Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Oh!

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Nobody cares.

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

**Craig:** Oh, nice.

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

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

**John:** GTD, yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Okay. Good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right. Yes.

**John:** Or playing Skyrim.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** What are you doing?

**Craig:** I don’t know.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

And Derek Haas sort of pulled me on this one.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** He’s poor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Ha-ha.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Mostly. [laughs]

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** And does it?

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

**Craig:** Well, but —

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** And who is —

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Of course not.

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

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

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

And so I started thinking about it for those reasons.

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Well, listen — [laughs]

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

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

**John:** It’s pretty good.

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** No!

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

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

**John:** Well, it’s done.

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

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

**Craig:** [singing along]

**John:** Craig.

**Craig:** John.

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

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

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

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

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

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

How are you, Craig?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Inevitably.

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

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

**Craig:** Mmm.

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

**Craig:** No way!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It was stopped?

**John:** It was stopped.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Very sunny.

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

**Craig:** Cool.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Yeah. I have heard the…

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** You are so right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Hmm.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay, that’s better.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** I love it.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Very, very bad.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No, who?

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

**Craig:** Those kids.

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

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

**John:** Those fools.

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

**John:** Yeah.

Craig, thank you for another podcast.

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

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

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** New York.

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

**Craig:** My birthplace.

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

**Craig:** Yes sir.

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

**Craig:** Brooklyn.

**John:** Ah, how nice.

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

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

**Craig:** Presbyterian?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t like that.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Really?

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

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

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

**Craig:** Exactly, thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** No. No.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Amazing.

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Joy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** Yes!

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

**John:** No, it’s his friend.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Can you vehemently agree?

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

**John:** [laughs]

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

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

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

And, Craig, thank you very much.

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

**John:** Great. Thanks Craig.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** I think Vagisil.

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

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

**Craig:** Nerd!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That would be great.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** What?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ll fix that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Protest.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Done.

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Maybe. Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t be a jerk.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Actually, no.

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

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

**John:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No.

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

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** It won’t help you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** “It seems fair.”

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we found was that —

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

**Craig:** Sure.

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

**Craig:** Correct.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** No.

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yup.

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Every time.

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

**John:** Mm-hmm.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

It’s a very complicated business.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because oftentimes actors are —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** — re-writing.

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

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

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Sometimes.

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

**Craig:** I agree.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** That’s right.

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

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

Next week let’s talk about sex.

**John:** Let’s do it.

**Craig:** Yeah, okay.

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

**Craig:** Bye.