Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

John August: Hey, this is John. So today’s episode of Scriptnotes was recorded live at the Austin Film Festival. There is some swearing, so keep that in mind if you’re listening in the car with your kids. There’s also a very special introduction by Beto O’Rourke. So, if you want to see the video of how that all went you can click on a link in the show notes. So, enjoy.

Beto O’Rourke: Good evening Austin and welcome to Scriptnotes Live. I’m just going to take a quick moment to remind you that you can vote any time between October 22 and November 2, early voting in your polling location of choice in the county that you’re registered. And then if you didn’t get a chance to vote early, vote the 6th of November, Election Day.

Craig Mazin told me to tell you so. And we’re all counting on you turning out and winning the victory of our lifetimes for Texas, and for the country.

And now on with the show.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is…this is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are…?

Crowd: Interesting to screenwriters.

John: You guys are so good.

Craig: Well trained. Well trained.

John: This is the 19,000th year we’ve done a live show at Scriptnotes.

Craig: Yes indeed.

John: Here at the Austin Film Festival.

Craig: Correct. Although we’ve never quite had that amount of firepower to open it up.

John: That was a lot of firepower.

Craig: Concentrated firepower. I have to say I was a little concerned because there was a chance that maybe all these people would be Ted Cruz fans. [laughs] Just a small chance. And if you are, get out!

John: Done.

Craig: Not a Republican/Democrat thing, just a me thing. It’s just a me thing.

John: Yeah. Because you have a personal issue.

Craig: A little bit of a thing. Little bit of a thing. But we’re so happy to see you all here. What an incredible crowd. And this is our favorite, honestly, it’s my favorite show of the year because there’s just a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and we love seeing you all and we have great guests and we have so much cool stuff, although we’ve sort of piqued, so you know, lower the expectations now and everything will be great.

John: So, for people listening at home I always think of the listeners at home. And so it is 10pm at night. It is a Friday. I have lost all track of what day it is.

Craig: It’s a weekend night.

John: It’s Austin time. And we are in an incredibly crowded room with standing room only with amazing screenwriter people. They’re all wearing something around their necks. It’s like a blue band. Do you recognize what this–?

Craig: Yeah, I don’t have to do that shit.

John: Yeah. So they’re all wearing–

Craig: I’m too cool.

John: They’re all wearing these lanyards that say Highland 2 on them.

Craig: Wait, what?

John: Yeah. If you notice they all–

Craig: Oh my god, you did that?

John: I did that, yeah. And so I got this for you. I spent thousands of dollars so that Craig would have to use Highland 2 for a weekend.

Craig: I’m not going to use it, but that’s, I mean, no, that’s actually pretty amazing. I can’t believe you – god, I’m not paying for this, am I?

John: No, no, no.

Craig: Oh, you’re paying for this. OK, great.

John: You pay for nothing and I pay for everything.

Craig: Phew. Got a little freaked out there. That’s actually pretty impressive. And I will say that I have bumped into a bunch of people that do use Highland 2.

John: Yes.

Craig: And they love it. I’m not an anti-Highland guy in any way, shape, or form.

John: No, you just promote my competitor at every moment. And that’s OK. That’s absolutely fine.

Craig: I like his work. Yeah.

John: Absolutely. Let us sit down and we can do some follow up, because one of the first things we have to do in any normal episode of Scriptnotes is some follow up.

Craig: Follow up. Yep.

John: So in the last episode of Scriptnotes we talked about this WGA campaign for No Writing Left Behind. So that’s a thing which happened. So we got some great emails back from people and some representative stories. We got some, you know, well what about this situation. But we got this email that I was like oh yeah that’s exactly the right thing to talk about.

So this is an email from Eva. So I’m going to read aloud Eva’s letter because this is what a good live podcast is is reading aloud stuff.

Craig: We should, before you know Eva is going to be listening to this, we have to let her know just as a disclosure that we’re a little drunk. So, OK. Traditionally this is our drunk show. We’re not Austin drunk. This is like Austin breakfast level alcohol. But still for us, yeah.

John: For me especially. All right. So Eva writes about No Writing Left Behind. She says, “This just happened to me in a very brutal way. I was asked to read two novels a company had just bought rights to and they asked about what I thought about them and what was in my opinion the best way to adapt them. When we finished our meeting I was asked to put together a document that talked about all these things. So, I’m aware I’m a ‘new writer,’ so I will only do that if it’s clear that I will get the job. They say I am the frontrunner. That my credits are not an issue.

“Fast forward two weeks later, and they have a pitch booklet/look book, complete bible for a premium TV series adaptation with a breakdown for the entire 12 episodes of the first season. And then I am called into a meeting with all parties involved. I am praised for my work. Everyone is so impressed. They just need to send to the director and see what he thinks.”

Craig, what happens?

Craig: “A week later I receive a call. The director doesn’t feel comfortable having someone so new onboard. So they’ve decided to look somewhere else, meaning a more established writer.” You didn’t take that job, did you?

John: I did not.

Craig: That would have been brutal. “Before meeting with me they didn’t even know what they were going to do with the source material. Now they have everything they need to develop a TV show, and they have literally thrown me to the curb.”

She doesn’t mean literally there. “And what control—“

John: Figuratively.

Craig: “And what control do I have in how they use those documents moving forward? Zero. If you need a clear example to support your cause I am more than willing to share. This is a very big company we all know and the director and other producers are also very big. Thanks for giving a voice to us writers.”

John: “Thank you guys for making us feel less lonely.”

Craig: Yep. Just checking the grammar on that.

John: So, Eva’s situation is sort of a why we were talking about that last week because that is the thing that happens where you’ve gone in and you’ve done all this work for somebody and then it’s not your work because you didn’t own those books. You didn’t own the stuff underneath that.

So, we were talking this afternoon Craig and you and I had two different opinions about sort of what Ava’s situation was and what her best play was now. So the best play Ava could make would be to build a time machine, go back, and not give those pages. And not do all that free work for those people. Best scenario. Second best scenario in my mind would be to go to those people right now and say like, “Look, I wrote all this stuff. I clearly wrote all this stuff. You are in a weird place because all the stuff you’re basing this on is stuff I wrote. Make a deal with me now. It’s going to be a scale deal. It’s going to be some deal that sort of says that I am the first writer that wrote this stuff. Even if you go with the other fancy writer, I was in the chain of title. That’s my play. What’s your play?

Craig: And that is what a reasonable person would do.

John: All right. Let’s hear Craig’s version.

Craig: What I say is: lie in wait. Because one day they’re going to make that thing and then about, oh, I don’t know, three weeks before the first air date you call them up and say, “I’m suing you. Because you stole my shit.” And then they’re going to settle. And it’s happened. This happened before. It’s just maximizing your leverage via evil. And the service of an attorney. But it’s deserved. They asked for it. They are doing a bad thing.

And the reason I’m so glad that you made this our follow up here because for you guys out here there is a decent chance this is how it’s going to happen to you when it happens. Your first encounter very frequently when you have that first sale, that first good meeting, that first kind of yes/almost yes, there’s a decent chance you’re going to be dealing either with peripheral people who are maybe a touch on the shady side, or you’re going to be dealing with established people who are still on the shady side.

The cost of someone asking you to just do a little free work is zero. Zero. So they’re going to do it. And then you are put in this terrible spot. But we’re here to tell you it’s actually not that terrible. The answer is nah. And if you’ve done a good job and you’re impressive and the work you’ve done at least in describing what you want to do is impressive that should be enough.

If you have to write a bunch of stuff up the potential for abuse is enormous and the potential for wasted time is enormous. But I guess there is the one up side that you may be able to lie in wait and sue. But if you’re not particularly litigious, don’t leave anything behind.

John: Yeah. All right. The other categories of responses we got in Twitter would fall into sort of four basic general buckets. The first one is the question of like well what if it’s my own thing. What if I came up with this original idea, this original pitch, this original thing, and went in to describe to these people and they said like, “Oh, could you send me through that thing you wrote about?” You could theoretically do that. That is your own thing. That is not mostly what we’re talking about here. You own that idea. The only thing I will caution you is the moment your idea becomes four paragraphs you’re sending through, then it’s all about those four paragraphs and it’s not about you and you as a visionary writer with those ideas. It becomes about that thing. So while you can legally do that and maybe in some situations it makes sense to do that, the more you can keep it in the realm of talking before you get to a screenplay is usually a good thing.

Craig: Professional writers get paid to write. So if you want to be a professional writer, and I’m thinking a lot of you do, get paid to write. If you are writing something for free you must control it all the way, meaning it’s your own spec work. It’s your original work. If someone is saying to you I have a book, I have an idea, I have a piece of this, I have a song, I have a toy – anything – that you don’t control completely you start writing when they agree to pay you, in writing, period, the end.

John: The other thing which showed up in our Twitter feeds, Craig what would you call this category of like people objecting to this idea of not leaving stuff behind?

Craig: There were a certain category of people who said, “Don’t interfere with my right to take abuse in order to get a job.”

John: My process is to be abused.

Craig: Sort of like you fat cats are trying to keep us out of the business by taking away our ability to write for free.

John: How dare you, Craig.

Craig: Right. Your rhetoric has disqualified you from our business. I don’t know how else to say. It’s just a silly line of reasoning. If your way into the business is writing for free, big headline, you’re not in the business.

John: Yeah. A related category of criticism was “but what about…” It’s what about ism. It’s basically like this thing you just said, yeah, but this other thing is more interesting. OK, great. This thing we’re talking about is specifically leaving stuff behind in a room. There are many challenges facing feature writers. They all are worthy of attention. Most of them are worthy of attention. This is about the one thing. So, what about ism I’m always vigilant for.

Craig: “Tu quoque”, is that how you pronounce that?

John: I don’t know.

Craig: It’s the you too. It’s a fallacy. It’s Latin. Guys, it’s Latin.

John: Latin. Latin.

Craig: It’s Latin for what he just said.

John: The last thing which came up a lot in this thing was the sense of like “Well why did nobody tell me about this before?” And the somebody telling you about things from before that’s institutional knowledge. And I feel like that’s a thing maybe we haven’t done a great job on is like when Craig and I were starting in the business other screenwriters would say like, “Oh, no, whatever you do don’t leave stuff behind.” And I guess we didn’t communicate that message through to everybody else. And so part of the reason why we have these amazing guests with us here tonight is so we can pass along some of our institutional knowledge of what’s happened before and hopefully fix people in the future.

Craig: Yeah, you know, maybe whatever happens, maybe it’s a little late. Maybe we should have said this earlier. Acknowledge/stipulated. But that’s not a reason to suddenly question the validity of it now. It is valid now. And so we’re saying to all of you don’t do that. For yourselves. Honestly for yourselves. It doesn’t change our lives, but for yourselves. And also I guess for the people that are with you in the room tonight. There is a certain impact we have with each other. And every time we agree to a condition that is unprofessional and debasing we’re making it a little harder for the next writer, or the writer next to us, to be treated well.

So, consider that as you go through your lives, you wonderful people.

John: Let us bring up a panel of institutional knowledge we are so lucky to have. First off, Wendy Calhoun. She is a writer whose credits include – Wendy Calhoun – credits include Station 19, Empire. She’s on a development deal right now. Wendy Calhoun, welcome to the show.

Wendy Calhoun: Thank you. It’s such an honor.

John: Yay. Next up we have Phil Hay.

Craig: Phil Hay.

John: Phil Hay, oh my god. Phil Hay has done a ton. The Invitation, which was amazing. Destroyer, which is coming out soon. Crazy Beautiful. Ride Along. Clash of the Titans.

Phil Hay: Right on.

John: Phil Hay, welcome to our program.

Phil: Can I ask a quick question before we start?

John: Yes.

Craig: There’s another guest coming. You know that right?

John: Two more.

Phil: Yes, no, it’s addressed to Craig and it’s regarding the video. How the fuck did you get so relevant? I can’t believe it.

Craig: I was born relevant, yo. When I came out people were like this means something.

John: This guy is…

Craig: This is important.

Phil: In relation to something else, this guy…

Craig: Nurses who literally deliver nothing but babies all day long, day after day, were like, “Stop everyone. Something just happened.”

John: One day you will have a famous roommate. He’ll have a famous college roommate and everything will change.

Phil: That’s it.

John: Nicole Perlman.

Craig: Yeah!

John: Nicole Perlman. Her credits of course include Guardians of the Galaxy, the upcoming Captain Marvel, Detective Pikachu. Nicole Perlman, welcome to our program. Thank you very much.

Nicole Perlman: Thank you for having me.

John: Finally Jason Fuchs. Jason Fuchs.

Craig: Fuchs.

John: Writer whose credits include Wonder Woman, Ice Age: Continental Drift. Jason Fuchs, welcome to our show, a return guest from last year. Nicely done.

Jason Fuchs: Thanks for having me back.

John: Yeah. So you passed some test with Craig.

Craig: Did you guys hear the show last year? Do you remember the greatest story in the world that Jason Fuchs told us? He can’t top that this year, can he? No, not a chance. Try. That’s a challenge.

John: We’re not trying to top, we’re trying to educate. We’re trying to discuss.

Phil: And what about the year before, Craig? What about the year before that?

Craig: Phil killed it.

Phil: It was fantastic.

Craig: Phil killed it.

Phil: This is a very controversial item with John.

John: Craig wanted like 20 people on stage and I said like let’s limit it to four.

Craig: Oh, I’m sorry I wanted to give you guys more.

John: Always the buzz kill. I sent through a depressing article for everyone to look at. So if you’re following me on Twitter you see that we’re going to discuss this article. This is an article that came out by Nicole Laporte on Fast Company. It came out yesterday. And it’s titled The Death of the Middle Class, but it’s really about how streaming has effected writers’ lives and streaming not just for TV, because you think about TV being all the TV shows that are going to Netflix and other channels, but also increasingly for features. So, I want to–

Craig: Happy time is over.

John: Happy time is over.

Craig: Here we go guys.

John: So we have four writers up here who work in sort of various capacities. Now Craig now has a TV show for HBO. And I want to talk about the change that’s happening for writers right now because these are mostly people who are moving into this industry and while there are more TV programs on the air than ever, in some ways it’s harder to make a living, or at least a middle class living in this. In this article that she lays out the people at the very top, the people who are making the giant deals, they’re making a lot. But the people who are going show to show, it’s actually harder than ever.

So, Wendy, I want to start with you because you have the most TV experience of the people here. What have you seen changing over the last maybe five years? And as you talk to writers who are trying to make a living, what’s different now?

Wendy: Well, I mean, I can use a very personal example. How about that?

John: I like those.

Wendy: I was on a show called Nashville. I worked on the first two seasons of that show.

John: Heard of it.

Wendy: I don’t know if anyone has seen it. Thank you. It’s about country music. The show was the hardest show I’ve had to launch. I’ve been a part of seven new series and that was the hardest. So to break up a bit of the sadness and monotony that we had in the room I would come in and pitch the black version of the show. And very often those pitches landed, by the way.

So, when we were in season two and I got sent by a friend a pilot script that had not been shot yet but was to star Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard called Empire I read it and I said, holy crap, I’ve been pitching this for two years.

So, I had to quit my job at Nashville without having an offer yet for Empire. It was a real flyer. I had kind of built my entire career writing, sorry to say, but white men with guns. And I thought this would be a really kind of different thing. I’d like to write a show with black people. That would be interesting, wouldn’t it?

I did get the offer, thank goodness. I went on as a co-executive producer of the show. I worked my ass off. The show came out of the box and it was a big hit. Now, we on Nashville were making 22 episodes a year. Fox ordered 11 episodes of Empire. That’s a half pay cut for me. Right?

Craig: Because just be clear, when you’re working in television you are paid per episode. Not by time, but by episode.

Wendy: By episode. Right. So do this math. So we got that going. And on top of that they added 12 weeks to the schedule before we actually shot. So, we had scripts written before we actually shot, which is different for broadcast television. So my money is not only half but it’s stretched out over three extra months.

Now, the show comes out, is a big hit. And I’m thinking, well, those residual checks will start rolling in. The green envelopes will start coming, right? No. The show goes directly to Hulu and I don’t get any–

Craig: I love the way you say Hulu.

John: I love that you say Hulu.

Wendy: Hulu.

Jason: I can tell you, Hulu actually pays way better.

John: Directly for Hulu, yeah.

Wendy: Not for broadcast repeats it does not.

John: But Hulu, the other one, it’s the wrong one. That’s the problem.

Wendy: Because it’s sponsored by Le Croix. Anyways, so you can kind of see how that is just one example of the economic impact that’s happened in the last five years. And that is to a broadcast television writer-producer. So you can only imagine when you start talking about cable where you’re making, what, $0.60 on the dollar? When you’re talking about digital where you are trying to – you have to rely on your management and agents and reps to try to get you some sort of back end participation so that you actually see some sort of money for all of your shows being shown again. And it becomes a real issue. A real issue in the middle when you’re in the middle.

Craig: So this is something that the Writers Guild had a big deal with the companies and we kind of went up to the edge of a strike with. So the old way of doing things, if you became a writer, a new writer, and you worked on staff at a show like Nashville, which was a classic network show, 22 episodes a year, you were paid per episode usually some sort of producing fee or consulting or something per episode. You got your episodes that you wrote. They had a rerun. Those generated a lot of extra money for you.

Now they cut that in half or even less. Sometimes it’s just eight episodes. That’s all you’re getting paid. But the amount of time you spend on it gets expanded so essentially what was a living at a certain number has been quartered in some senses by this evolution that we all kind of love as consumers. But as writers it’s become a real problem. It’s a real squeeze.

Wendy: Yeah. It’s an interesting conundrum because on the one hand side I love what digital has done in terms of democratizing our ability to distribute content. On the other hand side, this digital revolution is led by disruptors and they are disrupting the content creators so that they can have content for their technology.

John: Nicole, what are you seeing? So right now you are doing Captain Marvel, so it’s going to be a giant Disney/Marvel/Touchstone, or Guardians of the Galaxy. That is a big movie that gets a big theatrical release. It has a whole residual life to it.

Nicole: I mean, yeah, all the movies, the hope is that you’ll make a lot of money and the residuals and that will sort of make up for all the pain and suffering that goes into the writing process. But I haven’t written for television and frankly I’m so in the dark about all of it. I always assumed that my reps would warn me about it. And then just talking to you guys out in the hallway they’re like, oh, that company that you’re pitching for, yeah, that’s rough. And I was like, what? Wait, what?

And it’s not that I haven’t been paying attention, but I haven’t been paying attention.

John: And one of the challenges, so classically what Wendy is describing is a thing that’s been happening to TV writers over a period of time. But increasingly it’s happening to feature writers, too. So I went in to meet on a project at Fox, a big Fox movie. And my question was like but, wait, will there still be a Fox? Where does this movie go? And so you ask this question and they’re like, well, we’re not sure. I’m like, wait, is this going to go to the Disney streaming thing? They’re like “Maybe.”

And so I said like, OK, on one hand it’s going to be great if the thing got made. But then I’m thinking like, wait, then there are no residuals because then it never goes anywhere else. And so then it’s only showing up on Disney. It’s like, wait, then I don’t have a back end. Or that thing that I had in my deal with like box office bonuses if it crosses a certain threshold, well, there’s no box office, so it all goes away.

Phil, have you encountered that in any of your deals yet? Have you started looking at feature stuff where it’s like you don’t know where the feature is going to end up? Like you just did Destroyer. It was an indie movie. So you didn’t know who the distributor was going in.

Phil: Yeah, I mean, I think that if you make independent movies you’re comfortable with the idea that you don’t know what that end is. And that you don’t know if the movie that you’ve made and intended to be released in theaters is going to ever be released in theaters because for example Netflix has the power to take whatever they want. So, had we – we were fortunate that we’re with the distributor Annapurna that is committed to releasing movies in theaters. But we were well aware that Netflix could have at any time decided to take the movie because of the amount of money that they offered and there was not much you could do.

And many people are thrilled with that actually, but I think when I think about some of the stuff we’re talking about what strikes me is that there’s a real short-sidedness that is happening with the kind of business strategy that’s going on that I think is extremely inhumane and very brutal. And there’s sort of I think maybe a culture that certainly in Hollywood and in Silicon Valley that kind of values brutality. That there’s some truth to that. There’s some core Hobbesian thing that they’re chasing. When in fact I think that when we talk about the demise of the middle class of writers that the idea that it’s very short-sided to kill the ability of people to develop and to be able to create the things that are going to make you a lot of money. Because people have options, right? I mean, you know, I grew up wanting to be a screenwriter and people grew up wanting to be TV writers and people still want to do that because there is something truly magical and special about it.

But people can do other stuff, right? And the business as a whole has an interest in keeping people able to have a life and a family and develop their craft to then create stuff that makes money. And I’m afraid that now all the opportunities are at the very beginning level, which is great because you need those opportunities, and at the very, very top level. And if you’re at that level that’s great because you can do those things. But that part in the middle that we’ve talked about for several years and seems to be accelerating, I think it’s beyond a business problem. It’s a societal problem. It’s not valuing the ability to make a living at something, and to develop, and to work, and thus you’re going to drive talented people into other businesses. And that’s my biggest worry for us as a business.

Craig: Yep. And my guess is they won’t stop until they start feeling the impact of it, of their loss of talent. I mean, for you guys the thing to understand about the way a career in television – because television is just statistically where you will get your start. They just make a thousand television shows now. Netflix will have 700 titles. 700 original Netflix titles. It’s insane.

So, they’re making thousands of these TV shows across these new platforms. But traditionally television writers, the people that ran the show, these were the big guys, the big guns, and they were the new writers. But the bulk of people kind of – what they would do is they would get a job working on a show. And maybe if the money they paid you to write a script or two or work on that show wasn’t quite enough to afford to live in a place like Los Angeles, which is expensive, there were these residuals. That was the reuse money. When they would do reruns you would get this extra money and it would keep you going and you could raise a family and support a family and send your kids to college. The American dream.

And what they’ve done – and I think part of it is what Phil is saying, it’s a Silicon Valley, well, humans are just meat and computers are computing. Like we don’t care. They’ve eliminated a lot of that rolling support. So you now are hand to mouth. And when you are hand to mouth you tend to, I think, emphasize younger workers, newer workers who are willing to deal with it. And then when they get to a certain point if they don’t have their own show they look around and go I can’t make a living at this.

John: I think what you’re describing is that in some ways the proliferation of all these services and all the shows mean there are more jobs, total number of jobs, for writers. And so in many ways people entering the business like there’s more spots open, there’s more chairs. The thing is you’re not advancing because the shows don’t go on, or they’re only half a season so you’re jumping from show to show. It’s very hard to build up from one to the next. Agents aren’t pushing to advance your quote so your quote is how much you got paid on your last job, how much you’re getting paid on your next job. There’s not an incentive to sort of keep pushing your quote up. And so it makes it harder and harder to grow up the ranks of a business.

Wendy: I thought it was really interesting the fact that linking, I mean, maybe it’s obvious, but linking back that Netflix doesn’t release data on how well your show is doing, it takes away a leverage that you might have to say this is a top three rated show that you have. We deserve to be getting paid more. You can’t say that if there’s no data to point to.

Jason: I think everything everyone is saying is spot on.

Craig: Thank you. Thank you, Jason.

Jason: It’s probably something that the guild – particularly you Craig.

Craig: Thank you. I agree.

Jason: But isn’t there a certain component of this that’s organically also going to tilt a little bit in our favor? What you said, John, or Craig, you said 700 Netflix shows, so it feels like there’s this proliferation of material, but really it’s not competitive because you can’t very well tell Netflix you’re going to go off and do this other Netflix show. It’s still them.

As the studios all develop their own streaming platforms, right, Disney over the top has won. But at a certain point Time Warner has already announced it. It’s going to make sense for all of these studios to develop streaming platforms. There’s also going to be a proliferation of competition. I’m not saying that’s going to be enough to create a playing field where we can negotiate fair deals, but I also think it will help level the playing field a little bit.

John: I have a very specific question for you, because on a previous panel you were saying how you developed this new project with a director, you were very excited to do it, like it was a shared interest, a piece of property that you guys did together. As you have developed that property did you say like oh we want to go to a studio, or were you open to the idea of going to a Netflix, of going to an Amazon, or going to an Apple rather than going to a studio? Because it changes the equation of what that is.

John: The project he’s referring to is Robotech, which I’m writing for Sony and Andy Muschietti is directing. No, it wasn’t a conversation on that because Sony controlled the rights. It was something we knew Sony had and had been developing. So it wasn’t–

John: But if Sony wanted to do it for a Sony streaming platform would it have been as interesting to you?

Jason: For me it would have. I can’t speak for Andy. For me, I’m still in shock at the opportunities that I have. Robotech is a property that I loved. I loved the series growing up. So, yeah, for me the creative would have driven me to do that regardless of whether maybe it was a less financially rewarding situation. But I think it’s something we’re all going to face. I mean, as I’m developing more original stuff, it’s a big conversation with filmmakers. Do you want theatrical or not? Does it matter? Does it have to be a theatrical experience? And every writer is going to have to make their own choice.

Craig: I’m kind of curious what you guys think. I hate to do the Applause-o-meter but if you think that something means more because it’s in a theater as opposed to being on a streaming platform please applaud if it means more. OK. Now, if you don’t really care one way or the other whether it comes through a streaming platform in television or if it’s in theater, please applaud.

Interesting. Now. You do that six years ago, that’s everybody in the first applause, no one in the second applause.

John: So I’m here at the Austin Film Festival, but I’m also here at the Texas Book Festival which happens to be the same weekend. And so for Arlo Finch I’m doing all the book events for that. And so this morning at 7:20 in the morning a van picked me up and I went to a grade school and I talked to 300 kids about Arlo Finch and did my little slideshow. It was great. I’m really tired now.

But, I asked the same question. And so there’s been a lot of talk about will you do Arlo Finch as a movie or as a TV series, and so I polled the audience. I did the same thing. You don’t let kids clap. They had to raise their hand quietly. And so I asked them “Should Arlo Finch be a movie or like a Netflix show?” And it was pretty evenly split.

Craig: And so I’m glad that some of the kids knew what a movie was. That’s very good.

John: Yeah, exactly. What’s a movie?

Craig: A theater?

John: A recurring topic that will be a topic on Scriptnotes for the next however long we do the show is what is a movie? We talk about like is a movie a piece of entertainment that’s about two hours long that is a one-time story? Probably, because right now we have these definitions of what a movie is versus what a TV movie is for Netflix, which are just ridiculous. They don’t match reality at all.

Phil: But I think it’s a cultural. It’s not just the responsibility of the people making the stuff, or the people distributing the stuff, because you know what I would say as a person who is a diehard believer in the theatrical experience. It’s just what I love. But to look at it and say that it’s really the responsibility of people who write about movies, people that talk about movies. For example, right now I would say – and this may be changing really fast – but I’d say right now a TV show on Netflix, there’s no difference in the culture between a TV show on Netflix and a TV show anywhere else. It is not less than, it is not different than. It just is.

For some reason, and I think it’s because maybe the critical establishment or maybe the press doesn’t treat them the same, a movie that’s on Netflix is not quite the same. And that can change. That just takes the culture changing to kind of embrace and treat them the same way. So that’s the thing that I’m interested in seeing is if the people that kind of keep the culture alive decide that there’s no difference between a movie that is streaming only versus a movie that appears in theaters for however long it does. That will be different. There’s power in that in itself.

Jason: Is that also just a qualitative distinction? Like the reason that there’s no difference between a Netflix show and a broadcast show or cable show, I think, is because it’s just so good. Right? There’s started to become content on streaming and Netflix–?

Craig: Wendy hates what you just said.

Jason: No, no, no, but there were so many shows–

Wendy: That’s a relative opinion though, isn’t it?

Craig: Finally a fight.

Jason: It’s all a relative opinion. But didn’t – there started to become content on streaming that people were really excited about and so people started to take it seriously because they loved it. And I think that it’s not to say there aren’t films particularly in the last year like Roma that have come out in streaming, but I suspect that as there are more great films on streaming platforms, perhaps that will change people’s opinions just a little bit of what a streaming two-hour film could be.

Craig: In rebuttal–

Wendy: Having developed for both Netflix and broadcast television–

John: The expert in the room.

Craig: Here we go.

Wendy: They’re very, very different. They’re completely different. They have totally different models about how they approach content and about the kind of content they want to create. Typically what I find is when I’m developing with a streamer or with a cable, they want to do something that is absolutely the opposite of what’s happening on broadcast. And when I’m developing with broadcast, which by the way I’m developing two at this very moment, they are still playing by an old rule book.

So, I’m not going to say necessarily that what you’re saying like all of Netflix’s content is great, because I think some people here beg to differ.

Jason: No, I don’t think it is.

Wendy: You can’t have that volume and have that much greatness. But there is still something to really be said for broadcast. I mean, I love developing in broadcast and I’ll tell you why. I do believe that the Netflix, let’s call it a revolution, is changing the landscape of what kind of stories can be told and how much an audience can absorb and how smart audiences can be. And that is something that the broadcasters are catching up to fast.

There’s a reason that Fox gave us 12 extra weeks in the room, because they know how impossible it is to write a series in the short amount of window that was that traditional broadcast model. Right? A lot of times if you were on a broadcast show you would start writing in May and you had to start shooting by July. So they realize that that time crunch was an issue.

And, you know, people that are working on Netflix shows, they may be developing for a year before that show is even shot. I mean, it could go on forever.

John: Yeah. But in developing for a year, the extra time in Empire, the extra year for Netflix, that’s costing you as a writer money.

Wendy: It’s costing us money. Absolutely.

Craig: They’re penalizing you for the care you put into your own show.

Wendy: That’s right. And people say this all the time. I’m not the first person to say this. They say well the quality of shows, these shows are winning all these Emmys. OK, I got an opinion about that, too. But, winning all these Emmys versus broadcast and it is true. And broadcast is a completely different monster that you’re playing with. You are on a train that you’ve got to deliver every week a certain amount of content that is not equal to what’s happening on Netflix or even FX or anything.

Craig: And Nicole you were ready to jump in there as well.

Nicole: I was just going to say exactly what Wendy said. Not at all.

Wendy: Now that you got me fired up. Now that my Coca Cola has kicked in. Coca Cola.

John: Coca Cola, nothing more. Well, we need to move on to a craft topic that everyone can relate to. So we’re not all going to be making TV shows, but we’re all going to be writing stuff.

Craig: Most of these people will be making TV shows.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: If Netflix continues at this rate.

John: Everyone in this room.

Craig: Almost everyone here will have a TV show.

John: As you walk out, please pick up your No Writing Left Behind sticker and your Netflix deal.

Craig: You will all work for Hulu.

John: This was a tweet that was sent to me and to Craig. Nicola Prigg tweeted, “Is there any storytelling reason why we get bored during an episode of television? Or why we feel a story is slow in a movie?”

So Craig and I both saw this tweet. Craig said, “Yes, that’s a good topic for an episode.”

Craig: Yeah. Do something about it, John.

John: And so I said, yes, let me put it in the outline where we actually keep these ideas for episodes.

Craig: He’s scolding me now. Because I’m lazy. But it worked.

John: But Nicola Prigg actually had a really good topic. So why sometimes as you’re watching TV or watching a movie–

Craig: Or reading a script.

John: Or reading a script, yeah, which is the prototype to sort of both of these. I’m bored. And this actually happened to me this last week. I was talking to a writer-director about his script, which I loved, but I had to say like, starting at about page 45 I got kind of bored until we got to this moment. And I could describe exactly why it was. And so I want to talk with this panel here, as you’re watching a movie, as you’re reading a script, the things that get you bored.

And so I can tell you what happened to me was the writer had set up that in like two days this thing is going to be happening. And so once he established that landmark, like this is a thing we’re going to be watching for, everything that wasn’t that was kind of filler and felt boring to me. So that was a reason why I was getting bored in that script. As you’re reading–

Phil: I know the answer, John.

John: Tell me why you get bored.

Craig: Came out of the gate very strong there. You have nothing. Got nothing.

Phil: No. I think that one of the best pieces of advice I ever got about writing in classic form, I don’t remember who gave me this advice, but I remember the advice. And the advice was to get rid of everything in your script that seems remotely obligatory. And so I think people get bored when they smell that there’s something even in a well-written, engaging, funny, interesting script something obligatory is happening. We have to show that this is a good person. We have to show that they’re really worried about this. Any statement that starts with we have to do this, and I think you hear when you work with people, a lot of times you hear that exact verbiage. We have to see this. We have to see this. We have to know that.

Sometimes that feeling, sometimes you do have to know stuff, yes, but to me that’s the thing like if I’m watching a movie or I’m reading a script, when I get bored is when I can smell that the person is doing it because they think they have to. And the scene is over and it’s not over because there’s still a little bit more – we have to show how nice this guy is now, or something.

So I think the word obligatory is what always comes to me as boring.

Craig: I think that’s good advice.

John: So that sense of like you’re doing a thing because you feel like you need to do it rather than you want to do it. There’s not an excitement. And there’s no curiosity from the reader because—

Phil: They see it coming. They’ve already seen this story.

Craig: The calculation is evident right. When you’re reading it you go, oh, they’re doing that thing because they feel that they have to do the thing. That immediately is boring. And it’s probably a sign that you didn’t need to do the thing at all.

Phil: And maybe the remedy or the experiment doesn’t work every time is to try to do exactly the opposite and see what happens because sometimes that does work. To truly deny the thing that everyone has told you to do could. So just even as an experiment in your writing, I mean, I found that helpful in our writing is to sometimes do the thing that’s the opposite and see what happens.

Craig: Nicole, you are particularly good at entertaining me, in particular. And you’re not at all boring, you’re the opposite of a boring writer to me. What are you doing to avoid being boring and what are worried about when you read things and you go, oh, it’s happening?

Nicole: Of my own work?

Craig: No, of other people’s. You are never boring.

Nicole: Well, so I read a lot of scripts because I mentor a lot, so I do a lot of work with Sundance and with SF Film and with Sun Foundation. And so I’ve read a lot of scripts that I would say, there’re a few things. I mean, I could speak many things of this. But one is when the writer doesn’t trust the reader to be following them, and so it’s not breadcrumbs, it’s like loaves of bread being heaved at you. And you’re like, yes, I get that they have an issue with their mother. OK. This is like the fourth time you told us. So obviously the thing with the girlfriend is going to echo the mother. We know. And then you’re just waiting for it to happen.

And I think a lot of times I’m sitting around reading a script waiting for them to get to the part where the story really should start. Or just like get past the thing that is the big reveal that we all saw coming. So I would say people who don’t trust their reader to be more subtle or to be more complex or sophisticated. Or they’re just telling us too much. Shoe leather I think can be really boring. A lot of the like how did they get from this file that they found on the desk, and then they have to go to the gas station to talk to the guy. And a lot of the times it’s just following a paint-by-numbers kind of thing and it’s just not that interesting because there’s not necessarily any compelling emotion or conflict that’s inherent in that scene. They’re just sort of following a to do list. And so then we feel like we’re reading somebody’s to do list.

And the other thing I would say is that as much as I love research and I’m a big research fan, I think I’ve read a lot of scripts especially because I frequently am given science-based stories that are just like there’s an interesting fact that I’m going to shoe-horn in there that isn’t that interesting. And it’s like maybe if I was reading it in a game of Trivial Pursuit, but not in the second act reversal.

Phil: And just to add to that, I think that what you’re saying is so right because I think a lot of times there’s a false value that has kind of taken hold which is no one should ever be confused for even a second. No one should ever wonder for a second. Or just think, whoa, what, for a second. That there’s this weird impulse that everything has to be explained. It doesn’t come from us. It comes from other people.

Craig: Them.

Phil: But that idea that it can be fun and entertaining to sit in not knowing and wondering. It’s a whole concept called suspense. That’s a great concept but that is kind of weirdly under attack all the time, with the fear that the audience will just be so mad that they don’t know right that second. And I just don’t believe in that, but I know that there’s a lot of people who do. And so I think a lot of the stuff that you’re talking about is exactly that. That people are trying to cover all their bases and make sure no one is ever wondering for a second. And to me wondering is an amazing thing. That’s a great thing.

Craig: Wendy?

Wendy: Sure.

Craig: Love of my life.

Wendy: Hello. What’s your number? Just kidding.

Craig: I just love, “Wendy, love of my life” is the greatest movie quote of all time. Any time I hear your name I’m like, “Wendy, love of my life.” You guys know what I’m talking about, don’t you?

Wendy: The Shining.

Craig: Thank you, Wendy. The Shining. I’m not being creepy. I mean, I am.

John: We’re in a hotel.

Craig: I mean, I’m being creepy a la The Shining.

Wendy: A couple of things. When I go into a writers’ room and we are breaking the story for an episode of television, I’m going to stick with broadcast because the gauntlet has been thrown down there. So, in broadcast television, which millions upon millions of people watch–

Craig: Do it. Keep going.

Wendy: Maybe less than five years ago.

Craig: Yes.

Wendy: But there’s still a lot of people who don’t pay for content and want to watch it for free and don’t bother watching a tampon commercial. OK, so.

Craig: You’re the villain of the podcast now.

Jason: Just to clarify, I was not taking down broadcast.

Craig: No, no, no, it’s too late. It’s too late. You’ve been defined.

Wendy: He likes the conflict. And that’s actually what this is all about.

Craig: I love conflict.

Wendy: This is where I’m going. I always go into the room when we’re breaking a new episode and I say, OK everybody, what is the climax of this story. Show me the climax. I want to see what’s happening at that act five break. And I drive people bananas because they’re like, well, we want to talk about the teaser. And we have an idea–

John: You have act breaks. That’s a crucial difference in broadcast. You have act breaks that you’re building up to.

Wendy: Yes. And if you have story blocks that don’t service that climax, bye. It’s not here. We’re not using that. And, by the way, it takes me a while to get there. As a writer I’m very honest about this. What I find in my drafts as I go along is I’ll just – I don’t know, we’re in Texas so I’ll use a gun analogy because ya’ll understand that.

So like, OK, imagine you’re at target practice, right. You’ve got your gun. You’re looking down range. So, what I find in my scripts, especially the first few drafts, is that I’ve shot all around the middle target. Like the scenes are almost there, but they’re not quite there. And when I hit the bullseye, damn, you know that’s not boring. Right? So to me that’s really how I feel. I often say what is the highest point of drama that I can find in this story I’m trying to tell and then what are the highest points of drama that will get me to that place.

And so that’s how I keep it from getting boring.

Craig: That’s kind of where I’m at. Well done. And I think when I’m reading something and I get bored, or when I’m watching something and I get bored it’s because the show has decided to take a break, or the movie has taken a break. And what I mean by that is there is a propulsion going on. Somebody needs something. At all points something must be done about something, or someone. And then another thing happens that makes it really hard, or really surprising. But every now and then a show will take a break and go, OK, let’s just have a chat. Or, you know what, I want to tell you what I think. That’s a break.

I don’t want it. Even when people – sometimes you’ll have that moment in a movie where someone will sit down and there will be a little fireside chat of some kind and someone will start telling a story, but you don’t get bored because there’s a meaning to the story that impacts the end. Case in point, Gandalf sits down at one point. They are lost in the mines of Moria. And little Frodo notices that Gollum has been following and he says, “Oh, Gollum has been following me.” “Yes, he’s been following us for a long time.”

And then they have this very long – this is an action-packed movie and now it’s just two people talking. But what it comes down to is Frodo says, “I just wish I were not alive right now.” And he says, “It’s not our choice to determine when we’re alive. It’s only our choice to determine what we do with the time we have.” That is literally the theme of the entire series and it is why in the end the end happens the way the end happens. That is not a boring scene.

Right? Because they understood if you dare stop and take a break you better deliver something that matters. OK? If you dare to stop it’s got to be amazing. Like that. Just so you know, write Gollum.

John: So that’s a quiet moment. But so often I get bored during really loud moments. So like a bunch of stuff, like cities are being destroyed, and I’m like I’m just so bored. And because I’m not watching characters do anything that I care about. I’m just watching stuff happen. And it’s basically they’ve stopped actually the story of the movie just to show a bunch of special effects. And you can only take so much of that. It’s just like, no, I’m done, let’s get onto the next – stop. Stop destroying the buildings.

Craig: How many buildings can you blow up? At some point there’s just enough–

John: So many it turns out.

Craig: Oh no, the city is, again with the buildings. And I also think about the insurance adjustors.

John: Yeah. That poor man.

Craig: Or just like people that erect and take down scaffolding. There’s so much work to be done.

John: There’s a lot of work to be done. So, Jason, I wanted to get to you because you have done some of the big smashy things. So, can you give us any suggestions for a bunch of smashy stuff is happening, what are you doing to keep us engaged during the smashy-smashy bits?

Jason: I think the thing about broadcast is…

Wendy: Bring it.

Craig: You’re so funny. You’re so funny.

Jason: When you’re writing these big action sequences I think it’s very easy for audiences to tune out. It’s very easy for it to become about the logistics, about sort of the physics of what’s going on and the visual effects. And it just has to be about character. And it’s so rare that you have big action sequences that are driven by character. And I think Nicole you did something really brilliant with the finale set piece of Guardians of the Galaxy where it’s just about this group finally learning to trust each other and to work as one. And so it really is just a group of friends who all got thrown together, or hate each other, trying to figure out how not to for one moment.

And the stuff that’s going on around them is cool and beautiful and James Gunn does an amazing job of visualizing it, but it really does feel like it’s just a character piece. That’s what I aspired to do with Wonder Woman. And I think it all stems, you know, to your earlier question about why audiences get bored when they get bored. I think a big part of it is familiarity. And everyone was sort of hinting at the same thing which is lack of faith in the audience.

And I think audiences are ready for smaller act three set pieces. I think an example, well, World War Z is a movie that’s not necessarily beloved.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: So World War Z is a great lesson because initially the climax of World War Z was a massive action set piece that took place in Moscow.

Jason: Big Red Square finale set piece.

Craig: Where Brad Pitt faced off against waves of Russian zombies, which we wouldn’t know anything about now today, but when it was revised it was determined that actually Brad Pitt versus one zombie.

Jason: And it works way better because it’s character.

Craig: Much better.

Jason: But I think underestimating – we’re still I feel like–

Phil: Would have loved to see a sky portal in that opening.

Jason: Sky portal would have been nice.

Phil: Just for me.

Craig: Just one portal.

Jason: But I do think we’re still a little bit behind the audiences in big studio feature film land. I think audiences have gotten so smart and so willing to experience different things from characters. And it’s not just about, I think confusion is a good point. There’s a real aversion to allowing audiences to live in that space of confusion which I think is valuable as he was saying. But I also think audiences are able to process complicated characters. I think probably all of us, or at least maybe this is just me, you get the note about characters being likeable. Your hero being likeable.

Craig: Oh, that’s the worst note.

Jason: Heroic enough. And that’s boring.

Craig: Never do that. Never do that.

Jason: People can be unlikeable.

Craig: If anyone ever says to you your character is not likeable, you say thank you.

Phil: And even worse if they say the word relatable. Because honestly, you know, we just made a movie about a character who is not likeable and not relatable. And the only thing that’s important to me is if you think the character is interesting. That’s all that matters.

Wendy: And now add gender and race to that equation. Tell me. You know what I’m saying.

Phil: Exactly.

Wendy: It’s very, very different.

Phil: Exactly.

John: You can’t throw that out there and not do anything more with that.

Craig: What else is there to say? She said gender and race. End of discussion.

John: End of discussion.

Wendy: If you don’t know what that means I can’t help you.

Phil: But relatable to who, likeable by who.

Wendy: Exactly. Exactly. Who says what’s relatable? Who says what’s likeable?

Craig: There we go.

John: There it is. I wanted some closure on that moment. This next moment–

Phil: You did it again. Perfectly.

John: Is a moment we’ve been waiting for for 370 episodes perhaps. So this is about a character who is perhaps relatable.

Craig: Not likeable.

John: Not always likeable. Not always entirely consistent. But it’s a character who we’ve all come to know really, really well. So this is a new game we’re going to play tonight called Why is Craig So Mad?

So, one of the things we did very early from the start of Scriptnotes is we have transcripts of every episode. So I can Google words to see certain words. Words like “angry,” or “umbrage.” And so what I did yesterday–

Craig: Or “fucking.”

John: Is I went through and I looked through the transcripts to find examples of like Craig being angry. And the question is would even Craig remember what he was angry about. So, in previous years we’ve brought a person out from the audience to guess. When I showed this to Craig, Craig had no idea so Craig will be the contestant and the host of this.

So, we’re going to take things, real things from the transcripts and Craig is going to have to figure out what he was so angry about. And our panelists here, so you have this Why is Craig So Mad? And so we’ll be reading down A, B, C, and D so you’ll be offering these alternatives.

This is from Episode 34, way early on. Episode Umbrage Farms. Craig, can you reenact your speech here?

Craig: The thought that you would poison your show with somebody because their daddy was somebody is insane and inane. I mean, I don’t know, I haven’t watched the show. Obviously you do and you like it. I haven’t seen it yet.

John: All right. What is Craig so angry about? Option A.

Wendy: Now do I read the parenthesis as well or no?

John: Including the parenthesis, yeah.

Wendy: OK. He’s really angry about Zoey Deschanel on New Girl. Her father is acclaimed cinematographer Caleb Deschanel.

John: Or Option B?

Phil: He’s actually angry about Allison Williams on Girls. Her father is disgraced news anchor Brian Williams.

John: Or is it Option C?

Nicole: Angelina Jolie in Girl Interrupted. Her father is wackadoodle actor Jon Voight.

John: Or is it Option D?

Jason: Jason Ritter, in Another Period. His father is actor John Ritter, rest in peace. Why did I get the sad one?

John: So, Craig, talk us through your mental process here.

Jason: Tonal train wrecks in this show.

Craig: By process of elimination it can’t be Jason Ritter because it can’t be. That would be crazy. I can’t imagine that happening. Who would dare question lovely Jason Ritter? And I can’t imagine Angeline Jolie. I’m torn between Zoey Deschanel and Allison Williams. I’m going to go with Allison Williams on Girls.

John: You are correct. It is Allison Williams on Girls.

Craig: I’m so proud of myself for guessing something I said once.

John: Indeed. Zosia Mamet would also have counted for the same thing. All right, by the way, I should say you weren’t angry at her. You were angry at people who were angry at her being cast on the show.

Craig: Correct. Correct. I was in support of Allison Williams.

John: Yes. Next up is Episode 305. Forever Young and Stupid. Craig, take it away.

Craig: Second of all… [laughs] You can see by Episode 305 I had really fallen into my kind of rhythm. Second of all, screenwriters working in the feature business, I mean, the people that are constantly telling us, hey, things have to change are directors. And now directors are just shocked. Hey, it’s the same deal with us. You took a check. You did something as a work-for-hire piece. Shut up. Piss off.

John: What is Craig so angry about?

Craig: I don’t know.

John: Option A?

Wendy: Sony’s plan to sell clean versions of its movies with none of that upside down kissing in Spider Man.

John: Or B.

Phil: Bryan Singer complaining that he was fired off Bohemian Rhapsody after, you know, not showing up for days at a time.

John: Or Option C.

Nicole: Louis C.K.’s movie, I Love You Daddy, being pulled from theaters after Louis C.K. pulled his dick out.

John: Or Option D.

Jason: DGA complaints about Netflix not showing director credits on the ten thousand billboards they buy around Los Angeles.

John: Craig Mazin, which of these things were you so angry about?

Craig: Oh no. Sony’s plan to sell clean versions of its movies?

John: Craig was right!

Craig: Again, I’m so bizarrely proud of something that should just be normal.

John: Yeah, so I don’t even know, did Sony do the clean versions? I don’t know. But we talked about it.

All right, last one. So Craig has two so far.

Craig: Two out of three. Basic memory, yeah.

John: Absolutely. Episode 221, Nobody Knows Anything Including What this Quote Means.

Craig: Because you’re a good person – I’m talking about you – because you’re a good person. You know, here’s the difference between you and me. A good person sees something that is deserving of vomit and says I don’t understand. Those words don’t fit together. I’m puzzled. I will take a nap. The bad person says I am filled with rage because I can see the bad conscience behind this.

John: What is Craig so angry about? Is it?

Wendy: Warvey Heinstein? Or, I’m sorry, Harvey Weinstein.

John: Harvey Weinstein. Or is it, B?

Phil: Final Draft!

John: Is it C?

Nicole: College students protesting Kimberly Peirce.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Or is it D?

Jason: The Blue Cat Screenplay Competition.

Craig: Shit.

John: That’s a hard one. I got a good one for this last one.

Craig: I mean, they’re all really good. God, it would be so depressing if it was the Blue Cat Screenplay Competition. I got to go with an old chestnut here. Final Draft.

John: It was the Blue Cat Screenplay Competition! Oh, Craig, you almost won the whole game.

Wendy: You’ve got to trust your gut.

Craig: You’re right.

Wendy: Trust your gut.

Craig: Never change your answer.

John: Yeah. You could have won the Showcase Showdown. Instead you gave it up at the end.

Craig: Could have spun the big wheel. Dammit. That’s great. I’m smart. “A good person sees something that is deserving of vomit.” That’s great.

John: We have transcripts for the whole thing. If you listen to the show or read the transcripts you would have an idea of what our show actually is.

Craig: I just finally got why they listen to the show.

John: Yeah. Sometimes it’s funny.

Craig: It’s actually quite entertaining.

John: Yeah. With some planning it sometimes works out pretty well.

Craig: You guys aren’t crazy. This makes sense.

John: We have time for some questions. So, who would like to raise your hand to ask a question?

Hello, what’s your name?

Atticus: Atticus.

John: Atticus like Atticus Finch?

Atticus: Yeah.

John: All right. Very nice.

Atticus: So my question has to do with like writing for TV and streaming and stuff like that, like the difference. So, with the culture of like binge-watching shows now where like on Netflix and streaming stuff you can do a whole season in a day, like do you have to tailor your writing of a TV series differently nowadays?

Craig: That is a great question.

John: Yeah, because you do that.

Craig: That is a really good question. It deserves commendation. It does. You guys have been around these festivals. They’re not always good.

John: So let’s talk about why that was a good question. So that is a good question because it speaks to the expertise that people have on the stage. That’s always good. It is a thing that will be generally interesting to everybody else around you. That’s another good thing.

Craig: Also, there’s something very real and craft about the way that has changed. So, I’m going to start with you here on this one and maybe you have the full answer to this one, Wendy, because you are primarily working in network where you do write week by week, but have you written anything in the binge space?

Wendy: Yes.

Craig: So do you do it differently?

Wendy: Yes.

Craig: Tell us.

Wendy: The companies that make binge product [laughs] really believe that their audience will sit through probably the first three episodes before a major incident happens. That’s very different from network television, where we have about 15 minutes. So that’s a completely different way of thinking. So, that extra two to three hours allows you to develop character, place, set a world that in broadcast your window is about that big. So, you can imagine then the type of choices you can make as a writer.

So, when you’re writing in broadcast and you’ve only got 15 minutes to sell it, you have to go right for the punches. And when you’re doing something on a streamer you can take your time with it. You can flow with it. You can let it go a little looser.

Craig: And you’ve got, I guess the most helpful tool in your tool belt to ensure that somebody comes back seven days later because they don’t have another episode to watch is the cliffhanger.

Wendy: Right. Right. I mean, both models use the cliffhanger. That’s for sure. Because they do want you to keep watching. But I would say that on the streamers, because they do slow it down so much – sometimes too much if you ask me. Sometimes I’m not willing to invest that amount of money. Money, ha. Time. Time is money. What am I saying? But you know what I mean. So it is interesting, because it does change the way you approach the story. It changes the way you approach the season because when you’re making the season and you’re not having the constant interaction of an audience that comes through social media or through ratings or through any kind of, you know, that sort of constant interaction that you have when you have a show that’s on week to week, and you’re making it in a bubble and you’re going to release all of them at the same time you can really approach your storytelling in a much different way.

I know that the way they try to emulate is they imagine that it’s – if you’ve got ten episodes you think of it as a long feature. Right? So your first act break is actually the third episode. Second act break is actually towards the seventh or eighth episode.

Craig: All right.

John: So another episode you might want to listen to, Stephen Schiff came on and we talked about The Americans. And so The Americans is a show that kind of feels like it was streaming, but it was a week to week show. And so they talked a lot about the previously ons and sort of how you have to build in the expectation like a person could be watching them all at once or the person is watching them week by week and you have to make sure that they’re caught up in a way that’s different. Because classically on Netflix there’s no previously on. It just assumes that you’ve watched all of them all together.

Another question. Who has a question?

Male Voice: Hi. After writing so many successful comedies, how did you come to Chernobyl and what was the experience like?

Craig: And who is that question for?

Male Voice: For the whole panel. And when do we get to see it?

Craig: Thank you for asking. Don’t know when I’m allowed to say.

John: Not when it comes out, but you can say why you wrote it.

Craig: It will be coming out next year. Not past the halfway point. The first half of next year.

The way I came about writing it is, I mean, the thing is it doesn’t matter the other stuff I wrote. Like Phil for instance writes all sorts of stuff. I don’t know if you saw The Invitation. It’s a wonderful movie that he wrote with Matt Manfredi and Karyn Kusama directed. It’s a fantastic movie. It is not at all like for instance Ride Along. But he also wrote Ride Along.

I generally think that people that write funny things can do anything. I like the Vince Gilligan method of hiring funny people to play dramatic parts. But I’ve always been interested in not funny things. It’s just that they were mostly paying me to write funny things, so I just did what I could. But probably Chernobyl is the most me thing I’ve ever done. So, really I guess it was just me being me. There you go.

John: You being you. We have time for one more question. So, right behind him is a gentleman who is wearing a shirt. Great, you, sir. The gentleman in a shirt. That’s a really specific thing. You sir, what is your name?

Christian: Christian.

John: Hi Christian. What is your question?

Christian: OK, so Oscars are coming up, award season. What’s one screenplay for each of you that you hope gets nominated, besides your own?

John: I would hope that Black Panther gets nominated, because Black Panther is fantastic. And it’s a fantastically well-made movie, but it’s also a great script. And so Joe Robert Cole and the director also deserve huge credits for how good the writing was in that. I’m trying to think of another – there’s other good stuff, I just wasn’t thinking about what was great this year.

Craig: Oscars are coming up now already? Didn’t we just do them?

John: No. I know it feels like we did.

Craig: I so don’t care.

John: Yeah. Franklin was the show and we talked about like we just don’t care about the awards.

Craig: I mean, I just like movies. The whole rat race of it all. I mean, I know people do get into and everything. I just wish – I love the way the AFI does it where they’re just like it’s 2018. Here are ten movies we loved. Let’s celebrate these ten movies. They’re great. Instead of like pitting them against each other in a fight. But that’s just – oh, probably also because I’m never going to get an Oscar so it’s easy for me to say that, isn’t it. To be like oh Oscars, blech.

John: Can I punt your question a little bit and say that one of – the only good thing I will say about the whole award season bullshit is that the studios all publish their scripts. And so you as writers who are like curious about screenplays–

Craig: Oh, that is true. This is good.

John: You can now read all the screenplays. And like us growing up, it was hard to find screenplays–

Craig: Is there an app that they could read those on?

John: You could read it on Weekend Read, for example. So, Megan, is also going to be putting all of those scripts as they become available up on Weekend Read. So that’s a place you can read them, but you can also find the PDFs other places, too.

Read good scripts. You should also read some terrible scripts so you can understand what never works in scripts. But reading really good screenplays is a great way sort of to develop those muscles and sort of see like, oh, I should aspire to do these really good things. And you see like what it looks like on the page before it becomes the movie.

Craig: I feel like there should be one more question.

John: There should be one more question because I kind of punted that question.

Craig: Can maybe not a dude ask the last one?

John: Which woman in the audience – this young woman right here has raised her hand. She’s wearing a–

Craig: A shirt.

John: She’s wearing a shirt.

Female Voice: I’m also wearing a shirt.

John: All right. People in shirts. But it’s the same color. Is that an Austin Film Festival shirt?

Female Voice: No, it’s just palm trees.

John: Because that is the Austin Film Festival color. The official staff are wearing those shirts.

Female Voice: Oh that’s true. Please don’t ask me anything. I don’t know anything.

John: All right. But you have a question for us.

Female Voice: So my question is at this level of your writing I hear a lot of you guys talking about assignments and I want to know how often, I don’t know, weekly or if it’s maybe daily, you get to work on your kind of pet projects and your own things that nobody pays you for. Or, are they paying you for those?

John: They’re not paying. So, let’s talk about that. Let’s start at the end. Jason Fuchs, how much are you chasing or writing on assignments versus your own thing?

Jason: I would say right now it’s probably weighted more heavily on assignment stuff. But I think that part of staying sort of fertile and fresh creatively is focusing on things that are originals that mean a lot to you. So my time for the most part right now is divided between Robotech which is, although it’s a passion thing, it’s obviously something was an assignment. And an original. And so I try to split time between that and then in the back of my mind there are always original ideas percolating. But I think it’s really easy to get excited about open writing assignments and these are things that you have to work very hard to get.

And oftentimes they’re properties that you fall in love with and that you care as much about, at least in my case, certainly as some originals. But I think it’s really helpful to still focus on what those originals might be.

John: Nicole, what’s your split?

Nicole: Well, let’s see. The last year has been really intense. So, I did a studio project that was an assignment but it was based on an IP that was just basically a title and like a bad guy, so it felt like an original but it wasn’t. And a pilot that was also based very, very loosely on a short film. And then I wrote my own short film and adapted it from a New Yorker short story and directed it. That was a passion project which was great. My agent was like where have you been for three months? So that was fun. And then I have two passion projects I’m working on now in addition to the writing stuff. So, I would say that it’s about 50/50, but this year it’s been more like 60/40. It’s been a lot.

John: So Phil Hay, you do assignments but also this Destroyer, would you consider that – that’s your own thing? That’s your fun thing?

Phil: Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, it’s changed for us. So, my partner Matt and I who have been together for a really, really long time now work with my wife, Karyn, so the three of us – we basically have a family business. So we try to always have – we have one way where we’re trying to just make our own stuff at whatever budget level that is. And sometimes the next thing we do might be a studio. We have a studio that we might do next, but we also have an independent thing that we’re writing. So, for me personally and really fulfillingly the needle has shifted way toward just building stuff originally from the bottom up. And then doing assignments that really has a goal because it’s just our little group doing it.

But still doing some studio assignment work. But I would say like generally my lesson of my whole life and career, and I’m sure you guys feel similarly, you said something similar, is that you need to be doing your own stuff. Regardless of whether the results of it, just for you to be you as a writer and to stay alive emotionally and intellectually.

So, the original stuff always had a huge spot for me. But sometimes it’s had more of an economic spot and sometimes it’s had less of an economic spot. But it’s always been equally important.

Wendy: Yeah, I mean, he’s clapping. Like a dad.

Phil: I’m going to buy you a beer. Let’s go.

John: Wendy, do you get a chance to do your own original stuff? You’re doing TV for folks?

Wendy: Well, god, I’m so lucky right now. I feel kind of shamed.

Craig: You’re ashamed because good things are happening to you?

Wendy: Because good things are happening. Yeah. Yeah.

Craig: That’s the most writerly shit of all time.

Phil: Here truly is a writer.

John: Tell us why you said that. Why do you think he said that?

Craig: That is so writerly.

Wendy: Because I’m so used to losing, man.

Craig: There you go. There you go.

Wendy: I’m so used to being the – I had actually a showrunner once say to me in the room, “Learn to take a yes.” And, I mean, that’s me. I’m so used to fighting. I’m so used to having to push so hard. But this year was pretty brilliant.

So I’m in a deal and I sold two projects that I love. And so they’re assignments, but they were created by me. So, I don’t know, where does that fit in? So I would say 45% on the one piece that I sold, probably 45% on the other piece that I sold. But you know me. I always save 10% just for me. So I got 10% of things that are stories that I’m incubating that I’d like to go sell next year. Because, I mean, it takes a long time to develop what could be the concept for a television show.

You’re talking about millions upon millions of dollars of investment. So it’s important. I take that 10% and I invest my own money, not very smart but whatever. I invest my own time and really try to develop those stories so that come next June when the wonderful studio I’m working for comes and says, OK, what do you want to go pitch, I can say I got this ready, I got this. What are we going to do?

Craig: Great.

John: Craig Mazin, obviously Chernobyl is a passion project. It’s your own thing that you sort of came out and created.

Craig: It’s my own thing.

John: But the sort of – the stuff you don’t talk about on the show, you’ve also done a lot of work for other folks this last year, too.

Craig: Mostly. I mean, the truth is I have deferred for the longest time any kind of me time.

John: The personal enjoyment.

Craig: Like I’ve just always been somebody that’s helping someone else do what they do. And a lot of it has been wonderful and fulfilling. I don’t mean to ever suggest that I was not grateful for it. And a lot of it I loved doing. I mean, I loved working with Todd Phillips. That was great. But those were his things, you know. And I’ve spent so much time helping other people with their things, or coming in and fixing things, or dealing with distressed property, whatever it is, and to finally just do my own thing was wonderful. And I want to keep doing it. And so I think I’m going to.

And, you know, you can do the other kinds of stuff if you need money and you’ve shown that you have a track record of doing those things. That’s great. But I’m an odd one actually. I do feel like I’m very odd in the sense that I kind of started in a weird way, even though the first thing I did was like my own thing kind of. But it was really honestly it was a service job. It was like you guys need a movie like this. I’ve always been that. And only now weirdly after fucking 23 years am I finally just – so it’ll be tragic if it’s awful, wouldn’t it? I hope you don’t think it’s awful. Because if you do, then you think I’m awful.

John: No, we don’t think you’re awful, Craig.

Craig: I’m a little bit awful.

Wendy: Would somebody buy him a beer?

John: And so I will say from my perspective like doing Arlo Finch was a chance to just do completely my own thing. And so the best thing about making movies and television is it’s incredibly collaborative. The worst thing about making movies and television is it’s incredibly collaborative. And no matter what your vision is going into a thing, it’s always being filtered through a bunch of other people. And so to actually say like, oh, you know, that comma is there because I want that comma there and it matters to me was a great change for me and really, really good.

I won’t ever have that in features because it doesn’t matter. The screenplay is a plan for making the other thing. But to make the thing as a book was great. So that’s been my three books of doing my own stuff.

Craig: That was also a good question.

John: Yeah, see.

Craig: This row was nailing it.

John: The question row. Another free beer.

Phil: Another free beer.

John: This was a really – this was a pretty good Scriptnotes I think.

Craig: I don’t know. Was it?

Phil: It’s really up to them.

John: A good audience! We need to thank some very important people, starting with Beto O’Rourke.

Craig: Yes. And in all seriousness, how many of you – just raise your hand if you are a registered voter in the state of Texas. Now, lower your hand if you have not yet voted. So if you’ve voted lower your hand. If you still have yet to vote keep your hand up. You haven’t voted yet. And you can vote in the state of Texas. Very few of you. Wonderful. You’re voting, right? Good.

John: Good.

Craig: Yeah. Yep. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for, but I will tell you do not vote for Ted Cruz.

John: The only thing he asks is not to vote for Ted Cruz. We need to thank Megan McDonnell who made this whole night possible. Megan McDonnell, our producer.

Craig: Where is she?

John: She’s right there.

Craig: There she is.

John: Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you Austin Film Festival’s Colin Hyer. Thank you very much for having us here again.

Craig: Always wonderful.

John: Olivia Riordan. Travis, Joseph, Sonja, James. All the Austin Film Festival volunteers. You are fantastic. So let’s thank everybody here at Austin Film Festival. And Ben thank you very much for the lights. Hey guys, thank you very much. This was another fun year to do this.

Come tomorrow if you can get into our Three Page Challenge. We’re going to be talking through three Three Page Challenges.

Craig: We’ll be tearing humans apart in front of you.

John: Indeed. And we won’t be drunk. Well, we may be a little bit drunk.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Thank you all very much. Have a good night.

Craig: Thanks guys. Have a great night.

John: And Craig has one more thing to say.

Craig: So, if you’re a WGA member you now know that you can vote on our proposal to amend the credits rules for screenwriters. We strongly, strongly, strongly, both of us, urge you to vote yes on this. If you have questions, take a look in the booklet. There is a statement against it, which I strongly disagree with. And in fact you’ll see that the committee, including a lot of terrific screenwriters, have put together a very clear argument rebutting all of those points. So we really, really urge you to vote yes. It’s something that we need as writers.

Links:

• Thanks for joining us, Wendy Calhoun, Phil Hay, Nicole Perlman, and Jason Fuchs!
• And thank you, Beto, for the message! Check out the video from the audience.
• The Death of Hollywood’s Middle Class by Nicole Laporte for Fast Company
• This tweet by Nicola Prigg
• Keep an eye on Weekend Read for screenplays this awards season.
• T-shirts are available here! We’ve got new designs, including Colored Revisions, Karateka, and Highland2.
• The USB drives!
• Wendy Calhoun on Twitter
• Phil Hay on Twitter
• Nicole Perlman on Twitter
• Jason Fuchs on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2018/no-writing-left-behind).

**John August:** Hey this is John. So, Craig and I are going to be at the Austin Film Festival this weekend. We look forward to seeing many of you there. But there’s two other things that I’m going to be at that I wanted to let you guys know.

So this Saturday I will also be at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. I’m on a panel at 10:30am Saturday morning called Fantasy Meets Reality with two other great authors, so you can come see me. That’s free. And there’s a signing afterwards at 11:30. There’s a link in the show notes for that. And on Monday I will be in Boulder, Colorado, my hometown, at the Boulder Bookstore. There’s a book event at 6:30pm. I’ll be reading and signing books, so if you’re in the Boulder or Denver area come see me there. So, links to both of these are in the show notes. And now on with the normal Scriptnotes.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

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

Today on the podcast we’ll be discussing the kind of writing you do before you start writing, such as pitches and outlines, and why it’s a bad idea to give that material to producers and executives. We’ll also be answering a listener question about want versus need.

**Craig:** You know what? This is going to be a good episode in part because I broke this rule recently and I feel bad about it. And it was a certain circumstance but I still feel bad about it, so part of this episode is going to be me cleansing myself through fire.

**John:** Yeah. So, we’re going to dive right in on leave behinds, but I’ve had my own experiences where I’ve left stuff behind and felt kind of guilty about it and recognized it was a bad thing. Like this is a bad idea, but we’ll get into sort of why it’s a bad idea and sort of everything.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** No follow up. No news. We’re going to get right into it.

**Craig:** Just plow in. Boom.

**John:** So this most recent version of this topic came because last fall we did a bunch of screenwriter outreach lunches. So the WGA would invite screenwriters in and we’d talk about what things were concerning to them. And so you went to one of those lunches and I went to a bunch of those lunches and there was one lunch – I think not the one that you were at – where this writing team was there and they described how they had to write a 50-page treatment to get this job.

**Craig:** Oh man.

**John:** I wanted to reach through time and grab them by their lapels and say don’t do that. But of course they didn’t know they were doing that at the start. They went in and they pitched on a project, they had their little notes with them. The producer or the executive said like, “Oh hey, could you send through that stuff?” And so they sent through that stuff and then he’s like, “Oh, could you just work on it a little bit more?” And it escalated up until it became a 50-page document for which they were not paid before they were hired to write that script.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve been hearing this a lot. And, you know, we just both spoke about how we have occasionally done things like this, but I’ve never done it because I’ve been asked to do it. I’ve only done it because I wanted to. Sometimes I have – and I need to stop for reasons that we’ll get to later – but sometimes I think to myself well you know it would be easier if I just sort of wrote down across two pages what it is exactly I’m feeling here, this way I don’t have to feel quite so song-and-dancey when I sit down with people.

But what you’re describing there and what those writers described that’s happening all the time now and it is just a pure abuse. It is not just kind of a narrow abuse of writers per the MBA and the WGA and blah-blah-blah. It is all of that. It’s an actual abuse of humans to make them do things like this. It’s outrageous. And it is reflective of I think the cheapest, thinnest, meanest kind of executive, the most frightened sort of employer who is incapable of just making a decision or acknowledging for instance that they just don’t have as much control over this process as they wish they did. And so they make writers do this awful, awful thing that degrades them. So by the time the writer is hired the power dynamic has already been blown to smithereens.

**John:** Yep. So we’re going to talk about how this pertains to screenwriters and to some degree TV writers, but I think a lot of people listening to this program who are not writers are nodding along because any kind of freelance worker – anybody who is working for him or herself may find themselves in the situation where in order to get the job they’re asking you to do a lot of stuff first. And auditions are great, but when you’re auditioning and you’re just creating new material that is a real problem and you’re under-validating your work and you’re making it harder for everyone around you.

So we can get into this. One of the nice things, we do have a union. And one of the things a union can do is actually conduct surveys to figure out how pervasive a thing is. We’re able to survey our membership. And amongst screenwriters at least a third reported they were asked to turn in written material before getting a job and that number is up to 41% when you look at screenwriters who are earning around scale, so at the lower tier of it, which tells you that the newer writers are more likely to be asked to do this stuff than you or me.

**Craig:** That’s the statistic that makes me want to vomit the hardest. I mean, everything that we’re going to talk about today is vomit worthy. But that one really gets me because those are the people who should be asked the least of. They’re getting paid around scale. That means the minimum amount we can pay them. That’s the minimum wage of the Writers Guild. And you may look and say, well, you know, scale is actually pretty good. That’s a pretty good number. Yeah, except spread that out over a year and a half, take away taxes, and if you’re writing with a partner cut it in half. Oh, and then give away what is routinely 25% to an agent, a manager, and a lawyer. It’s not a lot.

And those people, the ones who can afford this misery the least, nearly half of them are being asked to work without any pay at all.

**John:** Yep. Craig it’s actually much, much worse than you’re describing.

**Craig:** Oh good.

**John:** Because think about this. We’re surveying all these screenwriters and we’re saying, OK, you’re earning at about scale level. But who knows how many jobs they’re going in for and being asked to submit material that they weren’t being paid for? So for all we know this theoretical screenwriter/screenwriting team went in on five different jobs and were asked to provide written material on all five jobs. And so that’s the real frustration here is that this is pervasive and it shouldn’t be happening.

So, starting today we just rolled out a new campaign through the WGA called No Writing Left Behind, which is just to remind writers they shouldn’t be doing this. In fact, they can’t be doing this. It’s considered free work. And we just need to stop doing it. So, you and I are talking about it, but we’re going to have a bunch of other screenwriters talking about it today and tomorrow and this week with stickers and articles and everything out there just to let everyone know that this is a thing that shouldn’t be happening.

And also why it shouldn’t be happening on the studio level, the producer level, because it is a giant copyright liability for them as well.

**Craig:** This was an argument that I made to a number of people at studios. I made it at Paramount. I made it at Universal. And I have always describe this as a ticking time bomb. And I think it’s actually gone off a few times in all honesty. I think a few times they have been called on their shenanigans because what happens is they ask writers to supply them with writing before they can get a job. Well, as you point out, only one writer or team can get the job. So what happens to all that other writing that they’ve collected from people they haven’t employed? They don’t own that writing now. Can other writers do anything with that writing? No. But can the studio? No. They haven’t purchased it.

And so they go ahead and make a movie and then someone calls up and says, “You know that scene? I wrote that. You took it from me and you don’t own it.” And now they’ve got a problem. And I think if the business affairs people at studios understood how widely practiced this chicanery is they would lose their minds because it is incredibly dangerous for them. It’s a huge liability.

**John:** And so in today’s conversation we’re going to focus on screenwriters, people who are writing feature movies, partly because that’s what you and I know, partly because that’s who we have the data on. But it’s also the nature of the kind of jobs we’re going in for. It’s more likely to happen to feature writers.

TV writers who are going in for staffing, they’re going in to meet with showrunners and they’re talking to the showrunners, but they’re not writing a spec episode of NCIS to land a staff job on NCIS. Where we do see this happening sometimes in TV and I think increasingly in TV is there’s a lot more TV shows that are based on underlying IP. And so you might be going in to meet with a company that owns a property and so you’re going in to pitch on that property, pitch doing a show on that property. And that’s where the same kind of thing could happen to a TV writer that happens to feature writers all the time which is where they’re asking, oh hey, could you just give us those notes about what your plan was for this thing.

So, TV writers should listen up as well.

**Craig:** Yeah. Everybody who works as a writer in our industry should listen to this. And I’m really glad that you guys are doing this. I’m learning along with everybody else at home about how you guys are going to be doing No Writing Left Behind, but I’m just going to say prospectively and with great hope that there is a large component where the guild does its job to enforce this so that it’s not simply membership on the frontlines individually on their own taking these little thousands of micro-stands, but rather that the guild lets companies know that we’re doing this and that we’re watching and we’re listening. And if they break this rule we’re coming for them because it is a pure violation of–

**John:** It is. All that stuff is sort of down the road. This first wave today is just making sure everyone understands that this is happening and that it needs to stop happening.

So let’s talk about how it happens for you and for me and sort of the natural ways it comes to be. Because I remember the very first job that I booked, it was How to Eat Fried Worms. It was a project over at Imagine. And this was literally the first screenwriting job I was going after to try to get hired for. And so I pitched my little heart out. I don’t remember whether it was in that meeting or in a phone call afterwards they asked like, oh, could you just send over what you wrote. They could see that I had a three-page document that I was pitching off of. And then over the next couple of months I went through that pitch with them several times down to the point where like I was making changes to that document and sending it back in.

That’s not good. But that’s how I started. So I certainly have done it. Craig, did you do that early on? Have you done it since then?

**Craig:** I’ve done it really once in that kind of way. I mean, every now and then, like I say, for instance if I’m going to be hired, somebody says, “Look, we want to hire you but we just need to know generally what it is that you’re thinking about doing,” I might say, look, here’s a couple of pages. But you’re only talking to me and this is just really kind of a general descriptor. But I could just as easily just come and say it to you. It’s not like you can do anything with this stuff. And then it’s fine.

And I should stop doing that, too, just because it might give them ammunition to say to other writers, “Well, you know, other people do it.” But there was one time where I was coming back from the Weinstein Wars. I had full PTSD. I was a shattered wreck. And I was just trying to find a job. And they were making a sequel to a comedy. It was a comedy that did pretty well. It didn’t do great. They never ended up making the sequel. But they were talking about making the sequel and the director is a nice guy. And they said, “Look, we want you to do it. You’re the only guy we’re talking to.” And he had a guy working for him who I still to this day loathe. And they, you know, it was mostly the other guy but they were like, “Well, yeah, you could write down what you think.” And then it just became – I was getting notes on a thing.

And then not only – do you know I lost the job to “we’re not making the movie.” That’s who I lost the job to. And I lost my ever-loving S on this dude. I have never been so loud, so incensed, and angry, and irate at someone on the phone. And lucky for him it was the phone. I apologized maybe for the tone but not for the content of what I said.

Anyway, he’s not in the business anymore. But I am.

**John:** Yeah. You’re in the business. He’s gone.

**Craig:** Gone.

**John:** You know, so what you’re describing is probably the most flagrant example where they say like, “Hey, would you write up this that you are describing?” Basically rather than coming in, why don’t you just write it up and we’ll read it. And that’s probably the most flagrant version of this.

I think what happens more often, and in talking with other screenwriters, is you have a good meeting and then afterwards they call or email and say like, “Hey, could you just send over that thing that you had with you? It would be really helpful because when I pitch it to my boss I want to keep all the details straight.” It’s that sort of hey like would you be a pal, or I’m trying to help you out here, or let’s be a team.

Very rarely anymore does somebody ask for the literal notes that I brought in with me. So like at the end of the meeting they’re like, “Hey, could you hand us that thing?” That I’m not seeing as much anymore. I’m not getting reports of that as much anymore. I will hear sometimes from writers who they did – at the end of the meeting they thought it was their job to sort of hand them this document. It tends to be the people who really write out full pitches and they’re sort of like reading off their pitch as they’re in the room. And that’s not a style of a pitch that I’m ever a fan of.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But if you’re going to do that, it’s just like the transcript of what you pitched.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, you can – it’s so technical right? I mean, you can actually – the one thing I don’t want anyone to feel like the guild is doing is suggesting to them how they ought to work, or how they ought to create their ideas or imagine or invent things. You can do pretty much anything you want. You can actually bring – if you wanted to write everything up you could. You could bring it in and have those images pasted on a board. And you can do whatever – you just can’t give it to them.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** That’s the key. You just can’t give it to them. You can do anything else. And by the way if they sit there and they take notes, all they’ve done is just record things you’ve said. They can’t copyright that. They don’t own those notes at all.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Any more than you might own if you sit and watch one of their movies and take notes and go, OK, now I’ve written a – it doesn’t work that way. That’s just notes. That doesn’t count.

**John:** Well, let’s walk through sort of why leave behinds are bad idea. Because I broke it out into several different categories of types of bad ideas it is. And really I want to start with the creative process and sort of how leave behinds hurt the creative process.

For me, what happened on this first project and it’s happened other times when people have turned in stuff is that you get trapped in revisions before you’ve even written the thing. And so suddenly you’re revising this set of notes that really aren’t the final document that you’re supposed to be basing everything around.

So you do all the what-if’ing and you kind of never get to write a first draft because you’re always just trying to perfect this document which is not a screenplay at all. It’s not really anything like the final document. You are trapped in revisions before there’s a thing to revise.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you have invited other voices in at a stage when there should be no other voices. I mean, you can have voices if you want to collaborate with somebody intentionally, that’s great. And that works all the time. I’ve done that lots of times. But the one thing I don’t want in my head when I’m coming up with – because I outline everything. I like writing these things for myself. You know, we work differently in that regard.

But what I don’t want is some studio’s voice in my head while I’m doing it. This is the only time I’ll have that’s mine. Do you know what I mean? So it can just be me. And everything can feel unified to what I want it to be. And when you let people get involved in this part by doing these sorts of things you have given away any hope that there will ever be any purity or sort of clean continuity to your story. It’s now been committee-ized from the jump. And at that point what possible good can come of that? I don’t see much.

**John:** Now, in the TV process you will turn in outlines. And so for Episode 3 you will turn in to the studio and to the network this is the outline for Episode 3 and they’ll have specific things they want to see before you go off to do script. That is part of the process of television.

Here’s the key difference. You are a paid writer on that television show. This is a thing they are paying you to do is to write this document which they will approve and note and make changes to before you write the script. But you’re not trying to get hired to do the job. You are already being paid to do the job. And that is really a crucial difference here because your motivations behind making those changes or not making those changes are different when it is your job to do this versus I hope someday to be employed doing this thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s that weird per-episode kind of way of looking at television and how you’re paid. But, yeah, you have a job. You work in a room. And you’re absolutely right.

This stuff where you don’t have any job and all of it contingent on you trusting these people, because they’ll tell you that you’re the person. They’ll tell you they’re not talking to anybody else. They’ll tell you the job is basically yours but they just have to show something to somebody. They’ll tell you that there’s no way for them to get you hired. They want to hire you but they can’t get you hired unless there’s something they can somebody. They have so many excuses. So many things. And you have to believe all of it. And I don’t believe all of anything anyone says in any business, but in this business, I mean, why even pretend that people aren’t lying at a minimum of 40% of the time.

**John:** Yeah. So when I talk to writers who have done leave-behinds, it’s often about, well, I wanted to get the job. And so I would say the second thing to remember about leave-behinds is in many cases they hurt you getting the job. And so what Craig described with the project that just went away, that happens a lot. And when they have a written document in front of them they have the opportunity to pick apart and over-interpret little things in one sentence on an outline that aren’t reflective of what the actual screenplay would be. Outlines aren’t screenplays. They don’t have dialogue. They don’t have everything else that a script has that makes it feel like a plan for a movie.

This is a plan for a plan for a movie. And so it’s necessarily going to feel underdone. It’s not going to be the same experience as reading a script. And so so often I truly believe you’re hurting your chances of landing that job if you turn in that document and are working through revisions on that document. Because if you’re doing it, probably somebody else is pitching them on that same thing and is going through that as well. You’re not getting yourself any further in the process.

**Craig:** And you are immediately subjugated. There is a very brief window where you are potentially treated as well as you ought to be all the time as a writer. And that’s in the beginning. Because people are excited about you, hopefully. They are hopeful that you are going to bring something special to this project. They’re desperate for it to get made. Every time they hire a writer they are doing it the way that a dying person is trying some new potential miracle drug. Literally. That’s how they approach things through just abject fear and worry and so there’s a moment there where you can be a hero. And you are the beneficiary of a certain amount of positivity and optimism and trust and confidence.

And those things, which we should get anyway, are very helpful I think in the beginning when you’re trying to be creative because you feel like the wind is at your back. You feel supported. You feel believed in. And so you’re not terrified. And you’re not exhausted. And you’re not emotionally all balled up in a fist.

When you do this you immediately just become the thing that they can kick around. There it is. Now you’ve handed it to them. Now they can read through it. Now they can just start hitting it, punching it, punching you, hitting you. It’s mundane. And you never get a chance to feel like you’re special. You begin the process as some sort of draft horse that they can whack at with a stick. And the emotional cost of that is very real and I think even if you are the sort of person that doesn’t care about what it’s doing to your mind and your heart, you should. At the very least I think it negatively impacts the quality of the work you do.

**John:** So often in early in my career I would go into pitch on projects that I didn’t really want. They weren’t dream projects for me. But like well that’s a job. That’s a thing I could do. I could do this thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so I’d go in and I’d pitch on them. But I can imagine if I had turned in that five-page outline for it, you know, that eight-page, ten-page outline for it, well, then there’s sort of a sunk cost fallacy. Even though I haven’t gotten paid it’s like, well, emotionally I’ve invested this much in it so I’m going to keep going. I’m going to keep trying to win this project. Even this thing that I didn’t really want so much at the start, but I’ve done this work now and I want to see this thing happen. So I think that’s the other sort of danger that comes with you getting the job is because you now have this sense of like, well, if I walk away then all that work I’ve done is for naught. And so often you probably should just feel free to walk away.

**Craig:** You should always feel free to walk away. Of course, for a lot of the writers that we’re talking about sometimes they just need work.

**John:** They need work.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s not as simple as well it’s a job and I could use a job. You know, I’ve been pretty lucky in the sense that once I started working I never drifted out of the zone of, you know, well I could use a job here as opposed to I need a job. I never got close to if I don’t get a job in blankety-blank weeks or days I’m in trouble. Right?

But there are people who end up in that and I think frankly more and more people are like that because of the way this business has evolved and the way that they make so many fewer movies. And I think just pay less to newer writers. And they need a job. They need it. And this is the part where I think it’s really important that the guild works hand in glove with the membership because somebody who needs a job is going to hear this and say, “Yeah, absolutely. I get it completely. Also, I need a job. I’ve got two kids and a husband and car payments and a mortgage and if I don’t have a job in the next four weeks then we have a huge problem.” So we’ve got to figure – we’ve got to help that person so that they’re able to take a stand without feeling like they’re going to lose that job to somebody who is willing to break the rule.

**John:** Yeah. The last part I would put under this subheading is that in terms of getting the job or sort of like the creative process of working with those people on this project is if I’m in the room pitching on something I can sort of see their reaction and I can sort of feel like, OK, this is where they’re having an issue. If they have a question they can ask that question. They can see my enthusiasm. They can see what I’m gearing up for.

If I send in a document I don’t see any of that. It’s a monologue rather than a dialogue. And so the conversation of being in the room and talking to the people who are responsible for trying to make a movie or seeing what they’re really going for is crucial. And so if I’m sitting across from a director and get a sense of what kind of movie they want to make, I can tailor my pitch and my discussion to the kind of movie they want to make and see if there’s some common ground. Versus if I send in that document I have no idea what that director is looking for. I have no idea what they’re really getting out of this document that I’ve sent. And so that’s, again, a reason why a face-to-face meeting or at least a phone conversation is better than sending through a document.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sometimes I like a little basis of conversation. You know, so I’ve done that before. It’s funny, the thing that I hate the most is that feeling that I need to sell somebody in the room about something. I find it demeaning to everybody. And I wish I could say to all of Hollywood at once, oh wait, I am. I’m doing it right now.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Pitches are stupid. Pitches are dumb. Everything that you do, and you meaning studios, everything you do to try and kick the tires and get some sort of glimpse into the future of what this script is going to be is stupid. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work. It’s not going to be that. And somebody who is really good at pitching may not be really good at writing. And somebody who is terrible at pitching may be amazing at writing. And sometimes the best writers have no idea what the script is going to be. All they know is they have some massive pounding wad of passion in their chest for it.

And that is the person that’s going to do the best job for you. And sometimes you’re getting flimflammed by some just grinder.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** And I just wish I could just say to all of them stop this stupid, pointless, ridiculous jumping through hoops nonsense. It doesn’t translate. If it did you wouldn’t be so angry and disappointed all the time.

**John:** There was a project I did for Disney where I was producing and not writing it. And it was really eye-opening to be on the other side and hearing these pitches because I got to see how different writers were pitching it. I think they were all writing teams for this one.

And I felt their frustration and I felt frustration because this was a first step and then we’d go in and pitch to the CE and then we’d go and pitch to Sean Bailey. And it was just not a well set up process. It was not going to be a good process I think for getting the best work out of people.

But what you describe in terms of like feeling that passion, feeling that excitement, that is the value of being in the room to talk with people about a project. And so while I agree that like sort of pitching through the beat-by-beat plot details of a script is not going to be – that shouldn’t be the standard by which you get hired or not get hired for a job – I do believe in that sort of face-to-face meeting where you can see like, oh, I get why you’re so excited about this project.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that we’re all on the same vibe. That we have the same vision for what the project is. That is, I think, invaluable. It’s the let me read from my outline for what this movie is going to be that I don’t think is helpful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think it is either and, yeah, I just think that they have pretty much all the information they need. They’ve read something that this writer has written.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Right. So they know. OK, you can write something. I know that. That’s why I’m talking to you. Do you want to write this? OK, great. Let me look at your face. Oh, you really want to – you love it. Talk to me about, just have a conversation. Forget the story. That’s the part – like if I were running a studio I would say don’t tell me anything about the story you’re going to do. I’ll have a chance to correct that later if I think you’ve done something wonky. Right now I just want to know why. Tell me about what it is about this story, these characters, this world that gets you going that makes you want to write. And I guarantee you if it’s a conversation like that the writer will end up saying more of value that is story oriented and that is predictive than they would if they were forced to come up with some fake sub-movie.

I mean, we’re already faking a movie on paper. Now we’ve got to fake a movie before we fake the movie? Ugh. Anyway, so yeah. This is a separate thing, but I completely agree that being in the room in that regard is really, really important and that there are huge dangers to leaving things behind beyond the legal dangers or abuses, but rather there are creative dangers. I completely agree.

**John:** Absolutely. Let’s wrap up by talking about how leaving stuff behind hurts other writers. And I think it lowers the bar. It sets the expectation that everyone else is doing it so if you don’t do it then you’re not a team player and you surely won’t be taken seriously on going in on a project. And there’s some truth to that and some fallacy to that. But it just sets this expectation that everyone is doing this so why aren’t you doing this.

And the truth is most people aren’t doing this. Two-thirds of writers are not leaving material behind. And they shouldn’t be leaving material behind. And we could get that number down to zero if everyone just would actually stop doing it and everyone would stop asking for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And here’s, I guess I could say this much. For the times that I’ve done it, like I’ve said, it’s been very de minimis. It’s just been, you know, a couple of pages and not a pitch or an outline or a story. It’s really just more about me putting into words the sort of thing that I would just say about why I would love to do something. It was an expression of enthusiasm. So if anybody ever says, “Well, you know, Craig Mazin gave me some, or John August gave me,” I think the two of us can say to everybody now, no, that’s not true. So at least we can get off the hook.

**John:** I certainly did – 20 years ago I did.

**Craig:** Yeah, sure.

**John:** And I do not do that now. So let’s talk about how you say no. And how you can say no in a way that is positive rather than just sort of being negative. And we’ll link to a video that has Billy Ray and Andrea Berloff and some other folks talking about how you say no to leave-behinds.

But for me when I’ve been asked I will usually say like, oh, these are just for me. These wouldn’t even make sense to you. And that’s actually kind of true. The type of document I bring in to a pitch tends to be not really complete sentences or like good English. It’s just like a scattering of thoughts about sort of how to get through this pitch. Because I’ve really prepared this as like this is what I’m going to say. This is how I’m going to get through talking about like why I’m excited for this project, sort of who the characters are, what the world is, you know, the bullet points.

But this thing I’m carrying into the room would not make sense to them. And I think that’s a true thing I can say and I think it’s a thing that many writers can say when asked about could you give me that thing or email me that thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve done that very same thing as well and there’s nothing they can do about it. You can say it’s literally garbage for me. It’s cue cards. It’s not real words.

**John:** Increasingly I pitch off of boards. So I go in with a bunch of black art boards that have images on them and I’m using that as sort of the framing device for the pitch and that’s how I’m really going through the story, so I’m not even looking back at a written document. A natural question will come up, well could I send through a PDF of those images or whatever. I guess. That’s not writing. That’s just collecting. So something like a look book that doesn’t have text in it, I guess that’s sort of your call. If it gives them a sense of like what your thing felt like, OK. But that’s not writing. And that’s not your writing work. And it’s about making sure that you’re being paid for your writing because that’s what being a professional screenwriter means.

**Craig:** Literary material. That’s what we’re paid to do. So if it’s not literary material you can bring it to them. If you want to bring them look books, pictures, you want to bring them a song, you want to bring them statuary, I don’t care.

**John:** Yeah, do it.

**Craig:** You just can’t give them the stuff that they’re supposed to pay us for specifically as per the WGA deal and that’s writing.

**John:** Yep. Now, there are situations that are true spec projects, so like Go was a spec script. And so the script goes out and I meet with people and I describe sort of what the movie is and here’s literally the script. That’s fine, too. I’ve also sold things off of an outline. You sold things as an outline.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** That’s valid, too, because they’re literally buying this thing. They’re not buying you writing this movie and here along the way are some free stuff you’re doing. If they’re buying the thing that’s fine. And maybe they’re buying the script and they’re buying a budget and a production plan. That’s great. That’s not what we’re talking about. It’s going in to pitch on a project and then leaving that written pitch behind.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the simple way of looking at it is this. Who initiated this? If it’s your work, that is to say it’s original to you, that means you have copyright in it. You can show it to anybody you want. You can put it online. Doesn’t matter, because it’s yours. You own it. Nobody can have it until they pay you for it. But if they initiate it then it’s partly theirs and then, well, then you can’t get into the business of writing unless they pay you.

**John:** If a studio has the Slinky movie and you’re going in to pitch on the Slinky movie, you are one of five writers, 10 writers, 15 writers going in to pitch on the Slinky movie. If you start leaving written material behind then you are basically, in addition to creating a huge copyright mess, you’re creating a free brain trust to do their development work for them. And, you know, the odds are the Slinky movie doesn’t get made and part of the reason why it doesn’t get made or doesn’t even go to script is because they see all this written material and they’re like, wow, Slinky movie is a terrible idea. And, you know, you and 15 other writers have just spent a week of your time writing up this imaginary movie that will never be.

**Craig:** You know what’s so depressing to me is that we always talk about the Slinky movie and if you gave me a million years I couldn’t write a good Slinky movie. But Lord and Miller could. They could. I just know it.

**John:** They absolutely could. Look at the Lego Movie. Fantastic.

**Craig:** They would make a Slinky movie that would literally make me sob at the end. Those guys.

**John:** They’re so good.

**Craig:** They’re really good.

**John:** Yeah. That new Spider Man movie looks amazing.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, it does look really funny.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s also leave with some ways out of this. And so let’s say you are a producer or a studio or production entity that really believes that you want to see this material along the way. Congratulations. There’s a way to do it. There’s actually minimums. You can just buy an outline. You can buy a treatment. These are all things you could be paying people money for. And that’s a way through this if you feel like you really want to be seeing that written material. Ask people to write stuff up and then pay them money for writing it up. That is a thing you can do and then you would own the copyright on the stuff that they wrote up. That would be a good choice for those people.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Makes total sense to me. Just protect yourself. I mean, at this point, hopefully people understand roughly what the rules are here. You know what would be really great? If people didn’t have to rely on you and me, but rather their agents and lawyers told them these things.

**John:** Oh my gosh. Wow. That’s great.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Even their managers could say that.

**Craig:** I mean, they’re paying them. Right. They’re paying them and they’re not paying us. We don’t take their money. So it seems like the people that take their money should give them this advice.

**John:** Can you imagine if a manager or an agent said like, “Oh hell no, you should absolutely not do that,” when in fact when we asked screenwriters they said like, “Oh yeah, my agent said it’s fine. That everyone does it.”

**Craig:** Right. What does it cost them? Nothing.

**John:** It costs them 10% of nothing.

**Craig:** It costs them 10% of nothing. Exactly. They don’t care. Basically their whole deal is get some work. Right? And I’m not going to tell you to not do it because I already told me other client and he’s going to do it, and then she said she was going to do it. So whatever. They don’t care.

**John:** Because remember their relationship is with you but their relationship is also with that person at the studio or that producer who are buyers. And so they do not want to piss off that buyer because that’s an important relationship for them. So if you play along and write up that thing for free for them, well, it helps their relationship because their client is a team player and will turn in that document for free.

**Craig:** Team player.

**John:** Team player.

**Craig:** Do you know that studios have a company that they create to be the WGA signatory, you know, to pay you. Some of them it is the company, like Universal I think it’s Universal. But sometimes they have these little sub-names. Do you know what the Weinstein Company, their pay out company was?

**John:** I’m sure it’s on my old contract but tell me.

**Craig:** Team Players.

**John:** Oh man.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know what? That tells you everything you need to know. Anytime somebody tells you you need to be a team player, run away. Because they’re not team players. If they were team players they would be playing with you on your team, too. They’re not. They’re just saying do what I want you to do. Because we’re on a team together that I own and you don’t. And I’ll decide when you get paid as being part of this team. Or not. And also I can fire you off of this team.

That’s not a team. There’s no team.

**John:** Not really a team.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** There’s no team players. You know the team that you should be on as a writer is your own team and your family’s team. That’s your team. Don’t be fooled by anybody that tells you you need to be a “team player.” And I will assure you that there are a ton of people out there doing just fine who have terrible attitudes about being a team player. Like me. The worst.

**John:** Yes. The worst. So let’s actually segue to the happier version of this which is sort of the craft version of like what stuff might you write up for your own purposes before you go in to that room? Because we’re definitely not saying that you can’t do pre-writing, you can’t do stuff for yourself, because I actually find the process of writing before you start writing to be an incredibly crucial time. It’s actually probably my favorite time–

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because anything is possible and you’re gathering. You’re figuring out like what is meaningful about this idea to me. What is it that is possible? What’s exciting? Who are the characters? What is the world like? What are the challenges? How does this fit into like a two-hour timeline, or oh, is it actually a series? This idea is appealing to me and that very early writing is really important to me. So let’s talk about that early writing from the conception up through you are into the room to pitch.

**Craig:** Well, again, I’m going to sort of cut it off from the pitch part because I don’t really do that now. If I’m going to do something I’m just sort of like, look, can I do this? Should I do this? Will I do it? Let’s have a discussion, then I’m doing it.

But the process regardless, whether it comes before or after that, it’s pretty much the same for me. I begin by just thinking about the story in a sort of vague general sense. And then I just start having conversations with myself–

**John:** Definitely.

**Craig:** About what it could be. And I begin doing note cards and sort of laying things out and Identity Thief I was hanging out with Jason Bateman the other day and he reminded me that for Identity Thief we went to a Dodger game and somewhere between the second and seventh inning I had sketched out essentially the plot on a napkin. And you can do this. It’s a very sort of skeleton-like thing. And then you begin to expand that part. And then I do – really do – enjoy writing a very long kind of expanded document that really forces me to start thinking about things before I start writing because you know psychologically the thing I fear the most is the terror of writing myself into a corner that I can’t get out of, or not knowing what’s supposed to happen and feeling overwhelmed. And this helps me not be overwhelmed because when I’m working in prose it just seems like it’s much, much lower stakes.

And so anyway that all works for me. And, yeah, I could theoretically hand all of that over in order to get a job. But no. Never.

**John:** No. Yeah, for me the early process is once you sort of have an idea in your head you put on these kind of goggles and you’re sort of looking at the world saying like is this part of my movie, is this part of my movie? Does this fit inside my universe? And you’re sort of gathering and collecting things.

And I will make a folder and I will just throw images in there. If there’s stuff that sort of makes sense. I’ll type up little notes just on my notes app on my phone. Just for what something feels like. If it’s based on an existing movie or a book I’ll watch the movie several times. I’ll go through the book and highlight stuff that’s especially meaningful to me. You’re just in the process of collection.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And before I would go in to pitch on something I used to write kind of detailed pitches, were sort of a transcript of what I anticipated saying in there. And I don’t do anything like that at all anymore. And instead what I’ll tend to do is figure out what the images are that reflect the world, reflect the characters, reflect some sort of big crucial beats. And so just a lot of Google image searching for actors who feel like the right people or just production designs or settings that feel right for this. I’ll put those on a folder. I’ll print them on the color printer. I’ll spray glue them to my art boards. And it’s really a process of going through those art boards that gives me a sense of like, oh, I’m missing something here. What am I missing? Oh, I’m kind of missing a beat. I’m missing a moment. I’m missing a character who could do this thing.

And so that process is really where I’m feeling like this is what the movie is going to look like. This is what it’s going to feel like. This is the world of the movie.

So, all I’m taking into that pitch meeting is these boards and a really one-pager basically of reminders to me of like I’m going to start the conversation by talking about why I want to do this, what the movie feels like to me. These are some crucial thematic elements. And here’s how I’m introducing the most important characters.

And then it ends up being kind of bullet-pointy as you get through it. But also allows me to have it be more of a conversation. So as I’m showing boards they can ask questions. They can sort of get involved in the process as well.

So, there’s not a thing for me to be leaving behind because it’s just sort of my set up for things rather than the whole movie on paper.

**Craig:** It’s really interesting listening to you talk about that process. Something occurred to me, and it’s why I don’t bring the boards in like you do, I think, it’s because I’m very private about that time in a young story’s life. You know? That beginning part where you’re sort of reaching and grasping and making choices and realizing you’re missing something and going back and finding those images, or those moments that mean something. I’m very private about them. I feel like no one should see them until I want them to see them. And so I think that may be why I’m so kind of weird about all that stuff because I just feel like – and it could be just emotional. It could be superstitious. But I just feel like in a weird way if I show it too soon it will be wrong.

Do you know what I mean? Like it’s not meant to be in the air yet. It’s supposed to still be in a womb. So, yes, it’s an interesting thing.

**John:** Yeah. And that’s why there’s not, again, what we said earlier on, this is not prescribing one way to pitch or like one way for a writer to work. I really like having these boards so I can point to a thing, and therefore at the end of the pitch if they want to refer back to a moment they can find that board and point to this board, ask a question about that thing. It makes things a little bit more concrete. But that’s not the only way it can work.

And likewise after I’ve gotten a job I don’t write that long outline that you do. I am happy to sort of write myself into a corner and then write my way out of the corner because I want to be surprised. I want to be surprised at the end of a scene. Like, oh, I kind of thought the scene was going to go into this next scene, but actually I don’t need that next scene now because this actually did the job of that. And so as a viewer I really want to see what’s happening with these people.

And so I don’t tend to write those outlines anymore for myself or for anybody.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re unique snowflakes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Just like the Alt-Right accuses us of being. [laughs]

**John:** All right, let’s answer a listener question. Heston writes, “John, in 2008 you wrote an article about why character’s wants versus needs is a load of BS. Wants versus needs has become an even bigger must have when planning characters as more gurus have popped up in books, videos, and podcasts on the craft. So, when throwing protagonist ideas about in your head what method do both of you use when constructing character metamorphoses. I’m talking about the character has a goal and a mindset attached to why they want that external goal, but something else happens and they realize a better path and by the end they’ve changed regardless of the external goal’s accomplishments.”

So, Craig, I suspect you don’t say want versus need, but do you think you still have a want versus need built into your storytelling?

**Craig:** That’s not an axis that I consider. I generally think a character wants something. Need is a really dumb word I think for story.

**John:** I think it’s a dumb word.

**Craig:** It’s dumb. It’s like what do you need? You need to breathe and you need food. I mean, you can live alone and miserable for the rest of your life, but like the needs are – it’s wants. I like to boil it down to wants. And the way I consider the axis of character change is that the character at the beginning of a story wants to keep things the way they are out of fear of something going wrong, or out of fear of the world around them. Anyway, just some general fear. They want what they have now not to change. And it changes. Or they want something to change and it’s not changing. Doesn’t matter. They want something. And by the end they will realize, and sort of in the middle towards the end the realize what they were wanting they don’t want anymore. They want something else that’s much, much harder to get and will require much, much more fortitude.

So it’s about the fact that your wants change, which is essentially what we go through in life as humans. I mean, all these books, they’re trying to remove you from why these things came around in the first place which was they’re reflective of your life now. You don’t need a book to tell you that you want – OK, Heston, maybe you met a girl and you wanted – you wanted so much to be in a relationship with her. And lo and behold she wanted to be in a relationship with you. And it happened. And then somewhere along the line you did not want to be in a relationship with her. That’s the way life works. And now what happens? Right?

And then you say I don’t want to be in a relationship with you, and then the minute that happens you realize, oh no, I’ve made a terrible mistake and you regret it. And now you do want to be – because you’ve changed. This is how we tell stories. We’re just reflecting the way life works. So forget all this junk and stop reading books.

**John:** I agree. I gave a presentation at Austin last year about want and one of the points I tried to make is that want versus need is a trap. You can think that you’re actually building great character development and arcs by like, oh, they realized what they really need is this thing. And I think it’s a dumb thing that somebody came up with at some point and people have been trying to enact.

A thing I will point out about needs is they feel like taking your medicine. It feels like one of those things where the character doesn’t choose to do a thing. They are forced to do a thing.

So what’s useful is to think about anytime you say the character needs to do something, try replacing needs with wants. And ask what would it be like if the character wanted to do this thing. So rather than I need to call my mom, it’s like I want to call my mom. Well, that implies there’s something about your relationship with your mom that is actually interesting and it’s not sort of every other relationship with somebody’s mom.

So, replacing needs with wants is a way to think about it. But this general dogma of want versus need is a dumb way to go through it.

**Craig:** So dumb. It’s like somebody needed to fill in a chart in their stupid book.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** And I would also say that it probably reflects how English does some things. If you study other languages the breakdown of want versus need, should, have to, it’s a spectrum. It’s a big rainbow. And the equivalent words end up in different places on that spectrum. And so it’s just a very English way of thinking about this stuff because we have a differentiation between those words that are specific that doesn’t exist in other languages, too. Because it doesn’t really exist in people. The things we want and the things we need, it’s all blurry.

**Craig:** I wish I could Thanos snap and make all of that crap go away. All of it.

**John:** All of it.

**Craig:** Although I will tell you that every now and then I do have to recommend a book to someone. I was at a charity event and I ran into a guy that I know. He’s in the banking industry. And he said to me, you know, by the way I’m writing a script. And I went, oh, I’m opening a bank. He didn’t get the joke.

Anyway, but he asked me a question about – he said is it OK if I’m writing in Microsoft Word. I said, yeah, if you follow the general format you can write in anything you want. He said, so, when I’m doing like the character and then colon, and I went, wait–

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** Stop. What colon? There’s no colons. And he goes there’s no colons? And I’m like, nah, there’s no colons. You know what? Pick up Syd Field. So that one I was like, OK, you know–

**John:** Or how about download any script off the Internet and sort of see what the general formatting is.

**Craig:** At that point I wasn’t sure why that hadn’t already happened. So I kind of skipped more specific advice. [laughs]

**John:** Craig, let’s be realistic. You sent him to Syd Field because you knew it would frustrate him and he would stop writing his script. Because he should stay a banker.

**Craig:** No, no. Everybody should write one. Just like everybody should own a bank. But it’s so much harder to own a bank.

**John:** Don’t we all own our own banks in a way? Aren’t we always like loaning ourselves or giving ourselves credit?

**Craig:** No. [laughs]

**John:** I am my own bank.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. You might actually be. I could see that. But for the rest of us, no.

**John:** No. All right, let’s get to our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is an article from The New York Times called The Confidence Gap. It’s by Claire Shipman, Katty Kay, and JillEllyn Riley. It was recommended by friend Dara Resnick. It is a really good little look at sort of how young women, sort of tweens and teens, go through struggles of confidence and sort of like ways to talk to them about the struggles that they face. It’s geared towards tweens and teens and yet most of the recommendations in there I could use on a daily basis.

So, the way we can ruminate about our failures and set ourselves up for future failures is worth looking at kind for everybody. So, a good article about thinking through the psychology of stuff goes wrong and how you learn from it and move on to the next thing. And how you keep from escalating when stuff goes bad.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well, I mean, I don’t know if this really counts as a One Cool Thing, but I think it’s freaking cool. So, John, do you use DirecTV or cable television?

**John:** I use DirecTV.

**Craig:** I was also a DirecTV customer. And I just dumped them. I got rid of them. So, my daughter said why do we even have DirecTV? Why don’t we have YouTube TV? And I was like, what? What teenage nonsense is this? And then I looked into it and I was like, oh yeah, this is probably better. So it’s way cheaper and so YouTube TV they actually do have broadcast channels. They have all the basic channels you would want live and they also – I think I pay $5 extra to get AMC. And then of course if you want HBO you just buy the HBO service. And when all was said and done it was still like one-third of my DirecTV bill.

And I think DirecTV has some sort of app that does this as well, but the YouTube TV thing works really well on my phone and my tablet and now in my office I have television. Anyway, it’s really easy to do. It’s seamless and it works brilliantly. I hate giving credit to massive, you know, Google Company, right, with all their crap that’s on regular YouTube. But YouTube TV actually as a service makes a ton of sense. And so we have eliminated the DirecTV. And we also don’t need those stupid boxes anymore. They’re all gone.

**John:** So, is there any equivalent of a DVR with this?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** There’s a digital–?

**Craig:** It’s actually better than the DVR because DVR you would have to go into that box thing which is actually very poorly – when it was TiVo it was awesome, but DirecTV’s OS or whatever they call it, their GUI, it sucks.

But on YouTube you’re just like, oh yeah, I like this show. And you just tap on it, and put it in my library. And it just knows. It’s quite – it’s really good.

**John:** All right. We’ll check that out. Also, while you’re mentioning TV stuff, I want to thank everybody on Twitter. I had asked a question about I really want my mom who is 82 to be able to watch Netflix, basically The Crown and The Great British Baking Show, and other things that I think she would really enjoy. But adding one more box to her setup is just not going to work. She would rebel against it.

And so people had really good suggestions for ways to get around it. I think we’re going to end up with it turns out her cable is Xfinity and I can actually just add it through her cable system. So, I’ll do that. But I want to thank everybody who – like 70 people reached out with good suggestions.

**Craig:** Good lord. My god.

**John:** Twitter doing something good.

**Craig:** That’s weird. That’s not the normal thing.

**John:** Not the normal what Twitter does.

**Craig:** That’s not the Twitter I know.

**John:** To bring everything back around, No Writing Left Behind, don’t leave writing behind is the message we’re trying to get to people. So, don’t do it. Craig will come and beat you up if you do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll at least yell at you sternly.

**John:** Yeah. No physical violence. Just–

**Craig:** I’m not particularly good at that I must admit. But I can be intimidating just volume wise.

**John:** Yeah. I can be shouty, too. Rarely happens, but.

**Craig:** I know. But every now and then daddy’s got a bark.

**John:** Daddy does bark, yeah.

**Craig:** Yep. I’ve done it.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Brown. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. We’re kind of low on the outros. They’ve trickled down, so we need some new outros. So people, fire it up. Rajesh Naroth, if you’re listening we need some new outros.

That same address, ask@johnaugust.com, is where you can send questions like the one we answered today. You can find us on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review. That helps people find the show.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts. We get them up about four to five days after the episode airs.

You can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. If you sign up for the premium service, which is $2 a month, you get all of those back episodes.

**Craig:** All of them.

**John:** Plus bonus episodes like the random advice episode we’re recording. So actually it should be up there by the time you hear this. So you should subscribe for $2 a month and get all of those back episodes.

**Craig:** That alone is worth $2.

**John:** It’s worth $2. Craig, thank you for another fun show.

**Craig:** Thanks John. See you next time.

**John:** See ya. Bye.

Links:

* Hope to see you this weekend at the [Austin Film Festival](https://www.austinfilmfestival.com/aff/live/)! You can also catch John at the [Texas Book Festival](https://www.texasbookfestival.org/) and the [Boulder Book Store Event](https://www.boulderbookstore.net/event/john-august-arlo-finch-valley-fire)
* [No Writing Left Behind](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GhZMFTtags)
* [The Confidence Gap](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/01/well/family/confidence-gap-teen-girls-tips-parents.html) by Claire Shipman, Katty Kay and JillEllyn Riley for The New York Times
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Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_372.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/writing-memorable-dialogue).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 371 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we’ll be looking at writing and remembering dialogue, plus how to deal with a very large number of characters in a scene. Then we’ll be answering questions we’ve gotten from listeners just like you.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** Mm. Craig had the dialogue topic, I had the topic about a bunch of people in a scene because that’s what we’re writing this week. It’s always nice when like the stuff that we’re working on is actually useful for people to listen to.

**Craig:** I mean, mostly any idea I ever do have is because I literally think, oh, here’s something that cropped up today. You know, I guess that’s sort of why we’re a vaguely useful podcast because we don’t actually invent baloney topics. We come up with the things that we’re actually dealing with all the time as screenwriters.

**John:** A vaguely useful podcast about screenwriting and things that are vaguely useful to screenwriters.

Before we get to those topics though we have some news and some updates. News on my side, I put out a trailer this past week for Arlo Finch, so Arlo Finch being the books that I write. The folks at MacMillan said like hey would you want to make a book trailer. I’m like, yeah, that sounds like a way I can spend a lot of time just like not writing the books and it would be a lot of fun. So, I made a book trailer so you can see a link to that.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** Our own Matthew Chilelli did the music for it and did a fantastic job.

**Craig:** Great. Yes, I liked it a lot myself.

**John:** And a friend of ours, his son Cormac Gavari did the narration, so I want to thank him. I think Mr. Gavari listens to the podcast as well, so thank him for lending his son’s voice to the trailer.

**Craig:** I happen to know for a fact that Michael’s son is a big fan. So that must be a thrill for him. And you can’t fake sense of wonder. Well, no, I take it back. I suppose you can. That’s how movies are made all the time. But still, it’s hard to fake a sense of wonder. And children in particular when they try and fake a sense of wonder sometimes it just comes off as this incredibly insincere puppet act and you know how I feel about puppets. But this was sincere because Cormac is in fact a fan of the books.

**John:** Yeah. So, I was looking for – usually when I had to do voiceover stuff and I’m reaching out to somebody there’s these services you can go to and you can find the voices of stuff. And those people are really good and we’ve used those for like our announcers for Scriptnotes live shows and other times where we needed professional voices. And if you go on those sites looking for child actors and child voices you either find adults pretending to be children in a really uncomfortable way, or these actual kids and I worry that they’re being stage-mom’ed to death.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, it was much better to go to a real life kid I knew who is actually genuinely a fan of the books.

**Craig:** Of course. And if you become abusive in your recording session and hit him or something you can always just make it go away with a small payment.

**John:** That did not happen.

**Craig:** Oh. OK. Well, I’m just saying.

**John:** Several episodes ago we talked about the credits revision that is coming through from the WGA and the WGA East that Craig actually worked on, so this is the Screen Credits Revision. It is a whole cleanup of the manual for screen credits. But there’s been a change since the last time we spoke. Craig, do you want to speak to the change?

**Craig:** Yeah. So I’ve already gone on my rant, if you listen to the WGA episode where I went on my bananas rant. And so you know basically we’ve been dealing with a misinformation campaign. And you could even call it a disinformation campaign. And the last thing that any of us wanted was for the, I don’t know, 100 small but essential changes we were making to get undone simply because of this one thing. So we’ve altered the language to in fact reflect what I think was always going to be the reality anyway. And so what we’re saying now is reasonable requests for extensions will be granted but will not preclude the guild from proceeding with an arbitration with the statements then available to the guild. Essentially what has always been the case is that any participating writer can submit a statement up to the point where the arbiters render their decision. You don’t have to get it in right when they start. You may want to. You may think that that might help your case. But it’s not essential.

You are allowed to get it in when you can get it in. And the moment the guild receives it they forward it to the arbiters so that they can have it. And we’re just sort of making that quite a bit clearer and, yes, we’re saying reasonable requests for extensions will be granted. I mean, I had a conversation with a – I won’t say who it is – but a very high profile screenwriter who called me. He’s based in New York. And I don’t know him but he had heard about this and had some concerns. And I walked him through it and essentially he was saying, “Look, if I’m on location and something falls on my foot, or I have a heart attack and I’m laid up in the hospital and I miss the deadline by three hours…” And I’m like, no, you know, we’re not – the guild – we’re not a bunch of total jerks. I mean, we meaning all of us, we’re part of it, but also the staff. That’s not the business they’re in.

What we’re just trying to do is just get rid of the, you know, the endless pattern of obvious abuse of the system where I just said, listen, we have people who literally the writers will say, yeah, I’m happy with that timeframe to write my statement and then two hours later their lawyer calls the guild and says absolutely not, we need a week.

Well, no, you know, in that case that’s not reasonable. That’s just lawyers doing what lawyers do. So, in any case, this is a good clarification. I think it should clear up everyone’s serious concerns. And when we do submit this to the membership and go for a vote I will be urging all the members of the guild to vote yes on this. It’s a nice step forward and I think it’s going to make arbitrations go a bit more smoothly and hopefully with some of the extra explanation we’ve added a bit, well, just a bit more fairly.

**John:** Yeah. And also a bit more calmly I think. I think some of the good changes in this manual make the process clearer for both people going through arbitration and for arbiters and take a little of the panic out of it. And so anything that can sort of turn down the temperature a bit on arbitrations is a good thing.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Our future episode on random advice, well, we’ve been asking people to send in their questions, our premium subscribers to send in their questions for us to answer on a future episode called Random Advice. I thought we’d do a little sampler platter of some of the questions we got asked. We won’t actually give you our answers right now, but these are some questions that people are asking. We’ve gotten 53 questions so far. So, do you want to take one of these?

**Craig:** What is your opinion on polyamory?

**John:** Yeah. I’ve got an opinion. I’m happy to share it.

**Craig:** Me too. Me too.

**John:** Do either of you have a favorite sport?

**Craig:** Oh, I certainly do.

**John:** I do, too. What is the best thing you’ve ever cooked?

**Craig:** Ooh, best, I hate the whole best/worst.

**John:** Yeah, best and worst is tough. I can probably get down to some favorites.

**Craig:** Yeah, favorites.

**John:** Or things that I’m proudest to make, especially like family recipes. And those are just opinion questions. Here’s a real advice question. A listener writes, “I own a laser tattoo removal clinic. Occasionally angry or panicky parents drag in their underage kid with a contraband tattoo and pay me to remove it. The kid, while technically a dependent, is never on board with this, but he or she is my patient, not the parents. Am I violating my patient’s autonomy by following through with the removal as dictated by the parents?

**Craig:** That seems like a pretty easy one for me, but I’m excited to answer it.

**John:** I’m excited to answer it, too. I definitely have my opinion and at the same time there’s some shading on it. So, yeah, it’s going to be a good question. I’m excited to answer it.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is going to be a fun episode. And that’s only if people pay the exorbitant fee of $1.99 a month.

**John:** That’s what we’re charging for.

**Craig:** I mean, come on, $1.99? And we don’t do the stupid ads. We don’t even do telethons. We don’t even interrupt your, I don’t know, watching Upstairs, Downstairs to demand that you give us money and we’ll give you a tote bag. We don’t do any of that. $1.99.

**John:** All we do is talk about things that are interesting to screenwriters and topics like Craig’s that he proposed.

**Craig:** Hmm, Segue Man.

**John:** Craig, start us off.

**Craig:** Sure. So, a couple of weeks ago I had an opportunity to participate in something. It doesn’t really matter what the circumstances are. But it was the first time that I had to memorize dialogue in forever. And it was a particular kind of dialogue memorization. Most people at some point in school will have to memorize something like a passage from Shakespeare or if they’re in a school play or a musical there’s a script. And then there’s a lot of time given to memorize it. In the case of a musical, you rehearse over the course of a couple of months or so.

But traditionally the way we shoot movies and television an actor comes in and learns their lines for that day. Every day new lines. Maybe you’re doing one scene that day. Maybe you’re doing two. So, the object is to learn, well, somewhere around three, four, five pages of dialogue. You rarely individually have three, four, five pages of dialogue, but it’s part of a conversation that goes on and that’s roughly a day’s work. So actors learn their lines for the day.

And I had an opportunity to do that and so I had the scene and I just read it and I had to memorize it somewhat, you know, relatively quickly. But, you know, 30, 40 minutes or something like that. I mean, I was familiar with it prior, but about that much time to memorize it. And then I had to do it. And it was very instructive. And I hadn’t written this dialogue. So it was a way of interacting with dialogue that I don’t normally do at all.

And in the doing of it I kind of learned some interesting lessons that I had never considered that I think might be applicable to the writing of dialogue, because in the end someone is going to have to memorize it and someone is going to have to say it. So, there were certain challenges that come across right away. I mean, the really easy ones. You have to remember what you’re saying. You have to obviously think about how you’re going to say it. That’s the performance part. And then there’s this third one that I think people underestimate which is when do you say it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s easy enough to know when your dialogue ends because it ends. And then someone else starts talking. But when do you come back in? So that’s the listening part. But in that part you begin to see how memorization relies a lot on two things. The relationships between different words and what I call – what I don’t call, what neurologists call chunks. Have you ever encountered the chunking theory of memory?

**John:** I think I know what you’re talking about. Essentially we don’t hold little atoms of information. Instead we group things together in bigger packages and it’s those larger puzzle pieces that we’re putting together to form actual memories and to form a string that becomes a sentence.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. I mean, the brain is pretty good at taking certain bits of information like a number and then chunking them together in a group that is memorable. And so what they find for instance is that roughly seven digits is about the largest chunk of information you can make for people where they reliably remember it. Meaning to say if I come up to you and I say I’m going to read, I don’t know, seven random digits and I just ask you – single digits – and I say you’ve got to remember that, I’m coming back five minutes from now and you didn’t write it down, you can’t write it down. You’ll be able to. More than that becomes really, really hard.

**John:** Yeah. And the same thing would be true with words. If I gave you seven random words that had no contextual meaning together it would be very hard to get those seven words, or more than seven words, together. But if they had semantic meaning that would be very simple.

**Craig:** Correct. There’s a certain ability to chunk them together. They find that people that are really good at things or have a lot of experience, the amount of information they can put in an individual chunk expands. So for instance chess players they found, whereas I might look at a chess board, I’m a terrible chess player. So if I look at a chess board that’s sort of set up to be mid-game, and I’m told you have to memorize this, and then walk away from it, come back one minute later and reconstruct it on the board, the amount of pieces that I will be able to keep in my mind and where their positions are is very small.

Whereas people that are very good at chess, it’s a breeze for them because they’re essentially creating relationships between things. They understand these four pieces and relationship is sort of a thing. It’s a chunk.

**John:** It’s a pattern.

**Craig:** It’s a pattern. And so I realized that’s kind of how you memorize dialogue when you’re reading it. There are certain things that kind of indicate this is the beginning and this is the end of a chunk. And the chunks of words are anchored essentially. So, there’s always a word or maybe a couple of words that are stuck together that is the emphasis, the point, the reveal or maybe a strange word. In this little chunk, and the chunk could be five words long, those are the words that are kind of the glue that’s holding all the other stuff together. Little bits and bobs of words that maybe in and of themselves like The, And, But, Before, and OK, and Whenever, and Ever, and so on and so forth, all those are kind of connected to this anchor word.

So one thing to consider as you’re writing your dialogue is what is the anchor of this thought or piece of dialogue?

**John:** Yeah. So if it’s not hanging on anything it’s just going to sort of fall away. And probably was not a meaningful line anyway.

**Craig:** Is not a meaningful line anyway. And so what you end up with is, well, it could be a meaningful line but you heard it by creating a kind of hypnotic rhythm or pattern to it. So, for instance, here’s something that – the sort of thing that we might say in this sort of rhythm. “After we go but before we’re let in, if we can take a look at how we arrive at the” – every single one of those words was one syllable or maybe two. They were all roughly the same length. There were certain repetitions of words. A lot of minuscule words with hundreds of meanings, like look and act and can and in, you know, like there’s just a lot of – you’re asking the brain to do a lot of work to remember the stuff and there’s nothing anchoring it together.

The other thing that can sometimes anchor a chunk is not a word per se, but your reaction to something that you’re looking at or you’re smelling or you’re hearing so that the words are chunked around a reaction to the world around you.

**John:** Yeah. So classically dialogue, you’re going to be reacting to the thing the person just said beforehand, but there may also be something in the environment that’s actually causing the line to happen or causing you pick those specific words. And so you can think about what that thing is that’ll help you remember that chunk, or it will help unify that thought.

**Craig:** Yeah. If someone says I want you to take a look at this document and review it, and that’s their line of dialogue, and my line of dialogue is to pick it up and say, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s, OK, those are sort of bland words. There’s not much of an anchor to that. But if someone says take a look at this and they whip a window open, “I’m not even sure what I’m looking at here,” that’s a reaction. It’s already so much easier to remember because it’s not just words. It’s words in relation to something.

And similarly I think the – as I was doing it I noticed that the way you realize that one chunk is over and another one is beginning is that inside of well-written dialogue there are all these little mini/micro reversals, reconsiderations. There’s little built in pauses or moments for emotion. And all those little things help you divide it up into chunks so that you’re not memorizing a list of words but rather you’re memorizing movements of thought. I don’t know how else to put it.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s like musical phrases but they are little sections of thought. And a lot of times they will follow English grammar. So, I suspect oftentimes you find the chunks do fit in where commas are or where connector words like “and” are. Or they end at periods. But they don’t always. And so it’s always worth looking at would it make more sense to continue this thought sort of beyond the period into its next line. You can also be thinking about sort of where is the natural place to breathe, and that may also give you a sense of where that thought really wants to break.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re right. Sometimes your desire actually is to blow through the stop sign because you realize that everything is chunked together around one emotion of rising frustration. So you blow through that stop sign and you chunk a larger bit together. And I also noticed how little bits of odd word order could trip me up. It’s interesting – odd words are great to help you remember things and they’re great to sort of signify what’s happening in a kind of attractive way when you’re performing dialogue, but here is the sentence I just – this is my example sentence. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s just odd in a mundane way.”

OK. Now here’s that sentence again. I’m going to make one change. “Odd helps if it’s notably odd, but it hurts if it’s odd in just a mundane way.” All I did in that second one was move the word just to a slightly different spot. I moved it down two words. It’s not wrong, but it’s a much harder sentence to memorize at that point because just is kind of the anchoring word. Because it’s a change. It’s sort of signifying a new chunk. And so I just made the first chunk way longer. And but if it hurts it’s odd in – all single syllable.

It seems like it’s not a big deal, but in a way it is. I’ve spent a lot of time on sets watching actors sometimes trip over these seemingly minor things and you wonder why. And I’m starting to think it’s because of things like this. Or for instance this is the third time. This is the third time you’ve done this. OK, perfectly reasonable bit of dialogue except this is the third time is kind of – your brain starts to–

**John:** It’s annoying. It’s not that hard, it’s just a little bit annoying. It’s because they’re different THs also. So the this and third are not the same TH.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that also messes you up.

I want to get back to your moving the just. I think part of the reason why it’s tougher that way is you’ve created a parallel structure where you’re saying odd twice, but the repetition isn’t meaningful in the second way without the just there. And so that hurts you. But you’ve also broken the rhythm of the sentence. And it’s like there’s a bump in the carpet and you’re trying to walk naturally across it and you just can’t because that just is in the wrong place.

And it’s a thing you don’t notice unless you read your dialogue aloud that it’s happening.

**Craig:** Ah, unless you read your dialogue aloud which therein is the ultimate lesson of this little mini discussion on craft. We advocate all the time that you read your dialogue out loud. Mostly because I think you start to hear maybe that some of the choices are wrong or perhaps you’re going on a bit too long. But also I think these little things start to emerge. These are the things that will subconsciously begin to undermine the performers.

They’re really good at what they do. They can memorize anything. And they will. But the stuff that’s easier to memorize I suspect is therefore easier to perform and therefore I suspect is easier to hear. And when I say easier I don’t mean less challenging intellectually. I mean just – it’s just more mellifluous. And so when you and I fuss over where the word just should be placed in that sentence it’s not merely writerly fussiness. It’s kind of the point. These things really, really matter.

So, the little lessons that I learned from my little bit of memorization and perhaps they might help people as they go about creating things for other people to memorize.

**John:** So a few techniques which I want to suggest to anybody who has to memorize dialogue they did not write is obviously the cliché of this, just sort of how the writer cliché is sort of like typing on the typewriter, oh it’s terrible, you rip the paper off and crumble it up. The actor cliché is I’m auditioning for something and I’m just running lines with a friend. Like that running lines, it really does happen, but the way we usually see it in movies weirdly just feels very false and fake. But literally just the practice of going through the lines and having somebody else work through the lines with you will help.

When I’ve had to do it for songs, I don’t know if you ever encountered this, is to memorize lyrics. Other singers have told me that you just write the lyrics out by hand. And the process of actually having to write it out sort of helps cement it in the brain a little bit more. Makes you think about what those words actually are and helps you chunk them down.

Make sure the words mean something to you. That you’re not just saying the words, but you actually understand the intention behind them. My daughter had to do Shakespeare, she had to do a scene from Midsummer Night’s Dream, and you can just spout the words out but if you don’t actually understand what they mean the scene is not going to really work and you’re going to have a harder time really holding onto those words because they’re just syllables. They’re not words that actually mean anything to you.

And the last thing I think really goes back to your idea of chunking, it’s really connecting the thoughts. And so obviously you’re going to be responding to the person who just spoke, but you also have to connect back to the scene as a whole. You have to understand, remember, what was your intention two lines ago, three lines ago? What’s actually happening in the scene and what is the environment in which I’m saying this line because the environment is constantly changing based on this conversation.

So it’s not just a ping pong match where the ball in on one side of the net or the other side of the net. It really is a bigger environment in which this is happening and make sure that you’re learning the line in that environment and not just in a little vacuum by itself.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in the end when you learn your part of a conversation you have to learn their part, too. You have to. It’s essential. You need to kind of know at least – I mean, part of acting is being surprised by something you know is coming, including what you’re supposed to say. But you do need to know their side, or else you’ll get lost real fast.

**John:** Yeah. Being surprised by what you said is – that can be really useful. It can make a scene feel really alive. But do remember that in real conversations, it can be useful to sort of turn on that little recording light when you’re having a real conversation. You generally do have a sense of what you’re going to be saying kind of 15 seconds from now. Even while you’re listening to the other person, you do have a next line sort of queuing up. So, would your characters in the scene and so will you as an actor. So, it’s OK to let the mental wheels spin a little bit to get that stuff started even as you’re actively listening in a scene.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, neither one of us are accomplished thespians by any stretch of the imagination, but considering that we work with them these things are always useful – I think they’re very helpful to consider. And I handed poor Jared Harris massive reams of dialogue that he handled brilliantly, but it was a challenge. His character in Chernobyl is a – he’s wordy. He’s a scientist and he’s a talker. And he’s an explainer. But he’s also very emotional. So when he gets going it all has to come tumbling out in this incredibly natural way. And he’s a master at that, but it’s a lot. It’s hard.

**John:** My prediction is the things that were mostly challenging for him, and this has just been my observation on many, many sets, is when actors have lines that are similar that are in different parts of the scene that messes them up. If they were completely different lines it would be great. But if they have things that are kind of the same idea and they’re repeating themselves but they’re not repeating themselves in the same way, that’s where things get tripped up. It’s like, wait, did I already say this? Where am I at in this scene? And that’s probably a sign that something isn’t working quite right in the writing or at least in the execution because each of those lines should only kind of be possible in that one moment.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, if you have any sense that thoughts or lines are vaguely repeating, that’s a writing problem for sure. And you have to eliminate those. And you can hear them sometimes, too. Again, when you read things out loud or you listen and you go, OK, that seems like we’re kind of rolling over the same ground there. And, yeah, you’ve got to get rid of that.

**John:** Yep. The writing challenge I faced this week was I’m doing a scene that is at the end of the second act, and so all the characters are well established. I didn’t need to introduce any new characters in the scene, sort of scene/sequence. It’s a pretty big number. It’s about five pages in all. But almost all of the characters in the story are in this sequence.

Now, the scene is clearly driven by one person. One person has almost all the dialogue in the sequence, and yet there’s a lot of other characters to service. And the challenge in these kind of scenes, and these kind of scenes happen in almost every script I guess, is how do you keep everybody else alive and active and engaged in that scene and sort of make them count in that scene when they don’t have a lot to actually do.

And so it’s a frequent challenge. So, I wanted to sort of go through why this happens and some strategies for dealing with it when it happens. Because Craig I’m sure you face this on a weekly basis.

**Craig:** It’s inevitable. I mean, there are scenes where people need to listen. It’s really important that they’re there because they have to listen to something happen and they’re going to have one or two important moments within that, but mostly they have to listen and yeah you need to really think carefully about how you’re portraying. You first need to ask do they really need to be there. And once you decide they do, well, then you’ve got to handle them. You have to service your characters.

**John:** And so one of the big complications in this sequence, but it’s also true I think for a lot of other movies, is the biggest name actors in the movie are going to be in the scene, but they’re not going to have the most to do. And that’s kind of inevitable based on the story. And that, again, does happen a lot. So, I want to make sure that as I’m writing this that these characters and these actors who don’t have a ton to do still feel very, very important in this scene because you and I both know that otherwise they might show up on set and be sort of frustrated that they don’t have anything to do.

So, I’m trying to be mindful from the start of giving them interesting business and making them feel important in the scene even though they don’t have a lot to do. And so that was one of the other things I was working through with this sequence.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, I don’t get too concerned with the egos of actors because I’ve given up trying to predict what will or will not spin an insecure person off their axis. But what I do know is if they’re the most important characters in the movie, and it sounds like they have to be because they’re the big stars, that means that the scene is about them. The bottom line is it’s about them. They may not be talking in it. They may be listening. They may be experiencing something. But it is about what they’re feeling. It’s about what they’re thinking. It’s about who they’re looking at and why they’re looking at them.

So, that’s kind of the thing. Like it may be when you look at A Few Good Men, it may be that we’re concentrating on Tom Cruise and Jack Nicolson. They’re going back and forth. But when you go over to Demi Moore or to Kevin Pollack, their looks mean something. There’s something happening there that’s valuable.

**John:** I think it’s good you brought up A Few Good Men because I was trying to list the types of movies where you see this challenging sequence happen. Courtroom dramas are one of the main places. But sporting championships are another important place for this where the action is taking place on the field but, you know, we need to also track the coach and the people in the stands and all of the other characters are there for that final sports championship.

**Craig:** I can’t get over sporting championships.

**John:** Sporting championships.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Well, because I’m saying, I don’t want to be just football, or just soccer, or just basketball.

**Craig:** I know. But it’s literally like you landed here yesterday from Planet Questrom.

**John:** I like sporting games. I like to watch the sporting games.

**Craig:** When writing sporting championships. [laughs] Oh, you’re the best, man. I love you.

**John:** But even like major battle sequences, so when you see Star Wars, when you see big fights like that, you have a ton of things happening in the sequence and to be able to track all those people. And every time you cut away to show somebody else, their reaction, you risk breaking the flow of the main action. So it’s finding that natural way to do it is tough. Some movies with big musical numbers, you’ll just have everybody in there. And so how do you service everybody in that big musical number? And then speeches and rallies where you have one character, this is sort of like a speech or rally kind of moment in the movie I’m doing right now, you have one character making a big speech, so therefore will have almost all of the dialogue, so making sure you find interesting things for the other important characters to be doing in that, even though they’re not naturally going to have lines because they’re not going to be talking at the same time as the other person talking.

So, those are circumstances where you find yourself in this writing challenge.

So, for me what I did is I went back to sort of real basics. Making sure to do an audit of all the characters there and really look at what they want in that moment. Like what are they trying to do right then at that moment? What are the micro interactions between characters? And so it’s a way of acknowledging multiple characters there. If two characters can look at each other, exchange a meaningful look, that takes care of those two characters and keeps them alive in the scene rather than having them do individual things.

I looked for like what physical actions could they do, so to give them something concrete, something we could see. And I really looked at sort of how can this scene geography suggest where people can be so that in cutting to them around the space we’re actually exploring more of the environment, exploring more of what’s really going on there. How can things change within that scene geography?

Those are just some of the techniques I sort of found for this sequence, but in doing it I found that’s probably true for most of the sequences I’ve had to write that had five or more characters in them.

**Craig:** Yeah. I try and think of these things in terms of sort of multi-track narratives, because you have your main narrative which is the narrative of the big scene. You know, we are watching the Super Bowl and the big narrative is what is happening with the football, where is it going, who is running where, and how far are they getting. And in trials it is between whoever the fireworks is coming from in any particular moment. Same with battles. And same with musical numbers. And same with speeches.

But, that’s one track of the narrative. Then the question is, OK, for the people that are watching, what is their narrative? Because if it’s I’m watching, then they don’t need to be there. And it can’t just be I’m watching, because at that point they become boring. They have to be actively watching. Actively listening.

**John:** Yeah. What I needed to make sure is that the characters who were there who had to watch or witness part of it still had important choices to make, and that the choices they’re going to be making are directly impacted by their reaction to what they just saw. And so that gives them a reason for why they needed to be there and why they’re making this interesting choice at the end of the sequence.

**Craig:** Right. So to go back to A Few Good Men and the trial scene there, there is a moment where Cruise’s character is considering basically putting his entire career, even his freedom, on the line to pursue a line of inquiry with Jack Nicholson’s character. And he looks over and Kevin Pollack simply gives him the slightest don’t do it head shake. That’s it. And these moments are crucial because it means he’s a participant. He is impacting and affecting what is going on around him as an observer. So when I write those scenes I really try and give every character a narrative and also a moment where they can make a choice to stand up and say something or to not. They can stand up and go I have to stop this, or they just let it go, but I understand that they are participating. And even if their choice is to not do a thing, they have changed the path of the scene.

This is frankly – no offense to our director brothers and sisters – but this is so important for us to do as writers because if we don’t do it and we don’t do it clearly on the page, they don’t do it. They don’t do it. They miss those little mini stories. They’ll just write it off as, OK, let’s just grab reaction shots now. OK. But what is the actor doing in the reaction shot? Listening? Coming up with their own theories and things? That’s fine. But that’s not as good as a clear narrative story that that actor understands that they are pursuing before they ever get there on the day. And that the director then can think about how they stage that scene understanding that they are not covering one narrative here but multiple narratives.

It’s really important that we do this on the page because, if we don’t, we are going to be deeply disappointed nine times out of ten when we see the film.

**John:** Yeah. So, the Kevin Pollack that you mentioned, I don’t know what it looks like on the script page. I suspect it is clearly called out there. It’s the kind of moment where as I read back through the script if I am worried that people are going to miss it because people sometimes do get to be a little skimmy and they might not be reading every line of the scene description, I might save one of my underlines for that. Just to make sure that it really lands. Like, oh no, no, this is a real moment. This moment has to happen. This is going to change and pivot what’s happening after it.

And, yes, great directors will look at a scene and look at it from every character’s angle and really have a chance to study and explore and would probably figure out, like you know what, I need to really make that moment so I’m not just going to worry about coverage to get that reaction. I’m going to make sure I specifically plan for what is the look between those actors, what’s happening in that moment.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When you don’t have that kind of prep time, when you’re shooting a one-hour drama on a tight schedule, those are the moments that can be lost. And that’s the reason why in TV they want the writer on set. And it’s also the reason why in the tone meeting where they’re going through with the director while the director is doing prep they’re really trying to single out those moments that are so crucial that they anticipate needing as they get into the editing room.

**Craig:** Right. 100%. And I do think, look, every show has a different kind of constraint on it. But if you’re doing one of these scenes and you feel like given the nature of the time you have and the writing you have that you can’t afford to multi-track your narrative, rewrite the scene. Because otherwise it literally will just be boring or stupid.

**John:** Yeah. So obviously going into one of these things I should have said at the very start is one of your first choices may be like do I need to have all these characters? Am I making my life too difficult by trying to service all these characters in the scene? And sometimes you are making it too difficult. In the case of the scene I was writing, it felt like all the threads needed to come together under one roof, and so yes, I definitely needed all those characters there.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Cool. Let’s answer some listener questions.

**Craig:** Yeah! Good.

**John:** Josh writes, “I have been listening to ya’ll for several years and I don’t recall you ever discussing the process of adapting a script from stage to the screen. So I was hoping you might offer some thoughts about that subject. Obviously I know that in a global sense that film is a format better suited to shorter scenes and a more visual approach to storytelling than talking dialogue format of stage writing. But dialogue driven plays like Closer and Glengarry Glen Ross were adapted magnificently. So clearly that sort of story can be made just as gripping with good camera and editing choices. What needs to be on the page for a screenplay that wouldn’t be part of a stage play?”

**Craig:** Well, I have never done this. I have never – I have adapted novels. I have adapted all sorts of stuff. But I have never adapted a stage play. No, sorry, I take it back. I have.

**John:** Harvey.

**Craig:** Harvey. I don’t know why, maybe because it was for the Weinsteins and I have just been really just brain-bleaching, just a lot of PTSD brain-bleaching. You know what, I did. I adapted Harvey. That’s right. And what you do is you try and do what I think you do with all adaptation. You look for the heart of what is going on there and you try and translate it.

In certain cases there are plays that feel as if they can just be slid on over, because they can. Like Glengarry Glen Ross is not meant to be a large production. It is meant to take place largely in two spaces. And that’s basically what they did. And they were smart to do that because it didn’t ask for anything else. All the fireworks were from the brilliant actors that they had and the incredible dialogue of David Mamet and storytelling.

And then in the case of Harvey you’re talking about a play from many, many years ago and a lot of things simply don’t apply anymore. Like the notion of sanitariums and so on and so forth. And so it needed quite a bit of rethinking and restaging. And since it was a play that could take place in a city, where is this place? And we do want to go outside. And so you begin to separate yourself from the details, but draw upon the things that matter, the movements that matter. And my copy of Harvey was deeply earmarked and underlined and highlighted and circled and scribbled because I would seize upon these lines and go this means something important to me.

So, how I present it is less important than the fact that I do. And that I present it in a way that’s true to the way Mary Chase meant it. But all forms of adaptation essentially are different because you never know how close or how far the material is from the screen.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve only had the opposite experience, so I wrote Big Fish and then I wrote the stage version of Big Fish. And very little translated directly from the movie into the stage version. And I recognized early on that they were just completely different beasts.

One of the things that’s so different about the stage is that the audience has bought a ticket and they’re sitting in a theater to watch something and use their imagination to fill out the rest of it. So they are imagining the town of Ashton. They are imagining so many things. A desk rolls onto stage, and that’s a whole office. There’s a suspension of disbelief that is so different in stuff done for the stage than stuff done for movies.

And so looking at it the opposite way, you’re going to be making some things which could be sort of abstract on the stage and making them very concrete. And as you visualize these moments happening in concrete real places because you’re literally going to be filming an actor in a place, you’re going to have to look at what does this feel like when you’re actually in that place with the actor. And the expectations for reality and for even the naturalism of dialogue will change I think because of that.

You’re also going to be aware of there is a tick-tick-tick thing that happens in movies where just we become uncomfortable being in a place for too long with one sort of continuous moment happening too long. And scenes that you can have an hour-long sequence on stage where the curtain never comes down and it never goes dark, that’s going to feel really strange in most movies. It’s going to feel like you are just shooting a play. And if you really need to make it – if you really want it to feel like a movie you’re going to need to find ways to move outside of that space and allow for cuts, allow for time and change.

**Craig:** Exactly. All right. We have a question now from Daniel who writes, “I’m sitting here watching Shrek 2 on HBO and I’m a bit stumped. So during the red carpet scene the part Joan Rivers played in the theatrical release is now voiced by someone with a British accent, clearly not Joan Rivers. Considering that if you own this film on DVD or presumably Blu-Ray you can hear Joan Rivers, why would it be a different voice in this version? A dispute with the Rivers’ estate? Fine print about ancillary markets? The lines are the same. It’s just a different voice.”

John, what should we do to find this information out in a world where we’re not connected to a super-computing network?

**John:** Well, I mean, if you were connected to a super-computing network you could Google it. And so I Googled it.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** And so it turns out, because he was not the first person to notice, like wow it’s so weird that it’s a different voice. So it turns out that in different markets especially the UK they used local celebrities for the equivalence of Joan Rivers or other people. And that’s the concrete answer to Daniel’s question is that they used voices that British people would recognize rather than Joan Rivers, because Joan Rivers’ voice was distinctive but has no special meaning to a British audience, whereas this person’s did. So, Daniel for whatever reason was watching the UK version of Shrek 2.

But that kind of localization is fascinating. And all of our animated movies usually they’re carried overseas. They find great local actors to do all the character work for that. So I’m sure in France Shrek and Donkey were great local French actors who did great versions of that. We’re just not used to it happening in English.

**Craig:** That makes total sense. The whole reason they put somebody like Joan Rivers in there because there’s this kind of an instant caricature read. We go, oh, it’s Joan Rivers. Well, it’s absolutely useless if you don’t know who that is. Then it’s just a yelling lady. So you want the local yelling lady. Who did they replace Joan Rivers with out of curiosity?

**John:** Kate Thornton. So, British showbiz reporter Kate Thornton replaces Joan Rivers as the role of red carpet reporter.

**Craig:** Kate Thornton. Yeah, I’m looking at her. Yeah. So she’s sort of like known for being on the red carpet. There you go. They know her for that. Makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. Makes sense. All right, a question from Andy in New York. “Script takes place in three timelines, all at the same location. As a thriller, it relies on a few reveals and surprises. So the timeline specifics don’t really become evident to the viewer until the second half. While I want the viewer to be surprised by the reveal of multiple timelines, I think the script’s readers have been confused. Is there a way to clarify to the readers that this scene takes place in 1955 and this one in 1992 but explain that the viewer doesn’t necessarily get that insight until later?”

Craig, what’s your opinion on reader vs. viewer here?

**Craig:** What? I mean, Andy, we’ve got to talk. Look, you’re doing this thing where your script takes place in three timelines in the same location. You’re saying the timeline specifics don’t really become evident to the viewer until the second half. How is that possible? The clothing hasn’t changed at all? The furniture hasn’t changed at all? The lighting? The installation? The appliances in the room? The phones? It seems highly unlikely.

But let’s just say it’s a barn, OK? And the clothing hasn’t changed at all. Then I think you would have to just write the script as if you were seeing some sort of like parallel timelines. Right? You could call it we’re in timeline 1, timeline 2, timeline 3. And the point is these are all taking place in parallel universes at the same time. And then you could say my big reveal is ha-ha they’re not parallel and there isn’t three parallel universes. It’s one universe and you’ve been looking at things that are at three different times in our universe, 1955, 1992, and 2018, whatever.

I’m doubtful. I don’t know how you pull this off exactly, but that’s probably what I would do is I’d try to make it an ah-ha for the reader because the point is you want the reader to be surprised when the audience is surprised. You can’t separate that surprise out. It just doesn’t work.

**John:** So I suspect that the solution he’s looking for really is what you’re describing is that in scene headers you’re probably putting in little brackets that say timeline 1 after the day or night, just to make it clear. Because as a viewer we’ll see like, OK, we’re back in the same space but there’s different characters, so there’s a different thing happening here. They’ll at least acknowledge that they’re in different kind of spaces. They’ll follow different places. And I can see where they might be having a bit of an advantage over the reader who is just seeing – all text looks the same. So marking the different timelines in the header might be a way to do it. Some sort of just simple indication that this is the different stuff.

Ultimately when you board it and figure out how you’re going to shoot it those timelines will be useful for everyone on the production to understand that this is this part of it.

The closest analogy I can think of is the pilot for This is Us tries this trick where it’s not immediately clear in the pilot for This is Us that we’re in multiple timelines. And so they did as much as they could to hide the stuff that would make it obvious that they were in vastly different timelines as the story began.

**Craig:** Yeah. And they had to fit that within essentially 46 minutes or 48 minutes. This is different. Sounds like it’s a movie, so a little trickier. But sure. It’s doable.

We’ve got time for one more here. Alex writes, “I’m currently pitching a series and I’ve been asked to sign release forms that state ‘I the submitter acknowledge that the submitted materials to producer may be similar or identical to those submitted by others or in development.’ Is there a safe way to edit this to similar within reason so that I am protected if the company wholesale steals my material in the future? I know this is extremely unlikely, but I’ve come across extremely dodgy companies already in the pitching process and wondered if there were a sensible approach to this.

“I’ve looked everywhere I can think of online and I haven’t found a comprehensive answer. I realize in most cases companies are just protecting themselves from lawsuits, but is there a compromise edit to this kind of submission release form without looking like an unreasonably fussy person?”

Well, John, you and I have both gone to law school so why don’t you kick this off?

**John:** So, the kind of thing that Alex describes I hear about a lot. And there are things that people are signing. I don’t know that you really get away from signing it if you are going into pitch at these places. I’m not excited about you going into pitch at dodgy places. That doesn’t sound great either. And yet the process of getting started sometimes is taking a bunch of movies with people that like, eh, I don’t really like you but you don’t know until you kind of get in there.

The reason why they’re having you sign this thing is because they are worried about a lawsuit and a frivolous lawsuit about some other project just because they’re reading a bunch of stuff. I get why they’re doing it. I get why you’re frustrated to do this. What I will tell you, Alex, is that you signing this does not preclude you from doing a true on copyright lawsuit if they really do steal your idea. That doesn’t happen much.

Always remember that you are taking these meetings and trying to get your career started as a writer overall, not a writer of one particular project. And so to not be losing any sleep about your one idea being stolen. You want them to be hiring you as a writer to write stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, well first of all you can’t, well, you can’t file a proper copyright case if your idea is stolen because your idea is not property. But if you felt that your material had been properly infringed upon, that they were essentially appropriating your unique literary material in fixed form then sure. So, look, here’s the thing. I don’t know what the difference is between similar and similar within reason. I think sometimes people think – and by the way, to be clear, John and I are not lawyers.

**John:** Not at all.

**Craig:** But I think that sometimes people think that there’s some sort of weird magic binding power in these legal terms. And that if you come up with the proper incantation you have then protected yourself from evil — you have not. The fact is if you said I want to change similar to similar within reason, they would just argue with you just because that’s what they’re paid to do. But what’s similar within reason? OK. That’s what a judge would have to determine anyway. Because they would say, look, this thing was similar to something we already have. And you would say no it’s not. And a judge would have to say is it similar or not. That’s what similar – so it’s just adding words and I don’t see really what the magic protection comes of that.

And I also have to tell you, in general, I think people sometimes misunderstand. They think that these contracts are kind of the important factor. That your success or failure turns on the language of these things. When in fact it really turns on the nature of the people that you’re making an agreement with. If they’re bad people it doesn’t matter what you put in this. They’re going to abuse you and exploit you and they have more lawyers than you. And if they’re good people they won’t. So the most important thing that you said here Alex is, “I’ve come across extremely dodgy companies already in the pitching process.”

Stop. You wonder if there’s a sensible approach. Don’t pitch to them. By the way, don’t pitch to anybody that’s just like one of these pitchy pitch companies. Just don’t do it. And if they seem dodgy or dinky it’s because they are. Everything basically is as it appears when it comes to this sort of thing. The studios are studios. You’ve heard of them. They’re real. Then the mini majors, you’ve heard of them. They’re real. Then there’s like some companies that have made movies you’ve heard of. They’re real. Then there are these other places. They’re not.

And it’s not really hard to figure out who is who. And, yeah, it’s quite likely that people that are on the edges of things may be more willing to play fast and loose because they don’t care. The weird part is all these writers are out there trying to break into the business and they’re finding people that are offering them a toehold and they’re thinking, “Oh thank god, my ship has come in,” but the people that are offering them a toehold are also trying to break into the business, as producers, and financiers, and studios.

So, you see, we think as writers that we’ve found an adult, but we have not. We have just found another child who is far more ruthless than we are. So, I wouldn’t worry so much about the specific words here. I urge everyone to please, please have a lawyer review any document you sign. But I don’t think that your salvation lies within the tweak of a clause like this or a phrase like that. I think it lies within your own intuition and trusting your gut.

**John:** The other sort of crucial bit of advice, just having watched a bunch of writers start their careers and sort of how it all goes, is you’re more likely to have success by having as many people as possible read your stuff and your stuff gets passed around and people you don’t know are reading your script are reading your script. That’s sort of the organic process.

And so in saying like don’t pitch to dodgy companies, yes, I mean don’t get in business with people who are awful. But at the same time don’t run away from somebody just because they have one produced credit. Like everyone is starting someplace and so the person who may get your movie made may be a person who hasn’t done a lot yet. So, when you’re sitting across from somebody and they skeeve you out that’s a good sign don’t be in business with them. But just because they don’t have an Oscar on their shelf doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be taking that meeting.

**Craig:** There you go. 100%.

**John:** Cool. All right, it’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is You Might Be the Killer. So it’s a movie that is debuting on Saturday, so I’ve not yet seen it, but I love the genesis of this movie. So this movie is written by Brett Simmons and Thomas Vitale. It’s directed by Simmons. But it’s based on a Twitter exchange that I watched happen in real time between Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes.

It is a genius Twitter thread. These guys are playing characters. And that became the basis for this movie. So everyone sort of read this thread is like, wow, let’s make a movie off of this idea. And they sold them the idea and made the movie. It is a slasher comedy. There’s been many slasher comedies. The first one I know that’s ever been based on a Twitter thread. And I’m just happy for these guys and happy for them to have made their movie.

Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes are both fantastic writers to follow on Twitter, by the way. They have really good advice on a consistent basis. So I would urge you to follow the two of them. And just to see their movie which will have already debuted by the time you’re listening to this podcast, but should be available on Syfy Channel at whatever point you want to watch it.

**Craig:** Cool. Why does Sci-Fi Channel spell their name Syfy?

**John:** It drives me crazy.

**Craig:** What is that? They’re afraid?

**John:** They went to a branding expert who said we should spell it in a way that no one would ever want to spell sci-fi.

**Craig:** I want to go to a branding expert that helps me launch my new company where branding experts are paraded in front of large groups of people and then slowly beaten to death with wooden spoons. I mean, come on!

**John:** I mean, I think the first thing they would do is, “Does it need to be wooden? Because wooden feels organic, but it does it have to be wood?”

**Craig:** And can we spell spoons Spunz?

**John:** Oh my god let’s build a company called Spunz.

**Craig:** [laughs] I mean, it’s like Syfy. Like if you were starting the Action Channel. Now you have to spell it Axion. It’s so dumb.

**John:** You know that’s a real channel?

**Craig:** What? Axion is a real channel?

**John:** It’s a real channel?

**Craig:** What? What do you mean?

**John:** Yeah, I think Sony owns it.

**Craig:** Axion Channel. I’m looking it up right now. Axion Channel? No there isn’t.

**John:** Oh, maybe – what am I thinking? There’s a Sony brand that is essentially the same thing.

**Craig:** Oh my god. Unbelievable. So outrageous. Just spell words the way they’re supposed to be spelled.

Right, well, my One Cool Thing this week is something that I’ve been using all week long. It is a tool that is useful if you are currently in production and perhaps working with editors who are not where you are. It’s called Evercast. Their website is evercast.us. It is a company that was cofounded by Roger Barton of all people who is a big editor. He’s done a lot of big like Jerry Bruckheimer movies and Michael Bay movies and stuff like that.

And essentially it’s a proper screen-sharing of an Avid or Final Cut Pro or any standard professional–

**John:** Non-linear editor.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so it allows me, because right now our editors are in London. That’s where our postproduction is set up. That’s where it’s happening. And I’ve been over there to work with them and obviously the director has been over there working with them. But for little things like tweaking and reviews and stuff I don’t want to fly to London. So along comes this solution where we can get on this service together. It is studio approved and secure. And it allows me to literally see the screen. It’s a proper screen-sharing of the Avid screen, including the timeline and the bin and everything. And plus there’s audio and video conferencing. And interestingly you can also record your audio and video chat so that if you’re saying giving notes on something the editor can record it and then listen back later when they’re doing the changes.

So it’s really, really useful and it works quite well. A couple of times it’s glitched on us, but then support has been right on top of it and fixed it. It’s web-based. You access it through your Chrome browser. It does not work on Safari. And it’s been kind of a lifesaver.

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think as production continues to become a global affair this is going to become more and more useful as time goes on.

**John:** Yeah, I’ll be curious which shows start going to an around the world production. Because podcasts like The Daily I know they record it in New York but then they send it over to Europe to do music and final sound editing. And it’s not because it’s cheaper in Europe but because just time zone wise it lets them work all night on that and so they can send it back in the morning.

**Craig:** Oh, interesting. Yeah. Right now I’m just waking up super early to spend time with this wonderful editor who goes to bed quite late now. So, we’ve been kind of dealing with that. But she’s been great and so far so good. So I just wanted to give them a little nod. They’re doing a fine job over there at the Evercast Company.

**John:** Very nice. That is our show for this week. As always, our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is also by Matthew. We’ll just use the audio from the Arlo Finch trailer, which he wrote and it’s just great music, so good to hear it even without the visuals.

If you have an outro for us 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. We’re actually running a little bit low on outros. So, folks, step it up. We need some more outros there.

You can find Scriptnotes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there leave us a review so other people can find the show.

You’ll find transcripts at johnaugust.com. They go up within the week of the episode airing. That’s also where you’ll find show notes and links to the things we talked about.

You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net. It is $1.99 a month. If you subscribe now you can send us a question to answer on our questions episode which I guess we should probably try to record that next week maybe.

Oh, also you can find all the back episodes available as 50-episode seasons at store.johnaugust.com. Craig, thanks for another fun show.

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

Links:

* The Arlo Finch [series trailer](http://johnaugust.com/2018/arlo-finch-the-series-trailer) is live!
* [Chunking](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology))
* [How Shrek 2 has been redubbed for the UK market](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/how-shrek-2-has-been-redubbed-for-the-uk-market-730943.html) by Leslie Felperin for The Independent
* [You Might Be the Killer](https://nypost.com/2018/10/03/how-a-twitter-feed-morphed-into-a-syfy-movie/amp/?__twitter_impression=true), written by Brett Simmons and Thomas P. Vitale and directed by Simmons, born from this [Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/SamSykesSwears/status/890751932779839488) between Chuck Wendig and Sam Sykes.
* [Evercast](https://www.evercast.us) allows Craig to be in the Chernobyl edit from home
* 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).
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [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_371.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/Two-Things-at-the-Same-Time).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Oh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 370 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the program we’re going to take a look at simultaneity which is a difficult to spell word for two or more things happening at once. Then we’ll hopefully be applying what we learned to three new entries in the Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Ah. Our old friend.

**John:** Yes. It’s back to basics. Just me and Craig. No special guests. It’s a craft episode.

**Craig:** Good. Because you know what? It’s enough already.

**John:** Enough.

**Craig:** Enough. I mean, we are like County Kitchen Buffet, or Perkins Cake and Steak. I don’t even know if that’s really a restaurant anymore. I’m coming up with comfort food restaurants. We provide a certain comfort food experience to people. And while every now and then they might like the fancy breakfast, mostly they just want the Root and Toot and Fresh and Fruit’n or whatever that stupid thing is called.

**John:** I feel like this is more like the Quarter Pounder with Cheese. You know exactly what you’re going to get. That’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get a conversation about a topic in craft. You’re going to have some Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s going to be some stuff we love, some stuff we think could be better. There will be spelling mistakes.

**Craig:** Probably a little bit of anger somewhere in there.

**John:** Maybe. There could be some anger. We’ll see.

**Craig:** You know what’s interesting about the Quarter Pounder with Cheese? It’s a very good example of getting what you expect, except it’s never a quarter pound. I guess it starts as a quarter pound and then something happens to it. So you actually never really know what it weighs. I’d be interested. Somebody should put them on scales and see.

**John:** I know exactly what a Quarter Pounder with Cheese tastes like, but I’ve not eaten beef in 25 years.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** But I still know what it takes like. I lost a tooth to a Quarter Pounder with Cheese growing up. It was a tooth that was going to fall out. I was losing my baby teeth.

**Craig:** Ah, OK. It wasn’t like the white whale coming to take your leg.

**John:** Not a bit like that.

**Craig:** OK. You’re not on some lifelong revenge crusade against Quarter Pounders.

**John:** What if I were? What is that were really my thing?

**Craig:** It would explain a lot.

**John:** It would explain so, so much. Last week, or the week before we talked about how we’re going to do a special episode that is just random advice for people who are premium subscribers. And so these premium subscribers have been writing in with their questions. So, here’s a little sampler platter of some of the questions we may be answering from our listeners. So, we’ve gotten a bunch in, but these are three ones that I thought were really good. I’ll start with one. Craig, what’s your take on traffic calming, such as narrowing streets or reducing lanes, adding bike lanes, etc. to reduce crashes between drivers and pedestrians or cyclists? How do you feel about that?

**Craig:** I’m pretty sure the robot cars are going to solve that problem for us.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Because the robot cars will just plow over those cyclists and pedestrians because they’re the enemy.

**Craig:** They’ve been taught to prize other robot cars. That’s in the hierarchy of who they should murder. First must protect self, then other robot car, then pets, then property, then human beings.

**John:** I think, I mean, Elon Musk is their first priority, isn’t he? Like must protect Elon Musk.

**Craig:** Like I said, the robots are going to protect themselves first. He’s – what’s going on with Elon? He needs to adjust the dosage there. Something has gone a little wacky.

**John:** The dials got a little bit off there. People who don’t sleep can kind of accomplish a lot, but they also can make some bad choices.

**Craig:** It’ll kill you in the end.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, here’s one. I like this one. One of the questions that we’re going to be answering is “Did John have a roommate in college?”

**John:** I’ve had many roommates in college. And I will talk about them I think on our special episode. None of them are as notable as Craig’s. But actually the last roommate, so by roommate I’ll define like a person I shared a room with for an extended period of time who was not my husband Mike is a famous person. So I can talk about that as well.

**Craig:** OK, well there you go. So we’ll have a little bit of that going on. What else are we going to be talking about in this – this is going to be a great episode by the way.

**John:** So another question is my partner and I have a theory that only one member of a romantic couple should enjoy pickles. Do you eat pickles? Does your significant other eat pickles? Are we speculating uselessly based on anecdotal evidence?

**Craig:** That one is not going to take a long amount of time.

**John:** But I mean yes or no. So we’re happy to answer your pickle-based questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. But I would also encourage people to write in with questions that are suitable for our vast intellect and enormous reserves of practical wisdom.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say that some people have been writing in with genuine screenwriting questions and it’s like you know what that’s probably not what we’re going to prioritize in this episode because we do that every week.

**Craig:** All the time.

**John:** All the time. So this is going to be a special thing. We’re going to really try to emphasize random advice, not screenwriting advice.

**Craig:** Yeah. John and I are trying to spice things up over here. Don’t bring us the same old thing.

**John:** Absolutely. We’re in a long relationship here. This is going to be sort of our weekend getaway.

**Craig:** Right. Come on. You get what we’re doing? Let us just have fun. Don’t – ugh, these people. What else is going on? You know what? I sense, just because I have a certain telepathy, that there’s some kind of t-shirt news in the offing.

**John:** There are three great t-shirts up. And so you were actually gone for when we announced these t-shirts, but there are three new t-shirts that are available at Cotton Bureau. The first is Colored Revisions, so it is a helpful guide to the order of colored revisions if you’re doing that in your script. Next we have a Highland 2 shirt. And finally we have a Karateka shirt, which we’d actually done years and years ago, but people asked for more of them so we made more of them. So, they are selling nicely. They’re available right now at Cotton Bureau.

**Craig:** Now, John, do we happen to have a revisions t-shirt that is Europe only?

**John:** Tell me about European revisions. Tell me what is different.

**Craig:** They flop pink and blue. So they go white, pink, blue, not white, blue, pink.

**John:** That’s crazy.

**Craig:** I. Know. Trust me I know. I mean, there’s a couple other weird ones down the line, but the big shocker right off the bat, I mean, because we’re so ingrained here in the US. It’s like after white comes blue. And they’re like, wait, what, blue, what happened to pink? I’m like what do you mean what happened to pink, pink is next. No it’s not.

**John:** I don’t remember that from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory but I believe you. So I’m sure that’s just the order they use.

**Craig:** They may have let you do what you do. But because we had so many different countries and it was exclusively European, I mean, the production was entirely housed in Europe. It wasn’t like we were shooting stuff over from – I mean, you guys were at Warner Bros right?

**John:** We were.

**Craig:** So Warner Bros can sort of say we’re in charge. Do it American. But no, not for this.

**John:** That’s a good point. Because Warner Bros insisted that we keep the script formatted for 8.5×11 even though we were on A4 paper.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** There you go.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** Last bit of news is that you and I are both doing some stuff in October. I am starting off in October in Frankfurt. So I’m doing an Arlo Finch event at Hugendubel an der Hauptwache at 11:30am.

**Craig:** That’s a great place.

**John:** On October 10th. It is a very cool bookstore based on how the website is set up. So I’m doing a tour of Germany and Scandinavia and so that is one of the public events in Germany there.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Then after the Austin Film Festival I am going to Boulder, Colorado. And so I’m going to be doing a 6:30pm reading event kind of thing at the Boulder Book Store which is my hometown bookstore. So come check that out. That’s October 29th at 6:30pm.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But we’re both going to be at the Austin Film Festival, which should be great. We’re confirming our guests for the live show. It’s going to be a fun time.

**Craig:** Yeah. And based on the guests that I already know we have, you’re going to want it. And we now have a pretty decent multi-year track record of delivering some pretty awesome live shows. So, you’re going to want to see it. I don’t know what else to say. You’re going to want to see it.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to say a little bit more of the entertainment burden for this show is on Craig’s shoulders this year based on an idea that we’re going to try to do. So I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit of an entertainment. I like to think that the entertainment burden is always on my shoulders because I’m vivacious.

**John:** Yes. You are vivacious.

**Craig:** And I’m a human.

**John:** You are. Yet, to pull this off you’re going to have to do some work ahead of time. And I’m usually the person who is just like Mr. Organized thing, but you’re going to have do some organize-y stuff.

**Craig:** After we conclude recording this podcast I will give you an update on that.

**John:** I’m so excited. All right. Let us get to our feature topic which is simultaneity. So this came up with some stuff I was writing this week and I thought it was something we could talk about in this episode because a lot of times in scripts you have two events need to be happening simultaneously. And it’s a weird thing about how text works versus how images work. So, when you see an image you see the whole image at once. And you can take in all of it at once.

When you are reading a sentence you don’t know how the sentence ends until you get to the end. And as a writer you have to arrange your sentences in priority of what you want people to see in the frame. So, here being an example. Let’s say you have a burning clown being chased by a polar bear in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

**Craig:** OK. Seen it, but fine.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s a cliché image, I know.

**Craig:** Trite.

**John:** You can only do so much in one sentence so you have to prioritize do you start with the clown, or the man on fire, or the bear, or the setting? Basically each sentence is going to do kind of one thing, or you’re going to have to basically arrange those objects and those things in the importance you want the reader to see them. Versus on an image, like if you just saw that as a frame, you saw this as a scene in your movie, you’re going to get all of that at once, to the point where like a director may have to make choices about what he or she is going to focus on in that frame so we can actually see not the whole thing all at once.

And so this kind of simultaneity, like we’re always wrestling with sort of the order of things and sort of how we’re seeing stuff. But it becomes especially challenging when two things are supposed to be happening at the same time and on a script level you have to figure out how you’re going to show that these things are happening simultaneously.

**Craig:** And it’s where the screenplay format does let us down a bit.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** The very first writing job I ever had was for an advertising agency. And they gave me a format to use for, you know, you’re writing a 30-second ad. And their format, which I think is fairly common in the advertising/copywriting world is basically a paper that’s divided into two columns. And the left column is for text. That’s dialogue or onscreen text or voice over. And the right side is visuals. So right off the bat they have created a sense of simultaneity that we simply don’t have in screenplays because we’re reading them top to bottom and we’re separating what we say from what we see.

**John:** And so we make certain exceptions, like dual dialogue, where people are speaking at once. And, sure, but you’re still going to always read the stuff on the left before you read the stuff on the right. So as a writer you’re making choices about who gets to be the left hand column because that’s the stuff that you’re going to read first.

You know, text, it’s inherently limited in its ability to do a lot of things at once. It’s always going to be – it’s always linear. It’s always going to be left to right, or right to left if you’re in a different language. But it’s not going to be everything at once.

**Craig:** Yeah. And, look, certainly everybody is dealing with this when they’re making the movie as well because we experience time in a linear fashion. So no matter what we do, no matter what funky games we play, we experience things linearly. In movies where we call them non-linear, for instance like a Tarantino movie. So Pulp Fiction gets all loopy and funky with its time and you realize that the thing you saw at the beginning is now at the end. And in fact it’s not really the end. The end is in the middle of the movie. But we experience all of it in sequence linearly and then the movie goes, oh wait, by the way imagine that that actually already happened or something. Right?

So, we’re always struggling with this, whether we’re writing or we’re shooting, but what you’re right to say that one thing the camera can do is witness things at the same time. We cannot witness for the audience, meaning our reader as writers, we cannot witness things at the same time. And this is why sometimes you will – if you listen to us a lot and we talk about these things and it may come up in our Three Page Challenge analysis – we harp on the way people write their action. Because in a very real way your return key, your enter, your paragraph break is you essentially saying this is where the end of a thing I want you to experience happens and now you’re going to see another thing.

So for instance, in your example, if I want to see the clown first I describe the clown. Then I hit return and then I describe oh my god look he’s being chased by a polar bear. But if I want to see it all at once, if I want to see the clown, the bear, the fire, the post-apocalyptic landscape, I just lay it in one tight little paragraph to say, “See, you experience all this before I hit the return key.” That means you’re kind of getting it all at once.

**John:** So if we want to separate those ideas out, like if we want to give a sense of how it’s going to feel on the screen you would probably say a man is running. We notice his oversized shoes. The man is a clown. Widening out we see what he’s running from. It is a polar bear charging on all four feet. Widening further we see the post-apocalyptic landscape of this thing. So that’s giving the sense of like by breaking out into those smaller sentences and putting them in that order we’re getting a sense that, OK, we’re probably kind of pulling out here. Basically we’re focused on this and we’re coming out.

If we did want to see the whole thing all together we’d keep it together as one sentence. And that gives a sense of like all of this is going to be sort of one shot. Sentences aren’t exactly one for one matches with shots. But we do as a reader tend to think about an image that goes with a line of scene description.

**Craig:** No question. And similarly when people are talking we either can say, look, this is what they’re going to say and you’re going to listen to it, or this is what they’re saying and while they’re saying it I want you to notice another thing happening. So, in that case you will break their dialogue up on the page. That is essentially how we create simultaneity between speaking and seeing is by carving up the dialogue. And the reader understands that it’s not like we look at the person talking then look away to see the thing then look at the person talking. It’s all at the same time.

**John:** An example being like a man and a woman are having a conversation at a table. She finishes her dialogue. She picks up the bottle and refills his glass. And then they keep talking. As a writer you may have put that there just to sort of break thoughts up. But it’s also going to change the energy of that moment. It’s basically signaling that there is a shift here. If we were in one type of coverage we may have moved to a different type of coverage. Something has happened here. And sometimes you see especially new writers they’ll throw that kind of stuff in without recognizing what it actually feels like from the reader’s perspective. Or that by breaking out a separate line versus sticking some of that stuff into a parenthetical they are really changing the texture and feel of how that scene is playing.

**Craig:** No question. And good point for all of you that are starting out. It may seem a bit random like why do you carve up this bit of dialogue. Why do you put a return thing here? Why don’t you? There’s no hard and fast rule to this except that you must always imagine how people might feel reading it if they don’t know what’s coming next. And think impressionistically. What is it that I want them to feel in the moment? Simultaneity is a very exciting thing to be used in a movie. You can use it sparingly. There are plenty of movies that have very little of it. But when multiple things are happening at the same time it’s exciting.

So, for instance there’s a scene in Chernobyl I’m thinking of where a character is listening to other people talking. And he knows something that apparently they do not. And he keeps waiting for one of them to say the thing that he thinks is so obvious but none of them do. And he’s growing increasingly nervous. So there’s simultaneity there because people are talking and I need to be also with him and see his experience of this. So, I have people talk and then in between I start writing bits of dialogue for him that’s in his head that he doesn’t say that’s in italics that’s in action.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So it’s like I’m creating simultaneous dialogue between what is spoken by the talkers and what is being thought by the thinker. Anything you can do to kind of get across – and there’s no screenwriting book in the world that will list that as a thing you can do. And nobody taught me to do that. I only did it because it just seemed like it made the most sense to convey what I wanted people to experience. Simple as that.

**John:** Yeah. So what you’re describing is, well, maybe we can talk about three kinds of simultaneity you’re going to find in screenwriting. There’s at least three, but let’s talk about these three. So this first one is I think kind of what you’re describing in Chernobyl, also the example of the clown running from the polar bear, which is a simultaneity where everything is happening all at once in a frame and yet we are having to focus on certain things. And so a thing that often comes up in these questions that people write in is like I have this big party and there’s different conversations happening at different places in the party. How do I show that?

Well, that’s a thing that you do all the time and as you’re recognizing that while these people are having this conversation over here other folks are having a conversation over here and it’s all happening in a shared space. And maybe it doesn’t matter that they’re all exactly synchronized, but there’s going to be a reason why you’re moving from one conversation to another conversation. So, they’re all in a space and they’re all happening at the same time but there’s not a great degree of interaction between the two.

A second kind of simultaneity that you see is people in different places that have to be happening at the same time. So, it can be examples of parallel action but with interaction between the two. So like there’s two sides of a phone call. So you and I are talking, we’re not in the same space, but we can cut to either side and it’s one conversation. Or a car crash where you see we’re in two different cars and we realize like, oh, they’re going to crash into each other. Like they’re headed towards each other. That’s a kind of simultaneity that’s common and it’s generally set up through parallel action, parallel structure between what one character is doing and what another character is doing. And when it’s done really well can have a tremendous amount of suspense. If there’s no interaction between the two then we as the audience have information that the characters don’t and that is stressful in a good way.

**Craig:** Yeah. And you’re putting your finger on, particularly with the party scenario you described, you’re putting your finger on one of the main struggles that both writers and directors and editors have in transmitting narrative that’s like real life and that is that there is a certain kind of mundane simultaneity we simply cannot do. We are incapable of doing it. Because at a party three different conversations are happening exactly at the same time in different places. We don’t know how to do it.

**John:** Yeah. So often like those conversations are happening literally just across from each other, so like you and I are having a conversation and the people next to us are having a different conversation and somehow we’re able to keep it all straight. That’s actually very hard to do on film. I’m sure people can find good examples of places that have been able to pull that off, but when I’m talking with you at a party I’m able to tune out everybody else and just focus on what you’re saying. That’s really hard to do in film and in television because we’re used to like if there’s people talking we should be understanding the people talking. So to push out that other noise is really a challenge.

**Craig:** Neurologists have been studying this issue of attention for a long time because the human brain is remarkable. We can actually pick out if we choose to one person’s voice among 40 voices. If you were at a party, everyone is talking at once, you can still have a conversation with one person. Because your brain decides I’m just going to focus on you. In movies our attention devices are literal focus and then the levels of sound. So you can sort of simulate things by rack focusing. That means, OK, I’m looking at these people in focus, I’m hearing them, and then I rack and I realize that these people are also talking. They’ve been there the whole time but now I can see them and hear them because the other audio has gone down.

It turns out that this sort of thing is actually quite distracting and oddly artificial. Because in a weird way it’s closer to how our minds process. So therefore it ends up a little bit in the uncanny valley of attention setting. And that you may very frequently be better off just simulating the simultaneity by listening to one conversation and cutting and going to another corner of the room and listening to a different one. And it doesn’t matter – only if it’s really important that they happen at the same time. And if it’s really important that they happen at the same time then you get to play tricks like this person’s conversation is going on and then it gets interrupted by somebody coming in through the door and going I’m Here and everybody cheers. And then you cut over to the other corner and they have their conversation. And theirs ends with that same person coming through the door and going I’m Here and everyone cheers. And you go, oh, I get it. Those were happening at the same time.

But the rack focusy, gimmicky fade in/fade out stuff, sometimes it’s not worth it.

**John:** Yeah. My year living in France I saw a bunch of movies in French and generally I can do it. If I am watching a movie and I can see the actors talking I can follow, even without subtitles, I can follow what’s going. It takes sort of every brain cell. But if you try to do that and you also have a voice over, like that kills me. My brain can’t process both them talking and a voice over. I need to be able to see the person speaking the French or I am just completely lost. And to the point where like I saw a movie with Mike and I was like, oh yeah, that was good. And he’s like did you understand what happened in the last five minutes? I was like no. He’s like the little girl died. And I’m like the little girl died? I had no idea. And it’s because my brain could follow people talking. And the same thing happens at parties if people speak to me in French. I can follow one conversation in French if 100% of my attention is focused there. But everything else around the sides I can’t deal with it. It’s just too much noise and too much information.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so we kind of do our own weird approximation of simultaneity because we can’t actually handle it ourselves. There’s only so much information we can take in. So, it’s not cheating. It’s just sort of an acknowledgement that what we’re doing is we are approximating reality but we’re doing so in a very unreal way. Reality is not two-dimensional. Reality does not have edits. Reality doesn’t have a score. So I don’t get too hung up on the fact that we can’t achieve perfect simultaneity and I think it’s probably a dragon that certain fancy directors are more interested in slaying than writers.

But as writers our job is to convey a sense of simultaneity.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And so apart from whatever simple kind of things we have at our disposal like the shift key and breaking of dialogue, it’s really about honestly keeping the reader in mind.

**John:** Yeah. The last kind of simultaneity I want to make sure we talk about is that sense of a shared clock, or sort of like you’re in movie mean time. Everybody in the movie is on the same clock. And by that I generally mean like if it’s day for me it’s also day for you. That we’re all in the same time space. And so soap operas are sort of a classic example of this. In college I used to watch Days of our Lives, and a thing you notice about soap operas is like all the characters they’re in the same day. So, you never sort of jump to the next day in soap opera. Every soap opera happens within a day. And really most movies and television they’re pretty explicit if we’re going on to a new day, time has changed. And every scene that happens happens after the scene that happened before it. So even if there’s different characters you’re going to default to the assumption that this scene has happened after the scene that happened before, even if it’s completely different characters. You’re going to assume that time movies forward. And it becomes jarring if you and I have a conversation and it’s sunset and the next conversation we see with the other characters it’s still afternoon. That feels weird. And we want to believe that it’s always going to go from morning to afternoon to evening to night to morning again.

And so sometimes as a writer you’re going to have to make choices about like, OK, when are we starting night and when are we going to believe that it’s the next day, or time has moved forward?

**Craig:** I told you about the crazy thing they made me do with the timeline writing in Europe right?

**John:** Yeah, so they want you to number every day and hour? Basically give a clock time for every scene?

**Craig:** Every single scene header had to have a time. An actual clock time. And I mean I gave it to a woman who works with me and I said please take the first pass at this because my whole thing is there are three times of day in movies – bright, dark, and in between. That’s the time of day. And, yes, sometimes you do need to know the time of day. And I had already called out those scenes. Like, yeah, you need to know this is 4:05. This is 4:10. Five minutes have passed by. But they’re insane about it. And it really wasn’t particularly useful. I don’t know why they do it that way. I will rail against it for the rest of my life. But they are very, very, very concerned about that sort of thing.

**John:** I would assume that their logic behind it is that it helps all the other departments figure out what day it is, what will have happened before, so if they need to make choices or changes. And literally so that the set department can move the clocks on the walls to the right time.

**Craig:** And yet somehow the largest motion picture and television industry in the world has managed to get by without this for a century. By the way, the way to deal with clocks: don’t show them. Don’t show clocks.

**John:** Don’t show clocks.

**Craig:** There you go. Problem solved. Because clocks are a continuity nightmare anyway.

**John:** Maybe we can find this episode online or a clip online from it, but I do remember an episode of Studio 60 which is all about the clock, because it’s all racing up to put on their Saturday Night Live like show. And there’s this meeting between two characters and they’re talking and the clock on the wall changes every time they cut back to the character. And you just can’t believe that they left it in. And so the clock is important as a story element but why they wouldn’t have stopped the clock is crazy to me.

**Craig:** Yeah. Stop the clock. Yeah, that’s like a rookie mistake. There’s that and the scenes where there’s one that Melissa always gets crazy about in Thelma & Louise where Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon are in the, I think it’s the bar, it’s right before the big confrontation where they kill somebody. And they’re having drinks. And every time you go back and forth the level of liquid in each glass goes up and down, and up down, and up and down.

**John:** The prop people are just like killing themselves when they see that.

**Craig:** You know, at some point though I guess you look at that and you go whatever. Like it’s important and then it’s obviously not important because Thelma & Louise is an institution. I don’t think that that glass scene harmed anyone’s appreciation of a classic film.

**John:** It was an important movie about women taking control of their lives. But the glasses. Oh my god! I can’t get past the glasses.

**Craig:** I always thought it was a movie about the strange behavior of liquids.

**John:** It really is. The fluid dynamics of that movie I just couldn’t put up with that.

**Craig:** It’s my biggest problem. I just thought that they kind of got away from what mattered.

**John:** Yeah. I mean, obviously evaporation in that universe works completely differently.

**Craig:** And condensation.

**John:** Indeed. So.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Amazing.

**John:** Magical.

**Craig:** We’ve got some three pagers here that we’re going to have to deal with, huh?

**John:** We do. So let’s wrap up our simultaneity saying like if there are situations where you have to signal simultaneity, Craig really hit on one where it’s that sort of repeated moment, so the guy walks through the door and everyone says welcome or like surprise, to signal that those two moments really did overlap, they happened at the same time. So characters reacting to the same thing is a good way to do it.

Just really repeated scenes. So that’s what Go does. It repeats the exact same scene three times. And when we first shot Go we didn’t have that scene. We were repeating a different scene, two different scenes. And it didn’t work. Like the audience couldn’t track it. So that’s why I had to write a new scene that could be the one scene that we’d always go back to. And then finally like just communication between two characters can signal that people are in the same time space. And so classically now a text sent between people lets us know to connect where they are and that we’re in the same time. Because otherwise if you just cut to somebody you don’t know is it right now, is it hours after that last scene. So some kind of communication between the two of them can signal this is happening now and not slightly in the future.

**Craig:** Excellent summary, John, and an excellent topic of something that is a challenge but also an opportunity I think for writers.

**John:** Agreed. Let us take this opportunity to look at more writing. This is a Three Page Challenge–

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** A segment we do every now and again. The next time we’re going to do this segment is at the Austin Film Festival, so we’re going to do a live version of this at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So starting today if you would like to submit your three pages you can submit them specifically with a little tick box that says I will be at the Austin Film Festival and I am happy to come up on stage with you and talk through these three pages.

**Craig:** I feel like we’re extra nice to people in that venue. So if you want the nicest possible treatment, that’s the way to go.

**John:** And we always have special guests up there to help us talk through things. It’s a fun time to do it. So if you would like to submit to that you can. But in a general sense these are the first three pages of movies or pilots that listeners have sent in for us to take a look at. This is not a competition. This is just an exhibition of screenwriting craft. And we talk through what’s working and what could be better. So if you have three pages you want to send in you go to johnaugust.com/threepage. If you would like to read the pages that we’re about to discuss they’re attached to the show notes or just go to johnaugust.com.

Craig, do you want to start us off with Collective Outcasts?

**Craig:** All right. I will do that. This is Collective Outcasts. This is a pilot written by Angelique Gross. And so we begin with Jack, he’s 25, kind of a buzz cut military guy, waking up in the morning to his alarm. Meanwhile in her own bedroom is Amy, 24, a slacker who does not want to wake up at all. And we kind of go back and forth between them. He’s completely on point, gets up, gets dressed, he’s clean, he eats a healthy breakfast. She refuses to get up. She drinks some wine from last night. She’s kind of a big hot mess. And then she eventually gets going a bit late.

We see that they’re both on the same campus. She is – it’s some sort of art campus I believe, an art college, and she’s talking to her mother and explaining that she’s registering for her classes right now. And Jack, who is former military, walks through this very sort of squishy liberal campus to arrive at this faculty adviser Richard, who is surprised to see that this is their first student who has ever been here on the GI Bill. And Jack explains that he has in fact been in the military since he was emancipated at the age of 16. He served in Iraq. And now he wants to meet people with similar interests. He did not make any friends in the army. And those are the first three pages of Collective Outcasts. John, what did you think?

**John:** Well, let’s start with the obvious relevant topic which is the parallelism. So, this first page is all parallelism where it’s the exact same time we’re seeing Jack, we’re seeing Amy, we’re seeing them going through the same time. It literally says 6:00AM, 7:00AM, 8:00AM in the scene headers there to show us that these are happening simultaneously. It’s a very classic structure to show two characters with very different reactions to the same kinds of everyday things.

Where I was frustrated by this set up is – I think we talked about sort of like the showing hitting the alarm clock when you wake up in the morning is just such a cliché beat that you have to really put some spin on that or else it’s going to feel just really cliché and it’s going to start you off on a bad foot. This kind of does that.

The bigger problem for me was moving from Jack’s side to Amy’s side to Jack’s side to Amy’s side, the transitions really weren’t built there. It was just basically contrasting, but there was no sense of flow between them. And the good versions of these sequences it really feels like you’re moving forward every time you’re moving between the characters. It can be as simple as like he opens a door and then she opens a door, or she walks through a door. That sense of like there’s a visual feeling of moving through a space. And here it was just like a bunch of shot, shot, shot, shot, shot, which got me a little bit frustrated.

Craig, I had a hard time understanding this campus. And so our initial description of the campus, I think the reason why you sort of wonder like is it a private art college, so “Amy walks across a small but fancy university campus pathway. This school probably wasn’t like your college. There are no frats or grades but there are workshop nights with copious amounts of alcohol and ever present judgement from the anti-commercialism students.” But you didn’t say private art college. You didn’t give me a sense – give me a name. Just be specific about sort of where we’re at. I didn’t know where we were at sort of in the world. So, you gave me a lot of context without telling me what I’m actually looking at.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, let’s talk about the simultaneity in the beginning. I think you’re exactly right. The best of these things work where one side of the simultaneous action is commenting on the other. So it’s simply the contrast of I got up on time, I didn’t. I’m clean, I’m going to take a drink. But there’s something a little bit more commenty about it. It seems like – well first of all I thought they were in the same place for a while. It’s a natural thing to presume that if we start with an interior of a bedroom and then we cut to an interior of a bedroom and they are two people in their mid-20s and they are both waking up at the same time that they may be roommates. They could be living in the same house. I don’t know. So partly I also wanted to make very sure, or I would suggest to Angelique that she make sure that there’s a little bit there to make it clear that this is one kind of space, this is another kind of space. This one is on the ground floor of a tiny thing and this one is in the high rise of a large dormitory. Whatever it is, just so I know they’re in different places.

It is very cliché. And it’s not giving me much other than this. This guy is a straight-shooter and she’s a mess. Which kind of, hmmm, we’ve seen it. We’ve just seen the wake up sequence many, many times. It’s hard to get excited about it. And I’m not sure it’s the best way to introduce somebody like this, meaning Jack. Amy, yes. Right?

So let’s get to John’s point about this college. Here are the things that Angelique describes about the college at the top of page 2 that we will not see. We will not see that it is small. We will not see that it is fancy. We will not see that it wasn’t like our college. We will not see that there are not frats or grades. And we will not see that there are workshop nights, whatever those are, with copious amounts of alcohol. And we will not see the ever-present judgment from the anti-commercialism students. What are they anyway?

We will see none of that. Here’s what we will see. We will see a 24-year-old woman walking across some sort of quad. So, therefore what Angelique does later down is exactly the kind of thing she needs to do right away. “Jack walks down the hall taking in all the posters and art. One flyer reads: ‘WANT TO JOIN AN EMOTIONAL FIGHT CLUB?’ Another: ‘JUNG DEMOCRATS MEETING TONIGHT!’”

So, you need to build the space. First of all, give this place a name. Tell me that it’s an art college. Tell me that it’s super snow-flakey. Whatever it is that you want to do so that you want to set up a situation where Jack is a fish out of water. Go for it. But then you have a fish out of water. So, introduce him as the fish out of water. He walks into a place and people presume that he’s someone’s dad, or that he’s lost, or that he’s security. Do you know what I mean? Like what could possibly happen when this guy walks in. But just to see him wake up and approach his adviser just feels sort of like a pretty boring way to introduce this character.

When he meets Richard, who is his adviser, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to think about Richard. Richard seems to be both interested and not interested. He announces exposition. He says, “That’s right, Jack. Nice to meet you. I just wanted to touch base before the semester started. You’re our first student here on the G.I. Bill!”

What? No. No one says that. Ever. In the world. And nor would he want to touch base with him just because of that, especially because right after that it says, ”Richard doesn’t really care about what Jack is saying.”

So, it just seems like Richard is here for exposition. He’s Professor Exposition and it’s not working.

**John:** I agree. It’s not working. So my bigger macro concern isn’t really Richard. It’s Jack. Because Jack doesn’t feel like a guy who just spent eight years in the military. He feels like unfrozen Boy Scout. Like what I’m getting right now doesn’t feel like a person who has lived and done stuff. It feels like he’s just naïve in ways that you wouldn’t be if you served eight years in the military. So, you’ve seen some stuff if you’ve served eight years in the military. And so, yes, I think the general idea of a guy on the G.I. Bill going to an art college, that can be some good interesting tension. I buy that as a concept. And ultimately I assume this is a romantic comedy, so they will become a couple.

But this isn’t the right way for me to meet him and I’m nervous about how we’re setting up this character because I can sort of feel his arc and the thawing of his soul and I’m not loving it.

**Craig:** I agree with you. And another thing that always concerns me is when fish are out of water and seem to be really excited about it. You should be gasping for breath when you’re out of water. You don’t belong here. You want to get out of here. You didn’t want to be here in the first place. And the good news is you don’t have to stay. You’re only there for a week to do something. And then you get stuck, or you meet someone you fall in love with, or something.

But there’s no conflict inherent in the idea that he really, really wants to be there. So, I’m not sure where this goes. But I would say to Angelique that while these pages are laid out nicely and–

**John:** And they use Courier Prime which is a beautiful font.

**Craig:** Courier Prime, which as you know always butters John up. I think you need to go on cliché patrol. I think you need to go on exposition patrol. I think you need to really think about how you want to introduce characters. And you definitely, definitely want to manage information flow, because right now what you’re doing is you’re just kind of dumping information on us either through clunky dialogue or clunky action. But you’re not actually providing the filmmakers, whether it’s you or another person, with the tools that are required to convey this to the audience.

**John:** Yep. The last really small thing I want to point out is as Jack and Amy are introduced, “JACK (25), he’s a buzzcut military man but socially awkward,” so you can lose the pronoun for he and for she on this. When you’re introducing a character let them be their own noun. Let them carry the sentence. So, I just think you could lose the he’s and the she’s. Jack is a military buzz cut man, but socially awkward. Just let that be the thing. Don’t double up your noun and your pronoun.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can also drop the verb. Jack, 25, buzz cut military man. You don’t even need A. Buzz cut military man, socially awkward, endlessly curious. I like a nice bip-bip-boop. But yes, Amy, “she’s a feminist slacker.” It starts to feel a little bit like he – it’s like The Dating Game.

**John:** He’s a/She’s a. Yeah.

**Craig:** Exactly. Yeah. What’s next?

**John:** Let’s go to Yohannes Ashenafi. This is The Foster House Part 1, GPS. So, let me read a little summary of this. Mr. Kenny, 40s, is a raging hillbilly in every way. He’s driving recklessly while drinking a 12-pack PBR, Pabst Blue Ribbon, listening to a college ball game on the radio, and angrily trying to navigate through the Pocono Mountain backroads.

Toby, 17, with the brains of a genius but the accent and vocabulary of a hillbilly, is surrounded by his younger foster siblings watching a nature documentary on VHS. Hearing the screeching approach of the car the kids all jump, Toby signaling for them to keep quiet. Mr. Kenny enters in a rage, kicks the dog, meanwhile Toby warns the kids to stay quiet. Lucy, who is 11, wets her pants and asks him not to leave, but he must. And that’s the end of our three pages.

Craig, get us started at the Foster House.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not The Foster House. There’s about three different foster house movies in three pages, so let’s go through each one of those and maybe Yohannes can figure out which one he or – I guess it’s a he – wants to write. Because we have tonal problems throughout here.

Here’s what we have in the beginning. We have by the way a fairly well described scene where a goofy redneck weirdly in a neon blue Nissan, which already I was like, wait, what, OK but fine, is yelling at his radio because there’s a game going on and he obviously bet on it and it’s not working. That part was a bit cliché. And the radio broadcaster does not sound at all like a radio broadcaster. Sounds like movie radio broadcaster.

What I thought was really true to life was the way he started yelling, Mr. Kenny started yelling at the GPS navigator voice. That felt true and comical. Honestly comical. And then we go to at the same time this foster house where children are watching a nature documentary and they’re really excited by this and most of it is occupied by the narrator’s voice over for the documentary. And so the kids seem to really be enjoying this movie where animals kill each other, which is this whole other different vibe. And then things take a real hard turn once more when Mr. Kenny, who was presumably just a hapless goofy idiot who yells at GPS woman, comes home and now you realize, oh god no, he’s like Bill Sikes from Oliver and he’s going to beat or sexually assault them. And they’re terrified. I don’t know why they’re suddenly terrified. Because apparently they live with him all the time.

He kicks the dog which I got to tell you if you literally kick a dog on screen some people are just going to get up and walk out, FYI.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you actually kick a dog, without warning, with no warning. You can show violence towards animals as something that a cruel, terrible person does, or you’ll see in the case of Chernobyl something that soldiers are required to do and it’s very sad, but it is explained. But there’s this sudden shocking moment of really awful violence. And then we have Toby speaking in a very kind of cornball approximation of an Appalachian accent or something telling these kids to be quiet because he is going to essentially beat them up or something.

And one final bit of confusion, a little girl, 11, which is not little by the way. 11 years old they have iPhones and a bunch of them are vaping at this point, but fine. 11 years old, it says, “She has soiled herself.” Which one is that?

**John:** That’s a bad thing.

**Craig:** I didn’t want to know. And she says sorry to Toby, who is one of the older kids, “Please don’t leave us.” Why would he – he’s 17, he lives there, he’s their brother, their foster brother, where is he going?

**John:** So my hunch is that Toby has left the house and is probably living out in the woods and sort of watches over the kids. So, there’s a lot to unpack here.

Let’s start with our sort of marquee topic of simultaneity, which is part of the reason we picked these three pages.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** So hillbilly guy is driving back, the kids are watching a nature documentary. We sense that he’s probably headed towards them just because we’ve seen movies before. We know how movies work. But there was an opportunity here that if we were to intercut between the two of these a little bit more we could have a little bit more tension. If we really establish that he’s coming to them before they know he’s coming that is a possibility. I don’t know if it’s necessarily what we want, but it’s a possibility of escalating tension which could be good.

I agree with you that this sort of initial like he’s driving and he’s bet on the game, there’s too much, but I like sort of what it gets to. Where I wanted more is on page two, “Mr. Kenny slams on the breaks, the car fishtails to a stop. Fueled by petulant tantrum he trashes his car.” I want to know what trashes his car means.

**Craig:** Did he get a sledgehammer out?

**John:** But if you actually describe what that is, that is a really good revealing character moment. He’s just the kind of guy who beats up his car can be funny but it can also be really kind of terrifying. And it would be great to know that it crosses from funny to terrifying at this moment, because then I have a very different feeling about him coming into this house.

What you said about the dog, it drives me crazy. And so it’s not even about violence to animals, it’s just that, you know what, racist hillbillies, they love their dogs, too. And I think there’s a much better version of this scene where he’s this maniac but he still pets his dog or something. He doesn’t at least kick it. I think there’s something about that which is I just checked out of the movie because I didn’t believe that moment and I didn’t sort of want to keep going with it.

My probably biggest problem with these pages is there’s a bunch of foster kids. I have no idea how many. I don’t know what ages they are. I don’t know how many kids are in this scene. And that was frustrating to me. They’re not even uppercased when they appear. And so I don’t have a sense of am I looking at three kids, am I looking at ten kids. What is the nature of this scene we’re headed into? And if I don’t have those details I don’t know what to be anticipating.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is an unacceptable level of ambiguity. At the very least you need to know how many actors you’re hiring to put in a scene, if they’re children in particular, and people need to know the size of the family. Similarly, there’s just basic logic things. If this is the sort of guy that kicks his dog, the dog – this is what we have here, “His dog knowing no better comes running towards him bearing love.” No, dogs don’t do that to people that kick them in the face. They cower. You know, it’s just like stuff like that where it’s just – it feels like this is one of those things where we have a writer who wants to do things but doesn’t necessarily want to be accountable for them. I mean, even soiling themselves. Like now what? Are you going to just let her stand there in that? You know what I mean? You have to be accountable for everything.

**John:** So, I have no idea whether English is Yohannes’s native language or not. There were some things in here that made me believe that either it wasn’t carefully proofread or this is not sort of his first language. I would say that simple things like repeating hillbilly a lot doesn’t give me a lot of faith. You’ve got to be more specific. I think you can say hillbilly once. You can use it as a noun. Then you don’t get to use it as an adjective again. You have to be more specific about sort of what specific things we’re seeing.

So, Pabst Blue Ribbon, great. I buy it. That’s good. But you’re going to have to keep providing details that are not just hillbilly.

**Craig:** Agreed. One quick typo at the top of two. Mr. Kenny is yelling at the GPS woman but he refers to her as women, plural, but it is a woman.

**John:** It is a woman.

**Craig:** A woman. All right, well.

**John:** Great. Let’s do our third and final Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** This one is Token Genius, also a pilot. The title of this particular episode is Andre and Aggy and it is written by J. Gordon.

So, we begin with Andre Brown, 30s, black nerd, addressing an audience we do not see. And he’s there to tell them about what it is that he does. His research is to create humanity’s last invention. And he talks about how at some point technology is going to render human beings completely obsolete. You might as well just give up because the super intelligence that Andre is going to help create will kill all of the people on the planet in their sleep.

And then we reveal that he’s talking to a group of five year olds in kindergarten under a career day banner. And that ends our teaser. When we come back the students are watching an animated lesson, which is some sort of thing on the television about the body and the brain, and how the brain is sort of like a computer. And while that’s going on Andre is talking with the teacher, Janice, a young Jane Goodall sort, and she’s trying to explain to him that he didn’t quite exactly fit the bill of what career day was. And she points out he looks terrible. And he says, “Yeah, late nights.”

And the animated computer on the little video that they’re watching crushes a brain, a regular tiny cartoon human brain, and the video is over, and Andre is confused – or not confused. He understands they didn’t applaud because they didn’t get it. He knew they wouldn’t get it. And Janice reminds him that they’re five.

**John:** They’re five years old.

**Craig:** Those are our three pages, Token Genius.

**John:** I’ll start. So the simultaneity in this one is these kids are watching a presentation while the adults are having a conversation. And it works here. I believe that we can cut back and forth between the two of them. We can hear walla-walla while the adults are talking. Works great. And the two sides inform each other and that’s lovely.

I thought the writing was really great and also these pages just look really good. There’s just generous white space on the page. I was never sort of frightened to read stuff. What was bolded made sense. It all really invited me to sort of keep reading through it. And that’s worth a fair amount. I would keep going into this script because it was funny, because it was very specific, and I was curious sort of what else was going to be happening in this story.

I loved the description of Janice so much. So here’s the full description of Janice: “JANICE (30s) young Jane Goodall; frizzy bun, empathetic brows, counselor’s smile and speaks with the calm confidence earned after over a decade working with irrational creatures.” And that’s a very set up for her next line. There were a lot of really smart choices here and I really dug it.

Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** I’m a little harder on it than you. Although I do agree that the character descriptions were great and if you look at Andre’s black nerd is brilliant. Says a lot right there. And there’s a certain confidence to that. And then it says, “He cleans his thick lenses with the hem of his cardigan.” Well you know me. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. It’s my favorite. So we’ve got thick lenses. We’ve got the hem of a cardigan. We’ve got a frizzy bun. We’ve got empathetic brows. Love it. So I can see these people.

Here are my issues. First, this set up where the sort of crotchety, curmudgeonly scientist doesn’t understand that delivering some kind of anti-human scree to five year olds won’t work. That feels very broad. Broad to the point where I just think, OK, we’re not in real-ville at all. Because I don’t get it. And at the very end of it for a teaser definitely doesn’t work because we reveal that these kids are sitting there and then the last line says, “SPOOSH – a juice box EXPLODES in the back row and we…END TEASER.”

What? I don’t understand. Meaning like a kid squeezed down on something? But that’s not what they do. And even then it’s just not that funny. So the kind of set up is not – it just feels very clammy to me.

Second problem. I agree with you that the simultaneity that was handled really well. When we come back and they’re watching an animated lesson, first of all I’m like what’s this? So is this from him? Did he bring this? Maybe at the end of his little speech when he realizes he blew it he could say, “Maybe I should just show the video,” and Janice says, “Just show the video.”

When we see the video though it seems like the video is just reiterating the stuff he said, which is odd. And doing it now, again, it’s the same joke. Computers are going to kill us. And you just don’t want to repeat that vibe again. It just doesn’t quite move the ball forward. It just seems like we’re doing the same thing again. I’m not even sure why Janice is letting this continue.

I like the fact that J. Gordon allows me to determine that Janice and Andre have some kind of relationship without telling me that they do. I just get it. They know each other. I don’t know what that relationship is. If they’re friends, if they’re lovers, if they’re exes. Doesn’t matter. I just know that they know each other. And again at the end when Andre says, “No one clapped. I knew they wouldn’t get it.” “They’re five.” Dude, it’s like you’re just not a real person at that point. You know? You’re now repeating the thing from the beginning. Do you still not understand that they’re five? What?

So, it got clammy. It got broad. That part I thought was not great. But the general flow of things I agree with you is really good. The descriptions are good. I just would say to J. like, OK, you hit the broad one, now do better. You can do better. I can tell. Just be a little smarter about this and just presume that we’ve already seen this joke done this way on Nickelodeon and Disney Channel sitcoms. Don’t Zack and Cody me man, you know what I mean? Give me better, right?

Couple of big typo-y think-o things in here. Meet and greet he spells “meet and great.” That’s greet, not great. And there was another wacky one early on.

**John:** You should route for me to win?

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, root is R-O-O-T, not R-O-U-T-E.

**John:** There was also an its/it’s problem on page three.

**Craig:** There you go. These things matter.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk about the clamminess because, yes, that page one is a giant clam. And where I think you have to be really careful about it is it also feels like a cheat if you didn’t establish the background behind it in a way that could work for both what we’re supposed to think it is and the real thing. And so Crazy Rich Asians which is a movie I loved so much and saw it twice, one of the things it does really well quite early on is it establishes our heroine in the middle of a poker tournament or poker game and she’s against an opponent. And it’s a very dark space. And it looks like it could be some sort of backroom at a club or something. And then as the lights go up we see it’s a lecture hall. Is it a bit of cheat of a lecture hall? Sure. But we believe that it could possibly happen. And I want to make sure that in this script we believe that in that initial shot we can believe that we are in someplace like a Ted Talk or something and then it’s revealed that he’s actually talking to a bunch of kids.

So I want to make sure that that is a possibility. Maybe this doesn’t have to happen at the school also. Maybe there’s some other place where he could do the same presentation.

I also agree with you about the video. It’s like I think the idea of showing a video because it would be fun could be good, but like what was the video actually made for? And if the video was a sales presentation or some other thing that he’s just, well, it’s got animation and kids love animation, that may be a reason why we believe he’s showing it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You make such a good point. I mean, it did occur to me that if someone said to me you must direct this I wouldn’t know how. Because a kindergarten classroom isn’t like only a kindergarten classroom in one direction. There’s colorful baloney everywhere. That’s kind of the nature of it. And you could say, well, you could be really close on him. Not for an entire half a page of a monologue. It would become bizarre. And understand also, J. Gordon, the longer you are on somebody talking without showing who they’re talking to, the more people, with every passing second, more and more of your audience will go, oh, there’s going to be some sort of funny reveal or crazy reveal of who he’s talking to but it’s not who I think it is.

And by the time you get about halfway down the page that number goes to 100%. There’s literally nobody who doesn’t see it coming at this point. And then if you turn around and you see it’s a kindergarten classroom and they go, whoa, whoa, hold on, it wasn’t behind your head, now you’ve just cheated. So, it’s a clam and you actually cheated to do the clam, which is the worst clam.

**John:** Absolutely. It’s one of those bonus clam strips that you get at a second rate fast food seafood company.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s just batter. There’s not even a clam in it.

**John:** Just batter. There’s no clam inside.

**Craig:** Right. I actually like those.

**John:** Yeah, I do too. I kind of loved Sea Galley fried clams. I mean, it’s just fried fat. It’s delicious.

**Craig:** We just love fried.

**John:** Fried anything. Love it.

**Craig:** Fried. We love fried.

**John:** Tempura fried stuff. Tempura fried is delicious, but of course it’s just fried.

**Craig:** It’s just a different kind of fried.

**John:** It’s all good. So let’s recap what we learned from these pages. So we had examples of simultaneity, of parallel structure, of people in the same space experiencing different things. We had simultaneity of someone approaching and sort of the tension you can build from that.

I want to thank all three of these people for writing in with their Three Page Challenges. And basically everyone who has written in, because to pick these three Megan went through, god, like a 100 of these over the last couple of days to get these down. So thank you to everyone who sends those in. Thank you to these people for being so brave.

Megan did point out to me that she estimates that about 6% of the things she looked through were written by women. And so we’ve talked about this on previous episodes is we’ve gotten as high as like 30% I think in past years. So I don’t know why we’re down to 6% right now, but–

**Craig:** Wait, 6% of the submissions?

**John:** Of the submissions.

**Craig:** What is going on?

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on. But, at different times the ratio has been up to like 30%. And obviously, yes, sometimes people are using initials. Megan is Googling to see if she can figure out who these people are to see if they’re male or female or don’t identify as male or female. But we would just love to have some non-guys in here. So, if you are considering writing in this thing and you think like, oh, they never pick women. Yeah, we do pick women. We really do try to. So send those in.

**Craig:** Apparently wildly disproportionate to the submissions we get.

**John:** Anyway, we would love to have–

**Craig:** OK, so you know what? We should just say, you know what, for the next two months only women submit. Literally. That’s it. Just women. Because this is crazy. And it’s nothing against guys. It’s just that, OK, you’ve been getting kind of a free ride here off of the reluctance of women to send in script pages. Well, let’s just cut that out for a while. Just women, come on. We want to do this.

**John:** All right, so Craig, are we going to say that for Austin it’s only women? Or for the next ones we do in a non-live panel? Because I don’t want to sort of–

**Craig:** No, Austin is special. Austin is special.

**John:** So right now send in your three pages to Austin or to other stuff. There’s basically a tick box if you’re coming to Austin. But for the next one we’re doing just as a normal show, it’s going to be all women. So, we’re going to be looking for those submissions.

**Craig:** Yeah. So your odds of being selected have just skyrocketed. Maybe women aren’t sending these in because they realize that it’s just a terrible experience.

**John:** But I think it’s mostly a good experience. So we’ve done previous live shows where we had I think all three of the entrants were women. I don’t think that’s been the case. I hope it’s not the case.

**Craig:** You’re right. You’re right.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a video I watched on “How to Beat Any Escape Room,” by Mark Rober. And I thought it was pretty good. So I’ve done a bunch of escape rooms. You’ve done a bunch of escape rooms. I thought this guy’s advice he wasn’t an expert at all, but he went to talk to people who have done a bunch and people who design escape rooms and I think his basic advice makes a lot of sense. And so the first thing that Rober is going to tell you is that communication is key. You have to be speaking aloud about the things you’re finding and also crucially what inputs you need to solve a problem. So make sure that everybody in the room understands what you’re trying to do.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** A thing that Mike pointed out, which I’m glad to see this video points out, is you need to clean up after yourself. And so once something is done, find a place to put all the stuff that’s finished because you will waste so much time picking up a thing, a puzzle, that’s actually already solved. And so there are these kind of suggestions, but also other suggestions in here. So if you’re interested in escape rooms I think this would probably help you.

**Craig:** I’ll watch that. I mean, I did escape rooms in Lithuania.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** I did escape rooms in Latvia. How about that?

**John:** I’ve never done a Latvian escape room.

**Craig:** It was quite good.

**John:** It’s just a hotel room.

**Craig:** It’s called Latvia. No, I like Latvia quite a bit. The bit of advice I always give people beyond I mean the things that you said are absolutely true. I mean, communication is always the big one. But I always say to people ask yourself what could pair with this. Because it’s very rare for any escape room to give you a self-contained puzzle. Like here’s a lock and the stuff around it will answer the answer of the lock. No. It’s going to be something somewhere else that you’re going to have to go, oh wait, that plays back to this. So think about an escape room as a series of pairs of things. And puzzles are in pairs. And if you can figure out what the pairs are a lot of times you’re well ahead of the game.

**John:** My other bit of advice which is not covered in this video, but understanding how to do tangrams is genuinely useful for many escape room situations which are those – like how you arrange the pieces, the little triangle pieces and things to fit into puzzles. I’ve seen that in multiple cases in multiple places. So knowing how to do that will save you some time.

**Craig:** That is literally an automatic minus star for me. Because I just – tangrams, it’s just a waste of time. It’s busy work. It’s a busy work puzzle. It requires no insight. It’s just sort of doing it. So I don’t like it when they do stuff like that. I much prefer the insight.

**John:** I guess the other problem with the tangrams is that like really only one person can do it at a time. And so there’s no teamwork.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s like, oh, let’s put that guy – just randomly start mushing these triangles around until you find. I think it’s lazy. I don’t like the tangrams. There was a tangram in one of the Escape LA rooms which I think you were saying they were converting to a different room which it was their worst room by far I thought. The cavern.

My One Cool Thing this week, I mean, you know I’ll go on and on. If I could make 1Password my One Cool Thing every week I would. But what I really love is the combination with – so in iOS 12 they now, you know, it was a big thing when they allowed you to use the share functionality to kind of go over to another app, get something, and pipe it into a thing. But now you can literally – and it’s with a bunch of different password managers – when you are on a field on your iPad or your iPhone and you need to fill in account information and you put the cursor in that thing it will bring up your keyboard. But above your keyboard it already says something like, hey, do you want to pull in your information on this website from 1Password. And you hit that and off you go.

**John:** Bloop bloop.

**Craig:** So it’s just getting much, much faster and zippier. I really like iOS 12. I think there’s a lot of cool stuff.

**John:** Yeah. One of the new features that’s in Mohave I think is it’ll show you all of the saved passwords you have for various things and it will put little yellow triangles if you’ve repeated a password for multiple sites. And it’s a very useful way of thinking like, oh, shoot, I should not actually be using the same password on multiple sites. And so you can see which ones you’ve done and then change them on those sites.

So, credit to Apple and to everyone else working on the problem of passwords.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re trying. 1Password has something called Watchtower where it will both analyze all of your passwords to make sure that they’re not weak or even just good but strong, and they’ll also reference everything against the Have I Been Pwned database to say, oh you know what, you need to change this one because there’s some evidence that there was a hack and some of that information might have gotten out.

**John:** We got an email in here that said like, oh, this was your password for this and I have evidence of you doing these terrible things and it was because of just one of those LinkedIn kind of password things that got broken years ago. And so it’s scary when you get an email that says like your password is this. And it’s like, yeah, but you know what because I use a different password for every site I know exactly which one that was and, nope, you’re just a scammer.

**Craig:** Yes. If anybody sends me your password is this, it’s just going to be a big long string of garbage. What do I care?

**John:** You don’t care.

**Craig:** I don’t care man. I don’t know my passwords to anything.

**John:** All right. This is our show. And our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. 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, longer questions are great there.

Short questions are great on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. While you’re there leave us a review. That helps people find the show. You’ll find transcripts for this show and all shows at johnaugust.com. If you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, that’s where you submit your entry to the Three Page Challenge.

You can find all the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. That’s also where you can sign up to be a premium subscriber. And those premium subscribers, well, you need to send in your questions. And so there’s a special link in the show notes where you send those questions and it shows up a little Google form and it’s great. And we will be doing an episode with just those questions pretty darn soon.

Craig, a pleasure.

**Craig:** As always.

**John:** And have a great week.

**Craig:** See you next time.

**John:** Bye.

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