Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/how-to-cut-pages-2).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Things that are interesting to people who are interested in what screenwriters are talking about, I guess.

**Craig:** Things that are interesting to people who are interested in the things that interest screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah. It’s one of those nesting things; it can keep going on and on and on…

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

**John:** Hello, Craig Mazin.

Craig Mazin, I heard your name mentioned this week because you gave a presentation at the WGA for members that was very well received. What was that about?

**Craig:** That’s great to hear. I did. It is the second time I have done it now. It is basically a seminar on how to survive and thrive during development, and to a lesser extent, during production. And this is something that you simply will not find anywhere. There is no book that can tell you how to do this because all of the people who write books are writing them for people who aren’t in development.

But people who want to be in development, and also, of course, as I have pointed out many, many times, most people writing books have never been in development because they are not really screenwriters. So this was a very focused sort of seminar for people who have to deal with the misery of writing a script, getting notes from multiple sources, navigating those notes, and somehow surviving the process. And doing well during it.

And so it is a little bit of therapy. It is a little bit of psychology. It is a little bit of strategy. And, yeah, it is the second time I have done it and people seem to dig it.

**John:** What is challenging about development is that there are things that are actually part of your contract. You have a writing period. You should be able to turn things in at the end of your writing period. They need to pay you. You have your order to commence. There are some technical things that should be there.

But there are also standard business practices, and there is all the psychology of how to really figure out when to get them to pay you for another step. So I assume you got into that kind of stuff?

**Craig:** Not really. Actually, no.

**John:** Oh.

**Craig:** I sort of stayed away from the business arrangements. I mean, there was a little bit of a sidebar on how to handle the producer draft or the so-called “free rewrite.” Most of what I talked about really was how to behave. How to behave in such a way and how to manage your own behavior in such a way as to maximize your chance of protecting your intention from the beginning, the first day you are hired, to the premiere.

How can you survive this, not lose your mind, not get fired, and protect what matters to you in the movie. So, it was really all about that, and not so much about the gears.

Although, you know, what we are talking about is the Writers Guild does something called the Television Showrunners Training Program, which was actually a get that we received in negotiations from the companies where they basically pay for it. It is not much to them, but it was kind of a smart thing for them to do because basically writers end up running shows, and the better they know how to run a show, theoretically, the better it will be for the companies.

And it is such a specific skill set. It goes far beyond writing, of course. You become, really, management — writer management, I guess. And that has been a very successful program. And since 2004, when I was first on the board, I have been kind of clamoring for an equal thing for screenwriters, not because we would ever become management — we rarely do — but just because I feel like there is a lot that most screenwriters simply don’t know.

And those of us who have been doing this for 15 to 20 years have picked up quite a bit. So, finally, they are talking about it now. And this would be part of it. And then certainly there would be other topics, like if I could design a screenwriters training program today it would be first how to survive and thrive during development.

I guess actually even before that: pitching. How to pitch. Then how to survive and thrive during development. How to work with a director. How to behave, and survive, and thrive during production. And the fifth topic probably would be how to best manage your relationship with your representation.

But I am also open to ideas. If you think there are other big topics that would make sense in a training program, tell me.

**John:** Definitely. I was just meeting with my new WGA mentees. I got assigned a group of four new members who I am going to be meeting with regularly to help them get started in their careers. And they are all tremendously gifted writers, so they don’t need any help on that front.

But, they are asking questions that are really kind of fundamental to that first part of your career which is, “I am being sent out on a thousand meetings. I don’t know which ones to sort of take seriously. I don’t know how seriously to approach that idea that the producer sort of brings up in the room that I am kind of interested in, but I don’t know if it is a real project or not a real project. How do I apportion my time between writing the stuff that I want to write for myself and pursuing these projects that may never become a real project, for which there may be six other writers also pursuing this topic? How do you figure all of that out?”

And that is the kind of stuff I hope the screenwriting training program would cover.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the trick with some of those topics is that they are so circumstance-dependent that it is hard to kind of codify a best practice, because it really depends. It depends on the kind of work you do. It depends on, frankly, how much money you require. Are you somebody that can kind of go for a year or two before selling something? Or do you have a family and a mortgage?

So there are a lot of different circumstances, but sometimes the best way to sort of codify that is to just give people the instruction set for how to even discuss that with their representation.

**John:** Absolutely. You are not going to provide them the answer, but you are going to give them the smart questions to be asking, so they can ask themselves the question about what is important to them. At what point are they going to be willing to jump out of competition for something that may or may not become real?

**Craig:** You know, John, I think you just might be instructing that segment of the screenwriting training program.

**John:** Perhaps I will.

**Craig:** Yes. Perhaps you will. And by perhaps we mean “you will.”

**John:** I will definitely be instructing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s tough. So today I wanted to talk some more crafty kind of things if we could?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Last week, you and I both got offers to run major studios, which was really flattering, but I really want to go back to our screenwriting roots and talk about the words on the page and those drafts that you have to turn in that become part of development.

And today I want to talk about cutting pages, which so much of your work as a screenwriter is to try to generate pages — to write those three, or five, or seven, or ten pages in that day, and build up to a whole script. And then, eventually, you have to start cutting it down because your script is too long. And I guess we should talk about what is too long. What is a good benchmark?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** For feature screenwriters, 120 pages is often thrown about as like the upper limit to how long a screenplay should be. That is an invented figure. That figure basically probably came from most movies are about two hours long. Most scripts kind of average out to about a minute of paper to a minute of screen time, so the script should be about 120 pages.

It is really arbitrary, and yet it has become kind of codified as that is the upper limit. To the point where if you turn in a script that was 122 pages, your first note will always be, “You need to cut a little bit here.”

**Craig:** Well, it goes even further than that. I know that Warner Brothers, and possibly Universal, puts that in your contract. They have the right to refuse delivery of a script that is over 120 pages. And I think part of it is that even though… — It’s a funny thing; this is how you can tell a writer from a non-writer: non-writers tend to under-deliver on pages.

Those were the kids in class who turned in book reports and the teacher said, “You need three more paragraphs.” Writers are the ones who write way too much. There’s never enough pages for them. And every screenwriter I know is constantly in a panic that they are on page 50 and they have 200 more pages to go. Because they have so much they want to say, and so much they want to do in the story, and studios have been burned before by these really long drafts that ultimately are unwieldy and unproduceable, and unbudgetable.

And you would think that they could just simply go, “Well, look, obviously these 40 pages need to go.” But, they don’t know how to do that. And frankly, if the writer did, they wouldn’t have turned in that draft.

So, 120 pages is pretty hard and fast. If you are doing an epic, a historical epic, or something like Lord of the Rings, where you know that the movie is really ambitious, you just have to all agree beforehand that the draft will be longer than the average draft.

**John:** Yeah. We should state the obvious that it is not a hard and fast rule that 120 pages equals a 2 hour movie. Go was 126 pages and it is well under 2 hours.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Big Fish was the same situation. So, it is a mistaken assumption. It is a bad benchmark, but it is still what people expect. And if a producer has two scripts to read, and they were printed out, back in the days when everything was printed out, if there are two scripts to read they will flip through the end. They will read the 111-page script before they read the 120-page script every time.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right. And your point is well taken. Go is a perfect example because there is a certain caffeination, or it is speedified, you know, the movie is on speed. And, similarly, with kind of rat-a-tat comedies — spoofs are sort of notorious. I mean, I would get into these wars with Bob Weinstein where he would insist that the script had to be 105 pages.

And I would say, “Just so you know, our script is timed at nearly 30 seconds a page. You are just simply not going to have enough movie.” And we never did. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We were also like pad… — Because it is so fast. And there is a great story recently from The Social Network, because Sorkin writes very — the dialogue is designed to be delivered at an insane pace. And he turned the script in and everybody was kind of freaking out. And he recorded that great opening sequence with Mark Zuckerberg being dumped by his girlfriend.

He recorded it the way, at the pace he thought it should be, and supposedly — this sounds true to me — Fincher basically timed everything per Sorkin. And on the day, he would sit there and his script supervisor had a stopwatch, and if they didn’t hit it, they did it again. [laughs] It had to be at that pace.

So, the one minute per page rule is something that, some standard needs to be there, but… — Like I said, if you know that it is supposed to go faster, just make sure everybody knows beforehand.

**John:** Yeah. The same also applies for TV. We should say that TV actually has much more stringent guidelines because shows are a half hour, or they are an hour long. And you can’t be long. You can’t run long. There is no arbitrariness there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So you are going to have to hit your act breaks. You are going to have to hit your end times on those things. So, a lot of times you really do need to cut to match your amount of time that you have. When Melissa was working on Gilmore Girls, she said their scripts were hugely long. That is because, again, it is that rat-a-tat tempo, blasting through stuff.

**Craig:** Right. I would imagine 30 Rock scripts are probably quite long.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** I mean, they are going at this nuts-o pace. But I could also see like CSI scripts not being able to go long because there is a lot of silence, and looking around, and studying for clues.

**John:** Yeah. And then there is Family Guy, which often will have Peter staring at the camera for about 30 seconds.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs] Exactly.

**John:** So regardless, at some point you are going to be in situations where you are going to have to cut pages. So let’s talk about the situations that you might want to have to cut pages. And sometimes it is really simple. Sometimes you want to just cut a page or two.

Let’s just talk cosmetic cutting, where you aren’t really trying to change the story, you aren’t trying to change what is really happening, you are just trying to make your script look shorter.

**Craig:** Okay. So we are not talking about nibbling at content really?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Well, some simple things that I always do is I look for those gerunds that don’t need to be there. So, “He is looking through the file,” should be, “he looks through the file.” You are looking for those action descriptions that have one little word sticking off to save a line.

Sometimes you have action broken up and you think, “Yeah, I could probably pull it up and make that a paragraph.” I don’t like going more than three lines really, or four max, for an action paragraph. But if I have, like, three in a row that are just single lines, and they are not super important that they be like that, I pull them up.

Actually, I have to say: Movie Magic has a fantastic little add-on thing that scans your script and basically says, “If you could shorten this word by five letters, then your script would be pulled up by one-eighth of a page.” It is very cool. And so you can kind of go through and look for those targeted ones that actually start saving you page length.

**John:** Yeah. What you start to recognize is, because feature scripts are 120 pages, very small changes will ripple through and create huge differences because of how paragraphs are breaking up, because of dialogue that is breaking across pages. So, literally changing… — cutting one paragraph on page 20 might make your whole script a page shorter.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so looking for those is good. I would caution against some of the really obvious things that people attempt to do, like these screenwriters attempt to do. Don’t try to change the margins because they will know if you tried to change the margins.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Don’t try to change the font size. Don’t try to change the line spacing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Final Draft will let you do the tight spacing…

**Craig:** Uh, don’t do it.

**John:** Don’t do it.

**Craig:** Look, the first thing I do when I get a script to rewrite is I put it through my format which is a very standard AD-approved format. And so I get a 119-page script, I put it through my format. I immediately call everybody and say, “Just so you know, this is 138 pages. So there is more going on here than we realize. Don’t be surprised when things start disappearing.”

Because, you know, they — “they” meaning producers and studio executives — are just as childish as we are when it comes to page count. Prior to the green light coming on, everybody is shoving as much in as possible, and page count is sort of a fantasy. The second the green light goes on, it is a panic. And pages become absolutely critical. Because the way…

For screenwriters that haven’t been through production, they have to understand. The way the schedule is laid out, it is in eighths of pages. And every day is two and three-eighths of a page, something like that. And every eighth of a page matters. And every additional day of shooting is six figures.

So, it really becomes very… — It is just an academic grind to start removing stuff and winnowing away to what is absolutely necessary to put on screen. And what is tough is, of course, once it goes into editorial even more of that will be cut. The director that knows exactly what is going to be on screen before he shoots it is the greatest director in the world. And he doesn’t exist. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, that’s a good point you are making there. You could be cutting this at a script stage and actually do it gracefully, or you have to cut it in the editing room and it be probably much less graceful. So for the logic and sake of your story, if there are changes you can make on the script to make it more like what you think the final movie is going to be, it is worth it to try to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I have two cosmetic things before we get into the actual cutting the meat issues. The first is CUT TO’s, TRANSITIONS TO. At the end of every scene, some writers use those, like every scene ends with a CUT TO.

**Craig:** Really? Wow.

**John:** Yeah. And some writers still use those. And, you don’t have to.

**Craig:** That’s crazy. No. I mean, use them for impact.

**John:** But don’t use them every time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So there you have saved a tremendous amount of money.

**Craig:** That’s huge.

**John:** I would also say look for orphans. And orphans are those little bits and fragments of lines that are taking up a whole line of your page but actually aren’t doing anything meaningful.

So, sometimes you can rewrite a sentence to get rid of that orphan and bump everything up a line.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Other times, the only time I will occasionally cheat a margin is in a dialogue block.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** And I will bump the right edge of a dialogue block just a few characters over to pull an orphan up.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And no one will ever see that.

**Craig:** And, by the way, it is legal, and here’s why: That word doesn’t add time to the day. You see savvy, and this where… — You know, it’s funny, I’m going through it now on this script that is shooting at Universal. Sometimes people who aren’t savvy about what takes time on a given day will obsess over page length. ADs know. Directors know. But, others may not. And they may say, “Look, is there a way for you…we can cut the scene down if you got rid of this line of dialogue.”

That will not cut the day down at all. What takes time is setups. How many angles there are. If I am shooting two people talking in a restaurant at a table, frankly, I could double the page count and it really won’t add that much to the day.

**John:** Exactly. But if you were to add, the scene would be the same number of pages, but you added another person to that table, you have doubled the amount of shooting you have to do.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You have to shoot all the angles to cover that.

**Craig:** And sometimes you will get suggestions where, and this is where production experience is so important, and why I urge screenwriters to go to sets and sit there and watch how they do it, as boring as it may be, because you are able to see, say, “Listen, your suggestion is to take these five lines of dialogue that are an exchange between these two people at the table and just cut them and replace them with just one waiter walking over and saying, ‘Are you guys okay?'”

That literally makes it longer. And sometimes they just don’t get it.

**John:** They don’t. Because they are not going through that and they don’t see what that is. But you are right, the AD will always see what that is.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** The other thing which is frustrating is when they are trying to cut stuff that is important. Like, it is kind of reader setup. As you are first introducing a character, you are first introducing one of your major heroes or one of your major villains, you may throw two or three lines at that character’s scene description lines to really setup who that person is.

That is not screen time. That is just to help the reader who is trapped with only seeing stuff on the page to understand what that person is going to be like in the movie. That is not shooting time. So…

**Craig:** Don’t obsess over that, right?

**John:** Yeah, don’t obsess over that. And if you have to cut something just for cosmetics…but that is the reason why you have it.

**Craig:** It’s free. It’s free page. And a nice rebuttal to that is to sort of say, “Not only does it not cost us time on the day. Not only do those three lines budget out to zero dollars, but in casting it is going to be enormously important.”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So, as long as you have some sort of practical reason for them other than, “Because my words are so precious,” then they will be cool. You can’t just say, “Well, because it is just cool. I really liked the way the words lined up there.” “Well, great. You are not writing a novel, buddy. We have to cut pages.”

**John:** So let’s say we actually have to cut some meat. You have that script that is 138 pages. You are going to have to cut some serious things. What are easy targets for cuts?

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know if there is any category that is specifically easy. I think that you have to look for… — First of all, if you really want to cut a script, you have got to ask yourself if there are any sequences that can come out. Start big, frankly.

It is a rare script that can meet a schedule when it is currently budgeted at over schedule or over dollars that can comply and conform to what they have through little tiny cuts across the whole thing. So, big question first: Is there a sequence we can just do without?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And sometimes a fresh pair of eyes is helpful with that. Because, remember, while you are a good writer, and you have written everything with intention and purpose, many of those scenes were written before the whole script was written. In fact, all of them except the last one. So, you should be able to recontextualize some things, too.

Now you have the whole thing in front of you. Maybe one of those sequences can go.

**John:** The smaller things I sometimes try to take a look at, especially if I am being sent something for a rewrite. I will always target any scene in which a character recaps something that the audience has seen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s wasted time. There is no reason for that to happen. And surprisingly it still happens a lot in TV, and I don’t know why. I guess, you are coming back from an act breaking, you need to sort of remind people what happened. But, yikes, it always feels very frustrating.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** If that conversation has to happen, come to the very end of that conversation and just let the audience know that that character now is up to speed.

**Craig:** Exactly. Exactly. There is a logic thing.

**John:** Yeah. But take out the dialogue that actually does it.

**Craig:** Correct. You could just open up with one character just staring at the person who has told them this story off-screen, and that character just goes, “Wow, really? Yup. Okay.” [laughs]

**John:** Or a meaningful follow-up question that actually pushes the scene forward.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, but a recap is dreadful. Yeah.

**John:** Try to get out of scenes… — Classic advice for screenwriting in general, but try to come into scenes later, try to get out of scenes earlier. And so don’t let characters walk through doors, either to enter a scene or to exit a scene. And sometimes just trimming those will create some space, but will also speed up the pace of things and not make things feel so long.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I would also say to look at your setups. And this is a place where you and I may disagree a little bit, but you have said that you tend to write long first acts, and really have a lot of setup of character. I tend to have less of that. And just because in my experience a lot of times you will shoot that meaningful thing that sort of introduces the character, and then when you actually put the thing together, you go like, “I didn’t need to catch that last moment. I could catch them at this moment and follow along.”

**Craig:** You know, I think it is a little genre dependent. I tend to like shorter first acts in action movies, thrillers, even in dramas, I think. Comedies, I like a longer first act because I feel like that is the broccoli that you have to eat to enjoy all of the comedy of the second and third act.

And, I will also say that you will eventually, once you get into the editing room, decide where and how you need to kind of compress it down a little bit. And there is a magic that occurs in production where things jump out. And you realize the actor has packed an enormous amount of information in simply a look. And so things can start coming out that way.

But you don’t know that until you see the performance. So, frankly, where I like to compress things is the third act. I feel like every movie I have ever been to, with rare exception, by the time I get to an hour and 30 in my seat I’m kind of like, “Let’s finish this. Let’s wrap it up.”

So, long, drawn out climaxes are not a bad place to take a look.

**John:** I think the third act problem also comes because of the way that we write screenplays in general. We have all of this energy and drive as we are writing through the first act. And the second act we are dealing with all of the complications we have created. And by the third act we are just exhausted and we are sort of slogging through it.

So that is the process of writing the script the first time. And some of that lethargy, and some of that exhaustion sort of creeps in, just sort of stays with the script I should say, throughout its process. So, you are really tight when you are writing your first act, because you went through it a lot of times, and you have really figured out the best way to do it.

And that third act, you are like, “Well, all of this stuff has to happen. We will make it all happen.” And, writing your third act with the same vigor as the first act will often shorten it down a lot.

**Craig:** That is a great point. And there is a point under that point which again goes to — it sort of identifies who writers are. Non-writers when they get tired write less, and writers when they get tired write more. They just get long and they lose that kind of parallel construction and concision. And if you feel it happening, just take the day off. Take the day off and come back to it.

**John:** Yeah. It is also worth asking the question: Which threads do I really need to wrap up, and which threads are important? And are there ways I can wrap up multiple threads in one moment together? So rather than having to cut between all of the different characters and subplots I have set up, is there a way to bring those together in a way that is going to feel more rewarding?

Sometimes it is helpful to think about, if I had to watch this sequence with the sound turned off would I be able to understand kind of where everybody ends up at the end? And if it relies on a lot of dialogue to wrap things up, that is not probably your ideal situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. As much as I loved all of the Harry Potter books, the one criticism I have of J.K. Rowling is that she tended to talk her way through every climax.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I understood to a point, because they were all mysteries. They were all basically elaborate Scooby Doo episodes, so the whodunit and why needed long talks. But you could see how great of a job Kloves did to not do that in the movies. He deserves a huge tip of the hat for visualizing those climaxes and letting the performances…

And frankly, we also forget when we are writing that there is this other voice. We know that we have what we have written. And we know that there are camera angles. And we know that there are actors for sure. But don’t forget score. Score sometimes is the best way to think about how to save pages. Because great score against an actor’s face is writing.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And if you know what your intention is for that moment, it is amazing what you can get away with.

**John:** Yeah. It’s hard to reference the score in screenplays. I will do it sometimes. I have done things like, “As music swells we descend upon…” giving that sense of an operatic moment, or some sort of big transition. Getting a sense that this is a Lawrence of Arabia moment here can buy you that.

But the challenge is that readers, and producers, and everyone who is going to be taking a look at your script are used to going through it so fast that you have to really signal to them that, “Really we are doing this in a shot. So don’t skim it.”

**Craig:** I don’t think I have ever once referred to score on the page itself. But in my mind, if I know that that is what is going on, sometimes I will take a little bit of extra space for the action lines, break them up a little bit more, nice short sentences, and maybe underline the one that matters.

And then that sort of implies that this is one of those moments. It is just one of those ways of thinking intentionally as opposed to spelling it all out. But I honestly feel that nine times out of ten, when your script is really long it is because there is some sequence in there that just doesn’t need to be there, or could be combined with something else in a fun way.

**John:** Yeah. The other good test, which I talked about at lunch with my mentees yesterday, was you sort of take each little piece of your script out, and you hold it up to the light and say, “Is this my movie? Does this feel like my movie? Does this have to be in my movie?” And if there is a sequence that doesn’t sort of meet that criteria you have to really look at whether it belongs back in your movie, or whether something else is going to be better in its place.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes the best way to cut pages is to cut a lot of pages and write a better, shorter thing that can take its place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Every writer is familiar with the concept of killing your babies. So, we are sort of taught very early on, “Don’t get precious about those things that you love. You have to cut them.” But I actually found… Dennis Palumbo, who is a screenwriter-turned-therapist, had a more elegant explanation of why it was hard. And his explanation also allowed me to understand why — or rather made it easier for me to cut those things.

His point was it is not like… — Killing your baby sort of implies that you have written something beautiful and wonderful, but it just has to go because of some sort of circumstance. His point was: actually let’s think about why we call them our babies. Because the truth is a lot of times the things that we write that we don’t think of as our babies are fantastic.

And then there are these things that we do think of as our babies, and people are like, “I just don’t get it.” And his point was: it is your baby because the writing of that line was significant to you. That was a kind of a line that you admire, and you did it. Or, that was a kind of a thing that you have struggled with a lot and you feel like you finally grew as a writer by writing that line.

None of that is relevant to the audience’s experience.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** So, give yourself a huge pat on the back for whatever you accomplished with that line, but if it needs to be cut, cut it.

**John:** Yeah. You are talking about sort of sunk costs. So, either you want to hold onto it because it was so hard to write, or you want to hold onto it because you felt so great about having written it. And those are completely valid for why you feel that way, and no one else can know that, until they see the director’s commentary, or the writer’s commentary…

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** …and you can say, “That’s the best line in the whole thing.” And then you sound incredibly conceited.

**Craig:** And what’s more, once you realize that that is why you care so much about that line, cutting it doesn’t take away the victory. You still have the victory. You just realized that was important for me. So I will put that on an index card and paste it to the wall, and I feel really good about that. But nobody else is going to… — It is not a gift for anyone else, so let’s not impose it upon them.

**John:** Yeah. It does become easier to cut things once you have written a lot more. So in those early scripts it was just torture to cut like three lines because, “Oh, but I love these three lines.” But then you have written 20,000 lines and you are like, “Oh, fine.”

**Craig:** It’s the “There’s more where that comes from syndrome.” I mean, you and I in a distant podcast talked about how many individual drafts we produced. I assume at this point we will eventually hit 100 at least. And at that point you become a little less concerned.

It’s the difference between hitting your first home run and hitting your 530th. It is just not that big of a deal.

**John:** So, one last piece of advice I would offer is that as you approach as section with your script where you are going to be cutting a lot of things, go into it with a plan. Know what you are going to cut. Cut on paper first if that makes sense to you, if it is helpful for you. But definitely go in with a plan because otherwise you are going to go through your script and just start moving commas.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have to really go in with, like, “This is the focus of what I am trying to do here.” So, if it is to write new sequences, delete the sequences that are going out and write the new things. If you are doing a major overhaul and a lot of stuff is moving around, open up a new file and just copy and paste in the stuff that stays. But don’t try to work in that original file.

And that can be freeing, too, because you are not surrounded by all of the stuff that was there.

**Craig:** Absolutely. You and I obviously approach very differently at the start. You write longhand initially. I compose on the computer. But we both finish the same way. Print it out. Do not make that first pass on your computer because there is something about physically looking at the page that makes it so much easier to cut.

And I also find it very helpful to just read it. Out loud. Read the script out loud. You will suddenly realize in the middle of a particular line that you are bored.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that the scene is long and boring. And that there is a shorter way to get to this. Perform it for yourself. You can record it and play it back if you want. But reading it out loud, reading it with a friend — you don’t need a whole megillah of actors showing up at your house, or friends sitting around in chairs reading all the parts. Just read it with two of you. Just go through each scene. A huge help.

**John:** Well, Craig, this was a good conversation.

**Craig:** It was fantastic. I mean, you know what we should have done: we should have recorded this and then put it on the internet because it was such a useful —

**John:** Oh my god, that is so great. Because others could benefit from our conversation about our working practices.

**Craig:** Right. I don’t know why we don’t do that?

**John:** I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do that.

**Craig:** No. I know why everybody doesn’t do that. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** There are a lot of people that should not do that.

**John:** Craig, I meant to ask you. Are you listening to any other podcasts?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. You don’t watch any TV.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t listen to podcasts.

**Craig:** No, but I’m a…

**John:** Basically, you do some writing. You kind of father your children. And you play Skyrim.

**Craig:** I totally father my children. And a lot of baseball practices and games.

**John:** Oh yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** And I am waiting for Skyrim DLC. So while I am waiting for Skyrim DLC, I am now 58% of the way through Arkham City — which is spectacular, by the way.

**John:** I heard that is great, too.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it’s so good. It’s so good.

**John:** So the DLC for Skyrim is like new missions? Or are they new things, new monsters? New what?

**Craig:** No. Bethesda has a pretty longstanding tradition with all of their titles to do quest line DLCs. Some of them are very short. But most of them are rather long. Their idea is, like, you buy it for — I don’t know — maybe ten bucks or something, or $15, and we will give you another 20 hours of game play.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** So, with Skyrim, I don’t think they are anywhere near there yet, but all of the initial press seems to indicate that they are going bigger. That they kind of want…

And they did that for Fallout, too. I mean, almost like getting new games.

**John:** Yeah. I had to stop. So, I was playing Skyrim, and then eventually I had a hard time with like the marriage quest. It was like, “Oh, I’m going to get married.” And so I went through all of that, and I sort of got through all the steps, and I had a hard time finding the guy in the city who I needed to get the amulet from.

And so I finally got… — It just ended up being a lot of hassle and a lot of work. And so then I finally got married and it was like, “Yeah, now I’m bored.”

**Craig:** Oh, I killed my wife.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what, here’s the thing.

**John:** That sounds better.

**Craig:** [laughs] In Skyrim you can get married. And the way you get married is you put on this particular amulet and you walk around. And if you have done nice things for people, and you have achieved enough, they will say, “Hey, I see you are wearing the amulet. Are you interested in hooking up?”

**John:** The Amulet of Mara.

**Craig:** Correct. The Amulet of Mara. And then you say, “Yeah, let’s get married,” which seems like an atrocious way to actually approach marriage in Skyrim, although they are very progressive — men can marry men, women can marry women. I don’t think you can marry animals. Regardless, my wife who is super hot, she was this warrior, and she was really badass. That’s why I married her, you know? She was really tough.

And then the second I married her she just went into my house, stayed there, and made food. And she just kept saying, “Hi, oh hello, love.” And I’m like, “Eh, you are not…” — Bait and switch, you know?

And so I chopped her head off.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not good. Can you marry again after you have committed wife-icide?

**Craig:** I just don’t want to now. Once I see…I think it is uxoricide. Is it uxoricide? I believe U-X-O-R-icide.

**John:** Well, I have Google up, so I am going to type it in right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see if I got that one right.

**John:** Latin, murder of one’s wife.

**Craig:** Beautiful. No reason for my wife to be concerned whatsoever that I know that word.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But uxoricide, no. Once you commit uxoricide you really shouldn’t marry again. You have a problem.

**John:** Yeah, that’s true.

**Craig:** Your problem is that you solve your marital issues with beheadings. So…

**John:** [laughs] With violence, yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, also I just feel like the domestication… — I mean, did that happen with the guy you married? Did he just become, like, a weenie?

**John:** Yeah. He became kind of a weenie. And he was sort of a pity marriage anyway. It was the guy…

**Craig:** [laughs] Which one?

**John:** Angrenor Once-Honored.

**Craig:** Oh, that guy? Really? Alright. I mean, I know something about you, John.

**John:** He had sort of a wounded Daniel Craig quality that I found sort of endearing, but then he became kind of a sop. But I married him, and then like five minutes later I stopped playing the game completely.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well marriage just killed it for you. I married Aela the Huntress. I mean, she was so cool. And then she just stopped being a huntress. She became Aela the Boring.

**John:** So she wouldn’t go out on a quest with you?

**Craig:** Well, she would, but the point is I can get anybody to go on a quest with me. I wanted her to be cool. And I wanted it to be exciting. And I didn’t want her to lose her personality just because I married her, but she just sat there and she would say, “Oh, honey, I made you a home-cooked meal.” “What?! Your head is coming off!”

**John:** Now, could she carry more as a wife? Or does she still have the same sort of burden requirements?

**Craig:** No. Same crap. And then they open a store and they give you money. But if you have played the game long enough, you don’t need that $100. It is like, “Get out of here with this. I’m rich! Look at my house. What’s wrong with you?! Why did I marry you? I hate you!” [laughs]

**John:** You should be able to marry a dragon.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, that’s kind of cool. At least then, you know, the sex would be interesting. Eh, Angrenor, really? That guy?

**John:** Yeah. I’m not saying it was the best choice. But I just sort of made the decision, and I felt bad for him. And apparently, because I was looking up sort of who was marriageable, and apparently at a certain point in the game he dies. Like if you don’t marry him, he will just die.

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s a great reason to not marry him. You shouldn’t have married him then and just let him die. I don’t remember that guy specifically.

**John:** He is the guy who didn’t just take an arrow to the knee like all the other guards. He was actually deeply wounded in some battle.

**Craig:** Oh, I remember that guy. Yeah, enough with him. I can’t believe you married that guy. By the way, it’s interesting that you and I both portray a certain amount of racism because neither one of us married like a lizard person.

**John:** Or the cat people.

**Craig:** Or the cat people. Well the cat people basically are thieves. I don’t trust them. I don’t trust them. I’m racist against cat people. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah, totally racist against cat people. Lizard people I am okay with.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are just basically drug addicts. [laughs]

**John:** So at this point we are falling into the “and things that screenwriters might be interested in.” But it’s good. And so you are not going to marry anyone in Arkham Asylum or Arkham City or whatever that is called.

**Craig:** You can’t. Batman doesn’t marry people. Batman is a tragic figure. Frankly, I don’t even know if Batman has a penis. I mean, Batman is so…

There is a little bit of a romance, like a hint of a romance between Batman and the daughter of Ra’s al Ghul. Which by the way, in the movie, it was Ra’s al Ghul. And apparently, I always feel like the videogame people are that many more clicks to the right on the nerdometer, so I think the right — they say it’s Ray-shal-ghoul.

**John:** Ra’s al Ghul.

**Craig:** Whatevs. Anyway, it is a great game. It is really cool. You should play it. Just do it.

**John:** I will never play it.

**Craig:** Oh, because you have to watch another episode of Glee?

**John:** [laughs] Exactly. But Glee is actually a thing I can watch with my family, for example.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You used to watch American Idol, though. Are you watching American Idol?

**Craig:** No. I finally… — Well, you know what? After Simon left, I gave it a shot. I just couldn’t get into what had happened to it. I mean, Randy was always the worst judge anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The worst. Jennifer Lopez is fine. Steven Tyler is bizarre. But really what I couldn’t get into was the fact that what had been so awesome about that show — that it was the first show to tell the truth ever in the history of television. That was gone. It was back to being fake praise and nonsense.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that was a bummer.

**John:** But now that I am watching it with a six-year-old daughter I am happy to have no Simon on the screen. We don’t really even watch the judges part of it, but we do see the girls sing. And so you see like, “Oh my god, she really likes the Justin Bieber-looking guy.” Yeah. That happens early. It is hard-coded in the brain. It’s like the same way that you like puppies. A little kid with blond hair that looks like Justin Bieber. Just like him.

**Craig:** Justin Bieber really is the perfect… — I guess the idea is that girls at that age, anywhere from 6 to 12, what they are attracted to is boys that are girls.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And boys, I guess, aren’t really attracted to girls, or boys. They just want to shoot stuff. [laughs] That’s the way it goes in my family.

**John:** Yeah. But then once they start getting attracted to girls, they sort of leap up towards women. And not girls their own age.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know, because my son I have to say, he is in fifth grade. And every night we have the same discussion about this girl he likes. Every. Single. Night. And she is in his grade. And it’s adorable. It is just every night he says, “I just don’t know if she even knows I exist.” [laughs] Every night. And I just comfort him every night.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s cute.

**John:** Parenting advice from Craig Mazin and John August.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Craig, thank you very much for another great podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Talk to you soon.

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

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/lets-run-a-studio).

**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 doing okay. It’s February 29th today as we record this, which will probably be the only February 29th recording we do.

**John:** Yes. It’s Leap Day.

**Craig:** Yup. Leap Day. Boop.

**John:** Yeah. Do you do anything special on Leap Day?

**Craig:** No. I do exactly what I do every day.

**John:** Yeah. One of the things you don’t do every day is watch television. So if you did watch television you would know that many of the sitcoms this year have referenced Leap Day. And Leap Day as being a special day to do things you would never do in real life.

**Craig:** But that is a plot?

**John:** That’s a plot. You’ve got to look for a plot, especially if you are on your 5th or 6th season. You have to find something good to do.

**Craig:** Leap Day? Really? Alright.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t say that this is pushing me towards television, but fine.

**John:** Oh, yeah, it’s fine. Hey, we have a bunch of followup questions, so I thought maybe we would hit those first.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Craig, did I just lose you?

**Craig:** No, I’m here.

**John:** Oh, your silence indicated boredom or something. But let’s address this question. A reader named Daniel asks, “I assume that the author of a novel gets more if a movie is actually made, just as screenwriters do. What is the typical ratio of upfront payment to the option?”

**Craig:** I have no idea.

**John:** I have no idea either. Options, when you are optioning a book to make it into a movie, you end up paying generally a pretty small amount. So it could be $1. It could be $5,000. It could be $10,000. For a big book that is selling out of New York, that people think is going to be a really big thing, maybe you are optioning it for $100,000 against a $1 million. 10% could be a good break.

It really depends. A book that they are hoping to make into a major Hollywood studio feature, $250,000 sounds like a pretty low-to-reasonable figure for that. But it really does vary a lot. And I think that the thing to remember, if you are a novelist who sold a book to become a big Hollywood movie, you are also looking at the fact that you are going to sell a whole bunch more of those books once that book becomes a movie, especially if it is not a title that breaks out and becomes a huge hit independently.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think for sure that whatever the sort of heat is behind the novel is going to impact the kind of deal that the book agent, the publishing agent, can get for the author.

**John:** I remember when The Help sold. Octavia is a friend of mine, and she had written on Facebook that, like, “Hey, my friend Kathryn wrote this great book, it is called The Help. Everyone is loving it.” And I was like, “Oh, so a friend of Octavia’s, I will buy that book.” And so I bought it on Kindle. I didn’t read it right away. And then it became this huge bestseller. It became this huge deal thing.

And I think it was on its way to becoming a big deal thing when they took it out on the town and actually sold it. And they sold it with a screenplay already written. Tate Taylor had, I think, optioned the rights to the book himself, who is friends with everybody involved. So that was probably a unique situation. But that was a case where the book becoming a movie certainly helped the book, but that book was going to be a huge book regardless.

**Craig:** Yeah. I can’t really… — I have to say, I can’t really answer this guy’s question because I just don’t know. It seems like if there is a Booknotes podcast that those guys, the alt John and Craig would be able to better answer this.

**John:** Yeah. Second question here. “It seems the author of the novel always gets some sort of official ‘Based on’ WGA credit. Does this come with residuals?”

**Craig:** It is actually not a WGA credit, per se. The MBA, our collective bargaining agreement, specifies that there are certain source material credits that the companies can use. But the WGA doesn’t determine them. All it does is make sure that those credits don’t show up in some strange form like “Authored by” or something like that that might confuse people about who wrote what.

So “Based on the novel written by” is the standard source material credit. But that credit is assigned by the studio. It is something that they determine if they are going to assign. It is sort of pro forma, I think, for novelists that that credit is assigned if the rights are exercised.

There are no residuals. It is not a WGA credit. It confers nothing. Because the union is for employees, let’s remember that, not for contractors or independent contractors.

**John:** So, the novelist may get some backend on the success of the movie, but that would be a separately negotiated thing that is not part of WGA residuals.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Third follow up question. “J.K. Rowling is listed as a producer on the final two Harry Potter films. Is this as rare as I think it is?” It’s pretty rare.

**Craig:** I would say, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. In the case of Harry Potter, I believe that Harry Potter was a pretty big deal, even when she first set that up. Because remember Spielberg was interested in directing Harry Potter originally, and he really wanted to combine the first two books. And she said, “No,” and it became this whole big thing. I’m surprised it is only the last two movies that she has the producer credit on, because she controls that franchise with remarkable strength and finesse.

Good job, J.K. Rowling.

**Craig:** Sure. It may have been that there was kind of an agreement that… — It is sort of like when sitcom actors renegotiate mid-contract because the show is doing really well, and they just want them to be happy, and know that they will stay beyond the term of it. So, it may have been one of those things where halfway in Warner Brothers said, “You know, we would love to keep you around. If you wrote another book…if you wrote a laundry ticket, or a shopping list, we would like that, too.”

So, it was probably just a nice little “Thank you.”

**John:** Yeah. And at that point they could have been negotiating for some other extension of the Harry Potter universe or world. There may have been a very good reason why they wanted to keep her especially happy at that point.

I will say that I feel like I have seen novelists’ names listed as a kind of producer on movies not too rarely; like Stephen King will always be a producer of some kind on an adaptation of one of his books.

**Craig:** It sort of speaks to how watered down the producing credit is. And for those rare people who really are producers in Hollywood, that is producer-producers, it is a bummer. I feel their pain. The producer credit has turned into a sop as it were.

**John:** Here is the fourth follow up question from Daniel. He asks, “What is Daniel Wallace’s role in the Big Fish musical? Does he have to okay it? Does he share in the proceeds?”

**Craig:** You know what? Let me take this one, John. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. You know everything about this situation, so, go, Craig, go.

**Craig:** Daniel Wallace is a nightmare. I have been working with him for a long time on this Big Fish thing, which by the way is a terrible musical. I just don’t think it is going to work.

Anyway, he has hit me. He took a swing at me once. The guy is a nightmare. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] So that was Craig Mazin. This is John August who actually is working with Daniel Wallace on this.

So, Big Fish is based on a book that Daniel Wallace wrote. A great little book that I took into Sony, we got the rights to it, we optioned the rights, Sony bought out the rights. We made it into a movie. Now we are making it into a musical. Daniel’s role is as source material. I mean, his book is still considered the source material of the musical. And he actually, for Broadway rights, has much more — I wouldn’t say control — but has much more upside in having it become a Broadway show.

Essentially, in order to make the Broadway version of it we had to go back and reacquire the rights to Daniel Wallace’s book, and to my screenplay which Columbia Pictures owns. As the screenwriter of the screenplay, I have no claim over the things I wrote for Sony because Sony is considered the author of that movie. So we had to go back and option both the book and my screenplay, bringing them together so we would have this source material to write the musical.

Daniel Wallace, I’m not sure the exact fractions of how this all works, but Daniel Wallace and Sony Pictures will both receive a royalty on every performance, every incarnation of the Big Fish musical. And so, every week, depending on how many tickets we sell, they will be getting a check, which is a very unique different thing than he would be getting from the movie version of Big Fish.

So, he has no approvals, per se. I think there are certainly situations where I think the person who wrote the source material might negotiate for approvals on things. In this case he doesn’t have those, at least as far as I know.

Daniel is awesome, so even if he does have those things, he is great. And so he has been seeing stuff along the way and we are keeping him in the loop. But he doesn’t have like a sign-off thing.

**Craig:** Well it sounds like he has been really nice to you.

**John:** Yes. Switching to Craig, I mean, he beats him up. He runs him down.

**Craig:** Savage. Savage. That was a good answer.

**John:** Thank you. I tried. What I will say in a general sense is that the rules for Broadway are arcane, and different, and sometimes more complicated, and sometimes a lot simpler. And a lot of stuff is a little bit more standard practice rather than “this is the Guild that is overseeing things,” because there is really not an equivalent Writers Guild.

There is a Dramatists Guild, but it is not a labor organization in the same way. So it is a guild that is sort of representing the best practices of things. And partly this is, again, because what Craig always says: the Writers Guild represents employees; the Dramatist Guild represents authors and people who own copyright on things. And on the Big Fish musical, I will own copyright which is a very different situation.

**Craig:** Correct. And there are obviously some wonderful things that go along with being the copyright owner. There is a reason that studios want to be the copyright owner. But one of the benefits that we have as screenwriters in not owning copyright is that we get to collectively bargain. So, you know, there are some plusses and minuses with these things.

**John:** Yeah. Our next question actually ties into that. Jonathan asks, “Regarding the discussion of dramatic rights, if a spec is involved, what is to stop the writer from converting it into a book form and self-publishing it before selling a spec? Then the writer could license the copyright of the book to the studio or the writer’s corporation in addition to doing the ‘work for hire’ on the script.”

**Craig:** Well. [laughs]

**John:** That does happen, kind of.

**Craig:** Yeah. Kind of. It’s actually not a great idea. Here’s the thing: first of all, if they want to buy your screenplay, and what you have done is, in some sneaky way, written a book first, and then you are going to license them the rights to the book, and then the screenplay, they are just going to pay you for the screenplay and $1 for the rights to the book. They don’t care about the book.

Frankly, given that circumstance, nobody cares about the book. That is why you are self-publishing it. It is not a very good book. Or it is not a notable book. So, there’s that.

The other problem that you have is, if John August writes a script and goes, “Before I sell this I am going to game the system and quickly do a novel version of this, self-publish the novel, and then go to them and give them the rights to the novel, and then I will sell them the script.” What you have actually done is screwed yourself out of separated rights. And you screwed yourself out of a really good credit because you are not going to get a “Written by” or “Story by.” You are going to get a “Screenplay by” and “Based on the novel by John,” which is kind of weird.

And so I don’t really see what the point is. What is the upside?

**John:** I can imagine some upsides. I mean, how about remakes? Or how about doing other incarnations? How about with doing the Broadway version of things?

**Craig:** But here is the problem: I see what you are saying on the Broadway version of things, but we will get to that in a second; in terms of remakes and all the rest of it, when they buy the rights to your novel, if you have the amount of leverage that normally goes along with a self-published novel, that is to say zero, they are going to get all rights in perpetuity for everything. They are not going to… — The last thing these corporations do is leave the door open for anything.

Any time they have ever let the door open they have been burned. So they are not going to do that. When it comes to the stage rights, I don’t think that that is going to work either because they are not going to be amenable to you doing anything that might trade on or violate their interest in the movie.

Remember, they can block you from using the title, I think.

**John:** Yeah. But you could block them from using… — If you owned the underlying source material of something, they could not do the Broadway version of…

Eh, I guess it is sort of the same case with the screenplay.

**Craig:** They are going to license everything. They will literally say, “You are going to give us the rights in perpetuity across the universe and all known galaxies. All rights in connection to this.” They won’t leave anything for you. And your little game will not work.

Now, obviously it is a total different situation if it is a legitimate novel and you have legitimate leverage, multiple buyers are interested, and all the rest of it. Makes total sense.

The only thing I have ever heard from people to recommend this kind of strategy is just to make the studio more interested in the screenplay, because sometimes studios like the notion that it is based on something. Because they can read that thing, but then again, if you have a spec, they can read the spec, too. I don’t know. It seems a little nuts to me.

**John:** Going back to your idea of, like, sometimes studios want to buy something that is based on something. That has been the argument for doing a graphic novel rather than doing a spec screenplay, or really honestly taking your spec screenplay, doing it as a comic book, and then selling the rights to the comic book, because for awhile people were eager to buy comic books.

And I think Derek Haas with Popcorn Fiction, that was some of the same instinct, is that this was the chance for screenwriters to write short stories and for development people to read short stories in genres that they are maybe not making as many movies. And say, like, “Hey, this is a great idea for a movie. Let’s have this guy come on and write. Let’s buy this story and turn it into a screenplay.”

**Craig:** That’s right. But it is important to note that Derek acts as a publisher. And so in a sense, whether this is rational or not, studios can say somebody, in this case Derek, read something and liked it enough to publish it.

Similarly, if you want, I know a couple of writers who had a really great idea for a screenplay, decided to go the graphic novel route for precisely the reason you are mentioning. Set up the rights to the graphic novel at a publishing company. And the second that happened, suddenly people came calling asking about the script because somebody somewhere had bought it.

**John:** There is a Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

**Craig:** That is right. Self-doing it ultimately is a transparent ploy. I just don’t see it panning out.

**John:** Let’s change gears and let’s have like a John & Craig’s Fantasy Exercise. And so this is what I want to talk about this week is what if you and I were each given control of a studio. So, Craig, you are in control of… — You can pick any studio. You don’t have to pick which one it is.

But you were given control of one of the major studios. And part of the — thinking about this is — I linked to the blog a week or two ago, and I will put another link in the show notes, Asymco, which is a website that does statistics on things, took a look at maybe 50 years of studio data. And they looked at all of the studios’ outputs, and you realize that the top five studios have been the top five studios basically for the last 50 years.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And they have traded one and two for top position, occasionally, but it has basically been the same people running — the same companies are running and making all of the major movies that we do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So every once in a while there is a regime change, and you put somebody else new in charge of one of these studios. And let’s say that is you, Craig. So let’s talk through what decisions you and I would make if we were put in charge of one of these studios. Sounds good?

**Craig:** Sounds good.

**John:** So let me start with this. First question: Which overall deals would you want to keep at your studio?

**Craig:** I don’t want any overall deals with… — I don’t want many producer overall deals. I think there are a few producers that are absolutely worth it. And I would like to have them around. Although I think that in this economy you could probably get away with another kind of arrangement.

The most important overall deals that I would want to make would be with directors.

**John:** Okay. Which kind of directors? Who would you want to have an overall deal with?

**Craig:** I’m looking for directors that have a track record of delivering movies that people like within a reasonable budget. And particularly I would aim at directors who have shown a good track record of success in the $20 million to $60 million budget range.

**John:** Okay. So are you looking for Michael Bay Platinum Dunes, or are you looking for the ones that he is actually going to direct himself?

**Craig:** I’m not looking for… — Platinum Dunes, the idea of that is really about genre movies. To me it is less important about the kinds of movies. I am not necessarily…

If I am running my studio I don’t care so much about emphasizing genre or B-level or whatever, because I think there are really good movies, quality movies, that are made for $30 million. And there is genre that is made for $90 million. I am more interested in directors that I think are able to work with writers well and deliver good movies.

That combination, the director who delivers and writer who delivers, to me is the most important combination. If I can find teams like that and pair them up, that is how I want to develop my movies.

**John:** Yeah, I would say my criteria thinking through the overall deals at a studio that I am now in charge of, any producer deal that is costing me seven figures and they are not bringing their own money is highly suspect. If you are one of the people who makes those big, expensive movies, at this point you should probably be coming in with some of your own money. It feels really weird for me to be financing all of your overhead so you can have a really nice office on the other side of town, and maybe make a movie for us every once in a while.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I think there is a certain kind of dinosaur producer that has that kind of arrangement. And those are all disappearing. The only guys that really justify that are the ones that are delivering movies on a certain level in a big way, and there aren’t too many of those guys. And we know who they are.

But I wouldn’t make that… — Sort of prospectively moving forward that wouldn’t be my instinct. My instinct is all about the material and the director.

**John:** Yeah. Now, so rather than director overall deals, my focus would be TV showrunners who want to do features, and plucking some of them, plucking the very best of the TV showrunners and pulling them into the feature land.

So, the guys who are coming off of five years of an amazing show and can probably do amazing TV, I think they are undervalued in features. And I think they could probably do some amazing things. The danger, or course, is that they really are just going to go off and develop another TV show. You are not going to get anything out of them.

**Craig:** Yeah, as your competitor, I relish that this is your strategy, because to me, they are entirely different disciplines. And the things that work on TV right now, I think, interestingly are not working in theaters. There is material that requires people to go to a theater, and Mad Men isn’t it. But Mad Men is fantastic on TV. There are some showrunners that can make that jump. I mean, J.J. is sort of the most famous example.

**John:** You see, to me, I think you are spending not a lot of money to find who is the next J.J. Abrams, or Joss Whedon, or Ryan Murphy.

**Craig:** See, but I don’t need to make overall deals with them. They are going to find me because they want to do movies. If they want to do movies, they will come to me. And they will give me material. But more important, frankly, than the showrunner kind of guy to me is knowing… — J.J. is so valuable because he is a director. I just think that that is the most important part.

And the reason why I say that is the most important part, even as a screenwriter, which might seem crazy, is my new studio, or I guess I have taken over Paramount or whatever… — My studio can’t afford to make 30 movies a year because we can’t afford to market 30 movies a year. We have a small amount of these things.

When we have the material and we have the availability of actors, we need to get going. And that means we have to have a… — To me it means get a director on board from the start. Because what happens is if you develop material in the old school way, and then you bring the director in, you start going backwards and redeveloping.

**John:** That is absolutely true. You are making a very good point right there. And if you already have, in that director’s deal is already how much it is going to cost to direct the first movie you put him on, that is great and you can move faster.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I completely agree, because we do waste a tremendous amount of time. I’m on two movies right now where the studio wants to get everything just perfect, and then they will go after a director, and once the director is on board we are going to develop the whole thing again.

**Craig:** That is very 90’s to me. Because inevitably what happens, it is a very amusing thing from the perspective of a screenwriter — you will go through this very delicate, exhausting brokered negotiation over how the script should be, down to the letter. And then a director comes in and says, “What if they were all women instead of guys?” And the studio is like, “Great!”

Because ultimately they need a director to direct this thing and all of that fastidiousness falls away, and you start redeveloping. The other thing that it gets you is, as you mentioned, budget. If a director and a writer develop the screenplay together, they are developing it with that number in mind. You are not writing… — You don’t get caught in the “I just wrote a $100 million movie but they want to make it for $30 million.” That will kill the project.

So, in my mind, I don’t like the notion of screenwriters developing in vacuums. And, frankly, I don’t really need my studio executives developing the screenplays either because that is not really what they are spectacular at. Directors are much better — good directors — are much better at working with writers than studio executives, in my mind.

**John:** Let’s talk about studio executives. Which studio executives do you keep? What is your criteria?

**Craig:** I would love to find people that know how to match-make. I want studio executives with great relationships who can encourage teams to come together and develop the material. I want executives who can keep the director and the writer inside the box of what the studio generally is looking for in terms of tone and scope. And I want studio executives who aren’t afraid to let that team come back and say, “This is a better way.”

The most important thing a studio executive can do in my mind is help the writer and the director get to where they want to go within the chalk lines on the field that you have drawn for them.

**John:** I would say my criteria would be people who have actually made movies. And people, independent of their sort of studio executive function, have literally made movies. Because my frustration with a lot of the studio executives you end up working with: they don’t have a good sense of just literally how films are put together.

And I want the person who kind of feels like a producer but works for the studio.

**Craig:** Interesting. I mean, there is a movement, it seems, at studios to kind of fold the producing position into the studio executive position, kind of make it like a producer-executive kind of thing.

And I get where you are going. It is kind of a choice you have to make, I guess. You have to decide are you going to go for that kind of, the hybridized thing, or are you going to still have producers come in and handle that part of it.

Because it is hard, frankly, to find people who have made movies, who aren’t still making movies, or who want to do this and weren’t terrible at making movies, if that makes sense.

**John:** No, it does make sense. But I would say producers are having a hard time. Like the actual real film producers are having a hard time getting movies made. So I think you could probably cherry pick some of the very best of those people and bring them into the fold and let them be the people running the ship.

**Craig:** That is a good idea. There are a lot of producers out there who could be excellent studio executives in the absence of the old model which was flooding the lot with producers, all of whom had their offices, because there is enormous redundancy in it. A producer has three development people. And then the executive suite has development people. And everybody has development people.

And in the end, the funny part is once a director and a writer are sitting together in a room, none of those people really are developing anymore. They are just helping, as they should. And that is a good thing because sooner or later the writer has to write it, and the director has to direct it.

**John:** I would also want to find some way to reward these development executives with a percentage of the success of the feature so that… — I don’t have the right formula for it, but like the bonus for getting a movie made, the bonus for “this” amount of box office, the bonus for “this” kind of award. Just incentivize actually getting movies made because I don’t know that we do enough incentivizing. And so that is why calls go unreturned for six weeks.

**Craig:** It must be the case, I say that realizing I am setting myself up, but it must be the case that studio executives are rewarded for success. I mean, it may not be as direct as a piece of a movie or something quite that mathematical, but I can’t imagine that that doesn’t factor into their individual negotiations, how much they are paid, their position.

I mean, it seems like that would be the case.

**John:** Yeah. But if they are renegotiating every three years, then I don’t know. I just feel like there needs to be more of an immediate reward for it.

**Craig:** I guess. I mean, look, the problem is I am running my studio and I assign Jim to oversee a movie. And all I deal with for the next eight months is the fact that Jim is screwing up. And now the movie comes out and is a success because of the writer, the director, the cast, me for working hard to get it all done. And, wow, now I am paying Jim for a piece of it?

**John:** That’s true. I get that point, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I’m cheap. I’m running a mean, lean machine here.

**John:** Now, you have just taken over this studio. There is a lot that is on its development slate, there’s a lot of things it owns, how do you figure out what are the stuff that is on the development slate you keep and what you get rid of? And do you put stuff in turnaround?

**Craig:** Well, sure. If you look at the material and you either don’t think that is going to connect creatively, or it is going to be impossible to sell, you need to turn it around. There is no sense in throwing good money after a project you don’t believe in; that is why they put you in charge. And that is just one of those… — That is part of the animal kingdom. When a lion takes over a pride…

Oh, it is kind of a gross analogy that involves infanticide. But, regardless, yeah, you have to put some things into turnaround, sure, of course.

**John:** I think I would bring in a committee of people I trust, and I trust screenwriters. I would bring in a committee, a group of six or eight screenwriters to literally read through everything that we have, and this might take a month. And so we will find writers who are awesome but were not working that month and bring them in. And literally sit down and go through everything we have and figure out what is promising and what needs to go away.

It is very much like we have just been going through and cleaning our bookshelves off. I think you need to do that. Because all of the cruft that sort of builds up on there is stealing focus from the things you should really be working on. And just going through and just saying, “Is this a movie that we want to make? Is there something here that is worth spending time on, and developing, and making into a movie?” If there is not, then it goes into turnaround.

And I would be much more aggressive than I think a lot of studios are about putting stuff into turnaround. Because there is always that fear that if you put something into turnaround, turnaround means that you are saying to the town, “Hey, does anyone want to buy this?” And another studio can say, “Yes, I want to buy that,” and they buy all the rights to it. And they can make that into a movie.

There has been a reluctance to put stuff into turnaround because of the fear of being embarrassed that someone else is going to take this property that you put into turnaround and is going to make a giant hit out of it, and then you look like a fool.

Well, yeah, but you weren’t making that movie either. So, put it into turnaround, let someone else deal with it. And focus on the things that you actually have that you like.

**Craig:** I agree with that, certainly the spirit of that. I am just far more autocratic than you are. I want to do what Steve Jobs did. I just feel like I am going to go through and I am going to ask myself, “Would people like this? And is it sellable?”

And even then, is it sellable? And could people like a version of this? And then ask myself the most important question, “What kind of writer should write this? What kind of director should direct this?” And hopefully if you are lucky find a script where you go, “We should be making this right now as it is.”

**John:** Yeah. Always about the situation.

Well let’s talk about what genres. What kinds of movies do you want to make if given everything you could make, what kind of movies are you going to focus on making?

**Craig:** Well, I’m a big believer in big movies. I am not one of these people that thinks that studios should just make little movies. I think big, huge bets are important, and they are good. You just have to pick the right ones. And obviously that is where the rubber meets the road. And you have to figure out if, okay, the Lone Ranger in and of itself doesn’t sound like a big movie, but Lone Ranger with Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp does sound like a big movie.

So, I am going to make those big bets for sure, because to me that stuff in success spins out enormous benefit. You just have to be on the lookout for things that sound like they are big movies, but you are forcing it. And you have got to be careful about not saying, “Well, look, we have a couple of stars that are sort of on the edge of being big stars. And we have this material that feels like a big, huge spectacle. And we have a director that is kind of like in that zone, so we should just do it because who turns all that package down?”

Well, I would, if I didn’t think that it actually was going to be big. It is funny. It’s like we can smell it when they are forcing it on us. We just know. So I would make the big movies that feel like the wind would be at their back. And then I would really, really concentrate on the $20 million to $50 million comedies, the $20 million to $50 million genre pictures, and also then try and find some of those great $5 million to $10 million little bets that don’t cost much but sometimes just blow up and are amazing.

**John:** Yeah. Going back to the Lone Ranger and that kind of thing, so I am not really just picking on the Lone Ranger just by itself, but other sort of like really giant tent poles where you are spending a lot of money, and the Lone Ranger was an example where they stopped because they said, “Wow, this is going to cost way too much money.”

If you have big star, big concept, big director, I feel at some point you look at where you are actually spending your money. It is like, “Wow, do we actually have to spend that $50 million to do that special effect sequence that is not going to actually make the movie any better?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that is where you get into it. It is like, if you are getting big just to get big, well is it actually helping you sell your movie? And a lot of times I think it’s not.

**Craig:** Right. You are just forcing it. And I want to be clear that, because maybe it sounds like I am saying I want to make moves from a range of zero to $500 million. Well, who doesn’t?

But, to me, the danger zone of movies is when you go north of $60 million on original/first films, forget sequels and all the rest of it. If you are north of $60 million and you are south of $150 million, you are in a dangerous place. And the funny thing is I feel like that is where so many of the movies end up right now, because you are not big enough to be “oh my gosh — wow,” but you are definitely big enough to hurt if it fails.

**John:** Yeah. It’s bad.

**Craig:** It’s bad. You know, whereas I feel like if I have interesting people and a very sellable title and concept for a comedy, and it seems funny, for $30 million I will make that all day long, you know? The trick is to keep that budget for those kinds of movies… — I don’t know, I like that $20 million to $50 million, $20 million to $60 million zone. I just think that makes sense.

**John:** I’m going to pretend I took over Paramount, because I feel like there are Paramount movies that aren’t going to be made now, that they need to make more of, which are sort of the mid-budget, high concept dramas. So I am talking the Fatal Attractions, the Bodyguards. Look at the success of The Vow, and like The Vow is a movie that we kind of should have been making a lot more of.

It’s weird that we are not making kind of the Joe Eszterhas sexual thrillers anymore — that we are not making sort of the star-driven romantic dramas that people like. And you need to have a couple of those, and nobody is making them right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a good point. I guess it is all about the price point of these things. By the way, it must be, I mean, I can only imagine that some people who actually do make these decisions are listening to this and laughing their asses off at our naivety. [laughs]

**John:** I should have prefaced this whole thing by saying I recognize that these are tough jobs, and so people who come into these roles, not only do they have to meet with all of their own expectations, but they are not actually really in control of everything that we are pretending that we are in control of. Because they are reporting to other people, and there may be other reasons why they find themselves having to do those things. So this is why it is a fantasy exercise.

Like if we could come in and do anything we wanted to do, this is what we would do.

**Craig:** Yes. I have always found that when things seem sort of obviously fixable it just means you don’t understand them well enough.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** Because if it were obviously fixable, they would have fixed it by now probably is my guess. It just feels like that is the way money works. You know, it always finds a way. So it is possible that this is the best of all worlds, but I just believe that, to me, the biggest mistakes studios make right now — the two biggest mistakes they make — is not teaming directors with screenwriters to develop material early on, and forcing big movies when they know they are forcing it.

Those are the two big ones.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes that forcing big movies, like, yes, you had the big movie idea, and you had the big movie star and the perfect director, but you lost the big movie director and you lost the right star for it. So, are you going to make it with that sort of fourth choice guy? Ooh. That is tough.

And sometimes that gamble pays off, but it really often doesn’t.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** And so then you start to panic, like, “Oh, but we will cut $10 million out of the budget.” Well, that didn’t actually change the equation at all. You are still making a way expensive movie with the guy who can’t carry it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And the dangerous thing about these big budget movies is that once this train starts rolling, it will not be stopped. Because you can’t even get to the point where you start making the decisions you are talking about until you have spent $30 million or $40 million in R&D. And now, what are you going to do? You are going to write off $30 million or $40 million and not have a movie while stars and a director and people are available? Of course not.

You are jammed. And so the big choice to make is earlier on. And that is, again, another reason why writers and directors together, developing the material together, is so valuable because you are not going to have that kind of weird mismatch. And you are not going to have the parade of A-list screenwriters that are each getting $1 million to confuse things.

No. Get a voice together. That team is the key.

**John:** And we sort of talked about this before, but what would you do about home video? So you are now in charge of the studio, how are you going to handle home video?

**Craig:** I mean, it’s rearranging deck chairs. It’s so bad, and the fact is, talk about something out of their control; the marketplace is swinging around wildly when it comes to home video. The desire to own a physical piece, a physical object, that has a movie on it has disappeared. So, home video is going to continue to diminish.

The industry, all of the studios together — ideally — would come up with a joint venture that would iTunes it for them all, but they can’t get that together. So, I don’t know. I wouldn’t run that division. That’s the other guy. That’s not my problem. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Oh, that’s good. Yes. Bring in the Wall Street guy to do that for you. You are the creative.

**Craig:** I can’t. Honestly, I see no light at the end of that tunnel.

**John:** I’m going to pretend to shine a little light down there. I’m going to do my best. I have a weak flashlight, but I will shine my weak flashlight.

I think there is still some market for physical goods right now. And so I think while there is still some market for physical goods right now, you need to be able to sell those movies to people who want to buy movies. I would bundle Blu-ray with the DVD, so that people can buy one thing that has both kinds of discs in it so that they will be able to play it no matter what. So do that for while, and keep the higher price point which is helpful for right now.

I would, I don’t think UltraViolet is going to work. I mean, UltraViolet is what you were sort of describing where all the studios together were going to try to do this thing, but no one trusts that it is going to be around, so no one is going to do it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** People trust iTunes, so I would sell through iTunes. I would sell things you could buy at a store, that actually give you the download code through iTunes, people will understand. So, like, I am going to buy you The Vow on iTunes, and here is a physical thing that I can give you that is The Vow on iTunes.

And when I make licensing deals with places, I would make them long enough so that people feel safe that they are going to be able to find your movie. Because just this last week, Netflix lost its deal with Starz, that went down. And so suddenly several of my movies you can’t find anymore. And that is what frustrates consumers is that they can’t, they don’t know where to look for things.

And so, “Can I find your movie on this? Can I find your movie someplace else?” If you are going to make those deals, make them long enough that you really have a place to put your movies. Because otherwise people turn to piracy. And so the reason why people will download Charlie’s Angles off a torrent is because they can find it, and if they can’t find it a legal way, they are going to find it in an illegal way.

**Craig:** Yeah, it is true that people are still buying the physical objects. I mean, Hangover 2 sold millions of DVDs, many millions of DVDs. But when you look at the… — I was just doing a little research with a friend of mine. When you look at the amount of movies released in 2011 that sold more than 3 million DVDs, and you compare that to the amount of movies from 2007 that sold more than 3 million DVDs — in 2007 that number, I think, was 30. 30 movies. In 2011 it was 6.

And I have got to tell you, it’s not like the list of movies is that much more impressive from 2007. It is a dramatic falloff across the board. So, that is going away. And you are right to suggest that the problem is that the movie industry has failed to make an easy, obvious, new destination. And, by the way, the recording industry went through the same thing with even more turmoil because they were the first ones to be hit.

I don’t think that the problem is, at least in the immediate run, that people are going to turn to piracy, I think, because pirated copies still stink. I think the more immediate problem is that they are simply going to just turn to whatever is on cable, or just stop making movie watching a big deal. That is the problem.

If you untrain people to look at movies as a great way to spend an afternoon or an evening at home, they will find other stuff. And that is what is going on right now. The marketplace is retraining themselves in the absence of easy solutions to this.

So, if iTunes weren’t so wrapped up with Disney this would have been done awhile ago. But it is, and so we have got a problem.

**John:** Yeah. The last thing, which I think I suggested on a previous podcast, is if I am coming into a studio that has a big library, that big library is going to go on the equivalent of like the HBO Go. Because if you are Warner Brothers and you have crime thrillers dating back 50 years, put those together. Put those together as a thing that people can subscribe to.

And just the way that they at least have cable channels, I think there are internet channels where you could subscribe to something and be able to get any of those movies at any time is valuable. And try those new models.

**Craig:** That would be cool if you had access to decades, you know, just by subscription to Paramount — The 80’s. That would be cool.

I don’t know if our studio is going to work or not…

**John:** No. I think it could be doomed. But it is probably not more doomed than several other major studios currently.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] I mean, it’s sort of like when they look at the performance of mutual funds and then just compare it to the index funds. It is sort of like time just generally churns out a certain average of hits, and a certain average of losers. And we pretend that we have more control over this than we do.

And, frankly, no one studio has seemed to corner the market on an ideal practice. And sometimes studios are rewarded for bad behavior. So, what do we know?

**John:** The only thing I would say, you could look back at 50 years and see, okay, who is actually the biggest of the studios has changed over the course of the 50 years, but like the top 5 are still the top 5. But you look at other industries that seem not completely dissimilar. You look at the computer industry and there are titans who are making most of the money, and everybody else is scraping for some scraps.

I think there is an opportunity for one or two studios to become much, much bigger if they were to be dominant. If one or two studios did a great job figuring out home video and had big hits to back it up, they could be very dominant.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the thing that keeps these studios consistent in leadership is distribution. Because physical distribution of movies to theaters is an incredibly complicated thing. And it is very — requires a certain amount of monopoly power. I mean, I guess in this case it is a five-opoly. But that is what has kept them alive.

If that distribution advantage should disappear, I think honestly that the studios would disappear. They don’t have anything special there beyond that distribution ability. But it is a very powerful one. If one of them somehow mastered home video distribution in a way that the others couldn’t, I just don’t know how that would even happen. Why wouldn’t they all just copy it?

But if they could just get their acts together on this. They are repeating, it seems, many of the mistakes of the record industry in sort of squabbling while their companies burn. The home video thing is a disaster right now.

**John:** Yeah. And it is understandable why they are trying to defend the status quo because the status quo is their jobs. And so if everything changes, they may not have jobs, and that is a huge concern. But it is one of the reasons why the industry feels prone to disruption because an upstart who doesn’t have to have all of those other people doing those jobs could do a lot.

So I am wondering whether there is going to be a rise of sort of the pure financier who doesn’t actually deal with a lot of that backend stuff, and just makes the movies could possibly work.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, we have those. We have Legendary and Relativity.

**John:** And they come in as just giant banks.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But then eventually they start making their own movies and they start having their own distribution arms and doing other things. And we will see if that works out for them.

**Craig:** Well, you know, Legendary… — I don’t know if Legendary — it seems like Legendary is really happy doing what they do. And they have been so successful at it. You know? I mean, if I were running Legendary, if I were Thomas Tull I wouldn’t change a thing. I mean, it’s great. They bankroll, they make smart choices, they bankroll big hits.

**John:** For people who don’t know, Legendary Finances is the bank behind a lot of Warner Brothers’ big movies. And so I think 300 is theirs, the Batman movies are theirs.

**Craig:** The Hangover movies.

**John:** Oh, yeah, those little…

**Craig:** Those small things. They have done extraordinarily well. And, I think, they might have done Inception. Is that right?

**John:** Probably.

**Craig:** I think that it is a great relationship for Warner Brothers because what do these studios do best? What they do better than anybody is advertise movies and distribute movies. And when it comes to actually being a bank, there is no reason that they shouldn’t mitigate some of their risk on these real big bets.

It makes total sense. I think it is a great business for Warner Brothers and for Legendary. Smart.

**John:** And I also think there is a whole big chunk of money that is going to be looking for a place to spend their money in the next five years. And so, I think, a lot of the giant Silicon Valley money, and the Facebook money and stuff will eventually find its way here. And they will make movies, too.

**Craig:** Maybe so. Hey, only good for us.

**John:** Only good for us. Yeah, the more people that are willing to throw some money around, the more they are willing to spend some money on screenwriters to develop material. And that is a very happy thing.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yes, I am so sorry that Amazon’s venture hasn’t churned out massive hits for them.

**John:** Apparently they did actually write a check for a winner. I don’t know if they wrote like a million dollar check, but they actually did pick a best screenplay.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sure they met the terms of their contest. [laughs]

**John:** I don’t know that they will be making a movie any time soon, but we will see how it all plays out. But my frustration, and this is dealing with stuff that happened before the podcast began, but I criticized the Amazon Studios deal as being a really bad idea for screenwriters in the sense of they were taking ownership of stuff that you really didn’t want them taking ownership of. And doing weird things that felt, not unscrupulous, but just kind of…

**Craig:** Exploitative.

**John:** Yes! Thank you. But, I like the idea of Amazon coming in and making movies because they have a tremendous amount of money, and they have a tremendous amount of advertising power and ability to reach people who are coming to their site every day. So, I supported the idea of Amazon making movies, I just didn’t like how they were doing it.

**Craig:** I support the idea of anybody making movies as long as they treat the professionals who make movies like professionals. Meaning that they pay them according to our contracts, and they give residuals, and healthcare, and pension, and credit protection, and all the things that we fought very hard for and have had for 70 years.

And Amazon sort of thinks that they are excepted out of that. And they can except out of that, but they also except out of being able to work with fine screenwriters like yourself.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Well, Craig, this was a fun fantasy exercise.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s probably not the fun fantasy exercise that many of our podcast listeners were looking forward to.

**John:** I disagree. I disagree.

**Craig:** There’s quite a bit of slash-fiction. Podcast/fiction.

**John:** Someone recently was talking about the podcast. He was like, “Yeah, your podcast seems really weird because it feels like the only people who are the right target audience for it are people that are kind of successful screenwriters, but not really successful screenwriters.”

And I pushed back in saying I think most people who are interested in the film industry could relate to a lot of the things we are talking about. So, yes, the esoteric of credit arbitration, most people listening to this podcast will never go through it. But I think they can be interested and fascinated by it even if they are not affected by it.

**Craig:** I would have said to that person, it’s a fair point, that our audience is everybody that doesn’t already know everything about screenwriting, and is either screenwriting now or will be one day. And that is everybody minus A-list screenwriters. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And then A-list screenwriters can listen to it just to make fun of us. So it is everybody.

**John:** It’s everybody. Great. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thanks. You too. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

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

**John:** Kaj vi auskultas Scriptnotes, podcast por skriptistoj kaj ajoj grave skriptistoj.

**Craig:** What? What happened?

**John:** Google Translate added Esperanto to their engine. So now I can actually translate things into and out of Esperanto.

**Craig:** That’s fantastic.

**John:** [More in Esperanto].

**Craig:** Now all you need is a time machine to go back to 1972 and you could talk to the three other people that spoke Esperanto.

**John:** I know. That’s the whole problem. I feel like Google is giving us little bits and pieces of the future that I want, but at the wrong time. Like the future is not evenly distributed, of course. And this future came a little bit late, but I am still happy to have an Esperanto tool. Come on!

**Craig:** I thought you were speaking Polish.

**John:** It does sound a little Polish. I think, if I remember correctly the history of it, it uses a lot of Latinate kind of words, a lot of Spanish. But people say it sounds a lot like Polish.

**Craig:** It does sound like Polish. And I think until now the only other person that I had heard speak Esperanto was William Shatner.

**John:** Of course. William Shatner in his classic sci-fi film… — Now I am forgetting the name of it. It is, oh, something great.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have…

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** William Shatner.

**Craig:** William Shatner.

**John:** Awesome.

**Craig:** And now you.

**John:** Yeah. So Google is also developing some sort of like glasses that you wear that give you a heads-up view of information, which would be great, too.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** So, again, that would be an amazing thing from the 1960s or 70s that is finally coming true.

**Craig:** What do they call it, “Enhanced Reality” something or another?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. I think reality should be enhanced as much as you possible can do it.

**Craig:** It is basically another way for people to walk into light posts.

**John:** Yeah, or to sort of ignore you while you are in front of them.

**Craig:** [laughs] Fantastic.

**John:** So it is like the iPhone. With the iPhone you actually have to physically stick it in front of your face; whereas with this, they might look like they are looking at you, but they are not really looking at you. It is the same thing where I will be walking by someone on the street, and I think they are talking to me, but of course they are on their headset.

**Craig:** It’s the weirdest thing.

**John:** Yeah. It’s spooky.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, a good introduction then, because really our topic, our theme for this week’s podcast is etiquette. And etiquette in normal life, but especially etiquette as it pertains to screenwriters who are often mistreated, but sometimes actually mistreat each other. And, I think, that is maybe how you want to start off with; a thing that happened recently and had some fall out.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we are in a strange business where we are colleagues, and we are in the same union, and so we are together in spirit in some ways. But we also compete for the same jobs, and we also rewrite each other. And that can create some difficult terrain to navigate.

And I thought it was navigated particularly poorly this past weekend by Alexander Payne, who is a director, of course. He just directed The Descendants. And he is also a writer. And he is one of the credited screenwriters of The Descendants.

And at the award show, when they were asking him about it he said — specifically of the prior draft by writers Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who again, I want to point out, received credit on the movie — Alexander Payne said, “I couldn’t get into the film through their drafts. I respected their work very much, but I had to return to the novel. I learned some of the things I didn’t want to do through their drafts.”

Now, my whole thing is that that is lame. [laughs] So, I’m now leaving journalistic reportage and entering editorializing.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I think that’s lame. Listen, it may be absolutely accurate. I don’t know. It is interesting — some friends of mine have read the Faxon and Rash draft and thought it was actually better than Alexander Payne’s draft. But I haven’t read any of it.

All I know is this: No matter what the facts are, you are at an awards show. You are the director, also. You have gotten plenty of credit. Nobody refers to The Descendants as being authored by anybody other than you, Alexander Payne, because you are far more famous than Faxon and Rash. Why do this? Why throw them under the bus and say, “Actually what I learned from their script was what I didn’t want to do?” It is just unnecessarily… — It is unnecessarily stingy.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And we, I think, what I would like to talk about with you today is sort of a best practices way of approaching the etiquette of rewriting other writers, being rewritten by other writers, and dealing with press when you have co-writers, or there is the understanding that other writers worked on a movie for which you are credited.

**John:** Great. Going back to the Alexander Payne story, my recollection of that context for that: It wasn’t the actual award show, it was a panel of the nominated writers at the Writers Guild Theater.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, you are talking in front of a whole audience full of screenwriters, and you are throwing the other two screenwriters — who are up on stage with you — under the bus, which struck me as just very poor form.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, I don’t have video of this. I haven’t seen the actual moment. But I moderated that same panel last year. And I can’t imagine being up there on that stage and not having it feel just incredibly uncomfortable that this thing just happened.

And as a moderator you have to kind of acknowledge that this really strange thing just happened. The year I was moderating this thing, I had a situation where there was a guy who was rewritten who was up on the stage. And it can be fine. As long as everyone is sort of, like, upfront about it, and not horrible about it, it’s fine.

You had Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian on stage, who both worked on Moneyball, and they got through that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can discuss the different contributions to a script that screenwriters have made. And that can be navigated dispassionately and interestingly.

**John:** Which is actually a great thing to be discussing in front of a panel of writers because that is the reality of the situation.

**Craig:** Yes. Right. And it is interesting. I am the last person to say lets whitewash what happened. However, if you are the director of the movie, or the producer of the movie, and you had this particular additional creative authority over the film, what is the point of saying, “I learned what to not do from that draft?”

**John:** Look regardless of how much authority you have on the film, that is a bad thing to say. Here is the polite thing to say. Like the first Charlie’s Angels, Ryan Rowe and Ed Solomon created a draft, and I came in and did a very different movie. And so we are all very upfront about the fact that they had created this amazing opening set piece that set one kind of movie that was really cool, and that is still the same set piece that is in the movie. And we loved it, and that was the thing that never changed throughout the whole development process.

But their actual plot went in a very different direction. It wasn’t the direction we went in. And we can say that and talk about that in a very open and happy way because that is just the reality. And we are not saying that anything was bad or wrong in their draft, it just wasn’t the movie that we were going to be making.

And that can be a positive starting place.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can sort of talk about, “Look, here is where I went with it. Here is where they went with it.” But if somebody has credit on the movie, particularly screenplay credit, what are you suggesting? The Guild has already put its two cents forth and said, “This person wrote at least a third of this movie.”

So, I don’t get where the thinks he is coming from. Even if he feels like that was a bum decision, just be kind. Just be kind. You can say, “Listen, they…”

If it had been me I would have said, “I read their draft. I thought it was fantastic. I decided I was going to go back to the book a little bit just to tie in… — I was going to adapt it actually a little more closely to the novel than they did. So we went through quite a few changes. But, you know, overall I think the work that they did, and the work that I did, ended up on screen in a great way.”

How hard is that? It’s like, it’s baseball…

**John:** Just say it was a fantastic draft, but there were different things that interested me from the book, and I really went back and pulled those into the draft.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just be like baseball players when they are talking at the end of a game, you know. And everyone is like, “Wow, you hit four home runs. And the team won 4-3. That was all you.”

“Well, you know, it’s still a team effort.” Just be cool. How hard is that?

**John:** Be cool. Be nice.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** It costs you nothing to be nice.

**Craig:** And what it comes down to is: Are you so panicked that you are not going to get every little crumb of credit that you have to kick these poor guys in the teeth in front of their colleagues and in front of the press? You just… — I don’t know. It wasn’t his finest moment.

And, look, I don’t know Alexander Payne. I hope that he has apologized for that and won’t do that again.

**John:** Yeah. I hope he is a wonderfully nice guy who just said something stupid, like I say all the time, but didn’t have Stuart to edit out the dumb things he said.

**Craig:** We all need Stuart there in real life.

I mean, look, obviously — obviously — I have said a billion stupid things. And so I don’t mean to come down and say that this was the worst, most horrible thing anyone has ever done. I just felt bad for those other guys, and I just thought it was unnecessary.

**John:** Yeah. Pretty good segue to a question that someone wrote in. Kevin Arbouet, I’m going to say it is Arbouet — he criticized me for mispronouncing his name last time.

**Craig:** It is Arbouet. Yes.

**John:** Arbouet. Two scenarios. I will read the second of the scenarios he proffers. “A friend of yours has sold an original screenplay to a studio. Sometime later your friend calls and tells you that he or she has been fired from the studio. Then, dum-dum-dum, you get a phone call from that studio asking you to rewrite your friend’s script. Do you take the job?”

**Craig:** This happened to me recently. I got a call about a project and actually the director was saying, “Would you be interested in me… — I would like you to write this. Can I pitch you for this job?”

And I always sort of just generally look up, I’m just curious like anybody would, and I saw who had written it prior. And it is somebody I know quite well and I am friendly with. And I said, “Look, I would have to talk to them first.” And that is my thing.

We are all big boys. We are all adults. If you are fired, you are fired. There is no point in keeping your friends from getting work. You are fired. [laughs]

So, that is not the end of the world. I just think that you owe that person a phone call to say, “Is it okay with you if I go in and meet on this?” I can’t imagine anybody ever saying, “No. It is not okay.”

But you know what? If they did, I guess I would respect that. Because, I don’t know, if it is a good friend, you know. Maybe I am a Pollyanna but friends are friends.

**John:** Yeah. Every time I have taken a job that I am going to rewrite, if it is someone’s real project, like this is their thing, they came up with the idea, or they were the first writer on this thing, and I would be going in and sort of being that second writer, I am always going to make that call. And I will always get the number for the person, I will make the call, and it is always super awkward to do it, but I will do it because you owe that to them.

And in most cases it is a huge relief for them because they know who is potentially coming in. They know that you are not a jerk. And they can tell you where all the bodies are buried and who the crazy people are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The times I haven’t done that it has been where like literally it has been a handoff from like a week, to a week, to a week through a whole bunch of people.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** In those cases I haven’t worried so much about being the last guy carrying the football.

**Craig:** Yeah. If it is a gangbang you don’t have to kiss the lady. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] We should explain that a “gangbang” is sort of a term of art in screenwriting in this kind of thing, where it is like you throw a whole bunch of writers at it. And so despite its vulgar connotations, it is a word that you will hear said all the time.

**Craig:** Yes. I apologize to your mother.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, yeah, that is true. I have basically the same… — I use the same essential rule set. I will call the prior writer if, always if it is an original script, but even if it is somebody that was close to an adaptation or whatever. Or even if there were two prior writers, I will call them.

Yes. If it is I am one of 100 people that have come and gone, or if the studio has had a particularly bad situation; they just are like, “Leave that person be,” then I won’t do it. I have to say, I have never had a bad one of those conversations. They have always gone really well. If anything, the writers that you are calling are grateful that you are acknowledging that they existed.

So, it has always gone well. And so, as a general etiquette thing, if we are talking about best practices, I would say to our fellow professional writers listening: do this. And by the way, I have to ask the studio. I always say, “Do you mind if I call so and so?” They never care. And do it. It knits you together in a better way. And I have to believe…

In fact, I will tell you a story. I did this… — Well, I will start with in the future, which was in the past. Sorry. [laughs] I need notes for this story already.

**John:** Yeah. So you are time traveling. The Esperanto threw you off.

**Craig:** About two years ago I was having dinner with a friend. She is a producer, and she saw a guy she knew and said, “Oh, blah-blah-blah, come on over.” I won’t use names. And she introduced him to me and she said, “He’s a writer,” and I shook his hand.

And he looked at me and he said, “Wait a second, you are Craig Mazin?” And I said, “Yeah.” And he said, “Dude, seven years ago you called me because you were rewriting me on something, and I never forgot that, and it was the nicest thing. And I really appreciate it.”

And he had been walking… — Seven years he remembered that, which told me probably that nobody else had done it in the seven years that had lapsed. And so I urge everybody to do this. It just, I don’t know, it brings us together.

I’m very Pollyanna today.

**John:** You are. But, I think, I’ve had the same experience. One of my first interactions with Aline Brosh McKenna was on a project that I was going to be coming on board. And it was really her thing, so I had to sort of talk to her. I wanted to talk with her about sort of (A) that she felt okay about it, (B) is sort of figure out why she wasn’t going to be doing the next draft, and sort of what was up with that. And it was good. And we became better friends after that.

Same with the Wibberleys. The Wibberleys rewrote me on the second Charlie’s Angels, and I came back in and rewrote them. And we talked, and talked, and talked, and talked, and it was really good. And so I never met them in person until the premiere of Charlie’s Angels, but I knew who they were. And we actually ended up going through arbitration on that. It was the friendliest arbitration you are ever going to find because we had done that early talking.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s a great point, by the way, that when it does come time for arbitration, there is a human being on the other end of that thing. And I think a lot of these really ugly arbitrations are about people who are just names on a piece of paper, and who haven’t spoken with you, and you don’t think are real. They are just people out to screw you.

And I do think it helps immensely when you do get to an arbitration to just know that we are all writers trying, you know. So that is my big etiquette speech on that.

Now, on the flip side though: What happens when you find out that you are being rewritten? And I will tell you, the first movie — this was back in 1996, I believe — It was the first job I ever had was an original script that my then writing partner and I did for Disney. And we did our two drafts, but you know, we were true rookies. And an actor was attached.

The movie essentially got a green light, and then they do what they do which is not trust a movie to 25 year olds, but to hire a couple of guys. And they hired Steve Rudnick and Leo Benvenuti who had done The Santa Clause, and were pretty big at Disney.

And they asked that I send over the script, the Final Draft file, or I think we had Final Draft then. And I did. I put it on a disc. [laughs] You know, an actual disc for those guys. It was the era that we lived in. And I wrote a note. It was sort of like it was the file, and then a note that was a file that was entitled, “For Steve and Leo: please read.”

And the note was basically, “Greg and I are really happy that you guys are coming on and we are really excited that you are going to take the script and carry it somewhere great. And if you have any questions or just want to say hi, this is our phone number, and this is our email,” I don’t think we had email, “and thank you so much.”

And they never picked up the phone or said anything. And I just thought that was lame. And, you know, when they got fired, and we got brought back, I felt glee frankly. Because I had thought they had treated two rookies unnecessarily coldly.

**John:** Yeah. Especially after you reached out to them and made it so easy for them to contact you, and made it clear that it wasn’t like a weird bad feeling, that they weren’t going to be walking in to get punched.

**Craig:** Right. Quite the opposite, you know? But I guess my point is, too, when you are being rewritten, and these things happen, nothing wrong with welcoming the next guy along. You didn’t get fired because he got you fired. You got fired because you got fired. And then this woman comes along to rewrite you, and you should be nice to her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or him.

**John:** It is hard to separate the anger and frustration you feel about being fired, about no longer being on board this project. You are angry at the producers, the director, the studio, whoever didn’t believe in your ability to carry the project further forward. And that anger is real, and you have to own it, and try not to be a maniac on the phone when you get the news. But you are going to feel those feelings.

But the guy who is coming on board, it isn’t his fault. And he is not the one who did it to you.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** So anything you can do to reach out. And a lot of times, through the internet, and through how stuff works, it is not that hard to find out who that person is, and figure out the mutual friends or whatever, and try to reach out.

It hurts. And I feel like the times I have been replaced by people and they haven’t acknowledged me have been the situations where the anger just festers longer — my anger about sort of no longer being on board with the project, and just sort of the wondering.

Having that conversation with the next writer at least gives you some closure, and is like, “Okay, I can see what is going on here. I can give them some helpful tips. I can let them know that this one person is an absolute maniac, and to not trust that.” Or, the things that they are trying to do have already been done and it doesn’t mean that they won’t work now in this iteration, but let them know where the bodies are buried.

**Craig:** And then an important thing to point out about all of this stuff is that that phase that you are talking about, where you have either been fired, or you are taking over for somebody that has been fired, is all pre-premiere. That doesn’t mean that you are not going to have your name on the movie. That doesn’t mean that they are not going to have their name on the movie.

You may be sharing credit on this thing. And if that happens, you will be together. And you will be together promoting the movie. And you will be together talking about the movie. Or you will do so separately, but that brings us to a whole other layer on this which is how to deal with press and publicity when you are talking about your movie and you are sharing credit with somebody.

**John:** You can probably generalize it out with your movie versus the movie that got made. And different movies I have been involved with, I’m not at all happy with the final movie. But I am not going to throw the movie under the bus either. I’m not going to throw the filmmakers under the bus.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You are trying to be honest about what the experience was, but not negative.

**Craig:** Yeah. While I am entertained by people who throw things under the bus on some sort of lurid level, on the other hand it makes me uncomfortable. And I definitely just feel like there is no cause to be undiplomatic. And you know what is the word I am looking for? The word I am looking for is uncharitable. Don’t be uncharitable in the press.

The simple things in terms of etiquette that I like to talk about any co-writers: I talk about what they brought, and I don’t talk about what they didn’t bring. I talk about the director in a charitable way. And I talk about the actors and what they brought. And there is a funny game that goes on. And you notice it very early on in your career as a screenwriter when you start going through press.

The natural tendency of everybody who isn’t a screenwriter is to talk about everything on screen that wasn’t in the script. And at first you think to yourself, “Why are they being so mean? Why are they obsessed over the 12 adlibs or the thing that they came up with on the day? Why is that so important to talk about?” Because you will hear it all the time in interviews with actors and directors — “You know, that wasn’t even in the script. We just came up with that on the day.”

Well here is why they are saying it, not because they hate you or they disrespect you. It is because they are proud. They are proud of literally writing one-tenth of this thing that you wrote nine-tenths of. Or, maybe the ratio is even more out of whack. But they are just excited because they did it, and that is okay.

And similarly when I talk about the script, I don’t talk about all of the wonderful things that I wrote, “Well I wrote that, and I wrote that, and I wrote that.” I talk about how it was a wonderfully collaborative effort, and then inevitably they will ask, “Was there a lot of adlibbing on the set?” And inevitably I answer, “There was some adlibbing. I mean, largely the guys stuck to the script. Or largely the director followed the script. But always in the moment because we have such a wonderful cast, they are going to come up with interesting things.”

There is your vanilla pudding answer. But you know what, it is actually accurate. So, just be charitable and be cool.

**John:** My frustration comes… — There are actors who will openly disparage the script, not just saying like, “Oh, we came up with a whole bunch of new stuff.” And you and I know who we are talking about. We are not going to say his name because we hope to… — We should be so lucky to work with him. But who actually say like, “I don’t like the script at all. I hated the script. But I thought…”

**Craig:** I will never work with him. There is no chance that I will ever work with him. [laughs] It’s not my kind of guy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, whatever. He is not the only one.

**John:** And I worked with a probably bigger actor who had similar kinds of things where he would… — It wasn’t just like, “Oh, we adlibbed some stuff.” It was like, “Oh, we ripped out the pages and started over from scratch.”

It is like, yeah, you managed to rip up the pages, but somehow you ended up saying exactly what I had written. So it is great that you were able to sort of recreate what I had done, but that is not really…

**Craig:** Look, when they are being truly aggressive… — Well, okay, two things. First, if you can end up having a good professional relationship with the actor, the odds of that occurring go down. That is not always the case. There are times when you write a script, you are disappeared off the movie, and then the actor eight months later is on TV talking about how your script sucked. That is brutal. They shouldn’t do that. I wish they wouldn’t do that. And there is nothing charitable to say about that.

If you can have a positive relationship with the actor, 9 times out of 10 they are not going to do that just because now you are a human being that they are not going to be mean to. In the overall analysis though, we should be clear about one thing: Nobody really cares.

Nobody really believes that actors… Either people really believe that actors write everything, because they don’t know that screenplays exist, or if they know that screenplays exist, don’t really believe that actors write every line. Everybody kind of knows how movies are made if they know how movies are made. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter anyway.

Either way it doesn’t matter. So I don’t get too worked up over it, I guess, is my point. I would rather take the high road and be the guy that is charitable. And if somebody takes shots at the script in the press, what are you going to do?

**John:** Yes. I think we are calling for best behavior by writers because we can’t get best behavior out of everyone else. Control what you can control. Do what best you can do for yourself.

**Craig:** Listen. If you are an actor, or a director or producer and you are listening to this, you should also please show best behavior. Because I mean unless someone has been a total jerk, you know, come on.

**John:** I think the number of A-list actors who are listening to this podcast is low. But maybe there are some future A-list actors listening to the show and we will inspire them to do the right thing.

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly.

**John:** That’s my hope.

**Craig:** Thank you. You have given me great hope. We have changed the future, precisely. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s finish up with one more etiquette question. Mike asks, “What is the etiquette in following up with producers to see if they have read your script?”

So, I think he is talking about sort of like a spec kind of situation. I have heard one month is reasonable. I don’t want to be pushy, but I want to stay on their radar. One month is a really long time, if you are actually working for them, that is far too long.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, no. If you are working for somebody, that is a different story. At that point they are actually just hurting the project by not doing their job. Now, that said, there are some places where the wheel turns really slowly.

I mean, I remember, I worked on a project for Bruckheimer. And I love those guys, I love… — Mike Stenson and Chad Oman, great guys, would take forever — would take forever — to get back to me. Sometimes it would take them two months.

But then they would come back to me, and then the notes were really good, and we would do another draft, and then it would happen again. And, you know, once I realized that that was their rhythm, I was like, “Well, you know, I will see if I can fit other things in. This is one of those deals.”

But if you are sending a spec to a producer with a query letter or something like that… — Is it quAIRy or quEARy?

**John:** I think either one is acceptable.

**Craig:** I like quEARy. Then, yeah, I think a month is a pretty good check in time. Maybe three weeks. Not bad.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe it is a situation where you met the producer that said, “Hey, send me that thing.” And you sent them that thing, and you haven’t heard back. A month? Somewhere between two weeks and a month is probably good. I mean, that first check in is just like, “Want to make sure you got it. And make sure that it was what you were looking for.” It reminds them that you exist.

There have been times where I have asked people to do a first person thing. So a lot of times with the first person posts on the blog, I will get like six of them at once and I will sort of pace them out, but then I will kind of forget about one. And so it is really good when that person will remind me, like, “Hey, I wrote this thing for you. I just want to make sure that it is okay.” And it is like, “Yeah, that was exactly the right phrasing, this is exactly the way you would talk to a producer saying, like, ‘Hey, just want to make sure you got this thing that I sent you.'”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the truth of how this all shakes out per human psychology, and Hollywood human psychology is incredibly predictable human psychology, very consistent human psychology. If you send 15 follow-up letters for your script, and it is good, you were persistent. If it is bad, you were a lunatic nudge, and a stalker. And that is the way it goes.

Everything will ultimately be processed through the lens of the quality of the script. And since that is already finished by the time you are writing your follow-ups, I would just advise to you: Relax and follow up as you feel the need to.

**John:** Mike’s second question here was, “Do producers usually give you a yay/nay, or is the lack of response code for a pass?”

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, you know, I always say there are 14 million ways to say no, and only one way to say yes. And so, everything other than the word “yes” is “no.”

**John:** Yeah. At a certain point you can assume silence is a no. If they are not getting back to you even about your checking in, that you got something, then it is a pass. And that is okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. And don’t bother sending strongly-worded letters trying to teach them etiquette because they don’t care. And they will just never read anything else that you ever send. It is just pointless. And depending on who they are, they may just be deluged with scripts. Or they may have just really, really hated it. Sometimes it is your fault.

**John:** Or it is just not for them at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They read three pages and were like, “Nope, this isn’t a movie I want to make.” And so they are not taking the time to email you back or give you an official pass or whatever else. Sorry.

Eventually that becomes your agent’s job to follow up with that. And so they, on one of the weekly phone calls they have with that person, they will say, “Did you read this?” “Yeah, it wasn’t for us.” And that is the effective pass.

**Craig:** Yes. That is exactly right. That is exactly right.

**John:** So, Craig, this week I had the good fortune of being asked to be a mentor for some of the new members of the WGA . So, and I think it is every six months or every quarter as the WGA brings in new members, people who sold their first script or got hired on a TV show, or come in through some new media kind of project, which I don’t really understand, they are invited to the Guild to sort of talk them through, like, “This is the Writers Guild. This is how your residuals work.” And all that kind of stuff

**Craig:** I, too, am a mentor to lovely new writers.

**John:** How many mentees do you have?

**Craig:** I share mine with Ted Elliott. The two of us are team-mentoring I think five writers.

**John:** [laughs] Oh god! I fear for those people. They are going to get so confused.

**Craig:** It just means that I am mentoring them because I don’t think Ted writes them back. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] If Ted wrote them back, Ted Elliott — who is a brilliant man — but Ted will write them like 19 dense paragraphs about esoteric details of the WGA.

**Craig:** Ted’s normal speech mode is technical manual.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yeah. I don’t know… — I knew when I took them on as…

It was sort of like when Ted and I started The Artful Writer I knew that that meant that I was starting The Artful Writer. He did write one blog article in — I think we were operative for six years — he wrote one article.

**John:** It was your site, exactly.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right.

**John:** So, anyway, my mentees, they are great. And so I think my official commitment for them is that I have to have some meal with them, and then I will answer their questions as questions come up via email or phone or things like that. But I have a great group.

And so what was exiting talking about spec scripts is this one guy sold two spec scripts in the last six months.

**Craig:** Wow! Great.

**John:** And I’m like, wow, that happens?! That’s great. I had sort of assumed that spec scripts weren’t really happening now because it is not my business, but…

**Craig:** No, but they are. The market has definitely revived, or relatively revived.

**John:** Yeah. So it is not the heyday of the giant 7-figure deals for everything, but still that’s great.

**Craig:** No, it’s not the Last Boy Scout kind of days, but it is not as bad as it was sort of like around 2006 or whatever, where literally no one even bothered.

**John:** That was good. Exciting.

**Craig:** That is good. Excellent. Well good for him, or her.

**John:** Hurray.

**Craig:** So I feel like we…

**John:** We talked about some etiquette, yeah.

**Craig:** …we bettered the world.

**John:** That’s the hope. That is the hope with any podcast, I think, is to make the world a little bit better than where we found it before.

**Craig:** This is my only outlet for bettering the world. Everything else that I do is about ruining it, so, thank you for providing me with this opportunity.

**John:** I try to provide a positive forum for your happy thoughts so that all of your negative thoughts can be translated into things.

**Craig:** Yes. I have to go out and ruin someone’s life now.

**John:** Craig, thank you for bringing some sunshine into my day.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? You are always a ray of sunshine. I wonder if that is going to work its way into the… — Do we dare talk about this ridiculous drinking game? Your guys lost their minds.

**John:** Yes. So here is the thing. And we will see if this actually stays in the edit or not. There is a drinking game that was formed about our podcast. And I assumed that it was…

It was presented to me as this anonymous cabal of people who did this. And they were like, “What do you think of this?” And I’m like, “Oh, it is kind of amusing.” But then I realized that it is actually some of my people and some of my posse are doing it. So, I have given them the official notice that I want nothing to do with this. And so if they end up making it, that is their extracurricular project, but I am having no official part of it.

**Craig:** It is so strange. [laughs] But it is fascinating. I will say that there is something very flattering about having identifiable verbal ticks, because you can’t really hear your own verbal ticks, but apparently I start a lot of sentences by saying, “Look,” which I didn’t realize. That’s cool. I like that.

**John:** And I do this thing where you will make a very long pronouncement about something, and I will say, “Yeah.”

**Craig:** Now that I noticed. [laughs] Because sometimes I feel like I have just delivered this wonderful sermon on the mount, and then there is a little bit of pause, and then, “Yup.” And I think, “Oh, god!”

**John:** Yeah. But how am I supposed to respond to this sermon on the mount? That is the whole issue. I can’t just applaud. Applause sounds weird.

**Craig:** I mean, why not. I think you should applaud.

**John:** Okay, I probably should applaud.

**Craig:** You should applaud. You know what we really need is like a Robin Quivers in here, too.

**John:** Oh, thank you! That is what we are completely missing. Someone who thinks all of our jokes are really funny…

**Craig:** That is exactly right. Somebody that is laughing at everything we are saying, so you don’t have to do it. She does it. In fact, let’s get Aline. Let’s get Aline Brosh McKenna to do it.

**John:** She is not busy writing 15 other movies.

**Craig:** No! And also she is naturally prone to laugh at everything we say.

**John:** That’s a good thing. It’s a very key point.

**Craig:** She is not at all demanding, or critical.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one scares me more than Aline Brosh McKenna. You know, I have said this to her a hundred times. I’m frightened to death of her.

**John:** Yeah. One disapproving glare from Aline Brosh McKenna and I am ruined. I am in bed for the rest of the day.

**Craig:** Literally done for the day.

**John:** What is interesting also I found is that I listen to most of my podcasts at double speed, which some people criticize as, like, that is not the true art, but I am used to everything being double speed. And so on the rare occasions where I have to listen to things on the web, so I am not listening to it through my little player, I listen to it in normal speed and everyone’s voices sound completely wrong.

And people who I think are really, really funny are noticeably less funny when that pacing is different.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I like this idea. I’m going to start doing that, too, listening to it at double speed.

**John:** Yeah. Because there is no reason this podcast should be 34 minutes long. It should be 17 minutes long.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well let’s see if we can get it down to five minutes; let’s go quadruple speed.

**John:** Good. Done.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t think you should edit this out. This is the most fun we have had yet.

**John:** Good. So it is in there and so everyone can enjoy it. And they can enjoy another week’s podcast. This was episode 26. Episode 27 will be about something.

**Craig:** Something exciting.

**John:** And we will talk to you then. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/optioning-a-novel-and-the-golden-age-of-television).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, Episode 25. This is a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m fine. I’m amazed. We’ve gotten to 25 of these things.

**John:** 25. That is a quarter of a century, or some sort of centennial celebration. A quarter of the way there.

**Craig:** It is, uh, some kind of anniversary. Gold, or diamond, or something, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you get me?

**John:** I got you nothing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I got you topics. I got you questions. I’ve got things we can discuss.

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s good.

**John:** We can put them off for a little while if you wanted to blather about something. I could find some other network promo that I could talk you through.

**Craig:** I don’t like your characterization of blather. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Let’s just get right to some questions, because I actually have some pretty good ones this week.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Cody writes in to ask, “How does one obtain the rights to a novel, etc? I know I need to contact their agent/lawyer, but I guess what I am asking is how do I go about it without coming off like a complete novice or tool? Or, knowing me, most likely both?”

So, a kind of very basic question that is sort of procedural: How do you get the rights to a book. But, also, some psychology, so thinking about how you are going to approach a writer, an author, a novelist, and convince them that you are going to be the person who can adapt their book.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Have you optioned any books yourself?

**Craig:** It’s funny that this question comes up because I did it for the first time just a few months ago.

**John:** So tell us about it.

**Craig:** It was a book that I loved as a kid called The Hero from Otherwhere. And it is a sort of fantasy/fiction novel about two boys who end up in this fantasy world. I just always loved it, and for years I would sort of check… — First of all, I couldn’t remember what the name of it was.

And then with the Internet now there are forums. I think there is a forum literally called What’s that Book? And where you just say, “Okay, I remember three things, and there is something from the cover,” and then 100 people say it was this. So, I figured out what it was, and then I had…

So the first thing you do is you check and see are the rights available. And that is something where ideally you have an attorney, and they go to some sort of… — There must be some central database somewhere that keeps track.

**John:** I don’t think there is a central. I think they are actually just contacting people.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah. So you just had your attorney do it?

**Craig:** Yeah. He figured out that the rights were not available, and so I just let it go for many years, but then it just kept popping up. And so finally, a few months ago, I asked him again, and he said, “Look at that? They are available.”

And he knew that the rights holder was the daughter of the author. He had died many years ago. And she was an older lady, and I said, “You know what? Have my agency, CAA, reach out to her, and see if she is interested in optioning the rights. And if she is, then I will call her.”

And it was actually a very interesting phone call, because I called — and I have never done this before — and a very nice lady answered the phone. And she knew that I was going to be calling. And I said, “Listen, it’s a book that meant a lot to me as a kid, and I would love to adapt it if at all possible.”

And she said, “Well, I have to tell you that two days ago my husband died.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** And I was like, “This is going so badly. What’s wrong with my timing?” So, my heart sank, of course, like, oh my god. And I was just like, “I am so sorry.” I mean, because now I feel like a real vulgarian talking about options and books. Her poor husband died. And she said, “No, no. I knew that you were calling, and I said to my husband when he was in the hospital that somebody was calling about this. And this book meant a lot to my father, and to me, and to my husband. And he said to me, ‘Maybe this will be the one.’ So, I feel like an angel brought you to me.”

And, as you know, of course, I am…

**John:** Craig Mazin is all about angels. I mean, angels guide most of your decisions.

**Craig:** [laughs] My existence is proof that there is no God. So this was even more of a burden upon me. And I felt…you know…

But at the same time, it was just a very nice moment. I mean, and maybe if there is a lesson in general to be applied here it is that when you talk to people who own the rights to things like novels, presuming it is not a very popular thing — maybe it is a little thing — it means a lot to them. It is not just commerce. It is emotional to them, especially if it is a relative and the author has passed away. It is part of their family, so you have to be very respectful about it, and go about it the right way.

And it worked out.

**John:** That’s great. So after this conversation, what was the follow up?

**Craig:** So then I spoke to my lawyer, and I said, “Write up what is a very standard, fair agreement to option this novel. Don’t lowball. We don’t have to highball either. Just come in with what the sort of industry standard is for a property like this.”

And he sent her an option agreement, and she signed it.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Wonderful. So this will be a project that you will adapt here in the near future and hopefully turn it into a great movie.

**Craig:** That’s my hope. I have been talking about it with a few people, and it has its challenges, but there is a great story there. So, we will see if I can get it done. I would like to think I could.

**John:** Great. Over the course of my career there have been three books that I have been directly involved with getting the rights for. The first was Big Fish. So, Big Fish I got set as a manuscript, so it is not really the same situation in that my agency was representing the rights; they sent over a book as a manuscript, which is basically just a box full of pages. And you just flip through the pages and I said, “I know how to make this into a movie.”

I went into Sony. I pitched it to Sony. Sony got the rights for me. And so my name was never on the option agreement for that book. But a large part of adapting that book was my relationship with Daniel Wallace, and getting to know him, and getting to know sort of all the secrets of the book and figuring out what that was.

And the reason I have been active with Big Fish throughout all of these years is I have a great relationship with Daniel Wallace. And he has seen the project grow from this very nascent idea to now several different kinds of iterations.

Books I tried to get myself, or did get myself… — I remember going after this great book that I actually just found on the shelf this morning called Summer of the Monkeys. And I will find the actual author’s name and put up a link to it. Summer of the Monkeys was this great book that I remembered again from childhood, same situation as you. But, of course, it was a much easier title to remember because it is about a bunch of monkeys.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Summer of the Monkeys is this great story about this circus train that crashes, all of these monkeys get lost in these woods in the south, and this boy and his dog have to basically catch all of the monkeys. And he is getting paid money for each monkey he can bring back to the circus.

And it was a really great, charming story. Same guy that wrote Where the Red Fern Grows.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Rawls, I think, was his last name. I will find it.

So, I wanted to get the rights to this book, and at this point I don’t know if I even… — I guess I had an agent, but I was just doing this myself. And this was also pre-Internet age, so I had to flip to the front of the book, and you see who the publisher is. You call New York City information, because all of the publishing houses are in New York City.

This is actually, in the age of the Internet there is probably an online way to do this, but this was the old-fashioned way. You called New York information — (212) 555-1212. You ask for that publisher. You call that publisher. You ask for their sub-rights department. And this is what is called subsidiary rights. These are the people who represent the publishing rights on properties, or the non-publishing rights on properties. So, film rights, and everything else.

And they are the ones who will have the contact information for who owns the film rights on a book. So, I got this woman’s name, and this address, and I figured that this must be the wife of the author, the widow. So, I wrote a letter. I heard nothing for a couple weeks, wrote a follow up letter, and she finally wrote back and said that someone else had the rights, and she was really sorry.

And I eventually sort of forgot about it and got busy with other things. But they finally made a movie of that book, which I never saw.

**Craig:** Oh, somebody did make a movie of it?

**John:** Someone did. And it actually… — Dave Matthews is apparently in that movie.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Isn’t that so odd?

**Craig:** Yeah, that is. You know, the thing about rights is that they have become increasingly difficult because everybody who writes a book is seemingly already on the lookout to sell the film rights. And so a lot of them get snapped up. And sometimes it is particularly difficult when you are dealing with international titles.

Lindsay Doran, one of our favorite producers who we discussed in another podcast, brought me and Scott Frank a book that we wanted to adapt, a really cool book called Three Bags Full. And it was a German novel, and basically — it was a great idea — a shepherd in Ireland, in a little village in Ireland, is murdered. It’s a murder mystery. And his sheep take it upon themselves to solve the crime. [laughs]

And sheep, as it turns out, are particularly advantaged in certain ways, and incredibly disadvantaged in other ways, like their propensity to panic, and the fact that they can’t remember anything. And it was really great, and we really wanted to do it, but the rights were…

**John:** In your head was this going to be a live action movie or animated?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was going to be a Babe kind of deal.

**John:** Oh, perfect.

**Craig:** But, god, the rights were just so entangled with the German companies, and became very difficult. And the other day Lindsay and I were talking about it and we just thought it is never… we will never untangle that knot. It’s a shame, but you have to try at the very least.

**John:** A more recent example for me was Steve Hely wrote a great book called How I Became a Famous Novelist. And I read this little short book review blurb and said, “Well that sounds great.” So I tracked down… — I figured out that this one person who was doing a blog written in the author’s voice, the book is about a guy who writes a book.

And I was able to Google and find the writer of the book within the book, and that there was a blog that was sort of his self-important point of view. And I realized that Steve Hely himself is probably doing this blog. And so I just emailed at that address and said, “Hey, I’m John August. I have done these things. I really want to see your book. Can I see your book?” And they sent me an early copy.

I loved it. And because I sort of had been that first person to reach out, I was able to sit down with him and convince him that I was the person to adapt his book and to make it into a movie.

That ended up not being the case. And I ended up getting busy with a lot of other stuff that made it impossible to sort of do that movie, but reaching out directly to the author, when you can find a way to do that, is a great way to approach it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I should say that you have to, like in all things, you have to gauge your value. If you are a new screenwriter, or you have no track record, then don’t think you are going to be getting the rights to a popular title. It ain’t going to happen.

**John:** But there may be a smaller book that no one is actually approaching the rights on, and if you are a person who can do it, and you can convince that writer that you are the person who can do it, maybe you will get it.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so you probably won’t get things that are still in galleys, or unpublished, or on their way out. But these little things like the books you remember that are now out of print, or have just been languishing somewhere — those little uncovered gems — those are real opportunities for you.

And it also gives you quite a bit of leverage when you do write a screenplay, if you write a spec screenplay based on a title that you have rights, it does give you a bit of leverage when it is time to sell that script.

**John:** Yeah. Have you read How I Became a Famous Novelist?

**Craig:** I haven’t. No.

**John:** Oh, okay, well I am sending it to you like right now because it is great. I will also put a link to it in the show notes. It is still one of the funniest books I have ever read and someone else has the rights to it now. And they are going to make a movie, and it is going to be great.

**Craig:** Can you say who it is?

**John:** Oh, I don’t remember who it is. I don’t remember who got it. But Steve Hely himself ended up getting hired onto 30 Rock, and now he is working on The Office.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** He is doing just fine, so there is really no sad part to this story, other than the fact that the movie didn’t get made.

**Craig:** By the way, it was me. I got the rights.

**John:** I thought so. It was some sort of clever pseudonym.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So to summarize our guidance on getting the rights to a book, I would say — this is my advice — if you have a way to contact the writer directly, try to contact the writer directly. If you don’t, you go through sub-rights at the publisher to try to find who the contact person is. If you already have an agent or a lawyer, they can help you there.

Ultimately when it came time to option the rights to How I Became a Famous Novelist, that is the thing that my lawyer did. My lawyer talked to his lawyer, and it was all happy and good. And, try it. People might say yes.

**Craig:** And be nice. And just remember that they have something that you want, so be respectful and seductive.

**John:** Yeah. Good. Our next question: CeCe, this person named CeCe asks, “When can you say you wrote a script? Something like Big Fish or Go are obvious. Go was a spec, and you were the only writer. And on Big Fish, although it was adapted from source material, you were the only listed screenwriter. But for something like Charlie’s Angels, there are other writers who share that credit, same with other panelists listed. Can or do those writers also say they wrote it? I guess a more specific question is, is there some sort of unspoken rule in the industry among writers about who claims credit out in the world? Does the guy who did most of the work generally say he wrote it, but subsequent writers that did enough credit, but weren’t the first writer don’t? Does it even matter?”

That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** That is a really good question. I think the last question in the series of questions is probably the operative one. I mean, look, it is a little… — Most of the movies that I have my name on, I am a co-writer, not an “and” co-writer but an “&” co-writer. I wrote with, in conjunction with, other people like Todd Phillips and Scott Armstrong, or David Zucker, or whatever, Pat Proft.

It is a little unwieldy at times to say, you know, “When I co-wrote blankety blank,” or “When I was co-writing such-and-such;” it is just unwieldy. It is just simpler to say “writing,” because the truth is the credits are a matter of public record. It is not like you are pulling a fast one over on anybody.

If you, I suppose, if I… — I don’t have any credits that are just “Story by.” If I were just “Story by” on a movie, I probably wouldn’t say I wrote it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would say I have a “Story by” credit on it. But, I guess the big question is does it really matter? Not really. To me at least. You know, if you worked on it, and your name is on it, your name is on it.

**John:** Yeah. I think I am with you in terms of I wouldn’t say I wrote a movie if… — I wouldn’t say I wrote or produced a movie if I only got “Story by” credit. And so on the upcoming Dark Shadows, I ended up just getting “Story by” credit. And I certainly worked on that movie; I can absolutely claim that. But I would draw a distinction between “worked on” and “wrote.” And I worked on Dark Shadows, and I worked on a lot of movies.

And Aline Brosh McKenna actually emailed me after I posted on my “About” section, or some other blog post, about the movies that I have worked on. And she was like, “Well, isn’t that sort of claiming credit for it?” And I said, “That’s an interesting discussion, whether I am claiming credit for things by acknowledging that I worked on these movies that don’t have my name on them.”

So, like I worked on Jurassic Park III. I worked on Minority Report. And I am not sort of claiming that those were mine, but the litmus test, the threshold I sort of had for which movies I worked on, is did my pen go all the way through that script? So, did I not just like drop in for one quick little moment and then drop back out? Was that entire script, and the responsibility for that whole movie, within my word processor for a period of time? And those are the movies I felt like I could honestly say I worked on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could say you worked on those for sure, because that is accurate. For me, I’m a little different on it. I feel like the movies that I have done, that I have worked on but don’t have credit on, I don’t like talking about it because I feel like, hmm, how should I put it?

I just feel like it is probably a bummer for the people that do have credit. Because the truth is on a few of the them I don’t have a word in there. It was like you came in, and then suddenly the studio went, “Wait. Wait. We don’t want to do this kind of movie. We want to do this entirely different movie with different actors,” and all the rest of it. And I’m gone. My script doesn’t resemble what is up there. I don’t even ask for credit.

So, I just feel like it would be a bummer for them to go, “Oh, and then there is Craig Mazin out there saying that he worked on it.” Well, now, did he…

See, here is the thing that people have got to understand: Our writing credits’ rules state that you can, in certain circumstances like an original project, you can write nearly half of a movie and not get credit. So, if you say, “I worked on it,” that means you have done anywhere between zero and 50%. There is a certain vague…

So, my thing is I don’t talk about it. I just don’t. I don’t talk about it because I feel like, I don’t know. Because I don’t want people doing it to me. So don’t do that to me. You do it to everybody else. [laughs]

**John:** To me, I just feel that it is a little bit dishonest to talk about the career of screenwriting, and sort of like how I have actually made my living and not acknowledge the actual things I am working on. Because if you just look at the movies that I have made, that have my name on it, well that is great. But that is not really in some ways the bulk of what my career has been.

The bulk of my career has been a lot of things I sort of came in and carried along. I carried the football for a while on them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that is, I don’t know. To me, if you are being honest about what the actual day-to-day job of screenwriting and what the career of screenwriting is, sometimes it is that — being the person who carried this movie from this point to this point for awhile.

And in no way, whenever I talk about movies that I have worked on, and I don’t have my name on them, I try to make sure I am really clear about the fact that this isn’t my movie in any specific way. I don’t own this as my own, but this is the work I did on it, and this is why I did the work I did on it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s fair. I mean, look, this used to be, I think, more of a controversy pre-Internet. If you get hired on something now, it is on the Internet because there are so many sites that rely on pumping out marginally interesting information about Hollywood.

So, you know, I get hired to do something and it is on some website. So it is part of the public record. But, it is a little…

Sometimes I think, you know, it is a bummer that the best work I have done probably — not the best work — some of the best work I have done will never be associated with my name. And some of the worst work I have done is associated with my name. And that, unfortunately, I don’t know; I chalk it up to part of the price of the job we do. So, we have two different answers to your question, CeCe.

**John:** Yeah. And in a general framework I should say we were talking about specific WGA screenwriting credit versus having worked on something. There is continually a discussion about should there be some kind of acknowledgement of participating writers in the end credits of movies, or something else. And the two sides of the debate are basically: no, there shouldn’t be, because it diminishes perceived value of the actual “Written by” credit; and then there is the other side of the argument that says, “Okay, what does this mean that you were acknowledging the catering truck driver, but you are not acknowledging the person who wrote a tremendous amount of this movie?”

**Craig:** Well one day we could fill an entire podcast I bet with that debate. Because that is a raging one. And I have, and I know this is going to surprise you, extraordinarily strong opinions about that. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It is going to be an Evergreen topic. That is never going to be solved, and it is never going to be solved to satisfaction.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s do our third and final question.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Ben asks, “What are your thoughts on what everyone else is calling the ‘Golden Age of TV.’ As a new writer trying to find a place, I am finding myself torn between the love of film, and also the lure of TV shows and networks such AMC, Showtime, HBO, and even new ventures on NetFlix. I was halfway through watching season one of Homeland and I started to get the bug to try to write a TV spec instead of a feature. Is it more realistic to become a working writer in TV nowadays than in film? What would you advise to a new writer? Pick TV or film?”

**Craig:** Hmm. Do you want to take a stab at that one first?

**John:** Yeah. You should write TV.

**Craig:** I think so. I mean, the only caveat is this: If you are a feature writer, you are a feature writer. Don’t force yourself into a square peg, sorry [laughs], into a square hole if you are a round peg. I don’t think my mind is structured in such way as to write television. I don’t think I would be very good at it. I tend to enjoy writing stories that are self-contained, that arc over 100 to 120 pages. That is just the way my mind works.

And, not surprisingly, I like going to movies more than I like watching TV. But in particular, if you like drama, specifically the kind of adult dramas that are flourishing right now on television, then television. Because they are not making those for movies anymore.

**John:** Not at all. I mean, there are whole genres that we have just conceded to TV, because TV is doing them better. And God bless it.

And if you look at, we talk about sort of auteur theory and filmmaker culture, and the way that people, these great movies of the 70s where you have these visionary people coming in and changing the way that cinema is. That is where we are at, I think, now with our TV. Our TV showrunners have come in with such a specific clear vision and a voice for what these shows are going to be. They are wielding these incredible writing staffs that are generating just amazing hours of television. And half hours of television, too. I think that is the unheralded thing now, too.

You look at the New Girl, which is a great half hour, that is specific and weird and amazing. I think the better writing is happening in TV. I think there are more jobs in TV.

**Craig:** No doubt.

**John:** Yeah. If you are a great writer who wants to work in TV, you should work in TV. And you will write some features, too, and it will all be happy and good. But that is where the excitement is. That is where the energy is. And it could swing back.

You know, I can see some of these TV showrunners are going to go back to film. And they may bring some of that awesomeness with them. J.J. Abrams is doing movies now. Joss Whedon is doing movies now. That is going to happen more and more. But, TV is still where the best stuff is happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Again, for drama, for sure. It has as much to do, I think, with just the kind of audiences that these things address and the structure of the business. Adult audiences, I think, who are looking for drama are more likely to show up in business-satisfying ways for the companies for television than they are for film.

And so it makes sense that they would go ahead and then focus their firepower in television. Television is a little bit of a lower risk for them because, you know, you are not spending… — I mean a small studio movie, a small studio drama is $35 million. Big ones, you know, like for instance State of Play was a big bet. It was an adult drama. It was a big bet. I think it cost $100 million. TV shows don’t cost $100 million, at least not to start with.

So, it is a much lower risk bencher for them. There are more jobs. And there is a season to it. So there is a way; there is actually a protocol to follow to try and get hired. Movies, there is no protocol. It is kind of a crazy, like everybody is rushing into see The Who in Cincinnati, and hopefully you don’t get trampled.

There are much fewer movies being made, whereas television, reality kind of hit its peak and has pulled back a bit. And the other thing is television is unlimited by exhibition. You can keep making channels. The only thing that is stopping you from making more channels, I suppose, is the bandwidth of the delivery mechanism. But they keep squeezing that down in such a way that you can have 500, 600, 1,000 channels.

There are only so many movie theaters. There are only so many movie studios. So you are fighting over release dates. No one fights over a release date in television. There are so many reasons why television is a safer and more vibrant job market.

However, in addition to my caveat about if you are a movie guy write movies, if you are a comedy guy, I think movies are still a great place to be. Because television comedy is not yet back to where it was in its heyday, and I don’t know if it will ever get back there.

**John:** I think it will.

**Craig:** And if it does, that’s great. I mean, because a ton of guys really just suddenly found themselves outside in the cold going, “What happened?” And they are really funny people. I mean, it is funny — I was talking with, I won’t say who it was, but an excellent showrunner. Why not, I’m praising him? Steve Levitan. Great showrunner. Genius. And Modern Family is a terrific show. And he has been around forever.

And he was telling me how when they put their writing staff together for Modern Family it was like putting together an All Star team, because everybody was available. I mean, almost everybody, because sitcoms had been so decimated. So, hopefully those shows like New Girl and Modern Family help these networks see their way back to half hour sitcoms, because, man, I love sitcoms. I’ve always loved them.

**John:** Yeah. But I also think there is comedy that is happening at the edges, at sort of the edges of the dial. So the Portlandias, the weird little things that are right now off in sort of the cable universe where all of the great one-hour dramas sort of started. I think those half hours are starting off there.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Those shows are happening out in the cable universe. That sensibility will find its way back to the broadcast networks, and there will be more jobs. There will be more comedies like that.

**Craig:** I hope so. I mean, the good news is if you are a movie type of person and you writes comedy, there is still a strong desire on the part of studios to produce medium-budget comedies. And, frankly, all comedies are basically medium-budget. No one really spends a lot on them. You don’t need to.

But, yeah, the guy who wrote in and said that he is a Homeland fan, I think that tells us what kind of writer he is. And I would say, you don’t have to give up on movies, by the way, but yeah, television.

**John:** Television. You have two feature writers telling you to write in television.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** Maybe it is selfish. Maybe it is actually we just don’t want any competition, and that is why we are telling you to write television.

**Craig:** They are not competing with me. You are being selfish. I write silly movies. But, you know, look, they make dramas. I will say, if you want to be in the drama feature business, be a director-writer or writer-director. Guys like John Lee Hancock and James Mangold. These are guys who work in that area and they are able to generate material and direct. That is what the studios, I think, are looking for. Because if you are not writing action, like big action movies, it is tough.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, we got depressing again, didn’t we?

**John:** So we are going to spin this back around. TV is great. It’s the Golden Age of TV. This is a great time to write TV. Hooray for TV!

**Craig:** Hooray for TV!

**John:** We are not going to go into that depressing mode again.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** It’s a happy podcast.

**Craig:** You know, I feel like an angel brought me to you.

**John:** Ah, thank you very much, Craig. This is terrific.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It is. It is all a dream.

**Craig:** So beautiful.

**John:** We have one last piece of business. Because so many of our listeners are presumably WGA members, the WGA asked if we could mention on the podcast about the survey which they sent out. If you are WGA member, you should be getting a survey in your email inbox which is about working conditions. So, it is specifically about features, I think, talking about who you have worked for, what the situation was like. It is all anonymous. You should really fill it out because it is how we can get report cards to studios and producers, and it is a very good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if you are a WGA member, look for that in your mailbox. And if you don’t see it, you should email screensurvey@wga.org. And that is our piece of business there.

Craig, 25 podcasts!

**Craig:** 25 in the can, man. I mean, that is pretty great.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like quite an accomplishment. I remember when we were doing our first awkward podcast. It has gotten much, much easier.

**Craig:** I think so. And I wonder what we will be doing when it is like our 1,000th podcast, and we are both really old and irrelevant.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And by the way, and we are like still doing a podcast when the rest of the world is like, “Podcast?!”

**John:** I know. It will just be beamed directly into people’s brains.

**Craig:** Right. “Why aren’t they doing a Braincast? It is so lame.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, enjoy the phone calls from now, John.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, talk to you later.

**Craig:** All right, man. Bye-bye.

**John:** Bye.