Scriptnotes Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/the-one-with-the-indie-producer).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is Scriptnotes. It’s a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig is off in Europe working on Chernobyl. Luckily we have a guest who is more than his equal. Keith Calder is an indie film producer with credits ranging from You’re Next, to Blair Watch, to Charlie Kaufman’s animated Anomalisa. His new film, Blindspotting, debuted at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival where it was purchased by Lionsgate. It comes out this summer. Keith Calder, welcome to the show.

**Keith Calder:** Thank you for having me.

**John:** So when Craig is gone I love to have a guest on who knows about things that Craig and I don’t know about. And I really don’t know very much about indie film. So, I have worked at the Sundance Labs helping out projects that are going into production. I had a movie that came out at Sundance, The Nines, but that was 10 years ago. And I feel like indie film changes a lot year-by-year. So, I’d love to talk about sort of the state of indie film right now. And a lot of our listeners are people who are trying to put together movies, and I want to know what that’s like. So, I think you might be the person to help us out.

**Keith:** I can try. [laughs]

**John:** What do you actually do as an independent film producer? What is your day-to-day life in trying to put together movies?

**Keith:** You know, it’s interesting, because it’s a question that gets asked a lot is “What does a producer do?” I get asked it even on the sets where I’m doing my job and people still don’t know what it is. And I think it’s a hard question to really even define. The more – I think I used to have a bunch of glib answers and a lot of kind of easy quick responses. And the more I’ve done it the more I realize how useless most of those are. So, I’ll try to give a more complete answer.

The simplest is I think you sort of have to separate the concept of the credit of the producer from the job of the producer. The credit of the producer could go to really almost anyone. It could go to someone who was friends with the writer. It could go to someone who knew that an actor might have been looking for a certain piece of material. It could go to someone who just has some money that they want to put into a movie. Or it could go to someone who is doing the more full set of jobs that is a producer.

Or it could go to someone who is actively trying to sabotage your movie. They just end up with a credit anyway.

**John:** Let’s go through the range of those possibilities. And first of all we’ll talk about what kind of producer are you mostly? Are you a producer who is on set every day getting the shots, making sure that the movie happens? Are you the person who finds financing? What is your role in the movies I have described?

**Keith:** I think traditionally I’m a – first of all, I would say I work with a producing partner who is my wife, Jess, and we’ve worked together on almost all the movies we’ve made. So to a certain degree when I’m answering, what I’m really answering is how we as a unit work. But I would say that predominately we’re a beginning to ending producer. We’re there from often concept through to marketing campaign. And that means being in the room for casting sessions. It means being there, deciding who the director is. It means being on set with usually one of us at the monitor all the time and the other one, if not at the monitor then kind of preparing for the challenges of what’s coming up later in the day or the week or the rest of the shoot.

What I would say is that as I’ve grown as a producer I’ve come to realize that that’s not necessarily always the right answer. Like I think that a lot more of what I do now is I do what the job requires. And I think on some films it means you have to be there for everything. And some films you actually shouldn’t be there for everything. There’s other people that can make those decisions and be there. And that your job is choosing when to actually step in and when not to step in.

**John:** Absolutely. So on projects where you are the producer from beginning to end, so this is a thing where you have found either the filmmaker or you found the script and here is a nascent idea for a movie and you’re the person who gets it to the next step. Talk about what that part of the process is like. Because so often what Craig and I are talking about – so in the background you’re going to hear my dog whining. This is Lambert, my dog, who is the best dog. But he’s very excited to have a guest in the office. So if you hear some whining in the background that’s Lambert.

**Keith:** It was very kind of you to excuse my horrible whining sounds that I make by blaming them on your dog.

**John:** Exactly. Always blame the dog for the farting noises and everything else.

Usually when Craig and I are talking about putting a movie together we’re talking about there’s a pitch and you’re going in, you’re pitching to a producer, then you’re pitching to a studio. And there’s a whole sense of “this is how movies get made.” But it’s a very different process that you’re describing. Most of the movies that you’ve made, what is the process of – is it a filmmaker first? Is it a script first? What is the thing that got that project to come together?

**Keith:** I think it’s different with every project. I think I’ve come to realize that each film takes its own path. I will say that for me and for Jess a lot of the things that we’ve made started with us identifying talent that we wanted to work with. And then building a film from there. So in the case of our most recent film, Blindspotting, it is one way the most typical version of how we would make a film, and in other ways completely atypical.

About 10 years ago Jess and I decided we wanted to make a movie based on the world of spoken word poetry. And so we started watching a lot of Def Poetry Jam and watching a lot of poets on YouTube, and finding whatever we could. And we found this young poet, Rafael Casal, who is based up in the Bay who had appeared on Def Poetry Jam a couple times. Jess reached out to him I think via YouTube and just said, “Hey, have you ever thought of making a movie? We feel like you could write a movie or star in a movie.”

We flew up there, met with him, and he’s like, “Well, I love movies but I don’t know anything about it whatsoever.” We then spent really nine years working with him and then meeting his friend, Daveed Diggs, and developing a film from scratch that they wrote, starred in, and produced with us. But it was really from us identifying a type of movie that we wanted to do. And then finding the right collaborators, and then building it from the ground up from there.

I mean, I say building, really they did most of the building. They were writing the script. But we were sort of helping them figure that out the whole time.

**John:** Great. So you identified an area. There’s a movie to be made in this world.

**Keith:** Yeah.

**John:** Who might be the person to make that movie? And then you sort of nurtured them along the way.

**Keith:** Exactly. So that’s a good case there. And then I think with You’re Next was a movie where we had produced a few horror movies, and it was a genre that we liked working in. But we found it really hard finding projects, like films that were horror movies but also had an interesting voice or something to say. Or something that separated them from the rest of low budget horror.

And we had a film doing the festival circuit the same time that Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett had A Horrible Way to Die. And a few friends said, oh, you guys should really meet because I think you’d work well together. We finally grabbed dinner and started talking about movies. And the four of us all really hit it off.

And Simon mentioned that they were working on a home invasion movie, and we kind of spent the rest of the dinner talking about a lot of what we all considered the problems with that genre and kind of how those problems could be opportunities if you approached it the right way. And I think within two months Simon had a script that he sent us that we liked and we immediately signed on to produce it and put it together. And we were shooting it in the spring. And that was the first of three movies we’ve made with Adam and Simon. And I think that, yeah, it was about the person first for us, and then the idea, the sort of what the movie could be. And then just a lot of conversations about how you go from idea to execution.

**John:** Absolutely. So in the case of You’re Next, which I thought was terrific, and it was a very smart exploration of the home invasion genre and sort of what that’s like. Basically really question the motivations of why these characters are doing what they’re doing. You have a script now. So you have a filmmaker you like. You’ve seen the thing that he’s made before. You have a script you like. What is the next step in figuring out where we shoot this thing, how we do this thing? And while you’re figuring out how you’re making it are you also planning how it gets released? What the venues are for it getting out there in the world?

**Keith:** Yeah, I mean, You’re Next is an interesting case study for this, because we knew we wanted to do it. Simon and Adam were coming off of making a movie for I think about $100,000 and they wanted a step up in budget. We had had some experience in making movies in that sort of $500,000 to $1 million range, which is in a way a really huge range, but also a very small range. So it was kind of figuring out where in that range the movie made sense to do it.

Adam and Simon had worked on A Horrible Way to Die in Missouri, and so they were really excited about the idea of going back to Missouri to make You’re Next. So the location was kind of figured out in a grand sense from that. Like we knew we wanted to go to Missouri to shoot this movie.

The actual location of the house was something we found literally a week before we started production. It’s not like we had a specific place where it was going to happen. In terms of building it, we had the script. We started casting. We brought on a foreign sales company, Hanway, which is the company we had a relationship with from prior movies. Hanway started selling the film off the script, and I think before we started production we decided we just wanted to try to sell one major international territory. And then kind of take risk for the rest of the equity on the film. And so we sold the UK I think for about half the budget, which is really unheard of. And once we did that we were like, “Oh OK, we’re fine, we’ll just go make the movie. Keep the rest of the world as upside and know we’ve kind of covered half the cost out of the UK.”

And our goal was very much to shoot the movie in the spring. To have it ready to bring to Toronto to premiere at the Midnight Madness section of the Toronto International Film Festival, which I view as one of the top places to launch a low budget horror movie. And luckily for us Toronto saw the movie, and liked it, and accepted it. And so it was definitely a case of we had a plan for each step and it all went according to plan. But to a certain degree those plans are ludicrous. Like it’s nonsense to assume you’re going to sell half your budget from one territory. It’s nonsense to assume that your film is going to get into the exact festival and the exact thing you want. And then it’s going to sell to the one distributor that you think is probably the best distributor for it.

And I think it’s easy to look at the success stories and say, “Oh, that’s the path.” It’s only the path because it was successful. If we hadn’t taken that path, we would have had to find some other way to have the movie find success.

**John:** Absolutely. So I want to go back and define some terms, just because people may not know some of the things that you’re talking about. So when you say equity, so basically this is money that you had found. That you had/you found. Basically it’s money that you could write a check for or have somebody to write a check for for making the movie. So, in a small budget, in this case it was half of that. But other times you might write the whole thing and sell stuff later on. There’s many ways of finding the money to make the movie the first time.

**Keith:** Yeah. I would say the thing that makes it hard for people to learn too many lessons from our path is that we have financing. So we can put our own money into films at this point. So a lot of the more traditional independent film producers and model are about finding other people to put money into the film. For us it’s much more about feeling comfortable with where we’re putting our equity in. And if we’re making bigger movies it’s finding other partners or finding ways to justify it.

You know, the truth is with independent film even if you do have financing it’s a hard business to stay in business in because the nature of it is that most films don’t succeed. And if you’re a studio, most films not succeeding means that you recoup half the budget. In independent film, the film not succeeding means no one ever buys it. It never gets seen by anyone. And you recoup nothing. So it’s a high risk/low reward business, so kind of the worst of them all.

**John:** Yeah. Good choice of career here for you.

**Keith:** Yeah.

**John:** Just to define other terms. So you talk about foreign sales, or foreign presales, or foreign sales. And so classically most indie movies back 10 years ago when I was doing The Nines, either you would – based on the script, the director, and the cast you would go to international markets and say like, “OK, I have this movie that stars these actors, it’s this budget, it’s this thing. Here is a mock poster for it. Will you give us a certain amount of money for France, a certain amount of money for the UK?” And hopefully you get some people bidding against each other. You raise enough money from those people essentially saying “We promise to buy your movie when it’s done” that you’re able to then go back and get financing in order to do it.

So, essentially you have a commitment that they’re going to buy it when the movie is completed and then you go and get a bank loan essentially, a special kind of bank loan, to make the movie. Is that still the common model? Because I feel like in the last 10 years with the rise of streaming, with the rise of other sort of distribution platforms that may not be as crucial. And also some budgets, just because of technology and other things, some budgets have come down a lot lower. So, what are the models right now for making a movie?

**Keith:** I mean, it’s definitely the Wild West now. I think that what you described was the dominant model for, I’d say, pretty much from maybe the late ‘80s through to maybe six or seven years ago. And I think it still exists. There’s still a lot of independent films that get financed off of the foreign presales model where you use that to kind of fill in the gaps. And you put it together that way. I think more and more it’s a hard model to make work, because a lot of foreign distributors are struggling in their own territories to kind of make their businesses work. They aren’t being as aggressive on pre-buying most movies. The sort of star value system is in a different place than it was in the past. Like I think there’s a view that a lot of stars that used to be bankable just on their own now are maybe bankable with other stars, or bankable within certain types of intellectual property. Or bankable within certain genres. Or bankable if you are also spending $20 million on P&A. So it’s less of a given that you can kind of raise money off of a package.

The other side of it is that the market for films now a lot of time are driven by worldwide buyers and the foreign sales model can really hurt the chances of a film when you do that. So Netflix for example is a big buyer of movies now. They’re not super excited about buying a film that already has a lot of foreign territory sold off in advance, because they want the entire world. Same is true for Amazon. Same is true for even some of the traditional distributors like a Fox Searchlight. They kind of want to have the world when they’re buying a movie.

There’s definitely a weird chicken or the egg problem there because you sometimes need to try to sell those rights to finance the movie, but then you also are expected to retain those rights to sell the movie later.

**John:** The situation I find even sort of more frustrating and dispiriting is when you see a movie that’s gotten made that’s not perfect but there’s something promising there, and they clearly have not thought about distribution at all. And so I’ve gone into 20 screenings where I see this film and it’s like “This film is good and it’s interesting and it’s promising, but there’s a very good chance that no one will ever see this film because it will never get released in a meaningful way.” And that’s the real heartbreak is that when people come to me saying like, “Oh, I was thinking maybe I’ll just raise some money and do this myself.” I want to be encouraging because you want them to be that sort of one thing that breaks out that gets that big attention, but it might not be that thing that breaks out. And they could have spent all of their life savings trying to make this movie that no one will ever see. So, figuring out like what the overall plan or strategy is for distribution feels so crucial at an early stage.

Not only what is this thing that you’re trying to make but how will people see this thing you’re trying to make.

**Keith:** I completely agree. It’s interesting because I think a lot of people, when they’re approaching independent film, are looking at the movies that exist in the marketplace, meaning like things you can just watch on TV or in theaters or on Netflix, and their assumption is, “Well, if I make a movie that’s better than the worst of those then that means I will get to be released in those same ways.”

**John:** The plus one fallacy.

**Keith:** Yeah. And it’s the same thing that happens with people writing spec screenplays. They look at the movies onscreen and they say, “Well, if I write a script that’s better than the worst of them then that means that I will be able to succeed.” And it’s just not the way that the world works. And I think that one of the key things to realize is that most of the movies that you see in the world are movies made by companies that already own their own distribution system. And the nature of that is that they will always rather release the worst movie they’ve made than the best movie you’ve made. It’s just fundamentally the nature of their business is that they need to try to return money on their bad movies over making you money on your good movies.

I would agree with you. I would be very cautious to advise anyone to go out and try to make an independent film. I think it’s a tricky business, and it’s a tricky creative path to take. That said, sometimes it’s the only way you can make a movie and sometimes for certain types of movies it’s the only way they would ever be made. And I think that the models that we kind of touched on a little bit, but the other models for making independent films these days are really relying on soft money, which is when I say soft money that usually means tax incentives. In Europe or Australia or certain other parts of the world they have heavy arts funding bodies where you can kind of get big chunks of your budget that way. And independent film financiers that are looking for different returns than just financial returns. Like there are definitely people that are putting money into movies because they want to support the arts, or because they want to – for the more callous reasons is that they want to hang out with famous people and things like that.

I’m not saying that I wouldn’t advise that. That’s what people do. But sometimes that is the source of money you need to get your movie made.

**John:** So let’s talk about a hypothetical filmmaker who has a script that’s in a genre that they know the genre, it’s a pretty good script. It feels like a movie that should be made independently. It’s fairly low budget. It’s the next Adam and Simon.

So, if Adam and Simon were to come up today, what would your recommendation be for their next steps? Should they shoot a short that’s a proof of concept? What would be the way to get their movie made, whether it’s You’re Next or their movie before that? What would you recommend that they do?

**Keith:** I think the key advice I would give anyone is when you’re starting out make things as cheaply as possible. I just think that there is a path for just making things so cheaply that the minimal value that most independent films get can still help you recoup your budget. And I think that that’s a path that I think the Duplass brothers took really well and I think it will always be a path. There’s always going to be an appetite for movies of a certain sort. And if you can achieve quality with very low budget I think you can find a path within independent film.

I think a lot of it is about deciding where you want your career to be and what type of filmmaker, either as a writer or as a director, or any aspect of filmmaking. You want your path to be. I think that if you’re looking at what you hope to do and it’s Marvel movies or Bond movies or just movies that require a lot of money to go do, I’m not convinced that the independent film path is the best path there right now. Even though a lot of the studios have been hiring independent filmmakers, it’s a lottery ticket path rather than like actually doing things that show you can do the work to get there.

**John:** So your hunch for going down the Marvel path or the James Bond path would be through screenwriting, though visual effects, like how would you recommend that person get to the big prize of making those things?

**Keith:** My advice is always that your path to success is to do the things that you’re the best at. And I think a lot of time the things that you’re the best at are the things that you have the most passion for. And I think those are the two areas I would always recommend people focus on. I think that it’s more likely that a fantastic amazing stunt coordinator is going to get hired to direct a big movie than someone who has made another big movie really badly. Like I just don’t think that – it’s an industry where you get over-rewarded for things that you do really well. And I think that those are the things that you need to focus on.

I think it was Guillermo del Toro said that all of the things that are flaws about you when you start doing well just become your voice. And when you’re not doing well they’re all the things people point out as problems.

**John:** Yes.

**Keith:** And I think if you focus on all the things that you do great, then all the things you don’t do great you either figure out how to get around or you they just become part of your voice.

**John:** That’s great. So, let’s talk about, when I was doing The Nines, a big push at that point was that you had to – you really wanted a deal that guaranteed theatrical release. And if you didn’t get your hand stamped in theaters that was a real mark against you both for the value down the road in home video, but just as a filmmaker you wanted to have that theatrical release. Do you still see that as being such a crucial thing for a movie that’s coming out of a festival right now? Like Blindspotting is going to have a theatrical release, but if Netflix had come to you and said we’re going to buy it for more money and we’re going to promote it a certain way, would that matter to you?

**Keith:** To me, yeah, it probably would still matter to me, if I’m being honest. I mean, part of that is that I’m what I view from a sort of in-between generation of people that kind of grew up with Netflix as their primary form of entertainment and people who grew up with theatrical film experience. If Netflix were offering a lot more money and that meant that our financing was recouped and that it had a higher profile in the world then yeah, for sure, I would go that path.

But I do think you have to kind of compare these things realistically. So I think that a lot of the time people will overvalue the theatrical release because they’re imagining that the film will break out in some massive way. And the truth is that very rarely happens. So I do think that you have to be fiscally responsible. Like you shouldn’t go with the theatrical distributor that is paying you nothing over a non-traditional or what is it, I guess, online release or something like that where you are actually able to recoup your investment and get your film out there and seen by a lot of people.

**John:** Yeah. The question of like “seen by a lot of people” is such a weird thing with streaming because obviously anybody who looks at Netflix, you scroll through and you see like what are all these movies. What are all these things? Who could watch all these things? But living in Los Angeles you actually drive by billboards for all of these different limited series and movies and I’m halfway convinced that some of them don’t actually exist. That like if somebody actually looks for them, then they’ll go off and make them, but they’re just trial balloons for things because it’s a giant expensive billboard for something like I don’t know what that is. I’ve never heard of this thing. And yet somehow you made this thing. We’re in a very strange time.

I feel like all the extra money being thrown into that system is leading to some really weird choices. And obviously people are – you know, it’s production that’s happening, which is great. But if I were that person with that billboard I would be excited but I would also really be wondering is anyone actually going to see this thing that I’ve spent years of my life making.

**Keith:** I’m always curious about those billboards in LA. But I feel like part of it is just about these streaming platforms proving to the rest of the industry that they’re legitimate and big and promoting their movies. And I think it’s so much of the billboard – the billboard game in LA seems to be about advertising within the film industry rather than advertising to consumers. It’s an odd sort of ego game more than anything else.

**John:** Yeah.

**Keith:** You can also see that – I know that studios will buy billboards near the actors in their movies so they feel like they’re spending money on the movie. And I think the same thing happens where Netflix are buying billboards based on reminding certain production companies that “Hey you should come sell your thing to Netflix” and things like that.

**John:** That’s very true. We got a question in from a listener and I thought – I already emailed it back because I actually know the person, but I thought I’d read it and get your take on it because this is sort of your wheelhouse. And it’s about a decision of life kind of moment.

So he writes, “After working for a reality TV company for over two years I was just laid off. With a downturn in show production came downsizing, and it turns out I was more expandable than I thought. Stressful, but I’m realizing that I have basically unlimited possibilities in deciding what’s next for me. I’m unmarried, no financial dependents except for a low maintenance dog. I’m not tied to any geographical location or job. And the world is essentially my oyster.

“If anything, I see this as an opportunity to take steps towards big picture career goals: writing and directing features or writing and producing television is the real goal here. In the moments of calm self-reflection that I’ve been able to find between bouts of panic, two distinct potential next moves have clarified for me.

Option one: I focus all my energy on making a feature film directorial debut. I drive Uber, work part-time, sell myself to extras casting to make ends meet while giving myself the flexibility and time to develop, write, and put together an achievable indie feature film. It’s hella ambitious, but I still have a lot of connections in my non-LA places to crew something like that up for a non-union low budget feature within the next year or three.

“Option two: I still work on my own projects in my spare time but stay working in the industry. Jump to the bottom of a more useful ladder, such as a PA or assistant in the lands of scripted television or features and then work my way up.”

Keith Calder, so these are two very different paths and they’re sort of what you were describing. That sense of like do you go off and make the independent film or do you try to work a more normal path and inch your way up? What would you want to talk to David about?

**Keith:** I think that my main advice for David, not knowing anything beyond his scenario from what he’s kind of outlined here, is that I don’t think you should view these paths as mutually exclusive. I think that writing is something that as long as you have time within your day you can set aside a large enough portion that you can focus on it. You can do really no matter what else you’re doing, especially when you don’t have kids and you don’t have other draws on your free time. So I think that if he wants to write I think that’s something he can do while he’s still supporting himself financially with an income of some sort.

I also think that when you’re trying to make a film, especially a micro-budget independent film, you need to have resources other than money. And those resources are a crew base that are from people that you know or that you have worked with or that you have mutual fondness of film together. And I think that you build that by working within film or working on other people’s films or doing things like that. I think that there’s a danger to think of this as, “Oh, my path to making movies is to silo myself.” And I actually think for most people your path to making movies is to surround yourself by other people that are making movies.

So, I would advise that, if he wants to take the path of writing and potentially directing and making an independent feature, I think that it’s something that while he’s writing it he can be building a crew base by going out there and PA-ing and working on other people’s independent films or on short films or whatever it is. And I think you build the team that you then use to go make your micro-budget film.

**John:** I think that’s the right advice. When I was writing back to him I said, I first off asked does he have that project that he’s passionate about. Whether it’s written or not written, you have to have that thing like you’re going to wake up every morning saying like “Hell or high water I’m going to make this thing.” And figuring out what that is is a crucial first step.

And so to put everything else aside, to write this thing which you don’t know what it is yet, feels like a mistake. But I really agree with you. You have to find who your group is. Who your core people is you can collaborate. Because so much of making a movie is essentially entrepreneurial. You’re basically figuring out how to do all that stuff. And if you’re figuring out how to make a movie and how to sell a movie and how to cast a movie and how to do all of these things for the very first time, you’re not going to be great at all of those things. So you need to witness the process through other people. And so you’ll learn about how to physically shoot something by physically shooting some things. That means crewing on some other people’s films. Not just little student university shorts, but some bigger things. Seeing the ups and the downs. And then make your own stuff and sort of work your way up through.

On any crew you’re going to be able to pick three or four people who are like, “Oh, they’re great. They really know what they’re doing.” Help them out and get them to help you out and sort of rise up together. Because you see even the people who have gone through to do the bigger studio features, people who have done Star Wars, they tend to still bring along some of their indie film people because those are the people who are really smart that they trust, but who also have a vision who can do a thing that other folks can’t. So, I’m urging David to spend these next couple of years finding those people and finding that place rather than try to do the lottery ticket where I’m going to write the one thing that’s going to breakout and everything is going to change.

There’s a thing, you know, a term called “silent evidence” where we only see the successes and we sort of miss all the things that fail. And I feel like it would be helpful for people to go to a second or third tier film festival and see all the movies and then follow up on like what actually happened to those movies. And some of them you’re going to love and some of them you’re not going to love, but most of those movies are not going to find a home anywhere. And yet each of those filmmakers had spent years of their life trying to make that thing. And so recognize what a gamble you’re making by sort of putting everything into just one thing.

**Keith:** And to think about those second tier, like those mid-level tier film festival, are still rejecting other movies that don’t even get into that festival. So, yeah, it’s absolutely true. I think independent film and film and entertainment in general is dominated by success. And I think that that success is all that’s visible. And it’s easy to get caught up in the idea that the lower tier of the things that are successful is the lower tier of everything. And it’s just not true. You’re just seeing the top 1% of what’s being made. And you’re looking at the bottom of that top 1%.

**John:** Yeah. It’s crazy.

Starting to talk about film festivals, how important are film festivals for an indie film that’s coming out right now? Theoretically you would have finished – like a movie like Blindspotting – you would have finished it. You would know what it was like. Why go to Sundance to debut it rather than just like you know who the distributors are. You could’ve just had a screening and invited them to come. What’s the decision process there?

**Keith:** You know, it’s interesting. I think there’s a few key festivals that are really, really important to trying to sell an independent film. There are festivals that are wonderful for exposing audiences to independent cinema and for building great relationships and things like that, but I do think there’s a few that are really markets for selling finished films in a way that still provides a lot of value. And I think Sundance is near the top of that list. And there’s a huge variety of reasons. Things that you can read about and I’ve thought about a lot over the years.

I think the key ones are just the decision makers are actually all watching your movie at the same time. And are aware that they probably have to make a decision quickly. I think those two things lead to being able to sell an independent film and create not necessarily a bidding situation but the idea that there’s an understanding that this film will probably get distribution within the festival or shortly after the festival if it’s a commercial movie that people recognize that side of it.

I think other festivals it’s really hard to do that just because honestly the distributors don’t go. So you can go to an even just slightly tier below Sundance and have an amazing screening, and it doesn’t have that same benefit because the decision makers aren’t in the room. Maybe the junior people below them are and they can kind of say, “Oh, it was good, you should watch it at some point.” It just doesn’t have the same environment that I think Sundance and Cannes and Toronto and a few of these other film festivals will have.

So I would always – if you have an independent film that doesn’t have distribution, I think it’s always worth targeting the biggest film festivals that you can. You can do your research and see which films have launched out of which film festivals and sort of start to get a path saying that, “OK, my film is like these types of films that did really well at this festival. That’s probably a good festival to premiere at.”

**John:** So, when we were doing The Nines one of the crucial things we had to have was a PR/marketing company who would plan the festival basically with us. Basically so we could go in with a message and this is how we are going to communicate. These are all the different media venues we’re going to talk to. Is that still a thing? Is that still a crucial aspect of this early part of the process?

**Keith:** If we have a film that’s premiering at Sundance or Toronto, which are really the two main festivals we’ve had films at as premieres, the two things that I would make sure that we have are a festival publicist that is just handling all of the PR requirements for that festival. And a sales agent, whether that’s a foreign sales agent or domestic sales agent.

I think that if you’re trying to sell a film at a festival, especially at a major festival, those are two very important elements. The sales agent especially if you’re making your first movie. You don’t know how to, A, manage the sort of market process of getting distributors to show up to the screening. But certainly you don’t know how to manage the process of handling proposals and how to counter the proposals and when and when to have filmmaker meetings and when not to have filmmaker meetings. And there’s a whole rigmarole to selling a movie at a festival that you just won’t know how it works on your first movie or probably your second movie either.

And then with the publicist, there’s a lot of things that you can do as a savvy producer to help promote your movie, but the publicist will have a better sense of how to target it towards critics. Which critics to get into which screenings. A lot of times they’ll be helpful thinking about sales strategy. But they’ll also give you good advice on what not to do. So there’s simple things that I would advise filmmakers not to do when premiering a film at a large festival. And a lot of those things go against what the festival is encouraging you to do. So I think that you don’t want to release a ton of still images. I think you usually would want to release one, maybe two, and I don’t think you should be putting up your own trailer and your own promo. I don’t think you should be releasing clips for the movie.

And really all the things that on the surface seem like really logical things to promote your movie I would advise against.

**John:** Why?

**Keith:** I think that if you have a movie that has anticipation, where either it seems like it’s a commercially-minded movie or it seems like it’s the launch of a really interesting filmmaker or interesting acting talent and you have a good screening slot in the festival, I think you have to have confidence in your movie and confidence in the festival that you’re in that people will want to come see it. And I think that the more materials you release the more you’re potentially seeming desperate, which I think doesn’t help the market around your movie. And I think the more that you are putting out into the world things that your eventual distributor will regret that you’ve put out into the world.

Almost every time I’ve worked with a really great distributor it’s something they’ve brought up is that they’re really thankful that we didn’t have some trailer that we cut in-house and put out there because as – I mean, as I think everyone knows now, once something is online it’s just forever. And so suddenly anytime anyone wants to see what’s going on with that movie they’re opening the trailer that you did your best intentions to do a good job cutting a trailer for, but it’s just not what a studio would use to sell your movie.

**John:** You’re going to show up with some sort of one sheet, some sort of art work that can represent it on a board but it won’t be the final artwork.

**Keith:** If that. If that.

**John:** So you wouldn’t even do that?

**Keith:** We do do that, but we only do it if we’re doing it properly. So, I mean, we’ll use poster vendors and we’ll go through the process and get a lot of comps and kind of really make sure that either it’s a really strong poster or something that could not be considered anything other than a teaser image. I think that your strongest step forward at a festival is purely non-traditional marketing, or very teaser-based marketing that don’t reveal much about your movie.

I think that the more you reveal about your movie before it plays at the festival, the more that you’re either elevating anticipation to the point that you’re setting expectations differently from what you want them to be, or that you’re giving distributors a reason to pass on your movie. I think that a trailer that doesn’t fit how they would sell a movie or a poster that doesn’t fit how they would sell a movie is a strike in their heads against your movie.

**John:** All right. So all this advice that you’re giving are things that a first time writer-director is not going to know going into this. So it feels like that writer-director wants to have someone like you, an experienced producer who has done this kind of thing before. How would you recommend that writer-director find the producer who might be the right person to do this movie, or to do all these parts of the job, but especially this part of the job which is so different?

**Keith:** I think that if you’re making a low-budget independent film, especially if like your friend David, like if he’s making a movie that’s really a micro-budget movie where it’s a group of friends coming together to make a movie, I don’t think you need to have a producer like me where I have a bunch of experience at festivals and things like that. But I do think that’s where you want to have a good sales agent and you want to have a good publicist.

I think that you can find someone like me to give advice. I mean, every year at Sundance there are filmmakers that I know or friends of friends or things like that that will reach out for advice on what to do at the festival and I’m happy to give it. But I’m not a big – I’m not a big proponent of filmmakers making a movie and then seeking a producer to put on it to help them with the sales process. I think that the kinds of producers you would convince to do that are not the kinds of producers you actually want to be in business with, generally.

There are people who exist in that space doing – giving the advice that you’re looking for. And really those are sales agents and festival publicists.

**John:** So, the flip side of that question, so let’s say that you are a person who loves movies and loves independent film, but you are not a writer-director yourself. How does one become a person who is making films? Is it what you’re describing where you find a filmmaker you like at a festival and you say like, “Hey, I want to sort of help you make your next thing?” Like what is the process of–?

**Keith:** Of becoming a producer?

**John:** Of becoming a producer. Of becoming sort of like what you’re doing.

**Keith:** You know what? I actually do think that if you live really anywhere in the world and you want to be a producer, I do think that your best step forward is to go to your local film festivals. Wherever you live there’s probably one within driving distance. And see what the local talent base is like and see if you can build a local filmmaking community of some sort and make movies that way. I don’t think that that is necessarily a path to financial success and kind of success within the larger industry, but it is a path to working within the arts and making movies in the same way that I think if you want to do theatre you can go be in your local theatre production. You shouldn’t have an expectation that that’s going to lead to you starring in a play on Broadway.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making regional cinema. I think that’s actually a great way for people to spend their time. And I think you can do really cool work that can expand way beyond that. But I do think that the arts has a tendency to look at the absolute most success and then say, “Well how do I get to that?” And there’s very rarely a real path to that other than doing what you can do as well as you can.

**John:** Yeah. I think your metaphor for like theatre is appropriate because most people are not making a fortune in theater, especially not smaller theater. You do it because you love to do it. And so there aren’t people who are making a fortune off of independent film. There was sort of that heyday in the rise of Miramax where it felt like, “Oh, that’s where all the excitement and all the money is.” Fox Searchlight does really great, but that’s not what most indie film is really like. It’s making enough money to make that movie successful and be able to make the next movie. It’s not giant mansions.

**Keith:** I think it’s also tricky with independent film is that a lot of movies get sold as independent film. Like it’s viewed in the world as being independent film, but they’re truly studio movies. And I think that a lot of the most successful movies you would consider independent — that the general people would consider independent films — are essentially studio movies that were just made for a low budget that they were able to convince everyone to work for cheaper by pretending it was an independent film.

**John:** That’s true. So how do you like to define independent film right now? Because we’re talking Fox Searchlight or we’re talking A24, they’re making the movies that are kind of like that but they are really their own studios. They’re getting approvals – it’s not like they’re buying that movie off the festival usually. So what is independent film to you?

**Keith:** I would still consider, I mean, this is a definition that everyone has differently. For me, I’m pretty strict in the sense that I think that if the source of financing of the film was not a major distributor, then it’s independent film. And that can include really very large movies as well as small movies. Like I would include a movie like Looper as an independent film because it was put together, the model we talked about earlier, where they were doing foreign presales and they were piecing it together that way. But it’s a big budget movie with movie stars and everything in it.

Arrival I think is a similar thing. That’s an independent film because it was made independently. And then a studio really wanted to buy it and they bought it. I wouldn’t consider a lot of Fox Searchlight movies for example as independent films because they were really just low budget movies made by a division of a studio that makes low budget movies.

**John:** Yeah. “Specialty” might be the better term for it.

**Keith:** Yeah. They can still be an art house movie. Like it’s released in art house theaters, but that doesn’t mean it’s – to me it wouldn’t be an independent film. That’s kind of my criteria.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Keith:** So I would still consider an A24 movie an independent film because I think that they are an independent company. That they also release their own movies doesn’t mean that they’re not independent of the larger major studio system.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Keith:** To me, the sort of ground where I’m not sure is you could make a case that Lionsgate’s movies are independent films. I mean, it’s an independent studio, but it’s also a majorly traded public company at this point with a large valuation. I guess mini-major is kind of what you call it now.

**John:** But to be clear, you’re trying to distinguish between independent film represents a business model whereas specialty or art house represents a style or a placement of a kind of movie, regardless of the genre.

**Keith:** Yeah.

**John:** So you can have big budget sci-fi indie movies and you can have studio-made art house films and that’s fine. But not to try to conflate the two things together.

**Keith:** Yeah. I mean, for me, to a certain degree, I’m not sure what – if a studio is financing a movie I’m not sure what it is independent of. I think independent should be defined by it being independent of studio financing. I think that is what independent should mean.

Yeah, I think it’s more helpful to describe films by how they are originated rather than how they end up being seen.

**John:** Absolutely. Sometimes it’s also the sources of financing are a bunch of things cobbled together. So Participant felt like that kind of thing, where Participant was a company with a specific sort of agenda in terms of progressive ideas. And so they would funnel money into a bunch of things. And so a lot of those movies feel either they truly were independents or they were kind of studio movies where Participant was participating in them.

Go was originally a totally independent movie and so we had foreign financing. We had a list of – we had to get a white male star, 45 years or older, to be in it. And we just couldn’t put all the pieces together. And at the very last minute Columbia came in and took over. And that – it was a combination of things. And still it happened, it’s called a negative pickup, where essentially the studio has already agreed to buy it and basically they’re the bank that’s paying for everything. But we were still able to work like an indie film, where we didn’t have quite the oversight that a studio would have.

That’s another way of thinking about it is that I talk to sometimes Sundance filmmakers who are – they have a certain plan. They’re going to do it in a very classic way and then a studio comes in and the studio just becomes the bank that takes over the making of things. So you don’t know what it’s like. I think sometimes being flexible about sort of how you’re actually going to do it is the key. You have a vision for what the movie is going to be. Who paid for it and how it is coming out in the world is sometimes less important.

**Keith:** Well, yeah. I wouldn’t put a value judgment on whether something is independent or studio. Like I think that there are movies where you maintain more autonomy and creative ability within a studio than you do independently. Yeah. I think there’s so many emotional things tied to the idea of something being independent or studio that I think in every given case is not the reality.

**John:** Yeah. What are some movies that you’ve seen lately at festivals that you want to make sure that we are aware of that we look for that are coming out in the next year?

**Keith:** I’ll be honest. Like, at Sundance, I was at Sundance. We had our movie there. I saw one other movie. It’s just when you have a movie premiering at a festival that you’re selling and doing all the marketing PR around you don’t – I find I don’t have time to watch anything.

The film that I saw recently that it’s not helpful because it’s not out in the US. There’s a movie called Down Under that’s an Australian independent film that’s fantastic. And it was so good that I immediately reached out to that writer-director about doing his next movie which we luckily were able to do. But it’s a comedy about a real race riot in Australia. And it has tinges of Get Out and that type of where it’s a commercially-minded movie that deals with very real issues in the world. And I’d say Down Under is an incredible movie. And if you are in a country where it has been released, I highly recommend checking it out.

**John:** Talk to me about how you reached out to him. Did you reach out through Twitter? Did you reach out through official representatives and channels? How did you get to him?

**Keith:** So, I’ll tell you. The short version is that it premiered at Fantastic Fest, which I wasn’t at, but I have had films at before and I kind of know people there. And a friend of mine who lives in Austin was at Fantastic Fest and he said, “Oh, you have to see Down Under. It’s the best movie at the festival.”

I then went on Studio System and looked up the director. And I saw that coincidentally he had just been signed by the same agent who represents Adam Wingard who is a director I’ve worked with a bunch. So I reached out to the agent and said, “I hear this movie is great. Is there any way I can see it?” And he got me a screener. I watched the movie with Jess and we both loved it. And I said, “Can I talk to the director?” And the agent set up a Skype and we Skyped.

**John:** Great.

**Keith:** And then the next time he was in LA we got dinner together with him and with his producing partner.

**John:** Great. So that’s the situation of this wasn’t anything he did to get to you. He made something good, put it out in the world, and people came to him because it was good.

**Keith:** Exactly. And I will say that that’s often what the path is. I think that there’s a tendency to feel like the proactive thing an aspiring writer-director should be doing is reaching out to people with query letters or emails or things like that. And I actually think the proactive thing you should be doing is making things. And then showing them to as many people as you can show them to and hope that that goes somewhere.

**John:** I’ve had a series of assistants who have gone on to become great writers and busy employed writers. And they always ask me, “How will I know that it’s happening? How do I know that it’s all going to happen?” And to me it’s always when I hear that their scripts got passed around to people who they didn’t hand them to. And basically when someone read something that was good enough that it just got passed around. And that’s almost always kind of the case where it’s the work itself. And so it’s doing really good work, putting it out there in a way that people can discover it, because it’s not going to do any good on your shelf. And then it just kind of happens. It’s what happened for me and it sounds like it’s what happened for this filmmaker.

**Keith:** Yeah. I think so much of what launches careers is word of mouth about your work and word of mouth about you as a person. Those are the two things. And I think that in the case of with Adam and Simon it was the word of mouth that you would all work really well together, which I heard from four or five different people. With the case of Abe who did Down Under it was, “Hey, you have to see this movie. You’ll love this movie.”

**John:** Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a book called Liar Town: The First Four Years 2013-2017 by Sean Tejaratchi. I’m going to mispronounce his name. But Liar Town is a great site on the Internet. You should go type, I think liartown.com. And you will see that there are absurd images and memes that this guy has created with ridiculously good Photoshop skills. They’re always found things, as if he found this book that existed on a shelf, but of course he made it up. The book version of this sort of takes all the stuff that he’s done on his site and prints it in a terrific form.

If you buy this book you should not leave it out where children can see it or your parents can see it because there’s lots of dirty images. But it’s one of the most hilarious things I’ve seen to the point where like, if I read it at night, I hurt from it – stomach and chest hurt from laughing so much. So I’d recommend Liar Town: The First Four Years.

Do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Keith:** I do. I thought about this a lot, because I’m an avid listener to the podcast, so I’ve heard many cool things at this point. Mine is the Eco-Cha Tea Club which is a – there’s a lot of these online things where you sort of pay a subscription fee and they send you different things each month. This is an oolong tea club based in Taiwan. These guys that go out and find small farms that have small stock oolong tea leaves and they send you a bag of tea leaves every month. And it’s different ones every month and they are all delicious and incredible and I’ve now become a big supporter of Eco-Cha Tea Club. And I’ve been a member for a few years and I’m never let down by the tea they send me.

**John:** That’s fantastic. That is one of the most esoteric One Cool Things. Well done, Keith Calder. That’s a very good job.

I have a tiny bit of WGA business here at the very end. So the WGA will have just sent out a screenwriter survey to all of the screenwriters in the WGA about what they’re experiencing in their daily life. It takes about 10 minutes. I think it’s a well-designed survey. We went through so many iterations of it. So if you are a screenwriter in the WGA West you will get an email with a link. Please click that link. It takes 10 minutes to fill it out. It will really help us figure out what you’re facing out there in the world.

And that’s our show this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Luke Davis. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions like David’s question.

We’re on Facebook, maybe. I don’t know if we should still be on Facebook. Facebook seems like it’s a sinking ship. But you can look for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can look for us on Apple Podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a comment.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. And the transcripts which go up in about a week.

I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Keith, you are on Twitter as well.

**Keith:** I am Twitter @keithcalder.

**John:** Yes. You often answer questions about film and stuff and you’re a great person to follow. I’ve followed you for many, many years.

**Keith:** I sometimes answer questions about film. Mostly it’s nonsense.

**John:** Nonsense is what Twitter is for.

You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net or you can buy a USB drive with the first 300 episodes at store.johnaugust.com.

Keith Calder, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was so good to be able to talk to you about film stuff that I just don’t even know about.

**Keith:** Thank you so much for having me on. I hope that I gave useful answers.

**John:** Great. Thanks Keith.

Links:

* Thanks for joining us, [Keith Calder](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2096462/)! You can check out his [website](http://keithcalder.com/) and [wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Calder).
* [Blindspotting](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt7242142/) comes out this summer. [Here](http://variety.com/2018/film/reviews/blindspotting-review-daveed-diggs-rafael-casal-1202667959/) is Variety’s review.
* [You’re Next](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27re_Next) and its [IMDb page](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1853739/). You can watch it on [Amazon](https://www.amazon.com/Youre-Next-Sharni-Vinson/dp/B00GNL127K/ref=sr_1_1_pfch?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1522106656&sr=1-1&keywords=you%27re+next) now.
* [Down Under](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Under_(2016_film)) [trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Whn4q8HuC8g) and [IMDb page](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4463120/).
* [LiarTown: The First Four Years 2013-2017](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1627310541/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Sean Tejaratchi.
* [Eco-Cha Tea Club](http://teaclub.eco-cha.com/)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [The USB drives!](https://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-300-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Keith Calder](https://twitter.com/keithcalder) 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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Luke Davis ([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_343.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/getting-paid-for-it).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 342 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

We’ve had a bunch of craft episodes back to back, so today I thought we’d take a look at the business side of things. We’re going to talk about getting paid, getting credit, and getting rid of a bad manager.

**Craig:** Yes! Oh my god, that’s like the trifecta of stuff that makes me pleased.

**John:** Very good. We’ve done almost no preparation for this episode, so it’s going to be making up answers as we go, which is sometimes the best thing.

**Craig:** You know, John, welcome to my world buddy. This is every episode for me.

**John:** We have some follow up though. Chaz from Disney wrote in to say, “On the last episode of Scriptnotes, Craig and John pitched a ‘standing offer’ to come and discuss the notes process with any studio that was interested in having such a discourse. I ran the idea past our president, Sean, and we agreed. As two gentlemen that we hold in very high regard, we’d like to take them up on that offer.”

So, that’s one studio down.

**Craig:** It’s not just one studio. It’s actually five studios. So, if I could have picked one studio to do this, it would have been Disney, not because they’re particularly good or bad at giving notes. It’s more that they cover so much. They now own Fox, in terms of movies, and Disney, and Disney Animation, and Pixar, and Marvel, and Lucas Film. That’s a lot of notes going out the door. And Sean Bailey, who is the head of Walt Disney Pictures, so that’s their live action film arm from Disney, is fantastic. We both know him and have worked with him and for him.

And I’m not surprised that he’s the guy who said yes to this, by the way. It’s very Sean-like to want –- he’s a good scientist in this regard. You know, he’s very rational and he loves the idea of kind of hearing another point of view on this.

So, I want to say to – so first of all, we’re doing it, for sure.

**John:** Yeah. We need to figure out when we’re doing it. Sometime post-Chernobyl or sometime.

**Craig:** It will be post-Chernobyl. I mean, we are all living in a post-Chernobyl era, but probably as we get into the summer. But I would also like to point out to any of you listening at Sony or Universal or Warner Bros., Disney is doing it.

**John:** It’ll be nice.

All right, so the question is what exactly are we going to say because it’s very easy to point out like bad things about notes, but even since we got this email in I started asking other writer friends about what are examples of good notes –- what is a helpful way to sort of give notes?

So, if you are a writer who has gotten good notes from a studio, or have received notes that were actually helpful or presented in a way that was helpful. It could be the means of getting the notes, or the structure of the notes, or who was giving the notes, let us know about that because we’d like to talk about best practices and not just complain about things that are terrible.

**Craig:** Completely. And, in fact, I don’t think it’s particularly useful to run down a list of here’s the dumbest note I ever got. That’s not what this is about. For me, this is entirely about process and philosophy. And very specifically what is going on in our brains, in an emotional sense, and in a productive sense. What is happening inside of our heads when we’re doing this? And what are the general philosophies that work best?

The whole point of this is entirely to get better work made. So better work out of us. Better work for them. And some of it is a little counterintuitive. There are things that I think have just become encrusted in the notes process that need to be looked at freshly and then dismissed. They are no longer useful. They’re not the right way to do it.

**John:** Yeah. They are barnacles on the system that need to be shaken free.

**Craig:** Hells yeah.

**John:** Hells yeah. Next up, Jen writes, “In Episode 340 both John and Craig use the term ‘central casting’ to describe a character. Can you describe what you mean by this?”

**Craig:** This is an old Hollywood term that’s kicked around forever and then has made its way into general lingo out there. Central casting refers to the most stereotypical example of how you would fill a role. So, if you say, OK, well this character of the prison guard is straight out of central casting, well who would you imagine is the most stereotypical prison guard? This big beefy guy with a buzz cut and kind of tough looking.

I mean, whatever it is that you imagine. It’s just the most stereotypical version of that person.

**John:** Yeah. So central casting, there was a casting department at a lot of studios. I think there still is a casting department at most studios. I know like networks will have the casting department. But it doesn’t sort of work that same way now. When we talk about central casting, we’re describing the look of the person. So it’s both the actor and how that character is made up. And so that’s the, again, the incredible stereotype of what that’s supposed to be like.

So it’s the nurse with horn-rimmed glasses. There is a very set idea of what that thing is like. So, you can say central casting in your script if you’re trying to sort of push against it or that it’s an example of why you want to be the biggest stereotype possible. But it’s not generally helpful. And so usually, if hear the term central casting, it is pejorative in that it is not well thought through.

**Craig:** Yeah. Inside of our business it’s pejorative. So you’ll say, OK, well you’ve written this butler character to be straight out of central casting. He’s a ramrod posture British man at the age of 60 who says, “Very good sir.” That’s central casting. It’s cliché. We don’t like it so much.

In the outside world, behind Hollywood, a lot of times they use it as a compliment like, well, we had to hire ourselves a new head CEO and we found this person and they were straight out of central casting, meaning they’re just the ideal person for that gig. So, two different meanings, but inside Hollywood not so great. Outside, generally pretty good.

**John:** I’m not sure. I think it’s changing outside of the world, too. Like your example of a CEO out of central casting, it does feel a little unimaginative. Like you’re worried that that person does not have a vision.

**Craig:** I think in the business world that’s considered a plus.

**John:** Although I would say, you know, the central casting version of the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, like that I totally get. You still see that out there.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** Yep. With the hoodie.

**Craig:** With the hoodie.

**John:** Kevin writes, “I’m listening to you guys argue about Sarah Paradise’s three pages as I type. I’ve been a stuntman in LA since 1999. Craig, you’re right.”

**Craig:** Oh, let’s just stop the podcast here. We’re done. Wrap it up. We had a great run. Folks–

**John:** 342 episodes.

**Craig:** At that’s our episode. Scriptnotes is produced by–

**John:** Now fill out your forms. Make sure you return all your uniforms. Erase all those little notes in the margins because we’re done.

**Craig:** We’re done.

**John:** Craig has finally been proven right.

**Craig:** Finally.

**John:** There’s a little bit more to the email, so we’ll get through it.

**Craig:** Ah, OK.

**John:** “Stunt people don’t punch each other in the face, especially stunt people who happen to be attractive women. If we are accidentally hit during a fight on a show or a movie we pretend it didn’t happen, then whisper to the person who did it to say you clipped me on that one. Then they apologize profusely. This is because how we look is a large part of how we get employed. Hell, we don’t even get haircuts for fear of losing work because an actor has to be doubled with long hair.

“Side note: I’ve been writing for about 17 years. I’ve been listening to current episodes as they come out, but I’m also on Episode 80 on the back catalog. The back episodes are fresh and informative because I’m a different writer now than I was a few years ago. I recommend that every listener go back through the old episodes again. It’s not like watching reruns. It’s more like watching Fight Club for the second time.”

**Craig:** Wow. That’s a hell of a compliment.

**John:** That really is.

**Craig:** Thank you, Kevin. I mean, by the way, also just a brilliant analogy, because I remember the first time I watched Fight Club and I was like what is this garbage? Then I got to the end. And then I watched it again and I was like, oh, this is my new favorite movie of all time. And I’ve seen it a billion times since.

Yeah, by the way, Kevin, first of all thank you. You sound like a very responsible stunt actor, stunt performer, so thank you for also doing that job. We need you. And also I’m a different writer then I was back then, too. I think everybody is changing constantly. This podcast as it goes on is an interesting kind of archeological record of me and of John and of all of us. So, thanks. Really nice comment.

**John:** It is a nice comment. I would say that making Launch, the other podcast I did for Arlo Finch, even as I was making it I realized like, oh, this will actually be a great little time capsule of who I was and where I was at that time, because it’s really like what the experience was like of making that book. And I’m looking forward to being able to go back 10 years, 20 years from now and listening to that again.

I don’t know that I’ll go back to listen to the old Scriptnotes, but I’m sure if I did go back and listen to some, there’d be advice I gave or things I talked about which I have a different opinion on now just because things have progressed and changed. The industry has changed and I have changed a bit as a writer.

**Craig:** I mean, and the world around us. Everything. Everything. If we were the same, what would be the point anyway? Right? I mean, things keep changing. Even though I’m joking about how exciting it is to hear that I’m right, the truth is as writers we spend most of our day being wrong. That’s part of the process. And that’s how good things will eventually come. You recognize that you’re in motion all the time. So, we’re like little butterflies that flit around, then we land on an opinion. We can stay there for a little bit, and then we’ve got to flit away and find something better. So, all good. Thank you for that Kevin.

And I have a little bit of follow up myself. Because I talked about being wrong. OK, so I had my one brief moment of being right there. Yay. Now let’s get back to me being wrong again.

My One Cool Thing last week was Alto’s Odyssey, a game I was really enjoying and still am. But I had one complaint and that was that when I downloaded it for my iPad it did not show up on my iPhone. In fact, the iPhone was saying, hey, you got to give us more money now. And I thought, oh, they’ve made this app where you have to pay for it twice for some reason because it’s on an iPad versus an iPhone.

No, no. It’s just that I had stupidly disabled my automatic iCloud app download function thingy. So, when I flipped that back on suddenly Alto’s Odyssey was available for download for no money, because I had already paid for it. I apologize Alto’s Odyssey people. My mistake. Sorry.

**John:** Yeah. It was user error.

**Craig:** It was totally user error. And you know what? I’ll tell you, it’s not like anyone told me. The Alto’s Odyssey people didn’t call up. If they heard about it, they probably just shook their heads and said, “Idiot.” But they let it go.

**John:** Yeah. Because you were that one person. I mean, there might be like 10 or 12 people in the world who are using this app and you are one of them. And I’m sure they were saddened that one of their 12 players wasn’t getting the best experience out of it.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, they spend their days listening to us. And specifically me. I’m pretty sure what they do is they just listen to my side of it. And, you know, they hang on every word. I get it. And I’m sorry. What do you want from me? I apologize.

**John:** All right, let’s get to some questions and all of these questions are from our listeners and they’ve written in about things that relate to the business of screenwriting. So, I thought we’d dig into those. They’re almost all feature questions, but I think there’s going to be some relevant things here for people writing for TV, both scripted TV and variety talk shows.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we’ll start with Anonymous in LA. Writes, “I’m a young screenwriter who recently quit my well-paying salary job to pursue screenwriting full-time.”

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** “I can hear Craig saying oh boy as I type this.”

**Craig:** Oh, interesting.

**John:** “Last year I wrote a script that earned a substantial amount of attention. And placed near the top of the Black List. It got me an agent and several dozen meetings with studios and production companies. Because I was taking mini meetings each week and could no longer fulfill the duties of my job, I decided to quit about three months ago. While I do not regret this decision, I have never been without steady work. And this new situation is quite frankly terrifying. I find myself in a constant state of anxiety and depression surrounding my unemployment. I am working towards securing work by pitching open assignments, but so far I have landed nothing.

“My question is, how do you deal with the anxiety and depression that comes from the instability of this profession?”

**Craig:** Well, we have talked about this quite a bit. So, first of all, Anonymous, you’re going to want to listen to Episode 99, that’s a big one I think that we talk about a lot. That’s where we had psychotherapist Dennis Palumbo, and also former screenwriter, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, Dennis Palumbo onto talk a little bit about the psychological challenges that we face as screenwriters. It is very, very hard to do what you’re doing. I feel anxiety and depression and terror surrounding potential unemployment and so when you are actually unemployed I can only imagine it is even more crushing. And I can also imagine it becomes extremely hard to be creative and inspired. My guess is the adrenaline is really good for volume, that is you will write because you’re terrified, but the quality of it is going to start to become warped by your perception of what they want and what they will give you money for.

Suddenly the money becomes really, really, really important. It’s not to say that when you start out you shouldn’t be taking jobs for the money. It’s not a bad idea. You have to pay bills. And all experience is good experience. But I am concerned about your situation because you did quit and you are scared. And you have not been paid yet. And so I think it’s fair to say that you should try and find something that brings in some money. Maybe there’s some freelance work you can do. Maybe your agent, for instance, can hook you up with somebody that needs some copywriting done. Little things. Anything. Just to get a little bit of money in so you’re not in just a total freefall about money going out and nothing coming in. That is terrifying. And more than anything it’s not so much about your bank account, it’s about your head space and feeling like when you sit down to write you’re not doing it with a gun in your mouth.

**John:** Yep. I will say Anonymous I think you made the right choice. And I don’t know anything about your situation beyond what you described, but in your situation that is when you just decide, OK, I’m going to have to pursue this fulltime because otherwise I can’t take these meetings. I can’t make this all happen.

So, you got to pull the ripcord at some point and you probably pulled the ripcord at the right moment. But it is scary. And I was exactly where you were at where I left my last job and I had not sold anything, but I had an agent and I had some traction. I was taking meetings. It looked like something could happen. But there were about four months there, five months there where there was just nothing and I was just falling. And one of those slow motion falls where you’re sort of swimming through the air. So I definitely remember what that felt like.

I think Craig’s suggestion of trying to find some way to get some income is good. And freelance copywriting could be something. Uber or Lyft could be something. Something so there’s a little bit of money coming in would be great.

Minimizing your expenses would be great, because if you’re a person who came from a salary job you’re used to like, oh OK, I can make this all work because I know how much money I have coming in. When you don’t know how much money you have coming in that all changes. And you’ve got to be realistic about how your life is going to change. Because even when you hopefully do get a job or sell something, that will be a chunk of money and that chunk of money will disappear.

So what I did in Anonymous’ situation was I had a little spreadsheet and I had my monthly expenses. I knew how much it cost for me to live each month with rent, with utilities, with food. I minimized those as much as I could, but I could see like this is how much money I have. This is how I can live for six months on the money I have. And you’ll get through it.

So I think you’ve done the right thing but I think you’re also right to be thinking about “How do I prepare for this thing that could go on a little bit longer than I’d hoped.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I think she or he has done the right thing, too. I definitely think so. I mean, based on what you’re saying, placed near the top of the Black List. You have an agent. You’ve had meetings and attention. All that says, yes, you did the right thing.

And I will tell you that the worst part of your fear, I think, at least for me, is the fear of the fear itself -– that it will never go away. That this is your life now. That you now live in a terrible freefall as John described. And it’s not going to get better. Or, if you do get a job it’s only a brief respite and then you’re right back in the fear pit again. So all I can tell you, Anonymous, is no.

Here’s the situation: you will either succeed in a reasonable way so as to make yourself a life and a career as a screenwriter. Or you won’t, and then you will go back to doing what your well-paying salary job was. The good news is you’re young so it’s OK to be afraid but don’t think this is forever. The feeling that you’re having now is not forever.

**John:** Yeah. It will morph into a different kind of forever feeling.

**Craig:** Which is also exquisitely horrible. But wait until you’re in your 40s and then you’ll know about that one.

**John:** Yes. So what I would say is different about my advice for Anonymous than for some other writers is that Anonymous is in a situation where –- we’ll say she –- she placed well on the Black List, she has an agent, she’s going out for these meetings. It’s not just an idle dream that she has of being a screenwriter. Like she’s a screenwriter, it’s just a question of getting paid to be a screenwriter and whether that will happen. I think it probably will happen. As we’ve always said, any person starting in the feature business right now has to also be looking at television, so hopefully your agents are sending you out on great television meetings as well.

But I think something will probably happen because you seem to be a good writer who is asking smart questions.

**Craig:** Yeah. One last bit of advice for you, and then we’ll move on from Anonymous, it’s good that you’re going out for the open assignments. Open assignments are lotteries really. Because what happens with open assignments is they are casting a pretty wide net. You’re going up against a lot of people who are exactly like you. And at any given moment either one of them will get the job, or someone like John will bump into the executive one day, they’ll have a chitchat over a drink. That executive will say, “Oh, we’re working on this thing.” And then John will say, “Oh my god, based on that book? I loved that book as a kid.” “Really? Would you want to read?” “Yeah, I’ll read that. You know what? I can do that.” And then it’s over. There is no more open writing assignment.

So, point being, don’t let those things –- and this is the hardest part because you have to prepare. It’s like you’re writing a movie a week preparing to pitch on these things. But don’t let that distract you from what got you in this position in the first place which was your voice and writing your work. That is the one thing that John can’t do, nor can anyone else. No one else can write your script. So, keep that going. That is going to keep you fresh and in people’s eyes.

They are so much more interested in writers that are sending them things than writers who are coming in with their hand out saying give me something.

**John:** Yeah. The third possibility in those open writing assignments is that the job just completely goes away because they decide like, oh, maybe there isn’t a movie to be made about this. And I would say in more than half the cases they hire nobody for those jobs. And so that is the other frustration. But what you’re describing, that process of going out for an open writing assignment, or a quasi-open writing assignment, like they’re not even sure they’re going to really be making this movie, is it’s like an actor going out on auditions. And auditioning is a crucial skill for actors and pitching on these things is a crucial skill for writers.

I’d hoped to have her on the show at some point and maybe we’ll still have her on the show, but Jenna Fischer has a really good book on being an actor and sort of an actor’s life. And she talks a lot about that audition process and how crucial it is in terms of finding your own voice going through that audition process. So I’m going to recommend that to you to read through as well, because actors and writers have a lot in common in this area.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Cool. Theo writes in with four questions. So we’ll take each question one at a time. His first question is, “How many scripts did you write before making your first sale?” Craig Mazin?

**Craig:** One.

**John:** So you wrote one script. What was that script?

**Craig:** It was a script that I wrote with my then writing partner called The Stunt Family.

**John:** Oh yeah, we’ve talked about The Stunt Family.

**Craig:** It was not good. But it was funny. It was just not good. It was very dated, very early ‘90s sort of Simpsons-y kind of live action thing. A very broad comedy about a legendary family of stunt people. Very silly. Sort of like a Chris Farley kind of thing.

**John:** Did they hit each other in the face?

**Craig:** Oh my god, like that was constant.

**John:** Because according to our follow up, they shouldn’t hit each other in the face.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the thing. Because this movie was so ridiculous and over the – I mean, they lived on the studio lot. Their house was part of the studio tour, so every day a tram would go through and an “earthquake” would rip their house apart. It was very, very broad.

**John:** I wrote three scripts before I had anything sold or I got paid to write. So, Here and Now, which was a romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado, my home town. Devil’s Canyon, which is a cross between Unforgiven and Aliens I want to say. And X which was the short film version of Go, so it was just the first third of Go. So those are the scripts I’d written before that.

My first sale was actually an assignment. I was hired to write the adaptation of How to Eat Fried Worms. Was your first sale a sale, Craig?

**Craig:** Yes. Well, it was a pitch.

**John:** It was Rocket Man?

**Craig:** It was Rocket Man. That’s exactly what it was. When we pitched it the title that we had was Space Cadet, which we eventually were not allowed to use because Lucas Film apparently was squatting on Space Cadet, which I’m still waiting for the Lucas Film Space Cadet. It’s been about 22 years.

**John:** Any day now.

**Craig:** Any day. They’re on it.

**John:** Theo’s next question is, “How many scripts have you written that have not been made?” For me the answer is at least 11. I was counting through in the folder. It’s probably more than that, but at least 11.

**Craig:** Now, does that include things like, OK, where I came in and I was rewriting something and then eventually that project just never happened?

**John:** Yeah, so I’m not counting those. I actually have printed original full scripts I wrote that were not based on a previous script.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Geez, maybe like three. Not that many. Because most of the time I was either rewriting something that somebody else had started or it was an adaptation of something that kind of had been sputtered along. Or it was kind of like a sequel. There was a lot of that.

**John:** Theo’s next question, “How many scripts have you written that have never been optioned or sold?”

**Craig:** I’ve never optioned anything.

**John:** I’ve never optioned anything either. The only thing I ever sold was Go.

**Craig:** I’ve never sold a screenplay.

**John:** Well except for Rocket Man.

**Craig:** That was a pitch.

**John:** Oh, it was a pitch. The pitch. That’s right. A pitch.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve actually never sold literary material like that. I’ve either been commissioned to do it, or I have sold a pitch.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve sold some original pitches, but I’ve never sold a spec script, except for Go.

**Craig:** Except for Go, yeah.

**John:** “And what was the story behind your first sale? How much did you sell it for?” Well, my only sale was Go. I think it was about $75,000, sort of all in. So it was purchasing the script and the rewrite on it. That was for a little tiny company called Banner. We ended up selling the project to Sony right before we started shooting. But it was really done as an indie film.

So, that was fine money for what that was. So they said in that deal that I’d be a co-producer on the film and I’d be involved in the whole process and they were true to their word. So, it was a very good deal for me to have taken.

**Craig:** Yeah, so my first sale was the pitch for Space Cadet/Rocket Man. It was to Disney. It was 1995, I think, is when it happened. Roughly I believe we got something like $110,000, which then we had to split, of course, and then we had to pay our manager, and our agent, and our lawyer. So, it dwindled pretty quickly. And that was also when we learned how long it would take the contract to actually be finished therefore how long it would take us to actually get our money. So, for one day we felt like billionaires, even though we understood $100,000 was not a billion dollars. About eight months later I was like, “Can I please have my $15,000?” Because that’s all I’m getting out of this really. After taxes.

But, yeah, at the time it seemed pretty awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So I will say the first thing I actually got paid for, sort of two things I got paid for. I wrote the novelization of Natural Born Killers and that was the money that I was living off of for those six months before I actually got paid for other things. The money I got for How to Eat Fried Worms was WGA scale. So the minimum they could legally pay me. It was about $35,000 I want to say. But then I ended up doing multiple drafts on it, so over time I got more money than that.

But that’s why we have to have scale. If we did not have the WGA enforcing minimums, there’s no way I could have been a professional screenwriter.

**Craig:** No. No way anybody could be. I mean, that’s the whole point.

**John:** Well, some really rich people could be.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, but what a weird way to spend your life as a really rich person, just idly writing screenplays that make other people massive amounts of money but not you.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Hmm. Do you want to take James’s question?

**Craig:** I do. James says, “I recently found myself owing $1,500 to the tax man. And it started me thinking about the business side of being a screenwriter. Do you treat your screenwriting as a business? By that I mean registering as an LLC, a limited liability company, or other entity? And what sort of expenses could you claim as a writer? Especially when you have no guaranteed income if you’re working on a spec script.”

John, all good nuts and bolts questions. What do you say?

**John:** So, yes, I do treat it as a business. And most screenwriters do treat it as a business once they start getting paid. So for our international listeners I think we should explain a little bit about companies in the US and how it all works. An LLC, I think it’s called a limited corporation in the UK, every country has some ability to have a corporation where instead of paying you as an individual they pay a company. And that company then employs you to do the work.

So, for screenwriters it is either through S-Corp or a C-Corp rather than an LLC. I am a C-Corp. Most screenwriters I know are S-Corps. There are subtle differences about how they can work, what deductions they can take. Both are fine. I’m a California corporation. You can incorporate in another state if that is more helpful to you.

But, yes, at a certain point you’re getting paid enough money that it makes sense to be a corporation rather than an individual person. So like for Go, my first sale, that was purchased from me. And so those checks go to John August. They don’t go to my corporation. So it’s always weird because I get separate residual statements for those things. And everything else goes to the corporation.

I will also say I do also have an LLC. So like this podcast and my software business, those are all run through the LLC rather than the C-Corp. It has to do with like a C-Corp really can’t have inventory and stuff like that. Whereas we have t-shirts and USB drives and stuff like that. And for accounting purposes it was really important that that be through a different branch. And that’s all through the LLC.

**Craig:** That’s how you’re laundering money and keeping it away from me. I know what’s going on. Continue.

**John:** That’s true. Craig, are you a C-Corp or an S-Corp?

**Craig:** I’m an S-Corp. I do not know the difference, but it’s just what they told me to be. I, like you, am incorporated in California. You have two numbers when you’re a corporation in the United States. You have a federal ID number which begins with the number 95 and then you have your state corporate number. And the reason is you’re paying taxes to both federal and state.

It would be awesome if you could incorporate in any state. And, in fact, you kind of can. If you’re a large corporation you often incorporate in Delaware because they have incredibly, well, just loving, lovey laws for corporations. They end up paying far, far less in taxes and all the rest.

However, when it comes to what we do it’s essentially impossible to incorporate anywhere other than the place where you are actually doing the bulk of your business. Believe me, I wish that I could do the bulk of my business across the state line in Nevada, and then I wouldn’t have to pay any state tax at all, although then I would just be a bad person. But pretty much every screenwriter is incorporated either as a C or an S in California. Like you, John, my residual checks for Rocket Man come to me and maybe Senseless, not that there’s that much coming in for that one, but regardless everything after that comes in through the corporate thing.

And, James, you’re right. You can claim all sorts of expenses as a writer. Easy ones off the top: every dollar you pay to your agent. Every dollar you pay to your lawyer. Every dollar you pay to your manager. That is a fair deduction. Also, the dues you pay to the Writers Guild. A fair deduction. Then if you have an office or office rent. You can even get away with a home office, although it’s a little bit of a red flag for the IRS. Computer equipment. Paper. Toner. Your cellphone.

Now, here’s the thing. One of the reasons that they tell us to incorporate is because it allows us to deduct a lot of these things without running into this whole alternative minimum tax business. I don’t really understand it. I’ll just be frank about it. All I can tell you is everyone is told to do it. It can’t be wrong. It just can’t be. So that’s kind of how it works.

**John:** Absolutely. The other thing I would say is helpful about a corporation is as a WGA writer you have a WGA pension. It’s lovely that we have a pension, but there’s a limit to how much you can sock away in that pension because it’s a union plan. You can establish your own pension and put money in for your pension for your corporation and that is a helpful thing as well.

So, for long term planning that is a reason why you would be doing that.

**Craig:** That’s my first level like every year the first level investment is the retirement plans and so forth that we’ve set up through the corporation. Because that is the best investment you can make because they don’t take tax off of it until you finally withdraw it later on in life.

**John:** Yeah. It’s been interesting. I’ve had some assistants, like Stuart Friedel, who were with the company long enough that they actually vested in the pension plan, which was kind of great. So it’s funny that Stuart has a pension through my corporation.

**Craig:** It’s going to be paying out for a long time because Stuart just seems like the kind of guy that’s going to make it to 148.

**John:** Oh, easily. Stuart Friedel will never die. He’ll find a way out. Like death will show up for him, and Stuart will negotiate a much better deal.

**Craig:** Forever Friedel.

**John:** Anonymous writes, “I was recently having lunch with an actor friend. The actor told me that all actors freely claim unemployment when they are not working. Up to $300 or $400 a week. I Googled it and SAG even has instructions on how to do this. The idea is that actors are only working while they are on set basically. All other times they are ‘looking for work’ and therefore eligible for unemployment. Does the same apply to writers in the WGA?”

**Craig:** I believe so. The issue has to do a little bit with this whole loan out company situation, but basically then your loan out company, meaning your corporation, as they pay you they’re paying the unemployment money. So the idea is when you work your employer has to send a bunch of money to the state on your behalf out of each paycheck that they’re responsible for, which is unemployment insurance. And then when you are out of work you apply to receive that unemployment back.

So, yeah, I’ve actually never done it.

**John:** So, Craig, I don’t think he was talking about the writers who have their own corporations. But what you’re saying is just fascinating, because I don’t know any writers with their own corporations who have done that. I think of that as sort of the writers who are still trying to get up to the point where they will have incorporated.

**Craig:** I mean, I think it would work either way. Now, when you are paid as a corporation what happens is a bunch of money comes into the corporation and then the corporation gives you a salary. This is part of how the corporation is viewed as legitimate by tax entities. So out of those paychecks there is some unemployment. But, yes, generally speaking if you have a corporation, money is coming through, this is not a problem for you anyway. But, yeah, I mean, look, it’s your money. Somebody once explained it to me, because I think a lot of people think, “Oh, he applied for unemployment, it’s like, oh, he went on welfare. He’s on the dole.”

No. It’s your money. It’s money that your employer had to send into the state on your behalf specifically for this situation. So, while I’ve never done it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t. It’s not a question of applying to writers in the WGA. It’s a question of applying just to citizens who work in the United States.

**John:** Yeah. So I know that production office staff will also do this where production office people will be working incredibly long hours on shows and then when that show wraps they will take some time off and get their unemployment for a while. They’ll do what they need to do in order to be “looking for work,” but that is sort of a planned part of how it all works.

I don’t know where the ethical lines are on claiming unemployment, but I will say that it is a not uncommon practice. And if it allows a class of people who are writers and actors and production people to exist between jobs, I get it.

**Craig:** Yep. For sure. That’s what it’s there for.

**John:** All right, Jay, in Los Angeles writes, “I sold a screenplay two years ago to a major studio. The script went into production this past September.”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, “The script went into production this past September. I found about this through a friend working on the film.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** “I also found out the writer-director attached to the film reworked the script, turning it into a sequel to a mildly successful comedy, all still using the title of my script to the film. The film is scheduled to come out in theaters in October of this year. No one has contacted me in regards to the film. I see write-ups on the film, but my name is not attached. I’ve looked up information on the film, but I have yet to see my name attached to it anywhere. All of the credits are listed on IMDb, except for the writer, which is odd. It’s as if they’re purposely not posting the writer’s name.

“My greatest fear is that the writer-director will take full credit for the film and I will be left out in the cold without a credit even. Even though I sold the original script. I also found out that a production company, not connected to the studio, financed the film. The studio I sold the script to will only be distributing the film.

“In short, studio buys my script. Separate production company offers to finance it through their company. It is then reworked to become a sequel. The production company shoots the film. The studio will distribute the film. I’m not a member of the Writers Guild, so what the F do I do?”

Craig?

**Craig:** Well, all this comes down to one single question. You are not a member of the Writers Guild, and yet you have sold a screenplay to a major studio. The major studio, by definition therefore, is a signatory to the Writers Guild. All major studios are signatory to the Writers Guild. Which means it had to have been a Writers Guild deal. If it is a Writers Guild deal, that is to say your contract is covered under the terms of the MBA, well first of all if it’s a screenplay and you sold it you should have become a member of the Writers Guild. But putting that aside, if it’s covered under the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement then you don’t have to worry because the credits are going to be determined by the Writers Guild.

Now, you have to be on top of this because – well, actually you don’t. You don’t have to be on top of it because the writer-director has written on it and therefore there’s going to be an automatic arbitration. And you are guaranteed minimum Story by credit if it’s an original screenplay. And you may very well earn yourself Screenplay credit as well, depending on what the actual shooting script ended up looking like.

If you somehow didn’t sell it to a signatory, I would be confused how that happened considering that you said you sold it to a major studio, then in this case your script is viewed as source material. It is not covered by the Writers Guild. The studio, I believe, will be obliged to say based on a screenplay by Jay in Los Angeles. You will not get residuals for it. They don’t have to invite you to the premiere. There’s no guarantees of anything. That’s it. That’s what you get. Which is all the more reason why no one should sell screenplays to anyone if it’s not under the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement.

**John:** Very true. So, Jay is not his real name. I emailed him when I saw this question this morning to try to get more details. Clearly some things have been changed in this email because I can’t Google to find out what this is. So don’t go Googling sequels in October because I think he’s changed some dates deliberately to obscure what’s happening here.

But I emailed him to ask what it actually was so Craig and I could figure out a little bit more closely like what might actually be happening here. I’m a little concerned that it could be a situation like The Disaster Artist. And we haven’t gotten into that because we just don’t know all the details yet, but essentially the lawsuit that was filed in The Disaster Artist was a very different kind of suit than we’ve seen in other things where like, “Oh, I sold my script” because clearly this person was writing a script for the actor and director of the film, but then other writers ended up writing a completely different script. And it became really unclear where this person’s script fell in the chain of title, or if there was a chain of title. It was a mess.

I’m worried that Jay’s situation may be a mess for some things we just don’t know about. So, that it wasn’t really a major, or sometimes – I remember back when I worked with Miramax, Miramax would have a whole separate arm that would buy non-WGA stuff. And that it could be some sort of weird arm’s length thing that they’re doing when they bought this thing. Or they bought it basically just for the title.

So, I’m a little concerned that there’s something going on here that we don’t know.

What I will say to Jay is don’t just sit on your hands and say like, “Oh I hope this all works out OK.” If you sold this thing, then you have an agent, a manager, a lawyer. You have somebody who represented you. Call them right now and ask. And then figure out who you sold it to and call them and ask what’s going on with this. Because just delaying and delaying, all you’re going to do is increase your anxiety. And you’re not going to make it worse for yourself by asking.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Ask now. Figure out what’s going on. Because it sounds like a situation where there should be a WGA credit arbitration. But if there’s not going to be one, you need to know that now.

**Craig:** Best advice.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take Peter’s question?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got Peter writing in. He says, “My wife was a full-time writer on a network late night show and now she has a successful full-time show of her own on a major podcast network. Two shows a week. But it is not a WGA show, which leads to my question do you have any suggestions on how to keep our health benefits through the WGA?”

All right, John, so she is doing a podcast. It’s not WGA. What does she do? What do they do?

**John:** Well, I don’t know of any WGA podcasts, but there probably should be and probably will be in the future because I think podcasts are occupying a space that feels a lot like what television has been in the past. What those deals are going to look like, I don’t know. But I think that’s a thing that will be coming at some point.

But at some point will not get you WGA insurance right now. So, if I were in your situation, Peter, I would encourage you to encourage your wife to find some WGA employment, writing on something that is covered by the WGA contract so she will earn WGA money that will pay for the health plan. Because WGA health insurance is fantastic and keeping it is a very good idea. So, if she can find some writing for some other late night show, for some other WGA-covered program, I think it’s probably worth it for her to be doing that because as busy as she probably is doing her own podcast, you know, keeping that WGA coverage is really a good idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s nothing that is going to happen now in terms of this podcasting, even if down the line the WGA starts making deals for podcasts, it’s quite likely that the initial deals won’t involve health. I mean, the contributions from the employers to healthcare are the single largest expense that they incur as a result of their deal with the WGA, I think even more than residuals. I could be wrong about that, but it’s a lot.

And so all I can say Peter is if she’s loving this job and loving what she’s doing, maybe whatever you’re doing on your side can get you guys some health insurance because it’s not going to happen through the WGA this way. And there’s really no suggestion of how to keep it. The only way you keep WGA health insurance is by qualifying by hitting the income minimum each year. And if you don’t, then you get a little bit of time with COBRA as an extension. And if you’ve over-earned in prior years you have the point system, so you can use those points to kind of extend it a little bit. But after that, no.

So, check with the plan. Maybe you have some points where you can extend it a little bit. But that’s about it.

**John:** Yeah. This is the brief political rant I’ll have here. The idea that we have to be freaking out about her health insurance and Peter’s health insurance at this moment is maddening to me because it stifles innovation and it stifles this person who has gone off and does something else that’s great because she has to be worried about keeping her health plan. So she may need to go write on a crappy home improvement show just so she can keep her health insurance. And that’s just ridiculous.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a whole – you know, that’s a good side podcast, too. Maybe we can solve one of the great intractable problems of American politics. But it does seem like things are happening in a weird way. It was the strange response to Obamacare in our country, followed by the strange response to the threat of taking away Obamacare. We are an irrational people.

**John:** Deeply, deeply.

**Craig:** But things are happening that are different than I have noticed before. And I think the trend is toward universal coverage. That’s the way it feels to me. But it’s a long road ahead.

**John:** Yeah. Everyone outside of the US is saying–

**Craig:** Like what?

**John:** What do you mean? How do you live with this?

**Craig:** Duh.

**John:** Not well.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, yeah. Gina writes, “I optioned a script with a manager about nine months ago, and since then I’m not happy with the manager.” OK, Gina, you’re in my wheelhouse now. “And plan on cancelling our contract when it is up in a couple of months. My question is the script I optioned while with him is in the late stages of development and it’s really picking up steam towards financing. After I leave my current manager, is he still a part of the option? That is to say, does he get his 10% and the money going through him before it gets to me? Am I stuck with him forever on this deal? Or, am I able to dump him and get a new manager by sweetening the pot with a late developed screenplay on the table. After the current screenplay option ends I could sign a new one with the new manager, right?”

John, I like the way Gina thinks. Let me just put out there, I like the way her gears are turning. I like the way she thinks a lot.

**John:** Yeah. Getting rid of bad, unhelpful people is a goal we encourage. So, your situation depends on whatever this contract was you signed with him. There’s probably things beyond that, but this contract will be the thing that determines ultimately I think whether he stays attached to this project or not.

I don’t know what your contract look likes. Manager contracts can look very different. My hunch is you will not be able to shake him completely from this thing because it started underneath his little mantle. But that should not deter you from getting a better person on your team, because waiting it out for the clock to run out is not going to help you.

**Craig:** Yep. OK, so a couple of things, Gina. First of all, take a good careful look at that contract and discuss it with your lawyer. Most of us don’t sign contracts with representation. When they ask you to sign a contract it in general is a red flag. And what I would say to any manager or agent is if you need me to guarantee to you that I’m not going to leave for a while, that does not speak well of you. You should have the confidence to know that I’m going to stay because you’re doing your job well.

That aside, in these contracts very typically there will be an escape clause that says something like “You are bound to be the client for a two-year period, however this contract can be nullified if employment does not occur within any consecutive 90-day period,” let’s say. So you have to take a careful look at that and see if perhaps you can escape based on that clause alone. Because options are not employment. And, in fact, you’re saying, “Well, it’s in the late stages of development,” but have you been employed?

Right, so anyway, take a look at that. Second thing: after you leave your current manager, is he still part of the option – does he get his 10%? OK, so here’s the deal. Managers are not agents. Agents are attached to deals permanently. Agents are also bound by the Talent Agency Act. Managers aren’t. That gives them certain upsides, but also certain downsides. The way it has been explained to me by an attorney, and this was proven in my case through jurisprudence, managers are what they call on the wheel/off the wheel. They are not being paid for a deal. They are being paid for their ongoing services to you on a day-to-day basis. Meaning the day they stop working for you as a manager is the day you stop paying them.

So, there are a lot of ways to handle this. There are also things that you can – look, it depends on how unhappy you are with this manager. If you’re really unhappy, well talk to your lawyer and take a careful look and see if he’s violated the Talent Agency Act by attempting to procure you employment. And if you have proof of that that’s one phone call to the Labor Bureau in California and suddenly you have quite a bit of leverage there.

This is why I’m not generally a fan of the way a lot of these managers operate. You have more leverage I think than you realize. Definitely talk to your lawyer.

**John:** Great. I’ll go back to the first sentence here: I optioned a script with a manager about nine months ago. I don’t quite know what that means. And so I don’t know whether that manager signed on as a producer or kind of what happened there. I’d look at sort of what the actual agreement was there between you and this person who is a manager, but sometimes managers are also producers. If it’s a producer situation, whatever the deal is there is going to show up in that contract.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know what? There is an ambiguity there because the way I read it was that she optioned a script and the manager was along with her when they optioned it to a studio. But you’re right. It could be that he optioned the script, or she optioned the script, and then they’re acting as a producer. This is why I don’t like managers.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Ugh.

**John:** It’s also why we don’t want agents to be doing managerial jobs, which they increasingly are doing.

**Craig:** God no.

**John:** God no.

**Craig:** Let’s hear from Mark.

**John:** Mark says, “I recently completed my first historical feature script and I’m currently looking for my next topic to tackle in the genre. However, I recently found out the historical figure I wanted to write about already has a major spec script sold about him with A-list actors attached to boot. I brushed it off and pivoted to a new historical event that was less famous, only to find out that this subject is also in development with A-list talent attached. Granted, one of the scripts has been in ‘production hell’ for over a decade. And the other is a fairly different take on my subject compared to what I had in mind.

“So should I just continue writing on these topics and hope that preexisting projects stay in production purgatory? And/or bank on my take on the subject matter being different enough? Or should I move on to a seemingly original topic to tackle?”

Craig, what should Mark do, our historical fiction writer?

**Craig:** Mark should stand still while I approach him and slap him. Slap! What do the five fingers say to Mark? Slap.

Mark, listen to me. Listen carefully. Everybody that anyone has ever heard of has a script about them in development somehow somewhere. Everybody. There are 12 different Winston Churchills on screens at any given moment on any given day all across the world. 10. 12. 15. Possibly 20 Churchills. It never ends. OK?

You will – listen to me, Mark – you will not care about that stuff. You will write your script. Either your script will or will not get made, but if it is beautiful and it is wonderful it is going to do wonders for you. The fact that one of the scripts you’re worried about has been kicking around for over a decade, well what else do you need to know? And the other one is a different take on this. You’re being way too concerned and scared and timid. My guess is that the historical figure you wanted to write about was a pretty brave person. Perhaps take some inspiration from them. And get back in there and do what you want to do. Write what you want to write. That will be the best script you are capable of writing.

**John:** Yep. I’d also say to Mark that it seems like your deal is that you love historical fiction about events and people of the past. If that’s your lane, stay in that lane. Do that thing and write really good scripts in there. And it’s helpful I think at the beginning to be a little bit stereotyped because then they know to go to you with that thing. So, don’t worry about it. Write the best script you can and then write the next best script you can.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right.

**John:** Cool. It is time for our One Cool Things. Craig? Oh, I know your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Well, I’ve been obsessed with this now for weeks. I think it went viral basically. There is an old advert, as they say in the UK, put out by the British Pork Counsel, Concern, you know, like these industry organizations that promote a particular meat or drink.

**John:** Milk does a body good.

**Craig:** There you go. Exactly. Pork, it’s what’s for dinner. Or Beef, sorry, Beef, it’s what’s for dinner. That was a–

**John:** Pork is the other white meat.

**Craig:** Pork was the other white meat. That was the American version. Well, in England back in the ‘80s there was an ad for British pork and I think the slogan was, “It’s got the lot,” meaning it’s got everything. But what is fascinating about this ad is that it is – it features a family. There is a man and his wife, and they’ve got friends and perhaps their children, all sitting around a table having lunch on Sunday. And they are serving roast pork.

And the man delivers all of the dialogue. No one else is allowed to talk. And it is the creepiest thing I think I’ve ever seen. What he’s saying is creepy. The way he says it is creepy. The way he says it is creepy. The way he looks at the camera, at you at home, implies that this is not really about pork at all. That he’s a killer. And that this may be – he may have killed Nana. This might not be pork. And he’s threatening you is really what he’s doing. It’s threatening. You feel unsafe watching it. It is astonishing that it was ever approved, written or approved, and put on the air in the first place.

Well, we have it for you to watch. I don’t know what to say. Just enjoy the subtle insanity of this British pork ad.

**John:** Yeah. So I have it paused here on my screen. And I had not really noticed, because I have only seen it on my phone, so now I get to see it on a bigger screen. It’s so fascinating, like the table they’re sitting at is incredibly tiny.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Tiny in a way that doesn’t seem that it could possibly be real. And it’s also a great thing to look at because you might have a question like what are eye lines. What is that term? Eye lines are not what this ad should teach you. Because he’s looking in really strange places. And when people look up at him, they’re not looking all the way in the wrong direction. It’s not like crossing the line problem. But they’re not looking at him. And it feels like a character choice, like I don’t want to look directly at him because he scares me.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** When the wife looks up at him in his general direction, and she quickly looks down, it’s just so fascinating. And it’s such a great example of how even if you took out his oddly menacing tone, you would know there is something deeply wrong in this family.

**Craig:** No, there’s something really – and I’ve been trying to figure out what’s going on. All right, eye line wise, so what’s happening is he’s standing over this pork. And he’s apparently going to slice it up and hand it out, but everybody already has their food completely. So I don’t know what he’s doing standing over this pork anyway.

But the next time we see him, the way he’s standing is such that when they go in close it appears that he’s sitting. His posture is odd. So then people are looking up at him, but it appears that he’s sitting, so the eye lines are bizarre. And what he’s saying – what he starts is, “My wife, she’s got what it takes.” She’s got what it takes. Which is the weirdest. Like what do you mean she has what it takes? This is about sex? What is this about? My wife has what it takes?

And then he starts talking about pork, which is a total non-sequitur. And he starts talking about how they have plenty. You know, he’s got plenty. They’ve got plenty. We’ve all got plenty. And when he says, “We’ve all got plenty,” it’s like he’s saying “Don’t you dare tell me that we don’t have enough meat in this house. Screw you, man.“

And then he returns once again to his, “My wife.” And it goes to her. And she looks so terrified, and is so clearly not allowed to speak. It is awesome. It’s awesome. I’ve watched it 100 times.

**John:** Yeah. So I think some of the backstory on this is this from 1984 apparently. These are times of trouble. This is like an economic downtown. This is not the peak of success. And so to have pork for Sunday dinner was considered not necessarily extravagant, but like the sense of like we’ve got plenty is like “I’m able to provide for my family.”

**Craig:** Right. I get that.

**John:** So you as the homemaker should be cooking a Sunday ham to prove that I am a successful breadwinner.

**Craig:** Yeah. It definitely is Thatcher-era, what do they call it, austerity. And he’s saying essentially, yes, that we won’t be hungry today. But he’s doing it in such a way that you think if I don’t get pork, a steady of supply of pork, to feed these people – who by the way are dressed in suits for some reason. If I don’t get this pork, I’m coming for you. I’ll cut your throat. You’ll be my pork. He’s terrifying.

**John:** Yeah. And the fact that he’s addressing camera directly. I mean, it’s a little unclear whether his eye line is supposed to be down the lens to us, or that he’s talking to somebody else. But no one else seems to be hearing him.

And it is a strange thing in commercials where the actors will sometimes address camera directly, even though there’s other people around them. But this doesn’t work.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It’s like an Uncanny Valley situation here.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s so weird.

**John:** It’s not quite to us. It’s not quite to them.

**Craig:** And it’s so quiet in the room. And you just hear the clinking of – you understand that what happened is he said, “I’m going to talk to my imaginary friends about this pork. You’re all going to sit and eat it. You’re not going to say a damn word. None of you. Not one word. Do you understand?”

And they’re all like, mm-hmm. “And when I point at you, you smile.” OK daddy. Please. “Good.”

It’s so great. What’s your One Cool Thing, John?

**John:** My One Cool Thing is the pilot for Champions on NBC. So Champions is a new show, a half-hour comedy, written by Charlie Grandy and Mindy Kaling. This pilot is directed by Michael Spiller. What I really admired about it is how it makes me remember how much information you have to pack into a pilot.

And so with the pilot episode like every time you’re going to a new set you have to establish that set. You have to establish who those people are in this set. You have to actually do the jokes, and be funny, and move the character things along, move the plot along. And pilots are just this weird beast. And I thought it was just a really great example of form of this really strange weird beast we do.

It made me think back to the first episode of 30 Rock where you have to set up Liz Lemon and Jack Donaghy who is taking over as the new boss. And what their whole dynamic is going to be. And their sets. And sort of what the show is trying to do. Yet it’s all for the first time. And so this was just a very good recent example, I thought, of how a pilot does all these things and sets all these wheels in motion.

And it’s so breakneck speed because there’s just so much to cram in. But just remarkably well done. Like you can actually still feel all the jokes in there. You can feel it all working. So, I just – I’ve never written a half-hour. I don’t think I ever could do it. But it was just an impressive version of like what a half-hour pilot can do.

And I wonder if I would be able to read it on the page and really see what was going to need to happen in front of the lens to make that all work. So, the writing was great, but I thought it was also really nicely directed.

**Craig:** Well this is why the writer of the pilot and the director of the pilot are handsomely compensated for the run of a show, because they really do set so many things in motion in that first. In a network pilot, you’re talking 23 minutes effectively?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s an astonishingly restrictive writing form and therefore it requires enormous craft. And, again, I will just say all awards should be given to comedies. All of them. Even best drama should be given to comedy as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Absolutely true. So check that out. I have a link to the little trailer in YouTube, but you can also check out the full episodes on iTunes or probably NBC.com.

Cool. That’s 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 by 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 longer questions or follow up like the things we answered today.

For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave us a review. We love those reviews.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. We still get those up about a week after the episode. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net or on the USB drive which you can find at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** We’ve got plenty.

**Craig:** We’ve all got plenty. Plenty to go around.

**John:** Have a good week.

**Craig:** Take it easy, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Alto’s Odyssey](http://www.altosodyssey.com/)
* An ambiguously threatening advertisement for [British pork](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0wDjWOnHcY) from 1984
* [Champions](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsobbyIvPn8) on [NBC](https://www.nbc.com/champions?nbc=1), created by Charlie Grandy and Mindy Kaling, directed by Michael Spiller
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Rajesh Naroth ([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_342.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/knowing-vs-discovering).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 341 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast we will try to answer the question how much do you need to know before you start writing. We’ll also discuss when to take a note and when to stand your ground.

**Craig:** Ooh, I like that one.

**John:** Stand your ground! But first we have some follow up. In our recent How Would This Be a Movie segment we looked at a Bloomberg story about debt collectors. And listener Joe wrote in who said, “The writer of the article, Zeke, is a buddy of mine from back in high school in Boston. He’s very excited that Hollywood people are talking about his story. And here’s the devastating news: Zeke Faux is actually pronounced Zeke Fox. I know. I’m sorry.”

**Craig:** Uh, it’s not. You mean, I think what listener Joe means is that Zeke Faux is actually mispronounced as Zeke Fox. I mean, that’s Faux. It’s F-A-U-X. It’s a word.

**John:** It is a word. It’s a French word. But he pronounces it Fox.

**Craig:** That’s fine. I mean, he can pronounce it Fox.

**John:** Like Guy Fawkes Day sort of pronounces it.

**Craig:** Right. But what he should do is go with Faux.

**John:** Yeah. So I sympathize with Zeke because I had an unpronounceable last name, which I ended up changing. But we pronounced my last name Misey, everyone else in the world pronounced it Mease, because that’s sort of how it looks. It should have been pronounced My-za in German. There was no winning. So Zeke has chosen his cool looking name, but he’s going to pronounce it Fox. I get it.

**Craig:** Yeah, listen, it’s cool. Whatever – I mean, it’s his name. But I’m just saying if you’re trying to be a super hero or villain, Zeke Faux is just cool.

**John:** It’s a cool name.

**Craig:** You know who loves that name?

**John:** Who loves that name?

**Craig:** Cool Craig.

**John:** Ah, Cool Craig. Oh, welcome back Cool Craig. Cool Craig, like are you a cousin of that other guy who doesn’t show up anymore?

**Craig:** Oh no, he shows up man.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Yeah. Cool Craig is actually a very close cousin of Whole Foods Craig. Whole Foods Craig cares more about you.

**John:** That’s good. I think the thing about Sexy Craig is there’s nothing wrong with Sexy Craig as long has everyone consents to Sexy Craig’s appearance in the podcast. And sometimes I don’t consent to it.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig weirdly is just learning about consent. Sexy Craig – he’s into it. Believe me, he gets that the world has changed and probably isn’t as hospitable to guys like Sexy Craig as it used to be. But, no, he’s learning about it. He’s into it. But he’s evolving.

**John:** That’s good. It’s crucial that this fictitious persona evolve along with all of the characters out there. So many characters in stories that I love are really problematic looked at through a modern lens. And that’s just a thing we have to accept.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** Do you want to take the next one about MoviePass?

**Craig:** I do. I do. Here we go. So, Brian in Winchester, Virginia writes, “An interesting situation arose this weekend with Red Sparrow.” That’s the Jennifer Lawrence film that’s out right now. “The regular 2D screenings of the film were not available on the MoviePass app. Each listing was grayed out just as the premium screenings of other films are, even in theaters that accept MoviePass. The scuttlebutt is that the distributor wouldn’t sponsor or pay for MoviePass to promote the film. Users have been getting direct emails to see certain films with their subscription. So MoviePass flexed their might and leveraged its users by preventing us from seeing the film on the opening night/weekend, likely impacting the box office.

“I’ve enjoyed MoviePass. I see more films and save money, but we are getting direct promotional emails to see certain films. It seems like a very slippery slope to use us subscribers as leverage against distributors. Both are options that could drive the value of the program down.”

Well, John, oh boy, here we go.

**John:** Yeah. This does seem like a slippery slope. And not even a slope. A thing just happened. The classic scheme of this would be you’d have a person who comes in and says like, “You know, it’s a really nice movie you’ve got here. It would be a shame if anything happened to it.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** This doesn’t feel great. Now, we’ll zoom back out and say like there are people who influence the outcomes of opening weekends and movies all the time. And there’s always the sort of quid pro quo where you’re doing publicity with people and stuff like this, but this feels like a very kind of direct transactional thing. And they’re coming to us and saying like, “Hey, would you like us to promote your movie?” And if you say no then they will sort of unpromote your movie. And that doesn’t feel good.

**Craig:** Yeah, you can now see what they’re doing. Right? The classic Internet truism is “If you are not paying for the product you are the product.” And in this case it appears that the subscriber base for MoviePass is the product. So MoviePass very cannily is monetizing this by advertising movies to their base and, yes, it appears that if you – it may not even be as much as, “OK, well if you don’t advertise with us then we’re not going to let our people see your movies.” It may also just be these people are advertising with us and they’re in direct competition with you. So part of our deal with them is we’re sending our hordes to them. This is sort of the Groupon model of things.

If they push this a little too hard and a little too quickly, which I think they are, I could definitely see a situation where studios – and this is where they have to be careful about not running afoul of antitrust – but I could see them all just going, “This service is not in our long term best interests. Let’s stop advertising with it.”

**John:** Yeah. No, it’s a really interesting situation. Now, I didn’t do any research on this, but I know in the past there have been controversies over things like radio stations that will have their annual holiday Christmas concerts. And there’s that sense of like if you are a band who is asked to play that and you don’t play that, you will not get radio play on that station. They’ll cease to promote you.

That is a form of a distributor coming in and saying to the artist if you do not basically pay us by your free performance we will not support you. That kind of thing happens in Hollywood all the time where if you don’t do Entertainment Tonight they’re not going to talk about your movie. There’s always that kind of situation. This just feels much more obvious of an impasse between these two powerful parties.

**Craig:** And I think also that if MoviePass pursues this method, at some point their patrons will become frustrated. I mean, I don’t think it was in the user agreement – I mean, it is, of course – but it wasn’t certainly out front that you would get to see all of the movies you could see in a month, except for the ones that they don’t want you to see because it’s not good for the MoviePass company. That’s not attractive.

**John:** I agree. I agree. So Netflix in its heyday when it was still sending out DVDs, there were limitations. They wouldn’t always have every movie available. There was sort of some built-in shortages there, but this was an artificial scarcity that they were just creating here and that is the thing that is going to make people less happy than they would otherwise be.

**Craig:** You know, a movie like Red Sparrow, I mean, come on. This movie – these are the movies we need to be helping. And I haven’t seen Red Sparrow. I don’t even know what Red Sparrow is about. All I know is that Red Sparrow is not a $100 million or $500 million budgeted massive brightly colored explosion festival. And therefore it would be nice – and it stars a movie star. And it’s not a little tiny, tiny like little indie-indie movie.

Right? It’s the sort of movie that Hollywood used to make a lot of. They’re frightened to death of making them. And now MoviePass is going to choke the life out of it. I mean, that’s just wrong.

**John:** I agree. All right, continuing our follow up. Last week we talked about the plan or lack of a plan in Return of the Jedi. Sian Griffiths wrote in to point out that maybe the worst thing about that opening sequence wasn’t Luke’s plan, but the metal bikini. So I’m going to link to her blog post she did which was a really good analysis of sort of how in that third movie of Star Wars, the initial trilogy, so much of what we had learned to love about Leia kind of becomes undone because the Leia character is suddenly sexualized. A quote from the article is, “The ultimate crime of the metal bikini is that it turned Leia from being a force of personality into merely a body.”

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I don’t know quite what to think about these things because I’m so easily swayed. I am very much a weathervane on these things, right? So I read something like this and I go, yep, yep, yep. And then I’ll see some other article where women talk about how they thought it was the most body positive thing and they love to cosplay as her in the bikini. And it’s a huge part of their – and I’m like, OK, yep, yep. You know what, I don’t know. I’m defaulting to my hands up. I don’t know.

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know either about Wonder Woman and her outfit versus Captain Marvel who has a non-sexualized outfit. I don’t know. I mean, I want women to be able to own and present their sexuality as a powerful part of their force. But I don’t want them to be limited to it. So, I don’t know what the right answer is.

**Craig:** Women disagree about things the way that men disagree about things, which makes sense because they’re human beings. When women are disagreeing about things that have to do with women, I have learned to shut my mouth. And just listen. You know, I’ll let them hash it out.

**John:** All right. We also had several listeners who wrote in with their own theories about what was possibly happening. We could get into this, but I don’t know that it’s really going to serve anybody to get into the more elaborate theories of why people were doing what they were doing other than to say you can make anything kind of make sense, but what we’re actually seeing on screen right now doesn’t really make a lot of sense if you stop to think about it.

**Craig:** No. I mean, people can torture some sort of bizarre bendy pipe cleaner explanation for this, but in general good storytelling observes Occam’s razor. Even if it’s not an explanation that you could have predicted, it’s a surprise, in the post-analysis of it you should be able to say that’s a very elegant thing that happened there. The more complicated and twisty and bendy it is, the more of a – well, just a screenwriting artifact it is to allow the writer or the filmmakers to achieve moments they wanted to achieve separate and apart from a compelling storyline or character motivation.

**John:** Absolutely. That actually is a perfect segue into our first main topic which is sort of knowing versus discovering. And sort of what you’re describing in terms of tortured logic to get you to a certain place. That can often come about because a writer has a plan for how things are going to fit together and that plan may not be the most natural way of getting about it.

So, this all sprung from a conversation I’m having this week and the people who are inviting me to have this conversation threw out this question, which was how much does a screenwriter need to know before he or she sits down to write a scene, which I thought was a great question and we haven’t really talked about that. We’ve talked about writing a scene, but we haven’t talked about what you really need to know beforehand. And so my first instinct of course was to make a checklist.

So, I’m going to read through this checklist, and then we’re going to throw away the checklist. And I wanted to read through sort of like what might be on that checklist.

So, you might ask, “Well, who is in this scene. What should those characters want? What are they hiding? What is the central conflict? Where does the scene take place? What just happened before this? What’s going to happen next? What’s the first image we see in the scene? What’s the first line? What absolutely has to occur in this scene in order for it to make sense and for it to move the story forward? And, finally, how does this scene change the direction of the story?”

So, these are 10, 11 points that might be on a checklist as you’re sitting down to write a scene. And I made this checklist and quickly realized almost every scene I’ve written I couldn’t answer all these questions and I think that’s good. I think if you did have the answers to all these questions you’d sort of be paralyzed. And I’m curious what your thoughts are on this checklist.

**Craig:** Well, it’s a good list. I think all of these are valid and I would – I guess in maybe a slightly more vague way some of the questions I ask myself are what’s the point of this scene. Why do I want this in the movie? And how will the scene be entertaining? Because I’m constantly terrified by being boring. And so those are two big things that hang over my head.

I actually try – I do try and answer as many of these questions as I can before I start writing the scene. And then I give myself permission, and I don’t even have to do it, it just sort of happens that as I’m writing things begin to occur. So I feel much more comfortable and targeted when I have a plan and I have a lot of answers.

And I think simply because I feel comfortable when I begin to do the writing other stuff starts to happen. But it happens within the context of an understanding about some hard answers. Even if part of the thing that results is a deviation from the plan.

**John:** Yeah. So you and I have never written on classic TV shows where there’s a room and as a room you’re breaking the story. So you’re breaking the big beats and you’re breaking the smaller beats. You’re breaking it down to scenes and often you’re breaking down sort of what happens in the scene. And there’s something wonderful about that because you have the ability to have a bunch of different brains working through something and sometimes you can come up with something really great.

Where I wonder if I would be incredibly frustrated is when I get that big document and then have to write the actual scenes that become the screenplay, or the teleplay, the kind of weird paralysis I’d feel that I was locked into the scene is going to happen the way that we broke it in the room. You’re going to have to follow these beats.

Because I have a very hard time writing a scene if I know exactly what’s going to happen in the scene. Like I have a hard time making that scene feel spontaneous and feel like the characters are making their own choices in the moment versus the scene making the choices. It’s the difference between character-driven versus plot-driven. And we always think about character-driven as like the whole movie is character-driven. The sense that these characters have a big someday wish that they are setting out on a quest to sort of get to that someday wish. They’re facing these challenges. They’re changed by the journey. That’s what movies are.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I think within the context of a scene that same thing kind of happens where characters come into it with a certain goal, a certain ambition, and by their own actions they’ve changed things. And you want to feel that they are making choices within the moment, line by line, what they’re saying, what they’re doing, how they’re reacting that is causing the effect of the change of the scene.

If I came in with this sort of master plan document for exactly what’s going to happen in the scene and how we’re going to get through the scene, I don’t know if I could do that very well.

**Craig:** I do a master plan. And I have the opposite emotional requirement. I find it hard to write a scene if I don’t know how it begins and how it ends and roughly all these things that are supposed to happen in it. But what I find is that what I really need to know when I’m writing a scene is – it’s a bit like, OK, I’m about to throw some characters into a lake. I need to know why I’m throwing them into the lake. I also need to know that at the end of the scene they’re going to emerge from the lake at this point on the shore for this reason. So, then I feel good. I’m like, great, I know why I’m throwing them in. I know what’s going to happen when they plunge down. I have a general sense of how they’re going to struggle to get back up to the surface. But from that point to the point I know must occur at the end, let’s see. Let’s see how it goes.

**John:** That’s I think what I’m describing. It’s that you just talked about your goals for this scene. Basically you as the writer, the sort of meta like what is the intention of the scene. Why does this scene need to be in the movie? What is the thing that’s going to happen to it? But the characters in that scene, they shouldn’t know where it’s going to go. They shouldn’t know what’s going to happen. And to the degree that we sense that they do know what’s going to happen or where it’s going to go, we’re bored.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It has lost all of its spark or magic.

Another analogy I’d have for it is sort of like a road trip. And so you can think of a movie as being like a big road trip and you can sort of pick where the destinations are going to be on that road trip. So we’re driving from LA to New York. Are we going to take a straight route there? Are we going to stop in Houston? Are we going to stop in Bozeman, Montana? Is it going to be on a time clock like we’re in a hurry, or is it just whenever we get there that it’s going to be that? That’s the scope of the movie feels that way.

But, an individual scene isn’t like a road trip in that way. It’s more like an errand. Like you’re going out to do something. You have a very specific goal. Like you have to stop at the drug store and pick up this thing.

And within the course of that scene you could just have them go in the drug store, pick up that thing, and pay for it and leave. But you can also do so much more. And if you let the characters, give them some space to breathe and sort of make their own choices you can find a much more interesting way to make that scene work than just the functional version of it. It’s like, OK, well that scene works because they picked up the thing that they needed to pick up. Those tend to be the least interesting versions of those scenes.

**Craig:** I agree. And this is why so much of the fun part of writing for me is the part where I try and see as much as I can in the space of the scene. So, if I have a scene that is designed to serve a plot purpose and also a character purpose, and I know what those are. And then I’m imagining the moment and trying to make it real. And so I have two characters that are in this pharmacy and they have to go pick up medicine, because that’s the errand as you say. I’m literally using an errand to describe the errand. And one of them is eating a Snickers bar. He has bought a Snickers bar and he’s eating it. And his friend is at the counter and she’s waiting for the pills to come out. And they’re having a conversation. And I know that the point of the conversation is they disagree about something. Well, there’s no way in the world that in my master plan I would have said and this guy should be eating a Snickers bar.

That’s just something that I kind of fill in. But now that I know that he’s eating the Snickers bar, at some point I want her to slap it right out of his mouth. Because that’s exciting. And that’ll just happen. There’s no plan for that, right? So you start to like use the stuff in your environment. The only way to surprise people is to surprise yourself. And to have characters surprise each other. Life is surprising, particularly the parts of life that we find fascinating which we’re supposed to be presenting in movies.

So, there is this kind of need to plan so that your scene isn’t this rambling, shaggy dog, pointless mush, which we see a lot of from early writers. These like long runs of rambly dialogue going nowhere because they think that’s what’s real. But, then within your disciplined moment you’re just playing in this very real world. And then if you know, “Well, my purpose here is for him to realize that she is no longer going to take his crap, well now the Snickers bar is the way I’m going to do it.” And I could have never foreseen that.

**John:** Absolutely. So, what you described with sometimes beginning writers, or other writers who they seem to become in love with their characters’ voices, but they don’t actually have them doing anything interesting, is these characters just sort of keep wandering down these blind alleys. That it’s not moving the actual story forward. So, the individual scenes might be really funny, but they don’t add up to anything. Or even within the course of scenes there’s not really a shape to them. They’re sort of just in this moment. And a lot of times you’ll notice this in scripts where you go through a whole sequence and you realize like they basically just have been talking or doing the same thing for like ten pages. Nothing has actually progressed. And if I were to take these ten pages out we’d still be in the same moment.

So, that kind of planning problem can definitely happen. I guess you can’t let this process of discovery just lead you away from where you’re actually trying to get to. And if your whole scene became about the chocolate bar and slapping things, and then became a huge slapping fight inside this, and they got arrested, and they got taken away, well, that probably wasn’t what the scene needed to accomplish.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it does go back to that initial question of like what absolutely needs to happen in this scene? Because the scene happened, this next scene is possible. Well, what is that next scene in general? Or how is it leading us to the next thing? And I have seen many cases where people get seduced by really interesting things that happen in the moment and they get led astray. And I face that in real life all the time. Like there will be times where a scene will take me in a really interesting way and I will decide like, OK, you know what, I was going to go there, now I’m going to go here. I think I can get myself back over there. Most of the time I can, but sometimes I will have to just chuck a scene that I really do like because it really wasn’t getting me where I wanted to go. It was a really interesting character scene that couldn’t actually contribute to what it needed to contribute to the story at that point.

**Craig:** Oh yeah. Happens all the time. You have fun when you’re writing and sometimes you have fun in a way where you go, “Wonderful.” And sometimes you have fun in a way and go, “Yeah, no, I got to delete all that.”

Anybody that is concerned about efficiency should not be a writer. It is not an efficient process. If it’s efficient you’re doing it wrong, I’m pretty sure.

**John:** I was reading this blogger recently who talked about how every night he makes a plan for the next day and he has his day scheduled out to like ten minute increments. It’s called hyper scheduling. And I could, A, never do that. But I do feel that sometimes aspiring writers are attempting that in their screenplays. And probably because they’re read too many screenwriting books they see like this big macro thing, like this is what structure is, and this is what happens in a scene. Or they read some book that tells them every scene needs to flip from positive to negative, and then negative to positive. And there’s a whole way things have to happen.

And so they get incredibly granular in figuring out like, “OK, what’s going to happen in this scene before I write it.” They keep trying to optimize this unwritten thing.

So I think there’s a real danger to over-knowing. And it’s you sort of preclude new discoveries. You preclude new possibilities because you’re so determined to hit these beats that you’ve already set out for yourself. And sometimes it goes back to even like character backstory. Like a lot of times before writers will start writing a script they’ll do these elaborate bios for their characters about where they come from and how many brothers they have and what their favorite cereal is. And I’ve never found that helpful for me because if I know those details part of me wants to use it in some way which is almost never going to be helpful. And by locking down those details I’ve taken away my ability to be surprised by something that happens in the moment.

Like if I knew that Lucky Charms was his favorite cereal that’s probably not going to help me. But, how you made that decision might preclude some other interesting decision down the road. So people obsess about that stuff which is just kind of so often busy work I find.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, everybody has a certain amount of busy work they do to comfort themselves as they prepare to do this thing that often is miserable to do. I would say this: if you are having success – and creative success is I guess the most important thing there. I mean, the rest of it hopefully is following along. And your method is to backstory the hell out of your characters because that’s how you do sort of your running jump, your running start. That’s your running start. I’m with you. I don’t really find those things to be particularly important. And generally speaking when I get to a moment where I think, oh you know what, it would be good to know what her attitude is about blankety-blank, then I start to go back and fill those little bits of the map in.

But I don’t feel a great need to do any of that stuff myself. And I think that new writers are trying to exert control over a very scary process. Who wouldn’t? I mean, we are trained to exert control over circumstances in order to achieve results. And when you try and control things like screenplays you end up with very dead things. There is a kind of madness that is required along with this remarkable sobriety. You kind of have to have both going on at the same time or you’ll either have this very wooden thing or just a rambly, bizarro mess.

**John:** Yeah. I think there’s essentially a great compromise we tend to make. Because you want your characters to be free to do what they need to do, to explore themselves. And you also need to get them to go to the places where you need them to go. And so I think the bargain we make is that the characters can sort of move however they want to move, but we are the ones who are going to lay down the road for them.

So, they can go anywhere they want, but these are the roads. And so you’re ultimately going to get them to where they need to go, but exactly how quickly they’re going to do that. They still have a feeling of control, even though you are the one behind the scenes who is sort of mastering everything. And I think that speaks to also why when people do these elaborate backstories sometimes they’re describing a character who is still. They’re describing a character who is like in a museum. But the characters we see in stories are in motion. And so if you’re so focused on where the character came from and all these things, it’s like this frozen in time snapshot of who that character is. But in a movie you’re always seeing them in motion. And so be looking for what’s changing. Be looking for what’s challenging them. Try to do the work to figure out what that character is like when they’re moving and talking and curious and frightened, not just who they were when they were ten years old.

**Craig:** Yep. I agree with that. I think that the more you lock yourself in on that stuff the less you are concentrating on how that stuff is no longer who this character is supposed to be. And that’s what your movie is about. It’s about taking somebody from A to B. And so much of what the beginning is is establishing what you believe the audience needs to know. So, there’s the question what do we need to know to begin writing a scene and then there’s this other question which I’m asking all the time, which I suppose informs the first question: what does the audience need to know coming out of this scene?

And too much information is bad. It’s not only boring, but it starts to reduce a sense of wonder and mystery and participation. There’s that notion of active viewing. That you are leaning in because you know you have to pay attention. And it’s interesting and also things will be left out that you’re going to have to fill in for yourself.

So, another question I suppose we could put on our long list is what does the audience need to know before you start writing your scene. Because I think about that all the time.

**John:** Yeah. The weird things about a screenplay versus a book is that as a screenwriter we are sort of the proxy for the audience. We are sitting in the seat watching the story unfold on a big screen in front of us. So when we say we see/we hear, we’re saying that as the audience. Like this is what we’re experiencing. And so we’re always trying to remember what the audience knows, what the audience expects, what the audience is looking for. Because, if we don’t have a sense of what this story looks like from the audience’s point of view, we’ve lost.

**Craig:** 100%.

**John:** All right. Let’s switch point of views to the screenwriter who is taking notes from somebody. Notes from a producer. Notes from a director. Notes from a studio executive. Craig, can you talk us through and answer definitively when should you take the note and when should you stand your ground?

**Craig:** I don’t know! I’ve been struggling with this my whole life. I did a talk about this at one of these creative salons that we had here in Los Angeles a while back. John, I assume you’ve read Le Petit Prince, The Little Prince, of course.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** So, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, wonderful book, but it opens with something that even as a child confused me and concerned me. So in the beginning of the book he says when I was a kid I used to draw. And I drew things – the idea was I drew a snake that had eaten an elephant. And so the snake – the elephant obviously is inside the snake so you can’t see the elephant in the snake – but he’s drawn a snake that has eaten an elephant and the shape when he shows it to adults he says, “Look what I drew.” And they would always say, “Oh, what a nice hat.”

But he knew that in fact it was not a hat. That’s the boring interpretation of it. And that in fact it’s an elephant inside a snake. And now he is a grownup and he’s crash landed in the desert and he meets the Little Prince who is the embodiment of innocence and child-like wonder. And he shows him his picture and the Little Prince says, “Oh, what a nice snake that has eaten an elephant.” And you’re like, ooh, finally, somebody gets it.

And as a kid I remember thinking, “But it looks like a hat?”

**John:** It does look like a hat.

**Craig:** It’s not fair. You’re not being fair. And that in fact that is a reasonable note that it looks like a hat. But I’ve always been a bit envious of people – and you and I, we know all sorts of writers and directors. And there is a certain sub-segment of our community that has absolutely no problem saying “What I’ve done here is an elephant inside a snake and if you don’t see it that’s your problem. I’m not changing it. I’m right. I have this bedrock faith in my instincts.“

When we go through this medium, this collaborative process, we are constantly getting input from people. And sometimes we think they’re right and sometimes we think they’re wrong. But the big question that I have, and I struggle with all the time, and maybe we can help people as they struggle with it is how do I know when I’m right and how do I know when I’m wrong. Because if you go too far one way or the other you end up either as a pushover or as this arrogant person. Or you could be this brave person, or you could be this weak person. And I struggle with it all the time.

How do you deal with it?

**John:** You know, I think a couple strategies I might employ at different times. One is just try to figure out consensus. So, if one person has the note, well, that could just be their opinion. If nine people have the note, then, OK, there’s something about that. There’s something that is hitting a lot of people a certain way and I need to really pay attention.

Another strategy might be to look back at my original intentions. Like what was I trying to do here and would taking this note change my intentions. Would taking this note bring me closer to my intentions? When I’m doing that sort of internal audit, I might also ask why am I reacting this way to that note. Is it because I’m afraid that they’re right, which is sometimes is the case. I might be afraid that they’re right and it’s going to be a lot of work, or I won’t even know how to implement that note. That might be something that I’m struggling with as I’m hearing that note.

But sometimes at the end of this assessment I’ll just decide, you know what, they’re wrong. And then I have to figure out like are they wrong enough that it’s worth sort of planting my foot and saying no I will not/I shall not budge. Or do I need to find a way to change something that addresses their concern without sort of implementing their solution if their solution is bad. I don’t know if any of these things are familiar to you.

**Craig:** No, they all are. And I’ve thought a lot about this. I think that there are certainly these moments where we get input and we have an emotional response. And that muddies the waters. And I’m almost saying let’s take that out of the equation. Let’s jump ahead. It’s two or three days later. You’ve calmed down. And now you can soberly look at this comment and even now you’re wondering “Am I right or am I wrong that they are right or they are wrong?”

And it’s not just about I’m right/they’re wrong. Sometimes I worry when I’m thinking they’re right and I’m wrong. And I worry about this because when we examine ourselves honestly what we will see is a lot of irrationality and a lot of cognitive errors. We change our minds, for instance, all the time. Sometimes our response to something is colored entirely by the fact that it is our first encounter with that thing.

Then the second or third encounter is a much different experience. So I’m wondering is my problem that I’ve seen it too many times? Is my problem that I just heard this note for the first time? I’m always sort of digging into this to try and figure out if I’m causing harm or not.

And over time I’ve come to the following conclusions, which are not super-duper helpful, but how could they be given the conundrum here. Conclusion number one is that there is no perfect way to do this. I will absolutely make mistakes. There are going to be times where I say no and I should have said yes. And there are going to be times where I say yes and I should have said no.

Conclusion number two: When I am particularly ambiguous or confused about whether or not I should be saying yes or no, that in and of itself is an indication of a problem. And so there’s a problem underneath all of this. Because even if there are times where I feel 100% confident and it turns out later I should not have been, generally speaking in those times my batting average is pretty high. Whether, again, sometimes I feel 100% confident that what somebody has just told me to change is exactly the right thing to do. But that happens because the writing around that spot is generally in the place it should be. And here’s a change that makes sense.

I get wishy-washy when the ground is not as firm under my feet as it should be.

**John:** Absolutely on all three points. And I’ve definitely been in situations where I’ve had the emotional response. I’ve stepped back. I’ve taken a look at it. I can look at it in terms of the work, the words on the page, the plan for making a movie. Obviously the screenplays we’re writing, especially if we’re not going into production quite yet, is just a plan for something that has not been built yet. And so sometimes we have difference of opinions on like well what should we build. And so it’s not a question of like is this the right way to do this thing. It’s like “Is this even the kind of thing we want to build?” And so those difference of opinions, like you have to sort of wrestle through those all the time.

Where it gets harder, and honestly I’ll say that half the notes I face tend to be in the second category, where I feel like the note is not actually about the work. The note is about something else. The note is about that other movie that opened last weekend. That note is about some other sort of defensive posture that this producer, this studio executive, this director is taking that has actually nothing to do with the work in front of them.

Those are sometimes the most frustrating notes because I have to then ask myself is it worth trying to implement this note if I will not ruin things because this is apparently something they feel they need to address in order for this project to move forward.

Sometimes you do those notes and sometimes you don’t do those notes. And I’ve been burned both ways where I’ve stomped my food and said, no, I’m absolutely not doing that. This is a ridiculous note. This is not helpful. And sometimes I’ve even said, “I can see why you’re saying that, but this is not the right thing. This is not the movie I signed on to write.” And I’ve left the project.

There have been other times where I’ve stayed on the project, and I’ve written those notes and it didn’t matter anyway. Because they were going to go in a different direction down the road. And so we’ve both been through situations where you’ve killed yourself for six months to sort of fine tune this thing and that line of dialogue on page 32 which you went back and forth over for three weeks and there was all this discussion. That scene is not in the movie anymore and they’ve completely changed how that whole thing works.

That’s the frustration, and the decisions that we have to go through, whether we’re taking a note or not taking a note. Because there’s a cost. There’s a cost to taking that note in terms of your time, in terms of your sort of pride in the work. You want to be the person who gets hired by that producer, by that studio again, because you are collaborative, but you also don’t want to just be a typist. Because that gets to be the real frustration.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you’ve hit on something really interesting here. Because most of the time when I’m feeling ambiguous and wishy-washy and doing my whole Hamlet routine it’s because someone has given me a note that they believe in. And anytime someone gives me a note that they believe in I have a natural instinct to give it credence or at least give it a fair shake.

But there is this other thing that happens. And I know that we have some executives and producers that listen to us and if you are an assistant and you’re looking ahead, you’re on that track to be a producer or an executive listen well. Listen carefully to what I’m about to tell you.

You know how one of the most common notes that you guys give us is, “Um, this writing here didn’t feel quite organic.” So, in Hollywood people use the word organic to basically mean natural, elegant, realistic, flowing, it doesn’t bump you is another term they’ll use. In other words, it seems nice and smooth and connected and integrated. It doesn’t feel artificial or inorganic. Well, there are inorganic, artificial, synthetic notes. And we know it when we’re getting them every single time. You guys think we don’t. You guys think that we can’t tell the difference between notes that you believe in because they have to do with this true creative feeling you have. And notes you’re giving us because of synthetic stuff. Like we want to hit a certain audience, an older audience, a younger audience, a whiter audience, a blacker audience. We are concerned about how this will play in China. We don’t know if we can get this on the schedule unless the budget is this. There is an actor that wants to do this movie here, and if we give them this one then they’ll do this one. There’s a million of those things.

And when you guys give us notes in order to help you achieve something inorganic – the marketing department thinks that blah, blah, blah. We know it every time. And it would be great if you would just say, “Here’s something that we are trying to accomplish that is separate and apart from just pure creativity.” Just be honest about it and own it. We’re not dumb. We’re not children. If you say, “Listen, we have a problem. We need to keep this budget under blank, which means we have to shoot it over here. And right now we’re concerned that we’re not going to be able to do it that way. So, we have suggestions that will help us get there. And you may not like them, but at least you’ll know why we’re giving them to you. We’re certainly not giving them to you because we think they’re brilliant creative ideas.”

It would go over so much better with us. And we would feel so less, I think, agitated. And then you see we would have I think much more mental capacity to handle the actual creative notes that are honest and organic.

So, to sum, if you are a producer or an executive or an assistant who wants to be a producer or an executive, be aware that we know when you are giving us synthetic notes. Give us synthetic notes and acknowledge they’re synthetic notes. It will really help all of us.

**John:** I really agree. And I can envision the document sort of being broken into two parts. Like these are the notes that are actually about the script itself and moments in the story that we feel could be better. Opportunities that we think aren’t being paid off. Moments where we are were genuinely confused. Great. Love all of that.

A second part of the note saying like these are things that we need to talk about because we don’t have this in the budget, because this is too similar to this other movie that we’re concerned about. That there’s some other extraneous forces that we need to be looking at here. Great. I get that, too.

Rarely do I see that in notes. And so instead when I get notes, when I get like official printed notes, is a paragraph that says, “We’re so excited. This has so much great possibility. It’s going to be an exciting movie, unlike anything we’ve ever seen. That said, here are our notes.” And then they go on for like seven pages. And they’ll be broken into little sub-heads about things. And they can be better written or worse written, but invariably there’s going to be contradictions. And sometimes the contradictions are called out. They hang a lantern on it like, “We’ll we said we want to see more of this character, we’re concerned that it not distract from the hero.” Basically they’re asking for – I want to see the hat and the elephant in the snake simultaneously.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** They’re asking for impossible things.

**Craig:** It’s what Lindsay Doran calls “a close-up with feet.”

**John:** Absolutely. That’s the best term for it. And those are maddening. So sometimes you’ll get to go in and you’ll sit down with the executive or with the producer and you’ll talk through them. And you can describe honestly like this is what I get, this is what I don’t get. Is there a plan for going ahead?

Another thing I will say that early on as I started out as a writer I loved the notes, because they’re notes. People have read my script. I will do whatever you tell me to do because I want to – not only do I want to please the teacher, I’m terrified I don’t really know what I’m doing so therefore I will just do your notes because you’ve made movies before. And I’ve not made movies. And that’s not a great scenario either.

**Craig:** No. No it’s not.

**John:** Again, you always have to be able to think about notes in terms of the context of like what the ultimate product is going to be. And that ultimate product is going to be both a movie you’re seeing on the screen, but also a movie that gets made. And so sometimes you’re balancing what this movie could be in this perfect form on the screen versus this movie actually existing. And it’s a delicate thing and you don’t quite know which side to push on.

**Craig:** Yeah. I wish that I could teach a class at every studio on how to effectively give notes to screenwriters. Not because I’m trying to help screenwriters, but because I’m trying to help them. I mean, their goal is to influence the work. The way that they do it, generally speaking, it’s not very – there’s a low batting average as far as I’m concerned. First of all the document, the notes document, is generally something I think we can all dismiss. Because I think even internally they’re dismissing it. Part of the reason why is that document is the result of some kind of political brokering process. There are multiple parties at a studio that are at multiple hierarchy levels. And they are all sort of throwing their opinions in. So you can have a situation where one person just keeps harping on something and everyone is like, “Well, none of us agree but that person is slightly above us. Let’s give them that one.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s put it in the document even though it doesn’t match any of the other notes in the document.

**Craig:** Correct. Well, we don’t know that. And, furthermore, you won’t tell us that, understandably. Right? So, that document starts to get silly. Also, that document often gets really granular because just like I think rookie screenwriters try and exert too much control over the process. That’s what I think a lot of newer producers and executives do. They’re trying to control this thing that ultimately cannot by being really granular. Like when you get into these page notes it’s laughable. Page notes literally ignore how movies are made. But there I think is a process that’s incredibly useful, that I find incredibly useful, and that’s the one where we get rid of all the formalities, and I and the producers and the executives just have essentially a therapy session for the screenplay.

We just talk.

And we just listen.

And we see where it is that we really are caring. And we don’t worry so much about trying to treat this thing like it’s a broken radio that just needs a few extra diodes and maybe a piece of wire here. It’s this living, breathing thing. It’s a story about human beings. So let’s just have a therapy session about it. And more often than not, just like in real therapy, the stuff that people were saying is what they wanted isn’t really what they wanted. And then you get to the meat of it. And then you can actually make things better.

**John:** Yeah, you could. Craig that was probably a very dangerous thing for you to wish because you say you wish we could just like go and teach a class to all the studios about how to give notes. That feels like a thing we could actually do.

**Craig:** Oh, OK, I’ll do it. I mean, if they are willing to actually sit there and listen to me. Because I actually like good notes, I just want to tell them how to do it better so that they don’t end up with either frustrated, angry, miserable, demotivated, or confused writers.

**John:** That’s totally a doable thing. Don’t you think? It’s totally a doable thing.

**Craig:** Well, you know, it’s really up to them, isn’t it?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Standing offer, folks.

**John:** All right. Let’s wrap this up and go to our new segment which we call–

**Craig:** John’s WGA Corner.

**John:** So today in the Corner, if you are a WGA member you got an email from the WGA that’s talking about the AMBA. You probably never heard of this term before. I hadn’t. But it’s essentially the Agency Minimum Basic Agreement. It is an agreement between the WGA and all of the agencies. And there’s discussion about what the future of that agreement should be. And there are some meetings coming up. So you should go to one of these meetings because it’s actually really important.

So the two that are coming up in the future are March 14 at 7pm at the Sheraton Universal and then Tuesday March 20, 7pm, at the Beverly Hilton. So in the email you go there’s information about how you RSVP for these meetings. But it’s really good if you go. I’m going to be at the one that’s on Saturday, so it will have already passed by the time this episode comes out. But it’s really good. And there’s good information about what’s happening and what the decisions are ahead.

**Craig:** It’s the new hotness in the Guild. So the old hotness was getting grouchy with the studios. The new hotness is getting grouchy with the agencies. So let’s see where this all goes.

You know, I remain, John, as you know endlessly skeptical of these things, but you know the last negotiations with the companies I thought really shook out some great things. Wouldn’t have done it necessarily the way it was done, but I can’t argue with the results. And so I guess I’m kind of hoping for the same thing here. I’m not sure if I kind of get how this going. But then again me getting how something is going isn’t necessarily the criterion which matters. How about that?

**John:** Indeed. So if you are in the Craig Mazin camp and are not quite sure what to think of it, these meetings are a good place to start. So, we’ll be telling you more then. If you don’t get to one of these meetings, the only thing I would tell you is that most writers who are represented by agencies have never signed agency papers. Have you ever signed papers for any of your agents?

**Craig:** Never.

**John:** Never. Like 1% of WGA members sign papers with their agencies. If your agency is suddenly like this week or next week says, “Hey, we need you to sign a contract with the agency,” don’t do that. That’s probably not a great idea.

And also I’d be curious if they are asking you to do that. So just email me at ask@johnaugust.com to let me know that, because I’m curious whether that’s going to start happening. Because we could envision a scenario in which a lot of agencies try to make their clients sign longer term agreements with agencies, which would be very unusual.

**Craig:** It would be. And my guess is that the larger agencies really aren’t going to go through the pain and weird awkwardness of asking their big money earners to sign these contracts because it looks weak. And if your client doesn’t want to be there, they’re leaving. It’s just not worth it. It’s not good for you. The worst possible thing in the world for an agency like CAA or UTA or WME would be to have a high profile client that hates them, doesn’t want to be there, and the agency won’t let them go. I mean, that’s just – that would be a nightmare.

**John:** Yeah. That would not be good. But other writers might not be in the situation where they can so easily feel like they can leave and so if this does happen, if you get this email or call from your agent, I’m just curious about that. So, just drop me a note at ask@johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** I feel like the managers may have people signing things.

**John:** I think it’s more common with managers.

**Craig:** I’m not a big manager fan as you know.

**John:** Yeah. At some point we will have the manager conversation. Most of these writers who I’ve met at these screenwriter meetings have managers.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** And it’s incredible common.

**Craig:** I hate it.

**John:** And most of them if you ask them why they have a manager they say it’s so their agent will work harder for them.

**Craig:** The whole – it’s just – oh man. It’s sort of like, what’s the best way I could think of this? Like if there’s a limited supply of positions. Every single artist requires an agent. So that’s one-to-one. I mean, it’s not really one-to-one because an agent, you have lots and lots. But for every writer, they can only have one agent. They can’t employ two agents or three agents, right? So this business just invented a new term. Here, now you can have two agents, because we just name this one a manager.

Well, why don’t we just have a third one now called a talent coordinator? And that will be your third agent. So I have an agent, a manager, and a talent coordinator. What else can we get in there? I mean, you obviously have a lawyer who does a very specific job. And maybe there’s a fourth thing that we can do so that more and more people can take our money.

**John:** That would be good. I will say that as I’ve been talking to different screenwriters at lunches and various things, people tend to like their entertainment attorneys who take a 5% commission or charge an hourly fee, and who are – I don’t know. They’re just responsible folks. And at some point I just want to give our entertainment attorneys a big hug because they’ve worked very hard for both me and for you.

**Craig:** Oh, listen, that’s the biggest scam of all. Is that you’ve got agents taking 10%. You’ve got managers taking 10%. Plus managers producing and getting backend fees. The lawyers are doing almost everything. The lawyers aren’t just writing up these long form contracts. They’re also negotiating the terms.

You know, typically the agent is really saying, “OK, this person wants to talk to you about doing this job. Great. Let’s talk about what the big number is that you’ll get paid. Great. Lawyer, literally do everything else.” Everything. That means it’s the big number, and how the bonuses break out, and blah, blah, and the options and the so-and-sos. The lawyers do so much more and they get half. And believe me, they know. They know they’re getting screwed. But, you know, they’re still doing pretty well.

**John:** But they’re not getting that big backend money.

**Craig:** No. Well, in that sense they’re like screenwriters.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Screenwriters just traditionally in features they’re like you guys don’t get first dollar gross, but dopey director Jim who has done four mediocre films, but he’s a director, he can get that. Why? Why? It makes no sense.

**John:** Agreed. Yeah. The only thing that makes sense are One Cool Things. Talk us through your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Segue Man! My One Cool Thing this week is a sequel, John.

**John:** You like the sequels.

**Craig:** I do. I like the sequels. So, there was a game a while ago that I think we probably had on as a One Cool Thing called Alto’s Adventure.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** Yeah, great little free runner for iOS and probably for that other platform that neither of us care about. And you play a guy skiing down a mountain, or a girl. Actually, you’ve got a guy, a girl, and then a big guy and a big – no, it was actually just one girl. She was the one I liked the most. I liked playing her the most because she had the tightest spin. I like a nice spinning.

So, anyway, love that game. Played it to death. Well, they have a sequel out called Alto’s Odyssey. And instead of you being in the snow, now you’re in a desert. And you’re sandboarding. So it’s a very different environment. But I thought like, OK, you know, so you changed snow to sand, and the graphics are a little updated. Cool, but what else?

They’ve come up with so many other things in this that are so much fun that build beautifully on the platform that was there. Just really very clever. And it’s such a fine line between not enough and too much. And they got it just right I thought. So, the only thing that bothers me is I downloaded it on my iPad. And then I went to my phone because I’ve got it like OK if you do it here it shows up there. And on my phone it wasn’t there.

And they’re going to charge me again. So there are those certain apps where they charge you separately. Because the iPad version I guess is slightly different than the iPhone version.

**John:** Yeah, sorry.

**Craig:** Is that a thing?

**John:** It’s a thing, yeah. So you can have combined bundles where it’s one bundle that can install on either iOS device, but they also have separate iPad versus iPhone versions. It’s the developer’s choice.

**Craig:** Yeah I don’t like that so much. So that was annoying to me. But, you know, listen, I can pay the $4, or the $5. It’s $5, I think. So, anyway, fun game. Alto’s Odyssey. Check it out.

**John:** And I did play through the most recent Room, per your recommendation, and it really was terrific. And so no spoilers, it’s basically all inside a creepy Victorian dollhouse and it was delightful.

**Craig:** It was delightful. I don’t know I would say, I mean delightful, the ending is disturbing.

**John:** Yeah, but they’re all disturbing endings.

**Craig:** I know. I love it. I’m so sad that it’s going to be another like two years. John, where is Elder Scrolls 6? What’s going on?

**John:** I don’t know what’s going on.

**Craig:** Do you realize Skyrim came out in 2011?

**John:** Yeah, so last year in France I started playing the up-res version of it, and it’s still just a terrific game. Like the same basic mechanics. It was still just great. But, yeah, I think they’re ready for a new one.

**Craig:** Yeah, like come on. Come on!

**John:** My One Cool Thing is simply a song and a video. It is by a band called Superorganism. The song is called “Everybody Wants to Be Famous.” It’s just good. Someone recommended it on Twitter. I listened to it. I’m like, you know what, that’s a really good song. I liked it. And it reminded me a little bit of Rachel Bloom’s version of the Scriptnotes theme where she sings When I Will Be Famous. And this is a whole song that is basically that same vibe.

So, we’re going to play this as our outro this week. So that is the music you hear underneath me as I’m speaking.

Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** If you have an outro or a question for us, you can write in to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place to send me notice that your agent has started asking you to sign a contract, because I’ll be curious if that happens.

We’re on Facebook. You can search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us at Apple Podcasts. Just look for Scriptnotes. While you’re there you can leave us a review. People leave lovely reviews, so thank you for that.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, going back all the way to Episode One.

You can hear all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net. It’s $2 a month for all those back episodes. Or we have some of the USB drives that have the first 300 episodes. Those are for sale at store.johnaugust.com.

Craig, on Twitter, is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. And have a really good week.

**Craig:** You too, John. See you soon.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Siân Griffiths’ blog post, [The only Girl in the Known Universe](https://changesevenmag.com/2016/07/06/the-only-girl-in-the-known-universe-by-sian-griffiths/amp/) about Princess Leia
* The Little Prince’s [elephant inside a snake](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/78/d1/1b/78d11b4d7c439f7fc2d61ecdc5912448.jpg), not a hat.
* [Alto’s Odyssey](http://www.altosodyssey.com/)
* [Everybody Wants to Be Famous](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJQYRzAoErc) by Superorganism
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](http://johnaugust.com/guide)
* [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/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Superorganism ([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_341.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2018/whats-the-plan-anyway).

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

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

**John:** Episode 340.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig.

**John:** Specificity.

**Craig:** Umbrage.

**John:** Segue Man.

**Craig:** Don’t you die on me.

**John:** That’s why they call it a One Cool Thing.

Today on the podcast it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge where we look at the pages that listeners have sent in and tell them what’s working and what’s not working. We also have some follow up. We have a deep dive into the plan behind Return of the Jedi.

**Craig:** If one can call it that.

**John:** Yeah. But I think we’ll actually be able to talk about plans in general, especially opening plans of movies. Because I think it’s sort of a special case.

So that is our episode for today. But first we have some follow up. Wyatt from Florida wrote in, “On Episode 80 of Scriptnotes, Craig Mazin said that it takes four hours to drive from Miami to Atlanta which is a grossly inaccurate statement. To give some context, he was talking about how in Stolen Identity it was mostly filmed in Georgia, making for a less breathtaking road trip than he desired. But, still, I find this to be upsetting as a resident of Florida. Google says this trip takes about 10 hours with a car, which will probably be more like 14 hours after you’ve stopped several times to keep your brain from exploding.

“While I agree that the trip from Miami to Atlanta is not an interesting drive, quite the opposite, it does take a very long time. I think it’s understandable that I would take a certain amount of umbrage with this claim.”

Craig Mazin, how do you answer Wyatt from Florida?

**Craig:** Well, I think I was using a little bit of poetic license there, Wyatt. If you’re going to do a road trip movie, probably you should limit your units to days. How many days will this road trip be? Will it be one of those weeklong road trips? Is it a three-day road trip? A one-day road trip is not a road trip. That’s just a long drive for the day. So, yes, the trip does take about 10 hours in the car. That’s true. You are absolutely correct that visually speaking the trip from Miami to Atlanta is a festival of flat unchanging landscape.

But the sentence here that I’m going to seize on, Wyatt, is, “But, still, I found this to be upsetting as a resident of Florida.” I think you have other things to be upset about right now, Wyatt, as a resident of Florida. I can think of like 20-hundred things that as a resident of Florida you should probably be worried about. But that said, you’re right. And, yes, tip of the cap.

**John:** Yes. We want to be an accurate podcast. I mean, we have a whole staff of fact checkers behind the scenes, but even they will let some things slide through. So that’s why we rely on our listeners to keep us honest and keep us – we don’t want any fake news in this podcast. We want this to be a completely accurate podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. So, Wyatt, thank you.

**Craig:** I kind of imagine Wyatt was listening to Episode 80. He was like loving the podcast, right? He’s just totally gorged on one through 79. And here he is on 80, he’s just humming along. And then he hears me say this and he turns white. Like white as a ghost. Then he rips his headphones off, finds a baseball bat, and just destroys his computer in a rage and then finally calms down, breathes, breathes, breathes. Gets out his phone and is like, “OK, I got to fix this. I got to make this right.” And then he sends this email.

So, I hope that’s not what happened. But if it did, I get it, Wyatt. I also get angry.

**John:** So Wyatt is listening to Episode 80 of Scriptnotes, so quite a long ways back. So either he’s listening to Scriptnotes.net where all the back episodes are, or he has the 300-episode USB drive. So I could envision that maybe he pulled the USB drive out from his device and broke it in half, because his faith had been shattered.

Although his email does go on to say, “Love your show. Hope to send in a Three Page Challenge soon.”

**Craig:** Yeah, no, I think he calmed down. In my scenario he got a hold of himself. I get it.

**John:** You get it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. A thing that caused umbrage on Twitter this week was a tweet by–

**Craig:** That’s weird. That never happens on Twitter.

**John:** This is actually an article by Mike Ryan from Uproxx. And I first saw it as a tweet, but then I clicked through the article. We’ll link to the article. Mike Ryan was talking with his friends about Return of the Jedi. And they happened to be discussing the opening of Return of the Jedi, which if you’ve not seen it for a while involves a plan – well, a bunch of actions that are taken to free Han Solo from the clutches of Jabba the Hutt, which was he had been sold off at the end of Empire Strikes Back. And Mike and his friends were wondering, wait, what was the original plan before everything went south.

Craig, can you talk us through either what does happen in the movie or what might have been behind what was happening in the movie?

**Craig:** Well, I can try. So, this is a movie that we all know really, really well, generally speaking. So you’d think that we would have noticed this collectively many, many times before. This is a movie I’ve seen, I don’t know, probably 20 times since it came out in the early ‘80s. And then the question that he asked here, “If Luke’s plan to rescue Han from Jabba had worked perfectly, what would that plan have been?”

All right, well, great question. So here’s what happens roughly in this opening sequence. This rather long opening segment of Return of the Jedi. First, we know that Jabba the Hutt has Han Solo. He’s got him frozen in carbonite. So he is a prisoner. He’s like a decoration in Jabba’s palace.

We see that Luke has started his plan by sending in C-3PO and R2-D2. R2-D2 plays a little message that basically is like, hey, I know you’ve got Han. Let’s bargain for him and I’m giving you these droids kind of as a show of goodwill. And Jabba is like, great, I’ll take your droids and I’m not bargaining with you at all.

OK. So now the droids are there. We also reveal that Lando Calrissian is working in Jabba’s palace kind of clandestinely. Right? He’s incognito, disguised as one of the guards. We’re not sure what he’s doing exactly, but we know that he’s a good guy and he must have a plan, too.

Then, next, Princess Leia arrives. We don’t know it’s her at first because this little bounty hunter with a mask comes in. You know, who talks like that. And the bounty hunter is bringing Jabba another prisoner, Chewbacca. And the bounty hunter, you know, is bargaining for money and then Jabba makes a deal. And now Jabba has captured Chewie.

Later on that night, the bounty hunter is revealed to be Princess Leia. She tries to rescue Han Solo. And they are caught really easily by Jabba the Hutt who now enslaves Leia and makes her wear the crazy metal special bikini.

**John:** The iconic bikini.

**Craig:** The iconic bikini. At this point, at long last, Luke – the Jedi – shows up, does a quick Jedi mind-trick on some of the pig-faced guards. I know they have names. Whatever. And then he shows up and he basically tries to Jedi mind-trick Jabba and Jabba is like, no, that’s not going to work, hits a button, and Luke falls through the floor, lands in a pit, and has to face a big monster. I know it also has a name. I think that one is called the Rancor. And he beats the Rancor, but you can tell he was not at all planning on falling into the pit and having to face that thing, because he almost dies. But he doesn’t. He beats the Rancor. And then Jabba is like, “OK, fine. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to throw you all into the Sarlacc pit, which is terrible.”

And during the Sarlacc pit execution scene Luke gets everybody to sort of work together to kill Jabba and rescue Han and save everybody and off they go. That’s how that all works. At no point until this gentleman, this mind-blowing Mike Ryan, mentioned that that makes no damn sense did it ever occur to me that that makes no damn sense.

**John:** Yep. And here’s my theory about why you never worried about it. Is because I think we give special dispensation to opening sequences in movies, where we see a plan that’s already in the middle of action. For whatever reason we don’t go too deep into thinking about, wait, how did this all come to be? What are they exactly trying to do? What are the next steps? Because we’re enjoying it. So as long as we’re buying it moment by moment we’re like, oh “OK, well this is the next thing that’s happening.” We’re always curious like well what’s going to happen next.

Because most plans in movies, most heists if you think about like in Ocean’s 11 or any sort of big thing that has a plan, we’ve seen the characters make the plan. And there might have been certain details omitted, but we know what the general steps are supposed to be and so then when things go wrong we know that they went wrong because we saw all this.

But with opening sequences like this we don’t see any of that planning. And so we’re just assuming that they have some kind of plan. And as long as they seem to be behaving competently we just don’t kind of question it. So think back to any James Bond movie you’ve seen, they almost always start with some kind of big stunt sequence. It never really kind of makes sense how he got into that situation or why there’s a nubile young woman waiting for him at the end of it, but it’s James Bond so you just kind of go with it. And it’s interesting how for 20+ years we’ve just gone with it for Return of the Jedi.

**Craig:** Well, I’ll push back a little.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** So, for James Bond, those opening sequences are clearly picked up in media res, right? So we are in the middle of a plan and we don’t need to therefore know how he got into that place. What we’re excited to see is how he gets out of it. And each James Bond movie, with a few notable half exceptions, stand alone as their own stories. They are not sequels to prior movies.

Now, in this case, we don’t start in media res. We begin with a plan. So at this point in the beginning of the movie Jabba the Hutt only has one prisoner, which we know he got at the end of Empire Strikes Back. He doesn’t possess Chewbacca. He doesn’t possess R2-D2, or C-3PO, or Leia, or Luke, or Lando. And so we’re starting in the beginning, and Luke kind of just wings it. And then everybody seems to be winging it independently of each other. And I have to say even though I didn’t notice that this plan made no sense, now that I look at it and I see that it makes no sense it explains something to me about my own reaction and relationship with that movie, which is I don’t like it as much as the other two.

And one of the reasons I think I don’t like it as much as the other two is because that long opening sequence felt a little – character-wise it was always missing something for me. So, in The Empire Strikes Back, for instance, there’s a scene where Lando Calrissian sells out his friends to Darth Varder. And we can tell that Lando is conflicted because he’s trying to protect his own place, but you know, what are you going to do and he’s selling out a friend and he feels guilty. And all of that is good character stuff. There’s no character stuff in the beginning of this movie. Nobody is doing anything from character. Jabba just happens to be able to resist Jedi mind tricks. Luke doesn’t really seem like a very good Jedi, nor does he seem to have an interesting plan. It seems all a little light. And, yeah, you know, it’s not great. And I’m not sure that there is any way to logically explain the rationality behind his plan.

First of all, for this to make sense at all, Luke cannot know what Leia is doing. Right? Because what she’s doing has literally nothing to do with what he has done.

**John:** Yes. That is true. And if you look through this original article we’re going to link to, there are some alternative theories laid out about what we might be missing. What the original plan could have been that could have gotten us there, including the possibility that these people are actually kind of working independently. That like Leia had her own plan. And Luke had his own plan. They were essentially acting independently and really had no sense of what was going on.

But here’s where I will push back against you. You said like, well, this isn’t in media res. Clearly this is in media res to a large degree because Lando is somehow there. So he’s already part of something. He’s already in the middle of some thing is happening. Luke has already hidden his light saber inside R2-D2. So there was some thought of putting that thing in where he could get to it later on. But the question of like do they anticipate they were going to end up in the Sarlacc pit together at some point?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That seems like an impossible stretch.

**Craig:** It’s crazy, yeah. No, that’s crazy. And also, you’re right, Lando is definitely in media res, but how? And why? What’s he been doing that whole time? What was his purpose there at any given point? And why would Luke hide his light saber in the droid? What’s the point? Just show up and start swinging it and kill people. I don’t get it.

**John:** The only thing I can sort of be happy about is that I know David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have just announced they’re going to be doing the three Star Wars movies. Apparently they’re all about how we got to this moment at the beginning of Jedi. That’s really–

**Craig:** I would watch it.

**John:** That’s where they’re going to spend $300 million to fill in this missing detail of how Luke got to this point.

**Craig:** I would love to do a kind of weird gritty – like a $10 million movie that’s just a gritty film about how Salacious Crumb came to end up sitting on Jabba’s lap like that. But like where he comes from, the whole Crumb family.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And just living on the streets and hard times. Drugs. Drugs. And, you know, prostitution. And just like — he’s seen it all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he’s lost his mind. He’s just lot it.

**John:** Yeah, but I mean maybe it’s not that bad of a gig for Salacious Crumb to be there, because you know he’s got – he has interesting people. I mean, he’s surrounded by interesting people all the time.

**Craig:** And he loves to laugh.

**John:** Yeah. And there’s lots of opportunity for comedy, which is a – he’s sort of like a Dobby the House Elf but in the Star Wars universe.

**Craig:** But I think he’s hiding an enormous amount of pain. I mean, that’s the story I want to see is sort of like what are you running from, man.

**John:** Yeah. Well I think the stories where you can take the villain and really re-contextualize him as an anti-hero and ultimately a protagonist, those are the most rewarding. So, again, I think that’s why – I mean, David and D.B. have told us secretly that this is really what their whole mission is. Is to fill in this crucial bit of logic behind this important piece of Star Wars canon.

So let’s try to generalize back out. This idea of opening sequences and plans where you don’t know what the characters are planning but the ones that work and the ones that don’t work. I’m thinking back to Pitch Perfect 3. And Pitch Perfect 3 opens with a sequence on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean and suddenly Rebel Wilson and Anna Kendrick are there and they are trying to save the rest of the Bellas from something.

It’s absurd, but it also gets to play in with our expectations of like what kind of movie this is. You know, it’s Charlie’s Angels. It’s deliberately sort of nuts. And ultimately we’re going to come around to see that moment again.

So, it was crazy when we first see it in the movie. It’s crazy how it actually happens in the movie. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But it’s fine for that kind of movie.

Other genres have much higher expectations of like these pieces all have to fit together.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, in comedy yes we do have a little bit more leeway on these things and they usually are not quite so complicated. But I can’t disagree with you. We have a grace period at the beginning of the film. People are more accepting and maybe you can get away with a few things that you wouldn’t be able to get away with later. But, there is a kind of weird hidden cost.

Nobody, you know, with rare exception people don’t have access to their – whatever the underpinnings are of their response to a story. There’s always going to be some weird impact that these things have on some people. And until I read this I didn’t realize that this was part of my – you know, it’s not that I don’t like it. I do. I just – I’m not a huge fan of that whole sequence. And I think now this is why. Because it just kept like – at one point he describes it, it’s becoming sort of like bad comedy. Because the plan is: droids show up, Jabba takes them. Chewie shows up. Jabba takes him. Leia shows up. Jabba takes her. Luke shows up. Jabba takes him. It’s just like what is this clown car being taken – and they definitely were not doing the whole “Don’t you understand I wanted to get arrested.” None of them wanted to get captured. Clearly.

Clearly. So it just became, I don’t know. I don’t know, Mike Ryan has really opened my eyes. And, you know, F-d up my head.

**John:** Yep. Now Craig, I know I have had experiences as a screenwriter where, over the course of development and then production, things that were simple and logical became much less simple and much less logical. And it’s maybe worth discussing sort of how these things happen. And we don’t know how it happened with the case of Star Wars. We don’t know whether this was the initial vision as written down in the script and this is what they shot, or if just a bunch of ideas all got thrown together and this is the result of a bunch of competing ideas being thrown together.

But in my experience when stuff doesn’t make sense, it wasn’t because the screenwriter said like, “I want to make the least sensible version of the sequence possible.” It was that people with strong opinions came in with specific agendas and someone had to find a way to match these specific agendas. So sometimes it was actor agendas. It was a studio saying we need more of this character, or could we shoot new stuff so this character is actually part of the sequence that they weren’t originally part of. Could we get rid of that scene that actually explains why they’re here and what they’re doing?

There are a lot of reasons why sequences which should make sense don’t end up making a lot of sense in final movies. Are there any other factors you’ve encountered over your years of working on movies?

**Craig:** Yeah. I consider logic to be a very dangerous weapon in the hands of certain people. And what happens is everyone is looking at a script and somebody might say, oh you know what, there’s a problem here. I don’t quite understand this. Or this doesn’t make sense. Or this maybe feels contradictory. And a good writer will attempt to solve problems from a place of character and simplicity and elegance. But a lot of other people, what they have is logic. They just have hard cold logic. And they will begin to add things to fix it. They are “helping it.”

So when you’re watching a movie and somebody suddenly just starts saying some stuff because apparently you need to hear it so that something makes sense, it’s rarely a screenwriter. It is typically a producer or a studio executive or somebody well-meaning who is attempting to solve a problem by just pouring logic ketchup all over it. But that is not good storytelling. It’s just fixing a problem. We don’t come to movies to see that. So I worry about that when that happens.

**John:** Yeah. And I would say in some ways the Star Wars situation is the opposite of that where no one is talking about what they’re actually trying to do. And so therefore it’s completely opaque. And it almost feels like there was a mandate of like all these characters need to be involved in this thing. Just introduce them separately. They can’t sort of be coming in as a block, except for C-3PO and R2-D2 because we always love to see them together. And everybody has to have heroic moments. And it is actually one of the challenges of supporting a large ensemble cast is finding things for each of those characters to individually do. And sometimes you end up with these kinds of sequences which are a little bit mish-moshy.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** Any of these movies that we talk about that have sort of large ensemble casts – Charlie’s Angels, the Pitch Perfect movies – you want each of those characters to have their little moment of shine and spotlight. You want to get to them as quickly as you can. But in doing so you end up sometimes creating kind of Frankenstein sequences.

**Craig:** Without a doubt. I think that’s a really good point. There’s also a demand of sequels, because you’re not sort of meeting these fresh characters. I mean, Jabba is sort of a fresh character. But we’re not meeting fresh heroes like we do with say Lando or something like that in the second movie. So in sequels it’s basically, OK, everybody knows these people already. Give them stuff to do. What you don’t get to do are these quiet, like look how we meet Han Solo in Star Wars. He’s sitting at a table, chitchatting about his ship. And then another guy comes along and he has a chitchat with him and then he shoots him.

Well, by the time we get to the third movie, when people make their entrances they’re dressed up as bounty hunters and threatening to blow you up. And then they’re saving the one that they love. And he’s blind. And then another guy comes out and goes, “Ha-ha, I knew you were there and now you’re going to wear a bikini.” And you’re like, wait, this is what sequels do to you. And believe me, I’ve written enough of them. They are very, very difficult to write because all of the tools of surprise and freshness and introduction are gone. It’s tough.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The lesson we’ve learned. So I guess the takeaway we could give to our screenwriter friends is if you are hired to write the third movie in a giant franchise that’s sort of world-changing, be careful with your story logic.

**Craig:** Yeah. But also you could say the other lesson is don’t worry about it. That movie did pretty well.

**John:** No one will notice your story plot holes for another 20 years.

**Craig:** It’s literally another 20 years. And then two nerds will talk about it on a podcast. But even then you’ll be all right.

**John:** You’ll be just fine.

**Craig:** We should do some Three Page Challenges right?

**John:** We should absolutely.

**Craig:** It’s been so long.

**John:** It’s been a very long time. So I think the last time we did this was the Austin Three Page Challenges.

**Craig:** Oh my. Whoa. That’s like a half a year has gone by.

**John:** Maybe so. Or I could be forgetting another one, but anyway we have three great new entries that Megan has picked. So the general theme she decided for this one was point of view. So characters who have either limited point of view or sort of different point of views that are uncharacteristic of other movies. So we’ll start with Pudgy by Jay Emcee.

We’ll have all of these Three Page Challenges linked in the show notes, so you can read the PDFs along with us, but here’s a summary in case you’re driving in the car:

A 10-year-old named Pudge observes his neighborhood from his stoop. He plays a CD in is well-worn portable CD player and starts nodding along to the gritty East Coast hip hop. Phat Boy, who appears next to him in Timberland boots, died jeans, and a gold chain raps along like it’s his music because it is his music. The two sit side-by-side on the stoop in the freezing cold, pouring rain, and blazing heat.

Fat Boy’s outfit never changes. Pudge makes sandwiches for himself and Phat Boy, though Phat Boy has more sophisticated taste than the ingredients left by Pudge’s mom than the fridge can accommodate. Craig, get us started on Pudgy.

**Craig:** Well, I generally liked this. Just to start, I don’t know if there’s a reason why our writer Jay Emcee has not told us what city we’re in. It seems like it’s New York. If I see brownstones and I’m hearing East Coast hip hop then I’m feeling like it’s New York, but I’d love to know. Just helps.

And I like the way we revealed his imaginary friend, right? So this is sort of like Hip Hop Harvey. We have a character who sees an imaginary person that nobody else sees because he’s not real. And I liked the way that this guy was introduced. This is a smart way to introduce somebody. You have a fact. He’s not real. Well, there are a lot of uncreative, boring ways to show that, like I’m sitting there and he’s rapping and then I cut to somebody else’s POV and there’s nobody else there except for this little kid named Pudge. And then we go, “OK, we get it. That guy is not real.” And what I like is that he didn’t do that.

Instead, what he did was he showed time passing, and because Phat Boy never has to change his clothes, never gets wet in the rain, never gets hot in the heat, our suspicion, which I think we will all have from the jump that Phat Boy is not real is confirmed. That’s a creative way of doing this. So I really liked that.

And there’s an interesting promise of a story here. And I liked that there was a kind of well-worn relationship between the two of them. I think sometimes people will create a kind of internal relationship that you would have say with an imaginary friend, somebody who lives in your head. And once those two characters start talking it’s like, wait, have you guys met each other because you’ve lived with each other your entire lives. There should be a complete, total, easy intimacy between you two. And that’s exactly what you see here.

I don’t quite get what’s happening on page three in terms of the food. I was a little thrown by that because Phat Boy seems to fill a role which is to be the kind of musical hip hop star that maybe Pudge wants to be, but Phat Boy also has really specific and quite extensive dialogue about how picky he is about food. If that’s meant to just be kind of flavor and sort of fun flavor, I don’t know if we need basically six-eighths of a page or whatever it is, three-quarters of a page to deal with that. I would probably limit that and get quickly to what we want to know which is what is Phat Boy doing for Pudge. Why does he exist for Pudge?

**John:** I agree. So I think “aioli” is a funny word. It’s used a little bit strangely here. Aioli is mostly a mayonnaise kind of situation rather than a mustard situation and it’s confusing that we haven’t gotten to the mayonnaise situation when he starts complaining about the aioli. So there’s some sequencing issues on page three that don’t really track for me. But I mostly agree with you. By page three I got it and I’m ready to sort of know what kind of movie I’m headed in for. Because at this point you’ve established this is a really good Hip Hop Harvey kind of situation, but I have a hunch that it’s not just about the two of them and their relationship. There’s going to be a third thing and I’m curious what that third thing is going to be. What does Pudge want? And he hasn’t really expressed anything that he wants.

We sort of get his situation. Now we know what his normal situation is. What is the change that’s going to come? What is the thing that he’s yearning for that’s going to take him on this two-hour journey? So, but I really liked the writing. I agree with you that the way we’re introducing Phat Boy and sort of going through the time passage is really well done. The observations of the other people on the other brownstones are really smart. It’s a little central casting, but it also feel specific to the thing he’s trying to do.

A moment that didn’t quite work for me is on page one he opens up his CD player and takes a look at the disc so we can see it. And then he closes it and plays it again. Like, well, you wouldn’t do that. And so maybe we need to find a way to introduce the name of Phat Boy without doing this. Or maybe he’s sitting down at the start of this and he’s putting in his headphones and we see the disc spin up or something. But it felt weird to really make a big show of opening it, looking at the label, and starting it again.

**Craig:** I had the same feeling, too. That was the one bit of clunky exposition and you don’t need it because you can just see it spinning inside or you can just see that he’s written Phat Boy, Money Hungry on his sneakers because that’s his thing, or whatever it is. Like there’s ways – I mean, kids write the names of their favorite artists all over things. There’s other ways to do it. And, by the way, he’s rapping. I mean, rap stars have been known to announce themselves in their songs. So, you know, that’s OK too. I think he could do that. So, yeah, that felt a little kind of, yeah, like ‘80s TV.

**John:** Yep. Because I’m a person obsessed about fonts, I’m going to talk about the fonts for a second. So this script is written in Courier Prime, which is the typeface I commissioned. It looks beautiful. It is delightful. But there’s other fonts used in here, too. So on page one where it says Phat Boy, Money Hungry that is in a bold type face, like it’s some sort of Sans-Serif bold. On page two there’s a note from his mom says, “Fresh cold cuts in the drawer. No music after 8pm. Xoxo, Ma.” Some people get really annoyed by this. For me, it’s fine. You’re trying to break something out as the thing you’re going to be reading on the screen and so to stick it in a different font for me is kind of fine. It doesn’t feel too cheaty for me. But I’m curious what you think, Craig.

**Craig:** I have no problem with it whatsoever. In general, I’m so bored with reading scripts that the one thing that blows my mind is this notion that people who read scripts are desperate for absolute violent conformity. That there must be always one Courier and this…and I’m just thinking oh my god if my job were to read scripts all day I would be desperate for one little blob of some other font there every now and again just to wake me the F up. So I have no problem. As long as it’s purposeful, and here it was, cool.

**John:** Cool. Last note on the title page. It just Pudgy, Written by Jay Emcee. That’s all fantastic. If I were to be turning in these three pages to somebody or showing them in the world, I might stick a date on them just so I could show when I wrote it. I would also put an email address just so if somebody loved them they could reach me. Because with a name like Jay Emcee, which doesn’t even feel like your real name, no one is going to be able to track you down otherwise. And so it’s good work. So, make sure that people can find you to tell you that it’s good work.

**Craig:** Yeah. I liked it. Good job, Jay.

**John:** Cool. Do you want to take the next one?

**Craig:** Yeah, what should we do? Which one do you think I should do?

**John:** Do you want to do Trucker?

**Craig:** Yeah, man, I’ll do Trucker. I’ll do it. Sure. Trucker, written by Erno van der Merwe. That’s a pretty Dutch name right there. Merwe. That’s a great name. Anyway, Trucker. So, here’s the story with this:

Sarah, 13 and tiny, observes a butterfly as Baron, 40s, packs up a truck. They prepare to drive off, but Sarah sensing that something is off asks if everything is OK. Baron offers a reassuring smile. As they drive, Sarah points out that they haven’t taken a vacation in a while and she pitches a beach in the Caribbean that she’s seen in a magazine. She shows him the picture and it does look lovely. She’s flipping through the magazine when Baron shouts at her to get down. She scrambles down to the floor of the truck’s cockpit. They are approaching a police checkpoint. An officer shines her flashlight in as she inspects the truck. It’s tense. Finally, she waves Baron on.

Good summary there, Megan. I like that.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, John, kick us off with Erno van der Merwe’s Trucker.

**John:** All right, so if you’re looking at the PDF of this you’ll notice that Erwin has chosen to sort of keep all the lines on the left hand margin. So they’re not paragraphs, they’re just single lines. That’s a style. It doesn’t really bother me. I don’t think it especially works for this script and we’ll talk about why.

I had a bigger problem with, actually, descriptions overall. And so I don’t know if English is Erno’s first language. I don’t know where Erno is from. It’s not the US because there’s definitely British choices in here. But the overall choice of words didn’t help serve the story especially well. So, start with the truck. First line, “SARAH is lying on top of a truck’s bonnet.” So, bonnet, the hood. This is the hood of the car. We know this is a British word. But, wait, what kind of truck is this? Because when I saw this I’m like, oh, it’s like a pickup truck, it’s something like that. But, no, it’s a big truck. And so if it’s a full big truck, how are you lying on the top of a big semi-truck? I just had a hard time envisioning what kind of truck this was.

Later on, you know, halfway down page one we are INT. COCKPIT – LATE AFTERNOON. I don’t think they call that a cockpit in British English either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** That is the cab of the truck. Or just say INT. TRUCK because we know that we are in the part of the truck that you can sit in, the cabin. But don’t call it a cockpit because suddenly I’m in space, or I’m in a jet. So, when I see words that aren’t the actual words for things it just makes me lose a little faith in the writer and the writing. And so pick those right words because in screenwriting you have so few words. They really all have to be the right words.

A few other small things. Second line, “An orange sun is lighting up her face.” An orange sun? There’s two orange suns? The orange sun. Orange sunlight. Sunlight is lighting up her face. Just giving us an orange sun, are we looking at the sun or are we looking at her face. And there’s a whole subject predicate thing that happens when you have sentences this short that we focus on, “Wait, what are we actually looking at here.” And by line two I was losing a little bit of faith.

Craig, talk me through what you’re experiencing.

**Craig:** Well, yes, so we definitely do have a non-native English speaker, or American English speaker at the very least. You know this from the very first scene header, EXT. PETROL STATION. So, petrol is what they call gasoline in the UK. And bonnet is a UK term as well. And in general I’m OK – look, I just had to go through this process with every single page of Chernobyl putting in Briticisms and taking out Americanisms just because everybody is UK or European on the crew and in the cast. So, you can write flashlight, but they call it a torch and, you know, why just not make it easier for them. Call it a torch, you know.

So, I sympathize and I’m not going to go after Erno so much on that stuff. I also really weirdly love this format. It is its own weird format. I don’t know if Erno is doing this because he’s just cool and doesn’t like to follow instructions. Or if he’s doing it because he doesn’t know. Either way, it was kind of cool.

I agree with you that there were some descriptive problems. There was some confusions. I do need to know what kind of truck we’re dealing with. It appeared to me that what we were talking about was a semi, like the kind of truck–

**John:** Tractor trailer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tractor Trailer. That hauls a big thing. I don’t know how the hell she would get up on the hood or bonnet of that truck. They are way up there. And I don’t think she could just hop on down easily either. She jumps off the bonnet. She jumps off that bonnet, she’s dropping a good six feet I think. So, yeah, I need to know what kind of truck we’re dealing with. But I really liked the back and forth between these two. I’m curious, this is good mystery as opposed to confusion. I don’t know what their relationship is. I don’t think they’re father and daughter. It seems to me more like a situation where he is taking her somewhere where she can be safe. That maybe somebody is looking for her. I just got that feeling.

So I liked the way that they went back and forth. I liked how much more she talked than he did, which felt very real to me. I got so much of her personality just from the way she kind of pushed him and kidded around with him a bit. She seems like she’s almost in charge, and then he gets in charge because here come the police. That was all really good. So I actually think there’s some really good character work here. There’s some good back and forth. It kept me going.

In general, Erno, you know, if you can sort of pull back a little bit on some of the fancier descriptions, because they do distract a little bit from the nice spare nature of your characters and their dialogue. For instance, “The truck roars to life and shoots out a ball of smoke. They drive off towards the sunset into the night. Slowly disappearing over the glazed horizon.” I get it. And I know exactly what you’re seeing. But, when you read it like that, it starts to sort of mush over into Bad Poetryville. Especially from your formatting.

So, I would maybe get a little – just pull back a little bit on some of that stuff. But I kind of loved it. I did.

**John:** OK, so I did not love it. And for me it fell apart in the character work really. I thought all of the scene description lines where he’s trying to do essentially the parentheticals about what’s going on between the characters, it was too much and it didn’t really work. So, if we took those all out and just had what was just in dialogue I could track it better, but I still wouldn’t love it. So, let’s just hear just the dialogue. Sarah says, “You know, we haven’t taken a vacation in a while.” “Oh yeah?” “Yeah. We’re always so busy. We need to relax every now and then.” “Look doesn’t that seem really cool?” “It looks nice.” “Ah-huh. It says it’s in the Caribbean. We should go.”

So, if I had that all together as one piece, I would be fine with it because I get what’s happening in there. I get sort of what she’s trying to do. He’s kind of engaged but not fully engaged in it. But instead in the actual what we have on page two is, “Baron knows what she’s trying to do. Always trying to be the optimistic one. He decides to entertain her.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Yes! She has his attention. Now it’s easy.”

“Yeah. We’re always so busy. You need to relax every now and then.”

“She sits up on her knees and turns her back. Shuffles in the back of the truck and pulls out a pile of magazines. Falls back into her seat and gives him a bright smile. Baron shakes his head. He is slowly loosening up. She takes the top magazine and opens it up to its centerfold. Holding it in front of her face she shows it to Baron.”

All of that action that he’s describing along the way is getting in the way of understanding what the real dynamics are between these two people which was done perfectly well in the dialogue. So, that’s my frustration with the character work in here. It’s making it seem like a whole bunch of stuff has happened when really nothing has happened and just dialogue in a screenplay can do that work for you.

**Craig:** I can’t disagree with that. I think it’s also exacerbated by the format because what would be three lines of action are seven lines of action when you present it this way. And that’s a long bit of page real estate to cover to get to the next line. And I agree. I think just pulling back on these descriptions would help a lot. But I could see his face and I could see her face. And I could see the place and I could see what she was kind of needling him on.

I’m kind of forgiving a bunch of that, but I will say Erno that don’t rely on people forgiving you anything. Maybe I’m just in a weirdly good mood today.

**John:** A generous mood. Then on page three, so this is the first real action of the piece which is like they’re slowing down because of the roadside check ahead. Here’s where Erno’s style is getting in his way a bit here. Because breaking it down into single sentences can work for moments of tension and sort of give you a sense of shot by shot by shot by shot. But by not putting any white space in here and just stacking the lines it is a real temptation to give up. And when you see a big block of text like that you’re like “I don’t know what to do with that.” That’s why poetry is broken into stanzas. You’ve got to give us a little space here so we will actually follow and see what’s important and what the changes are as we’re going through this.

**Craig:** Can’t argue with that either.

**John:** Cool. All right, Erno thank you for sending in your pages. Next up we have an untitled script by Sarah Paradise:

Lou Abern, a woman in her 30s, is getting viciously beaten by Keenan, who is also in her 30s. Both women are beautiful, tough, and fighting like they mean it in a glamorous LA nightclub. Onlookers heckle and cheer. Keenan grabs Lou by the collar and drags her across the bar top, sending all the glasses to the floor in chards.

Mitch shouts for them to stop from behind the bar. After a vicious bout of wrestling, Keenan emerges victorious. Lou exits to the alleyway and stretches her sore shoulder. Keenan playfully scolds her for giving her a small cut on the face. Lou counters that it’s not like she has a photoshoot tomorrow. Keenan mentions a movie that she’s working on that they need a stunt woman. Lou says she has retired from stunts but Keenan says she wasn’t asking.

Mitch pays them for their performance, but it was less than they agreed on. He scolds them for not avoiding the bar top like he told them. Glassware is expensive.

Craig, what did you think?

**Craig:** OK, so the generosity is over. I have many issues. Issue number one, we meet Lou Abern who is blonde and we meet Keenan who gets one name for some reason who is black. And they are women in a bar and they are having a crazy fight. Like a full-on punch you in the face fight, throw you over bars, smash into glassware. They land on a booth. They jump on booths, grabbing each other. At one point one of them slams headfirst into the end of a bar.

And this is not on a movie set. This is in an actual bar. And people are going crazy. And they’re shouting drink orders because apparently in the world of this movie people only order drinks at bars when two other people are fighting, when in reality when two people are fighting in a bar everybody backs the hell away because it’s dangerous.

Regardless of that, the next scene we see them and it’s like, “Oh, get it? They’re stuntwomen and they are putting this on kind of like professional wrestling to fool people into thinking there is a fight because according to this script that’s what gets people to buy drinks.” By the way, this has never happened in any bar in the world. And despite the fact that they have been punched in the face and had their heads smashed and fallen, it’s no problem. Keenan actually runs out and is like, “Wee!”

And they have kind of banter. So, which is it? Am I supposed to watch this fight and go “Oh my god this is a crazy fight. I understand that everybody is screaming for a reason. It’s a wild fight.” Or, is it just fake? Because when I watch professional wrestling I know it’s not a real fight. Everybody in the crowd knows it’s not a real fight. People don’t just punch each other in the face over and over and not fall down or bleed. And that’s what’s happening here.

The page two and three is a long discussion that feels mostly quippy and fake. I don’t know anything about Lou. I don’t anything about her. I don’t know where she’s from. I don’t know how she thinks. The way she talks is not particularly different than the way Keenan talks. I don’t know anything about Keenan. I just know that the two of them are stuntwomen who do this scam that isn’t real. And then Mitch is like central casting jerky sleaze ball. Like, “Sorry ladies, you broke a bunch of glass.” This all felt fake to me.

So top to bottom, I would say this to the writer. This is decently structured. You have a good sense of shape. You know how to begin, middle, and end a scene. You get pace. You have all these things working for you that a lot of people don’t. Like a lot of the stuff that’s in between the words. Where you’re going wrong is just simply believability. You have created unbelievable – and I see this so many times. You come up with what you think is a good idea and then you just start jamming this non-reality into words using the skill that you clearly have to do so.

So, I don’t believe the reality of this. I don’t believe the premise. I don’t believe that that’s the discussion they would have. I don’t believe the guy in the bar. I just didn’t believe any of it.

**John:** I liked this so, so, so much more than you did. I thought this first page was delightful. And I – and this is just people read things different ways – I read this as a crazy knock down roadside bar brawl that I have not seen two women ever have before. It seemed over the top, but kind of delightfully over the top. When they smashed the glassware on the bar I’m like, “Oh, that’s so cheesy, we’ve seen that so many times.” But then I was delighted to know that it was all faked. I guess I started reading this thinking like, OK, well this isn’t probably real. This is not actually the way it should go. And when you read it with that intention it’s like, “Oh yeah, I can see sort of kind of why they’re doing it.” Does the whole thing make sense? I don’t think we have enough information to know the degree to which the audience, the bar patrons, know that this is real or know that this is not real. I think it would be more fun if midway through this fight we sense that the people were there for the show. That this is a thing that they do. Because I would go to see that. If I could see two really good stunt people having a staged brawl in a public space that could be great. If I knew they weren’t really fighting that could be really, really cool.

So, I think it would sell drinks. I think there would be a reason why you would go to that fight, that bar to see that kind of fight.

The dialogue afterwards is not fantastic, but it’s getting us out of that setup and we’re trying to establish who Lou is and sort of what her background is. I don’t think it’s great. And I think we need to have more spin on Lou to know sort of what it is she tries to want. All we’re getting out of this right now is that she does not want to be a stunt woman anymore. And that doesn’t really seem to track with the brawl we just saw.

**Craig:** No. And also if this were in some skanky roadside bar somewhere I guess maybe. This is in a Los Angeles nightclub. You can’t get a Los Angeles nightclub to probably allow people to dance on a table, much less sponsor brawls that break glass. The liability problem is insane.

**John:** Well, but it’s fake glass.

**Craig:** Fake?

**John:** I took this whole – yes.

**Craig:** It’s not fake.

**John:** Well, I chose to believe that the things they were doing were stunt person kinds of things that they could survive. The sort of things that stunt people could do and so that stuff was deliberately staged, but some of the stuff that they broke was stuff they weren’t supposed to be breaking.

But I would say I totally believe that an LA nightclub would do it just because they want to get desperate attention. There was a bar on Santa Monica that used to have like Cirque du Soleil acrobats on Friday and Saturday nights who do the stuff like true acrobatic stuff above the crowd.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** That was really cool. This is not that different than Cirque du Soleil acrobatics in a bar.

**Craig:** It is massively different.

**John:** I don’t think so at all.

**Craig:** I can’t think of something more different. Here’s the thing, for me at least, if people believe that this is a real fight then a bunch of them are going to call the police. If they don’t believe–

**John:** So where on page one does it say that the crowd believes this is real? I see, “The crowd REACTS riotously to this while MITCH,” so they’re shouting, they’re cheering.

**Craig:** Here’s what I see. I see she’s punched in the face. That means it is real. You don’t get actually punched in the face in movies. They fake punch. She’s punched in the face. That’s a real fight. In fact, if you’re faking a fight and you punch somebody in the face it has now crossed over into a real fight. But, also, you’ve got drunk men heckling them. She crashes into – she gets kicked in the stomach. Again, real.

**John:** See, I guess I don’t understand why you believe that this fight has to be real, because we’ve seen good fake fighting a lot of times.

**Craig:** Because he’s selling it – or he or she – they’re selling it as real. I’m looking through this thing and I’m like so she gets her head slammed into the end of the bar and falls to the ground. Defeated, she rolls over and looks at the ceiling, breathing hard. That’s not from anyone’s POV. That’s meant to see like – that’s that shot at the end of a fight when someone is like, “Ow, that hurt. I lost.” And there’s broken glass, which is not fake glass. It’s real because at the end he says, “I’ll go bankrupt buying glassware.” Also, stunt people don’t smash into real glasses because they’d cut themselves and die.

None of this makes sense to me. I don’t get it at all. We’ll just have to agree to disagree. I just think if I saw a trailer for this movie I would be like, “Fake, not going.”

**John:** All right. That’s fine. I think there is an interesting idea here. I don’t think that pages two and three work especially well. But let’s go back to the actual writing on the page. I thought if this were meant to be a real fight, so take out the fact that it’s in a bar, just the action of two people having a knock-down, drag-out fight, it was pretty good writing. I never jumped out of the action writing.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** And that’s a hard thing because this first page is nothing but action. There’s no dialogue at all. And it got me all the way through the page and that’s a hard thing to do on a page one. So I want to give her props for that.

**Craig:** 100%. In fact, I liked page one so much that when page two showed up I got super angry because I thought that it was just undermining something that was good. Like I agree with you. I’m watching these two women in an LA nightclub having a drag-out, vicious physical battle, and they’re not like two 21 year olds with long hair and high heels who are kind of, you know, having that fight that we see on YouTube or World Star. This is like – like they could kill each other. These are two tough women going at it and I love that. And I was like who is this lady and what is her problem and how did she end up here. And then I get to the second page and I’m like, “Oh, never mind.”

**John:** Never mind.

**Craig:** This is baloney. It’s all baloney.

**John:** All right, I guess we both agree that page one is really good. We disagree on whether pages two and three deny the premise that this could ever be a real thing.

**Craig:** Welcome to real life, author of this script. This is how it goes. And here’s the good news. It doesn’t matter who doesn’t like it. It only matters who does like it. So, in this case, you would succeed, at least if John and I were in the business of buying screenplays.

**John:** Which we are not.

**Craig:** God no. What a silly business.

**John:** It is. I got asked to participate in an article that was being written about the death of the spec script market. And I was like I don’t know that it’s dead. I don’t know anything. I don’t try to sell spec scripts, so I’m the worst person to ask for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Spec script market, well it’s like this new phase of the spec script market where there’s no longer a spec script market. It’s a spec project market where people will go around – Rawson just did this.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Where you come up with an idea, you find an actor that’s meaningful for studios. You find a director or you are also the director. And then you go studio to studio and say here’s our package. It’s what Stephen Gaghan did with Dr. Doolittle and it’s what Rawson just did with the Rock, with Dwayne, on – what is it, a skyscraper movie?

**John:** That’s the one he already shot. So the next one is called Red Notice, I think. So.

**Craig:** Yeah. So it was a huge, huge deal. And so you go and you go to like five studios. Five studios used to all read a script on a Saturday and then get into a bidding war on a Sunday. Now, you go around to every movie studio on Monday and Tuesday and with just a meeting and a presentation and they’re bidding on something where there is no script yet on Wednesday. Fascinating. But it is akin to the same kind of market.

**John:** It is. It’s just a different kind of thing. And there have always been spec scripts that went out with talent attached. This is sort of a super version of that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I will say this much, and not good news for everybody listening. The barrier to entry for this version of a spec market is way higher. Way higher. It’s rough.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s wrap up our Three Page Challenge by thanking our three entrants to the Three Page Challenge. If you have a Three Page Challenge you would like to send in to us, just go to johnaugust.com/threepage. It’s all spelled out there. And in there you’ll find the instructions for what we’re looking for, how to attach a PDF. You’ll sign a little thing that says it’s OK for us to talk about your three pages on the air. And we might look through it.

So, Megan reads everything that comes in. So, send in your three pages if you have three pages you think we should discuss on a future episode of Scriptnotes.

All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is also font related. It’s called What the Font? And I may have talked about this years ago, but the app sort of stopped working and now it’s working again, so let me describe what it is.

So often I’ll be out in the world and I’ll see a type face and wonder what is that type face. Like I kind of recognize it but I want to know specifically what it is. So I pull up my phone, I open What the Font? It has a little camera. I click, take a photo of it. It scans it and tells me what typeface that is. It is a thing that is delightful for me. So I think if you are a type nerd like I am you will enjoy this.

There’s a web version of it, so if you’re just finding stuff on the web you can make a screenshot and do it through. But mostly I use the camera on my phone to do it, and it’s great. It’s so very useful. It’s put out by the people who sell a lot of typefaces so that’s really the business model behind it is they’re trying to sell you these typefaces that you identify. But it’s really good, so I recommend it. What the Font?

**Craig:** You know, nothing is as saucy as a font-based joke. What the Font?

**John:** What the Font?

**Craig:** So fonty. That is the most John August thing I can imagine. Here is the most Craig Mazin thing I can imagine. My One Cool Thing this week is Weird Al Yankovic’s Hamilton Polka. He has done a very bizarre kind of overture style summary of the show Hamilton by the great Lin-Manual Miranda. But he has done it in polka style. It is disturbing. It is weird. I love it. And you can enjoy it too, for free, on the YouTube.

**John:** Nice. That’s actually interesting. I mean, YouTube feels like the right place for Weird Al Yankovic to live. I mean, I have always perceived him as being a comedy and really kind of video person. And so YouTube feels like a very good fit for him.

**Craig:** Weird Al Yankovic, his career is fascinating. He has had this remarkable longevity. You know, a lot of these – you would think, like “Oh well, it’s a novelty act. It will come and go.” When you were a kid did you ever listen to Dr. Demento?

**John:** I was just about to ask about Dr. Demento. Of course I did.

**Craig:** Yeah. So Dr. Demento for the vast majority of you who are too young to know what the hell we’re talking about. Like, OK, first of all there used to be a thing called radio. And then you would tune into a station. And on some random night in your town, whatever your local weirdo station was, Dr. Demento would come on. It was a nationally syndicated radio program. And it was just this fun, old, kind of dorky nerdy guy who curated novelty records. And novelty records and comedy songs have been around forever. But you can’t really point to any one act other than Weird Al Yankovic that lasted beyond maybe two songs.

I mean, most of them it was like, “Well, there’s the guy who sang One-Eyed, One-Horned, Flying Purple People Eater. And there’s the guy who did Monster Mash. And there’s the guy who did, you know, whatever it was, like Fish Heads. And here’s Weird Al Yankovic with two decades and multiple albums.” And it’s remarkable. He’s just unstoppable. I love it.

**John:** So we will put a link in the show notes to Dr. Demento, the Wikipedia article. I am finding out that Dr. Demento is still alive. He is 76 years old. His real name is Barret Eugene Hansen. I don’t think we would have a Weird Al Yankovic without his radio program.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Oh radio. It was nice.

**Craig:** You know what? This is amazing. Dr. Demento you’re saying is 76 years old now?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because he seemed like he was 76 when I was listening to him when I was 12. He’s always been 76.

**John:** Craig, I assume you are not watching The Crown on Netflix.

**Craig:** Well, I watched a bunch of the first season because it was part of my general Jared Harris deep dive. And I really enjoyed it. I thought it was really, really good. I loved – particularly it was an episode about his portrait being made. Churchill’s portrait being made, which I thought was fascinating. But, no, I haven’t gotten around to the second season. I’m scared because I suddenly realized, “Oh god, The Crown will never stop because, you know, they’ve got many decades to go.”

**John:** Yeah. They’re jumping ahead quite quickly. But the second season is fantastic. The reason why I ask is because I’m looking up that he’s 76 years old. I was watching an episode last night that was largely about Philip, and Philip is 96 years old. I had no idea he was still – I mean, I knew he was alive, I just didn’t have a sense that like he’s 96 years old and still a person in public life. That’s kind of amazing.

I intend to be a person who is 96 years old and still in public life. That’s my goal.

**Craig:** Well, you know, there’s a possibility that right around before we croak they’ll come up with a way to just keep us alive forever.

**John:** Whether we’ll hit that magic spot right now. I think our kids probably will.

**Craig:** Yeah. If they want it. If they want it, you know? Yeah, I mean, who needs it.

**John:** Who needs it?

**Craig:** Ugh, enough already.

**John:** That’s our depressing way of ending this episode of Scriptnotes. Our show is produced by Megan McDonnell. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Matthew also did our intro/outro. If you have an intro or an outro, or really more an outro, you can send us a link at johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions or follow up like the follow up we answered today.

You can find us on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Just search for Scriptnotes. Leave a review there if you can.

All seven episodes of Launch are now up and available. That series is basically done, so I’m really happy with how it turned out. If you are person who doesn’t like to listen to series until they’re done, well, now it’s done, so you can hear it all together.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. If you have a Three Page Challenge you want to send in it’s johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out.

You can find all the back episodes of Scriptnotes at Scriptnotes.net or on the USB drives we sell at store.johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** You sell them.

**John:** Well, I guess Shopify technically sells them, but they exist in the world.

**Craig:** Mm-hmmm.

**John:** Mm-hmmm. Craig, have a great week.

**Craig:** You too, John. See you soon.

**John:** Thanks. Bye.

Links:

* [We Dare You To Explain Luke’s Plan To Rescue Han In ‘Return of the Jedi’](https://uproxx.com/movies/what-was-lukes-plan-star-wars-return-of-the-jedi/) by Mike Ryan for Uproxx
* Three Pages by [Jay Emcee](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Jay_Emcee_PUDGY.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Erno van der Merwe](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Erno_van_der_Merwe_TRUCKER.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Sarah Paradise](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/Sarah_Paradise.pdf)
* What the Font? [site](https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/) and [app](https://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/mobile/)
* Weird Al Yankovic’s [Hamilton Polka](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v0c6smpHSk)
* [Dr. Demento](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Demento)
* [The Scriptnotes Listeners’ Guide!](johnaugust.com/guide)
* [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/)
* [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

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