Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Actual news: we have a new WGA president elected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No, no. No, it’s not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, definitely.

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

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

**Craig:** No question.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s called Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you John.

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

**Craig:** Awesome.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hello, and welcome to Scriptnotes. This is Episode 4, a podcast about screenwriting and things interesting to screenwriters. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: I am Craig Mazin.

John: How are you doing today, Craig?

Craig: You know, John, I’m not bad. I’m a little busy, little headache-y today. One of these podcasts should just be on the physical ailments of the screenwriter.

John: You’ve actually had problems with headaches before. I know you used to have migraine problems, and you’re past the worst of that, is that correct?

Craig: I am, yes. I used to have terrible migraines and I’ve gotten much, much better. The truth is all headaches are migraines, as my migraine doctor told me. I was shocked. I always thought there was just headaches and then violent other things called migraines.

They’re all the same, it’s just levels. Now I can just take a couple of Advil and I’m like a regular human being, but it used to be terrible, terrible.

John: How bad did it get? Were you physically incapacitated, where you couldn’t —

Craig: Yes, sometimes. I mean, it would get pretty bad where you would have to just lie in bed and wait. I had a kidney stone once. That was the worst.

John: Kidney stones are the worst. We’ve both had kidney stones. Kidney stones are literally — if someone had just said, “Here’s a gun.” “Thank you very much. I will kill myself now.”

Craig: Yes — sort of famously, pregnant women who have had natural childbirth and then had kidney stones pronounce kidney stones worse.

John: After my first kidney stone incident, it didn’t pass that first time. I was at the emergency room. The doctor gave me a prescription for a very heavy-duty painkiller and I didn’t have insurance at that point, so I’m not going to fill this prescription because this is really expensive stuff. So I thought, “Oh, if it comes back, I’ll deal with it if it comes back.”

So it came back really, really bad. So I have this prescription for this heavy-strength painkiller. It’s like five in the morning, I’m going to the 24-hour drug store trying to get this prescription filled.

I looked just like every junkie you could possibly imagine, desperate to get this thing filled. Of course, by then it was too late, I had to go back to the emergency room. Because when it recurs, it’s just awful.

Craig: It’s hard to imagine it until it happens to you. It’s the only time in my life I’ve actually writhed in agony. I finally knew what writhing was.

John: Or you try to lay back on the gurney or on the table, and you actually have to keep moving, because that’s the only way you can distract yourself from the awfulness.

Craig: I’m not a big medicine guy, but they gave me the heavy-duty Oxycontin — and I’m basically inviting people to now break into my house and steal it — but I still have this big thing of it, because you pass the stone, you don’t need it anymore.

But I save it, because I just feel like one day it’s going to happen again, and I need that there.

John: If you were watching Torchwood, Craig, you would know that because no one dies in the Torchwood: Miracle Day plot line, heavy-duty painkillers become very, very important, because people who are mortally wounded don’t die, and they’re in agony, and so something like your Oxycontin pills would be incredibly valuable.

Craig: I don’t watch that, but I do know just from the existence of drug addicts that they are valuable.

John: The other, of course, good idea for keeping Oxycontin on hand is a zombie apocalypse, because situations are going to occur beyond your basic survival needs of an axe and something else to dismember zombies that are coming after you. You are going to want some pain pills to through some other incidents that happen. Not zombie bite related things that are going to infect you, but just the other wear and tear that’s going to happen, because the medical system has collapsed.

Craig: You know, I have to say, I’ve been thinking more and more about this zombie thing, and if it goes down, if it really goes down, I’m just going to blow my own face off. You know what, I don’t even want to live in that world. I’m gonna blow my brains out, that way I’m out. I’m checked out, I can’t be a zombie, I can’t be running all the time. I just don’t care that much.

John: Yes, Thomas Jane it. You can do the thing that Thomas Jane does at the end of The Mist and kill you whole family. That’s always a good alternative.

Craig: Yes, because once the zombie apocalypse comes, your life isn’t going to have to score in the top two boxes. I don’t care if the audience doesn’t like it.

John: That’s well said.

Craig: Thank you.

John: But you know who does care if their story…

Craig: Segue! Segue!

John: …scores the top two boxes? Did you hear that segue?

By the way, my whole life, of course, I’ve used the word “segue,” but when I’ve seen it written down, I assumed it was spelt a different way. Segue is spelt S-E-G-U-E.

Craig: Yes, it’s spelled like “seg.”

John: Like “seg.” Whenever I would see that written out, I would say, “seg to.”€ I would say, “That’s shortened version of segue.” It’s actually how you spell segue. We’re doing the Big Fish musical, musicals are a lot about segues. Rather than “cut to,” it’s “segue to” a new thing that happens.

So I had to write the word “segue” a lot, and it still just looks so wrong to me.

Craig: There’s a whole group of words — and I promise we’ll get around to talking about screenplays in a second — but there’s a group of words that read differently than they’re pronounced, and for a long, long time, I thought “misled” was “mizzled.”€ And then “awry” I thought was “or-ry.”€ I think that makes more sense.

John: Don’t know that. Let’s get to the topic at hand. Today we want to talk about directors and how screenwriters deal with directors, and what that relationship is like. Some templates for thinking about how you would work with a director on a project.

And you’ve had many movies shot and have all of your director experiences been fantastic?

Craig: No.

[laughing]

John: That’s weird.

Craig: No. I mean I think I’ve had more good ones than…I really only had one weird one. Mostly though they’ve been good, I would say. Mostly good.

John: Yeah. I’d say most of mine have been pretty good, and some of the good ones were ones where I wasn’t all that involved with the project from the beginning. I just came in and did some work and helped them out. They went off and shot the movie and good luck and Godspeed.

Other times I’ve been on board the project from the very beginning, and a director comes on board. You’re trying to get them up to speed with where you’re at. So let’s aim more towards that from-inception kind of relationship because I think that’s more what our audience is listening for.

Also, we’re talking about movies. That relationship between a writer and a director in television is very, very different. The writer in television has more power but also has responsibility to the overall continuity of the show. The director is there to get what needs to be shot on the page, onto film, and into the episode.

Craig: Yeah, in television the director doesn’t have to determine who is going to be playing these roles, what they’re dressing like, what the sets should look like, what the tone of the product is. All those things have been determined already. I mean that’s the massive gulf between feature directing and television directing.

John: Well, all those things we talk about are the crucial things that a director is doing while the director is getting up to speed with the script and thinking about making the movie. So let’s just start talking about all the stuff that a director needs to do because it’s tempting to think about, “Oh, the director is responsible for the story and for getting the story told.”

And yes, that’s one of his or her jobs, but so much of a director’s time as you’re approaching making a move is really dealing with completely different things that have nothing to do with the script itself. So recognizing that you as a screenwriter are essentially a department when it comes to making a movie.

And you are going to be one of his meetings over the course of the day, but he’s also talking to the costume designer, the production designer, the cinematographer, the editors, the producers, the casting directors. As a giant village who’s come together to make this movie, he’s the village chief and you’re one of the villagers. Recognizing that difference is a hard thing to sometimes to get up to speed with.

Craig: Yeah, we are very focused in on what we are responsible for. Like you said, that’s the story. As it turns out, that is the most important part of this whole thing. The story is more important than the costumes, the locations, where the lights are going to go, and what the makeup should look like. But all those things flow from the story and are mission-critical to making a good movie.

You have to look at every department as necessary. The story is the thing that’s driving everything. It’s just a question of time. Throughout the day he still has to sit there and figure out what the cars should be in the scene where, okay, and then she pulls up in her car. What car? Here, I got pictures of cars for you. That’s where you want to blow your brains out as a director.

Or we have a scene where there’s a party, and he’s going to crash the party and deliver a speech to the girl. Okay, well, how many people are at the party? What ages are they? Are they different races? How are they dressed? Is it upscale? Is it downscale? The billions of questions that start to bury the director in quicksand soak up so much time, and they all have to be answered. They’re all theoretically part of some cohesive vision.

John: A crucial thing that a smart screenwriter pointed out to me once is that as a screenwriter, you’re the only person who’s already seen the movie. So when you approach your first meeting as the director you have to remember that you already made the movie in your head. You can see the whole thing.

The director, he or she, hasn’t seen the whole thing yet and is still trying to figure out what the movie looks like and is starting to answer those thousands of questions ahead of time. If they want to go through every page of the script with you, it’s not necessarily because they have a problem with it. They’re just trying to figure it out.

Your job a lot of times is to almost be like an interpreter as if the script was written in some other language, and you have to help talk it through with them so that it can be understandable in their language and they understand what your intention was, who are these characters in the scene, what is important, and how they’re going to get through that.

Because ultimately the smart directors realize that they’re going to be on the set at four in the morning after very long days of shooting. They have two hours until the sun rises, and that actor is going to come to him and be saying like, “What am I supposed to be doing in this scene?” They have to be able to have an answer.

So the times where I’ve been most exhausted with a director, I’ve always tried to remember that, “Okay, that’s right. They’re trying to figure this all out, too.”

Craig: Yeah, and you’re smart because you’re putting the movie first. It’s tempting to put your own ego and what you’ve invested in the screenplay first, but the point of the screenplay is the movie. What you’re talking about is helping the director do the best job they can do in realizing their vision and your vision and your intention. So obviously, part of that is explaining your intention and defending your intention.

Another part of it is recognizing that they have to do it for real. The movie that you saw in your head? That can’t ever be a movie because in your movie people move like they do in dreams. They’re on one end of the room. Now they’re on the other end of the room. Time speeds up and slows down in accordance with the importance of the moment.

But in a movie, time moves at one second per second. [laughs] You can’t speed it up, really, or slow it down. I mean, you can a little bit here and there, but there are demands of production that force the director to, frankly, make a less amazing, wonderful, kind of translucent thing than you have in your brain, which is this kind of shimmering dream of whatever your movie was.

That said, the more specific you are in your head about the movie — Like I wrote a blog piece once that says, “You can’t just walk into a building.” You should know if your character walks into a building, see the building. You may not want to waste a bunch of space on the page describing the building, but sooner or later someone’s going to say, “What building did you have in mind?” It’s good to know.

If you drop your jaw and go, “Uh, I don’t know. A building,” you’re expressing a different philosophy than everybody else in the movie. Because they have a job to actually shoot something. If you start saying, “Ah, who cares, it doesn’t matter,” or implying, “Who cares, it doesn’t matter,” you’ve put this thing between you and them.

John: You should be able to have an answer for any question that comes up. So rather than having generic type of like, “This is a police station.” Well, what kind of police station is this like? Where are we at in the police station?

The very first movie I was involved with, the first movie of mine that got produced, was Go. On that movie, fortunately Doug Liman had me super-involved. I was not only on set every moment, but every moment of pre-production I was there, too.

It was a great experience for us to get in the same brain space about what was important, what kinds of things we were going to see. But I always had an answer. It wasn’t always going to be the same answer as Doug’s, but when asked, or occasionally when not asked, but when I saw something going in the opposite direction, I could volunteer my opinion of like, “This is what the intention of this was.” Always couched in terms of like, “These are the other options I could see being out there, but this is what the actual intention of this thing was.”

From casting, from what locations we’re picking to, just the style of the world. Like how rundown of a grocery store are we at, and where are we at in this grocery store. The script reflected a lot of those things, but you’re not ever going to be able to have all those details on the page. They were in my head, though, like I had filmed it well enough in my head that I could at least give them my answer for how things were supposed to be.

Craig: Yeah. That’s important. By the way, that is a help for a director.

Look, I’ve worked primarily with two directors, David Zucker and Todd Phillips — both incredibly different guys, very different filmmakers, different kinds of movies. But they’ve both been very generous with me, and they’ve included me as a partner. One of the parts of that contract that I honor is if they don’t get it — let’s say I express my intention as best I can, and they just don’t get it — it’s important for me to stop and go, “Here’s the deal.”

It doesn’t really matter if I get it. If they don’t get it, I have to figure out something else that they do get that satisfies whatever this intention is, because they have to do it. They’re the ones that actually have to relay it. Just as I think when you are directing, and your actor looks at you and says, “I just don’t get this,” you got to think about how to either make them see so that they can internalize and perform it, or find another way in.

The director has to be an adult enough to sublimate his own desires and ego to make the moment with the actors work, and the writer has to do the same for the director. Everybody ultimately has to be subordinate to the movie.

So when I work with those guys, they’re kind enough to let me on their set — and it’s their set — and they want me there, and I am respectful enough to help them. By help them, I mean help the movie, not the script.

John: Let’s talk about being on the set, and let’s talk set etiquette. I found a range of experiences on being the writer on the set. With Go, I was at the monitor for every shot. I had the contacts on, the little ear pieces on. We had a little hand-held monitor so if I needed to walk away from the camera, I could see what they were setting up and run back if something was not going to work right.

With those, I could always talk directly to Doug, and I had to talk directly to Doug because the camera was on his shoulder. So there really were no private conversations. Like I had to come up to him and say like, “What Sarah did was great. It’s going to be a problem when we cut to this next thing here, because we’re setting the expectation…” I would try to give a note that both validated what just happened, but also explain why I was coming up and talking to him. So that he could then turn to Sarah and say like, “Yeah, what he just said,” and shoot the next take.

Other cases, like on Big Fish, first day of shooting we’re in Montgomery, Alabama. Tim picked a really easy day of stuff to shoot, which is a smart choice. A really simple thing where Billy Crudup is coming to talk with Jessica Lange.

So I’m watching on the monitor, and I see one little thing, “Oh, I should tell Tim that, that there’s a little moment, opportunity there.” I go up, I pull him aside, it’s like, “Tim, that was great what she just did. But there’s also the chance here when he’s there, and there might be a little moment here.” And I could see like these garage doors go down in front of his eyes.

Craig: [laughs]

John: I realized, this is not going to be the kind of set relationship we have. He doesn’t want me to be chumming with those notes, and it’s a very good idea for me to go back to Los Angeles.

Craig: [laughs]

John: There wasn’t a problem. There wasn’t a disagreement, there wasn’t anything like that. But that wasn’t the way he wanted to work, and I wasn’t going to be able to have a lot of input on the choices made on the set.

Craig: Well, surprise surprise, the directors are as different to each other as we are to each other. I mean, David Zucker and I essentially would co-direct. We sat together at the monitor — I don’t think we would ever move on unless we both agreed to move on. Occasionally, he wouldn’t even care if I gave notes to the actors. We walked through the setups together in the morning. We set the blocking together. We very much worked hand-in-hand.

Not at all the case with Todd Phillips, who is a very different kind of director, and certainly a more traditional one. Todd is the captain of the set 100 percent. As he’s pointed out, I think the way he’s put it is, “I don’t need you to be here.” [laughs] “I’ve made plenty of movies without you. That said, if you’d like to be here, it could be helpful.”

So I take that to heart. I mean, I don’t think I maybe…With that relationship, it’s really just about picking those moments where you think I’m going to just say, “Okay, this is something that matters to me that’s really important, and I’m going to share that with him.” Either he’s going to go, “Shut up, stupid,” or, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” But I pick those moments carefully and few and far between. Frankly, he’s pretty good at what he does, and he’s the sort of very independent director.

One thing that I want to make clear about directing: so much of it has to do with confidence. You need to feel confident in your own vision. Some directors, their confidence goes up the more direct and obvious help they get. Other directors, their confidence goes down.

I understand that. I’m kind of that way myself. You and I write on our own. We don’t have writing partners. I always feel like I should be able to move this boulder myself. So you have to learn which kind of director you’re dealing with. If it’s a director that likes moving the boulder himself, just pick your moments carefully, and don’t be a nudge.

John: One of the luxuries of being a writer on the set is if you’re watching the monitor and you see something that you can fix and you have a good idea, you can speak up and have a good idea. If you see something that’s not working and you don’t know how to fix it, you can just sit there and shut up.

Craig: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

John: Versus the director, who every time he calls, “Cut,” there’s 20 eyes looking at him saying, “Okay, what are we going to do next?” And the director has to figure out who he needs to talk with, about what needs to change, has to figure out what wasn’t working about that moment.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So giving that person the space to be able to do that and hopefully help where you can help him or her make that next thing happen.

Craig: That’s a good point. I will say — I don’t care who the director is — give them a little bit of time to find it. No director is going to get it on take one. Well, occasionally magic happens. But the point is, if you watch a take and you go, “Oh, no,” after watching that take, it’s for the same reason people would say, “Oh, no,” if they read the first thing you typed in the morning.

It’s beginning. The process is beginning. Don’t overreact. Don’t jump in there and say, “It’s not working. It’s not working.” Believe me, they know. Everybody knows. [laughs] It’s fine. You have all day to shoot two and a half pages, let the director do what they do.

The only times I ever discuss things with Todd, for instance, is if I thought, “Okay, here’s just another way of approaching this.” Someone once said, “Don’t ever show up with problems, just show up with solutions.” Give them an alternative. If they like it, they’ll do it.

John: Another director who I’ve worked with twice is McG. I love McG. McG can be frustrating at times, but I do love McG. What I love about McG is his energy and his passion. It’s hard to connect with McG on a story level often, but it’s easy to connect with him on a, “This is what it’s going to feel like,” level.

I think no matter who you’re talking with as a director, early on in those conversations, have conversations about tone and feeling, and what this is like to you. A lot of times you end up watching other movies with directors or talking about references. With Tim Burton I could just go into his office, and he’ll have water-color painted a lot of scenes from the script. It says, “Okay, I get what this world is like as he sees it.”

Like for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was very specific about a lot of the stuff in it, but like the Oompa-Loompas, how is he going to do the Oompa-Loompas? Then you go into his office, and you see he has this scale drawing of what the Oompa-Loompas are like standing next to all the different characters. You can just see everybody in their wardrobe, it’s like, “Oh, okay. I get what this movie is like to Tim.” Then every other conversation I have can be about supporting that vision of how he sees the world of Willy Wonka versus what I might have had in my head originally.

Craig: That’s a good way in with directors who aren’t also prominently screenwriters. In working with David and Todd, I’m working with writers, because they’re screenwriters in their own right. That, actually, also dramatically changes the way you approach that relationship. Because with both of those guys, I’ve been writing partners.

So I don’t have to do quite as much ambassadorship with the script to them because we all wrote it together. That also takes an enormous burden off of me — or I guess not even a burden, because there’s no burden on me, it’s just a worry that I don’t have to have. Because the truth is I know that they actually sat here and worked through this scene with me. We made it together. They’ve seen it in their heads. It makes sense to them. That’s a big relief.

John: It’s great when you have that opportunity to work with a writer-director who actually can generally understand the writing process on that. I think there’s a misconception that because of the perils of auteur theory is that all directors really come from a place of story, and understand story, and have a great grasp of what the narrative of something is. A lot of them don’t.

Some of the best directors, I think, are the ones who are very upfront about that’s not their strongest suit. Just like we don’t expect every director to be a master of cinematography, we don’t expect every director to be a master of visual effects. There are some who are great at figuring out all the pieces of a story and how to move from the beginning to the end, and there’s others who are really good at getting that story up onto the screen. Recognizing which kind of director you are working with early on is crucial with that.

One of the places where I feel like I think I’m good at, which I think a lot of screenwriters will tend to be good at once they have some experience with it, is editing. We’re often the right people to come into the editing room after there’s a director’s first cut to help talk through, “This is what’s not working, and this is what we may want to talk about changing.”

We talked about that first test screening, which is just incredibly nerve-wracking. Especially if you’re the director, of course, because you’ve been staring at this thing on an Avid screen for eight weeks, 12 weeks, trying to get things to work, and you have no idea if it actually works.

As a screenwriter, you’re watching it a lot of times blind. You just don’t know what movie it is that they ended up making. Where I’ve been most helpful to directors, I think, honestly, is being that first set of notes after the test screening and saying like, “These are the things that were awesome. These are the things that worked great. These are the things we had challenges with, and here are some ways we might want to talk about changing them.” Being that first person with the best notes is a helpful role for a screenwriter, I think.

Craig: I totally agree. To that end, here’s just a bit of practical advice. If you want to be a screenwriter that collaborates with filmmakers beyond just, “Congrats, we’re making your movie. See you at the premier,” you need to understand the process of editing. You can’t approach it like you’re just sitting there watching a show going, “I don’t know. I didn’t get this part,” or, “Why…it’s just boring here.”

You have to understand how editing works, and you have to be able to speak the language of editing. Because ultimately, you need to — if you’re going to give advice, and it’s going to be a solution-oriented advice — you need to be able to say, “In this scene, how about just cutting the head” “How about taking this much off, and just keeping that line there?” “I know that you might have a problem with that because let’s say they’ve been talking up to that line and it’s all one shot, but do you have any coverage where you can establish them quietly and then just go in for that line?”

If you can talk like that, then your advice is usable, and it’s also clinical. Because remember, the director is going to be about as fragile as a human can be when they’re showing that cut for the first time. It’s truly nerve-wracking. So try and get some kind of handle on how editing actually works.

The other thing I was going to add was just when you were talking about directors who write and don’t write, comedy, it’s very rare — I don’t know why, it’s just the way it is — I don’t know any successful comedy, or repeatedly successful comedy directors, that don’t write. I don’t know if you can direct comedy if you don’t write. I’m not sure you can.

John: I’m sure if we spent a few minutes on that we’d find some really good directors who aren’t writers, but all of my favorite comedies I can think of have writer-directors behind them.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, if you look at the guys doing it now, Phillips, Apatow…I think Dobkin writes. Dobkin may be an example, actually. Because Wedding Crashers is awesome. I don’t know if he writes.

John: I don’t perceive him as being a writer.

Craig: Yeah, well, then maybe I’m wrong.

John: [noises]

Craig: Look at that. There you go. [laughs] Mazin’s wrong again.

John: We’re out about time, but let’s talk through some general advice for screenwriters dealing with directors. First off, the question of when a director becomes involved. Like, I may come on board this project which it’s the director’s idea. So I would be coming in, working very closely in collaboration with him, which can be really great and exciting, but can also be exhausting, because you feel him trying to shoot the movie while it’s still being —

Craig: Yeah, yeah.

John: — while it’s still at a very raw state. It can be great because it can be a really good collaboration. It could just take a lot of time. More often, you will have written something, and now a director comes on board. Your responsibility is to have a meeting of the minds where you can instill what was going on in your head to him or her, and she can communicate back to you like what she sees for the project.

That’s where I’m at right now with Susan Stroman on Big Fish, where I’ve had now 12 years to work with Big Fish in various forms, and she has to process what I’ve done and pull out of me what she needs to make it on the stage.

Craig: Yeah. If the director isn’t writing with you, I think it’s best to give yourself a little distance. Just like they need to get takes one through three in before anybody starts yapping in their ear, I feel like the writer needs some space to just write the script.

So if the director’s not writing, as long as everybody is connected on the vision and the rough idea of what the story is, you just…Yeah, it’s not a good idea to have them over your shoulder while you’re doing it. Look, even editors get to do an assembly.

John: Yeah. They give everyone a chance.

Craig: Everybody needs their shot. Yeah.

John: As you get closer to production, you have to accept the fact that you are going to become another department. Whatever close, one-on-one relationship you have with the director, it’s going to be a little bit more distant just because his or her time is going to be divided between a bunch of different people who need answers out of him — line producers, ADs, every department head wants as much time as they can possibly get.

So hopefully most of the big issues have been solved. Hopefully you feel like you really have a movie. If you get a chance to do a table reading, that’s awesome, because it’s the only way you’ll ever know that the actors read the script at least once. [laughs]

Craig: Well, and it’s your chance, too, to kind of…It’s your last shot at rewriting before they start shooting.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Start to hear what works and what doesn’t.

John: And if there’s lines that an actor literally can’t say, you have to change them. You can’t make an actor say a line that he or she doesn’t understand.

Craig: Yeah. They’re human beings. Use your actors to the best of their abilities. They’re all unique, and they’re there because they can do something we can’t, so make the best use of them. You’re right, as you approach production, understand that you’re a department, but be the best department. Be the department that the director turns to at the beginning of the day and the end of the day. Be the safe port in the storm.

You are technically — not technically. If you do it right, you’re really the only person that they can look at and say, “You and I both get this. Everybody else is looking like the blind men at the elephant. They’re feeling the piece of the elephant they feel, you and I can see the movie.” Be that person.

John: Sometimes I’ll have a producer on set who actually has the whole movie in his or her head, but more often, you’re going to be the only person around who has a understanding of what the whole story is, and how this little piece fits into the whole bigger piece.

Craig: That’s right.

John: The classic stories are always like the director decides to, “Oh, I really like that actress. Let’s throw her into this scene, just in the background.” The screenwriter says, “No, no, you don’t remember! She’s already dead!” A lot of times you are that person who remembers that. There’s a script supervisor who’s there, and his or her job is to check for some things like that, but you’re the person who remembers why everything is the way something is.

Craig: Yeah. I love script supervisors, but they’re not narrative supervisors. That’s the difference. They’re supervising the day’s work on the page and making sure that when you shoot things out of sequence, “Okay. Show me the Polaroid of what they look like in the scene before so I can make sure they match up.”

John: “Coffee cup right hand, coffee cup left hand.”

Craig: Yeah. Exactly. “You should be looking camera left and not camera right.” But we are the ones that technically we should know the narrative better than anybody.

John: We’re the story supervisors.

Craig: So to speak, yeah.

John: Then I would say, whatever your function is on the set, you’ll go away for a while, and the director will do his or her cut. You’ll get a chance to see it, and that’s hopefully a time where you can be a real help and a real ally to the director in getting the best version of this movie done. Because you had your shot at making the movie when you wrote the script, he has his shot shooting it and doing that first cut, and that final product is what you’re pushing to.

You’re always trying to write a movie, you weren’t trying to write a script.

Craig: Exactly, exactly. So just let the document go. Once the cameras are rolling, let it go. Every morning you take that piece of paper, the two and a half or three pieces of paper, look at them, love them, and then say goodbye to them. Because by the end of the day, they’re just paper, and now it’s movie. So service the movie.

John: Definitely.

Craig: Great. Before we go, can we say thank you to everybody for making us the number one film and TV non-music or — no, non-video podcast on iTunes? Is that right?

John: That’s pretty great. I think it’s also great that if you actually divide the categories down small enough, like pretty much everything is the star of its own list.

Craig: Right. We’re the top you and me podcast in the world.

John: That’s pretty amazing.

Craig: And like almost right off the bat.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Almost.

John: So thank you, Craig. A good conversation about directors.

Craig: Thank you, John. I was enlightened.

John: All right. We’ll see everybody next time.

Craig: See you next time, guys.

John: Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/kids-cards-whiteboards-and-outlines).

**John August:** Hello, and welcome to another installment of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Hello, Craig.

**Craig Mazin:** Hello, John.

**John:** That’s Craig Mazin, my name is John August. This is our third installment of the show. We are now listed on iTunes, which is a feeling of kind of legitimacy.

**Craig:** Yeah, we are big time now. You know in my day, podcasts were carved into wax disks and sold.

**John:** And really it was the job of the fastest young man in the village to carry those wax disks from one village to the next village, and all that sort of noble tradition has really gone away since we grew up.

**Craig:** Yeah, you and I grew up in the 1500s in England.

**John:** Yeah, talk about the 1500s. My daughter has no sense of history whatsoever because kids aren’t born with that — they don’t realize that the world existed before they were born — and I remember showing her Curious George, one of the stories. Curious George is at the hospital and he climbs on this record player and starts spinning around, it’s like a merry-go-round and he falls off the record player.

**Craig:** Yeah, I remember that one.

**John:** And my daughter thought that was great and I am like, “Do you know what that thing is he climbed on?” She had no idea. “It plays music.” She is like “No, it doesn’t play music.”

**Craig:** Right. Why would it, it seems ridiculous.

**John:** So that was one of the charming good things about having a kid, but we have a follow-up question from last week and so I thought we would talk about it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I wanted to ask you about something that was touched upon by you and Craig during the last podcast on how to find a manager or agent. In the opening, you both mentioned that having children can be difficult for a screenwriter and at one point you even humorously stated that ‘children are the death of all screenwriters.’ You have got me thinking and I was wondering if you could elaborate on your experiences as a screenwriter before and after having your kid.”

He goes on to say that he and his wife are hoping to have children and —

**Craig:** Oh good, I thought they may be contemplating killing their children.

**John:** Hopefully yes, so it’s a pre-father wanting to have our experience as a screenwriter with and without kids, so what’s different about having kids than not having kids as a screenwriter?

**Craig:** Well, I suppose this should sort of go without saying, but having kids is a far more impressive achievement than writing a screenplay, and creating a human being is the most creative thing you can do. That comes first.

I mean, don’t get us wrong. We are not advising you to not have children. You should have children, but certainly when you have a kid, your energies and your tensions are divided. You are now living to support another person and they have their own demands of your time.

And I think we all walk around with a kind of tape playing, especially screenwriters. I mean if you are a screenwriter you have written at some point in your career a movie where the main character is a dad who is not spending enough time with his kids.

So that’s constantly playing in the back of your head as you deal with your own kids. And so you just don’t want to be a bad dad, you want to be a good guy, you want to spend time with your kids and you love them. And it just so happens that when you do all that stuff, sometimes you find yourself tired and kind of creatively exhausted and you don’t want to do it.

**John:** Screenwriting is inherently kind of a selfish activity because you are going off by yourself and insisting on some form of quiet time to just be staring at your computer and writing these things. And that works really well through a lot of your 20s where you can basically be selfish and you can sort of go off or you can stay up all night working on a draft because you are inspired to work all night. And with a kid, you just can’t do that.

If you pull an all-nighter, you have ruined the next day, and whereas in your pre-child days you could just do a cover and go be a zombie all day, if you actually have to get your kid off to school in the morning that becomes much more challenging.

**Craig:** Yeah. And there is all these opportunities for procrastination. I mean I love — my son plays baseball — I love going to his baseball practices and his baseball games and getting him ready for baseball and taking him to baseball lessons and I do love all of that. It’s also fantastic procrastination, but I get to procrastinate under the guise of being the best dad ever. Just very seductive.

**John:** Yeah. We also have the luxury and curse of having very little structured time, so at any given moment we probably could be doing parenting things. So there is no reason why you couldn’t drop off your kid at school every day and pick him up every day and be a room parent and be doing all those things except for the fact that you are supposed to be writing and being creative. So I definitely want to come down on the pro-child side, but it definitely is a huge adjustment.

And I find that I have to be much more rigorous about, this is the time when I’m writing, this is the time when the door is shut. When the door is shut, she is not allowed to come out and bother me because this is the time I’m doing that. And other times during the day where I really can go in and play, I’ll go in and play.

**Craig:** Yeah, I have an office that’s about 15 minutes from my house. And that’s made a big difference. I used to have, we have a little log cabin on my property that was built there way back in the old days. The guy who used to live there, I guess he wanted to gamble, and his wife wouldn’t let him gamble in the house, so he built a cabin. He’s a cool guy.

And so I used to have my office back there. And my son would just wander in, fling the door open, fling the bathroom door open, sit down, and start using the toilet with the door open while talking to me while I was writing. That was when it occurred to me that — he was young; I don’t want to give the impression that he’s 19, and he does that — and I realized I had to get an office. And I do feel like, if you have kids at home, there’s some kind of physical separation has to — I mean you have like a little, some kind of back house or something, right?

**John:** Yeah, so we built a room over the garage. And so for the first three-and-a-half years of my daughter’s life, she didn’t understand that when I went off to work, I was actually just going up 20 steps. And so I’d make the big show, like, going off to work. So sometimes she’d realize, oh, he forgot to take his car. But she didn’t put it all together. And then eventually one day she discovered, oh, he’s actually right out there.

And she had constructed some alternate narrative about why my assistant, who at that time was Matt, was working downstairs. He was just like a guy who was there sometimes. She didn’t understand that he worked for me, that he worked for us. He was just a guy who sat at a computer out there sometimes. So she would see him, but not understand that I was right upstairs, because I was being quiet.

**Craig:** Yeah. I tell people, if I meet somebody who’s right out of college, and they want to be a screenwriter, I’ll say, look, here’s the good news and the bad news. The good news is, I’m better at this than you are just because I’ve been doing it longer, even if you’re the greatest screenwriter in the world, still, I’ve just done it so often and I’ve navigated the system so often, I’m just, I have the benefit of that experience. And you just don’t have it yet and it’s going to take you time to get it.

On the plus side, you’re way less tired than I am. You should be able to write three screenplays for every one screenplay I write.

**John:** Yeah. You have, in your youth, in your 20s, you have, just, energy. You can just keep going. You have that sort of un-killable serial-killer-from-a-movie kind of quality where you can dust yourself off and keep going. And your energy does flag a bit when you’re trying to raise a kid as well.

With time and experience and craft, my first drafts are much better than my first drafts were when I was in my 20s. I really know how to do it now. So I don’t have to pull as many all-nighters because I can just get stuff done the right way the first time more often. But it’s a very different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, have the kid, but…

**John:** Have the kid, yeah.

**Craig:** …But sorry, it’s going to put a crimp in. By the way, there’s a few other things it puts a crimp in. So add screenwriting to a long list.

**John:** Let’s go on and talk about our main topic today, which is outlining. We’ve been talking about WGA politics. We’ve been talking about career-y kind of stuff. But I want to talk really more, sort of words on the page, and sort of the daily thing of writing that screenwriters are supposed to theoretically be doing. And outlining is an important part of that.

And by outlining I mean it in a very general sense, all the sort of pre-planning you do about what’s going to happen in your script before you actually start, or even while you’re writing your screenplay. So it’s not the scene work, but the other work that doesn’t look like a screenplay but ends up becoming important for figuring out what’s happening in your story, when it’s happening, and what’s going on.

How do you start? Are you a whiteboard person, are you an index card person? How do you start beating out a story?

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m kind of an index card person. And I say kind of an index card person, because I feel like there’s actually a step before the index card person. I mean really, I’m a shower person. In thinking about it, all the fundamental breakthroughs that occur usually happen because I’m standing in the shower for 20 minutes thinking. And I don’t know why. That’s just where it happens, mostly.

**John:** That’s exactly where it happens for me, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. Shower. I don’t know, there’s something about that. And it’s sort of my little sacred place where no one can come in, and I’m alone, and I can just let my mind wander. And ideally I like to try to figure out the biggest things.

Beyond the idea of the movie, what does this main character want? What is the dramatic argument of the movie, the theme, whatever you want to call it, and what would be the most interesting story to kind of get this person from where they are to where they need to be? And I just start thinking there. But yeah, eventually I’d go to note cards.

**John:** The main ways I see screenwriters breaking stories is either index cards where each index card has one or two, or maybe it’s up to 10 words, that describe an important beat of the story. So, it’s not necessarily a scene, but it’s a thing that happened. So, if you write an action movie, it would be an action set piece. If it were a thriller, it might be a major reversal. So, some way of breaking down the important moments of your screenplay.

And those could be, you might have 30 cards for a movie, you might have 10 cards for a movie, you might have 100 cards for a movie. If you have 100 cards for a movie, you’re probably making too many index cards.

**Craig:** Too many cards.

**John:** Too many cards. But cards, here’s what I’ll say that’s good about cards is that it’s very easy to take up a beat and move it someplace else, and sort of lay them all out on a table and figure out how stuff works. A lot of people like to tape them up on the wall, or use Post-It Notes. When I do index cards — and I don’t always do index cards — I really like to have a big, flat table that it’s just much easier to sort of move them around. And, if you’re having to write with somebody, the table is good, because you can both stand there and take a look at this map that you’ve laid out. It’s like, this is how we would go through it. So, that’s index cards.

You can also do different colors for different kinds of beats. So, if you have action beats that are always on red cards…

**Craig:** Yeah, some people — and they color code them for the characters, so you can see, I haven’t been with this character in a long time.

Lately, what I’ve been doing is kind of short-circuiting the card thing entirely, and actually just recording my voice. I’ll sit with my assistant, and I just start talking through what I want to do. And I record it, and in talking, just as in the act, the physical act of writing, you can start writing.

There’s something about talking it through, where you can arrive at things, it unlocks you a little bit. The enemy of writing is silence, and inactivity. So, talking it out loud seems to be a big help. Now, I’ll take that, she’ll sort of take everything that I’ve recorded, summarize out the crap where you know, I’ll say, “You know what, not that — this,” and then she puts it into Microsoft Word and now I have an actual outline outline.

**John:** And then 20 years from now it’ll be like The Raiders of Lost Ark sessions, and someone will unearth the original audio and the original transcripts, and say, like, “Wow, that is how the Hangover III got figured out.”

**Craig:** Right. Except the opposite of that, in terms of its interest to people. Like, “Wow, this is the least interesting recording of notes ever.”

**John:** And that’s one thing I was using more when I was doing TV shows is the whiteboard. And the whiteboard is sort of ubiquitous in television-land as you’re figuring out your episode. You might be figuring out your season arcs, and you’re really figuring out this given episode, what’s happening in your episode. Generally, if you’re writing as a room, or all the writers in the room are trying to figure out how to do stuff, they’re all staring at one whiteboard, and they have everything marked down in terms of this is what’s happening.

Usually one or two people are empowered with the ability to write stuff on the whiteboard, but others…actual, just simple screenwriters use it too. I know Joss Whedon is a big whiteboard fan. You feel free to sort of erase and make a mess on a whiteboard in ways that you might not if you were doing note cards. Like oh, I have to rip up this note card and do it again. On a whiteboard, everything is sort of possible. And you can sort of scribble and draw arrows, and move stuff around.

**Craig:** It just seems like it would get so messy. Constantly erasing and doing and erasing and doing. Because I like to — with note cards, I use a bulletin board and thumbtacks, and obviously this is all academic, people should do whatever they want, but I like that I can, with my thing lately, is that I can make two columns. Because actually, I’m like, I don’t know why, I’m one of the few people in the world that makes the columns go columnar instead of rows. I don’t go across, I go up and down. So, as the Act One proceeds, it starts at the top of the board and slowly goes down.

And then — oh, you do that too? Oh, okay. So, that’s … so, I have one column that’s whatever the scenes are, and then to the left of that, I do a column and next to each scene, I have a card that sort of explaining why that scene matters. What is the purpose of the scene, what is the character intention. How is the story actually advanced in a way that has nothing to do with the plot, but the relationship between the characters, or the internal life of the character, and I found that that’s really useful, because it forces me to always think, “What is the point?”

You know, it’s one thing to sort of say, “I have to get from here to here, let’s have a big chase.” Okay. Well now, how could that chase actually be purposeful for advancing the character ball. And I don’t know how you’d fit all that crap onto a whiteboard.

**John:** It sounds like you’re writing a lot more information on each of those beats right from the very start. Let’s say, you were working on something that’s happening at the end of the first act. So, you have an idea for what the action of that is, and you’re sort of — the idea of the location: there’s going to be a big event at a carnival. So does your card say carnival, and then you have a second card that has all the detailed information about what’s happening there?

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I would do one card that says “Carnival — Maxwell realizes that the bottle toss game is rigged.” And then next to that I would put a card that says “Maxwell realizes that he should never have trusted So-And-So. He should have been listening to So-And-So all along; she was right.” So this way, I understand, it’s sort of like one column is what, and one column is why.

**John:** That does make sense. It’s a lot more detail than I ever got, and I would ever get into with cards. I’m always the person with a Sharpie, and I write three words on a card.

**Craig:** Oh, Okay. I see.

**John:** So, it’s a very different way of going about it. And I’ve seen whiteboards where they really do kind of get into that kind of detailed information, and so there will be a headline in blue marker, and then detailed stuff below it and you have to really squint to see sort of what’s in there.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it’ll be one of the assistant’s jobs — like the writers’ assistant’s job — is to take iPhone snapshots of all the boards at the end of the day, and transcribe those as notes.

**Craig:** What I’ve been doing lately is having my assistant actually write the content of the note card on a little Word template with some sort of Sharpie-ish font. And then we can print them. And then if we want to change something, you know, I can just scribble on the card, or I can just ask her to change it, and then she can change it and print it again. Because, you know, we’ve sort of all caught up.

But, the truth is, whatever — I mean, this is my whole thing about outlining: for everybody who is sort of wondering, “Should I do it?” Listen: however you want to outline, outline. If you want to outline in great detail or less detail, it doesn’t matter. But I do think it’s really important to at least approach writing with more than just, “Okay, I have an image of a woman walking through a forest. Fade in: Forest — Morning.” These are how bad screenplays are written.

**John:** I will agree with you that many bad screenplays are written with just like, I have this one kind of idea, and no idea how to extrapolate from it. What I will say is that a lot of the screenplays where I’ve had the most detailed outlines, I’ve been most frustrated by the final results, and that I kind of got sandwiched in by the outline. And so some of my very, very favorite stuff I’ve written never had that level of detail or thought. So, some of them feel very organic because literally, it was like, it’s what the movie wanted to do next, versus what I as the author said should happen next.

**Craig:** Right. And I do agree that, I guess the way I would put it is this: You should always feel free to ignore your outline. But if all you get from your outline process is the beginning, the middle and the end, then I think you’ve already done your job. That’s … you should have some sense that you know roughly where you’re going. And if you want to play discover as you go, absolutely.

**John:** I’ll usually start writing the first 10 or 15 pages of a script. Then I’ll jump forward and write some stuff in the middle, and I’ll always try to write the last 10 pages of the script pretty early on in the process. Because I find that I have a lot of enthusiasm when I start a project, and part of the reason why I think that people’s first acts of screenplays tend to be so good is they have a lot of enthusiasm, and also they went back and re-wrote those first act of 30 pages a lot.

But, I have a lot of enthusiasm. I have a lot of excitement about this project. And, as I get near the end, I just have a desire to get the damn thing finished.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, I end up just kind of racing through the end, and not this last 10 pages, would otherwise not be written with the detail and care that they might be written with otherwise. So, by really focusing on those last 10 pages quite early on, I get a good sense of … it lets me write towards the middle, and it also makes that ending as rewarding as I think it could be.

A lot of times, I’ll get through this script, ultimately I’ll have to rewrite those last 10 pages.

**Craig:** Right:

**John:** But at least I knew where I was headed.

**Craig:** I don’t do that. I’m definitely a very linear kind of guy. In fact, I really can’t leap ahead. If I arrive in a spot where I feel like something’s wrong, I never just leap past it, I always sort of go back and try and figure out where this went wrong, because I sort of feel like — at least from my experience — whatever the little problem is now, it’s just going to get bigger and bigger and it’s just going to wobble more and more and more. So, for me, I just write really religiously in the order of the script.

But, I have to know what the ending is, so I guess that’s why I … in a way, I’m doing what you’re doing with my expanded note cards, I guess. Because that is me, sort of caring about the ending. I always know exactly what the ending is. If I don’t know what the ending is, I’m dead.

**John:** I’ll at least have a beat sheet, and by beat sheet, I mean, like, these are the main things that happened in the story, and sometimes I’ll do that as a spreadsheet document just so I can have neat columns and line stuff up. And one of the things I’ll do with the columns, is — especially if a movie has a lot of characters in it — I’ll keep note of which characters are in which scenes. I found this especially helpful for TV, in that you want to make sure that you’re really using your cast smartly.

So for like a TV pilot that I’m writing, I want to see: Where did I introduce this character? Did I get them in before this act break or after this act break? And so an outline that shows, “These are my scenes, this is where I think the act breaks are” — which in TV are really hard act breaks — “and this is where my characters are showing up,” is very important, especially in a pilot where you’re really introducing all these characters for the first time.

When Jordan Mechner and I were doing the Ops pilot, we would send back and forth a spreadsheet to really show and we could sign off like “You do scene 23 and I’ll do scene 36,” and pass off that way.

**Craig:** That’s how I worked with Scot and Todd on Hangover II. We sort of would assign chunks, because we knew what those chunks were supposed to accomplish. Then you swap them.

That’s the other thing: if you’re working with a partner, I don’t know how you can avoid outlining unless you’re literally sitting side by side playing the piano together, which is very strange to me.

**John:** There are some writers who do work literally side by side. I met a writing team — I can’t remember which one now — that they always write in the room together. And they essentially just have one computer that’s being shared with two monitors.

They’re a comedy team, so they have to write facing each other so they can see each other, but they’re facing their own screen. And either one of them has full control over the screen at any time.

**Craig:** That is weird.

**John:** Yeah, that feels like a three-legged race to me. But everyone works differently.

**Craig:** Yeah, whatever works.

**John:** Derek Haas and Michael Brandt, friends of ours, are never in the room together. One of them works on a draft and sends it to the other person who writes it, so 100 different ways to work.

**Craig:** Yeah, whatever works for you.

**John:** The outline that we’re talking about so far is really outlining for your own purpose. But sometimes you’re required to share those things with other people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s frustrating.

**Craig:** I kind of don’t. To be honest with you, I just don’t. I always say “Look, I have an outline and it’s in my own weird reverse Polish notation and you wouldn’t understand it.” I’m like “I wrote it in reverse mirror writing.”

So I’m happy to talk through what I’ve come up with. I always feel like they deserve that much, but I don’t hand out outlines.

**John:** I’ve generally avoided them, avoided handing in any sort of outline. But on a recent project with a director, it became really the only way to communicate with him was to say like, “This is really what’s happening.” And because he wasn’t available, I couldn’t give him a written document. There was just no way to get feedback on what was going on.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s tough because you feel like you’re doing writing and you’re spending a lot of time writing for someone else’s ability to interpret what it is you’re trying to do. And so you end up having to, sometimes, generate, you know…

**Craig:** It’s busy work, a little bit.

**John:** It’s busy work, that you’re generating false details that might not really be the way you’d approach that scene when you really get to it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you’re doing it so they can understand. And of course, the unfortunate aspect is they always have that outline. So if you vary from that outline it’s not going to be what they expect. And maybe they’ll love what you did that’s different, but if they don’t love it they’ll be able to point back to something you wrote before and say “Well, I thought this worked really well.”

**Craig:** Well, when you’re dealing with a director I feel a little different about it because theoretically they are sort of more closely aligned with some narrative sensibility and hopefully they can work through your outline with you.

I will say there’s one great benefit to sharing, even if you don’t give a document but you talk through a story. One of the great benefits is everybody does agree on it, or hopefully has agreed on it. And people can change their minds. But there’s a difference between, “You know what? We changed our mind,” and, “We didn’t expect that and we hate it.”

And if everybody agrees that it should go this way and you deliver that and they say “Okay, now that we’ve read it I think we all together made a mistake,” that’s a very different conversation than “What is this? What did you do? Why did you write it this way?”

And so I like to make sure everybody is on the same page. And if you do change something significantly, let people know. Just say “You know what? I think I’m going to change this significantly and here is why.” Get them on board before they read it and reduce the shock factor.

**John:** I should also…what’s the opposite of preface? I should post-note this last part of the conversation and say this is very much feature screen writing that we’re talking now. In television a lot of times you really do have to write out an outline that a bunch of people are going to read and give notes on and approve or not approve.

And it’s really maddening if you’re coming from a feature perspective because you’re used to being able to have a wider range of options ahead of you. But because of the schedule of American television at least, a lot of decisions get made based on outline level. And so the network and the studio could come back and say just basically throw out your next three episodes’ outlines, and you’re back to square one.

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually understand that. I mean, you’ve got so many episodes you have to produce, even if you…just now from the network side, just as a show runner, you have a staff, you have people, you have to assign tasks to them, if somebody’s outline isn’t quite right, and you know that you need a little extra help with the script that is right. You just need to know what the stories are, just to map out the season. Even just that you know you don’t have three action-y stories in a row if you have the kind of show that sort of goes back and forth.

I remember, Star Trek, I liked The Next Generation. I watched a lot of those. And there were some that were sort of war episodes, and there were some that were kind of science-y episodes, and then there were ones that about character. And I could see where you wouldn’t want three of any particular kind in a row.

**John:** Absolutely. I’ve just been watching the most recent series of Torchwood: Miracle Day — it’s the American BBC collaboration on it — which has been really fascinating. And it’s because it’s only a 10 episode order, I find myself doing things that’s not quite really fair. Which is saying, well, they knew there were only these 10 episodes, so they could have done things a lot differently.

And 10 episodes is such a weird in-betweener. Because it’s not like…if it’s six episodes, then clearly they could pre-write the whole thing, and block shoot it, and do sorts of special things. At 10 episodes, you’re kind of making a real TV show. You’re probably into production while you’re still writing the next ones, so you’re not quite sure what’s going to be working and what’s not going to be working. I have this temptation to write a blog post that’s sort of like, takes a look at everything that actually happened over the course of the season, and sort of proposes a different way of blocking it out.

Because, like all TV shows, you have an instinct about sort of when you’re going to make reveals of certain key information, and this felt like they missed some really good opportunities, too, or they delayed a little too long in revealing certain key information.

**Craig:** Hopefully, we’ll get our first angry response from the show Torchwood.

**John:** That’d be great, because I enjoy Torchwood, and I have enjoyed watching it. But it certainly had some ups and some downs.

**Craig:** So the quote is “John August enjoys highly flawed series Torchwood.”

**John:** Oh, I love highly flawed series. I am the only person who will confess to watch every episode of V, the remake of V.

**Craig:** The new V. Because I saw the old V, and the old V was awesome.

**John:** The old V was so good. With its barely concealed Nazi insignia.

**Craig:** I think at some point they stopped even trying to conceal it.

**John:** It’s just kind of gray.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah, and Diana…and so, the challenge, of course, with the new V, is that they had me, because first of all, it was V, because V is fundamentally great. And Elizabeth Mitchell from Lost, she’s some sort of witch. I cannot not watch her. So, she could — I’ve said it before — she could just be boiling water all episode, I’d happily watch 60 minutes of that. It’s terrible.

**Craig:** I’m not — I haven’t seen any Torchwood. I’m going to, just as a counterpoint here and for the creators and writers of Torchwood, I think you guys did a fantastic job. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

**John:** Trust me, Craig literally doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

**Craig:** I literally don’t know what he’s talking about. I did not know there was a show called Torchwood. [laughs] So, there you go. I have the television-watching habits of a 90 year old woman.

**John:** Or, a father in his early 40’s.

**Craig:** That’s right. So I can tell you all about Phineas and Ferb and Adventure Time and cool shows like that.

**John:** All right. So, I think we’ve discussed the hell out of outlines.

So, outlines, as a summary and bullet point: Many ways to do it, the most common being index cards or whiteboards for generating the stuff of outlines. A lot of times, they’re a written document. You know, you could do it in a sort of spreadsheet-y format, you can do it as a just a text document. It’s whatever helps you sort of figure out and remember how you’re supposed to get through a story.

The one point I did sort of want to make, is — because I am a lot more sort of on the fly, off the cuff sort of changing stuff as I go along — as I finish a day’s work, I’ll always be that like, these are the next three scenes that happen. Because sometimes those aren’t what I had originally planned, but as I’m writing scenes, I have a very good sense of where I want to go next in this story, so I’ll always leave myself at the end of the day with some breadcrumbs for like, this is the trail of what happens next.

**Craig:** I usually, when I finish writing for the day, I curl up in a little ball and cry.

**John:** That’s another equally valid choice.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** And thank you, Craig.

**Craig:** And we’ll see you guys next time on Scriptnotes.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-episode-2).

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

**CRAIG MAZIN:** And I’m Craig Mazin.

**JOHN:** And here we are recording another podcast. The topic of Scriptnotes is really things that would be interesting to screenwriters, so screenwriting, for example, film making, the film industry. What else are we going to talk about?

**CRAIG:** Napping, video games, procrastination, substance abuse. [laughs] Just running down the stuff that I think of when I think of screenwriters.

**JOHN:** At some point I think we need to have a podcast that talks about why you always see screenwriters’ careers falling off after 40, and it’s because of children.

**CRAIG:** Yeah.

**JOHN:** Children are the death of all screenwriters.

**CRAIG:** God, it’s true. My kids are just killing me. You basically replace yourself. It’s like nature knows that you’re obsolete.

**JOHN:** Yeah, it’s a very sad thing. You always wonder why do writers have such great careers in their 20s, and they really achieve stuff in their 30s, and then at 40, it’s just a wall. It’s not really ageism, it’s children.

**CRAIG:** Children. And I have two of them, John. Two.

**JOHN:** I have one child. Kids are great, kids are amazing, kids are awesome, but they really do sap it out of you.

**CRAIG:** They do. It’s amazing how nature creates them to be so lovable and sweet so you almost don’t even mind it as they dig your soul out and your energy with a spoon and just eat it in front of you, and slowly choke your life out.

[laughter]

Just kind of love them for it.

**JOHN:** It’s the sunken costs. You spend the first three years of their life trying to keep them alive and afterwards you’re like, “Oh, I’ve kept them alive,” and you’ve built this love for them, so therefore you forgive them of everything that they have taken from you. You also forget all the things you used to have when you didn’t have children.

**CRAIG:** It’s amazing, I’m tired all the time.

**JOHN:** Yeah.

**CRAIG:** I honestly feel like I need Geritol or whatever the modern Geritol is [laughs] because…

**JOHN:** Wasn’t Geritol actually just alcohol or it was some sort of…

**CRAIG:** No, no, [laughs] but that’s a funny idea. Geritol was iron supplements. I always remember Geritol because the famous, or not really famous, Australian tennis player Evonne Goolagong would flack for Geritol and she would talk about her iron poor blood. Evonne Goolagong, I think she was half aboriginal and she had this funky accent. I just thought the name Goolagong plus iron poor blood was the funniest thing I’d ever heard as a kid.

**JOHN:** Yeah. You realize though that men don’t need more iron. It’s only women who need iron because they lose blood every month.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, and by the way, this podcast, I think we should regularly talk about menstruation.

**JOHN:** [laughs]

**CRAIG:** We should always talk five minutes to just get into any kind of gynecological issues.

**JOHN:** Yeah, because if there’s one thing we know even more than screenwriting, it’s women’s reproductive health.

**CRAIG:** I am so uterine. I’m uterine.

[laughter]

**JOHN:** I think we should focus on something we do know a lot about. We’re going to rip off the band-aid this week and we’re going to talk about something that in six years of running the blog, I’ve never actually written a post about this because it’s just such a dreadful morass of something to talk about.

**CRAIG:** It’s the worst, it’s the worst.

**JOHN:** It’s the worst, and at least 80 percent of the questions that come into the site are basically this question. You’re ready? I’m going to paraphrase the one question that I’ve heard my entire blogging career.

**CRAIG:** Just do it, do it fast.

**JOHN:** “How do I get an agent and/or manager?”

**CRAIG:** Oh, God. Now, let me just say, just so that anyone out there who is struggling to get an agent or manager doesn’t think that we are mocking your pain.

**JOHN:** No, not at all.

**CRAIG:** We’re not. Really what we are embracing is the pain of the question itself because here’s what’s difficult, guys. If you really get down to what John and I know about getting an agent or a manager, what we know is how we got an agent in 1995. [laughs] That’s what we specifically know.

Some of the pain of this question is it’s like a 15-year-old boy coming to you and saying, “How do I lose my virginity?” I could tell you how I lost my virginity [laughs] in 1986. I just don’t know if it’s going to be applicable to you.

**JOHN:** I think I do have a little bit more experience just because I’ve gone through generations of assistants who have become writers themselves and have gotten agents, so I’ve seen their process.

**CRAIG:** Good point.

**JOHN:** Yeah. It’s not identical to what my process was and a crucial thing for framing this whole discussion is that there’s not one way it happens. Just like everyone does lose their virginity in a slightly different way…

**CRAIG:** Right.

**JOHN:** …everyone gets to an agent or a manager in a slightly different way. We can only talk about general systems for success that people tend to find when they’re looking for agents and managers. I think we need to start by talking about what the hell an agent or a manager really is because they’re used interchangeably and they’re actually different things.

**CRAIG:** Very, very different, yes. There’s something called the Talent Representation Act or Talent Agency Act, I can’t remember quite the exact name, but it’s California state law. Basically, the law says if you want to represent artists of any kind as an agent and procure them employment — that’s the big one — you are regulated. You have to be licensed by the state, you cannot charge more than 10% of what they earn and you also can’t own any of it. For screenwriters what that translates into actually is that agents cannot produce your material because producing is a kind of an investment in the material itself.

That was the way it was for a long, long time. Then came the rise of managers who are not beholden to that law and they can, in fact, charge any percentage they want, and they can also produce your material. Technically, however, they are not allowed to procure you employment.

**JOHN:** Now, procure sounds like a very legal term and I assume that, obviously I know that there’s a lot of overlap between what an agent does and what a manager does, but what is the difference between procure? So the manager is not allowed to say, “Pay us this amount of money?”

**CRAIG:** The manager I do not believe is allowed to directly negotiate the terms of employment, I think. I’ll have to check on that one. By the way, as a general note, if there’s anything like this where I’m not quite sure, I can always lob a clarification on your blog when you put up the link. I know for sure that managers legally can’t seek employment. In other words, they can’t field requests for employment. They certainly can’t call up and say, “My client is available. Do you have anything that they might be interested in?”

Essentially, the manager is supposed to manage. Again, this is all the technical side of it and then there’s the real side. Managers are supposed to handle your day-to-day life. They help you develop material if that’s the way you want to use them. They help take care of your day-to-day needs when you’re working on a project. Let’s say you’re out of town working on something and they help facilitate your life. They’re not supposed to actually go out and get your a job.

**JOHN:** Right. Now, it’s not an either/or situation. Many writers will find they have both a manager and an agent, and in many cases they’ll have a manager a year before they have an agent.

**CRAIG:** Right.

**JOHN:** It feels like there are many more managers in the business and that they’re easier to gain access to than an agent.

**CRAIG:** I agree.

**JOHN:** Agents tend to be gathered together in very big, powerful agencies. There are certainly smaller boutique agencies that represent writers. Managers tend to be in smaller shops where they’re representing a smaller group of writers, or directors or other talented people and focusing on them. Managers, in general, might read every draft and an agent very likely would not read every draft. A manager might give you notes. An agent would be much less likely to give you notes.

**CRAIG:** Right.

**JOHN:** I approach the conversation with a dim view of managers, and this is just my generational bias. I’ve been called out for my generational bias because when I started in this business, the writers who had managers weren’t getting a lot out of their managers and they were just looking for the excuse to fire their managers. Now more writers who are working regularly are talking about having success with their managers and keeping their managers as an active part of their career even after they’ve had a few features produced.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, I’m with you in the generational [laughs] bias. I’m somewhat suspicious of managers. I had a manager for a long time, and in many ways it was a good thing and in a number of ways it wasn’t, and it didn’t end particularly well.

I think that there are basically three reasons that writers gravitate towards…I’m going to give myself a fourth reason. One is, as you pointed out, sometimes they’re the easier representation to get just to start with. Two, managers are much more willing to help you develop your material. If you’re the kind of writer who actually wants to bounce material off of somebody who isn’t a writer or a producer, a manager can help with that. Three, I think some writers feel like look, “I can’t have two agents at once. I can’t be represented by CAA and UTA, but I can be represented by CAA and Three Arts. That’s twice the bang for the buck.”

I wish I could remember what the fourth one was but that was probably the most important one of all.

**JOHN:** Those are three good points. To bounce off your third point there, being represented by two different people gets you exposure to more people who you could potentially be working with.

**CRAIG:** Right.

**JOHN:** And so even though the managers aren’t supposed to be out there giving you employment, they may be sending you out to meet with somebody and that someone they have you meet with ends up becoming an important link for future employment.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, that’s absolutely true. I don’t have a huge problem with it, and if you love your manager, awesome. New writers who are seeking desperately for representation, and understandably so, I think can actually benefit a lot from a manager. But just be aware — this is the great currency problem –€“ when you are a new writer without a track record and limited earning potential, you’re going to get a certain kind of manager. As your career advances, you owe it to yourself to fairly evaluate whether or not your manager [laughs] is appropriate for where you are in your career if you advance.

**JOHN:** Yeah. Let’s start the next part about what is an agent or a manager actually looking for. Let’s stop looking at it from the writer’s point of view. I need someone to represent me, to take me in and introduce me to all the right people and get me jobs. What does an agent want?

**CRAIG:** They want to make money. Bottom line.

**JOHN:** They’re there to make money for themselves, for their agency. They’re there to try to get their clients hired and working continuously in the business. From that perspective if they’re looking at a range of possible writers who they could represent they’re going to look at the ones they believe are talented, the ones they believe will work really hard, the ones that they believe can actually land the job which means going in there to the meetings for the nine meetings and convincing a bunch of people that they are the right person to be hired for the job.

The ones who are going to deliver. If an agent has a client that can land a job but then won’t actually turn in the script or finish the script or will turn in a really substandard version of what the script should be, that’s going to hurt. The agent has a limitation of time. The agent can only represent so many clients. There’s only so many hours in the day.

They can only put up so many clients for jobs. Taking on a new person is bringing a new person into the fold, someone they have to introduce to everybody, someone they have to try to keep employed, someone they have to be talking on the phone all the time and trying to get them hired.

**CRAIG:** Also, just as an extension of that, too, when an agent takes on a client that client is an extension of their reputation. I’m vouching that if I’m an agent I have a brand just the way that you and I have a brand. We’re known for writing certain kinds of things. Agents are known for representing certain kinds of people.

They take on the wrong person and that person craps out, that’s an uncomfortable phone call for that agent. That damages their standing and that’s going to hurt them. There’s a ripple effect. When writers approach getting an agent and they look at this incredibly steep wall and the barrier to entry and they go why? Why is this so hard to do? It’s because of that.

**JOHN:** Yeah. It’s important to remember screenwriting is about pushing those words around on the paper and it’s being able to write a really good script. Screenwriting, the career screenwriting, is also the ability to land a job and to get paid for what you are doing.

An agent is excited to read a really good script. They’re not going to sign a writer, in general, without sitting in a room with that writer and making the judgment call, “Could I send this person out on a job and get them hired to do something?” They are measuring the social skills of a person who they are going to be possibly be representing.

**CRAIG:** Yeah. That’s right. You can definitely be a complete Asperger’s weirdo if you are just killing it on the page. If you are a conventional screenwriter writing conventional material and you’re just a zero in the room, it’s going to be tough. I have to say that part of the business is unfair, but it’s real.

We can’t deny the fact that part of what we’re offering the people who hire us is a sense of comfort that we’re going to deliver and everything’s going to be okay. They’re just as scared as we are. Everybody’s scared.

**JOHN:** It’s very much a business of trust. As the person hiring you, I am trusting that you will actually be able to deliver me this script. I base that trust on the things I’ve read on the paper but also looking you in the eye and seeing “Okay, he gets it. He gets what it is we’re trying to do here.”

Yes, it’s incredibly important when you’re talking to the writer you’re bringing in for $1,000,000 to finish the script that’s about to go into production, but it’s also important just that the scale job that you’re trying to get made. Every step for one of us executives is important.

**CRAIG:** All right. Here’s the big question as we hit the midpoint of our podcast and everybody’s been really patient. They’ve listened to us talk about uteruses and the law. John, how do these people get a manager or an agent? [laughs] We ripped the Band-Aid off that 15 minutes ago. We’re still dancing around it aren’t we?

**JOHN:** I think you get an agent or manager through…I can think of three ways. The first is recommendation. So someone has read your work, has met you, and said, “This guy is awesome. This guy should be writing movies for Hollywood and I’m going to take this script and I’m going to take you, introduce you to this agent or manager, and say you should represent this person because this person is great.”

If that person has the ear of the right agent or manager and there’s already trust and taste being established between them that agent or manager will read your material, say yes or no, and be interested and excited about possibly representing you. That’s how I got an agent, is a friend took the script I had written to his boss.

He was interning at a small production company. The boss liked it, wanted to take it to the studio. I said, “I really need an agent, can you help me get an agent?” He said yes and he took it to an agent he had a relationship with. The agent read it because this guy who he trusted said that it was worth his time reading. He took it, read it, met with me, and he signed it.

That’s a very, very common story for how writers get represented. Second way, I would say, is agents read material that they found through some sort of pre-filtering mechanism. A pre-filtering mechanism could be a really good graduate school program. If you graduated from a top film school and you were the star screenwriter of a USC graduate film school program, some junior agent at an agency is likely reading those scripts and saying, “Oh this is actually a really good writer. This is a person we should consider.”

Even without that writer hunting down that agent the agent was looking for who are the best writers coming out of these programs or the best writers coming out of a competition. These are the Nicholls finalists. Those scripts get read and those people will be having meetings with the people they think are potentially really good clients.

**CRAIG:** Makes sense. What’s the third one?

**JOHN:** Just scouring the world to find interesting voices. I don’t know how much of this story is really accurate, but the apocryphal story of Diablo Cody is here’s a young woman who’s writing a funny blog. An agent reads the blog and says, “This woman can really, really write. She’s funny, she has a voice. I bet she could become a screenwriter.”

I don’t think all those details are quite accurate, but there’s always those writers who they were doing standup and they’re clearly very funny and someone sees their act and says, “I think that person is a performer but I also think that person is a writer and there’s something there that’s worth pursuing.”

**CRAIG:** I like those. Of course, all of them are predicated on you being a good writer and writing a good script, as is always the case, but those all make sense. I actually asked an agent at CAA named Bill Zotti, I gave him a call earlier today and I asked him the question. Of course, he groaned because it was that question, but he had a couple of pieces of really good advice that I figured I should pass along.

One is to make sure that, if you are specifically pursuing an agent, to really know who they represent and ask, “Is this agent appropriate for my material?” He said one of the most frustrating things is when he’ll get query letters or log lines for the kind of movies that his clients just don’t write.

Right now there are a lot of resources out there that are relatively inexpensive, like IMDb Pro for instance, where you can actually see, “OK, let’s say I write movies like Judd Apatow. Who represents Judd Apatow? Let me see. I write movies like John August. Who represents John August? Let me see.”

If I send that person a query letter and say, “Listen, I’m a huge fan of John August, I’m aspiring to write like John August, here’s my log line,” you might actually have a shot. Whereas, if you send it to a guy that represents writers who write rated R broad comedies, that person’s going to go, “Well what do I care? It’s not for me.”

Do your homework. If you’re going to go through the effort of trying to break the rocks to get a rep, do your homework about the rep. The other advice that he gave that I thought was pretty smart was to get a job in the business, which seems so blindingly obvious, but yet so many people resist it. I know why because it’s hard and it involves a commitment that you may not be willing to make.

He said listen, 80 percent of the people in the mailroom at one of the big talent agencies are not really interested in being agents. They’re there to learn the business because they want to do other things. They want to produce. They want to write. They want to direct. When you work in that business and you work in that place you get to know the other people there.

You work next to a guy who suddenly is now an assistant to an agent. You say to him, “Listen, I’ve written a script and I’m going to tell you what the idea is.” If he loves it he’s got a chance now to impress his boss with a great piece of material so he’s going to read it. These personal connections are invaluable.

It’s nearly impossible to do that kind of thing from Rhode Island.

**JOHN:** Yeah. I would also say what your example stresses is the horizontal networking. Everyone always thinks, “Oh to become successful you have to meet more powerful people and get more powerful people to love you.” It’s really not that case at all. It’s been my experience, but it’s also been the experience of all my assistants, the way they got to their next step was by helping out everyone else at their same level.

They were reading other people’s scripts and giving them notes. Those same friends were reading their scripts. Eventually they wrote that thing that was, “You know what? This is the script I’ve been waiting for you to write and I think I know the right person to take this to.” It’s always been those people who were doing exactly the same stuff you were doing who were the next step.

**CRAIG:** That’s right. That’s exactly right. I think people should think, as they are horizontally networking, about how they should market themselves. The funny thing is Hollywood, with one hand is saying, “Get out, stay out,” and with the other hand, is saying, “Please, somebody show up,” because they’re hungry for new talent, they’re desperate for new talent.

Nothing makes them happier than a writer who’s better than a guy who makes a million dollars that they don’t have to pay a million dollars to.

They’re actually looking, believe it or not. If you can market yourself properly; for instance we have a couple of friends who wrote a pretty crazy script and just put it out on the Internet and marketed it as this insane thing. It caught on.

**JOHN:** You’re talking about the Robotard 8000?

**CRAIG:** I’m talking about the Robotard 8000. You may say, “Why would you put your screenplay on the Internet, and why would say it was authored by the Robotard 8000?” Well, why, because they have agents at CAA and they’re working. It really got them a lot of attention.

Also, it didn’t hurt that other writers that people trusted were saying, “We read this script. This was really funny.”

Similarly, I’ll tell you, if I were 22 again and I were in a writer’s group, I would say…You and I didn’t have this in the 90s. Let’s get a web page for our writer’s group, and let’s just start blogging about the experience of our writers group. Let’s track the progress of our scripts and the log lines and the rest of it. If one of us catches somebody’s attention, suddenly our writer’s group has a little bit of buzz to it. “What will this writer’s group come up with next?” That’s why that Fempire thing was so cool, with Diablo…

**JOHN:** Dana and Lorena.

**CRAIG:** Dana and Lorena. It was like, Okay. There’s a group. Now, it’s not really a group; they all have to write their own scripts. But something about it, there’s a little bit of sparkly dust to it. It’s interesting.

How do you make yourself interesting? Maybe then somebody will be attracted to your script.

**JOHN:** We talked about marketing, but it’s really almost positioning. People need to know how to consider you, or what to consider you as. Here’s a terrible way to go into your first meeting: You wrote a really good comedy script that people liked, so they brought you in, a manager and agent sat down to meet with you. They say, “I really liked your script; it was really funny. What do you want to write?”

It’s like, “Well, I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.” The manager is going to hem and haw and make conversation for about another 10 minutes, but they’re not going to want to sign you because they were thinking about you as a comedy person. Let them pigeon hole you for five minutes until you actually get something going. They need to know how are they going to make the next phone call to somebody else, saying, “This guy has a really funny comedy script, but he’s exactly the right person to hire for your period action movie.” That just doesn’t make sense.

**CRAIG:** It doesn’t. Listen, these guys, what is their training in? Managers and agents are not there to tell you what to be. Their expertise is watching trends and patterns and pulling people out that fit what they believe is going to generate cash. They can’t tell you who to be. What they can do is see who you are and say, “That looks like money.”

So know who you are. Go in there and be who you are.

It doesn’t mean that you have to go in there as Michael Bay. Not everybody has to make $200 million movies; not everybody has to sell $3 million scripts. To be successful in this business, you just have to work. If I could walk into an agent’s office and say, “I will never make more than $200,000 a year, but I will make $200,000 every year for the next 20 years and I won’t bother you a lot,” that’s an instant signing. Why not? That’s great.

It’s not about how much you’re going to do, but just will you do. If you walk into an office and you say, “Look. I wrote this script and this is how I want to come off. These are the movies I love; this is the niche I want to fill.” If they feel like that’s a real niche and that niche needs filling, that’s a big deal. But they can’t tell you who to be.

**JOHN:** Exactly. You have to be able to come to them with material that shows what your talent is, and a story, or at least a way of presenting yourself that leads them to believe, “Yeah, I see what he’s going for and I think he or she can achieve that.”

**CRAIG:** People have to understand that agents and managers are…Let’s call them representation. They’re never going to be your mommy or your daddy. They’re not your savior; they’re not Superman. What they are, essentially, are the vanguard of the endless decision process that leads to a writer being hired. They’re the first people in line to say, “OK, I’m willing to take a shot on you.” You still haven’t made a dollar when you get an agent. But it all is driven by you.

**JOHN:** I always get the question of, how do I get an agent or manager? Generally, it’s the person who’s like, “I just finished my first script. How do I get an agent or manager?”

**CRAIG:** [laughs]

**JOHN:** OK, you wrote a script, that’s great. After your second script, then I’ll believe you actually can write a second script. Or they’re like, “We just started working on our first script. How do we get a manager?” It’s acknowledging that part of the process is the ability to prove that you can actually do this repeatedly.

I think we’ll probably say endlessly in the series of this podcast is that the career of being a screenwriter is not about one script. It’s about being able to write 50 scripts. While there may be one script that really gets representation’s attention, they’re really signing you for the next 30 things you’re going to write. They would love to be able to sell this one script. They mostly want to be able to sell you every year to different producers, different studios, to continue generating cash flow and continue making movies.

**CRAIG:** Yeah, there’s a certain naiveté about the question in and of itself. Again, why we hate the question is just that some people are asking it and they haven’t quite earned it yet. “How do I get an agent or a manager?” Maybe the better way to phrase it is, “Which agent or manager should get me?” Start thinking that way.

Then if you think that way, you realize, “Well, I’d better have something worth getting. I’d better know who these people are and I’d better know what I want, and where I want to work, and what kind of movies I want to be known for.” It’s the American Idol syndrome. “I go on TV, they like me, they pick me, I’m a star.”

**JOHN:** The lottery mentality, which kills me about screenwriting is that, by writing this one script, I will sell it for X dollars and then I will be set and everything will be wonderful and happy for here on out. It rarely happens that way.

I really liked the way you rephrased it, and I’m going to rephrase it again slightly, is, “How will the right agent find me?” If you can think about it in that perspective, a lot of things become more clear. How do I make myself visible enough that the right agent will recognize my talent and my determination and say, “This is the client I have to represent.”

What you may discover in that process is that, I say “the right agent find me,” the right agent probably isn’t the super-power agent who has Judd Apatow. It’s more likely the guy who has just a couple of clients, but they’re really good clients. I left a bigger agent and went to a smaller agent right before Go, and I made the change because I needed somebody who was generationally closer to me who was hungry in the same ways I was hungry, and I could grow with.

I get frustrated when people aim too high, too fast. You want the person who can grow with you, ideally.

**CRAIG:** So true. The only thing worse than not having an agent is having the wrong agent. Because then you feel like you are represented and everything’s going to be fine, but it’s a mismatch, so you have all of the lack of benefit of no agent, but none of the drive to get a new one because you have a one.

**JOHN:** [laughs]

**CRAIG:** That’s the worst situation. I don’t care about the size of your agent, how big they are, who their clients are. If you’re just starting out and you’re lucky enough to attract the eye of a very powerful agent, you should ask, because it’s going to happen anyway, that they assign a junior agent to you. You’re going to need more help, and you’re going to need more attention. They’re going to be busy talking to people that earn $20 million a year. They have directors and actors who out-earn every screenwriter. They just won’t talk to you.

[laughs] Get the right guy or girl.

**JOHN:** And if you get the wrong guy, you can tune into a later podcast in which Craig will tell you how to fire your agent or manager.

**CRAIG:** [laughs] It’s the best.

**JOHN:** It’s actually one of Craig’s specialties. It’s one of the things I think he’s best known for, is really how to sever ties and move on with grace.

**CRAIG:** [laughs]

**JOHN:** I’ve seen him do it for many, many other screenwriters. It’s a master class.

**CRAIG:** I’m the Kevorkian of talent representation.

**JOHN:** Well, for a terrible question, I hope we were able to cover some of most crucial things. I think my recap for our conversation is, think like an agent or manager. What are they looking for? When you flip the question that way, it’s like, “How do I present myself as the person that they want to represent?” You can find that right match.

**CRAIG:** I like that horizontal networking point you made, too. You don’t have to always be looking up. Your friends are your best resource.

**JOHN:** With horizontal networking, living in Los Angeles becomes more obvious. You’re not going to be able to be around all those same people who are doing what you’re trying to do if you are in Austin. Austin’s great, but the agents who are going to represent you are not in Austin, so they’re not going to know who you are.

**CRAIG:** That’s true.

**JOHN:** Also, I would say win the Nicholl Fellowship, because that’s a good start for anybody.

**CRAIG:** [laughs] Yes, win the Nicholl Fellowship. That’s the easiest way. Also, be related to a great agent.

**JOHN:** That’s a giant help, yeah.

**CRAIG:** It’s a huge boost.

Let us never answer this question again.

**JOHN:** Yeah, done. We did it once. We never have to do it again. That’s the great thing about a podcast, is this will be around for forever.

**CRAIG:** I feel like I need to sleep now for 10 hours.

**JOHN:** [laughs] It’s the worst. All right, thank you very much, Craig.

**CRAIG:** Thank you very much, John.

**JOHN:** All right, talk to you soon.

**CRAIG:** Bye, guys.