Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

Craig, how was your Father’s Day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Good.

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

**Craig:** So annoying.

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

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

**John:** Not one iota.

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes. True.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Very cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Bottom line.

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

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

**John:** Bill.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Mad Men?

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** All right. Nice.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, for Stacy.

**Craig:** Sure.

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

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

**John:** Oh god.

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

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** A sweater.

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

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

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

**John:** Thread?

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Well you’re saying “they.”

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

“A large suitcase is by the door.”

“The fire is intense.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** “There was a dragon.”

**Craig:** “There was.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

**Craig:** It can be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re there.

**John:** It’s worked.

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

**John:** Yeah, nerd.

**Craig:** Nerd.

**John:** Nerd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Um, because, the…

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

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

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

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

**John:** “Tell the joke to Tom.”

**Craig:** Okay, “Tell Tom the joke.”

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dammit.

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

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

**Craig:** That makes sense.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. “Direct message.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes!

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

**John:** What’s this?

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

**John:** Tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I love it. A lot.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Which would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** [roars]

**John:** [roars]

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] Rend.

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

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

**John:** I like that.

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

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

**Craig:** Wah-wah.

**John:** Vote us down.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow. Wow.

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

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

**John:** That’s a good, big number.

**Craig:** You don’t know who that is.

**John:** I have no idea who that is.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** That’s why I’m so productive. I don’t know anything about sports.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly. That’s why.

**John:** So anything you hear that we talk about on the show, the show notes are at johnaugust.com. So just look for this episode. And, Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. “This is a podcast.”

**John:** Yes. Take care.

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

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/getting-to-page-one).

**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:** Not bad. I’m a little tired. I’m bouncing back from my 20th college reunion which took place a few days ago.

**John:** And was it festivious? I mean, did you have a good time? Did you see people you haven’t seen for 20 years?

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. There was definitely… — The nice thing about a 20th reunion is there’s absolutely no embarrassment whatsoever about not recognizing somebody or somebody not recognizing you. It’s been 20 years. What are you gonna do, you know? We’ve had kids. Kids make you dumber. Time makes you dumber. So, it was fine.

I had no shame whatsoever to say, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know, I don’t remember you.”

**John:** Reunions are a little bit different in the era of Facebook because there’s people who I wouldn’t otherwise see but now I do see because I see them on Facebook sometimes. So, I’m looking forward to seeing everybody again at my 20th, but it’s not as pressing as it would otherwise be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today I thought we’d talk about three things. I want to talk a little bit about screenwriting software, sort of where we’re at and where things seem to be going.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** Second, I want to talk about how you know when you’re ready to start writing that script, sort of like how you get to page one. That’s something we haven’t talked about. And finally, based on listener requests, they want to know what we thought of the season finale of Game of Thrones. And so I thought we could talk a little bit about that.

**Craig:** Oh good. Yeah.

**John:** First, we have some follow up. In a previous podcast we talked about the challenge of Disney — Disney needed to find a new chairman. It was fairly hard to figure out who the right person was for that job.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so they went out and they found somebody, like a brand new person I’ve never heard of. His name is Alan Horn.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Oh, that’s right, he’s actually… — He’s done this before.

**Craig:** He’s the former chairman of Warner Bros. And I’ve got to say, I met Alan once at a test screening for Hangover 2. I had no professional relationship with him and generally speaking screenwriters don’t have professional relationships with the people that operate on that level. But from a purely outsiders point of view, kind of a brilliant choice I think on the part of Disney because even though they are not quite a full-fledged studio the way that Warner Bros or Universal is, because they get their Marvel product and Pixar movies and then they kind of just are going to do maybe six movies a year or something like that.

At least with Alan I go, okay, what they’re saying to everybody is we still are in the movie business. “See, we got a movie guy; we didn’t take the TV guy and put him in charge, or the cable TV guy and put him in charge. We actually went with the most traditional movie choice we could think of.” I have to feel encouraged by that. What do you think?

**John:** I think it’s a great choice. I knew Alan Horn from a couple times during Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and some Corpse Bride stuff. He was great.

But mostly why I think he’s a good choice is really the reasons why we talked about in the podcast, why it was such a difficult job is you had to maintain these relationships with some really big, powerful, important people who are going to want their own things. So you have the DreamWorks deal. You have Stacey Snider. You have everybody there who they’re making movies for you. You have Marvel. You have Jerry Bruckheimer. You have these big producers who are creating a lot of your stuff and you need somebody who’s able to maintain those relationships, get what you need, make everyone feel like they’re being respected. And he has the experience to do that. So, it’s a good choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I was surprised. I mean, I guess I never even thought of it because he was retiring, you know? But why not? Sounds great to me.

**John:** Yeah. Second bit of follow up. Amazon Studios announced this week their first movie that they’re going to be making. It’s Zombies vs. Gladiators. Clive Barker directing it.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. [laughs]

**John:** So what’s weird is I was looking through the news releases and they didn’t mention the writers at all. Well, who wrote this thing for it? And I kept looking through and I kept trying to find the original press release, and I still have not been able to find who wrote Zombies vs. Gladiators or if they announced it all.

**Craig:** [sighs] So, you know, Amazon, you guys frustrate me because you just come up with the dumbest program ever. John and I give you a big bunch of grief about it. You do the right thing, make a deal with the Writers Guild. You, more than anybody, were incredibly open about the fact that it all begins with a script. You finally make a movie and you don’t mention the writers. I mean, come on. Come on!

Now I’m angry. Hey, it’s gonna be a good podcast!

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, we’ve gotten Craig angry. I don’t know what to say to Amazon. It just feels like a really weird, dumb choice. Because if they’re going to trumpet their system and how they were able to get to this point based on their system of development then you should talk about the people who were involved in that system. And that feels like a frustrating choice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I can’t help but kind of wish Amazon well, because I want them to succeed, and I want them to be able to make movies and spend money in the industry because I think more people need to spend money in the industry. I’m just frustrated that they chose not to trumpet the right things in the press release.

**Craig:** I know. And just to be clear, this isn’t about ego. If it were just a matter of professional pride I would choke it down because I don’t really care about stuff like that. The issue here is when you don’t talk about the writer, and when you just go… — I mean, look, who’s directing? Clive…?

**John:** Clive Barker.

**Craig:** Okay, I mean, great. But it’s not like Clive Barker is Martin Scorsese.

**John:** Not a bit.

**Craig:** I mean, he’s a pulp novelist, and a fine one at that. But, I mean, come on. You know, when you don’t mention the writer what you are doing is by extension perpetuating the culture that sort of says, “Well, you know, but the script, who cares. The most important this is that we got Clive Barker to direct Zombies vs. Gladiators.” It’s actually not the most important thing. You wouldn’t have gotten there without it.

Why don’t you extend some respect and actually make screenwriting something more people want to do, especially if you’re running a business that is trading on screenplays? Argh! Come on. Stupid.

**John:** Next bit of follow up: Last podcast we talked about we’re going to do a live version of Scriptnotes at the Austin Film Festival and we’re very excited about that. But we’d love to do some live episodes here in Los Angeles. And so we solicited some listener feedback on places where we could do it, and we’ve gotten like a lot of really good suggestions. So, thank you for that. If you have further suggestions for a venue we could use we’ll certainly add them to the list.

Ideally we’d want some place that we could control for the night, have some people in there. It doesn’t have to be too many people, but enough that we could actually solicit some feedback. Drinks would be fantastic, but not required. So, if you have more thoughts, you’re always welcome to send them in.

**Craig:** And, of course, proximity to the Pasadena is always appreciated. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, Craig doesn’t want to drive to the west side. And really I don’t either. [laughs]

**Craig:** And you don’t either. Yeah, I think, I would say sort of east of La Brea, north of Downtown would be spectacular.

**John:** I went to a really good video game little summit meeting thing that was done at Bergamot Station which is in Santa Monica. And so I was like, wow, Bergamot Station is fantastic. But I’d never want to come back to Santa Monica at night; I never want to fight traffic to get there.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I was working for Bruckheimer for awhile. And those guys, I love those guys, but man every time they would do this to me. They were like, “Look,” they would always apologize, like it mattered. Like apologizing to me was going to fix what was about to come and then say, “We need you to come in tomorrow and the only time we have is 4 o’clock.”

So, you know, getting to Santa Monica from Pasadena by 4 isn’t the end of the world. But then you have an hour and a half meeting and it was always lengthy. And by the time you’re out it’s 5:45, or 6, and I would just make dinner plans ahead of time. I would just stay because you simply couldn’t get back from there.

**John:** Listeners who don’t live in Los Angeles can’t possibly understand the east/west divide, it’s not about territory or anything else, it’s just so hard to move east/west in this city that if you get stuck at the wrong place at the wrong time you’re in for a really hellish amount of sitting around.

**Craig:** And I should also mention it’s just as hard to move north and south. [laughs] Yeah, and there’s a diagonal that’s also brutal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The 101 is sort of diagonal. And I don’t know if you guys have seen the sketch, the recurring sketch The Californians on Saturday Night Live; the running joke is that everybody in the midst of high drama is constantly advising each other what routes to take to avoid traffic. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s horribly accurate. What I will say about the north/south split is that most of the business of Hollywood sort of takes place on an east/west axis, and so you don’t have to go north or south that often. Unless you’re like shooting something down in Long Beach and then just god help you. Just god help you.

**Craig:** Well, the worst of it is, I remember talking to, there’s a… — Mark Vahradian, he works with Lorenzo di Bonaventura I think; they have a deal at Paramount, producers. But Mark was a Disney executive and the very first thing I did for Bruckheimer was way back in like 2000 or something like that. And Mark was the executive and he would have to go from Disney to — and Bruckheimer is like Olympic and 10th, or some horrifying Santa Monica location — and he’s like, “This is the worst possible… — because now I have to go west and south, and then I have to go north and east.” And we could only have meetings basically at 1 o’clock. It was the only time that would sort of save us all the grief.

It’s awful. Awful.

**John:** Yeah. Skype. Skype is really what you need. And the Bruckheimer people, if they’re going to have like hour and a half meetings, just get good at Skype. I have not seen Craig Mazin in person in months.

**Craig:** Right!

**John:** And I’m better for it and we’re able to make this podcast.

**Craig:** Right. If we can do this, I mean, can’t we just have a discussion via Skype? But it’s gotten to the point now where honestly I don’t, and this isn’t going to come as any — no despair will result at Sony by me saying this, but I don’t want to really work there. It’s too far away. [laughs] Not that they’re pounding on my door, but it’s far away! And then Bruckheimer is even more far away. Forget it.

**John:** Yeah. Nothing to do. Let’s move on to our big topics, our three things. First off I want to talk about screenwriting software and sort of where we’re at because, I don’t know if you can tell, I’m actually kind of floating a little bit today because I finished a script. I finished a script this afternoon.

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**John:** Thank you. And as we talked about on an earlier podcast, you don’t do anything special to celebrate. And I don’t usually do anything special to celebrate, but this was like a long time coming. You know what this project was. To actually be done with it is just a huge weight off my back. I can’t sort of talk about the project itself, but I can about what was different about this one — it’s the first thing I ever wrote in Scrivener rather than writing it in Final Draft or Movie Magic. I wrote it in Scrivener.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit about what that experience was like. Have you downloaded it? Have you ever played around with it?

**Craig:** I have. And I didn’t… — It was a little, um, because it’s not simply for screenwriting, it’s for outlining and idea collecting, whatever, it just…

It was too much.

**John:** It seems like too much. And they have really good tutorials that can sort of walk you through it, but still like that first window opens and you’re like, oh my god, there’s just too much on the screen. I can’t.

**Craig:** Too much. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so you can get rid of a lot of that stuff. And, some of that stuff is really ingenious, but the short version of this review, if people want to fast-forward, is that Scrivener is an amazing application if you’re writing a novel because it can organize things in ways that are just spectacular. And you can do several little things for your character stuff. And it’s really smart about that, and keeps chapters separately, and I ended up keep scenes separately.

So, I’ll talk you through sort of my workflow on it, and the things I liked about it.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** So, as I’ve discussed before, when I start to write a project I usually go off and barricade myself someplace and I just write scenes by hand. And I send them through and Stuart, or whoever my assistant is at that time, types them up and puts them in a folder. And then at some point in the process I will gather together all those little typed up things and make the full script. But I usually won’t do that until I’m like 50 or 60 pages into it so that I’ve broken the back of it.

What Scrivener is very good about is how it will let you keep those files separate. And they gather in sort of like a notebook and then at any point you can sort of combine them or split them apart and they’re still there.

So, you can work on this one little scene, or the next little scene, and not see everything else that’s around it. When you’re working on a long and real full screenplay in Final Draft there’s that constant temptation to scroll up and scroll down, and scroll up and scroll down. And you’re just working on this little piece in the middle, but then you want to kind of look back at that thing there. This kept me really focused on this is the scene I’m writing. Each little scene is like a little slug line over the left hand side and I’m only working on that. And it’s all I’m seeing; I’m not seeing above it and I’m not seeing below it, unless I choose to go see something above it or below it.

And it was very good for helping me focus. It has a really good full-screen mode, which I’ve come to appreciate.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, the sides go dark and you’re just seeing your main text. You can zoom in and get your text nice and big. And it does a pretty good job with the screenplay formatting. It does some of the same matting things that Final Draft does where you put the wrong name… — God help you if you type someone’s character name wrong. And it provides that 1,000 times and you have to go through and clear the smart type list.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It does a bit of that. A few times grabbing the wrong element. But on the whole it was fine. And so if someone has Scrivener and they say, “Could I write a screenplay in it?” Yeah, you could. That said, when I was done today, one of the first things I did is I exported to Final Draft and sort of — I made my clean up in Final Draft.

**Craig:** Yeah. And just to be clear: Scrivener’s composition area for screenplays, does it have essentially the same kind of function that Movie Magic or Final Draft does where it organizes it by action, character, dialogue, parenthetical?

**John:** Exactly. So, your basic elements that you’re selecting work largely the same way, little selectors at the bottom of the screen. It does a reasonably good job of guessing what the next element should be most times. A few times I got a little frustrated, but a couple is fine.

**Craig:** And it’s a tab-enter?

**John:** Tab-enter, that whole kind of thing.

**Craig:** All right, well, that’s a pretty good review. I mean, but then again, you went running back to the comforting bosom of… — Well, I don’t know how comforting that bosom is.

**John:** It’s not comforting.

**Craig:** The rocky, unsightly bosom of Final Draft.

**John:** I wanted to go out to Final Draft because I knew I would need to ultimately be there to do some stuff. I mean, down the road I’m going to have revisions, it’s going to be there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And there wasn’t so much that was so amazingly better about Scrivener that I was going to want to stay there rather than be in Final Draft for the real stuff.

Oh, but I will say that the most illuminating thing about being in Scrivener for this whole script is Fountain, which is the other project I’ve been working on here, which is that plain text screenwriting format that we’ve been developing, I’m definitely going to write my next script just in Fountain.

So, Fountain is just text. There’s no formatting. It’s just character names are uppercase, dialogue is the line below a character’s name. That’s what we’ve been working on here and we have Highland which is the utility for it. And it wasn’t quite ready for me to start working when I was starting this draft, but I totally from now on would write a first draft in that.

**Craig:** That’s your plan?

**John:** That’s my plan. Because I feel like we focus so much on getting, like, the margins right and getting everything to look like a screenplay a little too early in the process. It’s like we’re picking out fonts for the book we’re going to publish back when we’re still typing it. And you can really type it without getting all of those margins stuff ready.

**Craig:** That’s right. I have become comfortable, I suppose, with my OCD in that regard. And I think I don’t have it any better or worse than the average screenwriter, you know. I do have a concern about how the page looks. I don’t like important revelations to be split up by a “more,” “continued,” and page break. You know, stuff like that.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** But, yeah, I mean some of it is just sort of fussy delay tactics to provide the illusion of control over something that you are hanging onto for dear life.

**John:** I would say that I’m actually OCD about all those same things, but I’m pushing back that OCD to the point that I’m really compiling the whole script together.

**Craig:** Right. When it matters.

**John:** When it matters. Because I shouldn’t be focusing on any of that stuff when I’m just pushing the words around on the page. And so a lot of my frustration with, like, “Oh it thinks that element is this when it should be this,” well I shouldn’t be worrying about that at all. It should be perfectly clear — I know that’s my character’s name, and I know that’s dialogue; I don’t need the program to do anything for me right now.

**Craig:** It’s funny. Sometimes what I do is I will take a walk and think the scene in my head, write in my head essentially. And then when I get back I will just email to myself in nothing but text, and almost no description at all, really just the flow of the dialogue, because I know what’s supposed to go around it. And then when I sit down and write I am essentially compiling it myself instead of having — but even then what I’m writing is an even more bare bones version of what you’re doing.

**John:** But honestly, what that bare bones you’re doing, that is essentially Fountain. Fountain can take an email and make it into a script. So…

**Craig:** But I don’t even write character names. So it can’t do that.

**John:** No, it’s can’t. It’s not psychic.

**Craig:** It’s not magic, John.

**John:** It’s almost magic, but it’s not magic. It can’t quite do that, but it’s very close to that.

**Craig:** It’s close to wizardry. I’ve been a little behind. You know, my secret hope for the future is Fade In, which is this wonderful piece of independent screenwriting software that Kent Tessman has authored. And I’m a little behind because I got a version a couple months ago and I started working with it and discovered three or four things that I knew weren’t right that needed to change. And I spoke with Kent about it and he finally agreed.

And I liked why he did them, because he was sort of saying the way that things are isn’t sort of normal. And I had to sort of explain that screenwriting isn’t really normal and it needs to be.. — You know, things like when you delete things, normally you would want to pull stuff up, but in screenwriting you don’t. You actually want to leave everything where it is. Kind of. I mean, not pull up, but like you don’t want to move elements up. You want to leave them in their box.

So, I haven’t had a chance to see the latest version. But I would love to write my script on Fade In. So, that’s where I… — Because it is cleaner, and prettier, and full-screen beautiful. And I like it.

**John:** Yeah. I didn’t sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I don’t think I’m violating anything weird by saying I had a chance to see Final Draft’s iPad Writer. So, they’ve announced that they’re going to make a writing app for the iPad. And you know what? It’s actually pretty good. I was actually kind of impressed by it. So, it’s really Final Drafty, but it seems really functional. So, it’s another choice that screenwriters will have down the road.

**Craig:** I don’t like writing on an iPad. It’s very slow.

**John:** Well, with a proper keyboard I’m sure it’s much better.

**Craig:** Yeah, I guess. But then at that point just give me my laptop. You know what I mean?

**John:** A case can be made for that.

Enough on screenwriting software. Let’s segue onto just the whole genesis of when do you know that you’re ready to start writing a script? This is a thing that came up in a discussion I had at the Outfest Screenwriters Lab yesterday, sort of how do you know that you have enough set and ready to start writing.

And it came up because there’s one guy who I was talking to who had a project that sounded really cool, incredibly ambitious, but he’d been sort of gathering his pieces and doing his outlines for more than a year. And I said, “No, no, no. You need to actually write because you are going to become one of those writers who never actually writes but is always planning for like the big thing.”

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s kind of the opposite of the more common problem which is the whole, “I find it as I go.” Yeah, that which I really don’t like.

**John:** There’s two reasons why writers, I think, often fail is that they started writing too soon, because they really knew how the story began, so they wrote that. And they were so excited and they had no idea what happened after that point.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So they lose their enthusiasm. They have ten interesting pages sitting there. Or the writers who just kind of never start because they’ve just been staring at it for so long and trying to figure out those little things that at a certain point they needed to just jump off the cliff and see what happens.

**Craig:** Yeah. And writers, of course every writer must be accountable to their own brain and what works best for them. You know, some writers require a kind of a scene-by-scene understanding. I have sort of over the years found myself basically using an index card system. I need to know what basically is happening in each scene and what the purpose of each scene is, all the way from beginning to end. And, you know, I don’t know; I’m looking at actually right in front of me are the index cards for ID Theft. And, you know, there’s about maybe 15, 16 cards in the first deck. There’s probably 20 cards in the second. And five cards in the third.

So it’s not a tremendous amount. But I know what all the scenes are. And more importantly, I know what the movie is. So everything is written with that purpose and unity. But once I have that I start.

**John:** Yeah. For me the issue is I don’t need to have all the cards, but I need to know what the movie is. And to me knowing what the movie is isn’t just knowing where the movie starts. I need to be able to picture several scenes in the middle of the movie that feel like, okay, I get what that movie is; I see what that thing is. I know how that’s… — I don’t necessarily need to know quite how I’m going to get to that thing, but I need to know what that thing is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I need to be able to picture those moments. And this script that I just finished today, it sort of sat in my head too long because it got pushed back because of other stuff that came up. But by the time I could sit down I could really see what all those big moments were along the way, and I could see what sort of the reversals were with some characters, and I knew what was going to be fun. And I also knew that all of those moments were going to feel like they were part of the same movie, even though they were different colors and different textures, and things were going to change over the course of the movie, I knew it felt like one thing that wanted to stay together.

And I’ve found that at a certain point, this happened with The Nines, too, where like the ideas will say, “Okay, you either have to write me or abandon me.” Because it’s taking up so many brain cycles to sort of keep it alive in your head that you have to, “Okay, I’m going to sit down, and buckle down, and actually get this on the page.”

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s funny. What you just described is sort of where I am right before I fill in all the other cards. And that’s a perfectly reasonable step to skip because I don’t start writing cards in sequence. The first thing I need to know is what is the idea, what is the premise, who is the hero, and how does it end because what is the theme? What is the argument of the movie on some level or another?

And then I come up with those big goal post moments that are in the very big, broad sweeps. You know, there’s probably only four of them in the movie, I think, you know. And then I start to fill in around them to connect them together. But I could also write from goal post to goal post. I don’t have to do index cards. It just makes me feel better. And, of course, as you start writing you realize, oh, my index cards are stupid now; I don’t need them.

But the other great thing about index cards I will say is that when I am done with the content that was indicated by the index card, then I draw a big red Sharpie across it. It feels so good.

**John:** Yeah. The satisfaction of knowing that you’ve done some part of it, that it’s finished. I don’t do a lot of that outlining stuff until I get pretty deep into writing the script, and then I can start to figure out, “Okay, what do I have left to write?” And then I make my list of like these are the scenes I have left to write, and then it’s incredibly rewarding to be able to scratch those through.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And for whatever reason I always end up at the right page length.

**Craig:** Always. I always do.

**John:** My friend Rawson who I love dearly but is like, “Oh, I got the first draft done. It was like 170 pages.”

**Craig:** Come on, Rawson!

**John:** Something did not work right there, because you should not be writing a 170-page script.

**Craig:** And that to me is, and I love Rawson, too — he’s a great guy and he’s a very good writer. So, you know, obviously he has his process. I mean, my whole thing is I don’t want to write 170 pages. I feel like I’m wasting everybody’s time, including my own. I want to kind of figure out the right 60 pages to cut before I write the 170 pages.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, I actually start to do that. One of the great things about outlining and index carding out your movie is that you can really just see where it suddenly starts to get sodden and limp. And then you compress and typically… — I actually don’t get scared when I see like, “Oh god, there’s like five scenes here, there should be one.” I just think, “Or there could be one really good scene that layers in a whole bunch of these things so it’s not so linear.”

And I routinely land between 107 and 119, like every time.

**John:** Yeah. I was 114 pages when I printed.

**Craig:** Look at that. I believe that’s right in the middle of my thing.

**John:** And so here’s the thing, because I was doing it in Scrivener I didn’t compile it until I was really all done. So, literally until this afternoon I had no idea how long it was.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s like, “What will our baby be? Oh, it’s a boy!”

**John:** Yeah. There were two choices. But, well, you hope there’s two choices.

**Craig:** Right. “Oh, it’s intersex!”

**John:** Yeah, the life became challenging, but potentially rewarding and maybe there’s a great narrative to be found there.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s a Rawson!

**John:** Oh, come now.

**Craig:** [laughs] I hope Rawson listens to this.

**John:** Yeah. Rawson’s busy. Rawson is going off to direct a movie. But he does listen to the podcast sometimes.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right. We’re the Millers, right?

**John:** Yeah. Here’s how Rawson will find out about this podcast. I’m sure Rawson has a Google News Alert setup. And so when the transcript of this podcast is posted he will get a Google News Alert, and then he will know that we talked about him.

**Craig:** Right. So in that Google News Alert will it mention that Rawson is, and now we can fill in anything we want.

**John:** Absolutely. Because that will become part of his little Google profile.

**Craig:** Will it mention that Rawson is a synthetic life from?

**John:** [laughs] Yes. That’s already well established.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, before we go to our third point, there’s something I meant to bring up earlier, because an amazing thing happened this last weekend. For the first time I got a script that they wanted me to read over the weekend, it was kind of a high priority project for these people, and I’m the company that makes Bronson Watermarker. So, I do understand people want to watermark their scripts so they don’t get circulated beyond places.

And I’ve dealt with, like Marvel, who’s really notorious for super watermarking all of their stuff. So, I’m pretty used to watermarking. This time what they sent over was not the script. They sent over an iPad with the script as a PDF in iBooks. And it’s a big old, well that’s not very secure. But, what they’ve done is they’ve turned on parental lock controls for the whole thing.

**Craig:** Ah!

**John:** And they have taken out all of the web accessibility and stuff. So, I’m sure there probably was a way that a person could get it off, but it would be really, really hard to get that script off the iPad. So in the end I was kind of impressed by it. That’s not a bad way, if you need to give a script to somebody and make sure they read it but don’t do anything else to it.

**Craig:** That is pretty smart. I did not, yeah, I’ll have to see. I mean, I’m sure within four minutes on Google we can figure out how to foil that. But, still, not a bad idea.

**John:** Pretty good.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, plus, it’s fun. If somebody sends me a script by email or messenger or something, then it’s on my pile of things to read. But if somebody sends me a script on an iPad, I just want to read it. [laughs] I want to read it right away.

**John:** So, Craig, I’m going to send you over this script on an iPad so that you’ll actually read it.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, because I did read 30 pages of your script and just…[laughs]

**John:** Yeah, the one that I sent you before. You were like, “Oh, yeah, I’ll get to it.” Yeah, that was very helpful.

**Craig:** By the way, I, um…

**John:** Yeah, Craig is a little behind on reading something. But you know what, Craig? You can stop reading that for reasons that I’ll talk to you about offline.

**Craig:** Well you see then I really saved us both time. [laughs] But the truth is until you just said that I forgot. I totally forgot it! I feel terrible. Because I knew I had read 30 pages and was like, “I got to finish that,” and then it left my mind. And you, honestly, are either incredibly patient or you were just really setting a trap for me because you never mentioned it again. And so then I forgot. I’m sorry.

**John:** Yeah. It’s okay.

**Craig:** It was a good first 30 pages, though.

**John:** You know, a script that might circulate on an iPad because they certainly don’t want people to know spoilers is Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Segue into our last topic of the day. How about that season finale?

**Craig:** I liked it a lot.

**John:** Yeah, so again, spoiler alert here, because there’s sort of no way to not talk about spoilers for the season finale of Game of Thrones. But we had talked in an earlier podcast about how amazing the season was and my only one frustration was I felt like the Qarth plotline was sort of tap dancing around a bit because they clearly had a big reveal and they weren’t ready for it, so they were just sort of stalling to save that for the season finale.

But the stuff in the season finale was really good.

**Craig:** It was. Although I will still say, okay, so I mean I guess we should put the spoiler alert on for anyone who hasn’t caught up yet, bizarrely. The zombie army at the end was awesome. And everything, as always, with Dinklage was awesome. And Brienne had a great moment. That was sick. Loved that.

I mean, there was just a lot of great, great stuff in it. And, oh, a really funny moment, I mean a sad but funny moment with Theon and his guys clocking him and, like, “I thought he would never shut up.” That was great. I did not see that coming, so, well done as always with those guys.

The Qarth thing for me ultimately, I was like I just, I’m not sure if any of that was really worth it in the end because, you know, remember the first season ends with this amazing moment where this girl who had been kidnapped and sort of subjugated by her mean brother and then her rapist husband, sort of blossoms into this incredibly self-possessed woman who then at the very end survives fire and hatches dragons which — that’s quite an arc.

And this season she went to a town and then the dragons sort of lit a guy on fire.

**John:** Yes. What I will say is that if you take out what I thought were the placeholder moments that happened in a couple previous episodes, and you just took a look at what she did in this episode, yes, she goes into that tower, but then she also goes through that temptation sequence where she ends up at the Wall, she ends up back with her husband. She sees the throne, but like everything has changed around it. She has her temptation sequence. I thought it was very, very cool. It felt like it sets her up as a truly kind of mythical creature.

I like that she defended herself as like, “Well what about my magic?” And that defining kind of stuff. And the warlock saying, “You know what? It’s because the dragons are here that the magic is increasing in the world,” which is cool.

**Craig:** Right. I like that. I mean, it certainly made sense of why they were doing what they were doing, because for the life of me I couldn’t understand why until that moment, and that was good. And, in fact, because I always read the… — There’s a guy who does reviews for Wired and he reviews Game of Thrones, and he reviews it entirely from the point of view of somebody that has really obsessively read the books. And so he tends almost always to bemoan any deviation from the source material.

But, I actually don’t think that was in the source material. I think that’s something that Dan and David came up with. And even he begrudgingly was like, “I guess that’s pretty good.”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** You know, I mean, he’s the grouchiest guy. I mostly read it because I just find it kind of ridiculous. It’s like the point is not to simply film every word you’ve read, sir.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that aside, I mean, that’s a minor quibble. And she’s great. All the performances were great. But it’s hard to do a final episodes that is, and it’s the same thing they did last season. Remember, the penultimate episode was the huge one, where they chop off Ned’s head and they have the battle this season, and then this ultimate episode kind of just to tease you off for the madness to come.

**John:** What I thought was smart about the episode, just to praise it a little bit more, is even though they had to skip around to so many different plotlines, it all felt like they were part of one universe. And I felt like it was one bigger message, and that all these things were going to be coming back together. Because the two young princes have to flee the burned city. It’s like, we’re going to head north to the Wall for safety.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** And like the zombie army is coming!

**Craig:** The zombie army is heading south towards the Wall. Right.

**John:** And establishing the small new things in the world, like, oh, the assassin, well he’s actually magical. Like he’s some sort of changeling kind of creature. That was…

**Craig:** That was cool.

**John:** Those are all important things.

**Craig:** That was cool. And got to give credit to the director. I don’t know if it was Nutter who did this last one. But, I mean, all the episodes have been extraordinarily well directed. It’s hard to direct television like that because I would imagine they’re producing these things in huge chunks. They don’t do them episode by episode. They’ve got to do all the stuff in Iceland. They’ve got to do all the stuff in Ireland.

And, so, they managed quite beautifully over many directors and many different locations and completely out of sequence to maintain these wonderful transitions and hold everything together. The show is very well written and very well acted. And you talked about the cast, but the direction is also excellent.

**John:** Hooray for Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Tech credits were astounding.

**John:** Yes. Craig, do you have cool stuff this week, like One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I don’t. You know, you always do this to me. I don’t…

**John:** I would say that most of our listeners have an expectation that often there’s a One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** I don’t — nothing’s cool.

**John:** Nothing’s cool.

**Craig:** [laughs] My One Cool Thing is being bored. Bored. What do you have? Tell me something cool.

**John:** I’ll tell you something cool. I don’t know if you’ve… — You play games like Ski Racer, that thing I got you hooked on.

**Craig:** Ski Safari. That was cool.

**John:** Ski Safari. That was good. So, I was looking around and I wanted to see both for sort of my daughter who is starting to learn some basic kind of programming kind of stuff…

**Craig:** Nerd!

**John:** Nerd! Super nerd. Super geek dad. And so I wanted to see are there simple little game tools because I really basically want her to have HyperCard, but HyperCard doesn’t exist anymore. And the things that are like HyperCard are really far too complicated and big and huge.

And so I was like, well, is there a way to make little Flash games? And I found this thing called Stencyl that’s genius. And so what it essentially is is a development environment for creating little flash games or little iOS games, but it’s all little blocks of code that click together. So you’re not typing statements and functions. You’re just setting parameters on things that can move in the world. And it’s incredibly smartly done. I don’t have any real sense of how big the company is that’s making it, whether it’s one incredibly maniacal person behind it or a bigger team.

But the things that you’re able to do are really, really impressive. And they’ve very smartly leveraged, there’s a beginning programming system called Scratch that MIT had made that I had seen years ago. And it was a good idea that never sort of fully developed. And Stencyl has sort of taken that idea and run with it.

So, I would recommend Stencyl to anybody who’s interested in making little Flash games, or anyone who wants to teach their kids about moving stuff on the screen.

**Craig:** It sounds like something my son would love. Is it web-based?

**John:** Yeah, because your son does little animation stuff. It’s downloadable. It’s on the Mac.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s on Mac.

**John:** It’s on the Mac and PC. So it’s an actual application and so it doesn’t have all that sluggishness that web-based stuff tends to have.

**Craig:** Oh great. It sounds like something he would absolutely flip for because, yeah, I know my boy.

**John:** You know your boy.

**Craig:** I know my boy, and that sounds like…

**John:** And so it comes with a bunch of little demo games that you can play right there and then you can just open them up and change all the parameters and see how stuff works. And it’s smartly done.

**Craig:** Ah, all right. Stencyl.

**John:** Stencyl. And it’s spelled S-t-e-n-c-y-l.

**Craig:** C-y-l, so it’s like the stripper version of Stencil.

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. Stencyl-Lynn would be the stripper name.

**Craig:** I do have One Cool Thing. I have One Cool Thing. The trailer for our friend John Gatins’ Flight.

**John:** I’m happy to link to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Flight is a script that John Gatins wrote ten years ago, I think, maybe longer. And it’s a very interesting story and in part sort of inspired by his own life, not the part with the plain. But I’ve been listening to John talk about this script for a long, long time. And then it all sort of came together. Robert Zemeckis returned to live action directing, and Denzel Washington, and all that stuff sounds great. But I was always sort of nervous about it just because they’re making a movie, I think the budget is like $30 million or something like that, or $35 million. Very low budget considering what they had to do and who’s in the movie, I mean, Denzel, and Robert Zemeckis. Everybody is obviously working for the love of the movie.

And I just get tense when I see trailers and things for friends’ movies because sometimes they just don’t look good, and then what do you do? And it doesn’t mean the movie is not good, it just means that I start worrying for them because the marketing is off.

And then I see this trailer for Flight and I’m like, it’s just — it does everything right. And I would love to find out — if any of you out there know what trailer house and specifically what editor cut the trailer for Flight, I’d love to know. Because it does everything right. I mean, it’s so smartly done. This is a trailer where you start off with a pilot and he’s on a plane and there’s a plane crash in the movie, okay; I’m not giving anything away there.

And every other trailer would have just shown the plane crash and then said, “And then…” You know? And this thing, he’s just flying a plane, and the next shot is he’s waking up in a hospital. And you don’t see the plane crash at all. And then over the course of the trailer they give you drips and drabs of his plane crash. And then there’s one final shot.

**John:** That shot, I get goose bumps just thinking about that final shot.

**Craig:** Okay? Just thinking about it. And my deal is, and I wrote something for, you can dig it up for the links if you want, for WordPress [*sic.*] many years ago about marketing and how screenwriters can help marketers in one little tiny way. And that is for all of the goo-goo bananas silliness of trailers, if there’s one image or line moment in a trailer that is really astonishing, or surprising, or fresh in some say, sometimes it’s even just a little joke that grabs people, it will work. You will drive people to the theaters.

I think in that essay I wrote I refer to the moment in, you know, I saw the trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean, I’m like, okay, yeah, it’s pirates and guns and stuff. And then they turned into skeletons and I was like, “Okie dokie, that was cool.” [laughs] You know? Like I did not see that one coming. “You better start believing in ghost stories, you’re in one,” you know?

And in this there’s this shot at the end where you go, “Oh?! OH?!” And then you really want to see this movie. So, awesome trailer. I’m sure the movie’s gonna be fantastic. Very happy for John. And you should all go watch that trailer.

**John:** Yeah, I praised John for it and also said I’m really hoping that it becomes the continuing gift of The Nines that we could have our fourth Oscar nominee from The Nines. Because John Gatins has a small role in The Nines. Octavia Spencer is in The Nines. Melissa McCarthy is in The Nines.

**Craig:** Melissa McCarthy.

**John:** Jim Rash is in The Nines.

**Craig:** Jim Rash. How do I get myself retroactively inserted into The Nines?

**John:** That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** In the director’s cut?

**John:** In the premise of the next…yeah, that’s right.

**Craig:** Yeah, get me into the director’s cut as somebody. Anything.

**John:** [laughs] Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll film new scenes and then delete them and they will be deleted scenes from The Nines.

**Craig:** Hey, that’s a great idea.

**John:** Done.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, now my odds of an Oscar have doubled from zero to zero. Yay!

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

**Craig:** John, my pleasure. See you next time.

**John:** Take care. Bye-bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] You guys…

**John:** So, Craig…

— You guys, you missed some good comedy there.

**Craig:** You missed, uh…

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** I remember that one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Biff.

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

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

**Craig:** Well let’s do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh!

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** An anonymous socialist writes…

**Craig:** Cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**John:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right. No.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s danger. Danger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s not fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Recycled plastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** We don’t like comments.

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

**Craig:** Yeah, @clmazin.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** So bless him.

**Craig:** Well done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sounds right to me.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s pretty amazing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Totally. Bronies.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yuck.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Oh god!

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Awesome.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

That, you know it’s a funny thing…

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

**Craig:** It’s awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Wow.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** I have faith.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Do yours first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Wow.

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

**John:** That is impressive.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No way? Cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Much cheaper.

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

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

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

**Craig:** I love it.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Hey.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Bye.