John:** No. So, I was watching a Littlest Pet Shop CSI episode. [laughs]

**Craig:** Oh man! [laughs]

**John:** And I’m reading the little synopsis for what happens in the episode, and so I thought this would actually be a good topic for our podcast today is plot. Because I was reading the little plot synopsis, and the plot synopsis was like what you read in a TV Guide for like a normal thing. But just reading the plot synopsis you really have no sense that this is being acted out with little tiny bobble-headed animals.

So I wanted to talk about the difference between plot and story, because a lot of times I think they’re used kind of interchangeably and the idea of like — the sense that I have an idea for a story, and here’s the plot of what would happen, well that’s really about maybe 5% of what the actual work of writing and creating an episode of a story is.

And so so much of what we assume is like that’s what happens in the story, well that’s the three-sentence description. That’s the synopsis of what happened in the story, but it’s not the actual work of what writers did.

And what occurred to me is there’s a person who wrote into the site who’s from some foreign country but had terrific English and was pitching this thing that he’d worked on. And it’s a website that’s called PlotWizard.com. And it’s inspired by this book called Plotto by William Wallace Cook. And I didn’t know anything about it until he sort of talked me through it. So, I Googled it more; God bless Google.

Plotto was this book that this guy put together, and there had been other things before it, which were sort of like universal plot bibles. And so it’s one of those ideas where you start a thread and then you can choose any number of options and then you go to Option 46 and then that could feed into these other options, and these other options; and so just by flipping through pages in this book you can create these really elaborate plots for things.

So like the hero discovers that his long-lost brother is still alive and takes a long journey to go find him and there’s these kind of complications. It’s a formula.

**Craig:** Yuck.

**John:** Yes. And so a mathematical reduction of sort of what story is. So this guy who wrote into the site had done sort of a digital version of it. And so I want to read you one of the plots that this computerized version came up with. You ready?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Okay. “While writing a con game, Gilbert meets Corrina, who astutely sees through his scheme. Corrina is also involved in a scam, and Gilbert becomes suspicious. Corrina learns that Gilbert is in serious trouble. In order to help Gilbert escape the law, Corrina seduces the arresting officer, Ronnie. Ronnie pretends to be in love with Corrina, but it’s actually part of his plan to capture both Gilbert and Corrina red-handed. Thinking he’s proposed to Corrina, Gilbert finds that he’s accidentally proposed to Corrina’s twin sister, Carly…”

**Craig:** Oh god!

**John:** “…who accepts. Now the twins both love Gilbert. Gilbert is about to marry Carly who has tricked him into believing that Corrina is unfaithful. Ronnie stops the wedding to arrest the bride and groom. Corrina pretends to be Carly and runs away with Gilbert, now a fugitive from the law.” [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Now what I should stress is that for some reason this little generator has a lot of twins and mistaken identities. And sort of like people pretending to be people that they’re not. But you read through that and it’s like, well, that could be a plot to something.

**Craig:** [laughs] No it can’t. No, I mean, that really is the definition of a dead thing. You know? I mean, it could be the plot of a soap opera, I guess.

**John:** It could be the plot of soap opera. But here’s what it is: that could be the formulaic reduction of sort of what happened in it, but it doesn’t tell you sort of how it happens. And so I want to talk about the difference here because I think a lot of times people say, “Well I have a good idea for a story; like this happens, and this happens, and this happens, and this happens, and this happens.”

But the actual work of screenwriting, of telling a story in fiction or in screenwriting, is figuring out how it happens. Not the what, but the how. And so all of those how questions are what you end up staring at the giant whiteboard and figuring out, well, who knows this piece of information and what would be the scene or the moment were they learn this thing, and how is this thing going to happen?

So, looking at this description, like: Corrina learns that Gilbert is in serious trouble. In order to escape the law, Corrina seduces the arresting officer Ronnie. Well, what does that mean? What is seducing the arresting officer Ronnie mean? Is that a scene? Is that an entire episode of an ongoing series? Is that the whole movie? That’s the difference in the work of what is plot, which to me is the distillation down of this is what happens in the story, and the actual work we’re doing.

**Craig:** Well, when you go through a plot like that you get a lot of “what” questions, like — what happens? This woman seduces a man to save a guy to do a thing. So, what happens next is what bad writers are constantly asking: what happens next? And I think good writers are always asking: why should this happen next? [laughs]

Because, when we tell stories, we are always telling them about human beings. Always. Even when we’re telling them about animated rabbits and fish. And what we care about, the whole point of plots existing in the first place, is to enthrall us in the lives of people who are interesting to us. Their problems are interesting to us. Therefore the things that happen to them must be interesting to us. So, the question that I think good writers should always be asking about plot is “why.” Otherwise you end up with what Aristotle astutely called, thousands of years ago, an episodic story which is, in his words, the worst story. [laughs] And it is.

There’s no purpose. There’s no unity. There’s no theme. There’s no character. So I always urge people to just think “why.” If you want her to seduce this guy — why? Why not just come up with an easier way that doesn’t involve that?

**John:** Well you need to ask why not from the perspective of the author, of what you need, but why from the perspective of the character who’s making the choice. And why is that the right choice for her to be making.

Now, ideally, the right choice for her to be making is also the most interesting choice for your audience to see. That become the weird balancing act of telling fiction is figuring out how to let your fictional characters make choices that are going to be the most rewarding for your audience to see.

Bad writing, it’s true, oftentimes you’ll have the episodic things where you also feel like you have plot robots who are just people who are being dragged through a plot. The other extreme, which can also be a very bad extreme, is you have characters who have so much control of the story that they’re just going to wander off and do whatever they’re going to do and it may not be very interesting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The challenge is corralling those two competing forces into finding what is the most interesting thing this character could do that is also very consistent with what the character would want to do in this moment.

**Craig:** That’s a great way of saying it.

**John:** Your struggle as a writer is to find, to create the situations that both of those things are going to be the same.

**Craig:** Yeah. The way of thinking about that dichotomy is you need to know what must happen. The characters can’t know what must happen. That’s where the fun happens, right? You know that these two people must go from where they are now in this particular circumstantial state to this next circumstantial state, but they can’t know.

You have to actually make it — you have to make them blind. It has to be surprising to them. You know, sometimes you’ll hear these terms, like “reversals.” They’re not really reversals because everything is on a straight line in its own way. The straight line is the one you’ve drawn. It’s just that the characters can’t see it. So send them off perpendicular to that straight line. Make it hard for them to get to A to B. Make B meaningful so that when they get there it suddenly changes or recontextualizes things for them which makes the next milestone even trickier to get to.

You need to know your plot, but your characters should never know it. And I think that’s what you’re touching on when you say that these characters are in control of the story.

**John:** When I was in journalism school we were taught pyramid structure and the journalistic questions, which are who, when, why, what, how. So, you’re trying to answer those questions in a news story. And so the what questions are really these plot questions, like, well what happens? Where it happens is setting. When it happens is also setting and weirdly it is sort of structure; structure is an answer to the question of when are characters going to find out this information and when are they going to choose to do these things. When in the course of this movie are you going to place things.

But it really comes down to the “who” questions and the “why” questions. Who are these characters and why are they doing what they’re doing. And ultimately this will hopefully answer why we as an audience should care about them.

When you see stories that tend to fall apart in their second act, which is basically after all the exciting stuff in the beginning has happened, it’s because you didn’t really know who those characters were and you really weren’t invested in whatever the specific journey of the story is that they were trying to set up.

**Craig:** That’s right. You don’t know where you’re going. It’s funny, I had a discussion with my 10-year-old son tonight because he has to write these little Cinderella stories for class. So, you can write any kind of story you want as long as it vaguely fits into a Cinderella paradigm. And he had written sort of two-thirds of a story. And then in the first part — it’s very my-son — in the first part a little girl lives with her dad in the woods and his robot wife, but he has grown tired of his robot wife and wants a real wife.

Okay. Act one is concluded upon his journey to town to find a real wife. Act two begins when he comes home with the real wife. He’s found a real wife, and she has two sons, and they’re terribly mean to our heroine and they beat her up and they give her abrasions, which is a word he learned yesterday so of course it must be employed in the story today. [laughs] “And they give her abrasions.”

And so he had gotten that far and I said, okay great, what happens next? And he said, “Uh…I don’t know yet. I haven’t written that part yet.” And I said, “You know, the thing is you kind of need to know where you’re going or just the ending is not going to relate to the beginning.” And he asked me to sort of give him an example which I think was partly his sneaky way of having me do it for him.

But, in the hopes that this would have some instructional value I said, okay, well, you have this interesting element of the robot wife that has seemingly been forgotten. So, you know, it’s a Cinderella story and in Cinderella stories there are fairy godmothers. Maybe the castoff robot wife is actually a fairy godmother or fairy god-robot. And she can help your hero girl somehow get one over on these terrible boys. And then maybe she can turn them into robots and maybe then the little girl, they ask for forgiveness, for mercy, and the little girl asks the fairy god-robot to turn them back into humans and then they show her mercy by being nice to her and they all live happily ever after.

And you see how in the stuff that you put there in the beginning, that’s there on purpose because that’s what the ending is all about. And he went, “Ah! Oh, that’s interesting.” And the funny thing is I read scripts from not-10-year-olds that make the same mistake.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Where you’ve got this wonderful little concoction you’ve built for yourself because you really love your idea. And your idea is good enough to start writing. The problem is your idea has no relation to anything of value at the end. Beginnings are wonderful things. I love beginnings. I spend more time writing the first 20 pages than I do the rest of the movie. But they only exist because they are there — they are the ball being thrown up in the air and you have to know where you want it to land. And it has to land somewhere that matters, that has some kind of import for the audience.

So, to me, plot is a function of where you want to end. And I think so many people start with where they want to begin.

**John:** A few weeks ago I linked to Old Jews Telling Jokes, and part of the reason why I wanted to bring that up is what is so crucial about a joke, and if you hear a kid try to tell a joke you will realize why this skill is so important to master, is a joke is about where you’re going to end up. A joke is about that punch line. And if you haven’t carefully walked everyone through the process of the joke to get to that punch line, the punch line is not going to be funny.

And when you see a young kid try to tell a joke, they will say a bunch of stuff and then they’ll say like “poopy” at the end.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And every once and awhile it’s hilarious.

**Craig:** That’s a really good joke actually. [laughs]

**John:** But most of the time that’s going to be — or they’ll say, “On your eyeball,” or just something gross — and it’s like, well, that’s actually not what a joke is. And working on various movies that are weepy, I would say that the same thing happens with emotional things. You have to have an emotional journey that gets you to that point where you’re ready to feel that emotion. And being aware of the fact that each moment along that journey needs to be rewarding in its own right, but needs to be able to take you to that place.

Now that sounds very much like here’s the author forcing these moments to exist to be that way so he can get to that last payoff, but no, you actually have to be able to somehow do both. And that’s the judo of it is that you have to have your characters feel like they’re driving those moments so that they’re naturally arriving at those moments all the way along the way. And it’s going to take you to that final place that you want to get to. And that can be a huge challenge.

The thing I’m working on right now I had sort of that thing where you lie in bed and I was trying to loop the scene, and trying to figure out how I was going to get this… — It’s a really simple kind of transition. I need to get this character from one sort of fantastical world to another fantastical world and make it a natural sort of seeming thing. And I was really struggling to figure out what is the mechanism, how is it going to work, and it wasn’t until I really sat down with the script and sort of went through some other scenes and really figured out what was going to lead up to, it was like, oh, I was trying to write that moment as if it was a first act moment, but this is a very late second act moment.

I don’t want to spend the shoe leather to make this big magical journey between these two places. As an audience I don’t want to learn something great and new about this world. I just want to get to the next thing. And that’s another crucial part of storytelling that it’s going to be lost in sort of this plot bot, like it’s not telling you where the real heart and time and work of the movie is. Is one of the sentences a scene, or is one of these sentences just an off-hand comment that somebody makes to somebody? That’s the real work of writing.

**Craig:** You know, we can talk about all sorts of little rules and tricks and things, but ultimately 98% of this is your instinct for things. Some stories deserve to be told microscopically, others deserve to be told macroscopically. Just like when you’re on Google Maps you can see a street or you can see a country. And there are movies that will take people over the course of ten years. There are movies that take place over one night.

The movies that take place over one night contain these micro-moments. I mean, Go contains micro-moments that expand and are hugely important, and then the night is over and dawn happens. The Hangover movies, the same way; you’re compressing a lot of stuff into small things, small temporal things, so you make bigger deals out of little moves.

But then there are other movies, you could tell a road trip movie over the course of six months. You could tell an epic over the course of five years, people are aging. You need to have some sense of your scale before you start writing because your script will either be 12-pages or 1,000 if you don’t have that internal metronome.

**John:** You look at either of the two Hangover movies. If the storytelling purpose of those characters was “we’ve had a very long and difficult marriage but we’ve had a great marriage,” all of the events of The Hangover could basically be summarized in a jump cut, like you know, “we lost him and then we found him again.” All of that stuff would be sort of eclipsed if you’re telling the person’s larger life.

Like Big Fish is a story of huge ellipses being put in a person’s life. Impossible things happen, but you just past them. You look at a moment but you don’t look at the whole thing. Even Spectre, which is a larger section of Big Fish, where he goes to the fantastical town, there’s clearly a lot left out of there. It’s clearly here-are-the-highlights-of-what-happens. His growing up in Ashton is just the highlights, versus Go and Hangover which is like zooming in on a very tight focus on things.

And that’s what I was really facing in the script that I’m writing right now is that I was doing some of the really close-up detail work, and I was trying to do the close-up detail work, and I was like, oh, this is not a close-up detail moment; this is a cut-to-the-next-thing. This is in Indiana Jones, like the-plane-flies-over-the-map kind of moment. And I was trying to build out the whole scene. Well, the movie doesn’t want that scene right there. The movie wants to get to the next thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to know your scale. You have to know your scale. And by the way, scale in and of itself is a dramatic tool, because sweeping movies tend to play well into our sense of mortality because they cover ground — people age, they grow old, they die, there’s a sense of loss, there’s that kind of weird existential whatever it is that is transmitted to you by a movie in which time passes and lives change.

Because we all feel that in movies that sort of take that point of view, whether they work or not, are designed to make us confront our own mortality and our relationship with time as it slips past us. These movies when you do a small scale movie it’s about tension and panic and anxiety, and maybe more important than that, those moments where you make the wrong or right choice that will change everything afterwards.

And the funny thing is those movies, movies like Go and Hangover are movies in which you get the sense that at the end your life is fine after that. You had a night where you could have gone to hell, or you could have set it straight and liberated yourself, and you managed to liberate yourself, and everything’s going to be fine afterwards, until the sequel. [laughs]

But, the grand scale movies are more ethereal. There’s a wistful sense to those. You have to understand what you’re trying to achieve with the audience and let that feed back into the tone you’re selecting and the scale you’re selecting, because plot will impart tone.

**John:** So, let us take a bit of a digression, but let’s talk scale and tone and sort of pacing and timing. Are you caught up on Game of Thrones?

**Craig:** Yeah. What a great episode.

**John:** That was a great episode.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Small spoiler warning, but not really a huge spoiler warning. I think we can talk about this without ruining anything great about Game of Thrones. This last night’s episode was a very epic battle that took place at an important city. And unlike most episodes, most episodes of the show are following many plot lines, and especially in the second season they are following many, many plot lines. And this episode chose not to do that and was just focusing on this one battle, and so it really changed the scale of what you expect from Game of Thrones, because Game of Thrones things seem like they could be taking place over months and months and months, and this took place over one 12-hour period.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it was terrific for that. And I just have no idea how they did it on the budget they did it; it was just remarkably well done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It addressed or sort of brought up a question I had about this season. Again, I don’t think I’m spoiling anything hugely for this, but if you really don’t want to know anything about Game of Thrones stick your fingers in your ears and go yeah-yeah-yeah for about 10 seconds.

The plot line in Qarth with the missing dragons was a weird thing that happened this season in that it was one of the few times in the show where I felt them sort of tap dancing and stalling for a bit, because the dragons are missing and we see they’re in this tower. We see the shot of the towers. Well, we know we need to get to that tower, but we can’t get to the tower right now because there’s clearly other stuff that has to happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so when you go back to revisit that plot line — I think in two different episodes they may have revisited she wants to find her dragons, she wants to find her dragons. Well, we want to find her dragons, too; like, don’t show us the scene of two people talking about wanting to find the dragons. Find the dragons.

**Craig:** It’s funny. I don’t even know why we want to find the dragons. [laughs] I have a whole big issue with the dragon plot line because I’m still waiting for sort of, like — okay, I understand the dragons will one day grow up and then they’ll lay waste to anything, or not. I mean, you’re in the middle of a desert.

That, you know it’s a funny thing…

**John:** Okay, so I need to preface this by saying I think the show is brilliant.

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

**John:** What David and D. B. have done is remarkable. And so of the few things that sort of blipped for me is — and Lost had similar problems, too — sometimes where things would get out of sync with each other — and True Blood has had it too, where the plot lines just aren’t syncing quite right. And this felt like one of those situations.

**Craig:** Well, I will say that I think that the material that they were drawing from for this season, it seemed to bottom out a little bit in the middle. And, look, they’re drawing off of… — The George Martin books are so intricately plotted; you can’t exactly just go, “Well you know, let’s vamp and do some other stuff now.” And it’s not like Lost where you’re writing a show and you can just sort of, “Okay, well what are we writing? It’s us.”

So, I think they did a very good job with what they had there. It seemed like this story had some circular motion to it. But boy did it pay off in spades. I mean, Sunday’s episode was one of those episodes where you go, “Okay, I’m glad I ate my broccoli, I got to here. It’s awesome. I wouldn’t have gotten here if I hadn’t eaten the broccoli.” It had so many great lines. It was one of those, you get to a line and you go, “Oh, that’s the line of the show.” And then five minutes later you go, “Oh, no, that’s the line of the show.” And they did it like four more times.

Can I also say something about, I mean not to derail us from plot, but Dan and David did something with the show that people don’t appreciate enough because it’s invisible, and that’s casting. And I know we’re talking about plot, but forgive me. Casting is something that the audience never notices because it’s inevitable to them. There’s only one cast. They never look at auditions. They never will nor should they.

And it’s not like drafts of a script, because drafts of a script are related and they are progressive, and it might be interesting to sort of dig through them like Troy and see how levels led to levels led to the final product. But casting is either it was going to be this guy or this guy. Great casting here.

**John:** And sometimes it was one guy and they recast.

**Craig:** Occasionally. And they did on the show. They recast a couple of key parts on the show after the pilot. But, there are… — I mean, how many characters are on the show that you keep track of? 40? I’m just guessing off-hand.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Not only would I say are they all cast well. I would say the vast majority are cast great, where they just nailed the casting. And think about, if you blow casting on a successful TV show on one little character like that, you’re stuck with that person for the run. You can’t change Theon in the middle of the show. It ain’t gonna work.

They did such an amazing job of casting this show. My hats off to those guys. It’s just unreal.

**John:** So circle back around to plot, talking about casting. The actress who plays Daenerys, who is looking for her dragons, she wasn’t my favorite right out of the gate. I’ll be honest, she wasn’t. And then she ended up stepping up and she was terrific once they sort of found her second life in that.

I fell like this second season these last couple episodes might have been stronger if they just took her scenes out rather that sort of like reminding us 40 minutes into the show we’re going to have one scene with her looking for her dragons. Let’s just not see her this week, because I feel like the episodes where they don’t go to see any other castle at all, those could be fine, too. It’s really the struggle, and I feel like we’re in a new art form right now, and it’s not really clear what the best practices are sometimes because these elaborately multi-plot-lined epic dramas, there’s maybe 10 years worth of history on these, and it’s still not clear what the best way to do these are.

**Craig:** Right. And they are, I think, very respectable… — Sorry. They’re very respectful of the source material. And I think they want to do right by… — I mean, there’s a huge fan base for the books themselves. And, look, they’ve had success smartly not doing the Hollywood thing of kicking the book out the door and saying, “We know better.”

Sometimes, you know, you might end up with a few episodes where she’s wandering around Qarth and we at home are sort of thinking, “Oh no, more Qarth.” But I have a feeling something sick and awesome is coming there too.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m just saying whatever sick and awesome is coming in Qarth, I would have been just as delighted to see it if I hadn’t seen the other Qarth first. Or in just like the Previously On could have taken care of it. And I didn’t need a placeholder scene.

**Craig:** Well, you know, and it’s funny because the show has, again, because of the casting. Hold on, sorry. [sirens blaring] And I thought it was going to be okay because we’re doing this kind of late at night, and then I realized, oh no, it will probably be worse with the sirens.

There are certain characters in the show that are so good. [more sirens]. Are you kidding? [laughs]

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And they’re so good. And they’re so much fun. Like I would watch — obviously I would watch Tyrion just eat lunch.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would watch him and Bronn. Bronn, right? That’s his sellsword.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I could just watch them talk about anything. I don’t care. I would take that over a Qarth scene. But I get it. It’s like, okay, you know. And then there were scenes where I thought, “Oh, I don’t know, is this that interesting with John Snow and that lady?” And then it got awesome, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I feel like…and you know what it is? I feel like Dan and Dave have done such a good job of taking care of me that even when I go, “Eh, another Qarth scene?” I think, they’re doing this for a reason. I gotta believe it’s going to be worth it, you know? I gotta believe it.

**John:** I have faith.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’ve taken really good care of the viewer. So, good for them.

**John:** And let us take good care of viewers and leave them with a shorter episode tonight, because it’s actually quite late as we’re recording this.

I do have a Cool Thing, and you have a Cool Thing, too. Do you want to do yours first? Or should I do mine first?

**Craig:** It’s entirely up to you. What do you think?

**John:** Do yours first.

**Craig:** Okay. Well my Cool Thing, boy, okay. So look. Listen up, people. If you are a listener who has been bemoaning the fact that you can’t get your script read, I’m about to give you the opportunity of a lifetime.

So, there’s this cool writer out there, and now I don’t have his name in front of me. [laughs] His name is Joe. You will have the appropriate link, won’t you John?

**John:** Of course I will, yes. Stuart will put it up.

**Craig:** He was the 2008, I think, Nicholl finalist. And he does this thing with a guy named Daniel Vang who works at Benderspink which is a pretty big management firm here in Hollywood, California, where they run a charity thing. This is the second time they’ve done it to raise money for the American Heart Association. And last year they raised over $8,000 to fight heart disease and stroke, and that’s great, but obviously now that we’re promoting this it’s going to be much, much, much, much more. And here’s why:

If you donate $25 through, and we’ll give you a link to their Kintera money-raising site. Daniel Vang of Benderspink will read the first ten pages of your feature film script or television pilot. If you donate $50, he guarantees he will read the first 50 pages of your work. And I’ve got to say, Daniel, you are awesome for that. Because 50 pages of bad screenplay is pretty rough to read.

If you donate $100 he guarantees he read the entire thing.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Guarantees he will read the entire thing. Now here’s what’s interesting about this: last year, and this wasn’t that big of a deal because last year, like I said, they raised $8,000, two writers who donated wound up gaining representation. That’s pretty impressive.

**John:** That is impressive.

**Craig:** So, the deal is if you donate between $25 and $100, you have a guy at a real management company that really represents real writers reading your script, either 10, 50, or all of it. If it were me, I’d go for the $100 personally.

So, we’re going to give you a link and basically you go, you make the donation, you get in contact with Joe. He will coordinate the submissions to Daniel, and your stuff will get read. Come on, people. And it’s just…save hearts.

**John:** Yeah. That’s the thing I’d come back to. The worst that’s going to happen is you’re going to donate some money to stop heart disease and stroke.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** That’s not such a bad thing.

**Craig:** Oh, no, this is to actually increase heart disease and stroke.

**John:** Oh, g’oh! I knew there was a catch.

**Craig:** I should have read this carefully. Well, you should still do it.

**John:** [laughs] Still do it. It might be good for your career, so you should still do it.

**Craig:** Now it’s incredibly selfish. No, I mean, it’s an awesome thing they’re doing and if you don’t take advantage of it, honestly you’re dumb. You’re just a dummy. What’s your Cool Thing this week?

**John:** My Cool Thing is much less for the good of the people, but more for the good of the individual. So, you know you have these club cards at grocery stores, or like Sam’s Club, or like Barnes & Noble — you have little card you’re supposed to carry around?

**Craig:** Right. The brand loyalty cards.

**John:** Brand loyalty cards. And so you can also give them your phone number, you can punch in your phone number or your email address, and it’s just such a hassle. And so I would have some of them in my wallet, but like you have an individual card for each. So my really incredibly smart husband figured out there’s place, a site called KeyRingThing.com.

What you do is you type in all of your code numbers for those things and it sends you a card with all of those barcodes on it. So you have one card that has all of your barcodes on it, and it’s labeled.

**Craig:** No way? Cool.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s actually kind of magic. So I use it all the time. I used it at Ralphs today. And every time I hand it to a cashier they’re like, “This actually works?” I’m like, yeah, it totally works. Scan it. And it totally works.

**Craig:** Wait, I just type in my phone number.

**John:** You can type in your phone number but your punching your phone number every time on those machines. This, you’re just handing them the card and it zips and the barcode scans.

**Craig:** You’re right. And you know what kills me? I go to CVS a lot to just buy sundries, and I don’t have a CVS card. And they say, “Do you want a CVS card?” And I think, no! And I honestly believe…

**John:** Yeah. It’s cost you hundreds of dollars.

**Craig:** Because when you go to Ralphs sometimes you punch in your number and it’s like, whatever, the $80 bill is now $0.14.

**John:** Yeah. If you’re at a grocery store you absolutely have to do it. When I was in New York for those four weeks I would walk by this grocery store every day and that became the place where I’d get my groceries every day. And so the first couple times I was like, “Oh, no, I don’t have a club card.” And I was like, “Yeah, I basically live in New York right now. Give me a club card.”

And so I took the two minutes to do it and everything was much, much cheaper.

**Craig:** Much cheaper.

**John:** So this is a good solution for just not having to carry those 8 cards in your wallet, or not having to punch in your phone number every time. You just have this one thing. It takes you five minutes, you get it done. There’s no kickbacks or anything; I just think it’s a good idea.

**Craig:** It’s the 1Password of brand loyalty bar scan.

**John:** It’s the 1Password of brand loyalty.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** See, I may be the person who brings information but you’re the one who codifies it in a way that people can carry it home with them.

**Craig:** I like to organize and categorize.

**John:** I like it. You are the librarian. The curator of this.

**Craig:** Hey.

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

**Craig:** John, this was a good one, and blissfully short.

**John:** I like short. Enjoy. I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** You got it. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/20-questions-with-john-and-craig).

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

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

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

**Craig:** Fantastic, John. Lovely day today here in Southern California, at least where I am in Southern California.

**John:** Ah, location is everything. You are ensconced there in highly defensible La Cañada Flintridge area.

**Craig:** Well right now I’m in Pasadena, but yes, when I go home then I go to the highly defensible La Cañada Flintridge area where, as I pointed out to somebody just a day ago, I can flee into the mountains and disappear within minutes.

**John:** It’s a perfect choice for you there.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** One of the plan ahead things we didn’t actually do for this podcast is figure out how we’re going to answer all the questions that came in. Because they kept coming in, but then I was in New York and I wasn’t really checking questions, and then we started talking about other things. And so, so many questions have backed up.

**Craig:** How many questions are we talking about?

**John:** A lot. So we’ll see how many we can get through today.

**Craig:** Can you make sure that at least one of them makes me angry? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I can guarantee it.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m so excited!

**John:** Woo-hoo! We’ll start with some easy follow-up ones. Micah has a follow-up question. “In episode 36 John talked about timers and how they fit into his workflow.” He says, “I’ve recently found timed writing in breaks to be quite helpful, and I’m experimenting with 10, 15, 20, 25 minute intervals, like the Pomodoro Technique,” which I’d never heard of, but I’ll link to it. It’s basically just setting a timer.

“I know it comes down to more of a personal preference kind of thing, but could you give us a breakdown on your typical work/break intervals? What’s your sweet spot?”

I have found that 20 minutes is about my sweet spot. So I’ll sit for 20 minutes, I know I can get through 20 minutes. If I’m doing really well I’ll sometimes just keep on writing, but 20 minutes is the minimum I’ll try to do. Like 10 minutes, I’m not really getting started on anything. 20 minutes I’ve at least gotten something done I find.

**Craig:** How structured of you.

**John:** Ah, I’m not always that structured, but it’s good. And Jane Espenson, whose name we often cite on this podcast, she has a thing called a Writing Sprint, which is like a 30-minute writing sprint. She’ll announce it on Twitter, like, “I’m doing a 30-minite writing sprint, everyone come join me; 30 minutes, no interruptions, just get stuff done.” And if that works for you, that’s great. That’s really the same idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s more my thing. I just sort of finally just go nuts.

**John:** Here’s a question that’s really tailored to Craig Mazin. David asks…

**Craig:** I hope this is the one that makes me angry. [laughs]

**John:** No, it’s gonna make you delighted. David asks, “What’s the best way to break up with my manager?”

**Craig:** [laughs] I love this question!

**John:** “Should I wait until I have a new one first, or just do it? I understand Mr. Mazin is an expert in this field. I’d love some advice, and a new manager.”

**Craig:** I don’t know if I’m an expert in the field. I have often spoken of my joy of firing people. So, if you have an agent, and this person does not indicate, then you don’t need another manager at all, frankly. But if you like having a manager then, no; just fire your manager and then if you want another manager have your agent help you sit down and audition some new ones.

If you don’t have an agent and you only have a manager, then I guess I would probably then say, okay, let’s talk to your attorney. Because if your attorney works in the business, they also deal with managers all the time. And maybe they could sort of at least suss out that there might be some interest in you as a client.

But, I guess my larger point is this: if you want to fire your manager, you should fire your manager. Because having a bad manager that you want to fire isn’t doing you any good. It’s doing you less good than not having a manager, frankly, in my opinion. So, fire away. Fire at will.

**John:** I agree. See, they’re not controversial at all. I think he should fire his manager.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fire. Fire. Fire!

**John:** Zach asks, “When writing out of order,” this is really I guess more for me, “when writing out of order, how do you organize your saved files? Do you just save them as brief scene descriptions and throw them all in a folder? Is there some more organized technique to it?”

I just throw them in a folder with a very simple name. So, usually if I’m writing stuff out of order, it’s early in the process. So, rather than working in one big file I’m just writing individual scenes. I’m usually hand-writing those and Stuart, or my assistant at the time, is typing them up. I will name what that scene is. And so it will say Bank Robbery. And so at the top of every page I just write Bank Robbery and Stuart knows to save that file as Bank Robbery. And it just sits in a folder.

I will avoid pasting all of those individual little files together for as long as I can stand to, so I don’t try to edit the whole thing for a long time — I build up a critical mass. And eventually I’ll go through, and it’s actually a really joyous day to put all those little pieces together and see what’s there like, ah, there’s my new script.

**Craig:** [sings] Oh happy day.

**John:** Sunshine happy days.

**Craig:** [sings] Oh happy day. I just love the idea that it was joy. That you’re putting your files together and it’s like Christmas for you and there I am like a jerk with one file.

**John:** Just one file.

**Craig:** One file. The whole time.

**John:** It’s kind of sad. The one thing I will say is that recently I had to go back through and look for my handwritten versions of things, and one of the nice things as technology has progressed is I used to handwrite these things and fax them to my assistant. And like there wasn’t — there was like a paper copy of the fax, but it wasn’t especially useful. And I would keep them in my notebooks, but I was like, “Why am I keeping this?”

Now, because I’m either taking photos of it and sending it through, or I would be faxing it to a sort of online account, there’s like a digital copy of all those handwritten things. So if I need to refer back to something, or in this case there’s a book that’s gonna show sort of my writing process on something, and I can show, “Oh, these are my handwritten scribbled pages for this movie from years ago.”

**Craig:** Everything is saved.

**John:** Everything is saved.

**Craig:** Everything. We live in a world now where nothing is ever lost.

**John:** Question for Craig Mazin, I think. “Quick serious question: Why join the WGA? This is not a joke question. I’ve recently joined” — this is Tom who’s writing this — “I’ve recently joined the WGA, or actually was forced to join after selling a feature script.”

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Yes. “And don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to have a band of writers watching out for one another. In general, writers are the world’s biggest pussies when it comes to defending themselves.”

**Craig:** Mm, yeah, that’s right.

**John:** Yeah. “But my question is much more basic than that. What’s in it for me? The welcome packet I got from them was a piece of hilarious corporate nonsense put together by lawyers. Literally the cover letter said something to the effect of, ‘We can’t keep you from unjoining the WGA, but just so you know if you withdraw from us you can’t ever join again. Ever.’ That was the welcome letter from a group of people who write for a living.

“My point is that, A) the WGA does a terrible job at expressing in clear language why I should want to be a member of their club, and B) does a terrible job of creating my sense of esprit de corps. So, could you and Craig talk about what being a member of the WGA does for the individual writer? I get what it does for the collective, but unclear what it does for the individual.”

**Craig:** Oh boy. Well, first of all, I sympathize with this person because we think of ourselves as living in a free country, and we think of ourselves as being in control of certain things. And even if things get super bad you can always pull a rip cord and bail out. If you work at a job and you hate it, you can quit. And if you don’t like the town you live in, you can move to another town.

The Writers Guild isn’t like that. [laughs] The Writers Guild is a very — and unions in general — are the strange carved-out exception where in fact, presuming you live in California or other non-right to work states as they’re called, closed shop states, you have to join the union. You have no choice.

What they’re talking about when they say you can withdraw is something called financial core. And very quickly basically a court ruled at some point or another that even in closed shop states a worker can essentially withdraw from the union and be only forced to pay the amount of dues that are used for the “financial core of the union’s activity,” which all unions basically extrapolate out to be about 95% of what your normal dues rate is.

So, if you go “financial core” and withdraw, here’s what you get: a 5% discount on your dues; you’re not allowed to vote on anything anymore, but you still have to work under the contract of the union. It is the worst exit door ever. [laughs] It’s not really an exit at all. In short, you’re in the union. So, the first answer to your question is: everything I’m about to tell you is irrelevant because you have no choice.

Now, I will tell you all of the things that are irrelevant. What’s good about being in the union? When you say I understand that there’s something good for the collective, but what’s good for the individual, ultimately they are one in the same when it comes to a union. The whole point is that the collective gets you things that you could not have gotten on your own. There are certain things in place that you would not get on your own. Those are very specifically: minimum salary for your work, credit protection for your work, residuals for your work, healthcare for your employment, and pension for your employment. Those are the big ones.

And, frankly, there’s little else the union can and will do for you. All those things that I just mentioned they already did for you, and people struck for those things so that you could have them which is nice. And essentially on a moving forward basis, the union’s job is to make sure that they don’t take those things away. That’s it. That’s the big deal.

There is not much else to it. There’s not much else to say. Look, I would much rather be in a club that I had a choice to be in, and if I had a choice, if I were given the choice, I would still stay in the Writers Guild because I believe that I am a direct beneficiary of the strength of the collective, as ridiculous and stupid as the collective occasionally is. But I would that it be a choice, sure. What can I say?

**John:** Let’s talk for a second about that letter, because I don’t see the actual letter in front of me, but he’s describing this letter being really off-putting. And I would say it’s a common experience or has been a common experience that, well, you’re suddenly kind of forced to join this thing and you don’t really know what it is that you’re joining. And you might say, “Great, I’m in the WGA — I don’t know what that actually means.”

Ian Deitchman who’s a friend and colleague of ours has been trying to get the WGA to do a better job with new member training and basically saying, “Hey, you’re now in the WGA. This is what it means. Come to a workshop that will actually be helpful to you so you know what’s in your contract, what some best practices are.”

They’re putting together groups — I’m mentoring one of these groups; I think you’re mention one of these groups, too — of the new writers who can come to you for advice on the stuff that’s coming up in daily life as a working writer. I think they’re trying to do better, but if this letter that came with your packet was awful, then that’s not better.

**Craig:** Yeah. The problem is that the Writers Guild as a union with a federal charter is beholden to quite a phonebook of legislation and regulation. And one of the regulations involves this financial core thing where basically the company side of things when they lobby the government, and this is all run by the government, they say, “Look, when people join these unions, these unions aren’t telling them that they actually have a choice between joining the union or becoming a ‘financial core non-member.'”

Why would the companies have an interest in you being a non-member even if you’re still beholden to the contract? Because I left off one other, I guess you could call it a benefit — if there’s a strike and you are a financial core withdrawn non-member, you can keep working. And they love that; obviously the companies love that idea.

So, the companies sort of said from a legal point of view, “Listen, when any union pulls somebody in and says you must join the union now, you must pay these fees, and you must pay dues,” and blah, blah, blah, the union is also required to let them know that there is this other option. So, unions tend to do that in the most dissuasive, creepy way possible, you know. “Oh, and we also have fish for dinner. It’s pretty stinky fish. And we also must tell you that fish with a certain odor can cause paralysis or death, but it is your option if you so desire.”

So, that’s why you get that awful, awful letter. Frankly, they should really just be really honest about it say, “Look, we’re forced by the government to tell you this.” But, you know, lawyers.

**John:** Lawyers. It feels like the WGA needs to do a better job with like a giant box of chocolates saying, “Hey congratulations, you’re in the WGA,” And then maybe a little bit further down the packet is like, “…by the way, here’s the required disclosure.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, John, the WGA is — and I really do believe that in the face of zero competition no sort of energy or positivity can ever survive. There’s something about having a monopoly that just kills the human spirit.

There is no other Writers Guild. This is the only one you can join. They have no competition. You can’t go anywhere else. Even if you leave you can’t go anywhere else. And I think that the institution suffers like all monopolies from a kind of shrugging, “Uh-ha, well, you know, there’s really no incentive for us to do better.”

**John:** Are there any unions or guilds that actually have competition?

**Craig:** No. The union jurisdiction is carved out, it’s essentially when you get your charter, you get your jurisdiction assigned by the federal government which recognizes that you are now a certified bargaining entity for a particular jurisdiction. So, that’s why, for instance, when we went after the editors for reality TV, when we tried to bring editors into the Writers Guild it was doomed from the start, because IATSE has editors. That’s it. So game over.

I don’t know what we were doing.

**John:** Yeah. So, to clarify, a person can be a member of multiple unions, but only for different facets of their career?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** So I can be a member of the DGA and a member of the WGA, but that’s because one’s directors and one’s writers.

**Craig:** That’s right. So if you write and direct a film, you’re writing will be covered by the WGA; your directing will be covered by the DGA. If you act in the film than you’re covered by SAG. But, no other union covers screenwriting for television or film that I know of. We’re the only one. And we will be the only one for these companies.

**John:** A question from Lance, also kind of pitched toward you. “In the Done Deal forum, Craig posted,” and we’ll put a link to the actual post. “In the Done Deal forum, Craig posted the following in response to the usual intense debates on whether aspiring screenwriters should follow the so-called guru’s advice and lingo such ‘inciting incident,’ ‘plot point 2,’ ‘all is lost,’ etc.”

Craig apparently said, “‘You don’t think every single piece of crap I get sent to rewrite has ‘plot point 2’ in it? You don’t think they all have a ‘low point’ and a ‘refusal of the call’ and a hundred other tropes? These things are tools, not solutions. I will tell you this: if you talk about screenwriting to producers, actors, directors or executives the way some of you talk about it in here, you will get laughed out of the room.’

“This made me itch to a fly on the wall in those meetings. I was wondering if Craig and you could talk about the real lingo pros use in story meetings as opposed to the lingo that would get us slapped out of the room.”

**Craig:** Ah, we don’t use lingo. [laughs] There’s the answer. Forget the lingo. I mean, good God, it’s like my son is on a tournament baseball team, and the 10-year-old boys are so into the uniforms and the numbers and stuff. And I get it, but there’s a certain juvenile aspect to the trappings of stuff. Who cares what the lingo is? It doesn’t matter. If you’ve written a terrific script, if you have a great insight into a character or a moment in a story, or a theme, or the way something should develop, or just a simple idea for how to do a better car chase, that will come through. That’s what matters.

Not nonsense about pinch points and page act blah-blah-blah. I don’t use lingo. I don’t think I ever use lingo. Do you use it?

**John:** I don’t use it. I was thinking back through what I would actually say in a meeting if I’m pitching something or talking about changes to something. I will say Act 1 or Act 2.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Everyone sort of does talk that way. Everyone talks about movies having three acts. It really means beginning, middle and end.

**Craig:** Right

**John:** You’re saying something happens at the end of Act 2, people understand that that means near the end and they may have some sense of it’s at the worst point in the movie, the most difficult thing for the hero. But I wouldn’t say “inciting incident.”

**Craig:** Never. [laughs] Ever.

**John:** I wouldn’t say ‘second act climax.’ You would never say that.

**Craig:** God, good lord, no. And look, Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 is so common, it’s almost a lay person — I mean, everybody knows about that roughly.

**John:** You can say ‘set piece.’ Set piece meaning like a big action sequence, a big showcase moment in your story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t even use that anymore. Sometimes I’ll just say sequence.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** To be honest with you, and to be honest with the person asking the question — and I’m glad, I mean, I agree with everything I said on Done Deal, [laughs] so it’s good I stand by that.

**John:** It’s good that you agree with yourself.

**Craig:** I stand by that 100%. The lingo is being peddled to you by charlatans who have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. To cover up their complete absence of expertise and insight, and experience in screenwriting, they invent lingo, lingo which appears to make them knowledgeable. The whole point of lingo is to shorthand things, right? Or, I suppose, to exclude other people and make them feel that they don’t belong. So, in this case, they’re using it in a kind of exclusionary way like, “Look, if you speak all these ridiculous words you’ll be in some secret club.”

No you won’t. You won’t. And the fact of the matter is I don’t want to speak in shorthand to anybody in a room. I’ll speak in shorthand about production, that’s different. When I talk to an AD, we’re talking in lingo because that world does require shorthand; a lot of details are going on and you’ve got to move quickly, and a lot of specific things.

But when I’m describing a story, the whole point is this: I’m telling a story for an audience, not for a bunch of lingo heads right? So I want to tell the story to the person who might buy the story like they’re in the audience. So no lingo. Da-da!

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Done. I got a little angry there.

**John:** I was excited that you got a little bit angry there. I was hoping.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Lena from Moscow asks — we have a lot of international questions. I really just want to bring up the fact that we have a listener in Moscow.

**Craig:** Hello Lena.

**John:** Hello Lena.

**Craig:** [Russian accent] Hello.

**John:** [Russian accent] Hello.

**Craig:** Hello.

**John:** “I’m writing news stories for the largest news agency in the country, but it turns out journalism is not for me. I’m currently writing a spec for an animated feature film. Even if I manage all the problems with working visas and stuff, there will still be a major problem holding me back. The problem is that English is not my mother tongue.

“Granted, it’s no easy task for me to write in English, even though I love this language more than Russian. I’ve been studying English since early childhood and thanks to my teachers I don’t speak with this awful Russian accent.”

**Craig:** Oh, bummer. I love that accent.

**John:** “But it’s still not easy, and I can make mistakes and have issues with word choice. Do I even have a chance as a screenwriter? Or will I always be an outsider looking in?”

**Craig:** In animation I would actually say you’re okay because animation is so story-centric. It’s so about story. And so many people work on animated movies, so even if you wrote a scene and the English wasn’t quite there, or specific lines weren’t quite there, the whole point of the animation process is that story artists take those things and then expand them and use their own voices to retell the dialogue and to re-pitch it.

If it were live action I would say this would be a huge issue. For animation I think it will be a challenge, but it’s not a killer. I think the guy who does Rio, I don’t think English is his first language.

**John:** I was thinking Guillermo Arriaga, I think, is native Spanish speaking, but he writes in English and writes great in English. I think it’s totally doable. And I didn’t really clean up much of what she wrote in reading this aloud. She had one mistake in this thing and she had good vernacular.

I think she has a pretty good shot at being able to write in English if she needs to. That said, she may also want to partner up with a native speaker who is also a good writer and together they could do something great.

**Craig:** Yeah. But you know, I think she’s lined up in the perfect area which is animation, because it really is less about the specificity of any given word. It’s so much about story there, so I think she’ll be fine.

**John:** She’ll be great.

Ryan asks, “Recently my writing partner and I decided to showcase our adaptation skills by finding a short story that was published. We optioned it and adapted it into a short film that we both feel will be an excellent showcase of our talents not only as writers but as directors as well. However, we disagree on what avenue to take this for releasing it.

“My partner thinks we should break it up episodically and release it on Funny or Die, since it’s free and has a strong audience. I think we may lose some value by breaking the story into parts and want to submit it for festivals. What do you guys think?”

**Craig:** God, is it any good?

**John:** That’s a great question.

**Craig:** You know, I mean if it’s really… — You have to be honest with yourselves and show it to people, not your family, show it to people that are mean. And if they love it and you think that it’s going to work as a piece in a really coherent way at festivals, which is no easy task, probably I would say go the festival route, if it were good. What do you think?

**John:** I agree. If it’s good and it holds together best as one thing, it’s not even huge, it’s a short film. If it holds together best as one piece, keep it as one piece. And get as much traction as you can with short-film festivals. If they don’t bite, then break it into smaller pieces and let people see what you’ve been able to do.

But in the time it took you to write this question into us you probably could have submitted it to a bunch of festivals through Without a Box, or the online places that let you submit films to things. So, see if people bite. If they don’t bite, put it up yourself.

**Craig:** I mean, look, giving it away for free never goes away as an option. So, you know — I mean, look, don’t waste your time chasing rainbows, but if you think you’ve got a real shot at… — I mean, obviously the whole point, like you said, was to be noticed as filmmakers, so give it a shot.

**John:** Mark from Santa Monica asks, “Do you have advice on juggling writing jobs? I have a few different assignments at the moment, all under contract. Can you talk about how you and Craig handle dividing your time, managing different producer’s expectations for delivery times? Any advice would be useful.”

First off, I mean, most of the people listening are like, “Okay, great. So you have a couple paid jobs simultaneously.”

**Craig:** I know, they hate those guys.

**John:** Glorious problems.

**Craig:** And he’s under contract.

**John:** Under contract.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, first off, congratulations. You’re writing, and more than one person wants you to work on their stuff simultaneously. That’s great. I have found that it’s basically impossible to write two first drafts at a time. I can write one first draft and do a little clean-up on another project at the same time, but I can’t create two brand new things at the same time. I’m gonna either finish one and start on the second one.

And so some of your job as a screenwriter is figuring out how you’re going to stall people well enough and long enough so they can feel like you are doing the work when you’re kind of really working on the other project. Sometimes you can just be honest. Sometimes you have to be a little less than 100% honest about what’s on your screen as they call you.

But you can do it. Be careful what you promise. And don’t try to over-promise and then get stuck with a bunch of things you can’t finish. Or the panic that Craig talked about last week, that fear that I’m going to be caught having to scramble to get something turned in that won’t be my best work.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is the real danger here. And, yes, congratulations. Good for you. And now it’s important if you’re exhibiting the kind of work that’s going to get you multiple offers and people are even going to say to you things like, “We don’t care, we know. You can work on this one in the evening,” or whatever, just be aware that there is a cost to being a pig. And you will end up losing in the long run. I do believe.

First of all, great answer from John, and I agreed with all of it, particularly the part that says, look, you can’t be in the same phase of two different things at once. That’s a disaster. Like John, I have been in the situation where I was sort of outlining one thing and rewriting another, because you can shift; it’s two different muscles you’re working on. Okay, so you can do batting practice and then you can throw bullpen. But, if you over-promise and you start playing games it will burn you every single time. I really do believe that.

Personally, I don’t lie to anybody about that stuff ever. I take deadlines very seriously. And I’m incredibly honest about what’s going on and when I can deliver things. Down to the week. I mean, I’ll say, “Okay, well I think I can have this done by October 1 if we get going.”

And then they say, “Well we just need another week before we hear from so and so.” If that week goes by, now I just want to point out, “Now it’s gonna be October 7.” “Really?” ” Yes. Really.” That’s how I work it out. So, I’m very honest and I’m incredibly above board about everything like that. I don’t necessarily need to tell them because I’m working on something else at the same time. But what I do need to be honest about is when they’re getting the work. And I find if I give myself enough time to do the work properly, and I get it to them when I say, no one cares frankly. I could be working on 1,000 things at once; if the work is good and it’s on time, no one cares.

But you will not be able to do good work, and you will not be on time if you get piggish. So, don’t do it.

**John:** Yeah, the whole idea of “Oh, you could write this at night,” is an elaborate fantasy. Yes, you could write that screenplay at night if you were working at a sandwich shop, because then you wouldn’t have spent your whole day writing pages. But the idea that you are going to be able to write in addition to all the other writing that you’re doing is just not possible. It’s like, well, you’ve been working six hours a day, so maybe you can work ten hours a day. Well, you actually can’t write more than that.

I know writers who have been working on a TV show and then someone will say, “Oh, and why don’t you also write a pilot for staffing for next season?” And that becomes incredibly difficult because you’re trying to write all the stuff you actually have to do for your job, and then write a completely different thing on your own. Sometimes you’re squeezing that in on weekends, but you’re not going to squeeze it in at the end of the day. It just isn’t going to happen.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. And you also have to be aware of the fact that the people who are hiring you are kind of babyish themselves about this. They want what they want. So they’ve decided they want you to do it. You, for whatever reason — hopefully it’s because of your talent — have solved their problem of fear over their project. “This guy is gonna make it better. And my boss wants this guy, and so I’ve gotta get this guy.” They will tell you whatever you need to hear to say yes. If you’re like, “I don’t know, I’m busy,” they’ll come at you pretty hard.

Brother, the day you take the gig and they mail a check, that all goes away. That understanding, all that stuff is gone. Now, they want their pages. And they will turn on a dime on you on that stuff. So, just be careful.

**John:** Bucky asks, “I’m moving to LA later this year with my wife and two-year-old son to pursue a career in Hollywood.”

**Craig:** Ah! [laughs]

**John:** Ah-ha. Competition. “Looking for advice on moving to an area that is safe, has good schools, and is conducive to working in the industry. Your thoughts?”

**Craig:** That’s a good question. I mean, look, my reaction always is: okay, here’s a man with a wife and child and he’s moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in screenwriting, and the immediate thing I think of is, “Oh, no,” because he’s not going to make it. And then what happens to his wife and his kid. And I’m scared. Now I’m scared for him. And I get scared for everybody who wants to do this, especially when people are relying on them.

I mean, I suppose I’m being sexist about this. Perhaps his wife is CEO of something so it’s not a problem.

But even that was sexist that the wife had to be a CEO to be successful. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, she could just be a provider.

**Craig:** Right, she could just be middle management at an advertising company. Okay, so that was that reaction. Hopefully you have some sort of cushion and you’re taking care of your child.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I think for, he’s looking for affordable, right? Safe, affordable…

**John:** Safe, affordable, good schools. He actually didn’t say affordable, so maybe he’s rich.

**Craig:** Well, okay, look, rich places are rich places, so that’s that. But assuming he means affordable, I think Sherman Oaks isn’t a bad bet. Studio City isn’t a bad bet, right?

**John:** Yeah. I would question schools. I mean, if he’s looking for public schools, those aren’t going to be the best choices in the world.

**Craig:** Public schools. Well, for elementary it’s not bad. Sherman Oaks has that Carpenter which is a pretty good elementary school.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, look, La Cañada where I live has great public schools. You can send your kids from kindergarten to 12th grade. They have excellent schools all the way through. Great little neighborhood. And you can actually find some affordable houses there now after the great collapse of 2007. So I always have to suggest La Cañada. It’s a great neighborhood.

**John:** Yeah. But you might as well be in Botswana; you’re really far away there.

**Craig:** You’re really not. Now, that’s where John has this classic Los Angeles bigotry.

**John:** I’ll fully accept it.

**Craig:** Bigotry. Because here’s the truth: if John has to get to Warner Bros. it takes him longer than it takes me. If John has to get to Universal, it takes him longer than it takes me. If he has to get to Disney it takes him longer than it takes me.

**John:** How about Fox?

**Craig:** Okay, if he has to get to Fox I grant you it’s a slog for him and a nightmare for me. But here’s the truth: at the end the reward is that you’re at Fox, so really who’s the winner? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s smart — antagonize the entire studio. [laughs] That’s really not healthy for your career. All right, the real winner… — and nobody likes going to Sony. The real winner — because it’s so far away — for John the real winner is Paramount because he could walk to Paramount, but for me it’s 22 minutes. And you know if I say 22 I’ve timed it. So, the truth is I’m actually quite close. It’s a great place to live. And I’d like to think that geniuses like John Hancock and Scott Frank know what they’re doing.

**John:** When I was hiring my director of digital things, it ended up being Ryan Nelson, he was moving from Columbia, Missouri and needed to find a place to live in Los Angeles. And so I put up on the blog asking for suggestions for where should Ryan live. And so I sort of described his life situation and which neighborhood should he pick. And people had really good suggestions.

And it’s so interesting that they were picking cool neighborhoods because he was coming from a place in life where like a cool neighborhood was important. And this person has a wife and a two-year-old son, and your decision process is vastly different because you’re not looking for a cool neighborhood.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So that’s why Culver City could be great. Palms, which is so incredibly boring, might be fine, because Palms is right by Sony. It’s really cheap because they over-built apartments. That might be fine. They opened the blue line, the express rail down through there. So, there’s lots of places that are sort of mid city that could be fine.

And if you’re in Palms you’re pretty close to almost everything.

**Craig:** Not really. No, see…

**John:** I think you are. Because honestly if you take Venice you get to — except for the Valley.

**Craig:** Well, but except for the Valley, except for three movie studios.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Uh-huh.

**John:** Okay. I see the flaw in my logic.

**Craig:** And you’re not close to Paramount either.

**John:** But you’re not that bad to Paramount. Because I’m essentially at Paramount. It’s easy for me to get down to Sony.

**Craig:** From your place to Sony is what, 30 minutes?

**John:** Oh, 15.

**Craig:** 15? Really?

**John:** It’s super quick.

**Craig:** You just get on Venice and go crazy?

**John:** Yeah. It’s fast.

**Craig:** I know, Venice is pretty great.

**John:** I’ve actually run from my house down to Sony.

**Craig:** Out of fear? [laughs]

**John:** No, I was running from Sony. That’s a whole different situation. [laughs]

Our next question. Blaze from Poland asks — Poland! We have a listener in Poland.

**Craig:** Hello, Poland!

**John:** “When you see a finished movie, does it actually look like what you imagined when you put the words on a blank page? Or do you want to stand up and scream, ‘Wait, this is not what a dreamed up?'”

**Craig:** Neither. [laughs] I mean, it never looks like it did in your head because, let’s be honest, our minds do not properly represent physical space or time. They compress them. It’s very elastic. Your dreams are pretty good indications of that where you just are moving around and there’s these little cycads and things that occur. And, of course, let’s not forget somebody else is shooting it, and also they have to find real places that might not look like these things.

Sometimes it gets kind of close, but I think you need to get accustomed right now, sir or madam, to the notion that, no, it will never look like your daydream. And if you are so inclined to stand up and scream at that eventuality, this is not for you. It’s not gonna go well for you.

**John:** Yeah, unless you’re directing your movie it’s never going to look quite like you expect. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the first third of it where it’s just Charlie Bucket’s house is so much like what I imagined it would be. And I was so delighted. And getting into the factory is great. But then once you really see Willy Wonka, it was a completely different thing than what I sort of had in my head. Like, I knew it was Johnny, but they just made really different choices from what Willy Wonka would look like. And I love it, but it’s just very, very different.

A related thing is I wrote the lyrics to Twice the Love which is the song that Siamese twins sing in Big Fish. And so that whole sequence is kind of close to what I imagined it to be. There’s like the ventriloquist dummy and there’s other stuff like that. But I knew that once Danny Elfman signed on to do the music for the movie, he was going to look at my lyrics and then he was just going to ignore the melody that I had sort of planned out for it.

And so it was such a weird experience listening to the song because it’s the words I had, it’s just a completely different melody, and that’s a good analogy for what the experience of watching your movie is. It’s like it is what you created, but it’s also very different than what you created, and you just have to accept that.

**Craig:** I think that one of the things that makes good directors good directors is that they have enough of an imagination, a visual imagination, whether they wrote the script or not to imagine it in their own minds. So they see the movie or see the scene in their heads. Then they get what’s real, so they’re in a place. They pick a place that would look great. And then they start to work with that. So they don’t push a dream on top of what they have; they take what they have and they make it great, inspired by their imagination of things.

Sort of think of it as this — a classic mistake of people to try and say, “Let’s just shoehorn what we wanted to do into what we got.” Bad idea. Use what you got.

**John:** A related example just occurred to me. So Frankenweenie is a stop-motion animation movie. And as I was writing it I knew it was stop-motion animation. I’d done that before. I knew what the world was like. I know that we talked about doing it back and white. And so in my head I saw it black and white, but I really did see it basically live action.

And it was sort of like a foreground/background thing, where like I would see it animated and I would see it live action. And I basically had to write it like it was live action so characters wouldn’t seem overly puppety. But now that I see it in trailers and stuff, everyone can see it, it is puppets doing it all, and it very much has that sort of handmade feel to things.

And so it doesn’t look like the movie in my head in a perfectly fine and good way. I just couldn’t write little stop-motion puppets in my head. I had to write it like real people and let the clever animators figure out how to translate my real people to what the puppet equivalents are.

**Craig:** Yeah. This whole “it’s not what I dreamt of” is tough.

**John:** Andy from New York asks, “I graduated from college two years ago, and since then I’ve spent the last two years working for a startup Internet company. But I really want to be a screenwriter, specifically for television, and I came to the realization that I can’t do what I want in New York City. So I’ve quit my decent paying job and I’m giving up an amazing apartment to live in Los Angeles without a job or even a place to live yet.”

**Craig:** Gah!

**John:** “I have friends and family there. And I do have a few connections to the industry. But I’m 23 years old and I have nothing holding me back really, so I figure why not. Am I doing the right thing?”

**Craig:** Oh, well yeah…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …there you go. You’re 23. You have nothing holding you back. No one is relying on you to eat or survive. Yes, you’re doing the right thing.

**John:** He’s in exactly the perfect situation for why you should quit everything and move to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Exactly. That’s pretty much the narrow slice of circumstances in which we can happily say, “Yes, congratulations; we’re not at all scared for you.”

**John:** He has a follow-up question. He says, “I love reading in pilot scripts, and something that has always stuck out to me is how race is mentioned in scripts. I’m an African-American male, and a lot of times minority characters have their race mentioned, but if their race isn’t mentioned, white is the assumed default. Occasionally there are times where race-neutral scripts surprise me, when certain characters aren’t Caucasian when they’re cast, but still, this is an issue that has always somewhat bothered me.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I think about it actually quite a bit when I’m writing. And I try when I’m… — If I’m writing a script for actors who are white, I don’t mention it, I don’t call out the race. And if I’m writing a script for actors who are black, I don’t call out the race. But if I don’t know who the actor is, I’ll say white, black, Asian, whatever I want. I don’t just default and say, “Okay, if I don’t mention it, it must mean white.”

And I know people do that and the reason is racism. [laughs] And I don’t mean virulent racism. It’s not like guys take their robes off after a tough day of cross burning and start typing up screenplays and giggle while they don’t refer to people’s race and go “Ah-ha!” It’s just sort of a passive… — look, I’m white, and people around me white, and obviously I mean white guy, I’m thinking a white guy. And a black character is like a specialty move for me, you know what I mean? At least that’s my feeling about it.

**John:** I wrote about this on the blog in relation to the Ronna character in Go in that Sarah Polley ended up playing. In the early drafts of the script, and when we first went out for casting, the description in the script was “18, black, and bleeding.” And so there’s no other reference made to her ethnicity in the script throughout the rest of the thing. But I’d envisioned a black actress playing this.

And so we went out to black actresses, and then we also sort of widened our search to actresses of every ethnicity. And we ended up casting the whitest actress in the world, Sarah Polley, who is wonderful. But when people read the early draft and they wrote in and said, “Hey, why did you change that?” It was important to me when I wrote it. And then as I actually saw people reading the script and everything sort of came together, it became much less important to me. And so I was like it’s not a crucial story point that she be African-American and we moved on.

Overall in scripts, I don’t tend to literally type out somebody’s ethnicity. I’ll often give characters a name that will strongly suggest that somebody is a certain ethnicity. So I will pick an Asian name for somebody with the assumption that we will find an Asian actor that will make sense for that. I’ll pick a Latino name because, why not?

And some of that is with the goal of having a more diverse representation in the movie. Some of it is the goal so that things are clearer for the reader, because if everyone is named Smith and Jones and Thompson, you’re going to get all those names confused. If somebody is named Gutierrez and Chang and something else…

**Craig:** Lipstein.

**John:** Lipstein. You’re much less likely to confuse and conflate those characters.

**Craig:** Yeah. Part of what we’re doing is sort of sending secret messages to the — not so secret messages to the casting people because then they call and they say, “Well what is this person supposed to be?” And casting people are meat markety. They don’t care about anyone’s sensibilities. It’s like, “Okay, do we go get black people, do we go get Chinese people? Do you want Chinese or do you mean Asian? Do you mean Vietnamese or Chinese?” They’re very much they’re shopping for people. And so they need to know the specifics.

Sometimes what I find myself doing for white characters is not calling out white, but calling out a nationality because white is actually the most generic and sort of uninformative term. Because, you could be talking about southern Italians or Swedes who look dramatically different form each other. And so…

**John:** And more importantly might have different cultural things that they would have.

**Craig:** Different cultural things. Different accents. Exactly. Whereas, and for me when I’m writing a black character it’s almost always an African-American character. I suppose if I were writing a drama or something that actually had African scenes that would be a different deal. But to me American white is, unless you’re talking about a real southerner, you know. I don’t know. I don’t really even get into dialectical stuff too much with American white. I just more like nationality stuff.

But, look, if the questions is is this partly because writers sort of get a little lazy about race? Absolutely. I think so.

**John:** I think you’re right.

Adrienne asks, and this is a question I’m completely paraphrasing because it was long, so I’m just going to boil it down to what I want. First question. Is it okay to refer to actors when pitching? Second question — how about when actually writing the script?

So, having a short and honest question I will give my short answer. Can you refer to actors while you’re giving a pitch? Yes. And that’s sometimes really, really helpful.

A lot of times, you’re starting a pitch, you’ll often talk about the world and then you’ll talk about the characters. You might talk about your hero and it’s “sort of a Matt Damon type.” And that’s okay to say that. That’s helpful for them. Give a couple examples for who the actor could kind of be. Or a lot of times you’ll describe and they’ll sort of come back to, “So is it like a Matt Damon?” It’s like, yes, it’s like a Matt Damon. And that’s okay, and that’s really helpful when you’re in the room.

Never say that in the script. You never want to put an actor’s name in the script, unless it’s like some really funny reference to some actor who’s dead or something. There might be a reason why it’s useful, but you’re never going to refer to an actor in the script because then any actor who is reading the script, or anyone who’s reading the script gets just paranoid about that actor’s name being in there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. I agree with your first answer. First answer is yes. When it comes to writing names in scripts, the only time I’ve ever done it — in fact, it was recently for our script for Hangover Part III, really because it’s for the studio only. It’s like, look, here’s a part that we would actually love a certain person for. And since you don’t know about this person, we want you to know that this is the kind of person we’re thinking about. But that’s almost like an internal thing. That’s not like you’re selling a script. And that will come out when it goes out to other people.

So, yeah, I agree with you on both counts. Yes/no is the answer.

**John:** And sort of answering two questions at once, I would often — several times in the past — I have written Octavia in for a character when I wanted Octavia Spencer to be cast. Because it was an easy way to make sure like, oh, they will think of casting an African-American in this part and they will cast Octavia Spencer because her name is Octavia and she’s exactly right for the part.

**Craig:** That’s a sneaky way of doing it.

**John:** It’s sneaky, yeah.

Luke, from Melbourne, Australia asks, “How did the two of you meet and then later decide to collaborate on this podcast?” It’s a history lesson. And I honestly don’t know the answer to some of this. I’m trying to think when I first met you.

**Craig:** Well, I know we first spoke on the phone because I was starting a blog.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** And we had the same agent at the time. And I called him up and said, “I want to talk to John August about this blog stuff.” And you were nice enough to talk to me. And so that was in 2005, I think.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then how did we start the podcast? This is a great story. See, what happened was John sent me an email and said, “Hey, would you like to do a podcast?” and I wrote back and I said, “Yes.” [laughs] There’s not much beyond that, I don’t think.

**John:** I think my decision on sort of why I approached Craig is you had had a very good blog that you had let sort of go fallow, and you had sort of gotten bored with it, but you had a lot of good things to say about the industry and screenwriting. And I had been on panels with you, and I’m like, oh, you’re well-spoken, you know what you’re talking about. So I figured you would be a good collaborator.

**Craig:** And I take umbrage very quickly.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I get angry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I love being angry.

**John:** Yeah. It’s fun to be angry. Strong emotions. Make you feel alive.

**Craig:** It makes you feel alive. Exactly.

**John:** April in Ohio. Her name is April, it’s not the month. April in Ohio. “Financially I can’t take the traditional route of trying to become a writer for TV/film by moving to Los Angeles and getting a low level job in the industry. I’m a 30-year-old mother of one working full-time while barely making ends meet. I’m finally taking the initiative to go after my dreams. I wrote a TV pilot, a spec of The Walking Dead, and am currently working on a feature script. My goal is to have at least five scripts by the end of the year to help build my portfolio.

“Would it be best for me to enter a screenwriting contest, enter writing programs to get my work noticed? My main concern with the writing programs,” probably referring to, like, the Warner’s writing program, “is that the majority of them are unpaid and the ones that are need you to have some kind of connection to the industry already.”

**Craig:** Well, look, April — here’s the bad news: the bad news is that you have the opposite circumstance from the gentleman that we said, “Yay, go; go move! You’re 23. Nobody cares about you.” You’re feeding a one-year-old. You have already the most important job there is. So, your options are limited. And I must tell you that even in success you will be in a state of crisis in screenwriting because there is no steady check in screenwriting. Success is not something that goes on and off like a switch.

It is a dimmer that waxes and wanes, and for some people burns brightly for six months and then does not return again. It is a dangerous path. It is a dangerous path; even if it works it will be a dangerous path. So, that’s the first thing I want you to understand.

That said, there’s nothing wrong with entering your material into contests. There’s nothing wrong with you sending it to people. There’s nothing wrong with putting it on the Internet and having people read it. Do all those things. Just be aware that this is one of those be careful what you wish for things. Because the worst possible circumstance would be that you’re just good enough to get out of town and go somewhere for five or six months with your child, but not good enough to actually make it on a permanent basis. That would be tragic.

And I have to tell you something else, not to be too depressing about it — that’s the majority of outcome for people who do get a break is that it’s not really a break. It’s like a little blip and then they’re gone. So, be careful. Make sure you put that kid first, okay? But don’t let me kill your dream. I’m not here to do that, I’m just here to protect you.

**John:** I would say I admire her work ethic, that she’s gotten stuff started, she’s gotten stuff done. She has a plan for how much she wants to get achieved. That’s great.

I wish that she was writing in to say, “I wrote a novel.” I wrote something else that’s more achievable from Ohio and that doesn’t rely on being in Los Angeles to do. Because I can picture her as, “Hey, I want to be J. K. Rowling,” and I’d say, you know what, you could very well be J.K. Rowling. And you could do all this because novelists live in every city across the country, everywhere around the world. You could do that from your home, and keep your normal job, and do this extra stuff. And there’s a clear path for success in it.

I know people who have done that kind of thing. I don’t know the people who’ve done what you’re describing, and that’s tough because I know a lot of screenwriters. I don’t know anyone who’s been able to do it that way. So, it’s not to say you couldn’t be the first, but it’s certainly a tough road ahead of you.

So, entering screenwriting contests? Sure. Writing programs? Sure. But your concerns are well-founded.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean John’s point, April, about novels is that there is actual success possible. And it is binary. Either you’re novel is a hit or it’s not. But it’s not like that with screenwriting. With screenwriting it’s fly out, hang out, take a meeting. Three months go by. “Great, we’re going to give you a job, but it’s week-to-week, and it’s not for that much money, but if we like you there will be more.” Okay, now you’ve been out here six months. “Oh, you know what? The show got cancelled.” “We don’t like you.” “Somebody else came in.” “Da-da-da, go back home.”

And go back home to what? Maybe that other job you had is… You know, there’s so many ways to get burned. I just, I don’t know, I get so nervous when I hear about people with very young kids jumping into this stuff.

**John:** I’m going to segue to another question here because it’s very much on the same lines. Tucker asks, “I make good money writing movie advertising. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I’ve written screenplays on the side for decades and I’ve always imagined I’d make the jump one day to full-time screenwriter. Recently one of my scripts hit and suddenly I was getting a lot of attention. I got a manager, had major agencies fighting over me. The day I had been working toward had arrived.

“Then I started having meetings. And more meetings. Came up with awesome stories for assignments I didn’t get. Then I find out what you get paid my level to do assignments and how long you work for nothing to get them, and it doesn’t add up. I don’t think ‘becoming a full-time screenwriter’ is a good career path for anyone anymore. Writing on spec makes sense, but doing that studio dance doesn’t make sense. They made it a loser’s game, suitable only for recent grads who live cheap.”

**Craig:** Man, I hope that there are some people at studios who listen to our podcast because I really — I want them to rewind and listen back. This is not some guy off the turnip truck with dreams of Hollywood. This is a working professional who works in marketing, who obviously works either at a big vendor or at a studio who’s been doing it for a long time, who knows all about it, and who put in his time and wrote a screenplay that you liked, that a lot of people liked, and he’s looking back at what you’ve given him in return and saying, “That’s not a job.”

Writing lines on posters is a job, but screenwriting isn’t a job anymore. I really want these guys who run the studios to think about what this guy just said, because it’s true. They are killing this as a career because of the way they go about hiring people, and the way they go about limiting development. So I’m getting on my Norma Rae soapbox once more and I’m saying, “Come on! Think about where this business will be ten years from now when the folks who came in the ’90s, under the system which used to develop stuff with, oh my god, two-step deals. When those people retire and all you’ve got are 23 year olds who have lots of energy but very little or no experience, and nobody in the middle, and nobody at the higher end, where will you be? Who’s going to write your movies?”

It’s killing me. Killing me. I mean, I wish I could say to this guy, “No, no, no,” but I can’t. And by the way, that’s what I did. I did what he did. The only difference between me and this guy is the year. I was writing movie advertising in 1995. And then I made the jump and there was a career to have. And now he makes the jump and he looks around and he goes, “What’s going on here?” Totally get it. It’s bumming me out.

**John:** Yeah.

Kenneth from Salt Lake City asks, “If you’re writing your own sitcom,” this is actually more a TV question, maybe I’ll answer this. “If you’re writing your own sitcom that really has no choice but to begin with a premise pilot,” a premise pilot meaning you’re setting up the world, you’re setting up the characters, and it’s classically, like, Laverne and Shirley become roommates. “Does it make sense to instead write a future episode of the show to use as your sample and try to sell it to networks?”

No. Most TV staffing these days, they’re not really looking for spec episodes of currently running series. Classically it was always like you write a funny spec Seinfeld and that’s what gets you staffed. That’s not really what showrunners are reading anymore. They’re reading original stuff. So, they want to read your pilot for something. So you write a pilot, an episode of a sitcom. And naturally a lot of pilots are going to end up being kind of premisey because you have to establish why this situation exists.

So, Kenneth’s question is, “Should I not write the premise version of it and just pretend like I’m writing six episodes into it” No. Because people have no idea what you’re doing. So, you’re going to inherently have some premisey stuff in a lot of these kind of pilots because you’re setting up a whole world and you’re setting up the basic nature of how things work.

That said, it can’t be so premisey, it can’t be just like Laverne and Shirley meet and decide to move into the apartment together. They don’t get the basic idea of what a normal show of this would be and who the characters are, and that you have enough different plotlines and different voices in there that people can see the range of what you can write.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that answer.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** And by the way, we know everybody who’s writing TV these days.

**Craig:** I know. Well we know everybody.

**John:** We do know everybody, but surprisingly a bunch of our feature people are now TV people and they’re killing it.

**Craig:** Because of us. I really do feel like we’re the hub, and from us emanates all success.

**John:** Yeah. That solipsism of everything starting from us and radiating outwards?

**Craig:** Well, the fact that I even included you in “we” is a really nice gesture on my part. Because as we all know, you’re not real.

**John:** No. I’m just a filter that you apply in GarageBand to make the second voice.

**Craig:** You in fact are. [laughs] That’s right.

**John:** We’re going to plow through because I want to clear out these questions.

**Craig:** Plow man, let’s go. Let’s do this. This is going to be a huge — this is a mega episode.

**John:** Mega. So many, an hour’s worth of questions.

**Craig:** Woo!

**John:** Michael in Seattle asks, “I recently finished my first spec script. I used Movie Magic 6 to write it,” so this is a Craig Mazin question because you love Movie Magic.

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** “I like Movie Magic and would continue using it, but I found a problem. The studio wanted me to submit as a Final Draft file. So I converted from Movie Magic 6 to Final Draft 8, and what was a 119-page script is now 127 pages. What should I do?”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Okay. So, this can happen. And I wish I could blame everything on Final Draft, but I think it’s just the function of the fact that you’re moving from one thing to another. Check all of your margins in Movie Magic and then adjust the margins in Final Draft to mirror those closely. You will probably get very close to the same page count.

The other issue is the font, because Movie Magic has their Courier font, and Final Draft has their Courier font. And while theoretically they should all be the same, it doesn’t seem like they are. So, first thing first, check all the margins of all the elements. That means the document top and bottom margins and then the width margins for all of your character, dialogue, action lines, slug lines. Copy them over and make sure they’re the same numbers in Final Draft.

That should get you close. And if you’re still off by a whole big butt load, then you can cheat a little bit on the top and bottom margins. I mean, the point is you wrote a, whatever, 116-page script, or 111-page script, that’s legal. Make your script 111. Don’t do that thing where you squish the dialogue together though; I hate that.

**John:** That’s terrible. I would say if it looked okay as a PDF, you’re probably fine. So do what Craig did, and you weren’t cheating, it’s just some stuff just comes out differently.

One of my great frustrations, being the company that makes — we make FDX Reader which is the rival Final Draft reader for the iPad because the Final Draft one didn’t exist when we made it. When they launched the new, official Final Draft reader they said it keeps your real page numbers correct. And I was like, well, page numbers are this really arbitrary thing. And somehow Final Draft decided, like, “Well our page numbers are the correct page numbers.” No, they’re really not. There’s not one magic formula.

Well, there’s one magic formula for Final Draft that they use to figure out how they’re going to do page numbers, but that’s not the end all/be all/only way the page numbers could be figured out. So, it’s not that it’s correct in Final Draft and it’s wrong in Movie Magic, it’s just a difference.

**Craig:** It’s just different, exactly.

**John:** Paul in West Virginia writes, “I’m working an historical epic screenplay, something akin to Braveheart, so I’m already compressing 15 years worth of material into three hours, combining people, composite characters, whole events, etc. I think the back story is crucial for the story. If I include the scenes covering the back story, my protagonists don’t even show up until page 30.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “If I just have her show up in the beginning and have another character just talk her through the back story, I can get to a long scene of exposition dialogue and violate the whole show-don’t-tell concept. Is there a happy medium?”

Yeah. Write a different script. Or write a different story from that world. You cannot have your lead character show up on page 30.

**Craig:** I mean, the only thing that comes close in my mind is Star Wars because…

**John:** Yeah. Luke shows up later.

**Craig:** Luke shows up really late. I mean, they stick with the robots for so long once they land — I’m sorry, the droids — once they land in the desert. There’s a great opening scene that’s sort of a classic prologue where the villain shows up, breaks the neck of some hapless guy to demonstrate that he’s evil, captures a princess to set the terrible events in motion, and then leaves. Then the droids land in the desert and they walk around for awhile, and then they get captured. And then you meet Luke.

But my guess is it’s still earlier than page 30.

**John:** It’s a lot earlier than that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, come on.

**John:** It’s not gonna happen.

**Craig:** Have you ever been in a theater, sir, and about half an hour into the movie the hero showed up? What was going on for the first half an hour? Who were we identifying with? No. No. Stop.

**John:** Glad we’re helping him so much. We’re just saying, no, don’t.

**Craig:** [laughs] No, you can’t make it. Stay home. Don’t do this. It’s not a job.

**John:** Carmen asks, “Suppose you read an idea online, not a news article that sparks an idea, but someone is actually saying in a completely public forum, ‘I had this idea for a script.’ There’s no plot to the idea, no characters, etc, just a concept. Is there any shame in taking the concept and running with the plot that popped into your head after you read this person’s blatant putting-it-out-there of their idea? Would you ask that person for their permission?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, she actually did use the proper word there which is “shame.” I mean, it’s not illegal. Ideas aren’t property. There’s a little bit of shame, yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t do it. I just have a little — this is going to be a shock to people who have seen my movies, but I have a little too much pride. The thought of taking somebody else’s idea because I can see a good idea and then running with it, when it’s not something that’s being given to me or offered to me just seems creepy. I wouldn’t do it.

**John:** This is a question of how specific is the idea. Because they’re saying the plot isn’t there, but just the idea is there. So if it’s like “it’s a witch who opens a bakery,” well, maybe that’s okay? I don’t know. If it’s about a witch, yeah, make a movie about a witch. Great, that’s fine. That’s not an idea. That’s just a general worldview concept.

The more specific the idea is, the more shame you should feel trying to get in there.

**Craig:** Even if it’s sort of big and generic like if somebody said, “Look, I’m trying to figure something out. I have a question because I’m writing this science fiction movie and my idea is that I’m doing Titanic in space. So it’s this huge, big thing that can go at light speed, but it’s marooned and slowly sinking towards a black hole. And there’s a love story, so I’m doing…” which actually now that I say it isn’t a bad idea for a movie. [laughs]

**John:** I think Titanic in space is generic enough that you shouldn’t feel too much shame in that.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, somebody now is going to do Titanic in space which is bumming me out, so I should come up with a title now.

Um…Spacetanic.

**John:** For my own personal life, I will say that there was a movie concept that I had for awhile and then I saw that Warner put something into development that was kind of like it. And I was really angry about it for a sec, and then I realized, you know what, everything that guy is doing with that idea — it was a science-fiction kind of idea, not like the Dyson sphere but that kind of idea — well, there’s room in the world for more than one of those and I’m not going to feel too guilty about doing my own. So.

**Craig:** You know what, I think you’re an adult, I assume, the person who’s writing the question. You tell me. If you feel shame, don’t do anything that embarrasses you.

**John:** Yeah. But also I don’t want to put too much credence in the idea of like, oh, I had that idea for a movie. It’s like, well, an idea is nothing. If you didn’t have a plot, a story, characters, you didn’t have a movie. You just had…

**Craig:** You had a nothing.

**John:** Yeah. You had an idea for a poster.

Craig, we’ve come to the time for One Cool Thing if you have one cool thing.

**Craig:** You know what? My One Cool Thing is to end this, because this is over an hour. Did you realize this?

**John:** It’s a solid hour.

**Craig:** I’m gonna propose that we save our cool things for next time.

**John:** We’ll save it for next time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, we answered a lot of questions. I think we did a lot of good today, I hope.

**Craig:** Crushed a lot of dreams. Broke a lot of spirits.

**John:** That’s also part of the… — It’s the whole omelets/breaking eggs, that whole analogy would apply here.

**Craig:** Our podcast motto is “It’s a Good Day to Die.”

**John:** Craig?

**Craig:** John.

**John:** Thank you. Have a good week.

**Craig:** You too, man. Bye.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Feeling good, buddy, how about you?

**John:** Good. What did you write today?

**Craig:** Nothing. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I wrote a lot today.

**Craig:** Oh, well, screw you.

**John:** Well good for me. There are many days I don’t get stuff written, so I’m happy today. But I was writing action, and action is just so not fun most times. I actually tweeted about it last night because I tweeted something like, “I think about writing action sequences the same way a tailor must approach doing button holes.”

**Craig:** I saw that. Yup.

**John:** Because, you know, you absolutely need them, and it’s such fine detailed work, and no one is ever going to notice it.

**Craig:** Yeah, because the action itself on the screen is obviously so much more impactful than what you see on the page. And when you write it on the page it really does feel like technical writing, like writing an instruction manual or something.

I remember talking about this with Richard LaGravenese who is a spectacular screenwriter, and he and I both bonded over our shared hatred and boredom of writing out action.

**John:** Yeah. And you can’t really skip it. I mean, it’s crucial to provide a sense of what the reader is going to see if this were a movie. I mean, I always treat writing a screenplay as I’m sitting in the theater watching a movie up on the big screen, so I’m writing what I’m seeing, or writing what the experience is of watching the movie. And that includes action, so you have to get that in there; the challenge is to make that interesting for the reader in a way that they just don’t want to kill themselves, or that they’re going to skip over it, because that’s the temptation that they are going to be like, “Okay, this paragraph is too long, I’m going to skip over it and just read the next bit of dialogue; this makes my eyes feel happy.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a chore.

**John:** And there are times where you can summarize a bit, where you can just give a taste of… — Sometimes if there’s like a football game you can get a sense of after a few plays we’re up by three, and you are getting sort of a lyrical sense of what is happening there, and it’s going to be left to the filmmakers to sort of show what that is. But there are also times where you need to be fairly specific because there’s comedy that’s happening because of what’s going on there. There are distinct moments in that action and you really do have to script them and choreograph them.

And that’s what I had to do for this. This was a sports thing, but there was comedy that needed to happen during it. And so it needed to be specific enough, and that’s where it just gets to be tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. And then eventually if the movie goes into production you will have to sit there… — And I remember sitting with Todd Phillips and the second unit director for The Hangover Part II. And sort of laying out exactly how the car chase would work. Every single bullet fired, because everybody has to know. Everybody needs to know, “Okay, where does the bullet hit, because we’re going to need a car that has a bullet hole, and da-da-da.”

And then you’re sitting after that meeting literally doing technical writing. I like to say this to screenwriters when they complain about how we have no power: Everybody is staring at it like it’s the Bible at that point. Every single word becomes incredibly informative.

**John:** What you were saying about that moment in The Hangover, I know exactly the sequence you’re describing. It becomes so important because there’s a change in state of the set that you’re in, which I guess is a car, so that joke can only happen at a certain time because you can’t take a moment from earlier in the scene later because you’ve changed the nature of the car. So you can’t move stuff around once you’re in there.

Versus a lot of times, if it’s just two people in a normal car that’s driving, you can change any of the lines around. Characters can adlib and do a whole bunch of different stuff because the car is staying exactly the same the whole time. If something is changing physically in the scene so that you can’t go back and forward in time, you’re locked in. And that can be really tough.

**Craig:** Right. And you have to choreograph it. And you are choreographing it just for the point of view of the production. Any kind of action becomes a very highly choreographed thing, to avoid accidents, and to avoid — and sadly there was an accident on that movie. That had nothing to do with our writing or anything. But, you are trying to make sure that everything is choreographed down to the slightest little movement.

And, so, yeah, when you’re talking about something that in a movie when you watch you think is a little nothing, like they shoot out the rear windshield — that’s a big deal. Because you’re right; every shot after that needs a missing windshield. So it just becomes, it’s a grind. I find writing action to be a grind for sure.

**John:** I was describing to somebody else that is working on a musical right now: Musicals are a lot like action movies in that every few minutes there’s a song being song rather than a big action set piece happening. And, working on several movie musicals, yes, everything has to be sort of carefully planned, but you have some flexibility, you can move stuff around.

Working on the stage show, it’s been really interesting that every day the script would change because we literally had moved one lyric in front of one line, or some character’s entrance was just a little bit later. And you had to accommodate all that stuff because it wasn’t just the script or the dancing, or the speaking; it was also the music department. Everything had to fit together in a way that was very, very tough.

And so you wanted to create as much room for the moment, for the acting, and for the possibility. But you’re on rails; you basically had to stay on this track or it wasn’t going to work.

**Craig:** In production, I honestly feel production of all kinds is so awful. I’ve never been on a movie where I didn’t look around at least once and think, “There’s got to be a better way.”

And I understand why directors, particularly very successful directors who reach a certain age and have done a certain amount of movies suddenly say, “You know what? Let’s just do this mo-cap then, you know. Let’s make Tintin on a green stage.” Because, it just takes away so much of the misery of production. It’s a very arduous task.

**John:** We should tell everybody that you’re on set for — our friends Derek Haas and Michael Brandt just had their show picked up, Chicago Fire.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you’re doing a little production rewrite there for them, helping them out, getting a few jokes in there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Chicago Fire is going to be the funniest show on TV. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s an NBC show.

Change in topics, this is a very exciting week because this is the week of Upfronts. So this is where all of the…

**Craig:** Exciting for you. [laughs]

**John:** Exciting for people who care about TV. Not exciting at all for Craig Mazin. This is where all the networks decide which shows are going to be on the fall season, and which shows are not coming back, and which ones they’re most excited about, which ones they’re nervous about, which ones they’re gonna stick in mid-season and cross their fingers and pray.

So we have several friends who have shows being picked up which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of them.

**John:** And we have friends whose shows didn’t get picked up and we’re sad for them. But what I’ve said before on the podcast is the amazing, wonderful thing about TV is that not getting your show picked up isn’t really considered a failure because most shows aren’t supposed to get picked up. Most pilots aren’t supposed to get picked up. So it’s not a big mark against you.

**Craig:** Right. If you got to pilot you have succeeded in some big way.

**John:** Yeah. I think I told you about this off-air last week, but I cheated on you. You know that?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I went and did another podcast. I recorded an episode of Jay Mohr’s podcast, Jay Mohr who I knew from Go, who I hadn’t seen for like 20 years or something so it was great to catch up. And so as I was driving over to Jay Mohr’s house to do his podcast, and he does one of those old school podcasts where they people actually look at each other…

**Craig:** Weird.

**John:** …unlike our podcast where I haven’t seen you in months.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is a blessing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s beautiful. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So one of the things in our mutual contract was that we couldn’t see each other.

**Craig:** Never see each other. Yeah. It was one of my demands.

**John:** So, as I was driving over to Jay’s house I listened to an episode of his show because I figured, you know that’s probably good preparation to listen to one episode of the guy’s show before you’re on his show. And so his guest that week was Ralph Garman who is a very, very funny radio personality on KROQ. He’s on the Kevin and Bean show. You don’t listen to the radio either, do you?

**Craig:** Actually I used to listen to whatever those — Kevin and Bean in the morning. And Ralph does the Hollywood…

**John:** He does the Hollywood Showbiz.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. He’s a funny guy.

**John:** He’s a very funny guy. So, both he and Jay are impressionists; they do a lot of impersonations. So they got talking about that and it was really fascinating to hear people talk about their craft, and especially when they can do things that I can’t do at all.

And so Ralph Garman was talking about this one other guy he had met who could do a dead-on Jason Lee impression.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so Jason Lee, who’s the guy on My Name is Earl, he was in the Chipmunks movies, and Ralph was saying like he had no idea how to even begin a Jason Lee impression. His quote, I think, was, “I wouldn’t even know where to hang my hat on that,” which is that when you are doing an impersonation there has to be something that you can start and you can build out from.

So, if you are doing a Christopher Walken thing you have this weird phrasing and sort of how he falls back into it. With an Al Pacino you sort of have his physicality that becomes sort of his voice. And like how do you do a Jason Lee impersonation?

And it is amazing when you see somebody doing an impression or impersonation that you’ve never even considered before. Like I remember when Jay Pharoah joined Saturday Night Live, Jay Pharoah does this brilliant Denzel Washington.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He also does Will Smith and Jay-Z. But particularly the Denzel Washington, it’s like you never even thought there could be a Denzel Washington impression, and he just nails it. And there’s not always comedy to back it up, but it’s just uncanny that he’s able to do this Denzel Washington.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think his thing is like he went in on the “my man,” like that’s his thing, you know?

**John:** Mm-hmm. He found something very specific and he sort of built out from that thing. And there is a difference between sort of voice acting; there’s people who can double and what we think about impressions or impersonations is really kind of a caricature. It’s like they are taking that one thing and blowing it out to this crazy distortion.

I mean, Ralph Garman describes it as like when you go to visit the Santa Monica pier and there’s those guys who will draw cartoon caricatures of you. And so they will pick like one thing on your face and make your head huge, and then give you a skateboard for some reason. That’s what a lot of that comedy is. But you have to find that one little thing.

And their conversation about finding a character’s voice, finding an actor’s voice for an impression got me thinking about what a character’s voice is. And so I thought we might start talking about that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Because to me, the mark of good writing is never really about structure, or where the beats are falling. I can tell if it’s a good writer or a bad writer mostly by whether they can handle a character’s voice. If they can convince me that the characters I’m reading on the page are distinct, and alive, and unique. I would happily read many scripts that are kind of a mess story wise, but you can tell someone’s a good writer because their characters have a voice.

**Craig:** Right. You can suggest ways to improve story structure. And you can always come up with ideas for interesting scenes. But what you can’t do is tell somebody to write characters convincingly. Either they can do it or they can’t.

**John:** Yeah. So this isn’t going to be a how-to-give-your-characters-a-voice thing, because I think it is one of those inherent skills; like you sort of have it or you don’t. You can work on it, and you can sort of notice when things are missing and apply yourself again. And, there are sometimes where… — There is a project that has been sitting on a shelf for awhile that a friend and I are going to take another look at. And looking through it again I realized that the biggest problem here is that our hero could sort of be anybody. We made him such an everyman that he kind of is every man. And because of that you don’t really care about him.

And so I thought of four questions, sort of four tests, to see whether character’s voices are working. So here are my four tests and maybe you can think of some more.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** First test — could you take the dialogue from one character in the script and have another character say it?

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a common complaint that you’ll hear from producers or executives that the character voice is not unique, that the characters all sound the same. And that’s a common error — I don’t even say a common rookie error. I think people misuse the term rookie error. It’s really a common stinky writer error, because rookies who are good writers I think automatically know to not do this. And that they write the characters as them, so they’re speaking through cardboard cutouts. They’re speaking through policeman. They’re speaking through Lady on Street.

**John:** Or worse, they’re just talking as “cop.” They’re talking like a cop. And they’re not talking like a specific human being; they’re talking like, “this is what a cop would say.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, that’s actually not especially helpful for your movie because this is not supposed to be any cop; it’s supposed to be a specific cop with a back story, and a name, and a role in your specific movie. And so if you’re making someone the generic version of that, that’s going to be a problem.

You already hit on my next thing which is is a character speaking for himself or is he speaking for the writer.

**Craig:** A-ha, I read your mind.

**John:** You did read my mind. And so that is the thing. Are you speaking really through your own voice? And some screenwriters are very, very funny. And so they have very funny voices themselves. But if every character in the movie has their same funny voice, that’s not going to be an especially successful outcome.

It may be an amusing read, but I doubt that the final product is going to be the best it could be.

**Craig:** Some people will say that there’re highly stylized writers who do a little bit of that, and I actually disagree. Like some people say, “Well in Mamet everybody sounds so hype literate and in Tarantino everybody sounds so deliberate, and quirky, and fascinated with pop culture, and thoughtful.” But the truth is, if you watch those movies you realize that he actually is crafting — yes, he has a style; yes, both of those brilliant writers have unique styles, but they do shade them for the different characters.

Sorkin is another one who… — It’s interesting. There’s a group of writers who have a very distinct style that exists through the movie. And yet the characters are distinct. That’s pretty advanced stuff to me.

**John:** Yeah. Diablo Cody often gets that knock. And she gets that knock off of her first movie, but then if you see Young Adult, those characters aren’t talking the same way.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Those characters are very specific and very unique.

**Craig:** That’s a good example.

**John:** Sort of a corollary to that, maybe I should break it out to its own point — is the character saying what he wants to say, or what the movie needs him to say? And that is is the character expressing his or her own feeling in the moment, or is he expressing what needs to happen next so that we can get on to the next thing? And that’s the subtle line that the screenwriter works is that screenwriting is always about what’s next. And you as a screenwriter have to be in control of the scene and make sure that this scene is existing so that we can get to the next story point.

At the same time, you can really feel it when a character is just giving exposition or setting up the ball so another character can spike it. And those are not good things to have happen.

**Craig:** No. You don’t want to set up straw dummies. And you don’t’ want to put things in their mouth because the screenwriter needed people to hear it. And frankly, I think of all those things as great opportunities. We all run into moments where we need the audience to learn information, or we need another character to learn information. So then it’s a great opportunity to sort of sit there and think, “Well how can I do this in a crafty way? How can I do this in a surprising way?”

Sometimes the answer is to be completely contradictory and to have people say the opposite of what they think and then be clear through the writing that you’re using subtext or you’re relying on performance.

I mean, the other thing is bad characters, and maybe I’m cheating ahead again, bad characters tend to speak like they’re on radio. And their dialogue ignores the fact that their faces will speak louder than any words coming out of their mouth. Was that number four?

**John:** No, no. That’s good. Not radio. So I’m going to add Not Radio Voices.

**Craig:** No radio plays.

**John:** In situations, I don’t want to get too off track talking about exposition, but in situations where you need to have the audience understand something, or you need to make it clear that a character has been caught up with another character, like the characters split up and now they’re back together and you need to make sure the audience understands that they all have the same information. Characters in real life cut each other off a lot, and they are often ahead of each other. So there may be opportunities to literally have one character stop the other and tell what they already know so that we don’t have to sort of walk through all of those conversations again.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to kind of recap. Simple rule of thumb is if the audience hears it once, don’t make them hear it twice. So, if you need to catch somebody up on what that bank robbery was like, and it was a crazy bank robbery, then the scene begins with the person who has been listening staring at the other person. They’re both silent. And then the person who was listening says, “Wow. That was insane.” “I know. You don’t have to tell me.”

The only important matter is that they they’re reacting to what they just heard, but certainly you don’t want to repeat anything ever.

**John:** Wherever possible, characters should speak in order to communicate their inner emotion and not to communicate just information.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is what I would throw out. What would a joke sound like from that character? And this is actually from… — Jane Espenson was on a recent edition of the Nerdist Writers Panel; Jane Espenson, who is a TV writer who has done a lot of stuff and had a blog.

**Craig:** And a lovely woman.

**John:** And a lovely woman. During the strike our three blogs came together and we all picketed at Warner Bros. Lovely woman. And so smart about comedy, and especially TV. She was on the Nerdist Writers Panel talking about Once Upon A Time, which is what she’s writing on right now. And she’s talking about having the Snow White character tell a joke, and that it was tough because it’s not a very particularly funny character, but you needed to find specific moments that she could be funny. And in finding what kind of joke can she tell is where you really get a sense of like, “Okay, I know who this person is.”

And so even if you’re not writing a comedy, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how can that character be funny. Because almost everybody is funny in some way, or at least tries to be funny in some way, so what is the nature of their humor? What is the nature of their comedy? And when you know that, then you will also have a sense of how they are going to respond in stressful situations. How they’re going to respond in sad situations. It gives you an insight into them.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I also like to think about power. I always think in terms of the power dynamic between any two or three characters or four, whatever you have in your scene. Who holds the gun? And how does that change the way they talk to the other person? Obviously the gun in this instance could be anything. It could be anything from information, to an actual gun, to “you’re in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.”

And then is there a way to change who holds the gun in the middle of the scene? And allow the character’s voice to adapt to what we would normally adapt to. I mean, think of how many times in life we have had conversations where we thought we were unassailable at the beginning and by the end we were getting our lunches handed to us? No, our lunches eaten, and our hats handed to us. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And so use that. Scenes are all to me, they are all about variation, and they’re all about growth. So, allow the voices to respond to the dynamics of the moment.

**John:** Agreed. My last test, and we’ll think of some more after this — can you picture a given actor in the role? Or at least preclude certain actors from the role because it doesn’t feel like they would say those things?

And so my example here is Angelina Jolie. So let’s say you’re writing a woman’s role and she’s funny. It’s not going to be Angelina Jolie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably not.

**John:** Probably not. Angelina Jolie has done at least comedy I know, but you don’t think of Angelina Jolie as being funny.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, it depends. I guess, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I thought she was very funny, but it was…

**John:** But it’s not telling a joke funny.

**Craig:** No, it was sort of clipped and wry which is…

**John:** Perfect.

**Craig:** She has a great arched brow, so to me like, it’s funny — when you think about doing impressions, I guess in my head I’m always doing impressions of actors as I’m writing for them. And so I think, okay, what’s that thing where I would go, okay, I can see her sort of arching her brow. And I always think of Angelina Jolie as somebody that has power. So, she can be confident and cut you down with one or two words.

I mean, in writing ID Theft for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, I kept thinking about how Melissa was sort of, you know, she’s somebody who would ramble and Jason is somebody who would be very short. And it was an interesting thing because it goes counter to the normal thing which is the rambler is the weak one and the short talking person, the terse person is the strong one.

But in this case it’s the opposite. You have the terse person who is weak, interestingly, and the rambler is strong. And that was actually fun; that was a fun dynamic to play around with because it felt, it just made those scenes more interesting to me. And if you’re not thinking in those terms of how language, the quantity, the quality, the size of the words, how many pauses, the speed; I mean, language is music and you should be musical about it, I think.

**John:** The project I’m writing right now, one of the reasons I had struggled with it a bit is I was writing it with one very specific actor in mind, who is great and funny, but is a tough fit for what this story kind of needs. And so once I got past that that it has to be this, and I started thinking of the broader picture, I landed on the other actors — oh, that’s inherently funny; him in that premise is inherently funny.

Now, ultimately, will we cast either of these actors? Who knows? But it helped me figure out the voice because I could hear what it would sound like if this actor were saying it, and I could shape the lines so that it would be very, very funny coming from that person.

It doesn’t mean that that’s the only actor who can ever play it. Famously, Will Smith was not the original choice for Men in Black. And it’s hard to imagine that it was supposed to be Matthew Perry, but it was supposed to be Matthew Perry. So don’t think you have to be locked into a specific cast. But if you can’t think of someone who should play the role, that’s also probably a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those things are sort of proof of concept, you know. If it’s funny with two particular actors, then at least you know it can be funny. If you can’t think of any two actors that it could be funny in combination, then screw it. It ain’t gonna work, for sure.

**John:** Any more on voice? We have a couple questions here.

**Craig:** Eh, let’s go to questions.

**John:** Let’s go to questions. James from Oregon. His question, I think, is about recycling, which, recycling is good. “My question regards ownership of your work during development. If I understand it correctly, once you sell a script to the studio they own it. Now say you have written a unique character or a specific funny gag and it is not used in the final film. Are you free to use that same gag or character in a new script? Or, does the studio own every word of every draft, and could they prevent you from incorporating that unused idea is another script?”

**Craig:** Yes and yes, kind of. I mean, for sure they own it. They are the copyright authors of that. You cannot use it in other scripts legally. In practice, however, we all will occasionally do this sort of thing where it’s like, “Look, you didn’t use it, you’re never gonna use it, I’m gonna steal it and stick it in this other thing because I wrote it really. And it has value to you.”

But you’ve got to be really careful about it, ’cause technically it is verboten.

**John:** Yeah. I had a couple thoughts here. First off, this is talking about the movie shot and they didn’t use it, and so that’s a very specific situation. So, like, that script that you wrote is never going to get made again because that already shot. Sometimes there’s things that just linger in development forever. Like I have this Shazam! project that, who knows if it’s ever going to happen over at Warner Bros. So, I would never feel safe taking anything out of that because, who knows, they could dust it off and shoot it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But if something has already shot and you know that they didn’t use it, technically they own it. But are they going to come after you for doing something that was in there? Like for the first Charlie’s Angels there was a, I think I may have mentioned this on the podcast before; there was a sequence where the Angels had to, in the script, in there’s a sequence where the Angels had to rescue somebody, and it was on top of a mountain.

And they end up in a van going down a bobsled run. And it was actually a really fun sequence. And Amy Pascal came in on like a Friday at 5pm and says, “We’re cutting $5 million out of this movie. And we’re not leaving the room until we do it.” And so she picks up the script and she rips out those five pages. They’re gone.

And so that bobsled sequence I sort of felt like was fair game. And so if another alpine action movie came up in some case, I would feel pretty good using that same kind of beat again.

**Craig:** Maybe now, but… — The only thing to be aware of is sequels because they will occasionally go back and want to re-mine the stuff that was there from the first thing. if the movie comes out and it’s a bomb, which wasn’t the case in Charlie’s Angels, I think you’re pretty much on safe ground. But if it’s a hit, you’ve got to be careful.

**John:** But we were also talking about how dialogue is sort of musical, and I think a lesson that I’ve learned from people who write musicals is that you always think like, “Oh, we cut that song out of that show.” And so I asked, “Well the song is great, why don’t you use it in a different show?” And the truth is, songs are kind of written for certain shows. It’s kind of tough to sort of take all the ideas that were in there and really apply them to this new show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the same happens with most stuff that’s in your movie. We were talking about voices just a second ago. If a character has a very specific joke, and that joke works in his voice, it’s unlikely that it’s going to work as well in whatever thing you’re trying to shoehorn it into.

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

**John:** There’s a script I wrote that actually I still own completely. And I considered going back through and like pulling out some of the action sequences I love in it for this other project, and the more I think about it the less likely I am to really do that, because it’s not… — Those worked really well in that movie because it was that movie. They’re not going to work at all in this one.

**Craig:** It was for that movie. Yeah. Look, you wrote one good scene, or one good line, or one good sequence before, you can do it again. Yeah. It’s better in general to be — I can’t think of any instances where I actually did lift something from an abandoned project.

**John:** Two things that came to mind, just as we were talking right now. When I was writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers a zillion years ago — it was one of the first paid things I ever did. I literally had three weeks to write an entire book. And I was also in the middle of finals in grad school, and I was working a full time job. It was a very crazy time.

And at a certain point I was like, “I just need more stuff.” And so I ended up going through my hard drive and going through like old short stories I’d written and other little things, and I found these moments that were interesting, and I did just sort of pull them in and use them. And it felt like — it was like I was making quilt out of all the little scraps I had.

And that’s okay. They’re yours. That’s fine. But you are not going to…

**Craig:** Not for something you care about.

**John:** Yeah. I did — it worked really well in the book because that book was so pastiche-y anyway. Here’s the other point I was going to make. Sometimes I will have something that I have always wanted to use, and I’ll be on a weekly. And this is nothing I used in any other project; it was something I had half developed for myself. I’ll totally use it in that weekly because I know, you know what, they are gonna probably shoot this. This idea I’ve had in my head can actually be shot and be used, and then I can stop thinking about it.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s cool. I like that.

**John:** William asks, “When writing action where a group of characters are involved, do you need to list them all in each new scene? If not, how else could this be handled?”

That’s a reasonable question. A little rookie, but not too bad.

**Craig:** I’m not quite sure. What do you mean in each new scene?

**John:** So what he’s talking about, let’s talk about The Hangover. In the second Hangover you were cutting back and forth between two groups. And do you need to remind the reader who’s in which group when we cut back to them?

**Craig:** Yeah, but there’s sort of short hand ways to do it. You don’t want to keep saying, “Phil, Allen, and Stu are still in the car.” We assume — there are certain things we presume if we’re going back and forth. I do know that Todd and I are often, we often do sort of say, “Okay, we’ve started a new scene, the guys say, ‘All right, let’s get in the car. We’ve gotta go to this place.’ And then the next shot is them in the car. Do we need to say Phil, Stu, and Allen are in the car? We actually do. We just lay out who’s driving, who’s sitting in the front seat, who’s sitting in the back.”

But in a sequence, so a group of scenes that are connected by action as opposed to location, like a car chase, running through a casino, or moving through different rooms of a house, it’s okay to sort of elide over that, or shorthand things with “the guys” or “the policemen” or whatever kind of group name you can come up with.

It’s really all about just making sure that it’s clear for the reader without it being boring and repetitive.

**John:** The thing I’m working on right now, the action sequence that I was talking about, it’s a sports thing. And so I do need to be clear about which players are actually playing at that time, because there are some characters who are back on the bench. Bu there’s also times where I can just refer to “the team” and it’s helpful just to refer to the team. And if a character needs to do something that’s distinct, I see them talking, so I know that they’re there at the moment.

But that will come up sometimes as a conversation during preproduction is they will check to make sure that who exactly is in this scene. And as the writer, that’s part of your job is to make sure that they really do have everybody in that scene who needs to be in that scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think it’s okay to leave out certain bits of information like that for the reader of the script, as long as you know. Because eventually somebody is going to ask you, and I do feel like it’s a wonderful thing to be able to immediately say to that person, “Here’s who’s playing, here’s who’s on the bench.”

Years ago I wrote a blog piece called You Can’t Just Walk Into a Building, which Josh Olson disagreed with — imagine that.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Dope. Anyway. In that piece I basically said, “Look, you can say your characters walk into a building in a script, and that’s fine, but down the line somebody may very well ask you what kind of building exactly are you talking about here? Are we talking skyscraper, this, that, whatever?” You should know. You should know your settings. You should have a sense of all of these things in your mind at the very least, because they will ask you.

On every movie I’ve ever done, I have sat down and been asked these questions by either the AD, the director, the costume people. Everybody. It’s amazing how many people actually do directly ask the screenwriter these questions. So know the answers.

**John:** Know the answers.

Luke from Poland asks, “I follow Derek Haas’s Popcorn Fiction site,” which is great, so we’ll provide a link for that, “which is all kinds of awesome. And I know that both of you wrote short stories for Derek’s site. Therefore writing prose is not completely alien to you. So I was wondering, have you ever considered writing a novel?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Is there a John August or Craig Mazin novel on the horizon?”

**Craig:** Those are two different questions. [laughs] Yes, and no. Yes I have. I have an idea for a novel. It’s really sad, and dark, and depressing, which I love. And I even have a couple of chapters of it. But I’m so fastidious about it. It’s funny, when we were talking last week about writer’s block and how you just have to keep moving. I don’t have writer’s block, but I am overly fastidious because I feel like, look, this is it. You write these sentences and they exist forever in that state, never to be amended.

So, I’m rather fastidious about it, and it’s very slow going. But I do kind of love it. I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll finish it and publish it. I don’t beat myself up over it.

**John:** How much is written?

**Craig:** I have two chapters, and they’re sizable chapters. But, I mean it’s probably one-fifteenth of what it should be, if that.

**John:** I have considered writing a novel. And it’s one of those things that loosely on the horizon, so I will talk to my agent or my lawyer about it once a year or so. And the thing I would want to write, it’s very much sort of in my wheelhouse. You could say, “Oh, what would John August write well?” John August — I adapt a lot of kid and young adult things and it would be one of those kind of projects.

So I’ve definitely considered it. I just know the amount of time it would take would pull me away from other things, and so it’s not my highest priority right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s where I’m at.

**John:** But, I would love to do it. And I love books, and I love writing, and I love the sense of completion and finality that you have in a book that’s wonderful. And world building, is that so much of the time I am writing these screenplays and I’m creating the world, and creating the characters in the world, but it’s only for a very specific small purpose. And I like that when you write a novel or write a series of novels you can really expand and expound and create stuff beyond the borders of just a two-hour movie. And that’s an amazing thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also there’s an ability to express an inner world in a novel, to really go into the kind of hard to articulate consciousness that we all think we understand, which you cannot do in movies. Movies are entirely about what you see in here.

**John:** Yeah. The toolbox is much bigger in novels. And you can spend five pages on the feeling of the sheets, and you maybe shouldn’t do that, but you can. And there are amazing opportunities in novels that are great.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a big Conrad fan. I’ve always been a big fan of his. And I always loved how impressionistic his style was, that he would sort of describe things to you in a way where almost he as the author didn’t quite see them clearly until maybe a scene later when it suddenly became clear what had happened. And that’s something, again, that you can do as a novelist. You can be impressionistic. You can have people misunderstand what they see, but in movies it’s very difficult. If someone gets stabbed…

There’s a wonderful moment in Heart of Darkness where they’re on the boat, and one of the natives who are, I guess, part of the crew of the boat. I think in the novel it’s something like, “He grasps in his hands what appears to be a cane, and then falls down.” And then only afterwards do you realize, no, a spear was thrown from the banks of the river, and pierced him through the chest and killed him. But in that moment it was like Conrad was as confused as all of us about what was going on. Can’t do that in a movie. Spear through the chest is a spear through the chest.

**John:** Yeah. In a movie you would have to pay that off within about 10 seconds, or else we would have forgotten what happened there.

**Craig:** It’s also hard to even just pretend that it’s anything other than what it is. Because we can’t — the lens is objective. It is not clouded by anxiety, or tension, or squinting.

**John:** When you write prose, we may have talked about this before, I’ve enjoyed writing stuff for Derek’s site, and it was one of the first times I have written prose in quite a few years was writing those two short stories, Snake People and The Variant which you can both find on Amazon. I found dialogue to be really frustrating. I got better at it as I would sort of go through it, but like the first day or two of trying to write those short stories, it killed me writing when characters had to speak.

Because I find that the form of dialogue in American novels incredibly frustrating the way we do the comma, open quotes, I speak a line, closed quotes, and the “he said”s. It’s really weird. Because when you read it, here’s what the difference is, I think: In screenwriting every word counts except for, of course, the character cues above dialogue. Those are ignored, you never say those. But everywhere it otherwise counts.

In books the “he said”s are supposed to be invisible, like they are supposed to not really exist. And I just find our way of writing really artificial.

**Craig:** Well, it is. And it definitely took a little bit of adjustment, but on the other hand when I would read it back I realized that they were invisible to me as well. And also I noticed that, well, a couple things. One, it definitely drives your interest in dialogue down which I think is kind of a good thing, because I don’t really like dialogue heavy books.

And it also, I noticed that if you had kind of established if there was sort of a back and forth conversation, it was legal to leave out the “he said”s/”she said”s if there was a run.

**John:** Exactly. As long as the rhythm was established, like your characters were all trading lines, then you can go through quite a bit without having to do that.

So, Craig, do you have One Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do have One Cool Thing this week.

**John:** Why don’t you go first.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is 1Password. I don’t know if you use 1Password.

**John:** I use 1Password. I like 1Password.

**Craig:** It’s the greatest thing ever. So, 1Password, it’s software that you can freely purchase for money, so it’s not free, online. Available for both Mac and PC.

**John:** And iOS.

**Craig:** And iOS, that’s correct. And 1Password is kind of brilliant. So, we all have a thousand accounts for a thousand different things and we tend to use one password or maybe two passwords because we can only memorize a certain amount of passwords. And those passwords tend to be fairly low security. Go ahead — there’s sites where you can test the security of your own password, and most people fail pretty miserably.

And then of course there are some websites that demand that you use a capital, and lower case. Some ask for a number. I mean, as we said in Hangover 1, my password used to be just “bologna,” but now they make you add numbers. [laughs]

So, hundreds of these passwords, and many of them are duplicates and many of them are unsecure. So, what 1Password does brilliantly is it says “No, no. Come up with one really secure password that’s a bunch of numbers and uppercases/lowercases, whatever you want to do, and we’ll help you come up with it. That’s the one you memorize.

“Then, when you go to a website, we’ll come up with a password for you that will be a huge gobbledygook 14 string combination of nonsense that no one could possibly remember, including you — you won’t have to.

“Then, if you go to that website and you want to get in, you just click on the 1Password icon which there is an extension for Safari, Chrome, and Explorer. Type in your master password, it then plugs in the password for that site and you are unlocked.” And it is spectacular. And, you don’t even need — you might think, “Well, what if I’m not at home on my computer that has all that stuff?” No problem, because if you have a Dropbox account, a free Dropbox account, you can use a web-based version of 1Password through Dropbox.

It’s spectacular. You should all get it. It’s the greatest thing ever.

**John:** See, I’ve had less success with it than you have. And so I have had situations where, especially the plug-ins weren’t working quite right. The browser plug-ins weren’t working quite right.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** So then it would fill in the wrong thing. I may need to sort of reinstall and redo some stuff. What I have found it very useful for though is overall control of passwords, especially the things you kind of forgot about from a long time ago. And so my general password philosophy is I have a schema for sort of how passwords work that every password for every site is different, but if I stare at a site I can probably figure out what my password for it is.

Now, that may not be the most secure, because somebody else could figure out what my schema is, but I think it’s going to be challenging for them to figure out what my schema is.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t even like to wait or even do that much thinking about it. I just like knowing that I’ve got one thing. I don’t know my email password, for instance. I have no idea what it is. But I know 1Password.

**John:** Ah, that’s faith. You have a lot of faith in that 1Password.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. But the point is I am no more faith in that than I am in any password. I mean, you’re hoping that the password…

**John:** No, but you’re putting a lot of faith in that 1Password, the application, is not going to completely self-destruct.

**Craig:** Well, you can if you’re really wigged out about it use the 1Password app to print out all of them and stick them in a safe somewhere.

**John:** That’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I do find myself using 1Password for credit card information. And so my American Express card, I used to have it memorized for a long time, and then of course someone stole it at a certain point, and we had to get a new number, and I don’t remember my new number. So I just go to 1Password and have that plug it in.

**Craig:** Exactly. And it works out o 80% of the time. There are some sites where just the way they set up their fields, 1Password can’t figure out what the hell they are talking about. But usually it will be able to fill in your number, your security code, your expiration date, etc.

**John:** On the topic of passwords, an application that you probably don’t have to use, and you should thank god you don’t have to use, I’m just gonna bitch for one second about iTunes Connect. So, if you’re selling apps in the app store, Apple has an app for iOS called iTunes Connect which will let you know how many copies you’ve sold. So like we have Bronson Watermarker there, and FDX Reader; those are the two apps that we’re selling today.

And so we can see how many did we sell today. It asks you for your password every single time you launch it. And you can’t actually change anything. It’s not like a thing where someone could grab your phone and steal your money or anything. No, it just tells you how many you have sold. And the fact that it asks you for your password every time is infuriating. And there’s no good way to get around it so you have to type it in.

And, of course, you don’t want to have an easy password for it, so you have to have a difficult password that you are trying to type in and the dots are hiding what you’re typing.

**Craig:** Well, if the point is that there’s really no secure information on it, why not just do 123412341234?

**John:** That’s the problem, is that the password to get into it is your real master password for iTunes Connect.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s super annoying.

**John:** So it has to be your real solid fear of god password because there’s tens of thousands of dollars at stake there.

**Craig:** That’s annoying, yeah. Annoying. Well, I guess that’s why they do it.

**John:** So, my one cool thing is a guaranteed time waster. So, probably the worst thing I should ever share with screenwriters. But it’s an amazing game that I’ve been playing the whole week. I’ve been playing far too much the whole week called Ski Safari, which is not a great title by any means.

So here’s the thing in Ski Safari. You are this little guy who’s skiing down a hill…

**Craig:** Well first tell us what platform it’s on.

**John:** Oh, it’s for iPad.

**Craig:** Got it.

**John:** And so the good thing about it being for iPad is that you can’t play it on your phone, so that you’re not wasting all your time on your phone with it. And also because it’s on iPad I don’t need to play it at my computer, which is good. So, it’s not one of those things.

I’ve also set myself a rule that I will only play it while standing up because as writers we sit down way too much. So I can stand at the counter and play this. And when I get tired of standing I should just sit down. So, it’s an incredibly simple game. It’s very much like Tiny Wings if you have played Tiny Wings, and it’s an Endless Runner. So, basically you’re leaping, you’re sliding, you’re leaping, you’re sliding. But the character design and sort of the world of it is really, really nicely done. It’s incredibly smartly thought out and it feels to me like a perfect pop song. Like you know Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone…

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** …is an amazing perfect pop song, this is sort of an amazing iOS game. It feels like it does exactly what it should be doing right at this moment and just knocks it out of the park.

**Craig:** I’m going to download it. Is it S-K-I Safari?

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I’m gonna download it tonight.

**John:** Yeah. It’s cheap. And it’s one of those things where, I think it’s $0.99, everyone who plays it will love it and will become addicted to it, I suspect. And then at some point the game designers will probably make some little change, and everyone will be up in arms about how they ruined the game, and demand their money back, their $0.99, after they played it for probably 100 hours.

**Craig:** Or maybe Zynga jerks will just copy it.

**John:** The Zynga jerks — I’m sure the Zynga people already have their photocopiers ready.

**Craig:** Are the Zynga people just the worst?

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know. They might be.

**Craig:** I think they might be. I just feel like they really are bad.

**John:** I didn’t really begrudge them for Farmville, because like, oh, great, you found a new kind of crack. Okay. Or Mafia Wars. You and I played Mafia Wars way back in the day, didn’t we?

**Craig:** Yeah. They’ve stolen, I mean, I feel like there’s 100 lawsuits against these guys.

**John:** So here’s what pushed me over the edge, is that there’s this kind of cute little iPad game called Tiny Tower where you are running this little tower and you’re building new floors, and you’re running the elevator to get people to places.

And then I saw the Zynga knock-off, which was exactly the same. I mean, completely 100% the same thing. And that’s not cool.

**Craig:** I hate it. No, it’s not cool. I mean, everybody likes to go after EA because EA… — The big crime of Electronic Arts in the gaming community is that they tend to swallow up independent game publishers or raid independent game publishers of their staff, their key personnel. And so they have a general depressing effect on game innovation and the indie game scene.

And I get that. But on the other hand, everybody’s an adult. If you own an independent game company and you feel like selling it to EA, that’s your choice. And if you work at an independent game company and you feel like going to work for EA, that’s your choice, too.

But Zynga, it seems like they’re ripping these other people off, to me, as a lay person when I read these things. And that’s kind of gross.

**John:** Yeah. That shouldn’t happen.

**Craig:** That’s One Bad Thing.

**John:** One Bad Thing.

**Craig:** One Uncool Thing. Zynga.

**John:** Zynga. Craig!

**Craig:** John!

**John:** Thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, and John.

**John:** Oh, there’s more.

**Craig:** One last little addendum. I just wanted to say congratulations to you and all of my gay, lesbian, transgendered friends, because the President of the United States for the first time ever in our history has come out in support of same sex marriage, and I think that’s fantastic.

**John:** I think that is really fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good deal.

**John:** Yeah. I was happy it happened.

**Craig:** Yeah, me too.

**John:** Yay!

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** All right, so I’ll pick appropriately triumphant end music.

**Craig:** Yeah, something good! But not, like no I Will Survive. No Gloria Gaynor.

**John:** No, it will be some good other anthem.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** My thinking cap is already running. And, in fact, it’s already playing under our talking right now.

**Craig:** Is it It’s Raining Men? [laughs] ‘Cause no Weather Girls will do. I can’t take it.

**John:** Thank you, Craig. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thank you, too, John. Bye-bye.