Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/how-credit-arbitration-works).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, and I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 20 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you Craig?

**Craig:** I’m good. Big 20 episode mark. This is where we don’t…we get renewed or go into syndication at this point?

**John:** Yeah, I guess we would have known by this point if we were going to be picked up for a second season. We would have already gotten our back 9 order theoretically.

**Craig:** Right. When can we renegotiate? [laughs] I’m tired of this salary that we get.

**John:** Yeah. It would really depend on our ratings. And I don’t really have a good way of gauging what our ratings are based on our competitors. Not that we really have competitors — it is a tough thing that we are doing right now.

**Craig:** I feel like, frankly, we have driven all of the competitors out. Why would anybody do a podcast like this when we are doing one? Stupid.

**John:** Well also how much should we be paid? It’s hard to say. Right now I feel like our salaries are probably commensurate with our audience.

**Craig:** That’s pretty rough dude. [laughs] That’s pretty rough. I want money. We should start doing what Zach does on Between Two Ferns. We should get a sponsor, like a weird sponsor, I think he does Mennen or something like that, Speed Stick. We should get something like Speed Stick.

**John:** Great. I listen to the 5by5 podcast and they have sponsors and every once in awhile Dan Benjamin breaks the conversation and talks about the sponsor and segues right back into the topics and is very good at it.

**Craig:** Given our tendency to always end on something about women’s reproductive health, maybe we can get some sort of sanitary product.

**John:** I think Vagisil.

**Craig:** Oh, good idea. Okay, well we will get — Stuart, get on that. [laughs]

**John:** So Craig, this week I went to CES for the first time.

**Craig:** Nerd!

**John:** Oh, so CES is the Consumer Electronics Show. It is in Las Vegas every year and I have always wanted to go. And so the Writers Guild wrote me last month and said, “Hey would you go and be on this panel that they are asking for a writer to be on,” and I said, “Sure, I’ve always wanted to go.” It’s a good excuse — they are going to fly me out there.

And it is not as much fun as I thought it was going to be.

**Craig:** Hmm. Tell me what went wrong.

**John:** Nothing actually went wrong. There weren’t great disasters. It is just when you see coverage of it you think like, “Oh my gosh, it is going to be a wonderland of new products. The future will be in front of me.” And instead it is a lot of the cruddy versions of the present in front of you, or the competitor’s version of this thing that you have already seen. At least that was my vibe — that is what I got out of it this year.

There were some things that were cool and new but most stuff was just…there was just a lot. There is just too much. It was like going to Lollapalooza but instead of great bands there were just a bunch of Chinese companies that made printers.

**Craig:** Right, so you are seeing miles of iPad knockoffs and printers.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that is actually really cool to see there are the TVs that will probably never come to the market, or won’t come to market for like five years, but they are ridiculously thin. They are as thin as your iPad, but they are like 50 inches wide. That’s amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I saw they had that OLED display from somebody that was super thin, but isn’t everybody sort of secretly waiting for this hypothetical Apple television thing to come out.

**John:** Yeah, if it comes out that would be great.

**Craig:** That would be great.

**John:** And some of the 3D stuff looked better than I have ever seen before. And a lot of it had glasses, but they also had little small things that didn’t have glasses, that you could hold your hand sort of like the way that the Nintendo 3D stuff works. Because it is so close to you it doesn’t have to require glasses. And that was okay.

But by about four hours into it my eyes hurt. And I don’t want to give that to the 3D. I think my eyes were just overwhelmed by so many things to look at and stare at and I don’t like crowds in general so it was tough for that thing.

I ended up sort of retreating into this one little room to eat lunch just to be away from people and to stare at a padded gray wall.

**Craig:** Well I also feel like sometimes, like for instance Comic-Con, any sort of gathering where you would expect a lot of nerds and geeks who are my brothers and sisters.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Sometimes those are the worst crowds because there is something about the nerd/geek DNA that doesn’t seem to mind crowds very much. So everybody really…I have a feeling if it is people that do mind crowds at a normal level of tolerance, they will, like diffusion, they will seek places of less crowdedness and it will even out, but not so much nerds and geeks. If they find something they really like they will just jam in.

**John:** I guess I was expecting more ordinary geeks and nerds. Most of the people that you see at CES are really people who are selling these kinds of products, so they are not necessarily nerds and geeks. They are not necessarily big on tech; they are just selling their product. And so there are a lot of people who are at booths who I suspect work at some office in Omaha, or were hired specifically to be a pretty model holding something at this show. And they are not there for the joy of technology.

**Craig:** Not so many fans in other words.

**John:** Not so many fans. It’s not like a car show where you feel like it is everyone crowding in to see the latest cars. It is a lot more like, “We are businessmen from various locations.” And the saddest thing that I didn’t really expect is that so much of the activity takes place in these three giant halls in Vegas, they are all next to Las Vegas Hilton. But a lot of stuff actually spills into the hotel rooms at the Las Vegas Hilton.

And so you would wander through the hallways and there would be little signs on the door for “This company, come in and let us demonstrate our thing for you.” And it just felt like maybe that was even worse than being in the massive show floor was to be stuck in a little hotel room for four days waiting for someone to wander in.

**Craig:** Come into your room and use your bathroom.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Weird. I didn’t realize that. Did you at least have some Vegas fun?

**John:** I don’t gamble, so I didn’t have that kind of Vegas fun.

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** Yeah. I know. But I got to have dinner with Gary Whitta who is a screenwriter colleague of both of ours and it was great to catch up with him.

**Craig:** Does he live in Vegas? Oh, no, he went for the nerd fest?

**John:** He went for the nerd fest.

**Craig:** Got it. I can’t believe you don’t gamble. I want to change that.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t derive joy from gambling. When I do gamble, the few times I have been gambling, I would just say, “Well this is the $100 that I will lose,” and that is the $100 I will lose. But I don’t get the pleasure out of it that I am supposed to get out of it.

**Craig:** Mm, you are doing it wrong.

**John:** I’m doing it wrong. I’m clearly doing it wrong.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll fix that.

**John:** Yeah. But so let’s offer practical advice on something that hopefully more of our audience will benefit from which is getting credited on a movie, or a TV show, but really a movie.

**Craig:** Now that’s gambling. [laughs] Now we are talking about gambling.

**John:** [laughs] There is a little bit gambling. So our topic today is arbitration, but really in a general sense it is figuring out who gets credit for a motion picture or for a TV show. As we have talked about before on the podcast there are different credits that you get for screenwriting. There is “written by” which is both story and screenplay, and then the story and screenplay credits can also be parceled out separately if that is more appropriate for what a specific writer did on a project.

If you are not the only person who wrote on a given project there is a very high likelihood that you will have to somehow figure out who deserves the writing credits. And you have several ways of doing that. You and the other writers can all mutually agree on what you think those credits should be. And in most cases that decision will be respected and that will be the final credit on the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. If in fact the writers, if there isn’t an automatic arbitration — we will talk about what triggers that — if the writers agree on what the credit is, that is the credit. There is a clause that allows writers to self-determine credits.

But, if there is an automatic arbitration, then there is no opportunity for that. And those cases arise when one or more of the participating writers is also what is known as a production executive which is a particularly bad, misleading legal term. What that really means is any writer that is also receiving credit as a producer or a director.

**John:** We launched into this and I didn’t sort of explain a big enough framework behind this. We are talking about movies that are written for Hollywood that are under the Writers Guild contract. The Writers Guild is ultimately the body that decides who gets credit for writing a movie or for a TV show.

And it hasn’t always been this way and there are problems with how credits are sometimes determined. But, given the choices you would probably rather have the Writers Guild figure out the credits on a movie than say a studio.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the idea was when this system was put in place way back shortly after WWII, so the company in the United States, these movies are exclusively, I think, works for hire. That means that the studios own the copyright. They are the legal authors of the movie. But who receives credit for authorship? Who is the author in fact of the movie?

And in order to determine that you have to look at all the people that contributed to it and make a decision. Prior to the Writers Guild making these determinations it was up to the studio. And the studio, frankly, can do whatever they want. They can give writing credit to the people who deserve it or writing credit to the people they like the most, or writing credit to their girlfriend. It doesn’t matter.

And to this day that, in fact, is the system that applies to feature animation. The studio has sole discretion over the determination of those credits. But for Writers Guild-coverage movies, live action movies, the Writers Guild determines it and what that comes down to ultimately, if there is a dispute among the participating writers, it comes down to an arbitration in which three of your peers get all of the scripts written by all of the participating writers, they read them — they don’t know who wrote what, they don’t know any names.

And then after reading all of them they make a determination about what the credit should be.

**John:** Exactly. So, let’s define some of these terms. So three of your peers, these are other screenwriters who are active members of the Writers Guild. I have been an arbiter. You have been an arbiter. They are recruited from the ranks of the Writers Guild. You don’t know who are the arbitrators on your project.

**Craig:** That’s correct. And there are some minor qualifications. You do need to be a member for a certain amount of time — I think it is five years — or have three credits. So, you can’t be a brand spanking new writer and expect to be an arbiter.

**John:** You don’t get paid to be an arbiter. It is actually quite a fair amount of work. So you do it out of a sense of responsibility, out of your writer’s citizenship. It is like voting: you feel like you need to do it because you want to make… you are going to do the best job you can as an arbiter with the belief that somewhere down the road you want those arbiters on your project being just as diligent.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is essentially jury duty for screenwriters and unfortunately, just as the case is with jury duty, it is very difficult frankly to get writers to participate as arbiters. It is work. Frankly, screenwriters hate reading screenplays, so the thought of having to read 12 drafts of a particular movie in order to make a determination is daunting.

And then on top of that you have to write a statement explaining your reasoning for the decision you make. It can be a little bit of a drag, but like you said, the system is only as good as the people who participate in it.

**John:** Let’s talk people through the process of how stuff goes into arbitration. You have written a movie. Let’s pick a name for this movie. Let’s say it is Batman vs. The Smurfs.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Alright. So, you were the first writer on Batman vs. The Smurfs and another writer was hired subsequently on Batman vs. The Smurfs.

Once the movie has finished production and there is no more writing happening on the movie the studio will send out what is called a Notice of Tentative Writing Credit. It is a very standardized form kind of memo that says, “We believe these are the writers who participated on this movie. We believe the proper WGA credit is ‘written by'” — or actually, it would have to be probably “screenplay by,” depending on sort what these underlying rights are.

It would say “written by Writer A and Writer B,” so the people’s actual names. And they send that out to everybody who worked on the movie, everybody who was a writer on that movie.

**Craig:** Yes. Everybody. That means even if they do a roundtable where they ask six or seven writers to sit in a room for eight hours just to do some punch-up on a comedy, for instance, which is fairly common. Even those writers will get the statement. Anybody that was employed under the auspices of this project gets this Notice of Tentative Writing Credits.

And all that is, is the studio’s suggestion. That is the beginning and end of the studio’s participation in the credit determination process.

**John:** Almost always. They may also get involved if there is a question of when material was submitted to the studio.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Over the course of arbitration the WGA may be asking the studio to provide certain drafts.

**Craig:** Yeah. It is the end, I suppose, of their opinion. [laughs] That is a better way of putting it.

**John:** So all of the writers who work on that movie, so this first writer, the second writer, and all of the people who were on that one comedy punch-up for Batman vs. The Smurfs, they all get this memo, this Notice of Tentative Writing Credits.

Usually it goes to your agent or your lawyer or both, but you get this notice. Actually one friend of mine who wrote on a movie somehow didn’t get the Notice of Tentative Writing Credit and it became a whole issue because she missed her window for when she could…

**Craig:** Protest.

**John:** …protest. And it became a challenge.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Ultimately she was able to get her protest in there because some other things had happened. But, anyway, your agent and your manager/lawyer should be given this notice. And you will read this and you will say, “Well I think that is the appropriate credit,” or, “I don’t think that is the appropriate credit.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, that doesn’t automatically mean that it goes to arbitration. As long as Writer A and Writer B or any of the other writers involved were production executives you have the opportunity to determine among yourselves what you think the credit should be.

So Writer A could call Writer B and say, “Hey look, I read through the Notice of Tentative Writing Credit. I think I deserve sole story credit and then we should share screenplay credit.”

Writer B might say, “Yes, I think that is actually a really good solution. I agree with this. We will both write up a letter to this effect and submit it,” and that will be the final credit as long as the other writers who worked on the project aren’t appealing that. That can sometimes happen.

It happens, I would say, a fair amount of the time.

**Craig:** It happens. Yeah. The simplest outcome to these things is that all of the participating writers get this Notice of Tentative Writing Credit and nobody has a problem with it. Everybody actually agrees with the studio’s opinion in which case the window for protest lapses and those credits become final.

**John:** Exactly. So we should list that as the simplest case. You get the Notice of Tentative Writing Credits, you agree with it, everybody agrees with it, Those are the credits. Done.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** Second simplest case. You get the Notice of Tentative Writing Credits, the participating writers confirm among themselves, agree what the credits should be. They both write letters to that effect. Everything is done.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I ran into a case on a project a while back that we couldn’t actually do that because of weird things that were in our contracts that I think I actually spoke with you about. Certain studio contracts, this boilerplate, that can have the studio…can prevent writers from just reaching that decision.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and in fact as far as I can tell it is every studio. Here’s the thing. I’m not sure this is enforced.

The deal is: writers get bonuses when they negotiate the terms of their employment. There is the money you get paid to write. And then there is a bonus that you get if you receive sole screenplay credit. It is never attached to story credit.

And there is a slightly diminished bonus you get if you share screenplay credit. And obviously the idea of the bonus is to reward you for authoring a movie that actually got made, which doesn’t…most of these movies don’t get made at all.

There is boilerplate language in just about every contract as far as I can tell that says if credits are determined by the writers agreeing amongst themselves to a credit that is different than the one the studio proposed they don’t have to pay you your bonus. And the reason why is because they don’t want writers to essentially collude to maximize the amount of bonus money the studios pay out.

On the other hand, it seems ridiculous because writers don’t care how much the studio pays out to other people. They just care about what they get. So, the truth is I don’t know if that is every enforced.

**John:** Yeah. The scenario in which I could see it happening is let’s say Writer A is a very low level writer and his bonus was $50,000 for the movie getting made. Let’s say Writer B was a huge writer and had a $1 million credit bonus. You can imagine a scenario in which Writer B would come to Writer A and say, “Hey look, if we just agree on this I will cut you a check for $200,000 so we can avoid all the arbitration and everything else.”

And I think that is the situation that that boilerplate language is trying to avoid. I don’t know that it really happens.

**Craig:** Maybe. Yeah.

**John:** But it did come up with one project that I wrote a while back where we realized that we couldn’t just simply come to an agreement.

**Craig:** Right. And that is a bummer.

**John:** That’s a bummer. So these are the two simple scenarios. First is Notice of Tentative Writing Credit. We agree. Everybody agrees. That is the final credit.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Second simplest solution is all of the participating writers decide their own credit, everyone agrees to that, and that becomes the final credit. If those two steps don’t work right then you file a Notice for Arbitration. So you are submitting a letter to the WGA. I think you can actually just call the WGA credits representative and say that you intend to seek arbitration on the credits for this move.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** That starts the whole process.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So that process involves a couple steps. First off you have to determine which drafts are going to be read, which drafts were written under the terms of the WGA contract. That can be contentious sometimes, especially in terms of what literary material really is literary material. Are you throwing in every outline? That can be complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there are rules governing this stuff and there is also a process called a pre-arbitration in which a separate group of writers will make a determination about whether or not something is, in fact, literary material and also what order things came in because chronology is very important. The arbitration process is based on a fundamental principle that all writers have access to all of the WGA-covered writing on the project that occurred before them.

It doesn’t matter if you read the script or not. It doesn’t matter if the studio gave you that first script or not. The truth is if it was assigned to you in your contract, and it always is, we have to assume you saw it. Therefore, if something occurs in a script that was written in June and something similar occurs in a script that was written in December, they will give the writer of the June draft credit for it.

So, a lot of times what happens is suddenly you think you are Writer B and then suddenly somebody waves their hands and says, “No, no, actually I turned something in before that. I’m Writer B. You are Writer C.” And then it becomes a whole thing about trying to figure out who came first.

**John:** Yeah. So, a pre-arbitration hearing may happen to figure out what order stuff happened in. I had a weird situation once where the pre-arbitration hearing was really to determine whether one of the participating writers was actually a writer at that point or was he a producer, like a studio executive on the movie at that point. Were those studio notes or was it really literary material?

So, there can sometimes be a pre-arbitration hearing. I wouldn’t say it is most of the time but it does happen.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Once you agree on which drafts are applicable, your name gets taken off of everything. And they start labeling things Writer A, Writer B, Writer C. If you are a writing team they will still call you Writer A. They don’t try to make it more complicated than it should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. You are treated as one writer by the rules.

**John:** And, of course, it can sometimes get complicated where you have a writing team and then they split up and one person wrote separately and then it just…yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have been in arbitrations where I have been part of a team that was called Writer B and on my own I was Writer C. And unfortunately your contributions as Writer C are viewed as separate from your contributions as Writer B as part of a team. It is just the way it goes.

**John:** Once you figure out which drafts and what you are going to label the different writers, the WGA has to figure out who are going to be the arbiters. Arbiters are assigned numbers rather than letters so you will have Arbiter 1, Arbiter 2, and Arbiter 3.

They will get a giant FedEx envelope or box with all the applicable scripts in it, any background material. They will also get a statement written by each of the participating writers. The participating writers don’t have to submit a statement but they generally do which outlines their case for why they believe they deserve the credit that they are seeking on the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Now Craig has a really good post on his blog about how to write a good arbitration statement. And so I am going to link to that in the show notes, but we can sort of summarize them here. I think this is back from 2005, but nothing has changed.

**Craig:** No. And unfortunately this is one of those areas where the psychology of the participating writer is in direct competition with their own best interests. Because it is a difficult process to go through; it is a very emotional process. The thought that you will either not be credited for the work you have done or that somebody else will be credited for the work you have done is horrifying properly to anybody who writes for a living.

It is a very difficult thing to go through and it is fraught with anxiety. You add to that mix the fact that you are entering into what people often refer to as the Star Chamber, where you are being judged by three people you will not see, whose names you will not know, and who will not be accountable to you.

And the only communication you can have with these people is this statement. Suddenly the importance of this statement grows into this massive thing. This is your make or break statement. And, add to the fact that we are writers and that this make or break thing is based on writing, and you can imagine how people obsess over the statement.

Unfortunately, on the other side of this thing where the arbiters are, here is the truth: as arbiters, we are judging the scripts. We grant credit based on the writing that we read in the scripts. And that’s it. Or in the treatments. Whatever literary material has been supplied to us.

The statements are nice, but frankly every statement basically makes an incredibly biased argument about why that writer should get this or that. They often include irrelevant comments about how long it took them to write it or that they got the green light or that they never read the other stuff. All that stuff in the end doesn’t really matter.

And tragically there are writers out there paying people, so-called experts, up to $10,000 to write so-called expert participation statements that will get them their credit. And the worst thing you can get as an arbiter is one of these over-written, clinical, legal treatises on why a writer should get credit. All you care about are the scripts.

So, how do you write a good statement? Well… [laughs]

**John:** Here are the bullet points you gave. So let me read them to you.

Keep the statement short. Absolutely. I think the first time I did this it was like a 15-page thing. I don’t do those 15-page things anymore. They have gotten a lot shorter.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Do not bad-mouth the other participating writers.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Obviously. Nothing, I mean, remember: it is other screenwriters who are going to be reading this thing. You don’t want to seem like a dick.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t be a jerk.

**John:** Talk about what you contributed to the final screenplay and nothing else which is very key because they are going to read those early drafts which were great but the only thing that matters is that final script. You have to show what of your stuff is in that final script.

**Craig:** Correct. And it ultimately doesn’t really… It is not your job to tell the arbiters, “By the way, notice that all of this guy’s first act isn’t even in the script.” They will get it, trust me. They don’t need you to tell them that. And it just seems petty. Talk about what you did.

**John:** Yeah. Avoid the percentage trap. And probably at this point we need to explain why you are talking about percentages at all, or shouldn’t, but why you are thinking about percentages.

In order to be credited as the writer on a project there are different thresholds you have to hit. I’m going to let you talk because I’m going to mess it up and then we will have to edit this back. So, for story credit, story credit can be split between two writers?

**Craig:** That’s right. A maximum of two writers.

**John:** So, in order to… If you are Writer B on a project you have to be able to show that you have contributed 50% or more to the story.

**Craig:** Actually, no.

**John:** See, that is why I am going to let you talk.

**Craig:** Yeah. Story credit doesn’t have percentages.

**John:** That’s right.

**Craig:** Story credit just says that you have to make a…I think it is significant or meaningful contribution to story. And they leave it up to arbiters to determine what that means.

The only limitation on story credit is you can’t give it to more than two writers, and again, teams count as one writer. So there is no threshold so to speak.

The thresholds come into play for screenplay credit. We have two thresholds essentially. The standard threshold is 33%. You have to show that you contributed at least one-third of the final elements that contribute to screenplay in order to receive screenplay credit if the project is a non-original screenplay. That includes adaptations and the like.

If it is an original project, typically something that began life as a spec or a pitch, then the first writer has to show that 33%. But all subsequent writers have to get a 50% threshold. They have to show that they have contributed in excess of half of the elements that contribute to screenplay.

Now, go ahead and ask me how an arbiter makes that mathematical calculation. [laughs] You can’t. It is nonsense. We typically refer to those percentages as guidelines. They are weird kind of — I don’t know how you… — metaphoric simulations of thresholds.

In my mind 50% is whatever half means. And 33% is a good amount. But no one, I dare anyone to tell me that they can figure out that somebody contributed 40% or 45% or 28%. It just doesn’t work that way.

But the upshot is that no more than three writers can share a screenplay credit. And that these percentages are guidelines. So, don’t talk about… That is the point, the reason you brought this up: the worst thing you can do, and I did it on a very early project because I was a dope, is to sit there and try and do math for the arbiters and say, “Look, I added it up and I got 59%.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Don’t try to invent your own math to it.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** It won’t help you.

**Craig:** No. It is just going to make you look like a dummy.

**John:** Your next bullet point: thank them for their service. Absolutely, because it is a hell of a lot of work. And I am always appreciative when I read a writer’s statement that thanks me for my service that doesn’t influence my choices. But I do get that small little endorphin burst that helps me then crack open the next script.

So, thank them, because you would want to be thanked. Golden rule.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Yeah. I have read some statements that were soaking in a strange sense of entitlement as if I had been employed by the writers to render this decision and it was… The statement was sort of a mix of griping, grousing, complaining about the process, suspicions that I wouldn’t understand, or complaints about how they had been burnt before by arbiters.

You know, I’m volunteering my time. And I don’t like it anymore than they do, so dispense with all the negatively. It’s just not going to help.

**John:** Yup. Next bullet point: cite the rules. This is really crucial because what the arbiter is ultimately going to do, he or she will read through all of the scripts, but the only way he can reach a decision is to go to the screenwriters credits manual and look at the rules and look at how to apply those rules.

So, if you are going to make a point, make your point using the same language as the rules that are going to be in the manual.

**Craig:** Yeah. If there is anything that approaches a trick, and it is not really a trick, but anything that approaches an effective way for your statement to have an impact on the arbiters it is this. The reason why is the arbiters have to write their own statement. When they are done with their decision they call the Guild and they say, “This is the decision I reached.” And then once the Guild has determined that there isn’t a deadlock among the jury members, then they ask each arbiter to write a statement explaining their reasoning.

And they do that because as participating writers we have the right to request those statements when the arbitration is concluded to review them and make sure that the arbiters didn’t violate any procedures, misapply rules, et cetera.

What you can’t do as an arbiter is write a statement like this: “I read all of the scripts and I just feel like Writer B just, they really wrote the script. I didn’t really get a sense from Writer A that they did much. But I do think Writer C should get story just because he worked a lot.”

**John:** “It seems fair.”

**Craig:** “It seems fair.” The staff will call you and say, “No.” You have to, please, use the language in the manual to clearly justify your remark that Writer B really wrote the script. Because we have to use the manual, it is helpful if the statements give us hints of how we could use the manual when it is time for us to make our decision.

I don’t think it is necessarily going to be determinative but it shows that you are serious and thinking about the problem the way the arbiter has to think about the problem. It can’t hurt. And it could help.

**John:** Yup. So the arbiter is given all of these scripts. He has received a big FedEx box with all the scripts in them and a timeline and really a deadline. This is how much time we have to figure out the credits. Sometimes there really is a ticking clock because there is a movie coming out, something big has happened. TV has more pressing deadlines a lot of times than features do.

Often I have had two weeks to read through the scripts and come up with answers. Sometimes it has been less than that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When you are finished — that deadline is clearly spelled out at the start — when you are finished you call into the WGA. You give them your decision.

If the decision is not unanimous they may ask you to do a teleconference. And, in fact, this last one I participated in they already had the teleconference time scheduled from the start, so they blocked out a period of time for when they would do a teleconference, if they needed a teleconference.

So this last one I went on we had a teleconference which was actually really cool. If there is not unanimity you call into a number, you identify yourself only as Arbiter 1, 2, or 3. You explain how you reached the decision. The other arbiters explain how they reached their decision. If that discussion causes a unanimous opinion to form, that’s great. If it doesn’t cause a unanimous opinion to form, that is still okay.

You don’t have to have unanimity but you would like unanimity if you can find it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is a rule change that our committee instituted a couple of years ago and it was kind of a revolutionary shift because the legal basis that the Guild has used to defend itself against many, many lawsuits over the years has been that this process is anonymous.

And they have always been very careful to preserve the wall of anonymity between both the arbiters and the participants and intra-arbiter as well so that I don’t know that you and I are both arbitrating on the same movie so I can’t call you up and say, “Hey John, shouldn’t it be this? Don’t you think it should be that? Should we give this guy credit?”

But we had another problem. The way that the rules work, if a decision is unanimous you are done. If a decision is two to one the majority prevails. Only in the case of three different decisions do you get deadlocked and then they have to impanel three new arbiters.

What we found was that —

**John:** Let me stop you for one sec.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** What you are saying is unanimity, great. Two to one, majority rules.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Two to one meaning you agree on the exact same breakdown of credits. Sometimes what will happen is one person will say, “I think Writer A should get sole credit.” Arbiter 2 says, “I think it should be split equal between the two.” And Writer C [*sic.*] says, “I think story goes to this guy and the other two share screenplay.”

So it is possible to reach three different decisions out of an arbitration.

**Craig:** Absolutely. Absolutely. And it happens frequently. But what we were finding statistically was that almost two-thirds of decisions were two to one. Only one-third of decisions on features roughly were unanimous. And the problem that we were having for our membership was if you lose an arbitration two to one you are sitting there going, “I shouldn’t have lost that arbitration. I mean, you give me another three people I might win that one two to one.”

It is a difference of one vote. If you lose unanimously, well, you lost. You may not like it, but three people all agreed that it should be this. And what we found often was that the differences between the two people and the one were fairly minor and they weren’t very substantive.

But the writers on the other end didn’t know that. So, what we required was in any case where it wasn’t unanimous from the start the arbiters had to get on this anonymous — this is a constant unanimous/anonymous shift — they had to get on this anonymous teleconference and defend their decision and talk about why they thought it should be a certain thing. And then see if maybe there was room for slight adjustments — if they didn’t feel very strongly, if they were on the fence about a minor aspect of it — maybe you could go to a unanimous decision.

The staff monitors the teleconference to make sure that no one writer is badgering, one arbiter is badgering another, or that no one arbiter is misunderstanding the rules when they make their argument. And two great things have come out of this.

One, we have far more unanimous decisions. And, two, the staff gets a chance to listen to the arbiters and learn who is actually on the ball and who is kind of a dope. And that is a big deal because, frankly, of all the problems that we have with arbitrations I maintain — this is my opinion — that the weak link is the arbiters, not the participating writers, not the staff, not the procedures, not even the guidelines, which are problematic, but the arbiters.

And if the arbiters are bringing bias or slip-shot methodology or just, frankly, a lack of mental acuity, we need to know and not have them arbitrate.

**John:** Yeah. So, this teleconference may or may not have happened, so coming out of arbitration this first step of arbitration, you may have reached an unanimous decision, you may have reached a majority decision. You may have reached a split decision, a deadlock, in which case you are doing the whole process again. But hopefully you have come out of this with a decision.

It is the Writers Guild’s responsibility then to call or email or contact the participating writers and let them know what the decision has been.

There is a possibility of appeal. The possibility of appeal can only be based on the application of the rules. It can’t be based on “I didn’t like that decision.” You have to be able to show that the rules were not applied.

**Craig:** Yeah. More specifically that the procedures weren’t followed correctly because it is… I will tell you that the staff is quite good at not letting out statements. Well, the Writers Guild West staff, not to beat up the East, but we are far more particular about this in the West — the Writers Guild West staff is excellent about not letting statements out that violate our rules.

You will not see a statement from a Writers Guild West arbiter saying, “This guy should get screenplay credit because he hit the 33% benchmark. And that writer really had to hit a 50% benchmark.” We don’t let that happen.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** You are not going to see anything like that. Where you can protest is if you feel the procedures weren’t followed correctly. For instance, you have evidence that one of the writers looked up your name and knew who you were. Or you believed that you didn’t have a proper amount of time to write your statement. Or, you can tell from one of the statements that the writer actually read the wrong draft, something like that.

So, when you get the judgment you have the opportunity to protest. And if you do protest you will receive the written statements of the arbiters which you can review. You will then be given an opportunity to go through with your protest or not. And if you do, you then go to what is called a Policy Review Board where three new writers hear your case with the proviso that they can’t read any of the literary material.

So they are not there to rejudge who wrote what. They are just there to monitor your experience with the procedures. And you can imagine that it is extraordinarily rare that one of these protests is effective.

**John:** Yeah. Basically in order for the protest to be effective you would have to be able to prove something that is very difficult to prove. Because the only things that the Policy Review Board is looking at are these three statements and do the writers get to make a separate statement to the Policy Review Board explaining their beef?

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Is it just in the statement or do they also call in?

**Craig:** They actually can show up in person. Because the Policy Review Board, you can see those people face-to-face because they are not reading your material. And you can give them your entire experience. And you can say, “Listen, I was misled by this person who told me this.” Or, “I heard during this process, somebody called me up and said, ‘Did you know that so-and-so is doing arbitration and that they told me that it was you?'” Stuff like that.

Then you can make your argument. But, again, the Policy Review Board is a… It is cold comfort for somebody who has lost an arbitration because their ability to overturn an arbitration is extraordinarily narrow.

And I get why, I mean, because honestly everybody would appeal everything and make everybody read the scripts over again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Every time.

**John:** So the outcome of a Policy Review Board, if they find that something was not followed properly, it just gets thrown out and the whole thing starts again.

**Craig:** With new arbiters, correct.

**John:** Yeah. Another chance to roll the dice.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** One thing a Policy Review Board can do, I know from experience, is they can call arbiters. So if they have a question about an arbiter’s statement they can call him or her and ask specific questions about things if there are questions that are not answered just on the paper.

**Craig:** That’s right. I did an arbitration once and I was called by the Policy Review Board. And they asked me to explain. There was one statement that I wrote; it was a very complicated arbitration that involved a project where things had started as… Sometimes, unfortunately, the real world operates in a way that is inconsistent with the cleanliness of our rules.

So, sometimes someone sells a spec and then a studio turns it into a sequel. This happens all the time.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Well is it original, is it not original? It turns out it is not, usually; sometimes it is. It’s a mess. Anyway, it was a complicated arbitration; those are the types I usually get. And there was a sentence I wrote in my statement that was very specific and appropriate to the rules. And I guess one of the writers, the participating writers, had questioned whether it meant this or that.

And so the Policy Review Board called me, not in front of that writer, and asked me to clarify my statement and I did to their satisfaction and that was that.

**John:** Yeah. One thing that the process of being an arbiter has reminded me of is just the same way that you are writing your statement to arbiters knowing that those are other screenwriters, I have been very mindful of the statement I write as an arbiter being straight-forward and clear but also respectful and kind. Because you realize that in many cases the participating writers are going to read this and so you want it to be clear…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** — but you don’t want it to cruel.

**Craig:** That’s right. There is no place for that. You should be…you are acting like a judge so you should talk like a judge and be dispassionate and impersonal and just be about the facts and also be aware that arbiters are not allowed… The statements that you write as a participating writer are considered private to you. It is private communication between you and the arbiters and the Guild.

What the Guild doesn’t want is for — if you and I are in an arbitration, I’m Writer A and you are Writer B, and I write in my statement, “Look, Writer B came in and worked for two weeks on this and then got fired and then they brought me back and it’s crazy,” I should be allowed to write that in my statement. It is not really relevant.

But I don’t want you reading that. So, arbiters are not allowed to quote or refer to anything that is in the participating writer statements because in the case of a protest you will get all of our statements and as Writer A I don’t want you reading in Arbiter 1’s statement how I said something about you.

It’s a very complicated business.

**John:** It is. Before we wrap this up, we have sort of jumped past a couple different times: production executive.

Production executive is a special term of art for determining screenwriting credits. And it doesn’t mean a person who works at Sony, although it can be a person who works at Sony. Production executive in terms of screenwriting credit is somebody who is employed on a movie in a non-writing capacity in addition to being a writer. Is that a fair description?

**Craig:** Uh, maybe, I don’t think that would work if you were both a writer and craft services. I think it comes down to —

**John:** It really means director or producer.

**Craig:** That’s right. It is a hyphenate. Writer-producer, writer-director. Because you can be a writer-actor and you are not a production executive.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because oftentimes actors are —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** — re-writing.

**Craig:** It is something that we have talked about.

**John:** Yeah. So, if you are a hyphenate like that, so let’s say Writer A creates a script, writes a spec script. A director comes on board and significantly rewrites it. That director may be considered Writer B.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And the fact that he is also a director triggers automatic arbitration.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, that movie will always go to arbitration. There is no way to not do that. They can’t even come to their own agreement, can they? They have to go to arbitration.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because the presumption is that a director or producer is in a position to pressure the non-hyphenate writer either with their status on the project going forward for press and premieres and so forth, or for future work. So, they take that out of the equation and it is going to be arbitrated no matter what.

**John:** Craig, is the system perfect?

**Craig:** No, no, no. Far from it. It is a deeply flawed system, frankly. The procedures, I think, are pretty good in terms of the way that they have built the firewalls around anonymity and so forth.

Of course, they do the best they can considering that we live in a world with IMDb. If an arbiter really wants to know who the participating writers are, they may not be able to match names to drafts, but they can always go on the internet and find out who wrote on this thing. And then using information from the writers’ statements they may be able to even piece together which writer wrote which draft.

But the procedures in that regard are about as good as they can be. Where we fall down is in the guidelines which we have been steadily improving but which are odd and occasionally impenetrable.

And in the pool of arbiters themselves who, I think, are not well trained and not well guided, not by the staff but just by the… — We just sort of get thrown into the pool and we have to swim. And it is unfortunate because the system is a legal procedure being adjudicated by non-legal people.

**John:** All the same, the people who are adjudicating it actually understand what they are reading better than anyone else would.

**Craig:** Sometimes.

**John:** They are the people who — well, a lawyer wouldn’t be able to read through a screenplay and know whether that change on page 56 was really significant to the rest of the movie or was it just an arbitrary change on page 56.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** That’s the advantage of having actual screenwriters doing this work.

**Craig:** Yes. Although I will say that there is a third option which is in, for instance, if you were to allege copyright infringement in the court — you write a novel and then somebody else writes a novel and there is a dispute. The courts rely on expert readers who are not only trained in terms of the dramaturgical and literary analysis of material but in the law itself to kind of combine those skills of legal analysis and literary and dramatic analysis.

We don’t have that training. And I think… Look, I have read — because I am one of the chairs of the Rules Committee, people will come to me when disaster strikes. And they will show me the arbiters’ statements. And I have read some unbelievably atrocious arbitration statements, that is to say, statements by the arbiters themselves. Statements that I thought revealed a very poor, un-analytical mind — a mind, perhaps, staring at the wrong things, thrown by bias, or just poorly argued and thought out.

And that is the part that concerns me the most. That is why I am always asking screenwriters that I know who are experienced and who are fairly left-brained to please, please call and volunteer and serve as an arbiter.

**John:** Great. Well let’s leave it at that as a final plea to our screenwriting brethren, the ones who actually are eligible — and I think a fair number of our colleagues are listening to the podcast now — to take the time out to actually do those arbitrations because lord knows you want smart people doing it when it is your time to submit for credit.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what, take a day and read the scripts and they usually send you M&Ms with it which is nice.

**John:** Yeah. A little calorie boost. This last time it was a Snickers bar. So you never know what you are going to get.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And, Craig, thank you very much for a very thorough discussion of arbitration.

**Craig:** Thank you. Hopefully everyone is sound asleep now. [laughs]. This is one of those podcasts that people will go scrambling back to four years from now when they are suddenly sweating in an arbitration, but, if you are riding in your car, it may be not the most applicable thing.

Next week let’s talk about sex.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay.

**John:** Thanks. All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/56-days-later).

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

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

**John:** And you’re listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

How are you Craig?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. I’m here in the foggy city of Seattle visiting some family.

**John:** You are always doing our on the road reports. I feel like you are the person who travels out in the world and sees things.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m the Charles Kuralt of this podcast.

**John:** It’s very important because our show, while topical, often can’t really incorporate a lot of the on-the-road flair and it’s great that you’re there. It’s too often we’re stuck behind our desks. I feel like I’m more like the newsreader who is just there and you’re the reporter out in the field.

**Craig:** Yeah, when there is some kind of storm, I’m the one that’s standing there in the rain and the wind, and your hair — or your hairlessness — is perfect in studio.

**John:** Yeah, and I’m telling you the questions I want you to ask the person sitting in front of you.

**Craig:** The greatest.

**John:** Really wonderfully awkwardly.

**Craig:** The greatest. I love that Saturday Night Live has turned that real video confrontation into an ongoing sketch.

**John:** I respect that as an idea. I don’t find those sketches particularly funny. And I think all those people are incredibly funny. It’s just the one thing that’s never really worked for me.

**Craig:** The first one worked. I think it was one of those where I was like, “Okay, I give “Saturday Night Live credit.” Sometimes they’ve mined repeatable characters out of characters I would have never thought you could repeat. Unfortunately that one, I think, they should have stopped at the first one.

**John:** The sketch that I find just endlessly entertaining is the Hoda Kotb, Kathie Lee sketch of The Morning Show. I had not seen the actual real show until I had seen several of the sketches.

And then randomly I saw the actual program and I was like, “Oh my God, they weren’t making this up. There actually are these crazy women who are drinking wine at like 10 in the morning.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I unfortunately am very familiar with the Hoda Kotb show because at the gym where I work out if I go at 10 in the morning they always have that show on because it’s me and housewives. [laughs]

Screenwriters don’t have big boy job hours. So it’s me and housewives and they feel a strong need to work out to Hoda Kotb on TV.

I just find the whole thing hysterical. First of all, Hoda has a…how do I put this delicately? She has a very masculine frame. And so I feel like, in a weird way, I’m actually watching a marriage. It’s like a husband and wife.

**John:** If RuPaul were to step in and play Hoda’s role it would be just kind of the same show, wouldn’t it?

**Craig:** Seamless.

**John:** Nicely done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well since we are on the topic of news and kind of news-related things, I thought today would be more of a news show because while we are very often topical, we are very rarely timely.

Part of that is because, I think we can confess this now, is that we actually prerecorded several of the podcasts in December.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** For understandable reasons. You had rehab.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** And I had my choreography I had to do, so it was a very busy time for us.

**Craig:** Very busy.

**John:** So now we’re back to our real stuff.

**Craig:** But that explains all those weird references to Michelle Bachmann winning the Iowa caucus. We were guessing.

**John:** Yeah, it was a really reasonable guess based on the way things seemed to be happening at the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But we had forgotten that politics has accelerated to the degree that you really can’t make any predictions.

**Craig:** Also, being married to a gay guy hurts you. You and I really should have seen that coming. There is no way she was going to win.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. I will kind of miss her a little bit.

**Craig:** Oh, I’m going to miss her a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Old crazy eyes. I have to tell you, it’s the husband. That’s the one I miss.

**John:** He’s so good.

**Craig:** I’m obsessed with this guy.

**John:** [laughs] You saw the last little bit where she was talking at her concession speech and she was talking about how, “Oh we were out shaking hands and Marcus went in and bought sunglasses for our little dog.”

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** And he just has this, “Oh I did,” smile on his face.

**Craig:** Guilty. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. You bought sunglasses for a dog.

**Craig:** Yeah, the only thing gayer than that I guess would be actual gay sex.

**John:** Yeah. Fortunately we have another candidate obsessed with that right now. It will continue to be entertaining for a while.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But let’s talk some actual news here. We have the WGA nominations.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have the 10 scripts picked for features. There is also TV stuff, and TV is important, but let’s focus on the features. For original screenplay, these were the choices for the WGA nominations for these categories.

“50/50,” by Will Reiser.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Bridesmaids,” by Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s “MUmolo.” I thought it was “MumOlo.”

**John:** It probably is “MUmolo.” I apologize to Annie for getting that wrong.

**Craig:** I don’t know. Either way it sounds like a vitamin deficiency.

**John:** Yeah, or it’s some sort of Hawaiian dish that you can only get at a little strip mall place, like they don’t serve it at the actual resort. They only serve Mumolo in…

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s because they don’t make it in Hawaii at all. It’s like the pu pu platter. It’s something that somebody invented in New York.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, “I’ll have the Mumolo.”

**John:** Or little kids who see Bug’s Life and will say pu pu platter for about the next…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** …three hours after watching that show. I want to just tape over that little part of it just so she doesn’t say that again.

**Craig:** Can’t tape over everything.

**John:** Midnight in Paris.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Written by this guy, Woody Allen.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s his first go round. I understand he’s a Jewish fellow.

**John:** He’s a Jewish fellow. [laughs] For his first try I think it was really admirable.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** I will say, if somebody else other than Woody Allen had written that movie, I’m not sure it would be on this list. I don’t want to speak any ill of Woody Allen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I thought it was the most enjoyable Woody Allen movie I’ve seen for quite a long time, but I felt like someone else with that exact same script may not have shown up here.

**Craig:** Well the WGA, I think, demographically is 96 percent old Jew.

**John:** Yeah. It’s still that way.

**Craig:** It’s a little skewed.

**John:** Yeah. Win Win, screenplay by Tom McCarthy, story by Tom McCarthy and Joe Tiboni. Tom McCarthy is the nicest human being you’re ever going to meet, so I was happy to see him get a nomination here.

And I really like that movie. It came out quite early in the year, so it’s always nice when a movie from early in the year gets remember this time of year.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. He’s a good filmmaker.

**John:** And the last original screenplay, Young Adult, written by Diablo Cody, which I adored. Did you see that yet?

**Craig:** I haven’t seen it yet. It is on my queue of things. I’ve got my screener with me, and I’m going to watch that one, perhaps, on the plane. I’ve heard people have loved it, people have hated it. That’s always a sign to me that the movie is actually doing its job. You know?

**John:** Yes, I would agree. There’s a very hateful central character who is sort of unredeemable and the movie doesn’t really try to redeem her. It’s just an interesting choice.

And for people who aren’t maybe crazy about historically Diablo’s movies because they feel like, “Oh it’s the very esoteric weird dialog that people wouldn’t actually say,” this movie doesn’t really do that at all. There is very little of that in this.

And, again, I don’t want to sort of spoil this. It’s not a giant twist ending. It’s not The Sixth Sense, but the last two scenes, last three scenes of the movie, are not at all what you are expecting them to be.

You realize that your central character’s expectations about what was actually happening weren’t accurate which I think is always a great sign.

**Craig:** That’s cool.

**John:** The movie chooses to limit point of view incredibly strictly so you basically only see things that Charlize Theron is seeing or is aware of.

**Craig:** She is perhaps an unreliable narrator?

**John:** No, actually no. It’s not that she was unreliable but you were making the same assumptions that she was making…

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** …and those assumptions were not correct.

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to…

**John:** I’ve set you up well for it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I have set the ball and you will spike it in watching it. It will clear the net.

**Craig:** Look forward to the next podcast where I take it apart.

**John:** Adapted screenplay. The Descendants, which is a screenplay by Alexander Payne and Nat Faxon & Jim Rash. To explain that, Alexander Payne wrote by himself. Nat Faxon and Jim Rash wrote together. Presumably Faxon and Rash were second, but it’s not really entirely clear.

I watched The Descendants this week and enjoyed it. Have you watched it yet?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** You watch no movies and see no TV shows. So basically this is a monologue at this point.

**Craig:** Yeah, a little bit. [laughs]

**John:** So here’s the thing about The Descendants that I liked most: I’ve been to Hawaii many times, and Hawaii is very beautiful.

But all of Hawaii isn’t really all that beautiful. So when you’re staying in the principal resort which they actually go to in this place, you’re like, “Oh it’s really, really pretty.”

But when you’re in Honolulu just like randomly Honolulu or if you’re staying at the Holiday Inn on Kauai where I had to stay when we were making Jurassic Park 3, it’s not that nice.

I loved that that movie showed all the parts that were sort of just ordinary and it felt like you could have been in Omaha…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …but people were wearing shorts.

**Craig:** That was the criticism that somebody had mentioned to me the other day. They said, “So I’m watching The Descendants and it seems like the point is…”

In fact, she made an interesting argument. She said, “If the purpose of narrative ultimately is to get across a point, wouldn’t it better if they just skipped the narrative and just wrote a short essay?”

[laughter]

**Craig:** “And what if the short essay was, ‘Hawaii is not that great.'”

[laughter]

**Craig:** You know? And then they could have just saved all this time and energy because the ride, I guess, wasn’t enjoyable enough for this person. I tend to enjoy the ride a little bit more, so I’ll see.

**John:** Well, part of that reason why that person may have said that is the movie opens with just a tremendous amount of voice over by George Clooney that I would have a hard time defending.

He essentially says that. His first lines are like, “Hawaii is not nearly as pretty as you think it’s supposed to be, and this is what it really looks like.”

It’s like, “Oh, you are actually reading an essay apparently to me right now.” But then the voice over stops, which is welcome but also a sign that perhaps the voice over wasn’t…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …the best choice. Maybe it was the best choice for the movie that they actually had in the can.

**Craig:** Right, right. Got it. Well, when I watch that one…

**John:** The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, apparently a small indie film. I had never heard of this before, but I think it’s really great that they’re making women’s movies now.

**Craig:** You know I am a huge Fincher fan. I love Fincher’s work. I love Steve Zaillian’s work. I read all three of the Dragon Tattoo novels. For the life of me I cannot explain why I read novel two and novel three, because I hated novel one so much. I hate those books. I hate them.

I hate them because…Somebody did this wonderful bit of criticism about them.

Basically the point was: Here’s a guy, an investigative journalist, who wrote novels in which the hero is an investigative journalist. They are all about how awful and sexually predatory men are, and yet every single female character in the book, without fail, needs to sleep with the hero.

I mean all of them unless they are literally old or children, they sleep with him. It is the most masturbatory series of novels ever, ever.

**John:** Yeah. Fewer women sleep with Daniel Craig in this movie. That’s not a spoiler, but there’s only so much time. It’s a very long movie anyway, and not everyone could have sex with him.

**Craig:** And you know what? By the way that just goes to show that Zaillian read this book and was like, “The truth is these three women sleep with him and the entire point is, ‘Oh look, everyone wants to sleep with this guy.’ Let’s just cut it out. It doesn’t impact the story at all.” It’s true.

**John:** The other reason why they needed to cut it out is because people needed to smoke more.

[laughter]

**John:** Honestly, they couldn’t fit in the sex between the cigarettes. I guess you can have sex and have a cigarette afterwards, but it’s hard to smoke while you’re having sex. And smoking is the priority in the movie.

**Craig:** Larry King mastered the art of smoking and sex, I’m pretty sure.

**John:** All right, okay.

**Craig:** Larry King apparently used to smoke in the shower. That’s the coolest guy in the world.

**John:** That’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The Help, screenplay by Tate Taylor.

**Craig:** Yes, The Help.

**John:** Yeah, hurray. Tate’s really nice. I’m happy to see him get nominated.

Hugo, screenplay by John Logan. I still haven’t seen Hugo, because I need to see Hugo in 3D and I need to see it on a big screen. I just haven’t had a chance to see it in the theaters.

**Craig:** My wife loved it, absolutely loved it. My son, who is a huge fan of the books, hated it. But he is 10 and very fickle about these things.

**John:** Yeah, that happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My nephew read all the Harry Potter books. This was back when he was 12 or 13. I asked him, “Oh, what did you think of the second Harry Potter movie?” Maybe the third Harry Potter movie, whichever one Alfonso Curon directed.

**Craig:** Third, yeah.

**John:** He was like, “I hated it. I can’t watch any more of them ever again. They’ve ruined everything because Hagrid’s house isn’t there. Hagrid’s house isn’t on that side of the school,” or something, and he…

**Craig:** Well, you know, Asperger’s is a really difficult syndrome. I mean, come on.

**John:** Yeah. The challenge of being that age and focusing on things, sort of, maybe not the right things to focus on.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Finally, Moneyball, a screenplay by Steve Zaillian, again. Apparently Steve Zaillian is a good screenwriter. And Aaron Sorkin, another —

**Craig:** What a bummer when you have those two guys working on a movie. I mean, how good could it possibly be?

**John:** I don’t know, actually, the back story on this. Story by Stan Chervin, and I don’t know who Stan Chervin is and how he got that.

**Craig:** Stan Chervin, he’s a screenwriter. He, I believe, wrote the first draft of Moneyball. And then, later, down the line, Zaillian was hired. Zaillian rewrote the screenplay, apparently, to the extent where Stan didn’t qualify for screenplay credit.

And then — I believe this is the chronology, just from what I pieced together in the media — and then Sorkin was the final writer to come in, I think.

And then, because it’s an adaptation, I guess, Sorkin, it’s basically, the screenplay credits are who hits the third — the one-third threshold. But it’s all, you know, who knows.

**John:** Yeah. The other people, obviously, whose names aren’t on this list…And one thing I should clarify, the WGA nominations are only for movies that are written that are WGA contract.

So, The Artist, which was a really good movie, which would normally get a nomination, I think, for screenwriting, isn’t eligible for this, because it was not written under WGA contract.

**Craig:** And so, Pixar movies are never eligible.

**John:** Exactly. But they will probably be nominated…Well, not this year, necessarily. But often would be nominated for a screenplay award. So, the reason why there’s no animation in this list is because animation is not covered by this contract.

**Craig:** That’s right. And also, interestingly, the Guild’s rules for what’s an original and what’s an adaptation differ slightly from the Academy’s rules. So, for instance, Syriana, sort of, famously was considered an original by one entity and a non-original by another. It’s very strange.

**John:** Yeah. It is strange. I was looking through here just now. There are six comedies, which seems like a lot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Kind of The Descendants is a comedy, which is kind of a stretch to call that a comedy. Win Win is a comedy, eh.

**Craig:** There’s one comedy, as far as I’m concerned. There’s one true comedy, and that’s Bridesmaids, yeah. And it’s nice to see.

**John:** Midnight in Paris, you’d have to call a comedy.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a comedy, but it’s a Woody Allen movie, you know? It’s almost its own genre. And, as you point out, it’s a traditionally celebrated genre. Woody Allen movies…It’s easy to nominate Woody.

I’m not taking anything away from his accomplishment, I’m just saying, it’s not like they’re breaking new ground.

Whereas in Bridesmaids, it’s…You can look at Bridesmaids, and the nomination of it as either this exciting new thing, or a continuation of what I think is kind of a love affair of the, we’ll call it, the…

The nomination of Bridesmaids, is a little bit of a continuation of the love affair with Tina Fey and now Kristen Wiig, that kind of, the distaff wing of SNL.

And I really enjoyed Bridesmaids. So, I’m happy, I’m happy to see any mainstream comedy nominated for anything.

I was thrilled when The Hangover won a Golden Globe. That was just, that was almost revolutionary, even though they have a separate category for comedy and variety or whatever it’s called. But I’m thrilled to see Bridesmaids there, and hopefully, we’ll see more comedies nominated for these things.

**John:** That’d be great. One movie series which hasn’t gotten a nomination here is, Steve Kloves for Harry Potter movies.

**Craig:** That’s crazy. It’s just, it’s stupid. It’s just dumb. And I feel like, these awards, a lot of times, what happens is, people who vote for these things think, “Well, why should we give an award to that? It’s already made so much money,” bah, bah, bah.

Yeah, except that there’s man who worked really, really hard on, I believe, six of the seven movies, did a fantastic job, truly an amazing job on those films.

And if people understood what screenwriting was, and what adaptive screenwriting was, I think that they would be throwing awards at this guy for how well he did. Those books are not easy to adapt.

**John:** The best point of comparison I can think of is The Lord of the Rings movies, which are also, you know, you’re adapting a well known thing that people have an expectation about, and all of those movies got writer’s nominations.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think the differences here is that Peter Jackson was one of the writers. And so, there was a person you could identify. It’s like, “Oh, that’s the person who did that.” And so, because he was part of the writing team, that’s one of the reasons why he got, they got nominations for writing.

And Steve Kloves didn’t, because he didn’t know…You never saw his face associated with Harry Potter.

**Craig:** I guess. I mean, look, you know, David Benioff and Dan Weiss, I’m sure, are going to be getting tons of Emmy nominations for their writing on Game of Thrones. I just feel like, it’s, honestly —

**John:** But I think in TV, they’re — I mean — they are associated with that show. They’ve done press for the show, you know, TV is known to have writing showrunners. No one’s paying attention to who wrote the Harry Potter movies.

**Craig:** I know. I just feel like it’s, this is why I hate awards. Stuff like that, you know? Kloves deserves an Academy award. I hope he gets nominated.

Kloves has made more of an impact, I think, as a screenwriter on modern popular cinema than just about anyone else I can think of in the last ten years. He’s just a huge, as an individual screenwriter, a huge impact.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, here’s to you, Steve Kloves. I appreciate you.

**John:** Yeah, we do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Other bits of things in the news this week. Stopping production on really expensive movies, so this week it was Akira.

But in the past year, stuff that’s come up, Arthur and Lancelot, which was a big movie in pre-production that got the plug pulled, or it’s moving to someplace else. Lone Ranger, famously, they said, “No.” And they had to go back and cut the budget down a lot.

The fourth Pirates, I know, had big issues, money-wise. And, Moneyball. Moneyball, one of the nominated films. It was on…It was weeks away from shooting with, who was supposed to direct that? Steven Soderbergh was supposed to direct that. And they couldn’t make the budget work.

Either they couldn’t make the budget work, or the studio suddenly had issues with what he wanted to do on his movie.

**Craig:** I think it was, I think there was the actual creative differences on that one. I don’t think Moneyball falls into the category of the 150, 200 million dollar bet where suddenly the studio says, “We just don’t want to pay this much.”

Whereas, certainly Akira…I mean, look, Akira’s a tough one. I’m not involved in any way in the development of Akira. I’ve seen the Japanese film a number of times. For the life of me, I don’t understand why they would have tried to do it in the first place.

I don’t know how you do that in live action without bungling it. And I’m not sure, even if you get it right, that anybody would like it.

It’s not a particularly accessible film. It’s very strange to me, but, you know, they went down the road, and yeah, I guess at some point, they looked at the numbers.

I mean, we were talking about the DVD business. And boy, I’ll tell you, man. I mean, The Hangover 2 DVD is doing really, really well.

And yet, when you look at the lists — And I went back and looked at the… — what the number one through number ten seller-of-the-year made, how many units were sold, as opposed to prices and so forth.

Whereas, you traditionally have a bunch of films that sold seven, six, five million DVDs over the course of a year, now, maybe you have three movies that do that. The DVD market has…It’s clearly collapsed.

And so, now you go, “Well, if that money’s halved, or if the trend continues, if we’re down to a quarter of that money, how are we going to convert this bet into profit?” I mean, “If we were betting $150 million on a movie which requires another 100 million to market, how are we ever going to see a profit?”

**John:** At the same time, Warner’s is, I think, best known for, “We don’t want to make the small version of this movie, we want to make the giant version of this movie.”

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** And so, they want to make big, giant, tent-pole movies of these things. But then, again, they also don’t want to spend, they also don’t want to make big giant-tent pole movies. And that becomes the push and pull.

And it’s, if you’re spending 150, 200 million dollars, the movie has to be incredibly successful to succeed. And you have to hit a home run, you can’t hit any doubles or else you’re lost.

And so, you have a movie, like, Disney has John Carter, which is a fascinating, expensive-looking movie, but that movie has to perform incredibly well in order to make its money back.

**Craig:** I know, it’s a very scary business, you’re right. The way the business is starting to orient is such that the movies that seem to be profitable are the big ones.

So, you build your machinery to fire six, seven, eight really big bullets out there. But each one of those becomes such a white-knuckle adventure in budgeting. And it puts downward pressure on everything.

I mean, I have a movie right now at Universal, looks like they’re going to be shooting it in the spring. It’s nowhere near the budget of these big movies.

But the downward pressure from the big movies, you can feel it. I don’t know what Battleship costs, but man, if you’re trying to make a movie for $35 million, the word Battleship comes up.

Well, that’s not fair. You know, I mean, like —

**John:** Yeah, it’s sort of like, $175 million movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, “Oh, so we have to be 35 instead of 38 because of another…?” It just seems, but the truth is, these things soak up so much in resource. I get it, you know? What are you going to do?

**John:** Speaking of DVD being one of the decisions in there: Warner’s — Time Warner moved this week to…or half-announced or it got out that they are changing their window for Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster. Did you see this?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, over this last year, Warner’s negotiated with Netflix, Redbox and Blockbuster. Redbox are those people who rent the DVDs in stores in the US. Netflix we know. Blockbuster was…that’s the video chain that’s irrelevant now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, basically, Warner’s had made a deal and the other studios had made a deal with these places that they would not be renting those movies until 28 days after they were available for sale on DVD.

And now, Warner’s is pushing that to 56 days, which will solve everything, won’t it, Craig?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, again, they’re trying desperately to shore up this DVD business. They want desperately for people to buy these things.

**John:** Do people want to buy them at all?

**Craig:** No. And I think the problem is, yeah, people, it’s not that, I don’t…Look, piracy is a problem. There’s no question that piracy is a problem. But that’s not what’s driving the fleeing from purchasing DVDs to renting them.

What’s driving that is a cultural shift from the…there’s no longer a need to possess these items. Nobody wants to possess anything anymore. They don’t want…We’re okay with possessing a virtual collection of things.

So, we can virtually collect music. But even that, I think, is going to start to go away when everything becomes, sort of, streaming, and then, it’ll eventually be like, “You know what? I just want to subscribe to a service, where, if I feel like listening to something, I listen to it. I don’t have to own it.”

And it makes sense. Ultimately, copies are an inefficient way to distribute information. If you don’t need to make copies of it, don’t.

So, eventually, and I think everybody sees the writing on the all, if you want to see Big Fish, you will watch a streaming version of the one copy that exists on a big server. That’s it.

We don’t need to make more of them. And that’s where it’s going. But in the meantime, I think they’re going to try their best to see if they can get people to buy these things.

Meanwhile, it’s strange: The Hangover 2, they waited so long to actually put the movie out on DVD, it wouldn’t have even applied to us because, I guess they had this whole strategy of making it a Christmas gift or something. I kept waiting for the DVD to come out, I’m like, “Where is this thing?”

**John:** Yeah. The movie actually exists. It doesn’t feel real until it comes out on DVD.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I actually…I get to speak about some of these topics this next week. I’m actually going to CES for the first time.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** I was invited to speak at a Variety panel. I’m, like, the one screenwriter on this Variety panel of digital rights people from studios. And so, I’ll hear them talk about things.

But I think I’m very much on your wavelength in terms of, you are trying to reinforce a system that nobody wants anymore, and sell people something that they don’t really care to own anymore.

And UltraViolet, which is the idea, you have this film locker, you buy the thing, but you hold onto it digitally. And it’s always yours, but there’s locks on it.

Like, I don’t think anybody cares. I don’t think anybody can mentally process the difference between owning that digital thing and being able to get to that digital thing.

My happiest video experience right now is HBO GO, which is this genius service, where, like, do you have HBO? Great. You have access to any show HBO’s made, basically, in the history of HBO.

**Craig:** Which they can get away with, because you’re already paying for HBO.

**John:** Exactly. But I feel like there’s opportunities for studios to aggregate stuff together just to make, like, the Action Channel. And like, this has all, every action movie you’ve ever wanted, it’s here. Every comedy of the last 10 years is here.

Comedy Central could totally do it. If Comedy Central as a brand I think is strong enough that they could gather together all the comedies, make really good rates for them. Do you have Comedy Central? Then you have all these things.

**Craig:** Right. Somehow or another it has to move towards some kind of subscription service because people don’t really even make a distinction anymore between owning and renting. It’s a meaningless distinction to them.

All they care about is, “Am I watching it when I want to watch it or not?” If I feel like seeing a movie, I want to be able to go find it on Google or a thing like Google, press a button, pay for it in some very quick and easy way, and watch it. That’s it.

iTunes basically works.

The problem for the movie business is they are so frightened of Apple controlling their content distribution, in no small part because Apple is associated with one studio, Disney, that they are attempting to do what Apple does in various different ways.

But they haven’t quite gotten it down yet, have they? [laughs]

**John:** No, they haven’t. I will defend them to some degree in that they are constrained somewhat by collusion. They can work together, but they can’t work together. If they work together too much, then it’s anti-trust. They have to figure out the right solutions for it.

But that’s where I feel like there’s opportunities for whenever one of those people doesn’t get the chairman job, they should go off and form their own company that aggregates people’s assets and makes the new HBO GOs.

Because that’s honestly where I think it needs to go. Or sells the individual things. Amazon can clearly do that and has started doing that.

**Craig:** But why couldn’t Warner Brothers have an app, just like HBO has an app, called Warner Brothers On Demand, and you just click on that thing on your computer or on your iPad and just rent a movie like, boop, and just do it?

Or don’t even rent a movie. Just pay a yearly fee and then just rent what you want to rent.

**John:** Yeah, and to some degree they have that. Crackle is basically just Sony.

**Craig:** But why are they calling it Crackle? What is that?

**John:** I don’t know why they’re calling it Crackle. It’s a dumb name. But the challenge is like a normal person doesn’t know what Warner’s really is, so the person is going to think like, “Well, what studio release that thing?”

That’s the advantage that HBO has, is they have a brand name. It’s like was that show on HBO or was that show not on HBO?

That’s why I feel like it’s going to have to be Comedy Central, which has a brand. It makes sense. Like, “Oh, it’s a comedy. It’s likely available through Comedy Central.”

**Craig:** Right. You know just that point shows how difficult it is.

But I think at the very least why don’t they all just agree to stop with this Crackle and Hulu and Voodoo and just call them what they are? HBO GO, I got it. It’s HBO. [laughs] I don’t understand. I’m a simple man. Crackle, what is that? [laughs]

**John:** Oh, this is our first question of the day. Kevin Arbuay or Arbuay. I’m not quite sure how to pronounce his name. I’ve seen his name written down a zillion times because he’s left comments on the blog and stuff, but Kevin writes in.

He asks, “Hey, have either you or John ever said anything to a bootlegger that was selling one of your movies or to a bootlegger in general? I smell a piracy conversation coming.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh, you mean like a guy on the street?

**John:** I have seen my movies for sale in subway stations. Not in the U. S. but overseas I have. Have you see your movies for sale?

**Craig:** Oh, of course. Yeah, I saw, yeah, Hangover 2 on the street, absolutely. I remember landing in JKF, getting in a car like a town car to go to meet with the Weinsteins about Scary Movie 4.

And the guy in the car was offering us videos including a bootlegged Scary Movie 3. It was kind of surreal.

**John:** Was he an actual taxi type driver or he was one of those gypsy cab or limousine kind of things?

**Craig:** No, it was like a limousine company. Yeah, and they were just like, “Here you go. You want these?” And then he had like some Pixar movie that had been out for a month. [laughs] It was still in theaters, you know?

They were terrible copies or whatever. I don’t say anything because what am I going to do? Get into a fight about it? “You shouldn’t do this.” They don’t care. Those guys aren’t the problem.

The problem first of all, the physical sale of DVDs on the streets is going to collapse [laughs] the way the physical sale in stores is going to collapse. The real piracy is online. It’s BitTorrent.

**John:** I bought a copy of Charlie’s Angels in Russia just because I was just fascinated to see what it was, and they’re very hard to play because they’re always these weird formats that we don’t actually have here.

But it was the movie. It had been out long enough that I think it was just a rip of the real movie file with strange intro stuff. They just threw extra trailers for like, “Here’s other pirated movies you might want to watch,” at the start of the disk.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it’s strange. I do feel like physical piracy will diminish pretty soon. It’s going to towards digital. We don’t have time today to talk about SOPA, but we can get into that at some other point.

Over the holiday I got to see Jared Polis, who’s the representative from Boulder where I grew up, who’s also a dad.

I didn’t get to meet his kid, but we got to talk about SOPA because he’s actually on the committee that’s discussing that. He’s one of the few people speaking up about what doesn’t work in that legislation.

**Craig:** Yeah. SOPA, there are two issues. One is that they’re like most of these pieces of legislation. For instance, I can’t remember for the life of me the name of it. I think it was through the Online Protection Act. It was the act that was designed to get rid of child pornography.

The problem with these online legislations is whoever’s writing them either doesn’t get it or is taking advantage of the fact that the senators and representatives don’t get it, and they become these nuclear sledgehammers that have these broad, wide-ranging impacts that they really can’t have.

They ought not have. So you have that as a component of a problem. So you’re trying to solve a problem. You come up with way too big of a hammer.

Then the other problem is that the culture of the Internet is one that is very much frontier and hates anything that should dare restrict absolute, total literally anarchy-level freedom.

So when you get those combinations, I mean there are people who are like, “Hands off my Internet at all costs,” even if it means not going after people who are trading in child pornography. They just don’t care. They literally don’t want anyone touching their Internet.

For piracy, I don’t know where the solution is to this stuff. The problem is so enormous, and it may end up actually killing things.

I can’t tell…Because I keep saying to people that are like, “Whoa, look what happened to the music business. The artists are in control now.” I’m like, “That’s great.” It literally costs $12 to record a perfectly good-sounding song. Anyone can do that.

The recording industry actually was propping up this massive shell of nonsense. It does in fact cost a ton of money to make a big studio production.

If you want to see those movies, unfortunately, we have to get rid of this piracy, because those two things can’t occupy the same space. So I don’t know what’s going to happen.

**John:** Yeah. My big issue with SOPA and the ignorance of legislators, who feel like they can weigh in on this, is that they will use the sledgehammer to do things it’s not meant to do.

So they can carefully state like, “Oh, this isn’t meant to do this, and it’s only going to affect foreign IPs. There are these controls on it.” But there really aren’t any controls on it at all.

I’ll give you a quick example of the DMCA, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and how I fell afoul of it. So my movie, The Nines, we had a trailer for The Nines. We put it out, and we put it up on YouTube.

It got taken down by DMCA for a violation that a video game company had protested that we were using their copyrighted material. I’m like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

They felt that the floating figures over the characters’ heads were too similar to something that they were using in one of their games.

So they were going to go through and do a whole separate lawsuit process, so we had to have that whole scary conversation where they were going to try to sue and stop the movie and all this stuff.

But the fact is they used the DMCA to take down the trailer for the movie based on what they perceived to be a copyright infringement.

**Craig:** Yeah, perception of copyright infringement.

**John:** Perception of copyright infringement. So it wasn’t like I was using their copyrighted song, and they could prove that I was using it. There was no burden of proof on them at all.

They just felt like, “Oh, that looks a little too much like ours, so we’re going to take it down.” So to protest, so I had to go through and figure out, “Okay. Well, how do I…?” There was a delicate dance in dealing with the actual legal thing that was happening there.

We got that all resolved, and they ended up being fine and good and swell. But to try to get the DMCA the lock on my account taken off, I would have to basically reopen the whole thing and file this special kind of appeal. It was essentially like they win unless you can positively prove that they shouldn’t win.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, of course it’s that the whole thing is skewed towards large companies, and to some extent that’s necessary because 99 times out of 100 it is the IP of large companies that’s being infringed upon.

But the fact is, you can’t design these guns to only work in one direction, and they can’t be built in such a way as to be punitive to legitimate everyday Internet traffic. It’s not fair.

It’s bad law, and what’s really killing me is that by doing this…First of all, you’ve got to understand, anytime you’re dealing with the Internet it is going to be picked apart like nothing else.

This isn’t like coming up with tariff rules for the steel industry where nobody notices or cares. This is going to be picked over by literally 100 million people within an hour, so you’ve got to get it right.

If you don’t get it right, you just hurt your chances for fixing what is an actual, real, serious bad thing, damn it. Damn it.

**John:** [laughs] Basically both the House’s version and the Senate’s versions are getting tweaked and changed. What’s tough is that we’re having this conversation now, and the bills are actually probably different than what they were last week, and things will get through.

My concern is that a really terrible version will get through, and even though it’s meant to have certain safeguards in it, those safeguards will be completely ignored.

Or the safeguards are basically like, “Oh. Well, a person can also file this special form that says that this didn’t actually happen.” But meanwhile the Internet has been shut off because that’s one of the things the new bills let you do, is to shut off somebody’s Internet. That seems pretty egregious.

**Craig:** Well, somehow or another, they’re going to have to figure out how to…It’s like if you think of piracy as a cancer, you have to figure out how to apply the right amount of chemotherapy and radiation so as to kill the cancer but not the healthy tissue surrounding it.

They don’t have this. They don’t have it yet. They basically came up with a chainsaw, and we’re going to have to figure out a better method. It’s on them. But the good news is they’re really, really good at their job. Let’s remember how efficient and productive Congress is.

**John:** Oh, you couldn’t ask for more. Yeah, sometimes I worry that they’re robots because they work non-stop, and they can come to such ingenious, really mutually beneficial compromises about anything.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, they’re my hero. [laughs]

**John:** I saw an interesting theory that part of the reason why we have such deadlock in Congress right now is that move towards trying to teach Congressmen to come home every weekend and not stay in D.C.

So basically that Congress hasn’t really moved to D.C. anymore. They’re still living in their home districts. The idea being, “Oh, that way you’re representing more your home district.”

The problem is that means they don’t actually see each other during the weekends. The wives don’t know each other, and their kids aren’t going to the same schools. There’s no reason for them not to just go nuclear on each other at any given moment.

**Craig:** And why do they need to go home anyway? Skype.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just Skype.

**John:** Just Skype, yeah. Raise your kids through Skype.

**Craig:** Nobody wants to talk to their congressman anyway. Honestly, I think maybe once in my life I needed to talk to a congressman.

Most of the time, if you have an issue you care about, you’re donating or working with an advocacy group. People who specifically, personally talk to their congressman more than three times in their lives are insane. They’re just crazy. They’re literally going home to service the crazy people.

**John:** Yeah. Jared Polis, I asked him if he knew my mom because my mom is the kind of person who will call…

**Craig:** Oh, boy. [laughs]

**John:** …anybody about anything.

**Craig:** Oh, I stepped in it, didn’t I?

**John:** Apparently she hasn’t got up to the level of actually calling…

**Craig:** Oh, good. [laughs]

**John:** …a congressperson for these kind of things.

**Craig:** Because she’s not crazy.

**John:** Oh, she’s not crazy at all, and she does listen to this podcast. Hi, Mom!

**Craig:** Hey!

**John:** But Jared Polis was saying that most of the constituent relations they have, there’s a very small list of people. Like they know the names of who the people are who are going to be calling in all the time.

**Craig:** Of course, cranks. I live in La Canada. It’s a very small town north of Los Angeles. Maybe I think 18,000 people live there.

**John:** So you have to deal with the coyote attacks and that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** We do have occasional coyote attacks, exactly. And probably we have two local newspapers. Both of which, by the way, I think are going to be strangled by Patch, but that’s another conversation. But both local newspapers every week, they’re published weekly, have letters to the editor.

And there’s pretty much three people you can count on. One guy in particular who is hysterical. I won’t give his name. But he’s super-duper right wing. He just loves to write in to that local newspaper.

I always feel like people who take advantage of those very traditional routes of communication are insane. They’re just nuts. You shouldn’t have that much to say to your congressman.

**John:** No. You shouldn’t.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** On the topic of protecting things, one of the things we came out with this week which is actually in the category of news, is we have Bronson Watermarker. Our very first Mac app came out this week.

**Craig:** Which I still have yet to try because I haven’t had anything I needed to watermark yet.

**John:** I know, it’s one of those things where it’s a utility that it’s there when you need it, but we weren’t expecting people to rush in and say, “Oh my gosh, I have to do this today!”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** FDX Reader was…had a very immediate need. “Oh, I actually do need to read a script on my iPad.” This is more like, “When do you need a watermarker? Well, it’s there. It’s at the Mac App Store.”

**Craig:** Bronson Watermarker can watermark…Tell me what documents, what file formats it can watermark, John?

**John:** PDF, any PDF you want to give it. It can be a screenplay. It can be a business document.

So here’s the genesis of Bronson Watermarker. For Big Fish, we had to do — Or we got to do, I don’t want to make it sound like a chore. It was a delight to do. — we did two readings of the show where you bring in actors and they rehearse for a week and you perform it once for investors at the end of the week. It’s a very strange New York way of how stuff works. But it’s smart and great and it was really fun.

So particularly the first time we did Big Fish, we hadn’t announced the name of it. The actors were coming in completely blind. We had to make sure that the script wasn’t leaking out, that the score wasn’t leaking out. We had to watermark every actor’s script and score before they got them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And this was a giant pain in the ass. I thought it would be really simple to do. We had to manually do it one by one by one by one. It took hours and we would make mistakes and it was a mess. So I said, “Never again.”

So Nima Yousefi, who is our programmer who lives in New York, I emailed him on a Friday and said, “This is what I need this app to do.” I drew it out for him, “These are the buttons. These are the fields, go.” And by Sunday he had an app for me.

**Craig:** He’s like an elf. He really is.

**John:** He’s an amazing little elf. Thank you Nima for making that.

We had a first draft of this app really quick, figured out the name. Ryan Nelson got started on the artwork for it. And then the thing that took the longest by far was the little video promo we did for it.

I’ll put a link up to that in the show notes. But we had to show what you would actually use it for. So we did an animated info-graphic-y kind of video to show it.

**Craig:** Is Dana Fox in the video?

**John:** She’s not. No one is in the video. It’s all animation.

**Craig:** It would have been better with Dana Fox.

**John:** Pretty much everything is better with Dana Fox.

**Craig:** Everything is better with Dana Fox.

**John:** Dana is lovely.

**Craig:** She’s the best.

**John:** She’s nice. So it’s been interesting to see how this has come out. It’s nice that the Mac has an app store now which is analogous to the iPhone App Store. We were able to sell it through there.

We don’t have to worry about the muss and fuss of credit card processing and distribution and updates. A lot of that stuff is taken care of for us.

**Craig:** So it’s…

**John:** But, what’s challenging is that people’s Macintoshes are much more different from each other than iPhones or iPads are. You have to know, what version of the system are they running? What other stuff do they have going?

Do they have Adobe Acrobat installed in a way that is going to fight with what we’re trying to do? So the troubleshooting has been interesting to work through, too.

**Craig:** But it’s now available in the store, right now?

**John:** It’s now available in the store today.

**Craig:** Wow, big day. When you say today, you really mean a bunch of days ago?

**John:** Yeah, like a week ago.

**Craig:** Yeah, well…

**John:** Whenever, it’s the middle of summer right now when we’re recording this.

**Craig:** It’s actually 2015.

**John:** It’s a warm day. It feels like summer.

**Craig:** We…

**John:** I thought we would leave today on a question that we won’t actually fully be able to answer ourselves.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** But readers may want to write in with their suggestions that we could share in the next session. Does that sound like a good idea?

**Craig:** It sounds exciting.

**John:** Okay. Here’s the last question. “My name is Eric, and I’m a working TV comedy writer in Los Angeles. I have been working for about 15 years. I have been staffed pretty much continuously on basic cable shows for the past 10 years and am shooting a pilot for a cable network in January.”

So he’s bragging, basically.

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Enough dude.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We get it. You could have stopped at, “I work.”

**John:** I work, he works. Bottom line…

**Craig:** Does he have awards?

**John:** [laughs] He lists them all at length. Bottom line, “In a writer’s room I am at my best.”

**Craig:** Oh God, this guy. He’s the best.

**John:** “Writing alone, I teeter constantly on the precipice of self-destruction.”

**Craig:** Finally something that I can identify with. [laughs]

**John:** “While I am happy to keep staffing on shows, I also want to create and sell shows. I’d love to do that with a partner. I’ve worked with a partner in the past, someone I met on the staff of a show I was on. But it ultimately fizzled out.

“I don’t have any current prospects in the circle of writers I know. I’ve thought about posting an ad on Craigslist but it seems like a crapshoot and I’m slightly scared I’d be murdered in the process.

“I’ve also thought about proposing some sort of speed dating type of event to the Guild, assuming there are other writers out there like me who are looking for their match. Just wondering if you or Craig had any ideas on this front?”

Here’s what I thought was interesting: We actually know a mutual writer who broke up with his writing partner. He’s now writing alone and is wondering whether he should be writing alone or should be matched up again.

It’s kind of easy to match up with somebody when you’re at the very start of your career. But if you’ve been working for 10 years and you’ve been busy, bringing a new writing partner in is challenging.

**Craig:** Yeah, there are so many issues involved. He mentioned the dating analogy. I would say that’s one that pops to mind the quickest. There isn’t really a meat market for these things.

Most people who have partners are happy with their partner or don’t want a partner at all. Very few people are unhappy with their partner and want a new partner.

The truth is it seems like he has the easiest path to it and that is he works in rooms. If there’s somebody in a room that he really meshes with he should just broach it with that person and say “Do you want to work on a thing?”

Even if it’s just one thing, “You have your career. I have mine, but let’s create a show together.” If that thing takes off, now we’re partners on a show.

Dan Weiss would write his stuff and David Benioff would write his stuff. But they partnered on Game of Thrones.

I don’t even think of them as partners in the sense that I would think of Ganz and Mandel as partners. They are partnered on Game of Thrones. But David can still do his screenplays and Dan can do his screenplays.

So that’s what I would say to him. He’s got it. He’s right there.

**John:** Yeah. He’s lucky to be in writer’s rooms where he’s around people who are doing the kinds of things he’s trying to do. He gets a very good immediate sense of their talents, whether he can stand them, their work habits.

**Craig:** Yeah, and whether their sensibilities mesh with his and all the rest of it. I don’t know, he didn’t say if it was comedy or drama, but at some point you realize, “Okay, the things I am pitching and the things that guy is pitching kind of fit.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But then he says, “I’m at my best in a room and I hate being alone.” So then, okay, as long as you’re not looking for a partner to do all the work that normally you’d have to do when you’re alone.

**John:** That would be a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** One of the interesting things that he might run into is, what if he wants to partner with a younger writer, a newer writer, who doesn’t have as much experience as he does?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** On some levels that could be great because you come at things from different angles. On the other hand, things like figuring out who should get paid how much and how the stuff should be split can be challenging. That could be tough, too.

Also I would have to say it would be hard for them to probably staff together as a pair unless they could show stuff that they had written together as a pair.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. Then in general, teams are paid as single writers, I think. So having a partner is the best way to lop your salary in half, as far as I can tell. Being solo is the best raise you’ll ever get.

But there is no success like success. If as a partnership you are doing better and getting more done and increasing the length of your career then of course it makes total sense. But look, he sounds like the kind of guy that wants a partner.

So he should ideally find somebody with whom he meshes in the writing room that is basically on the same salary scale as he is. And then the two of them should try and create a show together.

I don’t think there’s any sense in getting staffed as a partnership when you’re already being staffed on your own. It just makes no sense.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Because you could still work as a “partner” with another person in the room, but both get paid.

**John:** Yes. So I’m going to ask our listeners, if you are a listener who has experience with finding a partner later on in your career, we’d love to hear from you because you might have some perspective on this that we don’t have.

So drop us an email. It’s ask@johnaugust.com.

And also, show notes for this podcast and for every podcast are also up at johnaugust.com. If you click on the podcast tab you can go back through history and see all the pre-recorded shows that we did. We started this in what, 2007, I think?

**Craig:** I think our first one was actually ’98.

**John:** Yeah. It was challenging back then because the Internet was young and the podcast term hadn’t been invented yet. So we were really just forging new territory there.

**Craig:** We would ship reels of quarter-inch tape to anybody that wanted one.

**John:** It was tough. Stuart wasn’t born yet, so it was tough to be doing all this stuff ourselves.

**Craig:** I think he still did a pretty great job.

**John:** For being fetal, he did great. Things got a little bit wet there with the amniotic fluid but he did…

**Craig:** That’s so gross. He was pre-fetal. He was like a ghost.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** He was like a phantom baby that would come in and cry and then do our work for us and then return back to the magical egg. What happened to this podcast?

**John:** I don’t know. I get nostalgic just thinking about it.

**Craig:** I do feel like there’s an entire episode of just, I’m going to call them pre-ghost, a pre-ghost Stuart.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So exciting.

**John:** Stuart of course, we’re talking about Stuart who is my current assistant. And now that another generation of assistants has been born, Chad Creasey and Dara Creasey. Chad was my assistant and Dara was kind of almost my assistant because she was always around. They had their first baby.

**Craig:** That’s right, an adorable little baby and they seem to be very chipper and positive, which is disheartening.

**John:** Yeah, they have a happy, sleeping baby. So they’re just really lucky.

**Craig:** It’s weird. Yeah, they’re pretty happy.

**John:** And hey, guess what? We squeezed in our gynecological and parenting issue right in under the wire.

**Craig:** Thank God. Yeah, you mentioned amniotic fluid just as we were running out of time.

**John:** Yeah, thank goodness.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Next week we’re going to cover ectopic pregnancy and yeast infections.

**John:** I like it. Also, the IUD controversy because there’s really two sides to the IUD controversy and I think we can basically take both sides. I’m happy to take either one of them.

**Craig:** Are you talking about the one where Rick Santorum thinks that IUDs are abortions?

**John:** Rick Santorum thinks pretty much everything is an abortion.

**Craig:** By the way, IUDs are abortions. I am constantly talking to my wife about how we have literally created thousands of babies that have died on the spiral shores of her IUD.

**John:** Yeah. Pretty much every masturbation is an abortion, too, isn’t it?

**Craig:** It’s like a half abortion.

**John:** It’s a half abortion.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not really an abortion. I mean, come on.

**John:** But if a girl masturbated and a boy masturbated…

**Craig:** No, girl masturbation…

**John:** A girl has to ovulate, she doesn’t have to masturbate.

**Craig:** Exactly, girls are half aborting on a monthly basis whereas guys are half aborting on an hourly basis. [laughs] Podcast!

**John:** Podcast! Thank you very much, Craig.

**Craig:** Your mom listens to this.

**John:** Horrible. Horrible stuff. Thank you Craig and we’ll talk again next week.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/zen-and-the-angst-of-kaufman).

**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. This is Episode 18, by the way. And Happy New Year, Craig.

**Craig:** Happy New Year 2012.

**John:** What are your plans for 2012? Do you have a big, master… is this a significant milestone for you? Is there anything you want to do differently in 2012? I mean, what does the new year bring for you?

**Craig:** Good question. Well, it is a little bit of a milestone. My 20th college reunion is coming up.

**John:** As is mine.

**Craig:** Ah, yes, we’re Class of ’92. So, that’ll be fun, that’ll come along. And I went to Princeton, and Princeton reunions are this enormous thing. And they sort of famously are the, I think, second only to the Indy 500 for beer consumption in a single event.

**John:** That’s impressive.

**Craig:** It’s pretty nuts. And I’m actually a little scared, because I’m not, I don’t really drink that much. Bringing my kids, so they can see old, drunk men stumbling around, it’ll be exciting.

**John:** That’s a great idea. So, is your college reunion a fall event, a spring event? When will it happen?

**Craig:** Spring. It’s right after graduation. So, I believe it’s some point in May, I’m heading back there. It’ll be fun, because my wife also went to Princeton; we met there. So we can show our kids where Mommy and Daddy fell in love.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice?

**John:** How sweet. That’s so nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, our 20th anniversary, our 20th reunion will be at Drake University, which is during the Drake Relays. So, the Drake Relays are the big spring event, it’s sort of the closest we have to a homecoming. It’s this big track meet. And so the reunion always falls during Drake Relays, which is the big thing that everyone always celebrates at Drake.

So, I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Yeah.

Do you have new year’s resolutions? Are there any things that you want to do new or different or make changes this next year?

**Craig:** Well, I never do new year’s resolutions per se, because I always feel like every day I come up with twenty things that I want to do, and new years isn’t any different.

But yeah, I think this year I just want to continue a process that’s been going on for a few years. And I think we’re going to talk a little bit about some of the issues today regarding this Charlie Kaufman thing that was on the Internet.

But just trying to be a better writer and trying to do better work and trying to grow. Trying to grow. That’s my big thing.

**John:** Yeah, growth is nice. But that’s not very specific. I mean, are there specific things that say, like, over the course of this next 12 months, I want to do this thing different? Are there any milestones you could set? How would you know that you are a better writer on December 31st?

**Craig:** Well, I won’t know. And even if I am, it won’t matter, because I’ll want to be a better writer still again. So, it’s kind of a process thing. I guess I’m a little zen in that regard. But if I had to say, “Okay, well, here’s a concrete goal,” something I can accomplish that I would like to accomplish in 2012, it would be to finally commit murder.

**John:** Oh, yeah, that’d be good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, I like that.

**Craig:** Well. What about you?

**John:** I don’t have good resolutions either. Like, I’ve always found that when I’ve tried to make resolutions, it’s basically like committing to something that I’m going to give up — like — the third week of January, which is classically what people do on resolutions. They go into it with a lot of energy, and they just don’t end up fulfilling that goal or that promise.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, what I’ve started doing is declaring areas of interest. So, I would say, “Okay, for 2009, my area of interest will be archery and Austrian white wines.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Because an area of interest is less than a resolution. It doesn’t mean, like, “I’m going to go to the gym five times a week.” It’s more, “I’m going to try more Austrian white wines.”

**Craig:** Now, I’ve got to stop you there for a second, because, I mean, granted, now I’m starting to see why you were so put off by the generality of my goals, because your goals are so absurdly specific. Why Austrian white wine? Tell me.

**John:** Okay. You cannot master all wines. It’s actually impossible to master all wines. Like, you can — people spend their entire life doing that, and I don’t think it’s actually fulfilling to do that. But if you pick an incredibly narrow range in that field, you can actually have a pretty good knowledge of what those wines are, what’s interesting about them.

You know, if you’re trying to compare all the white wines, you’re not going to have taste notes to be really be able to distinguish them. But if you’re going for Austrian white wines, it’s like, “Oh, there’s a Gruner Veltliner.” So if I just order that wine whenever it’s on a list at a restaurant, then I’ll always have something that’s the interesting thing that I’m doing this year.

**Craig:** But what happens if you have… There has to be some sort of pretext for this. You already liked Austrian white wines. You didn’t just pick this out of a list.

**John:** No, no. I’d had Austrian white wines, and thought, “Oh, these are pretty good.” And so, part of my decision was, “Oh, well, why don’t I pick something that I kind of like and I will learn more about it?”

**Craig:** You know what? That’s the way I used to be with albums. I remember when I was a kid, I would get an album, and I would just say, “You know, just for completionist sake, I’m going to listen to every song on this album. I don’t care if this is the bad song, I’m going to force myself to listen, in order, to every song until I feel like I really, I know every song back to front, top to bottom.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it hurt sometimes, because, really, I just wanted the three or four Yes songs I liked, and instead, I’m sitting there, going, “God, this thing will never end.”

**John:** So, in your study of these albums, and completing these albums, did you get the perception that the artist knew that some of the tracks weren’t as rewarding as the other tracks? Or did it make you appreciate anything different about the artist themselves? Like, reticular tracks? I mean, that’s really the question.

**Craig:** I think, sometimes, they’re filler; sometimes it’s just the band goofing around. I mean, I don’t know why I forced myself to listen to The Crunge by Led Zeppelin as many times as I did. It’s just not very good. But you know, they were fooling around.

And listen, my feeling was at the time — and I guess it still is — you can’t enjoy the fun stuff if you don’t do the homework part. So it was discipline.

**John:** It was discipline. I mean, to me, archery — which was from that same year as the Austrian whites — archery is like, it’s kind of cool. And so, one of the things you did as a kid, like I did up at Scout camp, was like, well, archery is kind of great. What if I’m good at it, and I’ve never tried it as an adult?

And so, my friend, John Petrelli, is a trainer, but he’s also a bow hunter. So, we went out to the archery range and he taught me how to shoot.

The thing is, he’s a personal trainer, so he’s incredibly strong. So a composite bow, that first inch is fine and easy. The second six inches are incredibly hard to pull, and so none of his bows were actually light enough that I could reasonably pull them back.

So I ended up getting three shots in, one of which, the string, like, skinned right along the inside of my arm, and made a bruise that lasted for about six weeks. But that same shot that I bruised myself on, I came very close to a bull’s eye.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Nice. By a complete fluke.

**Craig:** Oh, of course.

**John:** I think I may have been aiming at the other target, but still, it came close to a bull’s eye.

**Craig:** It came close to something. I assume you’ve read Zen and the Art of Archery?

**John:** No, I’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

**Craig:** Well, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is this massively dense fruitcake of a book about the metaphysics quality, and that’s also an excellent topic that one week we should discuss. But Zen and the Art of Archery is practically a pamphlet compared to Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And it really is about zen, whereas Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance really isn’t.

And it’s a classic of the genre. It was written, I believe, in the ’50s by Eugene, I want to say Hergel? Or Herrgel? I think he’s German. But there’s translations. And it really is about his… Like you, he just said, you know what? He was living in Japan at the time, and he said, “I just want to take up archery.” And he learned the concepts of zen through archery.

And it’s a great read, it’s very short book. I highly recommend it to everybody.

**John:** We will put a link to it in the show links, which you can always find at johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** The other zen book I did read, which I remember loving in high school, was Zen Driving. It’s a book about driving, but just like, how to be more zen as you’re driving. And the thing I took away from it is, when you put on your seat belt, don’t strap yourself into the car, strap the car onto yourself.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Yeah, I just blew your mind, right there.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, what? You strap the car onto yourself?

**John:** Yeah. So, think about putting on, like, clothes, that the car is an external manifestation of your body. And so, you’re sort of putting on the car, rather than putting yourself into the car.

**Craig:** So that you don’t — you’re not pushing this machinery through something, you’re actually, you yourself are gliding through space.

**John:** Exactly. So, you can imagine, like, the four corners of the car are really the four corners of your body. And it was actually really transformative, because I read it at a time where I started to have to take really long cross country trips by myself to get to college or to drive out to Stanford from Boulder, and it was great. It actually made that a much more pleasant and possible experience.

**Craig:** Sounds like it would rob me of my right as an American to throw my car through traffic like a bullet.

**John:** Yeah, it might do that.

**Craig:** Bummer.

**John:** So this past year, my goal was to get better at piano, because I had had piano lessons growing up up until fourth grade and then I stopped. And so I’ve always been able to… I can read music on the piano, and I can sort of get my way through a song on the right hand — the treble clef — but I just couldn’t do the left hand at all.

So, this was really my year of the left hand. And trying to get… being able to play both sides simultaneously. So, I’ve been playing piano about half an hour to 45 minutes every day.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And it really does —

**Craig:** I’m sorry, you said trombone or piano?

**John:** Yeah, I just said trombone. No, no, piano. Craig is referencing, of course, a controversial post I had on my site about why people shouldn’t play band instruments, which we can get back to.

But I do want to stress that just literally going to the piano for half an hour everyday throughout this last year has been really remarkable and transformative. There’s actually little scraps of time where I would normally just pull out the iPad and check headlines and stuff. I would just sit down to the piano and play through something. And that’s been great.

**Craig:** It’s excellent for your brain. I took drum lessons for many years, and it is, obviously, for the drums — I guess, really, for every instrument — you have to develop your weak hand. And it’s when you start to confront the natural imbalance between your two sides…it’s shocking, actually.

And I remember having my drum teacher say, “Okay, for the next two weeks, you’re going to brush your teeth with your left hand, you’re going to use a fork with your left hand.” It was brutal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was really hard.

**John:** Yeah. Some of it is, literally, just strength. It’s literally just getting the wires hooked up right. But a lot of it is, when you’re really playing an instrument, especially when you’re playing piano, there’s not time for your eyes to see the notes on the page and for your brain to process it consciously and for your fingers to go in the right place. It has to sort of happen by itself.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I could do that with the right hand, I couldn’t do that with the left hand. I can now do that with the left hand. My fingers will find the right place, and I don’t even always fully remember the names of all those notes in the bass clef, but my fingers are finding the right places.

**Craig:** Very zen. Very zen.

**John:** Very zen. So, it’s been a year of that.

**Craig:** Coolness.

**John:** We should also review a little bit what’s happened this last year. You had a very big year this year

**Craig:** Yeah. I had a pretty big movie come out, that was exciting. And that was The Hangover 2. And it did very well, and I was very proud of it. I was very proud of it, I really liked the movie a lot, and really liked the people I did it with.

And also I got sued for the first time because of it, which was very exciting.

**John:** That’s awesome. Congratulations on that.

**Craig:** Yes. I had never actually been served. I got served. Just like they say in the movies, “You got served.” And then, not surprisingly, the gentleman who served us opted to withdraw his lawsuit.

**John:** Oh, yeah. That does happen.

**Craig:** Probably because it was a bunch of crap.

**John:** Yeah. Were you served at your home or at your office?

**Craig:** Actually, my lawyer got it. So I was a little bummed out, because I thought, “Oh, this will be exciting, it’ll be like the movies where somebody just walks up to you out of nowhere and goes, ‘Are you Craig Mazin? You’ve been served.'” But no.

**John:** The one time I’ve been served, the crummy detective who was trying to figure out where to serve papers called my mom in Colorado and started asking her all these harassing questions. Saying, like, “You have to get your son to call me, because there’s a legal concern.” And it was over something I was not involved with at all. And I really kind of let him have it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m sure your mom freaked out.

**John:** Yeah, my mom, of course, was delighted that random lawyers were calling the house and threatening her. So, that was not good at all.

**Craig:** And how about your year in review? What’s the big headline?

**John:** This year’s mostly been Big Fish, which was a secret project that we could finally announce and say that it was really happening. So, we had two big readings of the musical this last year. Which is great, because for six years it’s been Andrew Lippa and I at a piano singing for people.

And this has been the first time where we’ve have other actors come in and actually do it. And we have a director, and we get to sort of see the show independent of our singing the show. It’s such a strange thing when you’ve always been the performer, to sit back and be the audience watching something.

**Craig:** Right, that was interesting.

**John:** And a lot of this next year will be that, too. So, it’s been a good process.

It’s also been nice to sort of…I feel like, as a screenwriter, I’ve been able to do most of the kinds of things that I wanted to do. And a lot of the stuff I get approached with is, “Hey, do you want to adapt this book?” “Do you want to work on this project?” “Do you want to work with this director who wants to do something?” And I’ve said yes probably too often.

And this has been sort of, the last six months has been a nice bit of saying no. And I have good reasons to say no, but it’s also because I kind of just don’t want to do it. And that’s been a nice change.

**Craig:** That, the whole yes/no thing is, I’m sure I’ll be tortured by that until I finally get kicked out or quit.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing I would say has been good about the musical is it’s given me a chance to be a newcomer, be a newbie, and like, not to not know things and just ask questions and discover what things are like.

And really, developing my first application for the iPhone and the iPad, and we have a Mac application about to come out, has been that process, too. So, that chance to just explore new frontiers.

And while it’s nice to sort of know things about screenwriting, I can answer people’s questions about screenwriting, it’s not new and fresh and exciting for me in the same way that new, fresh, exciting things are exciting for me.

**Craig:** You’ve got to keep it changing, I think. I think you have to keep things ever in flux. Sort of the same principle of why bench pressing with dumbells is better than with one bar across, because keeping things in balance alone when things are changing and moving is good for you. It’s good for your brain.

And I’m excited. I’m looking forward to your show, and as a dedicated listener to Sirius XM on Broadway, I suspect that you will end up on Seth Rudetsky’s show.

**John:** That would be great.

**Craig:** You tell him I’m a big fan.

**John:** I will.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For all we know, he’s listening. That’s one of the other things that was new this last year, of course, was that we have a podcast.

**Craig:** That’s right. Oh my god, how did we forget that?

**John:** We did forget that. We have about 28,000 listeners on a given week.

**Craig:** Gee, man.

**John:** Which is really crazy. And growing.

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** So, thank you, people who are listening.

**Craig:** I mean, frankly, with that many listeners, it seems like you and I soon will be able to leverage it into some kind of military action.

**John:** I like it, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, a big mob that just suddenly goes and does something.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know what they’ll do, exactly.

**Craig:** I know. I’ve got to think about it.

**John:** They’ll demand change. They’ll have, like, really ambiguous goals and maybe they’ll wear masks, but it’ll be awesome.

**Craig:** That sounds crazy. Why would anyone do that?

**John:** Because it’s wonderful.

And also, this is a difference for me: I had no movies come out this last year. And this year, I have two. So I have Dark Shadows, which is May 11th, which is not really my movie, but it’s a movie that has my name on it. So, that’s different.

**Craig:** It’s partly your movie, at the very least.

**John:** It’s partly my movie, at the very least.

And Frankenweenie, which is October 5th. So, I’ll actually have movies.

**Craig:** That’s, you’re going have —

**John:** I won’t be just that theoretical screenwriter, I’ll be a screenwriter with actual movies in theaters.

**Craig:** A big boy screenwriter with your big boy pants. And you’re going to be, you’ll be everywhere. If you’ve got May, is a big month, as I came to learn. And then, October, you can just keep the PR ball rolling the entire second half of the year.

**John:** We’ll see what happens with Dark Shadows. I don’t know that I’ll be doing any press for it. I have story by credit, which is applicable. The movie that was made is a different movie than what I had originally set out to write. Not that it’s a bad movie, it’s just a very different movie. And so, I don’t know whether it’s going to be appropriate for me to do a lot of press for it.

**Craig:** That’s a good point. I agree with you. I feel like, if you don’t have the screenplay credit, maybe, it just seems odd to do the whole PR push.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you on that one.

**John:** Yeah, so. That’s the year ahead.

**Craig:** Sounds good.

**John:** Now, one of the things you want to talk about, which I think is a good thing for us to talk about, is Charlie Kaufman, who gave a speech to the BAFTA, the British American Film and Television Association.

**Craig:** Is that right? I thought it was just British. I thought it was the British Association of.

**John:** British, yeah, it’s not British American, it’s just British.

**Craig:** Something, something. Yeah. British Alliance of Film and Television a something?

**John:** Yeah, yeah. That sounds right.

I should know more about it, because I actually went to the BAFTA awards for Big Fish. But everyone just calls them the BAFTAs. And so it’s just one of those bunches of initials that we don’t really need to know about.

But Charlie Kaufman was a speaker at one of their recent events. And gave a presentation. So, I thought we’d start off by talking about Charlie Kaufman’s need to have people like him, which is — I think what we talked about before — which is sort of the good boy syndrome, is that we so much want to make people be happy with us.

**Charlie Kaufman:** I also struggle with wanting you to like me. And you know, in my fantasy, I leave here and people are saying, “Great speech,” you know, and “Not only is he a great writer but boy, you know, I really learned something tonight. He really brought it, you know?”

And, so, as much as I know that this neediness of mine exists, I also have a difficult time extricating myself from it or even fully recognizing it when it’s happening, because it’s a tricky thing, it’s, I mean, no one wants to come up here and bomb. It’s really, literally, the stuff of nightmares, you know. I’ve had that nightmare a lot of times. And then, and I know you want to be entertained, and so, for me to calculatedly not entertain you in order to be true, seems sort of selfish.

**John:** So, that was part of his introduction to the speech, where he’s talking to this audience, and explaining that he’s been commissioned to give his speech to them and feels that he is going to be, and worries that he’s going to be a disappointment if he doesn’t entertain them.

So, Craig, why don’t you do the set up and tell us what it was about Charlie Kaufman’s speech that got you thinking, or made you want to talk about it on the show today?

**Craig:** Well, it was a great talk, and it was, you just heard this clip, which is really one facet of it. But I guess, if there was a theme throughout all of it, it was this kind of self examination, and a look at the pitfalls that go along with being an author, an artist, an entertainer. For instance, in this case, he’s talking about this internal dialogue that I suspect we all have, in which we are obviously doing what we do to entertain or to provoke or inform or please or inspire.

But we cannot go down the path of simply putting “love me” first, because “love me” then leads you down the path of manipulation. And I’ve been there before. And one of the reasons that his talk affected me so much is because every sort of foible he outlined I have. Every mistake he said he’s made I’ve made, probably more frequently and more egregiously than he has. No doubt, I would say, actually, more egregiously than he has.

And so, it kind of hit me in my sensitive spots, because I do want to entertain an audience. Of course I want to entertain an audience. But, like so many who are in this business, maybe we start from a place of psychological neediness, but we have to grow past it.

As he then points out, conversely, what we can’t do then is start to get into conscientious navel gazing, where the point is to so studiously ignore the audience that they end up feeling alienated. And this dilemma is common, I think, to everybody that creates for a living.

I think Roger Waters started writing The Wall for precisely this reason, that he started to feel this weird alienation from himself and this audience, and didn’t understand if he was just there to kind of amuse them. Why did he hate them? Should he hate them? Is that what they deserved?

And like Charlie’s movies, his speech is full of all this, kind of, mind bending recursion. And I’m not sure that he arrives at a conclusion that is valuable or useful. I’m not even sure that was his purpose. I think, in a very zen way, ties back to what we were talking about earlier, the examination is kind of it’s own reward.

You do it, and you think about things, and by examining and questioning and testing yourself, you theoretically improve. And you improve in the absence of any notion of perfection, because I just don’t think that’s achievable.

**John:** I think I missed the part where he talked about the navel gazing.

Because if there’s a criticism I’ve often had about Kaufman’s movies — and many of which I’ve enjoyed, but some of which I’ve not enjoyed as much — it’s that they seem solipsistic, where it’s just one person figuring out his stuff throughout the course of the movie and seemingly not able to understand that there’s someone watching the story in front of him. And seemingly not, kind of, caring about the audience’s perspective on what they’re encountering.

I very much write movies as the person sitting in the theater watching the movie. And that doesn’t seem to be Charlie Kaufman’s perspective on the screenwriter’s job.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell. I mean, I grant you that he didn’t specifically call out navel gazing, but even in that clip, you can hear him say, “Well, okay, I don’t want to calculate, specifically, unentertaining, or being anti-entertaining.”

But I get your point, also, that yeah, it seems like the movies that he’s done that are the most enjoyable and the most interesting, and frankly, the most artistically successful are the ones where he does acknowledge that the audience has certain needs.

And you know, this is one of these things that happens where you have to constantly question, “Who am I writing the movie for? Is it for the casual moviegoer? Is it for the not casual moviegoer? Is it for the person who’s seen every movie and can’t stand the conventions anymore?”

And maybe he’s sort of gone to a place where he’s so sick of the conventions that part of what he does is sort of studiously avoid them. Maybe he’s gotten to the point where he’s so frightened by his own need to be loved that he starts doing things on purpose that make him not loved. I don’t know.

All I do know is that those questions are questions I have. And that I think that if there’s a spectrum, and on one end of the spectrum is kind of the solipsistic navel gazing, and the other end of the spectrum is, sort of, pandering, essentially, that I could afford to move slightly more towards navel gazing. Just incrementally so.

And because, look, I’m not, I am an eternal student. I try and I try and I try and I try to get better. And I just like the fact that he was so open about how frail and weak his own psyche was in regards to his own work. And here’s a writer that, frankly, is excellent.

And you’d think, “Oh, well, he just sits at home, just incredibly proud of himself.” Instead of, quite obviously, nowhere near the case.

**John:** Now, I approach Charlie Kaufman’s work as a screenwriter who, the work I’ve done, I’ve written very big commercial entertaining movies, you know. It’s hard to say that Charlie’s Angels is a deep evaluation of contemporary…well, maybe it’s contemporary culture, but it’s not, nothing in Charlie’s Angels is about why are we here on Earth.

But some of my movies are more of that. I mean, Big Fish is largely autobiographical. The Nines if very much autobiographical. And yet, I would…there’s something about…there’s something that feels like there’s a character Charlie Kaufman — this has been a frequent criticism of Charlie Kaufman, I think, but — that Charlie Kaufman is playing a character named Charlie Kaufman who is a tortured screenwriter and this is part of the act.

And I’m not saying that he’s false there, but there’s something that struck me oddly about his speech and it made me, I don’t know, it felt both a genuine and it felt like another layer of pretense piled upon itself.

**Craig:** Well, that’s part of the paradox of recursion. And yeah, obviously, that’s a topic that is fascinating to him, and of course, any speech is a contrivance.

I mean, one of my friends pointed out that, at one point, he says, “I think it was Thomas Mann, who said…” Well, you don’t think it was Thomas Mann; you wrote that down. You know it was Thomas Mann, because you looked it up, you put it down on paper. I mean, with any kind of calculated bit of artistry, there’s always artifice in artistry.

You know, for me, it’s not so much the examination of topics and of writing movies that are about deep things as much as it is your intentions and the purity of your intentions. And he talks about the purity of your intentions, and I think I’ve done my best work when my intentions were pure, and I’ve done my worst work when they were not. or when my pure intentions were overcome by a need to not be screamed at by a Weinstein, for instance.

So, that was valuable, to me. I just thought that was a valuable thing to contemplate.

Now, on the other hand, I think he concludes at one point by saying, if you be honest and true, people will like it. And that’s absolutely not the case.

**John:** Yeah, actually, there’s a clip here I want to play, which is where he talks about, sort of, audience reaction to things.

**Charlie Kaufman:** “That’s two hours I’ll never get back.” That’s a favorite thing for an angry person to say about a movie he hates. But the thing is, every two hours are two hours he’ll never get back. You cannot horde your two hours.

So, you are here and I am here, spending our time, as we must. It must be spent. I am trying not to spend this time as I spend most of my time, trying to get you to like me. Trying to control your thoughts to use my voodoo at the speed of light, the speed of sound, at the speed of thought, trying to convince you that your two hours with me are not going to be resented afterwards.

It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me. And I’m trying to move deeper, hoping to be helpful. This pattern of time usage paints over an ancient wound and paints it with bright colors. It’s a slight of hand, a distraction. So, to attempt to change the pattern, let me expose the wound.

I now step into this area blindly. I do not know what the wound is. I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least, inarticulable. I do believe you have a wound, too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone.

I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected. It is the thing that is tap danced over, five shows a day. It is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself.

But it is the thing that wants to live. It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay, is born. If you don’t acknowledge this, you will come up here when it is your time, and you will give your speech, and you will talk about the business of screenwriting.

You will say that, as a screenwriter, you are a cog in the business machine. You will say it is not an art form. You will say, “Here. This is what a screenplay looks like.” You will talk about character arcs, how to make likable characters. You will talk about box office. This is what you will do. This is who you will be. And after you’re done, I will feel lonely and empty and hopeless.

**John:** Okay, so what is he talking about with the wound?

**Craig:** Well, there’s so much going on there and I agree with so much of it. But there was, first of all, I will start by saying that he does make one mistake, I think, and that is suggesting in the beginning that he’s trying to not manipulate the audience and there is some kind of artistic nobility in avoiding manipulating the audience.

That’s baloney. The truth is, the purpose of art is to impact the audience. Impaction of the audience is necessarily an act of will in which you are trying to get people to feel something. And you can’t deny that agency. You can’t say that somehow you get to make you feel something without trying to make you feel something. Of course he’s trying.

Note his rhythm of saying, “It is the thing. It is the thing. It is the thing.” It’s a dramatic cadence.

**John:** He’s using craft.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** He’s clearly aware that he’s a craftsman using his tools to create a message.

**Craig:** That’s right. And it’s really interesting that he’s using his craft in service of a section of this speech that’s about how you shouldn’t be crafting it.

But that aside, so I thought, “Okay, I got you on that one, Charlie.”

But, here’s the part about it that is real and it mattered to me. He is right that the need to impact other people through any kind of creativity or art does come from a need. It is not something we do casually. Is it a wound, per se? I don’t know if it’s a wound. As he points out, it’s unknowable. It is a need. Like a hunger, a desire. And I don’t necessarily think that phrasing it as wound is fair to him or to anybody else that does it. It’s pejorative.

**John:** Wound definitely implies that something has been done to you, something has been ripped from you. It’s cut through you.

**Craig:** Yeah, it implies an injury.

**John:** What was that, by the way, Craig?

**Craig:** That was a motorcycle.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was my wound.

**John:** It was your wound.

**Craig:** It implies an injury and I think it feeds into an unnecessary character of an artist as a psychological mess using art to heal themselves or, as he puts it, I think, paint over their pain in bright colors.

I don’t think that has to be the case. But I do feel there is something very basic and engaged in a libidinous way in service of creating something.

And what he is right about is that if all you bring to the table is craft without that thing, without that passionate, libidinous drive, then you will be an empty person who is sitting there obsessed with nonsense books about page counts, plot points, act breaks and character arcs.

Absolutely, no question, that is true.

**John:** One of the things that struck me most as I was listening to this section of his speech was that my instinct was, “Well, write a novel.”

Because so much of what he’s talking about when you’re writing your screenplay, screenwriting is inherently not going to be your artistic voice alone. You are writing something that you’re hoping someone else will help convert into a movie. Actually, a lot of someone elses are going to convert into a movie. It seems like screenwriting is a strange craft to pick for your artistic expression if you’re goal in artistic expression is to truthfully explore this wound in yourself.

**Craig:** I agree, and I also think it’s…frankly, screenwriting is a pursuit that attracts people who are attracted to glamor and excitement and audiences. We can’t pretend that that’s not the case. Movies are exciting and glamorous. They exist on a level that is far more bright-y and paint-y over your wound-y then novels.

And I think, I would suspect that even Charlie Kaufman would agree with this that the reason he likes movies is because…

Well, he goes into a rationale of why he likes movies as opposed to other art forms. I don’t, frankly, think that his explanation made sense.

**John:** Yeah. His explanation was that movies are much more like dreams and that in dreams you can explore things that you can’t explore in normal text.

**Craig:** It’s funny. I have the opposite feeling. I feel like movies are the most literal form of art because they fill in almost every blank for you. To me, novels are able to, poetry approaches dream. Novel approaches dream.

I have to fill in everything. When I read a novel, I do have to enter… I think my brain probably enters a REM-like state. Movies chew your food for you in so many ways. All of them. Even the ones that are obtuse. Even the ones you don’t understand are still showing you step by step in real time what people look like. There’s voices, color. I know what they’re wearing, where they’re sitting.

So, I don’t think that that’s right. But, and I feel like I’m criticizing his talk when really, the truth is that it inspired me. Because, even if at times it didn’t hold up to the scrutiny of consistency, it was admirable. I thought it was very admirable how serious he took both screenwriting and the psychological pitfalls therein of the screenwriter. And there are many.

And I do agree with him very strongly that it is art and that we deserve to treat our own work with more respect then the business around us treats it. That’s for sure.

**John:** I would certainly agree with you there.

It is frustrating often to create an original screenplay that is viewed as less original, less it’s own work compared to a novel which has been adapted into the screenplay. One of those is considered art and one of those is considered a transitional document for making a movie. That is a frustration.

And, as we were talking about earlier, one of my last six month’s goals was passing on a lot more things. And it was recognizing that I have however many thousands of pages in me before I retire. I don’t necessarily want to spend them writing other people’s stories. I want to write things that are important to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And part of what I’m trying to do is…I don’t even think about — it’s funny — I never think about other people’s stories as important to me. I just want to try and be truer to what I think is good. That’s my big thing.

And I think that’s that, if I drew a lesson or encouragement out of this, it is that I am less concerned, more than ever — that’s kind of a weird sentence construction — I am less concerned then ever before with what other people think, and I am far more concerned with what I think.

That said, I am making a transitional document that will become a movie that will be shown to an audience. And in the end, the audience will have an opinion, and it’s the only opinion I care about.

And it’s a tough thing because I’m not really sure what I would do if I loved something that the audience hated. By and large, the things that they’ve hated, I’ve hated and the things they’ve really liked, I’ve really liked.

**John:** That was somewhat the experience I had on The Nines, except a lot of people really didn’t like the The Nines and… But I was surprisingly okay with it because it was very much my brain shoved up on the screen.

I didn’t have, the Charlie Kaufman of it all would say, I didn’t have to compromise anything about what I wanted to tell the story to be in order to make that movie. And that’s the luxury of making a tiny movie is that sometimes you actually have that kind control.

**Craig:** That makes sense. That makes sense.

You know, I wrote a short story for Derek’s website Popcorn Fiction called Lightning in a Bottle. Check it out.

**John:** There’s a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** There you go. Link in the show notes.

And that is I think maybe the only thing I’ve ever done, because it’s a short story, that wasn’t… I don’t know what word to use here. Impacted in any way by anyone else. It’s entirely me, top to bottom.

And it is true that, because it is entirely me and no one else and nothing else, I am oddly at peace with somebody coming up to me and saying, “That was crap.” Although no one has, happily. But that is… And it’s funny. It is the only pure expression of what I do. Period.

**John:** Yeah. And I wonder whether….

I have two short stories that I’ve had a similar experience with and that I’m really, really proud of. And they’re tough to write, but I love that they’re entirely mine and they are finished. I love that they’re done and I don’t have to go back and ever touch them again.

I wonder if you can ever really get that in a movie. I explained The Nines, I felt different about criticism than I ever had before. But there is a difference because that movie had a thousand people working on it. And there’s things about the movie, certainly about the marketing of the movie, that I had no control over.

And the marketing is part of the movie, ultimately. It’s part of the experience of how you encounter a movie, down to the cover art and which one sheet got approved and that kind of stuff.

And it’s the boundaries of what you consider your function as the writer, the screenwriter, the filmmaker, the artist behind the thing. Where that stops.

**Craig:** It’s true. Our experience of our own movies are so warped by the way they are reflected back to us. If all we did was write a movie and then watch it in the theater, I suppose we would have to just absorb what the director brought and what the cast brought and whatever changes were made by the studio, the producer. And those sometimes can be very considerable and sometimes they’re great and sometimes they’re traumatic.

But that’s not it. That’s just the beginning. Then there’s the publicity and the film critics and people on TV and Internet commenters. Even just things like reading… Just your bitterness about being excluded from something or being overlooked. Or it starts to…

**John:** Or if you have an award movie. Like with Big Fish, we were going through the whole awards process, and when we got some nominations but didn’t get other nominations, you’d ride the highs and lows on that, and you’d realize, “Wow. I’m doing as much work to try to get an award for this movie as I did actually making the movie.”

And that’s a weird part, too. So, was the release of the movie part of the art of the movie? That’s a whole… You don’t control it.

**Craig:** I don’t know if it’s part of the art, but it’s certainly part of how you experience your own work. Whereas for the short story I wrote. That’s it. It’s a short story. There’s nothing else. I couldn’t care less about anything else.

**John:** So as we’re wrapping up today’s topic, I think we’re telling people that they should write short stories.

**Craig:** It’s not bad.

**John:** Short stories are good. They’re entirely your own.

Even though I’m picking a lot of the Charlie Kaufman lecture, I would definitely say it’s worth seeing. That’s why there’s going to be a link in the show notes for it. Because he’s asking about what kinds of movies we’re making, what kinds of movies we’re setting out to write. And, if you have the ability to craft screenplays, is there a responsibility to try to use those tools in certain ways?

And that’s a good point.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s something there for everybody. It doesn’t matter what kind of movies you write. I think he’s…

I just love the fact that he was examining himself and his own method and his own purposes and intentions.

**John:** Because he’s never done that before.

**Craig:** Fair enough.

I probably could afford to do it more than I have. But I think that there is a great lesson in there, you should need to do this and I will always… I cite this advice all the time to new screenwriters who have a billion questions that I find to be irrelevant or stupid. Brian Koppelman, screenwriter, has a very simple, two-word bit of advice that I think is absolutely fantastic. “Calculate less.”

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** Simple as that. Stop asking about font sizes and margins and act breaks and how many words.

Oh, gosh, I get these questions. “How many words should be in a log line?” As many as required? I don’t know. Calculate less.

**John:** Make movies that need to be made. I don’t know. It would be interesting to have someone like Charlie Kaufman on answering some of the questions that come into the podcast because I feel like his answers would be vastly different. Or it would be very much about him.

**Craig:** I have no idea. I’ve never met him, but he seems… He’s obviously a very smart and talented guy.

**John:** Yeah. Indeed. Great. Thank you so much and thank you for our first podcast of the new year.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Looking forward to a year where we

Grow our audience to a true, world class army size.

**John:** I love it. All right. Thanks.

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

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/what-do-producers-do).

**John August:** Hello, my name is John August.

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

**John:** You’re listening to Episode 17 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you doing today?

**Craig:** Pretty good. I’m getting ready for the holidays.

**John:** Ah, very nice. Are you staying in town this year? Are you traveling, getting on planes?

**Craig:** I am staying in town. Man, it feels good. This time last year I was in Bangkok which is the least Christmassy place in the world.

**John:** Yeah. Did they have a concept of Christmas there?

**Craig:** Yeah…

**John:** Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

**Craig:** I’m sorry. Say that again.

**John:** [Singsong] Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

**Craig:** [laughs] They’re aware. They know its Christmas time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think they care.

**John:** Did you see inappropriately dressed Santas on the back of scooters or motorcycles?

**Craig:** No. It’s not a particularly Christian culture. It’s very traditional — very, I guess, Buddhist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re just not into Christmas. It’s not their thing. It’s also super hot. Also, it wasn’t like I was doing Christmas shopping or anything. I was standing in hot streets with scooters going by.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is nice. I’m actually really appreciating the whole pre-Christmas pageantry.

**John:** Yeah. We’re actually having unseasonably cold weather in Los Angeles right now. It doesn’t usually feel this cold. It was nearing frost temperatures here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also, we had this crazy windstorm and Pasadena and La Canada, where I live, got the worst of it. Our power was out for three days. You know, it was kind of fun for a day. By the third day, man, just darkness is a bummer. [laughs] You really start to miss power.

**John:** Yeah. You start to revert to like earlier primal forms.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Never good. Our big damage around here was that our DirecTV satellite dish got knocked askew which is… Yes, okay, first world problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what I’ll do is I’ll send you a picture of what the street near our office looked like and you can put it up with this podcast. It was crazy. I mean, huge trees just lifted out of the ground and thrown down. I think they had clocked it at 97 miles an hour which, I looked it up, qualifies as hurricane gusts.

**John:** Well, good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. We shouldn’t say “good,” but it’s exciting when changes happen and when things that you don’t expect to have happen do happen. The earthquake is actually a really good memory of mine, of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** You’re so weird.

**John:** I’m so weird. I kind of like when things fall apart a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. What are you, Sauermon, you like watching trees die?

**John:** [laughs] I don’t want anyone to be hurt. I don’t want things to necessarily be broken. But I like the idea that things are not permanent or that the way stuff is put together right at this moment isn’t necessarily the only way it can fit together.

**Craig:** Well, life rewards people like you because, eventually, it strikes you down. [laughs] I think it’s the second law of thermodynamics.

**John:** Yeah. Everything changes. Everything goes towards chaos.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And heat…

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Heat death of the universe.

**Craig:** Heat death. We’re on our way.

**John:** Yep.

Speaking of heat death and the universe, that’s not a segue at all actually, today I thought we would talk about producers.

**Craig:** Heat death and producers.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s see, how can we tie in heat death and producers? Both thrive on chaos.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, they’re supposed to fight entropy, but many times they do contribute to it too.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a better way of thinking about it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Today, let’s talk about what producers are. Craig, what is a producer?

**Craig:** Well, you ask a different producer you’ll get a different answer. And it’s different for television, it’s different for movies. Do you want to talk about movies first?

**John:** Yeah. I just want to talk about the general idea of what a producer is supposed to do though. I think we have an image in our head of sort of this rich fat cat who’s smoking a cigar, who’s giving orders and bossing people around. Or like the Robert Evans idea too. Thinking, “Well, that’s what a producer is.”

They used to be a little bit more like that. There’s a reason why some stereotypes are true. There used to be that “force of nature” producer who would storm in and do cocaine off of the table and make five movies before lunch.

**Craig:** Yes, off of the table. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I always find cocaine stories fascinating because I have just almost no drug experience whatsoever. I remember going to visit a friend of mine who had become a producer and exec at one of the big studios. I’m making this as generic as possible so that no one will actually identify who I’m talking about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He was so excited because he had gotten this new office. It had this built-in sort of cubby cabinet thing with the desk that folded down and there’s a mirror on the desk surface of it, which seems really weird. In the corners you could see the cocaine.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** This was like a special desk that was built to hold cocaine.

**Craig:** A cocaine desk.

**John:** Yeah. Which is such an ’80s thing. We got into the industry just a little too late.

**Craig:** Wow. I’ll confess something and it’s not a good confession. It’s like the opposite of an interesting confession.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m not a prude or anything. Not only have I never done cocaine, I’ve never seen it.

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever seen it consumed in my presence.

Which is weird. It’s not what you would think of like Hollywood should be.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You think Hollywood should be like, “Oh, rampant drug use.”

**Craig:** There should be coke everywhere.

**John:** I think there is drug use in Hollywood but it’s really not visible.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like cocaine… Cokeheads are really private, I guess, or shy. [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s also the people who were doing cocaine are probably doing pharmaceuticals now. They’re doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, like Oxycontin or whatever.

**John:** Yeah, or like less visible.

**Craig:** You know, I’m guessing cocaine is still around.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure it’s still around.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just… Yeah. Well, most of the producers I know probably aren’t coked up. Some of them, frankly, could do with a little bit of cocaine every now and again. [laughs]

**John:** Some of them could use a good, firm kick in the butt.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In general, a producer’s job — and we’ll just talk like a theoretical of what a producer is supposed to be doing, — is the person who is responsible for a movie — let’s talk features for right now — is responsible for a movie from inception all the way through distribution, which is now, I would say, all the way through iTunes and down the road. They are the person who is most and primarily responsible for the movie. That’s the reason why they get the Academy Award. They are the person who… It’s their movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They are the person behind it all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Rarely does that actually hold true now. There are exceptions. Laura Ziskin, I think, was largely that kind of producer. She was my very first studio development teacher when I went through my producing program, called Peter Stark, at USC. She was that kind of producer. There were movies where she had the idea, she found the writer, she got the writer to do 15 drafts, she got the studio to green light the movie, she was there for every frame they shot, and she oversaw editing. She oversaw the whole thing. That’s what producers used to do.

Now, if you look at the opening titles of a movie, there will be 14 people’s names listed as some kind of producer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You really can’t know what each of those people did. We can talk through, in general, what those responsibilities are supposed to be, but I really want to also talk about the realities of what it’s like to be a writer working on movies and dealing with producers.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you think about, sort of, when you and I started in the business, and let’s take Disney for example. It had multiple divisions. It was making a lot of movies. Let’s say it makes 50 movies in a year. There’s only so many executives you have and, ultimately, the job of the studio is to decide whether or not they should make the movie and spend the money on the movie and then market the movie and release the movie. But they can’t be there on the set. They can’t be there in every casting session. It would be impossible.

The producer becomes kind of an interesting independent agent of the studio. They are, ideally, in the best possible world, I’ll describe the best kind of producer, somebody who helps protect and nurture the creative value of the movie while, at the same time, shepherding the business of the production to make sure it’s done in a way that is responsible and satisfying to the financier, typically a studio.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That doesn’t happen. [laughs] Sometimes that just doesn’t happen. Sometimes you get one and not the other. Usually it’s the business one and not the creative one.

**John:** What’s interesting is, if you were just looking at Video Village, Video Village being at the monitors in which people are sitting in chairs staring at the little screen while the cameras are rolling. If you were to look at the people sitting in those chairs it’s hard to tell, necessarily, who are the producers and who are people who work for the studio because they seem to be doing the same kind of job. To a large degree, their functions do overlap.

We had a guy who worked at Warner Brothers come in once to talk to our class. He said like, “Oh, my friends, at Christmas, will ask me, ‘Hey, I saw that movie you said you were working on but why didn’t I see your name on the movie?'” He’s like, “My name is that shield that plays at the front. The big Warner Brothers logo, that’s my name.”

The studio executive, his function is really the studio’s function so he doesn’t have his own separate title card on the movie. He is the logo of the company. The exception being, weirdly, like New Line Cinema which all those people got producer credits even though they were really a studio.

**Craig:** Yeah. It gets very confusing in that regard. You’re right. It is interesting, sometimes a very strong studio executive will have more to do with the inception and shepherding of a film than the producer. It’s a very difficult thing. The reason it’s so confusing about what producers do is there is no barrier to entry, anybody can get a blank producer credit. For instance, associate producer really means a sort of producer-in-training who’s working with the real producer, typically.

Co-Producer could be anybody. A lot of times these things are handed out as little cookies for people to feel good about themselves. Sometimes those people are actually doing more work than the person who is the producer.

Then there is executive producer, which sounds more important than producer but actually isn’t.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s hop through the ranks from the top to the bottom just so people get a sense of what it means in film. After we talk through in film we’ll talk it through in TV because it’s confusing because everything is reversed.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in film the most important producer, the person who would actually receive the Academy Award, is the producer. It just says “Producer.”

**Craig:** Right. “Produced by…”

**John:** “Producer” or “Produced by…” there’s no other qualifier in front of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If there are several people with the title “Producer” on a film, the Academy has rules about who gets the award. There’s a Producers Guild which helps step in to specify who gets what kind of award for things. But producers should be the most important, significant person making the film.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Below Producer is Executive Producer. Executive Producer used to mean a person who brought money to a project. It still, often, does mean that. It’s a lesser function. It’s probably not a person who is involved day to day although, sometimes, that’s a credit that a Line Producer might be given or someone else who’s incredibly involved day to day but is not the overall overseer of everything about the movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Co-Producer, Associate Producer, are sometimes just handout producer credits. I got a Co-Producer credit on Go and I really did a lot of producing on Go, but that was just a stipulation in my contract.

**Craig:** Right. Or for instance, if there’s a big Producer, they may have somebody working for them that does an enormous amount of work on their behalf and that person might get a Co-Producer or Executive Producer credit.

**John:** Yep. Co-Producers, a lot of times you’ll see the person who’s responsible for the budgeting, the Line Producer being given that.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** I should specify: There’s two other titles that you won’t often see in credit blocks but are actual functions and that’s a Line Producer. The Line Producer is, I think of it, almost like the manager of a company. It’s the person who’s physically responsible for doing the budget, for making sure the trucks are showing up at the right place at the right time, all the sort of number responsibilities and production responsibilities.

**Craig:** Yeah. In the credits they’re called the Unit Production Manager. The Unit Production Manager is, essentially, the business master of the movie. It’s a very interesting position, actually, because the UPM typically is somebody that works more closely with the studio than with the productions. Studios are very particular about which UPMs they use because, ultimately, that’s the person they come to, to say, “You’re spending too much. These days are going on too long. Help us out here. Keep control over this thing.”

**John:** Yeah. So, the UPM is working with the producers on a general sense, working with the director on a general sense, in terms of some priorities. Or in terms of like how we’re spending our money, really overseeing the accountants and basically everyone who is staying back in those offices who are making sure that all the paperwork is actually done to pay for this thing and to make sure that insurance stuff is handled. All that sort of back office stuff is going to fall under the UPMs job. That person is working as much for the studio as it is for the production.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I just realized I have an Executive Producer credit on Prince of Persia, which is very classically the kind of credit I would be given in that situation. It’s a project that Jordan Mechner came to me with. He had the rights to Prince of Persia. We figured out the story, we put together a pitch, and we went around and pitched it to every place. I wasn’t going to write the movie but I was going to oversee the writing of the movie.

I developed Prince of Persia. Like — there wouldn’t be a movie if I hadn’t stepped in to do it, so Executive Producer is my credit for it. But I’m not the Producer. I didn’t oversee every frame of film shot or anything like that. I was a crucial function during one of the stages of production but I didn’t oversee the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s one of the reasons the Producers Guild exists. It’s not really a guild, it’s not a union, because they don’t… they’re not employees like a union is. But it’s basically, kind of a self-imposed group that wants to try and make some meaning out of these credits.

Because a lot of times, what happens is people get kissed into these things. I was involved in this, I found the initial script, but then it fell apart here. I took it over here, nobody wants to work with this guy. Take an executive producer credit and get the hell out of here.

The producers, rightly, are saying, “Listen, you’re watering down these credits. Executive producer, for some people, means an enormous amount of work, and for others, it literally means nothing. At all.”

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes it means we let you take the rights from us, because we didn’t want to make the movie. It’s that crazy. And obviously, the Writers Guild spent a lot of time and effort and strikes and so forth, to make sure that we can protect what our credits mean. Producers don’t have that.

**John:** No. And it’s going to be very hard for them to ever organize to the degree that it’s going to be meaningful for them to try to step in and say that, because they have to convince the studios to agree to these credits, and that’s a challenge.

**Craig:** It is a challenge, because essentially, it’s an open market. And the studios love giving credits like that away instead of money, because it doesn’t cost anything. They don’t care.

That’s why you see these, sometimes, especially in independent films. You’ll see a thousand producers, because everybody’s been handed a credit in lieu of money. It’s not that great of a deal.

**John:** Yeah. Weirdly, I would say, coming from Broadway, where I’ve just been at these producer and investor things, that is very true in Broadway. Like, all those names you see above the title of a show on Broadway, those were people who were, like, investing money. They would be like the executive producers who are coming in with money on a feature, but they all get their names on there.

And I really don’t want our movies to get to that point. I hope it doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s quickly talk through the ranks in TV, because it’s different and really confusing. We’ll try to talk through it. I’ll also link to it. I found I had an old blog post from 2004, and it’s actually accurate. So, I’ll talk you through it now, but you may also want to look at the show notes.

The highest rank in TV, executive producer. Now, the executive producer, whoever is running the show, the show runner, is usually an executive producer — not 100 percent of the time, but usually that person is the executive producer.

There can be multiple executive producers. You could have three or four people listed as executive producer. But that’s the highest rank.

Below executive producer, co-EP, which is confusing, because, you’d think that co-EP means the same thing as executive producer. It doesn’t. It means co-EP, it’s just its own title.

Below that, supervising producer. Below that, producer. Below that, co-producer. Below that, story editor, below that, staff writer.

Now, in that TV ranking that I gave you right there, that’s sort of the writers’ version of it, because most of the producers you think about for TV are actual writers. They’re doing the writing on the show and they’re doing the creative supervision of the show.

There’ll be other people who get producer credits on a TV show who are doing those physical production functions. Kelly Manners is a famous line producer type person for TV who did Angel, who’s done a lot of the sci-fi action shows.

Those people have titles, too, and those could be associate producer, or an executive producer. They could have other titles like that, but because TV tends to be so writer-driven, most of what I’m talking about in TV is really the ranks that you ascend through as you become a more and more powerful writer.

**Craig:** And what are pods? Tell us about that.

**John:** PODs are producer overall deals. A POD deal is with, generally, a non-writing producer who oversees a show on behalf of a studio, usually a studio or a network. Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen had a POD at Warner Brothers. They would come in and develop ideas with writers and set them up at Warner€™s and oversee the show as producers who are non-writing producers.

Generally, if you are, and I should specify… I have not been doing this TV writing for a few years now, so some stuff changes. Some stuff’s out of date. I rely on my TV writing brethren to correct me on stuff.

But if you are a writer who has a TV deal, your agents will often send you in to meet with a producer, one of those producers who has a POD deal, before sending you into the studio, the network, because they’re going to want to stick somebody on that show anyway. It’s better that you get matched up with somebody you agree with creatively.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Independent of this hierarchy on TV writers is also consulting producers. Josh Friedman, for example, is a consulting producer right now this season on Finder. That is generally a high level writer who is not on any specific show at the given time.

They don’t have their own series on this season, so they’re assigned to a show. They go on and they help out that show, they write episodes, they help write stories. They do a lot of great work on a show, but it’s not their show. It’s a way to keep those people in the fold and keep those people writing and keep better TV being made by applying them to a show that’s already going to be on the air.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. Regardless of the actual titles you get, I find that there’s three basic roles that producers play. You may have amendments to this. But I find, no matter what the nature of the production is, somebody in the production has to play these roles. Sometimes you get them found in one person, sometimes they’re split up between three people.

But there’s the peacekeeper/diplomat. There’s one producer whose job is to make everybody feel better. That is the person who’s always going to be on the phone talking to the studio or the network, talking to the agents, talking to the actors, getting everything to feel good.

When the actors have a problem, especially if the actors have a problem with the director, there’s got to be one producer that the actor can go to to discuss the problem. That’s a crucial role.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, for sure, producers, good producers are very parental. Movies are made by emotional artists. I don’t care what the movie is. I don’t care if it’s Ernest Goes to Camp. Everybody’s an emotional artist.

In order to be creative, you know, when people always say, “Oh, look at the imagination of a child. When did we lose that imagination?” Well, people who write and make and act and direct, theoretically, didn’t lose their childlike imagination or any of a number of hosts of childlike things that go along with that.

Sometimes, you just need a mommy or a daddy to help everybody play better, feel better about themselves, get over whatever drama or nonsense is going on at the time.

**John:** Yeah. Classically, this producer’s responsibility is to get the actor to actually come out of his or her trailer.

**Craig:** Yeah, sometimes, a producer has to undo a hissy fit. But, similarly, I think producers are the ones that sit down with directors and say, “Here’s the thing. The studio does not like the dailies, and we have to really think long and hard about what we’re doing here.”

The producer’s the one that sits down with the writer and says, “We just got notes back from the huge A-list actor, they don’t want to say these lines. So, we have to figure out how to get the dramatic intent across a different way.” The producer is the person in the middle of those problems.

**John:** Yeah. The second role that a producer often plays, or somebody on the production has to play, is the general, people that just sticks to the physical production, the, “This is how much it’s going to cost us to do this, this is today’s work, this is how much time we have left today.”

Your 1st AD is going to be doing a lot of that, getting the day’s work done. But in terms of getting the whole show done, or figuring out, “Okay, our script is taking place in these five countries, this is how we’re going to fake this country for that country, this is how we’re going to make our schedule work.”

It’s not just the AD’s job, it’s not just the line person’s job, it’s a semi-creative job and an ability to see how you’re actually going to get the movie made. Somebody on the production does that.

Some of the movie’s I’ve worked on, Bruce Cohen serves that function. I think it’s because he, in a previous life, was an AD, so he has a very good sense of, “Okay, this is how we’re going to get it done. These are the problems that are coming up. I’m going to deal with this crazy insurance situation and we’ll get the stuff handled.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and I would say, conversely, very good producers also understand that the essence of what we do is not to make a budget or make a schedule, but to make a movie. Sometimes, you’ve just got to break the rules and spend a little extra or go above or risk getting slapped on the wrist to get better work.

Somebody said to me the other day, and I thought it was very astute, there are two kinds of producers. There are anxiety buffers, and there are anxiety conductors. Good anxiety buffering producers will sort of see the pressure squeezing down on the director, usually, to get better work out of less time and money, and somehow, protect them from it and help the movie.

Because, in the end, the producer is that one person who needs to be able to play both sides of the field, business and creative. Whereas, the director, frankly, should be entirely concerned with creative and hey, if you want to give me 10 extra days and another 30 million bucks, yeah, of course.

Then there are the anxiety conductors, who get squeezed by the studio, amplify it, and then squeeze everybody else around them. That does not do anybody any good.

**John:** Yeah. I would say, related to the anxiety people are sort of dual functions I’ll call the bulldozer and the bodyguard. Sometimes you’re doing one or you’re doing the other one.

Dick Zanuck, to me, is classically a bodyguard. Dick Zanuck is a producer with tremendous credits who I’ve worked with on many movies. But I feel like a lot of his job is to serve as a bodyguard.

To say, like, anything that’s coming in Tim Burton’s direction, he will throw himself in front of and catch the bullet, so that Tim can focus on the work he needs to do and that Dick will take the hit and will figure out, like, what to do with this studio note, or just to keep people away from Tim. That’s a crucial function.

Likewise, sometimes you need a bulldozer. The bulldozer’s that person who has no shame and has no off switch. You can say, “Hey look, Paul, Paul. You see this ball in my hand? I need you to get this ball.” You throw the ball as hard as you can and he will knock down every building in the way to get it.

You need that person who’s delighted to break rules and to piss people off, because that’s, a lot of times, what you need. It’s the person who will risk getting the whole production stopped by the police, or will make those really awkward phone calls, because he doesn’t have filtering mechanism to stop him from doing that.

In the era of drugs, the bulldozer function was probably a lot easier. Anyone can be a bulldozer with the right narcotics.

**Craig:** I mean, they were all slamming into each other. You know, Hollywood is full of the legends of angry yelling producers who are screaming on the phone and throwing ashtrays at assistant’s heads and many of those stories are true.

It is an enormously difficult thing to make a movie. Enormously difficult. It is a business that must be built from scratch, ground up, tuned up to perfection, create this thing that absolutely works, and then be dismantled.

It has to be done on the fly, while you’re going, while temperamental people all around you are asking for something that’s intangible, namely, quality, and also, disagreeing on what that quality is. Everybody knows what it means to create a thousand widgets a day. It’s a number. We don’t have that.

It’s an enormously difficult task for anybody. Yeah, naturally, the people that often succeed are very loud and very dramatic and obstinate, but there are also producers who are known for quietly, magically, getting their way.

Frankly, depending on what the movie, depending on the director, different producers are better in different situations. As writers, typically, we don’t get to pick. And that’s where we can sometimes end up in trouble.

**John:** Indeed. The other function which I’d never really considered, breaking off here but I think it’s absolutely a good fourth role, is that sort of creative chaperone That’s the function that I think Judd Apatow ends up playing on some of the movies he doesn’t direct, which is that he is the guy that says, like, “Oh, let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this.”

It’s the person who reminds you, “Oh, this is what the movie’s supposed to feel like.” That’s the person who is helping out while you’re shooting. It’s the person who is taking a big role in editorial to get to the story, working the way it should, hopefully, early on in the process, was really working with you on the script to get stuff to feel the right way.

That was the function I played at the start in Prince of Persia, it’s the function I played in Go. Now, obviously, I was there during all the shooting, but also, in the editing room, it’s finessing stuff to make it feel like the right thing and reminding people what movie it is you’re trying to make.

**Craig:** Yeah, I wrote a draft for an animated film production now called Turkeys, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m serving in that producorial role to help keep things going. We have another writer who’s working. The director and I read his work and we take notes and suggest and all the rest of it.

Interestingly, for most writers, that is the bulk of our experience with producers. Producers, even if you’re selling your own original work, typically, when you go to each studio, you have a producer, quote unquote, “bring it in.” You’re picking a producer to already assign to this project,

If it gets bought, that person will help you develop the material. If it’s an assignment, there’s always a producer already attached. That producer will be the one that’s primarily working with you to develop the draft.

**John:** Yeah. Now something listeners may not be aware of is that sometimes a studio will develop a movie with producers who were involved with the project originally, but the studio does not feel that they can actually deliver the movie. The producer will go out and put another producer on a film. That happens because the studio has a track record working with a certain producer and believes that he or she can actually develop something.

Sometimes you’ll hear something like, “Oh, he got put on a movie.” That’s because this is a person they had a relationship with, and they really felt more comfortable making the movie knowing that this person was going to be on the film for them. That person is truly a producer. It’s not a studio executive, but it’s somebody who got brought in to help on something.

Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen were brought in on Milk, which was a movie that the studio wanted to make but they didn’t have people they felt could deliver the movie for Gus Van Sant. They came in to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, and this is where as a director I always felt like the best situation would be to have the bodyguard kind of producer because if you get the studio’s producer, you just have to be aware of where they land in the big game of things. This is the tricky part. Who do you work for? In the end, we all work for the people that sign our checks. But the writer and the director also work for this other thing called the movie, which we hope is good.

You want very much to make sure that your producer is working for the movie. Unfortunately, there are times when that’s not the case. I’ve been pretty lucky. I’m working with producers right now that I think are terrific and absolutely are in line with supporting the movie. When I work with Todd, he’s the producer along with Dan Goldberg. The filmmaker is the producer, and this is no problem at all.

**John:** A while back I had an interesting run-in. I was visiting a set, and I was talking with one of the producers in Video Village. I asked him, “Oh, hey, is Universal taking this movie all by themselves or are they splitting it with somebody else?” because this being a pretty expensive movie. He’s like, “Oh, I don’t know.” He asked somebody else. I was like, “You are a producer on this movie, are you not?” He had no idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not cool. [laughs]

**John:** No, I feel like if you’re going to get a producer credit, you should understand who’s releasing your movie, like those basic fundamental business things. I don’t care what role you play on the movie. If you have a producer title, you should know that.

**Craig:** Well, the job has changed. Here’s the basic evolution of the feature film producer: It used to be that they ruled the world. I mean every studio had multiple producer deals. These producers were very well compensated. Studios made a ton of movies, and they desperately relied on these producers to provide them with that material — to find it, grow it, and provide it to them. That’s changed.

Studios have become far more adversarial with these producers because they feel like a lot of their deals are far too rich for what they get. There are fewer producers because they make fewer movies. The recent strike, for instance, was a chance for them to force majeure out. A ton of their producing deals they just didn’t feel were worth their time or their money.

They tend to look at producers more and more like employees of the studios opposed to independent operators. They tend to look at producers more and more as agents of budget squeezing and schedule enforcement as opposed to creative partners with the filmmakers. Some studios just don’t seem to like producers at all. They think they’re the producers.

All of this adds up. Unfortunately, for writers it adds up to a very unstable environment. A lot of times you can’t quite tell who it is you’re working for. You can’t quite tell who’s in charge. Everybody’s competing internally. It becomes particularly difficult when the producer and the studio are not working together creatively because you just start getting pulled in two different directions.

For me, personally since I began, I’ve always had a simple rule. I don’t mind notes, but I like one set of notes. I don’t want producer notes, then studio notes, then producer notes, then studio notes. It’s a way to basically ruin your movie in three months.

**John:** Yeah. Really the problem comes even before it gets to the notes stage because if you’re going in for a job… Let’s say a producer bought a book at a studio. That producer is meeting with you to talk about, “Oh, how are you going to adapt this book?” You end up having meetings with this producer to say, “Okay, this is what we’re going to focus on, and we’re doing this.”

You end up spending a lot of time working with that producer to figure out how you’re going to do it. Hopefully, you’re the only writer who is going in to talk on that thing, but maybe there’s other writers, too. Then you’re going in to talk to the studio to pitch your take on this project. The studio may say yes or may say no. Or the studio may have completely different instincts than the producer did.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Whose instincts are you supposed to follow? The producer ultimately just wants to get the movie made, so the producer is really looking for, “Well, what does the studio want? I’m going to somehow magically read their minds, or I’ll just call them on the phone and try to get them to say what they want.”

It’s just functioning as an extra step before you’re getting in to talk to the people who are actually going to make the decisions. The producer’s not making any decisions at all. The producer’s just basically saying, “I will bring in people, and hopefully you will like somebody.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s very important to understand the economics of producing movies to understand the decisions that are made. Writers are paid for the work that they do. It doesn’t matter if the movie gets made or not, to the great chagrin of the producers. “You want me to write a script? Pay me. I’m paid. I’ll write a script.” You decide if you’re going to make it or not or if you want me to do another draft or want another writer to do a draft.

Producers are paid almost nothing until the movie gets made. This is why producing is becoming incredibly difficult. They just don’t make that many movies anymore. The opportunity to get paid has shrunk down dramatically. The stress level therefore for producers, when they’re developing material, has skyrocketed. They are desperate to get these movies made so that they can support themselves and their families. I get that.

In that desperation bad producers tend to make bad decisions. Good producers frankly tend to make good decisions because they understand that the way to get a movie made is to stop caring about getting the movie made and start caring about making a good movie. [laughs] Those are two different things.

But if you have one of those producers that is just hell-bent on getting it through the system, just put it out there, just dump it out there so I can get paid, you end up in a bad place because sooner or later everybody starts to realize that this particular space shuttle is losing heat tiles. This thing was glued together. It wasn’t [laughs] really built right. Then you perish in a ball of fire.

**John:** Yeah. Along with desperate to get this one particular movie made and make whatever compromises have to be made to get this one movie made, the producer, seeing that there are fewer movies getting made, is incentivized to step up to the plate as many times as possible. The producer has many more irons in the fire and is trying to strike them all just to make one of them actually work.

The amount of time that he or she is able to spend on one given movie is lessened. The amount of time and energy that person has to devote to getting that next step of the movie happening can be diminished as well. My frustrations with movies that haven’t gotten made or have gotten made poorly, sometimes I can pin it on the studio. But a lot of times I really can pin it back on producers not doing their job. I feel like they need to be doing their job.

Producers theoretically should have the ability to take a project out of a studio, too. If a producer came into a studio with the rights to something, to a book or to a remake of something, the studio is optioning those rights for a time. The producer may own some things. The studio may own some things. But that project should be able to travel outside of that studio if it becomes clear that this studio is not going to make this movie.

Unfortunately, producers have fifteen deals on other projects with that studio. They’re loathe to anger the studio by trying to execute turnaround, which they should have — turnaround being the process by which they can reacquire something — to take that project and travel with it to someplace that may actually make that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s really difficult for them. I mean look. Put yourself in a producer’s shoes. Let’s say you’ve worked on developing a script for three years. The writer’s been paid. You haven’t. But finally the studio is willing to make the movie. It’s just that they won’t make it unless you do A, B, and C to the movie, and A, B, and C are terrible ideas. What do you do?

You just pack it up? You go home? Or do you compromise? Do you sell out? Do you try and broker some sort of better idea? It becomes a very difficult thing for producers and becomes a difficult thing for everybody involved.

Frankly, they don’t even have the security anymore that they used to have of just what they call the housekeeping deal. Many of them don’t even get their offices and assistants paid for. It is a high-wire act to be a producer. I’m not one of those writers that vilifies producers. Good producers are fantastic — fantastic, and absolutely necessary. The way the business is structured now, I just don’t know why anybody would want to become a producer.

**John:** I don’t either. I see feature writers who segue into producing. I don’t get it because the only movie I was a producer on that I didn’t write was Prince of Persia. I found the process maddening because here’s what it is: It’s like I’m sitting with Jordan, and we’re working through drafts, it was like, “Okay, here are the controls of the airplane. Now you’re not allowed to touch the controls, but you need to tell Jordan how to fly the plane.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** It’s like, “Oh, just give me the controls. Let me fly the plane.” Jordan was awesome. I love Jordan. I can’t even imagine what that process would be working with a writer who you didn’t respect and like going into it. It ends up being a tremendous amount of time. You end up using the same parts of your brain that you would use to do real writing. It’s just that you’re not allowed to actually touch the paper.

**Craig:** I totally agree. Writers fall into this trap all the time. Every single one of them always comes back and says, “This was a huge mistake.” We like the idea of being producers because producers have typically represented power to us. We think we’ll be a producer now. We’re that guy. We have the shingle and the sign and the people working for us in the hallway at a studio and look at us and hooray.

Then you realize this is not great. You’re exactly right. I got into the business to write screenplays, not to tell other people how to write their screenplays. In fact, I would argue that writers are terrible producers because we’re writing it in our heads. We don’t have what a good producer has. They can’t write. If they could write, they probably would write.

What they can do is be a really good reader and a really good shoulder to cry on and support us and help us get where we need to go. They’re not sitting there trying to get us to write the script in their head because that’s what I do. [laughs] I’m talking to other writers.

Producing for writers to me, it’s just my opinion, is a trap. I don’t think it’s even helping the writers. I think the best thing would be for studios to be more encouraging of good producers. But unfortunately it seems like the trend is going the other way.

**John:** Yup. Alas.

**Craig:** Alas.

**John:** Alas. Well, Craig, thank you for this discussion of producers.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I look forward to calling all my producers awkwardly after this podcast runs so they think like, “Oh, you weren’t talking about me.” I’m like, “No, no, no. That’s…”

**Craig:** [laughs] “No, no, no. You’re one of the good ones.”

**John:** “You’re one of the good ones, yeah.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** If I didn’t single you out by name, I lumped you with the good ones.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ve actually been pretty lucky. I haven’t worked for…

**John:** I’ve worked for some terrible producers.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I have enough credits and stuff that’s not made that I can just generically say that I’ve worked for some just terrible producers. Terrible producers. Some who were far too meticulous and, “Turn a page. Fifteen notes on this page. Turn a page.” “Oh, my God. Just make the movie.” Others who you can’t get them to lift up the phone and call somebody.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ve been lucky, I have to say. Maybe it’s just that I steer clear when I smell trouble but…

**John:** But you’ve worked for some amazing executives.

**Craig:** Aha, well. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe that makes up the whole difference for it.

**Craig:** Yes, it does.

**John:** It does. All right. Thank you, Craig. Talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.