Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/seattle-live-show-2019).

**John August:** And we’re done. Yes.

**Craig Mazin:** So great.

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

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We are here in Seattle for our first ever Seattle live show.

**Craig:** Hear that, John? The sound of people that have been freshly enriched by a higher minimum wage.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** They’re excited. They’re caffeinated. They’re full of their legal marijuana and they’re excited. Excited.

**John:** They are excited and why would they not be excited?

**Craig:** No, of course.

**John:** So, the Northwest Screenwriters Guild has been gently stalking us for several years to try to convince us to come up here and they finally succeeded, so a good lesson is to just stalk somebody for a very long time sometimes pays off. So Northwest Screenwriters and TheFilmSchool, all one word apparently, got us up here. I was here on my Arlo Finch book tour. You generously agreed to like hop on a plane and fly up here.

**Craig:** What happened was – thank you – John said come to Seattle and I said OK.

**John:** [laughs] Yes.

**Craig:** I don’t really do a lot of thinking or what I would say independent thinking or decision making.

**John:** No, it’s not planned.

**Craig:** Normally just John tells me what to do. Earlier I didn’t know where he was and I got scared. So, just so you guys understand, and you probably do, how this works. It’s that.

**John:** Yeah. I text Craig like meet me in the lobby in five minutes and he’s like OK-K.

**Craig:** OK. Yeah. And I was on time.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Do not show up late for John August.

**John:** So let’s just get a general sense of what’s happening in the industry overall because we’ve done a live show in New York and a live show in Austin, which are both big film towns, a lot of film happens here. But not a lot of film happens in Seattle. So I was curious why Seattle wanted us up here. And so we got a chance to talk to the Northwest Screenwriters Guild at dinner and a lot of the folks who are in this guild who are doing stuff they want to be writing movies. They want to be telling stories cinematically and it’s a group that got together to help them figure out how to do that. And some of their members have gone on to do big cinematic stuff.

You know, there’s cinematic storytelling that’s not just about making big movies. It can be about video games. It can be about animation. There’s lots of other things that involve some of those characteristics as qualities.

**Craig:** Everything is kind of smooshing together these days which is nice. You guys are also kind of on the backdoor of one of the largest production cities in the world. And it’s something to think about. I know you have to sneak across the border. Obviously it’s a little trickier these days with the wall.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** [laughs] The wall between us and Canada. Ridiculous.

**John:** International listeners might not understand that Seattle and Vancouver are just next door neighbors.

**Craig:** Kissing cousins.

**John:** And they are so close together but so much production happens in Vancouver. So little production happens in Seattle because of tax breaks and exchange rates.

**Craig:** And also the general politeness of Canadians. I mean, we should give them a little bit of credit.

**John:** Give a little more credit to the Canadians because the Canadians deserve–

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m not saying you guys are rude. It’s not a “Hey!” See, it’s like “hello, how are you.” Oh, dual citizen? So you’ve learned to be rude?

**John:** So she’s a Canadian today but other days she’s an American.

**Craig:** Yes. Your alternate side of the street parking with your Canadians. Well, anyway, the point is you’re very close but I would imagine also that means there are probably a lot of training and educational resources here that you might not find in another city of Seattle’s size. I happen to be a huge fan of Seattle. I think it’s an amazing city.

Not every city has the spirit of art running through its veins. This one clearly does. So, I think–

**John:** It’s got a spirit of art and a lot of money. These are good combinations for a town.

**Craig:** Art and money.

**John:** Art and money.

**Craig:** Most of the people making art on the street do not appear to have the money. However, there are opportunities here. And so this is actually of all the places I think this is one of the – I don’t know, I think you guys are in a pretty great place. That said, you should probably move to LA.

**John:** At some point.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You should move to LA. So this was a Twitter thread that I actually got into today. And so I was retweeting some folks about when do you stop your day job which is a really good question. These were novelists who were talking about when you quit your day job, but as screenwriters it’s a tough question of like when do you stop working your day job.

For people who get staffed on a TV show, well, the choice is made for you. You’re now a full-time employee on a TV show so you’re not going to go to your day job anymore. But for screenwriters it’s a much tougher call. And so Shannon and Swift who are a writing team who do a lot of stuff they were saying like they were on the front page of Variety having sold their script and they still went to work that day because you just don’t know. You just don’t know when that next job is going to come, when you’re actually going to get paid. So, that idea of you made it, you didn’t make it, when do you stop working your day job is really tough.

**Craig:** I went through the same thing. The first thing I sold was in I think 1995 I want to say, possibly. And I don’t think I actually quit that job until late in 1996. So for a long time you’re just sort of waiting, which is smart. I mean, honestly a lot of people sell a script. Not to bum you guys out. You guys will sell many scripts. But some people only sell one. Boo those people.

And so I was kind of scared, but it was a weird thing to be – because you feel like you’ve made it. You know, you and I have talked on the show there’s no making it. There’s no breaking in. It’s not a thing. There’s just this strange progression. And then one day someone says to you, “I need you working on this now. You can’t go to your safe job anymore.” And that actually is a scary day.

**John:** It is a scary day. And if you get staffed on a TV show, well great, so you have 20 weeks of work, but then what happens – or hopefully 20 weeks, maybe it’s 10 weeks of work. But what happens after that? And a thing you guys should understand is that as television has gotten just shorter and shorter seasons, well that’s great for a viewer. I like a short season. I like being able to get through all of it. But as a writer that can be really tough because if you’re only working on those 10 weeks, those 20 weeks, well you’ve got to get on another show. You’ve got to find ways to fill a whole year.

And so I think we’re going to see writers having to do a lot more scrambling as they jump from show to show to show, or trying to find the next show down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. So maybe just quit now.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe just stop. That’s really our message. Or our anti-message.

**Craig:** The crazy part is there’s more jobs than ever before. It’s pretty awesome actually. You guys are in a pretty great time. There are more jobs than ever before. Almost all of them are in television, but that’s OK because television is more movie-like than ever before. But it is true. There is a certain pressure now on the way you live. That said, people are living that life quite successfully and some people are living it incredibly successfully. And I would add that aside from money there are other parts of this job that are so fulfilling and so lovely that they’re worth almost as much as money.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which you don’t hear very often, but they are.

**John:** So, so much of this conversation we could have every day in Los Angeles. We do sort of have it every day in Los Angeles. But when we decided to come up here to Seattle my first question to Craig is like, well, who should we have on the show? Who is a special Seattle person we could have on the show? And Craig was like, oh, oh, ooh, I know exactly who we should have on the show. So tell me what was your instinct behind having Emily.

**Craig:** So Emily Zulauf is somebody I’ve known for many, many years. I met her when she was working at Pixar. Pixar does this interesting thing where – so they’re Oakland. I was going to say up in Oakland, but it’s down in Oakland. And they are always looking for people to write. You’d think like, oh, they’re Pixar. But the way that animation is done, some of you may be familiar with this, there are so many people creating and so many people writing that a lot of times they’re looking in places for writers that you might not think. And a few years ago Emily came down with Mary Coleman, another development executive from Pixar, to meet some people who they had read some scripts and liked and I was one of those people. And I’m a huge Pixar fan. And we had this lovely lunch. And then I guess about a year later we ran into each other again at the Austin Film Festival which is a fun thing. I don’t know – has anybody gone to the Austin Film Festival?

**John:** There’s some hands up. Great.

**Craig:** Look at all you. Good for you. So we ran into each other there and we just decided – she was like we decided that we would be friends, but mostly I was like I don’t like anyone, so when I meet somebody that I like I’m like, OK, we’re friends now and they don’t have a choice because it’s hard for me to meet people that I like. Because I’m a bad person full of umbrage.

So, we became friends. And she’s got a remarkable story mind and she also came out of this place that is legendary and has created some of the most incredible stories of all time. And, in fact, is one of the few institutions in the world that I think is mostly just obsessed with pure storytelling. And she’s actually in a different endeavor now. She’ll tell you about that. But maybe we should welcome her down.

**John:** Emily Zulauf will you please come and join us here.

**Emily Zulauf:** Hey guys.

**John:** Emily, so at dinner I was trying to figure out how I should introduce you. Emily Zulauf is a blank – but you do so many things. Talk to us about what you’re doing now and how you would describe yourself on a resume.

**Emily:** Oh god. So right now I am running story for a new video game company that I can’t talk about.

**John:** She’s under so many NDAs.

**Emily:** I’m so scared.

**John:** There’s like a red dot aimed at her forehead right now.

**Emily:** I know. It was my honest reservation about doing the podcast was I can’t talk about any of this. So that’s what I’m doing right now in secret. And, yeah, prior to that I did some freelance writing. I was the executive director of a nonprofit for a hot second. And I was at Pixar for almost eight years. I was the script supervisor on Inside Out and I was in creative development for about 3.5 years.

**John:** That’s great. You are also a friend of Tess Morris.

**Emily:** Yes.

**John:** Who is a very frequent Scriptnotes guest. And so I always think of you with Tess Morris, because I always see you at the Austin Film Festival right with Tess.

**Emily:** Yeah. That’s a great association. I totally appreciate that. I want to keep that going.

**John:** You know what? We’re happy to have you by yourself. So, when we have–

**Emily:** Yeah. No more Tess.

**John:** No more Tess. This is a Tess-less episode. So, there’s so many things about what you’ve worked on that I want to get into because they’re different than what we normally experience as screenwriters. First, I want to talk about process because Pixar is just a very different story and creative process than what we’re used to as screenwriters because Craig and I we just go off in our little rooms and we beat ourselves up and we write our stories. That’s not the Pixar way at all.

I remember going up to a meeting at Pixar where I gave a little talk, gave a little class, and then they were like, “Oh yeah, and then we’re going to do a two-day offsite to work on this one moment at the end of the second act.” I’m like I would kill myself. But it works for Pixar. So, how does it work and why does it work?

**Emily:** Like how do people not kill themselves?

**John:** How do people not kill themselves?

**Craig:** There’s actually quite a high suicide rate there.

**Emily:** It’s a very tall building.

**Craig:** They’re dropping like flies.

**Emily:** It’s a very tall building.

**Craig:** There isn’t. No there’s not.

**Emily:** It’s totally a joke.

**John:** People hanging themselves from a little lamp.

**Craig:** So touchy here.

**Emily:** Starting dark.

**John:** So what is – I mean, that two-day offsite was probably a real thing and you probably do that.

**Emily:** Yeah. We didn’t make that up.

**John:** That actually does happen. So, what is the process? So something like an Inside Out, is there a script at the start or is it just an idea that – tell me.

**Emily:** Yeah, so usually what it has been traditionally, and I guess I want to caveat this by saying I’m not there now. They’re obviously in a transitional period and so this might be changing a little bit. But sort of traditionally what it has been is that the director is identified first by some group of the executive team. And that director is responsible for coming up with three different pitches of stories that that person wants to do. And so part of what we do in creative development is sort of support them as they’re trying to figure out what that is that they’re interested in. And coming up with sort of a rough pitch for all of those. And then they pitch that to whoever is in charge.

**John:** Whoever is in charge. Let’s stop though for one second though. When you say a director is pitching three ideas, they’re really pitching sort of three story areas, or they’re pitching three like I want to do a story that’s about this, or about this idea, but it may not have the exact characters or sort of what’s going to happen.

**Emily:** For sure. Yeah, it’s definitely like the roughest outline. It would fit on probably a page or a half a page depending on how much they fleshed it out. And it’s usually trying to find three areas that feel distinct enough and different enough that the president of the company can say I like this direction. You’re certainly not – you know, when they buy off on an idea they’re certainly not buying off on something that looks like a full treatment or definitely not a full script.

**Craig:** And they’re basically saying go ahead and take some time to dig at this little vein in the mountain and see if there’s stuff there.

**Emily:** Exactly. Like run that direction. But certainly not at the point of like this makes perfect sense.

**Craig:** I heard a story that Finding Nemo just began as – was it Andrew Stanton?

**Emily:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Saying “fish.” Just started with fish. And everyone was like, yes, of course, fish.

**John:** We’re going to do fish.

**Emily:** There’s a pretty wide variety in how much people have prepared for those pitches. And some of it has to do with how comfortable you are. You know, we’re asking people to – I mean, with any director you have a lot of different skillsets that have to exist in one person. But certainly we’re asking somebody whose job is not pitching to figure out how to get up and pitch effectively.

**John:** To how big of a group would that person need to be able to pitch?

**Emily:** Well, ultimately – and this is where I’m going to fudge around on it again – historically that was just John Lasseter. I assume now that is mostly Pete Docter. But there certainly are other people who will show up in those meetings. But ultimately there’s sort of one decider at the studio. It’s just sort of how the hierarchy is structured. And depending on how comfortable you are makes a big difference in how you pitch.

**Craig:** I mean animation in and of itself has so much pitching from moment to moment that at some point I assume people just get over whatever kind of baseline of fear they had because story artists are constantly pitching.

**Emily:** Yeah. And the majority of our directors come out of story, too. So most of them do have a baseline of at least being comfortable enough to get up and talk about story. But there’s always a process that everybody goes through when you’re new at anything. And pitching to the head of your company is not the same as pitching to the rest of your story team.

**Craig:** Right. When you know like I have a job now, so the worst thing that happens is I have to just keep doing my job.

**Emily:** Right. Exactly. And then I think they’re doing I think a really wonderful job right now of starting to pull from other places more. So, if you’re coming and I’m totally making this up, I don’t know that this is true. But if you’re coming out of lighting for instance like that’s not necessarily going to be your area. So part of what we would do in creative development is just pitch prep, is just help people get comfortable to talk about their story and how to do it and what the beats are.

**Craig:** I had no idea. That’s so nice.

**Emily:** Isn’t that nice?

**Craig:** You’re a good person.

**Emily:** We’re very nice.

**John:** There’s a whole department that does not exist at a traditional studio at all because–

**Craig:** I feel like this is the opposite department where they teach you – they just remind you repeatedly before you go into a room that it’s quite likely you’ll fail.

**John:** That you’re all terrible and it will never get past here.

**Craig:** But good luck.

**John:** So because we’re in Seattle, Amazon headquarters, I know that Amazon has this policy of when they’re going to start on a new project one of the first things you have to do is write the press release announcing the finished version. And it feels so different from what you’re describing. So these directors who are pitching these story areas they don’t really know what the final movie is. They don’t even know what sort of happens in it. They’re just describing an area, a vision, so it’s not a specific kind of thing.

When Craig and I go in to pitch something, like we’ll get called to the mat on details about like well how do you get to the second act moment.

**Craig:** I just tell them, I’m like shut up.

**John:** Shut up.

**Craig:** It’s a pitch.

**John:** Shut up Sean. I can do it.

**Craig:** Just shut up, Sean. I’ve never said shut up to Sean. He’s a nice guy. Super nice.

**Emily:** In fairness I think they do usually have a story sketched out. I think the difference is that it will change–

**John:** They know it’s going to change.

**Emily:** So dramatically. So a lot of times even though you go in and you pitch a story you’re really pitching the world. And you’re really pitching like do you want to live in this space for a while.

**Craig:** And you’re pitching to a creative person. You know, most of the time for us – not that producers aren’t creative, but we’re pitching to people that don’t write. So a lot of their expectation is tell me a story. But when you’re pitching to people that do write, when a writer friend pitches something to me, sometimes it is just fish because a question that I will always ask somebody, like somebody says, “OK, can you read these first 20. I’m lost. What’s happening here?” Sometimes the question you just ask is what made you feel fascinated in the first place and maybe that’s kind of what happens in those meetings is someone just shows this little piece of spark because they want to tell, there’s like a little thing. Well let’s go back to that seed.

**Emily:** I think that’s totally true. And I think that’s also sort of what our job was in creative development too is to start poking at those questions and help you articulate why does this matter to me so that when you walk into a meeting that’s what you’re–

**Craig:** When they ask you why does this matter to you.

**Emily:** And you’re like I don’t know.

**Craig:** I need my healthcare. That’s not a great answer.

**Emily:** I really enjoy money.

**Craig:** Yeah. I bought a car I should not have bought and…

**John:** Well, Emily, here’s a crucial difference though is these folks who are coming in to do this, the people you’re working with, they’re already working for Pixar so they’re already getting a paycheck. So it’s not that like I’ve got to make this happen or else I’m dead. They’re already working there. So you can support them because they’re already part of your family.

My question though is how many people are pitching their kind of project at Pixar? Because you’re only making two or three movies a year. How many folks are trying to get one of their movies up and running? Is it 20? Is it 30?

**Emily:** No. You have to be invited to pitch a feature.

**John:** OK. And to be invited you probably were a super star on some previous project.

**Emily:** Exactly.

**Craig:** Or you get a Golden Ticket.

**Emily:** Right. Or there’s a line outside the studio and one person comes in a year.

**John:** One person gets the ticket.

**Emily:** But if you want to make a short it’s a much more open process. So that ends up being more of a training ground. And then there’s some people who made a short and did it successfully and then moved on to features. But, yes, if you’re getting to pitch a feature it’s a small group.

**John:** Now, one of the rare things that you get to do which I don’t hear other people talking about is Pixar brings in writers to work for a time on a project and it was part of your responsibility to find those writers who would come in to do that stuff. And so we have a lot of people who want to be writers in animation or writers at all and how would you find their scripts and what are you looking for in those scripts that might say like oh this is a person who could help us out. What are you looking for in scripts?

**Emily:** It’s a lot of matchmaking because we’re trying to match with a very specific director. Right? So it’s matchmaking also in the way that, you know, if your friend asks you to set them up with somebody you have to read between the lines of what they think they want and then what they actually need. And there’s a little bit of that that goes on as well.

**Craig:** That’s why I keep failing at that. I just do what they told me.

**Emily:** Like, OK.

**Craig:** That’s not what they really – argh!

**Emily:** No, I know. Wants and needs, Craig, we’re going to talk about it later.

So a lot of times it’s sitting down with a director and talking about what they think they need for the project. And then, you know, knowing who they are and understanding how they traditionally worked. And so sometimes the people that you filter to them are actually a little bit more informed.

But generally we were looking for people – it sounds sort of cliché because we’ve said it so many times – but it’s smart with heart. People who can write in this space that is both funny and where the character – where the humor is really coming from the characters and driven by the characters.

The thing that we get a lot that we don’t need is people who’ve written children’s animated scripts. Because we make children’s animated movies it’s a really logical idea that this is what we would want to see. And, in fact, we’ve never hired anyone off of a script like that. We’ve only ever hired people off of – you know, we hired Mike Arndt off of Little Miss Sunshine, for instance, which it would be hard to say that that’s like children’s animated.

**Craig:** Talk a little bit more about the heart part. Because I think sometimes people struggle as they’re starting out or continuing their path as a writer to figure out how to be emotionally moving without being formulaically saccharine or sentimental. Can you see what the difference is? Where is the line? And what makes something proper heart as opposed to formulaic sentimentality?

**Emily:** I wish I had like a really easy answer for that.

**Craig:** Take your time. We’re on radio. Take an hour.

**Emily:** I’m just going to sit here.

**John:** I think we’re done. I do have a theory though and maybe you can expand upon this. Is that when you see sort of false heart it’s just spread over the top of it. It doesn’t feel like it’s earned by the characters and it doesn’t feel like the movie itself is generous, that the movie is generous with its characters. That it’s letting them struggle but ultimately overcome some of the things that they’re doing. It doesn’t let them make bad choices and learn from them. It’s just kind of spread over the top of it like frosting on a cake.

**Emily:** And it’s also easy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well that to me, because the thing about Pixar movies that’s always fascinated me is how brutal they are to their heroes.

**Emily:** Totally.

**Craig:** Tortuous. Brutal and mean. And when they figured out how to be terribly mean to a character then they add one more thing on to make it awfully mean. And in a weird way I think sometimes when people are aiming for heart what they’re aiming for is happy. They’re aiming for like a happy cry and a wonderful moment. But in fact heart comes from misery.

**Emily:** Yeah. And I think – and I agree with you. I think they do [laughs] – that’s the end.

**Craig:** So you guys got a shot at this.

**Emily:** Heart comes from misery.

**Craig:** Heart comes from misery. Well, because I don’t really care in the end if something nice has happened to somebody whose prior experience was a little less than nice. I want it to be awful. I mean, that’s classic literature.

**Emily:** I totally agree with you. And I think obviously they’re not afraid to let their characters, you know, hit that point. I will say not to – I feel like I’m pitching Michael Arndt today.

**John:** Well Michael Arndt is fantastic.

**Emily:** He’s fantastic.

**John:** He’s a good guy.

**Craig:** We love Michael Arndt.

**Emily:** But when he did – I watched his Endings talk that he did which I guess this is now just a pitch for his Endings talk. But I thought that was also really, really insightful about just this idea that you can’t just flip one set of stakes at the end. You really have to flip the sort of philosophical stakes of what your movie is saying and what it’s about.

**Craig:** Which means you have to know that your movie is supposed to be saying something in the first place.

**Emily:** Well, yeah, there’s that, too.

**Craig:** Your movie is supposed to be saying something in the first place.

**John:** Your movie should have a point.

**Craig:** Yeah. There should be an arguable point. An arguable point.

**John:** Yes. It’s sort of like what we always say. Your question at the end of this has to actually be a question. Your movie actually has to make a philosophical argument that it actually answers at the end of this.

**Craig:** What’s your movie about? Brotherhood. No.

**John:** No, no, more than that. There’s not a challenging thing there.

**Craig:** Family. Hmm.

**John:** Oh, no, no, no.

**Craig:** No. Sometimes the best thing you can do to show love to somebody is to let them leave you. Possibly permanently. When they are all you have.

**Emily:** Which also I have to say–

**Craig:** Doesn’t that feel like a movie? They should make that movie but with fish.

**Emily:** I’m a real sucker for movies that don’t end like “happily,” where you get the emotional catharsis of the film but you don’t–

**Craig:** If at the end of Finding Nemo the mom came back. Like it turned out she wasn’t eaten at all.

**John:** Oh, Nemo.

**Craig:** Oh look, and she’s here. And Dori remembers everything.

**Emily:** Right. I mean, genuinely I think one of the things that Pixar does really well is they do set up that hurt at the beginning. And they don’t undo it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Emily:** So, once you set it you let that–

**Craig:** They lean into it.

**Emily:** You lean into it. And you let that be the thing that’s guiding your character. And so I think you know, when I read scripts I’m also looking for that. I’m looking for people who are willing to let bad things happen to their characters.

**Craig:** Let bad things happen.

**Emily:** And then let the character react to it.

**John:** So Emily tell us about, like these scripts you’re reading, where do those scripts come from? Because Pixar is not a WGA shop so you don’t have to be a WGA member to be writing for Pixar. Where are you finding scripts that have this smart with heart that work for you?

**Emily:** Well this is the news that I feel like nobody is going to like, which is they’re mostly coming from big agencies. They have–

**Craig:** Well they’re all represented at big agencies.

**John:** Oh absolutely.

**Emily:** Yeah, no everybody. Like me too. You know, mostly they are coming through that way. But we also look at the Nicholls and we look at Austin.

**Craig:** What about short films that come, so not scripts, but rather little films, short films or any kind of expressed art that is coming in not from an agency but something that you just find out in the wild?

**Emily:** I think those are always sort of exciting little gems but they have to be – for us – backed up with written words. So, we have to see, you know, a lot of what we’re asking a writer to do is we have this incredible team of people of story artists who are all dedicated to making the story great. So you’re not by yourself, but you are – if you’re the writer you’re the person who is actually putting words on the page and like dialogue in the mouths of the characters. And so even if you’ve made an amazing short film, unfortunately part of what we’re looking for from a writer is to make sure you can do the structure. Make sure that you understand–

**Craig:** But that’s kind of fortunate in a sense because what you don’t get is fooled by auteurs and directors that aren’t really – because I think sometimes there are people that can make beautiful shorts that aren’t really writers. They’re just doing this little impressionistic wonderful thing. But these people are writers. So that’s a good sign.

**Emily:** Yeah. And I think that the truth is, I mean, anybody who has tried to write a short and then tried to write a feature knows that those are two different beasts, right? And so if you can write a great short but when you try to go expand it into a feature it very quickly–

**Craig:** Jog around the block/marathon.

**Emily:** Yeah. And so I think if you can make a beautiful short I think that’s fantastic and I think that’s an incredible thing to have and it’s another thing in your portfolio. But for animation you’re going to have to have an actual script.

**John:** Emily, my question is like let’s say you meet with a writer and is it a phone call first to talk with her about the script you read and then you bring her up to see if she’s a good fit? What is the dating process like for–?

**Emily:** Thank you for saying her John.

**John:** But you’re trying to get this writer to work on this project and see if it’s a good match. Obviously there’s a personality thing. Let’s say you all agree that this is the writer. This is the one we want. But what is she actually going to do? Is she going to write a full script or is she going to work on some scenes? Because that’s the thing I never really understood about Pixar is does any one writer actually finish a whole script or is everyone just working on little sections and it’s all getting assembled over the course of years?

**Emily:** At the beginning, like when you’re first in development, you probably do have one writer who writes a script all the way through. And it’s like the first draft and it’s really rough and no one will ever see it. But once you get into production everything becomes a big jigsaw puzzle. So everything goes out of order. You start boarding the sequences completely out of order which means you’re rewriting the sequences out of order. Sometimes depending on the project sometimes that writer will be the only person who writes. But a lot of times on a lot of projects there’s either a story artist who also writes or a director who also writes or a co-director or head of story. And so while the writer is still the writer and is still sort of the main person watching the full script you will often have people sort of come in and touch things along the way. But, yes, it’s a big giant jigsaw puzzle. And one of the most difficult things I think for our writers is that you do have to, you know, here’s all these moving pieces. They’re changing all over the place. And yet you still have to have the whole thing kind of in your head, which is–

**Craig:** That’s the job.

**Emily:** Just like a–

**John:** But it’s a very different job than what Craig or I usually do.

**Craig:** Well, it is, but I would say–

**John:** Well, in production I guess.

**Craig:** When you get in production that’s happening.

**John:** So that would happen, I mean, it happens for you on Chernobyl. It happens for me on a Charlie’s Angels where everything is just crazy. But you’re like, oh no, no, this is actually the movie we’re trying to make and you’re trying to remind people. But, there’s a lot of voices. So when I talk about that like we’re going to do a two-day offsite about this thing, so who would be in that two-day offsite? There would be storyboard artists. There would be the writers – writer or writers who are on. The director. And is everyone just pitching ways to get through this moment or new things? What happens?

**Emily:** It would depend on the nature of the offsite. Most of our off-sites are actually brain trust off-sites. So that would be all the other directors at the studio.

**John:** OK, great. So it’s like a council of elders looking at this project.

**Craig:** Nothing creepy about that in any way, shape, or form.

**John:** A brain trust. So they wheel out the brains in jars. They all stare at the project.

**Craig:** We are offsite.

**Emily:** We give them a little special–

**Craig:** Why do they have to go offsite? That building is amazing.

**Emily:** I know. It’s huge.

**Craig:** Where do they go? Like a La Quinta or something?

**Emily:** Denny’s.

**Craig:** Denny’s?

**Emily:** We go all over the place. It’s just sort of wherever the producer finds. But it’s like the idea–

**Craig:** That’s what happens when every movie makes a billion dollars. You’re like we’ve got to spend some of this money. Literally it’s coming out of the pipes. Uh, let’s go to Yosemite.

**Emily:** I don’t think we’ve ever been to Yosemite.

**Craig:** See?

**John:** Yeah. Good idea.

**Craig:** There’s an idea.

**Emily:** Somebody is going to hear this.

**Craig:** Mountains!

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh no, you already did – volcanoes did it. Pixar did it.

**John:** So, coming out of one of those sessions you would have new ways to sort of get through this thing. But the brain trust thing is really interesting. So we had Jennifer Lee on the show to talk about Frozen. And she talked about the brain trust and like the Disney brain trust that you’re showing these early cuts and all of the other directors and all of the other big powerful people are watching this and seeing this thing which is not very good in front of them. And having to figure out how we get it to this next stage. And she actually stepped up in Frozen because she had the answers and she became the writer of Frozen.

Because they had all these pieces and she’s like, oh no, the way you do this is to do that. Here you go. Let’s make this movie. And I’m sure–

**Emily:** It’s her own fault for talking.

**John:** It’s her own fault. Now she’s running Disney.

**Emily:** What a tough path.

**John:** It worked out pretty well for Jennifer Lee.

**Craig:** It can happen to you.

**Emily:** Speak up.

**John:** It can happen to you. Speak up with the right ideas.

This brain trust thing is a kind of thing that I think could only really happen in animation because animation is the only cinematic art form where you have this constant iteration. So even on live action features we go through cuts and stuff but there’s only so much we can change in a cut versus a Pixar animated film. You could change fundamental things. That sidekick character could become the main character. You can really revise stuff.

**Craig:** Well in live action there are people whose job is simply to get everyone to stop changing things. There’s an enormous compelling force once you start spending money to stop changing things. And very typically as the writer you’ll come on set and someone will walk up to you and say, “You didn’t change anything, did you?” Well, that’s what they’re paying me to do. “Ugh, OK. But now we have to figure things out. We were going to shoot here. Now we have to shoot here. This person was going to wear this. Now they have to wear that. They’re not even available on that day.” And so on and so forth.

Whereas in animation, change it.

**Emily:** Yeah. I mean, in fairness there’s a schedule in animation that–

**Craig:** That they blow through constantly.

**Emily:** That they blow through constantly. There’s still poor long suffering people whose job it is to keep us on schedule who like–

**Craig:** No one listens to them.

**Emily:** They try so hard.

**Craig:** They’ve been moved offsite.

**Emily:** They’re having a permanent offsite.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**Emily:** It’s a Denny’s.

**Craig:** And not in the United States anymore.

**John:** So most of the animated features I’ve done have been stop motion, which is a different beast because in stop motion we can’t tweak anything. So we’ll do cinematic sketch versions, but once we shoot a frame it’s just done and we can’t fix or tweak anything.

**Craig:** Well it’s like live action animation.

**John:** All of the challenges of animation with all of the challenges of live action, just put together. How difficult can we make it?

**Craig:** The South Park guys who did Team America.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** On day three: why did we do this? This is a nightmare.

**John:** This is a terrible, terrible choice.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we’re stuck. We have to keep going.

**Emily:** It’s true. If you are an indecisive person animation – like computer animation is your jam. It’s a great idea for you.

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**John:** I think we’re going to go out of sequence here because this feels like a good moment to introduce a brand new game. So, when we come back from this I want to talk about naïve characters, but before we get to that I want to try this new game. So, as I flew in here last night I had this vision for a game. And it partly came from sometimes – and I’m curious what you guys do about this – when you have an idea in the middle of the night do you actually get out of bed and write it down or do you just like, oh no, I’ll remember it in the morning. Craig, do you write down the stuff you think at night?

**Craig:** Yeah. My iPad is over here so I might email it to myself. That’s my quickie note thing. Except it so rarely is any good.

**John:** No, it rarely is any good.

**Craig:** A lot of times it’s just Ambien talking, I’ve got to be honest with you.

**John:** Sometimes I have no idea what the idea was. I just see these things together and I’m like I have no idea what this is. Emily, do you write your stuff down?

**Emily:** Yeah. But I have Evernote on my phone and then I type things. But also I’m really tired so I don’t check to make sure it’s spell-checked, made sense or anything. So, very, very often I open it like a couple days later and it’s actually nonsense words. I did it too fast and it didn’t autocorrect correctly. And then I’m just staring at orange sofa couch and I’m like I don’t know what that is.

**John:** Yes, but it was very important to you at like 12:30 in the morning.

**Emily:** It was so important at the time, yeah.

**John:** This idea kind of comes from that, but it also comes from a very Hollywood concept which is the open writing assignment. And so what an open writing assignment means is that there is a project that a producer or a studio has and they’re looking to hire a writer on this open writing assignment. And it can be just a very vague idea, but they’re bringing in writers to pitch their take on this open writing assignment. And so new writers will spend a tremendous amount of time coming up with takes so they can pitch on an open writing assignment. It’s one of the things you do a lot as a new screenwriter.

And so I thought tonight we’d do some open writing assignments and we have a great audience here who have helped us figure out some of the things we need to incorporate into this open writing assignment.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** I gave some people some homework in here. Raise your hand if you did the homework that’s on the slide up there. Oh, a lot of people did this. All right. I’m going to pick six people at random and I’m just going to come to you and ask. And I’m going to ask each of you one piece of what you did up here. So, raise your hand, someone in the second row. What is the genre of the movie that you wrote down?

**Fe**Male Audience Member:**** Drama.

**John:** OK, so we have to write a drama.

**Craig:** I can do that.

**John:** OK, we need to write a drama.

**Craig:** I’ll email it to myself.

**John:** What is the general setting of this drama we’re writing?

****Male Audience Member:**** Los Angeles.

**John:** So it’s a drama set in Los Angeles. All right, I’m going to come up here. I feel like a game show host here. What is the profession of the hero in the movie?

****Male Audience Member:**** Weatherman.

**John:** OK. It’s a drama about a weatherman in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** They’ve made this movie, but OK. Keep going.

**John:** How about you right here.

**Fe**Male Audience Member:**** Find out what is killing people.

**John:** Oh, it’s a drama about a weatherman in Los Angeles who has to find out what’s killing people. And who is the villain? You right there, who is the villain in our story?

**Fe**Male Audience Member:**** Classicism.

**John:** Classicism. Classicism is the villain. Oh, this is really good.

**Emily:** Oh no.

**Craig:** Someone has been to college.

**John:** Right here, I need a big trailer moment.

**Male Audience Member:** A meeting of gangs in the parks.

**John:** A meeting of gangs in the park.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, what was the last category?

**John:** A big trailer moment. It’s a meeting of gangs in the park. So I think what we need to come up with a pitch on is a project that is a drama set in Los Angeles about a weatherman who has to fight classicism–

**Craig:** And find out what’s killing people, which is classicism.

**John:** Find out what’s killing people, which is classicism, obviously. And there has to be a big meeting of gangs. So I kind of have a vision of The Warriors a little bit. Emily, talk me through—

**Emily:** No, I had a little moment of like wondering if you get some sort of weird like weather patterns that are only affecting certain areas of Los Angeles.

**John:** Microclimates.

**Emily:** Microclimates if you will.

**Craig:** Like douchebaggery is causing sleet over Brentwood?

**Emily:** And killing people.

**Craig:** And killing people that we want to die.

**Emily:** It’s a really short movie.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Well, how about actually–

**Craig:** It’s like over Howard Schwartz’s house.

**John:** But like lightning bolts. Like a lightning bolt could come down–

**Craig:** Schulz. His name is Schulz, right?

**John:** Howard Schulz, yes.

**Emily:** Also, he’s here.

**Craig:** What’s that?

**Emily:** He’s here.

**Craig:** Howard Schulz is in the audience?

**Emily:** No, no. Here in Seattle.

**John:** Hello! Please don’t run for president. Thank you.

**Craig:** I know. He employs most of the people here.

**Emily:** Do you think he listens to your podcast? Wouldn’t that be great?

**John:** Oh, it would be amazing if he did.

**Emily:** Wouldn’t it be amazing.

**John:** What if we were the people who convinced him, no, no, no, stop this right now. Crazy.

**Craig:** He should.

**John:** He should stop. I mean, he should stop.

**Craig:** I mean, he has four billion coffee stores. That’s good. You did it, man.

**Emily:** You did a good job.

**John:** You won. You won the race.

**Craig:** You win. Right.

**John:** Stop running.

**Craig:** We don’t open coffee shops.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** We don’t do that. Anyway.

**John:** Is it a Howard Schulz kind of character one of the villains, like the classicism thing?

**Emily:** Oh.

**John:** I think we have a little thing going here.

**Emily:** Interesting.

**John:** The hero is the weatherman, so maybe the weatherman hero is trying to figure out why these weird lightning strikes are killing certain people, or there’s some sort of–

**Emily:** They’re killing all of Howard Schulz’s primary opponents.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** This is called Geo Storm. They made this movie, again.

**John:** That’s right! It’s Geo Storm 2.

**Craig:** What if there’s like a science fiction kind of thing where as the weatherman realizes that in areas where income inequality is growing the weather starts getting more and more severe.

**Emily:** Which is actually what I was pitching.

**Craig:** That was? No, no, it’s not crashing down on rich people or anything.

**Emily:** No, no, you said the rich people thing. I was saying, I agree with you, I think it should have to do–

**Craig:** Well what you’re actually saying is I agree with you.

**Emily:** No, I really agree with you. I think we’re the same person.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Ah. I was wondering if you were doing the thing–

**Craig:** Shush.

**John:** You say the exact same thing the woman said and you take credit for it.

**Craig:** No, I thought I was saying a different thing.

**Emily:** You said a different thing.

**Craig:** I thought I was saying a different thing. I really did. Your circuit is misfired.

**John:** Oh OK.

**Craig:** But I agree with you. I think that’s awesome. But the meeting of the gangs, now it feels like there’s two groups of people that know the truth. And the weatherman gets pulled into one group that’s like we’re going to use this to bring the system down. And then another group is like, no, we have to stop this from happening. The system needs to keep going. And so there are two gangs and they meet in the park.

**John:** The park.

**Craig:** That’s a rough one.

**John:** Parks are a natural open environment. Weather happens in parks.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Also fascinating that the Weathermen were like a big gang of the time. So, that is an historic. Nothing said this has to be present day.

**Craig:** Can we switch it then? Yeah, so make it the Weathermen. Because that will really make this a lot easier.

**John:** Also it would make so much more sense that they were called the Weathermen if it was actually about weather. Because history is really confusing.

**Craig:** Here’s what’s killing us. Classicism rather. That’s not a villain. That’s a problem. It’s not a villain.

**John:** It’s very abstract.

**Craig:** It’s abstract. Your villain can represent something abstract like classicism, but it has to be someone. Let’s make it Howard Schulz.

**John:** A thing I want to stress here is that as absurd as this is so many projects that you will encounter are kind of like this.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** So I think we talked about this on the show before. For about 20 years there was an Imagine project called Clipped. And it was about a guy who got a paperclip shoved up his nose or in his ear or something and Brian Grazer is like well that’s got to really change a person. And so we all had to go in and pitch on Clipped. I pitched on Clipped. You probably pitched on Clipped.

**Craig:** I refused.

**John:** All right. Let’s get another open writing assignment going here. I’m going to go in the back of the audience here because I like walking around.

**Craig:** I’ll write this down again. I thought we did all right with that one.

**John:** We did pretty well. I think it was a good start.

**Craig:** We tried.

**Emily:** Shameless applause.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a pity clap if I ever heard it.

**John:** Who up here did your homework? Can you please tell me the genre of the movie we need to write?

**Female Audience Member:** A rom-com.

**John:** It’s a rom-com! We love rom-coms. We saved rom-coms. I don’t know if you remember that. But Tess Morris was on the show and she helped us save rom-coms.

**Emily:** I’m going to be the poor man’s Tess Morris on this.

**John:** The general setting of this rom-com we need to write?

**Female Audience Member:** England during the Regency period.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** England Regency rom-com. I like this very, very much. Who else up here has – please tell me the profession of the hero.

**Male Audience Member:** He’s an assassin.

**John:** Ooh, an assassin. This is so good.

**Craig:** Well at least you didn’t say something like an electrician because that would have been hard.

**John:** That would really be a tough thing. All right, so we have a rom-com set in the Regency period of England about an assassin, that’s his profession or her profession. Right here, can you tell me what is the main goal of this assassin character?

**Male Audience Member:** It’s a rescue mission.

**John:** Oh, an assassin has to make a rescue mission.

**Craig:** As they do.

**John:** As they do. Anyone else back here, right here, can you tell me the villain of this story?

**Male Audience Member:** His old mentor who ruined his career.

**John:** Ooh! An old mentor. I like that very, very much.

**Craig:** An old mentor.

**John:** Finally I need a big trailer moment. Who has got a big trailer moment for me? Going once, going twice – oh right here. Tell me what your big trailer moment is.

**Male Audience Member:** It’s anachronistic. Jumping from a horse onto a tank.

**Craig:** A tank? A tank. In the regency period.

**John:** A tank in the regency period. We’ll get jumping from a horse. I’m not sure we’re going to get to tank. All right. So we’ve got this Regency rom-com. That feels really promising. Assassins are good.

**Craig:** Everything is good except rom-com at this point because that’s, yikes.

**John:** Think about like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. If you could take that.

**Craig:** No, you know what? You can do this.

**Emily:** Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

**John:** You can do this.

**Craig:** Or, or, or – all right, so we have an assassin, oldie England, and he’s been trained by his mentor, but then he does the thing that mentors want you to do which is to become great. He becomes so good that the mentor gets jealous and blinds him. Right? He blinds him. And so now our blind assassin has to be led around by this – let’s make the blind assassin a woman. She’s a woman and she has to be led around by a guy who becomes like her eyes. And then they’re separated and she starts killing people because the guy helps her to kill people. So they start falling in love while she’s killing people, but then he gets taken away and she has to go rescue this guy. But he is her eyes. She’s blind. And she has to find her eyes in the dark.

And…and…has to jump on a horse. [laughs]

**John:** OK. These are fascinating choices. But what I will say–

**Craig:** Did I not get the job?

**John:** So, Craig, we really liked a lot of what you did there, but I would say–

**Craig:** Congratulations on the first–

**John:** Congratulations, yes. But what I will say that in a romantic comedy the villain, the antagonist, often is the other person in the romantic comedy. So I’m wondering if this other mentor character actually is a romance about that which feels very good for like Regency period. It could be sort of like an Emma. It could be like an Emma like this character who you don’t ever think of as being a possible love interest because they’ve always been older or a teacher figure, like oh this is the person. So maybe a young female assassin falls for her assassin–

**Craig:** Daddy figure.

**John:** Daddy figure.

**Craig:** Well, this is getting problematic.

**Emily:** Can we make it a woman?

**Craig:** Can we make it a young woman who falls for an older woman?

**Emily:** Yes.

**Craig:** Why not.

**Emily:** Takes away a little bit of the problematic-ness.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re going to come up with other problematics.

**Emily:** Slightly.

**John:** There will be problematics.

**Craig:** The presence of the tank will definitely be problematic.

**Emily:** Carry on.

**Craig:** All right, so this is a lesbian romance in Regency England between two assassins, a December-May romance between assassins, but one of them is – so the older one has ruined the young one? No, the young one has ruined the older one’s career, what about that? That’s a natural kind of thing. You trained me to take your place and I did. And now the older one does not want to let go.

**John:** Yes. It’s an All About Eve.

**Craig:** I just got rehired.

**John:** Yeah. Craig brought it back through.

**Emily:** Turned it around.

**John:** So here’s what’s good about that is their relationship is fascinating and why am I forgetting the name of this movie that’s the Rachel Weisz movie—

**Audience:** The Favourite.

**John:** The Favourite. Like that’s sort of The Favourite is what you’re pitching. It’s a funnier version of The Favourite.

**Craig:** Yes. I’m getting replaced by the younger, newer thing.

**John:** Yes. And so that’s a good dynamic and that tension is really interesting between the two of them.

**Craig:** And it’s also something that is always relevant. I mean, doesn’t matter what time period and doesn’t matter what their jobs are. Doesn’t matter what their sexuality is. The notion that you are going to be eclipsed by somebody that you love is something every parent probably on some level considers.

**Emily:** I feel like I’m putting on this development hat and I have so many questions.

**Craig:** Do it. Go.

**John:** Go. Ask your questions.

**Emily:** What is the driving plot thing of our story? Has our older assassin been pushed out at the beginning of our story and it’s a story about them – what’s our driver there?

**Craig:** I think they’re in love in the beginning of the story. I think it’s perfectly good. But there’s a little bit of a thing, right, where the older one feels that the younger one isn’t ready, and the younger one is kind of thinking the older one is holding them back. And then the older one realizes that the younger one is better than her, everyone thinks the younger one is better than her. That’s a terrible moment. She retreats. And now she has to prove herself. But she doesn’t want to let on.

But then she’s going to try to kill the person that the younger one has to kill. So they’re both racing to kill that person. And then I think where it has to go is she has to ultimately probably sacrifice herself because she loves that younger person somehow.

**John:** So I’m going to be Tess Morris here.

**Craig:** Do it.

**John:** I worry we’re losing the rom-com quality of it.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** That’s the only thing I want to say here.

**Emily:** I think that’s fair.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What you’re pitching didn’t feel especially comedic. So–

**Craig:** I don’t like rom-coms. [laughs]

**John:** Ah, after all this you don’t like – we saved rom-coms and Craig still doesn’t like them.

**Craig:** No, you guys saved them. I mean, I was happy for it, but it’s not like my jam. You know, I’m like, meh.

**Emily:** I feel like maybe if you don’t have her pushed out at the beginning but she’s starting to feel like a little instable – unstable/instable? Why can’t I? You know, all of those things. So that the journey is like a lighter journey between two people who are–

**Craig:** OK, so then here’s the question. So then comedy wise what’s – so when we’re talking about a comedy between two characters and a situation. What is the thing between them that now starts to be this fuel for funny situations? What’s the funny fuel? Because if they are – if one of them is helping the other – if one of them is the person the other one has to kill and they know that but they don’t want to get killed, then you could see some farce happening maybe. Or–

**John:** But I think we don’t want to just make a farce most likely. I think we want some real emotional stakes there.

**Craig:** I agree. Where’s the machine? Where’s the machine of the funny?

**Emily:** I also sort of feel like from a rom-com perspective we either need them to – you need some – like they’ve just broken up at the beginning or it has always been a very strict mentor/mentee relationship that is like–

**Craig:** Or it’s in that bed-death phase where they had it but they’re losing it and they’re on their way to losing it.

**Emily:** Yeah. A little bit like – I feel like that’s hard. That’s a hard place to–

**John:** Well it’s interesting when you have characters who are part of Regency England. They have a very rigid social structure. And yet they’re also assassins.

**Emily:** I forgot about the Regency England part. [laughs]

**John:** But they’re also assassins so they’re already outsiders.

**Craig:** And don’t forget the horse.

**John:** And the horse. So they jump off the horse onto the water tank. It didn’t say a tank-tank.

**Craig:** Rejection. It’s not exactly a great trailer moment. Like wah!

**John:** Yeah. Can you turn the tank and water it now. It’s not so good.

**Craig:** Whilst is there a tanketh in our midst?

**John:** At dinner we were talking about sort of naïve characters and so we were talking about Inside Out and the Joy character in there is so – she’s just – I don’t want to say she’s one note, but she has one drive, one focus, and she’s so naïve. And yet she’s not annoying and she’s not dumb. How do you find that balance? And that feels like the kind of situation where on a weekly basis you’re asking like does this actually make sense. Is this actually going to track? I want to talk about naïve characters because I think Pixar has a lot of those naïve characters.

**Craig:** Buzz Lightyear.

**John:** Buzz Lightyear. Wall-E.

**Craig:** Wall-E.

**John:** They’re very naïve characters, and yet they’re not idiots.

**Emily:** Although Buzz is not like the driver of that story, so his naiveté is sort of there for humor and there for comedy as opposed to him being sort of the emotional drive of the story.

**Craig:** Until that moment where he actually has to come face to face with the fact that he is naïve.

**Emily:** Right. Right.

**Craig:** That’s the one value I think of naïve characters is that they always provide that moment. The same thing happens to Joy. This is Pixar. God, they define a terrible weakness that would just ultimately murder this person emotionally and then they do it to them. That’s kind of the gift of those characters I think. I think Pixar does them really well.

**Emily:** And I will say with Joy especially like that character didn’t work for a long time because she was – I guess I can say she was really annoying. She was so happy and peppy and then we played with a whole bunch of different versions of her where she had more edge and less edge. I’ve never been a part of a project that noodled with a character that much. And really honestly the difference was Amy Poehler signed on and Amy Poehler has a level of joy and enthusiasm to her that is kind of infectious. And she’s peppy but she is like pumped about it in a way that we weren’t able to find on the page. And then when she walks in the room and you’re so rooting – like it’s so earnest and it’s so genuine and so even when it’s like over the top and if somebody else did it you’d want to punch them, when she does it it’s like you’re with her and you feel the joy and infectious energy she has.

**Craig:** Well she had this thing in her performance, but I also give all the writers and animators credit for also putting it there in the character and the conception of the character, that Joy isn’t just happy and naïve and loves to be joyful. There’s a desperation underneath all of it which is I’ve got to keep dancing because the second I step dancing I have to look at some painful things I don’t want to look at.

**Emily:** For sure.

**Craig:** And that was fascinating to me. It’s a little bit of a cheat, right? So one of the things about Inside Out that was a little cheaty and it had to happen—

**Emily:** Am I going to be mad at you?

**Craig:** No! Is that you’re taking a human being and you’re fragmenting them into these parts of their personality. But we’re with those parts of the personality and inevitably what we need is to see that that individual part has parts inside of the part. It just has to be there otherwise it doesn’t work.

**John:** Because Joy has to get sad in order for–

**Craig:** Joy has to be aware of it. Joy has to almost be joyful because if I just stop being joyful, whereas Sadness also kind of needs to understand – Sadness is sad that she’s sad. That’s a different thing, right? So that I thought was kind of fascinating. I mean, obviously you have side characters where they can just – Anger is anger, just be angry, it’s funny.

**John:** So we had Pamela Ribon on the Christmas episode and she was talking about–

**Emily:** Oh, I love Pam.

**John:** She’s so great. And she was talking about Ralph Breaks the Internet. And so during the process of that she played Penelope. She played that throughout the whole process. Does a similar kind of thing happen in Pixar where you have temp voices and you’re just trying to do stuff?

**Emily:** Yeah.

**John:** And so somebody else had to play that character who wasn’t Amy Poehler and is that part of the reason why you couldn’t find the voice and the approach?

**Emily:** I don’t think so. I mean, the woman who did Joy for us is a woman named Alyssa Knight who is fantastic and actually a very good actress in her own right. Sort of the thing that you’re talking about – we didn’t have a lock on Joy. We couldn’t figure out what was happening inside of her that was – it just took a long time. Literally I think I was on that project for four years and it took us – yeah, which is like oh my god.

**John:** Four years on a movie.

**Emily:** It took a good two of those years just to find where her center was.

**John:** So I want to talk through this part because during those two years of trying to find her, you know, how she was going to work you did have to map out the rest of the movie. So there were people whose job it was to figure out set pieces and all this stuff. But you still weren’t sure if you had the right character at the centerpiece of this movie who is in almost every scene.

**Emily:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s got to be scary.

**Emily:** Yeah. Almost all the movies hit a point where they hit the skids and it’s really – they’re bad, and they’re really, really bad. And we’re totally lost in the woods. Like quite literally, I mean Pete our director would spend two weeks walking in the woods like at some point.

**Craig:** Oh, he was legitimately lost in the woods.

**Emily:** Legitimately he went into the woods.

**Craig:** Wow.

**Emily:** And he walked around.

**Craig:** He knows that’s just an expression though, right? He doesn’t have to go out there.

**Emily:** He’s a very literal person.

**Craig:** Fair enough. Works for him.

**Emily:** It worked. It worked really well.

**John:** But talk me through that it’s bad because at this point is it bad in a way that there are reels of temp animation that you can look at and it’s like well that doesn’t work and everyone can see that that movie is not actually a movie? You’re looking at a real thing and not just words on a page?

**Emily:** Yeah. What we’re looking at is storyboards that have been edited together with music and sound and voices and all that kind of stuff. And we’re watching it through. You know, the big reboot – we did a giant reboot on the middle of Inside Out where the primary relationship changed. And I think I can say this because I think it’s on the DVD. It used to be Joy and Fear. And the main story was between those two characters which felt like it made sense for a really long time. And it wasn’t until Pete sort of had this revelation that the movie was going to be about connection and the way that we get to connection is allowing ourselves to be vulnerable around people. And that we have to go through sadness sometimes to get back to joy. And it fundamentally shifted the primary movie.

And it shifted those two characters. And so that was about the time that Meg LeFauve came on and she was sort of part of that reboot of rebooting our story so that it was about Joy and Sadness and that being the central relationship.

**Craig:** This requires an enormous amount of creative bravery.

**Emily:** I think so.

**Craig:** Because everybody who has ever written anything I think in part is desperate to believe that they’ve got it. Because writing is hard. So the last thing you want to think is, well, my job was to dig a hole and I dug the hole and oh my god this is not a hole. And you have to do it again. Nobody wants that, but sometimes you just have to do it again.

**Emily:** Well and I found it really – I mean, he’s going to get tired of me singing his praises, but I found working with Pete I found that to be the gift of working with Pete is Pete will do that. He will say I don’t have it and he will go spend the time and the energy and the cycles to find it. And you know I also think there was a gift in there, too, to work on you know this movie that ended up being this huge movie for the studio and to know firsthand that the middle of the movie – somewhere in the middle it was not a movie that any of you would have paid to see. I find that really comforting actually. I find it really comforting to remind myself time and time again that the creative process takes time and it does take that bravery. It takes the bravery to say I don’t have it.

**Craig:** I don’t have it.

**Emily:** And I’m going to go ask people to help me find it.

**Craig:** And isn’t that kind of the story of Pixar. The movie that launched them, Toy Story, was just a different movie. And then they went, no, you know what – animating which was enormously expensive, to dump actual animation was unheard of. And they just said we don’t have it yet.

**Emily:** And we talk about the creatives a lot which we should, but I think there’s also enormous bravery that’s sort of shouldered by the producers because they are at the end of the day the bottom line matters for them. And that is their responsibility. And yet I think they’ve sort of assembled a group of producers who are willing to sit in that discomfort – I sound like Renee Brown. But they’re willing to sit in the discomfort in how messy it is to make something good and creative. And they’re all really, really there for their director.

**John:** That’s so in a world that’s completely different than any live action producer we’ve known.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “What do you mean it’s not right?” They’re freaking out at all moments. And an animation producer just can’t do that.

**Emily:** Well, I mean, in fairness there’s a point in every process where it’s like, OK, like we’re done.

**John:** We got to release the movie here.

**Emily:** We’re done. It’s going out like this. We don’t have a choice. But, you know, they really do do a remarkable job of shielding the directors when they need to be shielded. And I think it’s one of the most remarkable things about that place.

**Craig:** God, I wish that they would learn this lesson – Hollywood.

**Emily:** Oh, Hollywood.

**Craig:** If you treat the people that make the stories well then they will have a chance to make the stories well. That’s it. It’s so simple. And they don’t – thank you. They don’t do it. They refuse to do it because they don’t – I think on some level they’re cynical and don’t really believe it matters. Like, ah, you could do it twice as fast. Doesn’t matter. Who cares? They all talk like this. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. Stereotypes.

**Craig:** Meh.

**John:** Argh.

**Craig:** You know what.

**John:** We’re going to do our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** We should do our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is really simple. It is the third season of Man in the High Castle, which I had let sort of sit back for a while, and then I watched the third season and it was just terrific. And so if you have fallen off watching that show, I wasn’t nuts about everything in the second season. There were a lot of pieces sort of moving around. But the third season they did really well.

And this is a very live action thing I’m about to say here, but I watched the first episode and I’m like, wow, that’s a really expensive set. I hope they use that set well, and they use those sets really well. They build all new sets and every character of that show gets dragged through almost every of the new sets they built. And as a person who has seen those line items on a budget they knew what they were doing. They planned that very carefully. They block shot.

**Craig:** I bet you they did not plan it carefully and then someone said, “If you want us to build this go back—“

**John:** And make sure every character walks on that set.

**Craig:** Through this set that we paid for.

**John:** It was really good. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is, so you know I’m a big escape room fan. And there are a lot of sort of escape room in a box things that they’re selling now, which are kind of fun. It’s not the proper escape room experience of course, but in its own way it’s actually really entertaining. Some of them are better than others. There’s a series of them called Exit The Game that I really like. There’s a lot of them – they’re great if you have kids and if you have kids that aren’t dummies, you know.

**John:** You know if your kids are dumb.

**Craig:** I’m just being honest. You know if your kid is an idiot. They don’t like this. Just send them out there to play their sports. But, no, shut up. But roomful of writers. “Oh, you’re being mean to the jocks.” All right. But if you have a smarty in your house the Exit The Game series are great. They have a very interesting mechanism where as you think you’ve solved a puzzle there’s a little wheel and you enter a code and that takes you a card and it shows you a thing, and then success. It’s fun and you don’t have to worry about the timer. Take your time.

And it’s put out by a company called, well I guess I would pronounce it like the River Thames, but it’s spelled Thames. Thames and Kosmos. That’s with a K. So give it a shot. And they rank the games by level of difficulty. So, you can start with one of the easier ones. That’s actually a way to figure out if your kid is smart or not, so try that.

**John:** Yeah. A little IQ test. Nice.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Emily, do you have a One Cool Thing for us?

**Emily:** Yes. So I watched, this isn’t my One Cool Thing, but I watched one of those Fyre documentaries which was just–

**John:** Fyre Festival.

**Craig:** Fyre Festival.

**Emily:** Insane. But it made me think about the book Bad Blood. Has anybody read this book? Oh my god, OK, it’s amazing.

**Craig:** Do the voice. Do the voice.

**Emily:** No, I can’t do the voice. So it’s a story about Theranos which was that start up that imploded in spectacular fashion and the book is totally riveting. It’s fascinating. It’s like the best beach read you’ve ever read. And it’s all true. It’s insane.

**Craig:** Great villain.

**Emily:** Great. Oh my god, it’s amazing. And they’re going to make it into a movie, so go read it before you watch it.

**John:** Figure out how you would do it and then see how they did it. And yours is probably different/better.

**Craig:** Probably won’t be as good. I’m just being honest. They’re going to get somebody amazing. It’s going to be Sorkin.

**John:** They’ll get Sorkin probably.

**Craig:** I can’t – you can’t–

**Emily:** Yeah. They will get Sorkin. It’s a very Sorkin.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m just being reasonable. Come on.

**Emily:** Anyway, go read it. It’s fantastic.

**John:** Great. We are going to do some questions from the audience. So you questions are going to be fantastic. What’s your question?

**Female Audience Member:** It’s going to be fantastic. OK, my question is you told us at the beginning to go to Hollywood and learn how to do it there and what do you want us to do when we go there? What kind of job would you send a writer from here down there to go do? Because I’ve heard other shows where you said you need to go and you need to make sure that you are on a set. And you want to learn how to write for real actors and write for people who are actually going to be using your stuff. So what kind of a job would we look for even if we were doing an internship or any kind of work? What would we do?

**Craig:** Well, I mean, I don’t know – it is incredibly useful to be on a set, but you got to – you don’t just get there right away. I mean, you can, but that’s more of like a production assistant job where you’re running around and you’re on the walkie-talkie and you’re learning the basics of film production. I’ll tell you what I did, because I didn’t know anybody. I drove out there and I went to a temp agency. Actually I went to three temp agencies. And I took their tests, which is mostly typing. And then they started sending me out for jobs.

But there’s a few of them in Los Angeles that service the entertainment business essentially exclusively. And one of them placed me in a position where I was mostly a file clerk at a little ad agency. And I did that. I did that and then I kind of found an opportunity to write something and show somebody. And then they’re like, OK, you can be a writer now. Sort of like that.

But just get a job near somebody and maybe you’re also in an apartment building where other people are just like you. And then everyone is talking. Things happen. But you’ve got to be there.

**John:** Emily, you live here. So tell us about that kind of experience living here. Two microphones.

**Emily:** Do you remember the Lady Gaga performance from the Super Bowl where somebody held the microphone like this for her? That’s what I’m into. Could you just hold it for me? No, I’m kidding. I do live up here. I’m from up here. I lived in LA for like a hot second and I did actually exactly what Craig just described. I went to like three temp agencies. I took typing tests. And they placed me at Creative Artists Agency where I was like a probably very abysmal assistant for a while. I would recommend that, too.

From up here that’s I think the best thing to do. Because unless you go down and you have all the connections in the world, which you probably don’t, I think temp agencies are the way to do it. And frankly assistant jobs turn over like left and right. So there’s always, always openings. And I would recommend that.

**John:** And I will also say when we recommend people move down to Los Angeles a lot of times it’s folks who just graduated from college. And so we say you’re going to start your life somewhere, start your life in Los Angeles if that’s what you want to do. That’s not always the same advice for somebody who is in their 30s or 40s who is looking for a career change. That’s a different thing. And I know in previous episodes, we’ll try to find a link to it, but we’ve talked about how do you know when it’s time to leave that place. It’s a different equation when you’re not at the very start of your life. 20s isn’t the start of your life, but you’re not at that transitional point.

Another question from the audience?

**Female Audience Member:** Hi. I don’t hear you guys talk much about advising screenwriters to make their own movies and what kind of exposure and success can come from that.

**John:** So I’ve made a movie for myself. You’ve directed a movie. It can be a great thing. If you are aspiring to be a writer-director you need to do both parts of that job, and so directing something you’ve written is a fantastic step.

If your goal is to be a writer, to be a television showrunner or be a television staff writer, having directed a thing may not help you out a tremendous amount. And I’m actually thinking back to even Megan McDonnell who is the Scriptnotes producer, she directed a really terrific short, and it was great, and really showed that she could direct. But that wasn’t sort of her main goal. And so it’s gotten her some attention, but it would get her more attention if she really wanted to be a director. And she really wants to be a writer. So I wouldn’t recommend somebody spend a year of their life directing a movie if that’s not their goal. Thoughts?

**Emily:** Yeah. I agree with John. I think it kind of depends on what your end goal is. And if the thing you want to do more than anything in the world is direct then you should do that. And there’s ways to do that here. There’s a lot of independent movies that do get made up here, even though I know it’s not a huge independent film town. But I agree that it’s a lot of money and it’s a lot of work if your ultimate goal is to get your writing out there.

I mean, as somebody who read a lot of scripts I can tell you there’s a lot of people out in Hollywood reading a lot of scripts all the time. So if that’s the thing you want to do I would just focus on that.

**John:** I think we can take one more question here before we wrap up.

**Female Audience Member:** So this is actually more of a craft question probably. I don’t know why I throw myself in the way of these arguments but I do. And I see the most common response to I’m having a problem with my plot/with my character/I don’t understand this that I see that drives me up the wall is, “Oh, you need to nail down your theme.” I don’t like that.

But I also understand that that means something different to every different person. So, my question is when, 1, is theme the correct solution that is something you need to look at, and 2, when is not the correct solution? When is the wrong thing?

**John:** This is a great question. So when do we need to think about themes. And you just gave a great example of that because Inside Out you had these character who represent these big thematic ideas and you had the wrong two ideas clashing together. So–

**Emily:** I will say I’m probably one of – so I’ve done a little bit of script consulting and I’m probably somebody you would hate to work with because while I don’t always call it theme I feel like theme is at the core of almost everything I’m poking at when I – I think that when you go to ask questions about what your character is doing and what it’s about and what they want and why do they really want that, I think all of that at the end of the day is theme.

So while I totally agree with you that the general note of “work on your theme” is super unhelpful.

**John:** That’s not an actionable note. You can’t–

**Emily:** It’s not an actionable note. But what is an actionable note, which is your theme actually if you dig down into it is about what is your character expecting. What do they want to have happen? What do they expect it’s going to do for their life?

So, all those questions about what your character and what’s motivating them, those are all theme questions. So I feel like when you’re getting that note what you’re actually getting – like when somebody is saying to you, “Oh, you’re theme,” what they’re actually trying to poke at I think probably not very well is that they don’t understand what your main character is doing. What do you think, Craig?

**Craig:** When we are stuck trying to describe these very nebulous things we come up with a word. And so of course when someone gives you this word it’s normal to say this isn’t – it’s not that you’re angry at them, it’s just more like you’re not helping me. What I always think about with this is what is the point of writing this. In a big way, not even inside of the characters. So like why would anybody want to go see this in the first place? Why does this deserve to be made? Why should 1,500 people in various jobs all assemble to create this thing?

And that comes down to something important to you that you’re saying. That’s you. That’s not the character. That’s not this character, or that character. It’s not about the sequence or anything. But you. That thing – that needs to be there.

And if you know what that is, this argument you’re making, this thing you want people to understand, the raison d’être of this, then I think what ends up happening is you find a way to start unifying things. So rather than having characters do things that make sense over here, and a character that is doing a thing that makes sense over here, but they don’t have necessarily some kind of relation, it’s because these things aren’t connected to the point that you’re saying the whole reason to show up is this. And once you know the whole reason to show up it actually becomes really easy to start making decisions about why people should do things. Well what should the ending be? The ending should be the opposite of the beginning and those two things are connected to this thing that you’re trying to say to everybody. This is why people should show up.

Forget people showing up in a theater. This is why people should show up to actually make the damn thing. So that’s what I think about.

**John:** And I think also there’s other useful words that are sort of thrown around that mean the same kind of thing as theme. When people talk about the conflicts, or I don’t feel like these conflicts are really advancing what the character needs, you may have thought of these great set pieces but they don’t actually do anything that your characters need to learn or achieve or accomplish. They’re just interesting set pieces that aren’t really connected to the central idea.

Sometimes we’ll talk about that central dramatic question. The thesis statement. We often talk on Scriptnotes that television sort of never fully answers that question but a movie does answer that question. As an audience member you sit down and you watch a movie expecting that it’s a character’s one-time experience that is going to transform them. And so if you’re not transforming a character, if it’s not that one unique experience then there’s something that’s not really quite figured out yet.

And what you may want to do is kind of what you’re describing here is look at what are the things we have here. What seems like they’re related? What’s the most interesting thing here? How can we bring that forward and build conflicts around it that can really explore that issue?

**Emily:** I also think it’s worth pointing out that a lot of people don’t find their theme on the first draft. So, I think sometimes we want to make it really clean and we want to say my movie is about this blank. And I think for a lot of writers I know they know they don’t have it on the first draft. So part of what you’re doing is you’re poking around and you’re trying to find out where the character wants to go and what the character wants to do. And it doesn’t even quite present itself to you until a draft or two in. And then you go, oh crap, my movie is about this. I get it. Like I had to go in this weird circuitous path to find my center, but you’ll find it.

And I guess that’s what I’m pointing out of like when you’re floating around in theme land and you can’t find it, and I think Craig is 100% right about – it’s the first time – but I think he’s 100% right about theme and that it being more about this larger question. But if you can’t find the question and you’re like, “Blech, I don’t know what it is,” I would go back to your main character and know that it might take you – you might have to just literally write a couple drafts and then it will show up.

And it might be somebody else reading your draft and saying, “You know what I think this is about? I think it’s about this.” Which is why even though this is this sort of isolating process to write something, it’s so good to have other people that you trust who can look at your stuff and help you identify those things because sometimes they’re not apparent.

**Craig:** Seems like a great advertisement for the society that has put this on.

**John:** Absolutely. Brain trust revealed. That is our show. As always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

We need to thank Seattle.

**Craig:** Nice job, Seattle.

**John:** And there are several people in Seattle we need to thank. Certainly Jeremy and Kristen for bringing us up here. The Northwest Screenwriters Guild. TheFilmSchool, all one word. Thank you so much for having us up here. This was really fun. And have a great night. Thank you all.

**Craig:** Thank you.

Links:

* Thank you, [Northwest Screenwriters Guild](https://nwsg.org/) and [TheFilmSchool](http://thefilmschool.com/programs/) for making this event happen!
* And thank you to our incredible guest: [Emily Zulauf](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1637392/)!
* [Scriptnotes, 225: Only haters hate rom-coms](https://johnaugust.com/2015/only-haters-hate-rom-coms) with Tess Morris
* [Michael Arndt on Endings](https://johnaugust.com/2018/michael-arndt-on-endings)
* [Amy Poehler](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K25d7QIC27c) as Joy in INSIDE OUT
* [The Man In the High Castle](https://www.amazon.com/Man-High-Castle-Season/dp/B07FDKRJQC)
* [Exit The Game](https://www.thamesandkosmos.com/index.php/kosmosgames/exit-the-abandoned-cabin)
* [Bad Blood](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/549478/bad-blood-by-john-carreyrou/9781524731656/) by John Carreyrou
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Emily Zulauf](https://twitter.com/emilyzulauf) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) “Jazz Waltz” by Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/38720-20Seattle20Live20Show202019.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/the-princess-bride).

**Craig Mazin:** We didn’t make this movie. You know that right?

**John August:** We’ll start this officially. Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And we are here for a special discussion after watching The Princess Bride. So, on our show Scriptnotes every once and a while we’ll take a movie and sort of go through and do a deep dive on it and this was a unique opportunity to show the movie and do a deep dive on The Princess Bride.

All right, so this screening is part of a special month-long retrospective of the work of William Goldman, an acclaimed screenwriter. This is our last night doing this. But when we got the email about trying to do this we jumped on this movie because this was a movie that – we’ll talk about our priors here – you love this movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s very meaningful to me. And I love it and I watched it a thousand times.

**John:** I’ve watched it four times.

**Craig:** That’s 996 fewer.

**John:** Yeah. It’s fewer. So I saw this movie for the first time in late high school/early college and I don’t love it as much as you do. So, I do really admire the movie. I don’t love it as much as you do. But I would say weirdly it’s had a much bigger – there’s many more parallels in the work I’ve done to The Princess Bride than the work you’ve done.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably because I just didn’t think I could ever do anything quite that good. No, I mean, the work that you do isn’t necessarily always going to match up. But there are things about this that I have taken in my own stuff, specifically this movie – it wasn’t anything that I specifically thought about when I watched it. It was just something that seemed evident. It was the first movie I remember seeing that would make me laugh and then – and not take itself or movies or storytelling particularly seriously. And then the next scene ask that I do take the character seriously. And then in fact I feel – should feel quite deeply about them and I did.

So, this sense of a broad tone kind of going back and forth with a rather moving, emotional tone, mushy comedy. That is something that I took to heart. And I think this movie does it about as well as anybody.

**John:** So as I look at this movie there’s so many echoes I see in Big Fish. There’s a giant. There’s a swamp. There’s a lot of things that are similar to it. And this sort of storybook quality where you have a narrator who is talking through stuff and we’re moving back and forth in time.

But also Aladdin, which you guys haven’t seen it. But Corpse Bride. That sense of this romance has to happen. That you’re only there if this romance can be fulfilled.

**Craig:** Yes. And obviously it reminds me a lot of Chernobyl.

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about the history of this movie. This movie came from a book first written by William Goldman in 1973. So at that point he had already done Masquerade, Papillion, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as a screenwriter. So 20th Century Fox bought the rights to the book and had Goldman do a script. That version never got made and then never happened. And so apparently Goldman bought the rights back from 20th Century Fox and his script. But then ultimately it was a Fox movie, so it went back there. But it went through a lot of directors. And we’ve both had projects that have gone through multiple directors.

At some point there was Francois Truffaut Redford, and Norman Jewison had all talked about directing this movie.

**Craig:** That would have been an interesting – the Redford version would have been interesting. I mean, I’m obviously very happy with the way it came out. There is a certain Borscht Belty thing going on throughout that Rob Reiner brought to it. And I always appreciate that. But what strikes me about the genesis of this is that William Goldman was just telling stories to his daughters, his young daughters, and these were kind of the stories he was telling them. He invented a princess named Buttercup. And this young farm lad that she was mean to, a farm boy named Westley. And he invented the ROUSes and the idea of a six-fingered man. A giant and a swordsman. These very broad Jungian archetypes. Very much a fairy tale thing.

And what I love about the way he talks about the creation of this is that when he decided to make it into a book he was really struggling, I imagine because he’s William Goldman and he’s sitting there thinking I know how a book should go. There’s all this stuff I have to do to make sense of this. And he said the thing that broke it open for him was coming up with the idea that he’s not writing it at all. That somebody named S. Morgenstern has written it. And that S. Morgenstern’s book is out of print and no one can find it. And so what’s he’s done is essentially put together an abridged version.

This story is only the best parts. And I love that because I think that ties in ultimately to what I love most about this movie which is that it is a movie about storytelling itself as an act of love.

**John:** And so part of the conceit is that he heard this story as a kid and that when he went back and found the actual book he realized it was like a big political tract and it was completely different than how he remembered. So he was using his childhood memory of the way he wished the story actually really went.

**Craig:** Which I actually had that real experience. When my kids were young I was like you know what I’m going to read you a book tonight. And they were like yay. And it’s one of my favorite books from childhood. You’re going to love this. It’s called A Wrinkle in Time. And then I started reading Wrinkle in Time and I’m like–

**John:** Yeah. So I worked on–

**Craig:** This is just a teen romance. When does the – like all the cool stuff is in the last 12 pages. I forgot.

**John:** Yeah. And you realize that many of the things that the missuses do so much of the work for the protagonist and it’s a frustrating adaptation. It was a hard movie to adapt. I tried it. It did not work.

So let’s talk about the frame story because this is actually part of the conceit. William Goldman had been telling the story to his daughters and the conceit in the book is that his father had told it to him. In this movie version, and I don’t know if it was always this way in the scripts but we have the Peter Falk, the grandfather character, telling the story to his grandson who is sick. It’s a pretty simple setup but we come back to it a lot.

And so the frame story gets us a lot. Let’s talk about why you do it and what’s helpful about it.

**Craig:** Well they’re letting you know right off the bat that the story that you’re seeing is a story. Usually when we tell a story on screen we want people to forget that it’s a story pretty quickly. Here they never let you forget. And in doing so they immediately excuse a lot of things that I think had they not done you would have said this is very true love. It’s so over the top. It’s over the top for a reason. Everything if you think about it, every emotion is pushed beyond to the edge. So, the true love is the truest of love. And the villains are the most hateful villains. The kiss at the end, there is the top five kisses of all time, and this one puts it to shame. So everything is taken to its extreme because it’s meant to be a fairy tale. And the actual story is the story of a grandfather and his son. Even though there’s these little tiny bits with Peter Falk and Fred Savage, to me that’s the movie.

**John:** Yeah. So obviously the frame story lets you jump forward. It lets you contextualize things. It lets you sort of fill in details that you wouldn’t have otherwise known and sort of skip past the boring parts. But let’s talk about this frame story just really quickly in terms of the progression of the relationship between Peter Falk and the Fred Savage character because it’s very simple but it’s really well sketched. And every time we come back to those things there needs to be progress. If we just came back and it was exactly the same situation it wouldn’t feel like you were moving forward. It would just feel like you were just repeating an old scene.

**Craig:** Peter Falk. Right? The perfect casting because he’s literally Colombo-ing his own grandson. You know? “OK, you know what, you don’t want to hear this. Never mind. Now you’re taking this very personally.” “No I’m not. No I’m not.” Right? So Fred Savage does a fantastic job playing like a regular – I think he’s a very regular kid there. They didn’t push it at all. Kids do get annoyed with that. They don’t want to hear about, at least in this case, you know, 1987 lovely gender stereotype of a boy that doesn’t want to hear about kissing. But I remember my son didn’t want to hear kissing stories. So that all felt very true.

But Peter Falk is playing a long con with this kid, repeatedly. “I told you.” “Yes, very good, shut up.” Wonderful. “You’re very smart.”

**John:** So let’s go into the actual story as it is being told. And so we really rush through the setup very quickly.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And it’s surprising even just watching it tonight to recognize how little backstory we know about our central characters. Buttercup, I guess she has a family. We never see them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** She lives alone in a cabin I guess.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** She makes fun of this farmer boy.

**Craig:** It’s just the best parts. Right? So actually no one in this entire movie has a real character. No one. It’s just nice farm boy, nice slightly noble girl, a very smart Italian, a very big Greenlander, a very skilled Spaniard. And then the prince is just a dick, right? That’s his character.

**John:** But a very, very proficient dick. You also watch, it’s like, oh, he’s somehow really good at all these tracking things.

**Craig:** He’s an amazing tracker.

**John:** And so you think there’s going to be some payoff like–

**Craig:** There was a great duel.

**John:** Yes. And somehow he can smell the iocaine powder that is unsmellable.

**Craig:** Of course. Isn’t that the best? I love that.

**John:** Yeah. [Unintelligible] but sure.

**Craig:** It’s so great.

**John:** But obviously the performances are fantastic and without great performances you’d feel the artist, these little paper dolls moving throughout the story, and yet we so quickly setup who Buttercup is, the nature of sort of what the stakes of the movie are, which is basically this is the couple and we want this couple to be back together.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** That’s the whole storyline that you’re really going to get through. So no matter what happens it’s the two of them. But what’s also surprising and sort of frustrating if you’ve read a bunch of screenwriting books is your protagonist, your heroes, are not on screen a ton and they often don’t – they’re don’t have a lot of agency in their story.

**Craig:** Correct. Because they’re in a story. So you can see why Goldman felt so liberated by the technique of imagining that he’s only telling you parts of a story. Because he can literally just not do the stuff that is really annoying for us to do, to make people believe that what they’re watching is real. He doesn’t have to worry about that.

And so in a weird way the protagonist, I always think of the protagonist of this movie in the true sense of someone that has to make a choice is Fred Savage. Because those are the only two real people in the movie. And the mom.

**John:** Oh, the mom is a really crucial character there. Yeah, without that…

Also, you notice, you watch the movie, it starts with this long shot of a baseball game being played on a video screen.

**Craig:** Which thrills me.

**John:** Yeah, of course, yes. I mean, it does anchor it in a place in time, but it didn’t even need to be because it was contemporary. It’s just a really strange thing. It’s like you’re watching Stranger Things and they’re trying to say, oh no no we’re this–

**Craig:** Well they didn’t know. They thought that was the way it was always going to be.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** I thought baseball games would always look like that. But I guess they were probably trying to say look kids don’t read.

**John:** It’s true. They don’t.

**Craig:** Which continues to apply.

**John:** It does apply. So, back to Buttercup and back to her story. So, let’s track the movie from what we know of Buttercup. So somehow she goes from the farmhouse. She believes that Westley has died. And then suddenly she’s getting married to the king. We don’t know why.

**Craig:** It’s been years.

**John:** It’s been years. She’s a princess now for some reason because–

**Craig:** He had the right to choose his own bride, so one imagines that he rode through the countryside and said, “You. I want you.”

**John:** Picked the prettiest.

**Craig:** And that was it. And then, boo.

**John:** Boo.

**Craig:** God, that lady scared the hell out of me.

**John:** Absolutely. Her eyebrows alone.

**Craig:** Well, it’s the last shot. The last shot just is terrifying.

**John:** From her perspective, so the story from her perspective is I’m going to marry Humperdinck because – there’s just no alternatives.

**Craig:** She’s going to commit suicide. I mean, one of my favorite lines is, “Please consider me as an alternative to suicide.” It’s so great. So she’s never going to marry him. She doesn’t want to. Her heart was broken because she had true love, which is the ultimate magic here. So, no, she’s never going to marry him.

**John:** So let’s imagine the version of the story where we don’t have the framing device and we actually have to fill in these details.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Oh my god.

**John:** So then you have to create some stakes and reason for why she doesn’t do this then there’s some other thing that she’s going to lose–

**Craig:** How about this? Start with the fact that you have to see Westley the farm boy show up and be hired. She notices him. Or they’re both children and they grow up together. It’s like, blah, I already want to die.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I mean, because everything that’s joyous about this–

**John:** Is that you don’t know.

**Craig:** It’s the best parts-ism of it. It’s that you don’t know and it doesn’t matter. She has no other wants. He has no other wants. No one – Inigo Montoya, his entire life is one want. His I Want song is one line long.

**John:** Yeah. That’s true.

**Craig:** Brilliant. And Fezzik has no wants.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** He just is happy.

**John:** He’s happy to be there.

**Craig:** He’s done. His character is complete.

**John:** Let us talk about the biggest character in the story who doesn’t actually appear on screen which is Dread Pirate Roberts. Which is actually a really fascinating running thing through it. It pays off nicely at the end. You know Montoya will be there. But it is a really interesting amount of screen time spent on Dread Pirate Roberts as a conceit, as a way through this. You feel like Dread Pirate Roberts is going to show up at some point as much time as we spend talking about it.

**Craig:** Somewhere among my many hundreds of viewings I lost that desire to see Dread, because in part once I understood that he was the Dread Pirate Roberts and he explains that the guy that took him wasn’t the Dread Pirate Roberts, it just becomes this very brilliant explanation. Again, you see Goldman just sort of waving his magic pen and saying you don’t have to worry about that. And you don’t have to worry about that. And you don’t have to worry about that. It’s just the way it is. It’s really simple.

And the Dread Pirate Roberts thing I have heard many times in my life used as an analogy for all sorts of things. It’s incredibly useful. The idea of something that isn’t a thing but creates its own mythology to be the thing. It’s quite lovely actually.

**John:** Absolutely. Well let’s talk about as screenwriters the ways that this is brought up, because I would say that one of the reasons I wanted to do this as our movie to talk about is it’s one of the most frequently mentioned movies that’s going to come up in a discussion, in an early pitch session, talking about how we are going to do something. And so the idea of a framing device, are we going to Princess Bride it? You’ll hear that as sort of like, OK, we’re going to wrap stuff around this to sort of show – to contextualize this as a story in it.

The Dread Pirate Roberts as an idea of like this thing that’s happening, this conceit about this is not really the person, or the person has actually died a long time ago, that gets brought up in meetings.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And then there’s this very classic structure that’s taken directly from Grimm and earlier, but it comes up a lot which is the notion of trials and tests. And it goes back to Greek mythology. But the idea of using this time in your first act, or whatever act, I hate acts anyway, but of encountering tests. And going through – one of my favorite things that happens in this entire movie is just the little exchange that Inigo Montoya has with the Man in Black when he’s hanging there on the edge of the Cliffs of Insanity. You know, “I’m waiting for you. I’m bored. Come on, I won’t kill you. I’m promise.” And he’s just bored. “I swear on the soul of my father that you will meet no harm. And throw me the rope right away.” And that’s such a great way to solve a little plot problem and a little story problem by also revealing something interesting about both characters at the same time.

This guy is not only a good guy and a good sport, but there’s something that matters a lot to him. And that guy is a sort of guy that knows when somebody is telling the truth about something that matters to them and can then invest trust in them. That’s brilliant. And that little bit of good sportsmanship and Fezzik’s bit of good sportsmanship at giving him a warning shot saves those two guys from the mindset we should have of them which is that they are hired murderers.

**John:** It’s true.

**Craig:** But that’s all. They’re good sports. We love them.

**John:** All right. But that idea that you have a person who is your opponent who ultimately becomes your friend, an ally, down the road after you go through a battle sequence we do see a lot. And I’m thinking Black Panther has that same sort of moment. The waterfall cliff moment. That’s an important moment that we need to see that both men are proficient, that they can do this thing, and then coming through this we’re going to get to a spot where they can be allies down the road. Because they have each other’s respect.

**Craig:** Correct. And it’s so wonderfully circular. You find out who these people are by the actions they take with the Man in Black. You find out how good he is. It’s so surprising that he’s better than both of them. Obviously Vizzini never has a moment of surprise because he gets the most surprises when he dies. Amazing. But through that we learn that this guy is great at everything, which again you cannot do. I mean, so Gary Sue, right, I mean, this is the classic character that’s just good at everything. And never loses. Even when he is murdered by a death machine he still doesn’t lose.

And what’s fascinating is that Goldman points to it through Fred Savage. Because when it seems like he’s lost Fred Savage gets upset, which I love. “You’re telling the story wrong.” Because he doesn’t get that he’s being misdirected. But the truth is that kid understands, even though he’s never heard this story, he understands how stories are supposed to go. And I love that.

**John:** So this movie hangs on a lantern on that sense of as a screenwriter you need to be aware of where your audience is at and what their expectations are. And so moments of Buttercup marrying Humperdinck. The dream of marrying Humperdinck, of Westley dying. Those are moments that as a screenwriter you have to be in the seat with the audience watching it and go like, oh no, no, that couldn’t possibly happen. Something is wrong or broken about this movie. And so in this movie we get to call that out. We actually have a character who can say like, uh-uh, that couldn’t possibly happen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You would have to do these sequences very differently if you didn’t have that character.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you don’t have to be quite so misdirect-y about it. Because it’s a child that’s being misdirected. It’s a children’s story. Of course she doesn’t get married there. Of course something is going to happen. We don’t know what. Did she really get married? I mean, I remember because I wasn’t familiar with the specific rights of marriage as a 16-year-old, when he says, “Man and wife, say man and wife.” “Man and wife.” And she goes, “He didn’t come.” I’m like, how are they going to get out of this? Well apparently did you say I do, that works in Gilder I guess. Or Florin or wherever they are. I never remember which one. Thousands of screenings and I still can’t remember.

**John:** They’re in Florin.

**Craig:** They’re in Florin. Thank you. But I got fooled by that. And I find it – I mean, I also got – even when Christopher Guest throws the knife he looked like –

My dad used to tell me a story. When he was a kid he would go to the movies and before the movie would start there would be a Flash Gordon. And the Flash Gordon would always end in a cliffhanger. So he said, you know, you’d go there and then Flash Gordon would get captured by guys and they would lift him up and they would throw him into this big lava pool, right? And he would be in midair and they would freeze it. How will Flash – and he’s like I’ve got to get back next because how, that’s not possible.

And when you would get back next week they just started it again but a little earlier he beats the guys up and never gets thrown.

**John:** Oh that’s horrible.

**Craig:** it’s like a massive cheat. You could get away with that in the ‘50s apparently.

**John:** Because they couldn’t go back and find the old take.

**Craig:** Exactly. They couldn’t go back and find the old tape. But that kind of cheaty misdirect is kind of fascinating. And here he gets to do this cheaty misdirect all the time which I just thought was great.

**John:** Yeah. But let’s talk about the places where he’s not cheating and where he’s doing kind of very classic things you need to do in scripts. And so as I watching it tonight I was looking at the moments where characters talk about the plan. And characters do talk about their plans quite a lot. So, from the start like after she’s kidnapped it’s like I’m going to leave this thing here and this is going to be this and then we’re going to take her to the Cliffs of Insanity and that’s where we’re going to kill her. So you get a sense of what is supposed to be happening up ahead so that if you didn’t have that sense of what was going to happen up ahead it would just seem like a bunch of random events.

**Craig:** Yes. And because they’re not really people but just archetypes, they can just announce their plans. It’s a little clumsy when Chris Sarandon says to the guy that also knows the plan, without even giving him an “as you know.” “I will do this and then this and then this and then this and then this.” But Vizzini laying out the plan it’s almost like you people are stupid, let me just say it again.

And when they come up with the plan of how to break in that’s the one where they don’t tell you how it’s going to work because there’s this big surprise that shouldn’t work by the way. It’s kind of crazy how not real that looks.

One step back for a second. I think about this all the time. If they made this movie today and everybody was – we just moved those people through time so they were still alive and that age, what would they do about the Andre the Giant voice problem? Because he is borderline intelligible. And there are times when he says things that just aren’t correct at all.

**John:** I have no idea what that was, yeah.

**Craig:** How many times does Mandy Patinkin say, “My name is Inigo Montoya?” A lot. He calls him Inigo. Inigo. Right? Which must have been the best he could do. It appears that all of it has been looped and that was the best they could do. [laughs] I wonder what they would do now.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about what they would do now because I think it would be actually very hard to make this movie now. Because I can just imagine, you know, even with William Goldman’s fantastic screenplay there would not be confidence that an audience would be willing to just go along with this ride. And there would be a desire to have just more stuff painted in. And there’s some things which are in 2019 we would make some different choices. And so I think, you know, this movie doesn’t pass the Bechdel Test. There’s no other female characters. You’d want to have just some other sense of who Buttercup is and have her do something, have her take some agency.

There’s a moment in the fire swamp where she just falls a lot. And it’s not her greatest moment. She picks up a stick–

**Craig:** Pokes at it, kind of.

**John:** But not especially convincingly.

**Craig:** Yeah. She seems anemic to me. Deeply anemic. And also let’s not forget the moment where Westley threatens to slap her across the face.

**John:** That’s not a good moment.

**Craig:** Doesn’t hold up. Problematic as the kids say. Also that is a moment that I never really bought. In other words Westley comes back to save her but he’s really angry at her because she wants to marry a guy, because she wasn’t loyal. But why would she be loyal? I mean, that makes no sense. His anger there makes no sense so it’s a bit of a false–

**John:** Yeah. It’s one of those situations where in a book where we can believe that she doesn’t really see who he is, but because we can see from the very first moment it’s like oh it’s him, he’s back.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. I mean, it’s a Clark Kent thing going on for sure. The mask does not hide.

**John:** Didn’t hide it so good.

**Craig:** The palpable gorgeousness of a young Cary Elwes. By the way, how beautiful are those two people?

**John:** I just want to slow motion walk–

**Craig:** I mean, the two of them, when they’re just looking at each other like on the farm. I’m like, oh my–

**John:** It’s crazy.

**Craig:** Are they the same species as I am? I mean, it seems like they’re from heaven, right?

**John:** They are. They are angels.

**Craig:** Just glowing angels. And they’re still both good-looking. I think people like that stay good-looking literally until they’re dead.

**John:** It’s out of spite.

**Craig:** But, yes, that thing does not work. And I think you’re right that in general this movie has a hard time getting made today because all movies have a hard time getting made today. And it wears its innocence on its sleeve. It wears its fairytale-ness on its sleeve. There’s no reason to cast a big movie star in it because the characters are unchallenging. It’s actually more like some of the spoof stuff I had to do. Had to do, like I was forced.

**John:** Indeed.

**Craig:** I was actually for some of them. But regardless, where the characters have no – what they say is exactly what they’re thinking. There’s no subtext ever to anything. Like there’s no guile ever. Even like when she says, “All your ships but your four fastest.” And he’s like, “Huh?” Like he forgot his own plan. And then she’s like, “But your four fastest.” And then he realizes his mistake and he still is like, oh. All you have to do is like, “Yeah, that’s what I meant. Of course.” But no one has any guile.

**John:** I do agree. You get the sense that there was nothing happening offstage. She walks in and she’s–

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** She’s been in like a box and then she walks out.

**Craig:** It’s very Westworld that way. Yeah.

**John:** It is. Oh, the Westworld version of this would be fantastic.

**Craig:** Cease all motor functions.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** For sure. But that’s kind of the joy of it. You know, I mean, I love that part. The moment for me other than the moment between the two human beings, Peter Falk and Fred Savage, there is one moment that is very human and very real and that is when Inigo Montoya gets his revenge. And that’s where the movie actually said, you know what, this is a real person. He has experienced – and Mandy Patinkin also just acts beautifully there. So does Christopher Guest who played an amazing villain. “Stop saying that.” Oh, it’s just wonderful.

And that’s a moment that a guy like William Goldman figured out how to do something like a simple revenge plot except he boiled it into this little rock of crack that has just gotten into our bloodstream. It is something everyone knows. Everyone knows this. The moment is–

**John:** Repetition is also a huge help of that. He says the line so many times that it just becomes a thing. And also he’s a character who clearly articulates his goal from the very, very start.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So we know exactly what he’s after and we know that he’s probably going to get it at the end or he’s going to die trying to get that thing. He’s the only character other than Buttercup and Westley that we really have a sense of what they’re after. Even our villain, I don’t really kind of know what he wants. He wants a pretense for this war.

**Craig:** He wants a war. He wants a war.

**John:** But we don’t know why.

**Craig:** Why? Doesn’t matter.

**John:** Doesn’t matter.

**Craig:** I mean, and also if you want a war there are so many better ways.

**John:** Maybe start a war.

**Craig:** Start a war.

**John:** Yeah. That’s a thing you could do.

**Craig:** Fire upon them. Seems pretty easy to me. God, I love his – the dad, the king, so great.

**John:** One little kiss.

**Craig:** “Isn’t that kiss.”

**John:** “Isn’t that nice.”

**Craig:** “She kissed me.” Oh, god, I love that.

**John:** Let’s sort of wrap up this part by talking about sort of world-building and then sort of the future of The Princess Bride. So the world-building of this I thought was really interesting. So it would take place in fairytale land yet it’s also the real world. It’s weird for me when they reference Australia.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I mean, it feels like a bit of a reach. And when they talk about Greenland, great, that’s sort of in that little space.

**Craig:** “Unemployed in Greenland.” I mean, greatest.

**John:** It’s a great line. Australia feels like a weird reach.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s an interesting universe. And also we don’t know sort of how much magic there is in the world. There’s a tiny bit?

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a tiny bit. So it’s this medieval version of our world. No one seems to be aware of anywhere in the world except for Vizzini who is aware of everything, including Plato, Socrates, Aristotle. “Morons.” And he knows Asia and why you should never get involved in a land war there. And he’s from Sicily. Right? So apparently this is in our world, it was just this little weird – it’s like Luxembourg, you know, it’s like this little area.

Magic wise it seems like there’s just minor, I mean, Miracle Max seems like just an early–

**John:** Like an alchemist.

**Craig:** Early pharmacist.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about the future of this movie. So we talk about sort of its history. There was discussion of Buttercup’s baby.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Right. That was William Goldman’s.

**John:** William Goldman. So William Goldman was writing a sequel book and never finished it.

**Craig:** Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t do it.

**John:** So he said, “I desperately want to write it and I sit there and nothing happens and I get pissed at myself. I got lucky with The Princess Bride the first time and I’d love to get lucky again.” So that was 2007, so there wasn’t one. There was a Broadway musical that was in development. A lot of it was written. It never happened. Apparently–

**Craig:** Royalty dispute or something like that.

**John:** Yeah, disputes behind that. So Disney Theatrical is apparently trying to do it again so there’s a new version.

**Craig:** Yes. And I think that that’s a fair way to approach this. Approach it as a musical because it does seem very adaptable as a musical to me. And that would not step on what exists here. There is beautiful music in this movie written by Mark Knopfler. One of my wishes for this, I wish that they would release a version where they took Knopfler’s score and recorded it with a proper orchestra instead of a synth which was I guess exciting at the time, but it just–

**John:** It feels a little thin.

**Craig:** Well, it diminishes the score and also it’s wrong. That place doesn’t have synth. You know, it’s just so weird. That makes me sad.

**John:** Oh, I’m sorry. We don’t want Craig to be sad. But I agree with you, I think the idea of doing a musical of it makes sense because it feels like these characters want to sing. So, they’re expressing such kind of simple true ideas that those feel like songs and that’s the way to get into these character’s heads. I’d be curious whether they keep the framing device of the grandfather and son. I don’t think you necessarily need it in the stage version. But you can keep it.

**Craig:** I bet they do.

**John:** I bet they do [crosstalk] simplicity.

**Craig:** And also the last line, why in god’s name Rob Reiner didn’t just fade out on Peter Falk after he says, “As you wish.” Why does he then go back and have him walk out of the room and close the door and just leave Fred Savage there alone? It’s the weirdest choice. Anyway.

**John:** We can find Rob and ask him.

**Craig:** Let’s. But that last line is the whole raison d’être of this thing. Which is you kid, just learned that love is a service that we do for others. That’s what this whole story was about. And me being here with you was my service to you. I love you. And you need that last line because that to me explains why we went through the exercise.

William Goldman effectively convinced I think everybody that reading a story, telling a story to somebody is in its own way an act of service and an act of love which is why he did it for his own kids. It is brilliant in its simplicity and I’m going to have to watch it for the 1,001th time clearly.

**John:** All right. Let us open it up to some questions. We have two stands in the aisle. If people have questions or things or comments they want to share. I guess we’ll allow comments. This is sort of a special, if someone has an observation–

**Craig:** I mean, we did not make this movie.

**John:** If people have other observations they want to share as well that’s cool, too, but we’ll sort of get your thought on this. We’ll start with you, sir.

**Male Audience Member:** Hey there. Just from the last few things you guys were saying about the synth tracks and the closing the door at the end, it occurs to me we’re not really seeing the story that’s on the paper. We’re seeing what Fred Savage is seeing. And we just saw him – we opened on him playing the video game with the synth track. And it kind of matches with what he might be imagining. And I kind of feel like that closes at the end of the movie, too, with the door closing. It’s him going to sleep. We’re not really following the book. We’re following Fred Savage in his head.

**Craig:** Right. That makes sense. I mean, I always identify with the old Jew, so that’s probably where my.

**John:** Yeah, but you’re actually raising a good point which is basically who’s POV is that whole sequence from. Is it from the grandfather’s POV or the–?

**Craig:** I always thought it was from the grandfather’s point of view personally.

**John:** You could make a good argument either way. But I think those choice of shots really matters here. I mean, an argument against it being from the grandfather’s point of view is that he walks into the scene.

**Craig:** Yes, but there are moments where Fred Savage is shocked and even says, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you said no kissing,” which makes me think that he isn’t watching the movie.

**Male Audience Member:** Well if I was going to turn it into a question the question would be you say you identify with the old Jew now, but the first time you saw it?

**Craig:** Oh, old Jew.

**John:** Craig has always been an old Jew.

**Craig:** I was born 80.

**Male Audience Member:** Hi, so weird seeing your guys’ faces move while I’m hearing your voice.

**Craig:** It’s weird for us, also.

**Male Audience Member:** I was into everything you were saying about not being able to make this movie today and the one kind of thing I wanted to bounce off of that is like in some ways I feel like I see this movie everywhere today, like everything that Phil Lord and Chris Miller do for example.

**Craig:** Yes.

**Male Audience Member:** So curious on your thoughts on like – because it seems to me know that meta-ness in movies is more endemic than it maybe was in 1987. So your thoughts on the state of that and the influence and doing it well versus doing it poorly and all that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wrote something down here. You can just imagine young Chris Miller and Phil Lord watching this and absorbing the lessons of a gentle meta-comedy. And it is very gentle. I mean, they are very gentle about it, too. I think that’s why they’re so good at it. One of my favorite jokes ever in history is “Where am I? The pit of despair. Don’t bother trying to escape.” It’s wonderful. It is meta. It pokes fun at a trope. But it doesn’t break anything. And I think that’s wonderful.

I have to imagine that they love this movie the way I do, but you know what, we’ll ask them.

**John:** We’ll ask them.

**Craig:** We’ll ask those guys.

**John:** So I agree with you that you see the same things that this movie does reflected in other things. And there are some direct echoes. Like you don’t get to Once Upon a Deadpool without this movie. But I would suspect that like the meta-ness of our culture is just there no matter what, so without this movie we’d still have – we’d probably still have Phil Lord and Chris Miller making their stuff.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. I don’t think they would have perished or anything like that, but maybe they would have.

**John:** Yeah. And so no spoilers but in some of the work I’ve been doing recently, which you guys haven’t seen yet, there is that quality of like are we framing that this is a story within the world of how it’s being told. And it can be a very useful way of placing something within a larger world and a larger context. And so that meta-ness is I think you’re going to increasingly see.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like it.

**John:** Over here.

**Male Audience Member:** Well there was one hole which again you explain in the very beginning because it is a fantasy, nothing really supposed to make sense in a way. But the beginning when the Man in Black, the protagonist, follows him he just appears. How does he know she’s there?

**Craig:** Oh, there are bigger holes than that one. I mean, how about this one: Fezzik finds a drunken Inigo and he fills him in on everything including the six-fingered man. How did he know about that? Was he watching this movie, too? There’s huge holes. But you’re like, meh.

**Male Audience Member:** But then again if you watch the comic books, what we watch, the movies all the time there’s holes all over the place. Again, it’s a fantasy, so it’s a fantasy.

**Craig:** You get away with a lot. No question.

**John:** Also, I think it’s important about setting expectations. So this movie in contextualizing it as a story it gives you a lot of buy-in for genre conventions and just the ability to skip over some things that would otherwise feel like giant plot holes. You feel like maybe this story that Fred Savage is hearing actually has some of those things filled in and we’re skipping over those.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Let’s start over here.

**Male Audience Member:** Hi, do you feel that there is any benefit to the fact that characters like Buttercup and the other characters in the actual story we’re being told don’t grow as characters, they don’t change. If the story were made today, if this film were made today, is there any benefit to keeping Buttercup as a character that doesn’t really grow and start learning to defend herself in that way?

**Craig:** Well, it’s a fairytale and what we’ve started to do now is reevaluate fairytales and retell them in a modern way, or if you want to call it postmodern way. Disney is doing this quite a bit. You reimagine these stories and then you turn them on their ear. And you don’t just have a female be a damsel in distress.

For this movie, no one changes. None of those characters change because that’s how that story functions. The only person that changes is Fred Savage, which is why I think he’s the protagonist. But no, you can’t do that now because it won’t work. People won’t like it. And this is why it’s important to view movies in their context. And, yeah, there are moments where you go, uh, the kind of trope-iness of their characters is sort of a point. He’s telling a tropey story.

**John:** Disney’s Cinderella, the remake of Cinderella, the live action version, one of the things I really appreciate about it is it was the exact same story but they gave the characters human motivations rather than cartoon motivations. She’s a more fully fleshed-out character than she would ever be in the original animated film. And I think if you were to approach this – I don’t think you should remake this movie – but if you were to approach a remake of this movie you would be thinking from inside her point of view like how can she do some things to change her world around her. And sort of what is it unique and special about her other than just being incredible gorgeous that we’re going to really focus on.

**Craig:** So gorgeous.

**John:** So, so beautiful. Over here.

**Male Audience Member:** Sure. Just watching this, having reflected on recent episodes, it’s like if there’s a scene you’re dreading to write just don’t write that scene, just move past it and see what happens. And there’s so much of – the economy of that story works so well that it feels like it’s 60 minutes long. What’s the runtime on that? Anyone? It feels less than 90 minutes it is so quick. And have you – does anyone know how close that follows the book? Did Goldman cut a bunch of material from that?

**Craig:** There are serious differences. The book was, you know, the subtitle of that book I think was called A Hot Fairytale or something like that. It was a little more adult when he put it in book form. But the basics are all there. There’s not much new there that isn’t in the book. So, yeah, that was kind of how he wrote it, right? He just was able – it’s a great experiment to free yourself from having to write everything in the story and just write some of it.

**Male Audience Member:** So many details that don’t matter. Is it Florin, is it Gilder? Doesn’t matter, it’s sword land. Who cares?

**Craig:** Does not matter. It does not matter.

**John:** Yeah, so this takes out all the shoe leather basically. Characters aren’t walking from place to place. Basically they’re just suddenly showing up there and doing stuff and that can be a really great lesson. You’re not always going to be able to have this kind of economy for very good reasons. But it’s also a good lesson in why it’s important to have something to cut to.

So, if you were to do this without the framing device it would still be incredibly helpful to be able to cut away to the other characters doing something so that you can move both stories together.

**Male Audience Member:** Splitting the party.

**John:** Yeah. Otherwise you’d be walking through all of this with them. I’m doing the third Arlo Finch book right now and man there’s times I wish I could skip over the stuff.

**Craig:** You can.

**John:** You can sometimes. But sometimes you cannot. And so chapter breaks are really helpful but like you got to finish out a scene. You can’t just summarize it out.

**Craig:** You got to finish a scene. Yeah.

**Male Audience Member:** Are you guys waiting for all the characters in that – All the President’s Men?

**John:** Oh, no, no, no. We’re not staying after that. No.

**Craig:** No. Oh, I thought you meant they were coming. OK, sorry.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** So it feels to me very [spollen] because it’s very playful the whole conceit of it. And I tell a lot of stories to my grandkids and I can jump all over the place, you know, the little mouse suddenly ends up three stories down and he finds a cockroach that he rides and like they just go with it. So, I think even though we have over-institutionalized in a way storytelling through our big brains and trying to figure it out, in the end just having a playful spirit and sort of the logic seems like underneath less important than this sense of play. So I wanted you perhaps to address how play and creating from a sense of play can inform story, like using this as a great example.

**John:** Yeah.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So often we can sort of imagine development notes and process on this and trying to answer all of the questions. And in trying to answer all the questions the notes will forget like, oh that’s right, it’s supposed to be fun. And so they will try to fix all the problems and not recognize what was actually great and working about it and would squash some of what was great and working about it. The lines that Craig quotes, they’re just weird fun moments that wouldn’t happen if you had spent all the time to fix all the mistakes.

**Craig:** Yeah, like no one ever tells you – it just says then assemble a Brute Squad. And we’re supposed to know what a Brute Squad is. You know? I’m going to call the Brute Squad. I’m the Brute Squad. You are the Brute Squad.

But I think that that is a great sign that it started the way it started. Because when you tell stories to your children within seconds you realize you better be entertaining. I mean, the attention span is short, but when you have them they give you more attention than any adult ever would. So it’s figuring out what are those things. And big swings and exciting things. It’s not enough to have, like OK, they fell down a hill. She just got hurt. The love of her life back. If we’re not telling that story to a child they sit down and they discuss. Not these two. They go into a swamp with huge rats. And fire. And the – and the – I mean, that’s the point.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** Swamp-eating fire.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes. Love it. So good.

**John:** Over here.

**Male Audience Member:** One thing I noticed while watching the film this time is how good William Goldman is at that bad guys closing in tracking beat that he also does that great in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And I was just wondering on a craft level like how do you approach writing those kinds of beats. We see them in lots of films and I just feel like there’s this great comedic interplay between the two spaces when they’re there and when the bad guy runs in. How do you balance that beat?

**John:** I think it’s recognizing that you’re going to want that moment. That you’re going to need that moment to see that this is between the two. That you see the interplay between them. Because there can also be the instinct of just like we’re going to deal with these people and then we’ll have a separate scene where we’ll see these people over there. And we’re not going to contextualize where they are in relation to each other.

And if the screenwriter doesn’t recognize like, oh, that’s a thing I’m going to need or I’m going to need to see those things, that may not get shot and may not be a thing that you have in your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, the key isn’t so much that you have that scene or not have that scene. It’s how you want it to be. What the meaning of it – do you want to see somebody looking at somebody in the distance that keeps coming while they’re standing there? Or do you want them to be surprised by it? But it is also a chance to be really funny.

I mean, one of my favorite versions of that is in Holy Grail. He’s running, running, and then he’s there. I love that. So you can play around with it. But you have to know what you want out of it. Yeah.

**Male Audience Member:** Thank you.

**John:** Over here.

**Male Audience Member:** I’m curious what you think is the target audience of the film when it first came out compared to nowadays. I think Craig you said you saw it when you were 16 and John like late high school/early college. But like you said there’s, you know, with the tropes and everything it’s kind of postmodern with the meta, you know, it almost has that idea of watch Star Wars when you’re younger because by the time you see it in your 20s how many times have you heard “I am your father” and that moment now has kind of lost its impact. So, just curious on – obviously it still lives up and the protagonist in your guys’ opinion is Fred Savage the child. So, even though you saw it kind of late adolescence has it kind of grown into a movie you should see and you should introduce to someone when they’re young, they’ll really appreciate it?

**Craig:** I think so. I think the movie is designed to speak to children of all ages as they say. Talking to you when you watch it now, I don’t care how old you are, it’s just all about the kid in you. There’s really nothing, I mean, there’s no – there’s not even a hint that reproduction occurs. Do you know what I mean? It’s about a kiss. Everything feels so broad the way a child would want it to be on purpose. And they keep making it broader, and broader, and broader. And the comedy is very physical. And I love that about it.

So to me who is this – this is one of those movies that anyone should be able to watch and hopefully enjoy. Anyone.

**John:** Yeah. So the movie was not a huge success. It did OK. But it was not a big blockbuster. Go to YouTube and look at the trailer. It is the worst trailer. It has the worst music. All trailers from that time are terrible, but this is a really bad trailer. So it’s hard to say who the target audience was, but like target audience is like anybody who would watch that trailer and actually show up at the theater and go in.

What I do want to address though, I feel like part of the reason why we’re talking about this movie and why this movie has had a cultural impact is because it came out on home video at a time where home video was incredibly important. Most people saw this a thousand times on home video. I didn’t. But also it got rereleased again and again on laser disc and better and better laser disc. So I felt like it really benefited from the rise of home video and the ability to see it again and again and become a family favorite.

**Craig:** Similar thing with Spinal Tap. I mean, look, every movie got that treatment, but this one captured people. It took a while. Because it’s also very hard to explain what it is. You have to kind of see it to get it. But it is so remarkably entertaining. And so it caught on. It was one of those movies where like “you have to see this movie, I love this movie.” And it wasn’t just your friend trying to push some art film on you. It was like moms were telling other moms, “You’ve got to see this movie.” It’s for everybody. Yeah, god, hard to solve. Geez.

**John:** Over here.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** So, I’m going to kick myself if I get this wrong but I’m pretty sure that the title of the book was A Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure, the Good Parts, by William Goldman. Which leads to my question–

**Craig:** Nice. That is.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** I’m fairly familiar with the book.

**Craig:** Apparently.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** And I actually remember the first time the book was read to me. I don’t remember the first time I saw the movie but I had seen it many times beforehand. And I’m just curious from, you know, we’re super lucky that William Goldman got to adapt his own work and really polish up his own wonderful novel. Do you feel like there’s anything from the book that’s missing that you’d like to see in this? Or do you think he just clinched it perfectly tight?

**Craig:** Honestly, I mean, I don’t want to represent that I am sort of steeped in the novel as you are, but I’m good. This gets everything that I want. And it’s one of those things where over time a movie that you love just becomes unchangeable. Even its flaws. You come to love all of it. I mean, there is some editing in this thing that is just astonishingly horrible.

**John:** There’s some eye lines that are rough, too.

**Craig:** Eye lines are like, you know, Westley’s head is flopped this way and in the next shot he’s close up looking that way. No one gave a damn. But I love it. So, anyway I’m happy. I’m good.

**John:** So I have not read the book. But I will say just in general an adaptation is how do you tell the best story for the screen. And so we need to remember that he was a screenwriter, I don’t really want to say first, but he had written a lot of screenplays before he wrote this book. And so I think even if he wasn’t planning at the time to adapt this into a movie I think he had a cinematic sense to it. And so he wrote this book probably with a good idea of what this would be like on a screen. And so I think there’s a natural reason why a screenwriter wrote this book and why the novelist was the screenwriter who brought it to the end.

Over here.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** Hey, so I have a question. We talked a lot about holes and it’s kind of a follow up to that. If each of you had to fill in a hole or had to add something I would love to hear what that is, whether it’s another element of the fire swamp, or if we actually see the Dread Pirate Roberts. I’d love to hear what you have to say.

**Craig:** Oh that’s good. That’s a good question.

**John:** I would want some Buttercup stuff where we understand why Buttercup is marrying him at the start. I just feel like she needs somebody else to talk with. Because the character is incredibly silent throughout the movie, as if she was only contractually allowed to say like 200 lines. Because there are a lot times where there’s cuts to like she just nods at the end of a scene. It’s like, well, you could say something there.

I would love to just have a little – someone else she can talk to in the movie just so I can get a little bit more insight into her.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** The albino. The albino.

**John:** Sure. The albino. That would be great. We want some albino backstory as well.

**Craig:** The origin story of the albino?

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. Why is the albino there and sometimes nothing? No, yes.

**Craig:** Love that.

Fe**Male Audience Member:** He could be the confidante.

**Craig:** I’m good on the albino. I’m going to be honest with you. I feel pretty good about that. I would want maybe I would love to see a short little bit where Fezzik and Inigo are kind of floating out there unrooted and miserable because when we catch up with Inigo he’s drinking himself to death because he’s miserable and has failed. And obviously Fezzik has just been recruited for the Brute Squad. So I would love – maybe even just Inigo Montoya, one scene where you see that it’s all unraveled for him. I would love that.

**John:** It’s kind of weird that it feels like, you know, for Inigo and Fezzik that like six months have passed, but it could only have been like 10 days.

**Craig:** Right. And no one ever changes their shirt.

**John:** No. That’s accurate. That’s accurate to medieval times.

**Craig:** True.

**John:** Over here.

**Craig:** Jay Hogan?

**Male Audience Member:** Hey, how are you?

**Craig:** He’s famous you guys.

**Male Audience Member:** I’ve been dying to be a guest on your show, so this was the only way I could do it.

**Craig:** Oh no. If you want to be on the show you can be on the show.

**Male Audience Member:** OK. Well here I am.

**Craig:** Great.

**Male Audience Member:** I was watching this and thinking as I’m watching this as a writer I’d be afraid to write this movie. And the reason I’m afraid to write this movie is there are no stakes in this movie. People don’t die. When you think they die, they don’t die. They come back to life. True love is going to save the day. It’s stated at the very beginning and proved very quickly in act one he’s going to come back, he’s going to find her. For no reason he’s going to find her. They’re going to get together. The love story is going to work. Nobody you care about is going to die. And the protagonist in your story, the little boy, is quickly into this book, pretty quickly. And into his grandfather – you could tell pretty quickly that this relationship, this bonding happens quickly.

So we’re watching this story and not necessarily getting as involved as you need to be. It’s a fairytale so you’re separated. Your emotions are separated. But that frightens me as a writer.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, that’s the thing. It’s a fairytale. So the traditional tale of Cinderella, the stakes are she’ll just keep being treated poorly and she won’t be married to a guy. And that’s pretty common. In this case you’re absolutely right. I love the fact that, oh my god, if they fail there will be a war between Florin and Gilder. Who cares, right?

So I kind of love the fairytale-ness of it. And I guess that’s enough stakes for me is will this kid like his grandpa at the end. It’s so sweet.

**John:** So Jay, what I hear you talking about is there are stakes, I mean, like you know will these two lovers get back together. Will he die? He’s being tortured. Will he die? Will she kill herself? But you know that they’re false stakes.

**Male Audience Member:** The writers’ room calls it Schmuck Bait.

**John:** Schmuck Bait. Absolutely. And so I guess what I would say is even when you recognize that it’s schmuck bait I think you can sometimes lean into a film because you’re wondering like how can this actually end well. How can this actually–?

**Male Audience Member:** Yeah. Process is the alternative to stakes. It’s like what is the most interesting way to get there even though you know where you’re going.

**Craig:** And also there’s – the schmuck bait catches a schmuck. It’s the kid. He falls for it. Right? So that’s the point. They know they’re doing it. What you’re doing is you’re watching somebody falling in love with narrative. So I’m OK with that personally.

**John:** So, Jay, you did talk about like you’d be afraid to write this because you’re just worried that stakes are so low. And I think that’s actually really interesting and thank you for bringing up that point because you do worry about is this actually going to feel – is this actually going to have the weight that you would kind of want it to have? That there’s going to be enough real emotional resonance beyond just like a beautiful kiss at the end? And I think that’s a fair thing.

I think if you were to approach this movie now there would be an expectation of–

**Craig:** Yeah, there would.

**Male Audience Member:** I would even say that the highlight, the climax, is when Inigo Montoya gets his revenge.

**John:** Exactly.

**Male Audience Member:** And it’s not when the lovers kiss, better than the best five kisses–

**Craig:** Leaves them behind, right.

**Male Audience Member:** Right. Because that moment feels like, oh, well maybe he’s really going to die. For that one moment you thought maybe he’s done. And then when he comes back that feels good. That feels like a victory. As a writer, I think my audience is engaged in that moment. But everything after that is just, well, do-di-do, fun times.

**Craig:** There’s not that much after it. I mean, they land on horses and they ride away. And then there’s a kiss.

**John:** Jay, thank you.

**Male Audience Member:** Thank you.

**John:** And we have one more question. In the blue shirt. You get the final question of the evening.

**Male Audience Member:** All right. Hope it’s good. Just thinking about how this all started because he would tell the story to his kids and it eventually became the screenplay. As screenwriters yourselves and having kids yourselves have you ever found yourself in a similar situation where you would tell stories to your kids that you would make up and just think to yourself like, hmm, this could be a screenplay? Has that ever occurred to you?

**Craig:** I mean, never to me, because I need to get paid. I can’t do it – I just can’t. I can’t. It’s so hard to do it anyway that without my kids slipping me serious cash.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, you’d have to pay Jessie like a big allowance so she could pay you back.

**Craig:** It’s just too much.

**John:** I will confess that I find it really tedious to have to do that work of making up a story for my kid. And there have been times where like we’re on a long flight and I’m just trying to get her through something. Luckily we’re past all of that stuff. But I find it really tedious because I hate sort of falling back on those tropes. I hate falling back on sort of the “and then…” and she’ll try to introduce something. I never enjoyed that. And so I want to have control over the universe and the world. I want control over Craig.

**Craig:** See what I talk about? Know what I mean? [makes robot noises]

**John:** But thank you for the question. All right, that is our discussion.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** I need to thank the Guild Screening Series, Ian Dietchman, Scott Alexander for doing this. Casey our projectionist. Marty and Brian for putting this whole logistics together. Megan McDonnell is our producer. And listen to Scriptnotes and this will be not Tuesday but a week from Tuesday.

**Craig:** Awesome. Thank you guys.

**John:** Thank you all.

**Craig:** Thank you.

Links:

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* Submit entries for The Scriptnotes Pitch Session [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch).
* The Princess Bride: S. Morgenstern’s Classic Tale of True Love and High Adventure [novel](https://www.amazon.com/Princess-Bride-Morgensterns-Classic-Adventure/dp/0156035219)
* The Princess Bride [Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnkfVvZ9q_0)
* [The Dread Pirate Roberts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dread_Pirate_Roberts)
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/rules-and-plans).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 385 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be talking about the plans your characters make and how to share them with the reader. Plus we’ll discuss rule-breakers, the techniques that absolutely no traditional screenwriting program will teach you but how they could elevate and invigorate your script.

But first, some reminders. Craig, we have a live show coming up.

**Craig:** Yes we do. In Seattle, the great city of Seattle and the great state of Washington. I’m very excited about this one. We’re going to be there February 6th at 7pm. John is going to fill you in on all these extra details. But what I’m really excited about is that we have one special guest, a very dear friend of mine, Emily Zulauf, who is a former development executive at Pixar. You may have heard of Pixar. They’re a small animation company.

**John:** Little upstart thing. They’re trying to use computer animation. We’ll see if it works.

**Craig:** And their deal is they at least claim to be good at story, so I suppose she might know something or another. And it’s going to be good. She’s a wonderful person. So I’m very excited to have Emily there. And you guys should – Seattle people come out and see us. Don’t leave us hanging. We’ve got a link. I guess it will be in the show notes. Is that right?

**John:** Yeah. The link will be in the show notes. So tickets we now know are $20 or $10 if you’re a member of the Northwest Screenwriters Guild, which apparently exists.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Or The Film School. So, $20 or $10, but come see us. It is at the AMC Theater Pacific Place 11, I guess. We’re going to show up there and we’re going to have a great time. I’m going to be way deep into an Arlo Finch book tour. Craig is flying up just for the evening. It will be a really fun time.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’ll be sort of an intersectionality of Arlo Finch and Scriptnotes and Seattle. It should be a good time.

**Craig:** The Film School is the name of a film school.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** TheFilmSchool. All one word.

**John:** All one word.

**Craig:** All right. So, don’t think if you are at a film school–

**John:** Any film school–

**Craig:** You’re paying $20 if you’re at a film school.

**John:** But if you’re at The Film School.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Definite articles. Indefinite articles.

**Craig:** Hugely important.

**John:** Not every language has the distinction between them.

**Craig:** Interesting. Interesting. I love the distinction between those two things. And I will also say having been to Seattle many times, everything costs $20. Everything.

**John:** Oh, totally. Absolutely.

**Craig:** Looking at a fish costs $20. Just standing in that market, looking at a fish, $20.

**John:** Yeah. Pike Place Market, so expensive just to your eyes, everywhere they look.

**Craig:** Everywhere you look. $20. So you guys can afford it. Yeah. I love that place.

**John:** Craig, we need some photos of you catching some fish at the Pike Place Market, because otherwise people won’t believe you’re actually in Seattle.

**Craig:** I don’t think they let you catch the fish. The deal is you buy the fish and then they throw it to each other. Because otherwise, let’s face, there’s going to be fish everywhere. Have you seen the Gum Wall, John?

**John:** Oh, I’ve seen the Gum Wall. I have good photos of the Gum Wall.

**Craig:** I love the Gum Wall. I love it. Anyway, Seattle, one of my favorite places, so please buy some tickets. Come see us. We’re incredibly entertaining in person. You can’t even imagine how much fun we are. Like beyond.

**John:** We have to cut so much out of the episodes just because it would be too much joy.

**Craig:** Too much cheering.

**John:** Yeah. So, that’s February 6, but then on February 9 I will be back in Los Angeles for the Arlo Finch launch party. It’s at Chevalier’s, the bookstore on Larchmont. That’s 12:30 in the afternoon on February 9. So come see me there. I will be signing copies of Arlo Finch. It’s as simple as it can be. You come in, you buy your book, I sign it for you, I talk a little bit, I answer some questions. I think I’m going to have special cool little patches to hand out, so come see me if you want to on February 9.

But if you can’t make it on February 9, preorder the book because, good lord, I would love to hit the charts.

**Craig:** Wouldn’t that be nice?

**John:** That’s sort of how you hit the charts on a second book is by people buying it the first week.

**Craig:** They pre-buy, they load up.

**John:** They load up.

**Craig:** Don’t just do it for the patch, people.

**John:** Do it for – because you know if it does happen to cross over that threshold and show up on the bestsellers list you will know that you were the reason why it did.

**Craig:** You were the straw.

**John:** You were the straw that broke the–

**Craig:** Finch’s back.

**John:** Yeah. Something. We have a brand new feature that we are rolling out, so not in this episode but we have to prepare for it. This is a new idea that we’re going to try out. It’s called the Pitch Session. And way back in Episode 274 we had Eric Voss who I guess he pitched to you like two years ago at the Austin Film Festival. You thought it was great. You had him record the pitch and so we played it and we discussed it. And we’re going to try to do that again, but opening it up to all of our listeners.

What we’re looking for is a 60 to 90 second pitch. It can be for a TV show. It can be for a feature. But it’s 60 to 90 seconds that sort of sells the idea and you are going to send in an audio recording. We’re going to listen to the recording and put a couple of them up and then discuss them afterwards. So it’s a chance to kind of do what we do on the Three Page Challenge but with audio pitches.

**Craig:** Pitches. I love it. I think it’s going to be fun. I do this at Austin. I judge the big finals. I mean, I’m just blown away. People show up to this thing every year. It’s amazing. It’s in this big bar. They pack the place. Pack it.

**John:** Packed.

**Craig:** The thing about it that blows my mind is people are so respectful of the people that are pitching because you know how hard it is to get a roomful of people to just listen. Well, this place will quiet down and listen really well to every single pitch. I think there’s like 20 of them. So, it’s been fun to that and, yeah, I think it’s educational because like it or not sometimes pitches happen.

**John:** Yeah. So, I would say that the pitch form that we’re looking for, the 60 to 90 second pitch, that’s not the kind of thing that you’re usually going into sit down and really pitch to an executive. But it is the kind of casual thing that you would be doing at a party. It’s a little bit longer than an elevator pitch, but it’s that short distillation of the idea.

And so really we’re going to be responding to does this feel like a movie or a TV show idea. And did we get enough out of this that we can actually see what it is you’re describing that you’re going to be trying to write. So, that’s what we’re looking for. So if you have an idea like this that you want to try to pitch at us the URL you want is johnaugust.com/pitch. And there’s a whole little form you fill out. You click buttons that say that you’re submitting this of your own freewill. That you’re not going to try to sue us. And that this is all–

**Craig:** Don’t sue us.

**John:** This is not a contest. This is not a competition. This is just for the learns. So, depending on how it goes we might do it again. If it goes poorly we may deny this ever happened.

**Craig:** Correct. We erase it from the record.

**John:** Yep. Speaking of erasing things from the record–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** We have more follow up. So this is Brooke in Los Angeles and Craig can you read what Brooke wrote to us?

**Craig:** Yes, so we recently had I guess a rerun of our Raiders episode, which is one of my favorites. Here’s what Brooke wrote. “I do have two questions about your episode on Raiders of the Lost Ark. I share your enthusiasm for the movie. It’s one of my favorites. That said, now that I’ve read the screenplay my feelings are decidedly more mixed. I always assumed Marion was being hyperbolic when she angrily accused Indiana Jones of taking advantage of her when she was ‘just a child.’ I hope Karen Allen will forgive me when I say that through my younger eyes I thought she was older than the script reveals she is supposed to be, 26. Doing the math, it turns out Lucas, Kasdan, and Spielberg intended Indy to have sex with her when she was 16 and to be completely blasé about that when confronted with her justified outrage.

“Now at first I was inclined to chalk it up to the times were different. But then on your recommendation I listened to the recorded conversations of Lucas, Kasdan, and Spielberg. And I heard Lucas arguing in favor of making Marion younger, as young as 11 when Indy was to have had sex with her. He thought making her 11 would be it ‘more interesting’ than if she were 16 or 17. Frankly, I was shocked and disgusted. And then confused.

“Here are my questions. One, when you’re creating a character that’s supposed to be a hero, albeit flawed, why would you ever want to so far as to make him a pedophile as Lucas was advocating? Can you please help me understand why these renowned creators thought that audiences would accept that kind of character? Two, why didn’t you address this issue in your podcast? You too are so wonderfully outspoken regarding things you support and don’t. Why didn’t this make the cut?”

Oh boy. You know what, John, just answer this with a yes or a no.

**John:** [laughs] Oh yeah. Simple yes/no. I’ll answer question two first because it’s the simplest answer. I didn’t know any of that backstory. And so while I had seen parts of the interview and I’d watched the movie a bunch of times I had no idea that there was this issue of how old Marion was, how old she would have been 10 years ago. It never occurred to me and I hadn’t seen that discussion from the transcripts or from the recording from before.

**Craig:** When I read this question it jogged a memory, like oh yeah, I think I remember reading that. But I had read that thing a long time ago. So, when we did the podcast it was not at all on my internal memory radar.

**John:** Yeah. So, as to the first question there, I think it’s absurd – I’m horrified. I think it’s bizarre and weird to have a conversation in which the protagonist had sex with a person who was 11 years old. That’s just bizarre and horrifying and I can’t even fathom sort of how that happens. So I can’t answer that in any meaningful way.

What I will say is that I can imagine scenarios, this isn’t apparently how this all happened, but I can imagine scenarios in which you sort of accidentally end up at that place where you didn’t do the math right. And so they knew each other this time and you cast somebody who was a certain age which would have meant they knew each other at a certain time. That is a thing you probably could find in a lot of other movies. When you actually do the math you’re like, wait, that means that she was negative four years old. That happens.

But that doesn’t seem like it would happen here. It sounds like they actually had a conversation where it’s like, oh, she could have been 11. And that is just wrong. And there’s other movies where these problematic things happen. Animal House being an example where that is not cool what happens in Animal House. And in looking at the movies you have to acknowledge that this is a thing which is problematic about the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Obviously Brooke is correct to say that the times were different is a thing. It doesn’t mean that we have to accept anything now about it. But things do require some context of course. I think in this case the one thing I would push back on Brooke is when you say, “Can you help me understand why these three renowned creators thought that audiences would accept that kind of character?” From what I’m reading from your question, because I haven’t actually reviewed that transcript again, so I’m just taking it off of your recollection here, it does seem like Kasdan and Spielberg were not at all in favor of Marion being 11 and in fact advocated that she be 16 or 17, which even now we would consider to be too young but not necessarily in the zone of 11 which is horrifying.

So, really the question is what the hell was Lucas thinking. And the answer is I have no idea. The only thing I can guess is that he was such a total dork that he thought in his mind that that maybe was – I have no idea.

**John:** I don’t know either and I don’t want to sort of get into places where I’m speculating on his mindset.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or what he was actually saying or that we’re actually understanding him properly here. The larger conversation I think we can have is when you dig back into how things came to be I think you need to be mindful that there’s the movie that finally was made and then there’s the process that led to the movie. And some of the process that led to the movie will have a bunch of false steps and blind alleys and things that were not reflected in the final work.

And so it’s fair to look at sort of where stuff come from and the history of stuff, but in looking at the history of stuff how much influence should that have on your perception of the final work. And that’s an artistic question that is fair to ask, but I think it’s also fair to – if you choose to not dig back into that history I think you’re allowed to not dig back into the history and look at the finished work as well. And not having seen the script to know that she was supposed to be 26 years old and this time factor, you can forgive a person for not doing that math or sort of exploring that.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re completely right that the important thing is the choices that were made. Not the choices that were not made. I think that Brooke brings up a reasonable point that the suggestion here is so bizarre as to be disconcerting on its own. And this isn’t a comedy where, I mean, you know, when Todd Phillips and I sat in a room together and just riffed on ideas for the Hangover movies it was – terrible things were said. The point is those movies were transgressive. And of course the point being that you then make choices that you think will work, not choices that won’t or that are going to make people disgusted.

In this case that’s not that – I don’t get it and it’s not good at all. [laughs] I don’t like it.

**John:** But, so you think back to you and Todd Phillips had sort of your writers’ room of two people to talk through doing the Hangover movies. Every TV show has a writers’ room where they’re discussing how to make the show. And a lot of what they’re discussing is things that do not become the final show. And so–

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** All those discussions are not – they’re not reflected in what the final thing was, but they probably had some horrible, terrible ideas or plans for like, you know, ultimately it’s going to be revealed that this was the connection and that wasn’t the thing. So that’s not canon. Like the stuff that happens in the writers’ room isn’t canon.

**Craig:** No, it’s not.

**John:** You want to be able to separate those things.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And I guess the only difference here is that if he’s saying that it’s cooler – I am – I hope that he was just maybe tripping on acid that day or something, because that’s just a crazy thing to say. So, I can’t explain it, Brooke. I can’t explain it. But, clearly by the time the movie was made all three of those guys were seeing Marion as the person that Karen Allen is.

**John:** Who is more of a peer to Harrison Ford’s character.

**Craig:** She’s a grown woman. And her age difference with Harrison Ford I don’t think was extraordinary at all. So, clearly cooler heads prevailed. Thank god.

**John:** So, while we’re talking about Indiana Jones, last week on the Slate Culture Gabfest David Plotz was talking about watching Raiders of the Lost Ark with his young kids and he said he found it really problematic racially. That there was a lot of sort of – you look at all of the non-white characters in the film and they are portrayed horribly. And that was not a thing I saw at all when I went back and watched it for this episode a couple of years ago. But I can totally see that. I can totally imagine that watching through it with that in your head you would recognize that like, oh, yeah, it is just a bunch of white people doing stuff and everyone who is not the white person in the movie does not fare well in it. And I think that’s a fair criticism to look at the actual finished work because you’re not looking back at the original intent of things.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, at some point I – if we go way far back, every single movie – every single movie – will be problematic because society, it was in our lens of today problematic. Thoroughly. Top to bottom.

**John:** Yeah. Thoroughly.

**Craig:** I mean, so what’s the point of the exercise? Yes, the answer is yes. It’s all problematic.

**John:** Yes. And so I don’t want to sort of go back and remake Raiders of the Lost Ark to take care of that thing. But I think it’s worth noticing that about the movie so that if we’re trying to make a film in that spirit now to be mindful like, oh you know what, we can’t do that thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If we’re making that movie in 2019 you can’t do that thing. And especially as we go into this era where we’re remaking everything there has to be a thought early on in the process is like, OK, just because we love this thing let’s also be aware of the things that just we cannot be doing in 2019 and beyond.

**Craig:** You know, maybe this is naïve but I feel like that conversation now is happening consistently across every single project in Hollywood. Am I naïve? Or do you think that it is?

**John:** You are not naïve. I would say it’s not every single project, but I would say most studio projects at an early stage are being mindful of that. And you and I both worked on some high profile ones where, yes, those conversations happened early on and frequently.

**Craig:** Yes. Which is good. And so the path of this stuff has been a somewhat promising one. Delayed, sure. Too long? Yes. But it is I think maybe a little easy to tee up some of these older movies and go, “Look, it doesn’t match our enlightened view of now.” Because that’s–

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Most movies before a certain age are going to have really, really problematic things. What I like about Brooke’s question is she was bringing up a specific thing from the script and from the conversations about stuff and thank you Brooke for writing in about it.

**Craig:** No question. And really specific answer to you Brooke about question number one. No, you would never want to go so far as to do that. I hate saying blanket things. If your character is a pedophile then we’re not going to like him ever. Period. The end.

**John:** Nope. Don’t do it.

That would be breaking a rule, wouldn’t it Craig?

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** This is Craig’s topic. So, Craig, hit us off with these rule-breakers.

**Craig:** So I’m working on this script where because of the tone of what the project is it’s very carefree and wild. And lately it seems to me that culture is starting to get a little more comfortable with acknowledging that culture exists, not necessarily dipping into the meta because not everything needs to be meta. But as we write screenplays there’s a formality that we may not necessarily need all the time. And in fact breaking some of these stuffy rules can kind of help bring your script to life and convey your intentions in fun ways if it’s done well. If it’s done for a purpose.

**John:** So, Craig, are we talking about the stuff that a writer would do physically on the page or things that movies would do or both?

**Craig:** I’m talking really about the page. This is a super writey topic. I’m not really here to talk in a big way about margins and fonts and stuff like that, although we will get into that a little bit. I guess I want to start with freeing yourself however you want, because we know that, OK, you have been taught at home by your school, or a book, or a “guru”, or the Internet, or people on Reddit that there is a format; you must follow the format; if you don’t follow the format you will be ejected into space. And I’m here to tell you that that’s only true if your script is bad.

If your script is good and it starts being free it can actually be exciting to read. If you are a reader, you are reading the same kind of thing over and over and over and over and over. It must be fun, I would imagine, to suddenly get something that’s wild and great. So, for instance, let’s start with the easiest one: breaking the fourth wall. Talking to the reader in description. If it’s cutesy and annoying, it’s bad. But if you want to have some fun, if you want to play around with their expectations, if you want to say you thought it was this didn’t you, no. You can do these things if it’s that kind of tone that allows it.

Similarly, I think, you can use any page as you want. I believe that you could put one single word on a page if it was a great word and if it required that. I think that would be awesome.

**John:** All right. So let’s talk about situations where you might want to do these things. What I like about both of these suggestions is they really are about the writing and they’re about sort of what the experience is of reading the script and how the experience of reading the script is meant to match or mimic at least the experience of watching the scene happen on a big screen in front of you.

So, in breaking the fourth wall if you’re writing Deadpool, which is constantly breaking the fourth wall, having that sort of chit-chattiness in there could be good. The Shane Black scripts are notorious for having a lot of chit-chat in them, or talking to you. That can work and that can be fine. If it works right for the tone that’s fantastic.

The thing about having a single word on a page that might be exactly the right choice if you’re making A Quiet Place. If you’re making something that actually is all about how disorienting the experience is, great. If you’re making a fast-paced thriller, a single word on a page might not be the right choice.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s a little bit of what poets do at times. And sometimes people interestingly that write books for children will be incredibly inventive with the page and the way words are laid out. Sometimes in our scripts we need to depict disorientation or madness or the voice of an all-powerful being. Well, you could just put it in 12-point Courier. Or not. You know? You have some choices. You aren’t locked into this very dry format that was created in the, what, ‘40s?

I mean, we live in a bit of a freer time. Set yourself free a little bit.

**John:** Yeah. So the quick history of screenplays is that they were originally just a shot list basically. They morphed into what we kind of think as the modern screenplay is around the Casablanca time where it’s not just a series of camera shots. It really has a better feel for what the movie actually is like. But they were all typed. And so the reason they were 12-point Courier is because they were all typed at a certain point. No one is typing them anymore.

We still use 12-point Courier because it is – Courier Prime if you’re fancy – we use Courier because – because it’s standard it sort of takes away distraction. And we sort of know what it’s like. We have sense of how much time it’s going to take because we’re used to it. But if you are doing something where you have a voice of god or something that is intruding and bold isn’t getting it there or italics isn’t getting it there, there could be a case to be made for using a different font for certain things.

I remember early on as I was doing lyrics in scripts I would put them in Verdana italic, partly so the lines wouldn’t break, but also so it would feel different because they were singing. In Courier Prime we added the special italics that look really cool and different largely for lyrics so you really can see that like, oh, this is a different feel. It kind of feels like it’s singing.

So, it is fine to mix it up somewhat. I remember reading a Gus Van Sant script maybe for My Own Private Idaho, or something else, where it was in a bunch of different fonts and colors. And it was annoying. I did not find it a joyful experience. But that’s not to say that you couldn’t make something great and joyful that way.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And listen one person’s excitement is another person’s annoyance. But I think that there is something that translates beyond the script if you do this in a way that is effective. By freeing yourself of the rigid formatting rules here and there you’re also allowing your mind to kind of be a little freer about what could possibly happen in this movie.

So, Pulp Fiction works like a regular movie. Yes, it plays around with time and all that, but other movies have played around with time. It’s basically a regular movie. Until at one point when Uma Thurman says, “Don’t be a…” and then she makes, well, weirdly a rectangle, not a square on screen. And a square appears on screen. Which is bizarre. But if I read that in a script and her dialogue said, “Don’t be a…” And then there was just a picture of a square. I’d be like, what the – ooh. This is somebody who is not necessarily bound by limitations. They’re thinking kind of wildly. The other thing that I am really enjoying doing is lying.

Because we have this thing where when we’re writing scripts our action description is telling you what you see on screen. But so much of what we try and do when we’re shooting is misdirect. It’s magic tricks. We are essentially visually lying to you and then revealing something else. There’s this – may I read a short paragraph from my favorite book Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad?

**John:** Go for it.

**Craig:** “The side of his head hit the wheel twice and the end of what appeared to be a long cane clattered round and knocked over a little camp stool. It looked as though after wrenching that thing from somebody assure he had lost his balance in the effort. The thin smoke had blown away and we were clear of the snag and looking ahead I could see that in another 100 yards or so I would be free to sheer off, away from the bank, but my feet felt so very warm and wet that I had to look down. The man had rolled on his back and stared straight at me. Both his hands clutched that cane. It was the shaft of a spear that either thrown or lunged through the opening had caught him in the side just below the ribs.”

So, we have this wonderful impressionistic lying, because our eyes lie to us, and people lie to us. And in experiences somebody gets stabbed through the chest with a spear and what we see is a guy is holding a cane. And what is in fact a man bleeding to death we just feel warm wet on our feet. That’s wonderful.

You can lie to people in description. You can say this is what happened. And then somebody says something and then you can say in description, oh wait, no, it’s this. And that is an effective rule-breaking way to actually relay what is a very common and completely accepted cinematic technique.

**John:** Absolutely. So what you’re describing though is the case of is a movie supposed reality, like what you see is exactly what it is, or is it a subjective reality. And the nature of your script may lend itself to you don’t quite know. The movie Memento is full of that. You’re not quite sure how much to trust your narrator. And so the kinds of things you’re seeing in the script description would make sense for that, because you just don’t know how much to trust the narrator and therefore the script that you’re reading in terms of what’s really going on here.

So, again, the right kind of script that makes sense. And it’s a question we’ve answered before on the podcast about like should you reveal who somebody is in the script if they’re not going to be able to see who that person is in the movie?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I always think like remember that you are the person in the theater watching this. And so what is your experience watching this? If it is ambiguous to you, you can use that ambiguity on the page as long as it doesn’t feel like you’re cheating in a bad way. If you’re cheating in a good way like this description from Heart of Darkness, go for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Will this help the people making the movie deliver what you want them to deliver? Simple as that.

**John:** So here is a complicated thing I did – this is way back on the first Charlie’s Angels. And so it was a sequence we didn’t end up shooting the way I wanted us to shoot. But here was the idea. So, in the final sort of castle fight Lucy Liu’s character is on one side of a gate and the Thin Man is on the other side of the gate and they are running in opposite directions. And we basically split screen and we see them running in opposite directions trying to get to each other. And so it’s done in sort of real time simultaneous. You’re trying to figure out where they are. And they will punch each other through openings in this castle wall as they’re doing it.

And it was really fun to do. But to try to do that normally on the page really wouldn’t have made sense, because it really wasn’t meant to be split-screened. So what I did is at the bottom page I said, “Now turn your script counterclockwise,” and I had two parallel blocks of text running on the next two pages that were talking through what was happening. And so these are the simultaneous actions.

It was really fun. It was really cool to read. It was really fun to write because just like you have dual dialogue and there can be reasons why dual dialogue is so effective, this was really a cool way to do it. It was torturous for the line producers. And I think they didn’t like it. But it really gave you the experience of why this was going to be a cool moment that you hadn’t seen before. And ultimately when they did get back together and they were both in the same frame it was exciting.

That’s the kind of thing that I think if you were to do that in a spec script people would notice. And if they were digging your script and they got to that it would pop out to them as like this person has an interesting idea and a cinematic eye for what is interesting and possible.

**Craig:** Totally. I love that. And you know what else? It immediately informs me that you care. You cared enough to say, you know what, I have a better way of doing this. And I don’t mind talking to you because I’m confident that my way is awesome. And that confidence is something that I think frankly helps people buy into your work.

**John:** Yeah. So, to wrap this up I would say an important thing to understand about rule-breaking is you can’t break rules if you don’t understand rules to begin with. And so I think having an understanding of what the screenplay format is is essential because otherwise you could just generate chaos that isn’t doing the basic jobs of what a screenplay needs to do.

But once you understand how screenplays basically work then to break the rules or bend the rules or do things that are unexpected can be great. It can be sort of provocative and make people lean in and be excited to see what you’re going to do next. Is that a fair assessment from you, Craig?

**Craig:** It absolutely is. The only caution I would put out there to our listeners: if you are a reader at a company, please do not email us complaining that you already get thousands of screenplays that are poorly formatted or the people that write them think they’re so damn clever and are doing all this crazy stuff. Because I don’t care about those people. They’re bad writers anyway. The format is irrelevant. They’re bad. You weren’t going to buy their script. You’re not not recommending this script because the formatting was weird. You’re not recommending it because it stank. So, just – I don’t care about that complaint. Keep that complaint to yourself. It is boring to me.

**John:** Yeah. And all the rule-breaking in the world will not help you if your writing is not fantastic.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So the writing is still always paramount. We should ask our friend Kevin who is a reader how much of this he sees. How much he sees people doing clever, innovative things on the page.

**Craig:** You know what? We should have Kevin on the show.

**John:** I’ve asked Kevin and he said no.

**Craig:** Oh really? Interesting. Maybe because – well, first of all Kevin is not his real name. [laughs] His real name is–

**John:** Thaddeus.

**Craig:** Thaddeus. Because he is a working reader and perhaps that would violate some sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe it would. So my topic for the week is planning. And I actually had this idea two weeks ago because I had a lunch with Ben Wittes who runs this great blog called Lawfare, which is all about federal policy and state security and does a lot of stuff about the Trump Administration and sort of the Russia stuff.

And I asked him a question and basically I wanted to know of all the people involved in this whole Russia mess who there do you think actually has a plan, actually sort of knows what’s going on and has a plan for what’s going to happen next. And how many of those people are just scrambling and just going one thing to the next thing to the next thing. And he said that he believed that almost everybody was scrambling.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because nobody sort of knows enough to actually make a good plan. And so that same week I was also writing the third Arlo Finch and in the third Arlo Finch it starts with the characters having this plan. And I had to sort of reveal to the reader kind of what the plan was, but it got me thinking well how do you reveal the plan and how much plan does the reader really need to know. And how much can you hold back which is more exciting for the reader. So I thought we’d talk about characters and plans and motivation and how you share them with the reader.

**Craig:** Yeah. I would imagine that the first question you have to ask is is my character a planner or not, because there are some characters that their hallmark is that they move through the day in a kind of bizarre fashion. The Big Lebowski has no plan. Ever. And that’s part of why that character works. But if they do have a plan, then yeah, you need to figure out how much people need to know and specifically if it’s helpful to conceal part of the plan from them.

**John:** Yep. Absolutely. Sometimes you want to kind of pre-answer some questions that are naturally going to come up like why is this character doing this. What is their aim? What are they actually going after? Sometimes you need to just take away the questions. And so a script I just turned in I didn’t need a big plan for this thing, I just needed to know – the character would say, “No, I can get you in the club because my uncle is the manager.” That’s all I needed to know. I didn’t have to hear the whole plan or how we’re going to get there or what the whole set was going to be. As long as I knew you could get through the door and that everybody would believe they could get through the door that was enough. And the surprises that could come up because people didn’t really know the whole rest of the plan, that was fun.

So, it’s recognizing the minimum that an audience needs to know about the plan going forward. And by plan I don’t necessarily mean like here’s how we’re going to do the heist. It often is just the character says like, “We’ll be in Denver in two hours.” It’s like, OK, as long as I know a destination that’s great. Or, “Finals are next week.” Ok, great, you set a time and so I know that finals are a thing that’s out there. It’s kind of setting a framework for what’s going to happen in the next little bit of your story.

**Craig:** And it’s hopefully telling us a little bit about this character’s method of interacting with the world. Some people are incredibly cautious. Prudent. Methodical. Planning can become an interesting aspect of your personality. Over-planning is an aspect of a certain kind of personality, just as under-planning is. Sometimes your plans frustrate people. What you really want to avoid are situations where your character comes up with a plan. The plan is flawed. People point out the flaws. And the character says, “Don’t worry about it. It will be fine.” And then it kind of is. You think, well, was it just that you needed the character to do that and then you realized it was a flawed plan so you had somebody say it to take the curse off of it but you didn’t actually – it makes that character into an idiot. And we do not like that at all.

**John:** Yeah. The other crucial thing about showing the plan is so that the plan can go wrong. So if we as a reader, we as an audience don’t understand what they were trying to do, or sort of what the steps were they were attempting to do then when things go amiss we won’t know that they’re going amiss. And so if we don’t know the basic requirements of what they have to do to get into this facility then we won’t know that something has gone wrong. We won’t know what they’re waiting for. So by showing the overall plan, the overall goal, we can frustrate them and a lot of plotting is frustrating your hero’s plans.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the best planning sequences ever is in Ocean’s 11, the 1990s version of Ocean’s 11, written by Ted Griffin. And it’s so wonderful because like most heist movies you get a chance to actually just stop and literally say, OK, here is the plan. I will announce the plan. I will take you step by step through the plan. And as Brad Pitt and George Clooney relay this plan step by step part of the way they tell it is to say every single thing we’re telling you we’re going to do there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it. And they keep listing one problem after another that makes this entire thing impossible.

And that is fascinating because everybody still agrees to do it. And when that happens you realize, OK, these people are a little crazy. They’re not like you and me. They kind of like the challenge of the impossible. And also they trust these two guys. They suspect that these two guys already do have the answers, they’re just not letting on yet. And that creates a wonderful expectation in us.

So, Ted managed to set up these beautiful obstacles. He created this lovely magic trick prelude. And then left us sitting in the seats going, well, OK, I know what their plan – how would I do the plan? I don’t see how this plan will ever work. Great. That’s exactly what you want to do with a spelled-out plan.

**John:** Agreed. So Craig, I’m curious about Chernobyl. Because Chernobyl obviously the overall plan would be for things not to go horribly wrong and for nuclear waste not to be spilling out every place. But I suspect throughout your story we are seeing characters like trying to deal with the situation. And we’re hearing what they’re trying to do. And seeing those things not work properly. Is that a fair assessment? Did I spoil too much about Chernobyl?

**Craig:** Well, clearly some things go wrong. That’s not a spoiler. There are levels of plans in a story like Chernobyl. There are the plans of what was supposed to happen on the night of the accident which clearly wasn’t an accident. That was not part of the plan at all. And that’s an interesting plan because you get to explain where a plan went wrong. And you get to show how people made certain assumptions or bad decisions that started to poke holes in this plan and make it fall apart.

But the other thing that happens quite a bit with a story like Chernobyl, and I think this is very common to any kind of telling of a historical disaster, is that no matter what you do to try and fix it after it happens there are unintended consequences. And that’s always fascinating to watch characters be confronted with the truth that there is no perfect plan. That the only way ahead is to create a plan that not very well might but certainly will backfire on you at some point. And then you’re going to have to deal with that problem and there’s no way out of it.

**John:** Yep. I mean, my movie Go was all about plans, simple plans, that go very, very awry. And sort of scrambling to fix the plan that went awry. But if we didn’t understand what the original plan was there would be no movie. So Ronna is going to try to pull off this very tiny drug deal and small things keep going wrong and keep going wrong and she has to scramble to keep ahead of it. And the sort of theme of the movie is that you can’t stop and really think about it. You just have to keep plowing forward. Everyone has to just go and move forward.

Same with the guys in Vegas. It’s just going to be a fun weekend in Vegas until one character just goes too far and the idea of how to get out of Vegas just keeps going wrong.

So, none of those storylines work though if we don’t understand what the characters want, what the characters are trying to achieve, and if they haven’t articulated a basic idea of what they’re going to try to do next. It goes back to sort of trust and confidence. Do we believe that the characters actually have a notion of what they’re going to try to do next? And that the characters around them would sign off on that plan?

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And if you’re working on a story right now and you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, oh no, my characters don’t have a plan, I assure you they do. When there isn’t the presence of a clear identified plan usually the plan is better described as routine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, very typical film noir story is woman shows up at a private detective’s office and says, “I think my husband has been cheating on me. Can you find out?” So the detective engages in his routine. That’s the deal. It’s not a plan. It’s your job. You stake the place out. You take the picture. You go inside. You check the thing. Except, oh, he’s dead.

So, your routine is disrupted. And now you are thrown off of your normal plan and you have to come up with a new plan on the fly. So don’t be afraid. You don’t necessarily need to start off with somebody going, “We’re going to A, B, C, D, and E.” Your story may just be one of a disrupted routine.

**John:** Yeah. So a great example of a disrupted routine would be Roma from this year. So your central character has no big plans. She’s not a classic protagonist who is like I’m going to achieve this thing. She’s just trying to keep normal life together and she can’t. And so she’s having to react to the stuff that’s happening around her. But the degree to which she has a plan is to keep things together. And you see her reacting to try to do that.

Compare that with Can You Ever Forgive Me? And so Melissa McCarthy’s character has to make a plan and so she sort of stumbles into this first bit of forgery, but then she has a plan for how she is going to keep it going and how she’s going to enlist other folks help her do this. It has to deal with the unintended consequences of this going a little too well.

And so characters are always making plans and they’re always – as an audience we’re always looking for what are they trying to do next. And if you don’t have a sense of that at a certain point you stop kind of following the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. And one last thing to avoid. There are times when you may think the interesting way to tell a story is to have a character do a whole bunch of things without letting the audience in on it. Because you would think, well, if I tell you what I’m going to do before I do it while I’m doing it you will be bored. So what I’ll do is I’ll have the character do it and then afterwards someone will say, “How did you do that?” And then the character will say, “Well,” and – see not particularly effective unless what they’ve done is really amazing. Because it feels a little bit like, mm, they could have actually told us the plan, they just wouldn’t have had a very good movie if they had.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say as you get notes back from producers, from studio executives, sometimes they’re pushing for people to over-articulate the plan. Sometimes in TV, especially in TV dramas, you see people way over-articulate the plan. It’s about finding that balance. Giving the audience enough information that they are excited to see what happens next and they’re excited to see if things work out well.

Chris McQuarrie had a great piece that I linked to this last week called How Can This Possibly End Well? That in any action sequence you always know that somehow it’s going to resolve, but the question you should be asking is how can this possibly end well. And so there’s always this sense of like given enough information we can see like, OK, I get where this is going but I’m really curious to see if this is all going to fit properly.

**Craig:** And to bring it back to Raiders there’s that amazing scene where Indiana is trying to rescue Marion. She is trapped in a plane. The engines are spinning. The propellers are moving. The plane is moving in a circle. There is gasoline and fire moving toward the plane. And Indiana Jones has to fistfight an enormously muscular prize-fighting bald Nazi while ducking propellers and the gasoline is coming and Marion is stuck. How can that possibly end well?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s good stuff. All right, let’s get to some questions.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** Do you want to take Dan in Sherman Oaks?

**Craig:** I do want to take Dan in Sherman Oaks. Hi Dan. Dan says, “I’ve written a pilot with three other friends of mine and as of right now we have it credited with all of our names on the page as Written by Person 1 and 2 & 3 & 4. We all had room sessions where we broke story and one of us physically wrote the script hence the and/ampersand designations. My question is would an agent or manager or producer balk at a title page with four writers’ names on it? Should we only say it’s written by one of us but created by the four of us?”

John, I see many problems. Layers of problems.

**John:** I see many problems. So the four of you writing together is really challenging. It may be fine. It may all work out great. But that is a challenging place to start things from. But that’s already been done.

But I want to urge people: title pages should be accurate. Title pages should accurately reflect who actually did the work. Because if they don’t then you have a document that is not sort of properly credited and it’s only going to add more heartbreak down the road.

I don’t think the agent is going to feel more scared, I guess, but yes it’s a lot of names on a title page. It’s a lot of names to be looking at. Craig, do you have solutions for Dan here?

**Craig:** I think so. First of all, Dan, you say that you had room sessions where all four of you broke story, but then one of you physically wrote the script. So–

**John:** Which I guess is Person 1.

**Craig:** Right. But then 2, and 3, and 4 actually write the screenplay, or were you just story? Because there’s story. I mean, you can say Story by and then Written by, or Teleplay by. Created by is a continuation credit that the Writers Guild awards to people that are credited with separated rights and the pilot. None of that matters. None of that matters.

If you want to get all four of your names on, sometimes what you can do is come up with a name for your crew. Just say the Blah-blah-blahs. The Duffer Brothers. There could be 20 Duffer Brothers as far as I know. I mean, it turns out there’s two of them and they’re clones. But, you can do that. And somewhere in the end you can say the Duffer Brothers are and then list your four names. And there’s ways around this sort of thing.

You can be creative because it ultimately doesn’t really matter. You’re not determining the credits.

Now, what you say you do here will be important. What you don’t want to end up with is a situation where down the line Person 1 asks for a WGA pre-arb because his point is, or her point is I wrote the screenplay. All they did with me, I mean, it’s not all they did, it’s an important thing, but they worked on the story. But I wrote the screenplay. Why are they saying they wrote the screenplay when they didn’t?

Stuff like that needs to be hammered out now.

**John:** Yeah, it does. I’m guessing that Dan in Sherman Oaks is Person 1. And Dan if you wrote this document and everybody else had story sessions and they talked about stuff, you’re going to be the writer because sitting around in a room chit-chatting isn’t probably going to get up to the stuff of having written something.

**Craig:** Yeah. Story is important. Give people credit for breaking the story. But then the screenplay is whoever wrote it.

**John:** Yep. Garrett writes in, “What do you make of the writing credits on the new High Life trailer,” which I haven’t seen but fortunately he’s listed them with us. “It says written by Claire Denis and Jean-Pol Fargeau with a collaboration of Geoff Cox and additional writing Andrew Litvak.” So this is not a WGA credit.

**Craig:** [laughs] No.

**John:** This is a foreign credit. And this is how credits work in lots of places in the world. It looks weird to us, but it’s not weird other places.

**Craig:** What I make of it is that the French – and I looked it up, too, just to make sure. But this appears to be a French production through and through. And so they don’t follow the Writers Guild of America credit guidelines. I don’t even think they have work-for-hire for instance over there anyway. So theoretically you should be able to put whatever you want on there unless there’s some kind of gentle folks agreement about these things, like a French Writers Guild or something like that.

So, what I think of it, what I make of it, is what I make of writing credits on all foreign films. That’s what they say the credits are. It’s the same thing I make of the credits on animated movies here in the United States.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** OK. That’s what you say they are. So, you know, cool.

**John:** As we talked about a lot on the show is that the WGA credits system has frustrations absolutely. But in looking at a credit on a WGA movie you have some sense of what those credits mean. I don’t know what “with the collaboration” means. I don’t know what Geoff Cox did on this. Additional writing by Andrew Litvak. OK, well Andrew Litvak I at least know must have written something because it says additional writing. But I don’t know what collaboration means. So, it is a little bit more confusing.

It’s just different. And so what do I make of it? I make of it as it’s a French film and that’s how they sometimes list credits.

**Craig:** You know, here’s the thing, Garrett, it’s France man.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s France.

**John:** It’s France. We call it the Royale with Cheese.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a very, very simple game. It’s called the Domain Name Pricing Game by Martin O’Leary. And it’s a really simple stupid idea, but basically it takes two web domains that are up for sale and lists the two domains and you have to guess which one is more expensive. And it’s surprisingly addictive because who would buy this domain name, but you almost always get it right. You’re always like oh that one, no one would want that. And it’s like, you’re right, that’s $50. But you see the other one and it’s like, oh yeah, I bet somebody would pay $1,700 for that dumb name.

So, it’s just a complete waste of time but also just a fun demonstration of a little web technology.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked it. I liked it. Cool.

**John:** Simple.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is an app that’s been out for quite a while but I’ve been making a lot of use of it lately. It is D&D Beyond. This is the official D&D companion app from Wizards of the Coast. And here’s why I love it so much. It really doesn’t do much beyond duplicate the material that’s in the hardcover books they sell. The Player’s Handbook. The Monster Manual. The Dungeon Master’s Guide. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But, as much as I love those books, the indexes, sorry, indices of those books are tragically awful. I think we’ve said it before. I think we even said it when we were on Greg Tito’s podcast. I’ll say it to anybody. Like whoever is in charge of the index department at Wizards of the Coast should be, again, ejected into space.

So, what’s great about these things is you have this material now on your iPad, your phone, your laptop and you are able to search through and index through yourself. You can create your own bookmarks. It works beautifully. It’s very quick. It has all the art. It’s just really useful, particularly if you’re DMing kind of the way that a lot of people do DM now with a laptop or an iPad.

So, one bummer is I don’t know – I think if you bought the Player Handbook I don’t know if you can just then get the Player Handbook into – because the idea is you download, you pay for the content. So they give you the structure of it and they give you some freebies, but the big stuff you have to pay for that content, so you may end up paying for things twice. But I’ve lived my entire life paying for things four times, because I forget about them. I have like seven copies of a certain book just because I keep forgetting. So, no big deal for me. For you it may be annoying.

But, if you are a DM or a player and you hate that index, and you should, check out D&D Beyond.

**John:** Yeah. So you only recently started using it and I was surprised, a little horrified, to see you sitting back there with your iPad. But it does make sense. And it is just much faster to be able to find that stuff in such a thing. So I don’t actually have it yet. You would think I’d be the first person to have used it and I’m not. But I probably will get there.

I enjoy reading my D&D books at night. And I try not to use screens after a certain hour. So, I may still buy the books and buy the additional copies because why not.

**Craig:** Yeah, why not? There are things where the book is actually a little bit easier, but when someone says, “OK,” this is so nerdy, “Sorry cool people, but some druid says ok I’m wild, I’m taking the wild shape of a grizzly bear,” whatever.

**John:** Get those stats.

**Craig:** What are the bear stats? Well, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip through the Monster Manual, because it turns out they’re in the back. They’re not under bear at all.

**John:** But some of them might actually be in the Player’s Handbook because they’re actually normal animals, they’re not special animals.

**Craig:** So, this way I just go “bear” and it comes up and it shows me. So, it’s much better. There you go. There you go, Dorks. Be like me. D&D Beyond.

**John:** Craig, while we’re talking about bears, something I just blogged about today. What is the difference between bear spray and pepper spray?

**Craig:** I don’t even know what bear spray is.

**John:** Oh, you’ve never heard of bear spray?

**Craig:** No, what’s bear spray?

**John:** Bear spray may be a very Colorado thing, but bear spray is for fending off grizzly bears who are about to attack you.

**Craig:** That makes sense.

**John:** It’s like a big can of stuff.

**Craig:** Well bear spray is maybe like mace? And pepper spray is made of peppers?

**John:** So, it turns out they’re the same thing. But which do you think is stronger?

**Craig:** Well, this feels like a trick question. But I’m not meta gaming this. I’m going to say pepper spray and here’s why. Many years ago my wife’s cousin, Joe, he was 14. Joe by the way lives in Seattle. Maybe he’ll come see us at our show.

**John:** So he’s still alive in this story?

**Craig:** Oh yeah. A little troublemaker he was. And we were all in his step-father’s house. It was a Christmas. And there were like all the leftover presents. And I think someone had gotten his stepmom a gift of pepper spray, kind of as a gag gift.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But it was all sitting in a pile. And all the kids were sitting around, you know, the 14 to 28 year olds are sitting around, chatting. And suddenly one of them starts coughing and can’t stop coughing. And I think it’s pretty funny. It’s funny when people start coughing. But then Melissa started coughing. And then I started coughing. And I’m like something is terribly wrong here. And we looked around and there was Joe sitting there with this “ooh, damn” look on his face. And all he had done was one squirt into the air. Not even towards us. He just wanted to put it in the air and see what would happen.

And just a few particles kind of like wafted over. And we were in paroxysms from like the tiniest bit. Joe. So, is that right, is it pepper spray?

**John:** It is pepper spray. But it turns out they are the exact same ingredients. It’s just the dosage in the bear stuff is much, much lower because you use it for a very different purpose. So you spray this big wide cloud that sort of keeps the bear at bay and keeps the bear from charging. Versus pepper spray which you spray directly at somebody as a targeted thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s basically bears are smarter than humans. If you just sort of go, “Look bear, this is going to be slightly uncomfortable,” he’s like, eh, I’m good. I’ll go eat someone else. But humans are terrible. If you don’t incapacitate a bad person they’ll keep coming.

**John:** They will keep coming. That is our show for this week. As always it is produced by Megan McDonnell, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Launch and Jim Bond again. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. If you want to find us on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you subscribe to podcasts, wherever you’re listening to this right now. If you leave us a rating that helps people find the show which is great.

People put us on lists of like best podcasts and–

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** That’s so lovely. Thank you for that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ooh.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. I talked to somebody this week who is deaf who reads all the transcripts and so it’s so great that we have a person who gets to experience the podcast that way. So, that’s awesome.

You can find back episodes of this show at Scriptnotes.net. You subscribe there and you can get all the back episodes, the bonus episodes, as well.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Our next two shows will be live shows, so we’ll have the William Goldman The Princess Bride conversation and the live show in Seattle.

**Craig:** Awesome. I will see you at our next event. Bye.

**John:** Thanks, bye.

Links:

* [The Seattle Live Show](https://nwsg.org/event/scriptnotes-live/?instance_id=523) is on February 6th!
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* Submit entries for The Scriptnotes Pitch Session [here](https://johnaugust.com/pitch).
* [Bear spray is not stronger than pepper spray](https://johnaugust.com/2019/bear-spray-is-not-stronger-than-pepper-spray)
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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_385.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2019/plot-holes).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 384 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’re going to talk about plot holes and why sometimes you’re better off leaving them than trying to fix them. We’ll also be answering listener questions about things that screenwriters notice that normal people might not. And sequences and outlines and sort of where to fix those problems when they come up.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. So it’s pronounced plot holes and not plotholes. It looks like plotholes.

**John:** So I was looking at the word plot holes and I realized today, and maybe I’m just dumb and never noticed it before, it’s based on pot holes, like pot holes the holes in the street.

**Craig:** Is it? Is it?

**John:** I bet it is. I bet that is the derivation of the word.

**Craig:** You think, because to me even if there weren’t pot holes there is a hole in your plot. It makes sense. You might be right. I don’t know. Who can answer this question for us?

**John:** I think John McWhorter can answer this question for us.

**Craig:** Oh, god, I would love to have him on the show. You know I’m like obsessed him?

**John:** You are. Because he’s also obsessed with musicals and you guys are pretty much separated at birth.

**Craig:** Musicals and language and language usage. He’s the one that turned me on to the whole – what is it – I can’t remember the word he used to describe it, but it’s the thing where people will add an “ah” at the end of a word to indicate emphasis, like No-ah.

**John:** Yes. Stop-ah.

**Craig:** What are you doing-ah?

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Love that.

**John:** It’s that extra little shwa, that little shwa.

**Craig:** So weird. Anyway, he’s a genius.

**John:** He’s a genius. We also have news. So our news is about three upcoming events.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s almost too many.

**John:** The Princess Bride, January 27 at 5pm. So, I think the rules are that the doors will open at 4:30 in which case WGA members can go in and get their seats. At 4:45 everyone is free to get their seats. The movie will start at 5pm at the WGA Theater. And then afterwards we will discuss it in a very classic let’s take a deep dive on this movie, except we’ve just watched this movie. So, that is the plan for January 27th.

**Craig:** Awesome. I think that’s going to be – and it’s going to be fun. And it’s in celebration, of course, of the great William Goldman. I happen to love the movie. I think most people do love the movie. It’s one of those movies that a lot of people sort of memorize, but I love digging into these things and finding these little bits and bobs that are just so gorgeous that make it work the way it does.

**John:** I agree. We have a live show coming up in Seattle. It’s long been rumored. It now actually has a date. It is February 6 at 7pm. It’s going to be at the Northwest Film Forum. There’s information in the show notes about how you get tickets, if there are tickets, or if you just show up. We’re recording this ahead of time so I don’t really know what those rules are, but Megan will have the information and those will be in the show notes. But we look forward to seeing Seattle on February 6 at 7pm.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s going to be fun. I love Seattle.

**John:** Seattle is great. I love it, too. Finally, this second Arlo Finch book comes out in February and there’s a launch event February 9 here in Los Angeles at Chevalier’s Bookstore. It is at 12:30pm. And you should come see me and I will sign your books. It’s your first chance to buy the book in Los Angeles. And you can come. I will probably read a chapter from it. And I’ll offer answers to questions that might come up. So come, bring kids who might be able to read the book, but also just come and say hi because I’ll be there and I’ll happily sign your book.

**Craig:** I mean, I kind of feel like when people see you in real life there’s a little bit of squealing now.

**John:** There might be. A little bit. I might spark joy for certain people.

**Craig:** For certain people.

**John:** Certain people. Not all the people.

**Craig:** No. Select people.

**John:** Select people. I’m going to segue into sparking joy for just a second because I blogged this week. I don’t blog very often. And I’m going to spoil who actually said this. There was a project that I was considering doing, it was a pretty big project that would be more than a year of my life to do. And I had a phone call about it and I was thinking about it and Megan, our producer, asked me, “But does it spark joy?” She’s using the Marie Kondo phrase. And I ended up blogging about this. And I thought it was actually exactly the right question. Because when I admitted to myself that while I admired the project and I was intrigued by it, it didn’t actually bring me joy. And if I were to lose the project I wouldn’t really feel that sad. It was a good signal to me that I probably shouldn’t pursue the project. And so my new thing when I’m considering a project is asking myself if it sparks joy.

**Craig:** It’s a great idea. And I’ve been going through this a lot myself. The danger is that sometimes if you’ve been working for a while without concern for joy sparks, you know, you’ve been working because it pays well, or because you felt it would kind of move things forward to a place where you could work on things that are just joy-sparkers, then you almost are unfamiliar with how to measure your own potential joy in something. The other issue that I have always, and have always had, is my joy, my spark of joy, will always be followed by a spark of panic.

So, I love something, I’m so excited about something, and I can’t wait. And then about two days later I’m suddenly suffused with dread. That this thing that inspired joy in me is now this dead thing. Just lying in the street like a big, I don’t know, dead side of beef and I want nothing to do with it. This goes on all the time – this may just be me.

**John:** No, it’s not that way. There’s instantly a kind of regret, like once you’ve gotten the thing, it’s the dog who is chasing the car and finally catches the car. It’s like, oh no, oh no, is this really what I want?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was recognizing that if I had caught this project I might not really want the project. And I remember a conversation with you, this was off-mic so it was maybe before we were recording an episode, there was a very, very big property that was coming into your universe.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And you asked my advice – you don’t often ask my advice – but I said the equivalent sort of thing is like but do you really want to be writing blank project? And is that a dream of yours? And you’re like, oh no. Then that’s your answer.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah. You know, it’s funny. I asked a few people advice on that one because I was really unsure of my own instinct I think. Because it seemed a little crazy to say no. And I asked Rian Johnson as well and I got, I think, halfway through the title and he just went, “No.” And by the way that’s the kind of advice I like. So it’s just like, oh good, you’re not actually even giving me advice. You’re just providing me the comfort of your certainty. I like – thank you. That’s really nice.

But that’s a great example of something where it seemed to me that I would not experience joy. And, in the end, you’re not simply protecting yourself. You’re actually also protecting everyone else. Because in the end they are relying on you to carry them through this incredibly important phase, writing, with your passion. And if you run out of it they can smell it pretty quickly I suspect.

**John:** Yeah. So I want to circle back to one thing you said is that at certain points in your career that question of like does it spark joy is not going to be the most important question. The most important question at certain points in your career is will they pay me money, is this a paid job I can take and actually deliver. And so I don’t want to sort of skip over that because that is such an important part of your early career is chasing all those projects and landing those projects even if they’re not the ones you really love. And you have to fake that you have that spark of joy on a lot of projects to land those projects. That is totally valid and true.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I think we’re both recognizing though is sometimes you can get so caught up in chasing things you start realizing like, oh wait, I shouldn’t be chasing these things anymore. I should actually probably doing the things that are meaningful to me.

**Craig:** Exactly. You know, John Gatins has such a great term for this, because he recognizes that there are times when you write things that you are in love with and then he says there are those other jobs that are Geisha work. And I love that. It’s Geisha work. Meaning it’s not just tawdry. It’s not this kind of empty thing. There’s an art to it. There is a care. There is a craft. There is a loving attention. But it’s not love. It’s Geisha work.

**John:** Yeah. It’s Geisha work. Let’s get to some follow up. So Joel wrote in to say he was hoping we could do some follow up on something we mentioned in a recent show. “In Episode 383, John while discussing the film Mortal Engines, said something like, ‘They set themselves some interesting story challenges.’ I found that an intriguing idea because I often wonder how much of the work that people do can only be appreciated by fellow crafts people. Can you name some other films or TV shows that fall into the category of interesting challenges that might go unnoticed by the general public?”

And I thought it was a good question because there definitely are things which we talk about in terms of like, oh wow, that was a really hard thing to try to do, and you might not notice that if you’re just watching the film. Some things which occurred to me that I saw, things with very limited dialogue because as a screenwriter if there’s not much dialogue it can be very hard to externalize ideas. And so *A Quiet Place* has very little dialogue in it. *The Hush* episode of Buffy has very little dialogue.

Likewise, shows that have too many characters or movies that have too many characters. So the first *Charlie’s Angels* is a huge writing challenge and I don’t think people noticed that enough that you have three characters who each have their own storylines that have to fit into the bigger storyline. They still have their villains. There have to be twists and reveals. So to keep all those balls in the air is a real challenge that you wouldn’t have if you had a single protagonist.

You worked on the next Charlie’s Angels movie, so you encountered the same thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s definitely an interesting thing to keep those balls in the air because you feel, well, I think if you’re doing it responsibly you feel an anxiety when a particular character hasn’t spoken in a while. And I think we talked about this in the last podcast. And you also feel an anxiety if the characters have these little arcs that are either too small or too out of whack with the other characters or not interlacing with the other characters. So there is a lot of craft that goes into that stuff.

That said, I would rather write a movie with a group of three or four “normal” people than another spoof movie where one of the biggest challenges in writing spoof is your characters have no internal life whatsoever. And there’s never a moment where anyone just stops and thinks. Ever. It is excruciating. It’s like taking away – we say to people you’re going to run, just remember to breathe. And with spoof it’s like you’re going to run, also you can’t breathe. Not allowed. It’s really annoying.

**John:** No breathing is possible. Another movie with a lot of characters which I think screenwriters really acknowledged was a real challenge was *The Big Short*, because *The Big Short* you have a ton of characters who have to give really important information. They need to feel like real people because in some of the cases they are based on real people. And yet you don’t have time to sort of give meaningful inner lives and challenges that are going to be resolved in a normal way. So it’s making sure that those people feel like they have weight even though they’re not going to do normal movie character things over the course of the two hours.

**Craig:** Yeah. And in those movies, too, you have a certain challenge of instruction. If a movie does this well, or if a show does it well, you don’t notice. That’s kind of the hallmark of these challenges is that when it’s really nailed you don’t even realize that they’ve done something incredibly hard to do.

I don’t think when people first saw, I don’t know what the first Disney animated movie was that had that multi-plane technology to it, but I suspect that they didn’t realize just how difficult it was to get that small bit of depth, that little bit of parallax motion. It was enormously difficult. And that’s a sign that they did it well.

**John:** And so I think narratively sometimes we don’t recognize that like, oh, there’s a lot of work happening to make it feel like – so you don’t notice that this thing is happening in front of you.

**Craig:** Which is good, because I mean in the end that’s a big part of our job is making it look like nobody did a job. You know? But it can be tough. Certainly when I see a movie like *The Big Short* I really admire the way that they went about instructing us, but instructing us in such a manner that they knew confidently we would understand.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And that was pretty great.

**John:** I could have put this under limited dialogue, but shows and movies with limited characters can be really challenging. So, Castaway. So often you have to externalize Tom Hanks’s thoughts, and so you create Wilson, you create other ways to sort of get us into his head even though he has no other character to talk with. So, if it had been a book then we could be just directly in his head. Because movies don’t let us do that, they have to find ways to externalize those thoughts.

Same with Gravity. So much of Gravity is just Sandra Bullock. So how do we know what she’s trying to do, what she’s feeling, what the next thing is for her? That’s a real storytelling challenge. In addition to all of the technical challenges of making that movie, the storytelling challenges are great in a movie like Gravity.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then Alfonso Cuarón’s latest, Roma, is a similar kind of thing in a weird way because even though there’s plenty of characters and there’s plenty of dialogue, your central character is not a classic protagonist and it’s kind of from her point of view, but it’s also kind of from an omniscient point of view. It’s a really – he created really fascinating challenges for himself in how he was letting us into this world. It’s almost the place is more the protagonist and we’re following a character but not necessarily seeing the world through her eyes. And I thought it was brilliantly done, but a really difficult choice.

**Craig:** You know, it occurs to me that a lot of the challenges that you’re describing in live action are things that animation has a very easy time with. For instance, expressing internal thoughts. *Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse* was able to kind of create a little bit of a new animated language so that you could see and hear people’s thoughts as they desired. But then of course in animation the problem is just making someone take one step is incredibly painstaking.

**John:** Lastly, I think the thing to talk about is movies that involve animals or children. So there are huge production challenges with animals and children, the number of hours they can work, or sort of the trainers that do that. But when you think about those as a writing challenge it’s how do we get in the head of this dog that is in front of us or this young character who may not be able to speak, so so much is going to rely on us looking in their face or their eyes and what we’re setting up about the world around them, how people are interacting with them. The order of events is going to be dictating our understanding of who these characters are. And those are narrative challenges that you probably don’t recognize until you actually have to do it and you see what the work is on the page to get you there.

**Craig:** I mean, just a simple thing like a drama in which a child witnesses a terrible event. Well, can they be there on that day? Will they actually see the terrible event? If not, how will they know what to say or do if they don’t know what the terrible event is? Do you describe it to them? Are you the first person to describe to a six-year-old what sexual assault is? These are real issues that people tangle with all the time when they’re making movies or television when you’re dealing with children because children are being asked to portray other children who have gone through some sort of trauma, sometimes. Not all the time.

**John:** A classic example is Kubrick on *The Shining*. And so he knew he was going to have these horrifying images. He also knew he was going to have this young kid. And so he would have conversations with the young kid about like, so, you’re seeing this thing. He wasn’t describing what the actual cutaway shot was going to be, but the thing that would get the kind of reaction that would be appropriate to intercut with. And that’s a thing you do all the time. You do as-if kind of substitutions for those things.

You can’t do that with a dog or a cat. And so you have to figure out what you’re going to do to get you into that place.

One of the biggest writing challenges I had was a movie that was never made called Fenwick’s Suit. And the central character in Fenwick’s Suit is this suit that comes to life. And so I had to think about like, well, how are we going to know what the suit is thinking? It has no face. It has lapels which can sort of function like ears. We can see its general body language. But it was a real challenge. And it would have been a challenge for the director and special effects people, but like to show that on the page was really tough because he couldn’t talk to anybody. And so I had to be able to find sentences that would describe exactly what the action was he was trying to do and how people would understand that.

**Craig:** Well, you know, that’s something that we might be able to help you with post-facto when we start talking about breaking rules. Because I’ve been thinking about that very topic a lot lately.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to Jim’s question. Do you want to take that?

**Craig:** Jim writes, “I’m 82 nonlinear pages into a script that features seven notable characters. Altogether they’re split across either three or four threads within the story. I’m trying to tie everything up while giving the characters their appropriate exposure and screen time. Would you, John August, have any advice from a technical standpoint on the best way to map out stories like these? Do we know how they tackle the stuff on Thrones?” He means Game of Thrones, by the way.

**John:** Game of Thrones. Talking the lingo.

**Craig:** Jim, go ahead and say Game of Thrones next time.

**John:** Just a few extra syllables. So, I would say the script that Jim is describing is probably an ensemble piece, there’s multiple characters doing multiple things. They may be in different timelines. It may be more like Go. It may be a more straightforward thing. But he’s describing a situation where different characters have different goals and different agendas and we’re not following a single character through the whole thing.

I think this is a situation where you’re using cards or a whiteboard or some other form of visually displaying who all the characters are and what they’re trying to do and figuring out where they intersect. Because if you could pull back and take a look at it you might see like, oh wow, this character doesn’t have enough to do. It’s not feeling rewarding. And you might be able to find some good balance between the characters.

The toughest thing you’re going to probably find in getting all these storylines to fit together nicely is that every time you’re cutting from one character’s storyline to another character’s storyline that it really feels like progress and that you’re not just like putting a pin in that and going off to someplace else.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m sure I don’t know the Game of Thrones writing process, but I’m sure quite early on in the breaking of stories they’re really thinking about like, OK, what is it going to be like to have these two scenes back to back and how is one scene going to inform the next scene? Might they switch some things around in post? I’m sure they do. But in breaking the script they’re always thinking about like what is it going to feel like to go from this character’s storyline to this character’s storyline and what are we gaining by making that cut right there?

**Craig:** They’re also making episodic television and it sounds like Jim is maybe making a feature because he’s 82 pages into a script, singular. So Game of Thrones can just simply stop following a character for two episodes. They can just stop and then they can come back to them later and sort of catch up. In a movie, not really. You can’t just stop. I mean, you can take a break. It’s a small break. But then you’ve got to come back.

So, one thing to ask yourself, Jim, is does your script actually feature seven notable characters or does it feature four notable characters and three sort of notable characters? Can you compress? Obviously if you can’t compress then you have to kind of stack your characters in terms of importance and complexity. Maybe character six and seven are just sort of thin, maybe a little bit more types as opposed to full people that require a lot of attention.

But the best way to map out stories like these, I believe, is to map them out the good old fashioned way from the point of view of your protagonist, or if you have a dual protagonist, two people, what they want, what they need, what’s wrong with them, what do they have to become. How does your plot help them or hurt them? And then these other people involved need to be looked at as allies and enemies and obstacles and assistants.

**John:** Absolutely true. And if you are doing something that is sort of more chapter-based, like *Go* is chapter-based, do that for each section and really think about like, OK, who is the equivalent of the protagonist in that section and what is their arc going to be over the course of that section. But if it’s a movie there’s going to be an expectation of progress that gets you to a certain place.

Unless you’re doing The Big Short, like we talked about before, and that’s a real challenge. And in that situation maybe you’re not worrying about sort of the balance of the characters and who has the most screen time, but are we telling the overall macro story well enough and am I using the characters that I’ve picked to tell that story as well as I can.

**Craig:** Exactly. John, do you want to see what Cade from Boise, Idaho wants to say?

**John:** Cade from Boise, Idaho writes, “Today I came across Episode Three—“

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** Episode Three. Way back in the vault.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**John:** “In which you discussed the process of outlining. I’m writing a spec TV show for which I recently finished the outline but there are oh so many problems with the story. I don’t know how deep I should go revising based on an outline. What are the things you look for to rework at the outline stage?” Craig?

**Craig:** The outline stage is the story stage, so you don’t stop until you feel quite confident that the story makes sense. That it holds together. This is if you are kind of outline conscious and I am. Some people don’t really like to outline and their process is one more of discovery. But for me I’m a big outliner and this is the time where I get to acid test the story before I go through all the effort of writing the script.

So, if there are so many problems with the story you’ve got to take a step back, ask yourself why, and then maybe start again. It’s just an outline, right? It’s just index cards. You haven’t built a house that you realize now is leaning slightly to the left and you have to demolish the whole thing. It’s just index cards. Don’t be afraid. Do it. Just start again.

**John:** So here’s what’s confusing about the term spec. And so what Cade is referring to as a spec TV show probably means an episode of an existing TV show for which he’s writing an episode for which he’s not being paid. So basically if he was writing an episode of *Game of Thrones*, a spec episode of *Game of Thrones* means it’s an episode of Game of Thrones. Versus a spec script in general means a script that there’s no underlying material. It’s confusing and we should have picked different words, but that’s sort of what it means.

So, I think particularly if Cade is writing a spec episode of Hawaii 5-0 that outline has to be tight and flawless and it needs to completely make sense because that’s a show that is entirely based on the plot of the episode. And so if the plot isn’t making sense on an outline level it’s not going to make sense in the finished script version. So, fix that now.

The outline phase is great for tackling logic problems, for like this just doesn’t make sense. It needs to make sense that way. The outline is not going to get you to sort of the more subtle emotional problems. That may not really become clear at the outline level. So, don’t kill yourself to write the perfect emotional outline because that’s just not the finished thing. And sometimes you’ll find in the development process if you are writing outlines for people they keep pushing for all this emotional detail that just doesn’t make sense on an outline level. So be mindful that you’re not trying to fix problems that just can’t be fixed in that medium.

**Craig:** Yeah. You certainly can’t achieve the emotional complexity of the screenplay. There’s no question about that. What you can do with an outline I think is build and investigate the function of the emotional pieces, like the big gears. If this person feels this way and then this happens and then they end up with that person does this make sense that they would feel the following? Would we feel something there? Has the story and the interactions between these two led to a moment that would create a feeling? That’s something that you could probably figure out from an outline and during outline. It’s certainly something I work on in outlines.

But the deeper stuff, yes, at some point you can just simply remind people, well yeah, you know, this is an outline. And for yourself as well, if there’s a little thing that’s kind of bugging you about it, sometimes you just let that go because in the writing you find a solve.

**John:** Let’s get into our feature topic which is plot holes and I think that ties in very well to this issue of outlines versus the finished product. So let’s talk about what plot holes even are because I think there’s a wide range of things we could describe as plot holes. But for today’s conversation, I’m going to go to the Wikipedia definition, which is of course the definitive definition of anything should be a community-generated webpage somewhere.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** They define, “In fiction, a plot hole is a gap or inconsistency in a storyline that goes against the flow of logic established by the story’s plot. Such inconsistencies include such things as illogical or impossible events, statements or events that contradict other events in the storyline. The term is more loosely also applied to ‘loose ends’ in a plot. Sidelined story elements that remain unresolved by the end of the plot.”

Another definition of it which I found, there’s a site called MoviePlotHoles.com, and their tag line is where suspension of belief comes to die.

**Craig:** Well at least they know who they are.

**John:** Yes. And so basically what we’re looking for when we’re talking about this conversation of plot holes are things in the finished product that just feel like, OK, there’s a mistake there and this mistake could bug people. And we’re going to get into whether it’s worth trying to correct this. But in a perfect world, I guess, these things would not exist and sort of where they come from, let’s talk about sort of the general shapes of them and sort of what you do as you encounter plot holes.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these are the things that drive us crazy as writers, of course. They are, fair warning to all of you out there who want to be professional, they are also things that studio executives and producers and actors and anyone on set are very capable of seeing immediately. There are things that no one else sees that we do. A lot of times people say, “Why don’t we just move that over there?” And everyone goes, “Yeah, why don’t we?” And then there’s one person in the world, the writer, going, “Oh god, you don’t understand what you just did.” But everyone – everyone – can see plot holes and they will come at you with them.

They will come at you. There will be a third assistant in the costume department will walk up to you and say, “By the way, I have a question for you. Does this make sense blah-blah-blah?” And you go, OK, it does. Here’s why. But you think – see, everyone feels entitled to discuss what they perceive as a potential plot hole.

**John:** Yeah. And so sometimes these are things which wouldn’t have been reflected in the script anyway, but they do have a bearing on story. So for example like that character was carrying their gun in this scene so why don’t they have their gun now? And so these are things where it’s the props department is going to be – as they’re reading through the script is going to be asking that question at every point so that they are not creating these plot problems.

We’re going to focus on it from the script level, but know that every department is going to be thinking about this and trying to make sure that they’re consistently logical. So, it’s not just your responsibility, but you’re going to get blamed for it. So, let’s talk about what this is.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yes.

**John:** So, general categories of plot holes – I would define one is problems of information. Which is when characters have knowledge that was never passed to them. So somehow magically they know something that the audience knows but it’s never quite clear how they learned it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Related is characters who don’t know something which we know they should know, or they seemed to know before, or they knew last week. There’s a show that I love very much but one of the characters is a doctor and yet she doesn’t seem to know some very basic things which is frustrating.

**Craig:** Like where the heart is?

**John:** Yeah. And so it’s like – or like they encounter something which is like but we already saw you do that, so this is not a new thing for you. This should not be a challenge for you at all. So, anyone in their position should know how to do that thing. So that’s a problem with information.

Often you find problems of time and geography, so multiple days seem to pass or didn’t pass and it wasn’t quite clear – the timelines just don’t match up. There are eight day weeks. Something is grossly wrong here. The sun never sets or it sets twice.

The plot relies on two things happening simultaneously but the characters couldn’t have anticipated those things were going to happen simultaneously. There’s like a coincidence that just doesn’t make sense.

This is the thing that bugged me all the time on *Alias* which is a show I genuinely loved, but Sydney Bristow could somehow fly to Asia and back in the course of a day. She has supersonic teleportation powers.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one is really good about that, are they?

**John:** Yeah. And I think this is a Too Fast, Too Furious, my friend Nima will correct me if I’m citing the wrong Fast and Furious movie, but there’s an action sequence that’s taking place on a tarmac where a plane is taking off and it’s like a 17-minute action sequence and the plane is moving the entire time. And so that runway would have to be like 40 miles long.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, just to like – is that a plot hole? We’ll get into that. It’s a thing you have to suspend your disbelief in order to get there and some people can’t suspend their disbelief.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there’s a line between, you know what, we’re just going to break the rules of reality to achieve something, and a plot hole which is we messed up. We actually legitimately screwed up here. They shouldn’t be able to do that inside of the logic of our own. You know, in Fast and Furious the logic of that world, the physics of that world, you could have a really super long runway and time is elastic.

But, you couldn’t have something in the Fast and Furious world where somebody simply didn’t know something that they knew 30 minutes earlier and we saw them know. You can’t have a character see someone and then later say honestly, “I’ve never seen them before.” That’s a plot hole.

**John:** That would be a plot hole. Or like they can’t change a tire. You know what, that’s going to come with it. You’re going to be able to change a tire.

And some of what you’re talking about is like, you know, your movies bend the world in certain ways. So Charlie’s Angels, like physics was sort of optional. They could do things that – it was heightened and so you had to sort of go with the heightened nature of it. Many years ago I wrote an article about *Spider Man 3* called The Perils of Coincidence and I’ll put a link in the show notes to that because there are premise coincidences which are – you get one of those for free. Like almost every movie relies on some coincidence that’s why this story is taking place now. But there were so many coincidences in Spider Man 3 that I needed to sort of acknowledge that like stacked together they form a plot hole because no, no, no there’s just too much happening here. It’s just all too arbitrary that these things all happened in the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah. If you put too many together it starts to take on the meme of a plot hole because what I think we presume even if we don’t presume it deliberately is that plot holes happen because the writers got stuck and needed to do a thing and didn’t know how to do it without breaking something. And that is also why I think coincidences stack up. We presume it’s because the writers needed something to happen and they didn’t know how to do it without breaking something.

**John:** Yeah. And in general, we’ll get into fixes later on, but anything you can do that your hero is actually creating the situation gets you out of that coincidence problem.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** If something happens because of your hero, then it’s just not random. Or if it something happens because the villain, then it’s not random. So just finding ways to match character motivation to events gets you through most of those situations. Or, if it’s still a little unlikely, you buy it more because you saw a character do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And generally that works in your favor because it feels like it’s tightening things up. It is creating a sense of harmony and the audience gives you credit for it.

One of my favorite kinds of plot holes is the kind that negates the need for the entire story to have happened at all. I love these. And I’m just calling it problems of over-complication, because I don’t know what else to call it. But the idea is that your plot needs to exist so that your movie exists, but it doesn’t need to exist for the actual events of the movie or the goals of the movie or the character. And one of the classic examples is a movie that you and I love that we have talked about many times on the show and that’s Raiders of the Lost Ark. And it goes a little something like this.

Once Indiana Jones discovers that the Nazis are looking in the wrong place because they don’t have both sides of the medallion, all you have to do at that point is nothing. Just do nothing. They will never find it.

Now, you can argue, of course, well he’s compelled to find it because he wants to see this thing. It’s part of who he is. And that makes sense. But the movie never really says that, so like in a perfect plot hole address somebody would say, “That’s it, we’re done. Let’s go home.” And he says, “No, I can’t. I just can’t.” And then you would say, OK, at least the movie understands that that’s a thing, right? But what they went for in Raiders was no one is ever going to comment on that, let’s just keep going, as if it makes sense that we’re still trying to stop the Nazis who have no idea and never will know where this thing is.

And I love that. I just kind of love that.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say this problem of over-complication often ties into villain plots and villain plans because there’s so many action movies particularly where – or thrillers – where if you step back it’s like, wait, was that really the easiest way to get a million dollars? That was really complicated. There are so many simpler ways to do that that wouldn’t have involved most of what we saw in the movie, but then you wouldn’t have a movie.

And so you can try to sort of lay the track to make it clear why it needed to happen this way. But sometimes in trying to lay that track you are making the answer more important than the question in many ways. Like make it seem like, oh, this is really important. Like, no, no, I was just trying to explain it away. In trying to get rid of the problem you actually made the problem worse.

**Craig:** This comes up I think all the time. When you are in development and the studio or the producer spot a plot hole, their instinct which I think is a normal human instinct is to pave it. Let’s fill the hole. But as writers we understand that that is a treacherous at to undertake because in filling that hole or fixing the hole, patching it over, you can create a problem that is actually worse than the existence of the hole in the first place.

**John:** Yeah. So, before we fix all plot holes let’s bring up a couple more issues of why these plot holes happen, because it’s not enough to say like oh this was a plot hole, but like where did that come from? I think probably the biggest cause of plot holes in movies is like there was a scene or there was something that addressed that issue and so what you see in the final film doesn’t make sense but that’s because something got cut or changed in the process. So either scenes were reordered, which is why the timeline doesn’t make sense, or they just took something out and that is the reason why this happened.

An example I found online was The Lost World: Jurassic Park when the T-Rex is on the ship, he’s in the cage but all the people on the ship are dead, so how did he kill everybody and then get back in the cage and lock the door? And the answer apparently is that there was supposed to be this velociraptor stuck on board and there was a whole scene and it just got cut.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That happens. And that’s a classic thing and you and I both have movies where like there really was an answer there, but the movie was running long, that wasn’t an important scene, it got snipped out. And so whether it’s timeline problems or some logic problems or like how that person got that piece of information, where was that phone call, we never saw that phone call, it’s because it wasn’t interesting and therefore it got dropped.

**Craig:** And I would argue that maybe 80% of legitimate plot holes that you spot in movies are not the writer’s fault. They were addressed or dealt with and then either there was a legitimately good reason that a scene had to come out of the movie. It was infected with a bad performance, or it just seemed to not really be what the audience wanted at that moment in the movie. Whatever the reason is, it had to go. And so everyone watches a movie and presumes that every single piece of film that was shot is in the movie. It’s not even remotely the case.

And I would say also there are times when the problem – in movies in particular – the problem is that the director made a mistake. Directors change things all the time in features because they are entitled to by our system. But occasionally, oh so very rarely, they do so in a capricious manner that actually does overturn an apple cart and cause a plot hole to occur.

**John:** Yep. It can be a situation where, oh, I really wanted this scene to take place at night rather than daytime, because it’s going to look better in this location. And maybe that makes perfect sense and maybe it truly does look better, but if these people are supposed to be on two sides of a phone call and they’re in the same time zone, why is night in one place and daytime in the other place? That happens all the time.

**Craig:** Happens all the time. Or, you know what, I want this guy to stand here when he sees him come in there because it looks awesome. And then later the writer watches and says, “Um, if he’s standing here and they’re standing there, neither one of them can see this third person that they’re both supposed to be noticing.” So there’s a plot hole now. We saw them not see that person and later they’re going to say how they saw that person in that place. Plot hole. Yeah.

**John:** Plot hole. Another reason plot holes happen I think sometimes, especially in series, is when it’s a moving target and so Harry Potter is the classic example. They started filming the movies before the books were all finished, so there’s some things which show up in the books that don’t quite match up to things that are going to happen later on in the books. They sometimes have to explain around that. So even though JK Rowling was involved in both, she was ultimately more responsible for making logic happen within her books and she didn’t necessarily know that that one thing that was happening in movie two was going to be a very difficult thing to pay off later on. The rules of where you can apparate. And they would need to do some things – they would need to make some choices that weren’t going to be paying off later on. So, characters could show up in places that didn’t make sense or an adaptation might establish one relationship that is not actually the same relationship in the books.

So the moving target of it all is a real problem. So you see that in both series but also in movie series.

**Craig:** It is a shame that series and movie series and television series that do this well I think get extra penalized when they stumble.

**John:** Yeah. True.

**Craig:** I mean, JK Rowling created this remarkably consistent world over seven books. Very few what you would call plotty mistakes. You may not enjoy a certain aspect of her plotting, but it was well thought – it was really carefully well thought through and done.

Similarly Game of Thrones, right? I mean, they have all these characters. They’re all interlocking/interlacing. And then, OK, so there’s one scene where a dragon shows up somewhere a little too quickly and people lose their mind.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because they are relying in a sense, they become comfortable with the notion that they’re in good hands. That the show is going to take care of them. And so when you have a movie that’s a little more fast and loose with things no one really cares. They’re just like, meh, you know, it’s fine. It’s all good.

**John:** Yeah. Finally, I would say that some cases the reality would be either not cinematic or would be really gruesome. A thing I found online was pointing out that like when *Ant Man* is tiny, when he punches people, the force with which he would punch people would be more like a bullet. It would rip flesh and bone. So it shouldn’t knock somebody down. It should rip through them. And they could choose to show that in *Ant Man* movies. But that would be gory and disgusting, so they don’t do that.

Sometimes the expectations of the genre steer you towards certain solutions that aren’t entirely logical but are logical for the kind of movie you’re making.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the physics of all of it is absurd. They will play around and say, “Well, you know, we’ve got the physics of him doing this,” but you look at it and you go if you are going to jump from there to there, or if you’re going to push off and fly from there to there, you will create this massive crater under you because for every action there’s an equal–

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** Like when there’s a moment in one of *The Avengers* movie where – maybe the first one – where Tony Stark is falling as regular Tony Stark out of his skyscraper and then the suit catches up to him and he turns it on and repels upwards about 20 feet above people. And I always think they’re dead.

**John:** They’re dead.

**Craig:** They’re dead. Forget even heat. Even if you have a heat-less thing, the fact that it is stopped that amount of acceleration means that they would be crushed. Crushed.

**John:** Yeah. Crushed.

**Craig:** Crushed.

**John:** All right. So let’s take a look at fixing plot holes. If we have identified plot holes let’s fix some of them.

So getting back to that earlier question, the outline stage is the perfect place to notice some of these plot holes and fix them before you start writing. You will do yourself so many favors if you recognize like, oh, these things are supposed to be simultaneous so therefore it needs to be daytime both places. Or how would she get from this place to this place? If you are outlining this is a time where you will catch a lot of those things.

The third Arlo Finch I outlined much more extensively than previous ones and I did save myself probably a week’s worth of work of torture about how to fix some things because, oh, on an outline I can see this is going to take this amount of time. I can fix some of these problems before I write the problems.

**Craig:** A hundred percent. I don’t have problems when I’m writing a script that are torturous for me ever because I’ve already tortured myself in the outline phase. And I will. I will walk around for weeks trying to solve a problem because it feels wrong and it’s so brutal. But then when you solve it you feel great. And you know you’re going to be OK when you write.

Don’t think for a second when you’re outlining that the cleverness, brilliance, beauty of whatever it is you are imagining is going to be able to overcome the plot hole that it is creating. It will not.

**John:** Nope. It will not. Another general piece of good advice I’ve tried to implement in sort of everything I’ve done, especially when I’ve gone and done rewrites on things which you’ve sensed some plot holes there is whenever possible take away the question rather than trying to pave over it.

So, don’t have a character give an answer to something. Try to preempt the question so the question is never asked. So the audience will never ask that question. And so there was a very complicated thing I was doing that involved time travel and I needed to have a character quite early on establish one rule that took away 90% of the questions that would come up. And so, you know, if you can eliminate questions it’s much better than answering them.

**Craig:** And this is an area I think people who come in to rewrites have an unfair advantage over people that have written before them because when you come into rewrite you have license to say, “You know the solution here is to just get rid of this entire thing. Everybody apparently has fallen in love with it and is dancing around it like it’s the golden calf, but it’s destroying everything around it. It’s creating this need for endless explanations and bendings and contortions to justify it and cover up the damage it’s causing. How about you just get rid of it? And then you have problems whatsoever.”

Nothing feels better than a movie that moves in a nice, clean, elegant way without ever stopping you in your tracks to go, wait, wait, hold on, what? Nothing.

**John:** Nothing. Another good solution sometimes if you are looking at a cut of a movie and there’s a plot hole is to always ask yourself could I solve this with a single shot. If a single thing was there and inserted would it take care of it? And this comes from the women who edited one of the *Star Trek* movies. They were talking about how there was a thing they were encountering in one of the movies and they just pulled out their iPhones and shot one shot and it’s actually apparently in the movie but it solved an issue. It was like a cutaway to a thing, I don’t know if it was a sign that said something, but it made it clear like, oh, it connected some pieces. And sometimes it’s just a single shot or two, three really quick shots to get you over that hump so like, oh, that thing happened. Basically I’m asking for what is the simple solution that gets you through it so you don’t have to explain more.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think that sometimes what you can do is take a look at the plot hole you have and ask yourself does it even have to be a hole? Maybe this is plot help. Because let’s say – for instance I’m working on something right now and in the story I got to a point where I thought you know what would be very helpful story wise in terms of establishing rules, boundaries, difficulty is if a certain thing were true. The problem is that that thing feels a little plot holey. So, I thought about it for a while and then I thought, OK, I’m going to have somebody say this like it’s true. And I’m going to have the character question it. And in the end we’re going to find out that it was a lie. But I get all of the benefit of having it.

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** And the lie also made sense, like why this person lied about it. And then you’re the winner. The plot hole suddenly is not a hole at all.

**John:** Yep. So the TV Tropes people will call that a Hand Wave, but it’s actually a very specific Hand Wave. So Hand Wave is when somebody says something that distracts you from the problem and it makes the problem go away. And it sounds like you did an Advanced Hand Wave which is it was distracting you but then ultimately it paid off that the character was lying. So, brilliant. And that’s why you win all the awards.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s yet to happen, but I did essentially have the character express what I thought the audience would be expressing at that moment which is you know what you’re saying doesn’t actually make sense. And somebody going don’t worry about it, I’ve thought it through, trust me. Which I think for an audience they go, OK, if the character on screen that I’m identifying with is questioning this the movie is aware. This will be explained at some point. And it is.

**John:** Yeah. A related term which Jane Espenson will use, you’ll see in TV Tropes, is Hanging a Lampshade, which basically is like having the characters call a thing out and point out the unlikely nature of it. Basically saying like this is one of those premise kind of things that this is – you got to give me this one, because without this the story doesn’t make sense.

**Craig:** Right. And what you are playing is a psychological game with the audience. You’re saying to them please beat me up a little bit less over this because at least I’m admitting it. I’m not trying to fool you. I’m not insulting your intelligence. I’m just saying, “Hey look it’s happened.”

Now, it is not even close to being as good as not being there.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But it is preferable to suggesting to the audience that what you just told them makes sense when it clearly does not.

**John:** Agreed. Final bit of advice on plot holes is often you are better off just ignoring them. And so rather than trying to fix them it’s acknowledging that some things that a certain percentage of your audience will point out as mistakes, most of your audience will never notice and trying to fix it will actually cause more damage.

We said before when you try to fix things you can sometimes call more attention to them and the audience will assume that that patch is more important than the actual material around it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And fixes often just feel like fixes. You and I are probably particularly attentive to looped lines, ADR. We’re looking at character B, but character A says something even though they have their back to us. And it’s clearly just a line that was thrown in there to address some problem. Sometimes it can be done really well and it’s seamless and smooth. But, man, sometimes you just really feel it.

**Craig:** Well, best option is get rid of plot hole. Second best option is turn plot hole to your favor. Third option is fill plot hole somehow. And you’re right, sometimes it’s better to just leave it be, depending on the size of it.

The danger, and you will see outside people – non-writers – do this almost exclusively is you decide that the way to fix the plot hole is to layer it with other stuff that solves the immediate logic problem. It’s as if they’re saying we have a problem right now not in the movie but in this room that we in this room don’t believe this moment. What can we say in this room to solve “that problem?” And you can come up with something, but it stinks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And therein is the danger. Because you can begin filling these things only to realize you were in it and you’re burying yourself under these layers of solution that have absolutely nothing to do with good storytelling, emotions, intentions, theme, adventure, feeling. They literally exist only to answer some dumb question. And if you even sense for a second that’s what’s happening, stop immediately.

**John:** Yeah. You and I have both been in rooms with filmmakers who have made really good movies and a lot of movies who do get tripped up on really frustrating things that they should not be getting tripped up on and are asking for solutions to things that aren’t problems. And that is just really disheartening but it’s also the reality. And so you hear them, you talk through it, you try not to fill the perceived plot hole, but actually design a path that’s not going to take them where they see that plot hole and we’ll still deliver the movie to where it needs to go. It’s really frustrating.

**Craig:** It is. And this by the way is actually one of the more annoying parts of writing anything. Because we are attempting to create a simulation of reality and reality is really complicated. And also reality is reality. So, it is not here to deliver narrative excitement or drama on any given day. It’s here to just function the way it normally functions. So what we’re doing is doubly hard. We’re trying to create reality and we’re trying to create reality on a crazy day.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so therefore we want crazy things to happen on the crazy day. But when crazy things happen in reality they happen in accordance with reality. It’s incredibly frustrating. Reality is slow. It unfolds in real time. People aren’t changing in the middle of it. Sometimes there is no particular challenge. It doesn’t care about our storytelling needs. And so we have to figure out how to tell a story in a matrix that doesn’t care about our needs as writers.

**John:** Absolutely. Craig, it’s time for our One Cool Things. What’s yours?

**Craig:** Great question, John. Very, very simple thing that I find myself using constantly. And I don’t know if you do. It comes with the iPhone. It’s the Measure App. Have you used it?

**John:** I’ve used it only once or twice. I always forget that it’s there.

**Craig:** Exactly. You always forget it’s there. Many, many times I’ve gone hunting around my house looking for the tape measure, looking for a ruler. In fact, the Measure App is better than both of those things. The Measure App, which takes about I would say 15 seconds to kind of get going because you need to move your phone around to let it orient itself in space and time, allows you to just place a dot anywhere you want and then you just start walking. And it’s just making a line on the screen using your calendar to lay the dot of the line over reality, AR style. And then when you reach the point where you want to know, OK, how far is this from my first dot, you hit it again, and it tells you.

You don’t need another person at the end with a tape measure. You can measure anything this way. It is incredibly useful. And I don’t think it existed until this recent iteration I think of iOS, or nearly recent. So, I use it all the time and I think now that I’ve put this bug in your ear you will too.

**John:** I probably will use it more and more. My belief is that some version of it existed from a third party developer and then Apple just made their own and Sherlocked it. But I agree it’s a really well done thing.

My One Cool Thing is an article in Lifehacker by Nick Douglas called Install These Apps on your New Mac. And it’s just a list of the apps you should maybe consider putting on your new Mac. And I liked it because I use most of these apps and it’s a convenient way for me to show some useful things that people should try to put on their Macintosh and at least experiment with.

So obviously we use Slack for everything around the office. Dropbox is essential for me. I feel like we need to do a little sidebar on Dropbox at some point because I see people who use Dropbox but they don’t use it to its maximum capability. So I think we’ll save that for a special topic bit. I cannot imagine my life without Dropbox.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, neither can I.

**John:** If you use multiple computers it is just–

**Craig:** Essential.

**John:** Incredibly important.

**Craig:** And we all use multiple computers because at the very least–

**John:** Our phones.

**Craig:** We have a phone and a tablet at a minimum, right? Or a phone and a laptop. So, they are computers and I was very happy to see my beloved 1Password on there as well.

**John:** Oh yeah. Crucial. And so I only was aware of this article because he uses Highland2 for writing and so that was the little new alert that showed up. But I thought the whole article was good. So, anybody who uses Highland2 for their main writing is clearly a genius and so therefore you should take all his other suggestions to heart.

Craig, you have a change in your life that you wanted to talk to our listeners about.

**Craig:** I do. I have a big life change coming. I have been in my office here in Old Town Pasadena for I think seven years.

**John:** Your office is terrific. I love your office. It feels old fashioned in the best way.

**Craig:** Well, I need a little bit more space for some things that are happening. And I love this part of Los Angeles. This is Old Town Pasadena. I found a new office just a few blocks away that is even more kind of old school and nifty and LA detective circa 1938. And so I need to help the folks who have this building, I need to help them rent the place that I’m leaving. So, hey, do you want to rent Craig’s office? You can.

If you are in the market for an office in Old Town Pasadena, it’s about 500 square feet. It’s got two rooms, separated by a door. You could do worse.

**John:** You could do worse.

**Craig:** So if you’re looking for something like that go ahead and email us at ask@johnaugust.com. And we’ll connect you up with the folks that are showing the office. I will not be in it, so don’t expect to see me there, but that’s sort of the good news. You won’t have to deal with me.

**John:** It’s very, very good news. And it is a beautiful office and I think it would be good for a writer or writers who wanted to use it for offices, but it would also be good for like a psychologist or somebody. Because it has a front waiting room and then a closed back office. So it’s good for that.

**Craig:** Exactly. It can be all sorts of things.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by James Llonch and Jim Bond. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions, or requests for Craig’s office space.

For short questions we’re on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there, leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com, which I think will be redesigned by the time this episode comes up. We did a big relaunch of the site. So if it’s not up Tuesday when this drops, it will be up shortly thereafter. It will look nice. I think you’ll like it.

**Craig:** It’s going to be a whole new johnaugust.com?

**John:** It’s pretty different, so I think you’ll enjoy it.

**Craig:** No, I don’t like change.

**John:** No change at all. So here’s one of the things I’ll say one of the goals. Because Scriptnotes posts are so big it just looked like a site that was only about Scriptnotes. And so Scriptnotes have their own column but they’re not the main topic of the site.

**Craig:** Hmm. Feels backwards to me. I think it should be all Scriptnotes with a small, tiny digital ghetto for whatever your personal musings are. But, yes, I believe Scriptnotes – I have a new vision. Somebody must own Scriptnotes.com I assume, right?

**John:** They do. Yeah.

**Craig:** Jerks.

**John:** Jerks. But on johnaugust.com you’ll also find transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs. You can find all the back episodes at Scripnotes.net. And you subscribe there and you get all of the back catalog episodes. The first 381 episodes of the show. And the bonus episodes.

**Craig:** I mean, what a deal.

**John:** What a deal. Thank you for another fun week.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I’ll see you next week.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Join us for the WGA’s [Princess Bride screening](https://www.wga.org/news-events/events/guild-screenings) on January 27th.
* [The Seattle Live Show](https://nwsg.org/events/) is on February 6th!
* You can now [preorder Arlo Finch in the Lake of the Moon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/162672816X/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) or come to the [launch event](https://www.chevaliersbooks.com/john-august-2019) on February 9th.
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 383: Splitting the Party](https://johnaugust.com/2019/splitting-the-party)
* [Scriptnotes, Ep 3: Kids, cards, whiteboards and outlines](https://johnaugust.com/2011/kids-cards-whiteboards-and-outlines)
* Plot Holes on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plot_hole) and [TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PlotHole). You can find examples at [Movie Plot Holes](https://movieplotholes.com)
* [The perils of coincidence](http://johnaugust.com/2007/perils-of-coincidence)
* [Measure App](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbLe4rHQI_I) on iPhone
* [Install These Apps on your New Mac](https://lifehacker.com/install-these-apps-on-your-new-mac-1831687258) by Nick Douglas for Lifehacker
* T-shirts are available [here](https://cottonbureau.com/people/john-august-1)! We’ve got new designs, including [Colored Revisions](https://cottonbureau.com/products/colored-revisions), [Karateka](https://cottonbureau.com/products/karateka), and [Highland2](https://cottonbureau.com/products/highland2).
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Scriptnotes Digital Seasons](https://store.johnaugust.com/) are also now available!
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by James Llonch and Jim Bond ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_384.mp3).