Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Happy New Year 2012.

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

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

**John:** As is mine.

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

**John:** That’s impressive.

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

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

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

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Isn’t that nice?

**John:** How sweet. That’s so nice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

So, I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh, yeah, that’d be good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Nice.

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

**Craig:** Oh, of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you.

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

**Craig:** Whoa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Bummer.

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

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

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** And it really does —

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was really hard.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Coolness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, my mom, of course, was delighted that random lawyers were calling the house and threatening her. So, that was not good at all.

**Craig:** And how about your year in review? What’s the big headline?

**John:** This year’s mostly been Big Fish, which was a secret project that we could finally announce and say that it was really happening. So, we had two big readings of the musical this last year. Which is great, because for six years it’s been Andrew Lippa and I at a piano singing for people.

And this has been the first time where we’ve have other actors come in and actually do it. And we have a director, and we get to sort of see the show independent of our singing the show. It’s such a strange thing when you’ve always been the performer, to sit back and be the audience watching something.

**Craig:** Right, that was interesting.

**John:** And a lot of this next year will be that, too. So, it’s been a good process.

It’s also been nice to sort of…I feel like, as a screenwriter, I’ve been able to do most of the kinds of things that I wanted to do. And a lot of the stuff I get approached with is, “Hey, do you want to adapt this book?” “Do you want to work on this project?” “Do you want to work with this director who wants to do something?” And I’ve said yes probably too often.

And this has been sort of, the last six months has been a nice bit of saying no. And I have good reasons to say no, but it’s also because I kind of just don’t want to do it. And that’s been a nice change.

**Craig:** That, the whole yes/no thing is, I’m sure I’ll be tortured by that until I finally get kicked out or quit.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing I would say has been good about the musical is it’s given me a chance to be a newcomer, be a newbie, and like, not to not know things and just ask questions and discover what things are like.

And really, developing my first application for the iPhone and the iPad, and we have a Mac application about to come out, has been that process, too. So, that chance to just explore new frontiers.

And while it’s nice to sort of know things about screenwriting, I can answer people’s questions about screenwriting, it’s not new and fresh and exciting for me in the same way that new, fresh, exciting things are exciting for me.

**Craig:** You’ve got to keep it changing, I think. I think you have to keep things ever in flux. Sort of the same principle of why bench pressing with dumbells is better than with one bar across, because keeping things in balance alone when things are changing and moving is good for you. It’s good for your brain.

And I’m excited. I’m looking forward to your show, and as a dedicated listener to Sirius XM on Broadway, I suspect that you will end up on Seth Rudetsky’s show.

**John:** That would be great.

**Craig:** You tell him I’m a big fan.

**John:** I will.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** For all we know, he’s listening. That’s one of the other things that was new this last year, of course, was that we have a podcast.

**Craig:** That’s right. Oh my god, how did we forget that?

**John:** We did forget that. We have about 28,000 listeners on a given week.

**Craig:** Gee, man.

**John:** Which is really crazy. And growing.

**Craig:** That’s a lot.

**John:** So, thank you, people who are listening.

**Craig:** I mean, frankly, with that many listeners, it seems like you and I soon will be able to leverage it into some kind of military action.

**John:** I like it, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, a big mob that just suddenly goes and does something.

**John:** Yeah, I don’t know what they’ll do, exactly.

**Craig:** I know. I’ve got to think about it.

**John:** They’ll demand change. They’ll have, like, really ambiguous goals and maybe they’ll wear masks, but it’ll be awesome.

**Craig:** That sounds crazy. Why would anyone do that?

**John:** Because it’s wonderful.

And also, this is a difference for me: I had no movies come out this last year. And this year, I have two. So I have Dark Shadows, which is May 11th, which is not really my movie, but it’s a movie that has my name on it. So, that’s different.

**Craig:** It’s partly your movie, at the very least.

**John:** It’s partly my movie, at the very least.

And Frankenweenie, which is October 5th. So, I’ll actually have movies.

**Craig:** That’s, you’re going have —

**John:** I won’t be just that theoretical screenwriter, I’ll be a screenwriter with actual movies in theaters.

**Craig:** A big boy screenwriter with your big boy pants. And you’re going to be, you’ll be everywhere. If you’ve got May, is a big month, as I came to learn. And then, October, you can just keep the PR ball rolling the entire second half of the year.

**John:** We’ll see what happens with Dark Shadows. I don’t know that I’ll be doing any press for it. I have story by credit, which is applicable. The movie that was made is a different movie than what I had originally set out to write. Not that it’s a bad movie, it’s just a very different movie. And so, I don’t know whether it’s going to be appropriate for me to do a lot of press for it.

**Craig:** That’s a good point. I agree with you. I feel like, if you don’t have the screenplay credit, maybe, it just seems odd to do the whole PR push.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, I agree with you on that one.

**John:** Yeah, so. That’s the year ahead.

**Craig:** Sounds good.

**John:** Now, one of the things you want to talk about, which I think is a good thing for us to talk about, is Charlie Kaufman, who gave a speech to the BAFTA, the British American Film and Television Association.

**Craig:** Is that right? I thought it was just British. I thought it was the British Association of.

**John:** British, yeah, it’s not British American, it’s just British.

**Craig:** Something, something. Yeah. British Alliance of Film and Television a something?

**John:** Yeah, yeah. That sounds right.

I should know more about it, because I actually went to the BAFTA awards for Big Fish. But everyone just calls them the BAFTAs. And so it’s just one of those bunches of initials that we don’t really need to know about.

But Charlie Kaufman was a speaker at one of their recent events. And gave a presentation. So, I thought we’d start off by talking about Charlie Kaufman’s need to have people like him, which is — I think what we talked about before — which is sort of the good boy syndrome, is that we so much want to make people be happy with us.

**Charlie Kaufman:** I also struggle with wanting you to like me. And you know, in my fantasy, I leave here and people are saying, “Great speech,” you know, and “Not only is he a great writer but boy, you know, I really learned something tonight. He really brought it, you know?”

And, so, as much as I know that this neediness of mine exists, I also have a difficult time extricating myself from it or even fully recognizing it when it’s happening, because it’s a tricky thing, it’s, I mean, no one wants to come up here and bomb. It’s really, literally, the stuff of nightmares, you know. I’ve had that nightmare a lot of times. And then, and I know you want to be entertained, and so, for me to calculatedly not entertain you in order to be true, seems sort of selfish.

**John:** So, that was part of his introduction to the speech, where he’s talking to this audience, and explaining that he’s been commissioned to give his speech to them and feels that he is going to be, and worries that he’s going to be a disappointment if he doesn’t entertain them.

So, Craig, why don’t you do the set up and tell us what it was about Charlie Kaufman’s speech that got you thinking, or made you want to talk about it on the show today?

**Craig:** Well, it was a great talk, and it was, you just heard this clip, which is really one facet of it. But I guess, if there was a theme throughout all of it, it was this kind of self examination, and a look at the pitfalls that go along with being an author, an artist, an entertainer. For instance, in this case, he’s talking about this internal dialogue that I suspect we all have, in which we are obviously doing what we do to entertain or to provoke or inform or please or inspire.

But we cannot go down the path of simply putting “love me” first, because “love me” then leads you down the path of manipulation. And I’ve been there before. And one of the reasons that his talk affected me so much is because every sort of foible he outlined I have. Every mistake he said he’s made I’ve made, probably more frequently and more egregiously than he has. No doubt, I would say, actually, more egregiously than he has.

And so, it kind of hit me in my sensitive spots, because I do want to entertain an audience. Of course I want to entertain an audience. But, like so many who are in this business, maybe we start from a place of psychological neediness, but we have to grow past it.

As he then points out, conversely, what we can’t do then is start to get into conscientious navel gazing, where the point is to so studiously ignore the audience that they end up feeling alienated. And this dilemma is common, I think, to everybody that creates for a living.

I think Roger Waters started writing The Wall for precisely this reason, that he started to feel this weird alienation from himself and this audience, and didn’t understand if he was just there to kind of amuse them. Why did he hate them? Should he hate them? Is that what they deserved?

And like Charlie’s movies, his speech is full of all this, kind of, mind bending recursion. And I’m not sure that he arrives at a conclusion that is valuable or useful. I’m not even sure that was his purpose. I think, in a very zen way, ties back to what we were talking about earlier, the examination is kind of it’s own reward.

You do it, and you think about things, and by examining and questioning and testing yourself, you theoretically improve. And you improve in the absence of any notion of perfection, because I just don’t think that’s achievable.

**John:** I think I missed the part where he talked about the navel gazing.

Because if there’s a criticism I’ve often had about Kaufman’s movies — and many of which I’ve enjoyed, but some of which I’ve not enjoyed as much — it’s that they seem solipsistic, where it’s just one person figuring out his stuff throughout the course of the movie and seemingly not able to understand that there’s someone watching the story in front of him. And seemingly not, kind of, caring about the audience’s perspective on what they’re encountering.

I very much write movies as the person sitting in the theater watching the movie. And that doesn’t seem to be Charlie Kaufman’s perspective on the screenwriter’s job.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t know. I can’t tell. I mean, I grant you that he didn’t specifically call out navel gazing, but even in that clip, you can hear him say, “Well, okay, I don’t want to calculate, specifically, unentertaining, or being anti-entertaining.”

But I get your point, also, that yeah, it seems like the movies that he’s done that are the most enjoyable and the most interesting, and frankly, the most artistically successful are the ones where he does acknowledge that the audience has certain needs.

And you know, this is one of these things that happens where you have to constantly question, “Who am I writing the movie for? Is it for the casual moviegoer? Is it for the not casual moviegoer? Is it for the person who’s seen every movie and can’t stand the conventions anymore?”

And maybe he’s sort of gone to a place where he’s so sick of the conventions that part of what he does is sort of studiously avoid them. Maybe he’s gotten to the point where he’s so frightened by his own need to be loved that he starts doing things on purpose that make him not loved. I don’t know.

All I do know is that those questions are questions I have. And that I think that if there’s a spectrum, and on one end of the spectrum is kind of the solipsistic navel gazing, and the other end of the spectrum is, sort of, pandering, essentially, that I could afford to move slightly more towards navel gazing. Just incrementally so.

And because, look, I’m not, I am an eternal student. I try and I try and I try and I try to get better. And I just like the fact that he was so open about how frail and weak his own psyche was in regards to his own work. And here’s a writer that, frankly, is excellent.

And you’d think, “Oh, well, he just sits at home, just incredibly proud of himself.” Instead of, quite obviously, nowhere near the case.

**John:** Now, I approach Charlie Kaufman’s work as a screenwriter who, the work I’ve done, I’ve written very big commercial entertaining movies, you know. It’s hard to say that Charlie’s Angels is a deep evaluation of contemporary…well, maybe it’s contemporary culture, but it’s not, nothing in Charlie’s Angels is about why are we here on Earth.

But some of my movies are more of that. I mean, Big Fish is largely autobiographical. The Nines if very much autobiographical. And yet, I would…there’s something about…there’s something that feels like there’s a character Charlie Kaufman — this has been a frequent criticism of Charlie Kaufman, I think, but — that Charlie Kaufman is playing a character named Charlie Kaufman who is a tortured screenwriter and this is part of the act.

And I’m not saying that he’s false there, but there’s something that struck me oddly about his speech and it made me, I don’t know, it felt both a genuine and it felt like another layer of pretense piled upon itself.

**Craig:** Well, that’s part of the paradox of recursion. And yeah, obviously, that’s a topic that is fascinating to him, and of course, any speech is a contrivance.

I mean, one of my friends pointed out that, at one point, he says, “I think it was Thomas Mann, who said…” Well, you don’t think it was Thomas Mann; you wrote that down. You know it was Thomas Mann, because you looked it up, you put it down on paper. I mean, with any kind of calculated bit of artistry, there’s always artifice in artistry.

You know, for me, it’s not so much the examination of topics and of writing movies that are about deep things as much as it is your intentions and the purity of your intentions. And he talks about the purity of your intentions, and I think I’ve done my best work when my intentions were pure, and I’ve done my worst work when they were not. or when my pure intentions were overcome by a need to not be screamed at by a Weinstein, for instance.

So, that was valuable, to me. I just thought that was a valuable thing to contemplate.

Now, on the other hand, I think he concludes at one point by saying, if you be honest and true, people will like it. And that’s absolutely not the case.

**John:** Yeah, actually, there’s a clip here I want to play, which is where he talks about, sort of, audience reaction to things.

**Charlie Kaufman:** “That’s two hours I’ll never get back.” That’s a favorite thing for an angry person to say about a movie he hates. But the thing is, every two hours are two hours he’ll never get back. You cannot horde your two hours.

So, you are here and I am here, spending our time, as we must. It must be spent. I am trying not to spend this time as I spend most of my time, trying to get you to like me. Trying to control your thoughts to use my voodoo at the speed of light, the speed of sound, at the speed of thought, trying to convince you that your two hours with me are not going to be resented afterwards.

It is an ancient pattern of time usage for me. And I’m trying to move deeper, hoping to be helpful. This pattern of time usage paints over an ancient wound and paints it with bright colors. It’s a slight of hand, a distraction. So, to attempt to change the pattern, let me expose the wound.

I now step into this area blindly. I do not know what the wound is. I do know that it is old. I do know that it is a hole in my being. I do know it is tender. I do believe that it is unknowable, or at least, inarticulable. I do believe you have a wound, too. I do believe it is both specific to you and common to everyone.

I do believe it is the thing about you that must be hidden and protected. It is the thing that is tap danced over, five shows a day. It is the thing that won’t be interesting to other people if revealed. It is the thing that makes you weak and pathetic. It is the thing that truly, truly, truly makes loving you impossible. It is your secret, even from yourself.

But it is the thing that wants to live. It is the thing from which your art, your painting, your dance, your composition, your philosophical treatise, your screenplay, is born. If you don’t acknowledge this, you will come up here when it is your time, and you will give your speech, and you will talk about the business of screenwriting.

You will say that, as a screenwriter, you are a cog in the business machine. You will say it is not an art form. You will say, “Here. This is what a screenplay looks like.” You will talk about character arcs, how to make likable characters. You will talk about box office. This is what you will do. This is who you will be. And after you’re done, I will feel lonely and empty and hopeless.

**John:** Okay, so what is he talking about with the wound?

**Craig:** Well, there’s so much going on there and I agree with so much of it. But there was, first of all, I will start by saying that he does make one mistake, I think, and that is suggesting in the beginning that he’s trying to not manipulate the audience and there is some kind of artistic nobility in avoiding manipulating the audience.

That’s baloney. The truth is, the purpose of art is to impact the audience. Impaction of the audience is necessarily an act of will in which you are trying to get people to feel something. And you can’t deny that agency. You can’t say that somehow you get to make you feel something without trying to make you feel something. Of course he’s trying.

Note his rhythm of saying, “It is the thing. It is the thing. It is the thing.” It’s a dramatic cadence.

**John:** He’s using craft.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** He’s clearly aware that he’s a craftsman using his tools to create a message.

**Craig:** That’s right. And it’s really interesting that he’s using his craft in service of a section of this speech that’s about how you shouldn’t be crafting it.

But that aside, so I thought, “Okay, I got you on that one, Charlie.”

But, here’s the part about it that is real and it mattered to me. He is right that the need to impact other people through any kind of creativity or art does come from a need. It is not something we do casually. Is it a wound, per se? I don’t know if it’s a wound. As he points out, it’s unknowable. It is a need. Like a hunger, a desire. And I don’t necessarily think that phrasing it as wound is fair to him or to anybody else that does it. It’s pejorative.

**John:** Wound definitely implies that something has been done to you, something has been ripped from you. It’s cut through you.

**Craig:** Yeah, it implies an injury.

**John:** What was that, by the way, Craig?

**Craig:** That was a motorcycle.

**John:** That’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was my wound.

**John:** It was your wound.

**Craig:** It implies an injury and I think it feeds into an unnecessary character of an artist as a psychological mess using art to heal themselves or, as he puts it, I think, paint over their pain in bright colors.

I don’t think that has to be the case. But I do feel there is something very basic and engaged in a libidinous way in service of creating something.

And what he is right about is that if all you bring to the table is craft without that thing, without that passionate, libidinous drive, then you will be an empty person who is sitting there obsessed with nonsense books about page counts, plot points, act breaks and character arcs.

Absolutely, no question, that is true.

**John:** One of the things that struck me most as I was listening to this section of his speech was that my instinct was, “Well, write a novel.”

Because so much of what he’s talking about when you’re writing your screenplay, screenwriting is inherently not going to be your artistic voice alone. You are writing something that you’re hoping someone else will help convert into a movie. Actually, a lot of someone elses are going to convert into a movie. It seems like screenwriting is a strange craft to pick for your artistic expression if you’re goal in artistic expression is to truthfully explore this wound in yourself.

**Craig:** I agree, and I also think it’s…frankly, screenwriting is a pursuit that attracts people who are attracted to glamor and excitement and audiences. We can’t pretend that that’s not the case. Movies are exciting and glamorous. They exist on a level that is far more bright-y and paint-y over your wound-y then novels.

And I think, I would suspect that even Charlie Kaufman would agree with this that the reason he likes movies is because…

Well, he goes into a rationale of why he likes movies as opposed to other art forms. I don’t, frankly, think that his explanation made sense.

**John:** Yeah. His explanation was that movies are much more like dreams and that in dreams you can explore things that you can’t explore in normal text.

**Craig:** It’s funny. I have the opposite feeling. I feel like movies are the most literal form of art because they fill in almost every blank for you. To me, novels are able to, poetry approaches dream. Novel approaches dream.

I have to fill in everything. When I read a novel, I do have to enter… I think my brain probably enters a REM-like state. Movies chew your food for you in so many ways. All of them. Even the ones that are obtuse. Even the ones you don’t understand are still showing you step by step in real time what people look like. There’s voices, color. I know what they’re wearing, where they’re sitting.

So, I don’t think that that’s right. But, and I feel like I’m criticizing his talk when really, the truth is that it inspired me. Because, even if at times it didn’t hold up to the scrutiny of consistency, it was admirable. I thought it was very admirable how serious he took both screenwriting and the psychological pitfalls therein of the screenwriter. And there are many.

And I do agree with him very strongly that it is art and that we deserve to treat our own work with more respect then the business around us treats it. That’s for sure.

**John:** I would certainly agree with you there.

It is frustrating often to create an original screenplay that is viewed as less original, less it’s own work compared to a novel which has been adapted into the screenplay. One of those is considered art and one of those is considered a transitional document for making a movie. That is a frustration.

And, as we were talking about earlier, one of my last six month’s goals was passing on a lot more things. And it was recognizing that I have however many thousands of pages in me before I retire. I don’t necessarily want to spend them writing other people’s stories. I want to write things that are important to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. And part of what I’m trying to do is…I don’t even think about — it’s funny — I never think about other people’s stories as important to me. I just want to try and be truer to what I think is good. That’s my big thing.

And I think that’s that, if I drew a lesson or encouragement out of this, it is that I am less concerned, more than ever — that’s kind of a weird sentence construction — I am less concerned then ever before with what other people think, and I am far more concerned with what I think.

That said, I am making a transitional document that will become a movie that will be shown to an audience. And in the end, the audience will have an opinion, and it’s the only opinion I care about.

And it’s a tough thing because I’m not really sure what I would do if I loved something that the audience hated. By and large, the things that they’ve hated, I’ve hated and the things they’ve really liked, I’ve really liked.

**John:** That was somewhat the experience I had on The Nines, except a lot of people really didn’t like the The Nines and… But I was surprisingly okay with it because it was very much my brain shoved up on the screen.

I didn’t have, the Charlie Kaufman of it all would say, I didn’t have to compromise anything about what I wanted to tell the story to be in order to make that movie. And that’s the luxury of making a tiny movie is that sometimes you actually have that kind control.

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

You know, I wrote a short story for Derek’s website Popcorn Fiction called Lightning in a Bottle. Check it out.

**John:** There’s a link in the show notes.

**Craig:** There you go. Link in the show notes.

And that is I think maybe the only thing I’ve ever done, because it’s a short story, that wasn’t… I don’t know what word to use here. Impacted in any way by anyone else. It’s entirely me, top to bottom.

And it is true that, because it is entirely me and no one else and nothing else, I am oddly at peace with somebody coming up to me and saying, “That was crap.” Although no one has, happily. But that is… And it’s funny. It is the only pure expression of what I do. Period.

**John:** Yeah. And I wonder whether….

I have two short stories that I’ve had a similar experience with and that I’m really, really proud of. And they’re tough to write, but I love that they’re entirely mine and they are finished. I love that they’re done and I don’t have to go back and ever touch them again.

I wonder if you can ever really get that in a movie. I explained The Nines, I felt different about criticism than I ever had before. But there is a difference because that movie had a thousand people working on it. And there’s things about the movie, certainly about the marketing of the movie, that I had no control over.

And the marketing is part of the movie, ultimately. It’s part of the experience of how you encounter a movie, down to the cover art and which one sheet got approved and that kind of stuff.

And it’s the boundaries of what you consider your function as the writer, the screenwriter, the filmmaker, the artist behind the thing. Where that stops.

**Craig:** It’s true. Our experience of our own movies are so warped by the way they are reflected back to us. If all we did was write a movie and then watch it in the theater, I suppose we would have to just absorb what the director brought and what the cast brought and whatever changes were made by the studio, the producer. And those sometimes can be very considerable and sometimes they’re great and sometimes they’re traumatic.

But that’s not it. That’s just the beginning. Then there’s the publicity and the film critics and people on TV and Internet commenters. Even just things like reading… Just your bitterness about being excluded from something or being overlooked. Or it starts to…

**John:** Or if you have an award movie. Like with Big Fish, we were going through the whole awards process, and when we got some nominations but didn’t get other nominations, you’d ride the highs and lows on that, and you’d realize, “Wow. I’m doing as much work to try to get an award for this movie as I did actually making the movie.”

And that’s a weird part, too. So, was the release of the movie part of the art of the movie? That’s a whole… You don’t control it.

**Craig:** I don’t know if it’s part of the art, but it’s certainly part of how you experience your own work. Whereas for the short story I wrote. That’s it. It’s a short story. There’s nothing else. I couldn’t care less about anything else.

**John:** So as we’re wrapping up today’s topic, I think we’re telling people that they should write short stories.

**Craig:** It’s not bad.

**John:** Short stories are good. They’re entirely your own.

Even though I’m picking a lot of the Charlie Kaufman lecture, I would definitely say it’s worth seeing. That’s why there’s going to be a link in the show notes for it. Because he’s asking about what kinds of movies we’re making, what kinds of movies we’re setting out to write. And, if you have the ability to craft screenplays, is there a responsibility to try to use those tools in certain ways?

And that’s a good point.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think there’s something there for everybody. It doesn’t matter what kind of movies you write. I think he’s…

I just love the fact that he was examining himself and his own method and his own purposes and intentions.

**John:** Because he’s never done that before.

**Craig:** Fair enough.

I probably could afford to do it more than I have. But I think that there is a great lesson in there, you should need to do this and I will always… I cite this advice all the time to new screenwriters who have a billion questions that I find to be irrelevant or stupid. Brian Koppelman, screenwriter, has a very simple, two-word bit of advice that I think is absolutely fantastic. “Calculate less.”

**John:** Oh yes.

**Craig:** Simple as that. Stop asking about font sizes and margins and act breaks and how many words.

Oh, gosh, I get these questions. “How many words should be in a log line?” As many as required? I don’t know. Calculate less.

**John:** Make movies that need to be made. I don’t know. It would be interesting to have someone like Charlie Kaufman on answering some of the questions that come into the podcast because I feel like his answers would be vastly different. Or it would be very much about him.

**Craig:** I have no idea. I’ve never met him, but he seems… He’s obviously a very smart and talented guy.

**John:** Yeah. Indeed. Great. Thank you so much and thank you for our first podcast of the new year.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Looking forward to a year where we

Grow our audience to a true, world class army size.

**John:** I love it. All right. Thanks.

**Craig:** You got it. Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/what-do-producers-do).

**John August:** Hello, my name is John August.

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

**John:** You’re listening to Episode 17 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Craig, how are you doing today?

**Craig:** Pretty good. I’m getting ready for the holidays.

**John:** Ah, very nice. Are you staying in town this year? Are you traveling, getting on planes?

**Craig:** I am staying in town. Man, it feels good. This time last year I was in Bangkok which is the least Christmassy place in the world.

**John:** Yeah. Did they have a concept of Christmas there?

**Craig:** Yeah…

**John:** Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

**Craig:** I’m sorry. Say that again.

**John:** [Singsong] Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?

**Craig:** [laughs] They’re aware. They know its Christmas time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t think they care.

**John:** Did you see inappropriately dressed Santas on the back of scooters or motorcycles?

**Craig:** No. It’s not a particularly Christian culture. It’s very traditional — very, I guess, Buddhist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re just not into Christmas. It’s not their thing. It’s also super hot. Also, it wasn’t like I was doing Christmas shopping or anything. I was standing in hot streets with scooters going by.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is nice. I’m actually really appreciating the whole pre-Christmas pageantry.

**John:** Yeah. We’re actually having unseasonably cold weather in Los Angeles right now. It doesn’t usually feel this cold. It was nearing frost temperatures here.

**Craig:** Yeah. Also, we had this crazy windstorm and Pasadena and La Canada, where I live, got the worst of it. Our power was out for three days. You know, it was kind of fun for a day. By the third day, man, just darkness is a bummer. [laughs] You really start to miss power.

**John:** Yeah. You start to revert to like earlier primal forms.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Never good. Our big damage around here was that our DirecTV satellite dish got knocked askew which is… Yes, okay, first world problems.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what I’ll do is I’ll send you a picture of what the street near our office looked like and you can put it up with this podcast. It was crazy. I mean, huge trees just lifted out of the ground and thrown down. I think they had clocked it at 97 miles an hour which, I looked it up, qualifies as hurricane gusts.

**John:** Well, good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. We shouldn’t say “good,” but it’s exciting when changes happen and when things that you don’t expect to have happen do happen. The earthquake is actually a really good memory of mine, of Los Angeles.

**Craig:** You’re so weird.

**John:** I’m so weird. I kind of like when things fall apart a little bit.

**Craig:** Yeah. What are you, Sauermon, you like watching trees die?

**John:** [laughs] I don’t want anyone to be hurt. I don’t want things to necessarily be broken. But I like the idea that things are not permanent or that the way stuff is put together right at this moment isn’t necessarily the only way it can fit together.

**Craig:** Well, life rewards people like you because, eventually, it strikes you down. [laughs] I think it’s the second law of thermodynamics.

**John:** Yeah. Everything changes. Everything goes towards chaos.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And heat…

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Heat death of the universe.

**Craig:** Heat death. We’re on our way.

**John:** Yep.

Speaking of heat death and the universe, that’s not a segue at all actually, today I thought we would talk about producers.

**Craig:** Heat death and producers.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s see, how can we tie in heat death and producers? Both thrive on chaos.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, they’re supposed to fight entropy, but many times they do contribute to it too.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a better way of thinking about it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Today, let’s talk about what producers are. Craig, what is a producer?

**Craig:** Well, you ask a different producer you’ll get a different answer. And it’s different for television, it’s different for movies. Do you want to talk about movies first?

**John:** Yeah. I just want to talk about the general idea of what a producer is supposed to do though. I think we have an image in our head of sort of this rich fat cat who’s smoking a cigar, who’s giving orders and bossing people around. Or like the Robert Evans idea too. Thinking, “Well, that’s what a producer is.”

They used to be a little bit more like that. There’s a reason why some stereotypes are true. There used to be that “force of nature” producer who would storm in and do cocaine off of the table and make five movies before lunch.

**Craig:** Yes, off of the table. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. I always find cocaine stories fascinating because I have just almost no drug experience whatsoever. I remember going to visit a friend of mine who had become a producer and exec at one of the big studios. I’m making this as generic as possible so that no one will actually identify who I’m talking about.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** He was so excited because he had gotten this new office. It had this built-in sort of cubby cabinet thing with the desk that folded down and there’s a mirror on the desk surface of it, which seems really weird. In the corners you could see the cocaine.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** This was like a special desk that was built to hold cocaine.

**Craig:** A cocaine desk.

**John:** Yeah. Which is such an ’80s thing. We got into the industry just a little too late.

**Craig:** Wow. I’ll confess something and it’s not a good confession. It’s like the opposite of an interesting confession.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’m not a prude or anything. Not only have I never done cocaine, I’ve never seen it.

**John:** I don’t think I’ve ever seen it consumed in my presence.

Which is weird. It’s not what you would think of like Hollywood should be.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You think Hollywood should be like, “Oh, rampant drug use.”

**Craig:** There should be coke everywhere.

**John:** I think there is drug use in Hollywood but it’s really not visible.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like cocaine… Cokeheads are really private, I guess, or shy. [laughs]

**John:** I think it’s also the people who were doing cocaine are probably doing pharmaceuticals now. They’re doing other stuff.

**Craig:** Oh, like Oxycontin or whatever.

**John:** Yeah, or like less visible.

**Craig:** You know, I’m guessing cocaine is still around.

**John:** Yeah. I’m sure it’s still around.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just… Yeah. Well, most of the producers I know probably aren’t coked up. Some of them, frankly, could do with a little bit of cocaine every now and again. [laughs]

**John:** Some of them could use a good, firm kick in the butt.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In general, a producer’s job — and we’ll just talk like a theoretical of what a producer is supposed to be doing, — is the person who is responsible for a movie — let’s talk features for right now — is responsible for a movie from inception all the way through distribution, which is now, I would say, all the way through iTunes and down the road. They are the person who is most and primarily responsible for the movie. That’s the reason why they get the Academy Award. They are the person who… It’s their movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They are the person behind it all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Rarely does that actually hold true now. There are exceptions. Laura Ziskin, I think, was largely that kind of producer. She was my very first studio development teacher when I went through my producing program, called Peter Stark, at USC. She was that kind of producer. There were movies where she had the idea, she found the writer, she got the writer to do 15 drafts, she got the studio to green light the movie, she was there for every frame they shot, and she oversaw editing. She oversaw the whole thing. That’s what producers used to do.

Now, if you look at the opening titles of a movie, there will be 14 people’s names listed as some kind of producer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You really can’t know what each of those people did. We can talk through, in general, what those responsibilities are supposed to be, but I really want to also talk about the realities of what it’s like to be a writer working on movies and dealing with producers.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you think about, sort of, when you and I started in the business, and let’s take Disney for example. It had multiple divisions. It was making a lot of movies. Let’s say it makes 50 movies in a year. There’s only so many executives you have and, ultimately, the job of the studio is to decide whether or not they should make the movie and spend the money on the movie and then market the movie and release the movie. But they can’t be there on the set. They can’t be there in every casting session. It would be impossible.

The producer becomes kind of an interesting independent agent of the studio. They are, ideally, in the best possible world, I’ll describe the best kind of producer, somebody who helps protect and nurture the creative value of the movie while, at the same time, shepherding the business of the production to make sure it’s done in a way that is responsible and satisfying to the financier, typically a studio.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That doesn’t happen. [laughs] Sometimes that just doesn’t happen. Sometimes you get one and not the other. Usually it’s the business one and not the creative one.

**John:** What’s interesting is, if you were just looking at Video Village, Video Village being at the monitors in which people are sitting in chairs staring at the little screen while the cameras are rolling. If you were to look at the people sitting in those chairs it’s hard to tell, necessarily, who are the producers and who are people who work for the studio because they seem to be doing the same kind of job. To a large degree, their functions do overlap.

We had a guy who worked at Warner Brothers come in once to talk to our class. He said like, “Oh, my friends, at Christmas, will ask me, ‘Hey, I saw that movie you said you were working on but why didn’t I see your name on the movie?'” He’s like, “My name is that shield that plays at the front. The big Warner Brothers logo, that’s my name.”

The studio executive, his function is really the studio’s function so he doesn’t have his own separate title card on the movie. He is the logo of the company. The exception being, weirdly, like New Line Cinema which all those people got producer credits even though they were really a studio.

**Craig:** Yeah. It gets very confusing in that regard. You’re right. It is interesting, sometimes a very strong studio executive will have more to do with the inception and shepherding of a film than the producer. It’s a very difficult thing. The reason it’s so confusing about what producers do is there is no barrier to entry, anybody can get a blank producer credit. For instance, associate producer really means a sort of producer-in-training who’s working with the real producer, typically.

Co-Producer could be anybody. A lot of times these things are handed out as little cookies for people to feel good about themselves. Sometimes those people are actually doing more work than the person who is the producer.

Then there is executive producer, which sounds more important than producer but actually isn’t.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s hop through the ranks from the top to the bottom just so people get a sense of what it means in film. After we talk through in film we’ll talk it through in TV because it’s confusing because everything is reversed.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, in film the most important producer, the person who would actually receive the Academy Award, is the producer. It just says “Producer.”

**Craig:** Right. “Produced by…”

**John:** “Producer” or “Produced by…” there’s no other qualifier in front of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If there are several people with the title “Producer” on a film, the Academy has rules about who gets the award. There’s a Producers Guild which helps step in to specify who gets what kind of award for things. But producers should be the most important, significant person making the film.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Below Producer is Executive Producer. Executive Producer used to mean a person who brought money to a project. It still, often, does mean that. It’s a lesser function. It’s probably not a person who is involved day to day although, sometimes, that’s a credit that a Line Producer might be given or someone else who’s incredibly involved day to day but is not the overall overseer of everything about the movie.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Co-Producer, Associate Producer, are sometimes just handout producer credits. I got a Co-Producer credit on Go and I really did a lot of producing on Go, but that was just a stipulation in my contract.

**Craig:** Right. Or for instance, if there’s a big Producer, they may have somebody working for them that does an enormous amount of work on their behalf and that person might get a Co-Producer or Executive Producer credit.

**John:** Yep. Co-Producers, a lot of times you’ll see the person who’s responsible for the budgeting, the Line Producer being given that.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** I should specify: There’s two other titles that you won’t often see in credit blocks but are actual functions and that’s a Line Producer. The Line Producer is, I think of it, almost like the manager of a company. It’s the person who’s physically responsible for doing the budget, for making sure the trucks are showing up at the right place at the right time, all the sort of number responsibilities and production responsibilities.

**Craig:** Yeah. In the credits they’re called the Unit Production Manager. The Unit Production Manager is, essentially, the business master of the movie. It’s a very interesting position, actually, because the UPM typically is somebody that works more closely with the studio than with the productions. Studios are very particular about which UPMs they use because, ultimately, that’s the person they come to, to say, “You’re spending too much. These days are going on too long. Help us out here. Keep control over this thing.”

**John:** Yeah. So, the UPM is working with the producers on a general sense, working with the director on a general sense, in terms of some priorities. Or in terms of like how we’re spending our money, really overseeing the accountants and basically everyone who is staying back in those offices who are making sure that all the paperwork is actually done to pay for this thing and to make sure that insurance stuff is handled. All that sort of back office stuff is going to fall under the UPMs job. That person is working as much for the studio as it is for the production.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I just realized I have an Executive Producer credit on Prince of Persia, which is very classically the kind of credit I would be given in that situation. It’s a project that Jordan Mechner came to me with. He had the rights to Prince of Persia. We figured out the story, we put together a pitch, and we went around and pitched it to every place. I wasn’t going to write the movie but I was going to oversee the writing of the movie.

I developed Prince of Persia. Like — there wouldn’t be a movie if I hadn’t stepped in to do it, so Executive Producer is my credit for it. But I’m not the Producer. I didn’t oversee every frame of film shot or anything like that. I was a crucial function during one of the stages of production but I didn’t oversee the whole thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s one of the reasons the Producers Guild exists. It’s not really a guild, it’s not a union, because they don’t… they’re not employees like a union is. But it’s basically, kind of a self-imposed group that wants to try and make some meaning out of these credits.

Because a lot of times, what happens is people get kissed into these things. I was involved in this, I found the initial script, but then it fell apart here. I took it over here, nobody wants to work with this guy. Take an executive producer credit and get the hell out of here.

The producers, rightly, are saying, “Listen, you’re watering down these credits. Executive producer, for some people, means an enormous amount of work, and for others, it literally means nothing. At all.”

**John:** Nothing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes it means we let you take the rights from us, because we didn’t want to make the movie. It’s that crazy. And obviously, the Writers Guild spent a lot of time and effort and strikes and so forth, to make sure that we can protect what our credits mean. Producers don’t have that.

**John:** No. And it’s going to be very hard for them to ever organize to the degree that it’s going to be meaningful for them to try to step in and say that, because they have to convince the studios to agree to these credits, and that’s a challenge.

**Craig:** It is a challenge, because essentially, it’s an open market. And the studios love giving credits like that away instead of money, because it doesn’t cost anything. They don’t care.

That’s why you see these, sometimes, especially in independent films. You’ll see a thousand producers, because everybody’s been handed a credit in lieu of money. It’s not that great of a deal.

**John:** Yeah. Weirdly, I would say, coming from Broadway, where I’ve just been at these producer and investor things, that is very true in Broadway. Like, all those names you see above the title of a show on Broadway, those were people who were, like, investing money. They would be like the executive producers who are coming in with money on a feature, but they all get their names on there.

And I really don’t want our movies to get to that point. I hope it doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** Me too.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s quickly talk through the ranks in TV, because it’s different and really confusing. We’ll try to talk through it. I’ll also link to it. I found I had an old blog post from 2004, and it’s actually accurate. So, I’ll talk you through it now, but you may also want to look at the show notes.

The highest rank in TV, executive producer. Now, the executive producer, whoever is running the show, the show runner, is usually an executive producer — not 100 percent of the time, but usually that person is the executive producer.

There can be multiple executive producers. You could have three or four people listed as executive producer. But that’s the highest rank.

Below executive producer, co-EP, which is confusing, because, you’d think that co-EP means the same thing as executive producer. It doesn’t. It means co-EP, it’s just its own title.

Below that, supervising producer. Below that, producer. Below that, co-producer. Below that, story editor, below that, staff writer.

Now, in that TV ranking that I gave you right there, that’s sort of the writers’ version of it, because most of the producers you think about for TV are actual writers. They’re doing the writing on the show and they’re doing the creative supervision of the show.

There’ll be other people who get producer credits on a TV show who are doing those physical production functions. Kelly Manners is a famous line producer type person for TV who did Angel, who’s done a lot of the sci-fi action shows.

Those people have titles, too, and those could be associate producer, or an executive producer. They could have other titles like that, but because TV tends to be so writer-driven, most of what I’m talking about in TV is really the ranks that you ascend through as you become a more and more powerful writer.

**Craig:** And what are pods? Tell us about that.

**John:** PODs are producer overall deals. A POD deal is with, generally, a non-writing producer who oversees a show on behalf of a studio, usually a studio or a network. Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen had a POD at Warner Brothers. They would come in and develop ideas with writers and set them up at Warner€™s and oversee the show as producers who are non-writing producers.

Generally, if you are, and I should specify… I have not been doing this TV writing for a few years now, so some stuff changes. Some stuff’s out of date. I rely on my TV writing brethren to correct me on stuff.

But if you are a writer who has a TV deal, your agents will often send you in to meet with a producer, one of those producers who has a POD deal, before sending you into the studio, the network, because they’re going to want to stick somebody on that show anyway. It’s better that you get matched up with somebody you agree with creatively.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Independent of this hierarchy on TV writers is also consulting producers. Josh Friedman, for example, is a consulting producer right now this season on Finder. That is generally a high level writer who is not on any specific show at the given time.

They don’t have their own series on this season, so they’re assigned to a show. They go on and they help out that show, they write episodes, they help write stories. They do a lot of great work on a show, but it’s not their show. It’s a way to keep those people in the fold and keep those people writing and keep better TV being made by applying them to a show that’s already going to be on the air.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. Regardless of the actual titles you get, I find that there’s three basic roles that producers play. You may have amendments to this. But I find, no matter what the nature of the production is, somebody in the production has to play these roles. Sometimes you get them found in one person, sometimes they’re split up between three people.

But there’s the peacekeeper/diplomat. There’s one producer whose job is to make everybody feel better. That is the person who’s always going to be on the phone talking to the studio or the network, talking to the agents, talking to the actors, getting everything to feel good.

When the actors have a problem, especially if the actors have a problem with the director, there’s got to be one producer that the actor can go to to discuss the problem. That’s a crucial role.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, for sure, producers, good producers are very parental. Movies are made by emotional artists. I don’t care what the movie is. I don’t care if it’s Ernest Goes to Camp. Everybody’s an emotional artist.

In order to be creative, you know, when people always say, “Oh, look at the imagination of a child. When did we lose that imagination?” Well, people who write and make and act and direct, theoretically, didn’t lose their childlike imagination or any of a number of hosts of childlike things that go along with that.

Sometimes, you just need a mommy or a daddy to help everybody play better, feel better about themselves, get over whatever drama or nonsense is going on at the time.

**John:** Yeah. Classically, this producer’s responsibility is to get the actor to actually come out of his or her trailer.

**Craig:** Yeah, sometimes, a producer has to undo a hissy fit. But, similarly, I think producers are the ones that sit down with directors and say, “Here’s the thing. The studio does not like the dailies, and we have to really think long and hard about what we’re doing here.”

The producer’s the one that sits down with the writer and says, “We just got notes back from the huge A-list actor, they don’t want to say these lines. So, we have to figure out how to get the dramatic intent across a different way.” The producer is the person in the middle of those problems.

**John:** Yeah. The second role that a producer often plays, or somebody on the production has to play, is the general, people that just sticks to the physical production, the, “This is how much it’s going to cost us to do this, this is today’s work, this is how much time we have left today.”

Your 1st AD is going to be doing a lot of that, getting the day’s work done. But in terms of getting the whole show done, or figuring out, “Okay, our script is taking place in these five countries, this is how we’re going to fake this country for that country, this is how we’re going to make our schedule work.”

It’s not just the AD’s job, it’s not just the line person’s job, it’s a semi-creative job and an ability to see how you’re actually going to get the movie made. Somebody on the production does that.

Some of the movie’s I’ve worked on, Bruce Cohen serves that function. I think it’s because he, in a previous life, was an AD, so he has a very good sense of, “Okay, this is how we’re going to get it done. These are the problems that are coming up. I’m going to deal with this crazy insurance situation and we’ll get the stuff handled.”

**Craig:** Yeah, and I would say, conversely, very good producers also understand that the essence of what we do is not to make a budget or make a schedule, but to make a movie. Sometimes, you’ve just got to break the rules and spend a little extra or go above or risk getting slapped on the wrist to get better work.

Somebody said to me the other day, and I thought it was very astute, there are two kinds of producers. There are anxiety buffers, and there are anxiety conductors. Good anxiety buffering producers will sort of see the pressure squeezing down on the director, usually, to get better work out of less time and money, and somehow, protect them from it and help the movie.

Because, in the end, the producer is that one person who needs to be able to play both sides of the field, business and creative. Whereas, the director, frankly, should be entirely concerned with creative and hey, if you want to give me 10 extra days and another 30 million bucks, yeah, of course.

Then there are the anxiety conductors, who get squeezed by the studio, amplify it, and then squeeze everybody else around them. That does not do anybody any good.

**John:** Yeah. I would say, related to the anxiety people are sort of dual functions I’ll call the bulldozer and the bodyguard. Sometimes you’re doing one or you’re doing the other one.

Dick Zanuck, to me, is classically a bodyguard. Dick Zanuck is a producer with tremendous credits who I’ve worked with on many movies. But I feel like a lot of his job is to serve as a bodyguard.

To say, like, anything that’s coming in Tim Burton’s direction, he will throw himself in front of and catch the bullet, so that Tim can focus on the work he needs to do and that Dick will take the hit and will figure out, like, what to do with this studio note, or just to keep people away from Tim. That’s a crucial function.

Likewise, sometimes you need a bulldozer. The bulldozer’s that person who has no shame and has no off switch. You can say, “Hey look, Paul, Paul. You see this ball in my hand? I need you to get this ball.” You throw the ball as hard as you can and he will knock down every building in the way to get it.

You need that person who’s delighted to break rules and to piss people off, because that’s, a lot of times, what you need. It’s the person who will risk getting the whole production stopped by the police, or will make those really awkward phone calls, because he doesn’t have filtering mechanism to stop him from doing that.

In the era of drugs, the bulldozer function was probably a lot easier. Anyone can be a bulldozer with the right narcotics.

**Craig:** I mean, they were all slamming into each other. You know, Hollywood is full of the legends of angry yelling producers who are screaming on the phone and throwing ashtrays at assistant’s heads and many of those stories are true.

It is an enormously difficult thing to make a movie. Enormously difficult. It is a business that must be built from scratch, ground up, tuned up to perfection, create this thing that absolutely works, and then be dismantled.

It has to be done on the fly, while you’re going, while temperamental people all around you are asking for something that’s intangible, namely, quality, and also, disagreeing on what that quality is. Everybody knows what it means to create a thousand widgets a day. It’s a number. We don’t have that.

It’s an enormously difficult task for anybody. Yeah, naturally, the people that often succeed are very loud and very dramatic and obstinate, but there are also producers who are known for quietly, magically, getting their way.

Frankly, depending on what the movie, depending on the director, different producers are better in different situations. As writers, typically, we don’t get to pick. And that’s where we can sometimes end up in trouble.

**John:** Indeed. The other function which I’d never really considered, breaking off here but I think it’s absolutely a good fourth role, is that sort of creative chaperone That’s the function that I think Judd Apatow ends up playing on some of the movies he doesn’t direct, which is that he is the guy that says, like, “Oh, let’s try this, let’s try this, let’s try this.”

It’s the person who reminds you, “Oh, this is what the movie’s supposed to feel like.” That’s the person who is helping out while you’re shooting. It’s the person who is taking a big role in editorial to get to the story, working the way it should, hopefully, early on in the process, was really working with you on the script to get stuff to feel the right way.

That was the function I played at the start in Prince of Persia, it’s the function I played in Go. Now, obviously, I was there during all the shooting, but also, in the editing room, it’s finessing stuff to make it feel like the right thing and reminding people what movie it is you’re trying to make.

**Craig:** Yeah, I wrote a draft for an animated film production now called Turkeys, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’m serving in that producorial role to help keep things going. We have another writer who’s working. The director and I read his work and we take notes and suggest and all the rest of it.

Interestingly, for most writers, that is the bulk of our experience with producers. Producers, even if you’re selling your own original work, typically, when you go to each studio, you have a producer, quote unquote, “bring it in.” You’re picking a producer to already assign to this project,

If it gets bought, that person will help you develop the material. If it’s an assignment, there’s always a producer already attached. That producer will be the one that’s primarily working with you to develop the draft.

**John:** Yeah. Now something listeners may not be aware of is that sometimes a studio will develop a movie with producers who were involved with the project originally, but the studio does not feel that they can actually deliver the movie. The producer will go out and put another producer on a film. That happens because the studio has a track record working with a certain producer and believes that he or she can actually develop something.

Sometimes you’ll hear something like, “Oh, he got put on a movie.” That’s because this is a person they had a relationship with, and they really felt more comfortable making the movie knowing that this person was going to be on the film for them. That person is truly a producer. It’s not a studio executive, but it’s somebody who got brought in to help on something.

Dan Jinks and Bruce Cohen were brought in on Milk, which was a movie that the studio wanted to make but they didn’t have people they felt could deliver the movie for Gus Van Sant. They came in to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, and this is where as a director I always felt like the best situation would be to have the bodyguard kind of producer because if you get the studio’s producer, you just have to be aware of where they land in the big game of things. This is the tricky part. Who do you work for? In the end, we all work for the people that sign our checks. But the writer and the director also work for this other thing called the movie, which we hope is good.

You want very much to make sure that your producer is working for the movie. Unfortunately, there are times when that’s not the case. I’ve been pretty lucky. I’m working with producers right now that I think are terrific and absolutely are in line with supporting the movie. When I work with Todd, he’s the producer along with Dan Goldberg. The filmmaker is the producer, and this is no problem at all.

**John:** A while back I had an interesting run-in. I was visiting a set, and I was talking with one of the producers in Video Village. I asked him, “Oh, hey, is Universal taking this movie all by themselves or are they splitting it with somebody else?” because this being a pretty expensive movie. He’s like, “Oh, I don’t know.” He asked somebody else. I was like, “You are a producer on this movie, are you not?” He had no idea.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not cool. [laughs]

**John:** No, I feel like if you’re going to get a producer credit, you should understand who’s releasing your movie, like those basic fundamental business things. I don’t care what role you play on the movie. If you have a producer title, you should know that.

**Craig:** Well, the job has changed. Here’s the basic evolution of the feature film producer: It used to be that they ruled the world. I mean every studio had multiple producer deals. These producers were very well compensated. Studios made a ton of movies, and they desperately relied on these producers to provide them with that material — to find it, grow it, and provide it to them. That’s changed.

Studios have become far more adversarial with these producers because they feel like a lot of their deals are far too rich for what they get. There are fewer producers because they make fewer movies. The recent strike, for instance, was a chance for them to force majeure out. A ton of their producing deals they just didn’t feel were worth their time or their money.

They tend to look at producers more and more like employees of the studios opposed to independent operators. They tend to look at producers more and more as agents of budget squeezing and schedule enforcement as opposed to creative partners with the filmmakers. Some studios just don’t seem to like producers at all. They think they’re the producers.

All of this adds up. Unfortunately, for writers it adds up to a very unstable environment. A lot of times you can’t quite tell who it is you’re working for. You can’t quite tell who’s in charge. Everybody’s competing internally. It becomes particularly difficult when the producer and the studio are not working together creatively because you just start getting pulled in two different directions.

For me, personally since I began, I’ve always had a simple rule. I don’t mind notes, but I like one set of notes. I don’t want producer notes, then studio notes, then producer notes, then studio notes. It’s a way to basically ruin your movie in three months.

**John:** Yeah. Really the problem comes even before it gets to the notes stage because if you’re going in for a job… Let’s say a producer bought a book at a studio. That producer is meeting with you to talk about, “Oh, how are you going to adapt this book?” You end up having meetings with this producer to say, “Okay, this is what we’re going to focus on, and we’re doing this.”

You end up spending a lot of time working with that producer to figure out how you’re going to do it. Hopefully, you’re the only writer who is going in to talk on that thing, but maybe there’s other writers, too. Then you’re going in to talk to the studio to pitch your take on this project. The studio may say yes or may say no. Or the studio may have completely different instincts than the producer did.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** Whose instincts are you supposed to follow? The producer ultimately just wants to get the movie made, so the producer is really looking for, “Well, what does the studio want? I’m going to somehow magically read their minds, or I’ll just call them on the phone and try to get them to say what they want.”

It’s just functioning as an extra step before you’re getting in to talk to the people who are actually going to make the decisions. The producer’s not making any decisions at all. The producer’s just basically saying, “I will bring in people, and hopefully you will like somebody.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s very important to understand the economics of producing movies to understand the decisions that are made. Writers are paid for the work that they do. It doesn’t matter if the movie gets made or not, to the great chagrin of the producers. “You want me to write a script? Pay me. I’m paid. I’ll write a script.” You decide if you’re going to make it or not or if you want me to do another draft or want another writer to do a draft.

Producers are paid almost nothing until the movie gets made. This is why producing is becoming incredibly difficult. They just don’t make that many movies anymore. The opportunity to get paid has shrunk down dramatically. The stress level therefore for producers, when they’re developing material, has skyrocketed. They are desperate to get these movies made so that they can support themselves and their families. I get that.

In that desperation bad producers tend to make bad decisions. Good producers frankly tend to make good decisions because they understand that the way to get a movie made is to stop caring about getting the movie made and start caring about making a good movie. [laughs] Those are two different things.

But if you have one of those producers that is just hell-bent on getting it through the system, just put it out there, just dump it out there so I can get paid, you end up in a bad place because sooner or later everybody starts to realize that this particular space shuttle is losing heat tiles. This thing was glued together. It wasn’t [laughs] really built right. Then you perish in a ball of fire.

**John:** Yeah. Along with desperate to get this one particular movie made and make whatever compromises have to be made to get this one movie made, the producer, seeing that there are fewer movies getting made, is incentivized to step up to the plate as many times as possible. The producer has many more irons in the fire and is trying to strike them all just to make one of them actually work.

The amount of time that he or she is able to spend on one given movie is lessened. The amount of time and energy that person has to devote to getting that next step of the movie happening can be diminished as well. My frustrations with movies that haven’t gotten made or have gotten made poorly, sometimes I can pin it on the studio. But a lot of times I really can pin it back on producers not doing their job. I feel like they need to be doing their job.

Producers theoretically should have the ability to take a project out of a studio, too. If a producer came into a studio with the rights to something, to a book or to a remake of something, the studio is optioning those rights for a time. The producer may own some things. The studio may own some things. But that project should be able to travel outside of that studio if it becomes clear that this studio is not going to make this movie.

Unfortunately, producers have fifteen deals on other projects with that studio. They’re loathe to anger the studio by trying to execute turnaround, which they should have — turnaround being the process by which they can reacquire something — to take that project and travel with it to someplace that may actually make that movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s really difficult for them. I mean look. Put yourself in a producer’s shoes. Let’s say you’ve worked on developing a script for three years. The writer’s been paid. You haven’t. But finally the studio is willing to make the movie. It’s just that they won’t make it unless you do A, B, and C to the movie, and A, B, and C are terrible ideas. What do you do?

You just pack it up? You go home? Or do you compromise? Do you sell out? Do you try and broker some sort of better idea? It becomes a very difficult thing for producers and becomes a difficult thing for everybody involved.

Frankly, they don’t even have the security anymore that they used to have of just what they call the housekeeping deal. Many of them don’t even get their offices and assistants paid for. It is a high-wire act to be a producer. I’m not one of those writers that vilifies producers. Good producers are fantastic — fantastic, and absolutely necessary. The way the business is structured now, I just don’t know why anybody would want to become a producer.

**John:** I don’t either. I see feature writers who segue into producing. I don’t get it because the only movie I was a producer on that I didn’t write was Prince of Persia. I found the process maddening because here’s what it is: It’s like I’m sitting with Jordan, and we’re working through drafts, it was like, “Okay, here are the controls of the airplane. Now you’re not allowed to touch the controls, but you need to tell Jordan how to fly the plane.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** It’s like, “Oh, just give me the controls. Let me fly the plane.” Jordan was awesome. I love Jordan. I can’t even imagine what that process would be working with a writer who you didn’t respect and like going into it. It ends up being a tremendous amount of time. You end up using the same parts of your brain that you would use to do real writing. It’s just that you’re not allowed to actually touch the paper.

**Craig:** I totally agree. Writers fall into this trap all the time. Every single one of them always comes back and says, “This was a huge mistake.” We like the idea of being producers because producers have typically represented power to us. We think we’ll be a producer now. We’re that guy. We have the shingle and the sign and the people working for us in the hallway at a studio and look at us and hooray.

Then you realize this is not great. You’re exactly right. I got into the business to write screenplays, not to tell other people how to write their screenplays. In fact, I would argue that writers are terrible producers because we’re writing it in our heads. We don’t have what a good producer has. They can’t write. If they could write, they probably would write.

What they can do is be a really good reader and a really good shoulder to cry on and support us and help us get where we need to go. They’re not sitting there trying to get us to write the script in their head because that’s what I do. [laughs] I’m talking to other writers.

Producing for writers to me, it’s just my opinion, is a trap. I don’t think it’s even helping the writers. I think the best thing would be for studios to be more encouraging of good producers. But unfortunately it seems like the trend is going the other way.

**John:** Yup. Alas.

**Craig:** Alas.

**John:** Alas. Well, Craig, thank you for this discussion of producers.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** I look forward to calling all my producers awkwardly after this podcast runs so they think like, “Oh, you weren’t talking about me.” I’m like, “No, no, no. That’s…”

**Craig:** [laughs] “No, no, no. You’re one of the good ones.”

**John:** “You’re one of the good ones, yeah.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** If I didn’t single you out by name, I lumped you with the good ones.

**Craig:** [laughs] I’ve actually been pretty lucky. I haven’t worked for…

**John:** I’ve worked for some terrible producers.

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** I have enough credits and stuff that’s not made that I can just generically say that I’ve worked for some just terrible producers. Terrible producers. Some who were far too meticulous and, “Turn a page. Fifteen notes on this page. Turn a page.” “Oh, my God. Just make the movie.” Others who you can’t get them to lift up the phone and call somebody.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ve been lucky, I have to say. Maybe it’s just that I steer clear when I smell trouble but…

**John:** But you’ve worked for some amazing executives.

**Craig:** Aha, well. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe that makes up the whole difference for it.

**Craig:** Yes, it does.

**John:** It does. All right. Thank you, Craig. Talk to you soon.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** All right. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/thirteen-questions-about-one-thing).

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

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

**John:** And you are listening to Scriptnotes episode 16, yet another podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

I should correct or amend, a friend of mine was listening to the podcast. He says, “I’m not a screenwriter and I find the podcast interesting. So you need to stop saying that header thing.”

I felt that just because we might be interesting to screenwriters doesn’t mean it’s exclusively intended for screenwriters.

**Craig:** No!

**John:** You’re welcome to listen to this if you’re a nurse, for example.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, dresses are made for women but men can wear dresses.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s completely your choice.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** This is in the digital world. Listen to whatever you want to listen to. That’s really the goal.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why should we stop saying that it’s for screenwriters because you like it and you’re not one? Look at this. I’m doing everything I can to lose listeners.

**John:** Yeah, you really are.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m the worst.

**John:** Yeah. I should explain to you listeners that often Craig will sort of ramble at the start of these podcasts and we’ll have to snip thing out, because we’ll always end up talking about terrible things about tragedies that happened during the second World War to certain groups of people. It just never really plays well in the podcast. So I’m always flagging to Stuart, “Maybe you could lose that little part of what Craig said at the header here.”

[laughter]

**Craig:** I won’t do it today.

**John:** Good. A little bit of housekeeping before we get started. This is Episode 16 of Scriptnotes and I keep getting confused about what number we’re on because you and I did some episodes that got thrown out because they were terrible.

On iTunes, only the last 10 episodes are listed. So someone who is coming to the show for the first time, they think, “Oh, they have 10 episodes recorded.” No. In fact we have more episodes recorded and you can find them all at johnaugust.com/podcasts to see everything that we’ve done and listen to everything that we’ve done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Dig deep into the archives.

**John:** Indeed. And if you’re digging deep into the archives, you’ll also see transcripts for all of our previous episodes. And not every podcast is going to give you a complete transcript of everything that’s said.

**Craig:** But ours does.

**John:** We do. Craig, you meticulously check the transcript to make sure it’s exactly what you said, correct?

**Craig:** I pour through it. Well, first of all, I do the transcripts myself. John pays me $33. I do the transcripts. It takes me about six hours.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then I recheck it and then we put it up. I try and put back in the stuff about the Holocaust that he takes out.

[laughter]

Try and edit that out, Stuart.

**John:** Ugh. And here’s the best part about our conversation right now is a day from now somebody, I presume in India, is going to be transcribing this conversation about the podcast being transcribed.

**Craig:** I mean no offense.

**John:** No. But I think it’s kind of great. I think it’s just wonderful that there’s a cycle of digital creation in the world that hopefully is making this profitable for someone to transcribe.

**Craig:** Somebody somewhere should be making money off of this because I’m not.

**John:** No, I’m not either.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** A podcast — people are interested in like, “Oh, I want to do my own podcast.” A podcast is not expensive in any real way. I mean, Craig and I had to buy our microphones and that was kind of it in terms of actual hard costs.

**Craig:** Yeah. Although you made me buy this $16,000 microphone. I don’t know why. John insisted that we both get this very rare Neumann microphone that was used initially at the old RCA. I think Toscanini used it for recordings.

**John:** Yeah. If you want a visual for it, it has the springs all over it and it would be very good if you’re a lone singer at a USO Show and you’re on a spotlight. This is the kind of thing you might do. Or if you were George Clooney and you were making Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s the kind of microphone that the woman would sing into in Good Night, and Good Luck.

**Craig:** Yeah. We always go vintage. We don’t like…

**John:** The other thing the microphone is fantastic for is recording all the bus noise outside Craig’s window.

**Craig:** Well, it was designed originally for bus noise.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Interesting fact.

**John:** It does that really well.

**Craig:** By Germans.

**John:** By Germans.

**Craig:** Right before that thing they didn’t do.

[laughter]

You should have never said anything.

**John:** Yeah. Craig, I think you wanted to bring up our first sponsor. Our podcast has its very first sponsor this week.

**Craig:** Yes, yes!

**John:** I’m so excited to be able to introduce this, a sponsor who will pay us absolutely no money.

**Craig:** That’s right. He’s not really a sponsor because we have no costs, but our mutual friend, Derek Haas, a terrific screenwriter who works with Michael Brandt. They’ve written movies like 3:10 to Yuma and Wanted. Derek is a novelist as well. He is writing a series of books based on a hit-man character and his latest book, Dark Men, is out. You can get it on Amazon. Dark Men by Derek Haas, H-A-A-S.

If you’re saying, “That’s not right. It should be Derek Haas,” correct, but he insists on pronouncing his last name Haas. I have to say, look, you change your name because people didn’t pronounce it correctly. Haas seems like the worst choice of pronunciation for that name. You just imagine what a fourth grader does with that. But he insists.

**John:** Derek’s also from Texas so I think that explains a lot.

**Craig:** Oh, you think it’s easier in Texas to walk around with the name Haas?

**John:** Well, I think you also might just make bad choices if you’re from Texas.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Well, listen, Texas is a big place now. Our friends in Austin, for instance —

**John:** Our friends in Austin are fantastic. There are many awesome things in Texas. I just feel like if you’re going to be in Texas, maybe Haas really is a better way to pronounce your name because it might be the more natural way people are going to say your name anyway.

**Craig:** It matches the drawl.

**John:** It matches a little bit of a drawl.

**Craig:** Well, Derek, I hope you got your money’s worth. I hope you got your zero dollars worth from that bit of promotion, most of which was spent on how ridiculous your name is.

**John:** Yes. We will include a link to Derek’s book on Amazon in the show notes. Every episode of our podcast has a list of links. You can go to the actual post on the site johnaugust.com and find this post, and you’ll find a link to it. You’ll also find a link to Popcorn Fiction, which is the short story collection that Derek initially created and I think, introduced to maintain that editorial control over…

I wrote a short story for that. You wrote a short story for that.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Many screenwriters have written short stories for that. That’s another Derek Haas creation.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Derek, by the way, somehow is able to write all the movies for Brandt and Haas and write fiction on top of that. That seems kind of crazy and impossible.

**Craig:** Well, Derek has this thing, or maybe it’s that he doesn’t have a thing that I have, which is a neurosis. He is the least neurotic writer I have ever met in my life. He’s happy. He sits down to write and he writes. He doesn’t sit there and torture himself and then suddenly novels are done and scripts are done. It’s remarkable.

One of the happiest people I know. I don’t get it.

**John:** Yes. Some part of his brain got burned out early on. I think they reached up a wire through his nose and shocked the little part of self doubt. And God bless him. We have Derek Haas to —

**Craig:** By the way, if they offered that as an elective surgery, I would absolutely do it.

[laughter]

**John:** You would completely take it.

**Craig:** I feel like my brain is mostly that thing.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Self recrimination.

[crosstalk]

**John:** The self doubt and…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** Our last podcast was talking about residuals. We got some good questions and we already provided some good answers I think on residuals.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But we got really just an amazing essay, which I’m going to call now Thirteen Questions by Daniel Barkeley, which feels like a short film — or actually a long film — that you’d find at the Sundance Film Festival, but is in fact a series of questions by Daniel Barkeley, all of which were worth answering. So I thought we would just quickly power through Thirteen Questions by Daniel Barkeley.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** Do you need a breath? Do you need a drink of water?

**Craig:** No. Although I remember that some of them were about TV and I’m a little fuzzy on that so I’ll say “Pass” for the ones I don’t immediately know the answer to.

**John:** I looked up answers kind of for the TV ones.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But we’re going to do our best. That’s what we’re going to do.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** We can’t promise more than our best.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** “In television, how is the residual allocated between the Created By, Storied By, and Teleplay credits?”

**Craig:** Can I guess?

**John:** Guess.

**Craig:** I don’t think Created By gets any residuals. I think Created By gets some sort of pass of payment that’s negotiated individually by the writer and that all of the residuals are attached to the story and the Teleplay By.

**John:** That is correct.

**Craig:** Woo! Ding-ding-ding!

**John:** Ding-ding-ding! And the split is the same as features, which is the next thing we’re going to talk about. “So how is the percentage credit on a film or TV episode determined?”

**Craig:** 25 percent of residuals are attached to Story or Screen Story By and 75 percent of residuals are attached to Screenplay or Teleplay By.

**John:** What a perfectly concise answer, and actually correct.

**Craig:** Thank you. Woo!

**John:** Question three. “The Hangover Part II used characters created by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Did Mr. Lucas and Mr. Moore” — I love the Mr.’s in there.

**Craig:** Misters, yes.

**John:** “…receive residuals for Hangover II?”

**Craig:** They do not. The Characters Created By is part of a separated right. If you are the credited story writer, so if you receive Story credit or Written By credit for an original screenplay that is produced, on all sequels you will receive contractually a Characters Created By credit. That credit comes with no financial attachment whatsoever.

**John:** Yeah.

“Who pays residuals when Go airs on HBO?” — And Go has been airing on HBO quite a lot, so hooray. — “Is it HBO that pays the WGA or is it the producer of the film or the original distributor of the film?”

The answer is it is the distributor of the film. So there is one entity who is responsible for paying residuals, and that is the entity that has the, in this case, home video rights to the movie Go. So in this case it’s Sony or Columbia TriStar or some giant shell corporation.

**Craig:** Is that right?

**John:** You don’t think that’s right?

**Craig:** Well, I’m just wondering because I always thought that the people who paid were the people that employed the writer under a WGA contract. If, for instance, one company employs the writer and produces the movie, and then another company simply distributes it, I think the employer pays the residuals.

**John:** You could be correct. In the case of Columbia TriStar, they are on entity so therefore that could be a little bit murky. I’m also, though, going based on The Nines, which is a movie that we independently produced and then we sold to Sony Newmarket. Sony and Newmarket, which is really just Sony, is responsible for handling all the residuals on that movie. And me and the production company are not responsible for the residuals.

**Craig:** That’s right. Because what happens is, yeah. There’s something called an assumption agreement and it gets really complicated. But once they buy it and they purchase it, they have to do it under a WGA deal. For instance, on The Nines, they didn’t just buy the movie. They also bought the screenplay.

Once they buy the screenplay, then they are the owner and they are the WGA employer. I believe it’s the WGA employing entity. So either way, it’s never the “producer.” It’s always the company that’s actually making the WGA deal, I believe.

**John:** Yeah. And it’s not HBO. It’s not the people who buy the movie.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s the people who are showing the movie on a channel.

**Craig:** Certainly not, no.

**John:** It’s not, yeah.

**Craig:** It would be the people that hired the writer and produced the movie, usually one in the same.

**John:** Yeah.

Question number five. “I often heard it said that writers/producers ‘have a piece of the show.’ How is this distinct from residual payments?”

**Craig:** Well, a piece of the show is some sort of profit participation. You are a part owner of the show so when receipts come in that are above and beyond costs, and there are all sorts of ways of defining that, people who have a piece of the show get paid a portion of the money the show generates.

Residuals have nothing to do with whether the show is in profit or not. They are simply attached to exhibitions or repeat showings of something. Having a piece of the show is something that you negotiate individually. Residuals are something that are already negotiated as part and parcel of the union contract.

**John:** Yeah. If there’s nothing else to take from our repeated discussions on residuals, it’s that you get residuals no matter how successful the film is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Whether it makes $5 at the box office or $50 million at the box office, you will get residuals. You’re more likely to get more residuals from a very successful run in post-theatrical life if your movies are incredibly successful. But the movie does not have to be profitable for you to see residuals.

**Craig:** But there’s probably some examples where I can imagine a movie that did fairly well in theaters and maybe just wasn’t a big seller on DVD. The writers of that movie could make less in residuals than, say, Mike Judge on Office Space, which made nothing in theaters and was massive on DVD.

**John:** Yeah. You know what? That actually was question number six. You kind of got ahead of us.

**Craig:** Hm.

**John:** His question was, “In film, it seems that the example John gave means that it is not uncommon to earn more in residuals than upfront payments. Is this a common experience in television as well?” So we were talking about film. In TV would you make more in residuals than you made on the first writing of a show? I don’t know.

**Craig:** Not anymore. I think those days are gone. It used to be that that could be the case, back in the days of the healthy network rerun. I think those days are gone. I could be wrong. Maybe we’ll hear from somebody that writes in TV frequently.

In movies, that would be the exception to the rule, generally speaking. Well, no. I take it back. In movies, if it’s a big hit I could definitely see you making more in residuals than in payments.

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Would you please discuss the differences between foreign levies and residuals?”

**Craig:** Yeah. Okay. So a big topic, and I’ll boil it down very quickly. So we have work for hire here. We don’t own the copyright to our work. The rest of the world doesn’t have work for hire. Not only that, the rest of the world thinks work for hire is a big scam and that, in fact, an individual must be the copyright or the author in law and in fact of any particular audiovisual work.

So in other countries, one of the things they do to reward authors for reuse of things it they charge a tax or a levy on blank media — cassettes, rewritable CDs, even hard drives, things like that — anything that people might be using to make copies of television shows or movies. That tax money in part is then parceled back out to the authors.

The problem is who is the author of Go? Is it John August or is it Sony? In the United States it’s Sony. In France it’s John August. So when they started collecting this money and we started looking for it, the MPAA here in the United States said, “Uh, we’re the authors so we’ll take that money.”

And the writers and directors who considered themselves both in authorship position on these movies, and foreign countries consider writers and directors both authors of movies, said, “No, no, no. That’s our money.” And essentially there was this massive threat of a lawsuit that would have ended up in The Hague for God knows how long.

So a compromise was struck. Over time I think we have moved to a place now where writers and directors receive half of the share of this money and the companies receive the other half.

In time, I think given the trend, eventually writers and directors will receive all of it, I think over time. In the meantime what it means is that every few months you might get a check. It’s not a lot of money but it’s some money, hundreds, maybe a couple thousand for more popular fare. That is sort of an aggregate amount of money that’s been collected from all of these foreign tax collection agencies.

**John:** Yeah. And the math behind it is crazy.

**Craig:** Insane.

**John:** You couldn’t possibly imagine it, because it’s not really tracking the success of one of your movies. It’s the success of your movies and the tax collections across a whole range of European countries. It is nuts.

**Craig:** It is nuts, and it also gets stranger for television, because a lot of times what they’ll do is they’ll re-chop these things up. I mean, Germany may buy a package of five shows and chop them up and make one weird long show out of it. Well, who gets the…? It’s crazy.

The bookkeeping is crazy. And frankly, the Writers Guild doesn’t do a particularly good job of getting this money to the people quickly. There’s a lot of controversy about whether the Writers Guild should be collecting this money at all because it doesn’t just collect money for Writers Guild members.

These countries collect those foreign levies on behalf of any author. That doesn’t mean just Writers Guild authors. It means non-Writers Guild authors. It also means, frankly, people who write and direct porn. Yes, porn generates a ton of foreign levies.

So the Writers Guild has become a collection agency on behalf of both Writers Guild members and non-Writers Guild members, which has led to a lawsuit, I think more than one lawsuit, and those are still wending their way through the system.

**John:** Yes. Thank you.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Question number eight. “Could you please discuss the new media residual that was gained in the last strike? Has it been a good deal for writers overall?”

**Craig:** Well, I mean, the feature side is easy. Is it a good deal? It’s better than what we had. We already had 1.2 percent of 100 percent for Internet rentals of movies. We got that in 2001.

In this last go-around, what they wanted to stick us with was 20 percent of 1.5 percent for Internet sales of movies. What we got was the equivalent of 40 percent of 1.5 percent for sales of movies. So we doubled the DVD rate for Internet sales.

Is that good for writers? Yeah. It’s twice as good as… Well, let’s put it this way. It’s twice as good as a terrible rate. So I don’t know what you’d call it, not great but not the worst thing ever?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But the streaming and the media, that stuff gets crazy.

**John:** It does get crazy. And you also have to consider if you’re doubling that rate for DVDs, the price points are also potentially a lot lower, too. So it may be less money actually coming into your pocket.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a bunch of factors. The price point may be a lower. We don’t know, frankly, if Internet sales will ever even come close to what DVD sales used to be.

My big hope is that, frankly, rentals are the things that capture the wave of the future, because we get a bigger piece of that. Even though that’s a smaller number, if rentals happen consistently and frequently, that could be a big upside for us.

**John:** Yeah. I want rentals. Just as a consumer, I want rentals. I want that media should be available to me when I want to see it and I don’t have to worry about holding onto it or storing it or doing anything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I just want to be able to see the show I want to watch when I want to watch it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now for television, it gets pretty complicated and there’s actually a pretty good rate for television streaming and reuse over the Internet. However, some of it is then qualified by the fact that they do this thing called imputed value, where essentially we’re talking about $2,800 for a year of streaming new programs over the Internet. It gets complicated.

If you go to the Writers Guild website, I think they do a pretty decent breakdown of how that works.

**John:** Cool.

“Have you two ever received a check from Netflix or Hulu’s reuse of your work? Who is paying the residuals in this case to WGA?”

That’s exactly like HBO.

**Craig:** Yeah, same deal. We wouldn’t get a check from Netflix or Hulu. Netflix and Hulu pay money… They don’t deal with residuals at all. They pay fees to the studios for the right to purchase those DVDs that they send out in the red envelopes or the right to host them and resell them on their servers.

The companies get this gross amount of money. It’s attached to a movie and they give us a piece.

**John:** Yep. And now currently — I actually don’t know the answer to this question — let’s say Netflix buys a block of Sony movies and Go is one of those movies. Are they splitting the money equally between the movies that Sony is selling at that block or are they apportioning for each play of Go on Netflix’s servers?

**Craig:** Our deal is structured so that every time your movie is rented you get a piece of the gross that that movie generates. However, I don’t believe the companies are restricted from doing the kind of deal you’re talking about.

If they did the kind of deal you’re talking about, somehow they would have to figure out, in some sort of lump sum arrangement, how to apportion that money. Because obviously Go deserves a certain amount of money and Moneyball deserves a certain amount and an Adam Sandler movie deserves a certain amount, and they can’t just make it equal across the board. That’s where it gets crazy. I don’t really know.

And frankly, that’s why the next few negotiations are going to be so difficult because the truth is no one really knows how the stuff is going to work. We have to smash a very mature contract to pieces and make a new one based on the way the market’s changing.

**John:** Exactly.

“What makes you think that new technology…” It’s always a bad sign when a question starts “What makes you think that?”

[laughter]

“What makes you think that new technology won’t enable the studios to escalate their underpayment shenanigans?” That’s a loaded question. “If a television program or film is re-aired on cable, it’s pretty easy for the guild or writer to determine how many times it was re-aired and what his compensation should be. With new media, there is no publicly accessible way to see how many times an episode or film has been downloaded or streamed.”

Some of that’s a good point, some of that I would take exception to.

Yes, one of the nice things about traditional broadcast and cable is that you can see, “Oh, that show is on HBO right now so I will get a payment for that.” It’s harder when it’s split across a whole bunch of different platforms. You don’t know how many times it’s actually being played. That I totally get.

But I don’t know that you’re necessarily going to know what the numbers were behind the cable deal or TV deal at the start.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** You don’t know how much they paid Sony for the rights to show that show on cable.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. The truth is, the part of the question that’s correct is the part that presumes that there are shenanigans. Absolutely there are shenanigans. They occur on a daily basis. The part that’s incorrect is presuming that it’s any more difficult to run those shenanigans with an old model than it is with the new.

What the guild has built into its contract along with the DGA and SAG AFTRA is the right to do something called a tri-guild audit, where the three guilds essentially force an audit of all of the signatory companies to check their books and to go through the accounting and make sure that we’re getting paid properly.

This is one of the great failings of the Writers Guild over the last 15 years, I would say. I don’t know the last time we actually imposed the tri-guild audit. That is part and parcel with the strange political culture at the guild that is fetish-ized appearance over results. We will go to strike to get a better rate on a deal that we aren’t checking.

I would much rather us spend the money to do these audits every year, and collect money that we are probably missing out on every year, as opposed to shutting the town down to try and improve our rate by some minuscule amount.

As I like to say, you can get 100 percent of nothing, it’s still nothing.

**John:** So, a true life example, here. For The Nines, we had to endure a motion picture television fund audit. And so, here’s how they audit an individual film: they came, we had to pull up all our boxes out of storage, and a guy sat at a table for two days solid with a laptop and went through every single file, checking everyone’s payroll, their time cards, and everything else like that. And at the end, gave us a bill for, like, $7,000 for underpayment on something.

Now, it was a pain in the butt for me. And it was kind of a pain in the butt for them. And we were able to negotiate it down, because there were disagreements about how some stuff was done, but they were enforcing their contract. They were making sure they were collecting every penny that they were owed, and that’s their job. And so, I would love to see a more aggressive tactic taken.

**Craig:** Yeah, and as you can imagine, when you’re dealing with three unions, each of which, maybe, have, I mean, for instance, the Writers Guild, I think it’s yearly income from dues and so forth, is somewhere in the 20 millions, you know, maybe 28 million dollars, let’s say.

28 million dollars isn’t an actual amount of money for, say, Fox. Does not exist, it doesn’t even compute. So, we’re talking about very small companies going into very large companies, and obviously, they’re going to resist these audits and do whatever they can. And, frankly, I think it should be job number one. I think we should be doing these audits, literally, it should be the most important thing we do. But, I’m not in charge.

**John:** No.

Question 11. “Are you aware of web only television series, such as Jane Espenson’s Husbands, or Lisa Kudrow’s Web Therapy?”

Why yes, I have. And I will put links to both of those on the show notes.

“For now, these seem to be passion side projects. But is it possible one day we will live in a cable-less world where there are thousands of shows online, all produced on a shoestring budget? Could it be, one day, that everyone will have their own show, but no one’s making much money?”

Again, that is not really a question we can answer, it’s really more a statement with a question at the end, not the answer.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, if you’re asking me to prognosticate, I would say, no. And the reason why is, people who are very good at what they do want to be recognized for it, because they will be recognized for it. So, if one person that’s making this terrific show that hundreds of thousands of people tune into because it’s really, really cool, somebody else is going to come to them and say, “You know, you could make a ton of money on ads and stuff.” And suddenly, there’s budget and there’s ads and the cycle begins again.

We always reward; attention is a resource. We don’t just spread resources out willy-nilly. The marketplace will draw resources to the stuff that deserves it, generally speaking. So, no, I don’t think we’re going to live in a time when everything gets equal attention, that just goes against human nature.

**John:** Okay.

Question 12. “How do you see film marketing evolving in the new media era during the home video window? In the old days, a writer’s film would be sold to HBO, HBO has an interest in promoting it, so it runs a few ads during its other programs. The fact that it’s playing gets put into TV Guides, newspapers, and to cable set top boxes across the country.”

So, the question’s really asking, with new media, how do we maintain the profile of big movies across the different platforms, I think?

**Craig:** Well, that’s a little scary. And I mean, movies, the studios’ marketing divisions rely heavily on television. And if television becomes fragmented to the point where no one’s seeing anything, then they obviously lose a massive tool.

Now, I will say, and I like using the word massive tool, when I talk about marketing.

**John:** I knew you did that, yeah. I can see the little glee in your voice.

**Craig:** Yes, yes, those massive tools. And I did start in marketing, so.

But look, let’s face it: it’s already happened. So, instead of companies spending 100 percent of their budget on television spots on three networks, they spend 100 percent of their budget on television spots across 80 networks. And, theoretically, the cumulative eyeball factor adds up. But, of course, you see movie ads everywhere on the Internet, all over the web. And then, there’s outdoor. And outdoor, I actually think, is going to become more important over time, because you can’t escape outdoor.

**John:** Yeah. Motion pictures are one of those things that you need to have everybody there your opening week. Your opening week is so crucial, that we’re going to continue to spend a ton of money on network TV, because that’s the only way you can sort of make sure to reach everybody all at once. And, to the degree that stuff gets fragmented, you’ll just have to buy up all the little different places that they could be watching something, to do it.

This is, I think, in marketing, or in ad buying, called a “roadblock,” where you’re buying a commercial on every channel at the same time so that at 8 p.m. on Monday, you’re buying out all the channels, so that you make sure that everyone is seeing your ad.

And you can do the same thing on the Internet. It’s called the Internet roadblock, where you’re buying massive ads on the top 20 sites, so that you make sure that everyone has been exposed to your thing on the same day.

And you’ll see some of that sometimes with other product launches. Like when Apple has a brand new thing. You’ll see a roadblock where they basically, they’re buying out everything on the New York Times, or they’re buying out a major ad on New York Times and all the other newspaper sites, same day.

**Craig:** I will also mention this other thing that is going to get worse and worse. The one advantage that studios have over car companies or Apple is that they own most of the delivery systems. So, as obnoxious as it is, these local news stories that are really just ads for the stuff that the parent company of the local news station is producing, it’s going to get worse. No question.

You’re going to see characters on TV shows talking about upcoming movies. You’re going to see, it’s going to infect everything, because it is becoming harder and harder to reach a unified audience.

**John:** Yeah.

Question 13, finally. “Craig, my web browser is full of Hangover two DVD ads for the December 6th release.” —

**Craig:** — See? —

**John:** — “Presumably, a big residual day is coming up for you. How soon after a film’s release on DVD do you get your first check?”

**Craig:** Well, there’s a formula, I believe it’s something like the company has — I think — six months following the beginning of the first quarter in which they receive grosses. There’s some very complicated thing. But the short answer to your question, my guess is something like a half a year later.

**John:** Yeah. So, my prediction will be, you will see a spike, and that will be like, “Oh, that will be a big check.” It’ll be actually the second check you get is going to be the big one. Because you’ll see, like, “Oh, there’s a bunch of things sold,” and then the next one is bigger. Based on other, bigger movies that I’ve sold.

Like the first check for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was nice and big. Like, “Oh, wow, this should be great.” And the second one was, like, “Oh, twice as big. It should keep growing.” And then it goes and it crashes and it does the familiar sort of long tail thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m kind of, I’m very curious to see what happens. That’s actually, the Hangover II DVD is an interesting case study, because it’s one of the first ones that’s really promoting this UltraViolet concept, where the studios are doing their own digital locker. And it’s also an interesting test case just to see, just to check the DVD market itself, because the first Hangover was extraordinarily successful on DVD and that was two years ago.

Granted, it’s a different movie, it’s a sequel, it may not even, apples to apples, it may have not done as well. But I’m kind of curious to see what the effect of the allegedly eroding DVD market is on the sales of this one.

**John:** Yeah, UltraViolet is stupid. I just don’t think it’s going to work. I think it’s a bad name. I just don’t get it at all.

**Craig:** It’s, you know what? I used to think that I understood this good name, bad name thing. But, man, I say Blu-ray now, and I thought that was the dumbest name I’d ever heard of in my life. But now, when I say it, it’s like a thing.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, I didn’t like the name iPad, but now I can’t imagine them calling it anything else.

**Craig:** Well, everybody was “iPad, yeah, it’s tamponesque.” And yet, here we are, just like sheep.

**John:** Beyond the name, I just don’t think I want to trust these other new people to hold on to my media in any meaningful way. I mean, Apple, I get, I mean, Apple has reason, I believe Apple’s going to be around five years from now. I don’t know what UltraViolet is, I don’t know who those people are. It just feels too much like HDDVD or all those other things. It’s like, I’m waiting for the winner, and I just don’t feel like that’s going to be the winner.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. Because the truth is, anybody, look, I save all my screenplays on my Dropbox account. I don’t know who the Dropbox people are, either. But, so, it’s not like, security wise, or will it still be there? It’ll always be there, it’s the studios, they own the movies anyway.

The real thing is, who the hell are — most people don’t know it’s the studios. And studios, what they’re good at making and selling isn’t this. What they’re good at making and selling are movies and TV shows. I don’t think they’ve done, as far as I could tell, a particularly good job of convincing people that UltraViolet is this great new idea. It’s great for us as writers, in terms of residuals, if it takes off. But this is all, this is a war between the studios and Apple.

**John:** Yeah. It basically is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. So, Craig, as we’re doing follow up, and some wrap up, too, we had a previous conversation about Follies, the great Steven Sondheim musical. So, two bits of exciting news that I think you’re going to be excited about. First off, the soundtrack to the Broadway production of Follies is now available on iTunes, and it’s great. It’s great. It’s actually really, really great.

Second off, and probably more exciting to you, Follies is coming to the Ahmanson in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Well, it looks like we should go.

**John:** We should totally go.

**Craig:** I’m going to make you go again.

**John:** We actually have season tickets to it, because this is actually going to be replacing Funny Girl, because Funny Girl was supposed to be coming to Broadway.

**Craig:** I can’t go see Funny Girl with you. It’s just too gay. Sorry.

**John:** It is, it’s too gay.

**Craig:** Too gay.

**John:** So, Funny Girl got nixed. It got, it fell apart.

**Craig:** Why, do you mean, fell apart? Just the, no one wanted it, or?

**John:** No, it’s actually, this was interesting, because it was while we were doing our second Big Fish reading, for our producers and investors and theater owners and stuff. It was that same week that we were in rehearsals, Funny Girl fell apart.

So, it was Lauren Ambrose and Bob Cannavale to star in the show, and it was originally, it was going to do its out of town at the Ahmanson, before traveling to New York, to Broadway, to open. And kind of at the last minute, it evaporated and fell apart. And so, the Ahmanson was left with this big hole, for like, “Oh my god, what are they going to do for their production now?” And they’re going to take Follies. It’s great.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** Everyone loves Follies. Yeah.

**Craig:** All right, I’m there.

**John:** Cool. And I think we’ll leave it at this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a lot of good follow up today.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and thank the great questions.

**John:** All right, absolutely. That was Daniel Barkeley, who did, really, the heavy lifting on today’s show.

**Craig:** Thanks, Daniel.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/screenwriting-gurus-and-so-called-experts).

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

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

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

Craig, a weird thing happened this last week. I thought I would share this anecdote, this story about a thing that happened this past week. It’s dinner time and we’re sitting down to eat some good dinner and we hear a helicopter overhead, which is not that unusual in Los Angeles. We have a lot of helicopters in Los Angeles because we have a lot of news copters, we have police helicopters. It’s pretty common to hear some helicopters.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But then I noticed this helicopter is persisting. It’s like, “Oh, well that’s kind of unusual.” While this is my most favorite time of year because of all the great stuff that happens this time of year, I don’t like that it gets dark so early, so it’s quite dark out. I notice that the helicopter’s light is going on. So they’re looking for something or someone in this area, so it’s a police helicopter, not a news helicopter.

We go out front and there’s two police cars out in front of our house. Well that’s not great news. If you’re a single person, you have the option of freaking out because you can just freak out that there’s a police helicopters overhead and there’s police cars out front. But when you have a young child, you’ve given up the right to freak out about things.

**Craig:** Yeah, because they’re going to mirror your anxiety.

**John:** Yeah. You have to just completely play it off like, “Oh, hey, how neat. There’s those policemen. Aren’t policemen great? Let’s talk about how wonderful policemen are while we’re locking the windows and locking the doors. Oh, you know what, I think I’m going to turn on the alarm now instead of late at night. Hey, that’s great. By the way, did we shut the gate? Yeah, everything seems to be pretty good.”

We’re trying to watch the police officers out front to see what’s going on and then I notice the helicopter overhead is circling around. The light just keeps going over the back of our house. They’re looking for something right here. This isn’t one of those things where they’re following somebody down the street. Literally something is happening right next to our house. It’s probably the house that’s under construction next door because houses that are under construction tend to invite problems because no one’s actually living there.

All this time I’m trying to keep really calm and not freak out the kid. Then I saw something that was actually kind of amazing. Police helicopters, the light is incredibly bright. It’s sort of like a second sun in the sky. Because it’s pretty low overhead, it’s casting these really cool shadows across the driveway. The silhouette of the trees is really cool. You see every little branch projected onto the driveway.

But what’s even cooler is helicopters, they have to circle a little bit and so the shadows of the tree branches keep sweeping across the driveway in this really, really cool way. It’s like one of those stop motion Vimeo things where they do those long exposure landscape things where you see all the stars going in circles across the sky.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s like that but it’s happening right in front of you.

**Craig:** It’s Koyaanisqatsi in your front yard.

**John:** It’s basically that word I can’t say in my front yard.

**Craig:** [laughing] Right.

**John:** I bring my daughter over to see it. “Hey, this is really cool.” I can genuinely say this is a very cool moment that is happening despite the fact that there could be murders next door. By the way, I’m completely holding onto this idea. If you see the next movie I direct has helicopters that are projecting branches onto the ground, you’ll know where it came from. This was my Alan Ball plastic-bag-blowing-in-the-wind moment because it was just really, really beautiful.

**Craig:** [laughs] This is the moment you’ll bore thousands and thousands of people with.

**John:** Oh, completely.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** People will be talking about it, reverentially at first and then they’ll just hate the moment.

**Craig:** Then they’ll realize, wait a second, [laughing] it was a plastic bag. That’s great.

Alright, so the helicopter is circling. What happened, murder?

**John:** That’s the thing about all police activity that happens in a city like Los Angeles is you never really know what happens. The next day we find out that it probably was a break-in, somebody trying to steal power tools next door. No one was hurt, nothing bad happened. It’s just one of those things where someone saw that there was a construction site, waited until it was shut down and then broke in to try to steal all the power tools.

**Craig:** You know, I used to live not too far from where you live so we would get the helicopters all the time. In fact, I was probably a mile or two away from where most of the bad things happened, which meant that the helicopter often was right over my house because they’re shining the light at the center point of their circle. I’m on the edge, I’m on the circumference of their circle.

I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced this, but sometimes they start talking to the people once they find them. Have you heard the helicopter guys talking?

**John:** I have yet to hear the helicopter people talking. That sounds great.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, they’ve got this massive loudspeaker on those helicopters. You just hear them giving very specific instructions. It’s so odd to just be sitting in your house and then you just hear this chopper noise and then, “The people on the roof, move to the ladder. No, the other way,” [laughing] this very casual conversation with the people on the roof.

I live in La Canada now, which is up against the mountains northwest of Pasadena. Our interesting thing was last night there was this amazing windstorm that brutalized Los Angeles. For whatever reason or function of geography, Pasadena and La Canada always get the worst of it. Last night was no exception. We had winds up to 95 miles an hour. My little thing for a movie is, I always like it when mundane things are slightly out of place because it’s more shocking, I think, than, I don’t know, just the sweeping shots of CGI devastation.

I’m driving back from my office — because we lost our power, I had to go to my office to work. I’m driving back on the highway and there’s a large oak tree in the highway just sitting there. Yeah, you don’t see that every day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was kind of cool.

**John:** When I was in Boy Scouts, there was one time we had a winter campout. It was really windy while we were up in the mountains but we drove back into Boulder and the traffic lights were down. The traffic lights had been knocked down or bent around themselves by this huge windstorm that happened while we were gone. It was very much like coming back into a post-apocalyptic scene.

We got home and there was no power at home. I’d come from a weekend of cooking over a campfire to building a campfire in the fireplace so we could actually have heat.

**Craig:** It doesn’t take much to remind how fragile our little grasp on civilization is.

**John:** It is. One thing I should say in reference to my earlier story about the police helicopter is there’s a danger that in telling that story I’m contributing to the fallacy of misleading vividness, which is that by telling you this story of this police action that happened next door, a listener in Topeka might thing, “Oh my god, I could never move to Los Angeles because it’s so dangerous because I just heard this story of this police thing that happened right next door to this guy whose podcast you’re listening to.”

That would be a mistake because if you actually stop and think about that story, it’s that the police you could say overreacted a bit to sending two police cars and a helicopter to potentially someone stealing power tools next door. It was really a very minor thing that I just had a very big reaction to and it felt very cinematic but it was really not that big of a deal.

**Craig:** That’s right, you don’t know. Maybe it was a murderer next door or maybe it’s just that the Los Angeles Police Department has this enormous arsenal of tools, so they bring the sledgehammer out for everything.

**John:** Yeah. While we were talking I actually looked up — Wolfram|Alpha is a really good place to go if you want to look up crime rates for places. The crime rate for Los Angeles I know had fallen a lot. The crime rate for Los Angeles is actually lower than the national average. It is lower than the California average. It is lower than Pasadena.

**Craig:** I believe that. You’d have to figure out which parts of Pasadena you’re talking about because there are parts of Pasadena that are pretty rough. But in general, one of the strange things about our culture is that — there was an interesting study I read a couple years ago: The violent crime rate in the United States has been dropping precipitously, I think, since the early ’90s and we are now back to levels that we haven’t seen since, I think, the ’50s or early ’60s.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yet at the same time the reportage of violent crime has skyrocketed. While we live in this relatively un-violent period of time, we tend to think we’re living in the most violent period of time.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** But in fact, we don’t.

**John:** No, we don’t.

**Craig:** No, it’s pretty good out there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Stop complaining.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I thought we might start today by doing some follow-up on previous episodes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Our last episode was on residuals and there was one question which came up in the comments section which I thought was pretty good. Residuals: do they count towards maintaining your health insurance?

**Craig:** They do not, not for the Writers Guild. They do for the Directors Guild, and I think we mentioned this last time. The Directors Guild automatically lops off, I think, half of the residuals. It may be a little more complicated than that but let’s just say for the sake of argument roughly half. And they steer those residuals into the health fund. Thus, as a result of that, your residuals count as earned income towards qualification for health care.

The Writers Guild does not lop any of your residuals off for health care. The exchange that we make, however, is that our earned residuals do not qualify us towards health care, only writing income.

**John:** Yeah. If you write a movie which is produced and you are earning residuals for it but you don’t continue to write other movies, your health plan will run out.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** You will stop being qualified for health insurance.

**Craig:** Yes, whereas in the Directors Guild — actually I directed a movie and all of my income was within one calendar year, so obviously I qualified for health insurance for the following year, but then I qualified again because the residuals the following year were enough to get me another year.

**John:** A weird loophole that happened for me was I’m not a member of the Directors Guild, but for a year I had Directors Guild health insurance which happened because maybe you remember a couple of years ago, Heroes was a TV show on NBC that was a huge success originally. After the first season of Heroes they decided they were going to do obviously a second season but they were also going to do these origin episodes.

They went to a couple filmmakers to say, “Hey, would you direct these one-off episodes of Heroes Origins that are creating new characters that could be folded into the universe?” A couple of us said yes, and so Kevin Smith was supposed to do an episode. I was supposed to do an episode. And they made a deal for us to do this.

Then the air went out of the Heroes balloon and they decided not to do it, but the money they paid me, for whatever reason, counted towards DGA. I ended up having Directors Guild health insurance for a year.

**Craig:** When you do, what no one tells you is that obviously you qualify for Writers Guild health insurance. Then this other health insurance becomes your secondary insurance.

What they don’t tell you, and you have to kind of figure out yourself is, that secondary insurance works, but every time you get something back from the Writers Guild, you have to then send that form to the Directors’ Guild so that they can process it. It’s the worst. It’s a full-time job. I was actually happy to not have secondary insurance. It was killing me.

**John:** Yeah, it was kind of a mess.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a mess.

**John:** Yeah, we should talk about health insurance sometime. That’d be a good thing to talk about.

**Craig:** The Writers Guild health insurance, like every health insurance system, is absurdly complicated and it’s not their fault. Frankly, the more complicated it is, it’s usually because the better it is.

We have an excellent health care system, but there are a lot of weird little ins and outs and things that people don’t know. You’re right, it would be — I mean, listen: god knows we risk boring everyone to death every time we delve really deeply into this stuff. But, why not?

**John:** I’ve actually had mostly good experiences with the WGA health insurance people. But I had one very bad experience where we were adding my daughter to our health insurance. The woman on the other end of the phone said, “No, I need the adoption papers.”

“Well, you don’t understand, I didn’t adopt my daughter.”

It was like, “No, you have to adopt your daughter.”

**Craig:** Huh?

**John:** It was this bizarre thing where she just couldn’t quite process what our family situation was. I was like, “I really need to talk to your supervisor right now.” It got all resolved.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, the question for you is, does the Writers Guild handle your specific situation relatively better or worse than, say, if you were with Aetna or an even more faceless massive bureaucracy. Because you obviously have a twist.

The other thing is that the same-sex couple rules are changing constantly, it seems to me, at least. They seem to be in flux, whereas, the traditional man/woman/kid situation is in stasis.

**John:** Yeah, I would say, overall, the WGA seems to be handling it as well as any place handles that stuff, so, I’m not particularly worried about it.

Another note follow up question here. We were talking about video games and getting union representation, WGA representation for video game writing. One of the readers wrote in and said, “Nobody in game development gives a rat’s ass about the writer. If anything, we’re viewed as an inconvenience to most game developers, a necessary evil, if you will. I predict you have something to say about that.”

**Craig:** I don’t really care if people in video game companies look down on writers. They can look down on anyone they want. The question is: Are those writers serving a role that makes it such that it’s hard to replace them if they all walk? If the answer is yes, then it doesn’t matter.

Unions aren’t about making people like you. They’re about protecting your job, setting some basic parameters for what you ought to be paid, and how you should be acknowledged for the work you do.

**John:** Yeah. Where would you start with the video game people? Would you try to go after everyone who works at the video game company, or just people who are doing, who are putting words on paper, or on a screen?

**Craig:** Well, this is one area where I tend to veer a little bit off from a lot of the more hard-line organizing folks at the Writers Guild. There is a tendency to want to overreach with these things and suggest that we should represent everybody that is, quote unquote, “contributing to story.”

The problem with that is, producers contribute to story, actors contribute to story, directors certainly contribute to story. Story isn’t the functional aspect when we’re talking about employment contracts.

The functional aspect is literary material. Who is putting their fingers on the keyboard, typing in words and printing them out? That is writing that we can represent, as far as I’m concerned. It’s provable, it creates literary material. Literary material is something you can take a look at and credit and assign authorship to.

I would say, if, let’s say, we were talking about organizing Bethesda, who are the people that are writing stuff down? Those are the writers.

**John:** I want to get on to our main topic today. Now, Craig, a question I get a lot, and sometimes at panels or forums or other things is: What books should I read if I want to become a good screenwriter? Are there any really good manuals or how-to guides for screenwriters?

I never have a good answer, because the short answer is that I don’t have one that I should say you should absolutely read. The longer answer sort of make me sounds like a jerk, because I end up sort of espousing too much opinion about other people who write books about screenwriting.

What do you say when people ask you that?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, look: Obviously, a big difference between you and me is I don’t care about sounding like a jerk. I just do it. I immediately go to answer number two.

I mean, okay, short answer number one. What book should I read? You can read any book you want. None of them will be as useful as reading screenplays and watching movies and thinking about story and then writing the script. That is the only basic instruction set that you need. And that works. The books are useless, I do believe.

**John:** Useless, though? I mean, I would — okay…

**Craig:** Useless. Because, look, we live in a time now where we have the Internet. Okay? If I need to know how long a script should be, if I need to know how it should be formatted, if I need to know what it’s supposed to look like, if I need to know how much description I should use and all. That stuff is out there, it’s on your website, it’s all over the place. There’s no need to buy anything.

**John:** But some stuff that you learn in books is not about…it’s not the simple answers to a question; it’s more — it gets you thinking a certain way about how to do stuff. If a book provides… I’m genuinely playing devil’s advocate here, because I do share a lot of opinions with you on this.

But I feel like there could be useful information in these books, and useful ways of thinking in these books for people who have never thought about story in a way before. It gets them really thinking about story, or thinking about how puzzle pieces might go together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it’s possible. I still don’t know if that is as instructive as reading the screenplay to a movie you thought you knew well and seeing, in a kind of reverse engineering way, how it came from a script. Because that’s all we’re really doing, is kind of pre-engineering a movie when we write a script.

Look: There are some basic instructional guides that aren’t harmful to you. Syd Field isn’t harmful, I don’t think, unless you somehow view it as a religious choice. I don’t think that Chris Vogler’s book is harmful.

**John:** You think it’s not harmful.

**Craig:** I don’t think it’s harmful. I just think it’s only harmful if people actually think that that’s the book that’s going to teach them how to be a screenwriter. It’s not. There is no such thing.

**John:** Okay. In research for this podcast, I looked up, and there are 2,123 books about screenwriting on Amazon. —

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** — It’s really a small subset of them are the ones that I think we often hear or talk about here. Certainly Syd Field is the one we have to talk about first. Syd Field, his famous book is called Screenplay. I didn’t, I had to look it up, because we don’t, we just call it the Syd Field.

Syd Field is — if you’re going to read one book, you should probably read Syd Field, just because everyone else in this town has read Syd Field. People will talk in, sort of, Syd Field terms whether they’ve read the book or not. When people talk about Act I, Act II, Act III, mid-act, climax, worst of the worst, those are all kind of Syd Field’y terms.

Everyone’s going to talk those ways, whether you actually believe in them or not, development people will talk in those ways. By reading Syd Field, you’ll understand that everyone thinks that there’s a first act that ends at about page 30, that there’s a reversal that happens at about page 60, that there’s a second act break that happens at page 90, which is the worst of the worst, and then the movie resolves itself in the third act, which is the last 30 pages or so.

Everyone sort of uses that as a template for thinking about stuff, even though that’s not the way most movies actually happen. The danger is people use that as a template to try to shoehorn any given movie in to fit those beats and fit those page breaks and that idea that this is exactly how a movie has to work, as if there’s one magic formula, or that the architecture of screenwriting is quite literally architecture or engineering — that if you don’t do these things exactly perfect, the entire movie will fall down and collapse on itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember when I was a kid in math class, that there were kids who wanted to understand basically why multiplication worked a certain way and grasp the concept behind it, and then there were kids that just wanted the 12-step algorithm, and just push it in one side and it comes out the other. It’s like a dumb box in between.

You can’t approach screenwriting that way. People who use these books to sort of try and reduce the process to something easy and controllable are failing. The only value, really, is what you’re saying, maybe plug into some common vocabulary and get a basic sense of the fundamental, most common shape of a screenplay.

Frankly, I would much prefer to see people go online and read a free public domain copy of Aristotle’s Poetics, which I think has more actual philosophical meat behind it about what the point and purpose of drama is, both good and bad.

**John:** I have to think about why there are so many people who aspire to be screenwriters and why there’s a market, apparently, for books about screenwriting. I think it’s because the form looks so different from everything else. The format scares people. Yet, it seems approachable in the way that everyone has seen a bunch of movies. Therefore — like, I get so frustrated when I hear people say, like, “Oh, I could never write a novel, but I think I could write a screenplay.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** As if it’s like, “Oh well, it’s just people talking.”

**Craig:** That’s exactly why they do this, because everybody thinks, “I can write a screenplay, I have a great idea for a screenplay. I just need a book to tell me how to do it, and then I’ll do it. But I’ve already done it in my head. I’ve already done this hard part, which is to come up with this great idea for a movie. Now, I just need to shove it through this process and the Screenwriting for Dummies will tell me about that. That’s just window dressing.”

No, that is the screenwriting. Your idea is useless. Useless. The screenwriting is everything. The process is the job.

That’s why I find these books to be, essentially… They are sold in bad faith by people who, quite frankly, were they better at screenwriting, would be screenwriting.

**John:** That is a source of frustration for me as I look through the people who are selling these books, is that most of them have no significant, or, really, any screenwriting credits whatsoever. They are aspiring screenwriters who probably have written some screenplays but have never actually made movies from their screenplays.

An exception: Blake Snyder, who has the Save the Cat books, which I’ve not read, but people seem to like a lot, has done. He unfortunately passed away. But he has two genuine credits to his name — just really makes him an exception to the rule.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah.

**John:** Everyone else has zero.

**Craig:** That’s right. We used to just have the plague of wannabes and pompous professors who insisted that they would give us the key to all this stuff. Now, we have this new scourge, which are underemployed readers.

For those who don’t know, because there’s so many scripts in contention at studios and production companies, the executives and gatekeepers hire people to read them, evaluate them, and score them. There’s a whole shadow industry of people that read and rate scripts.

Many of those people, I think, quite a few of whom don’t even want to be screenwriters, they want to be executives. Many of those people, faced with underemployment or lack of employment, begin to sell that service to others as a screenwriting consultant. Now they’re leveraging thousands of dollars out of people by reading their scripts and giving them so-called expert coverage. It’s atrocious.

**John:** And frustrating. I guess I come back to a question of, you know, I went to a university, I went to a film school. I went there to learn how to make movies. I had screenwriting classes. They were genuinely helpful. I’ve been a guest lecturer at screenwriting classes. I’m trying to in my head differentiate what that is versus what my frustration is with the guys and experts.

**Craig:** John, I have it. It’s — look, I just did, yesterday or two days ago, I guest spoke at Howard Rodman’s class at USC. I came there in good faith. You go to these things in good faith. And I think that for well-credentialed, respected academic programs, they’re offered in good faith.

So much of this is not. So much of this is simply a scam. You can smell it from a mile away. The truth of the matter is, there’s not much value in me reading some random person’s script, then giving them advice, because, almost always, they just don’t have it.

I want to be clear, and so, by the way, that would be in bad faith, especially if I took money, obviously. It’s about me.

I want to be clear, because a lot of times, people who are aspiring to be screenwriters feel that people like you or me are saying this stuff because we’re trying to keep them out, or hide the truth from them. Quite the opposite. I want more and better screenwriters. I want many, many screenwriters, better than I am, to come and make better movies than I make. Books aren’t going to make that happen. Talent is going to make that happen.

I really, more than anything, I’m actually trying to be very prosocial about this and say, “Please, save your money.” Screenwriting is free. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that by spending $3,000 you’re going to exercise a control that you so desperately want to have. I want that control, too. I don’t have it either. None of us do. Sorry.

**John:** One thing that occurs to me as we’re talking: While I didn’t honestly read a lot of the screenwriting books growing up, I have read a ton of programming books, because I love making apps, I enjoyed programming since I was a kid. I’m not especially great at it. I can do it, if push comes to shove. But I have real blind spots towards it. It’s not something that comes very naturally to me.

I’ll teach myself a language. I’ll teach myself Perl or Ruby or try to teach myself Objective-C, which just doesn’t fit my head very well. I can buy as many books as I want to buy, but I am searching for that book that says, like, “Oh, this is the magic formula for how you make any app.” And it’s like I said, I guess I’m guilty of that, too, is that I want there to be an easy way that just makes it all simple and possible. And it’s not.

You look at actual real programmers, Nima Yousefi, who does the programming for our stuff now, it’s just — it’s good and it’s natural for him. It’s just the work. He didn’t get to be good at it by reading a bunch of books about it. He got good at it by doing a bunch of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, the fabled 10,000 hours of doing something, it really does. I empathize with anybody who, faced with writing their 1st screenplay, or their 3rd or their 12th, who is seeking to be recognized for their work. I empathize with the pain and the fear that they have. Certainly, I empathize with their psychological craving for some kind of secret trick, control, leverage point, anything. It is a terrible drowning feeling when you don’t know if you’re doing it right. You desperately want to do it right.

It is discouraging to say to people, “There is no lifeguard on duty. The only way you will survive this drowning is by swimming through it.” But, unfortunately, there is no lifeguard on duty. These books will not help you. These people who charge you money will bleed you dry.

Think about this for a second. You are, let’s say, somebody who has a modicum of talent. But you’re raw. You are craving some assistance, some help. You spend money on a professional script consultant. They read your script.

They have a choice, they can say to you, “This is very far off the mark, you need to go write two or three more scripts and really figure out what this is about. Then, spend your money with me.” Or, they may say, “You have no talent, stop.”

Or they may say, “Wow, there’s great potential here. Here’s a bunch of notes,” that by the way, anybody could have given you. “They’ll make your script better. You go work on that, then come back, I’ll read it again, or I’ll read your other script, or I’ll read your third script. You’re the one. If only you, three or four more of my amazing sessions at $1,000 a pop and you’ll make it.”

They’re always going to do that, because it’s a scam. It’s a scam. Don’t do it.

**John:** We should probably differentiate between a couple things we’re talking about, here. I would come down on the side of, if somebody wants to read a book, it’s a small cost to reading a book. It’s going to cost you, now, $10, $15, and it’s going to cost several hours of your time. There’s the danger that it’s going to lead you in a very bad direction. But everything is a danger that’s going to lead you in a bad direction. It’s not a bigger gamble than anything else.

I would come down on the side of, “Hey, if the book seems interesting, go ahead and read it.” That’s basically what I’ve done with Stuart now, is that, Stuart is, you know, a young aspiring writer. As people ask questions, like, “Hey, is this a good screenwriting book?”

I would say, “Hey, Stuart, read this book and write a review for the site.” That’s what we’re doing with that.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** Seminars, I am opposed to seminars. I am opposed to seminars where the masterful instructor comes in and teaches you how to write a screenplay.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm, me, too, yeah.

**John:** Linda Seger’s known for them, Robert McKee is known for them.

**Craig:** Linda Seger. Linda Seger. Derek Haas was at some event and Linda Seeger was there speaking. She was peppering her speech with authoritative comments about how she assisted somebody who once wrote a Cagney and Lacey.

Good Lord. People are spending money? Why? Why? It’s crazy to me.

Listen, I completely agree with you on this. If all you lose is 80 bucks on six books, whoop-de-do. Go for it.

By the way, when it comes to… Look, there are books that I actually, I like recommending to people, because I don’t want to be a total jerk about it. I think, actually, rather than reading the Chris Vogler books, which are sort of a screenwriting view of Joseph Campbell’s work, just read Joseph Campbell.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** They’re wonderful books to read anyway, just to understand the commonalities of human narrative. But I would certainly say, before you start spending even money on books, you should read John’s site, you should check out, god, there’s just a whole bunch of sites out there.

**John:** You should also read screenplays.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the thing you keep coming back to, is that, you need to read as many screenplays as you possibly can read. You need to read the great screenplays. You need to read the screenplays to the movies that you love to see how those movies were made.

But you also really need to read bad screenplays. People don’t take my word for this, but I was a reader for TriStar for a year, and for other places for six months before that. I read, and had to write coverage on 150 terrible screenplays. You learn so much about what never works by reading bad writing.

**Craig:** So true. Not just what doesn’t work, but also where it could have worked, but the writer wrote himself out of something good, because they overwrote or they underwrote. You know, good advice, read bad scripts.

I have a few, if people want to read them. [laughter]

**John:** I’m saying, fine on books if you find that helpful. Just make sure that you’re also reading scripts. No on seminars. No on paid script consultants.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I just — if people can write in with comments if they’ve actually had a good experience where it has completely changed their…

**Craig:** They will. By the way, John, they will. They get so defensive. I’ve had lengthy arguments with people who are so defensive, but in the end.

**John:** I want to see one produced writer —

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** — who can show me where they paid a script consultant and that’s what got them where they are.

**Craig:** Thank you, thank you. It’s very dispiriting to have to argue with somebody about why they’re wasting their money. It’s a little bit like, arguing with people who spend money on psychics. At some point, you just throw up your hands and say, “Okay, you know what, go ahead. Go ahead, spend your money. I don’t care. it’s not my problem.”

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I think that’s it. I mean, is there anymore to say about gurus or experts?

**Craig:** Ptheh.

**John:** Ptheh. Ptheh basically summarizes Craig Mazin’s position on that.

Well, thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk soon.

**Craig:** Very good.