Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/optioning-a-novel-and-the-golden-age-of-television).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, Episode 25. This is a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m fine. I’m amazed. We’ve gotten to 25 of these things.

**John:** 25. That is a quarter of a century, or some sort of centennial celebration. A quarter of the way there.

**Craig:** It is, uh, some kind of anniversary. Gold, or diamond, or something, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you get me?

**John:** I got you nothing.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I got you topics. I got you questions. I’ve got things we can discuss.

**Craig:** Oh, well that’s good.

**John:** We can put them off for a little while if you wanted to blather about something. I could find some other network promo that I could talk you through.

**Craig:** I don’t like your characterization of blather. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Let’s just get right to some questions, because I actually have some pretty good ones this week.

**Craig:** Let’s do it.

**John:** Cody writes in to ask, “How does one obtain the rights to a novel, etc? I know I need to contact their agent/lawyer, but I guess what I am asking is how do I go about it without coming off like a complete novice or tool? Or, knowing me, most likely both?”

So, a kind of very basic question that is sort of procedural: How do you get the rights to a book. But, also, some psychology, so thinking about how you are going to approach a writer, an author, a novelist, and convince them that you are going to be the person who can adapt their book.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Have you optioned any books yourself?

**Craig:** It’s funny that this question comes up because I did it for the first time just a few months ago.

**John:** So tell us about it.

**Craig:** It was a book that I loved as a kid called The Hero from Otherwhere. And it is a sort of fantasy/fiction novel about two boys who end up in this fantasy world. I just always loved it, and for years I would sort of check… — First of all, I couldn’t remember what the name of it was.

And then with the Internet now there are forums. I think there is a forum literally called What’s that Book? And where you just say, “Okay, I remember three things, and there is something from the cover,” and then 100 people say it was this. So, I figured out what it was, and then I had…

So the first thing you do is you check and see are the rights available. And that is something where ideally you have an attorney, and they go to some sort of… — There must be some central database somewhere that keeps track.

**John:** I don’t think there is a central. I think they are actually just contacting people.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Yeah. So you just had your attorney do it?

**Craig:** Yeah. He figured out that the rights were not available, and so I just let it go for many years, but then it just kept popping up. And so finally, a few months ago, I asked him again, and he said, “Look at that? They are available.”

And he knew that the rights holder was the daughter of the author. He had died many years ago. And she was an older lady, and I said, “You know what? Have my agency, CAA, reach out to her, and see if she is interested in optioning the rights. And if she is, then I will call her.”

And it was actually a very interesting phone call, because I called — and I have never done this before — and a very nice lady answered the phone. And she knew that I was going to be calling. And I said, “Listen, it’s a book that meant a lot to me as a kid, and I would love to adapt it if at all possible.”

And she said, “Well, I have to tell you that two days ago my husband died.” [laughs]

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** And I was like, “This is going so badly. What’s wrong with my timing?” So, my heart sank, of course, like, oh my god. And I was just like, “I am so sorry.” I mean, because now I feel like a real vulgarian talking about options and books. Her poor husband died. And she said, “No, no. I knew that you were calling, and I said to my husband when he was in the hospital that somebody was calling about this. And this book meant a lot to my father, and to me, and to my husband. And he said to me, ‘Maybe this will be the one.’ So, I feel like an angel brought you to me.”

And, as you know, of course, I am…

**John:** Craig Mazin is all about angels. I mean, angels guide most of your decisions.

**Craig:** [laughs] My existence is proof that there is no God. So this was even more of a burden upon me. And I felt…you know…

But at the same time, it was just a very nice moment. I mean, and maybe if there is a lesson in general to be applied here it is that when you talk to people who own the rights to things like novels, presuming it is not a very popular thing — maybe it is a little thing — it means a lot to them. It is not just commerce. It is emotional to them, especially if it is a relative and the author has passed away. It is part of their family, so you have to be very respectful about it, and go about it the right way.

And it worked out.

**John:** That’s great. So after this conversation, what was the follow up?

**Craig:** So then I spoke to my lawyer, and I said, “Write up what is a very standard, fair agreement to option this novel. Don’t lowball. We don’t have to highball either. Just come in with what the sort of industry standard is for a property like this.”

And he sent her an option agreement, and she signed it.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Wonderful. So this will be a project that you will adapt here in the near future and hopefully turn it into a great movie.

**Craig:** That’s my hope. I have been talking about it with a few people, and it has its challenges, but there is a great story there. So, we will see if I can get it done. I would like to think I could.

**John:** Great. Over the course of my career there have been three books that I have been directly involved with getting the rights for. The first was Big Fish. So, Big Fish I got set as a manuscript, so it is not really the same situation in that my agency was representing the rights; they sent over a book as a manuscript, which is basically just a box full of pages. And you just flip through the pages and I said, “I know how to make this into a movie.”

I went into Sony. I pitched it to Sony. Sony got the rights for me. And so my name was never on the option agreement for that book. But a large part of adapting that book was my relationship with Daniel Wallace, and getting to know him, and getting to know sort of all the secrets of the book and figuring out what that was.

And the reason I have been active with Big Fish throughout all of these years is I have a great relationship with Daniel Wallace. And he has seen the project grow from this very nascent idea to now several different kinds of iterations.

Books I tried to get myself, or did get myself… — I remember going after this great book that I actually just found on the shelf this morning called Summer of the Monkeys. And I will find the actual author’s name and put up a link to it. Summer of the Monkeys was this great book that I remembered again from childhood, same situation as you. But, of course, it was a much easier title to remember because it is about a bunch of monkeys.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Summer of the Monkeys is this great story about this circus train that crashes, all of these monkeys get lost in these woods in the south, and this boy and his dog have to basically catch all of the monkeys. And he is getting paid money for each monkey he can bring back to the circus.

And it was a really great, charming story. Same guy that wrote Where the Red Fern Grows.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Rawls, I think, was his last name. I will find it.

So, I wanted to get the rights to this book, and at this point I don’t know if I even… — I guess I had an agent, but I was just doing this myself. And this was also pre-Internet age, so I had to flip to the front of the book, and you see who the publisher is. You call New York City information, because all of the publishing houses are in New York City.

This is actually, in the age of the Internet there is probably an online way to do this, but this was the old-fashioned way. You called New York information — (212) 555-1212. You ask for that publisher. You call that publisher. You ask for their sub-rights department. And this is what is called subsidiary rights. These are the people who represent the publishing rights on properties, or the non-publishing rights on properties. So, film rights, and everything else.

And they are the ones who will have the contact information for who owns the film rights on a book. So, I got this woman’s name, and this address, and I figured that this must be the wife of the author, the widow. So, I wrote a letter. I heard nothing for a couple weeks, wrote a follow up letter, and she finally wrote back and said that someone else had the rights, and she was really sorry.

And I eventually sort of forgot about it and got busy with other things. But they finally made a movie of that book, which I never saw.

**Craig:** Oh, somebody did make a movie of it?

**John:** Someone did. And it actually… — Dave Matthews is apparently in that movie.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Isn’t that so odd?

**Craig:** Yeah, that is. You know, the thing about rights is that they have become increasingly difficult because everybody who writes a book is seemingly already on the lookout to sell the film rights. And so a lot of them get snapped up. And sometimes it is particularly difficult when you are dealing with international titles.

Lindsay Doran, one of our favorite producers who we discussed in another podcast, brought me and Scott Frank a book that we wanted to adapt, a really cool book called Three Bags Full. And it was a German novel, and basically — it was a great idea — a shepherd in Ireland, in a little village in Ireland, is murdered. It’s a murder mystery. And his sheep take it upon themselves to solve the crime. [laughs]

And sheep, as it turns out, are particularly advantaged in certain ways, and incredibly disadvantaged in other ways, like their propensity to panic, and the fact that they can’t remember anything. And it was really great, and we really wanted to do it, but the rights were…

**John:** In your head was this going to be a live action movie or animated?

**Craig:** Yeah, it was going to be a Babe kind of deal.

**John:** Oh, perfect.

**Craig:** But, god, the rights were just so entangled with the German companies, and became very difficult. And the other day Lindsay and I were talking about it and we just thought it is never… we will never untangle that knot. It’s a shame, but you have to try at the very least.

**John:** A more recent example for me was Steve Hely wrote a great book called How I Became a Famous Novelist. And I read this little short book review blurb and said, “Well that sounds great.” So I tracked down… — I figured out that this one person who was doing a blog written in the author’s voice, the book is about a guy who writes a book.

And I was able to Google and find the writer of the book within the book, and that there was a blog that was sort of his self-important point of view. And I realized that Steve Hely himself is probably doing this blog. And so I just emailed at that address and said, “Hey, I’m John August. I have done these things. I really want to see your book. Can I see your book?” And they sent me an early copy.

I loved it. And because I sort of had been that first person to reach out, I was able to sit down with him and convince him that I was the person to adapt his book and to make it into a movie.

That ended up not being the case. And I ended up getting busy with a lot of other stuff that made it impossible to sort of do that movie, but reaching out directly to the author, when you can find a way to do that, is a great way to approach it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I should say that you have to, like in all things, you have to gauge your value. If you are a new screenwriter, or you have no track record, then don’t think you are going to be getting the rights to a popular title. It ain’t going to happen.

**John:** But there may be a smaller book that no one is actually approaching the rights on, and if you are a person who can do it, and you can convince that writer that you are the person who can do it, maybe you will get it.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so you probably won’t get things that are still in galleys, or unpublished, or on their way out. But these little things like the books you remember that are now out of print, or have just been languishing somewhere — those little uncovered gems — those are real opportunities for you.

And it also gives you quite a bit of leverage when you do write a screenplay, if you write a spec screenplay based on a title that you have rights, it does give you a bit of leverage when it is time to sell that script.

**John:** Yeah. Have you read How I Became a Famous Novelist?

**Craig:** I haven’t. No.

**John:** Oh, okay, well I am sending it to you like right now because it is great. I will also put a link to it in the show notes. It is still one of the funniest books I have ever read and someone else has the rights to it now. And they are going to make a movie, and it is going to be great.

**Craig:** Can you say who it is?

**John:** Oh, I don’t remember who it is. I don’t remember who got it. But Steve Hely himself ended up getting hired onto 30 Rock, and now he is working on The Office.

**Craig:** Oh great.

**John:** He is doing just fine, so there is really no sad part to this story, other than the fact that the movie didn’t get made.

**Craig:** By the way, it was me. I got the rights.

**John:** I thought so. It was some sort of clever pseudonym.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So to summarize our guidance on getting the rights to a book, I would say — this is my advice — if you have a way to contact the writer directly, try to contact the writer directly. If you don’t, you go through sub-rights at the publisher to try to find who the contact person is. If you already have an agent or a lawyer, they can help you there.

Ultimately when it came time to option the rights to How I Became a Famous Novelist, that is the thing that my lawyer did. My lawyer talked to his lawyer, and it was all happy and good. And, try it. People might say yes.

**Craig:** And be nice. And just remember that they have something that you want, so be respectful and seductive.

**John:** Yeah. Good. Our next question: CeCe, this person named CeCe asks, “When can you say you wrote a script? Something like Big Fish or Go are obvious. Go was a spec, and you were the only writer. And on Big Fish, although it was adapted from source material, you were the only listed screenwriter. But for something like Charlie’s Angels, there are other writers who share that credit, same with other panelists listed. Can or do those writers also say they wrote it? I guess a more specific question is, is there some sort of unspoken rule in the industry among writers about who claims credit out in the world? Does the guy who did most of the work generally say he wrote it, but subsequent writers that did enough credit, but weren’t the first writer don’t? Does it even matter?”

That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** That is a really good question. I think the last question in the series of questions is probably the operative one. I mean, look, it is a little… — Most of the movies that I have my name on, I am a co-writer, not an “and” co-writer but an “&” co-writer. I wrote with, in conjunction with, other people like Todd Phillips and Scott Armstrong, or David Zucker, or whatever, Pat Proft.

It is a little unwieldy at times to say, you know, “When I co-wrote blankety blank,” or “When I was co-writing such-and-such;” it is just unwieldy. It is just simpler to say “writing,” because the truth is the credits are a matter of public record. It is not like you are pulling a fast one over on anybody.

If you, I suppose, if I… — I don’t have any credits that are just “Story by.” If I were just “Story by” on a movie, I probably wouldn’t say I wrote it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would say I have a “Story by” credit on it. But, I guess the big question is does it really matter? Not really. To me at least. You know, if you worked on it, and your name is on it, your name is on it.

**John:** Yeah. I think I am with you in terms of I wouldn’t say I wrote a movie if… — I wouldn’t say I wrote or produced a movie if I only got “Story by” credit. And so on the upcoming Dark Shadows, I ended up just getting “Story by” credit. And I certainly worked on that movie; I can absolutely claim that. But I would draw a distinction between “worked on” and “wrote.” And I worked on Dark Shadows, and I worked on a lot of movies.

And Aline Brosh McKenna actually emailed me after I posted on my “About” section, or some other blog post, about the movies that I have worked on. And she was like, “Well, isn’t that sort of claiming credit for it?” And I said, “That’s an interesting discussion, whether I am claiming credit for things by acknowledging that I worked on these movies that don’t have my name on them.”

So, like I worked on Jurassic Park III. I worked on Minority Report. And I am not sort of claiming that those were mine, but the litmus test, the threshold I sort of had for which movies I worked on, is did my pen go all the way through that script? So, did I not just like drop in for one quick little moment and then drop back out? Was that entire script, and the responsibility for that whole movie, within my word processor for a period of time? And those are the movies I felt like I could honestly say I worked on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you could say you worked on those for sure, because that is accurate. For me, I’m a little different on it. I feel like the movies that I have done, that I have worked on but don’t have credit on, I don’t like talking about it because I feel like, hmm, how should I put it?

I just feel like it is probably a bummer for the people that do have credit. Because the truth is on a few of the them I don’t have a word in there. It was like you came in, and then suddenly the studio went, “Wait. Wait. We don’t want to do this kind of movie. We want to do this entirely different movie with different actors,” and all the rest of it. And I’m gone. My script doesn’t resemble what is up there. I don’t even ask for credit.

So, I just feel like it would be a bummer for them to go, “Oh, and then there is Craig Mazin out there saying that he worked on it.” Well, now, did he…

See, here is the thing that people have got to understand: Our writing credits’ rules state that you can, in certain circumstances like an original project, you can write nearly half of a movie and not get credit. So, if you say, “I worked on it,” that means you have done anywhere between zero and 50%. There is a certain vague…

So, my thing is I don’t talk about it. I just don’t. I don’t talk about it because I feel like, I don’t know. Because I don’t want people doing it to me. So don’t do that to me. You do it to everybody else. [laughs]

**John:** To me, I just feel that it is a little bit dishonest to talk about the career of screenwriting, and sort of like how I have actually made my living and not acknowledge the actual things I am working on. Because if you just look at the movies that I have made, that have my name on it, well that is great. But that is not really in some ways the bulk of what my career has been.

The bulk of my career has been a lot of things I sort of came in and carried along. I carried the football for a while on them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that is, I don’t know. To me, if you are being honest about what the actual day-to-day job of screenwriting and what the career of screenwriting is, sometimes it is that — being the person who carried this movie from this point to this point for awhile.

And in no way, whenever I talk about movies that I have worked on, and I don’t have my name on them, I try to make sure I am really clear about the fact that this isn’t my movie in any specific way. I don’t own this as my own, but this is the work I did on it, and this is why I did the work I did on it.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s fair. I mean, look, this used to be, I think, more of a controversy pre-Internet. If you get hired on something now, it is on the Internet because there are so many sites that rely on pumping out marginally interesting information about Hollywood.

So, you know, I get hired to do something and it is on some website. So it is part of the public record. But, it is a little…

Sometimes I think, you know, it is a bummer that the best work I have done probably — not the best work — some of the best work I have done will never be associated with my name. And some of the worst work I have done is associated with my name. And that, unfortunately, I don’t know; I chalk it up to part of the price of the job we do. So, we have two different answers to your question, CeCe.

**John:** Yeah. And in a general framework I should say we were talking about specific WGA screenwriting credit versus having worked on something. There is continually a discussion about should there be some kind of acknowledgement of participating writers in the end credits of movies, or something else. And the two sides of the debate are basically: no, there shouldn’t be, because it diminishes perceived value of the actual “Written by” credit; and then there is the other side of the argument that says, “Okay, what does this mean that you were acknowledging the catering truck driver, but you are not acknowledging the person who wrote a tremendous amount of this movie?”

**Craig:** Well one day we could fill an entire podcast I bet with that debate. Because that is a raging one. And I have, and I know this is going to surprise you, extraordinarily strong opinions about that. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It is going to be an Evergreen topic. That is never going to be solved, and it is never going to be solved to satisfaction.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s do our third and final question.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Ben asks, “What are your thoughts on what everyone else is calling the ‘Golden Age of TV.’ As a new writer trying to find a place, I am finding myself torn between the love of film, and also the lure of TV shows and networks such AMC, Showtime, HBO, and even new ventures on NetFlix. I was halfway through watching season one of Homeland and I started to get the bug to try to write a TV spec instead of a feature. Is it more realistic to become a working writer in TV nowadays than in film? What would you advise to a new writer? Pick TV or film?”

**Craig:** Hmm. Do you want to take a stab at that one first?

**John:** Yeah. You should write TV.

**Craig:** I think so. I mean, the only caveat is this: If you are a feature writer, you are a feature writer. Don’t force yourself into a square peg, sorry [laughs], into a square hole if you are a round peg. I don’t think my mind is structured in such way as to write television. I don’t think I would be very good at it. I tend to enjoy writing stories that are self-contained, that arc over 100 to 120 pages. That is just the way my mind works.

And, not surprisingly, I like going to movies more than I like watching TV. But in particular, if you like drama, specifically the kind of adult dramas that are flourishing right now on television, then television. Because they are not making those for movies anymore.

**John:** Not at all. I mean, there are whole genres that we have just conceded to TV, because TV is doing them better. And God bless it.

And if you look at, we talk about sort of auteur theory and filmmaker culture, and the way that people, these great movies of the 70s where you have these visionary people coming in and changing the way that cinema is. That is where we are at, I think, now with our TV. Our TV showrunners have come in with such a specific clear vision and a voice for what these shows are going to be. They are wielding these incredible writing staffs that are generating just amazing hours of television. And half hours of television, too. I think that is the unheralded thing now, too.

You look at the New Girl, which is a great half hour, that is specific and weird and amazing. I think the better writing is happening in TV. I think there are more jobs in TV.

**Craig:** No doubt.

**John:** Yeah. If you are a great writer who wants to work in TV, you should work in TV. And you will write some features, too, and it will all be happy and good. But that is where the excitement is. That is where the energy is. And it could swing back.

You know, I can see some of these TV showrunners are going to go back to film. And they may bring some of that awesomeness with them. J.J. Abrams is doing movies now. Joss Whedon is doing movies now. That is going to happen more and more. But, TV is still where the best stuff is happening.

**Craig:** Yeah. Again, for drama, for sure. It has as much to do, I think, with just the kind of audiences that these things address and the structure of the business. Adult audiences, I think, who are looking for drama are more likely to show up in business-satisfying ways for the companies for television than they are for film.

And so it makes sense that they would go ahead and then focus their firepower in television. Television is a little bit of a lower risk for them because, you know, you are not spending… — I mean a small studio movie, a small studio drama is $35 million. Big ones, you know, like for instance State of Play was a big bet. It was an adult drama. It was a big bet. I think it cost $100 million. TV shows don’t cost $100 million, at least not to start with.

So, it is a much lower risk bencher for them. There are more jobs. And there is a season to it. So there is a way; there is actually a protocol to follow to try and get hired. Movies, there is no protocol. It is kind of a crazy, like everybody is rushing into see The Who in Cincinnati, and hopefully you don’t get trampled.

There are much fewer movies being made, whereas television, reality kind of hit its peak and has pulled back a bit. And the other thing is television is unlimited by exhibition. You can keep making channels. The only thing that is stopping you from making more channels, I suppose, is the bandwidth of the delivery mechanism. But they keep squeezing that down in such a way that you can have 500, 600, 1,000 channels.

There are only so many movie theaters. There are only so many movie studios. So you are fighting over release dates. No one fights over a release date in television. There are so many reasons why television is a safer and more vibrant job market.

However, in addition to my caveat about if you are a movie guy write movies, if you are a comedy guy, I think movies are still a great place to be. Because television comedy is not yet back to where it was in its heyday, and I don’t know if it will ever get back there.

**John:** I think it will.

**Craig:** And if it does, that’s great. I mean, because a ton of guys really just suddenly found themselves outside in the cold going, “What happened?” And they are really funny people. I mean, it is funny — I was talking with, I won’t say who it was, but an excellent showrunner. Why not, I’m praising him? Steve Levitan. Great showrunner. Genius. And Modern Family is a terrific show. And he has been around forever.

And he was telling me how when they put their writing staff together for Modern Family it was like putting together an All Star team, because everybody was available. I mean, almost everybody, because sitcoms had been so decimated. So, hopefully those shows like New Girl and Modern Family help these networks see their way back to half hour sitcoms, because, man, I love sitcoms. I’ve always loved them.

**John:** Yeah. But I also think there is comedy that is happening at the edges, at sort of the edges of the dial. So the Portlandias, the weird little things that are right now off in sort of the cable universe where all of the great one-hour dramas sort of started. I think those half hours are starting off there.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Those shows are happening out in the cable universe. That sensibility will find its way back to the broadcast networks, and there will be more jobs. There will be more comedies like that.

**Craig:** I hope so. I mean, the good news is if you are a movie type of person and you writes comedy, there is still a strong desire on the part of studios to produce medium-budget comedies. And, frankly, all comedies are basically medium-budget. No one really spends a lot on them. You don’t need to.

But, yeah, the guy who wrote in and said that he is a Homeland fan, I think that tells us what kind of writer he is. And I would say, you don’t have to give up on movies, by the way, but yeah, television.

**John:** Television. You have two feature writers telling you to write in television.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** Maybe it is selfish. Maybe it is actually we just don’t want any competition, and that is why we are telling you to write television.

**Craig:** They are not competing with me. You are being selfish. I write silly movies. But, you know, look, they make dramas. I will say, if you want to be in the drama feature business, be a director-writer or writer-director. Guys like John Lee Hancock and James Mangold. These are guys who work in that area and they are able to generate material and direct. That is what the studios, I think, are looking for. Because if you are not writing action, like big action movies, it is tough.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah. Oh, we got depressing again, didn’t we?

**John:** So we are going to spin this back around. TV is great. It’s the Golden Age of TV. This is a great time to write TV. Hooray for TV!

**Craig:** Hooray for TV!

**John:** We are not going to go into that depressing mode again.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** It’s a happy podcast.

**Craig:** You know, I feel like an angel brought me to you.

**John:** Ah, thank you very much, Craig. This is terrific.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It is. It is all a dream.

**Craig:** So beautiful.

**John:** We have one last piece of business. Because so many of our listeners are presumably WGA members, the WGA asked if we could mention on the podcast about the survey which they sent out. If you are WGA member, you should be getting a survey in your email inbox which is about working conditions. So, it is specifically about features, I think, talking about who you have worked for, what the situation was like. It is all anonymous. You should really fill it out because it is how we can get report cards to studios and producers, and it is a very good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So if you are a WGA member, look for that in your mailbox. And if you don’t see it, you should email screensurvey@wga.org. And that is our piece of business there.

Craig, 25 podcasts!

**Craig:** 25 in the can, man. I mean, that is pretty great.

**John:** Yeah. It feels like quite an accomplishment. I remember when we were doing our first awkward podcast. It has gotten much, much easier.

**Craig:** I think so. And I wonder what we will be doing when it is like our 1,000th podcast, and we are both really old and irrelevant.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And by the way, and we are like still doing a podcast when the rest of the world is like, “Podcast?!”

**John:** I know. It will just be beamed directly into people’s brains.

**Craig:** Right. “Why aren’t they doing a Braincast? It is so lame.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, enjoy the phone calls from now, John.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, talk to you later.

**Craig:** All right, man. Bye-bye.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

**Craig Mazin:** I’m Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. This is episode 24, in fact. Scriptnotes is a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. And Craig, I’m in just the best possible mood, and I’m sure you can guess why.

**Craig:** Because, uh… Is it Glee-based?

**John:** Weirdly it is Glee-related, but it is not specifically Glee-based. What happened last Sunday, or as people are listening to this, two Sundays ago?

**Craig:** The Superbowl.

**John:** Well, yes, there was a sports game played, apparently. But, a very important thing happened on Sunday which I don’t think is getting enough cultural attention.

**Craig:** [laughs] A sports game?!?

**John:** Well, I don’t know. The judges picked who the best sports team was.

**Craig:** Judges. [laughs]

**John:** More importantly —

**Craig:** Yeah?

**John:** — a cultural event happened that as a listener to the show, I assume you listen to the show in addition to just talking on the show —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** — you would know is incredibly dear to my heart. What do I love more than anything?

**Craig:** Madonna?

**John:** No. Well, yeah, Madonna, fine. But whatever. Something even more important happened before, I think it was before Madonna in the show.

**Craig:** Was it one of the ads?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Um.

**John:** And even more than an ad. It was NBC’s promo for the whole network.

**Craig:** They did it. They actually did that thing.

**John:** They did that thing! That thing that I love more than anything on earth is a whole network promo where you see stars from various shows coming together.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** In this case singing a song together. So, it was pretty much just like a thousand Christmases for me.

**Craig:** And, the lens through which we both experience the Superbowl is so vastly different. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Now did you actually see it, or you just heard about it?

**Craig:** No, no. I saw it, but I didn’t care. I think I went to the bathroom. [laughs] But what was the song that they sang? What was their slogan?

**John:** Brotherhood of Man, which is from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And I thought maybe we would spend just a minute or two replaying it so I can kind of talk you through it. I can give sort of the viewer’s commentary on it.

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** So, some scene setting. We start off in 30 Rock. We are in Jack Donaghy’s office. And we have Liz Lemon and the whole cast there. And they are gathered together to watch the Superbowl. And there is random chit chat. The office is somewhat over lit, because you can tell it is not the real crew doing all of this. And some people look a little bit strange; they are not acting quite right. She is holding a big plate of nachos.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And then, Jack Donaghy starts singing. And it is not quite clear why he is singing. The only thing that is also weird you notice is this is early in the season for taping 30 Rock because Jack’s hair this season, for some reason, is much redder than it should be.

It’s like the hair dye just got a little bit off, and they decided, “Oh, to get rid of the gray, maybe we are going to go a little bit more — ” I don’t know, what’s that color? It’s like a dragon red.

**Craig:** [laughs] This is so funny to me. Keep going. This is great.

**John:** So now we move from 30 Rock. First we go to The Office, and so the three of them, the three sort of leads who are left on the show, sing their little bit. And it is a continuous one-shot. Then Parks and Rec. And then, come on, the Parks and Rec folks are great.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a good show. I like that show.

**John:** And Community. Community still exists as a show on NBC.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Which is encouraging. Ken Jeong doing a little hip swivel.

**Craig:** That’s my boy.

**John:** It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** My boy, Ken.

**John:** So now we are back at 30 Rock, and Liz is carrying her nachos. She and Jack are talking. They are doing their little mentors thing. And they are going into the main set where they do the show, the show that is completely implausible within the show —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** The thing called TGS. And Jane Krakowski gets to sing. Who, Jane Krakowski, by the way, is great. “Jane Krakowski from Go,” is what I always say, because she started off, you know —

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** — the first thing people know her from.

**Craig:** You should say, “Go’s Jane Krakowski.”

**John:** Go’s Jane Krakowski. Because the only other thing people would know about her before that would be Vacation. Because, you know, she is the girl in Vacation where, “Daddy says I’m the best kisser.” That’s her.

**Craig:** No way.

**John:** That is Jane Krakowski.

**Craig:** Really? I did not know that.

**John:** Okay. So now we have to cut away from here to Smash, which is of course a very natural cut here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Natural.

**John:** So Katherine McPhee and Megan Hilty are singing their belting their songs. And then the curtains open up, and then, like, the rest of the cast comes out really quickly and says, like, three lines. And you can’t even see it, it is such a wide shot. So if you are Debra Messing, you are probably not so happy.

But, then you go to Law & Order: SVU, and everyone from Law & Order: SVU is singing, except for the one guy, the hot guy who was in Oz, who was always naked on Oz. For some reason he is not here that day.

It’s a quick cutaway to Whitney and some other show that I don’t care about.

**Craig:** I have lost control, by the way. I just want people to know I am absolutely out of control right now.

**John:** Donald Trump shows up. And now the NBC news team is here.

**Craig:** Did they get naked?

**John:** They did not get naked. But now we are at the Saturday Night Live people who are all good singers. And so they are naturals for this. And it is weird how much Saturday Night Live has sort of taken over the comedy universe of NBC; so many of the people on all those shows are from SNL.

**Craig:** Yeah. They have cross-pollinated through the Parks and Recreation and 30 Rock.

**John:** And Alec Baldwin nearly falls over when he picks up the Rockette…

**Craig:** And was that it?

**John:** That was it. There is a little Jimmy Fallon tap dance number. And Jimmy is lovely, but the song is over. He is just sort of trying to mooch a little bit of energy.

**Craig:** So that, for you basically, they wrapped football pointlessly around that thing.

**John:** Yeah. It was basically an NBC promo/John August delivery vehicle.

**Craig:** Right. In a weird way the football was the promo for the show, which was the promo.

**John:** Exactly. It is like this was the hot dog, and they shoved the little medicine that the dog had to take inside the hot dog, and I ate it all up. So I ended up watching more football than I would usually watch.

**Craig:** The only thing that could have possibly made this gayer was the hot dog analogy. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] But, anyway, so I needed to share my satisfaction and my joy, because so often it is easy to talk about the bad things in life, and sort of like how the entertainment industry does things wrong. And so when they do something so amazingly right, I think we have to celebrate it.

**Craig:** You know what, listen man: passion. The key is to find something you love and be passionate about it. I’m from New Jersey. I love the Giants. It was a pretty good day for me.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You love those things. It was a good day for you. [laughs] I think just all around it was a great Sunday.

**John:** It was a great Sunday.

**Craig:** And our friend, Grant Nieporte… I never know if it is Knee-Port-Eh or Knee-Port.

**John:** It is so weird. Those people who you only see their names, especially because of online stuff. You only see their names online, and you have no idea how to pronounce them.

**Craig:** I think it might be Knee-Port-Eh, because I think it is Portuguese or something. But anyway, he is a screenwriter, and he and a bunch of other guys were the people behind the Doritos Slingshot Baby ad. And they collectively won $1 million.

**John:** Well that’s great!

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Hurrah!

**Craig:** How about that. I mean, he was like, “Well, but then, you know, after we all divided up I get $28,000, and then I have to pay taxes on it.” So it sounded much better than it was. But it still, I mean, it’s pretty good.

**John:** It’s still great.

**Craig:** Yeah. They win. That is the important thing. They win.

**John:** Winning is nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So other small things happened this week. We announced a new screenplay format called Fountain.

**Craig:** Fountain. This, actually, is an exciting thing. Tell them what it is.

**John:** So, Fountain is basically a screenplay markup language that is just plain text. So every fountain file is just a text file. You can open it in any text editor. You can write it in any text editor. What is different about Fountain versus just a normal plain text file is just how you lay it on the screen. So, it is basically what you think: character names are in uppercase; a line following a character’s name is dialogue; parentheticals are in parentheses; transitions end in “TO:”

It is very simple. It is very much how you would write on paper, if you were writing out on paper. Out of the box you can use any text editor. And the main screenwriting apps like Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, they will take these files really happily, and do a pretty good job interpreting them. New stuff is coming down the pike that will actually do great jobs natively with Fountain files, and will be able to interpret things like bolding, and centering, and sectioning.

And from Beth Schacter, a friend of ours, we have built in a feature called Boneyard, which is if you have a scene that you just want to omit, but you just want to leave it in place and omit it, you can just bracket it out, and it will just not be in your file anymore. It won’t show up or print.

**Craig:** That’s great. You know what I like about this? Eventually, they are going to… What I would love to be able to do on a set is have a script on my iPad. And then, if I really quickly wanted to make a change, take a pen, which I know Steve Jobs hates stylists in editing, but take a pen, cross it out, hit a button to insert, and then write very quickly a couple of new lines of dialogue. Hit a button it reincorporates it in. And then it prints them out.

And it seems like the first thing —

**John:** We are very close to that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Because you can’t really do that until… Because handwriting recognition goes to text, not to Final Draft gobbledygook markup. So, it seems like this is a very good step forward.

**John:** Yeah. And, weirdly, handwriting recognition is relatively simple, and kind of a solved problem. Speech recognition is getting much better now, too. So, it may just be as simple to tap where you want to tap, and just tell Siri what you want to put in there. I find myself using Siri a lot for sending myself reminders, or a text message.

**Craig:** Yeah. Me too.

**John:** There’s good news down the road.

**Craig:** That is a good point, that you would be able to speak it in there. I like it. Good job. Nice work from the skunkworks.

**John:** Skunkworks, yeah. So, there is nothing to buy with Fountain. And that is one of the sort of hard things to communicate is people are used to, like there is a product announcement, “So where do I buy it, where do I get it?” And the point we try to communicate is that you already have it. It’s a way of using any text editor you have on your iPad, on your computer, on your phone you can do it in mail if you want to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s a way of laying that out and just getting those files into screenplay format down the road.

**Craig:** And where can I buy this?

**John:** Yeah. Exactly. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** No problem. I’m interested in this product. How can I buy it, and how much does it cost?

**John:** Yeah. So I spent yesterday doing screen caps to sort of talk through different workflows on how to do things. And screen caps seem like a really easy thing to do, because it is just talking. It’s a lot like what we are doing right here. But you are trying to talk while you are also moving stuff around on the screen, and it gets to be really confusing, and really cognitively draining.

So, I sort of burned out yesterday. And Ryan and Stuart were downstairs doing their work, while I was up here trying to record this. And so they would hear me say, like, the same half of a sentence about twenty times. And I’m sure they wanted to kill themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, they probably already showed up at work wanting to kill themselves, but then that pushed them over the edge.

**John:** There is a reason we all wear headsets in this office, so we don’t have to hear each other.

**Craig:** I love it. You guys are like the Borg Collective over there.

**John:** Yeah. We are. We are very Borg.

**Craig:** By the way, I met Rawson Thurber yesterday.

**John:** Oh, Rawson’s awesome.

**Craig:** Great guy. I met him at a roundtable, and he was terrific.

**John:** Context for people who don’t know every detail about my life: Rawson Thurber was one of my very first assistants. And he was my assistant on a terrible TV show called D.C., and stuck with me after I got fired off that show. And during the time that he worked for me, he directed the Terry Tate Office Linebacker commercial, and wrote what became Dodgeball.

**Craig:** Very funny guy. Smart guy. But, I’m starting to put a little something together, John August. So, you also have one of your other former assistants is Chad Creasey.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I met Chad Creasey. And I don’t want to malign screenwriters, but we are not the handsomest looking bunch in the world. You know what I mean? You get a WGA gathering together, you look around, it’s like, “Boy, slim pickings!” Okay? I mean, Chad Creasey though, boy, this is a good-looking guy. And, I meet Rawson Thurber yesterday; I go, “Uh-huh. This is another pretty good-looking guy.”

I just want you to know I am on to you.

**John:** Well, Dana Fox is an attractive woman.

**Craig:** That was a mistake. It is accidentally attractive. You didn’t know. You don’t know. I know what is going on. I’m just saying, “I know what is going on.” And now everybody knows what is going on.

**John:** Well, clearly working for me does make people more attractive.

**Craig:** That was my point. That was my point.

**John:** Yeah. Hey, let’s do some questions. Let’s open the mailbag.

**Craig:** Awesome. Let’s do it.

**John:** All right. Sam in Brooklyn writes, “Hi there. I was wondering the proper format for a musical number in a teleplay. Here is the thing I plan on writing in the musical number.” That is actually not worthy of being spoken aloud. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Basically he is asking what is the proper format for —

**Craig:** Please keep that in there. That was great.

**John:** — What is the proper format for a musical number in a teleplay? And it is a completely valid question.

When you are doing a real Broadway show, there is a special format where the lyrics go off on the left hand margin, they are uppercase.

In movies and teleplays, it is not such a clear cut format, because there is not a way that we always do it. I have written a lot of songs in movies, and what I usually end up doing is putting the… It is like a dialogue block, but it is in italics. I will often move it from Courier to Verdana, or some sort of Sans-Serif face that can squeeze a little bit more onto a line. I will cheat the margins a little bit if I have to, to keep a line together.

And then rather than putting slashes in there, I will break it line by line. And so you sort of do the soft returns so that you can keep individual lines in dialogue in the songs.

**Craig:** That makes sense. I don’t think I have ever written a full musical number in the sense of a full song with verse/chorus/verse sort of thing. I have had, obviously, characters sing. And for that, usually, I just do it in dialogue, and I just italicize and do like “shift return” so that the lyrics get each line. But I guess your way makes sense. It is an interesting one.

**John:** If you want to look at sort of how I did it for Big Fish, I think that is the only thing I have in the library that shows it. I have a song Twice the Love in there, which is the song that the Siamese twins sing. And you can see the whole lyrics for that. And that is how we did it.

**Craig:** I believe that question has been answered.

**John:** Done. Checked.

**Craig:** Next.

**John:** I will go into OmniFocus, and I will put a little tick mark right by there.

Luke from Poland, the actual Poland, writes, “I have been seeing the term ‘overall deal’ on a lot of different sites. And I was wondering how they work for writers. For example, I read that a deal like that for some high level TV writer is worth seven figures for two years. Does that mean a writer-producer gets a salary regardless of what he does? Or is that figure contingent on how much work is actually done by the writer?”

**Craig:** Eh, both really. I mean it is a guarantee. In other words, they are saying, “We are going to make a deal with you. We are going to pay you, let’s say, $2 million over the course of two years. And in exchange for that $2 million, you owe us a pilot. You owe us a script.” And they spell out what you owe them.

If you write beyond that, I suppose it would be negotiated, an additional amount would be negotiated. But essentially they are saying this is the baseline of what we are going to pay you for sure.

**John:** Exactly. So, they give you an overall deal because they want to keep you working for that studio/network. They want your next thing. They don’t want you slipping away to another network for six years on another hit show; much more common in TV land than in feature land. There are very few feature writers now who have overall deals in place.

Seth Grahame-Smith and his writing partner just made some sort of deal at Warner Brothers for that. Joss Whedon for awhile had a deal like that at Fox.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But most of those cases are also folded into TV deals. So it is hard to pull them apart, one to the other. And then there are also sort of mega-producer people, like J.J .Abrams who is producing movies, directing movies, writing some movies, too. He has a deal at Fox, but that is really —

**Craig:** That’s a producing deal, yeah.

**John:** Yeah. That is a different class of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I had an overall feature deal at Miramax a number of years ago. And it was structured in such that there was a guaranteed amount of money over the course of — I think it was two years. And for that, the way we worked it out was they are guaranteeing me this, whether I write a word for them or not. Then we sort of preset with each kind of writing what it would be worth. So here is what a rewrite would be worth; here is what a first draft is worth; here is what a polish is worth.

And then as I did those things, they would apply that against the amount that they were guaranteeing me. And so if I went over, then I would get more. If they asked for less, I would still get the minimum guarantee.

**John:** Was that a good deal for both of your sides? Because in some ways it kind of rewards you for not working, doesn’t it? Because they are drawing down off of things they are going to pay you anyway.

**Craig:** It was probably… It was a fair deal, I think, given that it was understood that they were going to be… It was an interesting time, with an interesting company.

I mean, the truth is it was a better deal for me because what I was giving them in addition to the writing was a certain amount of comfort. Basically, “We like you, and we don’t want you to go anywhere else. And we want you to be here when we need you. So we are going to pay a premium to make sure you are not busy when we need you.”

So, maybe I do 70% of the amount that I would normally have to do to even make that amount of money, but when they want me to write I was available to write.

**John:** A lot of people assumed I had an overall deal at Sony because I was just working for them for such a long time. But mostly what happened is they bought the rights to Big Fish for me, and said, “Oh, great, you can adapt this book. But, hey, would you do this little bit of work on this script first? And then this script, and then this script.” And basically just kept putting things in front of Big Fish.

And so Big Fish was always something I owed them. I always had to do Big Fish, but there was always something that they would slip in front of it. And so Big Fish just kept getting pushed back further and further. It wasn’t a bad thing for me. I was able to sort of build up my quote, job after job after job at Sony, and get good stuff done. And I was delighted to work for them. But it wasn’t like an overall deal; I was free to go other places.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wouldn’t do it again. I think at the time that I did it, it made sense for me. But, frankly, I would much rather be available now to work for a good director, find a great piece of material, find a great actor. I am just more interested now in following the material as opposed to a home.

But listen, this is a difficult business, and it is a scary business. And when you are raising a family, you know, security has real value. And at the time it made sense.

**John:** There is also a value to working with people you like to work with. And if there is a studio or network that you get along with especially well, maybe there is a good reason to keep going back to that same place.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a, um, and I think everybody kind of has maybe this never goes away but for a while in your career I think there is a gnawing hunger for appreciation. And when you find people that really get you, and like what you do, it is hard to then leave that and go work for people, frankly, who may not like what you do at all when you have done it.

And, that is something that you have to actually concentrate on weaning yourself off of, I think. Better to not chase that stuff, and chase just the material itself.

**John:** One last thought I had about the TV overall deals. Josh Friedman, I think, made an overall deal with Fox. And when he didn’t have a show running on Fox, they would ask him to go in as a consulting producer on an existing show. So, I think, this last year he worked as a consulting producer on Finder.

And that is kind of good for everybody because you have an experienced person who can go in there and help, and help write shows, and help break stories. So if they are not busy doing their own show, they can help out on an existing show. So that is another reason why TV, in particular wants to hold onto those experienced people.

**Craig:** Yeah. In TV it makes the most sense, for sure.

**John:** Next question. Mischa from Toronto. “Last year I wrote a screenplay called,” this is a long one, “The 8 Ways I Could Have Kissed the Tall Lanky Jew: Based on the Pathetically True Events, as well as Memories Too Exquisite for Existence, as told by a Highly Sensitive Person.”

That’s a long title.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** “Last week, I was doing some research, just briefly Googling the phrase Tall Lanky Jew, just to see if there was some other movie or book that had a variation of my title.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** “There were no books or movies, but I came across a Jewish man’s blog entitled Tall Lanky Jew. In the event that I sold my screenplay to a studio, and had it in wide release in theaters, would I be legally obligated to pay this individual money? Does he already own the copyrights to the term Tall Lanky Jew?”

**Craig:** No. No. You can’t copyright a title. Titles are, actually movie titles exist outside of the realm of copyright, but they are managed by the MPAA, so, all of the member studios of the MPAA, the Motion Picture Association of America. And that covers, essentially, every big studio you know. They have to register the titles with the MPAA which is their trade organization. And then the MPAA acts as a referee to make sure that basically Sony can’t come out with a movie called The Hangover to try and trade confuse and market confuse.

But, that aside, no. You don’t have anything to worry about, other than your absurd title. [laughs]

**John:** So, let’s start with her title. Her title is — I don’t know how many words that is.

**Craig:** It’s a lot.

**John:** 40 word title. Sometimes on spec scripts that does happen, where you write just a crazy long title because it is just memorable for being so long. The movie that became American Pie had some famously long title, which I will look up on Google. But, Words, Words, Words, Words, Words that can be Shot for Under $10 million and Make $100 billion. It had like a very provocative title.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was like American Sex Comedy That Can Be Shot For Less Than —

Yeah, I mean, and that is a trend lately. I have noticed people are doing these kind of run-on titles, frankly just to separate themselves from the pack. And it does add a certain weird kind of honesty to the script. In the same way that in marketing departments the no-frills titles become incredibly attractive to them, like Horrible Bosses. What’s it about? It is about horrible bosses. They are not going for anything other than no-frills. But it is a trend.

And the trend will not save your bad script. Nor will bucking the trend hurt your great script.

**John:** I would agree. Tall Lanky Jew could be trademarked. Someone could probably trademark that. And then there would be an issue. Trademark is a whole separate thing, and if you are not seeing the TM there, no one has trademarked it.

**Craig:** Yeah. The trademark would be if they were selling products under the trademark of Tall Lanky Jew, and that your movie could somehow create marketplace confusion where people might think that they were somehow involved, but that is not the case. It is a blog. You don’t have anything to worry about.

**John:** Speaking to the MPAA title things, with The Nines we had to go through a fight for our title, The Nines, because there were competing projects. There was that animated movie 9. There was the Rob Marshall-directed musical Nine. And there was something else that had… There was a movie called Nine Lives that came out at the same time.

So, fortunately we were one of the first people to register, and so we were able to sort of win the first couple of rounds. And then we had to go through and actually give permission for the other movies to use that title.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it is this whole kind of Kabuki, because you are not really going to be a jerk about it, and no one is going to get these things confused. But we had to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There is a producer who I will not mention who told me that he basically registers titles. Like he comes up with ideas for titles, and then just registers them. And, in fact, has made money essentially extorting studios who do development material under that title. Draw your own conclusions.

**John:** Our last question for the day is from Christopher. “I’m a novelist working on a text which is set immediately preceding the Russian Revolution, and am having trouble composing the dialogue. The issues are great in number. I am having trouble working through the fact that some characters are English, and others are Russian, and sometimes they speak either language. I am finding it hard to make Russian sound more Russian than the English dialogue. Basically, how do I do this?”

That can be a real problem. If you are having characters… Like what language characters are speaking in movies when they really should be speaking a different language.

**Craig:** But he is writing a novel, he said.

**John:** He said a novel, but let’s just, whatever. We are mostly about screenwriting, so let’s talk about screenwriting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I mean, you have had that situation with characters speaking other languages.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. I mean, basically if they are speaking other languages, your choice is —

Well, obviously, are they speaking another language, or are they speaking accented English?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** If you go with them speaking the other language, you just have to make a point in the action. “They speak in Russian and we see subtitles.” And then you just write the dialogue in English.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I have to say for a novel, I have no idea what his problem is. You just write.

**John:** Just write.

**Craig:** Yeah. Just write.

**John:** He is having trouble with voice, though. Let’s talk about him as a novelist, first. Writing dialogue in novels kind of blows anyway. It is, like the times I have had to do prose fiction, I always find dialogue especially challenging because just the weird deal we make with the reader. You are going to ignore all the “he says” and “she says,” but they are going to be there. And we have the weird thing with the double quotes, and where the comma goes it is just really strange how we do it in English.

Spanish and other languages are much more natural. They use dashes or just different ways to sort of mark off what people are saying.

I think what he is having trouble is in places where they are supposed to be speaking Russian, it is written in English, and it just feels like English, so you don’t have a sense that anything is different or special.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I think that he is concerned based on a false premise. I’m guessing that what his issue is is that he is thinking of these Russians the way that Russians speak when they are speaking English, which is a weird stilted thing. But when they speak Russian, they are as fluid as English people speaking English.

A good example is City of Thieves, which is a novel by our friend, David Benioff, who is also an excellent screenwriter and television writer. And that takes place entirely in St. Petersburg, with a brief prologue in America. And everybody is Russian, and everybody speaks English, of course, because he is an English author.

**John:** He is not trying to create a false accent in English.

**Craig:** No, of course not. That’s the point. Really, if you understood Russian fluently, your understanding of those words would be no different than English. I don’t see what the problem is. I deny this question.

**John:** Let’s try to apply this question though a bit to screenwriting. And you mentioned before that in a screenplay, if you have a character who is going to be speaking in subtitles, on the page you tend to, either the first time, or a couple times if it is going to be confusing, you do a parenthetical, say like “Subtitled” or “English Subtitled” or “Russian Subtitled.”

Sometimes it makes sense to put the words in italics just so people get a sense that it is different, so you can understand, “Okay, the other characters who are only speaking English won’t be able to understand what is happening here.” But there are times where you need to have — think of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The remake of it was shot entirely in English, but they did use some accent and some word choices just to give you a feel that this wasn’t happening in English. And that is a subtle thing. And that’s a real thing. You can’t deny me that.

**Craig:** No. I can’t. I wouldn’t. But I also would caution against building that into the script itself. To me, that is so much a function of how you cast the movie, and how you direct the movie. And if you start to build that into the screenwriting itself, I think you start running into a little bit of trouble.

I mean, here and there you can pepper it in a little bit. Look, you have to acknowledge your characters. The script I am writing right now, there are a couple of characters who are Israelis, and one of them speaks English, and one of them doesn’t. So, the one who speaks English converses in sort of a broken English with people, and then translates for her friend, and then they have little arguments. And then she turns back and delivers the verdict.

But I don’t really write out the Israeli stuff. Occasionally I will if there is a little punctuation, or something like that. And similarly, when she is talking to people, I try and not get too pidgin English, because my feeling is ultimately what is most important is the flavor of what we are trying to get across here. Somebody is going to have to actually deliver that. So much of that comes in the performance.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, look, the more you pen the actor in with the specificity of the language, the more you are going to get just your version of what that would be, as opposed to maybe what their version is, particularly when you are employing actors who, in fact, are not American.

I would much rather have a Swedish actor tell me how a Swedish person would say it.

**John:** That’s a good point. When we were doing one of our readings of Big Fish, I had to have on the first day the general discussion to the whole group saying, “This is a story that takes place in the American South. It takes place specifically in Montgomery, Alabama, but we cannot let specificity get in the way of understandability.”

And, so, I wanted to caution everybody against sort of the Accent Arms race, where one actor chooses to do a really crazy specific accent, and everyone else feels like they have to reach that level. And then day by day it would get worse and worse. You want this sprinkling of the American South.

And I was specific enough to say, like, “We are still rhotic; like the letter R still exists. Characters go off to War, they don’t go off to a Wah.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “The letter G has taken a holiday. So we are always dancin’ and singin'”. But I didn’t want any more than that. And that is the kind of thing that on the page I try to give a sense of what the language feels like, but I am not going to take off every G off of every ING. It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Exactly. If how the actors deliver the lines is part and parcel with what your dramatic intention is as you write the screenplay, in a global way, not an individual line, but globally I don’t want this to sound like Gone with the Wind. It is okay to do a little prologue, a little advisory. There is no problem with that. But you just don’t want to get caught in, like, yeah —

It gets really annoying to read every single IN’ on every single gerund. It gets annoying. And also the script just seems stupid at that point. Like, come on, you know. Get out of here!

**John:** I once made a horrible mistake. [laughs] I was talking to a friend of mine, who is actually my agent, David Kramer, and I said something about… It may have been in relation to Big Fish, like when were down shooting. And I said something about like how I always tend to underestimate people with a southern accent, just because I have been conditioned by popular culture that people from the south aren’t as smart.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And he was like, “You know I had a southern accent when I got here?”

**Craig:** Yeah. He is from Florida.

**John:** Yeah. He is from like the south part of Florida. He is from the part that actually has an accent.

**Craig:** I thought he was from Northern Florida?

**John:** That’s what I am saying. So he is —

**Craig:** Oh, I see. I thought you meant the south part of the state. Yes. He is from Northern Florida which is, in fact, deep south. That’s true.

**John:** And so it is interesting. And, so then of course the minute he told me that, I’m going back through all of the previous conversations where I mocked something about a southern accent.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, you know, he can take a punch.

**John:** He can take a punch.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, what a great podcast.

**Craig:** Yes. This was a fun one. It was a great one. I like all of these questions that people ask; it makes our lives super easy.

**John:** It does. Good fodder for discussion.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So thank you. Please keep sending those in. My standard disclaimers: if you have a question for us to answer, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. For anything that we talked about here, including NBC’s Brotherhood of Man, we will provide links to that on the show notes. And the show notes are always on johnaugust.com.

If you are subscribing on iTunes, usually those links come through clickable, and great, and lovely. Also, if you are a person who sometimes enjoys podcasts, but sometimes enjoys reading with your eyes, we do have transcripts of all of our previous episodes online at JohnAugust.com, so you can check back; usually a couple days after the podcast is posted we will have the full transcript for you.

**Craig:** Remarkably efficient.

**John:** We try.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** Thanks, Craig. Have a good week.

**Craig:** Thanks. You, too, John. Bye-bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-happy-funtime-smile-hour).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is episode number 23, and this episode will not be depressing.

**Craig:** No. This is going to be uplifting, exciting, enlightening, life affirming.

**John:** Because you know what? That last podcast, we talked about some serious issues; we did some good, but I think, we also did a little harm, if I take another listen to it. It is kind of suicide inducing. It was depressing. It was realistic in a way that is not necessarily always helpful.

It was like Lars von Trier snuck in to the last 20 minutes of the podcast, and just said, “Do it. I will take over from here. There’s no hope.”

**Craig:** Well, but as you point out, this is the… That is the podcast that gets us an Oscar. We don’t get —

**John:** Oh!

**Craig:** — we don’t get nominations for this podcast, or the goofy ones. That one, though, that may be the one.

**John:** Yeah. I wonder how soon there will be like genuine podcast awards? I’m sure there is some sort of podcast award happening right now, because there is an award for everything. But, I feel like podcasting is an emerging form, that cultural signifier. It is something that will eventually become better acclaimed. And once it becomes better acclaimed, how will they award it?

**Craig:** You think that there is going to be like Poddies and things like that?

**John:** Yeah. Although, what are the equivalent radio awards? There must be radio awards; I’m trying to think about that.

**Craig:** There are, but nobody cares about them. There are radio awards, but they are — yeah, nobody cares.

**John:** Nobody cares.

My week is better than it was last week, for a couple of reasons. First off, I’m no longer on heavy allergy medication. That helps.

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

**John:** I have a brand new to-do organizer thing, which I love. So, what are you using to keep track of, like, the stuff you have to actually get done? What is your system?

**Craig:** You know, you were the first person to ever even reveal to me that there was this thing out there of to-do systems. And you turned me on to that whole FTL, FTC, TBD —

**John:** GTD, yeah.

**Craig:** — GTD, yeah. It is like GTL from Jersey Shore. And I bought the book because, you know, I like to try things.

You are one of those guys, when you say, “You should try something,” I always think, “Yeah, it is worth a shot.” Like I tried the crazy Dana Fox upright typewriter for, like, two minutes. I’m like, “What is this? I can’t do this.” It’s in my garage. Oh, my kids play with it.

And that thing, the to-do thing, I tried. But the truth is: I actually don’t need a system. I just feel like I get stuff done. I don’t know, am I weird?

**John:** No. You are not weird. I mean, stuff will get done; it is a matter of sort of how stressful your life is while that stuff is getting done. That is what I found to be most useful about these systems. And I have gone back and forth between some, and have been incredibly religious and dogmatic about it sometimes; I have been much looser about it sometimes.

Where the systems tend to be best is when you have a bunch of little things you need to get done, and they just keep stacking up every day. You have piles of tasks, and it is a great way of plowing through the piles of tasks. So, for a lot of the stuff related to apps, like the stuff we are developing, and two new products we are pushing out the door in the next two weeks, there is a lot of stuff like that that I have to keep on top of that is really time sensitive. It’s great for that.

And just for getting stuff out of your head and into your systems so that you are not thinking about it and stressing out about it. Because most of what stresses you out isn’t really the work that you have to do, it is kind of remembering the work that you have to do. And so you end up spending a lot of brain cycles thinking about the stuff that you can’t forget about.

And if you just had it down on paper, or had it in some other system, you wouldn’t stress out about it so much. It’s good for that.

**Craig:** It’s weird. Of all the problems I have, and I have got a ton of them, that has just never been a problem for me. I remember the things I have to do.

And, by the way, I remember them down to tiny, little details. I have like a weird Rainman-y ability to know all of the things that need to be done. And sometimes, if it is a really tiny, little thing that I know I am going to forget, I just write it on a little slip of paper. But most of the time I don’t really need a system. And I don’t forget to do things.

On the other hand, I was late for this podcast. So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah. This has not been one of your finer days in terms of getting stuff together for this. But, that happens to everybody.

**Craig:** Hey, you know what? I will tell you what, man: someone called, and I couldn’t get off the phone. It was one of those. It was one of those conversations where I could not get off the phone. I wanted to get off the phone. It wouldn’t have been cool if I had gotten off the phone. It is one of those deals. Like, I have a friend, who we both know, a mutual friend. And he works in the same… he has an office in the same building.

**John:** We both know him. He might be your friend, but actually my mortal enemy.

**Craig:** He is no one’s mortal enemy. [laughs]

**John:** He is just the nicest guy ever, right? Yeah.

**Craig:** He really is. When you hear the story you will say, “Oh, no, that was ridiculous. He is no one’s mortal enemy.”

He and I have offices in the same building. And about two years ago, he stopped into my office, he knocked on the door, and he wanted to chat. And the thing was, I had a cold, and I was on a deadline, and I was miserable. And I just said, “Oh, I’m so sorry man, I can’t talk to you right now. I can’t. I’m just in the worst mood, and I have got to get this done. I have a cold; I’m so sorry. I have a cold.”

I felt like, you know, when you say you have a cold it really excuses a lot, because you are sick. And he was like, “Oh, no problem. No problem.” And he walks out, and then at the end of the day he sends me an email to tell me that he had just stopped by to tell me that he had been diagnosed with cancer.

That was, I mean, I was… “I have a cold. Don’t talk to me right now. I have a cold!” “Oh really? I have cancer.” Ugh. So, that is why there are times when you just, you know what? You should have the conversation. Just have the conversation. Be late for the podcast; it is probably for the best.

**John:** So someone else had to call you to tell you that they have cancer.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Okay. Good.

**Craig:** No. No. It wasn’t anything like that at all. In fact, it was frivolous, and I should have just gotten off the phone, but I couldn’t. Sorry.

**John:** I hate being on the phone. I hate phone calls now. I have come to resent every time the phone rings, because it is almost never ringing for a good purpose. It is always somebody who is, like, just going to steal some of my time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not, I mean, there are phone calls that are fun to do and the rest, but it is true that most of the things that actually happen in life that are good happen face to face. This phone stuff —

That is why I could never be an agent. They are on the phone all day. It never ends.

**John:** Yeah. It’s never good. So, we got on a tangent there. What I am so happy about with my new system, I switched over to OmniFocus, finally, because I used to use OmniFocus and there were some things I didn’t like about it, so I switched to Things. And then I didn’t like Things, so I kept going through various systems. I was on paper for a long time. I had a little Moleskine notebook.

OmniFocus has gotten really good, again, in the last year or whenever; since the last time I paid attention to it, it got really good. And one of the actual great things about it now is if you have an iPhone with Siri on it, you can say, “Siri, remember to call Craig Mazin.” And it will create that reminder, and it will go straight to OmniFocus, so it is just on your list.

So, like, while you are out walking the dog, that thought comes to you, you have a place to put it. And that is what I find, probably, most useful about any sort of system for getting things done is just to, like, when that stuff happens, to capture it, and get it out of your head so you can focus on other things.

**Craig:** I think maybe as you spoke about that, I started to realize why maybe the reason that I don’t do these things is because I find that I am a very impulsive person. When it comes to my mind to do something, I do it. Because, and I know that people behave in different ways; some people like to defer these things to the right time.

But, I’m that guy who is just like, “Oh, that’s right. I need to call somebody. I am calling them now.” And then I will leave a message. But I am an impulse doer. I’m an impulse purchaser/buyer. That’s my thing. So, maybe it is just a reflection of my personality.

**John:** I would say in general that is a good way to approach many things. You shouldn’t defer things if you can do it right now. And, so, a lot of times I will be in a meeting with somebody about a project, or about a movie, or a name will come up say, like, “I wonder if that person would be in our movie?” And I say, like, “Well, let me call them right now, and see if they will be in our movie.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s a very good overall system. But there are times where you can’t do that, or it is 11 o’clock at night, so you are not going to be able to do that. Or, it is really a bigger idea that is going to have many steps along the way. Well what do you do with that bigger idea?

And as writers, you need to capture that little bit of dialogue, that little bit of, “Oh, here is an idea for how to do something.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And I have found it incredibly beneficial just to write that down. I always have this notebook in the bathroom so that at three in the morning I can run in there, and write down that good bit of dialogue that I thought of. And it is the same kind of thing for the stuff that I need to get done.

**Craig:** Right. It is a horrifying feeling waking up, going to bed, and as you are falling asleep going, “Oh, that’s it. I got it. I know exactly how the scene should go.” And then you wake up in the morning, and you can’t remember. It is a horrifying feeling.

**John:** Never let yourself do that. Always go to the bathroom, write it down.

**Craig:** Go to the bathroom. Write it down.

**John:** Yeah. And the other good thing I will talk about, and then I will shut up about the system, is I have added a list for Brain Dead. So, basically, you have projects which are… Projects are anything that involve more than one step. So, this thing I am writing for Fox, that is a project. And I have all the little things in there related to that, that have to get done for it.

There is also Context. And contexts are the situations that you find yourself in. So, I have a context for work. I have a context for Ryan Nelson, who is a graphic designer who I work with, so next time that I see him I need to talk to him about these things.

I created a context called Brain Dead for when I have absolutely no energy or will to do anything. It is, like, 5 o’clock at night, I have really stupid little tasks that I can burn off there that are things that actually need to get done, but I shouldn’t try to do them when I have energy to do anything real. So, it is a good way to use that time where otherwise I would be spending it clicking through websites, or doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Right. Yes.

**John:** Or playing Skyrim.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m suspicious of this —

But this is, what, you are German. This is why Germany does so well at everything they do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Other than large-scale dual-front world wars.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Single-front wars they are awesome.

**John:** Yeah. Well, does anyone thrive on dual-front wars?

**Craig:** No one has managed to pull one off successfully except for the United States.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. We actually were able to. We did that. We pulled it off.

**John:** Yes. But, granted, my knowledge of military history is incredibly slight, but what I would say is that we came into that war so late, in a way, that we sort of got in on the tail end of that goodness, and on the European goodness, and then had to do the Asian — the Pacific War ourselves.

**Craig:** Yeah. We hit Pacific pretty hard right off the start. Definitely eased in to the European theater, no question. Yeah, because Pearl Harbor was 1941. We went right into it in the Pacific. And then D-Day was ’44, I believe. Yeah.

**John:** See, all these details are murky to me because they haven’t reached that period yet in Downton Abbey, so I don’t have the context for it.

**Craig:** [laughs] That is tragic. [laughs]

**John:** Now, one thing that you do have, you do find the time to do, which I cannot believe you find the time to do, is to respond in online forums to incredibly esoteric questions. And that is what I think we will spend the bulk of our time doing today.

**Craig:** What am I doing?! I’m so stupid.

**John:** What are you doing?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** So, I will set us up on this, because there is a forum, an online forum, called Done Deal Pro.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, tell me what it even really is? I don’t go on, so explain it.

**Craig:** The name alone makes me laugh, because Done Deal Pro implies that there are pros there, and that deals are done, and neither of those things occur. But it is not a bad place. I think if you are an aspiring screenwriter, it is donedealpro.com, and it has got all sorts of things you can pay for. I don’t pay for any of it, personally. Maybe there is use in some of those —

**John:** You are kind of opposed to paying for things like that.

**Craig:** I mean, I don’t know what they offer, so I can’t evaluate it, because I refuse to pay for it. [laughs] So I don’t know what it is.

But, there is a free forum. And the forum is, like every Internet forum, full of interesting people, and actually a few quite talented people, I think. I have read a couple of scripts that I was impressed with. And then cranks, and idiots. But by and large, I think the tendency there is for people who mean well, who are serious about being screenwriters, and who are trying quite hard, and quite seriously, to do it, and want to learn.

And Derek Haas sort of pulled me on this one.

**John:** Derek Haas, who does somehow find extra time in the day to do all of these things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** When he is not like, you know, recording songs on YouTube and other things.

**Craig:** Right. And writing novels. Yeah. He pulled me in, and I got frustrated pretty early on because I felt like what was going on was a lot of people – who had no experience as a professional screenwriter – giving other people – who had no experience as professional screenwriters – the kind of advice that requires experience as a professional screenwriter.

So, it was just the blind leading the blind. There is a ton of bad advice in there. And I got kind of frustrated, and said, “You guys have got to stop doing that.” But then, unfortunately, what that means is then I have to start doing it. And I’m just, not like I am the Oracle of Delphi, but we did have after —

Because a lot of the questions are the sort of inane questions that professional screenwriters roll their eyes at like, “How do you format? And should you use is it okay to use voice-over?” And all these really just grindy questions. It is like, “I don’t know, is the script good?” That’s all anybody cares about. Is the script good?

But, there was finally a very, very, very interesting thread, I thought, and it is going on right now about the central dramatic argument.

**John:** And when you say it is going on right now, literally, there are new posts from today and yesterday. It is up to 43 web pages, so that is like 430 entries probably —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A long thread. And you are a good 30 or 40 of these entries.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m an idiot. [laughs]

**John:** This thread, and I haven’t read all of it, because I couldn’t possibly read all of this.

**Craig:** Put it on your Brain Dead list. [laughs]

**John:** We will link it in the show notes.

**Craig:** No. I think you should do it at 5 o’clock, when you are really tired. [laughs]

**John:** So there will be a link to this in the show notes. But it is the central question here. Someone asks, “What is the difference between theme and central dramatic argument?” And your response is?

**Craig:** Well, central dramatic argument is a phrase that I basically made up, although then one guy found like an example of it in a book from 1950 as if to say, “No you didn’t make it up.” Uh, this is the Internet, you know. God bless the Internet.

But the reason I made it up was because the word “theme” can be distorted when we talk about writing screenplays and theme. Some people can use the word theme the way we should probably use the world motif like brotherhood, or justice, or bravery. Those are motifs. But they are not actually useful when you are writing a movie.

What is useful when you are writing a movie is what Aristotle, going all the way back to Poetics, called “unity.” And that is, at its core, an argument, and what I call a central dramatic argument: an assertion that is the answer to a question, that you could agree or disagree with, but ultimately is at the… It is when people say, “What is this movie really about?” It’s about that.

**John:** Would you say that any argument could be rephrased as a question?

**Craig:** Any argument could be rephrased as a question. And in fact, to me, what is interesting about thinking about this when we write screenplays is that that question is the one… That question should have two answers. And ideally your hero is answering the question one way on page one, and the opposite way at the end of the movie.

That is sort of, when we talk about character arcs, and people say, “Well, your character has to change.” Well, okay. But why? And how? Is it a random change? Is it just that he got braver? Stronger? Smarter? No, it is that he is answering a question differently, a fundamental question about life differently. And, to me, at least.

And sometimes when you think about movies, like for instance last week, I think, we talked about Ferris Bueller, or two weeks ago, we talked about Ferris Bueller, and how Cameron is actually the protagonist of that movie. Because he is the one that answers the question differently at the end of the movie. Ferris Bueller doesn’t have a problem, other than that he doesn’t have a car.

**John:** The same with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Charlie really has no fundamental problem.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** He’s poor.

**Craig:** That’s right. Like you, yes, it is an interesting… Actually, it is interesting that you bring that up, because I always felt like in the original Willy Wonka movie, they are making Willy Wonka the protagonist. And his question is a very simple one, it seems: Is there someone worthy?

And maybe he starts by thinking there is no one worthy. And then in the end he changes his mind and says, “There is somebody worthy.” And you had a totally different argument.

**John:** I would also say in the original Willy Wonka movie, which I hadn’t seen until after we got started with the new one, but in the original Willy Wonka movie, I felt them desperately trying to make Charlie have hero/protagonist problems.

So that is why they had him stealing stuff, and making many choices that would seem to give him an arc, but he didn’t really need to have an arc.

**Craig:** Well, and I actually don’t even think that he does. I mean, in the Gene Wilder movie, I think that Gene Wilder starts essentially with a presumption that there is nobody pure enough to take on what he has created. He is a skeptic. He is a cynic. And at the end of the movie it is that little thing he says when he puts his hand over the Gobstopper, you know, that Charlie is behind. He says something to the effect of, you know, I can’t remember what he says, but it is quite lovely, and that is his new answer to the question.

And in your Willy Wonka it was really about, it was about a son and a father, and —

**John:** Yes. It’s letting someone in. So to me, Willy Wonka is a strange, sad shut-in who doesn’t want to let anybody in, but ultimately has to let somebody in.

**Craig:** Right. And then I would say that the central dramatic argument of your movie is you need to let people in. [laughs] So that is how I would phrase that, because what is nice about that is in the beginning of the movie, just flip that on its head, and that is where your character starts. I need to not let people in.

And, literally, by just keeping the same statement, even the fact that “I need to not let people in,” as opposed to, “I shouldn’t let people in,” or, “I don’t want to let people in. I need to.” Now, all of a sudden, I start to realize why this guy behaves the way he does, why he lives the way he does, why he acts the way he does because he needs to keep people out.

And so, I like to think about movies in terms of those questions that go from what they are in the beginning to the opposite of that at the end. And I like to let that inform how these characters should grow and change. It also helps you design the obstacles they face. It helps you design the antagonists. It helps you design their allies. You know now what their sore spot is.

**John:** Yeah. So, but let’s talk about the 43 pages of it all. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, I mean, I accept that as a thesis, and I would say that we can… I can push back to a certain degree because I feel like many of my movies, and many of my successful movies — the movies that I enjoy that I think work really well — don’t lend themselves to easy expression of the central dramatic argument, and weren’t conceived with that central dramatic argument.

So, it is a question of, you can say like, “Well, this ultimately is the central dramatic argument of Go,” but that really wasn’t in my conception as I was creating it. So, it is a question of was that the author’s intent, or is that something that you are applying ex post facto to the final product.

But looking at the 43 pages of this, looking at how it changes over the course of these pages, some of it is talking about just semantics, like “what is theme.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And growing up, going through junior high, theme was always stated as something versus something. So, it was man versus society, or man versus the wild, and it was easy for most stories to find that theme. It wasn’t especially helpful.

Deeper in this thread, as I was skipping through it, the question was like, “Well is greed a theme? Is greed a central dramatic argument?” And, the pushback was, “No, that is not enough of one because it is not saying anything about greed. It is just a thing.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What is your philosophy on something like greed, or envy? You need more than that. Is that correct?

**Craig:** I would say so. I mean, I just don’t know how that helps me write anything. I mean, I understand that you are giving me an emotion, or a motivation. I like the fact that a character is motivated by greed, but in the end I want to know why.

To me, that is what it all comes down to. When we think about these characters, I mean you may say, “Look, I didn’t think of the ‘central dramatic argument’ in that stupid phrasey way,” because I know I sound like Robert McKee when I am saying stuff like that, and that is the last thing I want to do.

You may not have thought of that while you were writing that movie, but at the same token, I can’t imagine that you weren’t thinking about why what this guy’s problem was. What is his real issue? That has got to be there, I assume.

**John:** I would honestly say, “No.” I approach most of my movies from the perspective of, “What is this movie about, and what is this movie about to me?”

So, I look at, you know, Charlie’s Angels is one of the things that I got actually bumped up in this thread. I should say that I never actually go to DoneDealPro, I don’t really sort of, like, hang out there. But every couple of months I will just do a forum search for my name to see what people are talking about me.

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

**John:** A specialized form of Googling yourself.

**Craig:** And what are they saying?

**John:** Mostly decent things. Mostly.

**Craig:** Mostly. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So in this forum, someone bumped up a post that is on my site, which I will also link to in the show notes, where I talk about writing from theme. And, so I bring up several of my projects, and discuss what I mean when I say writing from theme on those things.

And, so, Charlie’s Angels’ I said is, “Three princesses who have to save their father, the King.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now that is not, by your definition, a central dramatic argument. It is not a theme. But that is what that movie is to me. Without that, I don’t have a movie at all. I can only think of that movie in terms of this is what it feels like to me.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so once I know what the movie feels like to me, and who the people are within this kind of movie, then I can write it. But, I could have a really clear “this is what the thesis of the movie is” figured out, and still have no ability to write that movie unless I had that sort of core aspect, that core element.

**Craig:** I get it. I mean, look, I think you need all of that stuff. I don’t think you can write a movie if you don’t know what the basic attraction to it is, what the hook is, and the idea. The plot needs its own kind of archetype. You need to have a grasp of your story. And there are certain kinds of movies that are simpler in their execution. No. Let me take that back. Simpler in their construction.

You know, for instance, I wrote spoof movies. There is no central dramatic argument to those. They are a different kind of construction. If you are writing a fairy tale, or something that is larger than life, oftentimes you are right. It is really about —

If you are writing something with a little more drama to it; I mean, I don’t think of Charlie’s Angels as a drama.

**John:** Okay. Well, let’s take Big Fish. It’s hard to get more, sort of, like, that is a movie that feels like it should have a central dramatic argument.

**Craig:** And does it?

**John:** I would argue no. It is very hard to find a central dramatic argument that you are going to state that way? There are certainly key touchstone things that cycle back through, you know; what is the difference between factual truth and emotional truth? So that is a key idea. So the stories that Edward Bloom is telling, are they literally true, or are they emotionally true?

**Craig:** Well, but —

**John:** What is the difference between inspiration and sort of idealization?

**Craig:** Who is the protagonist of Big Fish?

**John:** It is a dual protagonist structure. Edward Bloom is the protagonist of the overall arc of his life, and so he is a boy who starts with humble beginnings and grows to some measure of success through these bigger-than-life stories.

The present day protagonist is his son, Will, who has to figure out who his father really is, and discover the secret that his father has been keeping.

**Craig:** And who is —

**John:** So, Will functions as the antagonist to —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — the function as protagonist/antagonist through the present-day story.

**Craig:** And what is Will’s opinion of his father in the beginning of the movie?

**John:** His father is a liar.

**Craig:** And what is his opinion at the end?

**John:** His father… That he was asking the wrong questions. That his father was telling the emotional truth, even if it wasn’t the factual truth.

**Craig:** So, in my mind, even though you weren’t consciously doing this, there is a central dramatic argument there. And the central dramatic argument is that our parents are more complicated people than we understand them to be as children. And the concept that your father is a liar is a childlike understanding of your parent, because you view them as some sort of authority figure that has failed you because of their failings, their shortcomings.

And then you finally get to know them as a person, and you realize that they are far more complicated. And that is an argument. And that permeates the entire thing, not to mention necessitates what is so interesting about Big Fish, which is that this man is a liar.

See, to me, that is always there. And you may have not thought of it, but I think it is there.

**John:** I agree that is an element of it. But what I am saying is, that alone would not have driven, I don’t think drives the story. I don’t think it could drive the story.

**Craig:** Of course not.

**John:** And it doesn’t drive this particular story.

**Craig:** I acknowledge that. I am not suggesting that these are the things that even drive a story. What I am suggesting is that they are valuable, at least for me, and it is fine if they are not for you; but for me, they are valuable when I am trying to figure out, particularly if it is not an adaptation, if you are really just like, “Okay, I’ve got a blank page here. What is my story to tell?” What should come next?

And that is why I always, to me… — And by the way, the only reason that I started thinking about this is because it is so evident in Pixar films. And I feel like Pixar films are so gorgeously structured. And it is so clear that this is part and parcel with what they do.

And so I started thinking about it for those reasons.

**John:** Great. Let me throw out a similar but contrasting way of looking at, I don’t even really want to call it theme, but let me describe what it is, and then we will find the right name for it. This is something that actually occurred to me when I was doing D.C., which was this terrible TV show I did for the WB network that I actually had a nervous breakdown during.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** But that was the extreme version of, I think, something that happens on every project, with everything you are writing, is you are trying to figure out what fits in this movie, and what doesn’t fit in this movie. And you are basically making two boxes. And as stuff comes out you are like, “Is this the kind of thing that fits in this movie, or the kind of thing that doesn’t fit in this movie? Is it in the box, or is it outside the box?”

And the extreme version of it on D.C. was I had to write so much, and oversee so much, and I was flying on planes constantly. Basically, any song that played on the radio, within five seconds I had to decide, okay, does that fit into my world. Is that a song I need to hold onto? Yes? It goes in the box.

People would be talking and I would just be sort of recording the whole conversation and figuring out what out of that can I fit into the box. Does this fit into the box? So something that wouldn’t fit into my show, I would walk away because, like, this is not helping me write my show.

To some degree, I think that is what you are doing on every project is you are figuring out some heuristic for sorting what belongs in your movie, and what doesn’t belong in your movie. And, if theme or your central dramatic argument helps you figure out, like, is this the kind of moment that exists in my movie, or does it not exist in my movie?

And when you read bad screenplays, it is often because they are trying to wedge in things that just fundamentally don’t belong in those pages. Especially, I think, it is also a syndrome of first-time writing syndrome is that you don’t know how many things you are going to write in your life, so, like, “Well, I have always wanted to write this thing, so I am going to write this in this script, even if it doesn’t make sense in this script.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, that is absolutely the case. Everybody who writes a screenplay has to have that weird horse sense about whether something fits, or doesn’t fit, the world that they have built.

But, what you are describing is almost like a passive filter in a way, like something emerges and I just decide, “Does that pass through or not?” And one of the benefits, I think, about to thinking about an argument underlying your story is that it helps you actively determine what ought to go in.

**John:** Yeah. So it is like writing a regular expression. I am going to get super nerdy here. Writing a regular expression which can sort of pattern match, and figure out, like okay, out of all of this possible stuff, what actually fits into our story?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I always think of these things as like when you look at a movie like Groundhog Day, for instance, which is appropriate because I believe we just had it.

**John:** And a new book about Groundhog Day just came out, which I linked to on the site.

**Craig:** Excellent. Groundhog Day is sort of the… To me it is the perfect execution of this kind of thing. And when we look at movies like this, whether there is a supernatural component or not. For instance, okay, Identity Theft, the movie that I have written for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, coming soon to a theater near you. Starts shooting soon. That’s my big plug.

That movie does not have any supernatural elements. A man’s identify is stolen. He has to get his life back together. In both of those situations, a man keeps waking up on the same day over-and-over. A man has his identity stolen, and needs to put his life back together. My argument as a writer is that as writers we are like, we are God, and we see Job, and we go, “Boink! We are going to make your life miserable. And the reason we are making your life miserable is, look, the side effect is we are going to entertain people. But the reason as God that we are making your life miserable in this specific way is because you need it. You need it. There is something wrong with you. You needed this to happen.”

That is why, and so then I say to people, “Okay, if you have a great concept for a movie, if you had a concept, ‘I imagine a man who tells these incredibly tall tales, and his son, who things he is a liar,’ I immediately think, ‘Wow, that is interesting.'” Now, who needs that to happen? Who needs that experience, to talk to that man, and have that guy be your dad? What is wrong with you? That is the way my mind works at least.

**John:** That is a reasonable way to approach it. And what you are describing with Identity Theft very much fits, I think, our expectation of going into these kind of comedies in particular is that the premise is straightforward, relatable, and everything that flows out of it should… Every important element of the movie should flow out of that premise.

So, the fact that his identity his stolen, or the idea of identity, or the idea of who it is to be you should be the central element of every sequence.

**Craig:** But, by the same token, it is a good thing for, I think it is a good thing if the internal problem is actually somewhat unrelated to the external problem. I think it is fun for an audience to match up a strange external adventure with a far more mundane internal problem. Finding Nemo is the best example. I mean, there is this enormous external problem: my son is lost in an ocean, and I have to find him. And internally there is this other, almost opposite, competing problem: I need to learn how to let my kid go.

And you can see how they both affect each other, but they are different, you know? And I love that.

**John:** And then Pixar made Cars 2.

**Craig:** Well, listen — [laughs]

**John:** You can’t hit it out of the park every time.

**Craig:** I mean, their batting average is still startling.

**John:** It’s pretty good.

**Craig:** And you have to forgive them for Cars 2, because I know some people talk about this, but maybe others don’t know. The most profitable Pixar movie by far is Cars.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s Cars. I know! Because, look: I am a huge Pixar fan. Is Cars near the top of my list? Nope. Is Cars 2 near the top of my list? No. But, they sold more crapola, more Cars stuff, and you know, if that funds another Nemo, I’m cool. I’m down.

**John:** Yeah. We’re cool. Yeah. We are not going to be negative this podcast.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** This is a positive podcast. How dare I bring up, you know, disappointing Pixar movies, when this is a podcast of celebration and joy, and not wrist slitting. And we are not going to talk about the sad realities of things. We are going to talk about the happy possibilities of things.

**Craig:** In fact, can you make the outro music the Ewok Celebration Song?

**John:** Well, it’s done.

**Craig:** Thank you! Jub Jub. Do-do-do-do. [singing]

**John:** You don’t have to even have to sing it yourself, Craig, because right now it is already playing underneath.

**Craig:** [singing along]

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** John.

**John:** Thank you very much for a nice podcast.

**Craig:** Jub Jub who? [singing] See you later.

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome. This is John August.

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

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

How are you, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m doing great. I know that that is a rhetorical question, but actually lately I have been having…

You know those days where you can’t seem to get on top of your own schedule? You are running behind on everything, and even the strange little quirks of circumstance seem to conspire against you and make you later, and later, and later? And for the last week everything has just been falling into place. Like today I knew that I had to be here to do this podcast with you and I was at Universal and this meeting was running long and then there was a lunch, and it just worked out almost to the minute that I was here on time.

Because… — I don’t know. The clouds parted. The sun shone through. Just things have been going my way.

**John:** Well that’s great. Congratulations.

**Craig:** No, no, no. That’s not great. That means that very soon…

**John:** Oh, I’m sorry, yes. I feel bad for you because it clearly means that your run is about to end and you will be sad soon.

**Craig:** The regression to the mean will occur.

**John:** The regression to the mean will inevitably occur.

**Craig:** Inevitably.

**John:** I had a… — I was in New York for almost two weeks to do casting for Big Fish. And I had to speak… — I was invited to speak to the film school out in the Bronx. It’s this public school that has this amazing film program there and so they invited me to speak. And it was… — Of course I’m going to go out and speak to them.

And I was so convinced that I was going to make it there in plenty of time. I was taking the 6 and I was going to get up there, and the trains conspired against me.

**Craig:** Mmm.

**John:** So, it was one of those days where I had the opposite of the Craig Mazin luck, and I watched as my speaking time passed while I was still on the train that was stopped on the tracks for about 15 minutes.

**Craig:** No way!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was stopped?

**John:** It was stopped.

**Craig:** Oh, eh, it was probably a suicide.

**John:** Oh, yeah. That’s a good way to think about it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So my minor inconvenience versus some family who lost a loved one.

**Craig:** Well you always want there to be some kind of death at the other end of any kind of commuting stoppage. I feel like if I am going to stop, there should be a price in blood.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I did finally make it to speak to this film school in the Bronx, which is this amazing film program which I was so incredibly envious of these students because they are in high school but they are studying making movies. And they have to do all of the normal stuff you have to do in high school, and all the basic requirements, but they get to shoot movies and talk to filmmakers. And I am just incredibly envious of people who get to come of age in this time of wonder.

**Craig:** Yeah. What school is this in the Bronx?

**John:** It is called — and I will put a link to it in the show notes — but it was called the Cinema School. It is a New York Public School, but it is especially funded for the arts. And so I think it is an equivalent of the Fame school if you were a dancer, but if you were a director or a screenwriter you might get to go to this school.

**Craig:** Right. Like there is the Bronx High School of Science which is the science version of that; it’s public. And it is selective I presume?

**John:** It is selective. Yes. You have to sort of apply to it and get in to it. But it is not a charter school in the normal sense.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It somehow magically works and they got money to do it. And God bless them.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s like Hunter High School and Stuyvesant High School, Midwood — I think it is called — yeah, it’s like a pre-med.

New York actually has a really cool system like that; it’s smart that they have a movie one.

Yeah, you are envious of those kids in a positive way, and I hate them for having advantages I didn’t have. So…

**John:** That pretty much explains the difference between you and me.

**Craig:** Yup. White and dark. Here we go. Yin and yang. Let’s do this. [laughs]

**John:** I was talking to Dana Fox this week, who is busy casting her TV show. She has a… — Dana Fox, who is my former assistant and a very good friend, she sold a show to Fox, the studio, and Fox the network about her brother, Ben Fox.

So there are so many Foxes involved that it is kind of crazy.

**Craig:** Yes. I mean, I could say that is pretty Foxed up, but, well, I’m not going to say that.

**John:** Yeah, that would be kind of a hackneyed joke.

**Craig:** I did not just say that. It didn’t happen.

**John:** No. But I’m not going to let Stuart cut that out. That’s going to stay.

**Craig:** No. He shouldn’t cut it out. It is evidence that I didn’t do it.

**John:** Ah, okay. Yeah. But talking to her about casting, because she is in the middle of casting right now, and I just came out of a casting thing, made me really think about the difference between feature casting, and TV casting, and Broadway casting.

When you are casting a feature, you have actors come in and they are reading the sides; they are reading the scenes from the actual script of your movie. Or, sometimes you will write special scenes that are better for figuring out who these people are. But your only question is: Can they perform the scenes that are in your film?

When you are casting a TV show it is really a different experience because you are wondering, “Well, will they be good in the pilot, but will they also be able to do stuff like three years down the road when our show is a giant hit?” It is all of this sort of… — You are banking on what that person is going to become. It is a very different process.

**Craig:** Mmm. Yes. I could see that. Casting for movies is very limited and narrow and, yes, you are going to…

And also, you only have to perform it once for a movie. But you have to find somebody with some kind of stamina, social stability, the availability to just commit to this for a really long time. Totally different animal.

**John:** It is. If you are casting a feature, sometimes you are willing to put up with an incredibly difficult person because it is just a feature, and they are going to shoot however many weeks and then they are done and they are gone. You never have to see them again.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you are casting a TV show, you are saying, “Do I want to show up to work every day to deal with this person?” And a lot of times the answer is no.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. So, how is that going for her?

**John:** Good I think. I think it is going to have an amazing cast. It’s a good, funny script. She’s awesome.

**Craig:** She is definitely one of the… — I would say she is probably the sunniest writer I have ever met.

**John:** Yeah. Sunny is a nice word. I like sunny.

**Craig:** Yeah. Very sunny.

**John:** Right now, she is a consulting producer on, or some sort of producer, on the New Girl, and the new show has a similar vibe and, I think, a similar opportunity for future success as that show.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Speaking of success, I thought today we would focus on, well, what I would call “Six Figure Advice.” Because we did a previous podcast, I called it “Five Figure Advice,” which is when you are just starting to work, and you are starting to make five figures. So, $50,000, $60,000, you are getting paid to write and that is a great thing. So we talked about what life was like at that level.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now I want to talk about the six figure advice. So, you are making more than $100,000, probably a fair chunk more than $100,000, and a lot of your decisions about things might be a little different. Your life looks a little different. And, based on my experience with screenwriter friends, the people who have problems with money and finances, a lot of times it really happens at about this level.

Because when you are just starting to make money you kind of know what that is like. You sort of know what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck. You know how to sort of pay for things and sort of how much, you know, to pay off your credit cards and that kind of stuff. When you hit the six figures, you are not sure if you are rich or not. You are not sure how much money is really coming in. You are not sure what your life is supposed to look like. And people make the wrong assumptions about what their life should look like. And then they end up having to take jobs out of desperation because they burned through their money quicker than they thought they would.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well that is a really good way of putting it, that people sit around and think to themselves, “What should my life look like now that I am a writer of a ‘this’ kind of movie or now that I have made this much money in a year?” And that is exactly where people go wrong because if you decide what your life should look like, what you are really basing it is on other people’s lives.

And what I have come to discover is, you have no idea truly what is going on in other people’s bank accounts. There are people who make so much more than I do, and you would never know. There are people who make so much less than I do, and you would think they make way more.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** People spend and borrow at rates that are widely disparate. So, put out of your mind what you think your life should look like, and instead just take a look at what is real for you; so that is sort of a basic starting place.

**John:** Yeah. The underlying advice behind all of this is: really pick a life that is comfortable for you, that you can easily maintain, at even less money than you are making right now. And pretend that you never make more money than that, and then you won’t go bankrupt. Then you won’t run out of money most likely.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, I guess, first of all, don’t be the kind of person that defines your life by the stuff that you buy, which is hard for some people I think.

But I like, sort of the first advice is, because I feel when you start making a certain amount of money and you are looking at ways to maximize what you earn, the number one way to maximize what you earn is to pay less in taxes. [laughs] That is… — Because that is something that you actually have some control over, whereas an agent will take 10%

So we talk about incorporating, and we talk about saving money for retirement. So I guess we should probably start with incorporating.

**John:** We should talk about incorporation. So, maybe a little bit of prefacing: By the time you are making six figures, you likely have some sort of a team who is working for you. So you would have an agent, certainly, at this point. You would have a lawyer who is making your deals. Those are kind of givens; it is unlikely that you are paying a lawyer per contract or something. You have a lawyer who is taking a percentage, taking 5%.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You might have a business manager — sorry — a literary manager, someone who is your manager, who is legally not soliciting work on your behalf but is working for you. So that might be another percentage of some money going out.

You are also probably incorporating at some point in this stage. It always used to be, the rule of thumb I always heard is, when you are making more than $200,000 a year consistently…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …then you incorporate. I don’t know if that is still the advice, but…

**Craig:** Yeah. I have heard the…

**John:** Your lawyer would tell you that.

**Craig:** $250,000. I mean because the deal is that there are benefits that come with incorporating but there are also some costs that go along with incorporating. And so the math is to do the cost benefit and the break point where it seems like it evens out is somewhere in that $200,000 to $300,000 a year range. So, you are right. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, “Is this real? Am I actually going to be making this on a year-to-year basis?”

So you have to actually get good at sort of figuring out what your deal is, and whether you have just had one big success that you may not be able to replicate. And the key is year after year. If you sell a script for $1 million in 2013, and then you don’t sell anything in 2014, you would get hurt by the corporate stuff in a weird way, I think.

You need to kind of be able, I think, you need to be able to replicate your success, in some way, year after year after year. And to that end, and it is a little difficult to do sometimes, talk to your agent and say, “Let’s just have a, forget about coddling me, don’t worry about my feelings, let’s just be super realistic so I can plan for my family — for me and for my family. What do we expect?”

**John:** And really, you can only be planning it based on, I think, writing assignments. Because you can’t plan, “I’m going to sell a spec every year.” That is just not going to happen.

**Craig:** You are so right.

**John:** Yeah. You are only going to be making $200,000 to $300,000 a year if you are pretty consistently being hired to write things for people. And, so if you have nested jobs where you are doing a rewrite on something and you are starting a first draft on something else, and that is pretty consistently your life; if there are always two things that are vying for your attention, likely you are going to start to make the kind of money where incorporation makes sense.

But if it is just a situation where you sold one script, then it is not time to incorporate yet. I didn’t incorporate until after Go. So, I had already sold three things — been hired to write three things — but I wasn’t making enough money that it made sense for me to incorporate.

So when I get my residual statements it is really interesting, sort of like a little history lesson.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** The residuals for Go go to John August. The residuals for everything after that point go to my loan-out corporation, because by the time I made the contracts for those other movies I was a loan-out.

Glossary entry here. A loan-out is another word for a corporation. So a loan-out is basically the company; rather than hiring you specifically, they are hiring your corporation. And your corporation is hiring you and loaning you to the company to do the work.

**Craig:** That’s right. Usually people are an S Corp. There are two kinds of California corporations, S Corp… — Actually, it is a federal designation, S Corp and C Corp, I think. And the idea is not to shield you from any legal stuff; it doesn’t. All it really does is give you the benefits of some tax work so that you minimize the amount of tax you pay. That is pretty much what it comes down to. Taxes.

**John:** It does. And when you are saying shield you from taxes, what it lets you do is expenses that you are accruing in business, you are able to take them, to pay for them as the business rather than having to pay for them as an individual.

So, rent on an office, an assistant if you have an assistant, agent fees, other things like that can be taken out on a corporate level before you are writing the check for yourself as an individual.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, essentially, the corporation is paying you on an annual basis, or more often than annually. But in return for that, you have to do quarterly taxes and a lot of other special filings that are a hassle.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, first of all there is an expense involved in just incorporating itself. But, there is another thing, one of the more hated aspects of the tax code is called the Alternative Minimum Tax where basically if you are an individual and you make a lot of money you can write-off a whole bunch of stuff if you want, but then they basically at some point say, “You have still made too much money. We are just going to now add more tax on.” You can’t write-off all that stuff because you are not a business. You are an individual. You couldn’t possibly be doing that much as an individual that is a business expense.

But corporations don’t have alternate minimum taxation. If you run a business and you bring in $1 million, and you spent $1 million to get that $1 million, you have a net taxable income of zippo.

So, while screenwriters don’t have the kind of expenses that go along with a shop, we do have our internet, and our cable, and if we go to see movies for research, and buying books, and traveling, and leasing a car, and all this other stuff. Oh, like I have an office, you know, so my rent here. And all of that gets taken off of the amount.

So, right off the bat, you have to talk to your accountant if it is time for you to incorporate and you incorporate. And I would say every single professional screenwriter we know that has been working for more than a couple of years is incorporated.

**John:** Yeah. Now I want to back up, because my understanding when I first formed a loan-out was that there was some legal shielding, that there were good reasons for, like, not losing your house for going through a loan-out rather than going directly, making a contract directly. But that is not your understanding?

**Craig:** Eh, they call it “piercing the veil,” where if you have a corporation that is really just you, and your corporation incurs some kind of legal liability, they will go after you. They can go after the officers of the company if their feeling is that people are individually doing wrong, but then hiding behind a corporation as if the corporation did wrong. There are fewer protections than you would think.

Now, that said, I should point out we don’t have that problem as screenwriters, because the only real liability we can incur is when a studio…

For instance, when The Hangover, when Warner Brothers, and Hangover Part II, and Todd Phillips, and I, and Scott Armstrong were all sued by this kooky guy who claimed that we stole his life, I got served papers until he withdrew the suit. But in our deals with the studios, they always indemnify us. They always say, basically, “You say that you didn’t steal it and we promise to cover your legal fees and all the rest of it if you are sued.”

So, given that, because I don’t really know what other legal liability we could incur.

**John:** But couldn’t it be sexual harassment or some other kind of discrimination?

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** I just could envision some other things which they might go after you differently as a corporation.

**Craig:** That’s true. I guess, like, for instance if you are on a set and you do something to sexually harass somebody. The point is, no, your corporation is not going to protect you from that because your corporation didn’t sexually harass somebody, you did. [laugh] And they are too smart for it.

I mean you can’t… — Maybe I suppose in some narrow place it might be advantageous legally, but really what it comes down to is taxes.

**John:** Yeah. Now on the subject of taxes, at this stage you would likely have an accountant who is figuring out your taxes, because your taxes would be more complicated than what you are likely to be able to do with just simple Quicken and the tax software.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** It gets more complicated. A lot of people will have a business manager. I had a business manager right about the time that I formed the loan-out corporation. But I think you don’t. Is that still the case?

**Craig:** I do not. Yeah. I do have a tax guy who handles my taxes. And I have obviously an investment guy who handles investments. But when it comes to… — Business managers tend to do things like pay your bills, calculate the taxes that you might expect to owe and make the installations, handle your payroll. Because one of the quirks of being a loan-out company is that you tend to have to employ a payroll service to make it seem like a real company. So you actually pay yourself from one account to another, which is a bit odd. And then they handle things like your dues and, I don’t know, stuff like that.

I do all of that on Quicken. It is not that hard, you know. So I take 45 minutes every third day, pay my bills, do it all through Quicken. Bing, bang boom and I am done.

**John:** Yeah. So I have a business manager so I don’t do that. And partly it is because I will be gone on a set and I won’t be able to think about that stuff. I will just submarine into a project, and I won’t come out for a long time, and stuff wouldn’t get done otherwise, which is just the reality of sort of my life and my situation.

The danger of having a business manager, I would say, is it can insulate you from the realities of your money.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the people who run into problems, they really have no sense of how much money they have or what they could be doing or should be doing, and that can be very dangerous. So I think it is less likely that your business manager is going to rip you off. It is more likely that you are not going to be paying attention to how much money you actually have and will get into trouble because of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, there are two problems with business managers as far as I can tell. One is precisely what you said, that you become infantilized to some extent, and everybody is different, and I suspect that you are pretty grown up about it. But some people really do in an almost child-like way hire these people to be their mommy and daddy, almost like they are living on an allowance from these people. And so they don’t know what their liabilities are, and they are not really in control of their destiny. The other problem is that they cost 5% often, and that is a lot of money.

Any percentage of what a very successful screenwriter makes is an enormous amount of money for what oftentimes amounts to somebody who is basically doing what I am doing 45 minutes every few days on Quicken.

**John:** Yup. I’m paying a flat monthly fee…

**Craig:** Okay, that’s better.

**John:** …which is, I think, a little bit more reasonable.

**Craig:** Yes. And that is fine. And I would say that I am in the minority, probably, of screenwriters in that I don’t use a business manager, but I do stay on top of my money and I know where it is. I like to have control of these things.

**John:** Yeah. On sort of control, insurance is the kind of thing that you are going to start thinking about more as you get into six figures. So you will have health insurance through the WGA. If you are working consistently, you are going to have health insurance, which is great. But you may need disability insurance, which was a real surprise when it was first raised to me.

As presented to me, disability insurance is important if your earning potential is much greater than your actual assets are going to be. So, as it was explained to me, and you can correct me if you feel that I am misspeaking, if I got hit by a bus and was no longer able to write, at a certain stage in my career that would have been really catastrophic because everything I could have made I would not be able to make anymore, and that was going to be a real problem. Now that my assets are bigger than sort of the money that I can make over a couple of years, it is less of a factor.

But for a time, it was really important that we find somebody to give me disability insurance. It ended up being, like, Lloyd’s of London to protect me in that situation.

**Craig:** You are absolutely right in the way you described it. I never did it. And I didn’t do it because there were a couple of problems. One, when you get disability insurance as a screenwriter, it is a little punitive because they are going to presume that whatever money you made this year, or whatever money you made in the most, that is what they are going to have to pay out. So they jack your premiums up pretty high. And the truth is, what disability short of brain damage is going to incur in such a way as to keep me from writing. If you smash my fingers I can still write. If I get hit by a bus, and I am laid up for a few months, I can still write. It is not like we drive a bus or use our eyesight. I mean, we can be blinded. [laughs] I started running down the list of stuff where it was so extreme that, basically, it was far more likely that I would be dead than disabled to the point where I couldn’t write anymore. So…

**John:** Yes. A traumatic head injury; that’s always my favorite.

**Craig:** Pretty much traumatic head injury. Eh, I don’t know. It is a little bit like earthquake insurance. Like, for instance, here in California, the State of California requires insurers to offer the option of earthquake insurance or they are not allowed to basically sell any insurance in the state. The insurers, of course, turned back to California and said, “We can’t offer earthquake insurance. It is impossible, because when an earthquake happens we are going to be bankrupted.”

So they came up with this nonsense called the Fair Plan, where basically they charge you a very high amount of money and, in exchange for that amount of money, you are insured against earthquakes. But you are not really insured against earthquakes because there is a premium. So if there is earthquake damage, you have to pay 20%, I think, of the value of your house just right off the bat.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then they cover the rest of the structure. But the point is there is never 20% damage to your house. It is like 5% or all of it. So if it is all of it, just walk away. If it is 5%, you are not going to get any insurance money anyway. So very few people take the earthquake insurance, and that is kind of the way I saw disability.

I’m sure people are going to write in angrily and say that I am insane and I should get it, but…

**John:** Yeah. And I am not sure it is going to be as important for you to get it at this stage in your career as it was a couple of years ago.

**Craig:** So I got away with something. [laughs]

**John:** You snuck away with it.

**Craig:** I love it.

**John:** Look at my friends Chad and Dara. They just recently got disability insurance because they are at exactly that stage in their career where their earning potential is much greater than their actual assets would be at this point.

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

**John:** And life insurance is a similar situation where life insurance is important for a family up to a certain point of income, up to a certain point of assets. But once the assets are actually significantly bigger than the yearly income it is not as big a deal.

**Craig:** It is not as big a deal. And obviously, the older you get it becomes less and less important.

**John:** Now simpler decisions, I think they are simpler decisions, for younger people who are facing this is your student loans. And I think I see people rush to pay off their student loans, which I think can be a mistake. Student loans are the cheapest loans you are going to find outside of a mortgage. If the money is burning a hole in your pocket, I guess better to pay off your student loans than buy a fancy car.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it is not the best use of your money.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, let’s talk about loans in general, because as you make money you do… — Look, you don’t need to become obsessed with finances. I actually, I don’t really like the subject of money. And when I say I don’t like it, it is not that it turns me off, it is just not… — I don’t have any passion for it.

But it behooves us to at least know some basics. And one of the basics of finance is what is the cost of money, what is the interest rate, what do people charge you for loans. And right now they are at historically low rates.

Student loans have traditionally always been artificially low because they are supported by the government, to some extent. And you are right; if you can, there are some kinds of loans that are good to have. I have a mortgage. I could pay off my mortgage, but I don’t because the interest is deductible for my taxes. I might as well just hold on to that money, let it grow at a certain rate, take the tax benefit, and if it is such time that rates should move in such a way that it doesn’t make sense, then I will pay it.

So, there are certain kinds of loans where it is okay to have. Here are the loans that are not okay. So, yes, student loans, yes. Mortgages, yes. Smart mortgages. Credit cards. Never.

**John:** Yes. You should never. And if you are making this much money you should never be carrying a balance on your credit cards. That is ridiculous.

**Craig:** Ever. I mean, I don’t care what you make. If you’re…

**John:** But particularly at this level of the podcast you should not be paying less than everything.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because credit card interest rates are always much, much higher than what you can get in the bank, and oftentimes wildly higher to the point of usury. You see rates of 17%, 18%, 19%, 20% when the prime rate right now is almost zero. Money is almost free at this point.

So, get all of your money off your credit cards. If you have any on your credit cards it is insane. And then start, I would say the next best thing you could do is figure out retirement, which seems a little weird, because I started thinking about that when I was 21. But it is the best savings, the best investment you can make.

**John:** Yeah. So, to back up a little bit, if you have a loan-out corporation, one of the advantages of your loan-out corporation is you can set up a pension plan.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that is one way to sort of divert some of your money to that pension that is in your name. And you can’t sock away all that much money, but you can sock away some money, and that helps.

Writers Guild has a pension. It is not going to be a ton.

**Craig:** Well, it depends on what you earn and how many years you have earned. I mean, it could be nice.

**John:** Yeah. But most of what you are thinking about for retirement is really just the money you didn’t spend. That’s the money you earned that you stuck in an account and forgot about. And that is your retirement.

**Craig:** Well, there is, look, level one as you alluded to, there are what they call Qualified Plans. A Qualified Plan is any kind of investment plan where you put your money in, specifically for retirement. You can’t touch it until you are 65; if you do there are penalties. But if you can be good, and not touch it until you are 65, there is a tremendous tax savings on that money.

Traditionally, you don’t actually get taxed on that income. So if you can sock away, and when you have a corporation you are right, you can set up your own 401(k) plan. Maybe you put in $40,000. That is $40,000 untaxed dollars. And when you are a big shot screenwriter, your tax rate is nearly half. So, that’s a lot of money that you are saving right then and there.

So, job number one is maximize as much as you can into a Qualified Plan. It saves a huge amount of money.

Then, I think the next thing that you are talking about is saving. The lost art of saving.

**John:** Yeah. Keeping the money. Just don’t spend it. Don’t be Derek Haas and set up your line of credit at the Hard Rock Casino.

**Craig:** Well, you know, you can, because I have gambled with Derek, and he is like a leprechaun.

So, like, he has a line of credit and then amazingly… — I didn’t understand how that line of credit stuff works, and then I did it with him. We were at the Wynn. So, you open up a line of credit, let’s say for $10,000. And then you sit down at a table and you say, “I want a marker for $2,000.” So they give you $2,000. You don’t have to give them any cash. And then they have you sign a check, and the check is to them for $2,000. Right.

Then, let’s say you win, and now you have $4,000 in chips. You go to the cashier and you say, “I would like to buy back my marker.” And you give them $2,000 in chips and they come back and they give you that check and you rip it up. And ripping that thing up is the greatest feeling in the world. It is actually, really; it is like a huge dopamine reward. Super… — God, gambling is pernicious.

**John:** Yeah. It’s all the fun of destruction, plus there is money involved.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. And just like how cool — you are like, “Look at me. I’m ripping up a check! Screw you. I win.”

**John:** On a less dopamine-inducing aspect of money, if we are talking about retirement, I think we have to be honest about the lifecycle of a screenwriter.

And so you are unlikely to be making this six figures for your whole career. And your whole career may be a lot shorter than you would like it to be. There are not many screenwriters in their 50s who are making that much money.

And that is the issue, is that your maximum earning as a screenwriter tends to come in maybe, it’s not your first year. It is probably years five through ten.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And after that point, some people will continue to make a ton of money, but most people won’t so much.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, what they don’t… — Everybody has their eye on what they call their big break, where you break into the business. And no one tells you that right after the break is a cliff where almost everyone that got their break falls off the cliff. And this is what is so, and frankly, it has gotten worse as far as I can tell. It is a harder business to stay alive in, because when you and I broke into the business Hollywood was making way more movies.

Now they make fewer, which means they develop fewer, which means they hire fewer of us, which means there are fewer of us.

When people ask, “How long can I expect to work in this business?” obviously the answer varies wildly according to your talent and your abilities to make your weight. But let’s just talk about averages. Not long. In truth, it is a bit like professional sports where a lot of people get their break, they play for a season or two seasons, and then they hurt themselves, or they just don’t quite click. And they are gone.

And there are guys who work five years and then are gone. There are people who work ten years and then are gone. To have a career that goes more than 20 years, you are in rarified air. You are in limited territory. There are not many of us. Look, I am on year 16 right now. You probably are similar to that I would imagine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would like to think I can get another four years. I would like to think I can hit that big 20 year mark. I think I will, but to be one of those guys that can put together… — Look, when I look at some of the names of people that say to me, “I’m having trouble finding work,” my heart sinks. It is a very difficult thing to make an actual, real career out of this.

And, please, for those of you who do have that wonderful day where you get that break, do not confuse that with a career. That is the beginning. In fact, the hardest work is yet to come. So, be prepared for that. If you are, you have got a shot.

**John:** Yeah. What I will say is you and I are approaching this from a pure screenwriting point of view, where we are writing screenplays that will become movies. Some A-list writers and sort of near A-list writers transition to TV and do other amazing things because TV is better in many ways. And sometimes people extend their career at the edges of what is a traditional screenwriting career.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So there are other things other than just falling back and teaching at a university, but it is important to be realistic about how much time a person ends up having a screenwriting career.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you know, there is also something very cruel about the way the business functions. There is this famous experiment that was done many years ago with rats where they would put them in a cage, and then they would flash a green light, and then shock the bottom of the cage. And they had another cage where they would just shock them occasionally, but there was no green light. And the rats in the green light cage lived twice as long because they were able to prepare for the pain.

But random jolts of pain are disturbing. Similarly, random jolts of success are disturbing. And, you know, Pavlov found out that if you didn’t always reward the dog when you rang the bell, but occasionally, it was even a stronger effect, because there was this anxiety of maybe this time. That’s why casinos function so well. And screenwriting can do that to people. I have seen people just go for years and years, and then there is this burst of activity, and like, finally, it is going to be okay.

And they ride that for another three or four very difficult, difficult years. And then it happens again, or it doesn’t, and I have to say at some point, you turn around and go, “Wait a second, did I just waste 15 years of my life in panic?” And it is just a very hard career.

I have to say, of all the arguments that the Writers Guild make to the studios about why we should be paid more, or how we should be paid, or two-step deals and all the rest of it, I do feel one of the strongest arguments we make is that the studios have effectively made this, it’s like it’s not a career anymore. They have ruined it.

I don’t know why anybody would get into this as a 21-year-old expecting to be able to support a family and make it to retirement as a screenwriter. It is just brutal.

**John:** Well that was a very depressing look at six figure advice, which really wasn’t meant to be so depressing. If you are making six figures, that’s good. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. Congratulations, you are making six figures.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And we realize that this is sort of esoteric advice because most people aren’t going to have a screenwriting career that gets them to that point and they won’t need to incorporate, but we always get those kinds of questions. And when we talk to real screenwriters who are working, some of the first questions they ask is, “Hey, do I need to incorporate? What should I do? Do I need insurance?” And so we thought we would talk about that.

On a future date, we will talk about seven figure advice, because then everything changes, because then you are looking at, well, like what kind of wood is best for the yacht that you are building.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And where can I legally kill and eat a panda.

**John:** Yes. And then there is eight figure advice, which is really esoteric because I don’t think there is any screenwriter who makes eight figures.

**Craig:** Not in one year. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No. Not in one year.

**John:** I think a couple of the super producers make eight figures in a year, but there is no screenwriter. And precious few directors make eight figures a year.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know one who definitely had a pretty good year.

**John:** I don’t want to… — One who you are working with who had a very good, lucky year.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know how lucky, but definitely it was… — He earned it, but man, that was a big year.

Yeah. I have to say, in summary, that if you are making six figures, I am thrilled for you and frankly any depression I have is related to the fact that it has become harder to become one of those people. And I want screenwriting to be a successful, viable career where people can actually work at it for the big bulk of their productive years. And right now, the squeeze is very difficult. And I do think that the studios are going to have to confront the fact that they are depleting their farm system in a dangerous way. And screenwriters need to be nurtured just like anything else.

**John:** Yup. We are the research and development for the film industry. And if they cut the R&D, then innovation will suffer, and things will get very, very bad.

**Craig:** Very, very bad.

**John:** I was just talking with a mutual friend of ours who is now segueing out of screenwriting and into digital development, so doing stuff for the iPhone and for other applications. And so she was meeting with VC people, and the VC people would say, “Oh, we like your idea but we only write like $10 million checks. We don’t really do the $3.5 million checks.”

And I was torn between my desire to congratulate her, I guess, and find those people and either throttle them or take their wallets.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I feel what we are mostly wrestling with here is just a lack of money. And if we could open up some purse strings here, I think there would be a happier time for a lot of us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t see that happening any time in the near future.

**John:** Yeah. We need another Village Roadshow or some other outside entity, to come in with a lot of money, and start throwing money around. And they will make stupid choices, but their stupid choices benefit us greatly.

**Craig:** I think even more than that, what would be useful is a new market. You know, whatever, if they could figure out downloads in a way that was really awesome or, I don’t know. It is getting tough out there man.

**John:** Yeah. But you know what? It won’t be our generation that figures it out. It will be the next generation.

**Craig:** We will be old and doddering in our chairs watching the world burn around us, giggling into our glasses of panda blood.

**John:** Do you know who is going to benefit from it?

**Craig:** No, who?

**John:** The kids at the Cinema School in the Bronx.

**Craig:** Those kids.

**John:** Those kids will figure it all out.

**Craig:** Those kids are going to graduate and go, “Wait, what?! I get what?! I’m going to earn…oh God.”

**John:** Those fools.

**Craig:** “I should have gone to pre-med.”

**John:** Yeah.

Craig, thank you for another podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. It was a good one.

**John:** I will talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.