Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/the-second-draft).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August and this is Episode 377 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is out sick today, but luckily we have two remarkable screenwriters to take his place. And today on the show we’re going to be talking about the second draft, and hopefully offering some practical tips for your first big rewrite on a project. Then we’ll be digging into questions from the mail bag.

To help us out we are welcoming back the writers of The Invitation, Ride Along, and the upcoming Destroyer, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi.

**Matt Manfredi:** Hello.

**Phil Hay:** Hey John.

**John:** You joined us on Episode 244. My first question for you is what did we talk about in Episode 244?

**Phil:** We talked about our motion picture The Invitation.

**John:** You did.

**Phil:** We talked about reboots and preboots.

**Matt:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Very nice you remember. And do you remember the specific term that we were trying to suss out?

**Phil:** It wasn’t preboot?

**John:** It wasn’t preboot, but preboot is really close to it.

**Phil:** It was pre-imagining?

**John:** Requel.

**Matt:** Requel.

**John:** Was the word of the day.

**Matt:** It didn’t catch on.

**Phil:** Clearly it’s dead.

**Matt:** Preboot really still has a chance.

**John:** Preboot has a good chance. I think we’re all pulling for preboot. I think I’m working on a preboot right now.

**Phil:** Is that right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Phil:** You’re keeping it alive. There’s hope.

**John:** Before we get started today, some news on Scriptnotes land. We have our holiday show December 12th in Hollywood and Zoanna Clack of Grey’s Anatomy is a guest. Pamela Ribon of Ralph Breaks the Internet. And Cherry Chevapravatdumrong of Family Guy and The Orville will be joining us. Plus, Phil Lord and Chris Miller of Lego Movie, Lego Movie 2, Last Man on Earth, Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse. It’s a remarkable lineup of guests.

**Phil:** Great lineup, John.

**John:** Great lineup.

**Matt:** Murderer’s Row.

**John:** Murderer’s Row. Come join us in Hollywood December 12th. It’s a benefit for The Writers Guild Foundation. You can find tickets. Just click on the link in the show notes or go to wgafoundation.org.

Phil and Matt, we have some follow up on previous episode stuff. I’m hoping you can help us out here because Craig is gone so we’re going to pretend that you guys are all the way caught up on all your back episodes of Scriptnotes. I asked in a previous episode whether other industries had a way of dealing with endless pitches. And sort of like when you go in to pitch on a thing like 19 times. Have you ever encountered that situation?

**Phil:** We have tried to really limit that recently, but I think everybody has encountered that. You know, where the goal posts sort of keep moving and the existence of the job itself starts to become in question.

**Matt:** And early, I mean, like especially starting out you pitch to the lowest person on the totem pole and you work your way up, and you work your way up. Or sometimes even worse, they pitch it all the way up and it just gets bastardized and bastardized.

**John:** Yeah. It’s bad. So specifically we’re trying to get to the situations where like you’ve gone in like 10 times to pitch on a project and it’s just not clear whether they’re ever going to do anything on this.

So I asked on the podcast whether people had suggestions from other industries about how they deal with these situations. So two people wrote in. Chris wrote in to say that she works as a production manager on commercials and she says, “Whenever we audition actors they need to fill out an initial Exhibit E, an audition time card. Depending on how long they are kept for an audition or how many auditions they are called in for, they are entitled to some payment.”

So we’ll send a link to the SAG form for Exhibit E. So there’s some record of how many times they’re going in on a project and if they are held for longer than a certain period of time they have to be paid for that audition.

Would you want to be paid for a pitch?

**Phil:** I think that regardless of me personally it actually sounds like a pretty feasible idea to – wasn’t there a concept way back in the old day, something called approach money or something like that? I feel like I’ve heard a term where it’s just saying we are officially asking you to come and basically “do a prototype for us,” which is your pitch, and we’ll pay you a very modest amount of money to do it, but we are paying you.

And so, you know, if we call you in for a second time we’re going to pay you again. I mean, I’m sure there’s a million reasons that people don’t want to do that, but the amount of labor that goes in to trying to get a job is so significant that, you know, I’m not writing those checks but I think it would be extremely helpful and useful because it would also make sure – I mean, it would increase the odds that there was something at the end of that process. That they’re going to invest even a small amount of money means that they think it’s headed somewhere.

**Matt:** I wonder if it’s past a certain point. You know what I mean? As a freelancer, essentially, I feel like the initial pitch is part of my job. I want to get the job. I’m essentially auditioning for the job. But once I’ve gone in, we’ve discussed our take, this is what I would do with the project. Once we get past a certain level, I don’t know what that level is, it does seem like some kind of thing would be–

**John:** Yeah. I mean, as we talked about in No Work Left Behind, this idea of making sure you’re not leaving written material behind after a pitch, so often we hear that writers lose the job to no one. Basically they just decided that there’s no – like that idea wasn’t a very good idea and so we’ve wasted everyone’s time trying to do this.

**Phil:** Thank you for proving to us that we shouldn’t ever spend any money hiring anyone to do it.

**John:** And so if there were some cost to actually having done that search process, you know, I think you could rein that in a little bit. We look at these mini rooms where they bring in a bunch of writers to crack an idea. They have like a piece of IP and they’re bringing in five writers to work for a month to try to crack that stuff. Those writers are at least getting paid. There’s a thing there. Intellectual labor is being rewarded. So, it feels like there’s some way to be thinking about that.

**Phil:** Well, and there’s a structure in place, right, so that there then can be rules. And there can be – maybe this is what complicates it – the ownership of the material. What are you selling when you take that money? So maybe that’s maybe the rub. But, yeah, I think that increasingly we’ve been talking – we talked about this a lot that just the job of the screenwriter now – the job of your typical screenwriter includes so much unpaid time that is very – it’s intense work.

**Matt:** I think it’s expanded. I think it’s a lot worse than it used to be.

**Phil:** Yeah. I agree.

**John:** I think even the nature of what a screenwriter is supposed to be doing has changed so much even in the 20 years I’ve been doing this is that screenplays have evolved into this thing which is not just a plan for making a movie but is really like a kind of marketing – it’s a vision document for what this is. It’s like a director’s reel but in a printed form.

**Phil:** It’s interesting. Yeah. Because we all came up with an edict that someone taught us, which is saying every draft is a sales piece. You’re selling to someone. You’re selling to first the studio or first a producer, then you’re selling to an actor, you’re selling to a director. But it does seem like you started selling now constantly. The organization, the principles by which this thing is going to be in the public you’re starting to sell within the screenplay itself.

**John:** A way you might get there, so Philip in Hamburg, Germany wrote to say that he works in advertising in Germany where pitches have gotten very competitive and big. Sometimes it’s two to four weeks fulltime to meet the deadline for the pitch, costs up to $100,000 in man hours, all of it for free. “So we managed to improve the situation. Companies are now starting to increasingly pay a pitch fee which often doesn’t cover all the costs but it’s something.” So he says, “The way it changed was for three things.” First, they made the clients aware of the situation and asked for the money. Because sometimes the clients really didn’t know how long it was taking or sort of how much they were spending on it. They got stronger together. So there’s an association for creative agencies. We have the WGA. And they started lobbying on behalf of the topic.

And finally they just started saying no. They would actually decide not to go in on a pitch because they didn’t feel like – if they weren’t going to get paid for pitching they would just politely say no. And so as writers, I mean, sometimes we’re spending 10 hours, 20 hours, more getting a pitch ready or going to talk about a movie, but it’s the directors who actually weirdly have it worse. Sometimes those directors who are trying to land those jobs because they’re the ones who have written in to say like, you know, I’m spending two months developing this reel to sort of promote myself as a director for this and I’m not getting those jobs. So maybe that’s the case where if they really are curious about that director, they need to be sending some money that director’s way to build that reel or to build up that proof of concept.

**Matt:** Yeah. And Phil gets at a point earlier, like if they do pay you for a pitch, a writer for a pitch, where does that come in terms of work for hire, in terms of chain of title? What is then owned? You know what I mean? Like it gets into a–

**John:** Yeah. But if they’re not actually taking a written document then maybe it’s not so bad. Basically if they’re paying for your time and they’re paying you for your time to meet you to talk about stuff, maybe that’s–

Phil Hay: Also there’s such a cultural–

**Matt:** It’s like a roundtable. You know?

**Phil:** There’s a cultural issue at hand which is the – and I think it’s always been weirdly baked in – but it seems increasing where there’s a sort of resentment toward paying people to do something creative. You know that there is a baked in societal kind of like wanting to get away with just kind of taking that work. Or just saying, I mean, in the world of kind of freelancers out there in the world that classic thing of like well what is the payment? “Well exposure.”

**John:** Of course.

**Phil:** For exposure. And so there’s that component, too, where I think in a way it’s not hard to imagine a slightly different society which says, yeah, of course, you should be – if you are attempting to create something or you are using your labor at their request to come in and potentially then be hired to create something complete that would make sense.

But I think we do have this cultural idea that there’s kind of a resentment toward that work.

**Matt:** There’s also something that my wife experiences. She designs book jackets. And if you’re designing a book jacket and it just doesn’t work out for various reasons you get a kill fee, which is like half of your fee. Do you know what I mean? There is something past a certain point where if you don’t get the job there’s essentially a kill fee as opposed to on the front end.

**John:** Obviously as writers we’re paid for our words, but we’re also valued for our time, and so making sure that we get the value out of that time is crucial.

**Phil:** And you also have to really peer through the language to figure it out, because so often we hear like – now we’re fortunate to be in a position where we say, OK, if it’s going to be multiple people then we’ll just back out. You can hire one of those other people, but we’re not going to spend the time to go in and do all this work.

**John:** So you’ll ask?

**Phil:** Yeah. We will ask. And we’ll kind of make sure we ask and then make sure our agents ask and make sure everybody is asking because there’s also all these way around. You hear so many times, I’m sure John you’ve heard it many times, “Well we really want you. Believe me, we really want you for this. We just need the – just give me something. And then I can just force it through. But we just have to as a formality.” There’s always something behind that.

**John:** Yeah. There was a project recently where I assumed I was the only person going in. And it wasn’t until I actually had landed the job where I talked to other folks like, “Oh yeah, I was up for that. I pitched a couple times on that.” I had no idea. So I felt really great that I got it, but also it was like, wow, I just assumed that I was the only person you were talking to.

**Phil:** We once ran into in the lobby of a studio we ran into Craig. And we were like wait a minute. And Craig was like, “Wait a minute.” And then it turned out to be for different things, so it was OK. But for a second we were like hold on.

**John:** Hold on. So, these are jobs that you’re going in to pitch on, things that already exist and you’re trying to land. But increasingly you guys have been making your own stuff. And so you were here last time to talk about The Invitation. Your new movie is Destroyer. And let’s listen to a clip. Phil, can you set up this clip we’re about to listen to?

**Phil:** This is an encounter between Erin Bell, who is the lead character, played by Nicole Kidman, and her teenage daughter Shelby who she has a very fraught relationship with. And this is sort of a scene of honesty between them.

[Clip plays]

**John:** Great. So that is a really quiet moment, because I was trying to find some big shouty moment, and there clearly is a tremendous amount of action, but that action has no words that would actually make sense on a podcast.

**Phil:** We’d like to try.

**John:** So, the reviews are fantastic. Raves. And so most of them talk about how great Nicole Kidman is and Karyn Kusama who directs it. But I had to dig pretty deep to find one review that really emphasized the script. But I did. I found it. So it says, “[John speaks in Spanish.]”

So guys, that’s pretty amazing.

**Phil:** That is amazing.

**John:** So what Maria Fernandez is saying is that beyond Nicole Kidman’s remarkable performance and a very solid cast, the most impressive thing about Destroyer is the sophistication of its scripting and its mise en scène.

**Phil:** Right on.

**Matt:** All right.

**Phil:** Well I think what’s interesting that we’ve encountered, you know, Nicole has made this point many times, and Karyn makes this point many times is to us there definitely is a natural tendency to – what Nicole does is truly astounding to me. I mean, it’s a performance that I am so blown away by just as a person watching it.

**Matt:** And she’s in every scene of the movie.

**Phil:** She really is.

**John:** It’s entirely on her back.

**Phil:** And so I understand and love that that attention is there for her. But if you ask Nicole and you ask Karyn, I think to all of us the character is the story, is the direction, is the performance, is the story, is the direction, is the performance. That they are all completely unified. And this character is, you know, for us the whole movie also for us flows through this one character and she is the focus of everything. And so to me it’s one of the most unified movies that we’ve ever been involved in because of what I just said. It is this story of this person who we tried very hard to give every dimension we could as a human being.

**John:** So, let’s talk about sort of how you conceptualize, pitch, write, set up a movie like this movie. Because this isn’t a thing where you’re going in. There wasn’t a book. There wasn’t an anything. This was an idea. And so where does the idea for this character and for this world become a thing that you guys do? At one point does Karyn become involved? And how do you say like this is the next thing we’re going to do? What is the process of saying, OK, we have this character and this world, this is the movie we’re going to make? What is that process?

**Matt:** We had just finished up The Invitation. And we were thinking of what the next thing we were going to do is. And we had this idea that had been kind of marinating for like 10 years. And it was this structure for a cop movie. We had all these scenes that kind of supported the structure and we were just kind of like – it’s kind of a complicated structure so we would pick it up and put it down.

**John:** Now you said you had these scenes and these ideas, so how much had been written versus just like kind of note carded or sketched?

**Matt:** Notes, like little notes documents.

**Phil:** And really like conversations more than anything else.

**Matt:** Conversations. We had spent so much time discussing it. And then finally, so we kind of knew the general direction of it, but we kept running into a wall until we discovered – and maybe it seems obvious – but until we discovered the character of Erin Bell who was going to populate this world and her relationship with her daughter. And when we actually outlined it and put all the cards up on the wall, I mean we knew it was going to be for Karyn, and so we brought her in, took her through the outline. Kind of like half-pitched it to her. And she gave some ideas. And then we were just off to write it. And that was kind of – from there Karyn started making her look book and stuff and she was kind of off to the races. And so on a kind of parallel track while we wrote the script.

**Phil:** There’s a lot of simultaneity to how we do these movies, you know, the ones that we do together where while we’re writing the script Karyn is doing all that, and our composer Teddy Shapiro is already writing music based on the script. And Plummy Tucker, the editor, is one of the first people to read the script, so she already kind of has it in her head.

And it’s kind of a unique and kind of amazing way to work because then we also get to the point – and another wonderful thing about Nicole is that, and Karyn, is that the script is the script when we get to shooting the movie. And they both are real believers in the screenplay. And that the answers are in the screenplay for whatever questions come up. And then we’re there as writer-producers. We’re there to provide context, to write new things if necessary, but it’s kind of a very organic and simultaneous process with these movies which have been so gratifying for us to be able to do that.

**John:** Stepping back, you said the idea, the Erin Bell character was what made these collections of things really pop. And so the 10 years where this was just bits and pieces, was it the character that wasn’t holding the thing together? What was it that changed? What was it that putting that character into the situation? Because was it always written for a woman that was kind of like Erin Bell but not specifically Erin Bell? Or was it a story that was missing a central character? What was different about it 10 years ago?

**Matt:** I think it was a story that was missing a central character. And we knew the beats of the story and the structure is kind of tricky. And so we would kind of puzzle over that without having the central character.

**Phil:** So it was really more like we had–

**Matt:** A puzzle.

**Phil:** Yeah. We had pieces of a puzzle and we had things and feelings and certain interactions that we could kind of see from one side in a way. And then we had a feel, this kind of feeling that was driving it, the kind of restlessness of a ‘70s noir in a way. And then it was like – when it kind of occurred to us it was kind of in conversation. Then we brought it to Karyn and we started talking and realizing who Erin was and how specifically she couldn’t be to us a woman “filling a man’s role or wearing a man’s clothes” basically. The story had to be about this woman who had this relationship with her daughter, had a very specific relationship with the world that was a relationship as a woman. And that’s kind of what made it necessary for us or essential for us. You know that thing when you’re writing where you know there’s something you like about it but it’s not ready yet. And something has to make you just light up. And that character and the opportunity to write someone and knowing that – the other thing that’s so great about getting to work with Karyn is we know where it’s headed. So we know that we can write this character and that Karyn is going to receive that in its fullness and so we can try and go for it and take swings and do all of that.

**John:** You didn’t feel like you had to make any safe choices.

**Phil:** Exactly.

**John:** Or round any corners or over-explain something just to make sure, to protect yourself and to protect the script. You didn’t have to have those extra lines that were in there just so in case–

**Phil:** Exactly. And that becomes so crucial because for Nicole she said a few times that she really responded to the mystery of this character and that there’s one line that basically tells you everything you need to know about what she suffered as a kid, a line about that she was burned with cigarettes by her mom and that she had these brothers who were just this kind of feral pack living by themselves basically. And to Nicole, she said like that was everything I needed and that’s what inspired me and more detail, more exhaustive archeology of her psyche would have not – that doesn’t inspire me. So it’s interesting. And that’s always – everything you write you’re looking for that balance. And it’s so great to not have to do anything because you’re worried someone is not going to get it, or you’re worried that they’re going to kind of – it’s going to go off the rails because some critical thing is not obvious enough. You know?

**John:** Right now, I’ll ask the question separately, how many projects are in your head that are sort of where this was over the last 10 years which are sort of like bits and pieces? How many different movies or other things do you think you have? Phil, I’ll ask you first.

**Phil:** OK. I can think of three off the top of my head that are in the sort of like, yeah, an idea. Sometimes there’s just a title on a notecard in the far corner of our corkboard that I don’t even know if Matt explores over there. He’s probably got his other corner with his stuff.

**John:** Matt, how many are on your list?

**Matt:** I think I have three as well. I mean, three that really like–

**Phil:** Maybe they’re the same. Or maybe we have six. We have to consult afterwards.

**Matt:** There are three that are kind of nagging at me in the same way. And, you know, like with both The Invitation, but more so because I guess we took longer with Destroyer. I was like we’re going to write this, we need to write this, I just don’t know when it’s going to be, but we’ll get there.

**John:** I always found that I’ll have a whole bunch of ideas that are sort of swirling around and every once and a while you think of the idea or basically the idea makes you think of it so that you don’t forget it. So like, oh that’s right, I do have that thing. And then eventually they’ll sometimes conspire and sort of gang up in ways. If we combine our efforts, John will have to think about us more.

**Phil:** That’s right. Exactly.

**John:** I didn’t intend for them to be the same project but they became the same project. It was like, oh, this is a way to get his attention.

**Phil:** They’re like we’re fighting for our lives here. We have to do something.

**Matt:** They wormed their way into other projects. You’re like well this could just be overlaid right on that.

**John:** 100%. And people often ask are there things that get cut out of one movie that you put into another movie, and like usually you can’t do that.

**Phil:** No.

**John:** There’s been little bits of an action sequence where they didn’t shoot that–

**Matt:** Yeah, we’ve done that.

**John:** In general like everything is so clear and specific once it’s been written down in some form. But these little ideas that are kind of floating around, they’ll try to get themselves into whatever I’m writing at the moment because they want to exist. And the only way they can exist, the only way they can be out there in the world is if they get me to pay attention to them and somehow get down on the paper.

**Phil:** Yeah. I think that happens a lot with little like – I mean, there’s something in Destroyer that’s a very specific story from when I was a kid and it just had been rattling around for a long time. And it’s just like one of those stories that I’ve told many people many times. And it sort of found a home in this movie, very unexpectedly. It was just sort of like, oh wow, that weird incident actually is a version of what we need in this movie right now. So, sometimes it’s something from life. And sometimes I think like, at least for me, I just needed to grow up more to understand what the thing was or to – or I needed to have a kid to be able to write that movie.

But I think it’s interesting what you say about you’re trying to keep – they’re trying to keep themselves alive out there in hopes that you’re going to find them again.

**John:** Writing a movie by myself, I’m sort of all the characters and I’m fully inside. I’m the camera into this world and I feel myself in all the different characters. Are each of you individually feeling that? Are you guys dividing up a sense of who is more what person in a movie? Is there any split that way or are you both fully inhabiting all the characters in scenes?

**Matt:** Usually both inhabit them. But every once and a while we’ll be working on something and there will be a character who is in maybe three scenes or something. And we don’t write in order. We just choose a scene that appeals to us and gets us motivated.

**John:** You’re the only other writers I talk to who do this.

**Phil:** Really? I can’t believe this. It’s like the greatest revelation that ever happened to me.

**John:** Okay, so let’s sell this to the world so people know that there’s more than one way to do this. I will write whatever scene appeals to me and I will skip over a thing I don’t want to do. Whatever scene appeals to me I will totally write.

**Matt:** Absolutely. I mean, in Destroyer it helped me get to know the character of Erin better because she is quiet and picks her spots and is watchful. And so one of the first scenes that I took a crack at was a scene where someone is really talking at her over and over and over again. She doesn’t have much to say, and so you’re thinking like OK well how does she have power, how does she have agency in the scene when she’s just kind of listening. And so I got the voice because I was writing out of order, you know what I mean?

**Phil:** And I think that it really changed everything for us I think because if you outline meticulously enough and you know where things are beginning and ending, it’s such a difficult thing to write at all, at least for most of us.

**Matt:** However you find your motivation.

**Phil:** Exactly. If you can get actually excited about a scene, go for it.

**John:** Totally.

**Phil:** And trust that you’ll find a way. And sometimes those scenes, like we learn so much just by the process of us splitting up the scenes. So Matt will say I really want to write this scene. And sometimes I’m like, oh, I really want to write that scene. So, wow, that’s a scene – obviously there’s something going on there. Or there’s a scene where Matt says I want to write and I say, thank god, I don’t actually think I know what to do with that scene, or vice versa. And you kind of go through and the scenes you gravitate toward tend to be the islands that really are the movie, so you’re kind of teaching yourself what the movie is. Those scenes tend to be the ones that change the least through the process, like those first maybe four or five sequences, because they are just like – that’s the tone, that’s the character, that’s the style. And you can use those then as touchstones.

You know, you’re writing, you refer back and then you also learn – you get to those lonely, sad little scenes at the end where no one wants to writes them and maybe they don’t need to be written.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Phil:** They haven’t earned a place in the story. And maybe you just can skip them.

**Matt:** And maybe the scene that introduces your character is much better informed by a scene that you’ve written earlier.

**Phil:** Yes.

**Matt:** But to get back to your question, sometimes because we’re jumping all around there will be one more scene left with the character who is in maybe three scenes. And I realize, oh, I’ve read Phil’s stuff and he’s done the other two and I’ll be like, OK, well you seem to have a handle on her voice or his voice, so why don’t you do that, and I’ll work on–

**Phil:** There’s sometimes, yeah, where in something like Destroyer, too, which is kind of an odyssey in its structure so she encounters all these people and some of them come back and some of them don’t. You know, there’s sometimes where I look, we talk through the character and I just know, OK, Matt just has a feel for this person’s voice, this one character. And like he’s saying, so great. You take the first shot at all that stuff. I’ll take the first shot at this stuff. And then once we get to that it’s usually pretty congruent. We’re so molded together at this point and we have the same instincts, so it’s rare that we see one another’s scenes and say, hmm, the voice sounds wrong. The voice almost never sounds wrong to either of us. There may be other questions. But that’s also the product of working together for 25 years or something.

**Matt:** And if we’re each writing a scene with the same character we’ll trade. Whoever is finished first will look at it and be like, OK, well I see what you’re doing here. I think we are on the same track.

**Phil:** Put this tremendous line that I just thought of in and we’re good to go.

**John:** I’m never going to write a screenwriting book, but if I do a chapter I’ve just come up with right now is how to be your writing partner.

**Phil:** I love that.

**John:** Because it’s that sense of – there are scenes you want to write and scenes you want the other guy to write. So write the scenes you want to write and leave your writing partner, which is your other self, to write the other scenes. And that’s why you write things out of order because write the scenes that are most meaningful for you to write and don’t worry about the other ones until you get to them.

**Phil:** Exactly. Because – and also often – we always know the ending before we start writing a script. Always. In great detail.

**John:** It’s one of the first things I write is the ending.

**Phil:** Yeah. And in some cases – I think I knew that about you actually – and in some cases in really extreme detail. I’d say with both Destroyer and The Invitation that was true. We absolutely knew what the end had to be for both of those movies. So we tend I think a lot of times to write the beginning of the movie much later in the process. We have the ending, we have these islands, you know, it’s different for everybody.

But, you know, you come up and it’s perfectly logical to think, well, I start on page one and I just keep going. And if I’m having a bad day I just fight through it. And I really don’t believe in that. The liberation that you feel when you realize I want to write a scene. That’s incredible. How did this happen?

**Matt:** I think it helps with the outline, too, because then you’ve got this scene and once you get to the place where you like it, you know, oh, well we’re actually going to need a different kind of scene to support this, or something else is going to have to follow this because of what we discovered here. And so it almost – I’m not going to say it – like everyone talks about second act problems, but we’ve outlined it like that, but we don’t really think of it that way. And so it doesn’t really occur to us in the same way.

**John:** Yeah. Also, by writing those scenes out of sequence those big marquee scenes you’ve figured out like you know what your in and your out is on those things. And so the scenes that are supporting those you might figure out like, OK, well I’m going to need to slope into that scene in a different way or get out of that.

**Phil:** Exactly.

**John:** You know what your in and your outs are.

**Phil:** And they can have a gravitational pull under those scenes. And so the other scenes I can picture how they orbit around that scene as opposed to a linear way.

**John:** So you’re not going to have nine talkie scenes back to back.

**Phil:** Exactly.

**John:** There will be a quiet thing before we get to this big long dialogue thing.

**Matt:** I think there was one movie, I don’t remember which project it was recently where Phil and I were both like I think we need to write the first act. I don’t know if it was Proof of Concept or something, just so we can – maybe it was the tone was different. I forget what it was. But we did it and then once we saw what it was we’re like, OK, now let’s try to bounce around.

**John:** We got a tweet question which was from Keith Hodder. He said, “Tips for approaching a second draft? Even with index cards I’m finding it tough to navigate the skeleton of the first draft. Feeling stumped. I revisited the transcript for Episode 199 but it mostly focused on the emotional toll of the second draft and being uneasy with seeing the original vision change. I have notes and I’m cool with them, but I’m unsure how to structure the second draft in terms of a game plan.”

Guys, do you have some suggestions on tactics and strategies for approaching a second draft, a successful second draft?

**Phil:** This is where I look at Matt, and I hope Matt does.

**Matt:** I would say, I mean, we tackle like what we want to tackle first. I mean, usually with a second draft if there’s big scenes that have to be changed or added we do those and then we go through and do all the little things. If it’s a character issue that needs to – the character needs to fundamentally change or we need to learn more, we map that out. The bigger scenes to tackle first is what we usually do.

**Phil:** Yeah. I think that’s true.

**Matt:** Is that helpful at all?

**John:** It’s helpful. For me, like I always make sure like you’re saying that I have a real game plan. This is what I’m going to try to do with this. And so I may have gotten other people’s notes, but that’s not really like how I’m going to do it. I’m looking at sort of like this is what’s going to need to change for me to do this. This is my checklist of things I want to make sure happens. And I’ll almost always start with a new document, and I’ll copy and paste in the stuff that I need from the old script but I won’t try to just work through the old script.

If it’s a significant amount of changes I’ll copy and paste the scenes in and sort of bullet point the stuff that’s brand new to write in there, but I find if I’m working on an existing script I end up just polishing stuff and I won’t do some of the big machete work that I sometimes need to do if I’m still working in that same file.

**Phil:** That’s interesting. Yeah, I think that we tend to keep the document, but then we’re very freely – you guys have talked about this before – we create the depot and just very freely grab scenes so that you don’t have to worry about it and throw them in that so that they exist, but they’re not in the script.

But what you were saying, I realize is so helpful not only internally for us, but sometimes we actually share this with our partners, is a written plan. A document that says here’s the plan. We’re going to cut these three scenes. We’re going to go through the entire script through the lens of this character and we’re going to make sure she is here by this point of the script and we’re going to fix this relationship and we have a new idea for a scene that’s going to go between this scene and this. And just kind of the process of just doing that is helpful.

And it also has been helpful when we’re – especially in movies where we’re like trying to head toward production the people kind of can envision what we’re doing and so we’re not “shocking” them when they get the draft back. But we are–

**Matt:** Sometimes as you know the note isn’t the note.

**John:** Yes.

**Matt:** What it really means is we don’t like this. This character isn’t working as opposed to like this scene. And so by kind of giving them something back it kind of creates a new notes document in a way that everyone agrees on. So now everyone feels included and heard and we’re all going forward toward now this new thing that is the new notes document.

**Phil:** Yeah. And I think for the listener that would, you know, just as an internal process I think that is really helpful to just write out your plan and maybe even write out your feelings about it. Write out how you feel about what’s going on in the second act that’s really bothering you.

Or the other thing I find useful is to go back to – and it goes back to this sort of islands concept – go back to listing, for yourself, what are the scenes that absolutely this movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Phil:** What is this movie? Period. And then anything else can be – has to arrange itself around that. And I think that’s helpful to just keep your kind of self together when you’re approaching the second draft.

**John:** What Matt pitches about the document, what’s good about sending through that document to your collaborators is it reminds everybody what the actual plan was. Because they may have forgotten what their notes were, what they talked about in the room. But if you say like this is what I’m going to do, they can respond to that. But even if they don’t respond to that when you turn in that draft they may still not love it. There may still be new issues. But at least to see this is what he said he was going to do. This is what he did. They can see the work that you actually put into it.

**Phil:** Yeah. And they also might be able to tell you like, oh, wait a second, I see that you’re planning on changing this part. I really love that. I think that’s so important. Can we find a way to modify that so it still fits? And so it’s wonderful when you have people fighting for things that they like in the script. And that’s what I always find just in any notes process. When I am asked to give notes to someone or to come up with a plan for someone, like that’s what’s helpful. There’s this sort of idea that you’re supposed to, it’s just this cage match of awful brutality, where I think it’s like hearing what is really the thing and what’s really great that just orients you.

**Matt:** When we’re talking about a script with somebody and giving them notes and ideas, sometimes you find it through the discussion. So like if you think of a studio notes document which is a list of questions, they’re kind of looking for something. And it might not be there yet and so you have to work through it as opposed to like take that in silence, go off and do it. You know what I mean? It takes a lot of discussion sometimes.

**John:** Yeah. So the response document is sort of continuing that discussion and so it may be a way of getting that down on paper. Some questions from listeners. “I just read your blog answering a question about sending a script to an actor. I have written a script in which the actor’s name is in the title and he would have a role. What is the best way to get it to him? Do I send a synopsis to his agent? The script to his agent? Do I send it to his agency care of the actor? How do I get this actor to read my script?”

Good lord.

**Phil:** Wow.

**John:** Yeah. So Being John Malkovich or something.

**Phil:** Yeah. I don’t know if it’s any different than any other script I guess would be the main thing because I think who knows. There might be actors out there who would be so curious to see that they’re being portrayed in a script that if they just caught wind of it they would want to check it out. I wonder if it would be harder to get an agent to give that to their client depending.

**John:** The right actor I could see being sort of curious enough about it, like if you’re writing a Michael Ironside feature, totally.

**Phil:** Oh yeah. Get it to Ironside. Now.

**John:** Get it to Ironside. Nothing better than Ironside. If it’s a megastar that you’re going after it’s going to be a challenge regardless. And I think there’s always the worry do you look like a stalker.

**Phil:** Yeah. It’s a rare – and that’s the thing. You’re taking such a big swing. And I’m usually also – I’m very fond of the idea of taking a big swing. Like you might as well. So in a way that’s really bold. And if you have the goods to back it up then you have the goods to back it up. But you have to be aware that you are definitely – you’re also making it impossible to make a movie without getting that one person. And in any movie if there was ever a script that we wrote that was like if this one person isn’t going to do it it will not exist, that’s pretty rough.

**John:** I will say that most times when you see an actor’s name listed in the title of the script it wasn’t because they really thought that one actor was going to do it. It’s because it’s a way of signaling what’s unique about the script. It’s a way of getting attention for the script. It gets on a list. It gets passed around the Black List because everyone says it’s really funny. This wild sex comedy with Wilford Brimley. There’s something about it that makes people want to pass it around.

**Phil:** Yeah. That’s interesting. And that may be in fact – that may be the point. It’s hard to know where this person is headed. But that idea of if it’s the right name it’s going to make somebody more likely just to pick it up.

**Matt:** I think sadly though if you’re not going through traditional channels, like if you’re not doing this through your lawyer or manager or agent the cold approach just is so rarely successful I think.

**John:** I think you’re right. Chris writes, “I’ve introduced a doctor into my script who has a fairly important role and I’m wondering what is the best way to write her action and dialogue? Wendy versus Dr. Patterson. Her first name seems more economical and she asks one of the main characters to call her by her first name, so it would be consistent. But is it confusing to go with her first name, or does it lose respect?”

So, you guys, what is your basic guideline for a character name for a doctor character. It says it’s an important character, so probably not the principal character.

**Phil:** Yeah, I would say if it’s not the principal character you use Doctor because I feel that just is doing a lot of work for you. And whether you call that character Dr. Johnson or Dr. Wendy, you know what I mean, you can actually say some things about the character.

**Matt:** Also it seems important to the writer that we continually know that this person is a doctor. So even if Dr. Wendy comes over to your house late at night it’s like, oh, it’s interesting because it’s Dr. Wendy.

**John:** Yeah. I would say in terms of the character cue, like the character name above dialogue, it’s weird to put the Doctor there unless it’s actually sort of part of the joke or part of just reminding like, oh, that person really is a doctor. There are characters in scripts where I’ll have like, you know, Mrs. Van Owen and I’ll keep that Mrs. there because Van Owen by itself you might lose her gender. You might sort of forget who it is if that person hasn’t shown up for a long time.

**Phil:** Sounds like a police sergeant.

**John:** So that’s reasons why you might want to keep the Mrs. And every script is going to be different, but the decision to go with the character’s first name versus their last name really tells us a lot about sort of how personal they are with the main character and sort of where they fit into the world. It can be confusing to have a lot of first names. It can be confusing to have a lot of last names. So finding a balance is important.

**Phil:** Yeah. I think it’s actually a really great question because it is another opportunity to teach people about those people and the tone of the thing. And I think for example in Destroyer the character–

**John:** Is it Bell or Erin in the character cue?

**Phil:** Erin Bell. She’s written as Bell always.

**John:** I was going to guess it was Bell.

**Phil:** It is Bell. And she’s never written as Detective Bell. Whereas other detectives that appear in the movie are Detective Kudra. That’s how they’re referred to. And also there are some honorifics. It’s funny, it’s easier to write Det. Kudra than it is to write Officer Kudra. Like you have a scene with Officer Kudra, Officer Kudra. You wouldn’t do that. I think you would just call them Kudra. And Doctor is a similar thing. You can write Dr. and that actually just to your eye – you’re used to seeing that. And if you’re spelling it out you think it’s like maybe it’s a drug dealer or something like that.

**Matt:** If they’re always functioning in the capacity of their job, Doctor, but if the main character is a doctor.

**Phil:** It’s actually sort of funny. Can you imagine a romantic comedy the person that’s their job is a doctor, but they’re just referred to as–?

**Matt:** Because they have a Ph.D.

**Phil:** Dr. Rehoboth. And they’re just falling in love. It’s the story of Steve and Dr. Rehoboth falling in love.

**John:** I guess an important thing to remember is that we’re talking about the words that you’re seeing on paper, but that’s not the same experience as what an audience is going to have in a theater. And so always be thinking about like, OK, I’m writing this on this page but what’s going to be seen on the screen is going to be very, very different. So, if we’re not going to be thinking of that character as a doctor with that line that they’re saying, don’t put the Dr. there. If it’s really all about them being the doctor we’re going to be seeing them in a lab coat. Putting that Dr. in front of their dialogue will help us remember sort of the context for all this stuff.

**Matt:** Yeah.

**John:** Last question is probably a simple one. Gary from Orlando writes, “Is there a preference for using the term montage or series of shots? From what I understand they both convey a similar visual but I would like to know from some pros which they use and how they use it.” Do you guys use the word montage? Do you use series of shots? How are you indicating a series of bum-bum-bum-bum-bum-bum?

**Matt:** I think more often than not we write “series of shots” only because – and this is just idiosyncratic – like montage to me in my mind is Love Story, you know what I mean, or like a romantic.

**Phil:** Someone is dancing and singing into their hairbrush when you use the montage going on. Which is delightful.

**Matt:** It’s obviously not just that. But series of shots, for some reason it just feels–

**Phil:** It’s tonal actually. There’s times when we’ve used, we’ve definitely used both, but I think Matt is right that it’s like series of shots. And then usually we do series of shots. Or often for us it’s more something like “Images – Colon – Dash – this image – Dash – this image – Dash – this image.”

**Matt:** Also, montage to me sometimes feels like we’re cueing music.

**Phil:** And it feels meta to me. It actually feels like removed when I see “Montage.” I feel like I’m now just watching a movie and I’m not inside the thing. And the immediacy seems less to me. I mean, this is all idiosyncratic. Other people might feel differently. But I think that’s probably why we lean away from calling something a montage and just like if we can not even labeling it, or just getting the little–

**John:** Yeah. A lot of times I will drop out either term. It will just be clearly a series of shots and there will just be slug lines of what it is you are seeing and it gets the same effect.

**Matt:** Yeah. Or just bullet points.

**Phil:** And then later we have to put the slug lines back in because the line producer is yelling at us.

**John:** “I need the slug lines.” I think the other thing that ruined montage for me was to American World Police you need a montage. And so then you hear that word enough and you’re like, OK, I’m [crosstalk] that kind of development.

**Phil:** It changed history in so many ways.

**John:** I forgot to warn you because Craig wasn’t here about One Cool Things. Did you guys come prepared with One Cool Things?

**Phil:** I know this show.

**John:** He knows the show well.

**Phil:** Front and backwards. I know it.

**John:** Phil Hay, will you start us off with a One Cool Thing?

**Phil:** I have One Cool Thing that I’m so sad that Craig is not here for this because it’s baseball oriented.

**John:** Oh my.

**Phil:** And Craig and I really share a love of baseball.

**John:** How do you have time for baseball? Baseball just feels like it’s just time to follow a thing that I just can’t care about.

**Phil:** John, that’s OK for you. Well, I coach baseball now. I coach my son’s baseball team, so it has kind of become the thing that I’ve arranged my life around. And so it’s reawakened my love for baseball, which I’ve always had. So there’s this Twitter, what do you call it, Twitter handle, a Twitter person, a Tweeter.

**Matt:** What’s up, old man?

**Phil:** Oh, god, I know. Called Pitching Ninja. It’s @PitchingNinja. And it’s a guy named Rob Friedman who is a pitching coach. And he has collected these incredible little gifs. It is a gif, is it jiff? I’m still getting older and older.

**John:** I say gif. There’s controversy, but gif makes much more sense.

**Phil:** So he’s collected these. He’s overlaid different pitches from the same pitcher. So if you are at all interested in baseball, if you play baseball for sure, but if you just love baseball and the kind of weird – there’s definitely parts, some of these images that crossover into kind of beautiful art. These incredible almost like mechanical drawings of the human body doing something incredible. So @PitchingNinja is my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Very nice.

**Matt:** Very nice.

**John:** Matt, what you got?

**Matt:** I was thinking about it because I knew this was coming and first it was going to be my six-foot iPhone charging cord which is really–

**John:** So it’s a long charging cord so you can sit on the coach.

**Matt:** Yeah, or at a hotel, or anything. I mean, that is One Cool Thing.

**Phil:** We’re not going to say it’s not cool.

**Matt:** No, but my daughter had a bake sale today.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Matt:** And she has this girls group and they are raising money – they were raising money to support the bees. And the organization it went to is called Backwards Beekeepers which is a Los Angeles group of treatment free bee keepers and they support feral bee colonies. So I’m giving them a shout out. People out there trying to make the world better.

**John:** Yeah. Bees. Bees are good.

**Matt:** So we saved them.

**John:** Yeah. You saved all the bees. One bake sale is all it took.

**Matt:** No one needs to do anything.

**John:** No colonies are collapsing.

**Matt:** Last year they saved the rhinos, so we’re good with those.

**Phil:** What’s next?

**Matt:** I don’t know.

**John:** The universe. My One Cool Thing is a show called Great News. Did you guys watch Great News?

**Matt:** No.

**John:** Not enough people watched Great News. So it was an NBC show that lasted two seasons. It was canceled after last season. But it showed up on Netflix. And so I knew of it in a general sense. And so it’s executive produced by Robert Carlock and Tina Fey who did 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Same music by Jeff Richmond. So it feels like it’s in that universe.

It is a workplace comedy that takes place at a television station. It’s 30 Rock-ish. It’s Mindy Project-ish. But it’s created by Tracey Wigfield who also plays a character on the show and it is delightful. And so it’s a show that I wish was still on and was making much more episodes. But they’re all there on Netflix. And so I think in a weird way it’s probably more successful seeing it all together as a block because it does build on itself in a really nice way. So it was a good little half hour comedy if you want an extra Tina Fey/Mindy Kaling style comedy. It’s there. It’s on Netflix. It’s called Great News.

**Matt:** Sounds good.

**Phil:** So nice when you discover something like that. Just thriving in the wild.

**John:** Tracey Wigfield, you made a good show. So I’m hoping she’s going to make other cool, good shows.

**Phil:** Right on.

**John:** That is our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. 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. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get 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.

If they want to see your movie they should go to see it in theaters on which day?

**Phil:** If you live in Los Angeles or New York City you can see it on Christmas Day.

**John:** So December 25th in New York/Los Angeles.

**Phil:** And then in the following weeks more and more cities. It will be everywhere on January 25th.

**John:** Great. But what if they are in Australia or what if they’re in London?

**Phil:** I don’t have – London will be January 25th. And it is actually being released all around the world. So if you tweet at me and you want to know where it is in your country I promise I will look it up.

**John:** How can they tweet at you? What is your handle?

**Phil:** It’s @Phillycarly.

**John:** Yes. There will be a link in the show notes. Matt, do you have a Twitter handle?

**Matt:** I’m @mattrmanfredi.

**John:** I also recommend that you follow Matt on Instagram because he takes photos of trees and bushes and pipes that he finds that are beautiful.

**Matt:** Yes. Manfredeus, like a Roman emperor.

**Phil:** Or an international conglomerate that is a front for political conspiracy.

**Matt:** Yes.

**John:** You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scripnotes.net. That’s where you can listen to Episode 199 or whatever episode you were on before where you talked about The Invitation which is also still great and available where you find movies.

**Phil:** Right on.

**John:** And people should see that movie because it’s really, really good. I really–

**Phil:** Thank you, John.

**John:** And I think I’m going to be hosting some sort of Q and A with you guys at some point for Destroyer.

**Phil:** We have many of those coming up.

**John:** I’m excited to watch it with you guys and talk to you about it. Guys, thank you so much for coming in.

**Matt:** Thank you.

**Phil:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Tickets](https://go.wgfoundation.org/campaigns/8810-the-scriptnotes-holiday-live-show) are on sale for the Holiday Live Show!
* Thanks for joining us, [Phil Hay](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0006534/?ref_=tt_ov_wr) and [Matt Manfredi](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0542062/)!
* [Episode 244: The Invitation, and Requels](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-invitation-and-requels)
* [Commercial actors can get paid for excessive auditioning](https://johnaugust.com/Assets/2016_commercials_ex_e_audition_form_0.pdf)
* [Destroyer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqHaLUoiWZU) is in US theaters December 25, 2018
* [@PitchingNinja](https://twitter.com/PitchingNinja)
* [Backwards Beekeepers](http://www.backwardsbeekeepers.com/), and having a 6 foot charging cable
* [Great News](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_News), created by Tracey Wigfield
* 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
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_377.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/austin-2018-three-page-challenge).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So today’s episode is the live Three Page Challenge we recorded at the Austin Film Festival a few weeks ago. There is some swearing, so keep that in mind if you’re listening in the car with your kids. If you’d like to see another live show with me and Craig and a bunch of other great guests we just started selling tickets to the December live show, December 12th at 8pm in Hollywood. So if you want a ticket for that you can go to the link in the show notes or to wgafoundation.org. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is the Three Page Challenge of Scriptnotes. And so what we do on a Three Page Challenge is we invite folks to send in the first three pages of their script. It can be a feature, it can be a TV pilot. It’s not always the first three pages, but it’s usually the first three pages. It’s confusing if it’s not the first three pages. And we talk about what we’ve read.

And so a crucial thing we should all note is that these are not necessarily the best things we’ve read. They’re the things that have the most interesting stuff to talk about. So, people were brave enough to send them in, so we always commend the folks who are brave to send their work out so we can all discuss it in this room and on the air. So let’s applaud for all these folks.

**Craig:** And we should thank our producer, Megan, who is the one that makes these selections. In a sense, the people here are slightly less brave than the usual people because we’re nicer in person. It’s just sort of a–

**John:** Well, except that they’re also brave because they’re going to come up. That’s the difference between the live thing. They’re actually going to come up and talk to us about the things they wrote which–

**Craig:** It’s a wash. They’re about as brave as everybody else.

**John:** They’re just about as brave as any normal people. And they’re braving a hot day, a very cold air-conditioned room for us to talk about this.

**Craig:** It’s freezing up here. But we do have another thing going for us on this kind of Three Page Challenge which is we have help.

**John:** We do have help. So with help in the form of guest analyzers of scripts. First off let’s welcome up Lindsay Doran. The legendary Lindsay Doran. Lindsay is a producer whose credits include Stranger than Fiction, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, Dead Again. Executive producer on The Firm, Sabrina. She’s the former President and CEO of United Artists. She is right now the script whisperer. She is the person that people go to help solve script problems. So we are very lucky to have her with us today.

Do you have a microphone Lindsay Doran?

**Lindsay Doran:** Got it.

**John:** We are so excited to have you.

**Lindsay:** Thank you.

**John:** Our other guest is Jewerl Ross. Jewerl Ross is a manager and the founder of Silent R Management. His clients include such names as Barry Jenkins, Matthew Aldrich, Jack Stanley, Our Lady J, Evan Endicott, and Hannah Schneider.

**Craig:** That’s where the real bravery is. A manager shows up at the Austin Screenwriting Film Festival. That’s impressive.

**Jewerl Ross:** Glad to be here.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Before we get started talking about these three page samples, I want to talk about reading scripts overall because the two of you must read an enormous quantity of scripts and you’re probably reading them for different reasons. So I’m guessing Lindsay you’re often reading scripts for things that are in development and things that are going hopefully into production. And you have an eye for what are the challenges, what are the problems, how can we make this script better. But you’re not doing the basic filtering at this point. Like you’re not reading terrible things. You’re reading maybe pretty good things that need to become great. Is that fair for what you’re doing right now?

**Lindsay:** Yeah.

**John:** Microphones are so helpful for a recorded podcast.

**Lindsay:** Here I thought you and I were just talking.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Lindsay:** So when I nod it doesn’t really do you any good? Yeah. So that’s true.

**John:** That’s true. And are most of your conversations these days with the writers, or with studios and producers who are coming to you for guidance on scripts?

**Lindsay:** Both. Both absolutely. I mean, I’m usually hired by studios but then I end up in the rooms with the writers. Once and a while things are in such bad shape that it’s about how do we get this in the kind of shape that we could even give it to a writer to do something with. Craig knows what I’m talking about there.

**Craig:** I didn’t write that one.

**Lindsay:** [laughs] But, no, a lot of the time I’m working directly with the writers.

**John:** And Jewerl, are you still filtering, because I feel like early on in your career you probably were just reading a ton of stuff and having to just triage like is this even a person I should consider as a client.

**Jewerl:** True.

**John:** Are you still doing that now, or you have so many people that you–

**Jewerl:** No. I’m lucky that I have enough people to filter things and so hopefully the things – I’m only reading client stuff, current clients, and things that my people think are great. And occasionally, you know, if something comes well recommended. Like if Lindsay sends me a script but I give it to my people and my people are like Jewerl don’t read it, I will occasionally say, “Well, I like Lindsay a lot. She has great taste.” So I’ll dip into their pile every so often.

**John:** So, how far into a script do you need to read before you see that this is a person who has a talent, has a voice, has an interesting thing. How long does it take you to get into a script before you get that sense?

**Jewerl:** You know, I can get that in two pages.

**John:** We gave you a third.

**Jewerl:** I mean, you can certainly see a bad script on page one. You know, but there was a script that was on the Black List that one of my clients was attached to direct at one point. I’ll remember the name in a minute. That the writing was so magical. The world was so interesting. I mean, it was like – I think about that script often because that’s what I want to feel right away. Like I’m in the hands of someone special.

You know, like craft is interesting and figuring out how to – act breaks is interesting. But what’s more interesting is someone who is doing something so differently. That has a perspective on the world that’s so different. And I did get that this year. I signed this 23-year-old kid out of Penn. His professor called me and said, “This guy is a genius and I’ve heard about you.” And so she sent me the script and it was the weirdest thing. It broke every screenwriting rule.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**Jewerl:** It took me five hours to read it.

**Craig:** Oh, cool.

**Jewerl:** And I think he’s a genius.

**Craig:** It broke every screenwriting rule. It broke every screenwriting rule. Remember that. Love it.

**Lindsay:** It started at the end.

**Craig:** We’ve already seen that. That was already a movie.

**John:** It was white letters on black paper.

**Craig:** Ooh. I would read that.

**John:** Lindsay, how quickly – he says he can do it in two pages. When do you get a sense of when a writer has a voice?

**Lindsay:** I try to be more generous than that, even though I do completely understand why the first page tells you an awful lot. The second page tells you an awful lot. I do a thing that I did yesterday morning called The First Ten Pages based on the situation I had with Dead Again where I found out later on that Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson were reading a ton of scripts at the same time. He had just made Henry V and he was getting sent a million things and he was touring the world with King Lear and Midsummer Night’s Dream and they were carrying around dozens, and dozens, and dozens of scripts.

So they just said we’re just going to read the first ten pages of everything and if we don’t like it we’re going to throw it away. And they had a huge trash can in their dressing room at the theaters. And when they read the first ten pages of Dead Again they missed their cue. Because they were so excited and they couldn’t wait to get off stage so they could keep reading.

So that is in my mind. And I do remember the first time I ever read Scott Frank. The first time I read Little Man Tate I called the agent on page 11 and said I don’t have to read anymore. I just want to meet this guy. And I know when Emma Thompson was reading Stranger than Fiction she called me on page 11 and said I don’t have to read anymore. So, I do know that it can make an impression on you that quickly.

**Craig:** Yeah. It would seem it’s a lot harder to determine how far to read to decide that somebody is great. But it should be fairly easy to determine that somebody is absolutely never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to qualify as a screenwriter. That you can sometimes see in four words.

**John:** Craig, I want to push back a little on that.

**Craig:** Go for it. You think you can get it down to two words?

**John:** Some of what we’re talking about is voice and vision. But some of what we’re talking about is purely craft. And sometimes you read stuff where the writer clearly has not read a lot of screenplays and doesn’t have a sense of what the form is. So they’re really struggling with the form and having a hard time understanding–

**Craig:** I would never turn something aside because the form was incorrect. It’s just sometimes you can read a few things and you realize just the mind is not a particularly strong mind. I mean, you guys have read things, right, where you’re like–

**Jewerl:** You guys are harsher than I am. Geez.

**Craig:** Oh, you have no idea.

**Jewerl:** Geez, I’m going to like you.

**John:** I mean, some of the things that knock it out quickly for me is when it’s halfway through the first page and I’m already on a cliché. And there’s no spin on the cliché. You’re just in this really rote moment. And it’s like, OK, if you’re doing that so early I don’t have good faith that it’s going to be worth my time to do it. And really what we’re talking about, reading a screenplay is an act of faith. If I’m going to give you an hour, two hours, five hours of my time, and the writer says I’m going to make it worth your while to do that. And there’s trust and faith. And if you break that trust, that sort of social contract between the writer and the reader, that’s a problem. And that contract starts on page one.

**Lindsay:** When I was doing my First Ten Pages workshop yesterday morning two of the scripts, the worst writing in the scripts were in the first page and a half. They were both things where they were putting the bomb under the table. You know, they were setting up the thriller underneath the other stuff. And once I got to the other stuff the writing was really sound and really good. They just didn’t know how to do that whole other thing.

So, and yet I was trying to convey that a lot of people will just put it down after a page and a half. If you’re not on the top of your game on page one. At that workshop I talk a lot about how everybody who reads your script has too much to read. Would rather be doing something else. They’re exhausted and distracted. So that’s what you’re up against. And that’s what we’re up against with the audience really. They may have paid the ticket, but they’re still thinking about a lot of other things before the lights go down.

So we have to grab people who would rather be thinking about something else or doing something else. That’s the job.

**Jewerl:** You know, I never stop reading at page two. I always give someone ten, 20, 30 pages. You know, I’ve been developing a TV pilot with Howard Gordon who produced 24 and some other big television shows.

**Craig:** X-Files. I think he was on X-Files.

**Jewerl:** Yeah, all these big television shows. And I stopped feeling bad because he has this thing where if there’s a logic problem on page 12 he can’t go to page 13. He’s like we have to fix the logic problem here before I can get to the – it’s an OCD thing with him. And I’ve appreciated that because it’s like when there are too many logic problems for me they’ve lost me. I can’t – I’m not longer in fantasy. I’m in why do you suck.

**Lindsay:** You think he’s meaner than you. Wow.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s hope he doesn’t repeat those words.

**Craig:** I can outdo that. I can absolutely go – that was positively Amadeusian. That was the greatest laugh I’ve ever heard. That was amazing.

**Jewerl:** I still want to figure out the name of that script. The three pages. I’ve been looking at my phone and I can’t figure it out.

**Craig:** The one that you loved, loved, loved?

**Jewerl:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well we should probably deal with these three pages.

**John:** We should. So I’m going to look at my phone and I’m going to read the summary for this first script. So as a reminder if you are in this audience and want to read along the pages with us, or if you’re at home listening to this podcast you can go to johnaugust.com/aff2018. Or if you’re listening to the podcast you can just click the links there. This is Night Trauma by Athena Frost.

We open in a boy’s bedroom in Chicago where 50-year-old Raimond Fanon is performing a ritual with incense. The young boy clings to his mother. Aimee Fanon, a woman in her mid-20s says the boy needs to stay in order to draw it out.

Raimond says that Connor Leidenfrost should remain outside, but Connor says my monster, my fight. Raimond begins chanting. The room begins to shake violently. Something bursts out of the closet, moving so fast we can’t finally see it until it ends up atop Connor. The monster is six-feet tall and thin as a broomstick, with sharp claws that cut down to Connor’s body armor. Raimond magically holds the creature and shouts to cut off its head.

Aimee dispatches it with Connor’s knife.

We cut to a hospital in Seattle where an Asian man in his 20s pushes his way into a critical care room. There, doctors Foster and Goralczyk are working on a gunshot victim. And that’s where we’re at on the bottom of the first three pages.

Lindsay, do you want to start us off? Talk about your first impressions going through these three pages.

**Lindsay:** Well, Craig knows that I have this thing about where is everybody standing. It drives him crazy. He thinks it drives other writers I work with crazy.

**Craig:** Only because they told me so.

**Lindsay:** Oh well, OK. If you’re going to go with that. So, I have to say my first impression was I couldn’t tell where anybody was standing. You start in the room. It’s boy’s room. But then the character comes into the room. I couldn’t tell whether those other people were in the room. So I was just confused and there’s – I work a lot with Phil Lord and Chris Miller on their movies and they always refer to me as Captain Clarity because if I can’t get past the clarity of the situation I have a really hard time getting engaged.

So, for example, I thought Connor was the father for a while because he talked about my monster, and so I thought that’s why he was there. But then he seemed to already know those other people and he was the one with the knife. So I guess he must work with them, but they don’t seem to like him. I was having such a hard time. Because I love the situation. I love being in a situation where it’s so scary and you need the boy to draw it out. Aye-aye-aye. What the heck? All of that seemed really, really good to me, but I was so troubled by the clarity of the situation that it was getting in the way of the suspense of the situation for me.

**Jewerl:** I totally agree. The geography of the room–

**Lindsay:** See?

**Jewerl:** Is impossible to know. Like for example, paragraph three, “He pulls out a small gray puck,” and I highlight the word puck. I don’t know what a puck is. “From his bag and lights it on top of an incense burner.”

OK, so he has a bag. He can light something while holding the bag and put it on an incense burner. I’m trying to imagine him doing that and I can’t imagine him doing it because I would need a third arm to do all of those things and hold those things.

And then you say he edges slowly into the room. Well, you’ve already told me that I’m in the interior of the room. And so how can he come into the room that he’s already in? And then when you introduce, mother has dialogue next, and mother says, “What is he doing?” Well, you’ve only described Raimond and you’ve described Raimond already in the room. You never told me that mother even existed. And so now I’m thinking she’s off-screen. She’s like – she’s saying something and you just didn’t write OS or something.

Like I don’t know – and so then I read more and there are more characters there and I’m like I was scared. I thought we were doing something where people were magically maybe appearing. Maybe he’s having a fantasy sequence. That they’re not really alive. I didn’t know if there were real characters in the room at that moment.

**John:** So geography was the first thing I underlined on the page because I got confused where we were. But I felt like if you’re introducing characters in the middle of the scene that totally works, but you need to tell us that we’re not supposed to see that they’re there until they start speaking. So like the word reveal is useful. So like we reveal a young boy clinging to the mother’s waist. Then it’s that sense of like OK now we’re seeing this kid for the first time.

If you set up the mother but we hadn’t seen the boy, and then you used reveal to show that the boy was clinging to his mother, that’s great. Then you’re adding to the scene versus just piling more stuff on.

The challenge with so many characters in a scene, I got really confused who was driving the scene. Who was in charge of the scene?

**Lindsay:** Right.

**John:** Because my assumption would be that it would be Raimond because he’s the first character who spoke. He’s the first character we meet. He’s not the first character who speaks. So I assumed that he was going to be driving the scene. But it seems like Connor is. And ultimately Aimee is. And we don’t know enough about any of them to sort of really have a sense of who has the storytelling power in the scene and through whose eyes were supposed to be watching this thing unfurl.

**Craig:** These people are terribly mean. Let me be very, very nice to you for a second.

**Lindsay:** Living up to his reputation.

**Craig:** Exactly. No, everything they’ve said is true and we’ll get around to it, and then I’ll be worse. But what I like a lot is that there is a situation. I’m not – it’s sort of reminded me a little bit of Constantine. It had a little bit of a Constantine kind of vibe to it, but it was different. I loved the description of the monster and so I’ll just do a quick little thing here.

I loved the way you did this. This monster appears through sound, which was wonderful. And then we couldn’t find him. It says, “The sound is continuously getting louder. It is in the room somewhere but we can’t see it directly. A flash here. In the corner of the eye there.” I can imagine that and I’m feeling it which is great. “Raimond motions for everyone to stop moving. No one can hear anything anymore.” That’s cool. I can see that. I can feel that. “He stands calmly in the middle of the room and pushes the incense away from him, talking quietly.” Then it says, “All sound stops,” which means that you’ve done that twice, right? You know that because nobody could hear anything else. But that’s a side.

What I loved was I’m learning about him and how he responds to things around him. I’m learning about his character through this action and his choices, which is great. And then the description of the monster is wonderful. “Over six feet tall but as thin as a broomstick, it glares at the three of them through shiny black eyes. Tufts of lint hang on to its glistening body. Its skin looks like it’s wet with syrupy tar. It spews out its previous meal of skin and hair and cloth.” I mean, I don’t know exactly what it looks like but that’s so cool. And so I kind of imagine this creepy, gross, like oily laundry monster. So amazing.

There’s all this really cool shit going on. But now here’s what’s going on. Why they’re confused I think in part is you’ve left them too much room to fill in. The human mind is expert at filling in gaps. That’s how we move through the world because we don’t see everything happening. We fill in gaps. So he starts to fill in gaps. I didn’t see her in the room. I’m hearing her voice. She must be outside of the room. Two or three of those mistakes in a row and everyone is completely lost.

So, I will absolutely be Captain Clarity with you as well. You can’t go into a room if you’re already in the room. There’s a point here where the mom says to her son, “Don’t worry. I won’t let it past this door.” What door? They’re already in the room. So are they just outside of the room? Are they in the hallway? Are they looking through the room? This is where I’m totally like you because what I think you need to do is set your stage. Just think about how to set this stage. John is absolutely right that there’s no real strong perspective in the scene.

So, when we talk about perspective we mean to say, for instance, “RAIMOND FANON (50s) looks a bit Rastafarian at first glance with his dreads and dark skin, but he carries himself…” Great description there. Black Dumbledore. Amazing. And then mother. I would do that off screen. What is he doing? Raimond turns to see an old woman standing there with a younger woman and a son. She’s scared. The young – you know? Put it in his perspective. Let that motivation. See what I mean?

When we’re shooting scenes that’s how we break down how to do it. Someone’s head turns to see something. And it’s his perspective because I think you’re right. It feels like it’s his scene.

The only other thing I would mention to you is the – I don’t know who Connor Leidenfrost is. I don’t know how he fits into this. Here’s what my mind did. My mind saw that Connor Leidenfrost – just from his name I went sounds white. Then nods to Aimee as he follows Raimond into the room. Nods to Aimee. Friend? Husband? Boyfriend? Not sure.

“He’s a handsome, corn-fed Midwesterner,” nailed the white, and then it says, “Accent and all the backward thought that comes with it.” And I went, oh, racist. Wait, hold on. What’s this racist doing with all these black people? Just reasonable.

**Lindsay:** That’s why I thought he was the father.

**Craig:** Wait, what?

**Lindsay:** There’s a mother and a son. I thought he was the father of that child.

**Craig:** The racist father?

**Lindsay:** Well I didn’t know where else he could fit into this thing. Eventually I realized–

**Craig:** OK. So I wasn’t really sure. You can see where we’re all really, really puzzled. And when he says, “My monster, my fight,” then I thought, OK, he seems to work with Raimond, so maybe they’re like a team. But he’s a racist? So I’m trying to figure out, OK, then what’s Raimond’s feeling about him and how does that work? And also all you’ve really told me is you’ve told me he’s a racist. But nothing he’s doing here is racist. So don’t tell me he’s a racist now. Reveal it later when it’s going to shock us and we’re going to go, oh, that explains why – really it’s just more like he seems like this perfectly fine person except that his partner is like, eh. You know what I mean? It’s all about that perspective.

So, anyway, oh, final, final thing. When all the clothes get torn away it says, “Clothes rip away to body armor.” Body armor underneath regular clothes for a guy like this is a bit surprising. This is one area where you might want to think about all-capping that, or underlining, or something. Just so that the reader doesn’t just go right past it. Because that’s actually really interesting.

**John:** It’s a really cool detail. Because it shows that he was prepared. It’s a surprise that you’re giving us, which is awesome. So, give yourself some weight on the page so we can see that and know that it’s a really cool moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. But there’s a really good thing going on here. Like I actually want to keep – I want to see what happens. I just think – take this all in. This is all kind of the best possible sort of mistake in that it’s super-duper fixable.

**John:** Yeah. You know what the great thing is. She’s just not a voice on the other end listening to us. She’s actually here. Athena Frost, can you come up and take a chair here?

**Craig:** And you know I’m so happy that Megan picked Athena’s work because Athena has been to many of our shows.

**John:** I recognized her name. I was curious whether she’d actually been on a Three Page Challenge before.

**Craig:** She’s a physicist.

**John:** I like physicists.

**Athena:** Astrophysicist.

**Craig:** Astro. She’s an astrophysicist.

**Lindsay:** Oh my god. So you’re a rocket scientist.

**Athena:** No, no, no, no. I’m not an engineer.

**Craig:** No, no, no, no. Those were the applied people here. She’s more theoretical. All right.

**John:** So, Athena, so what we’ve talked through here, you obviously have a geography in your head, and so what we were thinking about with like they’re mostly in the hall but some of them are going into the room. Were we right there?

**Athena:** Yeah. That’s what’s going on.

**John:** Are the three characters, so are Connor and Raimond and Aimee, are they the three main characters we’re going to follow in the course of this story?

**Athena:** Yes, they are.

**John:** And this kind of monster we saw in the first one is the first of many monsters we’re going to see in the course of the story?

**Athena:** Three for three. Yes.

**John:** All right. So what I think is good about this is I was able to make the right assumptions about what kind of script this was and what kind of movie I was going into based on these first three pages which is awesome. Because there’s nothing worse than like you’ve read something and you’re like this feels like a thriller and then you come up and tell us, “No, no, it’s a goofy romantic comedy.” And then it’s like, ah.

**Craig:** Tonally it was consistent. I think we all kind of probably saw the same thing happening, so that was great.

**John:** What world is this happening in? I had a hard time figuring out what kind of universe this was. What city are we in? What does this feel like?

**Craig:** And what time period?

**John:** Is it present day?

**Athena:** Yeah. So this is present day. It takes place in Chicago on the south side, which is where I’m from. And so the idea is that it’s a supernatural TV show that takes place in a hospital. So later you’re going to find out that Aimee is the head nurse of the ER. And that Connor Leidenfrost is a doctor.

**John:** It feels like you changed some stuff there or you’re not quite sure.

**Athena:** No, no, no. I mean, he’s a doctor to most people, but he essentially took over this other guy who died. Like weird backstory.

**John:** So where are you at in the process of writing this? This is whole thing done? Is this something you’re working on right now?

**Athena:** Yeah. The whole thing is done. I know that I need another rewrite and essentially very related to you all’s notes which is that I need to make some things more clear. A lot of times people are like left with questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, you know, it’s always that game we play of mystery versus confusion. Keep the mystery. Avoid the confusion. One thing to think about on a page one sort of thing now that we know where this is set is the very first thing people see will be – it will kind of help them understand what you’re going for and what’s special about your show.

So, for instance, in this case you’re in the south side of Chicago, but I would never know it. This could be any year. He’s pulling out incense and he seems a little old-fashioned in a way. So, if I heard or saw through a window South Side of Chicago and then just moved away from that to this weird situation that doesn’t feel like the typical South Side Chicago story that would be kind of cool.

Just something to get us into your world.

**John:** Or to the establishing shot that sort of begins this thing where you can paint a picture of what neighborhood we’re in would really help anchor us and sort of know that we’re in a specific place and time that’s going to carry through.

But this sounds cool. In your head is this more Buffy or is this more Grimm? Is this Grey’s Anatomy with monsters? What is this in your head?

**Athena:** The comps I usually do is Grey’s Anatomy meets Supernatural. More recent ones that people like to do is I think they like to say Gray and Constantine.

**Craig:** Yeah. I definitely had a Constantine vibe. One more thing for you to think about. When you get to the hospital scene at the end, your first scene there has an annoyed nurse, a woman, a child, and an Asian man. That’s four no-named people. So, I’m OK with one no-named person. Maybe two at the most. But I kind of want to know that I don’t have a scene with four day players kind of moving around. Just something to think about there. Cool.

**John:** Athena Frost, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, Athena. Which one should we do next?

**John:** Let’s do The Conch Republic.

**Craig:** Is it Conch or Conch?

**John:** It could be either one.

**Craig:** Conch.

**John:** Conch, sorry. Got the author here.

**Craig:** I have the conch.

**John:** Do you want to read it?

**Craig:** I’ll read the summary, yes. The Conch Republic by Elden Rhoads. We’re on a commercial fishing boat off Key West, Florida. It’s June 1975. Kittens sniff a chum bucket. The fishermen speak a mix of English and Spanish. Eduardo and Hector talk about the kittens and then use them as bait to catch sharks.

Oh, get over it. Felix, 30, is a burly fisherman. Fisherman? Fisherman. Drags Ramon Sanchez, 20s, up from below deck. Sanchez swears he doesn’t know who called the cops. Felix says Sanchez was going to testify against Artie. The men throw Sanchez to the sharks. Notice no one cared that a man was fed to sharks. It’s a human being, but fine.

Cut to one month earlier. In Miami police officer Carmen Soto, 20s, rides in a squad car with partner Cal Lakewood, 40s. Lakewood tells the story of finding a missing woman in a smelly apartment. Soto is unimpressed and keeps eating her sandwich.

And that is our summary for The Conch Republic by Elden Rhoads. So–?

**John:** So, before we get started here we have to – who can raise a hand and tell me what trait we saw in this script? What specific Three Page Challenge phenomenon we witnessed in this script?

**Craig:** Stuart Special.

**John:** It’s a Stuart Special! A Stuart Special is when you go through some time and then you jump back in time to sort of set things up. So, I just want to acknowledge the Stuart Special.

**Craig:** Lives on.

**John:** It lives on even after Stuart Friedel has left us. Jewerl, can you start us off with your first read on Conch Republic and what saw as you were reading through it.

**Jewerl:** I was just looking on my notes and I have a lot of little, little things about language. A lot of little, little things about why you used this language here. But I think overall I really liked these pages.

**John:** What was it that you made you spark to them?

**Jewerl:** It’s vivid. When I was looking at the geography of the boat and the fishing line and the chum in the water and what these guys were doing. And it was clearly gritty. And then we pan and we see these kittens. And at first I wrote why have you introduced kittens on a boat with fishing gear, like you’ve changed the tone of the movie. That was my note right then.

**John:** Yeah. Right then.

**Jewerl:** But then when he puts the kittens on the fishing line and they go into the water and the sharks eat them I’m like, OK. And then when they bring out the man and they throw the man overboard so the shark can eat him, I’m like this is a lot of work to kill someone, but it’s F-ing cool.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** It’s an amazing laugh. Lindsay, what did you read as you were going through this?

**Lindsay:** I don’t disagree with anything you said. But you kill in a kitten in a script and I’m out. I’m out. I’m a proud owner of a brand new kitten. I cannot read about kittens being thrown overboard. Craig will be glad to know I also felt really bad about the guy. I felt really terrible about that.

**Jewerl:** And I happen to be a dog person.

**Lindsay:** See? Good person. Bad person. Can read about kittens/can’t read about kittens. But I think it’s important to say that certain people are going to read this and just say that’s it. I wish I could unread these pages.

**John:** Yeah. Because we’re talking the first three pages. And so as a person who can’t read about – the kittens freaked me out. And so I had a hard time going back and reading it a second time. The second time I was like, OK, you get desensitized to the kitten death. But, here’s what I’ll say on the second read through is that the first read through I was so shocked by the kittens and then the guy gets thrown overboard that I wasn’t paying attention to the dialogue and sort of to what the guy was saying, what Sanchez and Felix, what their dialogue was about. And so I wasn’t really paying attention. There’s something going on between them. Someone is betraying somebody else.

The second time through when the shock wasn’t there so much I was looking at the dialogue and I wasn’t believing the Sanchez/Felix moment. Here’s the reason why. This guy was beaten up down below decks and then is brought up deck. And he’s saying the things I think he probably would have said down below. I didn’t feel like it was his final pleading. I felt like he was saying those things for me and the audience and not for himself in those moments. It didn’t feel real like what he would be saying in those moments.

So, if he’d been blindfolded and then blindfold was off and he realized where he was then I might be able to buy sort of what he’s doing there right now. But I feel like he already knows he’s on a boat. He already knows he’s really screwed. So I need to have a different way in. I always think about how would you direct that actor. What would you be talking to that actor about? I feel like I wouldn’t have the note for him given the lines that are there right now.

**Craig:** We have a typo on the very first line. June has an E at the end of it.

**Elden:** Oh, that’s throughout the script. I just used (inaudible).

**Craig:** Why? I guess later on when I saw Aug or Sep I would know, but here it just looked like Jun. Regardless, I think the best thing about this are the kittens. Here’s the deal. She’s right. You will lose people on the kitten thing. But, the name of the game is not to get the most people to sort of like something. The name of the game is to get one person to fall in love with something. So I thought it was shocking and remarkable. I’ve never seen it before. That alone gets a huge checkmark.

I think in a weird way you didn’t do it enough in a sense, because it’s so shocking you have to kind of build the moment around it. So for instance the first line – well first it says, “On board, KITTENS sniff the chum bucket. Looking closely at the litter, we see they all have six toes.” No we don’t.

**John:** No one will see that.

**Craig:** No one is going to see that. Ever. We’re not looking that close. And you want us to look at all those paws all at the same time? That’s not the way cameras work. And more important, that’s not important right now. There are kittens on a ship. What’s that about?

The first line is Eduardo, “Why all the gatos?” No. No, no, no, no. Everybody should know what the cats are for. The cats are the last thing on their mind. They know what the cats are for. The cats don’t know what the cats are for. But I want to think, right, lull me into a sense of security. Like that these guys are on a fishing trip and they just have cats. They like the cats. Maybe they’re feeding them some of the fish. They’re pets. They’re lovely. It’s fun.

And then when they casually grab one and stick it on a thing we go oh my god. It will come out of nowhere. It will be terrifying. So, that I think is important.

I want to read–

**Lindsay:** Yeah, make it worse.

**Craig:** Yes! Yes. If you’re going to do it, do it is my point. Right? Aim for me. You’re never going to get her. But you can get me, right?

**Lindsay:** Bargain.

**Craig:** This is the second line. I just want to read this. “FISHERMEN, leathery skin burned rusty brown by the tropical sun, monitor their thousand pound test fishing lines plunged 300 feet below the sapphire blue waters.” Do you sense a certain monotony to the rhythm there? So when you have a three-line sentence and it’s da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da without much punctuation or breaking it’s going to start to – you know, people want to skip past that stuff anyway. So, make it a little bit more fun or a little more breaky-choppy.

John is 100% right. This deal with Felix does not work because it’s not real. So we talk about emotional math. We are doing the emotional calculations here and we are immediately coming up with a wrong answer. For instance, they drag him up. “I swear man, you got to believe me. Please. It wasn’t me.”

These are not the most original lines in the world. However, that’s probably what somebody would say there. I believe the math.

He gets hit on the face. He falls to the side of the boat. And then a yellow pool forms between his legs and Felix says, “Damn, he pissed himself.” Felix has seen people piss themselves a thousand times. Felix doesn’t even notice anymore. Felix feeds cats to sharks. This is all in a day’s work for Felix. Let us go – in fact, we learn something when somebody sees a man pee and goes, uh-huh, we learn about them. OK. This ain’t your first man peeing.

**Lindsay:** He’s one of those.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s one of those guys.

**Jewerl:** I’m having so much fun.

**Lindsay:** There’s more challenges here than just the three pages.

**Craig:** And so I think John is right that this feels like an info dump and it’s coming from somebody under emotional distress who is the worst possible choice for an info dump. Because when people are under emotional distress they don’t speak in complete thoughts. They are not concerned with the information anybody else needs. Sometimes they can barely get words out at all. And so you can be interesting and creative about that.

If you need an info dump, he can try to say something and they can say, “Yes, we know. Blah-blah-blah. You said it a thousand times. It’s still not true.” Kick. You know what I mean? Find ways where the emotional math works.

I love this little bit at the end where he’s like, “Whew, not this cat. This is my daughter’s cat.” I thought that was great.

The only issue is I would think maybe to pull it earlier because if you’re going to do a Stuart Special you kind of have to cut on a moment of shock. And this is sort of – the moment of shock is they feed Sanchez to the sharks. Maybe the cat can meow and then cut. But there can’t be probably too much chitchat and then cut. This conversation between Soto and Lakewood, I’m having some emotional math problems here too. I feel like it’s trying very hard to make me feel something about Lakewood. Lakewood is talking to Soto like he’s never been in a car with her before. I mean, are they new partners?

**Elden:** He’s a rookie.

**Craig:** OK, have they been together for more than a day?

**Elden:** It’s very, very early.

**Craig:** Then I need to know that. Even the way he’s telling the story feels so casual, like two partners, and she’s like, “I’m eating my sandwich. You’re so boring with your stories.” So it was a mismatch. If he’s like let me tell you, you’re new, so let me tell you something. Whatever it has to be so we know that they don’t know each very well, then he would tell this story differently.

Also, why this story? Why is he telling it to her? Just to gross her. She’s a cop. You know what I mean? You’ve got to do a lot of that emotional math. And constantly ask is this true. I know I want to do it, but is it true?

**Jewerl:** By the way, for me the most important thing about these three pages, I wanted to read more.

**John:** That’s crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Elden, you’re here. Can you come up and talk to us about so we can know more about.

**Elden:** If there’s anybody from PETA please don’t kill me.

**Craig:** They’re just words. Just words.

**John:** So on the title page it says inspired by actual events. So can you tell us the shortest version of what are the actual events and were kittens harmed?

**Elden:** This is literally a story I heard around the dinner table as a child. Growing up in Key West, very shortly in the ‘70s it was a very big drug trade going on. And it was dark. So, this story just came out of – I thought if I ever told the story about Key West and the Conch Republic this was always the opening scene. Cats were used as bait on commercial fishing boats. And I heard this story many, many times growing up.

And to what you’re saying about the shock value of it, the Ramon character I really had to build it out because I had him just coming up with a blindfold on and being thrown overboard and the first people who read it literally didn’t even notice that a person went overboard and was killed because they were so freaked out–

**Jewerl:** Cat people.

**Elden:** About the cats.

**Craig:** Terrible.

**Elden:** And I’m not like deliberately doing it to be shocking. I’m doing it because this is literally the stories that I heard.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s cool. Don’t apologize for this. It’s awesome.

**Lindsay:** You’re horrible.

**Craig:** I know.

**Elden:** And so I had to expand. They’re like give him some lines. I didn’t even notice that he went overboard. Give him some lines. And what would he say?

So, when you’re saying that I’m like going back and the history of the rewrites and saying, OK, I was little clumsy here because I’m just trying to force this dialogue in here so people are paying attention.

**Craig:** I have an idea. Do you want an idea? I don’t know if it’s right or not, but what you could do is while these guys are talking and catching sharks with cats, you could just show that there’s a guy sitting there who is all beaten up and gagged watching. You know, so we’re like who is that, but he’s also – now the cats are contextualized in oh my fucking – these people do that to cats, I’m so fucked.

**John:** So, I mean, I think the other thing Craig might be suggesting is that is there a piece of information you want to get out of them. Are you just there to dispose of the body? Because you could kill him in advance and it wouldn’t really matter. Or are you trying to get some information out of him? That makes the scene alive.

**Elden:** Well, I’m trying to – I mean, the thing about Artie, this guy is a snitch. He snitched on Artie. Artie is a big kingpin/drug dealer/gun runner who is one of the main characters in the rest of the story. And he’s a snitch who is getting what’s coming to him.

**Craig:** Stitches.

**Elden:** Yeah.

**John:** Fishes.

**Elden:** So, I put the Artie line in there to tie him back to Artie so we know who this person is snitching on.

**John:** I have a question. So you’ve done I’m sure a lot of research figuring all this out. It’s 1975 and we have Carmen Soto, early 20s. She’s a spark plug of a Cuban-American chica. She’s a police officer riding with this guy. Does she exist? Is there going to be an early 20s in Miami female police officer riding in that car with that guy?

**Elden:** In this era there were women who were serving in the police force as well as military but they weren’t treated very well. And one of the things, again, about the dialogue that’s going on – he’s testing her. He’s trying to push her buttons and gross her out. And so right now she’s resisting him by eating the sandwich saying you’re not grossing me out.

**Craig:** I think we got that. I think the problem with that exchange is that he’s bad at it. He’s too bad at what he’s trying to do and she’s too good at ignoring it. It needs to be better. For me to feel that she – to give her credit for resisting I need to feel that she actually has to resist. Because the story he’s telling is too goofy I think ultimately for me to feel like, oh god, I’m in her shoes and this is – if that makes sense.

**Elden:** I will tell my criminology professor you thought his story was too goofy.

**Craig:** I’ve done it before.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** You know the thing about real life is it’s often boring.

**Elden:** Yeah. That was a story literally out of–

**Craig:** Oh yeah, there’s all sorts of them. But it’s not, you know.

**John:** Elden, thank you so much for coming up here.

**Craig:** Thank you. We’re kind of wondering if–

**John:** Hey, Joseph Valezquez, are you here?

**Joseph:** I am.

**John:** He’s here. All right. We weren’t sure if you were here.

**Craig:** Good, good, good.

**John:** Good thing, because we were about to talk about your script. And we would talk totally differently if you weren’t here.

**Craig:** I would not.

**John:** All right. This is Cameraman by Joseph Velazquez. Here is a summary. In a production office Australian animal show host Jimmy Cool Waller, 40s, tells cameraman Jason Rodger, early 30s, that he loves his name because that name, Rodger, means fuck. Waller tells Jason he’s hired, but Jason says he’s never worked with animals before.

When staffer Rachel Hawkins, her late 20s, enters with a snake Jason jumps up on his chair and screams. He falls, curling into the fetal position against the wall. He says a snake ate his Billy goat when he was a child. Waller says Jason is the missing ingredient this show needs. And that’s where we’re at after three pages of Cameraman.

Craig, why don’t you start us off?

**Craig:** Sure. This is my sort of thing. I do love these sorts of movies. And I was enjoying at least the sense of understanding who this guy was. This was sort of a pushed version of what’s his face.

**John:** Steve Irwin?

**Craig:** Steve Irwin. I thought it was – I loved the posted that he’s on open water behind a boat using two crocodiles as water skis, shocked yet delighted to have just noticed the rope he’s holding onto is actually a snake. And I love shocked yet delighted because I can see that idiot poster like, so that was great. Water skis does not take an apostrophe S. But fine.

Waller’s voice is unique and true. I believed it. It felt like he was this kind of like over-eager, over-happy, weirdly dim Australian adventurer. And Rodger literally means “to fuck.” “Your name’s a verb, mate,” is very funny.

All right, so, here’s what’s happening for me. Where things go a bit off the rails. The premise of these three pages is that Jason is being hired to be a cameraman because Waller loves his camera work, but you show us through a quint split screen, a five-way split screen, that everyone has fired him before. So I guess this scene is now from his perspective, even though you’ve put it from Waller’s perspective, so that has shifted.

The premise here is that he’s not very good at his job, therefore I’m wondering where’s the mistake in the comedy of errors where Waller thinks he’s great. I don’t understand why Waller is excited about him. So, the comedy starts to fall apart. Even though what you’re showing me is that he’s scared of snakes and all the rest of it, because I’m missing information I start to just drift away from the comic premise of everything that’s coming after.

So that’s sort of where I landed.

**Lindsay:** I was assuming, again, that what you want was they’re hiring him not because he’s a good cameraman but because he’s scared and he thinks having a scaredy-cat on this part of the show is good for the show. I just don’t understand how having a scared cameraman is good for the show? I would understand having a sidekick who was scared who would be funny and we would laugh at him running away from all of the things that he loves to do, but the guy behind the camera running away I couldn’t figure that out. So, I agree. There were a lot of things about these pages that I thought were really fun, but the basic situation I just couldn’t understand.

**John:** Could you understand there Jewerl?

**Lindsay:** He’s so far ahead of us.

**Jewerl:** For me, a comedy can make a lot of mistakes. It can make geography mistakes. It can make, you know, a lot of the mistakes that we talked about in the other scripts I forgive a comedy. The only thing I want from a comedy is to laugh. You know? This line, five people in five different Australian film sets fire Jason simultaneously I thought was the funniest joke of the three pages. But you know, I misread the joke. Like I thought that five different camera people had been set ablaze. I mean, that’s what I thought the joke was and I was like, god, this is the best joke in these three pages. I loved it. I might have even laughed out loud at the joke you didn’t write.

So, and I had the same problem that he did which is five different people are set ablaze and you tell me that in one line. I’m like they’re going to have to film that for – that’s a two-page thing. That’s a half a page joke. You know? And so yeah.

**Lindsay:** We also don’t care about killing cameramen as much as we care about killing kittens apparently.

**Craig:** Nobody cares about killing cameramen.

**John:** I want to talk a little bit about Jason in this scene, because it’s a question of like is this scene from Jason’s point of view? He sees this larger than life character. Or is it from Waller’s point of view trying to convince this kid to sign on and be the cameraman? And when Jason freaks out and climbs onto the chair and falls back he’s so big, we got to be so big and so cartoonish that I stopped believing it. Or I stopped believing the dynamic.

And so Waller is this big giant bulldozer character. He’s a Craig. And Jason in that moment was doing a big giant thing and you can’t have two Craigs. You can have one Craig. One Craig is enough. Two Craigs, it doesn’t really work.

**Craig:** It’s gilding the lily.

**John:** So, the idea that Jason is going to be hired on because he is terrified of stuff is a really good idea, but I think you need to find a smaller way to get into that that’s a less of a big, yelping, screaming kind of thing, but just we see how terrified he is and let that be the joke and set that up as the dynamic.

Because I suspect when we bring you up here their dynamic is going to be the heart of this. And I’m excited to see that. And even like your minor character who comes in, Waller.

**Craig:** Rachel.

**John:** Rachel, I’m sorry, Rachel. She has very few lines but, “He’s a fuckwit.” Great. That’s the perfect line. I see who this woman is in her very minimal things. And so that gave me confidence. We talked at the start about, you know, you have to have faith and trust that this writer is going to take you on something that’s rewarding. On every page I saw some stuff that I really loved and that was what was going to keep me reading along further into the script.

**Craig:** I still, you know, what I still cannot answer is whether Jason wants this job or not. Or does he need the job? Because when Rachel says, “What the hell is wrong with you,” because he’s scared of a snake, he says, “A snake like that killed my kid.” And they gasp. And then he says, “Kid Billy goat. A snake like that killed my goat.” He’s lying, but he wants the job so he’s trying to explain why he got scared because he needs this job. But if he needs this job then why one page earlier is he saying, “I’m a little concerned.” It’s like, are you or are you not? Do you need it or do you not need it? There’s something very funny about somebody who is deathly afraid of animals and absolutely must get this job working for deadly animals. Right?

And so then I understand the fakery and why and all the rest of it. And, frankly “A snake like that killed my kid” is a great excuse. He shouldn’t have – I don’t even understand the logic of why he left that. Why is the goat better than that? That’s a great one. That worked for him. You know what I mean? So there’s a lot of these picky little logic things, but they’re poking holes in the side of your comic Titanic and there aren’t enough lifeboats.

**Lindsay:** May I just say though if anybody has heard the big talk that I give here, it’s all about relationships. And what I felt very happy about was that I felt grounded in the central relationship right away and it felt like it could be something like My Favorite Year or The Producers where you have the sort of bigger than life character and this little scared guy. And they’re going to be on this journey together. And I love that right away on page one I felt grounded in that.

And I had a feeling that Rachel might turn out to be the love interest. Ta-da. So now I’ve got two different relationships going at the same time. And I just thought, man, you did that really fast in three pages. You told me that this was going to be a fun movie about this particular triangle, father-daughter-wimpy guy. And I thought that was good.

**John:** Cool. Joseph, come on up. Let’s talk more about your project.

**Joseph:** Hello.

**John:** Joseph, is this a movie or a pilot? What is this?

**Joseph:** So it’s actually a short but it was – I wrote it as an outline for a feature and then I wrote the short. And not I’m taking the short and I’m putting it back out to a feature.

**Craig:** Well that sounded good.

**Joseph:** I don’t know why I did that, but I think just to find the structure of it.

**Craig:** Sure. Whatever works.

**John:** What did you have first? Did you have Waller as the host and then you’re trying find someone opposite him? What is the genesis of the idea?

**Joseph:** I mean, it comes from watching Steve Irwin and like watching these situations where the snakes are biting him or this animal is terrifying. I was like, man, what is the cameraman thinking? I’m scared for the host. The cameraman is not a nature guy. He’s just a person. He just knows about video.

**John:** So, let’s go to what Lindsay said, because in some ways the cameraman is the worst person because the cameraman wouldn’t show up. I think she’s maybe pitching that it’s the sound guy or somebody else who has to be there and has to be really close who is the guy. How are you feeling?

**Joseph:** Well, I mean, I’m open to that. The reason it’s the cameraman is that he is actually good at his job and what makes him good is anticipating what people are going to do. So a lot of this movie is him learning to – that, and he only does it there. He doesn’t have that connection with people one on one, or the connection with nature, the thing that binds us all, right? So that’s kind of what he’s going to learn on this journey.

So he’s actually a good cameraman. The reason that Waller likes him–

**Craig:** Why has he been fired so many times?

**Joseph:** Well, that was a bad way to try to show that he needed the job. And it’s illogical, and you’re right.

**Craig:** It’s not illogical. We definitely know that he sucks. That’s what that means.

**Joseph:** Yeah, so that is an error.

**John:** So you’re saying, so he says there “my visa is going to expire.” So basically he needs this job or he gets kicked out of the country as well. Is that another aspect of this?

**Joseph:** Yes. Exactly.

**John:** And how soon do we find out why he wants to stay in Australia in the first place?

**Joseph:** Pretty much so the next scene is a quick like kind of Jerry Maguire/LA Confidential rundown of Australia opening where the animals and how terrifying and how ridiculous they are. And then the very next scene is where he goes back to his apartment in Sydney. He’s like I’ve got the job with his friend that’s there. And then he goes off to the northern territory right after that.

**Jewerl:** I mean, I personally don’t want him to be terrible. What I was imagining was a scenario where just a normal guy wants his job and he has the boss from hell. This guy is going to put him in danger with the alligators. Put him in danger with the snakes. And he needs the job but he doesn’t realize he’s signing up for the job from hell. And I thought that was such a clear idea, you know. I think making him terrible at it or making him super afraid of animals just muddles this very clear idea.

**Joseph:** OK.

**John:** In some ways the cameraman is the voice of reason. No, no, what you’re doing is crazy. So that sense that we can identify with him. So, you may want to push and heighten to some degree so we can be, because it’s a comedy, but like he is probably our way into, no, no, it’s nuts what you’re doing. You shouldn’t be doing these things.

**Craig:** And why is Waller so excited about hiring him?

**Joseph:** Well, so the excuse, and I guess maybe it’s not in those early pages, is that he loves his reality/crappy reality television show that he’s been shooting in LA before that. Whatever show it is. So he’s a fan of that show. So he knows he works on it. But I think there’s more.

**Craig:** Nobody gets that excited about cameramen.

**Joseph:** He sees something inside of him.

**Craig:** I mean, look, there is a version of this where – because John just said these magic words “the way in,” and I think Jewerl is talking about it, too. The way in is really important with comedy. If you have a cameraman who is quite competent and quite good but he’s been screwed over by something that’s realistic and, you know, we can identify with it. You know, like the company folded and you don’t get paid. And his visa is running out and he needs a job. And then lo and behold is looking through the – this is all page one stuff – looking through the ads and there’s a cameraman job that pays four times as much as any other one he’s ever seen. He’s like, I’ll go there, but there’s going to be like 20 people. And he gets there and there’s no one.

It’s just him. And then this guy is like, oh my god, great. First I’m going to interview you, then you get the job. No, I didn’t say that. Let me interview you. Maybe you’ll get the job. Right? Point being nobody wants to work for this guy because people die. That’s interesting. And you are – that’s where desperation meets need and situation. Now he can’t leave it. But you definitely want the last cameraman to be dead. Like behind Waller is like a think of In Loving Memory of.

**Joseph:** Croc got him, mate.

**Craig:** And a guy with a camera. Right? That’s what you want.

**Jewerl:** I mean, basically the joke that I misread, you need to change it to what I thought it was going to be.

**Joseph:** It’s way better.

**Craig:** Right. Like your last cameraman seemed to have died. He goes, “No, no, the last cameraman was terribly maimed. Oh, no, this is the cameraman before the last cameraman. This one died.” There’s a million ways. But it’s the way in. Also, we want to know who someone is before the – in comedy, I believe – we want to know who somebody is before the meteor smashes into their life. We need a little bit of, just a little brief sense of who I am as a normal person and then madness. So like for instance wonderful movie that you mentioned My Favorite Year. It’s a great movie to watch if you haven’t seen it. And it’s about a guy who works on a television show in the golden age of television. He’s a very junior comedy writer. And his hero, who is basically Errol Flynn, played by Peter O’Toole, comes to be a guest on the show. And he, our hero, our little guy, is put in charge of him. And the problem is this man is a terrible, terrible drunk. And a disaster of a human being. And probably won’t show up and it will mean his job and everything.

And, of course, a relationship is formed. We must know what it’s like for this writer and this girl that he is in love with but doesn’t seem to quite know how to, you know, can’t really get. And the situation vis-à-vis him and these older men. We need to see it first, just to know. And then in comes a wrecking ball that will smash his life apart and then somehow put it back together better. That’s this kind of movie I think.

So definitely watch that kind of movie.

**Lindsay:** I think of this as a bringer of chaos movie. And the surprise of the bringer of chaos movies, you know, Cable Guy and all these various things, is you start out thinking, god, if only that character would go away and by the time it’s over the person who has had to change is the sweet guy.

**Craig:** What About Bob?

**Lindsay:** Who has to realize, or Planes, Trains is a good one.

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s another one.

**Lindsay:** You essentially welcome him into your house when at the beginning it’s like how fast can I get away from this person.

**Craig:** They’re reverse Christ stories basically. It’s like what if Jesus were really freaking annoying, but has also been sent to save you. That is what What About Bob is. That’s what that movie is.

**Joseph:** Definitely spot on.

**Craig:** And then you can see in like Rain Man and Midnight Run, it’s like people that make us a little nuts, sometimes that’s what we need. So, watch those movies. See how they do it.

**John:** Thank you, Joseph. Thank you so much for coming up.

**Joseph:** Thank you guys.

**John:** All right, we have time for some audience questions. We have no microphones, so raise your hand. I’ll call on you and we will repeat your question back. Second row.

**Audience Member:** I was wondering if you could clarify the term emotional math. I kind of understood from the context, but I want to be sure what you meant by that.

**Craig:** Sure. I mean, I’ve invented it, so you don’t really need to – I mean, it’s not super-duper important. There will be no test on that. But to me when we are reading characters, and so we’re reading a representation of what a human being is. But on every bit of these lines what they say and what they’re doing, what the writer is doing is asking the reader or ultimately the person watching the movie or television show to believe it. The whole point is that we give ourselves even to a show. Even shows that are doing bizarre things that we know aren’t real. There’s no Chewbacca. But I want to believe that when Chewbacca sees Han Solo for the first time in a prison cell that he’s going be, “Ooh!” Right?

So it’s all about that. The words and the decisions and what is said and what is said and what is not said add up to, as I do it, yep, that equals real. None of those things seem to violate what I understand about how humans work.

And that means asking questions sometimes of your work that are pesky and annoying because you thought something that is funny to you, or you had a line that you thought would be really cool, and then everybody else goes, yeah, but that’s your problem. Our problem is it’s violating the real of what you have created.

**Audience Member:** Thank you.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** Question back there. So I’m going to repeat the question back just so we can have it on the podcast. So, Jewerl, when you’re reading a five-hour script that sort of breaks all the rules, do you think there’s a value to a writer deliberately breaking rules so they will get your attention?

**Jewerl:** That’s a really hard question. Generally the only thing that matters on a screenplay, to me, have I had a feeling response. And so people who are good craftspeople can produce that result with all of the rules. People who are just intrinsically talented who are channeling a story that is beyond them can do that. You know, people who have had an authentic experience in their own life and they are replicating that experience on the page can do that.

So whatever your means to get me to feel and be invested in your journey, that’s what you should do. If that means doing the Robert McKee method, fine. If that means telling a story that no one would actually film, you know, but you’ve written it so well that suddenly it’s the filmable thing. So that’s all that really matters.

**Lindsay:** One of the First Ten Pages things that I did yesterday, it was one of the things that I was really tired. I didn’t want to read anymore, but I thought, oh, I’ll just look at the very beginning. And I opened it and the first two lines of the script were in the past tense. And I went I’ve never seen this before. And it really got my attention. But eventually it felt like a gimmick and I became a little bit resentful. The writing got a little bit overblown and it felt like they were deliberately trying to get my attention with something that wasn’t organic.

I think breaking the rules is the only way to tell your story as opposed to here’s a way to get somebody’s attention and then you begin to say, oh, they’re just trying to get my attention.

**Craig:** Yeah. Don’t calculate. Don’t calculate.

**John:** Great. Oh, another question. Right here?

**Audience Member:** Thank you. I’m really interested to know kind over time from the beginning of your careers and reading scripts to now, how have you seen script writing change? Do you prefer scripts that are in the style of now? Do you still like scripts that were maybe 10, 20, 50 years ago in the style? What are you thinking about? How has it changed and what do you like to see now?

**John:** Lindsay, you probably have the longest track record of reading scripts.

**Lindsay:** Yes, 50 years ago when I was reading screenplays. [laughs]

**John:** Let’s actually talk about sort of the evolution of–

**Craig:** When sound came in…

**Lindsay:** Yes, exactly. [laughs]

**John:** We can do a very quick look at sort of—

**Lindsay:** When DW and I were talking about this very thing. You know, the first thing that comes to mind is the people who would fuck in the stage directions. That – you know, Shane Black.

**Craig:** Did you say people would fuck in the stage directions?

**Lindsay:** They put the word fuck in the stage directions. People start cursing in the stage directions. They became very informal and the language began to become informal. And I really did think that – for me, I just remember reading a Shane Black screenplay and I was, oh my god, I didn’t know you could do this. And it really did get people’s attention in a huge way. Now I feel like it happens so often that I don’t pay that much attention to it anymore.

But I do feel as though that format used to be much stricter. Now I think for better people feel a lot more free with stage directions to get a mood across, to get a tone across, to get a type of humor across. And it just makes the whole thing more of a whole. That’s the thing that comes to my mind first.

**John:** If you look back at the original screenplays, the women who were writing those were basically doing – it was kind of a list of shots. It was a plan for this is our shooting sequence and it very much feels like you’re shooting it this way. With Casablanca you start to see things that more resemble our modern screenplays.

And what we write now is basically you’re trying to capture the feeling of being in an audience watching that thing up on the screen and we’re kind of allowed to do anything it takes to get that experience across. And so I think it’s good that some of the harder restrictions of like that it’s only what the camera can shoot, some of that has melted away in a good way I think.

**Craig:** Yeah. As the actual format of what we’re writing for changes, so to can the format. It used to be that there was either a 30 or 60-minute television program, or a 120-minute movie, and so you go forth young person. And now you can write anything, in any length. It can also be a three-part thing, or a two-part thing, or a nine-part thing, or one thing.

And so you are allowed, I think, to write in such a way as to get across what is unique and wonderful about you and your story. Ultimately there is so much going on now in Hollywood that it’s the new, it’s the exciting. You know, we always say like if you’ve written something that seems like it’s something like they make, they’ll just hire one of us to do it, because it’s sort of something like they make.

What happens is it’s the new. They want to find somebody that just has some sort of undeniable thing that is of its own. And that’s where breaking the rule – it’s not even breaking the rules, it’s really making your own rules, right? Because breaking the rules is just an act of sort of petulant rejection. But it must be this way is an act of creation. So that’s more interesting to me.

**John:** I remember reading Natural Born Killers, Quentin Tarantino’s script for Natural Born Killers, and it was such a groundbreaking script for me to read early in my career because it would just morph into a completely different movie at times. And suddenly it became a sitcom. It just felt vital and alive. It was the first script I remember getting to the last page and just flipping back and reading through the whole thing again because it felt like the form had changed a bit. And that I think we see a lot more now.

What Lindsay was describing about with Shane Black’s scene description is he had voice in scene description. I don’t think that was a thing we were really focusing on then. Like the whole movie should feel like one person wrote it, like no one else could have written this scene description that way. That you’re in capable hands. That goes back to that trust and like if you give me your trust I will make this worth your while.

**Lindsay:** You know, a lot of times I feel like when directors write screenplays they already know how they’re going to make the movie so they leave out the stuff that makes them readable because they don’t think they have to fill them in. They already know.

But I remember before I was ever in the movie business I read the screenplay for I think it was The Apartment. And Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond wrote it together. And one of the things in The Apartment, I hope I’m thinking about the right movie, is that there’s all this slang that goes around the office about that’s the way it crumbles cookie wise. That’s the way everybody is talking. And the last line of the screenplay is “That’s the way it ends screenplay wise.” And I thought they’re just writing for themselves. They’re awake and alive and doing it for you. And I just love that.

**John:** I think we can fit one more question in.

**Craig:** Can we fit one more? We can fit one more.

**John:** One more question. Who has got the question? A gentleman with a hat back there and a pink shirt. Yes.

**Craig:** So, the question was are there things that we see repeatedly in screenplays that seem as if the writer was intending to be clever or interesting or provocative but in fact it’s sort of old hat and producers find it a bit annoying and obnoxious.

**John:** Jewerl, I bet you have insight there.

**Jewerl:** You know, I have a really big vocabulary. When people use words that I don’t know I’m like, wow, they’re trying to be smart and interesting and I just have to stop, figure out what the word is before I can move on. I find that people who can convey feeling with very short sentences and very simple words are the most exciting.

You know, the first book on writing I ever read when I was 16 years old was called On Writing Well, and it’s a famous, famous, famous book that’s been around for 40 years. And it’s about nonfiction writing, but the rules apply to simple language, simple sentences, clarity. Over the last year I’ve sent 40 copies of that to friends when they talk about – they’re at a hump. They don’t know if the thing is readable. I’m like these simple rules work everywhere.

You know, like simple way that we can convey – simple ways to convey what you’re talking about. You know, when someone gives me a run-on sentence, a three-line sentence, a three-line sentence, I say can we just do each of these sentences be three words. And it’s like magic.

**Lindsay:** I remember reading – I talked about this yesterday for some reason. A Steve Soderbergh screenplay 20 years ago. And the first line was, after it said interior bedroom day or whatever, it said, “The football just won’t fit.” And it was a scene about a guy packing. But I’ve never forgotten the rhythm of that and the simplicity of that and how it told me the emotion of it weirdly and everything else right away.

But in one of the scripts I read this week there was something where literally the villain was referred to as like the magnificent maestro of malice or something, like if you’re talking about what gets people annoyed is that kind of stuff. Where you just feel like people are showing off or it just takes you out of the scene in that kind of way.

**Craig:** Well, separating what your intention is from what you want it to be. Your intention is to move or create an emotional response, high, low, or something, fear. All these things that we want to do in the reader. And when people employ material like that their other intention which is love me, like me, be impressed by me is taking over. Well that’s ego. And no one is interested in anyone’s ego. They just want to read a good story. Your ego will be so well fed if you write a good script.

**John:** The last thing I would point out is that we talk about sometimes you need to underline, bold face, call something out so we can actually see it on the page. Sometimes I read scripts where it’s almost all bold face and there’s like double asterisk and things like that. Especially action movies.

**Craig:** It looks like the side of that guy’s van.

**John:** Exactly. [laughs] It’s bomber van text. Just be aware of that.

**Craig:** Like cats and van. We just want to find where the points are where we use them.

**John:** Be aware that the more you shout the less we hear. And so you got to really be careful with where you’re putting your emphasis so we actually are paying attention. Craig and I are big fans of white space and making it feel really natural to fall down a page. Anytime you’re doing stuff to stop us from reading it’s got to be worth what you’re doing to stop us.

Cool. This was so much fun. I want to thank Lindsay and Jewerl for this. I need to thank our three very brave Three Page Challenge entrants. Thank you again.

**Craig:** Thank you guys.

**John:** We need to thank Paul and Olivia, Hannah, Travis, and Jonas from the Austin Film Festival. Thank you for having us again. We need to thank Megan McDonnell for producing our show and picking out our things. And Matthew Chilelli for editing. Thank you all very much.

**Craig:** Thanks guys.

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* [Lindsay Doran’s Ted Talk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=752INSLlyf0) is also great.
* The [Three Pages](https://johnaugust.com/aff2018)
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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/commencement).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 376 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we’ll be looking at how you know when it’s okay to start writing on that project you’ve been hired to write, and how that ties into the new Start Button the WGA is unveiling this week. We’ll also be answering a three-part listener question about television and some other listener questions as well.

**Craig:** Terrific. And you’ve been working on this one for quite some time, so this is–

**John:** This has been a long term project.

**Craig:** I’m excited. It’s good though. This is why we elected you, John.

**John:** Aw, thank you.

**Craig:** Oh, and you know what? Well, I guess I’ll put it in follow up. I have follow up.

**John:** All right. We’ll put it in follow up. My little bit of news is I’m just now back from book tour. So I did a book tour of Europe. I did a book tour of Texas and Colorado. And I love it and I love signing people’s books and meeting people. But I can’t sign everyone’s books. So I’m doing what a lot of other authors do which is if you’d like me to sign a bookplate which is essentially a fancy sticker that you can put in your book that has my name on it and your name on it, I’m doing that now.

So, if you would like your Arlo Finch copy signed, maybe as a Christmas present, or a gift for some other young reader, you can do that now. So there’s a link in the show notes or just go to johnaugust.com. You’ll see the Arlo Finch little thing there. And I can send you a sticker that you can put in your book as a gift. So if you’d like that just go to johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** We don’t do any kind of Scriptnotes gift exchange at the end of the year.

**John:** We don’t. I mean, why don’t we do that, Craig?

**Craig:** Probably because I hate people and you aren’t really a person.

**John:** No, I would say that it’s because I don’t like giving gifts. I’ve just never been especially gifty. Stuart Friedel, our former producer of Scriptnotes, he was so good at gifts. He would pick the perfect gift for my daughter. He clearly had a brain that was just always on the hunt for the perfect gift for people.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You know, Craig, I think we should break tradition and actually exchange gifts and I think we should do it at our live Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** So we’re doing a Scriptnotes show on December 12 in Hollywood. And maybe we should exchange gifts at that event.

**Craig:** We have to give ourselves some kind of limitation. Otherwise it could become absurd.

**John:** So less than $1,000?

**Craig:** Oh god. That’s an enormous number.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s crazy. I’ve lost interest.

**John:** All right, so we will exchange some sort of gift but it should be a meaningful gift that the other person will like and we should do it at the live show.

**Craig:** OK. We’ll figure it out. But we’ll have to put a reasonable financial limit on it so that one person doesn’t overwhelm the other with insanity.

**John:** Why don’t we say $20 because the tickets are $20?

**Craig:** I like that.

**John:** So that will be the baseline. We’re going to be announcing our special guest for the show really soon. We were talking about it right before we got on the air.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we’re excited. We’re excited to be back in Hollywood doing our annual holiday live show. Tickets are on sale now. You can click on the link in the show notes or go to writersguildfoundation.org, or wgafoundation.org. It’s the usual place. And you can get a ticket for the show.

**Craig:** And we have not yet settled firmly on guests, but we have some excellent ideas that will blow your minds.

**John:** Blow our minds. So come see that. We have some follow up. So, Craig, why don’t you start with your follow up first?

**Craig:** My follow up is just some exciting news. We’ve been going on and on about these credit proposals and they passed.

**John:** They did pass.

**Craig:** Super excited by that. They passed by a very healthy margin, despite a little pushback from a prominent member of the legal community here in Los Angeles. But I think we as a committee we made a good strong case. And the nice thing is that all the changes that we made are really for the benefit of writers.

So, I’m really happy about that. It’s a great way for me to kind of ride into the sunset as I believe this incarnation of the credits committee is being sunsetted. I have been involved on a credits committee now in one form or another for like a decade. So, this is a nice retirement for me.

**John:** Very nice. So I will be joining the credits committee and I think the plan going forward is to listen to members about sort of the things they’re experiencing with credits. And as you and I have talked about there are some unique things happening with movies being written in really unusual ways that make determining credit a challenge and so we need to rise to figure out how to deal with those challenges.

**Craig:** We have actually done I think a very good job as a union to shift our perspective on how credits should interact with the world around us. When we joined the union we were still kind of living with the burden of the old philosophy which is we will write credits rules in such a way that will change the way the business does things.

No. Business doesn’t care. Go ahead and penalize rewriters all you want. They’ll keep hiring people to rewrite things. So, there was a nice philosophical pivot that happened over the last 10 years where the guild said, OK, this is how movies are actually written. How can we better serve our membership who are writing them? And that’s been a good change and there’s obviously lots of more room for improvement. These things have to be done carefully and incrementally and they’re subject to votes. And sometimes even subject to negotiation with the studios. So it’s a tricky, tricky business. But if anyone can do it, John, it’s you. And me. But not me this time. I’m not doing it anymore.

**John:** Not you this time. There will be many wise, smart people on both the East and the West figuring this out together, so I’m excited about that.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** So, a big piece of follow up, Craig many, many, many episodes ago you had made a spontaneous offer that if any studio wanted us to come in and talk about their notes process you and I would be willing to do that. And this last week we did.

**Craig:** We actually did it. So Disney invited us. They were the only studio brave enough to just listen to two writers talk for an hour. That’s all we ever suggested doing. At no cost to them. They were the only ones that even expressed interest in hearing what writers thought about the notes process, which on the one hand speaks glowingly of them, and on the other hand makes everybody else look a bit, well, tawdry to me.

We came and we did it. And I hope that they actually shared that experience with their other studio, their fellow studio people, because they seemed to really like it a lot. And what you and I did was speak about how notes feel on our side of the table and try and help them tailor the way they give notes to us and our responses so that they actually get better work out of us, better responses, better conversations, less strife, less drama, less trouble.

And it went really well. You know, tip of the hat to Disney for doing that. I was really pleased and just a roomful of executives who were willing to listen to writers talk about this. And, by the way, they seemed legitimately interested, which I really appreciated.

**John:** Absolutely. So it was a good conversation. We sort of laid out kind of just best practices, like some dos and don’ts, and really what it feels like to be on the receiving end of those notes and which notes are helpful to us and which notes are maddening because they don’t actually recognize the writing process or the filmmaking process.

And we actually got into a bit of back and forth because they say like, “Well sometimes we have to give that note because of X, Y, and Z.” And we said, great, so tell us why you’re giving us those notes if they are crazy notes. So it was a good conversation.

I know we’re going to be going in to talk with some other development executives down the road, but I guess we’re offering this to other folks as well?

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, my feeling is there’s no reason that executives at Warner Bros, executives at Fox, executives at Sony, executives at Universal wouldn’t want to hear this. What does it cost beyond an hour? And just to be clear, we don’t walk in there and go, “You guys are stupid. Your notes are dumb.” That’s not at all what we do. What we do is really talk about the psychological experience of writing something and receiving notes and where the notes are helpful. We divided in half. This is helpful. This is not helpful. So, it’s very pro-note and it’s really designed to kind of help improve the relationship between note givers and note takers. Why wouldn’t they want? It makes no sense to me.

But, you know, hey, Disney, trailblazers.

**John:** Yep. So, another thing we’ve been talking about on the podcast and also in the guild is the sense of No Writing Left Behind. This idea that you should not be leaving your materials behind after a pitch, so that it doesn’t become free work you’re doing for folks. And today we have two new folks who have written in who aren’t screenwriters but are encountering the same kind of thing. Craig, do you want to take the first one here?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. So this is what this person writes in. “In following the No Work Left Behind thread over the last number of episodes I wanted to relay a similar issue in the feature directing world, specifically the pitching process. For writers it sounds like “Show us exactly how you would write the script for free and then we’ll decide if we want to pay you.” For directors it sounds like “Show us exactly how you would direct the movie for free and then we’ll decide if we want to pay you.” In my experience, a typical feature film directing pitch from start to finish takes 250 hours or more over about two or three months. It’s free work. If you don’t get the job you don’t get paid.

“And often after going through the entire process the outcome is that the movie gets canceled or the studio hires a bigger name director. If one were to pitch for three or four projects you’re talking about more than 4.5 to six months of fulltime, unpaid speculative pitching work. This is reflective of my 2018. And no one seems surprised by this. In fact, it’s expected.

“I’m a WGA and DGA member, and while the WGA is brilliantly taking on the free work issue, I haven’t gotten a straight answer from the DGA, my reps, or anyone else about the free work required of directors. The only answer I’ve received is when you’re starting out you just have to do a lot of pitching. It’s pretty normal.

“One now well-known director’s rep told me that this director was consistently a runner-up on directing job hires for three years. I know Scriptnotes is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters, but would you be willing to lend any insights or suggestions about the free work issues in directing? No one else seems to be willing to talk about this issue.”

John, I feel like we could help this person.

**John:** I think we could as well. So, talking with director friends, this is absolutely true. And so I want to distinguish between a little bit – you know, writers write words and so we focus on like don’t leave your words behind, but there’s obviously a lot of work that’s being done to go in and pitch. And so if we’re telling you like, OK, you may have to pitch this project 10 times but you’re not leaving that document behind that’s still a tremendous amount of your time. And you and I both know many feature writers who are spending a tremendous amount of time pitching and pitching and pitching on projects.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This is a director who is doing the same thing. But what the director is coming in with is not a document. It is usually a huge mood board and cut of videos and rip reels from other things to show what he or she is planning to do were they to get the job of directing this movie.

And I would share this director’s frustration that like you are basically giving the studio an option for like this is what the movie could look like and getting almost nothing out of it in return.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, this is one of those rare moments where in the feature business writers have it better than directors. And I say rare because once the jobs are handed out, way better to be the director in features than the writer. The director is treated with respect and has some creative authority and the writer has none of those things.

But prior to employment however the writers do have a certain advantage because as you point out our work product is words on a page. So, it’s really easy for us to withhold that because that’s the only thing we’re paid for. For a director, what they’re paid for is film in a can and, well, or on a small digital card, and there is no way to essentially withhold that because that’s not going to get made anyway. It seems to me that if you are spending that much time creating a kind of film directing pitch and it’s not converting into jobs then you I suppose must ask the question what is converting into jobs for people.

If you’re spending six months of fulltime, unpaid speculative pitching work I feel like maybe the answer is to spend six months shooting something that is kind of remarkable.

**John:** Yeah, I mean, one of the luxuries writers have is that it’s cheap for us to do our jobs. And so we can just – you and I can just go off and write a thing. No one can stop us and it’s free. For a director to make something costs money and takes time and to make a film requires a tremendous amount of money. Even to make a small film you’re spending a tremendous amount of time and money to do that.

So, just this past week we had a launch party for Start Button stuff. And I was talking with a feature writer who was saying that he was going in pitch after pitch after pitch on this project and at a certain point he wanted to say, “OK, I will go back in and pitch again but you need to start paying me some money.” And he’d be fine if that was money against what they were ultimately going to pay him. But if it costs $500 or $1,000 to take another meeting that would at least incentivize both sides to really ask is this worth it. Is this money well spent? Is this time well spent? Because it becomes crazy after a certain point.

**Craig:** It does. I mean, look, the problem is I think from the point of a studio that’s contemplating hiring a director and paying them some amount of money that’s significant and then also putting them creatively in charge of a project that’s worth millions and millions of dollars they might look at that as penny ante nonsense and slightly unprofessional or dinky. And it may hurt you.

And you’re right. It is really hard to, well, it’s much harder for directors to create speculative work, like a proper film, than it is for writers to create speculative work on paper. But it’s cheaper now than it’s ever been before.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And it seems to me that we’re collecting quite a list of writers who are saying I have work that no one seems to want to pay for and directors who are saying I’m doing work that no one seems to want to pay for. And maybe they should get together and in actual partnership start working together to create work together that will benefit them together. And I’m pretty sure there’s about four billion actors who are saying I’m not getting work.

Do you know what I mean? If I were an agent I would be saying, “OK, here are three really talented directors that are underemployed. Here are three really talented writers that are underemployed. Get in a room and start talking guys. I need you people to figure out how to work together and create something that lets me be able to sell you.”

So, you know what, I’m blaming the agents, again.

**John:** I would also ask our listeners if you know of a system, it could be a different industry, we have people writing in from ad industry as well, if you know of a system that is set up to sort of help deal with this, to help deal with the sort of pitch again, pitch again, pitching for free forever. I mean, actors go through this, again, with auditions. And if you know of a system that you think actually does help with this I’d love to hear what you think could be a solution.

So, whether it’s an existing system or your pitch for how you actually fix this issue. Because I do think it’s the next wave of stuff we have to take into account.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s always been bad. It’s getting worse. And it will continue to get worse. And the thing that makes me really nervous, because look the part where employees like directors and writers, artist employees are being mistreated, that makes me feel bad. But what makes me nervous is that when you start to move large groups of people into states of scarcity, resource scarcity, they begin to turn on each other. It’s inevitable. And I think Hollywood, that is to say corporate Hollywood, has done a wonderful job pitting directors, actors, and writers against each other all the time in their system in such a way that the artists do not unite, regardless of the creation of a studio called United Artists. And they’re just really good at that. They’re smart. In general it makes sense that that’s what they’re good at. And we tend to bite each other’s backs, writers and directors in particular, really just go at it, fighting over the scraps that they toss down.

I know I sound a little bit like a Marxist nut job right now, and I’m not normally, but it’s not good what’s going on out there.

**John:** No. Well, I mean I think what tends to happen is there’s a race towards the bottom. And fortunately because of our unions we do have a bottom in terms of compensation which is scale. And so you cannot undercut each other on that financial level.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But creatively you can undercut each other and the one person who decides like, oh, I will turn in this 50-page treatment and sort of ruins it for everybody else. And that’s a real thing. And so we’ve got to make sure that we understand that it doesn’t get better until everyone sort of agrees on some terms.

**Craig:** Yeah. I completely agree with you. And one thing that I did once that worked out beautifully, and this is not for our director friend but for our writer friends, is that I made a deal for a project and they were a little bit like, hmm, we’re not sure if we want to do that. And I said I’ll tell you what. Let’s make a deal for it. And I will write a very extensive treatment. And the deal will have a cut off after the treatment. So just go ahead and pay me scale for the treatment. And if you read the treatment and you think, yeah, you know what, we don’t want to go ahead with this, you’re done. But if you do want to go ahead with it, then we have the deal and you go ahead and you trigger the first step and I start writing. And it worked out because they did like it and they did trigger the first step. But I got paid for that.

And I think any time you can say, listen, let’s just start dealing with scale. How about that? Because sometimes I think we’re so afraid to say, OK, just give me scale for something that we go ahead and accept nothing in its place. And nothing is in fact worse than scale.

**John:** It is in fact worse than scale.

**Craig:** And in that case doing the scale work got me my full fee and then some for the rest of it. I don’t mind being quasi speculative in that regard, but you got to pay me something. So, scale seems reasonable.

**John:** Yeah. So, this last week we got a tweet from Anïas with three questions and I thought they were all good questions, so let’s try to answer all three of these. Number one, what makes a good procedural TV show work, Craig?

**Craig:** Oh, OK. We’re going to go one by one. I like it. These were good questions. I am not the biggest procedural show fan. That said, I’ve certainly seen my share of procedural shows. To me, the most important thing for a procedural show is that the concept of the show is such that the actors involved have a job that is episodic. So, whatever they do for a living it changes on a daily basis or a weekly basis. They get something new that will have a beginning, middle, and end.

This is why most procedural shows are cops, lawyers, doctors, firefighters, because they get cases. But, you know, there are certain other kinds of procedural shows that are based around the nomadic lifestyle of the hero, for instance Highway to Heaven. Or, when we were children The Hulk, the Incredible Hulk was essentially a nomad show where a loner roams from town to town, arrives in a new place, deals with a new situation that has a beginning, middle, and end, and then can leave. But the important thing is that conceptually there is no continuing action beyond the kind of interplay between the characters who are doing the job, but the world/the plot always has hard ins and outs. And the concept needs to support the reality of that.

**John:** I would say a good procedural show is like one of Craig’s best crossword puzzles in that you sit down with it and you sort of know what you’re going to get. You’re not sure how it’s all going to fit together. But it delivers on what your expectations were for that period of time for that experience. You know sort of exactly what you’re going to get and that is I think why the good procedural shows keep going on forever and forever because they just deliver what you expect. It’s like McDonald’s hamburgers. They’re exactly what you think they’re going to be.

You know, when you talk with people who work on procedural shows, they will at the start of the season on a big white board figure out the giant arcs of characters over the course of the seasons, like what kinds of things we’re going to do. This character is going to buy a house. And these things will change. But episode to episode not a lot is going to change. And in many cases you could take episode 10 and episode four and swap them and nothing bad would happen. Serialized shows that wouldn’t work.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. And interestingly there’s been an evolution in comedy, in televised comedy. Sitcoms were always procedurals. We don’t think of them necessarily as procedurals, but they always were. It’s just the procedural wasn’t saving a life or trying a case. It was my dog got free, or I agreed to date two people at the same time. So it’s the situation right. And it was a procedure. And then it was done. And so week after week it was a new story entirely.

Comedy has now drifted more towards a serialization because of the changing nature of the way television is delivered to people. So even on network, for instance, Blackish is still a procedural essentially. It’s a comedy procedural. But something like The Good Place is serialized. They literally – each episode gets a chapter number, because they’re telling one continuing story like an ongoing soap opera.

So things are changing somewhat. And I think what has kept procedure, like classic procedure – for instance, our friend Derek has 20 procedural shows on the air.

**John:** He has all the Chicago shows.

**Craig:** He’s all the Chicago shows and the new FBI show. And what has kept procedurals going so strong for so long is how easy it is to essentially replay them. You can run them again and again and again in any order, at any time, and no one has to scratch their heads and go, “Wait, what?” You can’t show somebody episode 21 of The Good Place and have them understand anything. But I can literally watch any single episode of Chicago Fire and aside from, OK, I don’t necessarily know what the characters are talking about in terms of their relationships with each other, but the fire story I can watch that and be like, oh damn, OK. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it works.

**John:** Every episode of a procedural basically contains its premise. That this is a group of people that does this thing. Versus a true serialized show that wouldn’t make sense. You would not be able to follow episode 13 of that show if you just started watching right there.

**Craig:** Right. And I will say to people at home, don’t sleep on procedurals. Sometimes we think of them as old fashioned, and I guess in way they are old fashioned, but they work. People love them. And if you get yourself in a good groove with a good procedural. I mean, Dick Wolf’s entire trillion dollar empire is based on procedurals. And great writers have cut their teeth and then some in procedurals and mastered the craft. John Wells is one of the most successful television writers of all time. You know, was involved in huge procedurals.

**John:** Like ER. Like West Wing. And West Wing really is functionally a procedural. There’s great writing and there’s great characters and lots of stuff is happening, but the episode begins and the episode ends and there’s been an arc in that episode. It’s fitting into a larger piece but it is the crisis of the week.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is essentially a procedural.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s the monster of the week. Yes, there’s great big arcs and if you didn’t know who some of those characters were at the start it would be confusing a bit, but there’s still – you know what you’re going to get over the course of an episode generally. And then the unique episodes where they really broke those expectations stand out because it is just so jarring. The Body is great example of like it broke the expectation of what’s supposed to happen in an episode of Buffy.

**Craig:** Yeah, so you know Buffy is a good example of a very cool procedural in case you think like, oh, maybe they’re a little fuddy-duddy or a little boring. They’re not. And when they’re done well they’re done wonderfully well. And all shows ultimately are borrowing elements of procedurals. There’s always some kind of plot inside of a single episode that gets kind of consumed within the episode. So, something to definitely think about. Don’t necessarily think that you have to chase whatever you might think of as avant-garde or sexy or cutting edge. If you love procedurals, by god, write one. Because there’s still gold in them thar hills.

**John:** Yep. We’re only a third of the way through Anïas’s tweet. Her second question is what makes a show better to watch once a week versus bulk release.

**Craig:** Well, I have a little bit of a possibly unpopular opinion here, because I think this is a question of opinion. I’m not sure that there’s anything particular that makes a show more enjoyable in one way or another. I think all shows are better when you get them once a week. I think all shows are made better with anticipation. I just do. I think that there’s a certain joy to waiting and then to being satisfied. And sometimes you wait forever. I mean, we’ve been waiting for this last season of Game of Thrones for quite some time and we’ll continue to. And then it’s going to be satisfying.

And as we watch it week by week we all share in it together. Yes, some people watch it a little bit later than others, but for all the people that watched it when it was available we get to talk about it and share it and it’s the watercooler syndrome. All the shows that are kind of dumped at you, there’s no watercooler. Everybody watches them at different times. They watch them a lot, a little. So for me, I love a nice once-a-week. I do.

**John:** I watch a lot of once-a-weeks, but of course I’m also binging shows on Netflix at the same time. Many episodes back we’ll find a link to it. I had Damon Lindelof on the show and he and I were talking about Lost. And Lost was a once-a-week show that had a giant mythology and I think some of the success of Lost has to be attributed to the fact that it was coming out once a week and that fans could build up the theories over the course of the week and there was a chance to do it.

It would be a completely different experience if Lost had dropped all its episodes in a bulk. Like it would have been a very different experience. And, you know, a great example of that is when the writer’s strike happened their season got split. And so it ended up being a giant gap between those initial episodes of the season and the later ones. And it got strange. It got weird. Like once it got off of its rhythm, the fans had a hard time sort of grabbing back onto the show.

I’m in conversations now to do something that would be a once-a-day thing, which I think is a sort of interesting blend between the two. So there’s a watercooler moment, but you can also catch up which is a good thing, too. Sometimes the once-a-week shows, I guess a good thing about them is once I hear about them I’m not so far behind that I can’t catch up.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Sometimes when a 10-episode, 13-episode thing drops on Netflix all at once I’m like, oh god, I’m just never going to be able to. It’s just daunting. I’m never going to be able to catch up to the conversation about it. So if you have something that needs to have a big cultural conversation to really work I think that speaks towards the once-a-week or the not all at once release plan.

**Craig:** Yep. I’m just old fashioned that way. I like it better.

**John:** So, third point in Annalise for the Win’s tweet is what in storytelling differentiates a serialized bulk release from a movie? So storytelling wise what is different between what you’re doing for Chernobyl, which is a serialized – it’s not bulk release. You’re still doing it once a week. But what is different about Stranger Things dropping 10 episodes at once versus a long movie? Storytelling wise, how do you think about those things differently?

**Craig:** Well I think that the bulk release – the release pattern there is a bit of a red herring. I don’t think whether it’s released all at once or once a week is necessarily changing how you write your shows. Because each episode needs to have some driving force at the end of it that makes you want to watch the next one. Essentially it’s that page-turning feeling that you want to create whether that second episode is available immediately or it’s going to be available a week from then.

The real question is what’s the difference between that and a very long movie and that’s kind of it, what I just said. It is a long movie. There are a million differences in terms of how much time you get to spend on things and the way that you can make certain storylines and characters elastic. You can expand them as you desire. You can take a moment and just do a side trip that’s fascinating because it gets a beginning, middle, and end. The most important thing is at the end of it you keep moving toward the next one. And that when you are done you have clearly told a story that had its beginning at the beginning, and the ending is relevant to that beginning.

So, for me, having gone through the experience of writing Chernobyl it was the best because it was everything I love about writing closed end narrative and none of the things that I hate about writing closed end narrative.

**John:** Yeah. I would say a thing to think about the difference between a movie versus a long drop of a series is the previously on. So, in many of these shows that are all dropped all at once they got rid of the previously ons. So it’s essentially assuming that you may just be watching this whole thing through from the start and so therefore we are not going to give you a previously on.

I’m always a fan of previously ons because I think they can help steer the viewer’s eye and attention for the things that are going to be important for just this episode. I just finished watching Bodyguard which is a BBC production that’s on Netflix now.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And I think it was – I don’t know – maybe it was a week-to-week originally in the BBC but they kept the previously ons and I thought the previously ons were incredibly helpful in just steering you towards what to focus on in a given episode because even though it’s only six hours long a tremendous amount happens and you would have a hard time noticing those things. So, you know, with that I think they were able to get rid of some clunky scenes that would have otherwise just been there to remind the viewer that something had happened.

Movies don’t have previously ons. It’s just a run.

**Craig:** They don’t. And what’s also great about previously ons is that they can dip back – they can redefine what previously is. So, Game of Thrones occasionally in a previously on bit will show you something that happened two seasons earlier, because it’s suddenly relevant now. In fact, sometimes it annoys me a little bit because they’ll show me some random thing from two seasons ago and I’ll be like, OK, that’s tipped me off quite a bit about what’s going to happen here.

So, sometimes it can actually diminish a little bit of surprise. But with something that is as sprawling and as multi-episode as Game of Thrones you need it. It’s really important. But even for Chernobyl we’re certainly going to have to do some version of that. I’m a big believer in giving people a little bit of a short refresher and then before the HBO static comes on. And I’m a big fan of giving them a glimpse of what’s about to come. Which, again, is maybe what’s happening in next week’s episode, or maybe it’s a little bit of a glimpse ahead to the episode three weeks from now. They never really tell you which I think is cool. So you get to shape the kind of set up and the expectation for next time which you can’t do in movies.

Again, like, I don’t know, I think I should just keep doing. I mean, I just love it. The thing that always scared me away from television I think was just kind of the endless – but even now I think about the endless ongoing thing and I think you know what that was only a nightmare for me when I considered the idea of doing a procedural. I could never do what Derek does because it’s just not how my mind works. You know?

But now you can make these seasons that are eight episodes long. That is a miniseries essentially. And you just need to know that like, OK, and then I can do a second miniseries of those characters in this situation again the following season and it’s not so daunting. It’s actually quite lovely.

**John:** All right. Now, before we lose Craig to television forever, I want to get his opinion on something that’s really more of a feature issue which is our marquee topic today which is commencement. Commencement is a fancy word for beginning, but actually it’s a term of art that means something especially for screenwriters. It means that you can now start writing the thing.

And so let’s talk about this from the perspective of Craig you have just been hired to write a movie for somebody.

**Craig:** Which I have been.

**John:** Congratulations. Which is true.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**John:** And so it doesn’t matter really if it’s a first draft or if it’s a rewrite or a polish, ultimately you’re going to be turning in a draft.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a draft is sort of two things. I mean, it is a bunch of pages that have text on them and that is a thing they will hopefully shoot and make into a movie. But a draft from your perspective and as you’re planning your life, a draft is also time. It is a chunk of time in which you are going to be writing this thing. And because it’s both of these things sometimes it’s useful to think about just kind of a timeline. And on this timeline there’s one point where you start writing. That is commencement. And there’s one point where you give them the script. That is delivery. And ideally those are really clearly defined moments and everyone agrees on what those moments are and everything is happy and wonderful.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** The experience that you and I both had as screenwriters and which all other screenwriters can nod and attest to is that it’s really murky sometimes what those moments are. So take the delivery side, like I send in my script. You and I both grew up in a time where we had to print our scripts and put them in an envelope and a messenger would come and pick them up. Or we would literally drop them off someplace. Now we’re attaching them to an email and we’re sending them in as a PDF. And so we think like, “I delivered.” But did you deliver? Is it all done? Is it all final? Or did you just send it to the producer and the producer is going to come back with notes? Is the studio exec going to say like, oh, could we do a little bit more?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if you’re still within your initial writing period, which we should also talk about, yeah maybe you do do a little bit more of that stuff. But that becomes the endless rewrites. Those endless unpaid rewrites. Ultimately, you want to come at the end of this to be you really delivered when they’re cutting you a check. That is the moment that you can really know like, OK, I am done with this draft. This draft is both this document, this time, this moment has ended. And you don’t get to the end until you start.

**Craig:** Well, look, that’s how our contracts are designed. It’s essentially what they’re advertising to you. And then they immediately say now here’s how it really works. What they’re advertising to you is you write the script. You deliver the script, we give you a check. And also you started the script, we’ll give you half the money. Great. You deliver it, we give you the other half.

And then they do everything they can to subvert that. Everything they can, including taking forever to pay you the first half. They may say we’re not paying you the first half until the long form contract is done, but in the meantime you have to start writing because we need this soon.

I have been in situations, and this was a long time, the very first movie I ever worked on they dragged their heels so much that when we – because I had a writing partner at the time – when we finished the draft we called and said you can’t have this until you pay us commencement and delivery. You can’t have it. And it was a scary thing to do for two 25 year olds to say to the Walt Disney Corporation. But it worked.

But I never forgot how they dragged that out miserably. And while you’re looking at a piece of paper that says, OK, I officially have 12 weeks to do this. My contract says I have 12 weeks. Everything that they’re going to do is designed to make you work for 800 weeks.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you think like, oh, in a contract where you have a job and then you have a timeline where you have to do the job by that the person hiring you would want to enforce that. They specifically don’t want to enforce it.

**John:** No. The studio executive is being paid for every week of work. They’re not getting paid for like, oh, you know, make some movies and then we’ll pay you eventually. No, they’re being paid for their work and as writers we’re not paid for our work in the same way. Because we’re still working under the assumption that our work is this draft that we’re handing them, they will try to extend that time endlessly.

Our goal of this conversation is to talk about starting the clock and so that once you’ve started the clock you know the clock is running and then you can actually stop the clock when you’ve turned in the thing.

So, let’s talk about commencement because commencement is that sense of like, OK, it’s OK to go ahead and start writing your script. Now, the people who might tell you that it’s OK to start writing your script but you shouldn’t necessarily believe them are your agent, your manager, the producer, the junior studio executive. They might all say, “Great. You’re good. We all agree. You can go start writing the thing.” When you should really probably start writing the thing is when your attorney who is negotiating this says we’re good. So I would trust that person. I would also trust if you get a check in your hand that is a sign that you are truly commenced.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** Short of that check in your hand, you kind of don’t really know. If you signed your long form agreement that’s a good sign, too. But that check in your hand is really what means that like they believe you are starting writing, so start writing.

**Craig:** I don’t think I’ve ever waited for the check in hand.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** But I have certainly waited for the certificate of authorship, which is a pretty decent stand in for a long form. And it’s something that if a studio is seemingly dragging their heels and saying we’re not going to actually pay you until you sign this long form but please start writing, that’s when your lawyer should be asking for a certificate of authorship. And what that does is it basically just establishes the most important fact for all parties involved. They’re hiring you. They’re paying you. You are doing it as a work-for-hire so that they have the basic minimum required to be able to cut you a check.

**John:** Yeah. So, what I’ve taken to doing over the past couple of years is when I’m starting on the project I will send an email to the producers, to the executives, to everybody who is involved and say like, OK guys, I’m starting writing. We all agree that I’m starting writing. And I anticipate handing this in at about this date. And just having some sort of virtual paper trail that says like this is when I think – these are the boundaries I think are on this project is helpful, because it gets them in a sense of like, oh, you know, we can’t actually expect him to be turning this in sooner than that because that’s not realistic. And we can’t be dragging him on a long time after this because there is some limit to it.

If you don’t define your edges a little bit they’re going to just keep trying to get more out of you.

**Craig:** That’s correct. What they will do is say, listen, we need to get this as soon as possible. Everybody wants everything as soon as possible.

**John:** Everything is a crisis.

**Craig:** Everything is a crisis. But what they really want, and this cuts directly to producers. This is more about producers than the studio. The producers will not get paid unless the movie is made. That’s where they make their money. They get a very, very large fee for a green lit movie and then of course a percentage of the grosses is quite likely as well.

So, they want to get a green light-able movie as fast as possible. Which means they want you to write your first draft as fast as possible. Give it to them. They can tell you how it’s going to need to change to get the green light. Then you’re going to write that new change as quickly as possible and they’re going to keep doing that until they have something that they believe is going to slam dunk it on in there. And while that’s going on often they are showing it to the studio and kind of basically playing development without paying you. That’s sort of the gig.

And that’s why I don’t do it.

**John:** Yep. So my previous solution in terms of like sending out the email to everyone saying like this is – I’m starting writing. This is good. It was useful for me, but that’s not a sort of general purpose solution. And so one of the things we’ve been working on with the WGA West over the last six months is something we’re calling the Start Button. So that’s what we introduced this past week. And if you’re a WGA West member you can play along with us at home.

If you go to my.wga.org/sb for start button, or you can just say Start Button, you’ll log in and you’ll see a brand new thing there called Welcome to the Start Button. And it gives you a chance to update an existing project, create a new project, or go back to the main page.

If you create a new project it gives you a couple fields. And, Craig, you just did this. So do you want to talk us through what you did and how it worked?

**Craig:** Yes. Pretty simple. I said, yep, I’m starting a new thing and I hit that button. And then it asked me for the working title of the project. I typed that in. It asked me for the studio. It didn’t have the exact name of the studio in there because it’s sort of a prepopulated list and studios have like 14 million different weird names. So I was able to just type in the studio’s name and it took it. And then I put down essentially what kind of step it was and when I anticipated delivering it, which is basically the amount of weeks. And in that case I went for the maximum of 12 weeks.

**John:** 12 weeks.

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

**John:** Yeah. So you could have put in an expected delivery date or 12 weeks and you hit start.

**Craig:** And then I hit start. That was it.

**John:** That’s all you do.

**Craig:** Done.

**John:** So what Craig did when he did that was create a record in the WGA that says like this is a project that exists. This is a movie that someone is working on and 12 weeks from now we can check in with him and say like, hey, is everything OK with this project.

Now, it seems like, well, shouldn’t the WGA already know that this movie exists? They don’t. And that’s the crazy thing is because in television, you know, the WGA knows week by week every writer who is working on every television project. In features we don’t because all that paperwork, all the pay records, they can be months and months and months behind. So, this is a way for the guild to know what writers are working on at the time and help out if you’re in situations where you are being asked to do endless free rewrites, if you are being paid late.

It’s a way for us to check and see like what’s actually going on with this project. And in a general sense where are writers having the most challenges and where are writers having a pretty OK time.

As you go through the second screen you see there’s also a chance to upload your contract. Uploading your contract is super helpful because it lets the guild know kind of what’s happening out there in the world overall and what are the general trends that writers are seeing. Because the guild is responsible for making sure you’re getting paid your minimums, but the guild also wants you to get paid as much as you can be paid. And so keeping track of that over scale payment is another crucial function.

**Craig:** And I would imagine that if the guild has a copy of your contract and it has your start date and all the rest that when it calls and says, look, what’s going on. And you say, um, well I mean I’m done but they just keep asking me to do more. That they can say, well, we’re the bad guy and we can call the producer and the studio and say, “You guys are violating his contract and this is part of the minimum basic term because it’s effecting,” and they cite some MBA rules and you’re not allowed to do that so you have to pay him.

**John:** Yeah. And so to clarify, the guild is not going to suddenly call you. The guild is not going to call on your behalf unless you say so. So, what’s going to happen is 12 weeks go by. You get an email saying like, hey, checking in. Seeing what’s going on with that.

If you go back and you say like everything is cool, it’s all fine. Great. Nothing else. If you say there’s a problem we’ll ask do you want us to call you and talk to you about it. And if you say yes then the guild contacts you and figures out what’s going on. And figures out whether they should get involved on your behalf.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think what Craig said is probably the most crucial thing. It allows the guild to be the bad guy because the guild should be the bad guy in this situation. It’s so hard for writers to stick up for themselves in a lot of these situations, but that’s why you have a union.

It’s also why you have agents and managers who should be doing some of this, too. But it’s why you have a union. And the union is good at this. And the union is good at collecting money and let them be the bad guy in these situations.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And if you are worried that it’s going to somehow end up, you know, blackballing you, driving you out of the business, I point to the aforementioned DGA which acts as a bad guy on behalf of its directors all the time. Now, granted in the case that we read earlier they’re not particularly interested in advocating on behalf of directors that have not yet been hired. But when you are hired by the DGA and you’re working under the DGA, which I have done, they spring into action. They’re there. They show up on your set. They start talking to you. And they make a presence known. And if they sniff any kind of trouble, any sort of encroachment on what they consider to be directorial rights they are on it.

And the attitude in Hollywood is not well let’s not work with that director anymore. The attitude is, oh god, we have a DGA problem.

**John:** Yep. Yeah. And so I guess a crucial difference is the DGA reps, they can show up at a set because a set is a physical place. The WGA people can’t show up at your office and say what’s going on here. This actually gets them closer to being able to say, hey, what’s going on here. Is everything OK? I want to make sure that our writers aren’t being abused.

**Craig:** Correct. So it’s a really good idea. You’re smart for having done it. And this is why we elected you and such.

**John:** Hooray. Great. So it’s available now. Check it out. So if you’re starting writing something it’s a good time to do it, or if you’re on a rewrite for something. So try it out and see what it feels like.

All right, we’ve got time for one question. Shari writes in, “Friends and family who have read my pilot say it’s ‘too dark for television,” that it could never be produced. Yet South Park gets away with having woodland creatures banging each other in a satanic ritual on Christmas, while Frank in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia screams he has AIDS to cut through the line at an amusement park. My writing is not nearly as dark, I don’t think, but my script tries to poke fun at the fact that people sometimes have no choice but to experience some dark moments in life.

“Looking back on it, those moments can be funny as hell. So how do dark comedies redeem themselves? Do dark comedy writers follow different craft and structural rules in order to secure their audience? Is there are market for dark comedies on television? What does it look like to have crossed the line in dark comedy?”

**Craig:** Well, I would say that your friends and family may not be as dark as you. And you’re right. There is dark comedy on television. There’s more of it now than ever. And it’s been around forever. Seinfeld got incredibly dark. Even though it wasn’t maybe as overtly dark as South Park sometimes gets, in its own way was pretty brutal.

And you’re right. It’s Always Sunny definitely goes there. And so the answer is how do dark comedies redeems themselves, they don’t necessarily. They are there to be enjoyed by people who love that kind of edge.

We need to know that the people that we’re watching aren’t cruel. That is to say they’re not sadistic. They don’t enjoy the pain of others. The people that we like watching in dark comedies are selfish. They are self-obsessed. They’re egotistical. They are locked in self-defeating patterns. So it’s a little bit of kind of they are dark people operating in a moral universe, which is why I actually love the final episode of Seinfeld because it just basically took them to task for their behavior over the course of all their seasons.

Is there different craft or structural rules? No, it’s about your tone, your voice, and what you think is funny. I would say don’t apologize for any of it. If you’re going to be dark, be dark. And if you think it’s funny, then you think it’s funny and you stand by it. Yes, there’s a market for dark comedy on television, there’s a market for television on television at this point given that we have more and more content producers making more and more shows.

What does it look like to have crossed the line in a dark comedy? When people stop laughing. That’s what it looks like. When they just go, “Oh, that’s actually not funny.”

Years and years ago I was talking to a friend of mine and we were discussing that there’s that complaint that some white comedians used to make where like, OK, black comedians get to make fun of white people. Why can’t white comedians make fun of black people? And the answer is it’s not funny. That’s why. It’s not funny. It’s not about justice, or what’s right or wrong, or balancing. It’s not funny. Punching down generally isn’t funny, although sometimes it’s hysterical.

It’s hard to describe. We just know it when we see it. And for some people they will say, you know what, that crossed the line for me. And other people will say, oh my god, thank god they did that. The line has just moved again. Hooray.

You find your tribe. You do your comedy for them and you hope it’s a big tribe and you hope they love it.

**John:** Yeah. Craig’s you know it when you see it really speaks to expectation. And so my hunch is that friends and family who are reading your script right now Shari they are not expecting it to be what it is. And so that may be something about because they already know you, or it could be because of what they’re seeing on those first two pages. But there’s a mismatch between the thing they think they’re going to get and what they’re actually reading. And so they may not be the audience for it all, but if they were the audience for that kind of stuff they’re not being led into it in the right way to let them understand what the rules of your sort of moral universe are. And how the darkness is going to work in your writing.

So, I would look both at your friends and family. Look at who your readers are and are they the right readers for this thing. But also look at your writing and trying to figure out is there something about how I’m presenting this, really how I’m setting this up, that is leading people in the wrong direction so they think it’s one thing and it’s actually a very different darker thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, look, when Todd Phillips and I were writing the Hangover sequels we oftentimes would go places that were so horrifyingly dark, so incredibly dark that we kind of knew that we had crossed the line a little bit. And that’s keeping in mind the fact that we opened the third movie with a giraffe being decapitated on a freeway. But it was fun. We needed to do it. We needed to get in that zone. I mean, we had this idea – I don’t think I’ve ever said this before – we had this idea that – it would never fit in any of the movies. We were just talking about Mr. Chow, the character of Mr. Chow. And we just had this weird fantasy of shooting a scene where Mr. Chow goes to find his father who he’s not spoken to or seen in 30 years.

And he finds his elderly father and his father says, “Leslie?” And Mr. Chow says, “That’s right, mother-f-er.” And then he cuts his throat. He cuts his father’s throat. And his father’s final words are, “At last you make me proud.” [laughs]

It’s so sick. It makes me so happy. Now, I don’t know if anybody would think that was funny, but oh my god we thought it was hysterical. Just the idea of this family that was so sick that – anyway, I don’t have to explain it. It’s bizarre, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you go down these roads of this total F-ed up stuff. And then you come back from it and you, you know, you write things that are still F-ed up but maybe not so wildly F-ed up. But you need room to be transgressive, particularly if that’s the style of comedy you’re doing at that point. And it sounds like, Shari, you’re pretty transgressive. Go for it.

**John:** Go for it.

All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Art and Arcana. Now, Craig, have you bought this book yet?

**Craig:** You know I haven’t.

**John:** It’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, I probably should.

**John:** I feel guilty sort of recommending $125 book on Dungeons and Dragons artwork and history, but there’s also a $34 version which is just the book. So, the big fancy one comes in a box with extra stuff. But you do you. Decide what version of this you want because if you want this you really want this. It is the history of Dungeons and Dragons as told by the creators and showing all the artwork and how this thing came to be.

And so I have just – it’s one of those books that’s so giant that I have to sort of sit down on the couch and prop it on my legs and just fully engross myself in it. I found it just terrific.

**Craig:** That sounds like something I may slip my wife on a gift list for Christmas, you know.

**John:** Nice. Very good.

**Craig:** Because she hates – every time Christmas rolls around she’s like what do I get this guy.

**John:** Yeah, I know that Melissa loves Dungeons and Dragons. There’s nothing she gets more excited about than that. [laughs]

**Craig:** She hates it so much. So it will be fun to force her to buy that. My One Cool Thing is a fascinating discovery in the world of pain management. I was so excited when I read this article. It’s in Wired. And it’s an article about a cactus plant that grows in Morocco. Now, you’re probably familiar with the Scoville Scale of hotness, John?

**John:** Absolutely. So like pepper sauces are rated on how hot they are.

**Craig:** Exactly. So for instance the world’s hottest pepper, I don’t know, it’s so many hundreds of thousands of Scoville units.

This thing, this cactus like plant, clocks in at 16 billion units. So it is 10,000 times hotter than the Carolina Reaper, which is the world’s hottest pepper. 10,000 times hotter. And it’s that way because of this chemical in it called resiniferatoxin. I think I’m pronouncing that right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’ve had a jalapeno before?

**John:** I have. I’ve had good and bad experiences with jalapenos.

**Craig:** So this cactus is 4.5 million times hotter than a jalapeno. You cannot eat this. You can’t eat it.

So here’s what happens with this stuff. The reason that your tongue burns when you eat a pepper is because there’s a chemical in there that essentially stimulates the nerves that would be stimulated if you had actually lit your tongue on fire.

So, this thing does that so massively that it literally burns – it destroys the ends of the fibers of nerve bundles that generate pain signals. But only pain signals. So what it does is it doesn’t burn out nerves that sense pressure or cold or hot or feeling, just pain.

Now, the problem is if you’re going to do this it’s also going to cause you tremendous pain while it’s doing it. But, for this stuff that they pulled out of it, RTX, what they do is they give you an anesthetic. So let’s say you have knee pain. They give you an anesthetic in your knee so that you won’t feel the terrible pain of the RTX. Then they inject the RTX. The RTX binds to pain-sensing nerve endings and essentially blows them out to the point where they can’t really come back on for about six months.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** And then when you’re anesthesia wears off in your knee you might feel a little bit of like, ow, my god, but after an hour or so it’s over and then there’s this incredible pain relief. And the best part is there is no associated reinforcement effect. There is no euphoria. There is no reason to become addicted to it.

**John:** It’s not a neurotransmitter situation.

**Craig:** That’s right. It’s not an opioid or anything like that. And given how disastrous pain management has become in this country, something like this could be a huge, huge game changer, particularly for people that have chronic pain and also end of life terminal pain associated with cancer and things like this.

So, if you have arthritis or any kind of longstanding pain, this is exciting. So I hope that it – they’re just starting now, but it looks good.

**John:** Good. I like that. Optimistic.

Our show was sort of all over the place this week. And so we started and stopped so many times. So I wanted to quickly recap some of the things we talked about.

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Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. Edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is fantastic. It’s by Andrew Burns. 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 like the ones we answered today.

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There are no more USB drives. The USB drives have sold out.

**Craig:** Sweet. When do I get my check?

**John:** Oh, a giant check is coming. Well, on the 12th you’ll get your gift for less than $20.

**Craig:** [laughs] Getting ripped off again.

**John:** Yeah. At the live show you’ll get it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great.

**John:** Craig, thank you for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. See you next time.

**John:** All right, bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

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The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/real-world-villains).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 374 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show it’s a new round of How Would This Be a Movie? where we take a look at stories in the news and discuss how they could be turned into big screen entertainment, or realistically small screen entertainment because that’s where all the action is.

Plus, we’ll be answering a listener question about ensemble movies.

But we’re only going to do this if people vote, because this episode is coming out on Election Day. So if you are a US citizen who is of age to vote you need to stop what you’re doing right now and go vote and come back and listen to this episode after you’ve voted. Is that fair?

**Craig:** I think it’s more than fair. And if you’re still here and you haven’t voted and you’re still listening, I’m angry. So now you’ll enjoy the gift of my anger. What are you doing? Stop it. Do you enjoy this? Do you like podcasts and people saying what they want to say and freedom and, I don’t know, a planet that isn’t sweltering hot? Just go and vote. Just go vote, dumb-dumb, and then come back.

**John:** Yeah. We’re recording this on a Friday. I have no idea what I’m actually going to do on Tuesday other than sort of, you know, panic a little bit.

**Craig:** Well, at this point I’m preparing to curl up into the fetal position, but anything – anything better than that will be a joy.

**John:** It will be a joy. What is also a joy is the Random Advice episode that is now out for people to listen to. So if you are a premium subscriber, which you can subscribe to at Scriptnotes.net, you have for you to listen to the Random Advice episode that Craig and I recorded.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** So good. It’s actually a delightful episode. It has almost nothing to do with screenwriting. It’s just other stuff that listeners wrote in with their questions and we answered it.

**Craig:** But we’re so good at everything.

**John:** Yeah. We’ve got opinions on most everything and we answered most of those opinions.

**Craig:** But just really good. I mean, we’re really good at this. And, I mean, for $1.99, geez-Louise. I mean, you’re not voting. You’re not giving us two dollars a month. What good are you? I’m talking to you, listener. What good are you?

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** This is how I like to drum up listenership. This is direct abuse.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a strategy.

**Craig:** It’s fun.

**John:** Several people have written to us about FilmStruck shutting down. I was not a subscriber to FilmStruck, which is probably part of the reason why. It was me. It was my fault.

**Craig:** You did it.

**John:** I was the person. I did it. But it ties in very well to this conversation we had earlier about missing movies and sort of the research I’d done on movies that are no longer available. So FilmStruck was one of the ways that some people could see some of those movies that were missing. But of course the answer is that you can’t have one service that you rely on to solve all of the problem of missing movies and it has to be a systemic situation where the people who own copyright on these movies actively put them out there in ways that people can see them. And FilmStruck by itself couldn’t do that.

**Craig:** I feel like I’m the reason it shut down because I did subscribe to FilmStruck and I enjoyed it. Melissa enjoyed it. And so, of course, that was it. They found out that we were enjoying it and they took it away.

For years I’ve paid for Cinemax. I don’t think I’ve ever watched anything on Cinemax.

**John:** No, no.

**Craig:** And Cinemax is still going strong.

**John:** I think I have CBS All Access. Haven’t used it.

**Craig:** There you go. But you will once you turn 90. [laughs] Was a cheap shot. You know what that was? A cheap shot.

**John:** Yeah, it’s fine. Luke in San Diego wrote to us and said, “Thank you for single handedly bringing back the rom-com,” which we did. So that was in the repeat episode, the Tess Morris on rom-coms.

**Craig:** Oh yes, we did.

**John:** “So I wonder if you can work your magic to bring back my all-time favorite film genre, the terrible live action family Christmas comedy, a la Christmas with the Cranks, Deck the Halls, and Four Christmases. It seems like all of the bad Christmas movies coming out of Hollywood these days are either animated features or R-rated comedies. Will you please help return the true spirit of Christmas to our cinema screens?”

**Craig:** There is a genre of those sort of corny Christmas comedies. Jingle All the Way is one of my favorites. It’s corny. And the reason that they’re corny is because Christmas is corny. I mean, the whole thing. Let me see, what will the theme of this Christmas movie be? It is better to give than to receive. Done. It’s always the same thing. It’s always family and faith and spirit and giving. That’s what Christmas is about. It’s always the same thing over and over and over and over and over and over.

So, I don’t know, do we need more? Or can we just sort of live off the stored up fat of this particular genre?

**John:** I don’t know. Maybe we do need more. I mean, maybe we need, I mean, I’m sure we have the African American family version of this.

**Craig:** Oh yes, there is.

**John:** But there’s certainly always new opportunities to do new versions of this. I also just really kind of want to be on the set when it’s like July and everybody has to wear their parkas and they’re just miserable. And there’s fake snow everywhere. That’s just the movie magic of Hollywood.

**Craig:** Yeah, that is never fun. Never fun for anybody. There’s a scene where someone in our show had to be in a snowy park, wearing a parka, bundled up because it’s Ukrainian winter, and pregnant, so wearing like pregnant padding. And I think it was probably 94 degrees that day. Unpleasant. Or as they would say over there 31.

**John:** Yeah. Celsius. I tried to really master my Celsius while I was living in France. I just never really did it. It makes so much more sense and yet I love the granularity that we can sort of distinguish between like, oh, it’s 72 versus 73.

**Craig:** Exactly. Normally I’m with them on this. I get it. Metric system base 10, the whole thing. Yep. Yep. Totally. But the extra gradations of temperature are actually quite valuable. So, yeah, a little bit of a tradeoff. For some reason our water freezes at 32 instead of a rational zero.

**John:** Oh, and water boils at 212.

**Craig:** Instead of a rational 100. But we do have – you know what – like I like my office at 74. What is it, 21? Whatever.

**John:** My husband is listening right now and just–

**Craig:** So grumpy. [laughs]

**John:** He loves the metric system.

**Craig:** Good. Of course he does.

**John:** Prefers Celsius. Do you want to take this thing about No Writing Left Behind?

**Craig:** Yeah, sure. So we got a little bit of a communicado in from a Matt with a Day Job. And he writes, “Last summer I was approached by a production company via my agent to adapt a comic book series into a feature film. They sent me the comic and even put me in touch with its creator. I went in for the pitch and it was just as Craig said, it was a fantastic conversation about what made both myself and the executives passionate about that story. They then asked me to write a brief outline of what I saw the movie to be before any formal deal was signed.

“Being the new writer on the block, and not really knowing any better, I agreed. Thus began a,” are you sitting, dear listener, “a six-month process of writing and rewriting an outline that varied from 11 pages to 28 pages long. I was otherwise unemployed at the time, so as you can imagine this process was incredibly frustrating. After several drafts totally somewhere around 80 pages across various drafts like Craig I lost the job to ‘we decided not to make this movie.’ During this time my agent encouraged me to do the same with two other projects with another production company, so for seven months I worked on multiple drafts of multiple outlines for multiple projects. Needless to say I felt completely duped and foolish.

“Oh, and I will never, ever do that again.”

I wish John that this were a rare story, but it is not.

**John:** It is not. And even in this last week talking to some working screenwriters you and I both know this kind of thing still happens. Where they’re just like, “Oh, could you just write up this thing because it’s between you and this other person and this could help put you over the top.” Argh.

So, what Matt does bring up here is that in this case the agent said to do it. We’ve also heard from people who said like, oh, my manager told me to do it. My manager told me it’s totally normal. That’s bad. That’s not good. Because the agent and the manager, they’re not getting paid for that free work either. So it should be in their interest to make sure that their clients are being paid to write and yet they seem to have forgotten that key part of their job.

**Craig:** Yeah. Your agent or your manager who tells you you should do this is literally saying the following to you, whether you realize it or not. “I, your representative, do not feel that I can get you employment unless you debase yourself in this manner. I just don’t think I can do it. I’m not good enough. I’m not good enough to call this production company and say, ‘You like my client? You think they’re amazing? Hire them. Otherwise, I’m too smart to let my client work for six months and generate free labor for you in violation of a number of laws, by the way, because you’re not allowed to do that.’ And then not get the job. So I’m not good enough to handle that for you, dear client. Therefore you should just go do that.”

That’s what they’re saying to you. They’re useless. They’re worse than useless. In this situation you’re better off without an agent or a manager giving you this terrible advice. And to the people that do this to writers, all I can tell you is your time has come. We’re not going to stop talking about this. We are not going to stop. You are going to stop. Because we’re going to keep telling these stories and sharing these stories. The thing that ruins your little plan is when we all talk to each other and realize how often it doesn’t turn into anything except misery.

So listen at home friends. When you say, “Well, you know, John and Craig are just trying to keep us from doing this, keep us out of the business,” no. What we’re trying to do is save you from the misery that Matt had to deal with. And I’m going to repeat again: six months, 80 pages, no employment.

**John:** Yep. I’m trying to think of other industries that have agents and managers and people trying to be hired to do things and where this would be possible. So, I think about professional athletes. You know, the agent for a professional athlete, the manager for a professional athlete, is not going to let them go and play for six months for free hoping that they’ll get signed on the team. That just doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** No, I mean, the equivalent would be a tryout. So you’re not signed, go to a tryout. Great. Go to a tryout camp. That’s a week or two, but you’re not going to let them go on for six months. All they’re going to do is get injured. Are we playing for you or not? You have enough information to decide. Yes or no. Do it. Because what they can’t do, what any team can’t do, is see enough to guarantee this guy is going to help us win a championship. Nobody knows anything. You’ve got to let it just happen. Just let it happen. Trust it. Have faith.

**John:** Yeah. So if you were a model would the manager say like, “Oh, no, no, just go and let them take a ton of photos. No, no, let them take a ton more photos. Let them use your photos. No. Definitely go. Spend six months.”

No. That person would say like you want to take this person’s picture that is a job. You’re taking up their time. That’s the thing. It’s like it is ultimately their time is what they are billing. And they should bill for that time.

**Craig:** Their time is being abused and also their – I honestly just think that they are being abused. Their personhood is being abused by this behavior. And the people who did this, this production company, or if you are in a production company right now and you work for one, you’re listening to this, I want to tell you take this seriously. We’re not just mouthing off on a podcast. It’s stopping. We’re coming for you and we’re going to share names. We do that. We know. And you know what, I’ll start saying names on this show. I don’t care. I’ll blow my career up. I’m basically good.

You know what I mean? Like I don’t care anymore. I really don’t. It’s enough already.

**John:** Yeah. He’s been pushed too far.

**Craig:** I’ve been pushed too far.

**John:** Nothing left to lose.

**Craig:** I’ve got nothing left to lose. I have one day to retirement. [laughs]

**John:** How many more clichés can we stack on top of this guy as he goes into this journey?

**Craig:** I’m getting too old for this poop.

**John:** Katie wrote in. She said, “I’ve been catching up on about two years of Scriptnotes episodes and just today reached Episode 346, the episode with Christina Hodson. The question of how to indicate to casting that a character is ‘open’ gave me an idea. Why not work to implement and popularize a shorthand abbreviation that means open race or non-specified race? It could be as simple as Teddy Johnson, early 30s, OR, or NSR, removes his jet pack and glowers at the gathered crowd.

“Even if many writers choose not to use it, it could become a recognizable and accepted term that could help writers, executives, and casting departments move towards a more diverse range of actors.”

Craig, what do you think of OR or NSR?

**Craig:** This is not a bad idea at all. Things like abbreviations like OR or NSR may seem a little unwieldy, but then again we have lots of abbreviations that we use in screenwriting all the time that are a little odd like OS and VO and blah-blah-blah. However, what I think is if something like this is going to have a prayer of succeeding it needs to be employer-driven, because ultimately it’s the studios that set the standards for screenplays. If all the studios said, “Listen, this is a thing, part of our screenplay deal, it’s in your contract, is that this is part of the format we use,” then we would use it. But if you’re just going to ask screenwriters in general to do it, it’s just going to be incredibly difficult to reach critical mass, especially because most screenwriters and most screenplay material is for television where the cast is already in place.

**John:** Although every television show is always bringing in new actors to play new little parts. And so there’s always casting that’s happening on a weekly basis in television. I think television may actually be the opportunity. I can see if a network or a studio or even just a show decided like, oh you know what, we’re going to always just mark it in a thing that it’s NSR and it’s going to be – just to make it clear to our own internal team that like we are looking for a broad range of, you know, different possibilities for this role.

**Craig:** Just my impression of television writing, I could be wrong, just from what I’ve seen is that they don’t really call the stuff out in their scripts. Because they’re in production all the time, it’s a casting breakdown kind of thing.

**John:** Yeah, but I suspect race is still indicated in scripts where it’s important, even in television, even in like episode 11 of a show.

**Craig:** Right. Where it’s important, for sure, I guess so. But here where it’s not, I don’t know. I think if studios and large production companies made it part of the format than yes. But, hard to get people to just kind of piecemeal adapt it. That’s my gut.

**John:** That’s my gut, too. But if this already existed, I would be delighted for it to already exist.

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems like it would be helpful.

**John:** I agree. All right, a bigger topic was suggested by Aaron Sauerland. He tweeted at me. He said, “Hey John August, have you and CL Mazin ever done an episode on writing scripts with an ensemble cast. My writing partner and I are writing one right now and would love any insight on balancing characters for a story like that.”

Craig, you and I have both written ensemble movies.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk through some general advice for Aaron and his writing partner as they are getting started on theirs.

**Craig:** Sure. Well, no matter what the ensemble is, there’s going to be one main character, meaning one protagonist. There will be, typically in ensemble films A stories, B stories, C stories. There are some true ensemble films which are more in the kind of Love Actually mode where you are actually dividing a movie into really three movies that you’re running simultaneously or something like that. And that’s not this. But for a proper ensemble I think you have your main story with your main character and then there’s a sub story with sub characters. John Hughes would do this quite a bit.

You have to make sure who is who. And then you have to make sure that all the characters have a purpose. There is a thing that happens sometimes, and I will see it actually interestingly on sitcoms, where three people, four people, six people are confronted by somebody and one of the group has a back and forth with that person. And everyone else is just standing there. That can be awkward. Even after a minute or two you start to wonder why people are just standing.

**John:** As you were describing the kinds of movies that are ensembles, I think maybe we should break them down a little bit more because I have one idea for what an ensemble movie is, but there clearly are kind of many different ensemble movies. So, something like The Hangover is what you’re describing where, yes, there are multiple characters but there is one character who is sort of going to protagonate over the course of it and the other characters are going to have a function in that.

But I look at a movie like Go which truly has different protagonists in each of its sections. And so in each of those chapters a different character really is the central character and the one who has to go through the biggest change.

And then you look at Robert Altman movies which just have a bunch of people who are just doing stuff and it’s hard to say that that one character is the central character of the film. In fact, in an Altman movie generally you could take out one entire character from the whole movie and the movie would still work. And so they’re kaleidoscopic in that way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What Aaron should maybe keep in mind as he and his writing partner are getting started is that within a scene, like what you’re describing in the sitcom thing where like one character is driving and other characters are just sitting there, it’s something we talked about two episodes ago on the show, you’re often going to have one character who is the central character in that scene and he’s sort of the hero of that scene. And if you think of every scene as being its own little movie, there’s probably going to be one person who is the central character in that moment. And you’re going to have to figure out how to use the other characters to support that main character’s idea in that sequence.

Continue that through the whole movie and even if you’re doing an Altman-esque movie, or a movie like Go that has truly sort of multiple protagonists – Big Fish also has multiple protagonists – you’re still looking for a thread that follows a single character, even though there’s multiple characters around you.

**Craig:** Yeah. And again I tend to think of ensemble movies as more a unified story with a lot of actors sort of rotating around it as opposed to more of the kind of fragmented storytelling which is more of the Tarantino kind of action in Pulp Fiction. I think Go as well. There’s intersections, right, but it seems like there’s sort of somewhat independent stories going on.

**John:** Yeah. There are chapters.

**Craig:** Chapters. Whereas like when I think of a classic ensemble film I think of something like Bridesmaids where there are a lot of characters and you do get to follow these mini stories. And what’s very important for you, Aaron, as you’re balancing these things out and you understand what your A story is and you understand what your B story is and you know that, OK, the A story needs to have the most stuff in it and the most emotionally complicated stuff. And it sort of needs the biggest beginning, middle, and end.

As you go down the list of B, C, D, the stories need to get simpler and shorter. Simpler and shorter. Simpler and shorter. To the point where on a D story it may just be somebody wanted something in the very beginning of the movie and they get it at the very end. It literally could be that. But it’s really important to also keep in mind that when you have characters that feel really peripheral to the movie at some point they need to become incredibly important. It is just satisfying when for instance in Bridesmaids we see Melissa McCarthy’s character and we think she’s just a goof, and for a while she is just a goof. She isn’t really super friendly with our main character and she steals puppies. She’s kind of crazy. But at a crucial point in the film it’s Melissa McCarthy’s character who finally shakes Kristen Wiig’s character out of her funk and says stop it, go be the better you. She becomes incredibly crucial to the story. And that’s really important. That’s what you want to see in a movie where you’re layering people. Make that somebody that you didn’t think was that important become super important suddenly.

We like that.

**John:** Yeah. So a movie of my own that I can’t believe wasn’t the first thing that came to mind is Charlie’s Angels. So in the Charlie’s Angels movies there is no one protagonist. The three angels are all heroes and protagonists and not any one of them is the main character. They’re all three the main character. And so one of the great challenges of that movie is trying build arcs for all three of them so they each have their own journey, so that they each affect each other’s journey, that we still have a villain plot, and you still have overall surprises and twists. That makes it really challenging because every scene has to do a bunch of different work to service the movie plot but also to service really the character moments, the story moments that the characters are going through.

So in that case, I think what’s really crucial is to remember that no matter how many characters you’re sort of dividing that protagonist role between they need to all be addressing the same central dramatic question, the same thematic issue just from a slightly different way. So they all feel like they need to be in the same movie because they’re all tackling the same thematic territory. If you just have a character who is nothing but just a wild card who is out there to sort of throw hand grenades, you can’t give that character too much time or else they’re just going to pull the movie into a very bad place.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s a really good point. And one thing I would say to you, Aaron, is if you do kind of confront people saying well everybody needs their own arc, everybody needs the kind of attention and focus that the main character gets, think about just as a point of rebuttal think about a movie like The Big Chill where you can kind of see where the main characters are and you can see the A, B, and C story. But you also can say reasonably that the character arc for a number of those characters is the relationship that they all share. That’s kind of – so it’s a little bit of a family story. We as a family have a problem. We as a family confront it. We as a family move past it.

That’s reasonable. And in this way you don’t end up having to do individual little stories for every single person. It becomes exhausting. And more importantly it begins to feel super fake because in life we’re not all equally struggling with really important stuff that’s going to be handled in the moment of the story of the movie.

**John:** Yep. Most people’s lives are not going to fall into that two-hour block of screen time that we’re talking about. So it is unrealistic to think that everyone is going to have this giant transformational journey over the course of those two hours.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I just now realized what movie Aaron is writing. He is writing the PG Christmas comedy that people so desperately want.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** That is the ensemble movie that I’m sure Aaron is writing and I cannot wait to see what he and his writing partner are working on.

**Craig:** Every single elf needs a backstory.

**John:** Yeah. Every one of them.

**Craig:** Every one of them.

**John:** So, I mean, it’s Tim Allen’s coming back – oh, I bet it’s a new sequel to The Santa Clause. So Tim Allen is like handing off the mantle to the next person.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s going to be good.

**Craig:** Right. There was a The Santa Clause, and then there was The Santa Clause – what was the sequel?

**John:** There was a Santa Clause 2? Is there more?

**Craig:** But it had like a funny name like the Re-Clause, it doesn’t matter. All right.

**John:** If only we had an IMDb and could look it up.

Let’s get to our main topic which is How Would This Be a Movie? So, this is how this works. People send us either via email or by tweet saying, hey John and Craig, how would this be a movie, and a link to an article that they found in the news that they found fascinating and they are all fascinating. So, I will say that people do a very good job of sending us stuff. In our outline here we have at least ten things that I’ve passed on because they were good. I just didn’t find them interesting enough to be our marquee topics here. But in the show notes we’ll have links to all the things that people have also submitted, because there’s good stuff. There’s a love story that upended the Texas prison system. There is a woman who made her ex think she was dead for five years after he dumped her by text. Oh, not dead for five years. That he was a dad for five years.

**Craig:** I think the first version could be a movie.

**John:** Yeah. Both could be good. And heroin. There’s always heroin and drug stuff. But the ones I picked for today, three of them are about sort of real world villains and some of them have sort of political connections. And the other two are just delightful. So, let’s start with this first one. This is from Laurel Wamsley writing for NPR. Mystery novelist wife kills chef-husband after penning 2011 essay on how to kill one’s husband. Basically this woman, she had written up a blog post and she’s also sort of an author of a sort. Wrote this blog post about how to kill your husband. Then her husband dies and everyone is like, “Wait, did you kill your husband?” And she’s like, ah.

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** Maybe. So also the visuals are helpful here because the woman kind of looks like my grandma. She’s not a young woman.

**Craig:** No. She’s 68. 68 years old. This is an interesting one. So what’s sort of fascinating is when she writes this essay the thesis of the essay basically is it’s really easy to get caught killing someone. You should probably be really, really careful about it. Here’s what you don’t want to do. Don’t do this, don’t do this, don’t do this. And the conclusion essentially was, you know what, she writes, “It’s easier to wish people dead than to actually kill them.”

Years later she proceeds to make essentially every single mistake that she iterated in that essay which makes me think that in fact at the time she wrote it it was not at all any kind of indication of premeditation. That something had happened in the last couple of years that had sent her on this path where she decided to just shoot her husband, who apparently was a lovely man, and seemingly treated her really well.

So, the question is what do you, like how do you make this a movie. And I do think that there’s an interesting deal here where maybe an editor starts working with a promising novelist who is writing a mystery novel and the editor does what editors do which is to constantly means test and logic challenge this person’s murder mystery. And keep saying, no, no, no, you’d be caught doing this. You’d be caught. She’s supposed to be, no, your killer is supposed to be a genius. And then one day when it’s done perfectly the author’s husband disappears. And then the only person that knows for sure, or at least she suspects that she has essentially helped this woman design the murder of her spouse. Be kind of a cool – I think that could be a cool sort of Gone Baby Gone kind of movie.

**John:** Yeah, so this idea for a movie strikes me as a Joe Eszterhas classic. So Joe Eszterhas for people who don’t know was the premier screenwriter, or really prominent screenwriter of the ‘80s as we were getting stated. So he did Basic Instinct. He did Jagged Edge, which I also loved. Jagged Edge is about an author. Basic Instinct I think Catherine Tramell had also written a book about murder. And so it feels like that kind of space.

So the fact that she’s sort of a granny is a twist on this. So whether you keep that or don’t keep that. I like Craig’s basic pitch for it that you have somebody who has insight into this author ahead of time and has to figure out what’s really going on.

What was good about Basic – actually Jagged Edge was the person who has insight into it is also kind of falling for the person who may be the murderer.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is a nice aspect of it, too. One of my favorite moments in Jagged Edge is Glenn Close has the typewriter and types, “He is innocent,” and the T misaligned exactly the way that it was in this one clue.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was great. Well done Joe Eszterhas. So, yeah, I think there’s something here. And you don’t have to go goofy with it. You could go straight thriller. We just don’t make those thrillers very much anymore.

**Craig:** Well we don’t in theatrical unless it’s based on a very popular novel a la Gone Baby Gone. And even in that circumstance you still need a top flight director and a top flight – well, at least somebody they consider to be a movie star, or else it’s not going to happen. But they do make things like this all the time for television now. Joe Eszterhas was famous for the – he did it, he didn’t do it, he did it structure. So you would kind of be lured into believing that this person whether it was Jeff Bridges or whether it was Sharon Stone was clearly the killer. And then as you got deeper in you realize “Oh my god they’re not.” They’re not the killer and the real killer is going to get away with this because this person just seems so awful that we thought they were the killer. And then at the very end of the movie, oh no, they were the killer. [laughs] That was his go to. He used it a number of times.

But, yeah, I think there’s something here. I think, you know, it’s a good concept at least to kind of put a fresh spin on a murder mystery. There’s something a little Throw Mama from the Train about it also. I don’t know, there’s a dark comedy aspect to it I think that could happen here. The straight up direct version of this, no. You just need a little bit of an inspiration from this I would say.

**John:** Yeah. One quote that, a two-part quote here that I’ll read. “’I have sad news to relate. My husband and best friend, Chef Dan Brophy was killed yesterday morning. For those of you who are close to me and feel this deserved a phone call, you are right, but I’m struggling to make sense of everything right now’ she wrote. ‘While I appreciate all of your loving responses, I am overwhelmed. Please save phone calls for a few days until I can function.’”

I believe that. I mean, a person who is trying to pull their stuff together, I get that. And then later on, “Asked whether the police had been keeping her updated, she said, ‘No, I’m a suspect,’ without emotion, McConnell said.” That’s interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah. That was pretty good. A neighbor said of her in the days following the murder, “She never showed any signs of being upset or sad. I would say she had an air of relief, like it was almost a godsend.” That’s…yeah.

**John:** Maybe.

**Craig:** Don’t have an air of relief.

**John:** No, no. Let’s go on to our next story. Craig, I picked this one for you because I felt like this woman might drive you especially crazy.

**Craig:** I just don’t understand what’s happening here. So this article was entitled Never Go Full Trump: The Lena Epstein Story. And this was written by somebody I actually know. Josh Marshal who I came to know at the last college reunion I went to because he’s married to a former college mate of mine.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Great guy. He does excellent work. He is the primary editor/writer at TalkingPointsMemo.com, which is a political blog, quite good stuff over there. By the way, they have a new thing like TPM Gold or I don’t know–

**John:** Prime or something like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I did it. I did it. I did it because I like TPM. I like Josh.

**John:** You’re supporting the media. Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m supporting the media. And we don’t advertise anything so this is as close as I get to advertising something. So this article, Never Go Full Trump: The Lena Epstein Story, is essentially about this bizarre moment that happened recently where Vice President Mike Pence held an event, a fundraising event I believe, on behalf of candidate Lena Epstein. She is running for what? What is she running for?

**John:** It’s not entirely clear. So she was a Republican candidate running for I believe it is–

**Craig:** Congress. It’s congress.

**John:** Congress of Michigan.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s running for the House of Representatives in the 11th District of Michigan. She is the daughter of one of Michigan’s wealthiest Jewish families. She is Harvard educated. And she was a dyed in the wool democrat until at least her mid-20s. And then went kind of super far right. And what makes this particularly bizarre is that at this event Mike Pence had a “rabbi” named Loren Jacobs who was asked to say a prayer on behalf of the eleven Jews murdered at the synagogue in Pittsburgh. And it turns out that Loren Jacobs I think kind of got invited there by Epstein. Except Loren Jacobs is not actually a rabbi. Loren Jacobs was a clergy in the Jews for Jesus movement which is a culty not at all Jewish thing that Jewish people really – I can tell you as a Jewish person when I grew up like they were spoken of in the harshest possible terms.

But amazingly Loren Jacobs wasn’t even good enough to stay a rabbi for them. Even they kicked her out. So this was a doubly defrocked “rabbi.” But what’s interesting is the notion of a candidate who is of a certain ethnicity that begins to pal around repeatedly with people who seem to be in direct opposition of her faith, her ethnicity, her background.

John, what do you make of all this?

**John:** So I found her to be a fascinating character. And so she is – whether she is the central character who you’re actually seeing the whole world through, which that’s an exhausting movie but kind of fascinating. Or she is a character off to the side. Like she’s the annoying sister of our actual protagonist who has to deal with her. But there was something great about exactly what you’re describing. You seem to be promoting something that is completely antithetical to your cultural heritage and not even your self-interest but just like you’re doing an incredible disservice to your people. And she is fascinating in those ways.

It reminded me kind of a Reese Witherspoon character from like one of her–

**Craig:** Election type days.

**John:** Election. Like her Election character, but taken really, really dark and sort of self-serving. I thought she was really just fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that this is character more than a movie. I think you’re absolutely right. And it feels to me like if you were doing kind of an ongoing dramatic series for instance about politics or a wealthy family or something like that that having one of the people be strangely affiliated with folks that want – it’s sort of that self-hating minority trope I guess. But it’s not really a trope. I mean, having grown up as part of a minority group in the United States, I saw it. I mean, it’s a thing. It’s a real thing. There are people that come to sort of internalize the external criticism of the group they’re in. And they kind of turn on it. I mean–

**John:** There’s the gay Republicans, or the Gays for Trump. Like he’ll be the best person ever for this. I have seen that first hand and that’s the equivalent thing in my community.

**Craig:** Did you see, what’s her face, Jenner, Caitlin.

**John:** Oh, Caitlin Jenner.

**Craig:** Caitlin Jenner finally was like, oh well, maybe, should I have not supported him? [laughs] Oh, Caitlin. You silly goose.

So, yeah, I think a character here. And I think that the mechanism, the psychological mechanism of self-hatred is actually quite fascinating and complicated and importantly in there is a kernel of something that I think we can all empathize with. Because inevitably you start to see how someone has been a bit manipulated by the world around them. That in their desire to pass, which is a real phenomenon that has been studied numerous times, they begin to separate from the truth of who they are. And where they’re from. And it is – there is a kind of empathy you can have for people like that.

But it becomes tested, severely tested, when for instance the case of somebody like this, she’s found to be following and liking posts from people like David Duke, who is, of course, a Nazi. And, you know, that’s not good.

**John:** It’s not good. I think where we both end up is that she is a great character as part of an ensemble probably recurring drama, so something like a Succession, where she’s one of the siblings in that kind of show.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** But you probably don’t base everything around her.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. A similar but also delightful thing from this past week is The Humiliating Crash and Burn of Pro-Trump Media Star Jacob Wohl is the Best Political Story of the Season. I’m linking to an article by Dustin Rowles for Pajiba but there’s a zillion other things. You can follow this rabbit hole all the way down. This I just found delightful. Just because I knew in a general sense who Jacob Wohl was, and it just became crazier and crazier.

So Jacob Wohl for people who are lucky enough not to know who he is, he’s a disgraced financial trader. And it’s like I saw that description, but he’s like–

**Craig:** 12.

**John:** A teenager. Yeah. He’s 20 years old but he’s already banned from making financial trades because of stuff he’s done. He’s a super Pro-Trumper, Instagrammer. And just annoying as hell.

But, so he was trying to peddle this story about Robert Mueller having committed a rape at some point in the past, and he was going to have a witness. And he was trying to get different media outlets to buy into this story. All of them said like I don’t think that’s going to be accurate or real. And they were right. And this has come to bite him in a delightful way.

Again, I really thought he was a fascinating character. It reminded me a bit of Shattered Glass.

**Craig:** Yeah. Billy Ray.

**John:** Disgraced journalist. So it reminded me a bit of that. But, Craig, what do you take? Do you think there’s a movie to be made around him or this circus?

**Craig:** I think around the circus maybe. There is something fascinating about the gang that couldn’t shoot straight-ness of this. Because what happens here is he creates his own source. So essentially he says some intelligence firm has gathered this intelligence and has given it to me, I guess. I don’t know why. Well, it turns out that this intelligence company doesn’t really exist. He’s smart enough to create a fake website for it, which is very much Shattered Glass. Not smart enough to leave his name off the actual registration for the domain name.

But he just keeps digging, which is amazing. He says I’ve got a picture of the woman who was going to testify but I blanked her face out. And then somebody just did a reverse image search and was like, nope, that’s your girlfriend. [laughs] He’s so inept. You almost feel like, wait, is he working for the Democrats? Because he’s so bad at this. I mean, I couldn’t think of anything more exculpatory for Bob Mueller than this ding-a-ling attempting to smear him so terribly. I mean, it’s so incompetent. And incompetence on that level one has to look at as comedy.

I don’t know how else you look at it.

**John:** I think you’re right. And so the gif that I saw applied most to this whole story as it was breaking was Brad Pitt from Burn After Reading and so he’s just pumping the air because he’s so convinced he’s made a big score and he’s really landed it. And so there’s a Coen Brothers kind of quality to this.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** You could see this as ineptitude like Veep. But it’s more like a Coen Brothers, like you had no business even getting into this realm and now you’re going to be hugely embarrassed.

**Craig:** Well, not just hugely embarrassed, but the FBI is investigating this because it’s a crime. I mean, what he was doing was essentially creating fraud and making false accusations. And at some point you’re dealing – for god’s sake, you’re doing it to the former Director of the FBI. I mean, look, you know, you want to egg someone’s house, maybe drive past the former town police sheriff’s house because, you know, it’s like you know how the world works. I mean, Geez-Louise.

Anyway, he’s incredibly stupid. What are you going to do? Just so dumb. So dumb.

**John:** So dumb. I don’t know that there’s necessarily a movie here. And like I loved the book – I loved the story that became Shattered Glass. And I tried to get the rights to that. Billy Ray got the rights to it and made a really good movie. But I think part of the frustration of watching that movie is you are spending all of your time watching this character squirm you don’t really like. And it’s hard to sit with that character for 100 minutes/two hours because it’s just really uncomfortable and you just kind of want to get away from that kind of person.

**Craig:** Although, I don’t know if you watch Fargo. I mean, that’s kind of what – that’s the bread and butter there. And they do it very, very well. You do sort of sit there and watch Ewan McGregor be a weasel for a number of episodes. And it grabs you. So, I mean, I think that you’re right. And that is a Coen Brothers world. Right? Even though they don’t do that show. So I think there is a Coen-y Brothers-y kind of thing here. But in the lens of what’s going on right now it’s just how did Coen Brothers characters actually become news in real life?

Oh boy, well let’s take a look at this next one. This is called Nicole From Last Night. And in this story which was sent to us by – sorry, it was written by Maiia Kappler for the Huffington Post. So a gentlemen named Carlos Zetina who is a student at the University of Calgary meets a girl one night in a bar and he hits it off with her and he helps her and her friend get home. And he knows her name. And she gives him her number but she accidentally gave him the wrong phone number so he couldn’t get in touch with her.

**John:** Or was it an accident?

**Craig:** [laughs] Well that’s sort of the part where we’re not really sure. So her name is Nicole. So he writes an email to all 247 people in the University of Calgary’s directory whose name included some variation of the name Nicole, even including professors. And the email simply said, “Hi, this is a mass email to all Nicoles. If you don’t fit this description then ignore, and if you are the one and just don’t want to talk to me that’s OK as well. If your name is Nicole and you’re from Holland and you think Nietzsche is depressing then text me, his number. I’m Carlos, by the way. I’m the guy who took you and your friend home last night.”

So, I mean, he gave her an out there. He said if you don’t want to talk to me that’s fine. And what happened was all these Nicoles were like, oh this is interesting, and started emailing each other. It wasn’t even about him. At that point there just became this like weird Nicole from Last Night club which now has 80 members and they hang out, which is hysterical. And the mystery Nicole was identified and she actually did I think connect with him and agree to see him for a date or something like that, which is romantic.

**John:** Yeah. So I dug this story. And I think there’s something to do here. It’s the intersection of that guy in the movie who does the big romantic gesture, like I’ve got to find this girl, and sort of what the consequences of that are. I love all the other women coming together. I love that the original girl finally actually does find him. Oh yeah, I truly did mess up in giving you the wrong number. Yeah, we could go out on a date. But the sense of like all of the Nicoles is kind of great.

I feel like there is a thing to be done here.

**Craig:** I agree, too. And I think you’ve put your finger on it. The deal where someone guys, “Hey, missed connection,” I’ve seen this a billion times. There’s nothing new there. What’s new is that all these Nicoles form a Nicole army. And there’s so many ways to go about this. I mean, the rom-com version is that the Nicole that he’s actually trying to reach is a little frazzled or worried or something and all these Nicoles kind of get together to find her maybe and to help her, I don’t know, do something. That’s a very sort of old school romantic comedy.

But I’m more interested in like this is a bad dude and the Nicole army is like there to protect Nicole and also like take him down. The idea of your – talk about ensemble – you’ve got a cast of eight women and they have nothing in common. They’ve never met each other before. Except that they’re all named Nicole and they got a problem with this guy. That’s kind of cool. I kind of like that.

**John:** So the other variation of this is basically like a Cinderella kind of story where he’s met this girl and then he can’t find this girl. And so instead of her shoe as the only clue he just has her name. And so he’s just going out and searching by her name. And you can create a scenario in which he never got to see her, or it was unclear, or like they were only talking on the phone, there’s something like that. Then like you know if he’s putting this thing out there into the world there are all these Nicoles and maybe he’s trying to figure out who was the actual girl I spoke with. So it was in VR or something so he didn’t know what she really looked like and he’s trying to find her and there’s all these Nicoles coming together.

There’s a version of that that could work, too.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like that.

**John:** We’ve saved the romantic comedy, so I just want to make sure that we keep it going. We have to provide sort of new logs to keep that fire burning.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting is that this story probably doesn’t even become a story if Nicole isn’t named Nicole. If she’s named like Greta or Amy. Amy is a common name, right?

**John:** It’s not common anymore. It used to be. But Nicole is just such a common name.

**Craig:** But there’s something also just about Nicole from last night. It sounds like a title of something.

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** And also when you say 80 Nicoles that’s really funny. Whereas if it was like 80 Jessicas is not as funny to me, or like Jessica from last night. Nicole from last night – there’s just something about it. It’s sort of the perfect name for this story.

**John:** Our last How Would This Be a Movie is a story from Face 2 Face Africa. It is written up by Elizabeth Ofosuah Johnson. And it was just a part of WWII that I never heard of before. Meet the gallant all-black American female battalion that served in Europe during WWII. So the write up of the story is nice, but I was honestly really drawn in by the photos. So these black and white photos of these African American women in uniform lined up walking down the street. They were largely like a nurse’s corps and sort of mail delivery and getting people their mail. But I’d just never seen – honestly I’d just never seen black faces in uniform in this context and in WWII. And I loved seeing them.

And so what we actually have in this little write up isn’t very much, but there was a character – a real life person who is mentioned. And I did a little bit more research on her. Mary McLeod Bethune who was sort of a very important civil rights person of the era who actually had a really fascinating life. I wonder if she’s tied into the story you’d actually make here. But I mostly just liked this as a story space. I loved sort of seeing black American women in Europe in WWII.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve seen black men in these pictures, but you’re right I’d never seen black women particularly in uniform together like this in the European theater. So the pictures are fascinating. I think that given that – so primarily they were part of something called the 6888, which I guess they called the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion. So this is an all-black female battalion of the women’s army corps that was sent to parts of France and England to basically deliver mail. This was several years of abandoned and backlogged mail in Europe.

And they were doing this during WWII. It was sort of the tail end, but during WWII. Now, when I see that what I think is the one thing you want to avoid is sort of saying here’s what this movie is. Look, black women in uniform. You’re like, “And, yes? Great. And?” You don’t want to turn into a, see, look, they’re doing it.

So, but what I’ve never seen before is a war drama about delivering a letter. And it reminded me of a little bit of that Saving Private Ryan feel of some small act that needed to happen that wasn’t about capturing a hill or assassinating the enemy. It was about preserving some small shred of humanity for one person who is somewhere out there. And the way they sort of put it here, this could be mail that needed to be delivered to one of our soldiers, but it could also be mail that needed to be delivered to just somebody who lived in Europe. And I think that that provides a possible just storyline for a good old fashioned war story. And based in history. So I thought this was really – I think fairly fertile fodder for a good WWII movie about the kinds of people we haven’t seen before. And when I say kinds of people I don’t mean black women, I mean mail delivery people. Like to me that’s fascinating. And then you put on top of it the fact that we’re dealing with African American women and this was kind of their sort of entrée into the war. I think there’s all sorts of interesting stuff that can come out of it.

**John:** Absolutely. So you know we had other stories about postal carriers. So we have Il Postino. We have The Postman. We have that sense of part of reestablishing – a lot of this happens after the war. So, reestablishing normalcy is like getting the mail back and making those connections again which I think is great and fascinating. You have a whole – Europe has to rebuild and so you’re trying to come out of this dark place and back to a normalcy and trying to find some sort of normalcy.

What I do think is interesting in having African American women here is that they are completely out of their element. They’re out of America at the time and all the challenges of America at the time. So while there are new challenges in Europe, they aren’t carrying with them – or they’re not confronted at every moment by sort of the expectations of America and being a black woman in America. And so there could be more latitude. They can have different opportunities in Europe than they might be able to have in the United States.

They have the structure of the army. But they also – they’re in Europe. They’re in France. And I think that is potentially great, too. So you can track just the same way that the men who fought in WWII had never expected to go to Europe in their lifetimes and suddenly they’re in Europe. These women are in Europe. They had no prior expectations they would ever be there.

So, I think it’s cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like it. I think that there’s good fodder there for sure.

**John:** But I think you’re making basically an entirely new story.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** With these people. Or you’re finding, you’re doing a lot of research to find who those people could be that could make it all fit together.

**Craig:** I would be shocked if there were enough realistic material for a grip – I mean, because honestly when you pour through all of what happened in WWII people are still kind of making up stuff to sort of be able to do the delivery system, like Saving Private Ryan, which I think was based loosely on a sort of thing. You know what I mean?

So I would imagine there would have to be quite a bit of invention here.

**John:** All right. So it’s come time for us to wrap up and figure out which of these How Would This Be a Movies would be a movie because as listeners know we have a very high track record of the things we pick almost always one of them becomes slated for development.

**Craig:** It’s almost like people are listening to this. [laughs]

**John:** Maybe they’re listening to this. So, Craig, if you were to pick one of the five stories we talked about, which one do you think is most likely to become a movie?

**Craig:** Most likely to become a movie I think–

**John:** Or picked up for development.

**Craig:** Picked up for development, it’s a tie. It’s a tie between what I’ll call 80 Nicoles and the Triple Eight Six. Yeah. I think both are likely to be developed.

**John:** I think both are likely to be developed and I think those are the two winners by far. So the other things had interesting stuff. I bet the Lena Epstein story ends up influencing some other character down the road, but you don’t need to use her. Jacob Wohl, we’ll find characters who are sort of the equivalent of a Jacob Wohl character. That Jacob Wohl character will show up on a Law & Order: SVU at some point.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** But, no, I don’t think we need any of the specific details from that. I do think there’s a good movie spaced around the Nicoles and this female battalion.

**Craig:** And I would say the odds in terms of actually being made, 80 Nicoles. Because just in general period pieces and war movies are hard to make. They’re expensive. And there’s sort of a built in reduction in demand. That said, because there is such a hunger based on lack of supply for movies about African American women — Hidden Figures showed us that that can overcome the period piece. And even the sort of what you might consider to be dry subject matter of rocketry math. So that may actually kind of undo what I’m saying here, because 80 Nicoles seems like a fun sort of possible rom-com thing to do. But the Triple Eight Six may be – I hope somebody might look at that and say this fits an underserved demand. Maybe we should make this movie.

**John:** I also think the 80 Nicoles, like Netflix is already like when can we have that movie.

**Craig:** They may be done with it right now.

**John:** No, no, no, we need that movie in 60 days, so get shopping.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. I think that Netflix green lit that when we started talking about it, and they’re currently screen testing it right now. [laughs]

**John:** Indeed. They’ve got it out to casting.

**Craig:** Netflix, slow down guys. Slow down. It’s like what I tell my kids when they’re eating. Chew. Chew.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing was sent in by Mike Birbiglia because he wrote it. It is 8 Tips for Getting Your Solo Play to Broadway. Mike Birbiglia, a friend of the show. He’s been on the show once or twice, maybe three times. He is a fantastic writer and performer and comedian. He has a brand new show on Broadway. He wrote up an article for the New York Times, that small little paper, about how you put together a show for Broadway, a one-man show for Broadway, which is delightful like all things Mike Birbiglia. So I would recommend that you read this article and then get tickets to his show and enjoy his show because it’s going to be a terrific show.

So, Mike Birbiglia gets to be my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Mike Birby. Birbs, as I call him, is fantastic. It was really just a coin toss who was going to get to recommend him as our One Cool Thing because he’s a friend of our show. He’s been on our show. And everything he does is really, really good. And I have no doubt that his show is going to be extremely well reviewed, critically acclaimed, because he’s everyone’s darling. He’s certainly my darling. I love that guy.

And talk about a talented block of people. He lives right near Jorma Taccone and Mari Heller.

**John:** I believe they share a wall actually.

**Craig:** They do. I think they’re in a duplex sort of, I don’t know, thing.

**John:** It’s a NYC thing.

**Craig:** It’s in New York. It’s really cool. So anyone, Mike Birbiglia. Awesome. I’m going to see that show for sure.

My One Cool Thing is way dorkier than that. It’s a game called Decrypto. Have you played it yet, John?

**John:** No, I have not. But I opened this up. So it’s on Board Game Geek. It looks like it’s a board game. Why am I not playing this right now?

**Craig:** I don’t know. So here is the deal. Have you played Code Names?

**John:** Of course. Code Names is great.

**Craig:** Of course you have. Decrypto is kind of Code Names in reverse. It’s incredibly simple to play. So the idea is let’s say you and I are on a team together. We have four words that you and I can see. Those four words do not change throughout the many rounds. It’s like pumpkin, hat, sand, and car. And every round one of us will pick a card that has numbers on it like 1-2-4, or 4-3-3, or 4-3-2, and basically it’s giving us an order and we’re supposed to clue. I need to clue to you in order which of those words I want you to say back to me.

And you’re thinking well how hard is that, we’re both looking at the words. What’s the big deal? Here’s the problem. The other team is hearing my clue words to you. They’re writing them down. And the deal is if they can figure out from clue words what our clue words are then they’re going to win. So I have to clue these to you in such a way that you get them, but misdirect anybody else that might be listening who doesn’t see what the words are.

It’s so much fun. I love it. I was introduced to it by no surprise David Kwong. Decrypto is super fun. And you can play it honestly I think as a family it doesn’t require a lot of age stuff. Sort of like Code Names. It’s great that way. It’s super simple. You learn it in about, I don’t know, five minutes. And then it just becomes really – it just becomes really fun.

So, a big thumbs up for Decrypto. I’m playing it tonight in fact.

**John:** Very nice. I look forward to playing that with you at some point in the future.

That’s our show for this week. So as always our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Matthew. And so it’s sort of a horror theme, and I know Halloween has already passed, but you know what, terror can strike at any moment.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Yeah. I want to make a Halloween movie that takes place mostly on November 2. Just like you think you’re out of it, nope. Nope.

**Craig:** I like that. I like November 2nd. Yeah. That’s pretty good.

**John:** It’s like After the Day of the Dead.

**Craig:** Open up another beach head in the horror front.

**John:** Yes. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We need some more outros. We’ve got a few saved up, but we can always use more. So remember just like as long as it includes some version of [hums] that’s all an outro has to have in it.

ask@johnaugust.com is also the place where you send your questions and follow up things like the people who did today. For short questions on Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this right now. But if you could leave us a review that would be swell because it helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. We will put in links to all of the articles we talked about, but also a bunch of articles we didn’t talk about because they were other potentially good movies. In some cases the articles were just really long and I didn’t want to read them.

**Craig:** Too long; didn’t read.

**John:** Yep. But you’ll find the transcripts also at johnaugust.com. They go up within the week of the episode airing. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. That’s also where you’ll find the Random Advice episode that we just posted which is delightful, so thank you to everyone who subscribed and sent in a question because that’s why that episode exists.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right, Craig, thank you so much for a fun show.

**Craig:** Thank you, John, and I’ll see you next time.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [FilmStruck is Shutting Down](https://variety.com/2018/digital/news/filmstruck-shutdown-warnermedia-turner-1202998364/)
* Aaron Sauerland’s [tweet](https://twitter.com/aaronsauerland/status/1057425706450206720?s=21) about writing for ensembles
* [Novelist Who Penned ‘How To Murder Your Husband’ Essay Charged With Husband’s Murder](https://www.npr.org/2018/09/12/647113406/novelist-who-penned-how-to-murder-your-husband-essay-charged-with-husband-s-murd) by Laurel Wamsley for NPR
* [Never Go Full Trump: The Lena Epstein Story](https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/never-go-full-trump-the-lena-epstein-story) by Josh Marshal for TPM
* [The Humiliating Crash and Burn of Pro-Trump Media Star Jacob Wohl Is the Best Political Story of the Season](http://www.pajiba.com/politics/the-downfall-of-protrump-media-star-jacob-wohl-is-the-best-political-story-of-2018.php?fbclid=IwAR2C81ZC3YUUb7HOzQGblTDb1dicPKKQtD1nGnJthaXFBgWXSI5WXyaqNtw) by Dustin Rowles for Pajiba
* [‘Nicole From Last Night’: University Of Calgary Student Mass Emails 247 Nicoles](https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2018/09/09/nicole-from-last-night-university-of-calgary-email_a_23521669/) by Maija Kappler for Huffington Post
* [Meet the gallant all-black American female battalion that served in Europe during World War II](https://face2faceafrica.com/article/meet-the-gallant-all-black-american-female-battalion-that-served-in-europe-during-world-war-ii) by Elizabeth Ofosuah Johnson for Face 2 Face Africa.
* [Mary McLeod Bethune](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McLeod_Bethune)
* [6 Tips for Getting Your Solo Play to Broadway](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/30/theater/mike-birbiglia-broadway-the-new-one.amp.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&smid=nytcore-ios-share#click=https://t.co/Ggwb3dYQgI) by Mike Birbiglia
* [Decrypto](https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/225694/decrypto)
* 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 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/scriptnotes_ep_374v2.mp3).