The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/lets-catch-up).
**Craig Mazin:** Standards and Practices has informed us that we have violated a certain number of rules, including use of bad language that may be inappropriate, in fact is inappropriate for your children, so earmuffs, guys, or just listen to it when they’re not around.
**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name’s John August.
**Craig:** My name is Craig Mazin.
**John:** This is Episode 556 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, Craig is back, literally back, not edited together from episodes dating back 10 years.
**Craig:** Amazing.
**John:** We have so much to talk about, from movies to gun to created by credits. We’ll also answer listener questions that have been stacking up for months.
**Craig:** Yes, please. I apologize, I’m a bit raspy. Hopefully, this comes across as maybe perhaps-
**John:** No, it doesn’t at all.
**Craig:** … compatible with Sexy Craig.
**John:** Mildly ill, yeah.
**Craig:** John, you’re not ill. There’s nothing wrong with this. Don’t kink-shame my voice.
**John:** Oh yeah, so that’s how you’re going to spin it around.
**Craig:** I’m going to spin it around. Sexy Craig loves to spin it around. Sexy Craig had to come back because my voice is a little shot. We’ve gone through whatever was nearly a year of production. I’m back home. I am whatever beyond exhausted is, whatever that state of mind is, but ready to reengage my number one pursuit, podcast making-
**John:** Fantastic.
**Craig:** … because I love podcasts.
**John:** We’re going to get through all those topics. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’re going to discuss penmanship apparently, because this topic was chosen by our producer, Megana Rao, who I suspect just-
**Craig:** Has excellent penmanship.
**John:** I’m also making fun of you.
**Craig:** She can make fun of both of us, my friend.
**John:** At times I can write very neatly, but it just doesn’t stick.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Nope. Craig, while you’ve been gone, actually an update, the Scriptnotes book is actually going really well.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** We’ve actually done a lot of work on it these past couple weeks. We’ve done a deep dive, which we sent out to all those folks who subscribed to get the updates on things. We did a deep dive on Frozen, which was an episode that Aline and I had done.
**Craig:** Oh yes, I remember it, with Jennifer Lee.
**John:** It turned out great. It was our first time testing what a deep dive chapter would feel like.
**Craig:** Great.
**John:** A bunch of the interview ones done. Megana, you’re working on a chapter right now for group dynamics?
**Megana Rao:** Yes, on relationships in team movies and two-handers.
**Craig:** Nice.
**John:** That was actually based on… Two weeks ago our episode was a clip show that we put together. It ended up being a really good clip show with the two of us. That’s basically a chapter right there.
**Craig:** Honestly, we could probably put together 400 clip shows from the 500 shows we’ve done.
**John:** We’ve done a few while you’ve been gone.
**Craig:** You know what? Mix and match. There’s nothing wrong with that. When we were young, television would occasionally just-
**John:** Happens all the time.
**Craig:** You know what? It’s not new tonight. It’s a show that literally aired three months ago. Everyone was excited.
**John:** Also had the literal clip shows where it was like, remember that time we went and did this thing? That was a great time.
**Craig:** Yep, you get stuck in an elevator, you start remembering stuff.
**John:** You remember just a little bit. The Clerks animated TV show did not last for very long, but the first episode was a clip show, which I did respect.
**Craig:** Cute.
**John:** It was a good, fun idea. Updates on the book. I had said originally 2022. That’s not going to happen. We have a proposal that’s out now to our agent. We’re going to try to find a good publisher for the book.
**Craig:** What would you say the price is? Are we going to charge $300, $400 for this thing?
**John:** I think so, based on all of the work going into it. Each one is hand sewn. It’s going to be-
**Craig:** Big margins.
**John:** Big margins. Big margins for this book.
**Craig:** We’ve arrived.
**John:** It’s going to be good. Craig, not only are you back, movies are back.
**Craig:** Movies are back.
**John:** Movies are back.
**Craig:** They are back.
**John:** Big box office this past couple weeks.
**Craig:** It’s interesting. They’re back-ish. When Top Gun: Maverick comes out, it’s like the old days. It’s smashing Memorial Day weekend records. There have been big movies that have been coming out, but they are a very specific kind of movie, and there are not a lot of them. It used to be that on Memorial Day there would be two or three of these mega airliners smashing into each other and competing for this crazy week. It would go on for a few weeks. Now it’s like, oh my god, a movie. Then everybody goes, “Remember that?” I guess Jurassic Park, sort of.
**John:** Jurassic Park was probably the best example of… Top Gun was still able to hold on, while Jurassic Park did huge numbers as well. We’ll see whether we’re getting back into that groove. It’s also been nice to see Everything Everywhere All at Once doing great and just keeps trucking along.
**Craig:** That movie.
**John:** Delightful.
**Craig:** I can’t wait.
**John:** We’ve tried to get Daniels on to join us, and it’s just been a scheduling-
**Craig:** We’re going to get at least a Daniel. I don’t care. It has to happen.
**John:** Either one.
**Craig:** I love that movie so much.
**John:** So, so good. Craig, let’s talk about guns in Hollywood. This past week, a bunch of Hollywood creators signed a petition. I saw Shonda Rhimes. I saw Judd Apatow. Some of their statement with this open letter says, “As American storytellers, our goal is primarily to entertain. We also acknowledge that stories have a power to affect change. Cultural attitudes towards smoking, drunk driving, seat belts, and marriage equality have all evolved due in large part to movies’ and TV’s influence. It’s time to take on gun safety. We’re not asking anyone to stop showing guns on screen. We’re asking writers, directors, producers to be mindful of on-screen gun violence and model gun safety best practices. Let’s use our collective power for good.” An open letter. Craig, what’s your first instinct on this?
**Craig:** They solved it. We’re saved.
**John:** I have mixed feelings. I will say that going back to the episode we did about the Sideways effect and cigarette smoking, I do think stopping showing cigarette smoking on screen did have some impact in what people are doing to smoke cigarettes. The counter-example I have with guns though is that American movies are seen all over the world, and no one has the same gun violence problem that we do. It’s not the movies. It’s the guns.
**Craig:** In fact, I think it’s a very dangerous thing to suggest that it’s the movies. The issue with smoking is millions of Americans smoke. Millions of Americans do not murder each other with guns, although sometimes it feels like it. It’s a very rare and random thing that happens from time to time. When it does, the presence of a gun exacerbates someone’s terrible state of mind, and we have this awful violence. This is a uniquely American phenomenon, because for instance, certain states let 18-year-olds have assault rifles, which is insane.
We can’t impact millions of Americans with this, because millions of Americans happily are not murdering each other in the street with guns. Gun violence is not a function of movies. Nobody who shoots up a school or shoots up a supermarket or shoots up a post office is doing so because they watched a movie and got excited. No one. The premise is actually quite dangerous, I think. I think it feeds into this terrible narrative that we’ve always struggled to grasp at. You know what used to cause gun violence and things like that? Heavy metal. Then it was video games. Now it’s movies. It’s none of that.
You’re absolutely right to point out… In the UK for instance, there was a terrible school shooting in the ’80s in Scotland. The United Kingdom’s response, so, so sane, was to ban guns. There has not been such a school shooting since. They have all the same movies that we have. There’s plenty of gun violence there. I think that drama is always going to show extreme things. We’re allowed to murder people. Apparently, we can cut their throats. We can stab them in the head. We can have Jason walk around and hatchet teenagers.
This is a bit like… In reaction to the emergence of the AIDS crisis in the ’80s, the porn industry was like, “Maybe everyone wear condoms.” Everyone was like, “We don’t want to watch that so much,” and then they didn’t, because movies are not reality. We actually understand that. We didn’t start wearing seat belts because of movies. We started wearing seat belts because there was a law, and we’d get a pretty sizeable ticket. Plus, it also made sense.
**John:** I want to make sure we’re not straw manning them here, because they’re not saying as a factor of gun violence. It’s a cultural attitude towards guns. I do think that there is a possibility that the way we portray guns in movies and television has an influence in how Americans perceive guns and the problems of guns and the utility of guns to solve problems.
I’ll give you an example. On the first Charlie’s Angels movie, one of the things Drew and I discussed from the very start is the Angels don’t use guns. There just are no guns. There are no guns in our movie. An Angel will never touch a gun. That was an important distinction at the start. Therefore, we’re going to have to find other ways to do the things you would otherwise do with a gun. That was helpful for that movie. Is it going to work for all movies? No, but I think sometimes asking that question from the start, of does a gun need to be in this scene or in this moment could lead to some good, better solutions.
**Craig:** It’s always a creative question. Putting the gun debate aside, it’s a very important creative question. What sort of violence does this character commit? Very famously, Batman doesn’t use guns. What Batman does do is severely beat his victims, to the point where they are probably likely going to be permanently brain damaged, whereas perhaps just shooting them in the shin would’ve helped, made their life a little bit better afterwards. That’s a Batman thing, doesn’t use guns. Superman doesn’t need to use guns because he can throw a meteorite at your face. Other characters do.
I don’t think that the discussion should be within the context of actual gun violence in the street, because if I think about a movie that glorifies gun use, John Wick comes to mind. John Wick is fun, and it’s insane. It’s crazy, posits a world where there is a hotel for hit men, where they have hit men tailors and whatever they do in there. Nobody’s John Wicking around. I can’t think of something that glorifies gun use more. There’s all sorts of things that are… You know what’s glorious on film? Drinking. We show people drinking all the time on film. Drinking is a poison that kills a lot of people. More people die every year from drinking than from gun violence, but we love it because it’s fun and because it’s the movies. It’s fake. It’s fiction.
**John:** Again, I want to make sure that we’re not escaping what they’re actually trying to do here, because they’re also talking about gun safety culture, like showing characters who do have guns actually locking them up or doing them safely. There are small things I think that could help.
**Craig:** I don’t see how that helps. I don’t see watching a movie where a guy puts a gun in a safe and closes it is going to make anybody else in the world think, “Oh, I should get a safe for this.” We all know. It’s like with smoking. Prior to smoking being removed from a lot of movies, there were warnings on every single pack of cigarettes for as long as you and I have been alive that said, “Don’t do this. It’s going to kill you.” We all know it’s going to kill us. Any reasonable person understands that you should keep guns out of the hands of children or people who should not have guns in their hands. Every reasonable person knows that they should be locked up. What I do think is good is to show people… For instance, when you show people using guns in shows or movies, and they are somebody that has picked up a gun before, they should hold it correctly. Keep your finger off the trigger. Keep the barrel down. Don’t do stupid things like pointing it sideways. Then again, some characters are knuckleheads and that’s what they do. That’s part of the stupidity of it. Have you seen Barry?
**John:** I’ve seen Barry, yeah.
**Craig:** This year, there was a moment-
**John:** There was a moment where two characters who decided they were going to use a gun to do violence should never have been sold a gun.
**Craig:** Correct. That was an interesting commentary on gun violence, because they are having a discussion about taking revenge and murdering somebody, and then it is revealed they are having that discussion right in front of a gun salesman, who says, “So are you taking it?” They say, “Yes.” He’s like, “Great.” He gives them the gun. Somewhat predictably, they end up injuring themselves, because they’re bad at gun use. That is an interesting commentary on guns. That’s within a show where a guy is constantly killing people with guns and never locks it up. I think it felt to me like its heart was in the right place. We all want to do something. I think Hollywood tends to believe that it is more culturally powerful than it is when it comes to certain things. We are more of a mirror than a projector.
**John:** Here’s as far as I’ll meet you is that I do worry that sometimes making the statement or saying we’re going to do this thing on our side is taking the pressure off of the actual people who need to affect the changes, which are lawmakers, because it was not just cigarettes not being shown in movies that affected the change. It was you can’t smoke in restaurants. We made it much harder to smoke.
**Craig:** Exactly.
**John:** If we make it much harder to-
**Craig:** Get guns.
**John:** …own a gun, get a gun, use it improperly, yes.
**Craig:** From the beginning, one of the most popular Hollywood genres was the Western. In the Western, people shot each other constantly. That was the thing. There was rifles and handguns. They would swing the guns around. They would bring them in places and shoot each other in the streets. There were not mass shooting incidences in the ’50s and ’60s. One notorious one in Texas, and we still talk about it. If that happened today, it would be news for about an hour. The presence of the gun in our culture has always been there. The availability of guns for anyone, including the mentally ill or the angry or the young and brain not completed, therein is clearly, without question, the 99.9% contributing factor to our situation today.
**John:** We will not solve the problem of gun violence in America, but I think you and I may actually be able to achieve some closures or some real consensus on this next thing, which is a piece of follow-up. We talked about what is that page after the cover page before the script starts. It’s an interstitial page. Interstitial may be a good word for it. We asked our listeners for submissions about what they think that page should be called. I am going to read these aloud. I want your honest feeling about each of them. We may ultimately do a poll or something, but I want to hear you react first. Prescript.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Page 0.
**Craig:** Terrible.
**John:** Declaration page.
**Craig:** Outrageous.
**John:** Ancillary page.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Preface page.
**Craig:** Uck.
**John:** Epigraph page.
**Craig:** Yes.
**John:** Dedication page.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Notes page.
**Craig:** No.
**John:** Dramatis personae.
**Craig:** Get out of here.
**John:** Front matter.
**Craig:** Front matter just sounds disgusting.
**John:** This is from Icelandic. Sourbla [ph].
**Craig:** Perhaps in Iceland.
**John:** Elias sent that through for us. You liked epigraph most. I like preface most. Talk to me about why epigraph.
**Craig:** That’s what it is. That was the word-
**John:** In a book, it was.
**Craig:** That’s what I was trying to remember and I couldn’t. It was somewhere way back in my head. Epigraph is exactly the description that we have for that is the graph on top of epi. That is a perfect description of that page. Preface, it’s true. The problem is preface has its own meaning, which is a full chapter that is an introductory forward or something like that.
**John:** I get that. I feel like most people don’t know what an epigraph is.
**Craig:** Let’s teach them.
**John:** Otherwise, everyone gets the sense a preface comes before the thing starts.
**Craig:** Sure. I think we have the power, as we just know. That’s what I want to do. Let’s just put out our own competing thing, get as many of our friends to sign it, saying this thing really should be called the epigraph. Let’s stop calling it that weird page between the cover and the next thing. Let’s see if we can change the world.
**John:** After this episode comes out, we will officially poll the world and see if we can get people to come on board with one of these things. I feel like it’s going to be probably preface or epigraph. I also kind of like Page 0, but it also makes it feel like you’re going to number that Page 0.
**Craig:** Page 0 sounds pretty intense. That sounds like it could be a title of a movie. Look, I’ll accept any of them except front matter. That just sounds dirty.
**John:** Yeah, or it sounds like a brain thing. It’s like, oh, he has damage to his front matter.
**Craig:** Right, or it just implies that there’s back matter. I don’t want it.
**John:** A notes page feels like it comes at the end of a script to me.
**Craig:** Yes, or put notes on it. These aren’t notes.
**John:** No, they’re not notes. We have a question from Mark about Obi-Wan Kenobi’s created by credit. Megana, can you help us out with that?
**Megana:** Mark writes, “In Episode 552, you talked about the writing credits on Elvis and everything that went into the decisions to credit it the way that they did. In a similar vein, I wanted to ask why there’s no created by credit on the Disney Plus series Obi-Wan Kenobi. It’s my understanding that the writer of the first episode is usually considered the creator, but both of the first two episodes have story by and teleplay by credits in addition to the based on Star Wars by George Lucas credit, which has become standard since Disney bought Lucasfilm, and no creator credit. Is this more common than I think it is or is there some kind of weird possible IP-based reason why there isn’t a creator credit?”
**Craig:** There may very well be. My understanding is that when you’re talking about an adaptation, created by is in play if the adaptation is sufficiently different from the source material, if you’re directly adapting a preexisting storyline. I haven’t seen the Obi-Wan Kenobi show.
**John:** It’s based on things that exist, but there’s a whole new storyline. It’s not a remake of a thing.
**Craig:** It’s not from, for instance, a comic or a novelization or something like that. If you’re adapting something in a very close manner to what was there before, then there may be a rule about created by not being in play. My personal opinion is that the Writers Guild shouldn’t be in the business of taking created by away from anybody. I think it should be always available. It should always be there. I don’t really see what’s the point of limiting it, particularly if there’s not an argument about it. I ran into a weird thing with that on Chernobyl. Originally, HBO submitted the credits and said created by Craig Mazin, and the Writers Guild initially came back and said you can’t have created by because you’re only five episodes.
**John:** That’s right, you told me that.
**Craig:** Created by requires you to have six episodes. I was like, “Guys, it’s just me.”
**John:** No one else.
**Craig:** There’s no other writer that has been hired on this show. One writer is employed: me. You’re just taking away from me. It was going to be six episodes. We just collapsed it during production into five. They were like, “No, sorry, that’s the rule.” I was like, “Now I have to try and get a waiver.” I think at that point they were like, “Just give it to him.”
**John:** I just looked it up. Obi-Wan Kenobi has six credits, so that, it wasn’t the issue. I do wonder if there’s a thing about… There were multiple writers on it. I think there may have been multiple writers doing different things at different times. It may have been an arbitration credit to get to where we even were for the pilot credits. That makes it harder to get a created by credit.
**Craig:** I readily admit that when we get questions about feature credits, I have 100% confidence that I know what I’m talking about. Television credits, weird, but again, I don’t have a writers’ room, so it doesn’t come up, but I have 70% confidence in my answer.
**John:** The related credit you’ll often see in television is developed by, which is when it’s coming off of a piece of IP, but you don’t get a created by credit. We’re going to be comfortable in our not knowing the full answer here. You are doing more TV. I’m going to be doing more TV. We’re going to learn this. Check in in 10 years and we’ll be experts on these credits.
**Craig:** Or even a month.
**John:** Even a month. Let’s get to some listener questions. Megana, I hope you have your voice rested, because there’s a lot of questions to get through.
**Megana:** I do. We have Nile from Hong Kong, who asks, “How do you handle repetitive actions such as a military character enters and stands to attention? My current screenplay has quite a few ‘stands to attentions.’ I’ve tried variations, starting the scene later, adding a distraction, and even hanging a lantern on it, but I still have three more ‘stands to attentions’ than I want.”
**John:** I suspect you don’t actually need to have those “stands to attentions,” because at a certain point, we just get when a character comes into the scene, they’re going to have to do that. You don’t need to call it out every time. That’s my guess.
**Craig:** I’m a little concerned that you have that many soldiers entering and standing to attention period.
**John:** That’s a lot of walking in rooms.
**Craig:** It may be a sign that there’s just a lot of times where somebody walks into a room and goes wah. Are they saluting? Are they just bah? You can also get away sometimes with assuming that they’re standing to attention for the same person, like let’s say General Smith. You could say, “So-and-so enters the room, stands to attention in front of General Smith, as everyone always does,” and then you know this generally is going to happen.
**John:** Yeah, just because if you have people doing the kinds of stuff that they’re going to be doing in the world of your movie, you just don’t have to call it out all the time. In Top Gun, they’re not talking about how they’re doing stuff on the plane each time. Probably the first time in the script it’s mentioned, you’re seeing it, but then you’re not acknowledging it every other time.
**Craig:** Yeah. You can establish your routine as a routine, let us know that it is a routine, and then move along.
**Megana:** I think this is an interesting followup. Jonathan asks, “In your recent episode on entrances and exits, you mention that we don’t need to see people enter and exit places, yet in the show Severance it shows the subjects walking from place to place throughout a large portion of the show. Why do you think this works?”
**John:** I think it works really well in Severance. My guess is why it works so well in Severance is this is a show about characters being trapped in a place they cannot get out of. They’re in a very small environment. It works for them to always be walking from one point to another point. They’re always under surveillance. It feels right in the continuity of that show. My guess is that you see a lot more entrances and exits in an office world than you do outside, is that you’re seeing characters enter into spaces more down there than outside. I think there’s probably a good contrast there.
**Craig:** All we were saying is you don’t need to. We weren’t saying you shouldn’t or that it’s bad. It’s just that you don’t feel that you are obligated to show people enter or exit spaces. If there’s a purpose, whether it’s thematic or because the space is really interesting, do it. I write entrances and exits all the time.
**John:** I would say that show also has a lot of things that are happening in doorways, because you’re always in between two different spaces. It feels really natural that you’re just going to show somebody coming in and going out of that space. I would say definitely not trying to have a blanket prohibition on entrances and exits, but always look at a scene and say, wait, do I actually need to have this character walk in here, because I think so often, especially new screenwriters are treating it like a play, where everyone has to enter into the scene, do the work of the scene, and then leave the scene. The magic of movies is you don’t.
**Craig:** Exactly. We’re just saying ask the question.
**John:** Cool.
**Megana:** Alex from Manchester asks, “I’m in the middle of planning a short screenplay set in early 19th century Wales. While I’m happy with the overall premise, I can’t help but feel I’m damaging the integrity of the story by writing the film in English, as during this time, little to no one would’ve spoken English. Should this be a genuine worry or shall I plow on, incorporating the Welsh language where possible and in small doses to help hold up its overall integrity?”
**John:** I don’t know what I would do.
**Craig:** I know what I did.
**John:** Absolutely. People, they spoke, quote unquote, Russian.
**Craig:** Yes. People spoke English. They spoke English just like Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in not Danish but English. Alex is perfectly free to write this story not in Welsh, a beautiful but notoriously difficult language to speak, and very few people understand it. You’d right away be limiting your actor pool quite significantly. Again, it’s for an audience. The language to me is not where all of the beautiful detail is. If you get the clothing and the hair and the places and the props right, if you get the attitude, if you get the philosophy and the history correct, the language is just part of the regular artifice of recreating life through art. I don’t see any reason why you should feel obligated to try and write this in a language that I doubt you speak. Don’t make them sound like they’re from Manchester, because that would be hysterical but wrong.
**John:** A thing Alex may run into is that if everyone is, they’re speaking English, but we know they’re actually really supposed to be speaking Welsh, and he has to have a scene where some English speaker comes into that situation, that can be complicated. That’s the Hunt for Red October problem.
**Craig:** Exactly. England and the English language gives you such a great gift here. There is a Welsh accent in English. Lots of ells. It’s lovely. It would be good if the actors spoke English with a Welsh accent. Similarly, when the king is discussing how to put down the rebellion in Wales, he should be rather posh and kingly in his speech, RP and all that. There are wonderful regional accents that they can always pull from, especially if you’re making a film in the UK about a section of the UK. Try and get that accent right. Then again, they made Braveheart.
**John:** I was going to say Braveheart, that’s in English.
**Craig:** Everyone’s all over the place. Half of them are Irish. One of them’s American, so you know.
**John:** You know. I would say also, Alex, watch House of Gucci.
**Craig:** Don’t do that.
**John:** Watch House of Gucci, because those characters, they are Italian, but they’re speaking English. Sometimes they speak Italian. Sometimes they’ll say things like… In English they’ll say, “What’s the word for… ” It’s like, you’re speaking Italian right now.
**Craig:** Plus, they also vaguely sounded like vampires. It did not help that story. I agree with you. I really struggle when they just try too hard with the language. I do feel like well-trained actors from the United Kingdom will be able to do a Welsh accent with some training. There are wonderful dialect coaches that work with folks in the UK all the time.
**John:** Cool.
**Megana:** This is a quick question for Craig. Cuber Dad asks, “Do you like Rubik’s cubes? Where do they rank on your puzzle solving scale? I got one for my son and finally learned how to solve it in my 40s. Am I wrong to think that cubing and writing share some similarities? Trying to crack an algorithm on a cube feels like working through a difficult part of a script, turning a scene one way, then sideways, then back on itself, or perhaps I’m straining this metaphor.”
**Craig:** You are straining this metaphor.
**John:** You are definitely.
**Craig:** Writing is like a Rubik’s cube with so many pieces that no one can learn the algorithm, and it’s constantly changing anyway, because what you consider to be success with the Rubik’s cube, which is finite, is not success with writing. Nobody knows what success is with writing until you get there. No, they are not related. I do not know how to solve a Rubik’s cube. My script supervisor, Chris Roofs [ph], excellent Rubik’s cube solver. Bella Ramsey, excellent Rubik’s cube solver. The two of them would solve it, and then I would come and mix it up. That was my job. Could I learn? Yes. There is a method. You can learn it. That is the very reason I don’t want to, because once you learn it, you can pick up any Rubik’s cube that has been scrambled to any extent and within a few minutes, solve it, because you are essentially being a robot. That said, I do like watching them solve it.
**John:** It’s fun to watch. My daughter learned how to solve a Rubik’s cube while we were in Paris. For two or three years, she was solving it. Now it sits on a shelf. She’s never going to solve it again. It was useful in its time. There is a good Rubik’s cube movie. We’ll put a link in the show notes.
**Craig:** A documentary.
**John:** A documentary.
**Craig:** It’s lovely.
**John:** Great, but it’s not really about Rubik’s cubes. It’s about this relationship between these solvers and this one kid.
**Craig:** It’s about the autism spectrum more than anything. I think it’s gorgeous. Beautiful movie. I will say that level of solving is astonishing to me, where it’s not about solving your Rubik’s cube, it’s about seeing just how fast can the brain go, not only to know what should be done, but also to make the fingers do it. For these kids to blindfold themselves and solve a Rubik’s cube in 30 seconds is just astonishing to watch.
**Megana:** Ray in the Midwest asks, “I’m the main writer on a genre indie film coming out later this year with an Academy Award actor as one of the leads. On top of that, my representation is currently shopping three to four different genre scripts of mine that are getting interest. I parlayed this writing momentum into finally getting permission to adapt one of my dream projects after pursuing it for more than a decade. It’s a comic book property. I took it to my representation, thinking it could be a game-changer, which it was for a bit. Suddenly, they now have a major studio screenwriter who’s shown interest in the property and pitching it as a major studio tent pole, which means that I would not be the screenwriter on my dream project. However, I would still be on board as a producer, which my reps told me would be far more valuable than me writing my dream project at the indie level. I’ve dreamt about writing this movie for over 12 years, and I’m wrestling with what is the best approach here. I’m obviously in no position to get this made as a major studio tent pole like the other writer, but the project is incredibly important to me. I always want to be a team player, because this industry’s all about collaboration. My question is, is it more valuable to my career moving forward to write and maintain creative involvement even if the movie is at the indie level like 2 million or below, or to be a producer with very little input on the potential $50 million or more?”
**Craig:** There’s a girl you’ve been chasing for years. You finally get that chance, and then your best friend says, “You know what would be even better than sleeping with her? That guy sleeping with her.”
**John:** I feel really bad for Ray. I have had similar conversations with friends who have been in situations like this, where they had the take, they had the thing, and they were about to get the job, and then some big screenwriter, not me… There have been conversations where I’ve been the person who’s come in to be that big screenwriter. I feel bad for the Rays who I didn’t even know about who were involved in things. My hunch is that so far you have an indie coming out, which is great. You have this other thing you want to adapt. You want to do it as an indie. If it really wants to be a bigger property and you’re not going to be able to swing it, take the producer credit, learn how a big movie gets made. Learn how all the gears go together and grind things down into frustrating pulps. Then focus on doing other stuff, because you have other projects, other irons in the fire, as you said in the first paragraph, different genre scripts. Use those to be your indie calling cards. Use this to be a lesson about how to make a big movie.
**Craig:** You’re implying that you have a choice. I’m not quite sure how that is. If you do have a choice, then my feeling is write it. You know how to do it at a certain level. You believe you do. You should do it. If there is no choice, I’m not really sure what the question is anyway. This is happening.
**John:** Yeah, because he doesn’t control the IP it doesn’t look like.
**Craig:** What I would say is make your peace with it. John’s absolutely right. It’s a great chance to see something big get put together. It’s a wonderful opportunity to see something destroyed that you love, which everybody should experience in Hollywood at least-
**John:** I’ve had a few of those.
**Craig:** … 7 or 18 times. One thing I just want to be clear about, your reps are absolutely full of shit. This is not good. That producing credit will mean zero. There is in movies one producing credit that means something, and it is produced by. The rest aren’t going to mean anything. They’re going to give you co-producer or, God forbid, associate producer. Do not settle for that. Even if it’s executive producer, it doesn’t matter, because everybody will know who produced the movie, and everybody will know who wrote the movie. We all know. Don’t get swayed by that. It will accrue to a zero benefit for you.
**John:** Last week on the show we had Michael Waldron on. He was talking about he went to Pepperdine for film school. I was trying to drill him. I tried to be Craig here and say, “What did you really get out of it? Was it worth your time? Was it worth your money?” It was clear that he treated it as like, “I’m going to treat every day like it’s my job. I’m going to absolutely kill everything that comes my way. I’m just going to really approach it like that.” If this could be Ray’s film school, where it’s like, “Listen, I know that my producer credit’s not going to mean anything, just like my screenwriting degree is not going to mean anything, but I am going to learn the shit out of things every day on this process and I’m going to stay involved on those conversations,” that’s going to be really helpful for you.
**Craig:** You’ll have to fight your way into it.
**John:** You will.
**Craig:** You may think that, “Oh, I’m a producer on this.” They’re like, “No, you’re not.”
**John:** Craig and I have been producers on things we’ve barely touched.
**Craig:** Enjoy your two tickets to the premier, sitting way, way in the back.
**John:** Ray, congratulations that you have a movie coming out with good people. It sounds like things are going pretty well here. Just don’t take the negative of this one thing not going quite the way you hoped as a sign that everything is doom.
**Craig:** Lay in wait, because that big screenwriter may fall on his or her face. Happens all the time. Then you can step up and be like, “I know what to do.”
**Megana:** Nathan in Nashville asks, “I’ve been stumped for a few weeks on a new spec I’m writing. I have the gist of the story worked out in a broad outline. I know all the major set pieces, including the ending. However, something feels off with the logic. I feel like I’m trying to force a puzzle piece into a hole that’s a 95% match. It might even seem to fit to the untrained eye, but doesn’t lock perfectly into place. For context, it’s a sci-fi script, but if Michel Gondry and the Muppets had total creative control. In other words, the rigorous logic needed for audience buy-in is much closer to the Swedish chef cooking with singing food than it is to Anthony Rapp navigating a star ship through a multidimensional network of interstellar fungi. Even still, I feel stuck. Do you have any tips for working yourself out of this predicament? I keep trying to write around the problem and solve it in a second draft, but the fact that the story logic isn’t perfect keeps niggling around in my brain and stopping that progress. I just can’t find that perfect fit.”
**Craig:** You got to pay attention to that.
**John:** Something’s wrong.
**Craig:** There is no piece fitting 95%.
**John:** I can tell you as a person who solves jigsaw puzzles, there’s no such thing as a 95% piece.
**Craig:** Not a puzzle.
**John:** I am the person who’s qualified to answer this thing talking about puzzle pieces. I’m going to say if it’s a near fit, it is a misfit. It’s not actually going to work. You’re going to bend the edges of that puzzle piece. Only pain is going to follow.
**Craig:** You will not be able to reassemble your broken picture. I will say that you need to solve this problem. You cannot write your way around it. You can’t cover it with words. You can’t pour structure over it, all that stuff. You think that the untrained eye might not notice it. Everyone will notice it. It will be glaring the whole time. Think of how many times you walked out of a movie complaining that something didn’t make sense. You have to solve it. This is very hard. This is a hard, hard thing to do.
I always think of this line, I’m sure I said this before, from Searching for Bobby Fischer, where this little kid is sitting there, eight-year-old chess prodigy, but he’s learning from a grandmaster played by Ben Kingsley. He’s laid out this arrangement of pieces for the kid. He says, “You can get to checkmate in 10 moves. How?” The kid’s just staring. He goes, “I don’t see it.” He says, “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” “Don’t move until you see it.” “I don’t see it.” Then he whacks all the pieces away, and the chessboard is empty. Then the kid looks at it. Then he has it in his mind. Then he sees it. Then it’s glorious.
I would say to you, in terms of writing, don’t move until you see it. Solve the problem in your head. It’s often way more elegant than you think. You will go through all these, and I do this all the time, these torturous machinations, because you think you’re hunting for this elusive, complicated formula. You’re not. You’re looking for E equals MC squared. You’re looking for something so fundamentally simple that when you see it, you’ll know.
**John:** My hunch is that you’re going to find the solution is not by adding something, but by taking some things away, and probably by taking away some things earlier on, because you’re trying to stack things up to fit a certain way. If you just take that piece out, oh, that was the thing that was causing the wrinkle in the carpet. It’s that thing that you can’t solve. Once you take that thing out, you’re there. It may also be a piece of just logic you’re giving us early on or emotional logic that you’re giving us early on makes us feel like this is how it’s going to work. These are the rules of the world that I’m setting up. Within the rules of the world I’m setting up, this makes perfect sense. Maybe don’t move until you see it. Also, the other choice is to take a step back and don’t try to solve this problem right in front of you. Look at the whole thing, and see, if I take some other things away, does that problem disappear.
**Craig:** Look at what you have, and ask yourself if maybe the answer’s just sitting there, because just what happens if everybody relaxes? What happens if all the characters that are currently tormenting themselves into your plot, what if it just relaxes? What if it simplifies?
**John:** The language you’re using, you’re trying to force something. You’re trying to jam something. Nope, actually just got to ease back and just let it flow and let it go to the next thing. It can feel lazy. It can feel like, I’m not doing work to jam this thing. No. Actually, it’s much more natural. If you’re doing a great job of writing this, it’s going to feel both natural and surprising to the audience, I think, because one of the things I loved so much about the third act of Top Gun movie is that a bunch of stuff happens, that I’m not surprised that all happens, but it actually feels natural to how the movie is set up.
**Craig:** Great.
**Megana:** DJ from Palmdale asks, “I’m writing a script in which the main characters are introduced in the opening scene, but as younger versions of themselves. Later the story jumps forward to the time period where the rest of the movie takes place when they’re older. My question is should I do my in-depth character introductions in that opening scene when they’re younger versions of themselves or should I wait until a few scenes later when the main characters are reintroduced as their older versions? The characters haven’t changed much fundamentally since the time period in the opening scene and act pretty much the same, but their older versions are what the audience sees for most of the film.”
**John:** Interesting. I don’t think we’ve actually addressed this before. When you have younger and older versions of characters, if you’re saying here that they’re actually not fundamentally vastly different, personality-wise. They’re still going to look different. They’re still going to feel different in their space. Make sure you’re giving us a visual and a way to identify those characters, keep them straight, when we first see them, with the older version or the younger version. You get a sense of who they are. When we see the older or the younger version of them, you can use some similar language to remind us of the personality things or other defining characteristics so we completely connect them in our heads, because it’s one thing in a movie when we’re watching that we can see these characters, be like, “Oh, that looks like the young version of Bill Hader.” On the page, we don’t have that. All we have is these names, and hopefully, we’re going to match to be the same person. We can get lost in terms of what’s changed and what’s the same.
**Craig:** You’re asking should I do this or that. My answer is yes, because you want to introduce the characters as they’re young, the way you should introduce any character. I want to know what they look like, what their hair is like, their clothes, wardrobe, hair, and makeup. If there’s anything specific, are they missing teeth, are they skinny, are they heavy, are they goofy, are they handsome, whatever it is, tell us. If you’re telling me that when they’re older they’re basically the same, I’m telling you, you haven’t done it right, because age is the thing that changes us the most, and not just because there’s physical changes, but there are mental changes and emotional changes. If you’re telling me a story where I see them as children and then I see them as an adult, for the love of god, something must’ve happened when they were children to earn my way into now jumping ahead and seeing them as adults. It’s really important that you do it again. If all you do is say 15 years older but more worried, 15 years older, still boyish, but somehow has lost their charm, or the goofy one is now more possessed, whatever it is, you got to give me something. Otherwise, why are you jumping ahead in time? Something must’ve happened.
**John:** The other thing I’d ask you to really look at, DJ, is how important is the younger and the older version of these characters. It says here that you were mostly with the older versions of these characters. Really ask yourself what happens if we don’t have these younger versions. It may be absolutely essential to your story that we see these younger versions, but maybe it’s not. Maybe you’re trying to do a thing that won’t actually be benefiting you in the movie. Maybe the question you’re asking is really should you be doing this at all. Maybe you should. Just ask yourself could you get by without this.
**Megana:** Justin asks, “My name’s Justin, and I’m in Canada, and I’m dyslexic. I’m currently writing my first screenplay roughly 20 years after being told by a high school English teacher that I should give up writing. That moment shattered my confidence, but as spell check and grammar checkers became more and more reliable, I slowly began to write again. I will always have to take a final ultra-slow pass reading through my script, but I will still miss mistakes that may seem fundamental to other screenwriters. Generally, the mistakes are not so severe that it would ruin the reading experience. I’m really confident in my storytelling skills. Should I be informing people before they read my script that I’m dyslexic and that there may be a few grammar errors? I worry that they may not want to read it at all if I do this. If I don’t, I worry they may wonder how I could make some fundamental mistakes.”
**Craig:** Good question. For starters, you can ask somebody to proofread it for you. There are people who will read scripts, and they will check for both spelling and grammar issues. My guess is that there are probably some pretty good resources for you in Canada, Canada, my home away from home last year and some, a socialist country with a lot of resources. I would imagine that there’s probably some decent resources for people with dyslexia there. There may be something. I don’t know if you live in a major city or not, but perhaps at a university library or at the university setting, there may be somebody willing to just do that to help you out. If not, then I think it’s fair to let people know that you’re dyslexic. The way I would put it is, “If you see any errors that would make you think, why would a person like this make that error, now you know why.” I wouldn’t get into grammar or spelling per se. I would just say, “If you see an error that seems funky, just flag it for me. I’m dyslexic. This will happen from time to time.”
**John:** I think before you need to do that, you’re going to be able to find resources for getting that last set of eyes on them, because you talk about needing to read through slowly and carefully, so you do have a sense of the kinds of things you’re struggling with. It may be a public resource, but it may also just be the person you’re paying 50 bucks to do that last pass on a script before you send it in. I think we’ve talked about this on previous episodes where there are people who will just read your script and there are people who can help you out on that. Finding the college student who can do that may be one of the best resources there for that.
I would also say that I think one of the good things that’s happened in the 20 years that you weren’t writing is that we’ve recognized that dyslexia is a set of challenges for people to read and to write, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have the ability to express themselves or tell stories and do all these things. I’m just really happy that you’ve realized that you have the ability to do all these things, and just like a person who… Ryan Knighton is blind and can write a hell of a script. It’s a small obstacle on the way that you can deal with and address.
**Craig:** 100%. With that in mind, if you do find somebody that you’re going to pay $50 to, $50 Canadian-
**John:** Which is less than it would be in the US. It’s a bargain in Canada.
**Craig:** John doesn’t understand money. Anyway, the point is make sure that they know why they’re reading it. Everybody that you give a script to is going to be like, “I did have some things. I wasn’t sure if this… When she said that, would she really say that?” Just be real clear up front, “I don’t want any creative notes from you whatsoever. I just want spelling, grammar.”
**John:** I will say there’s a writer director I know, who I think she’s talked about her dyslexia, but I don’t want to say her name in case she hasn’t talked about it. She is dyslexic, and she has a very successful writing directing career. She just has people help her with those issues. Is it a thing you’re going to have to address? For sure. Can you still be perfectly successful? Yes, because she is.
**Craig:** There you.
**John:** Craig, it’s come time for our One Cool Things. Do you have a One Cool Thing to share with us? We’ve missed you for so long, so I bet you’ll have a cool thing.
**Craig:** I do have a cool thing. It’s free, which I can’t believe. Like most shows that shoot on digital, which is most shows, we used an ARRI. One of the primary tools that have been around for directors and cinematographers for many, many years when we were shooting films was a viewfinder. The idea when you’re shooting on the ARRI or a film camera is you’re constantly switching lenses. The lenses are fixed focal lengths, so 50 millimeters, 35, 32, 27. When you’re trying to frame up the scene, when you’re blocking it out and you want to know what lens should we be using, we used to just get the lens on a stick. It was a viewfinder on a stick. You’d look through it, and you could turn a dial. That was a variable lens, so you could roughly see what it would look like. We don’t have to do that anymore.
**John:** You’ve got your phone out, so I bet it involves your phone.
**Craig:** It is. There’s an app called the Magic ARRI Viewfinder. It is free. There are a few extra doodads you can unlock on it if you buy… I don’t know, it’s like $4 for the little upgrade. It’s wonderful. Basically, you hold it out, and you just dial in with your finger what focal length. It’ll take any focal length, including lenses that don’t exist. Nobody uses a 68. If you want to look at it in 68, you can. When I was directing, I found it incredibly useful to be able to just take my phone, especially when I was scouting, to look around, just see, okay, I’m just going to roughly go in my mind. I know what a wide is. I know what a medium is. I know what a long is. Let me just take some pictures using the bright lens. Very helpful. Super free and/or cheap. If you are ever contemplating using a viewfinder for anything, that thing did pretty well.
**John:** I’ve seen viewfinder things on the iPhone for a long time, but it sounds like this one is deliberately an ARRI thing that is going to give you exactly what you’d expect from this camera, which is great.
**Craig:** Especially with this iPhone, it’s saying, look, this is what-
**John:** This is what you’re going to get.
**Craig:** This is what you’re going to get with a general lens, because the ARRI is not lenses. The ARRI is just-
**John:** It’s a box.
**Craig:** It’s a box. The lenses are the lenses. It’s saying if you were to stand here and look through a real lens on a 35, this is what you would see.
**John:** Craig, when you’re out scouting at location and you’re pulling out this app doing this stuff, are you just setting location manager, AD, stand there, stand there, to see relative framing?
**Craig:** I will occasionally do that. The last time I used it, I asked my production designer to stand here. I was like, “No, move to your left. Take one step forward. Stop.” Then you can tap on your area of focus. If I want to see the back of his head sharp but in the distance things blown out-
**John:** That’ll give you a sense of like, okay, if I was on this long of a lens, how quickly would I lose that, could I keep both of them in focus, if you wanted to.
**Craig:** Right, or if I want the background to be out of focus, how much out of focus will it be with this lens. Then I find the one, like, okay, this is basically what I’m thinking, take a picture. Then I can share that with my DP. I always say, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. This is just for a vague sense of my… You will make it look great. Maybe this lens is wrong and all that. This was just kind of a thought.”
**John:** Whenever I’m Slacking something through to Dustin, our designer, and I’ve just done something up in PhotoShop really quick, generally I’ll say, “A thousand apologies, this is terrible, because I’m stepping into your domain. This is what’s in my head.”
**Craig:** You know what I did? There was a note. I was talking to Franny Orsi, who runs HBO Drama. She was saying there was just something in a scene she wanted. She described it in the kind of way that executives do. I knew I had 50% of what she was asking for, but not 100%. I said, “Okay, Frannie, write dialog for me. Don’t worry. It doesn’t have to be good. It’s going to feel weird. I’m not going to use it word for word or even any of it. I just need to know what’s in your head. It will help me write something that will probably look completely different but maybe get to.” She did it, and she was so sweet about it. She’s like, “This is a first for me.” She’s like, “This was hard and weird and uncomfortable, but here it is.” It was incredibly helpful. It helped me. Like I said, I didn’t use that, but I did this, and it achieved hopefully the thing that she was asking for.
**John:** That’s great. My One Cool Thing actually comes from Megana. This is a tweet by Alex Hirsch, who was going through some of the emails he got from Disney’s Standards and Practices on his show Gravity Falls. Did you see this today?
**Craig:** I was just talking about this with our editor, Tim Goode, an hour ago. It’s really funny.
**John:** Let me play a little clip here from it.
**Alex Hirsch:** Page 492. It has come to our attention that hoo ha is a slang term for vagina. Please revise.
It is a proper word meaning excitement or hullabaloo, and that is clearly its meaning here. The context is an owl-themed restaurant called Hoo Ha’s Jamboree. Not changing it.
Page 14. Please revise chub pup on T-shirt. Chub has a sexual connotation.
This is silly. It’s an image of a fat dog. On the context, there’s no reason to think chub means anything other than that.
We have ran this phrase up the line, and unfortunately the concern surrounding it still remains. If you’d like to send me some alternate phrases, I can run those and let you know what becomes of it.
Alternate phrases: chubby pup, tub pup, chubbity pup pup. I can’t believe I have to do this.
**John:** Standards and Practices, for people who aren’t familiar with it, international listeners, particularly on the broadcast networks but also on some of the cable networks-
**Craig:** Censors.
**John:** Censors. They are censors. They’re going through and saying this is appropriate or not appropriate for our audience, for our network, not in a legal sense, but basically so that people won’t come after us and say that we are corrupting the youth of America, things that we are being asked to change.
**Craig:** Standards and Practices is notorious for being… It’s like they found the most fuddy-duddy people on the planet and then gave them an audience and said, “Suck the life out of things,” because we generally are smart enough to know where the line is that’s hard. If you’re writing for network, you’re not dropping F-bombs on that show. That’s not allowed by the FCC. You can’t do it. Then there are those weird things that are in the middle. You know, okay, look, I was dancing around… You might say, “Oh, did you get a handy?” Now, handy in that context clearly means hand job. You’re going to get flagged by S and P. You got to take the L on that one. Okay, fine. If, look, it’s called chub pug because it’s a fat pug, and we heard that you could also say I got a chub meaning an erection, no. No, I’m going to fight that all day long. That’s crazy. Who is going to misinterpret that? Certainly not the nine-year-old kids watching it.
**John:** The frustration with all of it is that it’s anticipating an adult responding in a way that a kid would never actually do it and taking offense on behalf of an imaginary child.
**Craig:** I love those videos when some outraged mom somewhere is like, “I got this animal, stuffed animal, and if you pull the string, it says words. Listen to what it says. It’s saying go fuck Santa.” Then they play it for you, and it’s like, no, it’s not. It’s saying, “Oh, I forgive you.” It didn’t say fuck Santa at all.
**John:** It says, “I’m fun Santa.”
**Craig:** You’re like, lady, you’re crazy. Then they get attention. Then a hundred articles are written. Anyway, now we have to put a language warning on this.
**John:** That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by Lachlan Marks. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. The Dropbox folder that has all of our listener outros is getting a little bit bare.
**Craig:** Uh-oh.
**John:** Maybe send those in now. If you’ve been holding onto one, we need it. Ask@johnaugust.com is also where you can send longer questions like the ones we answered today, but for short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You could sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments like the one we’re about to record on penmanship.
**Craig:** Penmanship.
**John:** Craig, it’s nice to have you back.
**Craig:** It’s so good to be back.
**John:** Craig, what is your handwriting like? I don’t think I’ve actually seen your handwriting ever.
**Craig:** I’m happy to do it for you right now.
**John:** Let’s find a pen here. I would like you to write instructions for heating up dinner.
**Megana:** I’m pulling up an article that says what does your handwriting say about you.
**John:** We’re going to trade.
**Craig:** Trading.
**John:** Mine has things I legitimately just wrote for myself and one thing I just wrote now for this. Craig wrote, “First, put the food on a plate. Second, place the plate in a microwave. Third, hit start three times.” It’s clearly readable. I can see what you’re going for here.
**Craig:** It’s not going so well over here, John. I’m taking a look at what you wrote. This says, “Magical pollution.”
**John:** Magical pollution.
**Craig:** “At end of… ” I think you meant to say pilot, but it is spelled pidut. “L?”
**John:** Mm-hmm.
**Craig:** “Her?”
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** “Hope?”
**John:** Hope, yeah.
**Craig:** “L her hope?”
**John:** Yeah.
**Craig:** “He, um, loody, huh, owl, M,” music note, “didn’t,” two marks that mean nothing, and then another M. Then on the back it says, “This is my normal… ” You meant to say handwriting, but what this is is… I got hand, and then it just went bad.
**John:** It’s the difference between… I tend to just write for myself, because I can read everything that’s on this. I can get it all back. Then I won’t think about, oh, I’m actually writing this for somebody else who has to read my handwriting, and it becomes really bad. The exception is I used to do my first drafts all by hand, and so I would send them through to Dana. I would fax them through to Dana.
**Craig:** Fax.
**John:** Because I would be bunkered down someplace, I would hand-write the pages, send them through. I would be very deliberate about my handwriting when I send them through to Dana. This is my scribble.
**Craig:** That’s very bad. That’s way worse than I thought it would be, because I think of you as a precision machine, but not-
**John:** No, I’m full chaos.
**Craig:** You know what? Every machine has some weakness. This is yours.
**John:** I would say on this [inaudible 00:55:07] this is my normal handwriting. I will tend to focus on the first bits of a word that actually are important, and then I’ll just… I’ll get the rest of-
**Craig:** It’s gone.
**John:** I’ll remember what the rest of the word must be.
**Craig:** My handwriting, it’s good to see that it’s legible. That’s great.
**John:** I’m holding this up so Megana can see it on Zoom.
**Craig:** Let’s see what Megana thinks.
**Megana:** Yeah, that is legible. You both have very creative handwriting.
**Craig:** It’s bad. Don’t get me wrong. It’s bad. Your handwriting is probably outstanding.
**Megana:** Yeah, it’s pretty good.
**Craig:** This is an experience I think almost every boy has had, being in 5th grade and you’re writing your little thing, and then you look in the seat next to you, there is a girl who is calligraphying it as far as… Or her hand is a font maker, every letter, the kerning, the fact that the lines are straight, the precision of it all. You’re like duh, duh, der. You just feel so bad.
**John:** Megana, I’m trying to think what your normal handwriting is. Are you printing or are you writing cursive for your normal, just daily writing?
**Megana:** I do a combination. It’s like Spanglish between cursive and print.
**John:** Does your handwriting vary based on whether it’s something just for you? I don’t know if you do morning pages, but if you’re writing just for yourself, is it any different than what people are writing for other people?
**Megana:** I’m looking at my morning pages.
**Craig:** What are morning pages?
**John:** It’s a whole thing that, Craig, you missed out on, because it’s this idea of… Megana, you do it, so describe them.
**Craig:** What is it?
**Megana:** I don’t really do it. I just journal but call it that facetiously. It is from this popular book called The Artist’s Way. The idea is that you wake up every morning and you write three pages without thinking. It’s supposed to clear you for the day.
**Craig:** I’d rather light myself on fire.
**John:** I tried it for two weeks. It was weird, because it’s just stream of consciousness going to your pen.
**Craig:** Oh god, no. No, because I know it. Every morning, I don’t want to do this, which makes me bad. I never want to do things that are good for me. I’m a bad person. I’m no good. I’m hungry. I eat too much. I eat too much. I want to eat something that’s bad for me. I should stop. You know what? I’m going to have a breakfast salad. No, I’m not, lol, you fat bastard. Then I would do another two pages like that. Then I would weep. Then I would go ahead and have myself one of those nice eggwiches.
**John:** Eggwiches are delicious.
**Craig:** Love an eggwich.
**John:** Egg sandwich, so good.
**Craig:** Anyway, I’m not doing that, Megana. I don’t care.
**Megana:** I’m not telling you to.
**John:** Can you hold it up to the camera? We want to see what your handwriting looks like.
**Megana:** Let me find something that-
**John:** That’s not your private journal?
**Megana:** Yeah.
**John:** It’s like, please hold up your private journal to Zoom.
**Craig:** She’s like, “I hate John so much.”
**Megana:** You know what? This is actually Craig level. These are old notes from a couple of years ago that my writers’ group gave me.
**John:** I would describe these… It’s mostly printed, but some letters do connect together. I would say it’s written fairly big. There’s a lot of open space within letters. It’s really easy to read that.
**Craig:** Yes. It’s also evident that a woman wrote it. That is female handwriting.
**Megana:** I feel like boys are socialized to play, and I spent so much time just writing boys’ names in doodly hearts.
**Craig:** Boys don’t think that way.
**John:** Megana, how many different boys’ last names did you practice with on your Trapper Keeper growing up?
**Megana:** Oh my god, so many. I don’t understand on the Trapper Keeper, because then the boy would see it. It’s on loose-leaf at home.
**John:** Perfect. Which was the best last name you aspired to?
**Megana:** Gosh, this is so embarrassing. I think Barton and then using a lot of changing the vowels to be hearts.
**Craig:** Of course. Of course.
**John:** Perfect.
**Craig:** What is the deal with that A? It’s pretty common. I guess writing is vaguely gendered. It can be. My A is like a very normal A. The lowercase A is just a circle with then a little leg coming off the right. Then there’s what I think of as the girl A, which is this curlicue and then a little… It’s like a pregnant backwards R. Exactly. Where did that come from?
**John:** What it comes from, in print, in actual typeset print, that is an A.
**Craig:** We’re doing it wrong.
**John:** No, but what I think is it came from typeset print and some people just started doing it in actual normal writing. I don’t think it was a handwritten thing at first.
**Craig:** I think it’s just a cultural thing where girls will copy each other doing it.
**Megana:** I do remember seeing it and being like, “That’s beautiful,” and then a little voice in my head-
**Craig:** See, there you go.
**Megana:** … being like, “You can do that too.”
**Craig:** Or bubble writing.
**Megana:** There we go.
**Craig:** Oh, the bubble writing. I think that Megana Mazin is the best last name you could’ve played with, because think about it, you sound like Megan Amazin’.
**John:** Amazin’.
**Megana:** Megana Mazin.
**Craig:** It’s so good.
**Megana:** That is true.
**John:** Amazin’.
**Craig:** Megana Mazin.
**Megana:** The nice thing about Mazin is there’s an I, which gives you the opportunity for a heart above the I.
**Craig:** The heart dot.
**Megana:** Or a flower.
**Craig:** The heart dot or a flower. The flower is the friendship version. It’s the blue heart of red hearts.
**John:** Megana, when you were in school, did they still teach cursive?
**Megana:** They did teach cursive.
**John:** In Ohio?
**Megana:** Yes. I feel like I might’ve been one of the last people to learn cursive.
**John:** They’ve basically given up on it.
**Craig:** I don’t even know why they should be teaching handwriting at all. It’s gone. It’s over.
**John:** [inaudible 01:00:38].
**Megana:** Wait, when you guys were in school, did you learn how to make a cool S?
**John:** Yeah, you’re talking the super bad ass, looks like a rock star kind of thing?
**Megana:** Yeah.
**John:** The interconnected, the geometric-
**Craig:** Yes, the up, back, down, back, back, up.
**John:** That clearly is going to be the next Scriptnotes shirt.
**Craig:** It’s the Kiss S.
**John:** Yeah. The next Scriptnotes shirt will have to be-
**Craig:** Scriptnotes should have that. It should feel like that.
**John:** I learned cursive. For a while, my signature was the cursive J, which is that weird loop on top of a loop.
**Craig:** I like that J.
**John:** Then my friend Jason started doing this J that was just, “That’s cool. I’m going to steal that.”
**Craig:** Stealing it.
**John:** That’s now my signature.
**Craig:** My signature is cursive, but it’s evolved. If I do my name in proper cursive, so that’s my proper cursive name, which hopefully looks like-
**John:** Yeah, that looks like a Craig Mazin.
**Craig:** Now here’s the actual signature. It’s like every hard bit has been removed. All that’s left is C, G, and Z. You know what?
**John:** It works.
**Craig:** When we go to the Austin screenwriting thing and then they’re like, “Sign 400 of these.”
**John:** Wah wah wah, wah wah wah.
**Craig:** I watch somebody doing their very beautiful signature. I’m like, “You got to let that go.”
**John:** I have two different signatures. The top one here, which is the stolen J, is how I sign checks. It’s my legal signature. The other one looks Disney-like. It’s printy.
**Craig:** Oh yeah, look at that.
**John:** That’s what I sign for Arlo Finch books and everything else.
**Craig:** I’ll do my first name. When you do John and I’ll do Craig, it’s sort of print.
**John:** When we send out-
**Craig:** Like that.
**John:** … emails from the Scriptnotes account, which Craig never reads, we’ll send them out-
**Craig:** I didn’t even know that we did that.
**John:** We’ll send out to our Premium Members to say… Premium Members are the folks listening to this segment. We’ll say, “Hey, we’re doing a Three Page Challenge. Do you want to send stuff in?” It’s signed John and Craig. You wrote that eight years ago.
**Craig:** That’s like the version of when you listen to a TV show and you hear a laugh track and all those people are dead.
**John:** Exactly, that’s what it is. I think we originally did that for the USB drives. We used to have the episodes on the USB drives way back in the day.
**Craig:** You can probably sign checks using that with me. I think you’re allowed, just Craig.
**John:** Craig. Craig.
**Craig:** Who’s this from? Craig.
**Megana:** I do have to say I had a really nice experience recently. I got notes from John back, and he had made the notes on a pdf on your iPad. Is that right, John?
**John:** Yeah.
**Megana:** As I was scrolling through, I was like, “What is this circle that he’s made on the paper, or is this parentheses? Do I need parentheses in this place?” Then I realized it was a little heart.
**John:** I wrote little hearts in there.
**Megana:** It was so sweet.
**Craig:** Your hearts look like circles.
**John:** I think if I did it quickly it could look like a-
**Megana:** Some quick hearts.
**John:** Sloppy.
**Megana:** Then I had to go back, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, there’s hearts all over the place.”
**Craig:** There’s hearts all over the place.
**John:** There were hearts all over. It was a very good draft. There were things in there I really loved.
**Craig:** That’s great.
**Megana:** My heart exploded. I was so happy.
**Craig:** That’s great. Aw.
**John:** Aw.
**Craig:** I had a similar experience. You were there, Megana, when we talked through Bo’s script, which I really liked. What I do is I will just highlight using… I’ll do it in Notability. I’ll just use my highlighter and just make them green. It’s maybe not as emotional as a heart, but if there’s a lot of green, that’s good.
**John:** Good stuff. Good topic.
**Craig:** Great topic.
**John:** That pulled it out.
**Craig:** Fun.
**Megana:** Thank you.
**John:** Thanks, all.
**Craig:** Thank you guys.
**Megana:** Bye.
**Craig:** Bye.
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Lachlan Marks ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).
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