Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/follies-kindles-and-second-act-malaise).

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

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

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

**Craig:** A little tired. A little overworked right now.

**John:** I’m sorry to hear that.

**Craig:** Well, worse than underworked.

— I’m sorry, I said it’s worse than underworked. It’s better than underworked.

**John:** Yes. You wouldn’t want to be unemployed.

**Craig:** No, no. No.

**John:** No, no. At the worst of our jobs we’re not digging ditches.

**Craig:** Right, precisely.

**John:** We’re indoors most of the day. We have comfortable chairs. — If we’re smart we have comfortable chairs.

**Craig:** Yes. I’ve got the Aeron.

**John:** I’ve got the thing that’s not the Aeron. I’m going to stand up and look at the back of my chair so I can tell you what it is. Hold on one sec.

**Craig:** Exciting.

**John:** Exciting. I will post a link to whatever it is in the show notes. It’s the one that’s not the Aeron but it’s like the Aeron. It’s supposed to be they can rip it apart and recycle it better. It’s the next thing. Do you remember what that was called?

**Craig:** I think my wife has one of those. I’m one of the many beneficiaries of the dot com bust. Hundreds of start-ups bought thousands of Aeron chairs in a display of remarkable optimism and they all went belly up, so they sell these things on eBay or whatever.

**John:** A good chair is very crucial. I found that Aeron didn’t give me quite enough support and that’s why I was happy to switch to this one which has worked better for me.

**Craig:** I have a little guy here who pushes up on the bottom of the chair for me.

**John:** That’s crucial, having that small person in your employment who can provide lumbar support like that.

**Craig:** He’s actually not small. He’s six foot two but he takes pride in his work.

**John:** Pride in your work is really the crucial thing.

**Craig:** It’s key.

**John:** Hey, Craig, I have a question for you. As you’re working with a director — let’s just say you’re working with Todd Philips — and Todd Phillips says, “€œHey, you really need to see this one Orson Wells movie that you hadn’t seen before.”€ As you know, Orson Wells is a master of comedy and you really can’t make Hangover 3 without Orson Wells€ knowledge.

Todd said, “€œHey, you need to check out this Orson Wells movie.”€ What would you do?

**Craig:** I would watch the movie.

**John:** How would you watch the movie?

**Craig:** I guess I would try and iTunes it or Netflix it. Barring that, I guess I would go to a brick and mortar and rent it.

**John:** Isn’t it remarkable that you can find pretty much any Orson Wells movie that has probably ever been made? You can be able to find that movie.

**Craig:** Pretty much.

**John:** I bring this up because, as I’ve talked about before on the show, I’m working on €œBig Fish€ the Broadway Musical, so I’ve needed to see a ton of Broadway musicals so I’m up to speed and so I can talk somewhat intelligently about other Broadway musicals, and I’m finding it’s a very different situation.

If I want to see any movie that’s ever been made, I can go and find it either on Netflix or digitally or somehow I can find that movie. With a Broadway show, it’s much more difficult. You can find a cast album for a lot of things. You can sometimes find a recording. Lincoln Center has recordings of some Broadway shows that were staged in the last 10 years or before that.

Sometimes there’s a movie version of it so sometimes you can see — like — the movie version of West Side Story,€ which is great, but a lot of shows you can’t actually see because they’re not staged that often.

**Craig:** So you have to actually go and see shows?

**John:** Yeah. It’s like being a filmmaker or screenwriter in the 1970s, for example, where you actually had to see a print of the show, and if there wasn’t a print handy you couldn’t see it, but even more difficult because you actually have to physically be in a space where people have come together to put on a show.

I guess my point is it’s harder to get caught up with all of the history in musical theater than it is to get caught up to cinema.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m a musical theater fan but almost all of my fandom is based on the music. I listen to music and I listen to albums. I’ve seen almost no shows, so that’s something I guess I’ll have to rectify somewhere down the line.

**John:** In some ways you’re familiar with these musicals the same way if someone had only seen the action sequences in €œRaiders of the Lost Ark.€ You’re only getting the big highlights, but you’re not seeing how it all fits together in the bigger structure.

**Craig:** That’s right. On the other hand, though, I don’t have to sit through those really boring, bad songs.

**John:** Well, as the book writer who has to write all that really boring stuff I’ve needed to see a lot of those things. Luckily in a big city like LA we have Reprise!, which puts on a lot of the lesser staged Broadway shows. I think it’s Jason Alexander who is one of the big people behind Reprise!.

Several times a year over at UCLA they’ll put on a show that isn’t staged very often. I got to see €œHow to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying a couple years ago before this most recent incarnation, and I could see, “Oh, that’s what that show is really about and that song that I recognized needs to be in that show and that’s a good thing.”

This is all a very lengthy introduction to the point of I finally saw Follies for the first time two weeks ago in New York. It was really strange to see Follies. I’m guessing you’ve not seen €œFollies?

**Craig:** I haven’t seen Follies. I’ve heard quite a bit of the music of it, in consistent with my report from a few seconds ago, but €œFollies,€ by all accounts, was viewed as a very strange show from the start so you’re not alone in thinking that.

**John:** One of my frustrations, I should also add, when you’re trying to catch up on the history of musical theater is people inevitably say, “You should have seen the original.” That’s helpful because the original was in 1971 so unless you provide a time machine for me I really can’t go back and see the original staging of €œFollies.

The best I can do is a see a current staging of €œFollies, which is playing right now at the Marquee Theater in Broadway with Bernadette Peters and a lot of other talented people. Follies is this weird one, because I knew going into it that it has this weird place in the pantheon of Broadway musicals because it’s like a shibboleth.

You can’t say anything bad about €œFollies in a way because then you’re a godless heathen, but if you talk about it without acknowledging it’s generally perceived flaws you’re an idiot. It’s one of those things in describing it here and knowing that whatever I’m saying is going to be recorded for future people to listen to I have to be careful about talking about Follies.

**Craig:** But you’ve already blown it by saying that you have to be careful about talking about it. [laughs]

**John:** It’s like €œFight Club.€ You have to be careful about Fight Club. It’s such a strange, strange show. Do you know what it’s about? You’ve listened to the cast album.

**Craig:** It’s about these women who used to be burlesque-y stars and they all gather together for a reunion? Is that right?

**John:** That’s correct mostly. It’s not just women, it’s women and men. More women than men. It’s based on the €œZigfield Follies. This generation of it was between the two big wars so it’s the late ‘€œ40s, early ’50s I’m guessing. The show is staged with these older performers coming back to this theater that’s about to be destroyed for one last reunion.

A reunion setup is a very natural way of starting a story. What’s unusual about Follies is not only do you have all the older versions of these people, you have their younger versions as well, so the cast is huge because basically you have a younger version for each older person in the show so the cast gets giant.

The younger versions don’t interact directly with the older versions, but a lot of times they’re echoing what they’re doing or you’re seeing an earlier moment that they’re talking about in the present back in the past.

Also troubling, not troubling but problematic, is that the present day of it is the 1970s so you’re watching this in 2011 watching a show set in the 1970s and in the 1940s and your frames of references are off.

The younger incarnations of these people I take it in the original staging were much more explicitly handled in ghosts. In this most recent one I wouldn’t really necessarily call them ghosts. They’re more like a CBS show, like a Cold Case. It’s like they’re half flashing back to earlier times.

The show, the soundtrack album that you’ve listened to, the only reason that people still talk about it as much as they do is there’s amazing songs in that show. €œI’m Still Here,€ €œBroadway Baby.

**Craig:** Broadway Baby is a classic. Elaine Stritch has an awesome version of Broadway Baby.€ It’s funny because I don’t know quite where. It’s a live version. It must have been a tribute concert. The thing about Sondheim is every — I would say — 14 hours there’s a tribute concert to Steven Sondheim where everybody gets together and sings his songs.

There’s a great Elaine Stritch that is really funny and then there’s this heartbreaking version of I’m Still Here€ by Dorothy Loudon that is my particular favorite.

**John:** Those two songs are classics. Too Many Mornings Could I Leave You. Losing My Mind which is a great, great song. They’re all written by Steven Sondheim, who’s, again, considered a deity. The book was written by James Goldman, who is a screenwriter who did a lot of different things, is the brother of William Goldman. There’s a tradition of screenwriters working in the theater.

The other song that I’d heard from it that I didn’t know was from the show was œWaiting for the Girls Upstairs.

**Craig:** Yes, that is from that show.

**John:** That is from that show. That is very literally the suitors waiting for the girl performers that are getting changed upstairs and taking too long to change upstairs. I’d heard that song many different times but I really had no context for it. I always assumed it was like the girls upstairs were in an apartment upstairs.

I kept envisioning the cast of €œFriends€ for that song and it’s not even remotely that way.

**Craig:** That’s my struggle with all these songs. I don’t know what €œI’m Still Here is about other than a woman who used to be a popular singer or performer of some kind now well on in her years and she struggled through tough times and lost of fame. I don’t know what the context is beyond that.

**John:** Hearing that song wouldn’t you assume that it’s one of the main characters who sings that song?

**Craig:** I would, although I happen to know it’s not.

**John:** No, it’s a really side character. The same with that and Broadway Baby. Naturally as screenwriters you can’t turn off that screenwriter brain of, “Okay, this isn’t really all working right and so how do you fix this?” The only reason the fix it instinct kicks in is that you recognize that the parts are working much better than the whole.

The parts being these really, really great numbers, these great songs, but the framework around them isn’t maybe all you would hope it could be. Those two songs, they’re not your lead characters singing them. They do help set up this whole sense of this generation has passed and some of the people are still performers and most of the people have gone on to other kinds of lives so it works on that level.

The real meat of the show are these two married couples and essentially the one girl really wanted the other guy and both of them are in unhappy marriages because of choices made decades ago. €œCould I Leave You is could the one wife leave the husband, and it’s a really good, funny song, but it plays strangely in what’s meant to be a deserted theater.

It feels like you want to see her in her house singing this song rather than in some theater. Losing My Mind,€ which is a great song, but you hear that song and it feels like a more recent love. It feels more like I’ve been in love with you for a year and you told me once that you loved me and were you just being kind?

It feels more like a recent romantic obsession rather than something that dates back 30 years.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, maybe I’m kind of the beneficiary, then, of sort of hearing these songs out of context. For instance, Broadway Baby€ is hysterical when Elaine Stritch sings it. It’s a very funny performance. Maybe it’s really tragic and sad in the musical but I sort of enjoy it on its own.

Actually, it’s funny, with Sondheim. Maybe because I’m just not quite… I am not a musical theatre nut. I’m just a casual fan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’ve never seen, for instance, €œSunday in the Park. I’ve never seen it. But I do love It’s Hot in Here and I do love €œPutting it Together. I feel like that’s okay. I enjoy those songs for what they are. I can figure out that It’s Hot in Here is… or It’s Hot up Here?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I can’t remember which one. But it’s the people in his famous painting that are singing about being stuck there. And that’s all I need to know. I’m good.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah.

**Craig:** By the way, a little trivia question. Who’s the actress who originated the role that sings I’m Still Here€ in The Follies?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yvonne De Carlo who was famous for playing…

**John:** Ah-hah. Batwoman.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Catgirl.

**Craig:** No. Was she Catgirl?

**John:** Wasn’t she?

**Craig:** No. Well, maybe she was but I know her, most famously, as Lilly Munster.

**John:** Aaah.

**Craig:** Lilly Munster.

**John:** I’m looking at Yvonne De Carlo right now.

**Craig:** Yvonne De Carlo.

**John:** Just because that’s a crucial thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s crucial.

**John:** Yeah, I’m not seeing it here but she was in €œThe Girl from U.N.C.L.E.€ So that’s important.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. Trivia time… Done.

**John:** So, my other screenwriter brain. And this is, again, dangerous to criticize a show that is beloved by many people. But this is also useful for people, screenwriters, who are listening to this podcast.

In the clever idea of like, “Oh, you have the old version and the young version,”€ you end up dividing the audiences loyalties because it’s like, “€œWait. Am I supposed to be caring more about the older version or the younger version?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which is, certainly, a challenge we had in the movie version of Big Fish, too. It’s that you’re splitting the roles between the young Edward Bloom and the older Edward Bloom. So, which one is the real Edward Bloom?

**Craig:** That’s a great way of putting it because in every movie where an individual is split, through time travel or just the framing of the movie, you never really believe they’re the same person. In your mind you can’t track it that way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you’re always… I mean, you try.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** As writers, we try and do the best we can. But, inevitably, the brain won’t allow it.

**John:** Yeah. The other issue I found… and it’s not unique to this musical but when you have people in unhappy marriages, the idea that their marriage is going to fall apart on this one night… or, actually, more specifically, that their marriage would have lasted up until this one night… can be a real challenge. It’s like, if you hate each other so much then how did you possibly get in the car to come here tonight?

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** That’s a challenge.

**Craig:** It’s like the dilemma of drama. When marriages break up they usually break up slowly and miserably. It’s like dying. No-one ever dies by grabbing someone’s hand and whispering those last great words and then eyes roll back. It’s like two months in the hospital, bedpans, and machines that go “ping.”

**John:** Ping. Oh, I’m going to steal a line from Andrew Lippa, who is the composer on €œBig Fish.€ His father gave him an amazing deathbed line. His father was coherent enough so Andrew said, “€œDad, are you comfortable?”€ and his father opened his eyes and said, “€œI make a living.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Was he consciously joking, right there at the end? Or was he just confused?

**John:** Oh, he was consciously joking.

**Craig:** That guy is awesome.

**John:** That’s pretty amazing. Isn’t it?

**Craig:** That’s pretty awesome to be Vaudeville at the very end.

**John:** Yeah, Vaudeville to the end.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, by bigger framing around this whole Follies end, having to physically see musicals and see them staged, and having to really track down like… There are many musicals that I would rush out to see. Even a version that I know isn’t supposed to be the best possible version because otherwise I just couldn’t see it.

Another big difference with movies is movies have a fixed, finished form. €œRaiders of the Lost Arc€ is basically always going to be the same €œRaiders of the Lost Arc.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Which is why, when there are new releases where they change things, I think people get so pissed off. There’s this assumption with movies that once you’re done, you’re done. And you’re not going to change the movie anymore.

**Craig:** Right. In fact, this goes to the heart of a question that every screenwriter asks sooner or later. Typically, when they’re starting out and they’re dealing with a lot of the humiliations, the everyday humiliations of being a professional screenwriter.

They say, “Why? Why are playwrights treated so much differently? Why does everybody respect the playwright and never change a word? Not the directors. Not the actors. But, screenwriters are treated completely differently.”

The answer is very simple. Playwrights write a play and that’s done and then the play is performed. Performances are not intellectual property. They’re performances. They are not even works of art, in the legal sense. They’re performances of a work of art whereas screenplays are not.

Screenplays are intended to be transformed into a movie which is fixed, as you put it, and done and is, in fact, a work of art and intellectual property that is never changed.

The fact that the playwright writes something that is performed over and over and over in a million different ways requires consistency in the words. It must have it. Otherwise, what play are you seeing? Are you seeing Fiddler on the Roof or somebody else’s €œFiddler on the Roof?

That is why we are in a jam, as screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Our work isn’t performed.

**John:** Our work is transformed into something else that is the finished thing.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** It’s a little sorbet, before we get to our next big topic. Are you reading a lot these days? Are you getting a chance to read for fun?

**Craig:** Not for fun. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean, I got the Jobs autobiography. I have not even cracked it open. Mostly, I’ve just been reading stuff for jobs. I mean, for writing.

**John:** I’m sorry.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. Bummer. What are you reading?

**John:** I’ve read two things this last week. So, first off, I got the new Kindle. Not the Kindle Fire but the really cheap $79 Kindle, which is great, by the way.

I got the one with ads and the ads are a little bit annoying. They don’t interrupt your reading experience but if it’s just sitting there then suddenly it will turn into a hair care product ad. It’s like I don’t really want to see that.

**Craig:** Totally inapplicable to you.

**John:** Yeah. Not useful for me.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But it’s great and it’s small and it fits perfectly in my coat pocket, for when I’m in New York. I can be on the subway, I can pull out my Kindle and read for a bit on the subway and it’s great. So I find myself reading a lot more.

Or, and hopefully, if I’m in a restaurant and it’s too dark for me to use my real Kindle then I can just pull out my phone and read the same book on my phone.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, a useful advantage of living in 2011.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, I’m reading two things. I read Mindy Kaling’s book.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I heard that was great.

**John:** Yeah. Mindy Kaling is the producer and actress and director on The Office. It’s good. People want to compare it directly to the Tina Fey book and the Tina Fey book is meteor. There’s just more to it.

But what I found really interesting in Mindy Kaling’s book was her back story, in terms of how she got started. I’d know she’d written this play called Matt and Ben which is about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

But her whole back story about how that got set up and started was really fascinating and very much proves the thing that we say here a lot, “You don’t know what is going to be the one thing that is going to push you over the edge and get you noticed and get you started.”

This was just something that she found funny and fascinating and she pursued with full vigor. And people liked it. That’s the thing that sort of got her put in a spotlight and she used that spotlight very well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mary notes how funny talent plus unique perspective tends to stand out.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, she’s great. I’m reading Thinking, Fast and Slow. I forget the author’s name, but I will put it in the show notes. It is a really good brain book. I have to read a good brain book, every year or two, about the mental processes. His basic argument is that you have two systems that process thought for you.

You have system one which does things automatically and subconsciously and can do most of the functions of making the simple decisions about things and noticing when something is wrong and that you have to pay attention to it. And system two which does your more difficult… What we really think of as thinking.

It does your complicated math and stuff like that. A lot of our decisions that we assume we’re consciously aware of are really being made in system one before we’re thinking about it.

**Craig:** Yeah, absolutely. There’s a really interesting book I recommend. Actually, I took a class with this guy when I was in college. His name is Julian Jaynes.

**John:** Oh, I know Julian Jaynes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Bicameral or the breakdown of the…

**Craig:** Yes, €œThe Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.€ I said that really fast but you’ll put up a note, I’m sure. It’s a really interesting book. He essentially argues that the root of consciousness is language and it’s why we are conscious, in the way we understand it to be, and animals are not. At least that’s his theory.

One of the things he talks about first is what consciousness isn’t. A knee-jerk response to the question, “€œWhat is consciousness?” is awareness. But he points out… We’ve all had that experience of driving in a car and then suddenly realizing, “I haven’t really actually been paying attention. How did I even get this far? I’ve been thinking about something else while I’m driving.”

But while you were thinking about something else you were staying in your lane, slowing down when cars in front of you slowed down, making right turns and left turns, and taking exits.

It’s remarkable how much your brain can do without you actually paying attention.

**John:** Yeah. It raises the question of what is the you. It’s like, without you paying attention… well, part of you is paying attention. It’s just not that part that we think about as being consciousness.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s not that part that sort of self reports and carries your awareness of your inner monologue. So, Jaynes’s book is fascinating. I’ve seen it a lot. I read it ten years ago, maybe. I’ve seen a lot of criticism about it since then.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I think it’s fascinating in terms of its ideas.

**Craig:** It’s essentially groundless but, as a groundless theory, it’s fun to read. His essential argument is that once we developed a capacity for language and came up with the word “I” and with metaphors, to be able to describe ourselves through language, that’s how we essentially began to become conscious.

There was one thing that I remember after I read the book. I went to bed and I had a dream. It was a normal dream…. I remember in the dream someone said something that surprised me. That happens all the time in dreams. People say things and you go, “€œOh, okay,” and then you respond. Just like a regular conversation.

When I woke up, it occurred to me those aren’t other people. They’re just me. I mean, obviously, my brain is writing and playing all the roles in a dream. But you don’t know what they’re going to say. So, somehow your brain is capable of splitting off and creating multiple consciousnesses that can interact with each other in a dream.

Well, that happens most efficiently when we’re dreaming. Certainly, that’s a big part of what we do when we’re screenwriting. We do it with awareness, but part of the tool of the screenwriter is to somehow become schizophrenic and have people inside of your head think differently than you and surprise you.

**John:** I don’t remember if this is Jaynes’s book specifically, but I recall one of these books was talking about when we read the really classic Greek literature and there’s all the talk about the gods talking to people, that may have actually been the experience of what it was like to be alive at that time.

Well, our assumption that, “Oh, people back then were exactly the way that people are now,” that may not be entirely true and that people may have actually heard voices the way we consider a schizophrenic hears voices much more commonly because of just the way the brain was organized and the way that language had shaped how we’re thinking about things.

So people in the classic times or the pre-classic times may have literally been hearing voices a lot, and so their experience of who they were and who the outside world was could have been very different.

**Craig:** Yeah, that was Jaynes. He was arguing that the two hemispheres of the brain are connected by this big huge bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum, which is much larger in women by the way than men. Men are more split brain on the average than women, which by the way accounts for some of these very persistent cognitive differences so they think that we see over and over in men and women.

But his suggestion was that in the old days there was even less of a connection between the two hemispheres, and what we tend to think of as our own mind talking to us, people then either literally heard as an auditory hallucination or just interpreted it as somebody else speaking to us. It accounts in some small part for why people back then were so much more religious.

People are religious now, but not in the way they were then. I mean people then truly did hear gods telling them what to do, and it was quite commonplace. Interestingly, no one ever said, “€œOh, that guy who says God is talking to him, he’s crazy.”€ Quite the opposite. Those people were prophets. Now, of course, if you say that God is talking to you, it’s time for some chlorpromazine.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t want gods talking to me. I’m happy to have a sense of the universe being sane and rational and ordered and me being a player within it.

**Craig:** I beg to differ. I want to be in charge. Yeah. I prefer the solipsistic vision where you’re all here for my benefit. It’s just a big play, and…

[laughter]

**Craig:** …When I close my eyes you all die. When I open my eyes, you wake up again. [laughs]

**John:** Having made The Nines,€ which was essentially that whole premise, it’s not really quite how I view the universe. But it is fascinating and telling.

**Craig:** Tempting, isn’t it?

**John:** Tempting, yes.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** One other thing I want to talk about is what I described in our setup email is second act malaise. I should say second act, not in the sense of theatre second act because theatre has two acts. It has a first act and then an intermission and a second act. Second act malaise in terms of screenwriting, which is you have your first act which sets everything up. You have your last act which wraps everything up.

The second act is this vast stretch in the middle of writing, which can both be challenging narratively but also challenging really hard just in work because I find that when I’m deep in the second act like I am on this one project, you’re excited about all the stuff you’ve written. You’re excited about the stuff that’s coming up, but where you’re at right there in the middle can just be a slog.

**Craig:** It can. In fact, I am right there right now on a script, right in the middle, and because I knew we were going to be talking about this, I started thinking about why. Because look, the first act is actually the hardest thing to write I think. You have to invent all the voices, the characters, the appearances, the situations, the premises, and so forth.

The third act is a little easier because theoretically it is what must occur. The second act shouldn’t be so much harder than the first. So I started asking myself is this psychological? Is it just, “Okay, the excitement of the new is gone?” The excitement of “I’m almost finished” is gone?€ So is that the cause of the fatigue? But I came upon a possible different solution, so I’m curious to see what you think.

I think that when we write, we naturally identify with our protagonist. Even if they’re very different than us, their experience is something that we have to feel emotionally or we don’t write them very well.

In the middle of the movie our characters tend to be lost. [laughs] They tend to be unmoored from their comforting surroundings. They’re in the middle of their journey. It is the hard part of their journey.

There is no resolution around the corner. In fact, sometimes they don’t even know what they’re supposed to do next. I actually feel like when we’re writing, it’s not surprising that we get tired and a little overwhelmed and fatigued in the middle because that’s how our characters are.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a nice way of thinking about it. I like that.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I would push back and say I find the first act to be the easiest part to write.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** I find starting a script to be very difficult. Much like our friend, who describes her of having to climb into the water very gently and splash water on her toes, I have a hard time literally starting the work.

But the first act is fascinating and exciting for me because I am setting up the rules of the world. So anything is possible in the first act because what could happen in this movie? Well, whatever I want to have happen in this movie. I’m setting up the rules and the boundaries of what this movie is.

The second act for me partly is challenging because I already have established those boundaries, so I know that I can only go this far to this far, this far, this far. You’re on a path, and you have to stay on that path. You’ve decided we’re going to drive to Wichita, so you have to find a way to make that drive to Wichita as interesting as possible.

You’re not allowed to introduce a lot of new characters. You’re not supposed to be introducing brand new ideas in terms of what characters should want.

Sometimes you are revisiting things from earlier on in the story, so they’re not new. One of the projects I’m working on right now, the director has an interesting mandate, which has been challenging to carry out but also fascinating to carry out is that she doesn’t want to see the same set twice, which is…

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Really. Which is really a great goal. I don’t know necessarily that it was achievable. But her point worth discussing is anytime you come back to a set, you have a sense that the story is not moving forward because you’ve literally returned to someplace that you’ve been to before.

So even if some other things have changed or the characters in a different place now, you are going back someplace and you want to always go forward.

**Craig:** Well, there goes €œCasablanca€ and quite a few other movies. [laughs]

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Go on.

**John:** But some of my favorite movies, that is actually I think really true. €œRaiders of the Lost Ark€ is never going back to the same set twice.

**Craig:** That’s a really good question. Does it ever go back to the same set twice?

**John:** And Star Wars might but only in things like the Millennium Falcon or in the vehicles that are physically going someplace new.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, he goes back home and sees the skeletons of his aunt and uncle.

**John:** Aha! So that’s why I would add an addendum. It’s like you can go back to a place but only if it is destroyed…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or significantly transformed.

**Craig:** I think that that’s true actually. In thinking about the script I’m writing right now, I don’t think there are any returns. It’s a weird thing. I never thought of it that way, but yeah. It’s a good point.

**John:** Maybe part of the reason why I also am fascinated about second act malaise or maybe because I experience second act malaise so deeply and it frustrates me so much, a lot of my movies don’t have second acts in a classic sense. Like €œGo€ just restarts itself twice. The Nines restarts itself twice, and so The Nines is essentially three first acts. There’s something really exciting about that that you’re burning everything behind you.

**Craig:** Well, I’m a fan of a good, well-crafted traditional second act, but a lot of what I think about when I’m in the middle of it is making sure that…

I always like to think of these things in terms of the relationship between the character or the protagonist and the theme of the story, and making sure that as we go through the second act that they are encountering glimpses of this new way of living and this new truth and resisting it and fighting it.

So I feel like I never fear second acts. I don’t know — maybe all it really boils down to is the second act is that also the part of the process where you realize, “I’ve been doing this for a while.” And when you do anything for a while, it gets a little boring. It’s exciting to finish — god, it’s exciting to finish — and it’s exciting to start. But what’s exciting about page 40 through 80?

**John:** No, not that much.

**Craig:** Not that much.

**John:** This last weekend in New York I was lucky to be able to see my friend Quinn run the New York Marathon, and writing a script is very much a marathon. I suspect it’s a similar experience to a marathon runner. Those first four miles, that’s going to feel great. “Hey, you’re running a marathon!”€ Those last couple miles, like, “€œGreat, I’m almost done with my marathon!”

If I were running the marathon I would suspect miles 8 through 20 would get annoying because there’s nothing new about them. It’s just more fatigue and keeping it interesting for yourself.

**John:** Well, that’s what sets marathon runners apart from we mortals, and I would suggest that that’s what sets we professional screenwriters apart from the people who start 12 scripts and never finish them. If you can’t find the joy in that middle slog, some sick perverted joy, maybe this isn’t for you.

Bummer!

**Craig:** Bummer.

**John:** Gunshot.

[laughter]

**John:** That feels like the perfect note to end our podcast here.

One thing I should say and I meant to bring this up earlier is we talk about the show notes or the links. If you’re listening to this podcast or through iTunes or through wherever else, the links for every show are always on johnaugust.com. So just johnaugust.com, Scriptnotes, and all the shows are there.

Links that we’re talking about for anything that we bring up in the show will always be there.

Anything more, Craig?

**Craig:** No, I’m tapped.

**John:** Yeah, I’m tapped, too.

**Craig:** I’m exhausted.

**John:** But thank you, sir.

**Craig:** Thank you. That was good. That was fun. I really enjoyed the Musical Theatre Monday. That was fun.

[laughter]

**John:** Very good. All right. We’ll talk soon

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-movie-money-works).

**John August:** Hello. 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 today, Craig?

**Craig:** — Caught me mid-sip again. I’m doing fine today. Doing fine. How about yourself?

**John:** I’m doing really well.

Now Craig, whenever I bring up a television show, your standard response is that you have not seen it because you don’t watch any television shows. So I thought today I would ask what was the last movie you saw in the theater?

**Craig:** The Help.

**John:** The Help. Did you enjoy The Help?

**Craig:** I did enjoy The Help, I have to say. I thought that it was very well directed. Viola Davis, who I mention frequently, is a spectacularly good actor, and I like watching her in pretty much everything. I wasn’t familiar with her until I saw Doubt, and she’s only in Doubt for two scenes really.

But she has this one scene with Meryl Streep that is just unreal, I mean just spectacular, and a great example of a scene where the director just got completely out of the way and just covered it over a two-shot and just let the actors do what they do.

**John:** Yeah. The director’s name is Tate Taylor and actually a person I’ve known for a very long time. He’s part of the same crew with Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer, so it’s been great to see him have such a success.

**Craig:** Yes. Tate Taylor did not direct Doubt. He directed The Help.

**John:** No, no, no. The Help. So The Help was also a tremendous success. That was one of the breakout movies that did not cost a lot of money, made a tremendous amount of money at the box office, and should therefore be completely profitable. Isn’t that correct?

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, [laughs] yes and no. It depends. Define “profit,” John.

**John:** Well, I think that’s exactly what we’re going to try to do today. I thought of this actually this weekend. I went to go see Puss in Boots, the animated Puss in Boots, which was actually really good. But I hadn’t seen the Shrek movies for a long time, so this was the first time getting back into that world. It was really nicely done.

But as I was buying my ticket, I started to think about like, “Wow. How much of this ticket is actually going to go back to the movie versus the everything else of it all?” So this is going to be an upper-level discussion I think because it’s not talking just about the words on the page but just how the film industry works and how money in the film industry works. So let’s put on our big brains and talk through the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s worse than big-boy pants today. Well, it’s a good thing we’re talking about it because it actually is very relevant for what we do. Screenwriters are in a constant state of employment-seeking. We write movies. Movies are expensive to make, still, no matter what anybody tells you, and even more expensive to market.

So we are relying on people to pay us and to support the films that we want to write. If we’re going to do that, if we’re going to dance that dance, it’s probably a good idea for us to understand how the business works from their end, because it directly impacts us.

**John:** Yeah. Well, one of the most fundamental things I think we have to understand about how film economics works is that every movie is considered its own company. It’s considered its own venture. So The Hangover 2, it was set up as its own company to produce a movie called The Hangover 2. All the accounting for The Hangover 2 exists within this bubble for this one movie.

So they will charge any possible expense against this movie for The Hangover 2, and the money that comes in will eventually get a portion to it. The same for The Help. The same for every different movie. On independent films, like The Nines, there’s a little bit more transparency because you’re seeing exactly what money is spent and what money is coming in.

On bigger movies it becomes more complicated, because there’s just so much money coming in and going out. But ultimately they’re set up the same way, which is that each film is its own venture and has its own accounting for profit and loss. Almost no movie is going to show a profit because of the things we’re going to talk about today.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re certainly not going to show a net profit as defined by the studios. Look. It’s all tautological, and a net profit is what they define net profit as. There are certain facts that don’t change, and the facts are some things cost money and some things make money. Obviously, movies tend to make money. That’s why these businesses continue.

These studios, regardless of the fact that the ownership has changed hands over the years, most of them have been around for decades and decades. They are among the older businesses in the country. So obviously, movies make money. How they define making money, the rest of it, that’s the accounting stuff. So there are two ways we can approach this, which is, “How do movies actually make money?” And then, “Why do they keep saying they don’t?”

**John:** Yeah. So let’s break it into two different categories. There’s the money that you spend and the money that comes in. So first let’s talk through all the stuff that’s about the money that you’re spending in order to make a movie and market a movie. After we’ve made the movie, then we’ll start talking about the money coming back in from people buying tickets and buying DVDs.

So let’s first just talk about the money that we’re spending. The first thing if you’re going to approach making a movie is you have to buy the rights to something.

**Craig:** Oop! You’re already too late in the timeline. There’s something before that. The very first thing that will eventually be considered an expense of your movie are the salaries of the people at the studio.

**John:** The overhead.

**Craig:** Yup, overhead. Just business. Cost of business.

**John:** Generally, a 10 percent overhead is charged against a movie, although it can change based on the terms in people’s contracts.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So yes, there are preexisting costs called “overhead,” which are going to be a percentage of the total budget of the movie. As you start to approach making this one individual movie, the first thing you’re going to do is get the rights to something, or you’re going to buy a script that will become the underlying source for something.

So if you are making The Help, for example, you are going to buy the rights to Kathryn Stockett’s book I think. I hope I get her name right. So you have to buy the rights to her book. You need to hire a writer to adapt the book, which in this case is Tate Taylor.

Those are your first line out of expenses that you’re talking about for your movie. So however many, if it’s $100,000 you bought her book for, if it’s $100,000 you paid for the script, those are your first expenses that you’re running down.

Shortly after that, you have a director who you’re hiring on to direct this movie. You have the producers who are going to be producing this movie. A whole other podcast can be about producers and what good producers do and what terrible producers do, and why people get producer credits who probably shouldn’t get producer credits. But there will be producers, and those people are accounted for at this point, too.

You have actors. You have talented actors like Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer and everyone else who’s in that movie. Those are additional salaries that you’re paying for in this initial part of the process. Everyone whose salaries I’ve mentioned so far, those are considered above the line. So studio budgets for movies have what’s called “above the line” and “below the line.”

Above the line is the rights to the material, the writer, the director, producers, the actors. Is there anything else that usually gets counted above the line?

**Craig:** No, that is the above the line. The phrase comes from the fact that there’s an actual line, because the notion is “above the line” is the material and the “talent.” Then “below the line” is the crew and the physical expense of making a movie.

**John:** Yeah, and so really talented people are below the line. So you’ve got costume designers below the line. Your cinematographers are below the line. Your editors are below the line. But they’re not considered that above the line talent. Where it could become helpful to discuss the difference between above the line and below the line is certain kinds of movies will be very expensive above the line and very inexpensive below the line.

For example, when they were making those really high-concept Jim Carrey comedies, those were a classic example of “You’re paying Jim Carrey $20 million, but your whole budget in the movie is maybe $40 million.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** It’s a huge chunk of the budget. Increasingly, I would say that I don’t see that split quite as much because it tends to be like you’re paying somebody a ton of money and then you’re also making an incredibly expensive movie beyond that.

**Craig:** Yeah, or in the case of a movie where it’s a smaller film but you want a big star, they get creative with paying the star out of the real profits of the movie as opposed to guaranteeing them a massive payment up front.

**John:** Exactly, but above the line is all those billboard names plus all the actors, the writer, director, producers. Below the line, everybody who’s physically responsible for making the movie, so their salaries plus the actual expenses of shooting the movie, taking the movie through post, color correction. Everything that leads up to “Here is the finished movie that we can deliver and show to the world.”

So when you add together the above the line and the below the line, you have what’s called the “negative cost,” which is confusing because it sounds like it’s a minus number. It’s not. Negative cost literally refers to the cost to get you to the film negative that you are going from there be able to generate all the prints that you’re sending out to the world and releasing theatrically.

So when you see in a Variety story, like “this movie had an estimated negative cost of $80 million,” they’re referring to that’s how much they spent to get the movie finished.

One weird thing that didn’t occur to me until I started really getting profit statements on movies that I’ve worked on is you think the negative cost is just done at a certain point. Like “Okay, we delivered the movie. So the negative cost won’t go any higher than that.” But it still does, because they still find new things to charge against the movie years down the road.

**Craig:** That’s right; that’s right. Yeah, the accounting becomes amazing. Truly amazing.

**John:** So after buying the rights to material, hiring writers, hiring a director, hiring actors, hiring a crew, you went and shot the movie. You took the movie through post. You’ve delivered the movie to a studio. Now is the time to spend the money to market the movie and to create the actual physical prints that will go out to the world. So that’s called P & A, or prints and advertising.

Back when I was in the Stark Program, they would have us budget $2,000 per print for releasing theatrically. So literally it’s a 35-millimeter print that you are having Technicolor or Deluxe make and then ship to the theater and stick in the projector and show to the world. I don’t really know what the correct accounting is for a print now, especially if it’s digital, but there still can be a fee charged for every print to every theater.

**Craig:** There’s a cost. Yeah, there’s a cost involved in just making the prints, and they still make a ton of physical prints for movies. I think probably most movies are still physically projected. That part of the process also includes, I believe, dubbing and subtitling for foreign territories.

**John:** Yeah, and it seems like a weird thing, “Oh, well, $2,000.” Like $2,000 isn’t really that much compared to the budgets of these movies. But if you’re releasing on 3,000 screens simultaneously, that’s $6 million you just spent to make the physical prints.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s definitely real money for sure.

**John:** It’s real money.

**Craig:** The “A” in P & A is the killer though. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, so “A” is all the advertising. When you think about advertising, your first instinct is naturally going to TV, which I’m sure is still the bulk of what people are spending for…

**Craig:** For sure, yeah.

**John:** …marketing. So it’s every 30-second spot, every Super Bowl spot you’re buying for $1 million for that one launch thing. So that’s the easy money to think about for P & A. For independent films, you may never have a TV commercial, but you’re still spending on advertising because it gets down to the little banner ads you buy on websites.

You’re paying co-op money to the theater owners for the little listing in the newspaper that says, “Now playing at this…” and “Here are the show times.” You have to pay for every one of those little things. You’d assume that, “Oh, well, that expense would just go to the theater owners.” It doesn’t. You actually are paying for those newspaper ads in the free weekly newspaper.

**Craig:** Yeah. Theater owners don’t spend anything to advertise any particular movie. That is entirely on the studio. So every television ad, every bus side, every billboard, every radio spot, every promotional contest, stuff online, events, the premier. [laughs]

Everything, even the cost of sending the stars to New York to be on Letterman or wherever they go, all of that stuff ultimately comes under publicity and advertising. It’s all folded in as part of this massive expense. Increasingly, that number is starting to rival the budgets of some movies and in some cases actually more than budget.

**John:** Oh, yes. In some cases it’s far exceeding the actual budget of the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and that’s the thing that changed the most. I started in marketing in the early nineties, and that’s the biggest change to me in this business if I can look at one thing. It’s not so much that they’re making fewer movies. I actually think they’re making fewer movies because of this thing. This thing is that it costs so much more now to attract people to a movie because our attention is so divided now.

It’s not that we don’t like going to movies. It’s that we have less time in the day to notice what movies are coming out, so they have to bombard us and blanket and publicize movies in a way that they did not have to do before. That is enormously expensive.

Because of that expense, they then have to ask in a way they used to ask, but now it’s become almost an essential question, “Should we even make this movie?” If the movie costs $40 million, but it costs $60 million to sell it, what is the more important question? “Is this movie good?” Or, “Can we sell it?” Obviously the answer is, by $20 million to them, “Can we sell it?”

**John:** Yeah. So, it’s important to understand that there is a budget for the advertising and for what all the marketing is going to be for the movie. That is not part of the same budget for the movie itself.

So the line producer isn’t looking at the marketing budget for the movie. The line producer is looking at how much money he has to get this movie physically shot and delivered. The marketing budget is handled by completely different people. A good producer has his or her hands on both the production budget and the marketing budget and has a strong say in both of those. But it is beyond even the director’s control how much money is there and how it’s going to be spent.

**Craig:** Yeah, and the marketing budget is also elastic to a point. The budget for a movie is negotiated between the filmmakers, the producer, and the studio, based on the script and based on the cast and based on the expectations of what this movie could eventually bring back in income.

But the marketing budget expands and contracts based on the end result. They can look at a movie and say, “This is a dog. We’re dumping it. We’re not going to spend that much.” Or they can say, “This is great. We are tripling your marketing budget.”

I know that on the first Hangover, I think they saw the initial cut of the movie and went, “Alright, let’s spend way more than we spent on the movie to sell this, because it’s a hit.”

**John:** Yeah, that’s going to be the case. Another good example would be the Saw movies or any of the low-budget horror movies. They look at one of those and it’s like, “Oh, there actually is great potential here.” So they’re going to spend ten times their shooting budget on advertising because they feel like they can make their money back out of it.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Other things that get included in the overall cost of making the movie: We have the negative cost. Negative cost would also fold in interest. So basically, in order to have the money to make something, you are taking out a loan. Now usually, you’re actually taking out a loan from the studio itself, but they are charging you interest. So, in a way, it is the studio paying itself, is how it goes.

**Craig:** And insurance.

**John:** And insurance, overhead. Insurance is both the policy for in case a stuntman dies, but it’s also insurance to make sure that the film can get completed if there are other catastrophes. Because the last thing you want to have happen is you get 80% done with the movie, and then you can’t actually finish the movie. A movie that can’t be finished or can’t be delivered is… It’s a horrible situation, because you have burned all this money and you have no way of getting the money back out.

So you buy insurance and a bond, a completion bond, to make sure that you will be able to finish shooting the movie. In some cases it does kick in. A star dies. When River Phoenix died during that Dark Water or whatever that movie was —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — That became an insurance claim because you have to figure out what you’re going to do with that movie.

**Craig:** Every movie, at some point or another, has an insurance claim. I went down Monday when I was directing, because I had bronchitis. The doctor literally pulled the plug on me and sent me home. That is an insurance day. Every day costs money. People showed up. They cooked food. They built props. They were waiting around. That’s money.

**John:** Yeah. On Go, we had an insurance claim for a camera malfunction – basically had negative flashing and we had to go back and reshoot. So that was two days of reshooting, where we had to really press our case for, “We have to reshoot these things. There is no technical solution for this. We actually have to go back and reshoot.” That does happen on a lot of shows.

While it is not an expense that you have while you are shooting the movie, what is ultimately charged against the overall cost of making the movie will be things you’re paying out to first dollar gross players and residuals. Those are going to be costs that will be charged against the movie ultimately.

There are other things that are siphoning money off from the film, which, for screenwriters, is good, because residuals are a very good thing. Residuals will kick in even though the movie will never, itself, become profitable.

**Craig:** Right. Residuals are based on gross receipts. The other major expense that every movie incurs, and this is the fun one, is the distribution fee. A studio does not distribute. The studio that makes a movie does not distribute the movie. They own a company that distributes the movie.

So every Disney film is not distributed by Disney. It is distributed by the Buena Vista Pictures Distribution Company. What is a distribution company? It’s a bunch of people in the same building, employed by the same people, who work with the theaters to place movies.

Distribution is an incredibly important thing because big studios tend to be able to get any movie into a theater, into lots of screens if they so desire, because they trade on the movies that the theater owners know are going to be big hits.

So, “I have Pirates of the Caribbean coming down the line for Christmas. You need to take this movie now and put it in your theater or I’m not going to give you Pirates of the Caribbean.” “Okay, I’ll take it.” So there is a real value to the distribution company. They obviously do a lot of work.

But, in the end, here is the deal: This is one of the areas where the studios pull a fast one on us. They basically say, “It costs $30 million. Our distribution company charged us $30 million to distribute this film.” Well, what that means is that they moved $30 million from their left pocket into their right pocket. It’s the same company. They’re charging themselves money and then telling you that it is an expense.

**John:** Yeah, there are exceptions to that. When George Lucas hires 20th Century Fox to release the new Star Wars movies, it really is a separate company kind of releasing it. But in most cases it is exactly the same people who made the movie that are the people who release the movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It would be useful to step back and take a look at the three big players of how movies are made and released. You have the production company, the people who basically make movies. You have the distribution company, who take movies that have been shot and distribute them to the people who can show them. You have the exhibitors, who are the people who actually are physically showing them, who are the theater owners.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Once upon a time, those were all the same people. That was vertical integration. So, 20th Century Fox would make a movie, distribute a movie and show it in its own theaters. I forget the name of the classic lawsuit that broke up that model.

**Craig:** I can’t remember it either.

**John:** It’s like Taft-Hartley. But it’s not Taft-Hartley.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’ll put that in the show notes, but the studios are not allowed to own movie theaters anymore. So Pacific Theaters or AMC Theaters have to be their own separate companies. The distributors, which are really the studios, negotiate with the different theater owners to figure out who is going to play what movie and how that is all going to work.

**Craig:** Right. The theater owners basically – the way the studios make money off of movies is the theater owners pay them a rental charge, because they are renting the print from the studio. Obviously, they don’t own it. So they pay them a flat rental fee. Then, of course, they give them a percentage of the box office receipts.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s — I’m going to just put a boldface header here. This is the second section of what we’re talking about. So we’ve talked about all the money that goes out. Now, we’re starting to talk about the money that comes back in.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is how people make money on making movies. It’s by showing them in theaters and showing them on TV and everything else. So with theaters, we are negotiating with AMC or Loews or one of these places. We are agreeing to basically split the box office with the theater owners.

**Craig:** Well, to some extent.

**John:** Yeah, to some extent. Generally, in negotiating with theater owners about which theater we are going to show them in and which screens we are going to have, it’s an ongoing conversation. But you are trying to get into the right houses at the right size.

You say, “Okay, opening weekend we will make a 90/10 split and we’ll pay you a certain amount per theater.” There’s like a – each theater has a house nut. So, “This is how much we are going to pay you for the right to show our movie in your theater.” Does that make sense?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m putting that kind of poorly.

**Craig:** Basically, here is the deal. It’s all a negotiation. If I’ve got a movie — let’s use Harry Potter. Everybody wants Harry Potter. It’s a guaranteed hit. There’s no chance it bombs.

So Warner Brothers says to a theater, and typically a theater chain, a very large chain, “We will give you Harry Potter at this level, but that’s a favor from us to you, because we could give it to your competitor across the street. We’re giving it to you in return for the first weekend,” which is where the big bulk of money is made.

Often times, a third of the entire box office run is made that first weekend. “We’ll make sure that you don’t lose money showing it, and maybe we will give you a little piece of the box office, but the bulk of it comes to us.”

As weekends progress, that split trends more towards a 50/50 kind of thing. And it’s because every movie is different, it’s hard to say ultimately, “What do theaters keep from box office?” because everybody says – they look at box office reports and they say, “Wow, Harry Potter made $400 million in the U.S. That means Warner Brothers made $400 million.” No. The theaters keep a lot of that. Someone once told me it’s sort of like a 60/40 thing.

**John:** Yeah. If you average out all the weekends and how it all flows.

**Craig:** Yeah, 60 is to the studios, and 40 is to the theaters.

**John:** But another truism you will see cited is that the theaters make more money off of concession sales than they do off of ticket sales, which doesn’t seem to make sense at all. Because if you buy a ticket for $11, not everyone is spending $11 on candy and popcorn.

Whether that statistic is true or not, the thinking behind that is that the theater owners keep all the concession money for themselves. They are not splitting any of that money back with the studios who are making the movies.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. The theater owners are constantly… there is a war going on. I don’t know if people understand this. There is an endless struggle between exhibitors and studios. Obviously, they need each other, but they have cross purposes.

Theaters, obviously, want to make as much as they can. The studios want to make as much as they can. So the studios tend to win the whole box office battle. The theaters, in order to make their money back and to be profitable, obviously, they want to constantly raise ticket prices, which the studios constantly fight against them doing, because studios want more people showing up.

The theater owners obviously keep increasing prices on concessions. The big one that the studios hate is the theater owners run advertising, which pisses audience members off. Then, in return, what the theater owners hate is that the studios, in order to generate more money for themselves, want to shrink the time between the time that the movie is in the theater and the time that you can buy it on DVD.

As piracy spreads, studios are panicked that no one is going to go to the theater or, if they go, they won’t buy the DVD because they can get it that night on Bit Torrent or something. The theater owners hate that, because it means that the theater experience is being cheapened and isn’t as special. It’s this endless war.

Then, one last thing: Another big war is technology. Studios want theaters to have excellent projection. They want them to have 3D. They want them to have better sound, digital delivery. The theater owners are saying, “Great, but that’s entirely our burden. That’s a capital expense on our end and it costs you nothing, so help us.”

**John:** And, to some degree, studios are hamstrung to directly invest in the theaters, because they’re not supposed to be owning theaters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah. So it would behoove everyone if everyone had better projectors. It would be best for people who are going to see movies. It would be best for distributors, because that way they don’t have to make as many prints and they can digitally deliver prints and they love that.

It’s better for the theater owners ultimately, because there is less physical stuff for them to have to handle and they can get by with fewer projectionists. There are reasons why it is good for everybody. It’s just that switching over to a new projection system is really expensive.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So that’s why when they build new theaters, they tend to have nicer projectors and everything is more digital. In the older theaters, it’s hard to justify converting them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But it comes down to even things that seem really cheap. There was a fight recently over 3D glasses and who should be responsible for providing 3D glasses. Should it be the theater owners or should it be the people who are producing the movie? It can be a very low margin business, so the cost of those $0.50 glasses can add up.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. No, it’s an interesting study in forced partnership. I mean, it’s economic. I’m sure they teach it in some sort of class.

**John:** The only statistics that you are likely to be able to find out about how a movie is doing is by box office. So we talk about domestic box office or worldwide box office, and so it’s important to remember that box office is really a function of how many tickets were sold and at what prices.

That’s the public figure that’s actually ever disclosed for a given movie. Privately, that’s not what really matters to studios. Studios are looking at what is called film rentals, which is, “How much of the money from the theaters is coming back to their pockets?”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s what is letting them know which movies are successful for them or not successful for them. Those film rentals that are coming back to 20th Century Fox or to Warner Brothers. That’s where they take off their distribution fee. I think 35 percent is the standard distribution fee now?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** So 35 percent of whatever is coming back to Fox, they are saying, “35 percent of that is going to the 20th Century Fox distribution arm,” and is not counted towards the actual, individual movie.

**Craig:** Which is, sort of, on its face, kind of dumb. The fact that it’s even a percentage is counter-logical.

**John:** Exactly. If it really was a cost, then add up the cost and charge that cost to the whole movie, rather than making it a percentage.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it’s a scam. [laughs] It’s a total scam.

**John:** Yeah. So, agreed there are issues that you can take with studio accounting, its complexity, its…

**Craig:** Its scamminess.

**John:** Its scamminess.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The distribution fee is certainly one of the biggest ones. I would say distribution fee, interest and overhead are all easy targets for it and that when you really dig in, if you have to go through an audit on a given movie, you find that there are a ton of expenses that are thrown against a movie that may not really be legitimate expenses.

**Craig:** Correct. Correct.

**John:** Yeah. For example, if you are lucky enough to have a movie that is considered for an Academy Award campaign, every possible expense that they could think about to throw – in terms of trying to win you an Oscar — will get thrown against the movie. So every party, every screening, every possible thing will get charged to your movie. That’s going to be a tremendous amount of money.

**Craig:** By the way, those are actual expenses. I don’t mind those. [laughs] It’s the ghost expenses that make me nuts, but what are you going to do?

**John:** Yeah, but when you say, “Where do the expenses stop?” Should you be charging the studio executive’s hairstylist against the Oscar campaign?

**Craig:** Well, it depends on the hair.

**John:** Yeah, if it’s great hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If it wins the Oscar, then it’s worth every penny.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Right now we have been talking about the theatrical experience, which is clearly the first step for most of these movies. But, a lot of movies are going to be making more of their money on home videos. That used to be videotapes. Then it was DVDs. Now, it’s iTunes and all of the other places that people can get movies legitimately and see them on their flat screens of some kind. Pay cable. Free cable. Broadcast television.

And an important thing to understand about when you start making television deals for things is that a lot of times ABC is not buying your movie. They’re actually buying a package of movies. They’re buying five different movies from Sony for $40 million and they’re buying the rights to show those movies several times.

Where that becomes troubling is, if Charlie’s Angels is one of those movies — there are five movies let’s say — so Charlie’s Angels is one of those movies and the other four movies are four movies you’ve never heard of, and you would never, ever want to see, they will try to account for those equally. They will just divide the $40 million among those movies and Charlie’s Angels will not show the profit that you think it should show.

**Craig:** Shenanigans. More shenanigans.

**John:** Yeah, just shenanigans. So when you start to have audit fights or have issues, that’s the kind of thing that comes up often, how they are apportioning things.

**Craig:** That’s what they do. Also, airlines are a big source of revenue for the companies. Hotel rooms — Lodge Net and all that stuff. There is a ton of money in that ancillary market, the afterlife. What is interesting about the aftermarket is, unlike the expense of releasing a movie theatrically, where you are making those expensive prints and delivering them and pouring a ton of marketing in, the ancillary stuff is really profit magic for the companies, or has traditionally been.

The movie is done. It’s got awareness. Hopefully, it was a hit. If so, you are literally just, in the case of iTunes, pressing a button and getting paid and doing nothing else. Someone who ran the studio one said to me that the best way to make money in the movie business is to own a library of movies and to not make movies.

Libraries kick off money every year, every title, without fail, with very little expense, very little cost associated with that. So as the VHS and DVD market boomed, you could see the movie business expanding to just chuck as many movies out there, because there was just this pot of gold at the end of almost every rainbow.

Even if the movie was a disaster, theatrically, somehow it always seemed to make money overseas and here through DVD and home video. Less and less the case now. That is another reason why the movie business has contracted a bit.

**John:** When you see studios freaking out about piracy, this is why they are freaking out about piracy. A tremendous amount of their income was coming from those things down the road. So that guy who was videotaping the movie in the theater is costing them, in their perception, sales of DVDs or iTunes sales or legitimate sales down the road, and they can’t ever possibly make those back.

It’s also crucial for screenwriters who are hoping to make more movies. We only get residuals on those things down the road. We don’t get any residuals on the first theatrical run of a film. Residuals are things that get paid to us from all of those other little bits, the airplane runs and the DVDs.

**Craig:** Not airplanes, actually.

**John:** Airplanes is first, isn’t it?

**Craig:** They count airplane as part of the theatrical release. I don’t know why. But you’re right, everything else in the release of it is where our residual base comes. Frankly, that’s where the profit in the movie business is. If you were to say today, that by fiat, the movie business could only make money by showing movies in theaters, I think, honestly, that every studio would just shut down.

**John:** Pack up and go home.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they cannot make the economics work. Making movies has become extraordinarily expensive. It’s a little counter-intuitive, because you think, “These cameras are getting cheaper and it’s so much easier to deliver content.”

But the other truism is that we have come to expect a certain level of spectacle with movies that is enormously expensive to achieve. Even when you find interesting filmmakers out there doing it on the cheap, it’s still, overall the rule of thumb is that, if you’re going to deliver a big, huge action movie, you need to spend money or it’s just not going to look like a big, huge action movie.

At least, that’s the studio calculation. So they need DVDs and video. They also need DVDs and video tapes to pay for the bombs because there are bombs. When you make a movie for $40 million and it loses $20 million, that is a big hit.

**John:** Yeah, they want to create a portfolio of movies, so that the hits will even out with the misses. Obviously, whenever somebody new comes to Hollywood, whenever new money comes to Hollywood, they, very smartly, say, “We’re only going to make the successful movies and we’re not going to make the bombs.”

The truth is that you don’t know which movies are going to be successes and bombs. So you try to plan carefully for what those will be. The challenge, I think, in our current situation is that the movies that are successful tend to be the incredibly, incredibly expensive movies. So we’re only making those incredibly expensive movies and we’re not making more of these mid-range things. We’re not making very many of The Help, and The Help is a godsend if that is your movie.

**Craig:** It’s very profitable. Then you look at movies, comedies in particular, I think, are extraordinarily profitable. Obviously, The Hangover, Bridesmaids, Horrible Bosses are movies that don’t cost a ton. That’s why comedy, I think, will always be a staple.

It’s not because people like them. Obviously, they do, but they like lots of movies. Horror movies and comedies tend to not require a ton of cash to make, but they can be just as successful or popular as action films are.

**John:** Yeah, because they don’t have to be home runs. You can hit doubles and triples and make a tremendous amount of money. I should back up and say, when I say, “Oh, they’re tremendously profitable,” again, we’re not talking that on the accounting of each individual film that they’re profitable, because they won’t be.

**Craig:** None of them are.

**John:** None of the movies, I think, that we have talked about today are going to show a profit on their actual, individual statements. But they are profitable for the people who made them, because they got to charge that 35 percent distribution fee. They charged their overhead against them. They charged everything they possibly could against them and they have a nice chunk of change because of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, they run these models. That’s a word you hear all the time now. They model the budget based on what they think the movie will do theatrically and what that, then, implies the movie will do on video and OnDemand and iTunes.

They know before they roll a foot of film what they think the movie is going to make. Usually, they are right. They usually have a pretty good sense of it. But — I lost my train of thought.

**John:** It’s okay, because a bus just showed up.

**Craig:** Oh, a bus showed up.

**John:** People who are listening on good headphones may notice that Craig works at a bus stop.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have to have more than one line of work if you are a screenwriter these days. You have to have many irons in the fire.

**Craig:** Got to stay in touch with the people. Do you know what I mean, John?

**John:** Yeah. So, he gets his best stories working as a shoe shiner. I think it’s good that you are keeping your working-class roots going there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Really, you can smell the urine in the air. I love this bus stop.

**John:** [laughs] Craig, thank you so much for a good and lengthy discussion on how the film economics work. I hope we all learned something today.

**Craig:** God, I hope we have. I sure do.

**John:** One of the things that I actually thought about this as the intro to how we were going to talk about this today, is, as I mentioned before, I am working on Big Fish, the musical. Broadway has a whole different economic model behind it in how it all works.

I am just now starting to learn it and it’s just bizarre. So we are at the stage now where we invite really, really rich people in to listen to the show and they write big checks to invest in the show, hoping that it is a huge success.

But, I honestly can’t say I understand exactly how they would get paid out in success, or God willing success, or why it’s a good idea for them to do that. Obviously, hopefully they want to support great art. But there is actually a profit and a business model and I can’t say I fully understand it yet.

**Craig:** This is one of the ways that I am a creative person. I don’t mind money. I like money, but I don’t understand it, to be honest with you. I don’t understand the ins and outs of it. Frankly, it doesn’t inspire me to talk about finance. I don’t really get it.

So, the people who do get it, I think, they do just much better than we do, because they really understand how it works. To me, it’s just a check. I don’t know.

**John:** One last thing we should slip in here is merchandising. There’s not going to be a perfect answer for this. But if you are making a movie that has toys — let’s say you made a little movie called Star Wars — toys are going to be an incredibly important part of how you are making a tremendous amount of money.

Some of the money from merchandising will be counted towards your movie and some of it won’t — which is a way of saying that those little, small things in your contract that seem like you’ll figure that out whenever they kick in, can become very, very important. So the degree to which all the ancillary toys and such become part of the accounting of your movie is really dependent on how good your lawyers were.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know guys, the deal is if a movie fails it doesn’t really matter what was in your contract. But in success, you and the people that owe you money will go hand-to-hand combat for a while. You see it in TV. When TV shows get syndicated and 20th Century Television sells the show to FX and it’s all the same, it gets so complicated. An industry of lawyers and people deal with it.

For those of us who write, I think the most important thing is to just be cognizant of how these guys make their decisions. So when it comes time to write your script, just know if you write a period piece that is a very adult drama, the studio is going to look at it and go, “Well, I see a whole bunch of budget costs that wouldn’t be in a horror movie.” Just be aware that it’s a little bit of an uphill battle. Just know how they think.

**John:** Yeah. So Craig, they’ve already come back to you. Hangover 3 is going to be PG-13 and there are going to be a lot of toys. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Hangover 3 will be rated R. [laughs] But there may be toys.

**John:** Toys are great. We love toys.

**Craig:** Love toys.

**John:** And we love talking about movies. So, thank you again, Craig, for another great podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

The followup post to this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/more-on-movie-money)

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/good-actors-and-bad-writing-partners).

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

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

**John:** This is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screen writers.

How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m doing fine today. How are you, sir?

**John:** Very well. We are recording this on Halloween, so I should ask you, how has your Halloween been so far?

**Craig:** Nothing Halloweenie has happened yet, although my wife did say this morning something that I never thought I would hear her say. “I’m going out to get the dog a costume.”

**John:** You’ve hit that phase, haven’t you?

**Craig:** We have a new dog. She’s a Labradoodle puppy. She’s 15 weeks old. And it was kind of a fight to get my wife to even agree to have a dog, just as it was a fight to get her to agree to have a child and then a second child. So this is why it’s so improbable, but here she is getting her a costume.

**John:** What’s interesting is because Halloween is falling on a Monday this year, for people with kids, Halloween is still the actual Halloween day. It’s like that’s when we’re doing the actual trick or treating and that kind of stuff. But for people like Stuart, my assistant, who’s in his mid twenties, this whole last weekend has been Halloween. It’s been like a long blur from Friday, to Saturday, to Sunday of Halloween activities. It’s a generational observation, I would say.

**Craig:** Halloween is certainly an enormous amount of fun when you’re in your twenties. It’s another great excuse to get drunk, plus girls… Somewhere along the line, everybody sort of made the observation that every costume became sexy blank. So whatever it is, sexy.

It’s basically, “Let’s see your boobs.” So it’s a pretty good holiday actually for straight guys. But once you have your kids, it really is flashlights and traffic safety. [laughs] Totally different experience!

**John:** In Los Angeles, we do our trick or treating on that actual holiday. My husband grew up in Columbus, Ohio where they actually moved the day of trick or treating, so they will decide as a city or as a village what day they’re going to do trick or treating. I guess it’s because of football. They don’t want to compete with the local high school football game. But they would do their trick or treating on like say, the 26th.

**Craig:** That’s not cool.

**John:** It’s bizarre. I could imagine there being good reasons for doing it. It just seems like creating more problems for yourself.

**Craig:** There was an article about a guy who owns those — I don’t know what you call these, like — popup stores that just appear about a month and a half before Halloween, sell costumes and then disappear on November 1st. And he’s a billionaire.

One of the things he’s been trying to get the country to do is establish the last Saturday in October as Halloween for safety reasons more than anything else, I guess. I don’t know why. It was cuckoo. — It was to make money. I’m sorry. I forgot, it was so he could make more money. But it had something to do with safety.

**John:** For a holiday that was created by Pagans to celebrate some sort of God, or Samhain or killing of things, it is strange it has become the thing it has become.

**Craig:** I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before. I’m really fascinated with Jack Chick who writes Chick Tracts, the super fundamentalist Christian tracts. He really hates Halloween, so I always check on his site to see whatever his latest tract is about how basically Halloween is Satan crawling inside kids and sending them to Hell. It’s awesome.

**John:** He’s probably right.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** On the topic of things evolving beyond what they originally were created to do, just today we announced Screenwriting.io which is a new spin-off site we’re doing for johnaugust.com. And it actually got me looking back through what I’ve been doing on the site since the beginning.

So johnaugust.com, it really started that I was answering these questions for IMDb. They had this Ask a Filmmaker column and they asked me to be one of the guest columnists for that. I ended up being a guest columnist for three years. But it started back in 2000 and it was hard for me to believe that it was all the way back in 2000 that I started doing this.

People would write in questions to IMDb and I would answer their questions. They would write into IMDb and then an editor there would go through the questions and pick out the best of them, email me and I would email back answers. I was publishing through a third party. It was all very basic and very HTML-y. It was an interesting thing for me to do at the time.

I became frustrated that I would answer the same kinds of questions again and again. For a site that was setup to be about searching and finding information, it was really hard to find the prettiest questions. So I did johnaugust.com as sort of a way answering those questions more definitively on my own timetable with the hope that once I answered a question, it could actually kind of stay answered for awhile.

And so for a long time, I was answering all of those questions and eventually, I got tired of answering those questions and the site sort of progressed beyond just those questions. So today, we’re introducing a new site that’s just back to that spirit of answering those really simple questions about things like, “What is a slug line?” or, “Do I have to format screenplays in a certain way?” It will be interesting to see.

**Craig:** That’s great. And out of curiosity, .io, where is that?

**John:** .io, I think is technically the Indian Ocean. So .io has become a newly popular domain extension because it’s short and it’s kind of feels like it could be part of a word. It’s the same way .us became something folded into Delicious and other sort of things. .io is sort of a new thing.

So it’s exciting. It’s actually been in beta for awhile, that we’ve been figuring out how to do this. And now, we’re launching it upon the unsuspecting public to see how they like it.

**Craig:** Another excellent service from the John August empire!

**John:** I think the empire is what we’re going for. But on the topic of questions people write in seeking answers, I thought we might just do some viewer mail today.

**Craig:** Yeah, viewer mail!

**John:** Now you were just at the Austin Film Festival and you got to talk to some people who listen to the podcast.

**Craig:** So many more, than I thought would be. Dozens of people came up to me, all very, very pleased with the podcast. They listen to it. I did write down — because there were a lot of parties and mostly you just get drunk and talk to people — I was very drunk when I sent an email to myself saying, “Remember to mention Stacy Ashworth on the podcast.” She was there. She really wanted us to say her name. I can’t remember the rest of the context. But Stacy, I followed through.

**John:** That is your Casey Kasem dedication for Stacy Ashworth.

**Craig:** That’s my long distance dedication, I guess.

**John:** I love it.

Here are some questions that came into the site and I thought we would just take a few minutes to answer them. First is from Mike from Twitter. Who knows where Mike actually lives, because on Twitter, you could live anywhere. Mike asks, “I know bad actors can ruin a great script, but can great actors improve a terrible script?”

**Craig:** They can improve a terrible scene, but I don’t think they can improve a terrible script. I mean, I would watch two terrific actors read any bad scene from any movie and I would be fascinated by the two and a half minutes it took. But a movie is a collection of scenes taken as a whole to create a narrative. I just don’t think great acting can save bad narrative over the course of an hour and a half.

**John:** I would say that in terms of a comedy — because sometimes a film comedy can actually just be a collection of very, very funny moments that somehow all holds together in a way that is rewarding. It’s hard for me to say that some of my favorite comedies…

Like Stripes isn’t a very good movie, but I enjoy the movie because I enjoy the performances. I enjoy what happens in it. Sometimes comedies, yes, a great performance, great actors can make something happen that couldn’t otherwise work.

**Craig:** The criticism that you usually hear about Stripes is that third act just kind of falls apart, and that’s sort of true.

**John:** Once the RV shows up, it’s a very different movie.

**Craig:** They kind of give up. But I have to say, that could have been fixed and it could have been even better. It’s why Stripes, for instance, isn’t as good as Groundhog Day, or I don’t know. It was an interesting time. Caddyshack is actually a better movie to me than Stripes.

But there was some pretty great screenwriting in the first act. I loved the way they set those characters up, so it wasn’t a bad screenplay.

**John:** No. I was sort of picking Stripes as a random example, but I can actually think of a more recent example of something I love that performances are really the reason why I’m loving it. It’s American Horror Story. Are you watching this show?

**Craig:** As you know if you ask me the question, “Are you watching this show?” the answer I’m going to give you for every show is, “No.” [laughs] I’m the worst, but tell me about this.

**John:** Let me tell you about American Horror Story. It comes from the very talented people who do Glee and who did Nip/Tuck before that. It has many of the best and many of the most frustrating qualities of Glee and Nip/Tuck in that it feels like it’s running full speed towards a cliff. And it’s not afraid of the cliff. It’s just going to run as fast as it possibly can towards this cliff.

You’re watching this show and it’s about a family that moves into a house that is obviously haunted in Los Angeles. And it’s not that it’s a slow build to anything, like things happen really, really quick in the show. By episode three, they’re trying to sell the house and move out of the house because they recognize that something really horrible is going on with this house.

There are many aspect of the show that I enjoy, but by far the aspect I enjoy most is Connie Britton, who plays the wife and mother and is just amazing. She’s the glue holding this whole thing together.

You’re watching this show and the experience of watching this show — it’s not even that’s it good or bad. I can’t say that the writing is fantastic or that the writing is the problem. But the feeling of watching this show is, you know when you’re kind of sick and you have Vicks VapoRub on your chest and your mom puts too many blankets on you and you start to smother? That’s the feeling of watching this show.

It’s kind of great and awful at the same time. But she is an example of one actor who can pull something off. I feel like they could give her the absolute worst script possible and I would watch it just because she’s amazing.

**Craig:** Well, there are some actors that definitely cut through anything and they seem to make everything better. Philip Seymour Hoffman, it doesn’t matter what he’s in, and he’s been in some kind of bad movies and he’s been in some amazing movies. But in all movies, I always feel like I’ll just stop and watch him. I can watch an entire movie of him doing nothing — and I think he made that movie with Charlie Kaufman. [laughs]

But, yes. There are actors that sort of strike us in a certain way. But of course, that’s just one actor and what about the rest of them?

A movie that comes to my mind, I saw The Help. The story of The Help is a fairly traditional one and I presume it’s the story that’s in the novel. But Viola Davis is another actor who is so good. I would watch her do anything. She’s amazing.

**John:** I think we’re going to answer this question, “Can great actors improve a terrible script?” Yes. I don’t think they can necessarily pull off the whole movie, but they can certainly improve a scene or a sequence. There are definitely movies that you love where you recognize that the movie itself isn’t really cooking on all burners, but that one actor is sort of making it worth your time watching.

**Craig:** When you say “terrible,” I don’t think you can say “terrible.” But good actors can make mediocre movies very watchable.

**John:** The next question comes from Dan in Los Angeles. “Two writers co-write a feature script. The partnership breaks up. Writer A unilaterally takes the script and with a manager wants to option it at a production company. Writer A asks Writer B to take her name off the script since she is no longer interested in working on it, and the manager thinks it’s a simpler sale if her name is removed. They’re only offering a verbal guarantee that she’ll be compensated.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Dan goes on to say that, “It sounds ridiculous to me and I would like to tell her to get something in writing, but it seems like anything in writing would freak out the manager since it creates a paper trail that there was an uncredited writer.”

**Craig:** [laughs] This is stupid. First of all, great lesson here. When managers are talking, it means you are being lied to. “It will be an easier sale with one name.” No. If it’s a really good script, it would be a perfectly easy sale with four billion names. It could have been written by the country of Pakistan and it would be a perfectly easy sale. People like to buy scripts. They don’t care how many names are on the page.

Now here’s the deal. Writer A and Writer B wrote something together. They are the authors of that script. If somebody wants to develop that script further down the line and Writer B has lost interest, no problem. The script can then be written by Writer A who is now writing separately and as an individual who’s employed.

But under no circumstances for any reason should you ever, ever agree to have your name taken off of a script that you have co-written. That is insane and pointless.

**John:** I agree with you. If you are actually leaving the film industry completely and never have an intention of coming back to it, there might be some circumstances which would kind of make sense. Or if there was such a huge disparity between your name and reputation and their name and reputation, I could see there being some cause for that.

Like one of you is Scott Frank and the other person is someone you have never ever heard of, then I can sort of imagine some scenarios in which this could make sense. But that doesn’t sound like this case at all.

This just sounds like there is a partnership that isn’t working out and one of the writers wants to take the script. And this happens a lot. Writers do get divorced. They break apart and it’s horrible to figure out who gets ownership of what different thing. You have to figure that out and you have to put it in writing. But you’re not going to change history to pretend that one person wrote something and the other person didn’t write something.

**Craig:** No. I mean, actually when it comes to the divorce, the divorce is difficult prospectively for what comes after you split up. It is not a problem at all to figure out who divides up these scripts. The answer is you don’t. It’s like: okay, husband and wife gets divorced. The kids still have a mom and a dad. It doesn’t change.

So that’s it. You don’t take you name off of a script. I don’t think any circumstance really matters unless they were literally shoving bucketfuls of money down your pants. And in this case, they’re not.

**John:** But in terms of scripts you’ve written, I agree that you’re not changing the past and who wrote the things. But moving forward, if you’re not a writing team anymore and one of you is going to be handling it independently, you have to figure that out. So that’s going to happen.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** There’re also those things that aren’t quite script, but they’re the ideas you were going to work on.

**Craig:** Those are the perspective issues, the things that are not quite yet written. That’s where it gets tricky. The nice thing about this question is it has a clear answer and the answer is, “Good God, no!”

**John:** Next question. “Hello and Shalom from Ruth in Israel. Flashbacks: I understand they’re often a fallback, reverse the pace, and other commonly cited ills. However, in Slumdog Millionaire and Forrest Gump they work.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Let me confess that this was an incredibly long question, like paragraphs and paragraphs and paragraphs. I just excerpted it to two sentences I found most interesting and then the third sentence was, “How do you feel about this?”

**Craig:** I’m glad you said that because it sounded to me it was a question where somebody said, “What do you think about flashbacks? In these two movies it works. Should you never do this?” Obviously in those two movies it worked. So the answer to that question is: no, you shouldn’t never do it. Flashbacks are a perfectly good instrument to use as long as they’re interesting.

I like to think of flashbacks as having certain requirements that other things don’t have. They either have to be very short and very funny or they have to add a revelation that re-contextualizes the character for you in an exciting way. So you don’t use them for boring purposes like figuring out what that guy had for breakfast that morning. A good flashback can be awesome.

**John:** I think it’s worth asking why flashbacks get such a bad rep, and it’s because they’re used so horribly in so many screenplays. You so often see a flashback that is setting up some piece of, “this is what it was like when he was a boy” and the flashback was over and it’s like, “I didn’t care about that. I really didn’t need to know what it was like when he was a boy. I didn’t need to know why he put on the blue jumper at that moment.”

Flashbacks work in the kinds of movies that need flashbacks to move forward. Either your story is the kind of story that supports flashbacks or it’s not going to support flashbacks, but if your script has one flashback, it’s probably an indication that you should have no flashbacks in your script at all. It’s a kind of screenwriting device that you’re either going to use a fair amount in your screenplay or not at all.

**John:** Another reason why flashbacks get a bad rep is because screenwriters use them to paper over their mistakes. Typically example is, you’re doing a thriller, just the audience doesn’t understand the logic of how this character knew that a woman was going to be there at a certain time and he says, “Well,” and then you flash back and see that he was following her. Well, that’s just dumb.

You’re literally using a flashback to plug a hole in your story and it’s unsatisfying. It’s dramatically boring. We had a flashback in Hangover 2 which I thought was interesting. Because we learn something about the character of Zack and the way he sees the world — or rather Alan — and the way he sees the world around him. Everybody is a 12-year-old boy to him that he likes. So it’s fun.

**John:** By the way, that flashback in Hangover 2, I don’t know if we talked about it on the podcast itself, that was ridiculously difficult to do. That was one of the most impressive sequences in the movie because clearly you had to bring in those 12-year-old boys to re-shoot half of what you were shooting in the movie, which was great.

**Craig:** It was. I remember Todd was saying, “I can’t believe we’re doing this because I have to shoot the movie twice,” and some of those scenes were big scenes like a riot in the middle of Bangkok. It’s like you finally finished it, “All right, now bring in the kids and let’s do it again.” It was an enormously big thing to do and, frankly, we didn’t know if it was going to work.

The first time we ran the movie for an audience that flashback came and went and it wasn’t quite rolling laughs and we thought, “Oh no, that was a big waste of time.” It was the only time in my career that reading the cards helped. What happens is you test a movie and everyone gives you the score and usually you can tell from the score and the response what the deal is and you don’t read the cards which is everybody’s comment.

Famously they’re really crudely rendered opinions.

**John:** — Written on a pencil on somebody’s knee, so they’re really hard to read anyway.

**Craig:** — By a guy that’s high. Card after card people singled that out. It wasn’t so much that they were laughing, but they were fascinated by that, so we kept it. You can certainly use flashbacks. Make them interesting and make the important dramatically. A great example of a movie that uses flashbacks brilliantly is Dead Again, which is almost all flashbacks. The whole movie’s flashbacks and it works great.

**John:** A similar kind of problem is with voice over. Voice over is used so terribly in so many movies that it’s become the, “Oh, you need to avoid voice over no matter what you do.” It’s because it’s used badly to pepper over problems and to get around situations that should be resolved in a completely different way.

Any time you see something advised that you should never do something in screenplays, you need to take a big step back and recognize there’s a reason why people try to avoid it, but there’s also probably a reason why it’s awesome when it’s done just right.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Fourth question. Connor from London writes, and I picked sort of an international sampling as you see. London, Connor. “I’m currently at a film school in London studying screenwriting. For someone living an ocean and a country away from Los Angeles, I was wondering what you would recommend. I want to work in the US, however I’m unsure about the best way to approach it. My tutors urge me to stay in Britain and work in the British film industry, yet the number of opportunities available to me over here are dwindling by the day. I’m 19. I write bigger, high concept comedies and I don’t have an agent. What do you recommend?”

**Craig:** Obviously this advice has to be given in the context presuming that Connor is talented. If Connor is not talented it doesn’t matter where he lives. [laughs] However, if we are to presume that Connor has what it takes to write big budget action movies —

**John:** — It says high concept comedies.

**Craig:** — High concept comedies, I’m sorry. Yes, I would probably recommend the move. I would say Los Angeles. I have some friends that live in the UK, a friend that lives in Ireland and works in the movie business there. It’s difficult. It gets more and more difficult. You are relying not only on the dwindling private sector but also a cash strapped government, because a lot of film is publicly financed there. It’s just on a different scale.

You will find that if you are making very specific, smart, smaller comedies you can probably get away with that in the UK a little more easily than you can here where things have to appeal to an international audience. From what he describes, I think I’d say: yeah, move. You’re 19, you don’t have kids, you don’t have a spouse.

**John:** I think you should move. If you want to write smart, little comedies he could do a good job there. Between the movies that get made and the television that gets made there, there’s a lot he could do in Britain, but if he’s trying to write bigger feature comedies he has to go to a place where they make bigger feature comedies and that’s Los Angeles.

I always say if you want to write country songs you should probably move to Nashville because that’s where they write country songs. Also, he’s 19-years-old. It’s much easier to pick up and move at 19-years-old than it will be at 30-years-old, so the fact that he has few burdens on him, he can come to the US on a student visa, take classes at USC or wherever he’s going to do it, and get started.

**Craig:** Yeah. Go for it man. If it doesn’t work out take a mulligan, fly back home. I spoke at BAFTA LA, which is a pretty good organization that connects people from England who out here trying to make their way in the business, so you can network with your fellow countryman and find your way.

**John:** Come. Los Angeles is nice.

**Craig:** Welcome.

**John:** It’s really nice this time of year. We don’t have the burdens of snow and rain. It can be a nice place to come.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. Do it.

**John:** Craig, it was fun answering some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Those were pretty good questions, I have to say. I like that we were hitting multiple continents this time. This is nice. I’d love to see the vast reach of the John August empire extend into deeper Asia perhaps.

**John:** It’s actually fun because looking at people who come to just the website I’m able to track who comes from different places, and you get these weird little pockets. Obviously the US, Australia, Great Britain are going to be the largest ones, but a lot of readers in Germany. I guess that’s partly because so many people in Germany speak English and it’s easy for them to fall onto the blog.

You get South Africa hits and stuff like that. There are also just weird little pockets in India you get people listening.

**Craig:** Welcome our Indian listeners. It would be nice, I think, for people to not only write in with questions but if there’s a topic you want us to talk about, we have an ability to blather for half an hour about almost anything.

**John:** It’s really a skill that we’ve honed over years and years.

**Craig:** Honed. Carefully honed.

**John:** Well, Craig. Happy Halloween. I hope the trick or treating goes really well. What costumes are your kids going for this year?

**Craig:** My daughter’s going to be a witch.

**John:** Classic?

**Craig:** Yes, classic. She needs the green face paint. That’s what they’re hunting for today. And my son is for just

**John:** — [hesitates]

**Craig:** — Yes? Go ahead.

**John:** Granted, the green face paint is very classic and it’s very wicked witch sort of thing, but I feel with the rise of Hermione Granger and the Hogwarts of it all you could go for a non-verdant face.

**Craig:** No, no. Listen, she watches “The Wizards of Waverly Place. She’s entirely steeped in the world of the neo-witch and she’s basically said, “I’m a classic Margaret Hamilton witch girl. Green face.” I think mostly she wants the makeup, frankly. She’s firm on that. My son is going to be, like so many 10-year-old boys, a nondescript commando working for some unidentified military unit that allows you to carry Nerf guns.

**John:** Will there be some black camouflage or anything like that?

**Craig:** There’s going to be some camo, yeah. Going to be a little bit of camo. We’ll be walking around with those two. Then the dog, I’m as excited as you are.

**John:** By the way, there could not be a safer Halloween costume for trick or treating at night than camouflage.

**Craig:** Exactly. The only costume that’s more dangerous is dressing as pavement, which I will be doing.

**John:** We don’t know what the dog’s going to be dressed as.

**Craig:** It’s a big surprise.

What about you and the family?

**John:** We are trick or treating in a nearby neighborhood. Our neighborhood is actually surprisingly difficult for trick or treating because we’re on a hill. It’s 30 steps up to get to our front door from the street. No kid is going to walk up 30 steps. You’re going to burn up the fun sized Snicker Bar just getting up to our front door. We have very few trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.

Just blocks away in the Zak Penn neighborhood wonderland of trick or treating. In fact, I’ve helped out Josh Friedman trick or treating sometimes at his house and they’ll get like 1,000 kids.

**Craig:** Wow. You should definitely knock on Zak’s door and report back on what he’s giving out.

**John:** It’ll be good stuff.

**Craig:** If it’s not good stuff we should have words with him for sure.

**John:** I think so, because he’s doing well. He’s got a TV show, he’s rewriting a zillion movies. He’s doing great.

**Craig:** He’s Zak freaking Penn.

**John:** He is Zak Penn.

My daughter’s going to be Wonder Woman for the fourth year in a row. She’s a girl that makes up her mind, sticks with her mind. Wonder Woman, by the way, has a fantastic both mission and genesis. First of all, she’s made out of sand. She’s made out of beach sand that’s been brought to life.

**Craig:** I did not know that. I thought she was just part of that tribe?

**John:** She is. She’s Amazonian, but her actual genesis, and I don’t know at what point this got retconned. Her mother wanted a daughter so she fashioned her out of sand on the beach and the gods brought her to life. That’s why of all the Amazonians, she’s the most powerful of all of them.

**Craig:** Her mom gave her that chest? She gave her huge sand boobs? Thank you. Thanks mom. You’re cool.

**John:** She’s pretty great. The other amazing thing about Wonder Woman is her missions in life, she also wants to beat up bad guys like all heroes do, but she’s also more about social justice and making the world a better place, whereas Batman, for instance, has more limited ways of seeing the world.

**Craig:** Batman doesn’t care about that stuff. Batman votes Ron Paul.

**John:** I think so. We’re going to save the Dark Knight, the Frank Millers and all that, for later in her education. I will say if you have a young daughter, I’ll put a link to it, there’s this amazing My First Reader Wonder Woman book that is incredibly girl positive and the illustrations in it she looks like a teenager girl and not a voluptuously slutty Amazonian warrior.

**Craig:** Losing interest. Losing interest. [laughs]

**John:** But for your daughter.

**Craig:** For my daughter, yes, of course…

**John:** Happy Halloween and Happy Halloween to our listeners who will be getting this the day after Halloween probably. Keep sending in your questions and you can also become friends with us or like us or whatever action you’d like to take on the Facebook page, which will be set up by the time this is posted, and follow us there.

**Craig:** Awesome man. Good podcast.

**John:** Thank you. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Bye guys.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/five-figure-advice).

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

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

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

Craig, you are doing our first live from the field reporting.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m at the Austin Film Festival here in Texas. It’s a big deal. I mean, it’s not a big deal that I’m here but the film festival is a big deal.

**John:** The Austin Film Festival is one of the few festivals that is really setup for screenwriters. Screenwriting is the focus of the festival I would say.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There’s the National Screenwriting Conference but that really isn’t a film festival. That’s specifically just about screenwriting. The Austin Film Festival does have actual films.

It has a pitch competition, a screenplay competition, a ton of panels and seminars and big, big names here. Larry Kasdan’s here and John Lasseter from Pixar and I believe Johnny Depp is in town, your buddy.

**John:** Good stuff.

By the time this podcast is actually up on the site it’ll probably be past and no one can come see you at your speaking engagements, but what panels are you going to be on? What are you going to be talking about?

**Craig:** I already did two today. Today I did a how to pitch seminar and then they do these round tables where you sit down and just meet people and talk to them and then after 20 minutes you go to the next table, a little bit of a speed dating thing. Then tomorrow I’m doing — I’m flipping through the book to see what I’m doing tomorrow.

I think I’m doing a thing on comedy. Yeah. It’s called Comedy: The Hardest Genre, and it’s at nine in the morning, so yeah — at nine in the morning it is the hardest genre. Then something else. Then there’s some creative — I don’t know John. [laughs] Honestly I should know and I keep checking this booklet and I keep forgetting what I’m talking about, but hopefully I’ll be fascinating when I say it.

**John:** Last year I was at the Austin Film Festival and I gave a special master class seminar on Big Fish which was scheduled super early in the morning. It was like a 7 AM session on Big Fish.

I enjoyed doing it. The challenge was that I had to talk about Big Fish as if it was some project I had worked on many, many years ago, because at that point we hadn’t announced that we were doing the Broadway musical.

So there were several moments during the presentation on the choices of the adaptation that has to say like, “Now, if you were going to do this, for example, as a Broadway musical, you might make some different choices about these kinds of things,” but it couldn’t be too specific.

Of course I was literally hopping on a place to fly from there to work on the Broadway musical so it was a strange thing. People said, “Wow, you seem to remember that story very, very distinctly and clearly. Did you bone up for it for the session?” No, it was all there. It was all live.

**Craig:** No one bones up for anything.

**John:** No. We pretty much show up and talk about the kinds of things we know to talk about which is screenwriting and answering questions about screenwriting, which is why I thought today we might take one of our listener questions that came in. This came in today from a young woman. I assume it’s a woman. I assume she’s young.

These are just random assumptions. A person named Alana. She writes:

“I’m a pretty new working writer. Last year was the first year I did real work for a studio, and now that I’m done with that project and back on the merry-go-round of meeting some producers, I don’t really know how to plan my career or, indeed, if that’s even a thing people do. When your agent and manager bring you possible projects or people who would like to meet you, should you just say yes to everything, pitch on everything, develop ideas with every producer who wants to, or should you pick things that you think will lead you in the overall direction you would like to do? Basically, should you have rough goals for the next few months, the next year, should you have a five year plan?”

This is a very broad question I thought could be a good… Let’s talk about your first couple years as a screenwriter jumping off place both in career advice but also overall life advice.

**Craig:** That’s a great question. It’s a great question. I feel like I’m still wrestling with that one to some extent. Almost all those things I could answer yes to all those oppositional questions. Should you plan? Yes. Should you say yes to everything? Should you be picky? Yes. I feel like I’m always vacillating back and forth between those poles. I don’t know about you.

**John:** Definitely. So I think it’s going to be best if we break this into smaller, manageable chunks that we can address. So let’s talk about career advice in terms of Alana as a screenwriter. Let’s talk about meetings. Should she take every meeting that she’s offered at this point?

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say so.

**John:** I would agree. Your agent and your manager are going to send you out to meet with a bunch of people, and a lot of those are people who they have other clients working with, people they know socially. They’re basically going to throw you against a lot of walls and see what sticks.

The reason behind this is people will have read your stuff but nobody’s going to feel comfortable hiring you to do any project unless they’ve sat with you in a room and seen, “Oh, she’s this kind of person, this kind of writer. I can see calling her on the phone and talking about a specific project.”

So you’re very unlikely to get hired for any of these early jobs unless you’ve actually sat in a room and talked with these people.

**Craig:** It’s true. Sometimes there’s a magical little thing that happens. Inevitably, these meetings have some context. They say general meetings, but there’s no such thing, because everyone that’s having a meeting with you has something they need and they’re going to mention it.

“We would love to have somebody write a movie like this.” Every now and then you have one. You have that thing that they’re looking for, even if it’s just the germ of an idea, and you might just start talking about it and they might just get excited and suddenly you’re generating a possible job.

I always think of general meetings as specific meetings that just don’t know what they’re specific about yet.

**John:** I’ve talked about this in sessions like the Austin Fall Festival but I don’t know if we talked about it on the podcast is that every one of these meetings has the same kind of template, which is that you will show up at the office, you will be a few minutes early, the assistant will offer you for something to drink.

You should ask for a glass of water or a Diet Coke or something that they will have, so they can get you something and bring you something and feel like they’ve done some part of their job.

The meeting will start a little bit late. You’ll go into that person’s office, you’ll sit in whatever chair is appropriate to sit in, and you’ll spend the first five minutes talking about nothing important at all.

It’s just really general chitchat about the most recent movies, about random stuff, where you grew up, where you went to school. At some point it’ll segue to “This is what we’re working on. Tell us what you’re working on. Is there something together that we should be working on?” A lot of times this is the same template as going in for a pitch, where there’s the general stuff before you get to the meat of it.

In a general meeting it’s just, “I’ll show you some of what we’re doing if you show me some of what you’re doing.”

**Craig:** Exactly, and usually there’s some pretext for the meeting, even if it’s just, “I love your agent, he insisted that I meet you and then I read your thing and I really liked it.” There’s always some pretext. Nobody really has a meeting with somebody that is a complete blank with them. There will always be a little something to talk about.

**John:** At the same token, you should be able to have a conversation about the kinds of things you want to write and the kinds of things you want to work on. So you don’t have to be able to pitch specifically what it is you’re trying to do.

If you’re the kind of writer who is working on thrillers you might say, “I’m working on a thriller set in the Boston financial market,” which I’m not even sure makes sense.

It’s a general enough pitch that describes the kind of idea that you’re working on without giving up all the details of what specifically you’re trying to do. If you just sit there and respond, “Oh, that sounds good,” or “That sounds interesting,” they’re not going to have any more specific idea of what to pitch to you when something comes three months down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an opportunity also for you to start showing them what you can do. They might say, “Well you know we’ve had this idea that we’ve been working on for a while that’s the kind of thing we love and it’s this,” and they briefly describe it.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I really like that. When you pitched it to me where I was thinking it was going was this or this.”

The truth is that’s what they’re hiring you to do. They’re certainly not looking for people to go, “Oh, Okay. Thank you for spoon feeding me something.” They want people with an opinion, as long as it’s a smart opinion. So it’s a chance for you to begin to show off the quality of your mind. So I would say take every meeting you can when it’s early on in your career.

**John:** The more challenging decision is whether to pursue every project that comes up, every project that enters your universe of maybe-you-could-be-hired-to-do-this. When you and I were both starting, projects would come up.

The first idea I ever pitched on was How To Eat Fried Worms, which is an adaptation of a great kid’s book that Ron Howard’s company was doing.

It was presented to me as this is something you might be considered for. This was before I’d written Go. I’d just written a romantic tragedy and the novelization of Natural Born Killers, so it wasn’t a great choice on paper to be doing this.

But it was a book I knew and a book I liked so I pursued it hard and tried to get it, and I was able to get it.

There were a lot of those kinds of opportunities, and you had to be careful about which ones you were going after, because you could spend all your time chasing these projects that either aren’t real or were that they’re meeting with 15 writers and your odds of actually landing the job are pretty small.

**Craig:** That’s gotten worse, I would say, with the contraction of the release schedule. They just make fewer movies now, so there are fewer things to go in on, which means that the group of people that you were going up against — that cohort — has increased dramatically.

Early on in my career, most of the stuff I was working on was self-generated with my partner. So we would come up with ideas and pitch them and just try and get our own stuff going, which is always a great way to keep these meetings going because it’s a relief for them. They don’t feel like they have to do all the work and that they somehow are convincing you to let them pay you for something.

But when it’s early on you have to ask the fundamental questions: “Okay, do I need money?” “Am I starving?” “Am I making my rent?”

If you need money and a job comes in, take it. If you’re doing okay and there’s not going to be massive opportunity costs and a job comes along that just seems like a bad idea, you have to push the plate away.

That’s a lesson that it took me a while to learn, and I think I suffered, frankly, because I wouldn’t push the plate away. I grew up with… My parents are public school teachers and it was a very firmly middle class life where somebody offers you money you do the work.

I had to shake myself out of that a little bit, because eventually you start to become connected and associated with those jobs whether you like it or not.

**John:** The second scenario, though, that you’re talking about, where somebody comes to you with a job and you say, “No, no, I don’t want to do that job,” that’s a luxury problem, and I feel like this early on in her career that’s probably not going to happen very often.

It’s unlikely that someone’s going to come to her and say, “Hey, do you want to do this movie for us? You don’t have to pitch against nine other people. This job is yours if you want it.” That’s going to be unlikely where she’s at right now.

**Craig:** So the question is whether or not she should be pursuing the chance to write something?

**John:** Exactly. My instinct is if it’s a job she really wants then she should pursue it, but she should also be asking her agents and her managers how many other people are going out for this, which is information which I think contractually the studio has to say how many people are going out for it.

Producers will sometimes fudge and not really say how many people they’re bringing in or how many people they’re talking to about a project. If you find out that fifteen writers are going in for this adaptation of this book they just bought, that may not be the best use of your time.

**Craig:** If you love it then I think there is a case to be made that it’s good practice. Again, if you’re early on in your career it’s good practice. God knows how many stories I broke early on in the pursuit of chasing down work. It’s a way of honing your craft and getting better at it while exposing your potential value to people who hire writers.

But if you’re marginal on it or if your agent is excited about it for you but you’re not then, yeah, you might be better off working on your own thing.

**John:** What might be important to talk about is how many days to spend prepping that first coming in with your idea. Don’t spend two weeks on it.

I think it’s a great thing to be spending a couple days figuring out your take on it, being able to pitch what your idea is, but if you are writing a ten page outline even for yourself on that project you’re probably spending too much time pursuing something that’s not a real job for you.

Being able to go in and pitch a good version of a movie, especially if you’re one of the youngest writers, the most junior writers, going in on the project, that may at least impress them and get them thinking about you for the next job, certainly.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these things have levels in that you want to go in and pitch a take on it. You don’t need to give them your scene by scene description of the movie you would write; give them your take, your vibe, your approach. If they get really excited by that that is a green light for you to continue on it because there is a real possibility. If they’re lukewarm or negative you just saved yourself a bunch of time.

**John:** Absolutely.

Now let’s talk about the types of projects she should be pursuing, because in her question she didn’t say what kind of project it was that she got hired on, but my instinct is whatever it was she got hired on was probably based on other stuff she’d written before.

So if she’s a comedy writer she had written some comedy specs, she wrote a comedy for these people, the first studio job, and that’s what people are seeing her as.

This is not the time for her to say, “I’m going to write a political thriller.” I think if she’s being perceived as a comedy writer she would do herself best by continuing to write comedy and continuing to go out and pitch comedy.

**Craig:** Certainly from the point of view of building a continuing career, no question. Everybody’s a little concerned about being pigeon holed, but the truth is that is a rich writer’s problem.

You can write yourself out of your pigeon hole. You can’t write yourself into a career if you’re all over the place. People want to know what list they should put you on, and they do have list. Your agent, too — by the way, your agent will get very confused.

**John:** Yeah. If your agent doesn’t know which jobs to put you up for, that’s going to be a real problem, so you need to be honest about that. To a degree, to broaden your perception of how people see you as a writer, that’s why you need to be continuing to write specs even while you’re going out after these assignments.

You need to be working on your own stuff that is not beholden on anyone else hiring you to do stuff so that you can have new stuff to show.

**Craig:** I would say that the nice thing about specs is if you do want to branch off and show another side, I feel like you’re always allowed to do that in a spec, because the proof’s in the pudding. If you are getting comedy work but then you go turn around and sell this amazing horror spec, now you’re a double threat and that’s great.

In terms of pitching and going after jobs, don’t really think that anyone’s going to take you seriously if they don’t have evidence that you can deliver.

**John:** My first two jobs were How To Eat Fried Worms and A Wrinkle In Time, so at that point I was perceived — and pigeon holed — as being a guy who adapts kids’ books. So I was getting sent everything that involved gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I liked those movies, but it wasn’t the only thing I wanted to write.

The luxury of having Go as a spec is that people could read Go and say, “Oh, this is a guy who writes comedy or writes action movies or writes drama or whatever.”

People could read Go and see whatever they wanted to see in it, and even before we made the movie it was very helpful for me getting considered for lots of different kinds of projects.

I would only be able to have a writing career at all because I had written these other movies that were so safely pigeon holed.

**Craig:** I don’t get really fussy or embarrassed about whatever it takes to break your way into the business. There are very glamorous, apparently creatively honorable ways to get in, but I’m not obsessive over purity.

It sounds great to say, “I wrote an incredibly heartfelt spec that was shatteringly brilliant and that’s why I am the biggest writer in the business,” which I’m not, but you don’t have to be that.

That’s an unnecessary burden to place on yourself, particularly when it’s early on.

**John:** While she didn’t ask the question I will append the question: She should also be considering TV. If you’re a future writer who likes television you should also consider TV, especially at this early stage in your career. You don’t know that you’re going to get another feature job for a year or two years or ever.

There’s more jobs in TV overall, so if TV is something that you like and something that you feel like you can write, I think you’re doing yourself a service in 2011 also writing television and trying to get television shows set up, trying to get staffed, trying to make good television shows, because that’s where the best writing and the most writing is happening.

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** Let’s talk more life stuff for her in terms of a five-year plan. In terms of a five-year plan I think you have to ask yourself, “€œWhat kind of writer I perceive myself as being?€ Do I want to be a feature writer who is known as a brand of a writer?” If so, then probably picking a genre and being very true to that genre will serve you very well.

If you want to be a writer/director you need to start thinking about, when are you going to direct a movie? If you perceive yourself as being a writer/producer, like Kurtzman/Orci or Simon Kinberg, you need to start thinking about writing the kinds of movies that require such care-tending.

— Care-tending? Care-taking?€

**Craig:** I like care-tending€ Own it.

**John:** — Care-tending that requires such oversight and such producorial function that people start perceiving you as the guy that can keep the ship from sinking. You look at the writer/producers who do that and they are responsible people who are good writers but are also able to deal with all the politics and all the personalities of getting a movie made and can deliver a movie for a studio.

Kurtzman/Orci do it for Dreamworks; Simon Kinberg does it for Fox. There’s a lot of value.

**Craig:** The thing is, you have to know what your goals are and lay out perfect what the options are. Plan implies that you can chart a course that is followable, and I have to say I don’t think there is such a thing. What we’re dealing with is a highly chaotic business, and at its best there is still this enormous questionable outcome.

Even if you get your movie made, who knows how it’s going to hit the audience, how it will perform, how it will be received within the business, how the perception of you as a writer or writer/producer or director changes?

The important thing is to keep your goal in mind. Try and nudge this thing towards the goal, keep moving forward as best you can, but prepare to adapt, because you will get thrown curveballs. You may say, “I want to be a writer/director,” and you may turn out to be a writer/producer or just a writer, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Hard to plan, I have to say.

**John:** I think it’s hard to have a plan. It’s easier to have templates. I remember as I was first getting started, Go’s production offices or pre-production offices were actually shared with Kevin Williamson’s space. I would see Kevin Williamson writing Dawson’s Creek.

I’m like, “Oh, that seems really, really hard but I see that he’s working really, really hard and I can work really, really hard so I could probably have a show on the WB as well,” and I did. It was good to see that.

I always kept Kevin Williamson as an aspirational figure in those early years. Here’s a guy that’s making movies and doing TV shows at the same time and it’s all good and happy.

I think now with the rise of the show runners — or at least the publicity we now have for show runners — you have a better sense of whether it’s JJ Abrams from the Alias days or Joss Whedon, people who are running these major shows.

You see what it’s like and you can say, “I want to get to the stage where I can create a show and become a show runner and that’s not going to be easy,” but that’s a template.

You can see how those specific people did it.

**Craig:** Right. You define a goal, you look at how other people achieved the goal, and then you move towards it the best you can, but be open to things that you didn’t think would be there.

I never thought of myself as producing movies until I started producing movies. Keep your knees bent and stay loose because it’s going to turn out differently than you think. Over planning is just going to choke the life out of you. You need to be able to be prepared when serendipity strikes.

**John:** On the topic of being prepared, let’s segue to the life advice, particularly money, because you talked about, “Should I pursue this job? I need the money.”

Money was a huge concern for my first four or five years as a screenwriter in that what’s so different about screenwriting versus other jobs is we don’t get paid regularly. We get paid in these chunks and then that money dissipates.

So what I would do is as I would get paid to start a new draft…

Actually, I should explain how screenwriters sort of get paid in case people aren’t familiar with it. When we are hired to work on a project, we are given a certain amount of money to start the first draft. And then when we deliver the first draft, we’re paid the other half of that money.

So usually, the biggest chunk of money comes from that first draft, and we’re paid half upfront and half when we deliver. If we’re brought on for the rewrite, we get half upfront and half on delivery for that rewrite.

Once you’re hired onto a job, you have some sense that money is going to be coming in and you have some control over when that money should be coming in — hopefully they’ll pay on time, based on how long you know it’s going to take to write stuff.

Being an organizer and a planner, I would make a spreadsheet that would list all the months ahead. I would mark when I was expecting money to come in and I kept really careful track of all of my expenses.

I would say like, “Okay. This is how much it’s costing me to live each month in Los Angeles. This is my rent. This is how much I’m paying on food. This is how much I’m paying for my car. This is how the money disappears.”

And I could track that. Like, “I would be okay for six months at this point and hopefully, I will have another job before then to keep paying. And hopefully, I will overlap some of these checks so it’s not just, ‘Watch all of John’s money disappear.'”

But that’s very much the experience of being a screenwriter. You’re not getting a weekly paycheck, and without getting that weekly paycheck, you have to really be looking quite a few months down the road.

**Craig:** Certainly the best financial advice I could give to a screenwriter who is working and is early in their career is: live beneath your means.

Think of yourself like a professional athlete. You’ve managed to make it all the way past all the barriers to achieve this incredible goal of playing professional sports. All it takes is one torn ACL and you’re out. You’re done.

And things can happen in the movie business and suddenly the work goes away. It happens all the time, often terribly, terribly unfairly. Live beneath your means.

It’s funny listening to your heuristic of how you analyze what you should spend and all the rest of it. I made it really easy myself. I just said, “I’m going to spend as little as I can, just in general, so I don’t have to do much math. Just spend as little as I can. Keep socking it away. Keep socking it away.” And then at some point, adjusting that floor upwards as money would come in.

It is a difficult thing for anyone to master, the kind of financial planning with intermittent, unpredictable income levels. It is that much more difficult for people who aren’t naturally inclined to these things. The venn diagram of writing doesn’t overlap quite neatly with the venn diagram of financial planning.

And look, I know writers that have run into real trouble. And when you run into trouble, then the problem is this business is very high school. No one wants to date the guy that needs a date. When that pressure starts kicking in and suddenly you need a job and you need the money, they can smell it. It’s not good news.

**John:** You were talking about living beneath your means. The first four or five years I lived in Los Angeles, I didn’t have a bed. Instead, I had the two of those egg crate foam mattress pad covers and that was my bed and that was absolutely fine. I ate a lot of ramen.

**Craig:** Dude, so much ramen. I had a futon mattress, not the frame. I had the mattress on the floor. My first apartment I shared with a college buddy. The rent was $705 a month. Now granted, it was 1992. But the point being, it was like a game. “How little can I spend?”

I’ll tell you, there’s really nothing better for you, frankly, than to be in your twenties and live right on the edge of what you can get away with because then, man, you appreciate it so much more when you’ve earned it, and you have it, and you get it.

**John:** I think it’s important for people to understand here and dangerous if you were to miss it is that we’re not talking strictly about the people who are aspiring to become screenwriters, who are living cheap with like that dream, “One day I’m going to get paid to write.” We’re talking about like when you are actually getting paid to write.

People are paying you money. The problem is you just don’t know how long that money is going to keep coming, so living beneath your means is so crucial at this point. And basically pretending you don’t have some of the money you do have so it can last a lot longer is crucial.

**Craig:** And it’s crucial for people to know that sometimes the numbers seem like a lot more money than it is. I’ll give a real life numbers example. The first script I ever sold with my partner in 1996 I believe. I believe we got paid — we were guaranteed a payment of $110,000.

**John:** Oh, my god. That’s so much money, Craig. You could live forever on $110,000!

**Craig:** Let’s do the math. Shall we, John?

First of all I had a writing partner, so let’s whack that in half. It’s actually $55,000. Now let’s remove 10% for the agent. So now we’re down to roughly $50,000. Let’s remove another 10% for the manager I had at the time and most young writers do have a manager. Now we’re down to $45,000.

Let’s remove 5% for the lawyer, so now we’re down to about $42,500. Now let’s take out federal income tax. Let’s take out state income tax.

**John:** It’s not fun if you take out the taxes, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. But you have to because it turns out you go to jail like Wesley Snipes if you don’t.

And so, your big deal for $110,000 is actually putting maybe $30,000 in your pocket. Now interestingly when this deal happened, they said, “Okay, we’re going to pay you guys $110,000. Commence writing.”

Then they send over this contract that says, “We don’t actually pay you until this contract is signed,” which seemed totally reasonable to me until it occurred to all of us that the studio was taking a very, very long time to actually amend the contract to a place that was reasonable for our attorney.

So we had already finished the script by the time that contract finally got done. They withheld payment the entire time. So now we’re two months in and finally at the end of that rainbow, you get your commencement.

Now the commencement, that $110,000, that covered two steps of writing. The first step is always — you get a little extra in the first one. So I think it was something like 70/40. So okay, $70,000. But the commencement is half of that, 35. But remember, I split it with my writing partner. So that’s actually 17.5 and then the manager, the agent, the lawyer, the taxes.

Suddenly after all that time, maybe I had four or five grand in my pocket. And that’s what people need to get. Even if you write on your own, even if you make $500,000 and it’s just you, it’s less than it sounds like.

Oh! And I forgot. The Writer’s Guild takes a percent and a half plus an initiation fee of $2,500. I think I netted zero by the time the commencement was complete.

**John:** But you got paid $110,000, so the big party you threw because you got paid money to be a screenwriter was probably a little premature.

**Craig:** It was lavish.

In practice, I changed nothing. I took it all in stride. I did the math. I said, “Uh-huh. I get it. This is going to be awhile.” And it is going to be awhile.

People need to understand that there is no fast rise to the million dollar level, and these numbers seem bigger than they often in practice are. You have to, have to, have to save. You have to. No way around it.

**John:** So in general, my advice to Alana who’s at this early stage — and I guess this would be five figure advice. It’s not quite six figure advice, but she’s getting paid money to write projects with is awesome — I don’t know that she needs to keep a day job. I don’t know if it would be conceivable for her to really keep a day job and still take all the meetings she needs to take.

It would be great if she had a significant other who is also working to help even out the peaks and valleys of this monetary income. But in many ways, the degree to which she can pretend that she’s had no success at all will probably help her financially at this point.

**Craig:** And creatively by the way. I mean, stay humble in all regards.

**John:** Good. I think this is a good, sobering look at that first couple of projects for a working screenwriter.

**Craig:** I think we saved a lot day. [laughs]

**John:** We might have.

Down the road, I do want to have the more challenging but also more fun discussion of the six figure advice, which is for those writers who actually are working relatively regularly who have to start thinking about things like becoming a loan out corporation, and health insurance, and disability insurance.

You talked about the professional athlete who tears an ACL. At a certain point, I had to get disability insurance because quite rightly my business manager pointed out that if I got hit by a bus, it would be really, really bad and traditional insurance wasn’t actually going to help me out there.

**Craig:** We’ll call that “Rich Guy Podcast.” But there’s a lot of stuff that does need to be sorted through. We’re all in isolation, so I think that’s a great idea to talk about that stuff because a lot of it is boring procedural stuff. And yet, you can really, really screw yourself up if you do it wrong.

**John:** And I suspect you probably know how to do it right, so that’s why you’re a good person for this discussion.

**Craig:** I bet you do, too.

**John:** Craig, enjoy the rest of your Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir.

**John:** Are you going to have some barbecue tonight?

**Craig:** Tonight I think it’s Mexican food, which the only place in America that I think outdoes LA is Texas. So a little Mexican tonight, but there will be some barbecue in there somewhere for sure.

**John:** Sounds good. Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.