Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nothing. [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a chore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** [laughs] It’s an NBC show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Weird.

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

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is a blessing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I agree.

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

**Craig:** That’s a good example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No radio plays.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** And a lovely woman.

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably not.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Perfect.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Eh, let’s go to questions.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

**John:** Know the answers.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** How much is written?

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s where I’m at.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Why don’t you go first.

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

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

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

**John:** And iOS.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Really?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That’s a good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, that’s super annoying.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh, it’s for iPad.

**Craig:** Got it.

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

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

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

**John:** It is.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s One Bad Thing.

**John:** One Bad Thing.

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

**John:** Zynga. Craig!

**Craig:** John!

**John:** Thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Oh, and John.

**John:** Oh, there’s more.

**Craig:** One last little addendum. I just wanted to say congratulations to you and all of my gay, lesbian, transgendered friends, because the President of the United States for the first time ever in our history has come out in support of same sex marriage, and I think that’s fantastic.

**John:** I think that is really fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good deal.

**John:** Yeah. I was happy it happened.

**Craig:** Yeah, me too.

**John:** Yay!

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** All right, so I’ll pick appropriately triumphant end music.

**Craig:** Yeah, something good! But not, like no I Will Survive. No Gloria Gaynor.

**John:** No, it will be some good other anthem.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** My thinking cap is already running. And, in fact, it’s already playing under our talking right now.

**Craig:** Is it It’s Raining Men? [laughs] ‘Cause no Weather Girls will do. I can’t take it.

**John:** Thank you, Craig. Have a great week.

**Craig:** Thank you, too, John. Bye-bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/writers-block-and-other-romantic-myths).

**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:** Doing all right today. I finished up a draft, so I actually have a little bit of a day off here. It’s quite nice.

**John:** That’s pretty amazing. You finished up — do you celebrate when you finish a draft? Is there a ritual for you or anything like that?

**Craig:** You know, there isn’t. And that probably speaks to my total lack of romanticism about what we do. [laughs] It’s just another day. I mean, it’s like, how many scripts have you finished at this point? How many drafts have you finished? We’ve gone through this, I think, what, like 50 or something a piece?

**John:** Oh, easily. A lot of times. I do remember when I was first starting out, when I finished a draft my big treat for myself was I would go to Panda Express at Century City, because I couldn’t really afford to go to Panda Express all that often. But, Panda Express was my big treat. And I would spend my $10 and get my three items and my Diet Pepsi, and that was a good afternoon.

**Craig:** I love that, (A), you couldn’t afford Panda Express normally. Panda Express is one of those restaurants that makes food for seemingly less than the cost of the ingredients of the food. Like, I never understood how Taco Bell got away with tacos. I think the idea is that they are loss leaders and then they make their money on the soda.

**John:** I don’t understand how the chow mein/rice ratio works. Because if you ask for white rice, they will get it for you special. But the white rice has to be much less expensive than their chow mein. The chow mein, I don’t know.

**Craig:** No, you’re right. It has to be.

**John:** Although anytime you have the noodle products, they are always surprisingly cheap. Top Ramen couldn’t possibly… — How could they sell it for 10 cents a pack? But they do.

**Craig:** My first apartment in Los Angeles was right after I graduated, and I shared a two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Magnolia with my college buddy, Gene Yoon, who he had some relatives who lived in the area and they are Korean. And he would get these huge big boxes of this particular ramen that really only Korean people ate. So it wasn’t Top Ramen that was sort of watered down for whitey.

And I remember, it was called jajangmyeon. Jajangmyeon. And I think “jajang” was salt, or something like that. Anyway, the point, basically translated it was like “Oh My God, This is Salty.” And it was the best. And we would just eat it, and eat it, and eat it. It had to be super bad for you.

**John:** Would your ears start ringing after it from all the sodium?

**Craig:** No, but I think I would get very headachy and I would feel kind of ill. But it tasted really good. Jajangmyeon. So, hopefully we can find a link to some good jajangmyeon out there.

**John:** Absolutely, so everyone can purchase it up. Today I’m hoping that we can do some craft talk, but before we get to the get talk, I do want to talk one sort of businessy thing, which is I have been swimming in contracts all week. And contracts are one of these things, the necessary evils of the screenwriting profession.

And it came up originally because last Saturday I was on this panel at the WGA for new writers talking about contracts.

**Craig:** Oh, that sounds great. I wish I could have been there. [laughs]

**John:** I know. Next time maybe, Craig, you can come to one of these.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So I was just the token, just like the other writer who wasn’t the legal professional on this panel to talk about a writer’s perspective on it. And a few just bullet points I can hit just because screenwriters are going to have to think about these at some point.

Conversationally, you will hear talking about contracts and you have to separate the idea of the Big-C-contract, which is the minimum basic agreement that all screenwriters are employed under by the WGA auspices, and then your individual contract for a project.

And I remember being really confused by that at the start. As a member of the WGA there is a set of minimums: the least you are going to get paid for anything; certain things about how your employment has to work. And you can never negotiate for less than those terms.

But, on each individual project you will be signing a contract. And for TV writers it ends up being not especially important that the start, because like a staff writer deal is just really, really straightforward and kind of boilerplate. But anytime you are making a feature deal there is actually a 30-page contract this is going to be especially made for that project. And a lot of it is boilerplate, but you do actually have to look through that.

So, this workshop was talking through how to read that contract, what the writing periods, mean. We didn’t get into force majeure or anything crazy like that, but it was interesting.

So, the other reason why contracts have been so important for me this week is there is a project that may happen, may not happen, but that I need to figure out the underlying rights for. And the underlying rights are so complicated.

And so it is based on a preexisting thing, then it was a movie, then it was other things. And so I’m going through these old contracts from like 1954. And some of these things were only on microfilm, and so you are asking people in London to copy things.

**Craig:** Geez.

**John:** It was so fascinating because like I’m looking at this and, like, thank god someone held onto this. And then I’m realizing, do I have all the old contracts for Barbarella that I worked on 12 years ago? I know my lawyer does, but would I actually be able to find those? I’m not sure I would be. So, it has really reinforced how important it is to hold onto all of those pieces of paper that you are like, “I don’t care about those.” You do need to hold onto them.

**Craig:** Underlying rights — that’s a real job in and of itself. There is a book that Lindsay Doran brought to me and Scott Frank, called Three Bags Full. A really cool book that a German author — yes, she’s German. It was a novel, a detective story. A shepherd is murdered and his sheep decide to figure out who did it. And it was sort of like Babe meets noir; it was really cool.

And so Scott was going to produce with Lindsay and I was going to write it. And all we had to do was just get the rights. No big deal, right? And then it was insane. Like the German company had the rights for a German movie, but not American movie. But we couldn’t make the American movie until they decided about the German movie. And was it in development or not? And plus the German movie might be animated and da-da-da.

In the middle of all of it there was one guy who was going to make it all happen. And he died. [laughs] And at some point after two or three years of this stuff, all three of us just went, “Eh, screw it.”

**John:** Yeah. Too complicated. And maybe this is reached on this project. You never know that you are going to be able to actually untangle all these things. It’s detective work.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** It’s easier than writing. And that’s sort of our topic for today is we want to talk about writer’s block…

**Craig:** [laughs] Writer’s block.

**John:** …which is one of those — I kind of hate to say the words “writer’s block” because it’s such a cliché. And I think it is used in ways… — It’s used to describe very different things as a sort of blanket catch-all.

**Craig:** John, you don’t think of yourself as this bottle full of wonderful creative energy and then there is this weird cork on top that is blocking it all in? You don’t think of yourself that way? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. And what frustrates me is that most of our perceptions of writer’s block are media portrayals that came out of movies that someone had to write. But no one actually experiences what you see in movies as writer’s block, that thing where is like I am ripping the pages out the typewriter and crumpling them out. Or, like, “I don’t know what to write; I’m just going to sit here and stare at this typewriter.” That doesn’t actually happen.

**Craig:** Yeah. And neither does the opposite, which is when they finally kiss the girl do they sit down and write this brilliant thing all in a day. Neither of those. Again, romanticization of writing.

**John:** And I think it’s dangerous because aspiring writers who are listening to this podcast think, “Well that’s what a writer’s life should be,” and it’s like, well, that’s actually not what a writer’s life generally is, ever. Writing is difficult. Writing is frustrating. It is hard and you have a whole big bundle of fears to approach. But there is also procrastination which gets tied into there.

So, I would like to sort of separate out the threads of what we kind of mean by writer’s block. There’s the “I don’t really want to write today, or this minute, or this week.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is a kind of writer’s block. And there’s the “I don’t know how to do this scene; I don’t know how to finish this thing up and I’m stuck on this moment.” And they can sometimes be the same issue, but often they aren’t the same issue at all. And it’s weird that we ascribe a certain kind of laziness as this big romantic idea.

We don’t romanticize the, “I don’t want to make this uncomfortable phone call to somebody.” But it’s often the same kind of dilemma.

**Craig:** We have to make a discrimination between the writing and the writer. Writing is special. The act is special. I think it’s a wonderful thing. And I think the result is special.

Writers are just people. We are just meat sacks like everybody else with the same issues. Yes, there are going to be days where you just don’t feel like writing because you’re tired or because frankly your brain might still be processing it on some other level. There are going to be days when you are afraid to write, and fear is obviously a huge part, because you have loaded up your mind with stuff that has nothing to do with what you are writing. Am I good enough? Is this as good as another thing I just read? Is this what they want? Will this pay the bills? Will it sell? Will they like it? Da-da da-da-da, and on, and on, and on. None of which has anything to do with the words on the page.

There’s another kind of thing that happens. I guess I would call it just fastidiousness, where suddenly we become obsessive and OCD about every single word, where we are crafting it as if it is being chiseled in stone. And that is a dangerous one, and that’s a very tough one to navigate for writers because we must exercise care. We must be intentional about the words we use.

On the other hand, if you become so over-intentional and so paralyzed by perfection, you are not going to make it past the first sentence. And, when you finally do, that sentence is going to be crap. It’s just going to be overworked crap.

**John:** I think we have identified three pillars, and maybe we will find a fourth pillar. So, here are the three pillars of writer’s block that I think we have identified. You were just talking about perfectionism which I think is very true. It’s that thing where like everything has to be exactly one way, and if it’s not exactly one way I can’t do anything. There is perfectionism of the words on the page. I also find there is perfectionism of habit. So, like, “Well, I can only write if I have this kind of pencil and the sun is coming through the window at exactly this angle.” That ritualization — that drives me crazy. So, perfectionism.

There’s laziness, which is just pure old like procrastination… — A normal person would say, “Well you are being a bum and you are just not doing anything.” Well, we sort of romanticize it, like, “Well I’m a writer, so I’m thinking, I’m mediating.” No you’re not. You are playing XBox.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And then there’s fear. There’s a unique kind of fear that kicks in with writing. It’s like, “Is this thing I’m writing right now going to be good enough? Am I good enough overall? Is this what they want? Will people love me if I write this? Am I writing the wrong thing?”

Half the time when I feel myself sort of stalling on a project it’s because I’m not sure it’s even the right thing I should be spending my time on.

**Craig:** Yeah. All of these choices will sabotage your moment. I look at writing as a moment. I don’t look at it as a 9 to 5 job. And it doesn’t matter to me; 9 to 5 is as arbitrary as anything. To me, writing is a moment. There is a moment in the day where writing happens. And I don’t care what time of day it is. Personally, I know other people really like to kind of dial it into a certain time of day.

But in that moment you are going to write. And the writing will happen, and then it’s done. And everything that can disrupt that moment needs to be examined for what it is. It is not a mystical barrier that is keeping you from your work. It’s just good old fashioned fear stuff. You have to face it head on. Have to.

**John:** Oh, one of the things, you are talking about writing being difficult — it’s about the choices you have to make. And anytime you have to make a choice, your brain has to do work. And your brain has to literally spend some calories and burn some glucose in order to make that choice. And so if you are choosing like, “Am I going to walk to that meeting, or am I going to drive my car to the meeting?” Well that’s a little choice. If you are choosing it, like, What do I want to order off this menu?” Well that’s a choice. And sometimes that choice can be taxing.

Well, writing is about a thousand choices per page, probably more than 1,000. You are looking at “What’s the next word?” “What’s the next sentence?” “How do I get from this moment to that moment?” Writing is a lot of hard mental work. And it’s harder mental work when you are starting out, and it’s a little bit easier mental work once you develop some skills.

But, there’s a reason why the days where I have had to kick out seven pages, I’m exhausted, just because it is literally…

**Craig:** Draining.

**John:** …calories being spent.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s really important for people to contextualize that properly. It doesn’t mean you’re blocked if you’ve gotten four pages and you suddenly feel empty. It just means you wrote. That’s all. That’s supposed to happen. There’s no such thing as runner’s block when you finally fall down at mile 30 and poop yourself. That’s just your body [laughs] stopping, you know.

It’s the same thing with writing. You will exhaust yourself. Although, I will say that there’s an interesting thing about…you know you mention all these choices that we have to make. And so there are these micro choices within the moment. There are the macro choices that help fit into the larger story. So, your brain is working on multiple levels. It’s playing Star Trek chess, and yet there is this phenomenon where starting makes the all ensuing decisions come a little easier.

It’s a little bit, like, you learn in physics there’s a certain amount of energy you have to put into water to raise it one degree. And you keep putting that amount of energy into water, it will go up a degree, it will go up a degree, it will go up a degree. Until it hits 212 Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius, at which point suddenly it has put in a lot of energy and the temperature doesn’t move at all. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t move. And then kaboom, it’s boiling, and now it goes back degree, degree, degree, degree, degree.

And I think the same thing happens with writing. You will just — I think starting is like moving through a boiling point. And you just have to put an enormous amount of energy just to start. Sometimes putting my fingers on the keyboard is the hardest thing I do in the day. And then you just start. And then, I don’t know, there’s something about writing itself that makes the rest of the writing easier. Do you find that?

**John:** I do find that. In terms of the overall project, that’s why I tend to go away someplace and barricade myself in a hotel room for three or four days and just hand crank through pages, because I just have to get some speed, I have to get some momentum, and sort of break the back of it.

And once I have gotten, you know, if I have gotten 40 pages written by hand, I know I’m going to finish the script because I have some steam behind me. But I won’t get anything done until literally I arrive at the hotel room and then I start writing.

But in terms of the daily work, I do definitely find that I will do whatever I can to sort of avoid opening up the file. But once I finally open up the file I’m like, oh, yeah, it’s actually not so bad. There’s always stuff to do. And let’s talk about some techniques for just attacking sort of those three pillars — that perfectionism, that getting started, and the fear.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So let’s talk about just the getting started, literally making yourself do some work. To me, it’s helpful if I have a time a day or I have blocked off some time saying this is the time I am going to write, but what helps me more than anything else is just like literally setting a kitchen timer saying, “Okay, these next 20 minutes I’m going to write. It will be up on my screen and I will be doing some work on there.” And when the timer goes off I’m allowed to stop.

I don’t have to stop. I know there’s some writers who have this rule where they will work for 50 minutes, and then they will take a break for 10 minutes. And if you try to engage them, this is more like a TV writer kind of in a room thing, if you try to engage them about the story during the 10 minute break they will say, “No, no, respect the 10.”

**Craig:** That’s dumb.

**John:** I think it’s kind of amazing.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s just stupid. “Respect the 10?” Shut up. Come on, really?

**John:** Well here’s what I like about “Respect the 10” is that you are giving yourself permission to stop thinking about it for 10 minutes, and you really are going to think about other things so that when you go back onto it, you really will go back onto it.

**Craig:** I get that.

**John:** Same thing with a diet and having a cheat day. The cheat day is tremendously helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah, but then don’t sit with other people who are trying to do work. Go to the bathroom, take a walk.

**John:** Well the idea is that everybody should get up and walk around and do other things and come back.

**Craig:** Oh, I don’t like anything where your work process is enforced by some sort of Soviet work clock. I really do feel like everybody has their own rhythm. I, personally, I’m a sprinter. My whole thing is, I don’t work and I just think and grind my teeth and worry and imagine the scene, and take a long shower, and think about the scene, and talk the scene through my head, and take a walk. And then when it’s time to write, I know exactly what I want to write. And then I write it. And I write in a straight blast. This is why I can’t be in a room full of other writers.

**John:** You are writing on a straight blast though on that scene. You are not trying to write past that section that you have already figured out.

**Craig:** No, I’ve decided, and this is where in terms of the strategies, this is why I think having a terrific outline is such a huge help. It’s not only something that helps you from a craft point of view of understanding the Gestalt of your story as you are writing inside of things, but it also helps you break your work down in manageable chunks.

So, it’s not an open-ended question. There is no — you know what the sequence is. You know what comes next. And you can make a decision about what portion of work you’re going to feel accountable to today. And in doing so, when you sit down to write you are not burdened by the notion that there’s this huge script that needs to be written. All you are burdened by is the notion that there’s three to five pages that need to be written. And that’s very helpful to me.

**John:** I would get more specific that you are not responsible for writing the movie today, you are responsible for writing this one scene. And it’s particularly times that you are responsible for writing how these characters are going to enter into this scene. And if you don’t get anything more than that done, well you at least got that done.

I will often, as we talked about before on the show, I write out of sequence a lot of times. And so I will have enough of an outline that if I just don’t want to write the next scene, or I don’t know how to write that next scene, I will skip ahead and do something else that I do feel like writing. Because there are days you want to write something funny. There’s days you want to write an action scene. And then there’s the days you want to write those people kind of walking through doors, those sort of necessary scenes that move the plot forward but aren’t really the most important moments in a script.

Work on those. And sometimes the reason why I am leaning towards those is because I’m afraid of some of the big moments. And so I will knock out some easy ones. And that’s okay.

**Craig:** And part of that is learning your own rhythm. For me, I can’t do that. I just can’t. I get so panicked at the thought that I’m writing something that is disconnected from the things that come before it. So, I always work in order. But I will allow myself a variable attention depending on what the scene is. If there is a car chase, I am pretty sure I can handle the car chase in five/six pages in a day.

If there is a moment of revelation, or if it is the first five pages of the script, I might take a week. I mean, I know my rhythms now. I know that I will take two weeks to write the first 25 pages, because I will write them, and rewrite them, and really love them and care about them. Because those will turn into the rest of the movie.

You know, the last 10 pages, sometimes you can sprint because things are sort of inexorable. They must happen.

**John:** Yeah. Here’s the danger though. I feel like people know that they can sort of sprint through those last 10 pages. And those last 10 pages of many people’s scripts are terrible.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can’t do that. You’ve got to really have a great ending.

**John:** So that’s why early in the process, like, I will try to get my first 20, 25 pages done quite early in the process, and then I will skip ahead and try to write the ending. Even though stuff may change in the ending, but if I can write those last 10 pages early in the process, first off I know that I am going to finish the finish the thing because I have already written how it ends. And I know that that last desperate sprinting will happen someplace in the middle of the script where it’s kind of not going to — not that it doesn’t matter, but if the beginning of the script is really good and the end of the script is really good, and the middle has a few places that could use some work, that’s okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. The reason I think the ending is sometimes easier is because, and again, I outline very thoroughly so I know what’s supposed to happen. I know the ending. I don’t start writing unless I really know the ending. But, by the time you get to the end, your decision path tree has been pruned down to a single trunk. You know everybody’s voice, what they sound like, what they have done, where they’ve gone. They have already had every random thing thrown at them, every conflict, every obstacle.

So now it really is about resolution. And that to me is easier to write because there’s just fewer choices to make. But see, you and I have come to understand ourselves and I want to say to people, if you are struggling, first of all accept the way you write. If you write the way John writes, that’s the way you write. If you write the way write, that’s the way you write.

Accept it. Love it. Don’t fight it. Don’t try other ways. Don’t feel like there’s somebody else’s shoes are going to fit better on your feet than your own. They are not.

And, either way, take our general advice which is to not feel that you are writing the movie that day, just love the scene that you are writing. Show it as much love as you can because that’s all you have to do on this day is that scene, or two scenes.

**John:** I have said this at conferences before, but I used to say that I have a lot of bad habits. And now I just say I have habits. I don’t label them. It’s just the way I write. And it’s not necessarily the most productive way that I could be writing, or some other writer would probably be more productive with better habits, different habits.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** These are just my habits. And so I do tend to treat my life a little bit like midterms where I will kind of lounge around for a bit, and then I will have to really scramble to get stuff done in the last two weeks. And I may have some overnighters and stuff like that.

That still happens some, and it’s kind of okay. It’s just the way it’s going to work out.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just got to know yourself. I’m much more of a slow and steady kind of guy. I sort of look at the calendar and I think, okay, realistically I know I am going to do three to four pages a day. So, I’ve got 115 pages to write, and I’m writing 5 days a week, let’s plot it out. We start on Monday, we end in this week. And I usually get pretty close. Sometimes I beat it by a week, you know?

**John:** There are times where I will dangerously do that thing where like, “Well I was able to write 10 pages a day for that last project, for that last little sprint,” and that can be really dangerous where that starts to be like, “Well, I could do it in five days before, maybe I can do it in four days now.” And that does become dangerous.

**Craig:** My most hated writing feeling is not writer’s block, because I don’t get writer’s block, because I don’t believe it exists, the kind that we imagine. My worst feeling is knowing that I have a certain amount of writing to do and not enough time to do it the way I want.

Because I fear that more than anything, just literally my eyes are getting heavy and my brain isn’t working and I must write. Because I fear that more than anything, I don’t allow it to happen. That’s the thing I avoid.

**John:** Good. You should.

**Craig:** Thank you. [laughs]

**John:** No, I can’t defend situations where that has had to happen, but there have been times where I have had to write under less than ideal circumstances because I’m shooting a TV pilot, plus this other script is due. And so I will have to go from like the set back to my little trailer in Vancouver and write some new pages and go back.

And sometimes that has to happen. And sometimes it’s not going to be ideal. I would hope that my 80% is better than a lot of people’s 100%, and therefore it is going to move the project forward.

**Craig:** Well, there’s something about production writing that I find so adrenalizing. So, if I get a call at 11pm, or if I’m sitting on the set and I’m told, “You have 20 minutes,” sometimes there’s just this total adrenaline rush and you get all wired up and it’s actually kind of fun, and frankly, a little romantic.

**John:** Yeah. My happiest writing times have been the ones where for whatever reasons the stars lined up right and, “Well, this is the movie that they have asked you to do, these are the weeks that you have to do it.” And it’s just like, “Oh, this fits exactly in this little spot.”

And, so, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was that situation. Frankenweenie was that situation where it was literally like, “Oh, I could do it right now. I could give it to you in a couple of weeks.” And there’s the movie going off to shoot.

A lot of the times it’s the projects that you have been waiting on for too long, that suddenly it’s like, “Oh, now I am actually free to write that.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And like, “Oh my god, the enthusiasm for starting to write this has evaporated.” That can be the real danger. Scott Frank has talked about that on other projects.

**Craig:** It’s true, where suddenly you come to it and you are like, “Oh, it’s just a dead thing to me. I feel like I’m going back over ground that I’ve already kind of been over, but I haven’t really been over.” You must be enthusiastic. You have to have great passion. That’s why I’m always amused when producers will say, “Would you please write this?” And you will say, “Eh, no, that’s not for me. Thank you, but no thank you; I’m going to pass.” And they say, “No, you have to. You have to.”

Why would you even want me to at this point? I don’t want to. If I don’t want to, it’s just not going to be good. It’s going to be even worse than it normally is. [laughs] Because writing has to come from some sort of enthusiasm. It must, or else you are dead.

**John:** Yeah. One of my worst writing moments was I had another guaranteed step left on a deal for this project, and clearly the project wasn’t going to move forward, and so I talked to the executive and said, “Listen, you don’t want me to do this, I don’t want to do this, let’s just figure this out.” He was like, “No, you’re going to do your next step, and you are going to do our notes.” And, like, “You are seriously going to hold me to these notes on this project that you don’t want? And you are going to pay me these X dollars?” I’m basically telling him, like, “I am going to be willing to settle for less than that if you just don’t make me write this thing.” “No, I’m going to make you write this thing.”

So I was kind of happy with the draft I wrote, but also like I’m sitting down at the computer every day knowing they are never going to shoot this. They are never going to make this. He is doing this out of sort of a dick move pride to, “Oh, okay, I’m going to make you do this.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s…

**John:** I haven’t worked there again, since then, so people can maybe figure out what that was. But it was a very weird, not healthy situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s pretty bad. And it happens. There are times when, you know, you are essentially a porn start and you are being told to get on in there and do it again, and you just did it. You don’t want to do it again, or you don’t like what you are about to do.

**John:** Yeah. And there are situations where a piece of talent has come onboard. Like the director comes onboard for a project that you have been working on for awhile, you may disagree about this one thing you have to do, where you have to go into the 17th meeting with this actor who has these notes on thing. You are like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe we are back here again.” But because it is your movie you will do that, and that’s the reality of the collaborative medium.

I can always do that when it’s a couple days, I can survive anything for a couple days. But when I have to go off and do a full rewrite of something, it’s like, ooh, that’s where it gets really brutal.

**Craig:** I will say that I don’t really write with — I guess I don’t write with a goal in mind beyond write the best script I can write.

Even if you tell me, “We are never going to make this, but we are paying you to write a script, just so we can read it and throw it out,” I would still sort of approach it the same way I approach everything which is I just get excited. Because it’s hard enough to get these movies made. So, you have to reconcile yourself early on to the notion that you are going to be writing futilely on some things, and if you are starting out and you are sort of sitting there blocked up because you are thinking, “Is it going to sell?” “Who’s going to like it?” And so forth. All I can say to you is: Who cares? It’s irrelevant.

All that matters today, all that matters right now for you at your desk is what is the scene. What are they wearing? What are they looking at? What’s the purpose? What’s the point? What’s their intention? How do we get into it? What happens in the middle? How do we get out? What’s changed? Just do the writing.

**John:** You are getting the opportunity to perform your craft for people. And hopefully getting paid for it. These are good things, so you shouldn’t minimize those.

**Craig:** Yeah. And somebody might like it down the line, you know?

**John:** Someone just might like it. Someone might love it. Let’s talk about that someone might love it, because I find when I have guaranteed to somebody that they are going to read something is really the only guarantee I can make to myself that I will finish it. And so sometimes it is truly a deadline where you have to hand this into the producer, the executive, the director, at a certain time.

But more often what is helpful for me is I have promised a friend, like, I will give you that draft on Friday. And I will give them that draft on Friday. I am very true to my word on those kinds of things. And that is hugely helpful in structuring my attention and focusing in on what really needs to get done so that I can hand that draft in. And it can also, you know, we are talking about sort of laziness, but also the perfectionism is that sometimes people will just not stop writing. They won’t let you take it out of their hands. And you have to show it to people.

They aren’t private diaries that you are going to hold to your chest for the rest of your life. You have to let people read them and respond to them. And they may not like them. Or they may not like parts of it. And that’s the reality of it, too.

So, aiming for perfectionism, which is like there’s no typos, the commas are in the right places, it all makes sense. You are not changing how you are spelling a character’s name. That’s not the kind of perfectionism I am talking about. It’s the endless tinkering, and tinkering, and tinkering; because you can spend your whole life writing one script, and that is doing no one any good.

**Craig:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. Perfectionism isn’t really perfectionism. You are not perfecting anything. Perfectionism is protectionism. You are protecting yourself, or you are attempting to protect yourself from any sling shot or arrow. Tough. They are coming anyway. They are coming in an unfair way. It’s not fair. Somebody may read it and hate it even though it’s great.

Or, what may happen is they might read it and say, “Great. This is a pretty typical first draft. Liked part of it, didn’t like part of it. There’s some big problems.” Meanwhile you have been in the shower practicing your Oscar speech. That’s okay. But just understand that you are not actually perfecting things when you fall into the trap of “perfectionism.”

You are just shielding your script. You think you are shielding your script from the trauma that’s coming. And you’re not, so stop.

**John:** A related thing that happens is someone says, “Oh, I just need you to do one more rewrite.” And those endless rewrites are really just kind of moving commas around. You are so frozen in what the idea of this thing is that you are just revisiting the same things again and again. And sometimes that happens even when you are writing your first draft is that your process of writing the first draft is essentially you go back to page one and you read through the entire script and you get to page 106 and then you start to work on page 106. And that’s not going to be an especially productive way to go through your career’s work.

I mean, it’s important that you know what’s happening in your entire script, that each new scene feels like it’s building off the one before it, but so much I find they are not so much writing as they are reading what they have written, again, and again, and again.

**Craig:** Right. In a kind of fetishistic sort of protectionist way. It sort of feeds also into trouble down the line when people do read the script and give notes. The care gap is enormous. The care that a writer has for the words on the page compared to the care any reader has for the words on the page is separated by this massive chasm.

And so, on the other side, on the reader’s side they will say, “I just didn’t — I got really bored with this whole scene. I just don’t think we need it.” And all the way across the chasm where you are standing, that scene is the function and result of 1,000 decisions that are incredibly important, and were painful and difficult for you. And then there is this emotional reaction.

But the funny thing is, if you say to a writer, “Here, read this screenplay,” writers will read screenplays just the way everybody else does. That’s one of the reasons why arbitration is so fascinating to me because we read our scripts and we think, “Well look, I read my script and then I read his script, and his script is just like a version of mine.”

No, no, no. [laughs] Your script, you are not really reading your script. You wrote your script. You lived your script. You’re just reading that one. That one is just reading to you.

**John:** Yeah. Your reading of your own script is basically you recapturing the experience of having written the script. And so that is why that one line that is so incredibly meaningful to you is not meaningful to the other person who is reading your script because they didn’t spend 8 hours perfecting it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And they also only see little bits, like the tips of the iceberg sticking out of the water. Whereas you imagine this whole florid, beautiful, color-filled world of sounds, sights, and so forth. And you just have to kind of let that stuff — it’s part of writing, you need to do it, it’s incredibly important. But, on the other hand, don’t sit there chiseling away at tiny little branches thinking that that is what is going to save you when the read comes.

**John:** Yeah. The bigger issues are always going to be bigger issues. It’s never going to be about that one sentence.

**Craig:** Correct. I mean, listen, if all there is is an argument about one sentence, man, you nailed it.

**John:** So, let’s see if we can think of anymore tactics for people avoid writer’s block, whether it is the romantic writer’s block or just not getting their work done. So we have talked about timers. To me it’s just the discipline to force myself to sit down and actually stare at the computer sometimes is really necessary.

I find changing my environment is helpful, so that’s why I go off and barricade myself to start things. If I have been doing most of my stuff at one computer, I will pick up the other computer and work on it there. I will handwrite things if I need to. I will go through, and we have both talked about how much printing is helpful for proofreading; I find printing is helpful sort of along the way, too. That way I can get some work done.

So even if I can’t stand to stare at the screen anymore, you can still look at the printed version and make some changes on the printed version and get some stuff done. And typing up those changes will often get me started again working through the new scenes.

**Craig:** And printing stuff out is proof to you that you actually did something. I mean, you can only see one page at a time typically on your computer screen, so you often feel like you have been working for weeks and all you have is a page. [laughs] But when you print it out you start to realize that this is accruing. And you are writing, you’re on your way.

I guess my bit of advice is to do something that isn’t writing, so a walk or a long shower, or just lie on your bed, whatever you want to do, and just start imagining the scene. So it’s not writing, it’s just daydreaming. And just daydream the scene. And once you have daydreamed an interesting scene, the writing is almost academic. At that point you are literally just transcribing what you day dreamt.

**John:** Yeah. I call that looping. And so that is the process of envisioning the scene. You have kind of rough blocking that happens, and the characters start talking to each other, and you figure out how the information in the scene happens and what kind of stuff happens in it. And it just loops, and loops, and loops. It’s like, oh, okay, I get what that is.

And then I will do a scribble version which is like the quickest version of what that is. And so sometimes that’s into the computer, but more often it is literally just scribbled on a piece of paper, just so I have it down so I can remember what it was. And from there it’s pretty simple to write the actual scene. Then it’s just words.

**Craig:** I totally — I do the same thing. I will sort of daydream out a scene, and I will imagine an exchange, and just run it through my mind until it feels like it’s pithy and purposeful. And then sometimes when I, let’s say I’m on a walk, when I come back home I write it in an email to myself and I just write the dialogue down because I know the stuff that is going around it. And then the fun part is when you sit down to write it, you are actually free now to concentrate on other things. You have already figured out the ins, the outs, who’s in it, the why, the what are they saying, all the rest of it.

So you actually get to craft all those other little things around it in layers — what’s going on? How can the actual setting feed into what’s going on? Is there music? Is there sound effects? Is there what? You get to jazz it up a little bit, and so suddenly a scene isn’t just flat talking, there’s more going on.

**John:** Well great. Well these were some helpful ways to talk about avoiding writer’s block, which we should probably think if there is another term for writer’s block, because it’s a serious of syndromes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But we have two questions, so I thought we would maybe get to two last questions today.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** Rick asks, “My partner and I just got an option deal at a company that wants to make our script. A director has been chosen. We got to attend the interview meeting, so we have met him and like him.”

Good, congratulations Rick.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “We’re having our first notes session with the producer and director at the company’s office. I’m wondering if it would be out of line for us to record the meeting? We don’t need to be secretive about it, but I wonder if it would turn them off even by asking. Is this considered unprofessional? I’m curious what you think.”

**Craig:** I mean, I know why you would want to do it. It’s not a good idea, I don’t think. I do feel like people need to feel free to talk in a way that isn’t going to come back and haunt them. They don’t want to have to have any disagreements or weird things preserved for posterity. I mean, can’t you just take notes like everybody else? That’s what I do.

**John:** I generally do take notes. I don’t pull out my iPhone and record it. But I will say that if it works for you, I don’t think it is necessarily a bad idea. I mean, the same way that our podcast has a transcript, you can send off that file and have it transcribed, and then you have all those notes and stuff.

And you look at the famous Lucas, and Spielberg, and what’s his face’s meeting about Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that’s amazing. And that exists because they recorded their meeting. So that’s what I would say.

**Craig:** Well then here is what I would suggest, because I agree with you on that regard — it is very useful to have a proper transcript of something. Suggest that maybe they do it. Because if they can control it I think they will be a little more at ease. I personally would feel uncomfortable about an employee recording my thoughts and then taking it with them. And ultimately that’s what we are and I think we have to just… — It’s not because I feel like we shouldn’t be allowed to. I’m just playing the psychological game of being the comfort giver. And I feel like that is our strongest move to protect our work.

And so maybe get them to do it. Make it their idea.

**John:** I would say if it is your own project, or this is an indie film and you are meeting with the director, and this is all under your control and your auspices, then sure. It’s whatever works for you. I think Craig makes a good point in terms of the studio of it all makes a lot of sense.

Philip from Pittsburg writes, “One of the scripts I’ve written seems to be dying by my own sensibleness. The script I wrote before this was a $200 million space-based fan fiction beast, so I designed a studio film with a limited budget.” So essentially he wrote a $200 million big expensive tent pole movie. And it was so big, everyone said, “This is so big,” and so he wrote something to be smaller. He says this is like a $30 million, limited special effects. It’s smaller. And now people are reading this one and saying it’s too small.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “So, my question is this: does it make sense to write a $200 million spec which will get attention, knowing the industry will scale it back, or to write a $30 million version and hope that people will understand how sensible you have been?”

**Craig:** What do you want to write, Philip? Write what you want to write, because that’s the only script that is going to be good. They are going to come back at you and say it’s too big, it’s too small, it’s too black, it’s too white, it’s not international, blah, blah, blah. They have a thousand reasons of why they are just saying no.

If you write something great, that’s what they’ll talk about. They will say, “This was a great script. I wish we could make it. I wish we had $200 million to make it. I wish this, I wish that, but it’s a great script.” Write what you want to write. That’s my advice.

**John:** I would also say that the Goldilocks problem of like that’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too big, it’s too small — it will happen no matter what. And if you are a new writer, you are going to hear it a little more often. If you are a more experienced writer, then they will tell it to your agents more often, but it’s always going to be a situation. They always want a much bigger movie for much less money.

And right now we are in this weird environment where Warner Bros., for example, sort of got a rap for like they will only make $200 million movies. They are not making anything smaller. Other places are trying to make smaller movies and they won’t do anything big, they won’t take a gamble. It’s not your job to suss that out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** By the time you try to chase whatever that trend is, it’s already going to be past. So if you are a person who wants to write the most expensive movies ever made, then the script you are writing should be one of those most expensive movies ever made. If you feel like doing the smaller thing, do the smaller thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can’t write a size. There’s no such thing as writing as size. You write a story. You write characters, a story, a plot, theme. It’s invested with some kind of passion, your voice, your point of view, your intention. Don’t write size.

Put it out of your head; write what you want to write.

**John:** Okay. I’m going to disagree with Craig on one point here. I think you do have to have an understanding of size for… — You are going to make some choices; and if you are facing two choices between, like, “Does my movie go to Mars or not go to Mars?” That’s a pretty fundamental choice. And how you are going to do that and sort of who is going to read it is going to be affected by how you make that choice and sort of how you are selling that choice.

Sometimes you will have to understand what’s going to be incredibly expensive and what’s not going to be incredibly expensive. Take a movie like Ted for example, which is the animated Mark Wahlberg movie with the talking stuffed bear. You are going to have to make some choices about how you are going to have that bear interacting with the world, because that is going to influence whether this is a $5 million indie movie, or a $50 million Fox movie.

And so you would make some choices there, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah, but my point is you are making those choices anyway. Rather than make them in order to satisfy some unseen buyer, make them for what you want. It’s different — when you are hired to write something, when they come to you and say, “Listen, we have a project or an idea; we are looking to make this movie for this much money,” then you have to have an understanding of how to write to a size.

But when you are a new writer and you are writing specs, just write your spec. Because if I’m a producer and I get a brilliant script, but it’s going to cost $20 million more than I have, I’m going to buy that script and then I am going to have you write $20 million out of it. Or I’m going to have somebody else write $20 million out of it. Because the money isn’t what is making that great, and that one $20 million scene isn’t what’s making it great.

What’s making it great is you and the writing, and the passion, and the idea. So, I say write.

**John:** I agree with most of what you just said, especially the distinction between if they are bringing you in to write something they have a sense of what size movie they want it to be for. And as you get more experienced and have made more movies you get a good sense of what really costs money and what doesn’t really cost money. And you understand that the studios don’t really understand what that is, and you probably have a better sense of where the money is actually falling.

But I will say if you want to write this character drama about a murder on a space station, understand that that could be very, very expensive. And if they zero gravity space station of it all is not integral to your idea, you may find it more useful to write something that could be done in a different way.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, obviously you want the bigness to matter. But I would say to you, if you got a great story, like if you got a script and it was spectacular, just loved it, and it was, as you described, the character piece in a space station, and you really loved it. But you were running a studio where you had just a budget cap, $75 million, couldn’t go over. And this thing was like a super mega Jerry Bruckheimer kind of deal. Wouldn’t you at least then talk to that guy about maybe rewriting some other stuff that you thought he would be right for?

**John:** Yeah. I might talk to that guy. I might think that guy is great. I do want to argue for having some sense of what size and scale is going to be, even in the inception stage. Because, you look at Solaris. Some people loved Solaris, but that was an incredibly expensive tiny movie, and that’s all sorts of frustration down the road.

**Craig:** Well, it was an incredibly expensive tiny movie when it was Soderbergh and George Clooney. But it wasn’t an incredibly expensive tiny movie when it was first made. It was just a cheap tiny movie. And so I guess my point is there will be time for you to figure out size and all the rest of it, Philip. But for now, the worst thing in the world you could do is say, “Well, I wrote a script and they said it was too big, and so now I’m going to write a small movie.” That’s just a bad motivation. Don’t do that.

**John:** I would agree with you there. Craig, do you have One Cool Thing you want to talk about this week?

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** No? I’ll share my mine with you because you would enjoy it, too. A lot of people are talking about it this week because a lot of people have linked to it. I first heard about it from Tara Rubin who is a casting director we worked with who loved the site and turned me onto it. It’s Old Jews Telling Jokes.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And so what they do is they interview old Jewish comedians and have them tell a joke. And it’s great. It’s great because it’s funny, but it’s also great because if you are a screenwriter you really see what the construction of the jokes is because these tend to be the longer, there’s a lot of setup, and then it gets to a funny punch line. And so much of what is comedy these days isn’t that. So much of what is comedy today is I’m saying a funny line, you’re saying a funny line, you’re saying a funny line, there’s some information that we don’t have that’s making the situation funnier. But it’s very rarely does someone stand there and tell a joke. And this is pretty much stand there — these people are old, so they are mostly sitting down. They are sitting there and they are telling you a joke.

One of the examples I will link to in the show notes is a man telling a joke about a bull enema and you recognize, okay first off, there’s very funny stuff that’s built into that setup of a joke — a bull and an enema by itself, that’s very, very funny. There’s good comic potential there as it is.

But the work of the joke is the long setup. And it’s making sure that each little step along the way, the setup is funny and enjoyable and that you are really curious what’s going to happen next, and that it can get to a good surprising resolution and revelation at the end. That it didn’t go quite where you were expecting, but it went over and beyond where you were expecting it to go.

**Craig:** You know, in our next podcast we should each try a joke.

**John:** We could definitely try that.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I don’t know any clean ones.

**John:** I highly recommend Old Jews Telling Jokes.

**Craig:** Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Oh, you know what, I will leave you with one little cool thing, because I’m about to go to my son’s little league game where I keep score, and for those of you out there who are baseball fanatics like I am, and perhaps your kids play, or you like to go to games and keep score, keeping score in baseball is a very monastic sort of thing.

They give you this very strange looking thing and you have to kind of know the secret code of how to score. And there are so many different things that can happen. And it’s all quite beautiful, actually. like a scorecard is a beautiful thing.

But there’s this wonderful app called iScore that does it for you on the iPad. I love iScore so much. I swear, it’s the greatest app ever. So if you love baseball and you like scoring baseball. iScore. That’s my cool thing.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See next week.

**John:** Next week. Bye.

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. So, Craig, has anyone called to offer you the Disney job yet?

**Craig:** Ah, no, they haven’t called. I’m a little surprised.

**John:** Disney Studios is lacking a studio chief right now.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And based on our previous podcast conversations, I think, Craig, you might be the right person for the job.

**Craig:** I think so. I started at Disney. I know the culture there. I live in La Cañada like former Disney legendary employee Dick Cook. So I feel like that is a nice little bit of continuity.

**John:** But can you find your way around the lot? That is really the key. Because I was on the Disney lot just last week, I got completely lost.

**Craig:** Oh, no, that lot is burned in my brain. I even have my secret little spots where I got to think. I know that lot backwards and forwards.

**John:** This last time they had me park in the Zorro lot, which I was not even aware existed, and so the Riverside — and I remember when I was doing a TV show with ABC parking at the Riverside gate, but I think the lot is new from when I was really last there, because I got just completely confused.

**Craig:** Yeah. That structure by the Riverside Gate entrance, which they like to shove people down there now. When I started at Disney there were no parking structures at all; it was just a flat parking lot, which was brutal. But then they put this big parking structure over by the Alameda Gate side, and then that filled up with employees. So now the primary guest lot is the Zorro lot which is by the Riverside Gate, and now everyone is asleep.

**John:** This is a podcast about parking, evidently.

**Craig:** This is podcast about parking, and things that are interesting to parkers.

**John:** So, my meeting was in the… — The reason why I parked there, I guess I parked there because they told me to park there, but they said the animation building, so I’m thinking, oh, it’s the animation building, the one that looks like the little wizard hat. But of course it is really the old animation building.

**Craig:** Old animation building, yes.

**John:** And so it is so funny that the old animation building, I don’t know, it’s probably 50 years old, but the new animation building is still like 15 years old or something, but it is still the new animation building.

**Craig:** And the new animation building, frankly, I find to be god awful. I think it is an atrocity. Whereas the old animation building is this beautiful great old art deco classic Hollywood structure. I love it.

**John:** It’s nice. If you guys are ever at meeting over at Disney, you are probably going to be in the Dwarf building, the one that has the dwarfs are holding up the roof. But the nice building that is next to it is the animation building. And wander around it. It’s very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I was thinking about sort of as I was having my meeting at Disney that it is lacking a studio chief right now. Disney is sort of in a weird place, and I have seen some articles about it since they lost their studio chief; they have so many deals with other people now that they not going to be making a lot of movies themselves necessarily. So, they have a deal with Marvel. And Marvel is going to make two or three movies a year.

**Craig:** DreamWorks.

**John:** DreamWorks is maybe five, maybe?

**Craig:** And then Pixar.

**John:** And Pixar. Pixar and all the other animation, because last year sort of took over all the other animation responsibilities. So, Frankenweenie is a Disney movie, and I think it is sort of more under his auspices than sort of main Disney, I don’t know.

So, there are not a lot of movies, of live action movies, for Disney to necessarily be making. So, who do you bring in who only wants to make five movies a year?

**Craig:** Well that is the interesting thing. They are not just missing a studio chief; they are missing a studio. Disney used to have Walt Disney Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax, and all of that seems to have dwindled to almost nothing. I mean, they have gotten rid of obviously the Touchstone, Hollywood, and Miramax labels are no longer theirs. And the Walt Disney Pictures…

**John:** But they are still using the Touchstone label though, aren’t they? Didn’t they use that for The Proposal?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that trot it out every now and again. But it’s not like it was. You know, it was a real viable distributor. Disney seems to be out of the movie business, quite frankly. They just aren’t… — They are in the distribution business, they are in the marketing business. Obviously they are in the theme park, merchandising and cruise business, and network business with ABC. But, when it comes to making live action movies they have really shrunk down.

In fact, you could actually argue that in addition to the suppliers you mentioned, Marvel, DreamWorks, Pixar, I would include Bruckheimer, because Jerry operates almost like a little mini studio there.

**John:** He is going to make one or two movies a year.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he’s going to soak up a tremendous amount of your capital making expensive tent pole movies.

**Craig:** Right, which I think they want. I mean, they want those tent pole movies. But he operates so independently that it is almost like he is another little mini studio there. So, it’s a very strange thing. It’s one of those jobs where you kind of would be running a studio, but kind of not.

**John:** If they were going to call me for a job interview, which they are not, I would steal some of what you said when we did the podcast about running a studio. I would reach out and try to make some deals with some writers and directors, especially some directors. Because I feel if they could make three live action movies a year, they didn’t have to be tremendously expensive, but if they could make those three movies that really fit the Disney brand, they would be in great shape.

Here’s my pitch. You figure out which directors you want, you figure out which writers you want. You bring them in and you say, “Okay, we are making essentially blind deals with you. Over the course of this next year pitch us three movies. Pitch us one at a time, however you want to do it; figure out what movies that both of you want to make, you director, you writer.

“Yow will come in and you will say, ‘This is a movie that we want to make.’ We’ll say, ‘Sure,’ and we will have you write it, and if we decide to green light it then you are making that movie.”

Because that is the thing that directors aren’t getting right now, is they are not getting the opportunity to say “This is a movie I want to go make.” Instead they are having to sort of chase after jobs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If they could come in and say, “This is a movie I feel confident making. This is the writer I want to work with. We know how to make this movie.” And it feels like a Disney movie… — That’s a great place to be at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that is the key. It’s got to feel like a Disney movie because Disney is unique. They are the only studio whose name implies a brand and a contract with the audience. And they don’t really, with rare exception — you mentioned one of them — they don’t really make…

Touchstone was created to make non-Disney Disney movies, essentially. But here is a great example. John Lee Hancock is going to be making a movie there called Saving Mr. Banks about which I am extraordinarily excited. And it is essentially a movie about the creation of the movie Mary Poppins, and the tremendous tension between the author of the books and Walt Disney himself. So that is going to be great.

But that is [laughs], it’s an interesting thing. It’s like Disney movies now are almost down to movies that must be made at Disney because they couldn’t be made anywhere else. It’s a very strange situation over there. And I know that in talking with producers and directors and agents, and I think agents is the one that Disney should be most worried about: no one really knows what to do with them. And no one even looks at them anymore like a real supplier or buyer of property. It’s a really weird thing.

And it is depressing for me because, like I said, I stared my career there as a screenwriter. And, you know, I just would love to see them be back in that business. It just seems like they don’t want to make movies.

**John:** You brought up John Lee Hancock who I think is exactly the kind of person they should be trying to make movies with, because The Blind Side could have completely been a Disney movie. The Blind Side could be a Disney movie. The Help could have been… — The Help was a DreamWorks movie, but if you had the Touchstone label, The Help could have totally been that kind of movie.

So, here’s some people I would try to make deals with.

— Also, a DreamWorks movie, but Real Steel would have been a great Disney movie. It would have made $20 million more if it had a Disney logo on it, I think.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So you make a deal with Shawn Levy, John Gatins, John Lee Hancock, Anne Fletcher, who did The Proposal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Bill Condon. Susannah Grant.

**Craig:** Yeah. People who do good family… — And Aline was working on a movie there for awhile, a Cinderella movie, I think.

**John:** Oh, she was working on Cinderella, that’s right. Or Lennon and Garant, because they made Night at the Museum.

**Craig:** Night at the Museum. See, that is the thing, and you are exactly right.

**John:** That could have been a Disney movie.

**Craig:** And obviously it did extraordinarily well at Fox, but you are right, it would have done better at Disney. There is something about Disney that makes things seem classic and that name means something to parents. It certainly means something to me when I am looking for something to show my kids.

**John:** And they would have had a ride out of that for.. — They just could have cross-collateralized it. They could have transmediated it in a way that was meaningful there.

I would also add like Justin Lin, John Chu. These sort of interesting directors who are coming from action movies or coming from dance, or whatever, and who could make a Disney movie.

**Craig:** I think anyone. Yeah. If a director is interested in making family entertainment, and that doesn’t mean stupid entertainment. It must means movies for the whole family, then they could make a movie there. But the truth is the company doesn’t seem really that motivated. It’s not they are trying and failing. They are not trying [laughs] and succeeding at their goal which is to not make movies.

Now, it might be that Rich Ross, the recently deposed head of the studio, was the problem. But somehow I don’t think so. I just don’t believe that two or three months in, if he hadn’t been able to find material or had not been looking stridently for material that he wouldn’t have gotten a call, “Hey, step it up.”

I think that the company is just — they look around and go, “Look, we are paying this enormous amount of money for Marvel,” which is working out great for them. It’s about to work out hugely for them with The Avengers. “We are paying a lot of money to DreamWorks, we’ll see how that goes, and then Pixar.” I mean, let’s face it — people talk about Disney buying Pixar, but Pixar really bought Disney. That’s the big thing; that’s the big story to me.

**John:** Yeah. They have movies that are in the can and I will be curious how they work out. The Odd Life of Timothy Green, which is a small little movie my friend Jim Whitaker produced — it feels like it is a classic Disney live action movie, and it could work. And it sort of feel Christian-adjacent, which feels right for Disney as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m Christian-adjacent.

**John:** We’re all kind of Christian-adjacent. America is basically Christian-adjacent.

**Craig:** Christian-adjacent, exactly. I mean, I believe in not stealing. I guess that makes me, right? [laughs] I mean I follow quite a few of The Commandments.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Quite a few of them.

**John:** Also how the Golden Rule is considered like a Christian tradition when like every culture has the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule gets you though like 90% of morality.

**Craig:** I recall, now I have got to really dial way, way back to Hebrew School and my youth, but I recall that the Jewish version of the Golden Rule which obviously pre-dates the Christian version which was an interesting contrapositive — is contrapositive the right word? So, the Golden Rule in Christianity is do onto others as you would have them do onto you. And the Jewish version was do not do onto others as you would have them not do onto you. [laughs]

And I can’t decide which is better. I think that they are both probably pretty good. Like don’t hurt people or they are going to hurt you back makes sense. Whereas like “bring someone a cake and then you will get a cake” is nice, I just don’t think the world works that way. It’s not quite as practical. More admirable though.

**John:** More admirable. But there are so many statements, “You reap what you sow,” I mean it’s a question of has it become an active command, like this is what you should do, or just an observation that good things come to those who do well to others?

**Craig:** Yeah. I tend to think that the Jewish tradition is very legal and sort of practical and like, “Look, here’s a general good guide. This is best business practices.” And the Christian is more —

**John:** It fits very well with the no shellfish kind of structure.

**Craig:** Exactly. ‘Cause you could get sick. And Christianity is far more aspirational and it is about living an idealized life. Christ represents an idealized way of living; it’s the best possible way to live, at least according to Jesus.

**John:** So now we are a religious podcast. We are not just about vaginal issues and family and parenting, but we are also a religious podcast.

**Craig:** I wish we were just about vaginal issues. That would just… — It would be a shorter and more interesting podcast.

**John:** It would be terrific. Everything John and Craig know about women’s reproductive health.

**Craig:** [laughs] It’s a lot actually.

**John:** You have kids, you learn a lot about how —

**Craig:** You learn so much. You watch two babies come out, you learn all sorts of cool stuff.

**John:** You do.

So you had sent me earlier this week an article that Greg Poirier wrote for the WGA, I don’t know if it is the WGA Magazine. I’m not really quite sure what site I linked it to, but it was this nicely written essay by Greg…Gregory — I’m calling him Greg, but I’m not sure if we are friendly or familiar enough I can do that. But he writes about his frustrations of being a feature writer now and sort of how the industry has changed and how it is better in TV.

And you had sent in through as grist for the mill and I ended up blogging about it. But tell me what was in there that sort of set you off.

**Craig:** Well, he is talking about things that you and I have talked about before on this podcast, but I really hope now that our listenership is expanding, and hopefully it is expanding here inside of our business, I kind of feel like there is a chance for us to reach some people who make some decisions.

What he is talking about is the shortsighted view of employing writers during development, specifically the mania over limiting development deals to one step. The mania of not developing anything if you are not absolutely sure you are going to make it, at which point it is not really development. And also the nonsense about requiring writers to pitch out the entire movie before they get the job.

All of this stuff makes absolute sense from a paper-pushing, number-crunching point of view. However, it is hurting the movies. That to me is absolutely clear. I don’t see how anybody could see it in any other way. It is hurting the movies. And one hit movie, or one extra hit movie easily washes away any of these meager savings you might be getting cutting these deals down.

And he goes through why, and all of the reasons are things we have discussed. Development is the R&D of our business. Any business requires R&D. The first classic mistake of a dying business is to cut down on R&D. You are basically just lying down to sleep and die.

So, if you under develop and if you are unwilling to develop things that don’t actually come to fruition, you won’t be able to get those things that do. You are way too tight and you are running way too close to the bone.

**John:** In my blog post I sort of expanded on his idea that television works differently. And in television the research and development cycle is very clear and apparent because it is pilot season. So, it is a time where everyone hears the pitches for pilot shows, the buy a lot of pilots, they shoot a lesser number of pilots, and they pick up a subset of those.

And when you go through that process, it is kind of grueling and exhausting for a writer, but it is also exciting. It’s a chance, like, “Here is my idea. Do you want my idea? Great.” You are not going though endless notes on what your idea is because the clock is ticking so fast.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You are going in. Some of those pilots get shot. It costs a tremendous amount of money to shoot pilots – $5 million, more. They are spending a lot of money to figure out which shows they may not even make. Because they know they are not going to put every pilot they shoot on the air. That has never been their business in TV. They know that less than half of the pilots they shoot are going to be a series, but they see this as a good investment; a good way to figure out which ones are going to work. And then they put some of them on the air.

And the ones they put on the air have been through a vetting process and they feel have the best chance of breaking out. And so they are taking risks, but they are also taking calculated risks because along the way they are figuring out how they are going to spend their money.

Compare that to features right now where you go in, you pitch an idea. It’s like, “Well, I don’t know what that is; I don’t know what the poster is for that, so therefore we are not even going to try.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s why —

**Craig:** We are not even going to try. Right. We will never know if your script would have gotten Brad Pitt. We will never know if it would have attracted Christopher Nolan. We’ll never know.

“We just won’t know because right now here in this room I am not sure how I can justify to my boss that that actually will be in theaters in 2.5 years.” That’s ridiculous.

**John:** Also, when you consider — look at how much money it costs to market a movie. So, they are saying, “Well, movies are becoming so expensive and it costs so much to market them.” Well, yes it does, but really that $1 million you spent for that one Super Bowl commercial, that would have bought a whole new script, a whole new project that could have gone through multiple drafts and you might have had something brand new that you could have made.

So, spending some money upfront is giving you better choices for which movies you can make which can potentially break out. I don’t know, if you are only taking a few swings, you are much less likely to have hits.

**Craig:** And tragically when they do decide to take a swing, it’s a check swing. Because making these one-step deals, and I feel like I keep saying this over and over, and it seems so obvious to me. And I just don’t understand why they don’t see this. And maybe it is because they don’t write, so they don’t get it.

When you make a one-step deal, not only are you giving this writer one bite at the apple, and writing is a process. It requires a back and forth. That’s why they have executives there to give notes; they are acknowledging it requires a back and forth, and a review, and a development.

So, not only are you chopping that guy off — or that woman off — at the knees in terms of like, “It better be right the first time,” but you are also sending that writer off to get other jobs while they are writing for you. That’s the stupidest part of it all. It used to be that you would get a job, you have two guaranteed steps. Basically you could stop and go, “Okay, I can write this first draft and not go out on meetings, and not pitch other stuff, and not pitch other takes. I’m just going to write this material. And then we will see how it goes and then I will write the second part. And if it feels like it is kind of swirling the drain, I will start looking for work then.”

Now, everybody is always looking for work, which is ridiculous, so they are not completely focused on you. And to make matters worse on top of that, looking for work has become far more arduous because now they demand more work to get work.

So, they are shooting themselves in the foot. And this is one of those areas where I kind of sound like a traditional old bitter screenwriter going, “Those stupid idiots in the studios.” But in this case they are being stupid idiots. They really are. And they need to stop and think about what they are doing here.

There was an interview with Adam Goodman. He was talking about how proud he is of Paramount that they have been cutting costs. And he cited a bunch of things like, “We are cutting all of the frills like flowers, and producing offices, and rich producer deals. And we have cut down all of those two-step deals to one-step.” And I’m like, “Whoa, whoa, that’s not flowers in an office. [laughs] That’s not a frill. That’s everything.”

You got to do that stuff. If you don’t do it, you are killing the process that makes movies. I just don’t get it. I don’t get it.

**John:** So, and it is not just us sort of ranting about this. Actually a guy wrote in under the pseudonym of Biff. It’s a very long thing, but I thought I would read it because it is a different perspective and also a very useful one. So, I apologize in advance. This is going to be like a minute of me reading, but it’s good.

**Craig:** Oh god.

**John:** Oh, god. Right.

**Craig:** Whatever. [laughs]

**John:** So Biff writes, “I went for a walk the other day. I loaded up a bunch of Scriptnotes. I said to myself, ‘Maybe one day I will check these guys out. What could you possible know?’ So I listened to you and Craig go on for awhile. The walk was 14 miles long; I never got bored. You do an amazing job analyzing this mad world we live in.”

**Craig:** Wow, I’ll say. I mean, I’ve got to interrupt and say —

**John:** This is the part that I left in there where he just praises us.

**Craig:** And also but nice job on 14 miles. That’s like a three-quarter marathon or something?

**John:** That’s good. I love long walks.

**Craig:** Half-marathon. Nice work.

**John:** Yes. “So I’m breaking into the screenwriting business. Actually, I have been breaking in for 109 qualified quarters, or so it says on my WGA pension statement.” 109 qualifying quarters, that is 25 years? It’s more than 25 years.

**Craig:** He has been at this for a long time.

**John:** He’s been at this for a long time.

**Craig:** And qualifying quarter means that he qualified for health insurance.

**John:** So he got paid to write.

**Craig:** This guy has been working. He’s a real pro.

**John:** “I’ve written TV, features, and a novel. Done rewrites, weeklies, preproduction, and polishes during shooting.” I don’t know why I suddenly got southern there. “I’ve had a bunch of my stuff made. I have defended my deal; I’m still getting two steps. Hell, I recently got five: the two guaranteed, two optional, and a non-applicable when they moved the goal posts so much even they had to admit it was new work. We scouted that movie, movie stars were calling in to be in it. It just didn’t get made.”

So this is a real guy. I mean, he’s actually talking the way a real produced screenwriter would talk.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I just finished a pet project for another movie star; it didn’t get made either. That doesn’t bug me — I actually like doing what I do.” So, he is not being cranky old man here. “I have no debt. I own my house. I could stop doing this tomorrow and never worry about it again.”

**Craig:** This guy is cool. I love this guy.

**John:** “However, in the last year or so the job of getting the job has become untenable.”

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** “Sweepstakes pitching, jobs that evaporate at the studio level, producers sending me material I find out they don’t even control.”

**Craig:** Ugh!

**John:** “And the latest duplicitous move it to bring in a number of known working professionals, have us all pitch, have us come back again after demanding more details, and then hire a new writer who has never had a job, fresh off the blacklist, at 10% of the quote of the guys they have been meeting with.”

**Craig:** Of course. Meanwhile everybody has been funneling them stuff that they can hand off to this guy.

**John:** They have been the research and development department for the movie.

**Craig:** Unreal. Ugh.

**John:** “So the first time happens you shrug it off. The second or third time this happens you begin to get suspicious. If he is the right guy, well hell, they should hire him; that’s how I got my first job. But I have quit believing that is what is going on. ‘The next time,’ as Sam Butera explained to Louis Prima, ‘there will be no next time.'”

**Craig:** [laughs] I love this guy. He’s the coolest.

**John:** Maybe really this was you writing in under a pseudonym.

**Craig:** I would like to think that it is me in ten years. [laughs]

**John:** I have a hunch we might actually know who this is.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** I genuinely to my life don’t know who this is, but I feel like it is somebody who is in our world.

**Craig:** Alright. Well you tell me afterwards, because I love him. And first of all, I love the fact that he is obviously an older guy, or older than I am at least, and he is walking 14 miles. Hat’s off.

**John:** That’s good stuff.

**Craig:** But boy, yeah, he’s nailing it.

**John:** “I had a president of production ask for a free rewrite before he gave it to his chairman. Not a polish, he had notes. A true multi-week notes.”

**Craig:** [laughs] And a president of production asking for it. That’s unreal.

**John:** That strikes me as flat-out abusive.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** “Has the landscaped changed that much? Has the douchiness pervaded every level of the business? Have I turned into Clint Eastwood shouting ‘Get off my lawn.’ Do I get shot in the end? I have thrown up my hands and just gone back to specking stuff I love. I’m optioning books myself.”

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** “So I throw it out to you guys: How are you facing this new world? Is it a new world? Are you experiencing burnout? It’s a first for me.”

**Craig:** Look, the best question he asked, and this I want to say to you writers out there who are either trying to break in, or you are in and you are early on in your career. I want you to listen to how smart his question was at the end. “Is it just me?” Am I being that bitter guy railing against the system the way so many writers just knee-jerk their way into doing, or, perspective check, am I actually right and these guys out there are nuts?

That’s an important question to constantly ask yourself because it is so easy to slip into this sort of “it’s not me, it’s you/everything I’m doing is right/the world is unfair and unjust.”

**John:** Self-pity.

**Craig:** Self-pity. So I love that he asked that question. In this case the answer is no sir, you are not wrong, or crazy, or being Clint Eastwood on your lawn. The landscape has changed. It has changed dramatically and for the worst. No question.

No question has it changed for the worst. And this is the stuff we are talking about now that Poirier indicated. The notion that they are going to bring in all of these people and make them jump through all of these hoops is — there were always hoops, but now the hoops beyond the hoops, and the hoops within the hoops are just bizarre.

And then he said something else that really struck a chord with me. “Jobs that evaporate.” More often than not I hear from fellow screenwriters that they are not losing jobs to other writers. They are losing jobs to “we decided to not hire anyone.” They are losing jobs to “let’s just not spend money.” Which is amazing because you should really make that decision before you bring the writer in, don’t you think? [laughs] Don’t you think? That you wouldn’t bring writers in and have them come up with takes and ideas if you weren’t really sure you were going to make the movie, or god forbid didn’t control the property. It’s insane.

Insane. I’m taking umbrage. I’m taking umbrage.

**John:** He’s taking umbrage. And umbrage is important here.

He is asking do you experience burnout. And I have experienced burnout at several stages kind of along my screenwriting career, and sometimes it is just after a really bad experience where it is like I have to sort of not do this. I have to not get into the fray again after just having a really bad time on a given movie.

And I have had frustrations over the last couple years with a bunch of movies that sort of seemed like they were going to go, and then didn’t go for reasons — each of them sort of had their individual reasons, but that becomes frustrating, where you kill yourself to deliver a draft and it just doesn’t move forward.

But that is sort of the nature of being a screenwriter. That is not really unique or sort of special to the situation. Where I have become more frustrated is the kind of things that he is talking about, is the “Is that really even a job? Is this just a fishing trip? Are you really serious about making this movie?” And it is those times where I had to go in and found myself being asked to do a lot more sort of beat-by-beat-by-beat pitching out the movie. It’s like, “Well, look, this movie is sort of like Big Fish. And I wrote Big Fish. So I think I can probably write this movie.” And that gets to be frustrating.

And so some of the reason why I have gone off and done more stuff, developing apps, or why I went off to do the Broadway show, is because it is a different world. This is a different thing where it is new and exciting and fresh, and I am not charging to the same frustrating battles every day.

**Craig:** Yeah. I haven’t gotten burnt out. And it may be that because this gentleman is essentially nine years beyond where I am in terms of the longevity of his career, and how many meetings he has been through. I would imagine the grind eventually catches up to you. It has to.

But my strategy has been to try and be a producer. I’m not interested in being a producer-producer with a deal and a thing, but I approach everything like a producer. And I try and write screenplays now for a director or for an actor that means a lot. That is what I try and do. I have lost interest in random development. I just don’t want to do it anymore. Because I don’t believe in it. Because they don’t believe in it either.

So, in a weird way I have kind of shifted the way I work toward what they want. And the shame of it all is that the old way, the development way, was a good way. And made/produced a ton of good movies, and if you didn’t even like the movies, a ton of successful movies, how about that, if you are thinking about it just from the point of view of money.

But since that system is broken, I just don’t play the game anymore. I don’t like to play a game where the rules have been changed in such a way that it is pointless. I don’t pay Black Jack if they don’t give you a little extra when you get Black Jack. So, that’s been my move.

And I think, by the way, in a weird way he is already kind of going there. He innately understood, “Okay, that’s not doing it, so I am going to go make specs. I’m going to go option my own books.” Brilliant. Brilliant. I mean, obviously he has a great long-standing track record. He knows what he is doing. He has been doing it long enough that he is a pro, for sure.

So, that’s good. He is essentially avoiding the unfair game.

**John:** Yeah. But, still, frustrating.

**Craig:** Very. Very.

**John:** Let’s touch a craft question. Frank from Philadelphia writes, “Can you offer any before and after examples of characters who in one draft lack depth and in a subsequent draft have become more robust? I’m hoping to see side by side examples of how the action or dialogue changed to deepen a character.”

So, this is audio, so side by side is hard in audio. But I included his question because I think it is a useful thing to talk about is that sometimes you read a script and it is just flat. And the characters read flat. And you are trying to figure out what it is that is making you not care about these characters.

And, to me, it is generally that when I first meet the character, if I can see him as a stock person in this kind of movie, I won’t care. And so if this is a comedy and he is like the stock guy who hits his alarm clock in the morning and that is like the first shot of the movie, and we see him go to work in the morning. I’m unlikely to care. If I don’t know sort of what it is that is unique about this guy, and why this is a different movie because this character is in it, I’m not going to care.

So, it may be an interaction that happens very early in the story that lets me know something special about this guy. I can tell you, it’s almost never going to be a flashback. People try to add depth to characters by creating a flashback where they see how their father was killed. No.

But it is an action that the character takes very early in the story that is surprising, that tells me something unique and special about this character. It makes me curious to find out more about the character.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sort of a little puzzled. I don’t really — I don’t write a character that isn’t interesting to me. I mean, I may have to improve the character as I go and maybe increase the specificity. Simply the act of getting though the first draft makes me realize that there is more of an interesting role or more subtlety to add to a character.

But if I don’t actually know what is interesting or unique about the character, I don’t even know what to write anyway. You know, it’s interesting — there are writers who do these things called “vomit drafts,” where they just get it out, “I just get it out on paper, and it’s terrible, and I don’t care, because then I can go back…” And I’m not one of them. I need to know what the hell is going on.

**John:** I’ve never been a vomit draft person either. Every scene, once it’s typed in there I feel like it could shoot. It’s never just sort of the random —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I should say, I kind of reframed Frank’s question as I was answering it, so I wasn’t sort of talking about in my own script where like, “Oh, that character was flat in that draft, and now in the second draft it pops more.” I’m really more talking about something was sent to me, I’m scrolling through it on the screen as I need to rewrite it. And the things I am looking at to change are often those setup details and really those first moments of interaction that sort of set who are expectation is for that character.

And so as I am sent something to rewrite, I will look for sort of how does it begin. And what do I know about this character at the start? What am I curious to know more about? And how can I move this guy from being exactly the stock character that I am expecting to be in this movie?

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. That’s a good answer.

**John:** Thank you.

Next question. A reader writes, “I’ve recently graduated from college in Colorado.” Colorado is awesome, so congratulations. “During that time I wrote three feature screenplays with the intent of producing and directing them myself. However, I would like to see if I can sell them.”

Okay, well fine. You want to do everything because you just graduated from college. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Exactly. I’m not going to chastise him for the optimism of a new college graduate.

**Craig:** Mean John August is the best.

**John:** Alright. “What would be the next step? Do I try to get an agent? Can I do that while I’m still in Colorado? What is the process of finding representation as a writer?”

Well, an early step you might take is to go back through our old podcasts and find our second podcast, I think, which is about how do I find an agent. So that would be useful. But I kept this question in for the larger sake of you are a new college graduate, “Can I do this living in Colorado?”

No. You should move to Los Angeles if you want to make Hollywood movies. Because you are in the best position of your life because you are just now graduating from college. You have no expectations of quality or standard of living. You can move out to Los Angeles and be broke and work for minuscule money interning at places and making copies and running stuff around, and doing all the stuff you should be doing as a 21 or 22-year-old recent college graduate who wants to be breaking into screenwriting.

So, you should take advantage of your youth and your poverty and move out to Los Angeles.

**Craig:** I think this is a tougher thing for this generation to wrap their heads around than our generation, because the kind of telemetrics of social activity have expanded dramatically. You don’t feel a great need to be in a room with anyone anymore. But, in this business so much happens just in the gaze between two people sitting across a table.

And we have talked before about how being a professional screenwriter is built on a base of writing talent, but what escalates the base towards a pyramidal point is your ability to sit in a room and make scared people feel comfortable that their very scary proposition of giving you a lot of money for a screenplay is going to work out. And that requires eye contact and a physical presence, and that requires you being here.

So, get a ticket, or get in your car and come on out.

**John:** One of the other crucial advantages of being in Los Angeles is a lot of people in Los Angeles are trying to do what you are trying to do. And while that might seem like, oh, well that’s competition, it is also going to help you. Because that guy in the next apartment over, he is trying to work on this, too. Or maybe he is going off to direct a short film and you can help out on his short film and you strike up a friendship.

There is going to be a bunch of people who you can — networking is really gross. I hate the word networking, but there are people who can help you, and you can help. And you can all sort of rise up as a generation together. And that is not going to happen online.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’s going to happen if you are around actual real people. The random person you meet at the supermarket is going to be more helpful than the people you are going to meet in Boulder, or Colorado, wherever you are.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I get it, it’s scary. I mean, I remember when I first came out and started in the business, I was overwhelmed by the culture of it all, just how many people had so many strong opinions about so much stuff.

You were surrounded by people who hated things and loved things with a passion, people who were dismissive of other people. Everyone was hyper critical, and everything seemed to move at this fast pace. It’s all a con game, right? And confidence. It was so many people with so much confidence. And I remember thinking, “I really feel like 10% of this is valid, and 90% of it is nonsense.” But that 10% was useful.

So, by the way, was my ability to discern the 90%. And I feel like if you are a smart, self-assured individual who can keep your own center, who doesn’t feel the need to absorb the flavors around you like a brick of tofu, you will be able to parse out what is valuable and interesting and productive. And, then of course, just as importantly, parse out the stuff that is pointless.

Because, I’m sure you had the same experience: so many of those people we started with are gone. And boy they thought they knew what they were doing.

**John:** And then they vanished.

**Craig:** Vanished.

**John:** And so if you are driving up from Colorado, you also get to go through St. George, Utah, which is an experience that no one should ever miss.

**Craig:** What’s there?

**John:** It’s sort of the very tip bottom of Nevada and Utah, and I just remember every time I have driven from LA to Colorado or back, you always drove through St. George. It’s an important milestone along the way. You are almost in California.

I’ve done the drive straight through by myself, which is not healthy. I wouldn’t recommend it.

**Craig:** You mean like in one shot?

**John:** One shot.

**Craig:** From Boulder to LA no stopping?

**John:** No stopping.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Well I stopped to get gas.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. I mean no sleeping. I drove across the country three times. One way east/west, west to east, and then east to west finally. And the longest stretch I did was New York to Chicago. That’s a good haul.

**John:** That’s a good haul.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I did get pulled over for speeding in Utah I remember. [laughs] And the cop said if you disagree with this ticket you can see the judge. And I said, “Okay, where’s the judge?” And he said, “The judge, she is available on Wednesdays and Fridays. And she is about 40 miles…” And he started, I was like, “You know what? I’m going to go ahead and pay the ticket. That’s cool.”

**John:** Yeah. Utah.

**Craig:** Utah.

**John:** Meanwhile our international listeners are like, “What is this driving?” Like, “You can’t drive from one country to another country?” No, America is so huge that you can just spend days, and days, and days trying to drive across it.

**Craig:** Unless you live in Canada or Russia, in which case we are tiny.

**John:** Yeah. We are the third or fourth largest country?

**Craig:** I think we are the third. I think it is Russia…oh, maybe China is third.

**John:** We had this debate earlier this week. And so I think China is actually smaller than the US.

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Well you know why? Because of Alaska.

**John:** Alaska gives us so much.

**Craig:** It is such a cheat. I mean, it is such a cheat.

**John:** It was a bargain. It was a bargain just to put us in number three.

**Craig:** By the way, Alaska, one of the greatest purchases. Maybe the greatest bargain ever.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Seward’s folly.

**John:** Oil.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Brian asks, “I recently signed with a literary agent on the strength of my film school material. I’m a baby television writer looking to make good, so acquiring this agent was a great step forward. My question is this — how often can I expect to talk to my agent? I’m not sure how much I should expect her attention. As her newest and least profitable client, I know I am very low on the agency totem pole. I don’t want to appear needy or high maintenance.

“However, I have noticed that when I send my agent an email or place a call to the office, I won’t receive a reply for a couple of days. Is this normal? And if not, can you suggest any strategies?”

**Craig:** No it’s not normal.

**John:** It’s not normal.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** So the rule used to be that you should make — in Hollywood you are supposed to call everybody back within 24 hours.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That may have slipped a little bit. To me, I feel like someone can email you back on the basis of a call, that’s fine. But people should get back to you faster than that.

**Craig:** No question. I mean, unless you are really annoying. And then I get it. But then that is a conversation your agent should have with you.

My rule of thumb is I don’t talk to anybody unless there is a context. I don’t call people up to chat. I don’t call people up to say, “How’s it going.” I don’t ask open-ended questions like, “Is there anything I should be doing differently or have you heard anything?” I don’t do any of that.

I call up with a problem or I call up with a need. “I have a script, I need this. I’m working and this guy is being a jerk, can you help me out. I’m calling you because you sent me on a meeting, and I am giving you a report on it.” So it is all business.

If they are not calling you back, then you send them an email saying, “Listen, if you can’t get back to me within a couple of days, then I have got to move on to somebody who can. Is there somebody else at the agency that you feel has more time for me?” Unless you are being an annoying nudge, and then you stop doing that.

**John:** The only slight bit of slack I am going to cut for this agent here is Brian does say he is in television. So, depending on what the season is, and sort of where things are at, there gets to be crazy season in television where I can see a call slipping a day.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s true.

**John:** So I’ll give a little bit of slack for that, but if that has been the overall yearly pattern that they are taking three days or four days to get back to you on things, there is a problem and you need to call and figure out what the problem is. Or, figure out your reasons to call. There can be valid reasons to give you calls back.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sorry, Brian, but no, it should happen more often than that.

**Craig:** It should.

**John:** Kyle asks, “Where do movie pitches actually come from? How are they created? For adaptations or sequels, they are created from previous material, obviously. But what about other movies that writers come in and pitch for? Were execs just sitting around a room ad started throwing out movie ideas against a wall?”

So, that seems like a very basic question, but we haven’t addressed such a basic question. Movie pitches: sometimes a screenwriter has a great idea. And you say, this is my idea for this movie, and I’m going to go in and pitch it to producers, or studio execs, or whatever.

But sometimes the studio has internally generated saying we really want a movie about women’s golf. And so they will say, “We need to find a writer to come in and do a women’s golf movie.” So all they have is women’s golf. And then they are bringing in writers to pitch them a women’s golf movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And also sometimes they are sitting around and they just have a day where they sit in the office and they throw a ball around and say, “Let’s come up with ideas for movies.” They are not often very good ideas, but that is where a lot of those ideas come from.

So producers will literally sit like writers and come up with ideas for movies based on things that they believe they can sell, and sometimes they are inspired by newspaper articles or real life things, or something that happened in their own life. Sort of famously The Hangover was kind of inspired by an actual thing that happened to a producer in our business who lost the best man — or, I’m sorry, the best man lost him at a wedding in Vegas, or a bachelor party in Vegas.

These things sometimes emerge like that, and sometimes, like you said, they will emerge from more structured studio calls for a certain kind of thing. It’s funny, I don’t really think that there is that much success when that happened to you, but maybe that is just my bias. I have no stats to back it up.

**John:** Brian Grazer at Imagine is famous for he has like sort of an idea, just a very, very vague idea and they will spend years trying to figure out what the movie is that goes with that idea. So, I remember there being this idea of a guy who gets a paper clip shoved up his nose, and something — becomes a genius or something happens because of that. And so there was a pitch called Clipped, and a lot people went in on Clipped. I don’t know that there will ever be a movie about that, but you go in on that.

Or like I will get a call saying, I remember getting a call, “Brian really wants to do a movie about a bathroom attendant. So all you get is “bathroom attendant.” So what is a movie about a bathroom attendant?

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what I mean. [laughs] I just feel like that seems like a big, huge waste of time. And it sort of goes to the remarkable asynchronous nature of this particular business where somebody who has access to a studio or funding for movies can come up with a really dumb idea like a paper clip up the nose, sorry Brian. And suddenly people are jumping and driving over there and thinking about it to pitch it.

A writer can come up with a really good idea and everyone is like, “Nah. We don’t even want to hear it.”

**John:** The only advice I would give to a newly working writer is it is worth going in on some of those because it’s a chance to get you in the room and talking with people and get them to see how smart you are.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You don’t want to pursue all of them, and you don’t want to pursue a lot of them with the same people again, and again. But if it is an excuse to get you in the room and make a new relationship, that can be time well spent.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So, Craig, we have come to the section of the podcast I would like to start labeling and trade-marking “One Cool Thing.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And so I warned you about this. Did you come up with a cool thing you want to talk about at the end of this?

**Craig:** I totally did.

**John:** Do you want to go first? Or I can go first. Your choice.

**Craig:** You can go first, that’s fine. Because my thing is going to be cooler, so it’s cool.

**John:** Ah, so it’s a competition.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So, Craig, do you play piano?

**Craig:** I did — as a kid I played.

**John:** But your wife plays piano now. I’ve heard your wife accompany you.

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

**John:** So, one of my goals for this last year was to get better at piano, because I played piano at grade school, and I gave it up and I played clarinet, and that was useless. And so I’ve gotten back to playing piano better. And actually I can get my way through songs now, but I’m not great.

And so whenever I see the Broadway people, they are just ridiculously good. But I can sort of work my way through stuff. So, this last week I had this Christina Perri song stuck in my head, Jar of Hearts. Do you know it?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** [hums Jar of Hearts].

**Craig:** All those “das” were the same note, by the way.

**John:** Okay, so I was humming to myself, and then I realized it is actually the same chord progression as the Radiohead song Creep. You know Creep?

**Craig:** Sure, I do.

**John:** And what is cool about it, as I’m thinking about it in my head, the two songs actually nest really well together in sort of a Glee kind of way, like kind of a Glee mash-up kind of way. So, the Christina Perri song goes, [sings] “You’re going to catch a cold, from the eyes inside your soul, so don’t come back from me. Who do you think you are? / I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.”

So like they fit nicely together.

**Craig:** I see what you are saying. They flow. Got it.

**John:** They flow. They have good flow. And so I wanted to see, like I need to find sheet music for one of these songs to sort of try to figure this out. So, if you Google for sheet music, you can find a lot of illegal scans of sheet music, but I didn’t want to do that because it is really stealing. You are actually taking money from the songwriters who get publishing on those things.

And, I’m going to re-link to Jason Robert Brown had a really great blog post about vocal students who will write saying like, “It’s so mean that you won’t let us copy your songs for free.” And he has a very good point: “Well, that’s actually my job. You don’t Xerox Stephen King’s books.”

So, there is an online service called Musicnotes.com that I will link to, and what is great is that a lot of sheet music is just there. So I was able to find Jar of Hearts there. And so you pull it up, and it shows you just the first page. And you can see, oh, will this meet my needs? Is it something I could actually play? Does it look right? You can sort of play it on a piano and see if it makes sense.

But here is the amazing thing, and this is why it is good to live in the modern age. On the right hand side of the page they have a little menu, and you can transpose it to whatever key you need, and that is pretty amazing. And so I don’t know if it is actually doing it in real time, or if they just did different versions of it, but I mean computers can transpose things really easily, and good piano players can transpose things really easily. I just can’t.

So, this was very helpful for me. So I can get the song I wanted, in the key I wanted, and it is legal.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so Jar of Hearts was in C-minor which is three flats. And so you click, click, click. You move into E-minor is one sharp.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s easier for me to play. It’s in a range I can actually sing. So, it’s amazing. Anyway, my one cool thing for this week is Musicnotes, which feels sort of like iTunes for sheet music.

**Craig:** I have used them before. They are a little annoying because their DRM is kind of strict, and they only let you print it once as I recall.

**John:** Okay, so I don’t think I am violating anything super magic here. Rather than print it, just go to “Save as PDF.” So, in the print dialog box do a “Save as PDF” and you have a printed one, PDF. It is going to have your name watermarked on it, but that’s great.

**Craig:** That part’s dumb. I have used it. Mostly I play on guitar, and for guitar it is really chords is what matters. And there’s a hundred free databases where they just list the chords for things. And transposing on guitar is super easy. It’s really, really easy to do. I can either… — Either you are transposing strictly just for your voice, in which case you might use a capo which shortens the length of the guitar effectively.

Or, I can just do a quick transpo in my head and just go, okay, if it is in D-minor, and I prefer to play to E-minor because it is just an easier chord to finger, then I just bump everything up a step, and I can do that pretty easily.

**John:** It’s good that you can do that.

**Craig:** I can do that.

**John:** It’s interesting talking to the Broadway people because doing the workshop you end up transposing things a lot. They will move it up a step for somebody and figure out how to do that. And so I was talking to five great pianists there, and they all have different ways they do it. And some of them are actually sort of doing it mathematically. And others are really thing, they are doing what you just said with the guitar where this was at this key, now it is at this key. And they are not doing the math note by note, they are just changing the chord structure of the things.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** So that is my cool thing.

**Craig:** That is a cool thing. Well, my cool thing today comes with a little story, is vintage computers.

**John:** I love vintage computers.

**Craig:** Vintage computers. I would say right around when eBay started exploding, it posed an interesting question I thought to meet which was, “Okay, here’s all this stuff, what do I want?” And I am not a collector. I don’t really believe in collecting per se; I mean, I believe that it exists, I don’t really care for it. It just seems like obsessive hoarding. But the notion that you would buy something that matters to you that is a touchstone to you is interesting to me.

And the thing that popped into my head, really the only thing that I was interested in was to chase down my first computer. And my first computer was 1982, right around when the Apple II Plus came out, and the Plus was because I think they went to 16K. Franklin, a company that still makes, like, Speak and Spells and so forth, Franklin reverse engineered it, not realizing that this nascent Apple company would be incredibly litigious, and they made a copy all the Franklin Ace 1000 which was incrementally cheaper, not much.

The Franklin Ace 1000 went on sale, I think it was $1,300, which at the time was a lot, certainly for my dad, even though of course I come from a massive trust fund. [laughs] A public school teacher trust fund.

And I went online and I found a Franklin Ace 1000, and somebody was selling it for one dollar. And this was 1998, I think. And I bought it.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And I was just going through my garage the other day and I found it. It had been in storage and it made its way from one house to another, and I brought it into my office today. I’ve just been looking at it, and I love it.

And I just opened it up and looked inside. And I showed it to my assistant who was marveling at it, and he was like, “Where’s the monitor?” He literally said, “Where’s the monitor,” which I just thought was so great. [laughs] And it is just amazing how far we have come.

But it also brought back a great memory for me of my dad took me into the city — we lived on Staten Island, and there is 42nd Street Photo, and 47th Street Photo, and Da-da-da Photo, there are all of these stores in Midtown Manhattan that sell electronic equipment, kind of shystery, but we are not shyster as lawyers, but sort of rip-offy a little bit.

But, they had good prices. And so my dad and I went into the city on a weekend and went to the store and bought this computer. I was super excited. And I remember we had parked, I think, east of Fifth Avenue, and had to cross over Fifth Avenue because the store was west of Fifth Avenue. By the times we came out we were stopped because it was the Gay Pride march.

And I had no idea, and I was 11. And when there is a parade in Manhattan, they don’t let you just willy-nilly cross Fifth Avenue. You have to wait. They will give you little points, like okay, 25 minutes have gone by, now you can cross.

So, I remember standing there with my dad, holding this computer, and just jaw-dropped looking around at like men in makeup and dudes kissing. And I’m like, “What is going…?!” It was so wild. And I remember my dad was so uncomfortable! And I remember he said, “You know, here’s the thing. I’m standing here on the street, I’m a 40-year-old guy. I’m standing here with a 10-year-old kid.” [laughs].

“I’m standing here with a 10-year-old boy and I just feel like we are going to be on the cover of Newsweek next week.” [laughs] He was so convinced that his picture was going to be taken. It was great. It was great.

But we took the computer home, and we turned it on, and that really was a life-changing day for me. Just falling in love with a computer. And now it is sitting right here. I’m looking at it in my office. And in its own way, as ugly and stupid as it is, it is beautiful. And I love the notion that we can have history with our devices, with our computers, and cheaply at that.

And I have an Apple II Plus also and some old floppy drives and things. And I just love them. I hope that kids sort of dig into the history of computing, because they really have changed the world.

**John:** Now your Franklin that you bought, was it originally a black computer or a white computer? What was the case?

**Craig:** Beige.

**John:** Beige. And so it got that sort of vintage/nostalgia beige, the way that all plastic things from that era sort of changed colors.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I find it fascinating. It’s as if they were in a smoky environment all the time because they have that weird patina that they get on them.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s like a browning to them, you know. And the keys — just feeling those old spring-loaded, big chunky plastic keys.

**John:** They are very click-clacky.

**Craig:** Very click clacky. And when you pop the top of this thing off you realize how much empty space is in it, whereas now when you look at a laptop it has been engineered to the nth degree. There is no wasted space in a laptop. But in these things there was just huge open spaces because they ran so hot that they needed a ton of air just to circulate around. They hadn’t really perfected the heat-sinking yet.

And more importantly, they needed space for cards because every peripheral device, a monitor, a keyboard, your floppy drives, extra memory, a printer, all of them needed a card that would be slotted in and then a ribbon cable would go out the back. So you needed all this space, so when you pop it open you can see everything and you see little… — I mean, pop it off and there is like one little controller card that says 1978 on it. It’s so cool. It’s just cool.

**John:** And what was the storage for the Franklin when you got it? Was it a tape drive or was it a floppy at that point?

**Craig:** Floppies. Yeah, it was floppies. I had an Apple, I’m sorry, an Atari 800.

**John:** Yeah. Atari 800 was my first computer.

**Craig:** And that is long gone, but that thing had, I remember it had a tape storage drive. And I think it also had the ability for a floppy drive. And the tape storage, people don’t know this — cassette tapes, so the original, like the Atari 400 and 800 would use cassette tapes, audio cassette tapes as storage. And they would print the 1s and 0s on that magnetic tape and it was, as you would imagine, enormously slow to write and even more enormously slow to read because there was no random access. You would have to rewind the tape to get your data back. [laughs]

**John:** Obviously there was something digital, but you could hear it when it was loading it in, too. So, there would usually be three loud audio beeps to signify this is the start of a program. And then you could actually sort of hear it loading in. It was like Morse Code; it was a very manual process. But when we first got our Atari 800, I remember setting it up and they connect to TVs.

Like, Stuart had no idea that computers used to connect to TVs.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** But you connected it to the TV, and we typed in a program from I think Analog Magazine, or something like that. And so it was full of like Peeks and Pokes. And then it would generate these colored lights that moved around the screen. It was like, wow, this is great. But we didn’t have the tape drive yet. And so when you turned off the computer, that program went away.

**Craig:** It was gone.

**John:** You would never see that program again. So, like, we left it on for a couple of hours, and then like we can’t just leave the TV on all night.

**Craig:** Right. It was gone. There was no storage at all. Yeah, it’s a funny thing how tactile computing used to be. Even the floppy disks, nerds like you and me, we knew, we were like in this little secret brotherhood that knew that you could buy dual-sided floppy disks for a certain amount of money, but single-sided were cheaper. But single-side disks, obviously they were two-dimensional. There was another side to them. So all you would have to do is take a hole punch and punch a little notch on the other side of the thing so that the disk drive knew that there was a readable disk there, and you just flip it over.

And so everything was very tactile. You were really holding and touching things. All the controlling, cards, and the floppies. And you would push down on the lever to make the head push down to the circle in the middle of the floppy disk. There was something great about it. I loved it.

**John:** It was very mechanical.

**Craig:** Yeah. Beautiful.

**John:** That’s one cool thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s one cool thing.

**John:** Craig, thank you for this nostalgic trip.

**Craig:** Yeah, I hope that whoever this guy is, he gets up to a full marathon now with us.

**John:** Absolutely. This was a full hour so this will give him a fair amount of a workout.

**Craig:** It’s a good walk.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** You got it.

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

**John August:** Hola y buenos días. Soy John August.

**Craig Mazin:** Soy Craig Mazin.

**John:** Este es Scriptnotes, un podcast sobre la escritura cinematográfica y las cosas que se interesan los guionistas. ¿Cómo estás, Craig?

**Craig:** Bien. ¿Y tú?

[Sound effect]

**John:** Sorry, I had it set to Spanish. We’re good to go now.

**Craig:** Okay, great.

**John:** Craig, what does nepotism mean to you?

**Craig:** Nepotism means that favoritism, undue favoritism is shown to a familial relative.

**John:** When I think of nepotism I think of the boss who promotes his inept nephew up to a position that he should not be in, and he only has that job because his father is the boss.

**Craig:** Like Scooter from the Muppets.

**John:** Like Scooter from the Muppets.

**Craig:** Well Scooter turned out to be very good at his job, but I think he got it through nepotism.

**John:** Yeah. That’s fair. So, what nepotism isn’t is being related to somebody famous.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, the reason I bring this up, and I sort of hesitate to bring this up because we are recording this on a Wednesday and this podcast will air on a Tuesday, so there is a gap of a week here. So by the time we actually bring it up, the zeitgeist may have moved far beyond this one little thing, but it enraged me so much that I am bringing it up.

So, the show Girls on HBO, I saw on Facebook somebody had done up a poster of like the one sheet that looked like Girls but they changed the word Girls to Nepotism. And then they had these little tags for each of the young actresses in the show, saying like their name and sort of which famous person they are related to, with the not-at-all subtle implication that… — Well it’s not even really implication. It’s pointing out that these women are related and saying nepotism, but it didn’t actually make sense to me, and it sort of enraged me because it’s as if these young women are only in the show because they are related to somebody famous, and not because they are talented actresses.

Or that somehow being related to somebody famous is the reason why you are going to be cast in the show.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was sort of, David Mamet’s daughter and Brian Williams’s daughter. And the strangest one was the daughter of the drummer of Bad Company. [laughs]

**John:** Because you know that the minute she walked into the room, they said like, “Well, oh my god, she doesn’t need to do an audition. Her dad was the drummer to Bad Company, so of course she has to be the person.”

**Craig:** I mean, the fact that they don’t know his name sort of undermines their point. [laughs] Doesn’t it? I mean, how famous is he? He doesn’t even get a name to them; he’s just the “drummer from Bad Company,” a band that last recorded I think in the early ’90s.

**John:** So, really, the actual incident at this point I feel is well passed us, and so that one silly Infographic and whatever — it moves on. But I think the idea of nepotism is sort of poisoning the well. And so I just want to talk a little bit about that, because the idea that this show is on the air, or that these women are cast in the show because of who they are related to I think is a destructive and bad idea. Because it implies that it is not through hard work that someone succeeds; it is through being related to somebody famous that someone succeeds.

And it oversells the importance of being born into the right family, and undersells the importance of hard work.

**Craig:** It’s kind of like an extension of what we talked about last time with this whole trust fund nonsense.

**John:** The Jamie Vanderbilt thing. And, of course, your wealth and your history from those illustrious public school teachers who are…

**Craig:** Right. My trust fund from my public school teacher parents. I mean, it’s the same spirit. All of it comes from a resentment. “I am not making it, and it is only because either my parents weren’t rich, or my parents weren’t famous.”

And I have to say, look, slightly different case. I mean, there is a difference between nepotism and what we were talking about last time, which was this whole trust fund thing. Money isn’t going to make you a good writer. And I don’t think your parent’s money is necessarily going to open any doors for you as a screenwriter.

It is a different story of nepotism — there is nepotism, it does exist. I do believe that if your mom or dad are well placed in the business that you will have opportunities that other people wouldn’t. I mean if my son, who is now ten, grows up and wants to be a screenwriter, I can get him read. And that’s more than the average guy sitting in Indiana can say. So, yeah, that’s real.

**John:** You look at Anne Rice’s son who has become a novelist. Or you look at Stephen King’s son who has become a writer. Ultimately they are going to be judged on their writing, but they had opportunities and access that they wouldn’t have otherwise had with a different name.

**Craig:** That’s right. And I always think about baseball, because I’m a big baseball fan. And three of the greatest hitters that I have seen play are Ken Griffey, Jr., Barry Bonds, and Prince Fielder. All of their dads played baseball. It’s obvious, I think, at first blush that those three kids had more opportunities when they were young than the average kid did, and certainly they had more access to scouts and to attention than the average kid did.

However, they were also — and they are also — really, really, really good. And so what’s interesting about nepotism is that it does sometimes create unfair opportunities, but also when we talk about talent, the whole point of talent is that you don’t learn talent. You’re not taught talent. You have it; that means it’s innate. And on some level there is something neurological going on. If it is music, or literature, or writing, or visual arts, these things are controlled somewhat by the brain. The brain is a function of your genetics. Genetics matters.

It’s not determinative, but it does seem — like it’s hard to discount the fact that a great writer just might pass along some useful genes to a child.

**John:** Yeah. Beyond genes I would also say that a great writer might pass along the chance to see the writer actually doing his or her work.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so if your mother is a famous novelist, you were going to see your mother working day in and day out at a computer, typing up this novel, and you are going to see what that work is. You are going to see the editing; you are going to see what the whole process is. That is going to be an advantage.

But in many ways I think what was frustrating to me about this image or this idea that it is because of who these people’s parents were, well, I’m a product of my parents at least to the same degree. I had supportive parents. God bless them. And I think having supportive parents is a much bigger asset than having rich, or famous, or well-known, or well-connected parents.

**Craig:** I agree with you. I think we live in a time of resentment. I think we are in the middle of a time of resentment. And that’s normal. This is a bad economy and people are suffering. And it is good fertile soil for resentment. But anyone who makes a movie or a television show knows, particularly a television show where you are going to be — you are not casting an episode, you are casting all episodes.

The thought that you would poison your show with somebody because their daddy was somebody is insane and inane. I mean, I don’t know. I haven’t watched the show. Obviously you do, and you like it. I haven’t seen it yet. But they don’t cast David Mamet’s daughter because they think David Mamet is going to come in and do some polishes on the script to make it great, and they are just suffering her.

They cast her because they really liked her. This happens. It’s not the end of the world. Certainly being the daughter of the drummer of Bad Company affords no benefit to the show. The fact that the creator and star of the show’s parents were artists, is it shocking that artists had a kid that was artistic? I mean, really.

And then Brian Williams, who is not an artist, has a daughter who is on the show, and she is objectively beautiful.

**John:** She is objectively beautiful.

**Craig:** And so then, again, it’s like, “Oh my god, a beautiful person is on TV. Stop the presses.” I mean, really?! That’s what? It’s just dumb. And it’s just pointless resentment and I don’t get it. I don’t get it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Look, I’m taking umbrage. Somebody on Twitter said, “Every podcast should be called Craig Mazin takes umbrage at something.” And that is absolutely true.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** My natural state is umbrage. And I just took some.

**John:** Good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well let’s get on to some questions.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Nick in LA writes in with a question. “Some management companies refuse to send out writer’s scripts. One person writes about a particularly notorious case, in this instance…” I think it actually came from DoneDealPro that he was first talking about this.

“A well known management company apparently works this way. The sign tons of writers and get them all specing new ideas or rewriting scripts that they think have promise. If one out of twenty pan out, great, they take it out. The rest, the script never goes out, the manager tries to convince the writer to write a new spec. If the writer puts up too much of a fuss, oh well, there are ten more writers in the stable.”

And this is the idea of almost like a spec farm.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this is a management company that is signing writers who are probably unproduced and having them work on a bunch of stuff, trying to get the best of that stuff and sending that out. The management company in success gets a percentage of that sale, or becomes attached as a producer to that project.

I’d never heard of this term “spec farms.” It sort of disgusts me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But since this is new to me, I don’t know have specific advice to not being stuck in that management spec farm. But I think it leads to a better overall discussion of what do you do when you think your script is ready to go out on the town, and the people who are representing you don’t think it is ready to go out on the town, which is a case that happens to ever writer at every stage of his career.

**Craig:** I mean, I do think that even in this specific case here of the spec farms, there is some advice to give, and that is avoid them, because any management company that behaves like this isn’t a real management company that anyone gives a damn about.

There are only a few management companies that have any credibility whose imprimatur conveys some sort of legitimacy. And it’s none of them. It’s none of these so-called spec farms. I mean, that’s atrocious behavior. Part of the problem with the whole management business is that it is essentially unregulated agenting. Agents are regulated by the state. They have to be licensed by the state. They cannot produce material. There is a barrier, even a mild barrier for entry.

A manager is somebody that prints up a business card and writes the word manager under their name. And it is the most exploitative aspect of our business, I think. That, to me, low rent managers are where writers get hurt the most. And I know that the managers will say, “Incorrect. We’re the only ones willing to take a chance on these people.”

It’s no chance. You are not taking any chance on anybody. What, are you taking a chance on somebody by putting a stamp on an envelope? Get out of here. I’m taking umbrage again. [laughs]. But my point is I would avoid any management company that isn’t a real management company, or whose manager doesn’t represent real clients, and who seems to be in kind of a bulk business. It’s grotesque, to me.

**John:** Here’s my criteria for whether a manager is a real manager or somebody who is portraying themselves as a manager but isn’t somebody you should be in business with: Has this person produced any movies or TV shows recently? There are managers who have credits that are from ten years ago, but haven’t done anything meaningful in the last five or ten years. Those are not people you really want to be working with.

You need to figure out who their other clients are, and being able to talk to some of their other clients. You don’t sign with one of these companies unless you have talked to another client. And if they are not willing to let you talk to one of their other clients, they are probably not the right place to be doing business with.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** I know that a lot of times it is like, “Well, beggars can’t be choosers.” It’s like the only person who seems interested in you. It’s a fairly easily annulled marriage, but it is sort of a marriage. This person is going to be speaking on your behalf and you are going to be talking to them on the phone all the time. Don’t say yes to the first guy who proposes. That’s just not…

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m going to say something that may lead us down a dispiriting path, but it’s really important, I think.

You are not a beggar if your script is good. You are a chooser. If your script is good it will be noticed and it will be noticed by legitimate people, and you will be afforded some choices. If your script is bad, and yes, some of you have bad scripts, what ends up happening is there are these lint traps out there who just gather the substandard material and attempt to peddle it off for the value of the idea, so that better writers can come and rewrite it, but the manager accrues the benefit when the movie gets made, not the original writer. But it’s all a very cynical arrangement. It’s a meat market.

It is a marriage of the mediocre. Mediocre managers looking for mediocre writers to push mediocre material in the hopes of essentially profiting from the literary equivalent of junk bonds.

And if you believe that your script is good, you have to get out of the mindset that you are a beggar, because you are not.

**John:** Now let’s talk to the more general case, which is not necessarily working for one of these terrible management companies, but every screenwriter is going to be at a place with a project that says, “I think we are done here for now. I think we are ready to show this to other people.” This could be a spec that you are taking out on the town, or it could be, “I think we are ready to go out and look for a director.” And the other decision maker, or decision makers say, “No, let’s hold back a little bit. Let’s do a little bit more work.” That is a frustrating situation that you will never fully move on from in your career.

And so this will happen, this has happened on several projects I have been involved with over… — Some of which we are still debating do we take it out to people, do we not take it out to people? At some point you have to draw a line and say, “I am not going to be doing anymore work until we have some progress on going out to other people,” because you can rewrite something for forever.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you just end up in this trap. So, how do you manage this conversation? I will start, but you may have some different perspectives.

**Craig:** Go for it.

**John:** First you tell your reps what you feel like. “I cannot rewrite this anymore. We have to go out and we have to get somebody else onboard.” And you get their support on this. And if they don’t support you on this, well then you have rep problems. But you have to get their support on this.

And then you make it clear that whatever the next batch of work is, you listen to them about what the next batch of work is, and you may agree, you may disagree, but you say like, “I don’t think we can do this next thing of work until either we go out to this list of directors,” or like, “let’s make this list of directors.” Or, “We need to take this out on the town because right now we are trying to write this to one imaginary buyer rather than sort of the people who actually may make this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. This comes up all the time, and it comes up in every level. The first question I try and ask is, “Whose opinion do I trust more, mine or theirs?” And it is not always mine. There are producers who really do understand what is going to attract certain directors or certain actors. Oftentimes they have worked with those directors or actors before.

I’m thinking of, for instance, like Michael and Carla Shamberg and Stacey Sher. They have been producing for a long time. They know what is going to theoretically attract and what is not going to attract. And if they say, “Okay, you know, we need another pass,” I believe it. And if they say, “No, this is good enough,” I believe that too.

There is a negotiation that has to go on there where you are not just talking about what makes the best screenplay, but also what gets you close enough to the whole.

Now, the important thing to understand is everybody reacts differently to a screenplay. There are producers, and I call them just like — I think of them as just Nervous Nellies — who are trying to basically make the movie on the paper the way they see it. And suddenly you realize they are not actually producing at all. They are kind of shadow directing on paper, which is a fun game for them, and I understand that this is a very high stakes poker thing for them because they are not going to get paid if the movie doesn’t get made, whereas you will get paid if the movie sells.

But the truth is, that kind of picayune stuff gets blown out of the water the second somebody reads it and says, “I really like this. I see a whole bunch of different things I want to do with this.” And you realize, boy, you would have seen that five months ago. You would have seen that a year ago. And more to the point, I wouldn’t have ever stopped, looked at my screen and said, “I’m not really sure what I am doing anymore.”

If you get to that place where you feel lost or you are straying from your goal, or what you believe in, it’s done. Stop.

**John:** A lot of times what this hold up is is that there is some bigger decision maker they need to actually turn it into, and they don’t feel confident turning it into that decision maker. It could be the studio chief. It could be the head producer at the company. They are nervous to turn it in. And it may have actually nothing to do with your project. It may be their own insecurity about like how they are holding onto their job, or this other project which is going awry, or something that they know about that person’s personal life that makes it a really bad time for them to read it.

To a certain degree, you can give them some latitude there. If they say, “This is going to be a bad weekend to give it to him because of this reason,” trust that. But not every weekend can be a bad weekend. At some point they actually have to do their job. And people have to read the script and say what they are ready to do and what they are not going to do.

I always get nervous if people are unwilling to make a director’s list at all. That means they are not thinking about actually making the movie. They are only thinking about this stuff on the page.

**Craig:** Well, and this is a conversation that is useful to have at the very beginning of a relationship with a producer. Obviously they are interested in something, and the fact that they were attracted to it means other people will be attracted to it before a single thing has been changed, and a single asterisk is put on the page.

So it is important to say, “Okay, look. You have things that you feel need to be done for this to be ‘ready.’ Let’s have a discussion about what those things are right now. And let us memorialize this discussion, because I don’t want to enter into Vietnam. I really do want to make this script better.”

And if they have ideas and it is so important to listen with an open mind to anyone, if their ideas have great value and will make the script better, and are of the sort that you would think, “Oh god, I would hate to send the script out without addressing that suggestion.” Then do them. But, by laying the table at the start and saying this is what we are going to do, and that is what you feel is necessary, you won’t end up in this wandering mission creep, which is the worst feeling.

And now, I think, it has happened to me at least twice or three times where I can smell it coming from a mile away, and I just don’t go down that path.

**John:** Yeah, there are producers who I will not work with or for because I know that it is going to be that situation; or that you are going to have spent months on a project, then they will go into the room and they will have broken the whole thing down into cards again.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there is nothing more dispiriting than that. Like, “No, no, you have a full screenplay; you don’t need to go back down to index cards again.”

**Craig:** Everybody’s anxiety needs to be respected. And everybody’s anxiety needs to be indulged to a point, but then if the process becomes about this other person’s anxiety, it’s just destructive and counterproductive. And they are supposed to be producers, not counter-producers, so best to avoid.

**John:** The one person who gets a bit of a pass is the director who has just now come onto a project. Because what I have realized as I have sat down with directors who are coming into something that I have been working on for six months, eight months, and they have been on it for six days, is they are figuring out how to make the movie. And they are figuring out what the movie it is to them. So you have to be patient and let them explore what the movie is. And sometimes they will be trying to change things that they shouldn’t be trying to change, but they are trying to figure out how they are actually going to make the movie. And they don’t really know how the movie works. And so it may be a process where you are like literally just sitting down and flipping a page, and flipping a page, and talking them through how this movie works so that they understand what it is that you did so that if they are going to do something different they understand what the ramifications of that is.

But, at a certain point if they are not going to direct the movie you have to get them off the movie so someone else can direct the movie. And some movies become saddled with a director who is attached to five different things, and that is not helping anybody either.

**Craig:** No. Then it’s just like having another producer. I mean, I love working with directors when I know we are making the movie. I do that with Todd Phillips. I just did with Seth Gordon. And I feel like, “Okay, now we are really progressing towards a start date.” Everybody has enormous interest on resolution as opposed to kind of a wandering process.

But I do know — you essentially pointed this out — that if I come in and I am asked to rewrite a script, a lot of times I have to absorb it and run it through my own head and spit it back out to do my job. There are going to be times when by the second draft I go, “You know what? The stuff that was before me was better than what I just did. But I needed to do it to get there.” And so I give the director the same latitude, because sometimes they will come around and say, “You know what? I get it now why you had it that way I just needed to arrive there naturally on my own so when the day came I understood what I was doing and I felt married to the material myself internally.”

Because we write a script, and in our minds we see everything. They read a script — it’s just words. And they are trying to build it fresh. So you have to let them build it.

**John:** You have to remember that as the screenwriter you are the only person who has already seen the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** One thing I will say if you are in a situation where you have had a director on board who has gone through multiple drafts, and you are replacing that director, and suddenly there is an opportunity to get a new director on board: Take a few days and make a “best of” draft, because probably the best version of the script is not the one that he left. It is some new version that incorporates the best of those ideas, and the best of what was there before. And I found often those “best of” drafts are really genuine progress, because it is all the stuff you learned with that director and all the stuff that was better before that director came on board.

**Craig:** Yeah. I happily haven’t faced that too frequently.

**John:** I’ve faced it too frequently. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Next question. Clint asks, “I got notes back on a screenplay I wrote with a partner. One common criticism beyond ‘we are sick of zombies/zombies suck’ is that we introduce too many characters in the first two pages. The screenplay opens with a parade scene as a number of people march off to fight in the crusade. We were aware that naming so many people at the beginning might be an issue, but our rationale was that seeing it onscreen would be easier to follow, though reading it on page might be a little confusing.

“As the camera lingers for a few seconds on each person, if you were to think, ‘Okay, this person may be important later on.’ How would a more artful writer…” An artful writer.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** “…handle such a scene?”

**Craig:** Hmm. How many characters are we talking about? Five? Ten?

**John:** He doesn’t say.

**Craig:** A little tricky. What would you do?

**John:** I would establish the parade, but I wouldn’t try to name the individual characters. And even if you know sort of who those people are who are going to be in the scene, for the first — just for the read — you cannot break those people out because the reader has limited buffers for holding character’s names, and holding character details. And you can’t shoot too many of us all at once.

You have to be very selective. And you have to be able to give enough meat to who that person is so that we can remember them. If you are introducing a character’s name as part of a parade, we are not going to be able to see them do anything that is going to help us remember who they are, or what their name is, or what was different about them than all of the other people who marching along in uniform.

So I say you have maybe two people you can single out, maybe three, but don’t try to do more than that.

**Craig:** Yeah. My suggestion is don’t introduce your characters in a parade scene. It seems like a really weird way to introduce characters. Introducing characters is such an important thing to do. The first time we see somebody tells us so much about the intention of the storyteller.

And to just see them walking along seems a little odd. Maybe if you wanted to zero in on one of them, you could do that. Sort of see 100 men marching in unison. All of them are alike, but the camera finds so-and-so. If I were directing I am not sure I would sort of introduce characters in that way. It almost seems sort of like an old TV movie style way of introducing people under credits or something like that. I just think it is a bad idea for introductions.

**John:** If you have like the one soldier who is trying to get his boot on and can’t get his boot on, and is having to race to catch up with the rest of the group, if you have the other soldier who like falls out of step with everybody else, or the… — Honestly, it’s the one who doesn’t fit in with everybody else is the one we are going to remember. And that’s a crucial thing, too.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you were the kind of movie that had a voice over, then you might be able to land some specific details on individual people as we are panning across them. But just the camera slowing down and giving us a little bit of a linger on them is not going to help us that much, particularly if the guys, presumably if it is the crusade, the guys are going to kind of look the same anyway. So we are going to have a hard time knowing anything special about those people.

**Craig:** Yeah. The whole point of a parade is that it is a leveler. And one must presume that you are not going to have your cast of eight characters, or even if it is five characters, that they are going to be Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise. It’s going to be people that we might not now as actors, at which point we will just see guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or girls. So, I think the problem is frankly the way you are introducing your characters is a problem.

**John:** Introduce your characters with some specific details, both things that are for the reader and things that are going to be for the audience. So, they are doing something, they are saying something, they are establishing themselves as being worthy of specific attention in this whole world.

You know, it’s a grocery store, and you have clerks and you have customers. Well, that’s great, but be specific about who this one person is and why we are seeing them at this particular moment versus any other point during that day.

**Craig:** Yeah. The whole point is that you are instructing the audience to notice something. Therefore it must be notable, especially when you are introducing a character, and that point of introduction has to be pregnant with specificity and intention. People just marching is not specific or intentional. So you have to really think about that.

**John:** Really the writer is creating the spotlight. If this were on a stage you would shine a direct spotlight on that person, and that would say that this person is important. This is who we are going to pay attention to right now.

You have to create in writing a spotlight that is going to shine on them for that moment, so you know out of all the people who live in Animal House, this is the one we are going to pay attention to right now.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s why in ensemble movies you usually meet people sequentially, not at the same time. You meet somebody here, then you meet somebody here, then you meet somebody here. You see it in comedies all the time. Like the kind of the big institutional comedies that were around a lot in the ’80s, say like Police Academy, for instance.

**John:** Or Revenge of the Nerds.

**Craig:** Yeah. You would sort of get little vignettes where you would meet this person, learn something about them. Then you would go to a new place, meet them, learn something about them. And frankly, even though it seems hokey, in big ensemble dramas it usually works that way as well. It is just done somewhat more elegantly and with less goofiness.

But you don’t want to introduce people in a bland way, in a crowd. It’s weird.

**John:** And if for some reason you did need to establish that there was a crowd and they were in this crowd, you don’t have to single them out the first time they are in this crowd. Like let’s say you are at a concert, and everyone is at this concert; they are in the crowd of this concert. Just give us the crowd and then give us the individuals in a smaller situation, a smaller grouping, so that we can actually pay attention to them. Don’t try to introduce them as part of the giant…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Don’t introduce important characters in a wide shot.

**Craig:** This is a good question because it sort of goes to a simple truth. If something is hard to understand or follow on the page, it will likely be hard to understand and follow in the movie. It is not something you fix with formatting or tricks. It is something you actually fix with writing, if that makes sense.

**John:** It does. Third question. Jim writes, “My writing partner and I just did far better than we could have expected or hoped to at a script contest.” Well, congrats Jim.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** “We entered our first ever spec on a whim, just hoping for constructive criticism, but managed a place. We were shocked but ecstatic. The prize package included an email query blast that along with our own queries landed us some reads that have also pleasantly surprised us. That’s the good news.

“The less good news is we seem to be getting more interest from production companies than we are from management entities or agents. And when the production companies find out that we don’t have representation, the general response is, ‘We are interested, but we will need you to submit something through the proper channels for legal reason.’ And while I understand that completely, it’s still immeasurably frustrating.

“We are jammed in the middle of a Catch 22.” Eh, and a mixed metaphor. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** “Until we find reps, we are human risks, and our specs are radioactive from a legal standpoint. I have no idea what we are supposed to do now.”

**Craig:** I mean, maybe I am just naïve, but if the production companies are interested in the material, and have already looked at some amount of it that makes them interested, wouldn’t the natural response to their objection be, “Great. Do you work with managers or agents that you like, that you are fond of, that you could make an introduction so that we can then submit it to you so you can benefit from the work we have done?”

**John:** So you are suggesting that Jim write back to the production company…

**Craig:** Yeah. Great.

**John:** Great. I hope that would work. I can already hear a lot of listeners saying, “That doesn’t actually work. They won’t actually do that.”

**Craig:** If it doesn’t work, and they literally won’t take the time to email a manager or producer or agent and say, “Listen, we are interested in this script where we can’t accept it. Would you be interested in hip-pocketing these people or taking a look at it,” then really they are not interested. If you want to read something, if you are interested in material and you are not willing to do that, you are not really interested and this is a polite rejection.

**John:** It’s very possible that a lot of what we are seeing here is a polite rejection. I would say that even — let’s back up and say the reason why people have the blanket policy, like “we don’t accept submissions from unrepresented writers” is because they are worried about crazy people suing them, or crazy people just becoming a nightmare problem.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that is kind of fair and reasonable. But what will sometimes happen is the company itself won’t accept the stuff, but if there is a junior exec at that company who really wants to read something, he will just ask for it on his own and he will read it on his own. And then he will look like a hero if he finds something that’s great.

So, I would say that’s a possibility as well. The other thing I think is sort of new in this new age is if you have a great script that has won this attention, I would put the first 30 pages up online so people can read it. And that is sort of a zero-risk way for someone to just take a look through something. And if they don’t like it, they don’t like it. If they want to read more, they will ask for more, and that’s great, too.

Famously, I think Diablo Cody was found in that kind of way. She was found through her online writing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s other ways more so than ever that you can get that to happen.

**Craig:** Yes. The famous Robotard 8000 did that as well. And that was in fact…

**John:** Tell us more about the Robotard, because I don’t even know the full back story on Robotard.

**Craig:** The Robotard 8000 is either a dangerous psychotic robot that writes some of the most disturbing screenplay material known to man, or is two gentlemen [laughs] who write under the pseudonym the “Robotard 8000,” and who are working screenwriters and work both in features and in television.

They showed me this script they wrote called Balls Out and I thought it was hysterical, and smart, and inspired, and absolutely unproduceable and unpurchaseable for a thousand reasons. And I told them, “Put it online.” And they said, “Why would we put it online? Because then people can steal it, and they will…”

I’m like, “It’s never going to get made. It doesn’t matter. You put it online because it is going to get noticed and you will be hired. No one is going to make this movie anyway.” [laughs]

And I feel, by the way, it’s funny — I feel that way about most specs because of the way Hollywood works right now. They are so disinclined to make original material, particularly the sort of original material that a lot of people do spec. But what they are always looking for are writers who can write the stuff they want to produce. So specs almost become like a sample industry as opposed to what it used to be in the ’80s and ’90s which was a selling industry.

So, you are absolutely right. You put the 30 pages up. And I know everyone is going to say, “What if my idea is stolen?!” which is the… — If you say, “What if my idea is stolen?” just understand you might as well say, “I’m an amateur.” That is the mating cry of the amateur. “What if my idea is stolen?”

Ideas aren’t ownable anyway. They are not property. It doesn’t matter. Forget about it. So, put your 30 pages up. It is the writing that matters. It’s your expression. It’s your voice, it’s not the idea.

If it is a great idea, hopefully they will buy it anyway. But, I love that idea of putting 30 pages up, or the whole damn thing, by the way.

**John:** Or the whole damn thing, honestly. There’s very little cost to it. And that way… — These people have these rules about not accepting unsolicited material because they just don’t want that stuff showing up in their mailbox, and then all the follow-up calls, and all the other craziness.

If it is something where it is just a link, they can click on it. They can not click on it. Nobody really knows if they clicked on it. They can read ten pages while they are on a boring conference call. And if they like it, well they will read the whole thing. Or if it is only 30 pages that you are putting up online, they will ask for the whole thing, and that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just, you know what, register it with the US Copyright Office. When you put it online, you are protected. It’s yours. You still have the copyright. Anyone can steal your “idea” because it is not stealing. It’s not yours. Ideas are not possessable. But no one can steal your unique expression in fixed form.

So, you are protected from everybody. So put it out of your mind and get your career going.

**John:** Back when Craig and I were starting, scripts were still a physical thing. It was still 120 pages, and it was actually a significant expense to make a copy of a script. Either you were working some place where you could use their Xerox machine, or there was one place that was on San Vicente and Pico that had really cheap script copying.

So you would borrow somebody’s script, and then you would make a copy and then give it back to them.

**Craig:** I remember that.

**John:** It was still a very physical kind of thing. And there was that paranoia of like, oh, scripts were kind of a currency, “I will trade you this, I will trade you that,” because actually it had some literal value because you actually had to spend some money to make them.

And there was always that question of: how much do you let other people see your stuff, or not see your stuff? Well, you don’t show stuff that is not ready to be seen by people. If it is really just, you know, if it is something you are still working on, that’s great. But at a certain point you just have to give up and give it to the world and hope it lands on the right desks.

And at the best points of my career I had no idea who was actually reading my stuff. And someone said, “Oh, I read that thing.” And I had no idea that that thing was circulating, but, “Good, I’m glad you enjoyed that thing.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And now that it is all digital that’s even easier. And if I were in these people’s position, I would have taken those first things I wrote and put them up and let people see them if they wanted to see them.

**Craig:** Absolutely. That’s great advice. And by the way, what was going on with the Spanish in the beginning. Was there really a problem? Did we really have the Spanish switched on? I was talking in English. I don’t know what you were doing.

**John:** No, I just found a great intro that happened to be in Spanish for this podcast. And so I figured, oh, that’s going to be in Spanish, so let’s just start the podcast in Spanish.

**Craig:** I like it. By the way…

**John:** I may cut this explanation out, so just to not spoil the joke.

**Craig:** Oh, yes, but the joke has already happened so I’m okay.

**John:** The joke’s already happened.

**Craig:** I believe in like the Penn & Teller school of magic. Do a trick, ooh, aah, and then explain it because it’s fun.

**John:** Yes, this trick is done with wires.

**Craig:** Ah, wires. And surely we have some Spanish speaking podcast listeners among the…how many people listening to this, John?

**John:** I think it was half a million. No, it wasn’t half a million.

**Craig:** But it was close.

**John:** It was a big number.

**Craig:** Are we allowed to say it?

**John:** I don’t know that we should say it. I think we are allowed to say it. There’s no rules.

**Craig:** It’s just weird if we say it?

**John:** I think it’s just weird if we say it. Because to me, right now, we can go, “Wow, that’s a huge number.”

**Craig:** Huge.

**John:** But then someone is going to say, “Well, the Nerdist podcast has five times that, or 50 times the listenership.”

**Craig:** This doesn’t make me feel bad. I’m amazed that anybody listens to this. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So, if the number is bigger than 10 people, I’m just so impressed.

**John:** Yeah. I’m still pretending that my mom doesn’t listen to it, but I think she probably does.

**Craig:** Your mom listens to it?

**John:** Yeah, because it is on the website, so she doesn’t need any special software or anything to listen to it.

**Craig:** Hey, I have a question then about your mom.

**John:** Mm-hmm?

**Craig:** I’ve noticed, because obviously I want your mom to listen to a clean podcast, and I did check finally the iTunes listing of our podcast. Some of them are listed “clean” but a bunch aren’t. But I don’t think we are not clean.

**John:** So, it turns out the clean or not clean thing is a tick box we set when we are submitting the actual episode. They don’t check themselves. And so sometimes Stuart forgets to check it. So, again, it’s a Stuart problem.

**Craig:** Oh Stuart!

**John:** So I feel, and this is a valid thing to discuss: You and I decided that we were going to be a clean podcast, and that we would refrain from using the big words.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Just because we didn’t need them.

**Craig:** And because we are both Mormons.

**John:** Well that secretly, too. That’s a big factor.

**Craig:** Not a secret anymore.

**John:** Also, I have noticed that most podcasts, most technology podcasts end up talking about cars at some point. So I just bought a new car, so maybe close on a car topic. We just bought the Nissan Leaf. It’s great.

**Craig:** I have on pre-order the Tesla Model S.

**John:** Well this is going to be a great conversation because Tesla Model S people seem to love it as an idea. Here’s the reason why I am concerned about the Tesla.

**Craig:** Tell me.

**John:** That the company could go bankrupt in five years and then how are you going to check the car?

**Craig:** You can’t. That is an acknowledged roll of the dice. But, the one nice thing about Tesla compared to some of the other smaller independent electric companies like Fisker for instance, is that Tesla — and they don’t pay me, I swear — but Tesla sells their battery technology to Toyota, and I think maybe to Mercedes. So they actually have a revenue stream apart from the manufacture of their cars.

You’re right. I don’t even know if I am ever going to get this car. I put a $5,000 deposit down on it, and it is actually technically refundable unless the company goes belly up. But, I don’t know if I’ll ever get the car. I’m hoping I get the car. It seems like I will get the car.

And then, yes, I don’t know if the company will be around to fix it in five years. And it could just be a brick. But, I’m super excited about it anyway. I just feel that it is the only all-electric car I have looked at where I thought, “I like the way that car looks and I like the functionality they built into it.” It’s pretty amazing.

**John:** That’s great. I test drove the Leaf for a week before I went to New York for a month, and then it made no sense to buy the car right before going to New York. But now that I’m back, it’s good.

And you have to, at this point, plan a family — you have to have a family strategy for which car is going to be electric-only and which car can go a longer distance, which is basically the zombie apocalypse problem. What if you need to drive further than 100 miles from your house? You want a car that can go the distance.

**Craig:** Well, maybe you should get a Tesla Model S, because the Tesla Model S, the long extension model, goes 300 miles.

**John:** That’s a very long way.

**Craig:** 300 miles. Now, that’s probably 300 under optimal conditions, so let’s just knock it down and say it’s 250. I never drive 250 miles in a day. I mean, the only time I have ever done anything like that in years has been to go to Vegas, but I wouldn’t — all right, fine, I don’t take that car to Vegas. Although they actually do have a charging station, I think, in Barstow. So maybe I could do it.

**John:** Yeah. My range is 70 miles is optimal.

**Craig:** 70. Pah!

**John:** Which I very, very, very rarely would go further than. But on trips to LEGOLAND, that would be too far. So you have to have a car that can go to LEGOLAND.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That’s as far as we will ever go.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that for the typical LA local driver, the Nissan Leaf makes a lot of sense. I just don’t like the way it looks.

**John:** I love the way it looks. It’s like a bizarre little bug.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, not for me. But that Model S…

Dude, put a link on.

**John:** I will put a link to both cars on so you can see.

**Craig:** So beautiful. It’s just really a beautiful looking car. I am not a paid promoter.

**John:** But you are willing to become a paid promoter if they were to offer you a bump up in the line?

**Craig:** I’m not saying no. [laughs]

**John:** All right, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Have a good week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.