Scriptnotes Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

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

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

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

**Craig:** [laughs]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Let’s go. Let’s do this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He’s like, “I don’t know.”

“Well, I know.” [laughs]

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

**Craig:** I remember it well.

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

**Craig:** So different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** The Writer’s Store?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Alright. That’s exciting.

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

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

**Craig:** That’s interesting.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Love that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Not even Facebook?

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** We’ll talk again soon.

**Craig:** You’ve got it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Ah, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

**Craig:** Among many.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Does it work?

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

**Craig:** Right. I hear that’s good.

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

**Craig:** The Fempire.

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

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

**Craig:** Second position in dance?

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

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

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

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

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. Don’t worry about it.

**Craig:** Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** An evocation.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

[laughter]

**Craig:** You’re sad and you suck.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Uncle Titus’s dump.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** That sounds very Toastmasters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** I remember that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

**Craig:** Right, right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** New Vegas, yeah.

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

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

**Craig:** No. You’re right.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah, great.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** John, thank you.

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

**Craig:** Bye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yes.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

Actual news: we have a new WGA president elected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** No, no. No, it’s not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah, definitely.

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

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

**Craig:** No question.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**Craig:** Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

**John:** Yeah.

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

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

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

**John:** Yeah. It’s called Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

**Craig:** Thank you John.

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

**Craig:** Awesome.

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.