Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/the-good-boy-syndrome-and-whether-film-school-is-worth-it).

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

**Craig Mazin:** I remain Craig Mazin.

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

How are you today, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m good. Big gadget day today.

**John:** Oh, what happened?

**Craig:** Well, I’m on this new microphone that’s the same microphone you use, so theoretically I will sound as intelligent as you normally do.

**John:** That’s going to be a good step up for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m very excited about that. I have the new iPhone 4S. I’ve gone from AT&T to Verizon. I have completely screwed up the changeover from Google Voice, so that’s going to be a disaster for a while, but I’ll figure that out. Otherwise, yeah, big gadget day, so I’m excited.

**John:** So how did you get your 4S? Did you wait in line, did you pre-order it?

**Craig:** No, pre-ordered it. Because I was switching to Verizon… That night, that crazy night when Apple just fell apart on those pre-orders, Verizon was rocking. So you could go to their site, easily order phones from them. That’s what I did and it showed up today. Perfect.

**John:** I thought I’d start today with a quote because someone on another message board had left a quote about writing, which was really good, that referenced a Winston Churchill quote. So then I looked up the Winston Churchill quote, and it was great. This is the original Winston Churchill quote, which someone will probably actually find was not really something he said, the same way that all great quotes are always ascribed to Martin Luther King but he didn’t really say them at all.

But this is a good quote. “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.” Winston Churchill writing a book.

**Craig:** It reminds me of… I think it was Antonioni. Somebody said, talking about making a movie, when you start making a movie your goal is to make a great movie, then as you proceed you just want to make a good movie, then at some point you just want to make a movie, and the last stage is you simply want to survive. [laughs] Very similar sentiment.

**John:** Definitely. I find any of the sort of project that takes months to do, I end up always going through that stage. I always think, “Oh, this movie that I write will be different.” I’m on my 40th thing right now. I just printed, about 20 minutes ago, I printed for the first time because I realized, “Oh, I actually have enough pages that I could print, and it won’t be embarrassingly small.” There’s actually enough that I could actually spend a good hour going through pages. I definitely find that manic depression, peak-and-valley thing happening.

A mutual friend of ours, who probably doesn’t want to be mentioned in the podcast, so I won’t mention her name, described when she was first starting on a project that she was sort of like a grandmother going in the ocean in that she would dip her toes in and splash some water on her ankles and then get back on the shore. Then she’d go in a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper, and eventually she’s in the ocean and she’s swimming, like, “Oh, I’m in the ocean. I’m swimming.”

That very much is what it is when I’m starting almost any project, is I’m always reluctant to start and then I finally get in and get going and recognize, “Oh, you’re more than halfway through.” Suddenly all the stuff that was keeping you away from the script starts sucking you into it. It sort of occupies every available brain cycle. I’m hitting that point in this project right now.

**Craig:** That’s a great time. There’s something magical that happens around page 70 for whatever reason, the notion that you’re leaving the forest and no longer wandering in. It just lifts you up. Page 50, for some reason, seems like the worst page to me.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a bleak time. Weirdly, on two recent projects I’ve had to turn in pages early because we could have theoretically lost a director. Both on Preacher and on Monsterpocalypse — I wouldn’t have lost Tim, but we needed to get timing and schedules and stuff figured out — I had to turn in like 45 or 50 pages.

Fortunately, they were a really good, strong 45 or 50 pages. And I felt really good about them, and people liked them, which is hooray, fantastic, that’s exactly what you want. But then to get the mojo back, like, oh my god, I felt like I was done to finish those 45 pages, and then you have everything else ahead of you. That can be a daunting period.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think the people that employ us have any sense of how emotionally fragile we are when we’re doing this stuff. Minor interruptions, anything sometimes, can cause three days of downtime and fetal position. The truth is there’s nothing we can do about it. They have to do what they’re doing. We all live in the real world. We’re writing movies that require many moving parts and the participation of a lot of people. You don’t always have the luxury of being able to just go through the way you want to but, god, anything that stops momentum is the worst.

**John:** It’s rough. The challenge I always have if I get notes too early on in a project is I’ll start to question fundamental decisions I’ve made about a story. Thank god in the case of both of those two movies people liked it and said, “Go, write, full speed ahead.” But if they had said, “Oh, we’re reconsidering this aspect of it,” I would have been doomed. That’s the risk.

**Craig:** We should remember this. There’s a good topic to be had, I know it’s not today’s topic, but the notion of the Good Boy Syndrome, of how you balance being a responsible professional who’s open to criticism because oftentimes criticism makes us write better work, how to balance that with the demands of your own voice and your own instincts so that you’re not bargaining away what matters the most. That is an internal war. Sometimes you have to be a bad guy for everyone’s sake because you’re right. Topic for another day.

**John:** I don’t know. I would actually propose that we talk about that today. The topic we were going to talk about today was film school and I can sort of talk about film school any time, I have my notes here and I can get back to that. I love this idea of the Good Boy Syndrome is that most of us as screenwriters tended to be decent students.

If we weren’t teacher’s pets, we were at least responsible enough to get stuff done. A lot of times my early writing was getting my mom to read it and say, “Oh, this was really great.” She was proofreading it, but mostly it was, “Hey, mom knows how smart I am.” So we don’t want to be the villains, and sometimes we have to be the villains.

When I was first directing for The Nines, where I decided, “Oh, I should direct this movie,” one of the things I had to get out of my head was this sense of having to feel like a host, having to feel like the person who was putting on the event, putting on the party, and having to make sure everyone’s happy and comfortable.

That’s not my job to make sure everyone’s happy and comfortable. My job is to get this movie made, and I can be nice and polite and friendly while getting this movie made, but it’s not my job to make sure the gaffer’s having a great day. It’s my job to make sure the gaffer know what it is I need to have done or the DP knows what I need to have done, so that everyone can do their job properly.

As the screenwriter on projects, a lot of times so much of our work is theoretical and mushy and you could go 1,000 different ways and there’s not a huge time pressure usually. You want to be the good guy, you want to be the hero, and it’s not always the right choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not always the right choice. Think about two diametrically opposed extreme kinds of screenwriters, and they exist. On the one end you have a guy that is the classic resistant, defensive, “I’m not listening to you. I know what I’m doing. Don’t change anything. Don’t tell me what to write. You’re all idiots.”

When we look at that guy, we see someone who’s put his ego or his own fear or emotional needs ahead of what ultimately could be better for the movie. Because even if 90-percent of the people with whom you’re collaborating are idiots, 10-percent of them aren’t. Maybe even only one of them isn’t. Or maybe they’re all idiots, but the truth is one of them is going to be performing. You simply cannot do this job in creative isolation. Let’s call that the bad boy.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, you can have screenwriters who are so eager to please and over collaborate and who are steeped in enough self-loathing that anybody telling them, “I don’t like this,” triggers that impulse of, “Oh no, oh no,” that they agree to everything. Suddenly they find themselves under enormous, anxious stress because they are now writing toward pleasing people as opposed to making a good movie.

Both writers, in the end, will end up with a bad movie and negotiating within yourself, you need both sides of this or else you’re going to get crushed.

**John:** Yeah. That’s maybe a reason why some writing teams are successful is that one of them is that good cop people pleaser and the other one is the asshole who says, “No, we’re not doing that,” and you do need both functions a lot of times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sure the roles change, one guy can be the placater, the other one can be the defiant one and then for the producers and the director, whoever else is on the other side of the script, they can see, “Okay. Well, at least some sort of truce is being brokered. There’s a negotiation happening.” But if it’s just you, you have to be both of those things at once. Very difficult.

**John:** In projects that have come in to do rewrite work on, especially in the weekly rewrite work, part of my attraction for that is I do get to be the hero. I get to be the good guy. I get to be the person who arrives and fixes this problem and makes everyone feel better about the situation and then I get to leave. That’s the remarkable thing.

You recognize that a lot of the stuff that you’re finding in the script, a lot of the cruft and stacked up bad decisions weren’t because the previous writer or writers were bad writers. It’s that they were trying to address concerns that other people had, often not the same person’s concerns. So the director needed this and the producer said this and the star said, “I really want a scene where I’m eating hamburgers,” and all those things got put into the script that weren’t necessarily the right choice for the script at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. When you come on specifically to help something they’re literally saying, “Look, we need things. Give them to us.” So your job is very clear and you are sort of rent-a-writer and you don’t have to get super visionary about it because you’re only there for a week or two. And sometimes that kind of detachment is precisely what the movie needs. It doesn’t always mean that you’re coming in to deliver hackwork. Your emotional distance may be very useful.

But when you’re writing a script from scratch or you’re doing a page one rewrite or something like that you do need a vision and you do need something that you must protect. I’m still dwelling on the fact that you used the word “cruft.” Is that what you said? Cruft?

**John:** Cruft.

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** Cruft. My use of the word comes from coding, and cruft is extra stuff that’s in code that doesn’t actually do anything, it just junks it all up.

**Craig:** Like an inefficient…?

**John:** Yeah. Again, I’m probably using the term slightly incorrectly, but cruft to me is sort of like the breadcrumbs that are left from previous ways of doing things. So it’s the loops that don’t really need to be loops. It’s the extra stuff. So it’s not the comments. It’s not the actual explanatory stuff. It’s vestigial stuff that’s left.

**Craig:** It’s vestigial. I was going to say it’s like a little tail hanging off of a baby’s butt.

**John:** Baby tails.

**Craig:** Baby tails. By the way, that is not normal.

**John:** If you have a tail, you should probably see somebody because that could be a problem down the road.

**Craig:** It’s biological cruft.

**John:** I’ve had tail bone problems before and I think part of the reason why we have back problems is that our ancestors had tails and things just worked differently. From sitting in my chair for so much of my day I will develop aches in my hips and the sacrum, which is where your tail bone is. If I just had a tail I could crack something, but there’s nothing to crack.

**Craig:** The human back is the greatest refutation to intelligent design theorists. It’s the worst design ever.

**John:** We’re a series of compromises. Just like every movie is essentially a series of compromises. The human body is a huge series of compromises. We’re born at nine months not because we’re ready to be born, but because otherwise our giant heads would not fit through the pelvis.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s why the first two and a half months of an infant’s life are useless.

**John:** It’s the fourth trimester.

**Craig:** It’s the fourth trimester. Horses are born, they plop out, they stagger around for two minutes, and then they’re running around eating oats. We can’t even hold our heads up.

**John:** We’re sad and we’re pathetic.

**Craig:** Useless. We’re cruft. [laughs]

**John:** There’s a lot of cruft there. Because of this sort of biological problem, this engineering problem, the first two months of a child’s life for parents is just horrible.

**Craig:** Worst. The worst because your child gives you nothing.

**John:** Their brains can’t actually do any of the stuff that would cause you to have a parental attachment. They can’t smile at you, they can’t roll over. They can just poop and eat. We love them just because we have so much sunken cost into them during those two months. It’s tough. It’s not intelligent design.

**Craig:** I’m sure there is a biological, hormonal component to postnatal depression, but I do honestly believe at least half of it is the crash that comes from the expectation what it means to have a baby and then have no emotional connection to it. Babies, that first four, five, six weeks they don’t even recognize you. It’s awful.

**John:** My biggest frustration is couples, women mostly, pregnant women, who will go through this whole elaborate thing about exactly how they want the birth to be, because like with the birth is a big, bigger thing. And they haven’t planned for like two minutes after the birth. They know exactly how they want the room set up, and what they want the doula doing, but they haven’t figured out like, “Oh, what are we going to do in that first horrible month when no one is sleeping?”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And you know what? It’s people when they’re having babies — this is now, we’re once again back to gynecology, which I love — when people are going to have their first baby, they want to apply as much control as they can. But the only thing they can control is the birth, and they’ll get really, really finicky about it, but the baby upon birth dashes all of your plans to hell, because she’s screaming.

So that’s it. Plan’s gone. When I had my second kid, I didn’t care about any of that birth nonsense. All I cared about was lining up a night nurse. To me, that is like I would sell anything for a night nurse. I would rather have a night nurse for the first month of an infancy, for a new baby, than a car.

**John:** A night nurse, for people who don’t know, is a woman — generally — you hire and who comes and takes care of the baby overnight. Basically feeds and diapers the baby overnight, so that the parents can sleep. You don’t hire the night nurse for the baby. You hire the night nurse for yourself.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So you get a night of sleep.

**Craig:** And you cannot imagine the difference it makes in your experience with this child. The day is annoying anyway, because the child gives you nothing and screams and cries and poops, but at least you’re not exhausted to the point of tears. You’re functional. Again, nothing to do with screen… Although it is, you know what? If you’re a screenwriter and you’re having a baby, you can’t write without a night nurse. So that’s it. [laughter]

**John:** Actually, I have a better way to sort of bring it back to the actual process of screenwriting is that these couples — these women who are planning for the birth, and they’re focusing all of this energy on the birth — are very much like the producers and studio development people who are focusing on the screenplay.

So they’re trying to make this movie, and they’re focusing only on this script that’s in front of them. But they’re not focusing on, like, “Oh, you know what? There’s actually going to be a movie.” And that the minute you start production and the minute you get to that first test screening and all the stuff down the road, they’re not thinking about that final movie.

They get so obsessed with this little one moment on this page, and making sure that thing is exactly what they want it to be, that they sometimes stop thinking about the entire… the actual point of the work that they’re doing, which is to make this movie.

**Craig:** That is a genius analogy. It’s so true. The obsession over minutiae when you’re writing a screenplay is entirely about people who are afraid — and we all are, not just them; all of us, everyone’s afraid of this — exercising control over it, but it is endlessly amusing to me that all the things that we all have god knows how many hours of conference calls over tiny little things get dashed to pieces when the director shows up and says, “You know what? On the day, I think it should just be this.” And everybody’s like, “Okay,” because you’re the director.

That’s like, “I’m giving you the baby now. You raise the baby, but boy, we really sure put a whole lot of time into thinking about what it should wear on Wednesday morning.”

It’s a perfect analogy, and the more you recognize as a screenwriter that many of the notes are about exercising control out of fear, the more you can actually relax about them. Because we get bad notes sometimes. They’re not trying to hurt you. They’re just trying to protect their fear level, which is extraordinary.

**John:** And generally, as you’re getting notes and you’re job as a screenwriter is to figure out who’s notes are really coming at you, and which are the important notes.

And the best analogy I can actually think of is something that happens every time you go into a creative meeting. You’re in somebody’s office, and an actual okay question to ask is, “Where should I sit?” because there’s one chair that the person who’s the most important person in the room wants to sit in, so you make sure that person gets the chair they want to sit in.

And you should be sitting someplace where you can look directly at that person, and you can turn your head and look at everybody else, but really you’re talking to that one person. And when you go into those meetings and you figure out who is the actual most important person in the room — that’s the same experience of these notes. It’s that you could try to address everybody’s notes and make sure everyone gets heard, but then you’re just being a good boy, and you’re not necessarily being a good writer.

**Craig:** That’s right. And the instinct or ability to determine who needs to be listened to primarily — that is unfortunately one of those things that requires some experience. I mean, I’m sure some people are better at it than others right out of the box, but for new screenwriters, you are going to have some dramatic, clumsy meetings where you blow it. And you just blow it because you’re learning how all this stuff works. In the end, everybody figures it out.

**John:** One of the very smart things my first agent, who in the last podcast I talked about how I let him go —

**Craig:** Oh, your first agent in quotes, the one that doesn’t exist?

**John:** Yes, who apparently doesn’t exist — my imaginary first agent. One of the smart things that he did or I did myself somehow, was he sent me out on fifteen meetings, like right away. And they were really unimportant meetings. They were sort of the junior executives at various production companies. And so they’d read my script and we’d talk, but it was mostly, I think, just to burn me through my first fifteen terrible meetings, so I got better at it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I like this. Yeah, that’s smart. Good… It’s sort of like spring training for meetings. I like it.

**John:** So we have a little time here, so I think I may jump ahead, and I do want to talk about film school, but I think we can tie a lot of this back in here. So we’ll see how this goes.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** This last week I got to talk at UCLA. So it was a group of students who had just watched The Nines, and had watched God, the short I did with Melissa McCarthy before that, and so it was great to be sitting in a room with people who had just very recently seen the two movies I had done and could talk about them in a smart way. This was mostly a graduate group, some cinematographers, some directors, and I got to see what the UCLA Film School looks like, which is pretty nice. It’s not as nice as the new USC building, but it’s pretty nice.

And then over the last month I’d been up to USC three times to talk to students, both in the screenwriting program and some of the incoming freshmen, and it’s got me thinking a lot about film school, and college and graduate school overall.

So I made a list of eight reasons why you go to college or grad school at all, whether it’s film school or any sort of college program, some reasons why you’d want to go. As I’m talking, keep note of those and see which ones you think are actually important and which ones I’m just talking out of my ass.

**Craig:** I’m getting a pen. I’ve got an index card. I’m taking notes.

**John:** All right. Reasons to go to college or a grad school program. The information, literally so you learn this thing that you’re supposed to be learning.

Two, a degree or some sort of certificate that proves that you know how to do this thing. And in some professions, that’s incredibly important, like engineering — you have to be certified to be able to do certain things. Medical school, obviously.

Number three, access to special equipment.

**Craig:** Wait, wait. You need a degree to do medicine?

**John:** In the U.S., you do.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Is this going to be problematic for you there, Craig?

**Craig:** Ooh, no. I, I… Send him out. I can’t do it. Not today. Okay, go on. Number three?

**John:** Number three, access to special equipment. For some things, that’s really obvious. If you’re doing nuclear engineering, you probably need some kind of special stuff, but even, like, a law library is sort of special equipment. It’d be hard to do law school without access to some sort of law library.

Number four, structure. That’s the sense that’s like, “That’s me learning calculus.” I never had a real calculus class. And so I kept thinking, like, “Oh, I could teach myself calculus.” But I’ve never taught myself calculus, because I would need the structure of having to actually work my way through the book.

The last four reasons are sort of people-related.

Number five, professors. Professors are experts, like the learned people in that field who are the teachers who will teach you.

Number six, peers, people who are there to do the same thing that you’re trying to do.

Number seven, alumni, people who are going to be helpful for your learning process, but ultimately to get a job and to sort of thrive in your career.

And the last reason, so these are kind of out of order, but the last reason is because you enjoy it, because you want to have a good time, and it’s a good way to spend a couple years.

**Craig:** None of these reasons are sex.

**John:** Well, sex is enjoyment.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Okay, fine. Now I understand number eight. I didn’t understand until you said that. Okay.

**John:** I would argue that a lot of our traditional liberal arts education or our four year college education is really about the four years aspect. It’s like you’re taking kids when they are 18 years old and letting them grow up to be 22 years old without killing themselves, and they’re going to have sex in a safe environment — a safer environment — and drinking a lot, but they have a safe place to land.

**Craig:** All right, all right. That’s a pretty good list.

**John:** Of those eight, let’s think about film school, and which of those do you think are important for film school or not relevant anymore.

**Craig:** Let me go down the list. Info — of questionable importance for film, to me at least, and I’ll preface this by saying I didn’t go to film school. But I think that much of the information that we need to write good stories is available elsewhere. It may not be available to the extent or in the concentrated form, but that’s covered by some of these other things. So I’ll give it sort of a…

**John:** Partial.

**Craig:** …a partial. Degree — totally irrelevant.

**John:** Completely irrelevant. I have no idea where my MFA is. I have an MFA in film. I have no idea where it is. I assume I still have it someplace. No one will ever ask me for my film degree. No one cares.

**Craig:** No, no one cares. Special equipment — used to be the case. No longer.

**John:** Very true.

**Craig:** Used to need the moviolas and all the rest of it. Now, you just need a laptop.

**John:** It’s interesting looking at USC, because USC just built an amazing new complex for the cinema school, and at the same time, with their freshmen who are showing up there have 5D or 7D cameras of their own, and they have Final Cut Pro 7 on their laptops, so they’re able to make… Smartly, USC is having them make a lot of stuff right away, so they’re shooting stuff constantly and they’re doing it all on their own stuff.

And so downstairs at the USC complex they have these amazing rooms and rooms and rooms of Avids and George Lucas kind of special equipment. And there’s some special things it would be very hard to get any place else, like they have motion capture equipment and 3D labs and stuff like that that would be hard to find other places. But equipment is not nearly as important as it used to be. When I went to film school, you were going to have hard time getting a 16 millimeter camera any place else, and getting your film processed — that was all a big deal.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And now it’s not.

**Craig:** It’s just all gone, so that’s…

**John:** And, Craig, with your 4S, you have a better camera than anyone in film school had up until…

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**John:** …the mid-’90s, probably.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s nuts-o. So, I mean, special equipment — certainly doesn’t play anymore. Structure definitely, I think, is a huge benefit of film school. You are forced by the demands of your curriculum to write, produce, cut, edit, do whatever else is required. It forces you out of your normal state of procrastination, so that’s a helpful thing.

**John:** A helpful thing.

**Craig:** Professor mentors — obviously, you can’t get them unless you’re… I mean, you can’t get professorial mentors unless you’re there. I would argue, however, that you can get mentor mentors elsewhere. You don’t need film school to get a great mentor. And frankly, one of the hidden dangers of film school is that a lot of times, the professors are slightly more academic than you would want, I think.

**John:** I think it’s a really valid question to ask about any film program you’re looking at, is like what have these people actually done? Do they really know what they’re talking about as it relates to the film industry right now versus the film industry 20 years ago? If you’re going to film school for critical studies, that’s probably much less important, because you’re talking about the history of film. Well, you want somebody old, that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, if you are trying to be a director, a writer, a producer, and you’re not going to NYU or USC or UCLA, I’m not really sure why you’re going to film school at all. Because I don’t know if they are attracting the kind of people that really can steer you in a smart way. I mean, maybe there are other ones out there, but sometimes I meet people who are going to film school at a tiny, I don’t know, Arizona State Film Studies program, I just don’t know why they’re there.

**John:** I would say that number six might be a reason why — it’s the peers situation. I think of anything, I think peers is probably the most important reason now to consider film school. It’s that I look at these kids who are in the UCLA program and especially the freshmen, entering freshmen at USC’s program, is they are surrounded by 100 other people who want to do exactly what they want to do, and want to stay up all night doing what they want to do. And that’s a huge help.

They can make a lot of really amazing things. The people who were most helpful for me as I got started in the film world were not the people I knew who were more powerful. They were people who were doing exactly what I was doing. I showed up in Los Angeles knowing 25 people who were exactly the 25 people in my film program, and those are the only people I really knew for two years, and they became best friends and mortal enemies and everything in between, but they were incredibly important to me.

**Craig:** But that would still, I think, and when we get to alums, it argues for going to an excellent program, because the better the program, the better the peers, and certainly, in the case of USC, NYU, UCLA, the alums are… That’s the one I said wait okay yeah, I mean, man I wish that I had had USC alums helping me out when I showed up. I didn’t have anybody. That’s obviously a big one. And then sex — I feel like, ah, it’s an expensive way to get laid.

**John:** It is a very expensive way to get laid. I think, you know. We’ve intended to label our podcasts very conservatively, but “an expensive way to get laid” is really a good title for something. [laughter]

**Craig:** Yeah, tuition, also known as an expensive way to get laid.

**John:** I think going to undergrad with that as one of your stated goals is completely noble and good, but you shouldn’t be paying $35,000 trying to get into a top-tier film program for just that reason.

**Craig:** Yeah, super bad idea.

**John:** Plus the people who are going to applying to a film school program aren’t necessarily going to be the most attractive people you’re going to meet.

**Craig:** Exactly, for $35,000, this man or woman should be spectacular and do everything.

**John:** Instead, they’re going to be able to talk about the early films of Tarantino, but that’s not necessarily what you want out of that.

**Craig:** That’s correct.

**John:** Let’s recap this list. What is still important about film school in 2011? Partial credit on the information. When I went to film school, the Internet really wasn’t what the Internet is today, so I couldn’t find out about that stuff. I had Premiere Magazine. That was my source of film information, so I showed up not knowing what the studios were.

I’d not really read a script, the first script I read was the printed script in Soderbergh’s diary for Sex, Lies and Videotape. So I’d seen kind of a screenplay, but it wasn’t even formatted properly. Now the Internet is lousy with information about that.

Certificate? Useless, you don’t need a degree. I would say if you’re going to film school and an amazing opportunity happens halfway through, bail.

**Craig:** Totally, what’s the point of going? It’s a vocational school.

**John:** A mutual acquaintance of ours, Jon Glickman, was in my graduate school program and bailed, and now runs MGM Studios.

**Craig:** It’s not like he just became successful. Jon produced the first movie he ever wrote. He and I began at the same time, and you don’t need… If you get the job, go. That’s the whole point.

**John:** But it was a good thing he was in that graduate school program with me, because I remember being in the elevator with Jon Glickman. We were going to a class, and Joe Roth was going to speak in the class. Joe Roth, who was running at that time… I guess he’d left Disney, was running Revolution, or was right at that time.

**Craig:** It was Caravan, the forerunner.

**John:** Caravan before Revolution. I’m in the elevator. It’s me and Jon Glickman and Joe Roth. This is before the class, and Jon Glickman, to his credit, and his audacity, is like, “Hey, I’m Jon Glickman, I really want to work for you. After class, I’m going to give you my stuff and I really want you to hire me at your new company.” Joe Roth did.

**Craig:** It’s amazing is that he went to go work for Joe Roth. Joe Roth was partners with Roger Birnbaum, and then Joe Roth went off later to do Revolution. Jon has stayed with Roger the whole way through. Talk about a fateful elevator meeting. You’re right, I guess that falls under peers and alums.

**John:** Yeah, getting to meet people who will help you. Access to special equipment, not nearly as important. I think there’s still some amazing things you’re going to be able to do at USC Film School or UCLA Film School that are going to be hard to do on your own, but the special equipment is a much less important thing now.

**Craig:** You know what, it literally comes down to lights. That’s the only equipment I can think of. Lights and maybe a dolly.

**John:** I would say some of the 3D stuff, and some of the gaming, there’s some really special digital things that USC does now.

**Craig:** Like mo-cap and so forth?

**John:** They have a whole mo-cap stage.

**Craig:** By the way, in five years, watch.

**John:** Five years, it’ll totally happen. We’ll have mo-cap, easily. Did you watch the Trey Parker South Park documentary? It’s really good.

**Craig:** I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve got to watch it, I love it.

**John:** They talk about the six days to air, so they do South Park episodes in six days. What’s encouraging to hear is that they used to spend a ton of money on the technology to make it happen, and now they’re just buying Macs off the shelf, and that’s mostly what it’s done on. They’re able to do it in six days because technology has advanced, not because they necessarily want to do it in six days, it just became possible. Structure, still important?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** I think it’s really important, and having to get stuff done at a certain time is really important. A smart thing that USC is doing with their incoming freshmen is in addition to their class structure, because incoming freshmen, they have a lot of general ed requirements, so they’re taking a lot of stuff that’s not film related. They have this amazing game that’s being played this first semester where students are shooting projects constantly on their own. It provides a structure even though it’s not classically your education.

[Siren]

**Craig:** Siren.

**John:** I think they figured out that you’re not really a doctor, and they’re…

**Craig:** No, that was the ambulance I called for this guy. Just so you know, he was open, I was about to go in. We had him prepped, and then you dropped…

**John:** A crisis of faith.

**Craig:** No, you dropped this bomb on me all of a sudden that I can’t do unlicensed surgery in my office in Old Town Pasadena. Anyway, we wheeled him down over to the Cheesecake Factory, and left him there on the corner. He’ll be fine.

**John:** He’ll be fine. Cheesecake Factory is a pretty good restaurant, I think he’ll be fine.

**Craig:** He’ll be fine. Everyone’s such a baby about unlicensed surgery. God.

**John:** I know, come on. What is it, a manicurist can do your nails, but you can’t remove someone’s appendix?

**Craig:** This was a little more complicated than that, to be fair. I was doing a bypass, and I knew I was in over my head. I opened him up — sometimes I get excited about these things. I don’t think them through.

**John:** Again, women with childbirth. They have the doula, they have the whole water birth thing all set up.

**Craig:** That’s me.

**John:** Yeah, that’s you.

**Craig:** I got so excited about doing surgery, I really controlled everything up to the point where I was staring at a beating, exposed heart. Then I froze up.

**John:** Did you ever play the Macintosh game, the surgery game?

**Craig:** I totally did, I remember it exactly.

**John:** You had to draw with the mouse the little scalpel line. If you’d go too deep, he would start bleeding out.

**Craig:** I loved that game. They would also throw things at you, like, “Uh-oh, he’s going through bradycardia,” and you had to know, “Do I inject him with lidocaine or epinephrine?” And if you screwed up, the patient would die, and I killed thousands of Macintosh patients. Thousands, I don’t think I ever made anyone live. This is when I realized I shouldn’t be a doctor.

**John:** The thing about those early games is so many of them, you would just always lose, and then you just kept playing.

**Craig:** I think that’s why. It’s funny, they just released for the iOS platform this classic game called Out of this World, which was this gorgeous, rotoscoped game, revolutionary game from 1990. It’s impossible. I’d forgotten how impossible it was.

**John:** The nostalgic stuff being brought back to new platforms is a weird trend. There’s one video game I’m involved with that’s doing a bit of that. The fascination with pixel art I hope goes away.

**Craig:** It will. It was stupid to begin with, so we’re just remembering a stupid thing, and then we’ll stop, because it was stupid. Pixel art, ASCII art, all that stuff was ridiculous.

**John:** Let’s go back to our list here. We went through professors and experts. The real challenge of people who are teaching a film program is you have to ask, “Why are they teaching a film program rather than doing the thing that it is they should be doing?”

In many cases, they really are working professionals. That’s the luxury of going to film school in Los Angeles, is that a lot of people who are going to be teaching here really are working every day. The guy who’s teaching the class at UCLA is an editor on Fringe. That’s exactly the kind of person you want teaching a class.

Peers, peers are crucial.

Alumni.

**Craig:** Big time.

**John:** The whole reason I was at USC was because I was an alum. That’s why I stayed there. And enjoyment, sex.

**Craig:** Sex camp.

**John:** Still some good reasons to go to film school, fewer than there were 5 or 10 years ago.

**Craig:** I’d say. Given the way the economy is right now, if you have to take out a loan for it, think thrice. That would be my advice.

**John:** People cite the economy, but if the economy is great, should you go to film school then? Right now, I think a lot of people who are in film school, they wouldn’t have a great job anyway. Maybe it’s the time to get some schooling.

**Craig:** I don’t know, the burden of those loans. These are expensive schools.

**John:** You should have rich relatives who send you to film school, then it’s solved.

**Craig:** That’s kind of what I’m saying, if your dad’s rich, or your mom, or uncle, whatever, then sure. Go for it. But if you can get away with it without going to film school, do it.

**John:** One of the things I stressed to both these classes was that I envy them in the sense that this is just an amazing time. I think we’re making good movies, I think we’re making amazing television, and I also think we’re making more different kinds of things than at any point in our cinematic history.

It very much feels like the 1970s in the sense of you have people who are just forging whole new ways of doing stuff. Access to technology, and access to these great, cheap cameras that let you shoot things you could never shoot before. This is the time to be making those movies.

**Craig:** Without a doubt. Talk about just a different world for film students. We’ve often talked about the value of production for the screenwriter. The experience of seeing your pages produced will always make you a better writer, always. It’s so much easier to do that now, with actual expertise, than it ever was before.

Like you said, you could run around with a chunky VHS camcorder when you were a kid, or eight millimeter film, but then you’ve got to cut it, and edit it, and put it in the soup and transitions, all the rest of it. What you can do now almost compels you to do it. There’s no excuse to not.

**John:** At UCLA, they screened God, my short film, and that was a thing I made with Melissa McCarthy, and I’d taken part of the reshoot crew for Go, and we just splintered off and we shot the short film in two days at my house. That was $30,000 to do, and that was using short ends of 35 millimeter film and borrowing time on an Avid, and all those processing kinds of costs.

The thing that I can’t believe now is there’s just a superimposed title that says “God” over this opening tracking shot, and that was three days of opticals and $4,000 to get that one word over a moving image. Everything that we had to do to shoot God back in ’99 would be simple to do on any camera right now. We’d do it all on a computer.

**Craig:** No question. By the way, good on you for seeing how brilliant Melissa McCarthy was so early on.

**John:** I have a good track record of spotting people who will do well. After she got cast in Go… She was fantastic in Go. I watched the cut, and I was like, “My god, she’s terrific.” I bumped into her at Starbucks, and I said in that sort of brief, awkward seeing her again, “You’re amazing. I’m going to write a short film for you, and we’re going to do it, and it’s going to be great.” Then two weeks later I had her licking a parking meter for my movie. She used that as her audition real for years and years after that.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s awesome.

**John:** People say, “Do I have to move to Los Angeles?” That’s the reason you have to move to Los Angeles. Not just so you got your first movie made, but that you bump into her in Starbucks again, and you make short films with her, and make a series of movies with her after that.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** We talked about a lot of stuff today.

**Craig:** We did amazingly well. I want people to give us some credit. I want credit.

**John:** I hear some applause, but I’m traveling back through time for it.

I feel like we covered a lot today, and I’m really glad we got back to the gynecological issues that really were the genesis of this whole podcast.

**Craig:** Eventually we’re going to have a huge audience that just comes for that. Next week’s podcast is entirely about vaginosis.

**John:** I like it. Things I know, we’ve gotten some reader questions, and I’ve put that up on the blog. Before we go, I’ll say this. If you have a question that you want Craig and I to talk about, if you want Craig and me to talk about it — that was bad — email at ask@johnaugust.com. There’s a big bucket of questions, and if you ask a question that would be interesting for Craig and I to talk about, we’ll talk about it. Other than that, thank you for listening.

**Craig:** Yeah, thanks. People keep coming up to me and saying they’re listening to this. They really are, that’s awesome.

**John:** Thank you, Craig, and have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you soon.

**Craig:** All right, bye bye.

**John:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/firing-a-manager-and-trying-new-software).

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

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

**John:** This is Scriptnotes. This is a podcast about screenwriting, stuff that’s interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you today?

**Craig:** Good day today, I think, so far. How about you?

**John:** Good. Productive? Were you writing today?

**Craig:** Yeah, today I was actually sitting with Todd Phillips, breaking story. Now I’m going to have some dinner after this, and then I’m going to write.

**John:** That’s a very lovely day. I got six pages done today, so I feel productive.

**Craig:** Six pages is a good day.

**John:** Six pages, I will sleep well tonight.

Question for you. When you get an email from somebody you don’t know, do you google them?

**Craig:** It depends on the content of the email. [laughs] But if it intrigues me in any way, yes.

**John:** The reason I ask is because I wanted to start today with a question, and it’s clearly a genuine question. This person put in enough work to the question that I don’t think that this was any sort of scam deal or anything. But as I looked up this person’s name — I didn’t recognize it, so I googled it — it came up as an adult film star.

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**John:** I don’t think it’s actually the adult film star who was emailing me. But it’s a person who, because of the nature of the question, chose to use a handle, which was the adult film star thing, so that I wouldn’t actually print it. But of course, it was a female adult film star, which I would have no idea if it was actually a female.

**Craig:** Well, if you said the name, I would pretend that I didn’t know it.

**John:** Oh, very nice. That’s the lovely thing about an audio podcast, is no one can see your facial reaction.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I’m going to choose to name this person Tina, which is not the name that originally came on the email. Let me read it to you:

“About a year ago, a manager from a reputable company contacted me because they were a fan of my online videos.” Which, I presume, were not adult videos. “I agreed to work with them. Unfortunately, this manager also represents people with lots of IMDb credits — big people, mostly actors though, a few writers. Over the last year it has become painfully obvious they have zero time for me and have put zero effort into helping my career get off the ground.

“Any general meeting I’ve gotten over the last year has been a direct result of my own efforts. I am beginning to realize that this manager and I don’t agree on anything creatively. Their notes are contradictory and vague. When they’re not, I find them to be flat out wrong.

“My question is, if I cut ties, I’m back to square one with no other representation possibilities on the horizon. At the same time, this manager has made it clear I’m last on their list of priorities. Even if I weren’t, the difference of opinion on everything seems counter-productive. Is it worth just keeping the manager or risk going it alone?

“I’ve actually spoken to my manager about this. I asked him if he had the time for me. He said if I didn’t, they could maybe pass me along to someone a little lower at their company who would be able to champion me a bit more.” It’s a confusing note. I think it’s actually the writer saying that, so, the writer suggesting that. “And they said, ‘No, no. I have the time. Don’t worry.’ Well, I’m worried.”

**Craig:** This is, talk about a softball question. 90 percent of the question is really an explanation of how poor of a job this manger is doing and how bad of a fit they are, and then 10 percent is generalized anxiety disorder. [laughs] The answer is cut ties, of course.

**John:** I may disagree with you on this.

**Craig:** Let’s go. Let’s do this.

**John:** I don’t want to be the serial monogamist of these relationships, but I feel like it may be a situation where she needs to find the next manager before she leaves this current manager. I don’t know that being free and clear and floating in the Hollywood ether is going to help her any more than being with a manager who, while not helping her, isn’t an anchor in any way to her.

**Craig:** Well, here’s where I would disagree. It is difficult to switch representation without actively trying to do it. That is to say, without actively trying to get a new representative. It’s a very small community. As bad as a manager may be at their job, every manager seems to be amazing at sniffing out when their clients are trying to leave them. It becomes difficult to do a full-court press on your own behalf.

If there is any opportunity that this writer has to find a better manager, that opportunity doesn’t disappear simply because they don’t have this person. This person’s literally a zero. That’s what the question stipulates. In my mind, I think by cutting ties you give yourself every opportunity to get out there, do a full-court press and not run into anybody that said, “Oh, well, I would but your manager is a friend of mine,” or, “We share a client,” or, “I don’t want to poach.” Just get rid of him. I don’t know, that’s my feeling.

**John:** Devil’s advocate, I will say that there’s other people who this writer could be bringing into his or her team who may be helpful, and the manager could actually be an asset getting them to it. I feel like you maybe go to your manager and say, “Hey, look, I really want to try to find an attorney. Can you give me some suggestions of people I can meet with who are good attorneys?”

It could help open the doors to some of those things which aren’t a huge burden on the manager’s time. Then you have a pretty good attorney, and then, when it’s time to leave this manager, you have a pretty good attorney who can help make the next set of connections.

**Craig:** But it’s difficult to get an attorney if you’re showing up with no opportunity for lawyering.

**John:** That’s true. You’re not going to get a lawyer unless there’s actually some contract to negotiate.

**Craig:** Right, and that seems to be precluded by this relationship. I don’t know, I guess the underlying sentiment behind my advice here is that we as writers tend to project an enormous amount of power onto these representatives, fueled by our own anxiety that we will never love again.

But the truth is you’re not being loved now. It’s a bad marriage, get out of the bad marriage. Look actively and wholeheartedly for a new marriage. You found this person, you’ll find another one. I also feel like a bad manager is worse than no manager, because while you have your bad manager, you’re hamstrung and you can’t do better.

**John:** Okay. Craig, you are going to leave this manager. You’re going to advise Tina that she should leave this manager. What does Tina say to this manager?

**Craig:** Really simple. You call the manager up, no need to make a big production out of it. You lead by saying, “Listen, I made a decision to let you go, I’m going to end our professional relationship.” You start with that, right off the bat, really dispassionate.

Just say, “Unfortunately, things haven’t quite worked out the way I would’ve hoped. I had a certain series of goals for the two of us, they haven’t quite gelled, I’m sure you would agree. We’ve been together for X amount of time, it hasn’t resulted in employment, and frankly it just doesn’t seem like you have the time for me or the attention that I would’ve hoped. The decision is final, but I do appreciate the fact that you took a shot with me to begin with. I wish you nothing but the best, and I hope you understand.”

**John:** That sounds reasonable and mature and grown up. I will say that when I left my first agent, I didn’t have that level of sophistication. I felt the need to actually pick a fight, and be able to have the reason for why I was leaving.

He was genuinely a friend, but he was just simply the wrong agent for me to be with, and so I felt the need to pick some sort of fight that he wasn’t doing a good job with me, so he would get angry with me and therefore I could angry with him, and say, “I think I need to go find another agent.” The whole time, I had actually already started the whole process of figuring out who I was going to meet with next.

**Craig:** Right, that works. Look, the most important thing is that whatever method you employ, you employ it post-facto to the decision. You don’t use this breakup speech to build up to the decision, you lead with it. The decision should be unilateral, it should be a fait accompli, and then you roll out your dismissal plan.

**John:** What I just realized is that I led this conversation with talking about googling people, and I just googled my old agent yesterday. I was curious because someone said, “Whatever happened to him?” And I didn’t know what happened to him, and he’s fallen off the radar.

**Craig:** You mean the Google radar?

**John:** He doesn’t seem to exist in the last several years.

**Craig:** Is it possible that he never existed and this is like A Beautiful Mind thing?

**John:** That would be kind of amazing if he never existed. [laughs] You go back through all those old contracts and those phone calls, and you see the other side of it, and I’m just talking to myself. I basically rented this empty office, and I would go there.

**Craig:** This is the moment where Agent Kujan drops his coffee mug on the floor. [laughs]

**John:** So another thing that came up this week, I had been working on a very long post that I finally posted on the site called Workspace. I was blatantly ripping off another site called The Setup, where they talked to people — mostly creative, geeky people, technology people — about what computer programs they use, what hardware they use, and what they like and what they don’t like.

I did the same thing for my daily work habits, which is where I write, when I write, the hardware I use, the software I use. I get a lot of those questions piecemeal, and so I decided I would put them all in one post and put them all together so there was a way to look at gestalt, this is how I’m putting together my daily work.

I thought I’d go through the audio version of that with you right now. I’m going to start interviewing some other screenwriters about their workflow, and I have three of them lined up already. I have you here on the speaker, so I thought I might ask you about the stuff that you’re working on.

So: what is your daily workflow? When do you start work and when do you stop work?

**Craig:** It depends on what the task of the day is. If I’m in the mode of breaking a story, then I’m kind of — I’m pretty loosey-goosey about it. If I’m working with somebody, then it really is an external imposition. Be here at this time, let’s sit down for two or three hours, and work it through.

If I’m on my own, I just wait until that moment happens where I feel the level of procrastination has gotten insufferable, and then I try and marathon — no, that’s the opposite — I try and sprint, and jam in a day’s work in two hours, which often works. If I’m struggling at my desk, I’ll go take a walk, and if I’m struggling on the walk, I’ll go take a long shower. Whatever it takes to solve the story problems, I will do in a very fluid way.

**John:** I know you have an office, which we talked about in previous podcasts as an important way to get out of your house and to get focused on work, but do you travel? In my post, I was talking about barricading. And I’ll often go to some city — a lot of times it’s Vegas, but this last time, last week, it was Boston — and lock myself in a hotel room and just generate pages. Is that something that’s helpful for you?

**Craig:** I’ve never done it. But it sounds cool. Anything, I mean, the value of that, it would seem to me, is that it jars you out of your everyday routine. It’s a funny thing to sort of ask a writer, “What is your routine?” when so often, routine is the enemy of creativity. So, I love that you kind of do that. And I try and find my own ways of jarring myself out of it. Sometimes I will join the rest of the ranks of struggling screenwriters out there and go sit in a coffee shop and let the white noise of the chatter force me to kind of get going.

Anything that works, I guess, is my philosophy. And it seems like you kind of have to change it up every now and then. I mean, even you, even if you have a set pattern of “I go somewhere and barricade myself in a hotel room,” it’s a different place. So, you know, it’s not always the same place. I think that’s smart.

**John:** Well, with the advent of the iPad and with laptops and that stuff, it’s just, it’s so easy to take your distractions with you. And so, for this last trip, I took my laptop just in case there was, like, a huge disaster on the website that I needed to address, but I ended up never opening it at all. And I saved the iPad for only doing Facetime to call home.

And so, my structures I set for myself is, I can only be writing or I could be reading on my Kindle. And I’ve got, like, the $79 cheapest Kindle that can’t do anything other than, like, show you a book. And it ended up being a good combination of bouncing back and forth, because I was either focused on this specific scene, or was reading this book that I kind of wanted to read for a long time, but when I got tired of reading that book. I was back to doing the actual writing that I needed to write.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, you’re talking about this incredibly important aspect of the solo writer, which discipline. And we are constantly disciplining ourselves, tricking ourselves to do this thing that is difficult, annoying, psychologically taxing at times.

Inevitably, once you get going, the momentum takes over. And there is a real momentum to this. There is a momentum to not writing, just as there is to writing. But to jar yourself out of one state into another requires some kind of traumatic intervention. And part of that is eliminating all those things that keep you from not writing.

People who have partners, of course, they don’t really have this problem. I mean, I like working with other people as much as I can, because it relieves the burden of the self-discipline.

**John:** The nice thing about Big Fish, the musical that we’re working on, is that Andrew Lippa, the composer, he and I have to get things done at a certain time. And he’ll be depending on me to write the scene that the song goes in, and I’ll be depending on him to write the song that the scene needs to hold. And because of that, there’s a social pressure to actually get stuff finished. Which, as a solo writer, you just don’t have as much.

So, we end up having to set either artificial deadlines for “I will not go to sleep until I’ve written five pages,” or if we end up promising things to producers or studio heads or whoever else, that we will turn in a draft by a certain date, even if it’s an unrealistic date, so that we will feel pressure to get stuff finished.

**Craig:** Yeah, you need something like that. I mean, one of the things I’m doing right now is producing an animated film, and talk about all hands on deck. I mean, that’s such a big…in animation, development really is production. So, there’s already scores of people working on this thing. And knowing that, you really can’t mess around. A lot of people are sitting around waiting.

That’s why writing during production’s the most fun on live action stuff, because you’re there on set and you know that in about 10 minutes, they’re going to be rolling. And the adrenaline does wonders for writing, so it’s like, somehow or another, you have to make your own adrenaline when there is no external pressure on you.

**John:** I like to pretend that I’m actually writing not a feature but a TV show and that it’s a pilot that’s going to be shooting in three weeks. And that is, sometimes, it’s a good kind of pressure, because it forces me to be a little less precious about it. “This scene must be perfect in every way, that has to be the best version of this scene that could possibly ever exist.” No, it actually has to be shootable. And as long as it’s shootable, I should go on and write the next scene. That’s sometimes a luxury.

Let’s talk about hardware. What are you writing on these days?

**Craig:** A MacBook Pro. That’s my axe. 15-inch screen. I used to have that 17-inch screen, because I thought, “Why not have the biggest possible screen?” But then, you’re like, the thing’s like an airplane tray, it’s just too big. So, 15-inch is great. And then, when I’m in my office, I plug it into a cinema display and an external keyboard and a track pad. So, that’s my tool.

**John:** Now, have you gotten used to Lion’s use of track pads and, like, the scrolling in reverse and all that?

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny, I was just thinking about that today, because I have. It took, they said, “This’ll take two days for you to realign your brain.” No, it took a month. But I am definitely realigned. And, it’s funny, I was watching Todd today, because he’s not on Lion and he’s scrolling the other way and his, it was freaking me out.

So, it’s true, your brain does finally switch around. Now it makes total sense to me and I don’t — because, for a month, I would go the wrong way, and then go, “Oh yes, right.” And then go the right way. But now, yeah, I’m totally good.

**John:** When I got back from a trip in Boston, I’ve been using both my MacBook Air — which has a track pad in there for the Lion scrolling which makes a lot of sense because a track pad and that kind of scrolling makes very good sense. It feels like you’re pushing the paper around — but my main computer is a MacBook Pro tower and I use a special, bizarre, vertical mouse that has the little track wheel and for that it’s always felt completely wrong to be doing the Lion-style scrolling. But for whatever reason I got back from Boston and I hadn’t used the computer in a week and it felt right to use the Lion scrolling, and so suddenly I can do it.

**Craig:** It’s an amazing thing how we can retrain our brains. I think Apple basically they’re such control freaks they’re like, “Look, people are moving their hands one way on an iPad and they’re moving them another on a computer and that’s a problem for us. We’re just OCD and we need everybody to be moving their fingers always one way.” I don’t necessarily buy into the whole “It’s better this way!” It’s not, it’s just a direction. But once again Apple wins.

**John:** They basically did it to confuse my mom. My mom will probably call me in tears at some point because they’ve changed and ruined and broken something.

**Craig:** “John, the pages are moving the wrong way every time!”

**John:** If I could only get her to just give up her computer and go to an iPad I think life would be so much happier but they scare her too. We’re all basically tech support for our parents at some stage.

**Craig:** Yeah, my father-in-law is the best. My father-in-law famously…I got him to switch over to a Mac. And this was years and years ago. I think it was in the pre-Jobs phase. I think it was in the Performa era and they had these little reset buttons on them in case things would go wrong. He told me they had a problem with the computer, it wasn’t working anymore, and I had to fix it.

So I came in and basically what I discovered was that he had somehow, this was back on System 9, he had managed to create… He had a system folder, of course, but inside the system folder was another system folder and inside that one was yet another system folder.

So he had nested system folders, which I’d never seen before, and obviously I’m booting off of another disk at this point, and also his reset button had been jammed in to the point where I had to physically pry it out because it was constantly resetting the computer.

I said, “Bill, how did this reset button get jammed in violently?”

He’s like, “I don’t know.”

“Well, I know.” [laughs]

**John:** I remember there was one era of Macintosh where the reset button was actually a clip-on thing on the outside of it. It fit into the little grooves on the track.

**Craig:** I remember it well.

**John:** Wow. Things are so different now.

**Craig:** So different.

**John:** Now, software-wise we’re doing very different things because I’m mostly using Final Draft and you’re mostly using Screenwriter, or at least you have been.

**Craig:** Yeah. At this point I’m almost completely bilingual both mentally and in practice because Philips uses Final Draft and this animated movie uses Final Draft, so I’m Final Draft with those projects. Then this thing I’m writing for Universal is just I’m on my own so I’m using Movie Magic.

Although I have to say I got a tweet the other day from this guy in Toronto who built this new screenwriting app called Fade In which I think it looks fantastic. I emailed him and gave him a few suggestions for some features I thought would be easy enough to add. I’m actually going to get on the phone with him because I love this thing. I just think, “Wow, here’s a chance where I could actually get in literally on the ground floor and help a guy get a third better way out there.”

**John:** Now, I believe I’ve tried every screenwriting app out there. If I remember Fade In correctly it’s probably based on Adobe Air. Is it both on PC and Mac simultaneously or is it just a Macintosh program?

**Craig:** There is an app for PC and also an app for Mac.

**John:** So I think my objection to it was that because it’s using Adobe Air there’s a little bit of a typing lag and the typing lag drove me crazy.

**Craig:** I did not notice that. I’ll check with him and see if that is the software you were looking at. It didn’t appear to have any lag at all and it didn’t appear to take particularly long to load. What I loved about it, at least at first blush, was that it presented you with a gray background and then the page sort of floated on that background.

So immediately a lot of distractions just went away. It was very elegant looking and it was laid out in a very modern way. Final Draft really suffers from being a legacy application. I used Final Draft back when you had to drive over to Santa Monica and pick it up from…

**John:** The Writer’s Store?

**Craig:** Yeah. Actually even before The Writer’s Store. I picked it up from this bungalow where I think his name is Marc Madnick, the initial author of the program, he and his buddies were in a bungalow in Santa Monica and I bought the two floppy disk set. I think it was Final Draft 2.

And the truth is that Final Draft has that problem that legacy software has. It’s just a city that’s been built over and on top of itself and it’s become really unwieldy like the tax code.

Movie Magic, when I went over to Movie Magic I thought, “Okay, well, this is a little bit less of that. It feels like it started a little bit more advanced.”

Now with this Fade In I’m looking at it thinking, “Well, this is how you should do it. Just start fresh and really write code for the way computers work and look now.”

So I’m going to talk to this guy and see about getting involved with his program because I also just love that he’s a guy and not a big, huge company.

**John:** I actually had lunch with Marc Madnick several weeks ago. As you know, my company makes FDX Reader, which is the Final Draft reader for the iPad, because we want to be able to read Final Draft files, and we can.

We have had conversations before this about the FDR format, which is the old Final Draft format. We would love to be able to support the old FDR format. The short, non-want-to-rip-your-brains-out, technologically advanced version explanation of why you can’t do that is that we just can’t. It’s not even that it’s a special, magic proprietary thing. It’s that it’s basically impossible to separate the old file format out from how Final Draft worked.

Really what it comes down to is that the programs were so old that they needed to fit files and make them really small on floppy disks. So they would do these crazy compression things to them. They were reading the file directly to the screen, and it was a very different way of working than how we think about files right now. So basically we will never be able to support FDR files. That was the upshot of that lunch.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s interesting. When I was talking to the developer of Fade In, one of the first questions I asked was how easy is it to import. He said that, for FDX files, which are the Final Draft 8 file formats, just open it up and it works. And it did, beautifully. He said, “FDR files? Forget it. It’s a nightmare.”

**John:** Yeah. So we are working on some magic that we will be able to announce pretty soon that I think will be interesting to people who are dealing with legacy files. But I can’t quite announce that yet.

**Craig:** Alright. That’s exciting.

**John:** I’m actually trying out something new for this script. It is my 40th script and in celebration of the 40th script, 40th complete screenplay, I am trying Scrivener, which is a pretty elaborate program, which I have always been daunted by because it can do so much. It’s not just a screenwriting program; it would really be good for any long form fiction.

But it actually works in a way that is very nice for my workflow, in that when I went off to Boston and I barricaded myself in the room, I am writing individual scenes, and I am handwriting them. I’m taking pictures of them with my iPad and sending them to Stuart, who is typing them up. So they just sit in a file in Dropbox as individual scenes. The really nice thing about Scrivener is that with Scrivener you can drag those individual files into a folder in Scrivener and look at them individually or stream them together. So, scenes are both individual and all pasted together, depending on how you want to look at them.

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

**John:** So, it has been pretty good to work with. I found that the formatting on the page looks pretty good. It’s attractive. It does a very nice full-screen version. The moving from dialogue to character name to action to transitions is pretty natural and pretty logical. Rarely am I getting stuck in the wrong formatting template.

**Craig:** Does it use a standard sort of return-tab method?

**John:** Yes. So it’s nice to try something new and find that it is mostly working. The thing I have enjoyed most about Scrivener and the thing that got me most excited is that it is clearly being updated regularly. With some of these older programs you worry that they are not going to come out with the next version or you worry that it is a tiny company that might not exist three months from now.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This feels like it’s the right balance of young but growing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I tried Scrivener once. I fell into the initial trap that you were in, which is it seems like there is a lot going on here; my needs are actually fairly narrow. I don’t really use, for instance, Final Draft and Movie Magic have made big deals about their scene navigator and outlining. I don’t use any of that. I just get rid of that window. Not interested, don’t care. I just want a good writing experience.

The other thing that I think is of great value to me is software that can best handle production. Production has so many specific demands. If I can easily satisfy the requirements of the production, the 1st AD, the Script Supervisor, it just makes everything so much easier. They are always very appreciative of a screenwriter that just even knows how to do it.

**John:** Yeah. I fully anticipate that, at some point I will probably export this and bring it into Final Draft and do that last cleanup in Final Draft and make sure that everything is just the way I want it to be.

When I talked to Marc Madnick, I said, “Hey, why don’t you make a cheap version of Final Draft that is $99, that’s for everybody? Put all the pro features in the Final Draft Pro and make that the $299 version, because I would pay $299 for all the pro features of that.”

And his point, which I think is a very good point, is that then he has four products to support, rather than two. He would have the Mac and the PC versions of the low-end and the high-end. It becomes exponentially more work to make any sort of change across the programs.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. My whole issue with Final Draft and the reason that I left them publicly was that I did think that, when it came to support, they had just fallen apart.

And I understand why to some extent. They became the default screenwriting application. And while there are maybe 2000 or 3000 people in the world that write screenplays professionally, there are tens and maybe hundreds of thousands of people that are trying. And those people have lots of questions and get confused and also, frankly, Final Draft has a history of releasing buggy product. So suddenly they were charging for tech support and it was frustrating to me.

One thing I will say about Movie Magic is for an application that is just as feature rich as Final Draft their tech support has been outstanding and remains entirely free. So that’s a big deal for me.

And I don’t really need tech support, but tech support is one of those things that when you need it you really need it.

**John:** Yeah. Actually, a development just this week is Final Draft is now in the Mac App Store. So we’ll see how it does there. It’s there at its full price. As we’re recording this it’s $199, which is a lot for apps in the app store.

**Craig:** It’s so much. To me there’s a big opening, I think, for a new app that is reasonably priced, that has been built fresh from the ground up for this generation of operating systems.

**John:** What would you change about how you do your work? That was the last question in the blog post I did and I’m curious what you would do differently.

**Craig:** [laughs] I don’t know. I do a lot of stuff differently.

Look, I could tell you what I wish but that’s kind of a self-denial. I wish I were more regular in the hours I kept. I wish that I were more workman-like in the way I approach the writing. There are guys out there, some excellent writers, who clock in at 9:00 AM, they write until noon, they have their lunch, then they write until 4:30, and then they go home.

I would love to be that guy. I think it would make my life easier, my family’s life easier, but it’s not me. So there’s nothing I can do to change the way I do it other than to accept it, so I accept it.

**John:** Screenwriting is very much peaks and valleys. I wish they were all peaks and there were no valleys and I was always at an amazing flow, generating tons of pages, and loving everything I did. But I would recognize that that’s just not the way it really normally works in the real world.

I would try to use Freedom more. Freedom is the utility that turns off your Internet and it’s just a godsend.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** And I would just get away from my computer more. You were talking about sprinting and I do find that I tend to get a lot more done in short sprints rather than the slog sessions of staring at the computer.

**Craig:** Yeah. You just have to sort of be honest to your own self. Everybody’s got their own writing fingerprint. It’s a little difficult when you start out because you’re not quite sure what your fingerprint is and you, frankly, should make an effort to dispel the most odious habits because you might land in a better place and that becomes your method.

But you have to temper that with acknowledging who you are and how you work best. Try not to lend any great meaning to those moments where you are in despair. It’s inevitable and it doesn’t mean you’re bad, it means you’re in one of those valleys.

**John:** Yep. Good. Well that’s a nice conversation about some peaks and some valleys and some adult film stars who may have been writing in with questions and managers who have fallen off the grid.

**Craig:** You’ve got to find out where that guy went. Now I’m excited.

**John:** The reason I googled him is because someone asked, “Hey, whatever happened to insert-name-of-manager?” And I’m like, “Oh, that’s a really good question.” Google, google, google. He had a common enough name that I had to weed through some possibilities and do some minus in Google to take out certain categories of people, but strangely he disappeared.

**Craig:** Not even Facebook?

**John:** Not even Facebook. I’m always a little suspicious of people who are not on Facebook at all or you can’t find an image of them. I do find that generally if I’m stalking somebody Google image search ends up becoming the crucial thing because you can look for their face and that will lead you to some sort of clue of how to find them in other places.

**Craig:** For sure. It’s always frustrating when you’re looking for people in our business and maybe they’re not all that prominent and all Google will do is spit out posters of their one movie or something. It’s useless. There is an art to Google stalking.

**John:** And to finishing up the podcast. Thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk again soon.

**Craig:** You’ve got it.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-kids-become-screenwriters).

**John August**: Hello. Welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Craig, this is my favorite time of the year. Do you know why it’s my favorite time of the year?

**Craig:** It’s the Jewish New Year, of course.

**John:** Well, it is the Jewish New Year and it’s autumn. But autumn for me was never about the changing of the leaves because I grew up in Colorado and so we don’t have the yellow Aspen leaves. Autumn for me is entirely about the fall television series.

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

**John:** The new fall season. And I would see those promos for all the shows together. I loved when a network would do the special things where they get all the network stars from the different things and they’re crossing over. It’s like, “Wait — real people!” And I see Sarah Purcell and Gary Coleman in the same promo spot and it was just magical to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. I used to do that. My first job in Hollywood was promos for CBS. And this was 1992. It was the tail end of that era when they still did a fall campaign and they would have a theme like “Be there.” [laughs]

**John:** I love the campaigns. That idea of a theme, that you’re unifying so many disparate programs. From news programs to sports to the comedies to the dramas, all under one giant umbrella, this whole network is in it together, we are a team. Battle of the Network Stars was of course the ultimate expression of the team concept. But just packaging the whole network’s product together.

And the idea of an identity of what CBS was versus what NBC was versus ABC, it was very, very exciting. It was my version of fall football, the fall television season.

**Craig:** You know, my fall football was fall football.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a crucial difference between you and me.

[laughter]

**Craig:** Among many.

**John:** It’s probably among several other important distinctions and preferences. But are you watching the new fall shows? That’s the crucial point here.

**Craig:** I must admit that I have become the cable watcher. So I’ve got my TiVo set for Dexter, I’m excited for that. But in terms of network stuff I’m a total zero. I don’t watch any network stuff.

**John:** This year I was considering pitching a show. And because of that I read a lot more of the pilot scripts and I’ve watched some of the pilots and I’ve been watching the shows as they’ve come on the air. Which is always just great and fascinating to see what happens and what makes it to the air and what doesn’t make it to the air.

I was very intrigued by Once Upon a Time, which is an expensive ABC show. It’s a fantasy with fairytales crossing into the real world, with an amazingly good cast. So I guess it hasn’t aired yet but I watched the pilot for it and it’s really, really well produced. And you watch this hour of quality entertainment and you’re like, “I’m really curious how that can sustain a series.” It was like the very premise-y pilots are challenging.

**Craig:** I was just reading this interview with Damon Lindelof where he finally confessed that they were making Lost up as they went along. It was actually great. Did you see that interview?

**John:** I have spoken with Damon a lot about it. Yes.

**Craig:** It was great. Look, I think it was apparent to everybody that at some point they had kind of boxed themselves into a strange corner. But I love that really the genesis of the Lost mythos and the early conglomeration of mysteries centered around their heartfelt belief that the show was not going to make it. [laughs] So they would never be accountable for what they were doing. I loved it.

**John:** 30 Rock is largely the same situation where Tina Fey quite early on was convinced, like, “Well, this show can’t possibly sustain.” So they could go nuts, and “nuts” was successful. And suddenly they were riding the back end of their first season and they were riding into the second season. And they were having to figure out what show was after that point.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an interesting thing. You really have to believe in this thing and imagine that it’s going to be around for six or seven years. But Lost pulled it off, I guess.

My wife watched Lost and she was destroyed by that last episode. Not in a bad way — she was crying and it really affected her. And anything that makes her cry that’s not me I’m happy about it. I just feel like I got away with something.

**John:** There are a lot of Lost veterans who are working on Once Upon a Time. So that speaks well for it. Hopefully that will work out well.

On the other extreme of the shows with franchises I watched Grimm, which is also set in a fairytale world but it’s a procedural. And it was so interesting to see fairytale mythology just bolted on, very mechanically bolted on to a crime procedural.

So they were trying to make it feel like, “This is what the franchise is week to week.” I have a very good idea what would happen in episode 10 of that show.

**Craig:** Does it work?

**John:** I don’t know that it entirely works. There were things I liked about it but it felt very…you could sort of smell the whiteboard markers to a degree. And you could see these are the beats and we’re going to hit these beats at this time. I hope it works, I hope everything works. I’m never rooting against a show.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, I’m with you on that. So it’s kind of like Little Red Riding Hood meets Dun-Dun [Law & Order sound], is that the idea?

**John:** It’s exactly what the idea is. And literally the pilot is Little Red Riding Hood meets Dun-Dun. And I see Little Red Riding Hood, a girl with the red cape, get killed in the pilot, except it’s a red hooded sweatshirt.

**Craig:** That’s a good idea, I like that idea. That’s cool.

**John:** Yeah.

So you can what the kind of thing that could happen week to week is, but you’re worried that it’s going to become too mechanical. That’s the challenge.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. They’re going to have to figure out a way to get around the cutesiness of all of it at some point. That’s a great idea. If you’re doing CSI and then you have a special episode that’s like that that will be awesome.

How do you, on season three it’s sort of like, “Okay, apparently this wolf destroyed a home where a pig lived.” And you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” [laughs] Is it going to get tiresome at some point?

**John:** Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a monster-of-the-week, so was Angel. But those were very character driven shows, where there was always the franchise element of it, like, “This is what we have to do with this week.” But it’s more about the ongoing arc of the season.

**Craig:** Right. Those were soap operas basically.

**John:** And speaking of soap operas, Ringer, which is a CW show, I was fascinated to watch because it stars Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Sarah Michelle Gellar, was again a very premise-y pilot where you’re setting up that she is twins and one of the twins is done this and one of the twins is doing this and you’re rooting for one and you think you’re rooting against the other one and it’s very complicated.

Largely very well done. It has one of the most egregious green-screen-on-a-boat shots.

**Craig:** I saw that on The Soup. It was awesome.

**John:** It’s pretty amazing. And the show though isn’t going for that sort of crazy to amazing, it’s not going for arching over the top of things.

**Craig:** That was just a mistake.

**John:** That was the best, I think, they could do in the situation. It’s very hard to make that stuff.

**Craig:** Right. It’s very funny, you go through these arguments sometimes, and you think, “I don’t know, my being’s so precious because we’re making a genre television show and I’m sitting here throwing a tantrum of the quality of the green screen.” No, it actually makes a difference. It does. When it pulls you out of the show and that did look absurd.

**John:** Yeah. If you don’t believe that they’re on a boat, that’s a problem.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A favorite of the things I’ve watched so far, and I haven’t really seen everything, is probably The New Girl. Liz Meriwether’s show, with Zooey Deschanel.

**Craig:** Right. I hear that’s good.

**John:** It’s really good. And it’s odd watching it because Liz is friends of friends. She is good friends with Dana Fox, who I think we’ve mentioned before, there’s this girl posse of really talented female writers.

**Craig:** The Fempire.

**John:** The Fempire. And Liz is one of those writers and she wrote this. And I read the script and the script was great. And the pilot turned out great. Jake Kasdan shot it and it’s really, really good.

I was fascinated going into watching this because I knew they were going to hit something that I had noticed a lot this pilot season. Do you know what second position is?

**Craig:** Second position in dance?

**John:** No, second position in casting.

**Craig:** No, what’s second position?

**John:** So, when you’re casting a TV show, casting a pilot, you want the best actors you possibly can get. And particularly in comedy but also sometimes in drama, maybe the actor you want is on a show already.

**Craig:** Oh, you mean second position, like, availability.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes you roll the dice, it’s like, “I think that actor is the right person for the role and I don’t think their current show is going to get picked up for another season. So great, we’ll shoot the pilot with this person in it. And if that person doesn’t work out, well, they’ll have to eat the pilot or reshoot all their scenes.” And it’s a really risky move. And so that’s why networks and studios are typically loathed to do it.

For The New Girl they decided to cast Damon Wayans, Jr. as one of the three guys that Zooey Deschanel moves in with. And he was great in the pilot, so I can totally see why they cast him in this. But the show that he is on on ABC, Happy Endings, which is also a really good show got picked up for second season. Which is wonderful for him because he’s in two shows but he can’t be in The New Girl.

So when you’re in that situation you have to decide as a producer, like, “Crap, do we go back and shoot the pilot and all the scenes that he’s in,” and he’s in a lot of scenes, “or do we somehow explain why he’s not there in episode two.”

And so I watched episode two and they basically just explained why he’s not there and there’s another guy who’s the third roommate. It was ballsy and challenging to do that.

**Craig:** Well, the good news is they do it once hopefully and then that’s it. They never have to worry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** By the way, is there a second position in dance?

**John:** There is, I’m sure. I feel like there is second position. I think it’s with your heels are kind of together and you’re toes are out a little bit. That feels right to me.

**Craig:** I’m not going to commit to knowing what that is.

**John:** Yeah, see, just the way you should know more about football, I should know more about ballet, but I can’t.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m kind of feeling a strange, quasi failure-as-a-straight-guy shame right now.

**John:** Yeah. Don’t worry about it.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** I thought what we might talk about today is how people become screenwriters. And I don’t mean “how to become a screenwriter” because there’s countless books you can buy on any shelf in a Borders to tell you how to…

**Craig:** And I would take my microphone off and leave this podcast. [laughs]

**John:** Another podcast we’ll about the so-called experts and our fury about some of the screenwriting books out there. But rather than talking about how to become a screenwriter I want to talk about how a person becomes a screenwriter, and the paths to that.

Because if you talk to a professional tennis player and say like, “Hey, how did you become a professional tennis player?” They’ll say something like, “Oh, when I was eight I started playing tennis. And I just played tennis for forever and now I’m a professional tennis player.”

It’s not that they were 21 and like picked up a racket for the first time and became a professional tennis player. That just doesn’t happen. Or if you talk to a doctor and say like, “Hey, how did you become a doctor?” Maybe they were interested in medicine growing up or maybe they thought like, “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up.”

But they didn’t really do anything serious about becoming a doctor until they went to college and really until they went to medical school. They might have studied the sciences they needed, they got prerequisites they needed, but they didn’t do anything serious to become a doctor until quite late in the game.

Screenwriting is not really either one of those paths. There’s not a thing you can point to where you say like, “I’m an eight year old who wants to become a screenwriter.” Not only does that not really happen, there’s not even a meaningful way to think about that.

**Craig:** True, true. Yeah, it’s kind of the difference between the word “career” and the word “vocation.” Vocation, the root, the “voc” root is designed to imply a calling. That you’re called to this somehow.

**John:** An evocation.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. And screenwriting kind of falls into that area. You have this sort of innate desire to tell stories. But when does that come? Where does that come from? And how do you know you have it and all that?

**John:** Malcolm Gladwell famously has been trumpeting this idea of 10,000 hours. That if you look at people who are very successful in any field you can track back and they’ve put in 10,000 hours of practice to get to that point. It applies particularly well to sports figures, but even other professions like musicians and other artists.

You can really see that they’ve put in like the 10,000 hours time to get up to their mastery of something. No screenwriter I know, at least no screenwriter I know as they were getting started, has put in the 10,000 hours of writing screenplays. That just doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You don’t start writing screenplays, you know, when you’re six.

**Craig:** That’s right. If you’ve put in 10,000 hours of screenwriting and you’re still not a professional screenwriter, you suck.

**John:** That is true. If you, I mean, well you’re sad. And you probably suck.

[laughter]

**Craig:** You’re sad and you suck.

**John:** I mean it’s just kind of a tragedy. That has to be. Because 10,000 hours is a lot of time.

**Craig:** It’s a huge chunk of your life.

**John:** I’m not going to open my little solver program and tell you exactly how many days and weeks and moments of seasons of love that is. But it’s a lot of seasons of love to get to 10,000 hours.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** But, as I’ve thought more about like, well how did I become a screenwriter? Like where did I get that experience? Because the first thing I wrote wasn’t great, but it wasn’t like I said I put 10,000 hours in between my first screenplay and Go. And Go was a pretty good screenplay. It’s that I actually, I think I can make up a good argument that I actually had my 10,000 hours worth of experience and exposure in there. I just… It wasn’t all writing. And it certainly didn’t look like screenwriting.

My first memory of this story telling kind of stuff that I do now is as a boy I would often… First off, I always woke up really early and my parents wouldn’t let me come out of my room. So I stayed in my room and like played with all my toys.

And so I would always like line up my little toys and they’d be two like rival faction armies. Actually not really armies, they were sort of like Battle of the Network Stars. There was a …

[laughter]

They’d be on the other side of the river and they’d have sort of like competitions and things. And I’d always have sort of my favorites, but like my favorites wouldn’t always win. Because that’s the way the narrative should play. And so I’d always have like this sort of ongoing narrative of the Battle of the Network Toys.

That later progressed once I was allowed to stay up to watch the James Bond movies on Monday nights right before school started in the fall. So again, James Bond and new fall TV shows coinciding in the fall. That was an important season for me.

Once I was allowed to watch the James Bond movies on ABC, a lot of my sort of imagination play became James Bond. So, I was like on the speedboat, it was really my bed and I would build myself a grappling hook out of a hanger and some string. And do like James Bond-y kind of things.

And so I think that my early kind of narrative development, sense of like figuring out how this action sequence worked was really as a six or seven year old playing James Bond in my room.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know exactly what you mean. That there’s a way to practice the art of story telling without actually writing. And my experience was sort of around the same time as you, six, seven years old.

Well, first of all, I saw Star Wars, which blew my brain open. And then I have a clear memory that almost every night when I would go to bed I would stay up for about 30 or 40 minutes, with the lights out, in my bed, just — I guess you would call it daydreaming, although it was evening — just imagining scenarios, just imagining, just envisioning little movies in my head.

I would make little sound effects to go along with things and my dad would come in and say, “Stop making rocket noises.” I remember that was the phrase “rocket noises,” because everything was blowing up all the time.

But I would do that every night, I don’t know what it was. I was just compelled to tell stories in my head.

**John:** Yeah. There’s an assumption that’s all about how much you read as a kid. I was certainly a big reader but I wasn’t a bigger reader than many of my peers, most of whom aren’t involved in any sort of narrative, writing capability.

I read a lot, I read the same kinds of things. I read a lot of the Encyclopedia Browns, and the Three Investigators and the things that people read. But it was the imagining my own stories constantly which were more important.

I did write, I did some creative writing and I probably wrote stories earlier than other kid might have done that. And I was rewarded with teacher praise for doing a good job with it.

But I can’t chart that writing decision, it’s my ability to put some words together with my interest in telling movie-style stories later on.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m with you. I remember always having a sense of narrative structure. I read a lot when I was a kid. Although interestingly I would say movies certainly inspired more of my visual sense, that in my mind I would tell stories in a very visual way, but the books that I did love would inspire those things.

The Three Investigators, I remember, the thing about them I loved the most was that Jupiter Jones had his headquarters underneath the dump.

**John:** Uncle Titus’s dump.

**Craig:** There you go. Thank you. So that was awesome to me and I desperately wanted my own headquarters under a dump, because it was so visual and so cool.

**John:** I tried to put on weight in third grade so I could look more like Jupiter Jones.

**Craig:** [laughs] I was always more of a Pete guy. I felt Pete seemed like the cool one. I think he broke his arm at one point though.

**John:** Yeah. Therefore he was slightly handicap.

**Craig:** Yeah. And thus an object of pity.

**John:** Yeah. Pity slash lost. Yeah. I get it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You feel me on that one. I remember in fifth grade I had a facility for language, I found reading and writing just came easily to me, words came easily to me. And in fifth grade they asked me to deliver the graduation speech.

And I remember that I wrote a speech that was rather mock-ish and infantile in the way that a fifth grader would. It was a lot of bad metaphors about going through doors, opening doors and closing doors behind you and nonsense like that.

But it had a structure. I remember that I just sort of innately understood that there should be an introduction, where you establish this metaphor of doors opening and closing in your life. And then three examples. And then a final conclusion where the door closes behind you and you step out and you begin again.

**John:** That sounds very Toastmasters.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. It was as paint-by-numbers as you can be, but the interesting thing was there was no numbers. I just had that — I was born with formula. And, I don’t know, maybe you need to start there. It’s a weird thing: instead of you having to learn it it’s already in your DNA or something.

**John:** I think what I can also chart is probably the biggest, profound, biggest influence on my development that way and where I logged a lot of my 10,000 hours, was in Dungeons and Dragons.

D&D and one of those things where on the surface of it it just seems like, “Oh, you’re pretending to play with swords. And it’s a bunch of people rolling dice and sitting around a table and drinking too much Coke.”

But ultimately when you’re playing a lot of D&D, and especially when you’re playing at that age, you recognize that there are two very distinct phases to Dungeons and Dragons.

There is this social aspect, where you and your friends are sitting around your parents’ card table, and you’re playing the game. And one of you is the dungeon master, the other two or three of you are playing, like, “He’s the fighter, he’s the thief, and that’s the wizard over there, the magic is over there.”

And you’re trying to get into this dungeon and it’s very graph-papery and you’re looking at a bunch of charts. And that’s the part where it feels sort baseball-statistics-y. Where there’s math involved and you’re trying to win a game.

As you play more of it and you get a little bit more sophisticated you start to really focus on the story and the role playing aspect of it, where you’re pretending to be, like, you’re this character in this situation, what does this character want?

And you start to think about your characters independent of this dungeon that you’re going through.

My friend Jason and I, he had a character, Garrett Darkhorse, who was a ranger. But we started to build out these elaborate mythologies for the Darkhorse clan, and who all the people were in the different generations.

And suddenly, it was about your character who would have a kid and that kid would marry the other girl from over there. And you started to look at the death of your character as being just part of the overall arc of the thing.

The sophistication that came only as you sort of got to be more sophisticated, thinking about the narrative beyond this one specific game, this one specific dungeon you were playing.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I didn’t quite get that massively nerdy, although I did play the — Marvel had a role playing game.

**John:** I remember that.

**Craig:** And a few of my friends and I played that. And I remember not caring so much for the game, which I thought was just a little odd. I never quite got into the actual game part of it. But I loved making the characters.

And I typed up — everybody had a character and they had a name. And then I typed up back stories for all of them, sort of like what you’re describing, and actually tried to make sense of their — because what happens is, you know, you roll dice. And like, “Okay, he’s really strong and he’s really fast, but he’s stupid. Well, that’s interesting. Now, how can I create a narrative that explains that?” And I remember doing that and typing it up and printing it out on my daisy wheel printer. And handing it out.

**John:** I’m sorry, I just recognized you said daisy wheel, rather than inkjet. It was a daisy wheel. So, it was the one that actually spun around?

**Craig:** Correct. And it would go, yeah, but now, we had, so, there’s only one font. It’s the daisy wheel font. But it would spin, and you could get different daisy wheels for different fonts.

**John:** I think we need to take a little sidebar and explain to younger viewers, because this doesn’t make any sense. Because it was a very brief and very specific and wonderful time in printing technology.

So, a daisy wheel printer works this way: It’s essentially a typewriter, and if you’ve seen an electric typewriter, you’re used to the mechanical ball that’s there. And that ball, like, spins, it hits the paper and the ribbon, and that’s how you make a character on the page.

The daisy wheel’s the same idea, except it’s a plastic disc that has one character on each little spoke. And so, the hammer hits that and that presses against the ink and presses against the paper.

The magical thing about them is that you could get different daisy wheels that you could put in there, so you could have, like, an italic type. You could have different kinds of type. So, rather than having exactly one kind of Courier, you might have a Pica Elite. And that was so novel at the time. And the younger generations have no idea how well they have it now.

**Craig:** No, you just don’t know what it’s like to watch this wheel spinning at this remarkable speed, going from A to Z, depending on what the word is, and watching your paper slowly emerge from your printer.

And then, you know, the daisy wheel printers, like all printers at the time, needed tracks to move the paper through. So, you would get paper with holes in it, and then you’d have to pull those, you’d have to tear the perforated strips off the side and sometimes it would rip and you would curse god and reprint it.

**John:** And over time, the perforations got better. They got microperforated, so you could tear it off, and you could just barely tell that it was actually computer paper that fed through it. But an important thing to understand is, unlike an inkjet printer now, it truly is typing. It’s typing one letter at a time.

And so, if you hit print, or you know, made it, went through an elaborate series of arcane rituals to get it to print. It could take a good five minutes to print a page. And it was loud all the time.

**Craig:** It was really, really loud. It was excruciating. But it was considered the Cadillac of printing at the time when compared to the standard dot matrix, which was a “Nih, nih, nih, nih” which was that thing. And dot matrix was kind of like a forerunner of inkjet, I guess.

**John:** Yeah, just the dots have gotten so small on inkjet, you don’t see the individual dots anymore. But there really are dots there somewhere.

**Craig:** And there’s no head going back and forth. Oh, there is a head going back and forth.

**John:** Yeah. But it’s part of the print cartridge, now, which is —

**Craig:** Right. And it’s not making that noise, “Nih, nih, nih,” which was fun. And then, the whole printer would kind of shudder as this thing would go back and forth through this. It was an amazing time.

**John:** It was a great time. So, you would print out these characters’ back stories for the people who were playing your marvel role playing game.

**Craig:** And it was interesting, because they wouldn’t, you know, what they had were, well, like, “He’s got a power and he’s this old and he’s blond.” And then I would, kind of, try and explain where he was from. And is he a human and how did he get this way? And is he related to anybody? And what does he fear? And you know, come up with…

The idea, I guess, was that there was a narrative puzzle presented, and I always think of screenwriting as just endless puzzle solving. And the puzzle is, “How do you make logical sense of this?” Some sort of dramatic, compelling theory that makes sense of the character you just created with dice. And that was fun.

And it’s not — I don’t know so much that it was, that I spent a lot of time practicing it, that is why I do what I do today; it’s that I felt the need to do it in the first place, that explains why I do what I do today.

**John:** You felt a compelling need to create narrative meaning out of this thing that, actually, didn’t have a lot of meaning because it was rolled by dice. You wanted it to make sense and exist, in a way.

It was probably one of the earliest occasions for you to see that the decisions you were making about who the characters were would influence the kind of stories you’d want to tell with those characters. Were you being the equivalent of the Dungeon Master for this? Were you relieving the games?

**Craig:** No. My friend Dave Rogers was usually the Dungeon Master. And, interestingly, he is an Emmy Award winning director now, is a very well regarded director in television. He directs a lot of episodes of The Office.

**John:** I’ve noticed several people who are involved with big TV shows right now come from a D&D background. John Rogers, who does Leverage, has done a lot of other great shows, still writes for … I guess it’s not TSR now, it’s Wizards of the Coast who bought out the D&D franchise.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I first noticed like, “Oh, there’s this” … I was looking through one of the new manuals and there’s his name. I was like, “I wonder if it’s the same person.” So I Googled and like, “Oh. That’s just so strange that he still is doing that.” In fact, he’s doing the new Dungeons and Dragons comic book, which is great. It’s like Firefly, but with swords.

If we were to have him on the show I suspect he had a similar experience where that experience of developing characters and developing worlds for characters to run around in is really similar to developing the world of a movie or, even more so, developing the world of a TV show. It’s that you have a sustainable world that goes beyond the adventures of this one week’s play.

**Craig:** Right, right.

**John:** But has an overall narrative and overall arc. I haven’t talked to David Benioff to see whether he played much D&D but I’ve got the feeling that it’s probably true.

**Craig:** Knowing David, I would guess that he did. And knowing Dan Weiss, I would guess that he did as well. Yeah.

**John:** Right. It’s a pretty safe bet. I’ll also stump for the new D&D manuals. I don’t actually play D&D anymore, I wouldn’t have time to. I fell like so much of what I do and get paid to do is so similar that I’d be burning out that part of my brain to try to D.M. a session. But I still buy the new manuals. The new manuals are fantastic.

Anybody who’s listening to this who played in the past and has seen those manuals and like, “Ehh, I wouldn’t go into them,” they’re remarkably well done. Its Gary Gygax’s sort of legacy but sort of brought through to make a lot more sense. They made very smart choices in the new books. I have a ton of them that are all sitting on shelves and I read them as leisure time books.

**Craig:** I could never — that’s where I would fall apart. That’s why I can’t do that sort of part of the game because I don’t understand all the rules and my mind could not wrap around on that stuff.

**John:** One of the things that I think is interesting about where we are right now is the online games — Diablo and World of Warcraft — that seem to be very similar, where they’re doing a lot — you’re running around and you’re killing things — they don’t develop that same instinct, really, because in those games you are optimizing. You are trying to figure out the best kind of character to make but the character is really just a collection of statistics. The character has no back story. The character has no motivations beyond the quests that are assigned through the game. You have goals as a person but that character, individually, has no goals.

**Craig:** I like the Bethesda games. The main quests, at least, give you some sense of identity and sense of purpose.

**John:** In terms of choices you make?

**Craig:** Even in terms of your goal, like, in Oblivion you are tasked with a job by the dying king. In Fallout 3 you’re actually murdered in the beginning of the … isn’t that right, in Fallout 3? No, no. That’s not Fallout 3. That was the other one.

**John:** Fallout 3 is an example of a tremendous…

**Craig:** Oh, it was in New Vegas you’re murdered.

**John:** New Vegas, yeah.

**Craig:** But in Fallout 3 you’re actually born and you’re raised by a father and then he disappears and you have to go find him. There’s some sense of character.

**John:** There’s a sense of character but you’re not generating that sense of character.

**Craig:** No. You’re right.

**John:** You are essentially an audience to that character development. And so, while you might learn a lot by observing it, you’re not responsible for the making of it. You’re not making choices about how that narrative is going to be shaped.

**Craig:** That’s correct. That is the difference between the passive act of playing a video game that’s presented to you and scripted for you, and the idea that you’re going to make your own story as you go along. No question. No question.

**John:** This is probably a good time to sort of wrap up. I’d meant to segue into talking about film school and whether film school is even worth it or what the point of film school even is these days. And I think we’ll save that for another time.

**Craig:** Yeah, great.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** John, thank you.

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

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/wga-copyright-and-musicals).

**John August:** Hello, and welcome to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

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

**John:** Hello, Craig, how are you doing today?

**Craig:** Doing great, John. How about yourself?

**John:** I am doing pretty well. It’s a been a day of many small errands and things to take care of. I got my flu shot today, for example.

**Craig:** Which, and you know I’m a huge pro-vaccination guy, but I always feel like the flu shot is the one vaccine that’s kind of a waste of time; it’s just because the whole thing where there’s so many different strains and they’re kind of guessing.

**John:** They are guessing. They have to figure out which flu they think is going to be the biggest strain to hit American shores at the time. My gambler’s aspect of it is that having the flu completely sucks.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And so, if I can spend $20 and take 20 minutes to have a very good chance of avoiding a terrible flu, I’ll gladly spend that money and take that time.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And that’s why I’ll get a flu shot, also. And I always get my kids flu shots. I just always feel a little silly about it as opposed to proper vaccinations, which, of course, are life savers.

The other thing about the flu is, I feel like people misuse the word “flu,” because flu is a very specific virus. And usually, when people say they have the flu, what they mean is they have the common cold.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You really have to be pretty sick for it to be the flu.

**John:** If you’re knocked on your back and really, really hating life, that could very well be the flu.

**Craig:** Yeah, you’ve got, like, a serious fever, muscle pains, that’s flu’s bad stuff. And I’m constantly having unprotected sex with random strangers, so I really have to watch myself.

**John:** It is important. And the flu vaccine protects you from all things. It’s a bullet vaccine, too, apparently. It makes you lead proof.

Actual news: we have a new WGA president elected.

**Craig:** That’s right. Chris Keyser was elected last week, along with Carl Gottlieb, who will be our new vice president. Howard Rodman is our new secretary/treasurer. And then a bunch of people — a lot of new people to the board and a few incumbents were returned, as well.

**John:** One of the emails I got from Chris Keyser thanking everybody for the support along the way made a very good point: that we tend to notice the Guild and the activities of the Guild right around those annual election times and not so much in between. So, there’s certainly things we need to focus on now to try to make sure are enacted.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, that’s the theory that it’s really what happens in between the negotiations that’s kind of the important stuff. We fetishize negotiations because they’re exciting and because, in a way, it’s our — you know — we are constantly going through negotiations on our own, and we get frustrated with them, or perhaps they don’t go well. This is a chance for all of us collectively to have a good negotiation.

As I like to point out, when we negotiate with the companies, we’re negotiating on behalf of the minimum basic writer, the scale writer. Oddly, it’s like a combination of our strongest and weakest hand.

But in between those negotiations — which, granted, are somewhat exciting, particularly when a strike is involved — there’s all this stuff that goes on. And where the Guild tends to go wrong is when individuals are having a problem and they call the Guild for help, rightfully and justifiably. And the Guild fumbles it. And this happens all the time.

So, I’m hoping that Chris can kind of turn that aspect of it around.

**John:** The kind of things you call the Guild for most often are about money. And money that is due to you that is not being paid to you. So, collections is a crucial function of the Guild. And making sure that if a writer’s not getting paid, you have someone to reach out to to say, listen, this company is either behind on actual payment for the writing I’m doing for them right now, or on residuals. And there’s different departments that are responsible for trying to enforce those things.

And making sure you have the right people running those departments that you’re spending the resources right to get that money in is crucial, because that’s money that goes to the members you’re supposed to serve. And it’s also the money that is funding the Guild.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is an important distinction for people to understand. Our business is what they call an overscaled business in that, unlike most unions, which set a pay scale that everybody earns — depending on their seniority, the time in — we’re overscale. Almost everybody that writes for a living earns more than scale.

What that means is, if you’ve earned more than scale, the problem that you have may be getting that extra payment, or whatever is above scale, ultimately becomes — it’s far more efficient for your individual, your personal transactional lawyer to handle that sort of thing, or your agent.

But there are areas that are very important to us. You mentioned residuals. This is a big one. It’s important for people to understand this. When a company’s behind on residuals, or not paying residuals or not paying enough in residuals, the injured party is not the writer; it’s the union. Because the union collectively is what’s bargaining here. So, the union is injured, and the union is collecting on behalf of the writer. This is kind of a weird distinction.

So, you can’t really go in there with your heavy hitting lawyer and start suing over residuals. You need the union to do it, because they’re the ones with standing. So, when we call the union, and we say, “Look, we think these guys are behind on their residuals,” and then the union shrugs, then we’ve really got a problem, because they’re the only ones who can help us.

**John:** This’ll be an advanced section of the podcast, is to talk about this esoterica of what the Writers Guild is. We think, like, “oh, it’s a union.” But when we think of unions, we think of people who make things or people who work on assembly lines. And we’re such a strange, different kind of union in that — I was talking about this with Howard Rodman this last week, is that — most unions are concerned about time. So, like, the time and the working conditions and being paid for your time properly.

We are such a document focused Guild that it becomes difficult to figure out how to measure and adequately protect the other things a writer does. An example would be, you’re working on the launch of a TV show. And you’re working on all of the other media that goes with it. So, you’re building out the universe. So, within the course of this TV show, you have these characters and this sort of thing.

But they say, “Hey, we really want to figure out, like, make an alternate reality game for what this is supposed to be.” Is that something that is a Writers Guild covered function? It’s not even clear what the document is behind that, because it’s not clear what writing is happening there, it’s not clear where this falls under our distinction.

This was the challenge we ran into with editors is that editors working in reality television are doing some story kind of functions. But there’s not a document that you can point to that says, “This was a written thing.”

**Craig:** Right. In fact, we do have a word for story like functions in the absence of written material. It’s called “producing.” And we have a long standing tradition on the television side of writer/producers. Almost everybody that’s a show runner who works at a certain level on a TV staff as a writer is also a producer, because they are providing story functions without actually doing the writing — the specific writing. They also write, of course, in addition to those duties.

But yes, the truth is, the only thing that we provide for which we are paid is written material on a page — literary material. And in fact, you mentioned the notion of time. Creative workers who do what we do are exempt from overtime legislation in the state of California. We can’t sue because we worked more than 40 hours a week and somehow ended up getting less than minimum wage or anything like that. We’re exempt. The law sort of says, if you are creative for a living, it’s not about time, it’s about the product.

**John:** One of the things that’s hard to grasp — and maybe you can talk me through it again because I still have a hard time processing it fully — is the Writers Guild is based on a commonly accepted fiction of copyright. And I mean this especially in relation to spec screenplays —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — I’ve written a screenplay. And I want to sell it to this certain studio, this WGA signatory studio. In the course of selling it to that studio, we will all kind of enter into a mutually agreed upon fiction that this studio has hired me to write this screenplay and that they are the author of this screenplay. Is that an accurate reflection?

**Craig:** It is. Here’s the basic deal: The United States is unique. We have something called “work for hire.” Anywhere else in the world, an author is an author. If you write something, you’re the author. You are the sole author and you have certain moral rights as the author.

In the United States, going all the way back to the Constitution, there’s something called “work for hire,” where a person or a business can cause to be created or commission work that they don’t actually author directly, but they are the authors in law. And they retain copyright.

Now, interestingly, why this impacts us here as professional writers: We have a union. Unions in this country represent employees. That’s it. If you’re not an employee, then you cannot be in a union, because that’s the only thing unions are allowed to do by law.

So, for instance, novelists can’t unionize, because they’re not employees. They are independent contractors. They’re copyright owners. We are not copyright owners. We’re employees of the companies; the studios are the, quote-unquote “copyright authors” of the works that we’re writing.

The plus side of being employees is that we can unionize and we can collectively bargain with the studios, which I think is, obviously, a huge benefit for us.

The other thing is that we can take advantage of certain things as a collective, like getting pension and health care. Obviously, we have a lot of difficulties negotiating with the companies and the other things like compensation and residuals.

But here’s how it ties back to this whole spec thing: I write a spec screenplay. It’s mine. Nobody commissioned it, I wrote it. I have two choices: I can register it with the United States Copyright Office and now I have copyright, or I can just do nothing and just have implied copyright.

Now, it comes time for me to sell it to a studio. They want to buy it. The way it’s all been worked out is, either I transfer the copyright to them — which they just basically say is a condition, so if you don’t want to transfer the copyright to us, no dice, no sale — or, if I haven’t registered it, I just backwards retroactively agree to say that they commissioned it and it’s a work for hire.

That is valuable in a weird way to us. It sounds like we’re getting ripped off, but by agreeing to go along with that retroactive lie, we allowed the specs grip to be covered by all of our Writers Guild protections, including — by the way — some separated rights, which we’re going to be getting into in a second.

So, it sounds like it is a lie, it sounds like it’s kind of a ripoff to us, and in a way, the big ripoff is work for hire. But no work for hire, no union.

**John:** So, without this kind of fiction, the guild could cover us in situations where we clearly were being hired to work on a TV show, but purchasing our original ideas would be very complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah, basically if we didn’t have this fiction, the spec market could become a non-union writing market. That’s why the Writers Guild actually got the companies to agree to say, “Let’s all look the other way here when it comes to specs, even though technically they don’t meet the definition of a truly commissioned work, or a true work-for-hire.” It’s better to call it that, otherwise the spec market becomes this kind of gray zone where they don’t even have to pay minimums. That would be —

**John:** They could literally say like, “I will pay you $500 for this script.”

**Craig:** Or how about, “I’ll pay you $1,” in which, then it becomes almost like a weird option market. Then you also get no credit protections, and if you lose your credit protections, you’re losing your separated rights, you’re losing your guaranteed minimum share story credit, you’re losing residuals. The ripple effect that goes forward from that would be tremendous. It would essentially decimate us as writers and providers of original material.

**John:** So one of the protections that you get as a part of the Writers Guild is what we call separated rights, which is a complicated bundle of things that come with the person who is awarded story credit on — we’re talking screenplays, TV is always more complicated.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you get story by credit, you get screen story by credit, or you get written by credit, which includes an implied story credit.

**John:** Subsequent works derived from your original story, you are compensated for those.

**Craig:** You get — there’s some formula, it’s not particularly glowing, but there’s some formula where you get paid for sequel payments, you essentially get WGA minimums for the sequels. The truth is, that’s one of the weakest separated rights we have, because usually your agent gets you a better deal than that anyway.

When we look at our separated rights — and they’re called separated rights because we’re essentially saying, “OK, we’re giving you all of the rights, but we’re kind of holding these little few ones back.” — the one that’s become the most useful, and the most potentially lucrative for us is dramatic stage rights.

**John:** Dramatic stage rights brings us to our first thing that we want to talk about today, which is Jessica Bendinger. The screenwriter behind Bring It On is in contention with the producers of destined-for-Broadway musical, Bring It On, the argument being that the stage musical is using her story elements, and is not compensating her for those.

**Craig:** Right. We have, one of our separated rights is dramatic stage rights. Basically, the deal is this: if you have story by, or screen story by, or written by on a screenplay — in this case Jessica has that — then the company has two years following the release of the movie to produce a stage version of that screenplay, musical or not musical. If they don’t do so within two years, then the writer essentially has an exclusive license in perpetuity to adapt for the stage, and to benefit from that adaptation on their own without the studio.

What happens sometimes though is that the studio contends that they are making — five years after the fact — that they’re making a stage production that has that title, but isn’t really based on that script. [laughs] That’s where you run into trouble.

**John:** Yeah, and that is essentially what I think is happening in the case of Bring It On is that, based on the articles I’ve read so far, Beacon, the people who made the movie who are behind the musical say that, “Yes, we are making a musical called ‘Bring It On,’ but it’s not using the story that is inherent in Jessica’s original screenplay.” Further complicated by the fact that they have made two sequels to Bring It On that neither of which credits Jessica.

**Craig:** Right, so I mean technically…I believe Bring It On was an original screenplay, so Jessica will always get a based on characters created by credit. If they’re using characters from the first one, then they’re in trouble. If they’re not using characters from the first one, and they’re basing it solely on say, the story of the third movie, then maybe they can wriggle out of it. This is one of those things where unfortunately, the way our society works, people tend to just go, “Well, let’s roll the dice, and if it ends up being litigated, it ends up being litigated.”

**John:** Story is what’s really the crucial aspect here, and having written a screenplay for somebody doesn’t necessarily give you dramatic rights on something. I can speak very specifically about Big Fish. Big Fish is based on a novel by Daniel Wallace. Sony bought the rights to the book for me, Sony hired me to write the screenplay. We wrote the screenplay, we made the movie. Sony has the chance to make the musical based on it, because Sony’s considered the author of the screenplay. Daniel Wallace has the rights to make a stage version of his book because he wrote the book.

However, someone who wanted to make a musical of Big Fish would need to get both Daniel Wallace’s book and if they wanted to use anything from the movie, they would need to get the rights from Columbia Pictures. If a producer were to go in and do both of those things, they could make a Big Fish musical. They could use every word of dialogue from the screenplay, and my name wouldn’t appear anywhere on it, which is a bizarre and frustrating thing about how things are divvied up these days, and that the studio is considered the author of the screenplay.

It’s not a hypothetical situation, Legally Blonde is a Broadway musical, uses a lot of material from the screenplay for Legally Blonde and the screenwriters aren’t credited as writers on that project.

**Craig:** That’s right. I mean the truth is: every screenplay, no matter what the circumstance, is owned and authored in law by the studio. The difference is, if you have a story credit or screen story credit, or a written by credit, you essentially retain control over this one area of exploitation: dramatic stage rights.

In the case of Big Fish or Legally Blonde, you guys — Lutz & Smith, and in your case on Big Fish — you guys adapted a novel. When we adapt source material, unless we create a story that is uniquely separate from the story in the source material, there is no story credit, and there are no separated rights. You would have to negotiate ahead of time the right to be credited on some stage adaptation of the movie.

It is a weird thing, and since so much of what we do now is adaptation, our separated rights keep getting — there’s just narrower and narrower circumstances where we even get them in the first place. Then when you do get them, as is the case with Jessica and her project, then sometimes still there can be a real dispute.

By the way, I’m going to add another thing that’s really annoying, and God, I wish we could fix this one in negotiations: Let’s say everything goes perfect, you write a script and you do have story credit, and you do get separated rights, and three years later, you mount a stage production. You still have to get permission from the studio to use the title of the movie on your show. Very frustrating.

**John:** Is that part of a WGA agreement or is that a part of the contract that they hired for, or is it —

**Craig:** No. That’s one of the limitations in the MBA — in the minimum basic agreement, which is our collective bargaining agreement — it basically says…actually it’s even worse than I said. I’m going to read you — it says basically, When we decide that we’re going to use this separated right, prior to the first performance of the dramatic work, we are required to submit to the company a copy of the work. Then we will not, without their consent, use the title of the motion picture, or the screenplay, as the case may be, as the title unless they allow us to.

How about this one? But if they insist that we have to, we also have to. So if you decided to change it because you felt it was a better title for the stage play, and the company said, “No, we actually want you to use the title of the movie,” you’re forced to. It’s very restrictive.

**John:** That is restrictive. Now, the individual writer who sold a spec screenplay could theoretically have language in his or her contract that would supersede that, is that correct?

**Craig:** That is correct. We are always free to negotiate better individual terms than the ones that exist. However, I must tell you, it’s very difficult to get the studios to agree to any kind of change to what they call that “core language,” because they hate setting precedent. For instance, you will not find any writer who has ever gotten a better deal on residuals in individual contract. None. Does not exist; they’ll never do it.

**John:** You and I were both behind the writers group that met with all of the studios and ended up getting some, not quite first dollar gross, but a larger piece of the back-end for some projects that we’re now writing over at Fox. That was part of our instinct behind that was it was very hard to get a better back-end percentage as a writer because everyone was loath to do that.

**Craig:** I think it is first dollar gross.

**John:** It’s kind of first dollar gross. It’s a really good definition of back end.

**Craig:** It’s one of the flavors. There’s like a billion flavors of back-end participation; it’s one of the better ones.

**John:** I will say, it’s not Will Smith’s first dollar gross.

**Craig:** No, no. No, it’s not.

**John:** No, no one gets Will Smith money.

**Craig:** No, he gets like zero dollar gross.

**John:** Will Smith, he gets crisp, new dollar bills directly from the mint is how you pay Will Smith. And you know what? He’s worth every one of those crisp, new dollar bills they send to him.

**Craig:** Don’t begrudge the man a dime.

Yeah, you’re right, we sort of made a little mini collective there to break through one of the barriers of getting that kind of participation as a writer. When it comes to these things, separated rights, it’s very difficult to kind of get them to give you a better deal than is already there.

This will continue to happen, because — obviously as you can tell if you just take a walk down Times Square — studios have realized that there’s this pretty decent source of additional revenue. If one of these stage productions really connects, they can do very well. I think this is going to be a battle front for sure. An interesting case to watch with Jessica.

**John:** Yeah, definitely.

Speaking of adaptations, I was lucky to have lunch with Winnie Holzman yesterday; we were talking about Wicked. She is the book writer on Wicked and wrote My So Called Life before that. It’s so fascinating to see what a stage musical looks like in great success. Wicked was a book by Gregory Maguire that was option-purchased with the first instinct of making it into a movie.

They made it into a Broadway musical first. While ultimately you can imagine they will make a movie somewhere down the road, it’s much more lucrative for them to keep that on the stage right now.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** One of the remarkable things about Broadway also is that the reporting is fairly transparent. The writer of a Broadway show has a very good sense of how much money she is bringing in this week because it literally is a percentage of the box office take and that’s a public figure. It’s a very different formula than what we’re used to as screenwriters.

**Craig:** Right. And ultimately, when you mount a Broadway production, if you’re doing it independently of, say, a movie studio that controls rights, you don’t have these layers — these corporate layers that suck up all this revenue through their various vacuum holes.

**John:** The other topic of money related to copyright issues and what we do as screenwriters is the lawsuit that Harlan Ellison is suing over the movie In Time —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** — the Andrew Niccol directed movie, which is interesting. I’ve been involved in cases where a writer, after the fact, a movie’s is in production or a movie has been made,and then a writer steps up and says, “No. That’s based on my idea.” I’ve been involved in litigation over that.

I’ve never been in litigation where someone is trying to stop the movie or file an injunction, arguing before the movie has been released that it is based on his idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is one of those things where I’ve been on both sides of these things. Anybody that writes for a living and gets movies made is going to get the call sooner or later that you so-called “stole someone’s idea.”

First things firs:, ideas are not property. Copyright law is pretty clear about this. An idea in and of itself is not protectable. That’s why body-switching movies can continue to be made. They should stop, but — you can freely make another body-switching movie without being sued by Freaky Friday or any of the other billions of them.

So, what is protectable? Unique expression in fixed form. “Fixed form” is important. It’s not enough to just say the idea or say the specifics out loud that are protectable. In the case of Harlan Ellison, he’s obviously met that test. He’s written a unique expression of fixed form. That’s his story. And what he is alleging is that this movie, which I haven’t seen, clearly infringes on that which is unique to his story.

Ultimately, that’s what the lawsuit will have to determine. That’s what a judge will have to determine or a jury — that depends on how these things get litigated, and uually, they just get settled. — but they have to basically look at the two works and say, “All right. Is this theft or is this one of those hundredth monkey things where two people had similar ideas but it’s not theft?”

For instance, I understand that there is a character in Harlan’s story called “The Timekeeper.” So, in his story time is a precious resource that can be granted or taken away from people as part of reward and punishment. And there’s a Timekeeper who controls that. And apparently, in the movie there is a similar character performing a similar function and he’s also called “The Timekeeper.”

So, on the one hand, Harlan’s going to argue, “Look. That’s unique and he took it.”

On the other hand, the studio is going to say, “The guy who keeps time is called ‘The Timekeeper.’ It’s not that unique at all.”

And that’s how this is going to be fought out. And ultimately, this is why these things are so difficult. I read the Ellison story many years ago. I obviously haven’t seen the Niccol film, it’s not out yet. If it were me, if somehow I were magically in charge of this, I would have to read the story again, watch the movie, and sort of gut check it and say, “Did this guy rip this guy off or not?” Not even intentionally — I don’t have to prove that there was intention; I just have to prove that it looks like material was taken. That just comes down to looking at it. Bottom line.

**John:** The timing of the lawsuit, speaking of time, is interesting too in that I feel like a lesser-known writer would have waited until after the movie came out and was successful before filing a lawsuit. If Harlan Ellison genuinely feels that this is his story, it may have been smart to do this now because it puts pressure on them to reach a decision earlier on and perhaps settle out if they don’t feel like they’re going to win this.

**Craig:** Yeah. We went through this on Hangover 2 with the famous tattoo lawsuit.

**John:** For people who don’t know, this is the concern about Ed Helms’ tattoo in the movie.

**Craig:** Right. Ed Helms wakes up with a tattoo that is remarkably similar to the one on Mike Tyson’s face, and the artist who created the tattoo on Mike Tyson’s face said, “Hey. Wait a second. That’s my tattoo. That’s my original work of art. You have to license that. You misappropriated it.”

The studio said, “A, It’s not exactly his tattoo. And B, we don’t think it is protectable. And C, get out of here.”

And he timed in such a way to try to get an injunction against the release and all the rest of it that in the end, this thing was settled. Again, these things typically are.

I think Harlan went through a similar thing with The Terminator. It ended up with a settlement and some kind of source material credit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s a funny thing. He’s an incredibly prolific writer, and he’s also a very litigious writer. [Laughter] He’s like a perfect storm of a guy who has written a lot and can point to similarities frequently. But, if the material was taken, it was taken. It’s not fair.

I want to believe the best of everybody. I think Andrew Niccol is great screenwriter and a terrific filmmaker, and Harlan is a legend. I don’t know — I hope that it was either not intentional or that there was no infringement. But we’ll see.

**John:** But what it has to come back to though is that it feels like an idea that a subsequent writer could come upon and would write something very similar to. Here is where I would come to: if I were thinking about a movie as “What’s a valuable commodity? What if time were a commodity?” With the idea of time being a commodity, I wonder if I would actually come to many of the same conclusions as this story does.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s the challenge for me in thinking about this is: given this premise, these are the reasonable things you would come to. It’s like patent law to me: is it just a natural extension of the idea of what’s out there in the culture versus stealing somebody’s idea for what a graphical mouse will look like?

**Craig:** That’s right. You could say, “Here’s a phrase: Time is money. Now, let’s externalize it and create a story.” One of the things we have to be careful about is when we engage in this kind of litigation there is the law of unintended consequences. There are a thousand producers out there who could do the same thing that I just did.

“‘A stitch in time saves nine.’ What if that’s real? Oh my God.” Now they own that forever? No. It’s ridiculous.

So, you’re right. The concept alone isn’t enough. And even the expected execution elements of that concept wouldn’t be enough. You have to show a real lifting if you are going to actually get a verdict in your favor.

To get a settlement, I think you just have to show that you’ve got a reasonable enough case to cause a real problem and that you deserve some compensation to let that go. Obviously, I don’t know enough about the case to know what the level of evidence is here.

**John:** My concern is that intellectual property in the form of copyright could become the problem that’s become with patent law in the tech industry.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Basically like — oh, Sony is gathering up all these things about science fiction things so they can head off anyone who is trying to make a science fiction movie. I worry about copyright trolling.

**Craig:** Patent trolls becoming copyright trolls — I totally get it. And, you know, look: most of the time studios defend these claims vigorously, as the lawyers say. And 99 times out of 100 they don’t settle. They make them go away. In some cases they actually make the complainants pay them back. If they can show that it was a bologna claim, they’ll go after them for legal fees.

In the case of a guy like Harlan, it’s a little trickier. This is a pretty famous and accomplished guy who has also — and it’s not like a judge is not going to notice is that — he’s been down this road before, and to success. And so this one is a little trickier.

But by and large, I’m with you — I don’t like that everything we write can be held up by some nut who saws that he wrote the same thing in his little journal.

**John:** I think I am going to pitch a new science fiction story to our friend Derek Hass, who runs Popcorn Fiction. So here’s the basic premise: You have a moderately successful writer who invents the time machine, travels back in time, and writes the basic premise of all the future movies, such as Star Wars.

[laughter]

And then years later, sues Lucas and sues everyone, and becomes insanely wealthy. And then somehow gets tripped up in his own thing and dies of an appropriately gruesome science fiction death.

**Craig:** Or he just goes back in time, buys 50 shares of something and that’ll be good too.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But that just shorts it and then it’s not good.

**John:** Yeah. You’ve basically shortened my short story down to a paragraph and then it’s not good. It’s not even a short story anymore.

**Craig:** Is there a market for short sentences?

**John:** Yeah. It’s called Twitter.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great Twitter sentence.

**John:** It’s a very good Twitter sentence.

Well, thank you. I felt this was a good lesson with Professor Mazin.

**Craig:** I hope we didn’t put everyone to sleep. I mean — I just want to say for those of you have mustered your way through this, if you’re not a professional screenwriter and you’re wondering, “Why did I just listen to that?” It’s because you hope to be one. And believe me, it’s going to impact you. You have to know this stuff. Because they know it. So, you should know it too.

**John:** Craig, thank you very much.

**Craig:** Thank you John.

**John:** All right. And we’ll talk again next week.

**Craig:** Awesome.