Scriptnotes Transcript

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

**John August:** Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes. This is episode 21. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And usually this is the point where I would say, “Welcome to Scriptnotes.” But I actually said that in the intro because everything is a little thrown off because I am in New York.

**Craig:** New York.

**John:** New York City. It’s the Big Apple.

**Craig:** My birthplace.

**John:** You were born in New York City?

**Craig:** Yes sir.

**John:** What part of New York City?

**Craig:** Brooklyn.

**John:** Ah, how nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t know if you know this because you are a Lutheran, I think, I’m just guessing. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] I think I am technically a Presbyterian…

**Craig:** Presbyterian?

**John:** …but I haven’t been anything for a very long time.

**Craig:** But all American Jews come from Brooklyn. There is a factory there. That is where Jews are made. We are born in Brooklyn and then shipped off to the rest of the country.

**John:** Now are they still made in Brooklyn? Or are only hipsters made in Brooklyn?

**Craig:** Now only hipsters are made in Brooklyn. But my generation of Jews were manufactured entirely in Brooklyn. Todd Phillips and I, for instance, were born three months apart in the exact same hospital.

**John:** That is pretty amazing. Josh Friedman and I were born at the same hospital several months apart, too. So, there are going to be many of those synchronicities as we travel through life.

**Craig:** Apparently Josh Friedman is not Jewish.

**John:** Uh, yeah. Maybe he… — That is a very good point. I assumed he was Jewish but possibly that is not the case because he was born at my same hospital and all Jews, apparently, are born in…

**Craig:** Yeah. He meets most of the criteria for being Jewish.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Anxiety. [laughs] He’s got a lot of that.

**John:** A love of Chinese food.

**Craig:** Ah, huge. Such a big part. Such a big part of our ethnicity.

**John:** Yeah. So I am in New York because we are doing casting for Big Fish and I have been through a lot of casting before and secretly I am kind of a casting director. Like if I didn’t have writing chops I would… — Here is my ranking of what I would probably end up doing:

I’m a writer because it is probably what I am best at. I’m also pretty good at the graphic design, sort of like laying out stuff and fonts and stuff like that. I don’t do a lot of that anymore. But just one small notch below that is casting because I am really good at sort of remembering the guy who was in that one episode of Melrose Place like seven years ago.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And when that person comes into the room for casting I am like, “You were so good in that one episode of Melrose Place,” actually probably 17 years ago.

So, now we are in New York for casting on Big Fish and it is actually really exciting because this is kind of in my wheelhouse.

**Craig:** Right. Now let me just run this down. You are really good at graphic design and casting. Hmm…now what does that indicate to me? What? When does that normally go together? Hmm.

**John:** Yeah. If I said like ballet or said like cutting hair or flower arranging, those would be skills where I think I am even more a little bit more stereotypical.

**Craig:** [laughs] I will say that casting is one of those areas like costume design in movies where I don’t trust straight guys. If you are a straight guy in casting, something is weird, it is off to me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t like that.

**John:** Casting is one of those areas that does tend to be dominated by the gays. Not exclusively the gays, I have to point out — and I have made some bad assumptions assuming that everybody in casting is gay, because they are not.

**Craig:** Uh, yeah they are. [laughs]

**John:** No, I can promise you they are not…

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** …because occasionally I have made that assumption and then I will get a Christmas card of the casting director with his wife and two kids.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Gay men never get married to women and have kids. [laughs]

**John:** Well, okay. [laughs] But anyway, the point, not to the larger sort of closeted gay point or whatever…

**Craig:** Exactly, thank you.

**John:** … is that casting is actually a fascinating and very important part of, like in a musical, of making a TV show or making a feature, too. And screenwriters sometimes do get involved in casting. And that can be great because you have this memory of what those characters were to you and that handoff doesn’t really happen through the director. That handoff is sort of in a weird way direct.

Like for a long time you are playing all the characters yourself. And then one by one those characters are assigned out to actors. And that transition doesn’t happen through the director, it just happens through the casting process. So if you are lucky enough to be involved in the casting process, you can sometimes be really helpful.

**Craig:** That’s true. That is absolutely true.

**John:** Because you have a memory of not only what they have to do in the two selected scenes that have been chosen, you have a memory of like, okay, this is what the whole journey of the character is and there may be reasons why that person that is in front of you is great in those two selected scenes but is not ideal in those other scenes. Or, there may be reasons why as you are picking what those two selected scenes are, you can be an influential voice in saying, “Yeah, look, let’s see what this moment is, but also see what this moment is. And by the way, let me write you some better scenes that more succinctly show what it is that this character is going to need to do.”

An example I was thinking about came up in Big Fish, too. Sometimes a character will only have kind of responses to other characters and won’t have a really meaty scene by themselves. But you need to have the right person.

In Go the classic example was Mannie who is the guy who goes along with Ronna and Claire on their journey to make this drug deal. And he has moments but he doesn’t have like a whole scene to himself. And so when we were casting for Go I wrote a special scene just for Mannie that is a whole speech that he doesn’t actually have in the movie, but we needed something to look at so that an actor could come in and actually perform something to let us see who Mannie is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Traditionally in features casting is done under the auspices of the director. Occasionally screenwriters are involved just as friends of the court. I find…

Well first of all, to underscore what you are saying, casting is of the utmost importance. The most magical thing you can do to a movie is cast it properly. Screenwriting isn’t magic, per se; we write a script and everybody reads it and thinks about it. Same with dailies. “Okay, let’s watch the dailies.” But there is something magical that happens…

I guess the only thing that is close is music because sometimes adding music creates magic. But good casting suddenly transforms everything. And for us, as screenwriters, the most important thing we can do is to make ourselves be available as screenwriters to what the casting suggests because there are going to be times when the casting is either wonderful but sort of takes you even further than you thought a character could go or should go.

Sometimes the casting is just different than what you thought. It is the casting of the movie. No sense in fighting it at that point; better to work with it. At which point you do have to become available to conform the script to who is going to be performing it and also ideally write into that casting. I guess that is the best way I can describe it.

Write to those actor’s and performer’s strengths because that is who you got.

**John:** Yes. You have to look at cast as a resource. And every movie is going to be resource constrained or resource rich depending on sort of what you end up getting.

If the resources you have when you are making a movie, you have your cast, you have however much money you actually have. You have the locations that you are able to find.

So, as a screenwriter, you have on paper anything you can possibly want to do, you can do. When it comes time to actually make the movie you may find out like, “Wow, we don’t actually have the money to do that elaborate of a sequence. We are not going to be able shoot that many days. We don’t have the money for visual effects for that. We are going to have to think of something different.”

You may find that it is actually impossible to shoot in locations that you would love to shoot, so you look at, “Well these are the locations we can shoot.” You visit those locations and it’s like, “Well, if we are going to be here, this thing is actually really interesting and fascinating. I can write something great for this moment. Or we can acknowledge the space that we are in and it is going to play really well.”

You might have written something for… — A friend of ours wrote a very dark TV pilot that USA bought and USA said, “We love your very dark TV pilot called Burn Notice, but we want it to be bright and sunny, so we are going to move it to Florida.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So they moved it to Florida and the show needed to change in order to move to Florida, but that was the resource that he was given. And given that resource he could change things.

Cast is the same thing. You may have a vision in your head of who these characters are. And you may even have had some actors in your head as you were writing them. Those may not be the actors who are in your final project. Once those people are in your final project, you need to figure out what their strengths are and accommodate their strengths and deal with their lacks so that you can make the best possible movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean this is why screenwriting is one of the most frustrating kinds of writing to do because your script is going to be made into one movie. That’s it. I mean even Big Fish, there will be performances, there will be casts with an “S” at the end. You will hopefully have a huge success with this thing and it is going to run on Broadway and it is going to run in London and it is going to run in LA. And there will be cast changes. And over the years people will interpret it and put their own spins on it and if you might not like somebody playing a particular role in the beginning you will be able eventually to get your licks in and have somebody playing that part later on that is perfect for you.

Not so with movies. This is it. [laughs] So, you better write for who you’ve got. And I will also say that for anybody that is writing a screenplay — and most screenplays are written in the absence of cast, of course — pick a cast. Write for an actor because it helps focus the voice.

It is so much easier for me to write when I know who is going to be playing it. And when I am writing a script that isn’t already with cast attached, I can have anybody play it. So, why not?

**John:** Exactly. By writing with an actor’s face in your head, you have a sense of like could this person actually say these lines. It helps you to sort of create not just the character but create the reality. Do you believe Harrison Ford saying these lines?

And you should pick, hopefully, people who actually really exist. It is helpful just because, you know, picturing Harrison Ford as when he was Indiana Jones at his prime when the first movie came out, well that is great, but that person doesn’t exist anymore. So maybe pick who would do that role now. It’s very unlikely that is going to be the person who actually is doing your movie…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …but it helps you find a consistent face to put with that character throughout the whole writing process.

**Craig:** Yeah. And when people talk about… — A very common criticism of new screenwriters is that all the characters sound the same. And that is a function of the writer not actually writing for actors, but really just writing themselves into characters. And we can’t do that.

And I find that there is so much that doesn’t need to be said when someone can say to you, “This character should be played by this guy.” The difference between “this character should be played by Harrison Ford” and “this character should be played by Will Smith” is enormous. I know so much about how many words they say [laughs] to get across their idea.

I know if they are funny or not funny. I know if they are one or two word kind of guys or if they are 20-word kind of guys. And I suddenly start to flesh out this human being. You have to do it. I don’t know any… — I think it is insanity to not cast the movie in your head when you are writing the script because someone is going to be casting it later and if you haven’t casted it in your head, trust me, they will cast it for you and you will be shocked.

**John:** And so a crucial piece of advice here: As a screenwriter you cast it in your head. You never put that name in the script. Never.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** So what you do is when that character is introduced you give a description that very, just perfectly matches who it is you want to have, not physically, but matches sort of the type of person you want to have in it. And if you do it just right you can create that image in the reader’s head so they will see Will Smith as they are reading the character and all will be happy and good.

The weird magic is even if they don’t end up picturing Will Smith, they will have a consistent idea of who that person is supposed to be.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So if they are seeing it is a well-meaning but somewhat smart-ass guy who challenges the system, that is a terrible sort of character description, don’t use that. But, you get basically two sentences to introduce that character which are just sort of gimme lines, like they don’t actually have to be playable moments. You are just telling the reader, the audience, this is who this person is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Use those so well so that the person knows what those are. And if it is just a bit player, give that person a really specific name that immediately conjures the kind of person you want in that role.

**Craig:** Yeah. And once you start thinking that way you will surprise yourself with how much more variegated the characters are. There are some characters who will explain to you who they are and what they are doing. There are other characters who don’t want to talk. So other people are asking them, “What are you doing? Are you doing this?” And they will say, “Yup.” [laughs]

And that kind of stuff, that is the variety that is required. Otherwise, again, you run into that situation that a lot of new writers do where everybody sounds the same.

**John:** Yeah. Occasionally you can just cheat. And, so, for several movies in a row, dating back years, I would right “Octavia” in when I wanted Octavia Spencer to be cast in the role because if I wrote “Octavia” they would absolutely bring her in for casting and she would always get cast.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I did that for Blue Streak and she is also in The Nines as just “Octavia” because she is Octavia.

**Craig:** I don’t think you can get away with that one anymore.

**John:** Yeah. She is a Golden Globe winner so that is not going to be so simple anymore.

**Craig:** No. No.

**John:** I may have to think of some other name that will make people think, “Oh, what would be a great, interesting choice that no one is going to think of? Octavia Spencer” I’m like, “Wow, you’ve read my mind. I actually hadn’t even thought about that but it is a great idea. So let’s not go to anyone else until we hear back from Octavia.”

**Craig:** We could do an entire podcast on how to make your ideas seem like other people’s ideas. [laughs]

**John:** That is easily 40% of the work of screenwriting.

**Craig:** Amazing.

**John:** Yeah. The other work of screenwriting is figuring out what stories to write. And there was a really great New York Times article about Lindsay Doran this week. And so I wanted to spend the rest of the podcast talking about that.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Lindsay Doran is a producer and a former studio executive. I first met her when she was running United Artists which was, I don’t know if at that point it had merged with MGM or separated from MGM. It always gets bought and sold and bought and sold.

Regardless, she is really smart — really, really, smart. She is not a screenwriter but everyone sort of likes her in terms of her knowledge of story.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I first met her because I had written a treatment about a man who is a former spy, a retired spy, who meets somebody who claims to be the younger version of himself. And I had written up this treatment, planned to make it into a movie, and so that script was called The Nines. That treatment was called The Nines. And has nothing to do with the actual movie The Nines except that the number 9 keeps showing up a lot.

Ultimately I ended up rewriting it many years later as a short story called The Variant. But I had written it as a treatment. And we had sent it all over town and she was one of the few places that really responded to it. She was like, “I think there is a movie here,” so she called me and we talked about it. We couldn’t quite figure out the movie but I remember thinking, “Well, she likes me so she must be really, really smart.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. She likes me, too, so obviously she is a genius.

I love Lindsay. I met her many, many years ago. I’m not exactly sure what the circumstance was; I think it was one of those general meetings that turn into a nearly decade long friendship, I think. She is incredibly smart. She is a thinking writer’s producer.

We talked about producers and how there are all sorts of different kinds. She really understands story and I think more than anything loves writers. She actually loves the process of writing and she knows how to talk to writers and help them. And I find her to have terrific taste and sensibility and I just love her.

And it was nice to read that article. It was a very Lindsay kind of thing. I’m sure you will put the link up. She is always thinking, she is always coming up with… — Well, she is a questioner, which I like. I think everything should be, all tires should be kicked.

**John:** Yeah. So all of this is framing because I think Craig and I have gone on at length in a previous podcast about our distaste for so-called experts and gurus who aren’t themselves screenwriters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so this is all providing context for why this is why we think her opinion is really interesting and sort of worth discussing.

Also, I think what is fascinating about this New York Times article is she is talking about the “what” rather than the “how.” She is not talking about, “Here’s a template for movies. These are the beats you need to hit. This is where on this page things should happen. This is how to sell a screenplay.” It is more a questioning of what kinds of movies are we telling and within the movies that we are choosing to write what stories in those movies are we choosing to highlight or choosing to flesh out.

And that was actually really helpful for me, just even this week. So some context setting. Her basic argument, her idea is drawn from an author whose book I haven’t read. His name is Martin Seligman. And he identified five essential elements of well-being. And so these five essential elements are positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

So, the point being that it is your ability to achieve these five things or your ability to — your quantity, your quality of these five things determines how good you feel about yourself, how good you feel about your life.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And those seem like reasonable choices. They are not the obvious choices. It is not money, it is not victory over your foes, but positive emotions, a sense of happiness, a sense of the world being good…

**Craig:** Joy.

**John:** Joy. Joy is a simpler synonym for that. Thank you. You are very good at this.

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs] I really like short, short words.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. You are like a walking pocket thesaurus.

**Craig:** [laughs] Thank you.

**John:** Engagement. Engagement, sure, the ability to latch onto the thing that is in front of you. Relationships, sure, great. Meaning, so a sense that what you are doing is actually meaningful, that there is a reason behind stuff. And accomplishment which is a nicer way of saying victory, but just having achieved something. And those all seem like reasonable goals.

And crucially I would say Lindsay’s frame is not like, “Oh, let’s write in success for all five of these qualities.” It is about earning those in a sense of achieving success in those five areas.

**Craig:** Yeah. What I liked most about this was that it is not telling us anything we don’t already know. We know that generally we like what we call happy endings. What she is really doing is asking us why do we like the happy endings, because sometimes understanding why helps us get to write good ones because there are boring happy endings, there are rote happy endings, and then there are interesting ones.

Seligman is a name that should be familiar to any psychology major such as myself. He is the founder or one of the co-founders of the term “learned helplessness.” That was what he described as the root of depression, learned helplessness. And you can see how in movies a lot of times characters are stuck in learned helplessness.

When you look at the state of a character on page 10 they have come to be instructed by life through circumstance, through the people with whom they interact, that they are helpless. They cannot change things. And then something happens that forces them to ask the question if maybe they can change things. That to me is a more interesting way of approaching structure than “on page 10 a thing happens.” Yeah, buy why?

So I really like that she puts everything in the context of the character’s emotional and psychological state and arrives at this interesting place at the end where it is not just about experiencing joy, it is about sharing joy which I thought was great.

**John:** Her point which is that it is not about just victory, it’s not about accomplishments, it is shared accomplishment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which feels true to actual real life, too. If you are playing a video game and you finally — I’m thinking Sky Rim for example.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** I had to keep saving and restarting this one thing because I lost my follower guy and I was just at a level that was beyond where I could really be. And there were these two bosses sort of coming at me. And I was finally able to assassinate the one guy with the arrow and take care of the other minion boss in time to sort of get through it.

And there were maybe ten restarts in order to get through that moment. And it was like, “Woo, that was just a moment of real accomplishment!” But I’m sitting alone. [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** In the downstairs office. And no one knew that I was doing that. And so it was an accomplishment but there was no one to share it with. There was no one who knew I wanted to do it. There was no one who knew that I was trying to do it, so like I did it and it was like, “Oh okay.”

**Craig:** Yeah. We define for ourselves, we define joy, whether we know it or not, in the context of relationship with other people. There is no joy in solitude. It is a bit like watching a comedy in a theater or watching it at home alone. You will smile a lot when you are at home alone, but you will laugh in a theater because you are sharing something with others.

The line that immediately came to mind when I read this article was, “Yo Adrian, I did it.”

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I mean he lost, right, but he won in his own way, of course, and we don’t need to rehash why the ending of Rocky is interesting. But, he had to say, “Yo Adrian, I did it,” and then we feel something. Because there is somebody else on the other end of his emotional phone call that matters to him. And that is everything.

**John:** Yeah. In some ways it is a way of restating the cliché, “What does the character want versus the character need?” So classically that means he wants to win the fight, but what he needs to do is save his relationship or make this smaller achievement. He needed to change his life. I kind of buckle against that just because it has become such a cliché, but when you actually sort of break that, you pull back and look at sort of all the little things he needs, that can be very instructive.

Because one of the things, I think, she has hit on is how important it is to look at your whole story and look at are you really paying off all of those threads. Are those characters who you are introducing along the way, are they just helping out the character, your protagonist, your lead character, your hero, or are they really relationship set, change and evolve and are going to be able to highlight the sense of accomplishment at the end?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If you look at Star Wars, at the very start of Star Wars we establish the battle plans for the Death Star. So one version of Star Wars is basically, “We have to blow up the Death Star.” And the movie can be about that. It can be about finding and training Luke Skywalker to blow up the Death Star and he can blow up the Death Star, and he blew up the Death Star and it is great. Yay, success.

But that wouldn’t feel like a successful movie because what is really the success of that is not that he was able to blow it up but that everyone was cheering for him after he blew it up. My theory is if you were to take the ending of Star Wars and take out the victory celebration at the end of that you wouldn’t have the same satisfaction in the movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It is not about the explosion, it is about everyone cheering.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean he has an internal goal that he has to achieve. He has to learn what it means to put his faith in the force, for whatever value that is. And the truth is the value of that is minimal. Obviously in the movie it has great impact in terms of plot, but in terms of his character and his emotion, and my emotion as an audience member, eh good, that’s good, but you are absolutely right — there are friendships, there is loss that matters to him. It is all in the context of the relationship between the characters. That is the only thing that matters.

And you are right. The award ceremony at the end is a great way for them to kind of come together and be together. And it is, to me, cliché is only in the execution. But all movies, I think, ultimately if there is some kind of joy at the end it is joy in the context of what you have done for others or what you have done for yourself in order to be better for others. This is natural human instinct.

**John:** Yeah. I think it is crucial to talk about, we are not, it is not just a pitch for happy endings in a strange way. There are some of these movies that don’t end on happy notes. You look at, Obi-Wan dies, Yoda dies. Most of the people on the Titanic die. A lot of the Pandorans die. A lot of great movies don’t end with fantastic — they are tinged by loss. And in a strange way the character who succeeds with a smile but has sort of that tinge of loss to them, that is the guy you love the most.

**Craig:** Right. Well, and also the flip side of this is there is a way to deliver tragedy by leaning on this lever as well. They mention The Godfather in that article. And I didn’t quite…

**John:** I didn’t quite get The Godfather, but it wasn’t fresh in my head.

**Craig:** Yeah. I have a slightly different angle on that. There are a ton of reasons why The Godfather is probably the best movie ever made, but one of them is it presents family in a way that is really exciting. It actually romanticizes something that is very bland and hokey to us which is family. I mean the worst thing in the world is a “family film,” right?

But in The Godfather, not only are they a family, but they are a family of these awesome murderers that can run things and they stick together, and loyalty. And the whole movie is soaking in this kind of shared compatriotism.

But, the tragedy is that there is a price to pay for it. And at the end the protagonist of the movie is somebody that in a weird way stands apart from family. He is messed up. He is shutting the door on his wife. He is not like his father. He kills his brother-in-law. He is, in his attempt to be the family man par excellence, he has become sort of a corruption of that.

And that is why there is a tragedy there. And it is tragic to us because entirely he is voiding what we believe is so important.

And then, look at what happens in the second movie? They take, I mean Coppola and Puzo take it to the next level and have him kill Fredo.

**John:** Yeah. It was an HBO series before its time.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Yeah. And one of the things I found myself doing as I was preparing for this downstairs, I said, “Oh, I’m going to pull up the list of the AFI 100 Top Movies and sort of see how this applies to things.” And I was sort of skipping through and I found that, “Oh no, I’m doing that thing that I hate.” I was doing that thing where I was trying to apply this pattern, this template, to movies to try to make them fit into things.

And what I think is especially rewarding about this article is in no way is it sort of advocating that all great movies match this template, that this is the one magic formula behind things. It feels more like a challenge. More like, “Hey, look at the movie you are writing right now and see if you are paying off relationships in a way that is meaningful. See if your accomplishments are being tracked in a way that is meaningful to the characters in your story.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And don’t panic if maybe you don’t have a lot of plot-plot-plot if the overall feeling of your movie is rewarding. She cites Ferris Bueller which, I think, is a great one. The stakes in Ferris Bueller are not especially high, but the whole movie is constructed in a way — and I actually think a lot of John Hughes movies are structured this way — that the world is good and the world is safe and it is a very rewarding place to spend your two hours of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean John Hughes had a real talent for staging movies through the eyes of melodramatic teenagers. And melodramatic teenagers, and since I was one, have an amazing ability to narrow the focus of drama in the world to what is happening today. And he honored that.

I mean detention was massive. People forgetting your birthday on your Sweet 16 was massive. Just getting a day off from school was massive. And in doing so the stakes felt real to me, but he always found his way back to what we are talking about which is the relationships.

That is why when you watch Ferris Bueller, I mean Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who is the star, who is the protagonist of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? You think it would be Ferris Bueller but it is not.

**John:** No, it’s his friend.

**Craig:** It’s his friend. It’s Cameron. And understanding what Cameron needs is why that movie works. No Cameron, no movie.

**John:** Completely. When we were making Go I would glibly pitch Go as sometimes “The Breakfast Club with a body count.” Of course there really isn’t a body count, but it is a more plotty movie than the John Hughes movies are. And it is sort of pushing back against the John Hughes movies.

But when you actually look at where the movie spends its time, especially where you look at how the movie spends its last ten minutes, the movie could end significantly earlier on. You have wrapped up a lot of sort of the plot stuff that has been set up. But the experience of watching the movie, you really need Ronna to wake up in the hospital room. You need to see her reconnect with Claire. They need to go find Mannie. And they all need to get in the car together after having their conversation and you need to see that they are all going to be okay.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that setting the road forward, “Well what are we doing for New Years?” You need to know that everything is going to be resolved and that what happened happened — the whole world didn’t change. And no one is going to say, “That’s the night that everything changed,” but their relationships are retained and changed in a way that is meaningful.

**Craig:** That is the stuff the audience tracks and I think that a lot of producers sometimes, and studio executives, and directors, and writers sometimes miss that and concentrate on the stuff, the action. And they sort of feel like, “Well, the thing blew up, the bomb went off, you saved the day, movie over. Let’s just skip the rest of this stuff and head for the hills.” And it is not the case.

**John:** They concentrate on the intellectual logic and not the emotional logic.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** They don’t see how the whole thing fits together and what the experience is going to be.

And the challenge of being a screenwriter is you are the only person who has seen the movie. You know what the movie feels like because you have seen the whole thing. The whole movie has played through you and you have to be able to tell them that. Even on this project I am working on right now, there is one scene where they kept saying, “Well couldn’t you lose that?” And I say, “No, this is a crucial moment. I kind of have to walk you down the hall because I know you are not going to get there emotionally unless I have taken you through this place.”

It is like how we set up a joke. I mean punch lines aren’t funny, punch lines by themselves. They are only funny because you had the setup. And emotionally the same thing is true. Even if it is not a joke you are going for, you can only get to tears if you have taken the audience carefully through a process.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is one thing that I know Lindsay and I agree on vehemently, but I often find myself having…

**John:** Can you vehemently agree?

**Craig:** Yes. We violently agree on this.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** But I often have to be the sort of lone defensive voice on this one through the things that I write. We both put a lot of stock in healthy first acts. Nice, good, long first acts. It is okay, take your time, set people up. Don’t be panicked that they are going to get bored 20 minutes in. They don’t get bored 20 minutes in. They get bored 60 minutes in when you didn’t spend the time in the beginning and they don’t give a damn about any of these people because they don’t know what their problems are and they don’t know what their relationships are so the payoffs don’t matter.

I mean, the setup of a joke, set up punch lines, the same deal. I thought that she… — It was a very good article and it was definitely, you know, it was in our kind of Zen mode of anti-structure structure and anti-gimmick gimmick. So I liked it.

**John:** Yeah. So highly recommended. Links to anything we mention in the podcast are always going to be on the podcast notes which are at johnaugust.com/podcast. So we will have a link to that article and to things that are related to that article.

And, Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** And thank you, John. Have fun while you are continuing with your casting in New York. And we will see you when you get back.

**John:** Great. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** I think Vagisil.

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

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

**Craig:** Nerd!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That would be great.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** What?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll fix that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Protest.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Done.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Maybe. Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t be a jerk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Actually, no.

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

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

**John:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

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

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** It won’t help you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** “It seems fair.”

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we found was that —

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Every time.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

**John:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

It’s a very complicated business.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because oftentimes actors are —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** — re-writing.

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

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

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sometimes.

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

**Craig:** I agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

Next week let’s talk about sex.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay.

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

**Craig:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

How are you Craig?

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** The greatest.

**John:** Really wonderfully awkwardly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Seamless.

**John:** Nicely done.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

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

**Craig:** Very busy.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** He’s so good.

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

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

**Craig:** Oh boy.

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

**Craig:** Guilty. [laughs]

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

“50/50,” by Will Reiser.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

**John:** Midnight in Paris.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s still that way.

**Craig:** It’s a little skewed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s cool.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Ah.

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

**Craig:** Well, I’m going to…

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

**John:** All right, okay.

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

**John:** That’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yes, The Help.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, that happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Third, yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah, we do.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Oh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iTunes basically works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just Skype.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** …anybody about anything.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Because she’s not crazy.

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

**Craig:** Hey!

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No. You shouldn’t.

**Craig:** No.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Dana is lovely.

**Craig:** She’s the best.

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

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

**Craig:** So it’s…

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah, well…

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

**Craig:** It’s actually 2015.

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

**Craig:** We…

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

**Craig:** Good.

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

**Craig:** It sounds exciting.

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

So he’s bragging, basically.

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Enough dude.

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Does he have awards?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yes.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So exciting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, thank goodness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s like a half abortion.

**John:** It’s a half abortion.

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

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

**Craig:** No, girl masturbation…

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thanks John. Bye.

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

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. This is Episode 18, by the way. And Happy New Year, Craig.

**Craig:** Happy New Year 2012.

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

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

**John:** As is mine.

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

**John:** That’s impressive.

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

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

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

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice?

**John:** How sweet. That’s so nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

So, I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh, yeah, that’d be good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nice.

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

**Craig:** Oh, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you.

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

**Craig:** Whoa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Bummer.

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And it really does —

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was really hard.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Coolness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That would be great.

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

**John:** I will.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Gee, man.

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

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Because it’s wonderful.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** Sounds good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** He’s using craft.

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That was a motorcycle.

**John:** That’s awesome.

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

**John:** It was your wound.

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

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

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

Absolutely, no question, that is true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** It’s not bad.

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

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

And that’s a good point.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Fair enough.

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

**John:** Oh yes.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. Indeed. Great. Thank you so much and thank you for our first podcast of the new year.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Looking forward to a year where we

Grow our audience to a true, world class army size.

**John:** I love it. All right. Thanks.

**Craig:** You got it. Bye.