Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Happy to do so.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Not yet.

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

**Craig:** Ah.

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

**Craig:** Real smart.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I’m sorry, Amazon.

**John:** Sorry Amazon.

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

**Craig:** Oh, uh…

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

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

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

**Craig:** Hey, great point.

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

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

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

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

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

That second one doesn’t work.

**Craig:** No.

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

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

That does make sense.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah!

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah!

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It could happen.

**John:** It could totally happen.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

All right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

Question 2. Do you want to read that?

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Next question.

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

**John:** That’s a good question.

**Craig:** Thoughtful question.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s a great point.

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

**Craig:** No, I’d love to hear it.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah, he sees the world…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I think so.

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

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

**John:** Okay.

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** A very good man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

**John:** Team player, yeah.

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

**John:** Sounds good. Nice.

**Craig:** What’s your…

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s awful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

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

**Craig:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

Craig, how was your Father’s Day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Good.

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

**Craig:** So annoying.

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

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

**John:** Not one iota.

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, that’s nice.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes. True.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Very cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** Bottom line.

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

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

**John:** Bill.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Mad Men?

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** All right. Nice.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, for Stacy.

**Craig:** Sure.

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

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

**John:** Oh god.

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

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** A sweater.

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

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

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

**John:** Thread?

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Well you’re saying “they.”

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

“A large suitcase is by the door.”

“The fire is intense.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** “There was a dragon.”

**Craig:** “There was.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

**Craig:** It can be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re there.

**John:** It’s worked.

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

**John:** Yeah, nerd.

**Craig:** Nerd.

**John:** Nerd.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Um, because, the…

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

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

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

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

**John:** “Tell the joke to Tom.”

**Craig:** Okay, “Tell Tom the joke.”

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Dammit.

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

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

**Craig:** That makes sense.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. “Direct message.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes!

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

**John:** What’s this?

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

**John:** Tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I love it. A lot.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Which would be great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** [roars]

**John:** [roars]

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] Rend.

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

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

**John:** I like that.

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

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

**Craig:** Wah-wah.

**John:** Vote us down.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Wow. Wow.

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

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

**John:** That’s a good, big number.

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

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

**Craig:** I know.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes. Take care.

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

**John:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Very good.

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

**Craig:** Oh good. Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Clive Barker.

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

**John:** Not a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

It’s awful. Awful.

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

**Craig:** Right!

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

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

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

**Craig:** Congratulations.

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

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

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

It was too much.

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

**Craig:** Too much. Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** And it’s a tab-enter?

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

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

**John:** It’s not comforting.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s your plan?

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

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

**John:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s not magic, John.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Come on, Rawson!

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

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

**John:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, it’s a Rawson!

**John:** Oh, come now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Ah!

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

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

**John:** Pretty good.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** By the way, I, um…

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s okay.

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

But the stuff in the season finale was really good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That was cool.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Tech credits were astounding.

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

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

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

**Craig:** I don’t — nothing’s cool.

**John:** Nothing’s cool.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nerd!

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, it’s on Mac.

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

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

**John:** You know your boy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** I’m happy to link to that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Melissa McCarthy.

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

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

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

**Craig:** In the director’s cut?

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

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

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

**Craig:** Hey, that’s a great idea.

**John:** Done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] You guys…

**John:** So, Craig…

— You guys, you missed some good comedy there.

**Craig:** You missed, uh…

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** I remember that one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Biff.

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

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

**Craig:** Well let’s do it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh!

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** An anonymous socialist writes…

**Craig:** Cool.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**John:** Absolutely.

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right. No.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s danger. Danger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s not fair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Recycled plastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** We don’t like comments.

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

**Craig:** Yeah, @clmazin.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** So bless him.

**Craig:** Well done.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sounds right to me.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Bye.