Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/setting-perspective-and-terrible-numbers).

**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.

So, Craig, my working theory is that most of our listeners are not actual screenwriters, or they’re people who are interested in screenwriting but they’re actively pursuing a career in screenwriting. Is that consistent with your perspective?

**Craig:** Given the numbers that you’ve been reporting, it has to be true.

**John:** Because there are no 65,000 aspiring screenwriters I would assume.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So just people who are interested in screenwriting. And so I really thought this was great news that came out this week is that — it was a study released by the WGA. They released the earnings and clearly there’s never been a better time to not be a screenwriter.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s exactly right. If that’s your interest, if you are actively pursuing not being a screenwriter the trends are definitely in your favor.

**John:** Definitely. Really pretty much any other career you might want to pick other than screenwriting, it’s looking great. Or if you were thinking, “Maybe screenwriting? Or maybe dog grooming?” Well, the numbers are pretty clear that dog grooming is really your future.

**Craig:** It couldn’t be worse than the screenwriting numbers. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So the numbers we’re talking about, and it’s really hard to talk about numbers and charts on a podcast so I’ll include links to them at johnaugust.com. The Writers Guild every year, I think, has to report earnings for its members.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so essentially everyone who works as a screenwriter or TV writer in Hollywood is a member of the WGA, the Writers Guild, and the WGA has access to all their payment information, so they know how much these people are bringing in. And so what’s helpful is you can look historically to see how much did people make last year, or the year before, or ten years ago and see whether the trends are positive or negative.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the trends are not positive if you are a person who wishes to be employed in the Hollywood system.

**Craig:** Certainly not for theatrical. For television maybe it’s a little bit better. But for screenwriting right now it’s horrendous.

**John:** Yes. So the number that you actually, the chart you sent me which is Earnings and Employment in Screen, was that for features or was that for TV and…

**Craig:** That’s just for features.

**John:** That’s just for features.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Screen is what they call movie screens.

**John:** So, for this last year, for 2011, which is the last year that they have numbers, there are 1,562 writers reporting earnings for Screen, for the big screen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which was down 8.1%.

**Craig:** From the year before.

**John:** From the year before. And down significantly more from prior years. And the total amount of earnings of all those writers writing for feature films was down 12.6%, which is a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a lot. And at some point you can’t quite…you have to get off of the thing of blaming just the economy. If you look at the sort of year-on-year trends you realize that even though we sort of hit rock bottom with the economy in 2008, somehow there are still so many fewer of us who are reporting any earnings. Reporting earnings means that you made a dollar. There are so many fewer of us reporting earnings now than in 2008. And we are making much less as an aggregate because so many fewer of us are reporting earnings.

And if you go back to the last number that the Guild reports historically, in 2006, to give you perspective on it, 1,993 writers earned money in screenwriting for movies. That’s down to 1,562. So that’s 431 jobs, or 431 writers that earn money, gone.

**John:** Yeah. So someone might be thinking, “Well, there’s less competition, so that’s a good thing.” But that’s not really the case at all. It’s probably the same number of writers pursuing fewer jobs, and in pursuing fewer jobs fewer of them actually end up landing jobs.

The other sort of dangerous statistic which is a temptation but I would urge you to really step back away from the precipice there is to take the total amount of earnings and divide it by the number of writers employed. Because that would give you a number that is like $200,000 which makes it sound like, “Wow, everyone’s making $200,000,” which is not a very useful metric by anything because you’re making up an imaginary average writer who doesn’t actually exist.

**Craig:** That’s right. There is a distribution of income across writers. And this is a… — I’ve actually asked one of our Guild board members to see if they can’t put a chart like this together for us because this is what I’m most interested in.

Typically you will see bell curves for income distribution in any field. So, the fewest people earn sort of the bottom end of the thing. Another small amount of people are in the top end, but most people working in the business tend to earn the sort of middle average salary for that business.

For us, I suspect we’re looking at something like an inverted bell curve, a U-curve where the bulk of people are either earning at the lower end or at the very high end. And it’s the middle class of writing that has been decimated as the amount of jobs that are available go down, and as the amount of writers who are employed go down, and as the amount of writers who are employed go down, and as the total earnings go down.

**John:** And that’s what we’ve talked about many times on the podcast is that screenwriting is essentially the research and development of the film industry. You are designing the movies that may or may not get made, but that’s what they’re bringing you in to do.

And it feels to me like the biggest crisis in the film industry right now, especially as it affects screenwriters, is the decision not to even do the research and development. We’re basically just deciding, “We’re going to make this movie and we’ll spend however much money we have to make this movie, but we’re not going to try to figure out other stuff. We’re not going to experiment along the way. And so we’re only writing big checks and we’re not writing any small checks.”

**Craig:** Yeah. And unfortunately what’s happening, I think, is sort of akin to what the New York Yankees went through under Steinbrenner in the last ’70s. And I know you know what I’m going to say, John.

**John:** Absolutely. 100%. A sports reference, a sports metaphor, I’ll totally be with you.

**Craig:** [laughs] George Steinbrenner in his zeal to win World Series would routinely trade away all his young farm system players, all of his prospects, for middle aged or aging superstars who could give you that one great season and push you over the line. And in doing so kind of mortgaging the future.

And I think right now studios are kidding themselves if they think they’re not hurting the movies ten years from now, because if they can’t figure out a way to make screenwriting an attractive occupation for smart people, smart people won’t do it. They just won’t do it. It’s too hard of a job. It’s too unpredictable of a job to throw your lot in and hope that maybe you can make $100,000 a year when you could go into finance, or law, or medicine or something that frankly is more satisfying on some kind of a human level. Whether your interests are financial or just quality of life, it’s too easy to go do something else.

So, who’s going to be writing these movies ten years from now if they can’t figure out how to make this a reasonable occupation? I don’t know the answer to that question.

**John:** No. But let’s not dwell on the glumness of that. It’s not something we’re going to solve here today. And sometimes our podcast does get a little negative, so I want to make sure that we’re not driving people to the bridge that they want to jump off.

**Craig:** I know. And we do do this and I apologize. The truth is it would be… — It is unfair, in a sense, to go on and on about this stuff in a discouraging way to the person out there who is going to end up making $1 million because they going to make $1 million, no matter what we say, no matter how bad things are. But it would be equally unfair, I think, to hide the truth for people which is that it’s looking not good.

The only thing I will say… Here, I will end on an optimistic note. So if you are driving to the bridge, pull over. This business is remarkably cyclical. Almost fetishistically cyclical. I think Hollywood is built on the notion that new is good. And that permeates everything, even business, I think. So, it seems like what’s going to happen is in a year or two, I’m hoping, they just get sick of the current way of doing it and try something new.

**John:** Great. And I want to believe, Craig. You know I want to believe. What I worry about is that the next stage isn’t going to be actually a better stage. It’s going to be a riskier stage that’s not going to actually be helpful to people.

**Craig:** Well, you know, I was trying to be helpful. [laughs]

**John:** Where I do think your thesis is correct is that this is a business that is built on the new, and so if you’re a person who is now entering the film and television industry, there may be opportunities that weren’t there before, and there’s new stuff that will come up and new opportunities and new ways to do things. That doesn’t necessarily help the person who reached the middle of the career and it’s just sort of going away now.

**Craig:** I was really struggling to say something hopeful and you killed it.

**John:** I did. I’m so sorry. We won’t try to spin gold out of this anymore. We’ll just go on to something new and happy.

Let’s talk about craft. Let’s talk about a question from Kyle, a reader who says, “It would be great to hear from you and Craig to discuss setting and its impact on character, conflict, and story. I’ve been reading a lot of scripts lately and the kitchen, the car, and the sidewalk are due for an upgrade.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a good observation. A lot of times you will see just sort of generic settings used in movies. And movies don’t have to take place in normal areas and necessarily probably shouldn’t. So settings should be one of those early things you’re thinking about in the conception of your movie. And, you know, think about it… — Remember, you’re not just writing a script, you’re writing a movie, so where will be the interesting place to stage those scenes of your movie that have the visual and emotional impact that they could have?

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. It’s, to me, eventually somebody is gonna have to go scout, and how do you scout “Park?” How do you scout “Parking Lot?” How do you scout “Super Market?” There has to be something, I think, when you sit down and write a scene that connects the setting to what’s going on. And even if the nature of what’s going on is sort of setting independent, find a way to at least place it so it feels real. Interact with the world around you. Who is moving in and out of the space? What can the space tell us about the people who are employed there or the people who are visiting there, the people who are robbing from it?

Whatever it is, figure out how to make it integral. Otherwise, frankly, you’re just doing a sitcom, you know. It’s boring. Sets are boring.

**John:** The reason why you see the same settings again, and again, and again on TV is because TV is trying to shoot on a 7 or 8 day schedule. And so if you see parking garages a lot in TV that’s because they could get to the parking garage and it’s a location they can control. They don’t need to worry about day or night. Parking garages are common in TV because they’re easy to shoot. They’re sort of terrible for sound but they’re easy to shoot.

But if you’re writing a feature, well, I would say no matter what you’re writing, don’t be limited by what you tend to see on one-hour dramas. Think bigger. Classically a sort of like at this point clichéd-ly — is that the right way to say it? “Clichéd-ly?”

**Craig:** I’ll take it. Yeah.

**John:** Almost every Bruckheimer movie will have some scene that takes place in a boxing ring. And it will usually be some sort of exposition scene where somebody has to go to talk to somebody about something, and for whatever reason they’re going to be in a boxing ring. They just do that. Because it’s more visual.

And that’s a choice, but find your own boxing ring to stage that scene where two characters are talking.

**Craig:** By the way, the boxing ring is what happens when the screenwriter doesn’t come up with something better.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Because the director is like, “Look, I’m not having two people talk about this over a sandwich. So, oh, here’s a great space. And here’s light shining through. And here’s something with aesthetic value that’s gonna look cinematic.”

Now the truth is those things seem ridiculous because they seem superimposed onto the drama of what matters. But to me that goes back to, okay, at least… — If that happens to you it’s because they just didn’t like your idea, but at least have an idea. Have a better, more interesting setting.

Your point about television is a great one. Remember: hour-long dramas are on budgets. They are shot for a small screen. And they are confined by time. The show must be certain length. Movies don’t have to be a certain length at all and they’re very, very big. So that means when somebody drives to a spot the camera can linger on it. It can rise up. It can reveal. It can really make a meal out of it if it’s interesting, you know.

So, if you are effectively seeing the scene in your head before you write it, that doesn’t mean just the people and their mouths. It means the world around the them, for sure. And think about…I always like to think about the things that you can’t see immediately but then you can see on people, like heat, wind, dust, smells. Really work with the world.

And, you know, you will find sometimes that you get comedy or interesting surprises out of characters who are desperately focused on the thing that is the story and yet distracted by the world around them. And that creates a verisimilitude that I think is very satisfying.

**John:** Definitely. If that scene is now walking through a meat packing plant it’s going to have a very different feel and texture and you’re giving the actor something to respond to as they’re going through things.

And I’ve kind of forked this answer into two parts. There’s the setting that come to, “This is the world in which this movie takes place.” And so quite early on in the process you’re figuring out, “What is the setting of this movie?” “What part of the world does this take place in?” “What kind of things are in this movie?”

There are two projects I’m working on right now where setting, those big setting questions are really key and crucial. One of them, the initial version of the project was taking place in sort of Park Slope, Brooklyn. And I like Park Slope, Brooklyn, but I have weird sort of sympathy issues with Park Slope, Brooklyn and our expectations that come bundled with people who live in that neighborhood. So, is that the right place to tell this story next, or should we tell it in a different neighborhood? So we’re looking at sort of what are the alternatives that gives a lot of what Park Slope has but doesn’t have all the pressures of what Park Slope would give you.

Another thing I’m thinking about, it’s a dark movie, but could we take this dark movie and do it in San Diego? And you don’t think about San Diego being dark, but if we were going to do it in San Diego, what are the dark parts of San Diego? And that could be really interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. I mean, that is how directors approach the stuff and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do that as well. For a lot of the complaining that we do as screenwriters about directors “screwing up” our screenplays, sometimes they do. Sometimes they’re filling in gaps we just didn’t get across.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the more you can put into a script that conveys your intentions as an author, the more the director will tend to absorb that and use it directly or be influenced by it.

**John:** Look at The Hangover II. You had to make a choice very early on where you were going to set that movie. And picking, was it Thailand? Bangkok?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Once you picked that place that was a fundamental decision about everything else that was going to radiate out from there. And so if for whatever reason you couldn’t have shot there, you could have moved the movie somewhere else but it would have been a very different movie and you would have had to go through probably every scene and look at sort of, “What is this? If we’re now in Tokyo rather than Bangkok, what is different about our movie?” And kind of everything is different about your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it would have just been a complete rewrite.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can’t, particularly in a movie in which the location is such an enormous part of the plot itself, it needs to be tied in integrally, which means if you pull it out that’s not a simple stitch up. And frankly with that movie, Todd and I did a scout in Bangkok and in Malaysia and wrote — I probably rewrote 20% of the script just based on the locations that were there to be the locations we had wanted. So it was even, “Okay, we want to do something in a marketplace.” And we looked online and we studied and researched and found pictures.

So we wrote the scene crafted towards a marketplace. But then you get there and you walk around and you go back and you rewrite it again because you have to use what’s around you. It’s sort of fundamental to the gig. Which, by the way, another reason I feel like directors who sort of as a rule of thumb don’t like to have writers around during preproduction are hurting themselves.

**John:** Because they may have found an amazing location, but they’re going to try to shoehorn that location onto a scene that already exists. And if they’d actually brought the writer to that location and talked with them about like these are the opportunities at this place, “What do you think? What can we do? How could this affect the scene?” The writer might have great ideas for how it actually impacts things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, frankly, I’m okay with the director saying, “I want to shoot the scene here. I love the way this looks. I think it’s going to be exciting. And it’s going to put the audience in the mood I want. Please help me fit the scene as well for this space as you fit it for your theoretical space.”

**John:** Exactly. So, this is really staking to the other fork of the conversation is you’ve made the big setting choice in terms of this is the location, this is the world this is taking place in, and now it’s getting very specific. And so as you’re just the screenwriter working by yourself, you are approaching the scene and you’re sort of doing that looping in your head. You’re figuring out what’s in the scene. One of the first questions you should ask is, “Am I really setting this scene in the right place? Is this moment taking place in the most interesting place?”

A director I’m working with, one of her cardinal rules is she never wants to see the same set twice, which seems really, really hardcore but it’s actually a wonderful challenge. So you look at if you saw that character’s house before, she never wants to see that house again. She never wants to see that living room again. And so you’re constantly having to move on.

Her point, which I think is an interesting point, is that visually if we’ve been in a place before and we come back to that space it’s going to feel like, “Well, we’re just back to where we began.” Like we haven’t really moved forward.

So, you can go back to a space but only if you basically fundamentally destroyed something or completely changed what’s happened when you’ve gotten there.

**Craig:** It’s a good rule of thumb. It really is. In fact, I remember you were telling me about this and I looked back and it’s something that I naturally do anyway. I don’t adhere to it slavishly. There are a couple of times where you might see the same set twice for good reason. And certainly movies that are about journeys always require a return. But in general, yeah, that’s right.

**John:** You’ve got to burn the bridges behind the characters. And sometimes that literally means burning their house down. Always a good choice.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So as you’re looking at that individual scene that you’re writing, and you’re looping it in your head, “Where is the best place for that to happen?” And your first instinct will probably be something kind of pedestrian. And it’s like, “Oh, it’s a normal real world kind of thing, but it doesn’t have to be that at all.” And so look for what it is.

And that’s not an invitation to go nuts on your scene description and sort of do that, again, that D&D description where you’re talking about the tapestries on the walls, but just give us someplace interesting that’s going to have not just hopefully something visually interesting to see but will create interesting opportunities with the people or the characters who would be in that spot.

**Craig:** Absolutely. There’s no reason to over-describe the space if the slug line does all the work for you. Like you said, “Meatpacking Plant. Two people are having a discussion. He walks in.” “It’s an interior Meatpacking Plant. Day. It is a fully-functioning meatpacking plant full of cows, and blood, and workers wearing chain mail, wielding knives. Chunks of meat hit the floor. So and so moves to…”

That’s it. And by the way, here’s the thing, and think about this as a reader, anybody reading a script is going to remember that. It’s instantly specific. And people complain sometimes about writers skimming, we’ll naturally skim over the generic every time. It’s just sort of a neurological glitch.

**John:** Yeah. So, specific, interesting. Try to sort of pick the least boring place possible to set that individual scene. And, as you’re approaching the big idea of your movie, where’s the best place for it to happen? Where’s going to be the most visually interesting and create the most challenges for your character as you’re going through it?

**Craig:** Yeah. And when you’re sitting around sort of thinking, “Okay, now how do I make this interesting because they’re going to have a fight and they’re going to have a chase?” Well how will it be interesting? Stop and go, space. The space will make it interesting. But then think about how the space makes it interesting. It’s your friend.

**John:** Next topic I want to switch to is something that came up with something that you and I both interacted with this last week, but also a project that I’m trying to set up. There’s a book that may be made into a movie that I’m sort of taking around town and pitching. And as people read the book they like the book a lot, but the book is complicated in that it has multiple narrators and there’s overlapping narrations, and the story is told from different points of view, and some of those points of view overlap so you see the same events from multiple places.

So, the first question that people ask me when they read the book and want to know how I’m going to do this movie is like, “Well, so who’s story are we telling? How are we seeing it?” And they assume that because I was the guy who wrote Go and The Nines that I had this really complicated plan for how I’m going to do it. And I say, “No, no, I’m actually doing it very simple and very straightforward and I’m telling it with a camera and we’re moving forward in time,” and people feel much more confident when I sort of talk them off that edge.

But that idea of point of view and perspective is something I want to talk into right now. Because every movie is going to be told from some character’s point of view. And as I read screenplays from newer writers, sometimes that point of view is really murky and unclear. And so I want to talk about some of the deliberate choices you make as a screenwriter for who’s point of view you’re telling a story from.

I thought I might start with Bridesmaids.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So at the very start of Bridesmaids we’re seeing Kristen Wiig, we’re seeing Jon Hamm, and other important characters come through. There’s the other Bridesmaids. There’s Chris O’Dowd. Let’s just talk about Chris O’Dowd who plays the policeman, the unrealistically Irishman Irish police policeman. But he’s one of the main characters.

So, what if early on in the story we cut to a scene with Chris O’Dowd before we had met him with Kristen Wiig and we saw him going about his daily life, or we saw him like making an arrest? And a screenwriter might put that scene in saying like, “Oh, well this is going to be an important character. I want to know who he is. I want to know a little bit about him before we he and Kristen Wiig’s characters meet.”

That would change the script fundamentally if we had a scene with him that did not involve her. That’s my thesis.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Certainly, because it would start to feel much more like a romantic comedy centered around the two of them and less about the story of a woman growing up. Yeah, for sure. There are certain conventions that we use in the first act to cue the audience about what sort of story they are to expect and what kind of weight to apply to characters. And you’ll get this note constantly from studios to, “We need to see this person on their own. We need to get who they are, and where they live, and all the rest.” And that makes sense for some kinds of movies.

But like you say, for other kinds, no. No it does not.

**John:** So I would argue that in most movies your protagonist is going to be driving scenes, and by driving scenes I mean they are going to be the main engine behind a scene. And it would be very unusual to have a scene that does not involve your protagonist or some other characters providing some crucial service to your protagonist which could by your villain.

I mean, with something like Bridesmaids, though, let’s take for example what would happen if we did catch Chris O’Dowd. Our audience’s expectation would be this is going to be a two-hander. This is going to be a movie about how the two of these people meet and fall in love. And the only thing that would change is just that one extra scene with Chris O’Dowd would set that expectation.

If you have a movie that’s like a thriller and we’re following our hero and then suddenly this minor character who we’re cutting away to who is doing something, our expectation is going to be that that person is going to be very, very important. And so we’re going to watch and be waiting for that person. If that person doesn’t’ come back and do something interesting in the next 20 minutes we’re going to be frustrated.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a difficult thing to instruct. This is kind of one of those things you have to have a sense for. You have to have an ear for it. Because there are times where you could sort of feel like you might be able to go either way, or does this person deserve a little bit extra? You just kind of have to feel it. Yeah.

It’s funny that you mention because there is I know in Identity Thief, the first 10, 15 pages is kind of split perspective between Jason Bateman’s character and Melissa McCarthy’s character even though their nowhere near each other geographically, nor do they know each other. But that sets up the expectation that in fact the movie is about their relationship, which it is.

**John:** Yeah, exactly. So, it has a romantic comedy setup even though it’s not a classic romantic comedy.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** But if you did have that split setup and they were not going to overlap you have an audience revolt. If those two characters did not meet pretty quickly into the second act, your audience would get very, very impatient with you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you’re essentially… — The only people you introduce in the beginning, and from their perspective, are the key players of the key relationship. In an action movie you would obviously know your hero and you could split perspective to the villain, which they do all the time, because that’s the key relationship of the movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But beyond that, if it’s a story about one person growing up, the story about one person, I mean, because what is the central relationship in Bridesmaids? Well, you could argue it’s between her and the cop, you could argue it’s between her and Maya Rudolf, you could argue it’s between her and her friends, her and her mom, her and the world. It’s her. It’s her and herself. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. The primary relationship is Kristen Wiig and herself.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. It’s the same thing with 40-Year-Old Virgin. We don’t spend time meeting other people on their own because everything is through the lens of the person who has to grow up. So, it is an important thing to figure out. Are you telling a story about one person kind of blossoming, or are you telling the story of one person locked in battle with one other person? Or are you telling the story of one person falling in love with one other person? And that should help you figure this out.

**John:** So, an alternative if you are faced with a situation where you do need to introduce this character but you’re having a hard time finding out about this person without, you know, basically your instinct is to give the cutaway scene where you can figure everything out about the Chris O’Dowd character or whoever, and you don’t know quite how to do it. You probably need to find a way that your protagonist can come to wherever that other character is and see them there in their setting.

If you need to find that character in a setting, somehow you’re going to need to take your protagonist and bring them there to see that, because otherwise we’re under the expectation that we can cut to that character at all times and that person is going to have equal weight in the story.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can’t leave the character. The character doesn’t get their own introduction. You can’t leave them flat and sort of uninteresting without a life, but one of the things that brings us and the audience closer to the protagonist which is precisely what you want.

It is for the protagonist to ask the questions we’re asking. So we’re going, “Well what’s the deal, why is that guy Irish? And what is the deal with him being a cop? And why does he live here?” And then she asks him, and that’s comforting to me because I think, “Oh, she’s like me.” And we want that. We want that.

**John:** She is your window into the movie. And so you’re seeing things from her point of view and you have the same questions that she would have in the scenes.

Now, a related issue which often comes up is voiceover. And voiceover is like POV but sort of like a super power POV. And that’s the ability of a character to talk directly to the audience. There’s probably two or three different flavors of voiceover. There’s the voiceover that’s not attached to anything, so that’s literally just the character is talking to you directly as the audience. And you see that in some movies that sort of set up the “once upon a time”, or the…

**Craig:** American Beauty.

**John:** Exactly. And so the person is talking directly to you. There’s the attached voiceover which is a character starts talking and then it transitions into something else and that character is talking kind of continuous over that. So, Forrest Gump does that where Forrest will start talking to somebody on a bench and then we’ll transition into that. At a certain point they kind of blur together because if it’s been so long since we went back to the attached scene we’re going to sort of forget that it’s attached to anything.

But Big Fish actually has examples of both kind of voiceover, where most of the voiceover in the story is something that Albert Finney or Ewan McGregor started talking about a story and then we transition to what that was. But Billy Crudup’s character does have sort of direct voiceover power to the audience. And that was a choice we had to make along the way: “How are we going to get inside their perspective on what this story is about to them?”

**Craig:** Voiceover is sort of unfairly maligned because so many bad screenwriters use it as a crutch. They pour it like ketchup all over something because they don’t know how else to convey the information in an interesting way. But that’s unfortunate because in the hands of masters voiceover is amazing. And it can also evoke a certain tone, a wonderful tone.

I mean, you know, Blade Runner is the great — the great debate over the voiceover in Blade Runner. I kind of love it. I just feel like, okay, it’s film noir, that’s the point. And that’s what film noir has. It has voiceover. I love it. And the voiceover is good.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So I enjoy it.

One of the most fascinating uses of voiceover, perhaps misuses, is in Dune, the David Lynch film.

**John:** Absolutely. I love David Lynch, too.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m obsessed with this movie. I’ve watched it a billion times. It’s not a good movie, but it’s a wonderful movie anyway. It’s amazing. Parts of it are just stunningly incredibly great. Overall, I could see why, really the problem with the movie is I think you do have to watch it 12 times before you start to like it. [laughs] So that’s not really what you want out of a movie, but I love it.

But it has one of the.. — I don’t think any other movie has ever done this, where multiple characters will do voiceover of what they’re thinking. Sometimes in the same scene. One person will say something and then will hear what they are thinking.

Then you will cut to the other person they are talking to who will answer back and then will hear what they’re thinking. It’s bizarre. I just love that he did it.

**John:** Yeah. It feels very Lynchian, so there you go.

**Craig:** It does. It’s wild, man. But, you know, be careful with VO. A little goes a long way. And if you’re going to use it, just understand it has a big impact on the way the story is unfolding.

**John:** And the other related sort of super power tool that some characters are allowed to drive and some characters aren’t is flashbacks. And flashbacks are one of those controversial things because it’s like, “Oh, I need to find out more information about that character. I need to understand why they are saying this thing they are doing in the present.”

And that can be fine. There’s lots of movies that do flashbacks extraordinarily well, or that are built in a way that works them in really well. The big point of caution I would have with any sort of flashback situation is whenever you’re in a flashback that means that nothing bad can happen to your protagonist in the present. So, any time you are cutting away from the present tense storyline, you’re basically letting your character off the hook.

We know that nothing terrible is going to happen to them in the present which could be a bad thing if you’re in a thriller or some sort of action movie. But it’s also bad in a comedy because we were supposed to be caring about what was happening in the present tense of the comedy, and if you’re cutting away from the present tense of the comedy for a long period of time we have no idea what’s going on.

**Craig:** Yeah, comedies will sometimes use flashbacks just as goofs, you know, almost to make fun of the trope of flashbacks. The thing about flashbacks is that they are cheesy. So, if you’re going to do them, figure out how to do them in an un-cheesy way. Make them shocking, or confusing, or surprising. But, uh, you know…

**John:** I would also argue that anytime you’re going to a flashback, our having seen that flashback has to fundamentally change our experience of watching the present right at that moment. So you can’t just like — a character can’t just be sitting there on the lawn and then have a flashback to think about their life when they were a child, and then come back to them on the lawn and not have anything changed. It needs to be a crucial bit of revelation for us as an audience that changes what this character is doing next for us.

**Craig:** The only exception I can think of to that is if part of what is going on is that it’s not so much a flashback as a memory that is unconstructed or not completely realized. So a person is trying to remember something and they can remember all the way up to a point and then it collapses. And then that’s creating a mystery. But that’s really more about a memory and not a flashback.

I always feel like a flashback is the movie sending you somewhere, which I don’t like.

**John:** Yeah, it can be tough. Again, any of these techniques done masterfully are great, and they’re wonderful, and they’re awesome. And there are movies that do strange things with point of view and perspective that kind of shouldn’t work but because they do work they are kind of extra brilliant.

I love a movie that in the third act suddenly a character who shouldn’t really be able to drive a scene by him or herself does and it’s surprising and exciting. And that feels… — You notice that because it’s almost always a mistake. But then when it’s not a mistake it’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And can sort of recontextualize everything that came before it. And there are movies that sort of make a meal of being split perspective, and that’s a stylistic thing. The key is, of course, if you’re going to go for something, go for it and do it. So, Pulp Fiction fragments its perspective across a number of characters and just goes for it completely. It commits.

You know, there’s a fine line between mistake and on purpose, but it’s a line. So, if you’re going to do it, do it.

**John:** Quite early on in Go, I had to make the deliberate choice of every scene is from — as the movie starts — is from Ronna’s perspective. But then we’re able to cut back to Claire and Gaines at the apartment by themselves, and that was an important choice because that let the audience know that we were going to be jumping around between people and it’s going to be okay. And suddenly as the second act starts we’re going to be jumping to a whole new group of people who you kind of barely know and they’re going to have storytelling power for the next thirty minutes.

**Craig:** It’s funny, one of the most common words used in criticisms of big Hollywood movies is “Lazy.” They’ll say, “Well, it’s just a lazy movie.” But, frankly, I think there’s nothing lazier than a movie that doesn’t feel any obligation to make sense. I mean, god, give me two hours I write one of those.

**John:** Yeah, easy.

**Craig:** Easy!

**John:** Yeah, basically just write a bunch of scenes and then scramble them up and done.

**Craig:** Exactly. [laughs] Exactly. It’s why… — I don’t know if you’re familiar with The Shaggs.

**John:** I don’t know what The Shaggs are.

**Craig:** So The Shaggs were a…I hesitate to say a musical group. It was the 1960s and this guy in New Hampshire, I think, was looking at all these bands and a lot of the bands were family bands. And they were making money. And so he had three daughters and he bought each of them an instrument — a guitar, a bass guitar, and a drum set. And basically sent them to the barn because he was a farmer and said, “Learn how to play this and then I’ll write songs and then I’ll take you into Boston and well record an album.”

And the problem is they had absolutely no musical talent whatsoever. Nor music songwriting talent. In fact, they’re aggressively untalented. And he didn’t quite get that. And he took them to Boston and they recorded an album. And it’s the most amazing thing you’ve ever heard. And it’s freely available online. And Frank Zappa sort of famously said, “If any musician had done this on purpose they would be the greatest musician of all time.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Because the time signatures were incredibly complicated. The patterns were… — You really have to hear it; it’s remarkable.

**John:** It’s like outsider art.

**Craig:** It really is. It was just remarkable. And sometimes I feel like when I see really, really bad things that are just jumbled together and make no sense in and of itself, I think I couldn’t have done this if I tried. And no musician could do what The Shaggs did if they tried.

**John:** So maybe they shouldn’t try it.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t try.

**John:** Don’t try.

**Craig:** Don’t try it.

**John:** I’m ready for Cool Things. Do you have a Cool Thing this week?

**Craig:** I do. I do. I have a really cool thing this week. This is like the coolest thing to me. It’s so stupid but I love it. [laughs] So, I love peanut butter. And I’ve always loved peanut butter. And peanut butter is one of those foods that depending on who you talk to it’s either good for you or bad for you because it’s lots of protein, it’s a legume, and the kind of fat that is has is very good fat, but there’s also a lot of fat, there’s a lot of oil in it, and it’s very caloric. So, you get differing opinions on this.

But there is this new thing called PB2 and basically this company took peanut butter and smashed out all the oil and then dehydrated it basically into a powder. And then you just mix it with water and you get what is essentially peanut butter with almost no fat in it at all.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And so the caloric difference is like basically it goes from 200 calories to like 50 calories. It’s crazy. So I’ve been eating this stuff literally by the boatload. It’s spectacular. And so they have regular and they have chocolate flavored, so almost like a Nutella. And, okay, so the question is: Does it taste just like peanut butter? Almost! Yeah. And it’s not like “almost” like the way that Diet Coke “almost” tastes like Coke except it’s got that weird chemical thing going on. It’s totally natural. They haven’t put anything into it. They’ve just taken one thing out. And, oddly, you miss it less than you would think. So, you can get it on Amazon. I am not a paid endorser of this company, even though I sound like it. I just love it. I think it’s so cool.

**John:** We will put a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** Yeah, PB2.

**John:** I’m not a peanut butter eater. I’m an almond butter eater. I eat way too much almond butter. Like some days I think maybe 30% or 40% of my calories come from almonds in some form.

**Craig:** It’s good.

**John:** But, yeah, peanuts are good. Now, is the peanut butter fine enough that you could maybe distribute it in the ventilator system of a building and kill all the people with peanut allergies?

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Ah, see, we made a plot right here.

**Craig:** No question. No question. If you wanted to kill somebody with a peanut allergy it’s done.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool.

My Cool Thing is a simple little thing that you can buy at most office supply stores now. Now we talked in the podcast previously about how I tend to write by hand. So when I go off to do a first draft I will write by hand. I usually use sort of stiff-backed legal pad and white legal pad is my preferable legal pad. And it’s worked fine. The challenges of a legal pad is you’re always flipping the pages back over themselves and it gets to be a little bit unwieldy. So, I said, “Well maybe there might be a wirebound notebook that I would like.” And it turns out there’s one that’s amazing.

So, it’s the Cambridge Ivory Wirebound Notebook. And it looks just like kind of the notebook you remember from high school with like the little spiral wire thing, but it’s wider so that the pages are actually full size and have perfect perforations so you can rip out pages and they’re nice and neat and clean.

It’s slightly off-white which seems weird when you first look at it but it’s actually really comfortable for your eyes. It’s just the right heaviness and thickness.

So, I try not to be one of those people who’s obsessive about having to have one specific thing, or one specific pencil, or one specific anything, but I really love these notebooks. So, if you’re writing by hand I would urge you to pick up a three-pack of these because they’re really good.

**Craig:** I don’t understand. Because you said you don’t like flipping back and forth with the legal pad but don’t you have to flip back and forth with this, too.

**John:** No, here’s what I’m saying. As you’re writing on a legal pad you’re always bending those top pages back over.

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**John:** Bending over the top of the sheet.

**Craig:** And then by the time you get to like the 80th page…

**John:** And it gets messy and those pages get sort of bent.

**Craig:** So this lays flat like a proper spiral.

**John:** It lays flat like a proper spiral. And it’s good. And it’s easier to sort of carry around because a lot times when I’m doing writing someplace, I’ll be in Vegas, or Boston, or whatever, I’m taking this pad around and it always sort of gets dinged up and this actually has a cover on it so you can do it properly.

**Craig:** Ah, yeah. If I ever use paper for anything I would probably get that.

**John:** Yeah. But you don’t use paper because you’re a digital boy.

**Craig:** I’m digital. But I will tell you what, I do use that PB2 for everything.

**John:** If you could write just on a sheet made of PB2. And then if you don’t like you could just eat your words.

**Craig:** Just eat it. I’d just eat it. Yeah. Yeah, it’s delicious.

**John:** What if you get sick of it? What if like three weeks from now you’re like, “God, I never want to see that stuff again?”

**Craig:** Well, you know, they send it to you in a regular peanut butter sized jar which I blow through really quickly. Like, you know, my wife was out of town. And I don’t know if it’s the same thing with you and Mike, but when my wife is out of town I don’t go to the grocery store.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So what happens is I just start going down layers of old food, [laughs] because at some point I’m like I haven’t eaten in eight hours, because I’m lazy, but I don’t want to leave the house. So now I’m going to eat graham crackers for dinner. Which is what I did last night.

So the PB2 has been a huge thing because Amazon shipped it over. But it doesn’t come in massive sizes. So you’ll get through it pretty quickly, and if you don’t like it just chuck it. Send it to me.

**John:** I’ll send it Craig. Craig will eat it.

**Craig:** And for those one or two of you who are thinking, “Oh, why isn’t he playing his guitar?” I was thinking about it and then I realized it’s a little dumb to pointlessly play guitar and sing on a podcast about screenwriting.

But then I thought, you know, what if we get to 100,000 people…

**John:** [gasps]

**Craig:** …Then I would do it.

**John:** Okay, so if people get their friends to listen to the podcast then…

**Craig:** Yeah. If we can get, I mean, 100,000 people, at that point I am playing for a venue that’s bigger than Dodger’s Stadium or the old Meadowlands. Then I’ll do it.

**John:** That feels like a lot of pressure, but it’s certainly a good opportunity.

**Craig:** No, I have…I’m fearless because I’m a sociopath.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So that’s one challenge. And then we talked before we got on the air today, a second challenge that we’re going to do for next week. Basically we’ll be taking submissions this next week, and it may not be the next podcast we record, but a subsequent podcast. Let’s do a first Three Page Challenge. So this is a thing where you send us the first three pages of your screenplay and we’ll sort of randomly pick through and grab some of these screenplays that are sent to us.

Only send the first three pages. If you send more than three pages we will not open it. We will just delete the email. So, only three pages of your script. And we will read the screenplay and we will probably talk about it on air. And we will tell you what was awesome and what was not so awesome.

And we’ll also include links to…so that other people who are wanting to read those first three pages can read it, too. So, first three pages, it could be any genre, it could be any kind of thing.

**Craig:** Does it have to be the first three. What if they do like…

**John:** It could be a disaster, honestly, as I’m talking about it. It could be a horrible thing but it could be a lot of fun.

**Craig:** What if they do three pages from the middle of the script?

**John:** Oh, that’s an interesting choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why don’t we just say any three pages.

**John:** Any three pages.

**Craig:** As long as they’re consecutive.

**John:** First three pages make a lot of sense. But if the middle three pages are more appealing, that’s great, too. First three pages we would probably talk more about how you’re setting up your story. Middle three pages we might talk a little bit more about the words you’re choosing and sort of what you’re doing on the page. So, your choice. Please only submit once.

Other disclaimers: Don’t see us for stealing your idea or something because we’ll just mock you endlessly.

**Craig:** You should actually probably, if you’re going to do this online, make them sign a thing.

**John:** Yeah. Signing stuff online is really weird, though.

**Craig:** Oh it is?

**John:** I’m not sure that it actually holds up. Because how is somebody to say that it was really their script and not somebody else’s script? Yeah, when I first considered the idea I thought maybe we’ll do, like we’ll assign them a topic so that they would have to write on a certain topic so therefore they wouldn’t feel like there’s the…we’re stealing someone’s idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, we’re not going to steal your idea.

**John:** Maybe we should have talked all about this before we actually got on the air and started recording it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Maybe we should quickly go to law school.

**John:** I am willing to try the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it will be fun. The only other thing I would say to people is don’t send us your three pages if you’re not willing to get punched in the face super hard if we don’t like it.

**John:** Absolutely. So if you want to use a fake, a handle, a pen name, pseudonym, go for it. But, we might talk about your thing on the air and we might love it, or we might not love it. So, do be aware of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. But otherwise, let’s do it.

**John:** So final bits of business here. Anything we talked about on the show today, including Craig’s weird peanut butter, and my notebook obsession, and…

**Craig:** The Shaggs.

**John:** Bridesmaids, and The Shaggs, of course. Bridesmaids, if you’ve never heard of that incredibly successful movie. And, of course, the WGA earnings stuff, all those links will be at johnaugust.com which is a website that I run.

**Craig:** [laughs] They know. They better know what dot com means.

**John:** [laughs] Yes. On Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that’s it. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Take care. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

Craig: I’m 86% John.

John: Oh, good. I’m 86% as well.

Craig: No, no. You told me right before we started that you were 85%.

John: All right. I increased one percent in just…

Craig: I’m sorry, did I say 86? I meant 87. I’m 87%.

John: So I feel like most of my viral sinusitis is gone and passed. My voice is much, much better. There’s something maybe moving into my lungs. I do worry that I’m going to get that sort of thing that gets in your lungs for a long time and you finally have to take a Z-Pak to kill it. But then you take an antibiotic, and you don’t really want to take antibiotics because they’re really not good for you, but we’ll see what happens.

Because I have that slight cough. It’s like if I were a character in a movie and this was a first act and you heard that cough you might say like, “Oh, he’s not going to make it to the third act.”

Craig: Right. This is the beginning of Camille.

John: Yeah. But, it may be nothing. So, I may just be imagining this. It could be a tough of allergies.

Craig: No, no. It’s probably terminal.

John: Yeah. It might be terminal.

Craig: No, I’m pretty sure it’s terminal.

John: If this is our last podcast, Craig, let’s make it our best.

Craig: Oh, no, no, no, this won’t be the last one. We have a year of podcasts of your slowly withering. [laughs] The last one will be at your hospital bed.

John: So who are you going to get to replace me on the podcast after I die?

Craig: Ah, we’re currently, the guys who make your apps are currently going to — we’re replacing you, John, with an app.

John: I like it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So it will be all my little ticks, and all my little hums and haws.

Craig: Turns out you’re very programmable.

John: I like it. And if need to do a live one, there’s actually a lot of people who look quite a bit like me. So you’ll just stick somebody up there and they’ll buy it.

Craig: Oh for sure.

John: They’ll buy anything.

Craig: No, we’re not going to lie. We’re not going to say that you’re… — We’re just going to say that this is basically John 2.0. It’s an improved John August. It’s all the things you liked about John but none of the many, many things you hated. [laughs] They’re all gone. Like the face that he was organic. Gone.

John: Done.

Craig: Yeah, done.

John: We have one very small bit of follow up this week. Several listeners wrote in, British listeners wrote in, to say that when I had discussed the th-fronting which is that habit we hear in British accents, that I had said is relatively new. And they said, “You’re completely absurd. It’s been going on for 300 years. You’re an idiot, basically.”

So I wanted to clarify that. It is a thing that has happened for a long time. What linguists and people who research language have noticed is that it’s spreading in a way that is through different classes that is new and there are people who didn’t used to have that accent now seem to have that accent. And that’s what’s new about it.

So it’s like, it’s almost like how the Valley Girls speak spread suddenly. This has been spreading in ways that are not necessarily unexpected but are new.

Craig: Well you see it here, too. There’s kind of a running joke on the internet about the fact that in many movies where Will Smith has to save the earth, and there have been a number of them…

John: [laughs]

Craig: …he often refers to the earth as “the earf.” And, yeah, so any time that pops up they’ll talk about how Will Smith has to save the earf.

The one that gets me, the new one, among — it seems like it is metastasizing among young women in the United States…

John: I know what it’s going to be.

Craig: Tell me.

John: Vocal fry.

Craig: Vocal fry. Have we talked about this before?

John: We haven’t. But I’m fascinated by it, too.

Craig: You know, my prior assistant who is lovely had one of the most amazing vocal fries. I had no idea what it was. I didn’t know that there was even a name for it until I read about it. And then I brought her on, I’m like, “Listen, I know what to call that thing that you do. I now have a word for it.”

John: I can’t actually do it. Can you?

Craig: Yeah. Here it is. So this is the vocal fry: Ummmm, you knowwww, it’s when you talk like thissss. And that weird breaking up kind of, you know, it’s like the lady that holds the, what is it, the thermal detonator? It’s thermal detonator voice, you know? [vocal fry] Someone who loves you.

John: So it’s very deep back in your throat and it’s making your vocal cords just sort of like sizzle there a little bit, I guess, just…

Craig: Yeah, you’re basically modulating the air as it goes through.

John: [vocal fry] Uhhhhh.

Craig: And I guess it’s more common… — Yeah, you kind of did it there.

John: [vocal fry] Oh, yeahhhh, it’s, uhhhhh.

Craig: That’s it. That’s it. That’s it.

John: But it’s often done at the end of sentences to sort of like, to keep the momentum alive in a sentence.

Craig: Right.

John: Instead of an “um,” you do an “uhhhh.”

Craig: Yes. For instance, if I were to respond to you in the style of a 15-year-old I would say, “Riiigggghhhhttttttt.” Well what is that? Stop it. I mean, that’s even worse than up-talking as far as I’m concerned, which probably was prior to vocal fry the worst thing ever.

John: One of the articles that was talking about the vocal fry tried to pin it on Britney Spears, because Britney Spears has a fairly limited singing range. And so her lower notes are really just vocal fries. And that becomes sort of her little trademark and sort of how you can recognize Britney Spears singing. And that may have been one of the things that sort of catalyzed the resurgence. But I’m sure it was just a bunch of girls who started doing it and just spread and then they were on the Disney Channel and then it just….

Craig: Yeah. I think history has shown us that adolescent girls are the most rapid conductor of sort of mass hysteria social phenomenon, going back to Salem.

John: [laughs] I was just going to say Salem. Yes.

Craig: They’re just really good at it. They’re just really good at getting together and just deciding en masse, “We’re going to start doing something or believing in something.”

John: [vocal fry] “Really Proctorrrrrrr.”

Craig: Rrrrrrrrrr. You know, yeah. “She went out and kissed the devil under his tailllllll.” Yeah. It’s good stuff.

John: Good stuff.

Craig: Thanks girls.

John: Moving on to actual news that I didn’t know about until you told me about it, and sort of recapped right before the podcast, which I think is fascinating. So, tell our audience this news of Hayden Christensen and his lawsuit.

Craig: Right. So normally when writers sue companies, two things are clear: One, they’re going to lose, and two, they’re not actors. Neither is true in this case. So, very strange kind of story.

Hayden Christensen who played Anakin Skywalker, [vocal fry] Anakinnnn Skywalker. He and his brother came up with an idea for a television show. And they went and they pitched it to USA Television, to an executive of USA Network. And the idea of the show was basically that there was a doctor and he gets expelled from the medical community for treating patients who can’t pay, so he’s sort of a do-good noble guy. He moves to Malibu and becomes a house doctor for the rich and famous.

And the executive heard and said, “Oh, I really like that idea. That’s really cool.” They had a couple of emails back and forth and then apparently that was the end of that. There was no — they never got as far as, “All right, let’s pay you money and let’s figure this out.” It died essentially.

About, I guess it was four years later, USA comes out with a show called Royal Pains, which is a very similar concept. The concept is that there was a guy, I think it was just, the only difference was it was in Florida. But basically it was a doctor who gets booted out of medicine for being a super nice guy and becomes a house-calling doctor for the rich and famous.

Okay. So Hayden Christensen and his brother sue. USA’s defense, as is almost always the case in things like this is, “Hey, ideas aren’t” — and we say this all the time on the podcast — “Ideas are not property. You cannot own an idea. It’s not copyright-able. And because it’s not copyright-able, this whole thing should be tossed out.” And apparently the court, the initial federal court agreed and said, “Yup, summarily dismissed.”

So Hayden and his brother turn around and appeal. They appeal to the circuit court and a judgment was handed down yesterday that was actually quite interesting. Basically they overturned that summary dismissal or the dismissal and said, look, it doesn’t appear like Hayden Christensen and his brother are arguing that USA stole their work, because they didn’t use any of it other than the idea, even if they “used” it at all. What the Christensen’s are arguing is, “Hey, there’s something called an implied contract. If I come in and I pitch you an idea for a show, it is implied that if you use that idea, even though that idea isn’t copyright-able property, it is implied that you will pay me for that idea.”

I don’t go in there and pitch you things with the understanding that you could use that idea without paying me. And you understand that, and I understand that. So what the appellate court basically said is, “Eh, you can’t actually just dismiss this case. You have to fight it out in court.” Now, interesting, the judge didn’t say, “And by the way, having reviewed things I’ve decided that there was an implied contract.” It’s actually kind of, there a series of tests to prove that there was an implied contract. And it gets kind of complicated because part of the question is does New York law or California law apply?

All that aside, John, here’s what’s relevant. I suspect that coming off of this what’s going to happen for those of us who work in the business of selling stuff is that when we go in now to pitch things we’re going to have to sign something.

John: Or sign something that says there is no implied contract and these are all an exchange of — this is a conversation but there’s no implied contract for work being solicited.

Craig: Yeah. I have a feeling that it will go even further than that. I have a feeling that the paper will say what you just said, and also remind all parties involved that ideas are not own-able and so forth. And that a similar idea may come out of that company later, there may exist a similar idea at the company, and that in and of itself is not property and you can’t sue over it. And once more, we are not implying, as you said, we are certainly not implying by listening to your pitch that there might be employment out of it, or even out of that idea.

Will this have a real impact on the way we do business? I doubt it. I do think though it’s, well, a little bit. It’s actually kind of bad.

John: Yeah. I think it could set strange precedence for just being able to go in and talk to an executive about a property. Potential upsides I guess: You know one of the frustrating things that’s really developed in the last five, six, seven years is this idea of we have a general idea for something, or we have a piece of property, and we want like 12 writers to come in and pitch on it. That’s awful, and it happens way too much in that sort of sweepstakes pitching.

…Eh, that doesn’t actually change it at all.

Craig: I don’t think.

John: I’ve talked myself out of my idea.

Craig: Look, there are two areas where I think this is a problem for writers. One is that the kind of casual course of business that sometimes happens may be eliminated. It may be very difficult to sit down, have a drink with a guy at a bar, and then say, “By the way, I have an idea.” And for him to say, “I would love to hear that.” Because he doesn’t have his stupid paperwork with him and he doesn’t want to get involved in a lawsuit later on, you know? So that’s one issue. I just don’t like avenues being shut off.

But here’s the other one that people never talk about. I think a lot of times writers look at a story like this and they go, “Awesome. Two writers took on a company and beat ’em. Therefore I’m for it because I’m a writer and I’m on their side.” Here’s what is rarely taken into consideration: Somebody wrote Royal Pains.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Who is also a writer, who I’m going to guess had nothing to do with the Christensen’s, never read their stuff, didn’t know anything about it. Happened to come up with a similar idea as happens. Worked really hard, wrote something, and now suddenly people are implying that it wasn’t original to them. And, you know, we can’t forget those writers, too. There are always two writers on either sides of these problems. So, I don’t like the idea of people be able to emerge years later.

I mean, you know Koppelman and Levien very famously had to deal with that with Rounders. There was a case, Grosso I think it was. Grosso vs. Miramax. Very similar case that got tossed. But, it’s a bummer, you know, it’s a bummer. So, I don’t really like this precedent. I think it’s just going to cause paperwork and limit our avenues of selling. But that’s me.

John: So the next step is that it’s going back to the original court that has to consider the case rather than just doing a summary dismissal.

Craig: It’s going to go back to a court. And it will, well, presuming that there isn’t a settlement. I mean, at this point now USA may opt to settle; then again, they may opt to actually get some sort of case law here, who knows. But it sounds like at least that’s the move — it’s going to go back. And then Hayden Christensen and his brother will have to prove that there was an implied contract as opposed to just sort of a not-contract.

John: Yeah. It’s a different avenue for suing. Because usually it’s a copyright infringement.

Craig: Right.

John: The only time I’ve been involved with these kind of cases I was a witness. And it was a ridiculous case, but the people ended up settling because it was going to be so expensive to litigate and it wasn’t a lot of money, they just settled it out.

Craig: That’s the dangerous part here is that essentially once you get, once the kind of “quick, make this go away” legal action is removed from your arsenal, you then have to start very seriously considering things like settling because it is, you know, it can be a bumpy ride. And you might lose.

John: I thought today we’d start by talking about endings, and let this be more of a craft episode, because a lot times as we start we start looking at writing screenplays, start writing TV pilots, it’s all about those first ten pages, about getting people hooked and getting people to know your world, getting people to love your characters. That’s not ultimately what they’re going to walk away from your movie with. They’re going to walk away from your movie with an ending.

And so I thought we would spend some time today talking about endings, and the characteristics of good endings, and the things you need to look for as a writer as you’re figuring out what your story is both way in advance and as you’re leading up to those last few pages.

Craig: Yeah. Ending are… — Like I think we had talked in a prior podcast about the bare minimums required to start beyond idea, main character. And for me, one of them is ending. I need to know how the movie ends, because essentially the process of the story is one that takes you from your key crucial first five pages to those key crucial last ten. Everything in between is informed by your beginning and your ending. Everything.

I’ve never understood people who write and have no idea how the movie’s going to end. That’s insane to me.

John: So, I would argue that a screenplay is essentially a contract between a writer and a reader, and same with a book, but we are talking about screenplays. And you are saying to the reader, “If you will give me your time and your attention, I will show you a world, I will tell you story, and it will get to a place that you will find satisfying. And it will surprise you, it will fulfill you. You will have enjoyed spending your time reading this script and seeing the potential in this movie.”

The ending is where you want to be lost. It’s the punch line, it’s the resolution, it’s the triumph. And so often it’s the last thing we actually really focus on.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So many writers, I think, spend all of their time working on those first ten pages, their first 30 pages, then sort of powering through the script. And those last five, ten pages are written in a panicked frenzy because they owe the script to somebody, or they just have to finish. And so those last ten pages are just banged out and they’re not executed with nearly the precision and nearly the detail of how the movie started.

Which is a shame because if you think about any movie that you see in the theater, hopefully you’re enjoying how it starts, hopefully you’re enjoying how the ride goes along, but your real impression of the movie was how it ended.

My impression of Silence of the Lambs, great movie all the way through, but I’m thinking about Jodie Foster in the basement and sort of what happens there.

Craig: Right.

John: As I look at more recent movies like Prometheus, I’m looking at the things I enjoyed along the way, but I’m also asking, “Did I enjoy where that movie took me to at the end?”

Craig: Yeah. I like what you say about contract, that’s exactly right. Because it’s understood that everything that you see is raveling or unraveling depending on your perspective towards this conclusion. The conclusion must be intentional. We always took about intention and specificity. The conclusion must, when you get to it, be satisfying in a way that makes you realize everything had to go like this. Not that it had to go like this, but to be satisfying it had to go like this.

That ultimately the choices that were made by the character and the people around the character led to this moment, this key moment. And I think we should talk about what makes an ending an ending, because it’s not just that it’s the thing that happens before credits roll. You know, I’ve always thought the ending of a movie is defined by your main character performing some act of faith. And there’s a decision and there’s a faith in that decision to do something. And that is connected — it always seems to me — it is connected through, all the way back to the beginning, in a very different way from what is there in the beginning.

That’s the point is there is an expression of faith in something that has changed. But there is a decision. There is a moment where that character does something that transcends and brings them out of what was so that hopefully by the end of the movie they are not the same person they were in the beginning.

John: Either they have literally gotten to the place that you have promised the audience that they’re going to get to. Like if you have set up a location that they’re going to get to. Is Dorothy going to get back to Kansas? Well, you could have ended the movie when she got to Oz, or when she got to the Emerald City because she was trying to get to the Emerald City, but her real goal was to get back to Oz, or to get back to Kansas. I’m confusing all my locations.

Dorothy wants to get back to Kansas. If the movie doesn’t get us back to Kansas, we’re going to be frustrated. If she gets back to Kansas and we’re there for 10 more minutes, we’re going to be frustrated. The movie has promised us that she will get back to Kansas, or I guess she could die trying. That’s a valid choice too.

Craig: I’d like to see that movie.

John: That’s her literal stated goal. That’s her want. And there’s also her need. And her need is to, I guess, come to appreciate the people that’s she’s with, to find some independence…

Craig: Well, but that’s what I’m talking about when I say that the character must have some faith and a choice, and a decision that’s different. In the beginning of the movie she leaves home. She runs away.

John: That’s right.

Craig: And at the end of the movie she has to have faith that by actually loving home, which she finally does now, she can return. And essentially you can look at the entire movie in a very simple way as somebody saying to a runaway on the street, “Trust me kid, if you want to go back home you can get back home. You just got to want to go back home. I know you ran away, you made a stand, you thought you were a grown up. The world is scary. It’s okay. You can go back home. They’ll take you back.”

That’s what the Wizard of Oz is. And the whole thing is a runaway story. And yet the ending… — It’s funny; a lot of people have always said, “Well, you know, the ending, it’s they’re mocking us. She just hands her the shoes. She could have given her the shoes and told her to click the heels in the beginning, we’d be done with this thing.”

But the point is then, okay, fine, maybe that’s a little clumsy, but really more to the point the ending is defined by faith and decision. And I think almost every movie, the wildest arrangement of movies, and look at Raiders of the Lost Ark. In the end he has faith. “Close your eyes, Marion.” That’s faith he didn’t he didn’t have in the beginning in something. It’s not always religious, you know.

The Ghostbusters decide, “We’re going to cross the streams.” [laughs] “We’re gonna have faith that we’re gonna do the thing we knew we weren’t going to do. Forget fear. Let’s just go for it. It’s the only way we can save the world. We might die in the process but we’re heroes now. We have faith in that.” I see it all the time. And I feel like when you’re crafting your ending and you’re trying to focus it through the lens of character as opposed to circumstance, finding that decision is such a big deal.

John: Yeah. The ending of your movie is very rarely going to be defeating the villain or finding the bomb. It’s going to be the character having achieved something that was difficult throughout the whole course of the movie. So, sometimes that’s expressed as what the character wanted. More often it’s expressed by what the character needed but didn’t realize he or she needed. And by the end of the movie they’re able to do something they were not able to do at the start of the movie, either literally, or because they’ve made emotional progress over the course of the movie that they can do something.

Craig: Right. That’s exactly right. And it’s a great way of thinking about, you know, sometimes we get lost in the plot jungle. And we look around and we think, “Well, this character could go anywhere and do anything.” Well, stop thinking about that and start thinking about what you want to say about life through your movie, because frankly there’s not much more reason to watch movies. [laughs] You know?

John: And we are talking about movies, not TV shows. And a movie is really a two-hour, 100-minute lens on one section of a character’s life, or one section of a cinematic world. And so you’re making very deliberate choices about how you’re starting. One of the first things we see, or how we meet those characters. You have to make just as deliberate choices about where you’re going to end. What’s the last thing that we’re going to take out of this world? And why are we cutting out this slice of everything that could happen to show us in this time?

Craig: Right.

John: And you will change your ending, just as you change your beginning. But you have to go in with a plan for where you think this is going to go to.

Craig: No question. I think a huge mistake to start writing… — And frankly if you’re writing and you don’t know how the movie ends, you’re writing the wrong beginning. Because to me, the whole point of the beginning is to be somehow poetically opposite the end. That’s the point. If you don’t know what you’re opposing here, I’m not really sure how you know what you’re supposed to be writing at all.

John: In one of our first screenwriting classes they forced us to write the first 30 pages and the last 10 pages, which seemed like a really brutal exercise, but was actually very illuminating because if you’ve written the first 30 and the last 10 you can write your whole movie because you know — you have to know everything that’s going to happen in there to get you to that last moment.

Craig: I love it.

John: And it makes you think very deliberately about what those last things are. And so I still try to write those last 10 pages pretty early on in the process while I still have enthusiasm about my movie, while I still love it, while I’m still excited about it. And so I’m not writing those last pages in a panic, with sort of coffee momentum. I’m writing them with craft, and with detail, and with precision.

And then I can write some of the middle stuff with some of that panic and looseness if I don’t have… — If I’ve lost some of my enthusiasm, I can muscle through some of the middle parts, but I don’t want to muscle through my ending. I want the ending to be something that’s precise and exactly what this movie wants to be.

Craig: You know, I have the kind of OCD need to write chronologically. I can’t skip around at all. But I won’t start writing until I know the ending. And what I mean by ending, I mean, I know what the character, what he thought in the beginning of the movie, what he thinks differently in the end. Why that difference is interesting. What decision he’s going to make, and then what action is he going to take that epitomizes his new state of mind.

When we start thinking about what should the ending be, I think sometimes writers think about how big should the explosion be, or which city should the aliens attack. And if you start thinking about what would be the best, most excruciating, difficult test of faith for my hero and his new outlook on life, or at least his new theoretical outlook on life.

And, you know, Pixar does this better than anybody, and they do so much better than everybody. And it’s funny, because I really start thinking about endings this way because of Pixar films. And I went, I remember I was watching Up. And they got to that point where he had — Carl had finally decided that kid was worth going back to save. You know, he brought the house right to where he said he would bring it, and no, he’s going to leave that and go back. And I like that but I thought, that’s not quite that difficult of a test. And then, of course, see Pixar knows that it wasn’t enough, that the real test to say “I have moved on” is to let that house go.

And they design their climax, they design the action of the climax in such a way to force Carl, the circumstances force Carl to let the house go to save the kid.

John: Yup.

Craig: And that’s the perfect example to me of how to think about writing a satisfying ending. That’s why that ending is satisfying. It’s not about the details. The details are as absurd as “man on airship with boy scout, flying, talking dogs, and a house tied to him.” No problem; you can make it work.

John: And example I can speak to very specifically is the movie Big Fish, which really follows two story lines, and the implied contract with the audience is you know the father is going to die. It would be a betrayal of the movie if the father suddenly pulled out of it and the father wasn’t going to die. We know from the start of the movie that the father is going to die.

The question of the movie is, “Will the father and son come to terms, will they reconcile before his death, and will this rift be amended?” And so quite early on I had to figure out like, well what is it that the son — the son is really the protagonist in the present day — what is it that the son can do at the end of the story that he couldn’t do at the start of the story? Well, the son has to tell the story of the father’s death. And so knowing, like, that’s going to be incredibly difficult, an emotionally trying thing to do, but I could see all that, I could feel that.

Knowing that that was the moment I was leading up to, well what is it that lets the son get to that point? And you’re really working backwards to what are the steps that are going to get me to that point. And so it’s hearing someone else tell one of the father’s stories, it’s Jenny Hill, that fills in this missing chapter and sort of why that chapter is missing. That backtracks into, “Well, how big is the fight that set up this disagreement?” “What are the conversations along the way?” Knowing I needed to lead up to that moment, knowing what that ending was was what let me track the present day storyline back to the beginning.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. There was to be a connection between the beginning and the end. I am excited for the day that Identify Thief comes out, because I can sort of talk specifically about how that — that ending, the whole reason I wrote that movie, aside from liking it, was I thought I had a very interesting dilemma for the character at the end, and it was an interesting climax of decision. And the decision meant something. And it was interesting. And I like that. That to me — it’s all about the ending like that. So, looking forward to that one coming out. Hopefully people will like it.

John: This talk of endings reminds me of… — I met John Williams. He was at USC; the scoring stage is named the John Williams Scoring Stage. And when they were rededicating it John Williams was there, along with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and they were talking about the movies they worked on together.

And John Williams made this really great point, was that the music of a movie is the thing you take home with you, it’s like the goodie bag. It’s the one thing you as an audience member get to sort of recycle and play in your head is that last theme. So as I’m thinking about endings, that’s the same idea. What is that little melody? What is that moment that people are going to walk out of the theater with? And that’s — that’s your ending.

And we’ve both made movies where we’ve gone through testing, and you’ll see that the smallest change in the ending makes this huge difference in how people react to your movie.

Craig: Oh, for sure.

John: It’s that last little thing that they take with them.

Craig: Yeah. In fact, when people are testing movies that have sort of absurdly happy endings, you know, what you’d call an uplifting film, you almost to kind of discount the numbers. You’ll get a 98 and you’ll think, “Well, it’s not really a 98. At this point it doesn’t matter, it’s just that the ending was such a big thumbs up.”

But, you know, if you ask these people tomorrow or the next day would they pay to go see it, you might get a different answer. And similarly when you end on a bummer, or on a flat note, just like the air goes out of the theater, and people will struggle to explain why they did not like the movie when in fact they just didn’t like the ending.

John: But I want to make sure for people who are listening, we are not arguing for happy endings.

Craig: No.

John: We’re not arguing that every movie needs to have a happy ending. It needs to have a satisfying ending that matches the movie that you’ve given them up to that point.

Craig: Yes.

John: Is it one that tracks with the characters along the way? So it doesn’t mean the character has to win. The character can die at the end, that’s absolutely fine, as long as the death is meaningful in the context of the movie that you’ve shown us.

Craig: Yeah. And maybe just a little bit of hope.

John: Yeah.

Craig: You know, I mean, I always thought it was such a great choice by Clint Eastwood, the ending shot of Unforgiven, which really ends on a downer. I mean, this man struggled his whole life, most of his adult life, to be a good person when inside in fact he was awful. And in a moment of explosion at the end truly reveals the devil inside, kills everybody. We kind of sickly root for it. And then he goes back home. And it basically says he never, you know, he just died alone.

And yet there’s something nice about the image because while that’s rolling, and we just dealt with all of that, the final images of him alone on his farm, putting some flowers down — I think by the grave of his dead wife, who we understand from the scroll is somebody that he always, he truly loved and was good to, so that there is a bit of hope there. You know?

John: Let’s get to our question today because we had a writer write in. His name is Malcolm. “I’ve heard two separate execs say that Abraham Lincoln, along with everything else, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, along with everything else is proof that the box office is dying.

“Yes, we know it is gradually shrinking as there are other forms of entertainment, but execs seem incapable of believing that they are making moves that people want to see. When Safe House doubles the expectations for opening weekend no one thinks, ‘Hmm, people must really want to see s[tuff] like that.’ They identify Avengers and Hunger Games’ success as being mostly about the brand as opposed to about being the films that people wanted to see. So, I worry that the reaction is that the movie business reacts…”

Wow, this is not the best sentence, Malcolm. “I worry that the reaction is that the movie business reacts by saying a version of, ‘We can only do Avengers films,’ and contracts faster than it needs to.'”

Craig: Well, that’s a good worry. I mean, I guess the first thing is are those people right, and I don’t think they are. I mean, there’s a standard human response to failure which is to point fingers. And there’s a standard human response to success which is to claim credit.

So, it’s interesting. I work in comedy. There really aren’t brands in comedy; they have to be invented essentially. I mean, there are brands but they start as something original, typically. Well, you know, there weren’t any books or properties that led to The Hangover, or Bridesmaids, or Horrible Bosses, or the 40-Year Old Virgin, or any other movie that’s done well in the last five or six years as a comedy. And there are a lot of movies that aren’t Marvel super hero movies that people are interested in seeing.

You know, I mean, Inception. How much money did that make? Gazillions. And incredibly, aggressively intellectual. I don’t know, I mean, look, it’s not the most intellectual movie in the world, but it’s a challenging piece. It’s about as intellectual as big Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking gets. So, there, I’m sort of damning it, but my point is I actually love the movie. I love Inception. I think there’s a lot of good work coming out. A lot.

And I just think that when this happens people are like, “Oh yeah, the movie business is dying.” Meanwhile people keep buying tickets. It seems like every year the ticket sales are up 3%, down 4%, up 5%, down 2%. You know.

John: And I get frustrated by the discounting of like, “Oh, ticket sales are really down but it’s 3D that’s propping things up.” It’s like, well, but money is still money. Money is coming in to pay for things.

Craig: I don’t even understand what that means.

John: A lot of this is just Monday Morning Syndrome. And so they’re looking at whatever happens last weekend as being indicative of a great trend where it’s just like, no, it’s one movie that did extraordinarily well or didn’t do extraordinarily well. There are some bad movies. And there have always been some bad movies that aren’t going to work.

But I look at, “Oh movie stars are dead and over because Rock of Ages didn’t work with Tom Cruise.” It’s like, well, yeah, but just like last year you were saying that Tom Cruise is still proof of a big movie star because Mission Impossible did great with Tom Cruise.

Craig: Right.

John: So, people want to have — people want to take every movie as an example of their trend that they see which I don’t think is…

Craig: I mean, I’ll tell you a real trend though, this is real. The studios routinely make decisions based on cynical calculations as opposed to the merits of any particular given movie. This is why when Avatar comes out and becomes the biggest movie in history everybody says, “We need our Avatar.” They don’t say, “We need a story that might interest people. We don’t need a filmmaker that people really have this amazing connection with. We just want our big, huge, freaking Avatar.”

So, what happens is then the cycle kicks around. And by the way, they say the same thing about Transformers. Transformers comes out, huge movie. Whether you like it or not, Michael Bay has a way with his audience. Okay? That comes down to a filmmaker. And people kick Michael Bay around all they want. Let me tell you something: It doesn’t matter. As a filmmaker he rewards Michael Bay fans, of which there are many. So he has a deal with Michael Bay fans. “I’m going to be Michael Bay, and you’re going to love Michael Bay,” and that works for them.

So the point is, that guy is that guy. It’s not about the bigness, it’s about a person. It’s about James Cameron. It’s about the people who write those movies.

Now, so the studios see Transformers and the studios see Avatar and they go, “Oh, well we just have to make our own.” It doesn’t work like that, okay? It does not work like that. That is not how good movies are made or interesting movies are made or even popular movies are made. That’s how essentially copies are made. And while sometimes copies work, a lot of times they don’t. And, you know, I think the biggest problem with John Carter wasn’t the merits of the movie John Carter, it was that it seemed like an Avatar copy.

And I didn’t see Battleship, but I think that was the biggest problem they had. Seemed like a Transformers copy. And once it “seems” inauthentic, you’re already in trouble. And since there are such massive bets — massive bets — you can sort of wind the clock back and say, “Maybe we shouldn’t make decisions based on things other than the merits of any given story or filmmaker.” And instead you say, “Maybe the world is ending.” Because that’s a little more comforting than, “Oh my god, I screwed up, and I lit $400 million on fire.”

John: Yeah. So people are, you know, everything is horrible, and terrible, and bad, but like the Avengers made a gazillion dollars. And so they will kind of forget the Avengers made a gazillion dollars. And the Avengers wasn’t a bigger movie than some of the other things that haven’t worked. It was kind of a risky director to pick for that movie. The director hadn’t made anything of that size and that scale, but they’re not going to learn that lesson; they’re just going to learn that it was big, and therefore it’s good.

Craig: They won’t.

John: And Marvel is smart. And Marvel is smart, but that’s not the only lesson to take from that.

Craig: No. The lesson to take from that is hire a director and writer — and in this case it was the same person — with a specific point of view and a proven track record with an audience. And have him deliver the goods as best he can. That’s a risk worth taking. It doesn’t always pay off, but to me that’s so much more interesting of a risk and so much more potentially rewarding than the other way of thinking about it, which I guarantee you is going on right now, where people are sitting around going, “Okay, please list for me at my studio here all of the various heroes we have, create a team for them to be on, and do our version of The Avengers.”

And it’s just going, I guarantee you that’s going on.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And all those movies are going to be annoying. And people are going to smell it. And then the box office will be blamed. But I don’t think that’s a good idea.

John: So this last week I’ve been out with a pitch, and a book that we’re trying to set up, and it’s been really fascinating to be doing that again because I haven’t done that for awhile. And it’s a smaller book, and I think a book that has huge potential, but as we go into those meetings everything is always cautioned on, like, “Well you know this is a huge risk for us to take.”

And it’s like, well, it’s actually not a huge risk. This is going to be a much less expensive movie for you to try to do. And every year several of these moves do extraordinarily well. And so you’ll always say, “Oh, I wish we could have made The Help. I wish we could have made The Blind Side. I wish we could have made that movie.”

Well, I kind of think this is that movie, and it’s not costing you that much, it’s not that much of a gamble that it could be that movie. And yet it’s hard to get people over that hump to see what that potential is. And so like any pitch you’re talking about the characters, you’re talking about the world, you’re talking about how it functions as a movie, how the story functions.

But the second half of these meetings has always been, “This is how we market it. And this is how, I think you go after families. I think you go after women. I think you go after this…”And it’s been very odd to have to plan the marketing campaign before the movie.

Craig: Yeah. It’s the way of the world now. And it is, you know, it’s funny: I remember talking to John Lee Hancock about The Blind Side which ended up at Alcon which is a — it’s a company that’s part of Warner Bros., or they have an output deal through Warner Bros. But prior to that it was at a different studio. And that studio had John Lee, and that script, and Sandra Bullock. They had all the elements and they just passed.

And, you know, he just didn’t understand. I remember we were having a discussion, he goes, “I don’t get it.” I mean, you run the numbers, I mean, we’re talking about a budget of, I don’t what it was, it was $40 million. You’ve got Sandra Bullock. It seems like, what’s the big risk?

And in my mind I don’t think that other studio looked at it and saw a big risk. I don’t think they saw a chance that they would lose $40 million, or even $20 million or $10 million. I think the bigger risk to them was simply that they would only make $5 million.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That they’re in the business of making either a lot of money or not trying.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And so nobody’s looking for doubles or singles.

John: You have to swing for the fences on every movie.

Craig: They swing for the fences.

John: Yes, that’s risk.

Craig: Well, you know, you’re never going to leg out a triple if you don’t hit a few doubles. And, frankly, what’s wrong with a mildly profitable film? And a film… Which by the way, you know Bob Weinstein who made me crazy many, many, for many, many years did say one thing to me, I’ll never forget it, it was very interesting. He said, “Do you want to know how to make money in the movie business?” And I thought, “Yeah, [laughs] yes, I do, Bob.”

John: “Sure, tell me, Bob Weinstein.”

Craig: I would like to know how you think you make money in the movies. He said, “Very simple. Own a library of movies and don’t make movies.” Because when you make a movie the money goes out immediately but comes back in very slowly. But in library films, they have no overhead to speak of at all, but they generate money forever. And particularly those evergreens, they just every year generate money, and they cost nothing, right?

So I just think, what’s wrong with making some of these singles and doubles because then they go in your library and they make you money forever?

John: Yeah. What you will hear when you try to bring up that logic in the room is like, “Well, even if it doesn’t cost that money to make, it costs a ton of money to market.” And, so, okay, yeah, maybe you’re spending twice as much to market this movie as you did to make it. Watch your costs. Figure that out. I don’t want to say it’s not my problem, but it’s sort of not my problem.

Craig: Well, yeah, I mean look, they have to run some sort of model that makes sense for them. I understand that. Nobody’s under an obligation to make a film. But if I’m coming to you with a movie, I mean to say that there’s an audience for it. I don’t bring people, if the budget… — Basically my argument is I don’t bring you a movie that costs X if I don’t think there’s a clear case to be made that an audience will come and replace that.

So, if the movie is going to cost $35 million, I’m arguing you’re guaranteed to make $35 million for sure, probably more, but for sure. And then they’ll say, “Well then there’s the marketing cost.” And I’ll say, okay, well then there’s the DVD, and then there’s the cable, and then there’s the television, and then there’s the foreign. You’ll be okay. What I’m really saying is you’re breaking even…

John: And, by the way, a lot of them are phantom costs. They’re costs they’re charging themselves for things…

Craig: Of course. Yeah, I mean look, there’s real cost to it and then there are other phantom costs. The phantom costs certainly make it so that no one will ever see profit on a film. But, I don’t walk in and sort of say, “Listen, here’s a movie that’s going to cost $50 million. I’m not sure if more than $10 million of business will ever come on this thing, but I really think you should make it.” No. Of course not.

John: No.

Craig: And really what it comes down to is they don’t like backing movies that just break even. They don’t like it. And I understand it. I get it. Who would? It’s a lot of work and a lot of time for a push. But, you know, you and I, I don’t get the sense that neither you or I go and pitch for $200 million budget films. You know?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Where we are, where the studios have to kind of get back to is making a middle ground movie. And I know they are just freaked out; they don’t want to do it.

John: They don’t.

Craig: They don’t want to do it. But, what can I say? Then they’ll get more Vampire Diary situations where they spend… — Vampire Diaries, by the way, probably should have just been made for less money. There was a time when they used to make those movies…

John: You mean Vampire Hunter? Vampire Diaries is a successful television show.

Craig: Oh, that would have been awesome. I think that would have been really great — The Abraham Lincoln Vampire Diaries. Completely better.

John: Yeah. He’s just falling in love with Mary Todd Lincoln and it’s sweet and romantic.

Craig: Oh my god. Let me unbutton my pants. This is the greatest story I ever heard.

John: [laughs] “He takes off his hat very slowly.”

Craig: [laughs] But, you know, remember there was a time when people made horror films or genre films for a price, and it wasn’t just like massive effect-o-rama, you know.

John: And they still do that to some degree. Horror is one of the few genres that is done inexpensively and can pay out sometimes.

Craig: Right.

John: It’s just, there’s still the…it used to be called Dibbuk Box, it’s the Lionsgate. Like, well, Lionsgate and Summit.

Craig: Oh, yeah right. The Possession. Yeah.

John: They make those kind of movies.

Craig: Yeah, that’s right. You know, I feel bad for Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter/Vampire Diaries because truthfully it’s such a genre idea, it’s such a genre movie. It seems unfair to saddle it with the kind of budget that then makes everybody go, “Gosh darn, that movie didn’t do well.” Well, it’s the president chopping heads off, you know.

John: It’s an ambitious idea.

Craig: Right, it’s an ambitious idea. Maybe, just crazy here, stick with me on this: Maybe aim to make $55 million with that guy. Spend $30 million, you know, and then maybe, who knows? Like remember when you made Buffy the Vampire Slayer and it didn’t cost that much, and didn’t make that much, but then it turned into a television series that lasted forever and made a zillion dollars?

John: Yeah.

Craig: Just throwing that out there.

John: It’s always possible.

Craig: Always possible.

John: Well, Craig, let’s wrap this up. This was a fun conversation about endings and beginnings and the death of the film industry.

Craig: Mm.

John: But not in a negative way.

Craig: No.

John: I was worried it was going to tip to a negative place. I don’t think it did. I think we were arguing for the continued health of the film industry.

Craig: Yes, that’s right. One of our rare optimistic moments.

John: I like it. Now, Craig, you had promised us in the last episode that there would be some singing this week. Is that going to happen?

Craig: I forgot my guitar. [laughs] I forgot my guitar.

John: All right, well, we’ll save it for another time.

Craig: Next time.

John: And we’ll save our next One Cool Things for next time, too.

Craig: Yes, I’ll sing next time.

John: Craig, thank you for a fun podcast.

Craig: Thank you, too, John.

John: Take care.

Craig: Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/pen-names-and-divine-intervention).

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

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

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

**Craig:** I’m good. It’s funny, I’ve been… Ever since you said last time that we have — what was it, 65,000?

**John:** A lot of listeners, yeah.

**Craig:** So, there must have been some weird tipping point because suddenly now I’m having that weird thing where people that I don’t know mention the podcast. So I went to the premiere of Ted this week, a very funny movie with Mark Wahlberg and Seth MacFarlane as his foul-mouthed living teddy bear.

**John:** I love the outdoor campaign for Ted, just to interrupt your story completely.

**Craig:** It’s great. Yeah, I know, they’ve done a great job. And it is; there’s a ton of laughs in that movie. It’s pretty sick and funny.

And when you go to a premiere you go to like a will call thing and you give somebody your license and they look up your name and give you your tickets. And the guy looked at the thing, and he gave me tickets, and he said, “Oh, hey, I love the podcast.” And I was, like, “Wha — oh!” [laughs] Because, you know, people are listening to it. And it’s strange because the only people I’ve ever heard from up until this point are people I know.

And then I was posting on Facebook with an old high school friend of mine who lives somewhere, not here, and one of her friends in the little comment thread said, “Hey, are you the podcast guy?” So it’s happening, John.

**John:** I was at the Trader Joe’s in Hollywood and we were checking out, and it’s pretty common — like it’s the Trader Joe’s in Hollywood so there’s gonna be some screenwriters working there.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the guy who’s checking us out, I was talking to him a bit, he was like, “Hey, are you John August?” And what I could tell was it wasn’t he just recognized me — because I have kind of a common face, like a lot of people sort of look like me — but he actually recognized my voice from the podcast.

**Craig:** It’s wild. It’s funny — I was saying to a friend, 16 years of screenwriting and a bunch of movies, and no one knows who the hell I am. Six months of a podcast, [laughs] and people are saying hi to me. It’s just… — I mean a podcast of all things. Not to run our podcast down, I mean it’s cool. But, strange.

**John:** So, before we got on the air we talked: I’m actually fairly sick right now so people who follow me on Twitter know that I got diagnosed with viral sinusitis, which is basically an infection sort of in your head. It takes like seven to 10 days to heal. So I’m on day six of it and I feel better, but not great. So, I may have you do some more of the heavy lifting in terms of question answering today.

**Craig:** Happy to do so.

**John:** But I thought we would answer four questions.

**Craig:** Yeah, we have four questions. Before we get to those, you have to watch that you don’t get a secondary bacterial infection, John.

**John:** Yes, I know. It’s a huge concern.

**Craig:** It’s a huge concern. I’m concerned. But it’s not — you don’t have terminal viral sinusitis.

**John:** No, there’s no such thing as terminal viral sinusitis.

**Craig:** Not yet. You could be the first one.

**John:** Not yet.

The weird thing about getting sick, of course, is I’ve been playing a lot of Plague Inc., the iPad game where you try to design to plague to destroy the world.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** And so I’m playing this game while feeling sick which is not a healthy combination of…

**Craig:** Real smart.

**John:** …action. And you start to believe in causation in ways that you shouldn’t believe it.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s just a sinus problem.

**John:** Let’s power through this. So, start with some follow up. A couple weeks ago we talked about how Amazon Studios had brought in Clive Barker on this project, Zombies vs. Gladiators. And so we got an email from Clive Barker’s manager to make a correction. So, Clive Barker’s manager listens to us…

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** …which is kind of interesting. “Clive, whom I manage,” he says. “Clive, whom I manage, is not attached to direct this project. He’s merely attached to rewrite/reimagine it. I’m not sure if you read someplace online that he’s directing, but that’s inaccurate information if that was out there.”

**Craig:** Oh, okay. So then they did mention the writer.

**John:** They did, because he’s going to be the writer now.

**Craig:** Where did you pick that up? Was that from Amazon itself?

**John:** I think I may have hallucinated it, or honestly it may have been that someone else had blogged about it and added in the writer-director Clive Barker, and therefore I took it as that.

**Craig:** You know, John, 65,000 people rely on us the way they rely on Jeff Daniels on Newsroom.

**John:** That’s why I’m making a for-the-record correction. And I should probably flog myself and make everyone feel guilty.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, Amazon.

**John:** Sorry Amazon.

Oh, by the way, Amazon announced that they’re doing four TV series.

**Craig:** Oh, uh…

**John:** We’ll see if they really are doing four TV series. They made a press release, so that’s something.

**Craig:** Well, they’ve certainly accomplished that. I do feel bad because I like to, you know, when I get worked up and pissed off, I hate wasting it on things that aren’t…

**John:** I don’t know that you fully wasted it. I mean, they did not mention the actual people who came up with the idea who had worked on it up until that point.

**Craig:** Hey, great point.

**John:** Because it’s like when they make a Variety announcement that someone was brought in, really more a Nikki Finke announcement that someone is brought in to rewrite a project, but they don’t mention like whose project it was originally. That’s kind of lame.

**Craig:** All right. I feel better. Thank you.

**John:** Yeah. A follow up on verbs which was a topic from last podcast. Christina in San Francisco wrote in to recommend a booked called English Verb Classes and Alterations — I’m sorry. Alternations. God, I have to get it right — which I looked through the preview on Amazon, it’s kind of an expensive book, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to order it. I looked at the preview and it’s very hard core, but it gets into some of the really specific esoterica I was talking about.

And an alternation helps explain sort of why some verbs can do some functions and can’t do other functions. Here’s a good example I found from just skimming through it. So, here’s two sentences:

Bill pounded the metal. This metal won’t pound.

That second one doesn’t work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. But, listen to this:

Bill pounded the metal flat. This metal won’t pound flat.

That does make sense.

**Craig:** It does. Now do I need a book for that? [laughs] Do I need to read this book?

**John:** No, it’s one of those things, as you are a speaker of English you do that naturally. It’s only when you stop to think about like well why does adding the word flat make that sentence possible?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a strange thing. It speaks to the idea that there’s probably underlying concept beneath our language that are influencing why certain sentences make sense and certain sentences don’t make sense.

**Craig:** Yes. No question. Grammar…and you know, there’s the whole… — Actually, I should have mentioned it last time. So, Noam Chomsky, who’s more famous now for saying absurd things about politics, was initially famous for his work as a linguist, and he was really the first person to revolutionize the notion that grammar is innate to humans and that in all cultures, no matter how isolated, their language follows a certain rigorous grammar that includes elements that are common to all languages.

**John:** As an example, a language will either be subject, verb, object, or subject, object, verb.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** There’s certain ways it can work. And it’s going to work one way. It’s going to work consistently one way.

**Craig:** That’s right. And this became, essentially this became an object of faith for the linguistic community. But, a few months ago I read an interesting article, I’ll dig it up and put the link on, where basically there’s a guy challenging it. And he’s challenging it based on his understanding of a very isolated tribe in Brazil, which is pretty much where all the world’s isolated tribes live now, and his argument was: no, actually their language does not follow this, and the presumptions are incorrect.

That in and of itself seems like a mild debate between scientists. But what’s really fascinating is how viscous it’s gotten. That the way academics circle the wagons when their orthodoxy is challenged is remarkable. Remarkable. I’m going to dig this link up. It was a really cool read because it wasn’t about the theory. It was about people being jerks, which I love.

**John:** It is fascinating that academics can get so worked up about something so seemingly unimportant and esoteric. When you consider that, look at physics — we have Newtonian physics and then we have Quantum mechanics. And they are basically both right. Newtonian physics takes care of most things and most situations. And you can’t use Quantum mechanics and do a lot of everyday things. So, it’s good that we can recognize the value in both things.

**Craig:** Yeah. But what’s cool is that, and you see this is the hard sciences, they don’t really — it’s not like, I mean, there was, even early on, some objection to Einstein, but really what happened was people went, “What? That’s crazy. Let’s test it. Oh, it’s true.” It’s the sociologies, the kind of interpretive sciences — sociology, psychology, linguistics — where suddenly it just becomes emotional and protective and weird.

**John:** Part of it may be that something like linguistics or psychology, you really are building castles in the air. And so if someone challenges the foundation of what you’ve done, everything collapses.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** So, with the hard sciences, well, they’re hard for a reason. Like, you can actually test them. There are ways to measure these things. And it’s very different than the soft sciences.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let us move to screenwriting now, a completely different topic we could talk about in a podcast for example. We have four questions and you’ve been generous enough to offer to read these questions to us this week.

**Craig:** I’ll do the reading. I’ll do the reading.

So, question number one comes from Z in Los Angeles. Z. And he writes, “My writing partner and I got several meetings from a comedy spec, and one production company with a producer with big credits, we sat down with the creative executive. He said he loved our style and wanted to find something to work on together. He told us that his boss had a couple of ideas and gave us a sparse one line description of each. We liked one. He asked us to come back and pitch our take on it. Two weeks later we did that.

“He loved our angle, characters, ideas, but here’s the bad part: He tells us it would have to be done on spec for no money, but they can get the script read anywhere in town. As hungry, unproduced writers, it’s good enough for us. We go off and write the script, it turns out great.” So he did it.

“Now we’re jazzed, our manager is confident, the exec is psyched; creative executive has his boss, the producer, read it. Here we go. We’re told he thinks it’s funny but he doesn’t love it so he doesn’t want to send it out. Creative executive apologizes and expresses his regret. We’re bummed, of course, but then we were crushed to find out that it’s not ours. Hubba, what?!” That’s what Z wrote. He actually wrote “Hubba what?”

“And we can’t send it out as our next spec to the other places we took meetings. Can that be right? Where does his idea stop and his idea start? Our manager is wishy-washy about it…” There’s a shock. That’s my editorializing. “…and advises us to move on to our next spec.” Wow. What a genius manager you have.

“My partner thinks, screw ’em, let’s just roll the dice and send it out. Thoughts? Frustrated as hell. Z in Los Angeles.”

**John:** Yeah, so several issues kind of bundled up in one big package of misery in this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** First is writing that script on spec for this big producer with a lot of producer credits.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it does happen. And it’s not illegal. Typically these production companies aren’t signatory to the Writers Guild, the studios that employ you are. It’s not technically illegal. The whole point of writing something on spec like this in concert with a producer is that it gives you an enormous amount of leverage when you do go to the studios. You now have a piece of material they will either want or not want, but if they do want it they have to buy that. They’re not buying conjecture, like a pitch.

If you’re not a big shot screenwriter it’s a great way to sort of take away all the guesswork on their part. They don’t have to worry if you can do it or not. It’s material, and it’s original material, so it’s exciting.

I would say the bad part is this, but this is insane. I mean, I don’t know about you John, but I think his partner’s right. They wrote a script. It’s absolutely theirs. They own it lock, stock, and barrel. Ideas are not possessions. Adios producer. See you later.

**John:** The producer had no written piece of material that preceded theirs. There’s no underlying story. There was a one-line sentence.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And I think they can make a very good case for this is all theirs. Now, there’s the aspect of this is a big producer that you’re going to piss off by doing this. But, guess what? He wasn’t helping you anyway.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If he didn’t like the script he’s not going to be doing something for you next week.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Making one enemy isn’t going to be a problem.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, look, my whole feeling is there’s a — when you write something speculatively with a producer involved there is a contract. And the contract is, “I’m doing a lot of work here speculatively, you don’t have the ability to stop me from mining it if you don’t like it. I am actually — I have taken full control of this project as the writer from you.” So, the truth is, they can’t stop you. The worst they could do, I suppose, is if you did sell it, go to the studio and say, “I want to get kissed in on this thing because I ‘developed’ it.” And then that’s really for the studio to decide. But, frankly, the studio could also tell them to piss off.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I think the biggest tragedy in this is not that the producer and the producer’s creative executive failed to kind of uphold their end of the deal, because that’s just lions doing what lions do. The biggest disaster in this is that your manager — your manager, who you pay to represent and advocate for you — has actually advised you to literally throw the script away. That is shocking to me. And embarrassing, frankly. Embarrassing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a manager who doesn’t want to blow his relationship with this producer at the sake of these clients. So he’ll throw you under the bus rather than risk angering this producer.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, of course, the biggest laugh of all is that this manager’s relationship with this producer apparently isn’t productive enough to get this script to go out with that producer. I mean, it’s just a disaster.

These people, these managers, it’s like, guys, it’s embarrassing. You should be ashamed of yourself for giving that advice. Outrageous.

**John:** A good manager, and there are some good managers, would have stepped in earlier on and made sure it wasn’t going to happen this way.

**Craig:** Of course. Or just say to the producer, look…

**John:** Now, I do want to raise the stakes on this and imagine a worse scenario. Here’s my worst scenario: Imagine that creative executive had been pitching those same kinds of ideas to a couple different writers and had actually been developing the same spec idea with several different writers. And that this week another script is going to go out but this producer has said, “Oh yes, this is the take I like, and that’s when they go out on the town.”

**Craig:** It could happen.

**John:** It could totally happen.

**Craig:** Absolutely. In fact, your point is the exact evidence required when you’re asking, “Well, can we take this spec out on our own.” And the answer is yes, because frankly the producer could do exactly what you said. They could have 12 people write spec screenplays based on this non-possessable item of an idea.

Meaning, all of those writers own their individual scripts. It’s no different than you and I living in two adjacent apartments both working on a script of our own based on the same idea. We can do that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then it’s, okay, whatever, the best script wins. Of course, Z, you take that script out. It’s yours. You did it. Screw your manager. He’s crazy, crazy to advise you to move on. It’s outrageous.

**John:** The other reason to go out with this script as a spec situation is that people will read it because they might say, “This might be something we want to buy.” And in reading it they will read your good writing and they will consider you for future things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you don’t want to stick this on a shelf where no one can read it if it is as good as you think it is. And maybe it’s not. Maybe we’re being too optimistic. But you want people to see it.

**Craig:** Right. Maybe it stinks. Look, if it stinks it stinks. But then, exactly, if you believe in it and you don’t think it stinks, you send it out. If you think, “Oh, well, maybe they’re right and it stinks, then don’t send it out.” By the way, ask your manager, say, “Before we go crazy here, are you really just telling us this because you know it stinks and you don’t want to send it out because it stinks?” That’s fair. But then of course you really need to insist that they be honest from the jump with you and not make up baloney ideas.

The other bit of advice I would give to you, Z, is that in the future if you’re going to go out on a limb and write something on spec like this in concert with a producer, you must get the producer onboard at the very beginning. And you deserve that. You’re going to put in work and effort. You are now in a privileged position to demand that the producer hear your take, listen to what you have to say, sign on and agree that they’re gonna go and push this.

All right.

**John:** My other frustration is sort of just working practices. If this producer really has the credits that Z is implying, a big producer with some big names, they have the discretionary fund that could easily pay for this. And they should.

**Craig:** Well, you know, the funny thing is some of these guys out there are big names with big credits, but those deals are gone. So, they had a deal with discretionary funding. There are so few of those now. So they have all the appearance of being able to have a discretionary fund, but they don’t actually have one.

**John:** Yeah. They have their own money. They could do it. I just think it’s wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I totally agree.

**John:** Spec work in general: if it’s your thing it’s your thing. And that’s why I believe in writing specs that are actually generally yours. Specs that are somebody else’s, it’s just a bad…

**Craig:** Yeah, look, I worked on a script on spec with Michael Shamberg, and Stacey Sher, and Carla Shamberg. And I did it because I thought that the idea that we had and the story we were telling was of the sort where if I went and pitched it maybe I could sell it, but frankly it was so outside of the realm of what I normally do that I was just more comfortable on my own taking the time to spec it and not having the pressure of employment and just writing.

It was entirely my decision. It wasn’t something they asked me to do. If anybody demanded that I spec something I would just say, “Go, go away. I don’t like you anymore.”

**John:** Yeah.

Question 2. Do you want to read that?

**Craig:** Question 2. Justin writes, “A friend of mine was recently working as a PA for a major studio. While working he discovered another PA had sold some movie ideas to a studio for something around,” [laughs], “something around $2,500 to $5,000. How does someone go about selling a premise and does the WGA have any say in these kinds of transactions?”

Um, I don’t believe that the WGA has a minimum that covers a premise. A premise, in fact, or a movie idea isn’t really something that normally people buy, because as I just mentioned it’s not intellectual property that you can defend or own. I think the lowest level of literary material that the Writers Guild covers and recognizes as actually protectable material is a treatment or story. And the minimum for a treatment or story is much more than $2,500 to $5,000.

So, I’m guessing your PA sold it to a non-guild studio or something?

**John:** Yeah. I don’t even know… — I included this question because I just don’t think it’s real. I think the other PA was sort of making stuff up or spreading an old wives tale, because you don’t just like buy an idea for something, because there’s not enough there to actually buy. I mean, you’re sort of buying someone. It’s like I’ll pay you some money so you won’t write this yourself and I’ll have someone else I write it, I guess, but it doesn’t really make sense.

It’s the kind of thing that you would assume happens a lot if you were outside the industry. It’s like, “Oh, I have a great idea and Hollywood is going to buy my idea.” It doesn’t really happen that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That somehow this business works.

**Craig:** I agree. This feels like a Penthouse form letter. You know, it’s interesting but…

**John:** “A friend of mine recently…” Exactly.

**Craig:** “I never thought this would happen to me. But I was coming up…”

**John:** “One day I was working as a PA…”

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Next question.

**Craig:** Question number 3. Lou writes, “When I see a moment of divine intervention in a movie, like a randomly found item that moves the plot forward or an unlocked car with the keys in it just when the protagonist needs one, I usually buy it. I think we’ve all had at least one unexplained moment in our lives that has been just short of miraculous. However, if the writer layers on more than two of these moments of divine intervention the story takes a precipitous plunge in credibility for me. When you’re writing, how do you determine whether or not you should deploy one of these magic moments? And do you have a method to gauge if the act of divine intervention that you’re writing is just too far-fetched?”

**John:** That’s a good question.

**Craig:** Thoughtful question.

**John:** So, to me, it comes down to coincidence. And there’s coincidences that are good. There are coincidences that start the actual premise of your whole movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like two people happen to have the same name, or that this couple that could have met but that didn’t meet. That’s a coincidence. And you’re always going to buy that coincidence if it’s the whole premise of the movie. But if there’s too many coincidences it just feels like, well, these characters are not in charge of the movie; some sort of external god force is in charge of this movie. And you stop believing it. You stop believing in the consequences of people’s actions because another coincidence will get them out of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, essentially I think Lou has his own answer. You pretty much get one of those. I always feel like there’s one big conceit to a movie, one big buy-in that people make that makes the story special, but not too. And when it comes to something like this, like a moment of shocking coincidence or shocking intervention, you get one. I think you get one that’s sort of noticeable. More than one, you start to feel, like you said, that the screenwriter is just moving pieces around conveniently to avoid good storytelling.

Interestingly, a shocking coincidence is good storytelling because it reinjects into the audience’s experience, our understanding of life being chaotic, and that’s great. But the fact is if you have two chaotic moments that transform the plot, you’re actually now going the other way; now you’re implying that it’s not chaotic at all, in fact, it’s all rigged.

So, it’s wonderful in Boogie Nights when that guy comes into the donut shop and has a weird gun battle and gets blown away. And the character who desperately needs money to get out of porn and start his business has suddenly a bag of money there and no one around to see him take it. And he takes it. And that’s shocking, and cool.

And then there’s actually an interesting coincidence tied to it where as he’s walking out you see a car driving buy that his porn producer is in with Heather Graham and all the rest, but that’s okay, it was sort of like, because that didn’t warp the story. That was just style.

But more than one of those, I think you’ve got a problem.

**John:** The other thing to keep in mind is that coincidences or like acts of fate shouldn’t always benefit the protagonist. Every once and awhile they should benefit the villain. And so there’s nothing I love more in a fight when the hero seems to be winning and then the bad guy gets lucky. Let the bad guy get lucky every once and awhile. That’s surprising.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great point. So when you say, when Lou asks do you have a method of gauging if the divine intervention that you’re writing is just too far-fetched, the answer is: How does it make you feel? How would it make you feel in the audience? It’s not a question of far-fetched. It could be enormously far-fetched, like that bag of money just happening to be there because there’s a random gun battle. But how does it make you feel? Does it give you a little buzz from the kind of insanity of the moment, or does it make you feel like, “Oh, this movie is baloney?”

**John:** The other thing I would keep in mind is take a look at what the time horizon is in your movie. So, if you’re a movie that is taking place in pretty real time, you’re not, in your daily life a lot of coincidences aren’t going to stack up. If your movie is taking place over 20 years there’s a better chance that the moments we’re going to see are going to be those moments of coincidence, where things do occur.

So, if we’re checking in with a character every five years, we’re probably going to be checking with those characters at moments where things aren’t happening, where they are bumping back into somebody that they haven’t seen for awhile. So, you make it a little extra bump if your movie is taking place over a longer period of time.

**Craig:** That’s a great point.

**John:** Craig, I’ve pitched you my take for Hangover III, haven’t I?

**Craig:** No, I’d love to hear it.

**John:** So in case you throw out all the work you’ve done so far, I really think the next Hangover should take place over about 50 years.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So rather than, just throw out the whole conceit of like it happens all in sort of one long swoop, and just tracks them all the way to their death bed.

**Craig:** Hmm. Well, that’s not what we’re doing.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] But I will say that there is one sort of, well, I’m not going to say anything.

**John:** You don’t need to say anything. In the last movie you did go back to Zach Galifianakis’s early life which was a fun conceit.

**Craig:** Yes. There was, well sort of, I mean…

**John:** You saw how he saw himself in the moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, he sees the world…

**John:** Like you were going back to an earlier point in time, sort of sticking a kid version of him in the present.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. We have one more question and this is from Richard. And he writes, “I happen to have the same first and last name of an existing successful screenwriter.” I wonder if his last name is LaGravenese?

**John:** It’s not. That would be a really exotic name. That would be a coincidence. Because that’s an unusual name.

**Craig:** That would be crazy. That would be bad screenwriting if that happened. “I don’t want to cause any confusion, and have thought about using an alias on my screenplays. Is this acceptable? How would I go about doing that? I don’t want to legally change my name?” Well, don’t people just normally use a middle initial at that point or their middle name?

**John:** Yeah, that’s a good bet. So, if his name was, if it’s Richard Smith, there’s another famous Richard Smith, you could go by R.C. Smith and that works fine.

You’re allowed to do whatever you want to do in terms of a pen name or an alias. You don’t have to legally change your name. I did legally change my name before I started working. That’s just because I had a really unpronounceable last name that was frustrating for everybody involved, including me, but that’s not obligatory by any means. So, pick a name for me, too.

**Craig:** I think you have to, I mean, in fact our MBA regulates pseudonyms. You can’t actually — you’re not free to use a pseudonym. If you make more than, I think it’s $225,000 on a project you don’t have the right unilaterally to opt for a pseudonym. The company has to agree to it. And the reason that’s there is because when they pay big name writers lots of money they want to be able to say, “From the writer of blah, blah, blah.”

And so whatever name you sign on your contract needs to be the name you put on the movie. But if it is, so obviously you changed your name officially. That’s easy, that’s done. If you use a middle initial or your full middle name to separate yourself from another Richard Jones or Richard Smith, that would work, because you are using your name; it’s just a different format of the name.

**John:** But Craig’s point though is you can pick, you can choose what name you’re going to do, but once you pick your name you have to stick with your name. That’s a regulated thing. So, if you decide you want to use the name R.C. Smith, as you’re doing your contracts, you contracts will be done as R.C. Smith.

**Craig:** Right. You just have to make sure that R.C. Smith comports with whatever is on your driver’s license. Otherwise you do have to change your…

**John:** Oh, I don’t actually think that’s accurate.

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** The Wibberleys get away with.

**Craig:** Well, but the Wibberleys, they had to get permission for that.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because the thing is when you’re signing a contract, what goes along with that is whatever that tax form is to prove that you’re a US citizen and what your name and Social Security number is. You can’t just make up your own name and then use that.

**John:** But, Craig, couldn’t a provision in the contract say that writer will be credited as?

**Craig:** Yes, absolutely. And then in that case — that’s my point. In other words you could say the writer will be credited this way, and really for the studio I think the only thing that matters to them is that the way you’re asking for credit would easily be associated with you.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So the Wibberleys, okay, great, so if we want to say, “From the writer’s of Charlie’s Angels 2 comes some other movie,” then we know that people will get that the Wibberleys means them.

But, if you were writing a script and you were just a little embarrassed by the job and you wanted your name to be John Public on it, no. They’re not gonna give you that.

**John:** Yeah. And that has happened.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Speaking of, “From the writer of,” Aline Brosh McKenna who will be our guest on the live version of the podcast in Austin, “from the writer of” always gets checked with her but they never actually use her name. So it’s always “from the writer of The Devil Wears Prada,” but they never actually say her name. It’s Aline.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s marketing for you. You know, they are distributing the information that is relevant to the audience and not anything else. It’s easier to… — I mean, “From Steven Spielberg” actually tells you more as an audience member than, “From the director of ET, and Close Encounters, and Raiders of the Lost Ark,” blah, blah, blah. But if you have that one credit that sort of connotes something of marketing value they’ll just say that. Yeah.

Those were our questions. Do you have a Cool Thing?

**John:** Those are the four questions. Now, so I do have a Cool Thing, but you have a teaser for your Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Well, I actually have a, I realize that I do have a Cool Thing and I have a teaser for a thing that’s just a thing.

**John:** Well you go first with your Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Well my Cool Thing was, I was turned onto this by Phil Hay, fine screenwriter.

**John:** A very good man.

**Craig:** And a good man. And Phil and I are both great baseball fans. And he found this book which I’ve started reading called The Baseball Codes. And if you’re a baseball fan you will love this book. It’s basically an investigation and an illumination of all the unwritten rules in baseball. Baseball is the most legal of sports. The rulebook is enormous and dense and full of arcane nonsense.

But, what’s so cool about baseball is that there’s other rules that are just important to the people playing and managing the game that are not in the book at all, that are not in the rulebook at all, but they are sort of about the honor of the game.

For instance, if you are a hotshot rookie and you’re doing really well, someone’s gonna plunk you. And that happened this year with Cole Hamels just threw at Bryce Harper, who’s an amazing rookie and an amazing talent. And pretty much said, yeah, you know, he knows the deal. And that’s the deal. It’s like, “Welcome to the big leagues rook. I’m gonna hit you now with a 92-mph hard ball.”

But there are also little tiny things, like there are rules that are designed to be honorable when you are way ahead in the game. If you’re winning by a lot you don’t swing at a 3-0 pitch. If you’re winning by a lot you don’t score, you don’t try and score on a close play at home. You hold up at third.

Then there are little things like if you’re a left-handed batter and you’re in the dugout that’s to the left of home plate, don’t cross in front of the catcher on your way to take your position in the batter’s box. Just little weird things. And there’s so many of them. And it’s fun because people don’t understand why, for instance, in baseball teams will get into the sort of bean ball thing where pitchers keep hitting other hitters and then charging the mount and bench-clearing brawls. It’s actually all very highly orchestrated Kabuki theater. And this book is a great insight into what’s actually going on.

**John:** And the idea is that these are all informal rules that have been passed down culturally throughout teams and this is writing them all down.

**Craig:** Exactly. And sort of explaining them. And also talking about how they change because it opens with… There’s a very famous — you can put a link up to this — one of the most famous brawls of all time in baseball, Robin Ventura was playing for the White Sox. Nolan Ryan in his final year of pitching for the Rangers plunks Robin Ventura. Hits him.

Robin Ventura starts to move towards first because that’s what happens when you get hit by a pitch, you take your base. Then turns, throws his helmet down, and charges the mound. As he gets to the mound, sort of like you could see him saying, “Why did you throw at me?” Nolan Ryan grabs him, puts him in a headlock and starts upper-cutting his head repeatedly.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** The benches clear. It’s a massive brawl. And all we see as baseball fans is the fun drama of this young kid running out to the mound and getting absolutely schooled by this old man who’s teaching him the old ways like, “This is how you fight kid.” But in reality, when you read this book, what’s so cool is they explain how this had been going on for years between these two teams. That Nolan Ryan was playing old style baseball where if a batter got too close to the inside part of the plate he would brush them back or hit them because that was his, which has stopped happening in part because of the way college players started using aluminum bats which meant that the inside owning the — being able to reach that outside part of the plate wasn’t as big of a deal. In fact, it was better to back off the inside part of the plate.

So, new pitchers weren’t as obsessed with owning the inside part of the plate the way Nolan Ryan was. Nolan Ryan had been hitting people for a long, long time. He was kind of a jerk about it. The whole team had a meeting before that game and basically said as a team in the locker room, “If he hits any one of us, whoever he hits, you run out there and we all go get this guy because we’re sick of him pushing us around.”

So poor Robin Ventura was the one that got hit [laughs] and he had to run out there and just kind of… but when he ran out he didn’t run out with the intention of hitting Nolan Ryan. And in that hesitation Nolan Ryan took the opening and just grabbed him and started pounding him.

And so what looks like this great story about old guy beating up brash youngster really now turns into old jerk being even jerkier towards a guy that really had to charge the mound.

**John:** Team player, yeah.

**Craig:** Team player. Because if you don’t, I mean, enjoy the rest of the season on that squad, you know? So, even if you don’t like baseball but you like sociology you may enjoy this book. Baseball Codes.

**John:** Sounds good. Nice.

**Craig:** What’s your…

**John:** So my One Cool Thing, I was back last week in Colorado where I grew up, and my father who has passed away was a pretty significant photographer. Not like a fancy photographer, but he took a lot of pictures, and specifically took a lot of slides. And, slides are wonderful but slides are very hard to look at. It’s hard to sort of see, “Oh, this is a slide for this.” So, we knew we needed to scan slides but we have like 1,000 slides. More than 1,000 slides. And it’s going to be a lot of work.

So what we have been doing over the last couple years whenever we have a lot of stuff to scan, we have negatives to scan, photos to scan, we use a place called ScanCafe, which is a terrible name for a business because it sounds like, “Oh, it’s a little café, you go in and you scan and you get some coffee.”

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s awful.

**John:** So what the service does is you go on the website. You tell them how many slides, how many negatives, how many prints you have to scan. They say great. They send you this receipt. You stick everything in a box, stick the label on it, and ship it off to them.

They take all of the negatives, all the slides, all the photos, clean them, scan them, and then send them back to you. They either put it on a website that you can download them off a website, or if you have a ton like we do they actually stick it on a hard drive and send you the hard drive back. So it makes dealing with a lot of old photos just remarkably better.

So, it’s not inexpensive. There’s a price per slide, or per photo, but it just creates so much more sanity. And it’s so much easier to share these slides which were otherwise going to be locked away for another few decades with the rest of my dad’s family.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s a cool transition industry where basically it exists to move analog to digital, or even digital-but-in-the-wrong-format to purely-digital. There are services where you can ship out 1,000 CDs and they will send you back a hard drive with everything ready to just drop into iTunes or something like that.

But it’s not really a great long-term business strategy is it? [laughs] I mean, eventually everything gets converted and you’re done.

**John:** Yeah, but there’s always another thing to transition through. The other thing which we found which I don’t know, we haven’t looked whether ScanCafe does it or not: my parents at some point had made cassette tape interviews with their parents on history and sort of where they grew up and sort of like the history and background stuff, but they’ve never been transcribed. So we will need to find a place that can transcribe the cassette tape, or can take the cassette tapes and do them into audio format, and then we will send them to the same place that does the transcriptions for this podcast and get them types up, which will be really helpful.

**Craig:** That will be. And then I have one sort of — this isn’t a Cool Thing, this is just a goofy thing, but we had talked about me singing and music and all the rest, and so the next podcast, at the end, I will perform a song.

**John:** That’s great. You can play us out for next week.

**Craig:** I will play us out next week. It’s a short little song. Nice little song by John Prine. John Prine? Crine?

**John:** Sure. I bought it.

**Craig:** [laughs] Plant and Krauss did a cover of a John Prine song. We’ll go with Prine. So I’ll play us out next time.

**John:** Wonderful. So, Craig, thank you very much for your help getting through this. My voice is mostly here and hopefully by next week I’ll be at full speed.

**Craig:** I want letters demanding, I want people writing in saying, “Really Craig should be reading the questions.”

**John:** Really should be. And it’s good that we did this today. If we did this yesterday it would have been like you were doing a podcast with Brenda Vaccaro. So, this is a huge improvement.

**Craig:** Is that an option by the way? [laughs] Because if that is I will switch over. Brenda, if you’re out there, I’m avail. I’m totally avail. Feel better, John.

**John:** Thank you again for a fun podcast. Anything we talked about on this week’s podcast is going to be in the links for the show notes which are at johnaugust.com. And thank you very much for listening everyone.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

**John:** All right, take care.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/verbs-are-whats-happening).

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

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

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

Craig, how was your Father’s Day?

**Craig:** It was actually great. It didn’t start so great, [laughs] ’cause my son plays baseball — I think I’ve mentioned this before on the podcast — and he’s 10. And we’re on this tournament league; we’re in a tournament league. And what happens is on these weekends they’ll put together these ad hoc tournaments and six or seven or eight teams will get together and play at one place, usually some town that has good parks like, in this case it was Thousand Oaks.

So, I had to drag my butt to Thousand Oaks for Father’s Day weekend. But on the upside, he pitched really, really well. He was very proud. I was very proud of him. It was a good finish to the tournament season. So, all in all good Father’s Day for me. How about you?

**John:** You know, my Father’s Day also involved pitching because Derek Haas brought his kids over, his two young boys, and after there was some swimming and there were some cookies being eaten. Derek Haas, whose new TV show on NBC is called Chicago Fire, he’s in the process of breaking all the stories for the season.

And so he had his boys and now my daughter pitch stories, pitch storylines for Chicago Fire.

**Craig:** [laughs] That is such a Derek thing to do.

**John:** And it was honestly kind of amazing because you realize that these kids have never seen an hour-long drama, but the premise of Chicago Fire is essentially ER with fires. And so I would say give me a story about firefighters and some of the stories were actually kind of okay.

There were a lot of things about basements or barbeques or things like that. Very much like kids were glomming onto the idea that kind of worked in a previous pitch and were sort of massaging it. But it pretty much felt like most TV writer rooms. So, anyway, it was a good fun time. We got some good spec work out of our kids which is crucial.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Also my daughter started the morning by giving us the little Father’s Day things that she made at school, like little special projects that sort of look like a jacket and then inside there’s a little note. And of course she had like two dads she had to do this for. And so she had to do twice the work of all the other kids in her class.

**Craig:** So annoying.

**John:** Yeah. And so I was thinking, like, oh, well she got out of it for Mother’s Day. But for Mother’s Day she had to do one and she sent it to one of her grandmothers. Just one of her grandmothers, so…

**Craig:** But now, I don’t know if you noticed my… — I tweet once every 79 hours. But my tweet for Father’s Day was that essentially it is inherent to being a father to just not give a crap about Father’s Day. I mean, do you really care about Father’s Day?

**John:** Not one iota.

**Craig:** No. No. And I’ve never met a dad who gave a damn. In fact, frankly it’s annoying because it’s almost like we have to remember it. But, man, mothers care about Mother’s Day. Oh-hoo, do not forget it.

**John:** There’s no flowers for Father’s Day. Here’s what I got as a special bonus for being a father on Father’s Day. At the Counter, we went to the Counter for lunch, and the waitress told me like the special code for getting my kid’s meal free on Father’s Day. That’s basically it.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

**John:** Yeah. But, I mean, it was like a $5 mini turkey burger.

**Craig:** Listen, man. I know what I like for Father’s Day. I got it. [laughs] That was all I cared about. End of discussion.

**John:** So let’s talk about what we’re going to talk about today. I thought today we would answer three of our listener questions and then talk a little bit about my very favorite part of speech, which is verbs.

**Craig:** Well okay. It beats adverbs, which are everyone’s least favorite part.

**John:** Yes. True.

We’ll start with two things of follow up. Last week we talked about — there was a script that I was asked to read over the weekend and they sent it to me on a locked iPad. Do you remember that?

**Craig:** I do remember that, yes.

**John:** I felt it was kind of a cool thing. You know, it’s sort of a pain in the ass to send an iPad around, but I can understand why it was; because they had it locked down so much it really wasn’t possible for me to try to copy it or do anything strange with it.

So, one of our listeners wrote in to say, he was like, “Well why couldn’t you just distribute the script as an app?” So that basically is a third-party app so that a person couldn’t copy the stuff out of it because apps are actually kind of locked down on an iPad, which I think was kind of a smart idea.

For people who have developed applications for the iPhone or for the iPad, yes, ultimately applications go through the App Store, but there’s another way to put apps onto an iPad through… — TestFlight is one of the services that does it. So, I could imagine that someone might just develop a service that’s sort of like TestFlight, but it’s just for distributing locked down scripts that you couldn’t possibly copy. So, it was a clever idea. So someone, maybe Jimmy, he might implement that as a business idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I still feel like the world of “locking a script” or protecting a script from other people seeing it is, you know… — If people really want to get their hands on a script they’re gonna do it, you know?

**John:** And you’re of course talking to the person who makes Bronson Watermarker which is the foremost watermarking application for the Macintosh.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But I do agree with you on a fundamental level. Any kind of protection you’re putting on something is making it more difficult to do something. You’re never going to make it impossible to do something.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

**John:** The second point of follow up. Last week we talked about the Flight trailer; that was your One Cool Thing, which is for the John Gatins-scripted/Robert Zemeckis-directed movie with Denzel Washington, which looks great, and the trailer was great. And you asked who did the trailer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we have a name now. It’s Bill Neil at Buddha Jones is who we believe cut that trailer.

**Craig:** Very cool.

**John:** And it’s great. And I thought we might talk just for a second about that knowledge that somebody at a trailer house cut that, because that’s a thing that listeners who are not actively in the industry might not know is that the trailers for most of the movies, it’s not the filmmakers who are usually cutting those trailers. Sometimes they cut a trailer, but most cases trailers are done at trailer houses and they are these competing — you can think of them like agencies but they are basically like little creative labs that will compete to cut trailers for movies, cut trailers for TV projects. And they’re really… — They’re basically a bunch of smart editors at Avids and they take all the movie footage and cut a trailer.

And based on the footage they have, they usually have the script, their just sort of trying to sell the idea of the movie. And it’s a very different thing than I think what people would expect to have happening in trailer land.

**Craig:** That’s right. Basically the business of marketing is there are marketing departments at studios who are executives. The executives know that they have to market a movie. The first thing they do is they figure out which of the vendors, that’s our parlance for it here, which vendors would be appropriate. They have those vendors pitch on it and then they select one.

There’s a lot of money in this. The places charge a lot of money to create these campaigns for these movies. And they have editors and they have copy writers who are writing all that VO, you know, “In a world…” all that stuff. And they also, the bigger places do both AV work, audio/visual and also the prints. So they will handle the bus sides, the one sheets — that’s our term for posters — and all that good stuff.

So, it’s all done out of house, out of studio by vendors that then come in and then everybody looks at it. And the funny thing is that having started in marketing I can tell you, and everyone, that marketing departments tend to look at the filmmakers with suspicion, and reasonably so. Filmmakers often are wrapped up in what their movie is and are less concerned with what the job of the marketer is. So they either have goofy ideas about what the campaign should be — either they are up their own butts about it or they are really precious about not giving anything anyway — or they just think the movie is about something that it’s not. Or what it is about to them isn’t what would appeal to people.

So, the marketing department a lot of times keeps the filmmakers at arm’s length. And there are big wars that go on between filmmakers and marketing departments.

It used to be, a long time ago, that the marketing department was sort of, you know, a little bit of a red-headed stepchild and the filmmakers had more power. But, as we’ve mentioned before, that’s changed, that’s essentially flipped, because now for many movies it costs more to market than to make. And he who costs the most money wins. So marketing is a big deal now.

**John:** Yeah. In the development process, before you actually get a green light on a movie, the head of marketing will always weigh in and will have a big vote on whether the movie proceeds. Because you’re going to ask this man or this woman, “Do you know how to market this movie? Is this a movie that you can market? Is it a movie that we can make our money back and be able to sell to the world?” And that’s the marketing department head’s job is to figure out like, “Yes, I think I know how to sell this movie.”

**Craig:** That’s right. And if they say, “I don’t know how to sell it,” it’s not getting made.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Bottom line.

**John:** And this last week I was in New York working on the musical project that I don’t ever name, and it turns out there’s the exact same sort of parallel industry there. So, there’s two major vendors, two or three major vendors who do all the same kinds of things that we have in Hollywood to do all of our trailers and stuff. So, all the outdoor campaigns, there’s just a few companies that do all of the Broadway musical campaigns. And they have the very specific mandate and it’s the same kind of thing where they’re coming up with 50 concepts and those get narrowed down to five concepts. And they show you those five concepts and then you end up working off of those to find your next set of revisions. So, same thing.

**Craig:** Well, congrats to the… — Is it Bill you said?

**John:** Bill.

**Craig:** At Buddha Jones. Yeah, Buddha Jones is a huge place. And you can tell these trailer houses are kind of cool because they have names like Buddha Jones. But Bill cut a hell of a trailer there. Got to give him a lot of credit.

And, you know, usually the editor will have a creative director working with him. There will be a marketing executive who’s assigned to the project that monitors them. I’m sure everybody pitched in. They did a great job.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s start with three questions.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** First we’ll start with the question that was emailed, that you’d emailed me, so I think it was something you got off of DoneDealPro. Chris writes, “Recently I had my hand slapped by my rep for talking to some industry folk without his involvement. It got me thinking: as a new writer with his first rep I’m finding it difficult to gauge what I can and can’t do on my own. I understand there are certain places and people you’re rep is responsible for communicating with or soliciting your ideas to. However, a screenwriter can’t simply wait around for his or her rep to harvest Hollywood for them. I want to reach out, but not reach around. What’s a young screenwriter to do?”

**Craig:** That’s such a good question, isn’t it?

**John:** Yeah. That’s why I’m glad you emailed it to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I sympathize with you. I remember kind of struggling with this, too, in the beginning. The reason that your representatives slap your wrist typically isn’t because of ego or that they are standing on formality. It’s because you can get yourself in trouble.

I always use the bar analogy. The screenwriters are the really pretty 19-year-old girl in the bar. And all these other guys are the 28-year-old dudes with a pocket full of Rohypnol. And if you start talking to the wrong person without your representative and you start getting seduced by them or making promises or assurances it can really come back to hurt you. And they know that. They love to separate writers from their representatives. And then, when the rep calls, they’re like, “Whoa, hold on a second. You’re guy already said he was willing to kind of do this just on the fly, on spec, da-da-da. You can’t get in the way now. You’re client already told me.”

So the sort of simple rule of thumb is: be polite, talk to everybody, field interest always, and just use a simple disclaimer. Just say, “Listen, you know, I always let Jim handle the business end of things. Please give him a call. But I’m certainly interested in hearing what you have to say. It sounds great.” And just be really non-committal but interested.

It’s that school, that sort of vanilla school of sports interview skills that you just kind of have to master.

**John:** We always say that a representative wants a client who works and a client who will be able to get work, and really you want the client who you will have to do the least amount of work for this client in order to keep them continuously employed. And so hopefully you will develop relationships with people that are kind of independent of the agent needing to get involved all the time.

Like for a long time I was working on a ton of projects over at Sony, and my agent was involved in sort of making the deal but like I was dealing directly with them and if stuff would come up people felt free to call me and that’s okay. The thing you have to always remember is that when that executive calls you about a project or a producer calls you about something, you do need to lob in a call to your agent to let them know that this is happening and let them know what else is going on.

Another example of why Chris may have had a situation with his representative there is that representative may have other clients who are working with that producer or with that industry person at the same time; there may be complications there. For all you know they may be going after the same job. And so if you’re doing this and run around, stuff could get very complicated very quickly.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I do think you’re right to not to suggest that Chris or any writer shouldn’t be afraid to talk to people. Don’t clam up and don’t get tight over this sort of thing. The easiest slapping you can get in this business is from your own representative. Just say, “Got it, I understand.” And you learn each time and that’s fine. But any working writer will tell you agents don’t get you jobs, you get you jobs. Agents negotiate you the deal and help sort of spread the word of who you are. But, you are going to need to talk to people.

**John:** No agent is every going to complain, like, “My client works too hard to find himself work.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “My client talks to people too much.” That’s not a problem so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. “I wish my client were less friendly to decision makers.” I mean, that’s a good problem to have. It’s just, you know, and he didn’t indicate what the content was that got him the spanking, but just be careful to not — when you start saying things that you think an agent would be better off saying, let them say it.

**John:** And I would also, be careful about committing to, “Yes, I want to do that next; I’m happy to write this up for you.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t talk about the actual work you’re going to do. And try not to be too specific about your schedule, too, if you’re actually juggling multiple projects and you’re making it sound like this is the next thing you’re going to work on that can become complicated as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, go ahead and ask me if I’m available, John

**John:** Are you available, Craig?

**Craig:** Um, you know technology, yes. I’m going to say mostly, sure.

Now what the hell does that mean? [laughs] It means, “God, if it’s great, yes. Otherwise, no.” Which means nothing. And so I did my job.

**John:** You did your job. You sound like an agent.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Yeah, he could be available for the right thing. He’s working on some stuff but, you know, things could change around and dates shift.”

**Craig:** I mean, yeah, because as writers we have to, remember, we have to be — a lot of these people are our friends and we have to be friendly. Agents, it’s a more formalized business relationship. When they call up your agent they say, “Is John August available?” It’s perfectly fine for them to say, “Depends. What is it? I can make him available for the right thing.” He can do that; you can’t do that. You sound like a jerk if you do that. So, good question.

**John:** Stacy Ashworth writes, “I was curious about yours and Craig’s opinion on business cards, or for that matter, personal websites. Do you think they’re necessary/helpful for screenwriters in Los Angeles?”

I’m going to start by saying yes. I think they’re both helpful. Here’s why: If you’re an executive and you’re curious about a writer, like you just sort of read their script that was sitting on a sample, you’re probably going to Google their name. It would be very helpful if the very first thing you got when you Googled their name was something about them, like a site from them, that looked professional enough and made them seem like they’re not a crazy person. So, that’s my argument for a personal website.

**Craig:** Absolutely. I absolutely agree. What made me giggle was the business card thing because I feel like if I were getting started now the first thing I would do is make a website, only if to control the message better than Google does, or what some knucklehead might be saying about you somewhere.

But business cards, to me, have the opposite effect. They feel — and people hand them to me all the time, and they always say, “Do you have a business card?” And I always say no, because I don’t. And I don’t really know what the value of the thing is. If I want to give you my email address I’ll just tell it to you and you’ll type it in your phone and we’re done. But business cards seem so kind of…

**John:** Mad Men?

**Craig:** Dunder Mifflin kind of. They just do. They just seem very, I don’t know, clunky. Clunky and old and a little amateurish.

**John:** I was once like you, Craig, where people would say like, “Hey, do you have a business card?” and I’m like, no, I don’t have a business card. And most of the time I still will say no. But I actually do have business cards now which just have my site address which is johnaugust.com, which is so simple that I feel like people don’t need that.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I decided I would just do business cards for the people who I actually do have that longer conversation with. Like I was at this Sundance Theatre workshop thing in New York and I’m talking to this Brooklyn-based photographer. And it was actually really interesting. And so he gave me his card and I wanted to have a reciprocal card. And we actually have sort of kind of kept up in touch since then. So it was useful enough that I actually have like five business cards that keep going into my wallet and maybe once a month I will use one.

**Craig:** But let’s be honest here. Your business card is your name with dot-com.

**John:** Yeah, largely it is.

**Craig:** I mean, you could just tell him, “Just go to johnaugust.com and contact me through that.”

**John:** But if he forgets my name. Because this is a case where I wasn’t a comparatively famous person. So like if I’m going at a screenwriter kind of event, a lot of people there are going to know, like, “Oh, that’s John August.” And so, “Oh, johnaugust.com.” But this, there was no context for anything. So he was going to forget my name by 8:30pm. It was useful…

**Craig:** Hmm. How drunk was this guy?

**John:** Ah, well we were all drinking.

**Craig:** All right. Nice.

**John:** Because the food was slow coming, so there was a lot of wine being consumed first.

**Craig:** I guess I can see your argument that business cards are useful in situations where everyone’s getting completely loaded. But otherwise, here’s the deal: like — I don’t want to talk to anybody anyway. [laughs] So that’s why for me, the business card thing? No.

But, I mean, for this, was it Stacy?

**John:** Yeah, for Stacy.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Sure. I would say: Don’t push your business cards on people. But if it comes to a situation where they ask for a business card, yeah, give them a business card.

**Craig:** And also like no goofy business cards. I remember I did a talk once on screenwriting for a group, a local screenwriting group in Los Angeles. And they were huge; it was like 200 people. I was actually quite surprised how many people were at this thing. And then afterwards they do that thing where they sort of line up to ask you their individual questions.

**John:** Oh god.

**Craig:** And really 10% of them have questions and then 90% of them are just telling you about their lives or pitching you stuff. And I would say half of them — just to continue my fraction theme here — had these horrendously ugly business cards, like multicolored, and like sun bursting through clouds behind their name and in 3D. I was just shocked at the aesthetic depravity of it all. Just what’s wrong with a normal business card?

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing!

**John:** Nothing. Yeah. Oh, and I also do have business cards for Bronson Watermarker because sometimes I will be talking to somebody who is will ask me what I do and I actually make this app and they say, “That sounds really fascinating.” And so then I can just give them this card that actually has that link on there.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I understand that.

**John:** Next question, Dave, who I’m thinking is from England because of his verbiage here.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Dave.

**John:** [British Accent] Dave.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Dave.

**John:** “My question, you know when you pull a loose thread out of a jumper and before you know it an entire sleeve has disappeared?”

**Craig:** What’s a jumper now? [laughs] What’s that?

**John:** A sweater.

**Craig:** Oh, is that what that is?

**John:** Yeah, that’s why I think it’s from England or some place across the pond.

**Craig:** [British Accent] You know how you pull a loose thread out of jumper?

**John:** Thread?

**Craig:** [British Accent] Right. I’m not big on riddles. What am I? Please, sir, can I have some more?

**John:** Okay, I forget the name for the term, I’ll Google it after we’re off the air, but the British, the fairly new British habit of the TH sound becoming an F…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, oh, my.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Happy Birfday.

**John:** [British Accent] Birfday.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Birfday.

**John:** Yeah. So he says, “I’m rewriting a spec of mine and I’m getting that same feeling. If I change this, then I’ll have to change this, and this character can no longer, and that one will have to. You can picture. I’d love to her your thoughts on this problem of rewriting.”

**Craig:** It’s not a problem. That’s called rewriting. [laughs] It’s a good thing. I think it’s a good thing. It means that you actually did a pretty decent job of writing in the first place. If you can just start lifting chunks out without causing ripples in the rest of the script, something is terribly wrong. The joy of rewriting is not panicking over that and, in fact, seeing how the changes you make in a small place must end and should change things throughout with rare exception.

So, it’s a good thing. You should be excited by that. It means you’re actually thinking about the screenplay in the right way. You’re thinking about it in its totality. Don’t panic. And you may say, “Well, but I like that thing.” Well, I must say then, do you really like it? If it’s built on a foundation of something you don’t like, do you really like it? And is it possible that there might be something better?

**John:** Here is my counter-argument against that, which I’ll call the Will Smith problem: There are certain people who will see a possible loose thread, or something maybe that actually isn’t a loose thread. Maybe that thread is actually supposed to be there. But they see that little thread and they say, “I’m just gonna start pulling on that thread. I’m gonna pull, and pull, and pull, and pull.” And they will unravel everything before your eyes.

And, that can be really dangerous, because you are seeing like, well, rather than the simple solution to maybe tuck that thread back in there, they will insist on pulling the entire thing apart.

**Craig:** Well you’re saying “they.”

**John:** They or you. Yes.

**Craig:** You mean to say that the writer themselves will do this to themselves?

**John:** Yeah. Rarely does a writer do it to himself.

**Craig:** So you’re talking about somebody else coming in?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Well that I agree with. I mean, that’s bad. When other people do it it’s bad

**John:** But I guess then I would agree with you if the writer himself feels like, okay, I’m going to do this thought experiment of like, “I’m going to pull this through and see what it is.” You as the writer, you’re the only person who has actually seen the movie, so you do have the opportunity to say, “Okay, if I’ve made all those changes, what would happen, and what would the new thing be pulling that all apart? ”

The only danger I would say is that sometimes you can end up just rewriting that one script 1,000 times and never doing the next thing. So, you have to remember, like, “What was the movie that I actually set out to write?” and making sure that the intrigue of the excitement about doing this next thing isn’t going to keep you from working on other new stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. The analogy for when you’re directing you’re always trapped as you sort of, you get take three under your belt, you’re always trapped between a desire to make sure you don’t move on without getting it right. You don’t want to be that guy that just does three takes and says, “Good enough.” But you also don’t want to be that guy that just starts chasing things and unraveling and undoing pointlessly.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So you’re constantly working between two fears, and that’s your Scylla and your Charybdis. And for rewriting this is our Scylla and your Charybdis: Don’t want to change to much, don’t want to not change enough. That, unfortunately, is something you’re going to have to feel over time.

I will tell you, nothing like yanking on a thread, watching the whole thing fall into yarn in front of you, and then realizing you should have never pulled on it in the first place to teach you an important lesson, but similarly there have been times very early on when I handed something to somebody thinking in the back of my head there’s something not right here, but, eh, no one will notice it. Everybody notices. They notice much faster than you notice.

So, you have to kind of give yourself license to be brave enough to pull on the thread but confident enough to leave it be when you think it’s okay.

**John:** Yeah, here’s the danger, just to wrap this up. The danger is that in pulling on this thread and just seeing like the loose pile of stuff that’s in front of you, you’re going to be building a new script with all these new things. And the new script you’re imagining is going to be much better than the script that was there because you haven’t written it yet. And so you’re comparing this fantasy script that you could write out of all these new things versus what you did write which you have now recognized the problems.

And, so, just be aware that there may be the temptation of pursuing something that will be great, and new, and fun versus the hard work of what’s in front of you.

**Craig:** Right. [British Accent] Don’t touch my jumper.

**John:** [British Accent] My jumper.

**Craig:** [British Accent] Leave my jumper.

**John:** So, one of the things you may be doing as you’re rewriting a script is looking at the words you choose to use in your script. And so I wanted to close up today by talking about verbs, because I’m sort of — my weekly obsession this week is verbs.

So, here are three sample sentences I read in bad scripts all the time.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “There are four men in the room.”

“A large suitcase is by the door.”

“The fire is intense.”

So, those sentences, there’s nothing actually grammatically wrong with those sentences. They’re fine sentences. But they’re incredibly boring sentences. And the reason why they’re boring sentences is you are using to “to be” just to sort of state the existence of something rather than having the thing you’re causing to exist actually do something.

They sort of read like Dungeons and Dragons descriptions. Like when you walk into a new room in Dungeons and Dragons and this little bubble text of this is what’s in the room.

**Craig:** Right. “There is a phantom by the door. There is a puddle on the floor.”

**John:** Exactly. And so these aren’t — this isn’t Dungeons and Dragons. This is supposed to be a movie. Things are supposed to be happening.

**Craig:** Unless it’s a Dungeons and Dragons movie. Then I think it would be okay to do what you’re saying.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] That would be great. I think it should actually just be a scroll that comes across the screen with like, you know, description and stuff and then they show it to you.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. Or don’t show it and just after it say, “There was a dragon.”

**John:** “There was a dragon.”

**Craig:** “There was.”

**John:** And every time the character swings a sword you see the little hit points go down. That’s pretty good.

**Craig:** I have to tell you. It never crystallized for me why that was so annoying because I’ve read that very kind of clumsy, robotic sort of description before. And by the way, I’m not a huge fan of florid description or a lot of purple prose. But was it — the suitcase is what?

**John:** “A large suitcase is by the floor.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean shouldn’t the suitcase be leaning against the door? [laughs] Should the suitcase, “A large suitcase has been left by the door.”

**John:** Or better yet, rather than having the thing already be there, why don’t you have somebody put it there? Or why don’t you have your hero clock it or have your hero do something to it?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s like, because if the suitcase was left behind by somebody, let’s say, and you’re a detective and you walk in the room, somebody should say, “Take a look,” you know, “he looks over a suitcase toppled in place by the door as if somebody had left in a hurry.”

**John:** A big problem with “A large suitcase is by the door” is like well what is the shot here? Are we cutting away from our characters to show that suitcase by the door?

**Craig:** Right. Do you know what the shot is? It’s a 20mm lens way, way back like a stage. [laughs] And the room is empty. And it’s just a suitcase. And a door.

**John:** Yeah. So, my pointing out this frustration of scene description in screenplays is that I sometimes get the sense — this is an ongoing pet peeve. I hate screenwriters who say, “I could write a screenplay but I could never write a novel,” as if like writing is something that novelists and sentences and worrying about the words, that’s for novelists, but like, eh, screenwriting, whatever.

Those words do matter. Those words do count. And so when you see people making bad or boring choices here… Here’s the thing: If I see that the screenwriter doesn’t really care, I’m going to stop reading the scene description.

**Craig:** I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t think it’s that the screenwriter doesn’t care. You’re so much more kinder in that assessment than I’m about to be. It’s that they can’t write. They don’t have an ear.

If you’re writing lines like that as you just described, you’re really not very good at writing. And you’re not going to get much better at writing. I really do believe that we just need to start thinning the herd with this podcast. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Let’s start whacking away. So, there, if you find yourself constantly wanting to express things in the most generic, bland way, do something else.

**John:** I will be optimistic only in the sense that I feel like some people, some new screenwriters, either they just read a bunch of bad scripts a lot, or they’ve read scripts by writer-directors who end up making really good movies but who write kind of boring scripts. They may come to believe, like, “Oh, well screenwriting is supposed to be this spare, Hemingway-esque kind of thing.” And it’s true…

**Craig:** It can be.

**John:** Screenwriting should be sort of efficient. And I’m never one for sentences that are longer than they need to be. But the style does matter.

**Craig:** Style matters, man. Make me feel something. You can walk in the room and, you know, “Olsen looks around. A suitcase closed. A gun. No one here.” Fine, good. Be staccato. Be something. Make me feel something with the way you’re presenting the room. But don’t just give me a laundry list. People overwrite nonsense.

I go on DoneDealPro sometimes, I read their first three pages, and typically the problem is the opposite of this, it’s just endless discussions of the quality of the vermillion on the grass, and the dew, and the light, and the shining, and all the rest of it. And you’re like, yes, but that shot was literally the establishing of a park and we’re off of it in a second and frankly we can’t sit there all day capturing vermillion.

People go crazy with that sort of thing. But then on the other hand sometimes there is this kind of very sort of Asperger’s-y, tin ear, no social skills. I don’t know how to describe it. Just a kind of clumsy… — You know when you talk to somebody at a party and they’re incredibly boring? Their voice is boring. Their monotonic. They don’t give you anything. They’re like really bad improve artists that just shut down every possible line of interest. I feel like some of them are writing screenplays. [laughs] And then they do this. And they shouldn’t be. They shouldn’t be.

You know, it’s one of the great sad and frustrating ironies about screenwriting is that it does take a certain amount of internal nerdiness to write a screenplay. It’s very hard to write a screenplay and not on some level be a huge dork that’s steeped in words and in inner life and solitude. On the other hand, if you just told a little more you are completely disconnected from what is human and matters.

So, it’s like you have to fit right in this narrow channel of dorkiness. And I believe that you and I are in that channel.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re there.

**John:** It’s worked.

**Craig:** Yeah. We are both nerds. Every writer I know is a nerd. Even the cool ones are nerds. John Gatins, coolest writer in the world, right?

**John:** Yeah, nerd.

**Craig:** Nerd.

**John:** Nerd.

**Craig:** Nerd. Just doesn’t want to admit it.

**John:** So, to amp our nerdiness on this verb discussion, probably what got me thinking about it was I’m reading Steven Pinker’s… — I wanted to say it was his new book, but it’s actually his old book, it’s like 2007 — called The Stuff of Thought. Which, Steven Pinker writes a lot about English and words and such, but not just sort of like how our words came to be, but sort of the underlying meanings behind them. So not just etymology but sort of what the underlying framework is that is causing our language to exist.

And, so this was a really cool example that he had in this last book. Our verbs — and not just English verbs, this is sort of verbs across all different languages — there is some underlying structure behind them that gets revealed in certain situations like sentences that will make sense or will not make sense for reasons that seem kind of strange. So, I’ll give you two examples.

“Tell the joke to Tom.” “Tell Tom the joke.”

Those are functionally basically the same. A little more emphasis on “to Tom” in the first one, but those work both ways. And “Tell” is a pretty generic word. And it turns out you can use it either way and that’s fine.

**Craig:** But, boy, they mean totally different things though, to me at least.

**John:** Yeah. But they both make sense.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Tom is going to hear the joke.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So now I’ll give you another example.

“Whisper the joke to Tom.” “Whisper Tom the joke.”

You can’t really say “Whisper Tom the joke.”

**Craig:** No, you cannot do that.

**John:** Why can’t you do that? “Whisper” is not that different than “tell.”

**Craig:** Because whisper doesn’t take a direct object like that.

**John:** Why doesn’t whisper take a direct object like that?

**Craig:** Um, because, the…

**John:** It’s the indirect object is the problem. So, it’s the “to Tom.”

**Craig:** Yes, you’re right, it’s the indirect object. I don’t know why. Why? [laughs]

**John:** That’s the whole question. That’s what they are trying to figure out and study.

**Craig:** I actually want to go back to that other example because it’s fascinating to me how there are two… — Okay, what was, the first one was?

**John:** “Tell the joke to Tom.”

**Craig:** Okay, “Tell Tom the joke.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Tell the joke to Tom. You know what’s funny is? Even though they mean the same one, the first one to me is a syntax you would use when you just heard a joke and you want that person to tell it immediately to Tom.

**John:** Yeah. “Tell the joke to Tom.”

**Craig:** “Tell the joke to Tom” is almost like, “I heard a joke that is not funny and I don’t like it [laughs] and now you tell it to him because I don’t know why.” Like, “Tell the joke to Tom because he’s going to agree with me that it was stupid.”

The first one is a joke you like and the second one is a dumb joke.

**John:** Yeah. But both sentences make sense.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Both sentences are good English.

**Craig:** But you’re right, “Whisper Tom the joke.” You cannot whisper Tom anything.

**John:** And so they studied why can’t you do that, and it turns out there’s a whole bunch of micro classes that are sort of behind the scenes and stuff. So, specificity is one of those micro classes. And so the generic case of tell, like tell and give…

**Craig:** Oh, I have a… — Oh, I’m sorry to interrupt. But there is one thing is that “whisper” does take direct objects and tell doesn’t. That’s why it’s confusing.

**John:** No, “tell” does take a direct object. “Tell the joke.”

**Craig:** Yeah, “tell, joke.” “Tell the joke.” You’re right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dammit.

**John:** And apparently when you get to like the higher language discussion you don’t really say “direct object” and “indirect object.” You say “object one” and “object two.” But, anyway, so they studied these micro classes behind it and they figured out that it’s not just English that this is a situation. It actually travels across all different languages.

So, the underlying behind our language, what’s actually happening in your brain, the thought process, you are making distinctions between kinds of verbs. Even things that seem really closely related. So, “tell” is a very generic sense, it doesn’t specify the manner. But the minute you specify the manner it doesn’t let you do that thing where we move the indirect object up.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** So just the same way you can’t “Yell Tom the joke,” you can’t, “Shout Tom the joke.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But sometimes the new nouns that we’ve coined into being verbs, you can do that. So, “Send Tom the joke.” Fine. “Fax Tom the joke” we decided is okay. And so you can use the nouns that we’ve made into verbs.

**Craig:** Yes. You can “email Tom something.”

**John:** Exactly. But some nouns haven’t yet crossed over there yet. So you can’t “Facebook Tom the joke.”

**Craig:** You can. I believe you can. You know why? Because I hear people saying, “Facebook me that.”

**John:** Okay, so then it’s something that is starting to happen. But we’ve decided that Twitter, the verb is tweet. So, like, “Tweet me the joke,” but you don’t Twitter somebody something. And everyone says like, “Oh, you don’t know what you’re talking about if you use Twitter as a verb.”

**Craig:** They’re right. Yes. You tweet something to somebody, but I wouldn’t say tweet me that because that sounds dumb. Maybe because also tweeting is rarely “to me.” You should just tweet the joke. The point is, that’s the way Twitter is used, it’s generic.

**John:** You’re right. Absolutely. The idea of the, we’ll call it indirect object, is not a part of the concept of Twitter. You can say, “DM me your phone number.” Or, you will say, like, “DM me your email address so I can tell you more about this.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. “Direct message.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** So, verbs, specificity. Specificity usually a good thing. Some complications.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree.

**John:** And your obsession about the “Tell a joke to Tom” and “Tell Tom the joke” is exactly the kind of thing an actual screenwriter should obsess about.

**Craig:** Always. Always. I cannot tell you. Especially in comedy. Phillips and I will sit sometimes for 20 minutes and just move the “to” and the “the” around because one way is funny and one way is wrong. And it’s not because there’s a rule, it’s just “Tell Tom the joke” and “Tell the joke to Tom,” they mean two different things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They mean two different… — “Tell Tom the joke” almost sounds like you’re in trouble.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m ready for One Cool Thing if you’re ready for One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my One Cool Thing this week is: I was in New York this whole last week. And used a new app, or actually an app that I had on my phone for awhile but I made better use of it this last time, called Embark. And Embark is a really good transit app. They have it for New York City. They have it for other cities, too. What’s great about it is if you use the normal built-in maps function on the iPhone it will show you the subway stuff, but it’s not terrific at it.

With Embark you can say, like, “Start me here, I want to go there, and go.” And it will build options for routes to get you there. But it also knows when the trains are coming and sort of walks you through it. So, each step along the way it will show you a walking map of how to get to that subway stop. This is the train you take. You get off at this stop. From there you’re going to walk to this place. And each step along the way you can pull up the map for how you do that.

It’s really, really smart. And, it works offline when you are down in the tunnel and you have no internet connectivity.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if that was the one I used the last time I was in the city with the kids. But I remember thinking, “Oh my god, this is the greatest.” Like the subway is now my preferred… — I want to go everywhere on the subway because I know where to go.

I mean, the subway system when I was a kid was the most frightening thing for 100 reasons. Marauding gangs of criminals. Crack. Bernie Goetz. Graffiti. No air-conditioning. And, of course, 14,000 different lines with screaming trains and electricity. And you could not figure out where you were going. And now it’s like, “Beep-boop-boop, take me there.” It’s great.

**John:** My favorite trains, and I can’t remember which lines have them, which lines don’t, but my favorite trains are the ones that actually show you up on the wall on the side of the car, it shows you this is the stop you’re at and this is the next stop. I feel like all trains should have it, because it just takes away the questions. Like, “Am I headed in the right direction?” “Is this an express train?” “Is it going to stop at the places I expect it to stop?”

**Craig:** Right. The little dots. Yes, exactly.

**John:** The only sort of transit issues I’ve had in New York over the last few years have been those exceptions where I had to get out to this film school in the Bronx. And for some reason they would say, “This train is now an express and we’re going to skip these three stops.” And so they made that really awful announcement while you’re on the train. “What was that? Did I hear the right thing?” And then you’ve overshot you’re stop.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s all gone. Those days are over.

**John:** Do you have something cool to share with us?

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Aw, Craig, always forgetting to do his homework.

**Craig:** You know what I got today?

**John:** What’s this?

**Craig:** You know what came by Federal Express?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** MacBook Pro with Retina Display.

**John:** Holy cow. That is probably the coolest thing you could get this week.

**Craig:** Let me tell you something. It’s awesome. It’s awesome.

First of all, so my former computer, the computer that used to be my Woody but now is staring at the Buzz Lightyear going, “What happened?” was a MacBook Pro. But it was standard hard drive. And this one has the solid state drive.

So, first of all, it’s a faster computer. It’s a much faster computer. And it’s got the solid state drive. So, I rebooted ’cause I had to install a few little software cells, a few little software things. And I turned around and I had looked back and it had rebooted already. It was actually kind of like The Birds. It was really creepy. I actually got scared.

And the display is nuts. It’s just so great. It makes me never want to look at the other one again. Sorry, Woody.

And I love it. A lot.

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

**Craig:** And I want to hug it. Yeah. It’s great. I can’t… — Oh, and in terms of, just for people, a point of comparison, if you do have the other MacBook Pro, because it’s hard to sort of tell from all their pictures and measurements, but basically the whole computer folded up is the thickness of the bottom part of the MacBook Pro, the old one.

**John:** Yeah, without the lid.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. And it weighs like four pounds and it’s the coolest thing in the world.

**John:** So my travel computer is the MacBook Air. And I think I’ll stick with the MacBook Air because that’s good for me for traveling. My desktop is still my desktop. They didn’t announce cool new Mac Pros.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But it does seem like an amazing computer. We’re trying to figure out what we’re gonna do here in the office because Ryan, who does all the art stuff for us, ultimately needs that new monitor to figure out, like make the websites look right. So, at some point we’re going to have to invest in that so that we can have the modern technology, and all the pixels we need.

**Craig:** I think — there was some speculation that Apple was going to just give up on the whole Mac Pro line and just concede to the fact that everybody is using laptops. I mean, even I in my office power an external. I got a new Cinema Display and I have a keyboard. So I use the Cinema Display and an external keyboard when I’m typing in the office, just hooked up to the laptop.

But, I just read something yesterday where Tim Cook apparently said, “Oh, no, no, no.” So we know something awesome is coming.

**John:** Yeah. The reason why they need to keep the big towery kind of things, sometimes you actually need — I have four hard drives in mine, and I actually need to use the four hard drives in mine. If you’re editing video you actually need to have the ability to stick special cards in there.

**Craig:** Well, I know, but now with Thunderbolt you can daisy chain a bunch of drives together. Run them off your laptop.

**John:** Yeah. It’s not as slick or as awesome.

**Craig:** I will say, I get it. I mean, here, the good news for you is it sounds like basically they’re going to have a computer that comes out next year that can tear the fabric of space and time apart.

**John:** Which would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I want full rending capability.

**Craig:** [roars]

**John:** [roars]

**Craig:** There is a wormhole. There is a rip in space time.

**John:** I want my new computer to be a verb.

**Craig:** [laughs] Rend.

**John:** Rend. I want the Render. Ah, see, that’s what that’s for, is for rendering.

**Craig:** Oh, we finished on a pun.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** I do not. [laughs] Thumbs down.

**John:** [laughs] Sorry. Thumbs down.

**Craig:** Wah-wah.

**John:** Vote us down.

So, Craig, thank you very much for a fun podcast. I should say anything we talked about on this podcast is very likely going to be in the show notes. And so if you’re listening to this on iTunes. And, by the way, thank you so many people who listen to us on iTunes. Our numbers are kind of crazy great, so thank you for that.

**Craig:** What are they, John? Tell us.

**John:** We have about 65,000 listeners every week.

**Craig:** Wow. Wow.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a lot of listeners.

**Craig:** That is a lot of people. That’s more people than can fit in Yankee Stadium. I feel like Robinson Canó right now.

**John:** That’s a good, big number.

**Craig:** You don’t know who that is.

**John:** I have no idea who that is.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** That’s why I’m so productive. I don’t know anything about sports.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. That’s why.

**John:** So anything you hear that we talk about on the show, the show notes are at johnaugust.com. So just look for this episode. And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. “This is a podcast.”

**John:** Yes. Take care.

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

**John:** Bye.