Drew Marquardt

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

Craig, I have kind of a big agenda for us today.

Craig: Ooh.

John: I thought we might answer four questions and do three samples of the Three Page Challenge.

Craig: Awesome.

John: Are you up for it?

Craig: I’m always up for it.

John: Great. Let’s get right to it. This is a question from Bianca in Ann Arbor. She writes, “I’m moving to Los Angeles in a few months and I’ve already got a final interview lined up for an assistant position at a top 4 agency. I’ve already had the first interview. I want to be a writer and I have a short film I’d like to direct. A friend of mine says I should skip the assistant job and get a steady 9 to 5 non-industry job so I can have more time and money to work on my writing and directing. I wanted your honest opinion: Am I better off pursuing an entry level industry job with long hours and low wages so I can make contacts and learn how the business works, or should I get a steady 9 to 5 job outside the industry that leaves more time for writing and directing? I’m not sure which way to go.”

Craig: I am. [laughs]

John: What’s your opinion?

Craig: I’m super sure which way to go. You should go work at the agency. Of course. Of course. Look, yeah, it’ll be long hours. But, did she say how old she was?

John: She did not. My guess is she is kind of immediately post-college.

Craig: Okay great. So, guess what? You’re bulletproof and immortal and you can work a lot longer hours than I can. You don’t have a family, you don’t have children. You’re going to work. Yeah, of course. But the point is by working at an agency you are going to have people to give your script to. You’re going to have access to people who represent the best writers, actors, directors in the world. You will not get any of that working at TJ Maxx. I’m sorry. I don’t understand your friend’s advice at all. It makes no sense to me.

I’m sorry you might be a little tired. Yeah, tough. That’s called breaking into the business. Your friend could not be wrongerer.

John: Here’s where I think the friend has the right instinct but isn’t sort of putting all the pieces together: Bianca is moving from Ann Arbor. She probably doesn’t know a lot about how the film industry works. She probably doesn’t have a lot of contacts. She would get both those things working at an agency.

She would also have a tremendous amount of stress and long hours and she probably wouldn’t get as much creative work done for the first year that she’s in Los Angeles. Maybe that’s okay, because the tradeoffs, the things she would get out of it, are pretty great.

Should she stay in a very busy industry job she despises after a year or so of experience? Maybe not. And I think there does come a point in time where if you really are going to be a writer-director, if you’re really going to be trying to do that stuff, you can’t have an agent-assistant job and still be working on being a writer-director. There could be a place in your early career where you have to sort of pull the rip cord, get a boring job, and just buckle down and write. But that’s not when you’re first moving to Los Angeles.

Craig: Yeah. 100 percent. It just doesn’t make any sense to me. And I want to add another thing: Right now you think you want to be a writer-director. No, no, right now — I take it back. You do want to be a writer-director, but the point is you don’t really know what writing and directing professionally means exactly.

One of the interesting things that happens when people move to Los Angeles and get involved in the entertainment business is they suddenly find that there are 50 different things to do. And their skill set, their passion level, may change. What we see in front of us affects what we’re going to do.

I didn’t come out here to be a screenwriter. I just kind of found it and it was exciting. But really I came out with a very open mind. Some people do come out to be screenwriters and that’s exactly what they become. Some people want to be producers that become screenwriters. Some people want to be screenwriters that become directors.

But the point is access, friends, people that you can show your work to, people who can help you find financing — frankly, these are the things that set apart most people from the hundreds or thousands behind them who just have a script. So, I strongly urge you to take the agency job.

John: Yeah. Is there a chance you could become trapped in an agency job and not fulfill your dreams of writing and directing? Yes. But you would have trapped yourself. And you can’t be voluntarily trapped, so you can always leave the job if it’s not what you need it to be.

I moved out to Los Angeles to come to film school at USC. I got into a producers’ program, so I was learning sort of the nuts and bolts of the business, everything from contract negotiation to scheduling and budgeting. And development was part of it, but my whole life plan wasn’t to be a writer-director. I kind of knew I would write, but I didn’t know what it was. And that’s the place that you’re at right now. You don’t know what it is that you’re really going to end up doing. So why not go someplace where you can see as much as you possibly can, read a ton of scripts, and figure out what you want to do?

Craig: Yeah. For sure.

John: Next question. Mike writes, “I work on a TV writing staff where one of the junior writers rather brazenly bragged about writing during the WGA strike.” So, the great WGA strike of a couple of years ago. “She thought it was highly amusing that she wrote for studios at night while picketing during the day. Needless to say, no one else found this amusing. I’m very curious what you or Craig would do in the situation, which unfortunately probably happens more than anyone would like. Should I call the WGA? Should I talk to her one-on-one about how her selfish, self-centered actions affect others? Just forget she ever said it and move on?”

Craig: Boy. I mean, look, I have no, not one ounce of sympathy for somebody who was scabbing during the strike. I mean, if they’re a WGA member and they’re writing for signatories during a strike, I loathe them. I loathe them.

Yes, I think there is an excellent case to be made that you should pick up a phone and call the Guild and tell them what you heard. I don’t like — we all have a kind of “don’t be a tattle tale, don’t be a rat” built into us. I don’t think talking to her directly is going to do a damn thing. She’s already made herself and her position clear. I’m not sure what talking to her is going to do other than maybe she’ll think twice when the next strike rolls around?

No, I think that frankly there is a case to be made that, yeah, you pick up the phone and call the guild. I don’t like it any more than you do, but if we’re going to strike and people are going to do this, I mean, what’s the point? How do I turn around and tell somebody who’s barely hanging on, “Yeah, don’t write,” because we’re all in this together except for that person.

John: I think my overall concern… — I have two concerns. One is that this writer evidently did scab and write during the strike. Sort of my bigger, more immediate concern is that she’s bragging about it, and which to me sets a very dangerous culture of expectations so that, “Oh, it’s fine.” If you sort of let that go unchallenged like, “Oh, it’s fine that you did that.” If you don’t say anything, it’s sort of tacit approval. So I think having the conversation with the staff, “That’s not cool,” is make sure that everyone who has heard this conversation understands why that’s really not cool.

And then, listen, I don’t know your position on the staff, I don’t know her position on the staff. I don’t know sort of how it all works there. But I would say, “You know what, that’s not cool.” If nothing else it will probably shut her up from saying that again and again and setting this expectation that what she did was okay.

Craig: Yeah. It’s important to make sure that she actually was scabbing. Because she’s an assistant, there’s a chance here in my mind that she actually wasn’t a Writers Guild member. If she wasn’t a Writers Guild member, she was not — I mean, she was essentially hurting the strike, but she wasn’t breaking any rules.

John: Well it says here, it doesn’t say that she was an assistant during that time. It says, “One of the junior writers rather brazenly…”

Craig: Oh, junior writer. Oh, I’m sorry. I heard wrong. Well then I’m going to presume that she was a member of the Writers Guild. So I do agree that, yes, everybody else in that room needs to know that’s not cool. Frankly, I would think about firing her for sure because that’s disgusting to me. And then on top of that I would call the Guild. I hate to say it, but yeah.

John: Next question from Sean. “When writing slug lines for scenes that take place in a high school, is it acceptable to write, for instance, ‘INT. HIGH SCHOOL — STAIRWAY — DAY?’ Or it preferable just to write ‘INT. HIGH SCHOOL STAIRWELL — DAY?’ The majority of the film takes place in a school, so it seemed to make sense to specify the exact area of the school in the slug line. I’m just not sure which or either is the correct approach.”

Craig: How would you go about that? I mean, I know what I would do.

John: If most of the movie is taking place at the high school, to me I would cut the “high school” out of it at a certain point.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Because it would just become an extra sort of cruft on the page. There are times where I will do the specifiers where you talk about the general location — dash — the specifying location inside that. But that’s usually if it’s going to be… — You’re always thinking about the reader. What’s going to make most sense for the reader? Is the reader going to get confused if I don’t do it this way?

Craig: You’re absolutely right. If most of the movie is set in this high school, or a long sequence is set in the high school moving around within different locations inside the high school, once you’ve established that you’re definitely in the high school it’s okay to just lose that part and just say INT. STAIRWAY, INT. HALLWAY, INT. PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE, INT. CLASSROOM.

The second you leave the high school when you come back you’ve got to do high school again. The whole point of the slug line stuff, at least initially, is to make sure the reader knows where the hell they are. There is no slavish need to follow some kind of orthodoxy. Eventually when the movie goes into production, if there’s any question or concern from the first AD they will come and ask you, “Is this is the high school or…?”

But, I mean, everybody should be able to get it. So, clarity should be the rule of the day.

John: Absolutely. So, clarity for the reader. Simplicity for the reader. Ultimately you’re trying to avoid ambiguity for production so that if it says INT. HALLWAY, “Wait, is it the hallway of the high school or is it the hallway of the house?” You have to sort that stuff out. But at this stage, generally the shorter slug line is going to be the better choice.

Craig: Yup.

John: Next question is not really a question. It’s one of those things that it’s sort of phrased like a question, but at the end it’s just, “So what do you think?” So it’s really more of a statement.

Craig: [laughs] It’s a little essay?

John: It’s a small essay with a question mark at the end.

Craig: [laughs] Oh, okay.

John: But I thought I would bring it up because it’s a guy who wrote in before and I thought it made interesting points that we can talk about. Tucker writes, “From where I sit the business looks like it’s in real trouble. The business model itself seems broken, especially on the creative side. Making big, dumb, loud movies to build international franchises is fine if people buy tickets and like the product. The problem is they don’t and they aren’t. This has been a bad year at theaters; attendance is in a major downturn.”

So I’m going to pause here for one second because I want to challenge the thesis of that second part which I think it’s reported a lot really without backup. So the idea that the business is down a lot isn’t really… — It’s harder to defend that. If you actually look at the year to date, this year versus previous years, going up through — we’re recording this on August 15th. I pulled it up on Box Office Mojo.

Year to date we’re at $7.1 billion for 2012 versus $6.8 billion in 2011. So we’re actually $300 million ahead of where we were this time last year, so you can’t say that the business is down. You can say that attendance is probably down. I don’t have it broken down by the months, but overall ticket purchases have dropped since the high in 2002, so that is true to say that it’s down. But I get frustrated by the articles that sort of preface themselves saying, “Everybody knows the movie industry is falling apart,” when in fact by the actual dollar figures it isn’t down.

So, that’s my pause.

Craig: I agree with your pause. I have more to say, but go ahead, keep reading.

John: Tucker continues, “And I feel there is a perfect storm going on. The studios need to make big bets on big franchises that makes big committees come together to manage the creative, and there are all these Hollywood pros and execs in a grip of fear from the bleeding the business is going through, and that fear makes us play either safe or stupid, so the product lacks innovation and freshness and passion. And the public notices and stays away.”

So, let’s go back to the pause.

Craig: Wait. Wait. Where was the question?

John: Oh, I had cut out the part of the question which was the, “What do you guys think?”

Craig: [laughs] Ah, if that was the question I would give him a… — Look, I think that he’s half right. There’s no question that the business has become obsessed with big, loud franchise event movies. They are convincing themselves that event movies are the business of movies and that that’s where all the money is going to be. Event movies lend themselves to 3D and IMAX, which allows everyone to greedily pull down higher ticket prices.

And they are doing that in part to supplant the disappearance or the continuing disappearance of the DVD market. Where he’s wrong is that people are absolutely still showing up. No question. You can’t look at The Avengers — which I think would be a prime example of what he would call big and loud, because it is big and loud, it’s an enormous, big, loud movie, although I liked it —

John: It’s not dumb. It’s very popcorn, but it’s not dumb.

Craig: It’s not dumb. I mean, look: when he says “dumb,” I don’t know what he thinks dumb is. I don’t know if he thinks dumb is anything that’s big. I don’t know what he thinks dumb is. All I can say is you can’t look at what The Avengers did and go, “Oh yeah, the movie business doesn’t work anymore and people don’t want to go see this stuff.”

They absolutely want to see it. And frankly international audiences want to see it just as much if not more so than domestic audiences. So, really part of what’s going on in Hollywood is that they’ve decided that there’s a certain kind of movie that they should make. And it’s not that the audiences are rewarding them. It’s just that the audiences are failing to punish them for it. I don’t recognize that the movie business is floundering. They still pack ’em in, all over the world.

I absolutely recognize that the movie business is under-serving a certain market. And they seem to have forgotten that you can still make a lot of money making a certain kind of movie that isn’t the big, huge, loud spectacle.

John: Yeah. A lot of what we talk about on the podcast comes from the perspective of screenwriters who are trying to write the movies that will three years down the road become the big movies. And as the studios have pursued these big giant tent poles, my frustration which I think you share is that a lot of times the decision is basically, “We’re going to make this movie come hell or high water. We will throw a director at it. We’ll throw an actor on it. And somehow we’ll make it happen.” And they are not actually developing movies to shoot anymore. They’re just trying to… — They’re writing a one sheet and figuring out what a trailer is and then trying to make the movies to match that.

That is absolutely true, and that’s a frustration of content creation and the process early on. But as far as what is actually hitting in theaters right now, I don’t think that’s really entirely fair to be slamming the movies that are coming out right now. Often when people talk about like, “Oh, the movie business is doomed,” they try to bring up John Carter from earlier this year. And there’s nothing at all cynical about John Carter. I saw John Carter. I mean, John Carter is a big, goofy, delightful film.

I wish it had made a lot more money, but it’s not indicative of some sort of, like, Hollywood falling apart. Yes, it was really expensive. You can talk about it being really probably too expensive. But you can’t say that it was trying to be this big, dumb movie when it was kind of a swing for the fences. And so I kind of wish we would reward the chance that it took, or acknowledge the risk that was taken on John Carter, and not be slamming it for its simplicity.

Craig: John Carter is the worst example for people to use. The fact is when people think about risk they are completely upside down on the reality. They think that small independent movies take on this enormous financial risk and studio films aren’t risky at all. It’s the opposite.

The little independent movies, people have to understand this: They don’t get made unless… — not unless — often unless the financiers can pre-sell that movie overseas. So if the movie is going to cost $5 million and it’s this little beautiful, not loud, not noisy, not dumb art film, they’re not making it for $5 million unless they know ahead of time, “I’ve actually already sold this movie overseas based on who’s in it, or who the director is, for $5 million.”

“When we start to make this movie, I’m even. There’s no risk there.” That’s that model. And then it really is just about, “Okay, can we make a little bit of money, or a decent amount of money, or a lot of money for the effort?” And that’s that model.

When you look at John Carter, that’s a company that decides, “We’re going to spend $300 million just on the production alone. We’re going to make a movie that is based on a book no one has read, and almost no one has heard of, Edgar Rice Burroughs. We’re going to hire a director that is brilliant but has no live action track record whatsoever. And we’re going to let him make his movie.”

I’m sorry. Yeah, it didn’t work out. Okay? They don’t always work out. But to me, John Carter is an example of studio bravery.

John: Yes.

Craig: And so when people bring up John Carter I go, no, no, no, that’s not the problem. The problem is Battleship. That’s the problem.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I say that as somebody who is friends with a number of people who were involved. But the issue with Battleship is when you take something and you make it for too much money because you think the audience wants it, because they know the name or the word but there’s really nothing there.

I mean, look, John Carter is a novel. It was literature. I mean, I can’t say it’s great literature, but Burroughs is no slouch. Whereas Battleship was just pegs. It was pieces of plastic that were sold to us as children. And there is no narrative inherent to it. So, let’s not blame John Carter. But let’s also not engage in this pointless sort of… — I always smell resentment underneath these essays, like, “Good, the fat cats are dying. And now it will be time for the YouTubers to take over the world.”

No. Sorry. People still go to movies. I wish it were easier for $30 million comedies that are interesting to get made. I do. And it’s hard. But, you know, the same producer that made Battleship made Identity Thief. He’s a good guy. He sees that there are plays on both ends of the spectrum.

And so I would love to see Hollywood kind of be a little less pie-eyed about these big huge movies, especially when they can get you in trouble like this, you know, the World War Z movie that’s…

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: …you know, they’re going to have to do a lot of reshoots and a lot of money because they have so much into it. But, no, I don’t think we should be dancing on… — If you want to dance on the corpse of Hollywood, don’t dance with glee. Because I’ll tell you what, buddy: when this thing goes down, nothing will take its place, not like this.

John: I think the only time… I’m trying to think of examples of where you can really fault Hollywood cynicism. And Battleship does feel like one of those cases because Battleship was made kind of for the wrong reasons. To me they were clearly chasing Transformers. It felt like Transformers on water. And I wasn’t rooting against the movie, but I was concerned on those levels.

I see DC Comics/Warner Brothers trying to emulate the success of The Avengers and trying to put together the whole super group of their heroes, and that feels.. — I can’t help but feel that that seems a little cynical. “Well that worked for them, so we should do it with our group.”

It’s like, well, but there was something really inherently right about doing it the way Marvel did it, and it was tremendously risky and, god bless them, they took the risk and they made it. But I’m concerned that they’re going to spend $600 million, $800 million trying to assemble these heroes to make this movie that I’m not sure that we definitely need to make.

Craig: Yeah, it’s possible. Certainly Hollywood, this is nothing new. They’ve always chased success. There’s a movie coming out about 21 year olds who have a hangover night. There is also a movie about 70 year olds who have a hangover night. [laughs] And there’s the DC one, Justice League, I think.

They have done this throughout history. A big movie comes out and then people make movies like that movie. They’ve been doing that since I got into the business. There’s no trend here. That’s standard operating procedure. Mind you, not only in this business, in every business.

Look around at smartphones and find me one that isn’t a rip-off of the iPhone. Everyone in every business does this. Absolutely normal. But, of course, it’s the people that innovate successfully and first, I guess that’s sort of inherent in the word innovate who really reap the benefits and the rewards.

And I have to say, year after year, while things get creaky and maybe things get really, really top heavy, there are always good movies that come out. There are always movies that take us by surprise and that we really like. And I just feel like if you’re going to take a look at the business, look at it objectively and leave the resentment out f it. Because I don’t hate Hollywood. I love it. I love it enough to say, “Stop doing dumb stuff like A, B, and C, and do more smart stuff like D, E, and F.”

But I do love it. I love movies and I love Hollywood.

John: Yeah. Schadenfreude helps nobody. And it’s sort of a cliché, but a rising tide lifts all boats. And you want the box office to be really good because then they’re going to be spending more money to make more movies. It does actually help everybody if my movies succeed.

Craig: Yes.

John: All right. I’m ready for our Three Page Challenges if you are ready to start?

Craig: Heck yeah. Gosh yes.

John: Let’s start with Terrance Mulloy’s one. It’s the one that starts in New York City. It doesn’t have a title.

Craig: You’re going to hear pages rustling around because I printed it out again, John.

John: You did? That’s fine. You’re allowed to print.

Craig: I know you hate that.

John: So while you’re rustling through your pages, I will give a quick summary of what Terrance’s script is about. I should say that if you are interested in reading any of these Three Page Challenges that people sent in, they are all linked to on johnaugust.com. You can go to the podcast section and read the screenplays along with us. So, we can pause here for a moment so you can do that.

Craig: Pausing.

John: Pausing. This is Terrance Mulloy’s script. And I want to thank our three people who wrote in and volunteered to have us be talking about their things on air. That was very generous of you.

So, here’s Terrance:

So we have establishing shots of New York City. We then descend through the concrete and into a subway tunnel where two MTA maintenance workers are walking and talking. They talk about chili and try to figure out where they are on this map. They get off the tracks and the train goes passed, or sort of rushes, blasts passed. And one of them sees a human shape hop down into a hole. After the train passes, they investigate, thinking it’s maybe a homeless person, but it’s not.

And one guy gets his throat ripped out as we get to the end of page three. So it’s some sort of monstrous creature is in the subway tunnel.

Craig: Underneath Manhattan.

John: Yeah.

Craig: These pages were… — Nothing wrong with the way they were written. Everything seemed okay. The dialogue was sort of fine in its craft. Everything here was fine except that I’ve seen this a billion times.

John: Yeah.

Craig: There’s no invention here really. I mean, if you were to say to anybody, “Can you write a scene like the one you’ve seen a million times in the horror/monster movies where two guys are just innocently walking along in the darkness, doing their job, chitchatting about nothing, and then suddenly a monster kills one of them and the other one goes, ‘Oh my god!'” It would be this. It’s incredibly generic. So, I’m not sure what else to say.

You can’t ignore the 14,000 movies that have come before you. You have to really surprise us.

John: Yeah. I feel like with this, the conventions, it’s following the conventions so closely that I wanted to see some pushback, because by the bottom of page one I kind of knew what was going to happen. Like, if we are descended down into the subway and two people are just walking and talking and doing normal stuff, the minute I see, like, a shadowy creature move by it’s like, “Well, I know exactly what movie this is.”

And so if you’re going to give us that shadowy creature walking by, surprise us somehow. Let us know that there’s something — there’s a reason that something different is going to be happening, that you’re aware of the conventions. I mean, it doesn’t have to be Scream where it’s meta conventions, but you need to surprise us a little bit more than I felt like we were getting in these three pages.

I would say overall I was more curious about the story than I was about the writing. And sometimes you can write something that’s kind of conventional, but if it was really, really well-written that could serve you very well. Here the writing, it was only okay. It was doing what it needed to do. There were some significant typos that I wanted to point out.

Craig: Yeah.

John: We had an “it’s” and “its” problem.

Craig: That kills me.

John: Yeah. So the possessive “its” is just I-T-S. There’s no apostrophe. And it doesn’t make sense, but it’s just how English works. “Chili” has one L. And then I want to talk about these two MTA workers who throughout the three pages are MTA Worker #1 and MTA Worker #2.

Craig: I got so confused. I didn’t even know who was dead at one point.

John: Yeah. So here’s the thing: It’s fine to say MTA Worker, but if you’re going to have two of them and they’re going to be talking for more than two lines, just give them actual names. I think they should probably have last names, so one is Ramirez and one is Jones. It doesn’t kind of really matter. You don’t have to get into great detail and you don’t have to write up whole backstories on them. But just so we can keep them straight, because there’s a lot of times in the scene description where like, “MTA Worker #1 stops to survey through his surroundings.” But it’s like, “Wait, which one is that? Is it the guy who said this, the guy who said that?”

Craig: Right.

John: Give us some actual names so that we can focus on that a little bit more.

Craig: Yeah. You get trapped in the garden of “he”s and “she”s where you’re not sure to whom the pronoun is referring. And also, I’ve got to tell you: if you write the script well enough and somebody wants to make this, sooner or later some casting lady is going to be calling going, “Um, MTA Worker #1, white, back, tall, short?”

John: That’s where Ramirez saves your ass. It’s like, boom, helps you figure it out.

Craig: Yeah. Give us something. I mean, but in general I can’t… — You’re right, if for instance, there are ways where you can sort of say, “You know what? The pot of this movie is going to be incredibly generic. What’s going to be interesting is the speech of the people in it. I’m going to go Tarantino on this,” if you want. And sometimes that works. But this sort of had generic… — It just felt like kind of one of those movies, you’re flipping around late at night, and then suddenly there’s this sort of generic never-was-released monster movie starring somebody that might have been on TV once. There’s nothing to it to make me go, “Ah, cool.”

John: Yeah. Syfy Channel does originals of those now.

Craig: Yeah, even the monster. I’m like, “Okay, so it’s a pale Gollumy dude. It’s C.H.U.D.” You know what I mean?

John: I’m actually fine with it if it’s unapologetically that. But maybe it needs to acknowledge what it is a little. I don’t know, it felt like it wasn’t quite acknowledging what it was yet. Granted, it was only three pages so maybe there was a remarkable twist on page 6 that we see that actually there is a bigger thing happening. But I don’t necessarily have faith…

Craig: Yeah. There wasn’t even a sense of campiness to it, like, “Okay, that’s where the fun is going to come in. This thing is going to be just over the top and sicko,” or something. It just felt very down the middle.

John: So, there was a question that came in this week and I thought I would not actually raise the question because we could talk about it here just on these pages, which is the difference between ellipses and double dashes, because this is a script that uses a lot of ellipses. And so it uses them — it never really ends sentences. There’s just a lot of “…” and “…” and it’s a style. You see a lot of screenwriters that use it, and it’s absolutely fine.

It’s not a style I particularly care for, but it’s certainly a style. So, if you’re trailing off the end of a sentence that’s leading into a line of dialogue, often you’ll see, often I will use “…” so it sort of flows into the next line of dialogue. So this is going from scene description into dialogue. Dashes also work. The Wibberleys are big dash uses. And so there’s a script that they worked on, that I worked on, that they worked on, and every time it went back and forth one of the first things we would ever do is change all their dashes to ellipses, and all the ellipses to dashes.

Craig: [laughs]

John: Either one is fine. If you pick a style and you like it, that’s great. This guy is using “…” and it’s not a way I would do it, but it reads fine.

Craig: I didn’t mind it. I always say about these things: if the three pages had been really interesting and gripping, I wouldn’t have cared less. I will say that I tend to use “…” the way you do, to trail off things and then to break up things inside a paragraph if I’m sort of reporting. “He turns. Oh my god, a shot — ” Then I’ll do “–” because the “…”s somehow get a little…they look a little cluttery on the page. It makes my eyes hurt a little bit.

But it’s not really… — If somebody is writing a great script and they want to “…” the hell out of it, have fun.

John: Yeah. Either one is okay with us.

I’m trying to think of other last notes on this. The first bit of dialogue in a script is really crucial because that gives us a sense of the tone and sort of what kind of movie this is. Right now they’re having a discussion on chili con carne with garlic, and it just wasn’t great. And there’s probably a great version of this kind of conversation. Basically, if we’re laughing because what they’re saying is so funny then the horror stuff is great. But if it’s just so two people talking, it’s not going to really work for us.

Craig: Yeah. The only other suggestion I would make, just something to think about: I read once that Spielberg likes to find within the first image or the first few images something that’s thematically symbolic to the movie, to the guts of the movie.

I think the opening shot of Schindler’s List is a woman praying over a candle, and we just see the smoke kind of going up in the air and the whole thing, it’s like, “This is life, it burns and then it goes to smoke and it’s gone. It’s that fragile.” And I always thought that was a really interesting idea. And a lot of times I do try and think, “Well, what is that first thing I see?”

Now here it’s a trick, and it’s a trick we’ve seen, again, a billion times, where we do the macro to micro bit, where we fly down into Manhattan, and then we’re into people, and then we’re underground. But really all that’s done is say, “Look, there’s stuff underground Manhattan.” Yeah. We know. We know about the subway. [laughs]

So then the question is: what else could you do? I mean, is it two guys walking underneath and one of them sees like a bug and crushes it? Something where we get a sense that maybe there’s a bit of hubris that we think that we’re in charge here and actually there is this whole world underneath us that’s pissed off and ready to revolt?

Just find something that makes it visually significant. This to me was just, again, a very generic, technical trick. It was empty aesthetics.

John: It felt like the compulsory exercises in figure skating. It did its circle 8s, and it did a good job in circle 8s, but it wasn’t expressive in a way that could be awesome.

Craig: It was not a Triple Lutz.

John: No Triple Lutz there. There was no Lutz at all.

Next, let’s go to Trunk by Mario DiPesa. Here’s a synopsis of Trunk. So, we start at a tranquil lake and then suddenly a car plunges into it and sinks. Then we get a card that reads “Seconds Before.” We’re in a new scene. We see the car parked at the edge of a cliff. There’s a driver at the wheel. He looks at two bodies in the car. The police come up from behind, tell him to surrender. Then he drives the car off the cliff into the lake, so the thing we just saw before.

A new card that says “Minutes Earlier.” We see the car racing down a road pursued by the police. The men in the car are shooting at the cops who shoot back. And we have some dialogue among the men. And that’s the three pages.

Craig: Yeah. So you figure out pretty quickly that we’re doing a reverse narrative here. I presume that once we see that three scenes have now occurred moving backwards through time that we’re in Memento-ville.

And obviously that’s the first thing that people are going to read is, “Oh, okay, so we’re Memento-ing some kind of heist or criminal move that’s gone bad and we’re ending with a death and going backwards to see how it all starts.” And that’s, I mean, there’s nothing wrong with that.

John: I don’t know. I’m not convinced…

Craig: If it works, and it’s great. Memento is so good and it’s so good at that, and there’s also that great Gaspar Noé, I mean, it’s kind of a sick Gaspar Noé movie called…

John: Irreversible?

Craig: …Irreversible, I believe. So, okay, you know, the reader will have to either be into that or not into that, and there’s nothing you can do about it. That’s your deal.

I like the way that this writer wrote. I thought the description was well done, because I didn’t get bored and I didn’t get lost in it. And I thought it was a nice mix of poetic but not purple. I was infuriated on page 2 when there was a type in dialogue.

John: That was terrible.

Craig: I mean, if you’re going to do the its/it’s thing in action, or you’re going to do something in action, I get it. But in dialogue, that’s just embarrassing.

John: You’re talking about, “Comes out now, this is your final warning.”

Craig: Yeah! I mean, guys, you’re only sending us three pages. We’re not asking you to proofread with a fine tooth comb 120 pages. At least read the three pages you’re sending. It’s embarrassing to you, because we’re going to make fun of you and embarrass you. [laughs] So don’t do that.

I also thought the dialogue, I liked the dialogue in the sense that it seemed very simple and realistic to the moment of what was going on. It was certainly not over-written. I’ll take under-written any day of the week when people are driving from cops, and wounded, and bleeding, and trying to get away.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, a lot of good things here to say.

John: I liked it too. I don’t know that this time conceit is actually going to stay for the whole movie. I feel like this may be a setup kind of thing and once, at a certain point we may not be moving backwards in time. So I’m curious whether that’s going to happen. And my curiosity is partly what would keep me reading more of the script.

So, I liked the technique and I thought it was sort of well-handled. I felt like if the driver is going to have a name he should have it by now. So right now the driver is just called Driver. And maybe that’s fine. I think he’s probably our main character. I think we’re going to follow him through the whole movie. If that’s the case, and he’s going to have a name at any point in the movie, he should have his name by now.

Craig: Agreed.

John: Maybe it’s Drive and he doesn’t have a name. And that’s fine. Maybe it’s actually a sequel to Drive.

My theory with the typo is I’m not convinced that Mario DiPesa is a native English speaker. While it’s well-written, there are some strange choices that to me indicated that English may not be his only language. On page 2 he says, “Shifts the car’s gear.” What is it, “He shifts the car’s gear.” That isn’t sort of the way we would actually say that.

Craig: I guess. But then so much of this other stuff feels, I mean, I agree that that’s a little awkward, but I mean a lot of this stuff feels like, the action stuff, it’s hard to imagine this isn’t somebody that speaks English.

John: I think he speaks English, but something feels a little wrong. Also on page 2, “Wheels SCREECH as dust fills the air behind the car.” Fills the air behind the car? That seems like it’s coming from a different language.

Craig: I’ve got to tell you, [laughs] if this guy isn’t foreign he’s putting a gun in his mouth right now.

John: He’s just mortified right now. Maybe he’s special.

Craig: I don’t know. But, “The car bobs like a cork for a brief moment, then slowly sinks.” That’s very colloquial.

John: But, and then in the next paragraph; this is a style thing which isn’t an English speaker or not, but first page: “Water explodes like a thousand broken mirrors. The car bobs like a cork for a brief moment, then slowly sinks.” The double simile isn’t the most graceful. They have two likes back to back. That’s not ideal.

So, we’re “like a thousand broken mirrors” and “like a cork” back to back. It feels a little less graceful

Craig: That I agree with. That’s the sort of thing you want to kind of comb through and not do, but that’s not indicative of not speaking English. That’s just indicative of…

John: Well I will say that if Mario DiPesa, if you do speak English natively I apologize for implying that you didn’t, but I think you’re a much better writer in English than many people are. Anyway, so…

Craig: [laughs] That’s terrible.

John: No! I’m saying…

Craig: Because I really do think he is. I think he’s American and I think he’s like so a better writer than people, than you are in French.

John: Oh my god. He’s so much better.

Craig: Thanks.

John: I’m just wondering whether maybe he’s spoken English for ten years, and so is therefore really good, but some stuff is always going to be a little bit off. I’m looking him up right now to just see if he has an international…

Craig: See, the “Comes out now” thing is definitely a typo. Because the captain says, “Come out of the car with your hands on your head.” And then two lines of dialogue later, “Comes out now. This is your final warning.” It has to be a typo.

Also, because S is right near E on the keyboard.

John: Oh my god. So I just checked through my email and I’m completely wrong. So, Mario, I believe reading an actual email from you.

Craig: Yes!

John: For some reason I guessed that you are not a native speaker, but you are a native speaker.

Craig: Hey, Mario, listen, you don’t have to take this crap from him, okay? [laughs] I want you to do something. I want you to write in and really give him hell.

John: He actually wrote in about our last podcast and had, like, many paragraphs. And this does not feel at all like a person who does not speak English natively.

Craig: Shame. On. You.

John: Maybe he’s just poetic.

Craig: I think it was just a typo.

John: Well, no, “the car’s gear,” that read weird to me. Like I read that three times. Like, “Wait, that doesn’t actually make sense.”

Craig: It’s not good.

John: You don’t shift the car’s gear.

Craig: You’re right. That should have just been, you know, “Takes a deep breath. Puts the car in gear.” We put the car in gear. We don’t shift it into gear. But, meh.

John: Yeah.

Craig: It’s not enough to take the guy’s citizenship away.

John: No, it really wasn’t.

Our last Three Page Challenge entry is by, oh, here I am going to try it: Andrew Lauwasser. Lauwasser? It’s a good name. I just don’t know how to pronounce it.

Craig: I would say Lau-wasser.

John: Lau-wasser?

Craig: Lau-wasser. Yeah.

John: Let me give you a summary here. So we meet Justin and Amy in their apartment. They’re both mid-20s. Amy tells Justin she’s breaking up with him. We cut to a new house where we meet Marshall who’s around 60, and Brooke, his wife, she’s mid-30s. She’s divorcing him. We cut back and forth between Justin and Amy and Marshall and Brooke while they have dialogue and start to break up and move stuff out.

And that’s the three pages.

Craig: You want to start?

John: I’ll go first. This felt very setup-y. And setup-y in a way that I could see some credits playing underneath this maybe? It was, you know, I’ll give it this: It gets going really quickly. You see like, okay, these are two guys who are being dumped by the women in their lives. And the script is called Wingmen. I suspect they’re going to buddy up and help each other out. See the guy in his 60s and a guy in his mid-20s and they’re going to help each other out. And so I get the conceit of the character.

The Amy character is so horrible; I want her to be eaten by sled dogs. She says just the meanest things. And not in sort of like a really funny way. I didn’t… — Weirdly I had… — This happens sometimes in movies: if you see somebody who is in a relationship with somebody who is just terrible you stop having sympathy for them at a certain point. It’s like, “Why are you with this person?” So I felt that with Amy.

Craig: Uh…yeah. Okay, well, and by the way, I kind of suspect that this is a father and son thing. I don’t know why.

John: Oh, maybe.

Craig: I think that’s what the payoff will be. But, look, Andrew, come here. Come here, buddy. Let’s sit down, okay, let’s have a drink. You and me.

So, you got your drink? Good. I’ve got mine, too. I have written stuff like this before. Okay? So don’t take this the wrong way. This does not mean that you stink. It just means these pages stink. Okay?

I’m glad you got these out of your system. They’re terrible, but I understand why you wrote them this way, because I’ve done it before. When I was starting out, I would do this a lot. What you’re doing is you’re supplanting clever and quippy for human. These are not human beings. They are little joke glands you’re squeezing to get out lines that you think are clever. Frankly, none of them are that clever anyway, and the worst thing about being clever is you never really get credit for it anyway.

People smile at clever things. Your job as a comedy writer is to be making them laugh. To make people laugh in a theater, it’s not easy. God knows I know it’s not easy. You’re trying to cause an involuntary physical response. It’s a tough deal, okay?

People laugh when they see human things happening. They can identify with the humanity in it. Even if it’s slapstick it is partly about connecting with the humanity of it. The issue with this stuff is none of these people are real. Nobody breaks up like this. Nobody talks like this.

Oh, ah, Marshall says — he’s the older man — “You’re leaving me?” Brooke, “I don’t like to think of it as leaving. More like escaping.” I mean, that line alone is brutal. I mean, escaping from — first of all, I’m like, “What? Was he beating her? What was going on that she needs to escape?” And it’s so cold. And by the way, that’s not the character that John is talking about, who’s even worse.

Then Marshall says, “Is there anything I should do?” Which is a weird thing to say. And he’s not upset oddly, and she says, “Ah! I almost forgot. I need you to sign the divorce papers.” How? Really? You almost forgot? And the divorce papers were shoved in your purse? And he didn’t know? And he just goes ahead and signs the? Without even reading them?

And then when he says, “How long have you been carrying these around?” “Since I started seeing Ian. Sign on the…” “I know where to sign. You’re cheating on me?” Really?

This just doesn’t feel like humans responding to human things. The Amy situation is much worse because Amy just seems sociopathic. You have to ask yourself: Why was this person with this other person in the first place? I mean, he says, “We’re going to sit here and we’re going to talk this out. You can’t just throw away nine years like that.” Nine years of what? Living with this psycho? It’s crazy.

Then let’s go back to Marshall. And listen, Andrew, I know this sucks, okay? But we have to do this because I want you to get this out of your system. Okay?

Your first scene with Marshall and Brooke. Marshall is oddly calm. “(Not upset),” in parentheses, “Is there anything I should do?” “Here. Sign the divorce papers.” “Okay. You’re cheating on me?”

Next scene. “You’re such a bitch.” What?!

Then he starts talking about her tits. And now he’s complaining about the tits and now doing a joke about gravity and Parkinson’s, like a boob joke. And now she’s doing a dick joke. None of this makes me understand a single thing about who these people are. Does this really hurt either one of them? Are they real? Is this the way people really do breakup?

No. Not even in comedies. Okay? So, I want you to say with me, Andrew, because I’m your friend. Because you’re a comedy writer and we’re all friends, okay? So say this with me: I’m going to let go of this clever stuff and I’m going to start writing people. And when I write people, unless I’m writing a spoof, and then you can be an absolute idiot, okay? It grants you full license. But if you’re writing a movie that’s a romantic comedy like this is going to be, then find the comedy in the real stuff. And you can push it a little bit, but you can’t do this.

John: No.

A few craft things I want to talk about along the way, as he’s rewriting this, and as people are reading along with this. I kind of liked what he said about Justin, “27 years old and lean, with a mop of curls on his head and a face that only knows puppy dog sincerity.” Sure.

But he introduces both Justin and Amy in the same very, very long sentence. That sentence is five lines long. No. Don’t do that. Shorten. Each of them, they’re main characters, they deserve their own sentence. Break that into two sentences.

Both of these introductory scenes would be so much better if we cut out the first lines of them. So if the first line of the movie were actually Amy’s, “I’m keeping the apartment, so technically you’re the one who’s leaving.” That’s a much funnier start of a scene than, “You’re leaving me?”

Craig: That’s a great note.

John: Start with the answer rather than the question. And then you can cut out Marshall’s question, too. Start with Brooke like, “I don’t like to think of it as leaving, more like escaping.” That’s a good start, a funny line of a scene. Kind of everything that follows after it has to change. But it’s not a bad way to start a scene.

Craig: I just want to interrupt you for a second. This is why I love what you’re saying. Because by cutting out that lead-in line, my mind will fill in that there was a reasonable, rational, human exchange that led to that line. But with the lead-in line there isn’t, because it’s not. So that’s a great, great note.

John: Cool.

Beyond that, my notes are your notes, but probably kinder and softer, but maybe some tough love was needed.

I get what he’s kind of going for here. I think he’s just so desperate to sort of start the comedy engine that he’s not taking the time to actually make these people real human beings. And he’s making the two women so unlikeable that we don’t know what kind of reality that we’re in.

Craig: Yeah. And there’s another danger here, too. I’ve read a million comedy scripts, so I’m going to tell you what happens in this one. These two guys are going to get together and they’re going to go looking for women. And they both feel beaten up by women and angry at women. And then they’re going to meet women and those women are going to change their minds. Naturally.

The problem is the script starts off extraordinarily misogynistically. [laughs] There’s nothing wrong with one mean woman. I loved, I loved Rachel Harris, right, in The Hangover. That’s her name, right? Rachel Harris, the actress?

John: Yeah, she’s awesome. Blonde.

Craig: Yeah. The blonde one. Exactly. Who’s married to Ed Helms. Are they married? No, they’re going to be married. They’re engaged to be married, I think.

John: Congratulations to them.

Craig: And she was hysterical because she was this over the top horror show, but I also understood that he was an absolute weenie. That was his character. He had no spine at all. That’s why their relationship was stable. He was the beaten wife and it was actually kind of funny. But, it came inside the context of a movie where another one of his friends is getting married to a really nice girl who’s a normal, healthy human being that isn’t mean or awful.

We are starting the movie with two mean, awful, cold women. And I’ve got to tell you, there isn’t a single woman in the audience who’s going to be interested in watching past that because, frankly, it’s insulting.

It’s also just not honest. I don’t think it’s honest. And if comedy is false it’s just not going to work.

John: Let’s think about those first two scenes where we’re meeting the guys, if they are going to be our protagonists for the course of the movie those scenes need to be about them. And it needs to give us a sense of what they need to accomplish over the course of the movie. So, your description about Ed Helms is apt. It’s like, you know, Rachel Harris’s character was there to let us see what was wrong with him and where he needed to grow. So, as he’s rewriting these scenes and figuring out how this movie starts, those scenes need to be about those guys and not about the relationship falling apart.

Craig: 100 percent. Because all I know about these guys is that they made really bad choices of women. I don’t know what’s wrong with them. They are the protagonists. It has to be about them. All the more reason, frankly, if these women are leaving that they should be right. The women should be correct to leave.

John: Yup.

Craig: There you go.

John: Those are our pages.

Craig: But Andrew. Andrew, I’m serious dude, you can do this. Everybody that writes comedies makes this mistake at some point. You made yours. You can do this; I believe in you.

John: Yeah. Step away from the balcony.

Craig: Yes.

John: Terrance, Andrew, and Mario, thank you so much for writing in with your three page samples. That was very brave of you and I hope it was helpful. I hope we gave you useful things to think about with this script and with the next thing. And thank you for sharing with everybody else who’s going to read these pages and get some sense of how they might want to start telling their stories.

I think the time has come for our One Cool Things. And you have a very cool thing this week in that you’re going to play us a song.

Craig: I’m going to play a song. That’s right. Do you have a cool — and by the way, because we have 100,000 people listening.

John: Yeah. We’ve consistently crossed over our 100,000 barrier. So we have a lot of good listeners out there. And 100,000 of them, at least, which is amazing.

Craig: It’s awesome.

John: And nuts. So, you will play us out this week so there won’t be a normal song, so I guess I should do my Cool Thing now, and then we can just be done.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So my Cool Thing, I recognize that a lot of times the Cool Things are like, “buy this product,” and that’s never the intention. I don’t want to have an Amazon link for everything that we talk about. So my One Cool Thing is absolutely free, which this week is the LA Public Library, and your local public library if you don’t live in Los Angeles.

Because the thing is I sort of stopped going to the library for many years until I had a kid, and then you go to the library because it saves you from having to buy a gazillion books. And so you just take them to the library and they pick a bunch of books off the shelf, and you return them after three weeks.

What’s weird is going back to the library as a grown up and recognizing that libraries are kind of amazing. It’s sort of like Netflix, but for books. And that you don’t have to like actually purchase things, you can just borrow them, and then when you’re done with them they go away and they don’t have to live in your house anymore. Because so much of what I read now I read on the Kindle or through iBooks or whatever. And that’s great for like the modern books, or the new book that you read about online and you really want to read the book.

What’s so good about the library is it’s not just… — The books that are on the shelves aren’t necessarily books that you would ever want to buy. They’re books that you wonder why they’re on the shelf at all, and that’s kind of amazing.

So these last couple weeks at the LA Public Library, I found The Anarchist Cookbook, which I can’t believe is actually…to me it always felt like the Necronomicon, like — one of those things that’s rumored but doesn’t actually exist.

Craig: Right.

John: But The Anarchist Cookbook, which was this sort of famous book of the late ’60s, which told you how to build bombs and stab police officers, is actually on the shelf there, which I thought was kind of amazing.

This last week I discovered that our local library actually has big books of sheet music. So there are piano songs I want to learn — they’re right there. So I would say go visit your local public library. It’s not just for homeless people who want to get out of the rain. It’s a useful resource that’s out there. And just take advantage of it. Go in there and wander.

Craig: Absolutely. Some of my favorite childhood memories are going with my dad to the New Dorp Library in Staten Island. New Dorp. [laughs] It’s one of the great names. New York was sort of founded and settled by the Dutch, so there are a lot of strange Dutch names. And the New Dorp Public Library was this wonderful old east coast institutional building. It was the kind that had the fallout shelter signs, you know. It was very midcentury-ish.

And I loved it. I loved going. And I would just go and just look through the stacks until I found a book that interested me. And I would always walk away with three, or four, or five of them because I loved reading. And I take my kids to the La Cañada Public Library, and it’s a great thing.

And for those of you who do live in Los Angeles, if you haven’t been to the big downtown library, just go and walk around to marvel at it. It’s gorgeous. It’s just a beautiful building. Absolutely beautiful. Even if you’re not there for a book, you just want to walk around. It’s spectacular.

John: Growing up, one of my favorite libraries in Boulder was this little small library they built into the Meadows Shopping Center. And it seemed so weird to stick a library in a shopping center, but it was actually kind of genius because it was around places where people already were. And so people could just, like, drop into the library. And it was close to the grocery store. I liked that it sort of took away the fanciness of like it’s its own building and has this great thing. Like, no, it’s part of the mall and you can go in there and get the books you want to get.

And libraries in all forms are great. And I think I had sort of forgotten about them until I had a kid and ended up going to the library more. They’re cool.

Craig: Yeah. Fantastic.

John: And also I should say: we’ve been trying to get rid of a lot of books. We’re sort of doing a house purge. And I have this sort of rule that if it’s a book that I haven’t touched in five years, I don’t think I’ll touch in the next five years, it’s better off on somebody else’s shelf. And so the library has been taking a lot of our old books and they sell them in book sales and they make some money. So libraries are also a great way to part with the books that you believe should be on someone else’s shelf.

Craig: For sure.

John: Cool.

So, Craig, it’s come to that time. So, what setup do we need to do for your song? Tell us about this?

Craig: There’s no real setup. I initially tried to figure out how to run my acoustic — I have an acoustic electric, so it’s an acoustic guitar but there’s a little pickup inside. And I bought this little Behringer thing to connect in directly so I could record the guitar on one track and my voice on the other. That thing does not work at all. [laughs] Could not get it to work at all. So, I think I’m just going to play guitar and sing into one mic. So, it’s going to sound a little different because I’ve got to adjust the mic and whatever.

But the song is by John Prine and it’s called Killing the Blues. It was made slightly more popular by Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.

John: Krauss, yeah.

Craig: Is that right?

John: Yeah. Alison Krauss.

Craig: Yeah. Alison Kraus. And it’s short, so it won’t bore you. And there you go.

John: Great. Craig, thank you very much. Have a great week and we’ll let you play us out. Thanks. Bye.

Craig: Here we go.

[Strums and sings]

Sorry about all the bus noise. But no sirens!

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

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

Craig, can you feel it? It’s that time of year again.

Craig: It is my favorite time of year, John. My favorite time.

John: Because it’s WGA election season again.

Craig: Oh, so good.

John: Every year we get to pick new candidates for — not really new candidates — we get to pick new members to be on the Board of Directors for the Writers Guild.

Craig: We get to.

John: We get to. And for a very small percentage of our listenership are extraordinarily interested in it, and the rest of our listenership could kind of give a rat’s ass. But, I do want to talk about it because it’s important. And so it’s one of the things we’ll talk about today on the podcast.

And we’ll talk about actually a thing that is maybe a little bit more important and factors into more people’s lives, which is how to not be fat.

Craig: How to not be fat. For writers.

John: For writers, yeah. Really kind of for anybody. You can choose to not be fat and be an accountant, or an editor, or there’s many job which you can choose to not be fat. A sumo wrestler? This is not the podcast for you.

Craig: Right. That — we’ll be doing a future podcast called How to Be Fat.

John: And that’s just for sumo wrestlers. And we’ll give you fair warning that it’s not going to be for everyone.

Craig: Right.

John: Just like the career of screenwriting isn’t for everyone, the career of sumo wrestling is not for everyone. Did you ever see — there was a kid who really aspired to be a sumo wrestler, and he just wasn’t actually tall enough. And so he got essentially a silicon boob implant on the top of his head to give him enough height.

Craig: What?!

John: So, I swear this is real and I’ll try to find a link for it and put it in the show notes. This kid, he really wanted to be a sumo wrestler and he wasn’t tall enough. And so essentially they put in one of those expandable boob implants at the top of his head, like under the skin, between the skull and his hair line to raise up his head so he would be technically tall enough to compete in sumo.

Craig: But then unfortunately once the operation was complete he just spent all day feeling the top of his head.

John: Yeah. The things people will do. I mean, that’s crazy, but it’s crazier than like what many women in the 50’s will do to their faces.

Craig: Actually, I disagree. It is, in fact, crazier. He’s put a tit on the top of his head in order to be a sumo wrestler. First of all, sumo wrestling is a ridiculous sport. I know. I know, I’m going to get it from our sumo listening… — It’s really sumo wrestling is a legacy sport. It’s really done now I think mostly just to celebrate culture and tradition. It’s not actually really a good sport that anybody outside of Japan watches with any regularity.

I guess you could argue that — no, because baseball — people love baseball in Japan, and the Dominican Republic. It’s just a legacy sport. And this kid didn’t qualify for height, and this is a body size sport. Adding the head tit is not going to make him any better at sumo wrestling. He’s really just gaming the rules and he’s gonna get his ass kicked, I presume, because he’s just not tall enough.

And, also, he has a boob on his head which is insane. And I presume that, now that boob is there, that he’s going to spend the rest of his life as Tit Head.

John: Yeah. He could take the boob out if he needed to. He could have a head-breast reduction surgery.

Craig: It’s ridiculous. I mean, don’t get me wrong: I think that what a lot of women in their 50’s, and by the way, let’s be equal opportunity about this — men…

John: Oh yeah, do some crazy things too.

Craig: There’s a guy who’s reporting on the Olympics and my wife keeps…she insists I have to come in and see him every time because he’s so Botoxed up. But sometimes when they Botox you I guess they can’t hit the sides, they just get the front of your forehead. So he’s got this preternaturally smooth immovable forehead but every time he does move where his forehead would move, the sides wrinkle up. It’s kind of like Saran Wrap does when it’s over a nice chicken breast and then you squish it. It’s horrifying. Horrifying.

What are these people doing?

John: Which people? The people who are getting the Botox injections?

Craig: Right. I know what they’re doing. But why?

John: Because they see sometimes it actually works amazingly well and for some people it is fantastic. And god bless them if they want to look their best. But for other people it is just horrifying and they have some sort of mirror disease where they’re not actually seeing what’s in front of them.

Craig: Dysmorphia.

John: It’s dysmorphia, in fact.

Craig: Dysmorphia. But here’s my point: I grant you that in some limited cases with limited amounts of treatment it can make you look better, objectively better. But, over time that’s a losing battle. There is a tipping point for all human beings where all it does is make you look freaky. And at some point I suspect these people just don’t understand that they have to stop now. And it must be really hard because if you’re the kind of person that’s not willing to put up with a few wrinkles, you’re not going to be able to put up with looking like the prune that we all become.

John: The most impressive, I don’t know if it was plastic surgery or other work I ever saw done is Jaclyn Smith, who is, you know, from the original Charlie’s Angels. She’s also in the Charlie’s Angels sequel.

And so I met her and I’m like, oh my…I’d heard about…I’m like, “Oh my god, you are stunningly beautiful and you are a woman of quite a significant age.” And you can’t, I mean, literally her face was just perfect. But then you shake her hand and you’re like, “Oh, this is an older woman’s hand. This is the hand of the actual person you are.”

Craig: Yeah.

John: They can’t do anything for your hands. That’s why you can wear gloves.

Craig: And now you’re a glove-wearing freak. [laughs] You know, I remember Bill Maher years ago had a great thing — he was talking about how everybody would always say Sophia Loren is still the sexiest woman on the planet. And he’s like, “No she’s not. She’s a grandma. You don’t French kiss grandma. Let’s stop pretending that this 70 year old woman is the sexiest woman on the planet.”

There’s a whole reason that sexy is about young. It’s not about being offensive to old people. It’s because you’re not procreative anymore. Sexuality is tied to procreation. I mean, that’s why it’s there. Granted, in some cases orientation makes that impossible, but ultimately that’s why it exists in the first place. And we all stop being procreative after a certain age, so why would an 80 year old person be sexy, or a 60 year old person? They’re not really sexy.

And anybody who tells you that 60 year olds are sexy, they’re just being nice.

John: [laughs] Maybe so.

Craig: Ah, look, you see? This is where…so Pam Ribon, a good writer and a friend of ours, friend of the podcast, did a whole thing about the podcast the other day about why women aren’t sending in as many things and are they really less interested. And she, [laughs], she described it to us as you’re the nice, nurturing one and I was the rich, cranky guy.

John: Yeah, I don’t actually want to challenge you too badly on stuff, but there’s times where, yeah…

Craig: You think so?

John: …I disagree with you.

Craig: Well, first of all, can I just say, I know we’re wildly off-track now; we’re turning into the Howard Stern Show. But why am I the rich cranky guy and you’re the nurturing guy, but you’re not the rich nurturing guy? You’re rich.

John: Oh, that’s an interesting point of view. Nurturing I get; I do have this tendency to sort of look for the bright side of situations and to help people along. And I will humor people with their idiotic questions sometimes. Rich is an interesting distinction.

Craig: Yeah, like I’m the bad banker from It’s a Wonderful Life or something like that, you know. But then she called me out for referring to one of our submissions, and it was submitted by a woman, as being “cute.” And that was sort of, in her mind, it was a bit pejorative when…

John: See, I don’t think “cute” is pejorative at all.

Craig: I don’t either.

John: Like Frankenweenie is cute. My upcoming movie Frankenweenie is cute.

Craig: It is cute. Those ads are really cute. Exactly. Yeah. I don’t think so. And then also women call guys “cute” when they like them.

John: Totally. And I was just having a conversation with Mike Su, who is a video game developer for iPhone and iOS devices. And we were talking about like the best selling iOS games. And I pointed out, like, “They’re all cute.” The winning titles — they’re cute. They have to have something cute. And they need to have sort of bubbly heads and big eyes and those are the ones that are top sellers.

Craig: No question.

John: There’s nothing wrong with cute.

Craig: So that’s my response. That’s my response. That’s my cranky response.

John: Let’s do some follow up.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Last week we talked about my concern that when you read reviews of movies, the screenwriter’s name seems to only be mentioned when it’s a negative review. And if it’s a positive review you’re not even going to her the screenwriter’s name.

Craig: Right.

John: And so I asked if anybody who is like a grad student in statistics, or is pursuing that, wanted to actually do a study.

Craig: You’re not going to tell me that somebody actually — somebody actually did this?

John: Someone stepped up.

Craig: You’re kidding me. Already?

John: Already. So, Tim from Hollywood stepped up. And so he’s volunteered to do sort of a small pilot study. So he’s going to do 50 recent movies, looking through their Rotten Tomatoes, just to see if there’s something there.

Craig: Great.

John: So it’s just a test run to see if there’s something interesting worth studying there. If the results come back that there’s probably nothing there, yeah.

Craig: Hey, that is, you know, we have good listeners.

John: We have great listeners. We have the best listeners.

Craig: Really. Thank you. That’s awesome.

John: We have 99,000 brilliant listeners. And 1,000 people we could do without. But most, the people who are listening right now, they’re the best listeners in the world.

Craig: The best.

John: Mark writes in. “I listen to the podcast every week.” Thank you, Mark. “Ever since Craig mentioned his wacky electronic cigarette a few podcasts back I’ve noticed an odd sound that, upon closer listening, sounds a lot like someone inhaling a fake cigarette. It is telling that the sound always occurs when you, John, is talking, not Craig.

“Exhibits A through D in this week’s podcast: At 34:37 there’s a long inhaling sound followed by Craig’s ‘Yeah,’ which sounds like a veiled, gauzy, non-carcinogenic exhaled water vapor. The sound recurs at 35:09, 35:21, and 35:37. Is Craig toking like nuts to get through the show? Is this not a drug-free podcast? Can I believe the clean label on iTunes or are we mired in the filth of the explicit section. Please discuss.”

Craig: [laughs] Now last week, if you all recall, I was desperately tired. And I listened back to the podcast, [laughs], and I sounded like a different person. I was really mellow. Not at all rich and cranky, which is not like me. And, yeah, I was definitely puffing on my electronic cigarette. Now I’m going to do it now, and so for our sleuthy listener who is bordering, frankly, on obsessive and scary, I’m going to — I’m going to provide you with the sound. And you may then match it up in your audio analysis booth, and make sure to say the words, “Wait. Stop. Enhance that.”

Okay, ready? [puffs] That was it.

John: Yeah, it’s pretty subtle.

Craig: Yeah, it’s very minor. Now if that was the sound you heard, in fact that was me attempting through the judicious use of an electronic cigarette to stay the F awake.

John: All right. That’s totally fair. But now, of course, I’m going to have Stuart sample that out and blow it up really big. And so whenever there’s an awkward pause, by that we’ll all know what’s really secretly going on.

Craig: When you say whenever there’s awkward pause you mean every time I finish saying something…

John: Yeah, before I get to a “Yeah.” When I’m thinking, like, “What will I say instead of ‘yeah?'” That’s what I’ll say.

Craig: Are you starting to hate me? [laughs]

John: Sort of. If this were a video podcast everyone would see that you have the electronic cigarette, but it’s in like one of those long cigarette holders, [laughs], so it’s extra fabulous that way.

Craig: That’s like, oh my god, Robot FDR.

John: Yeah. Or Miss Scarlet from Clue. That’s what I really picture you like.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: Matthew writes about last week’s podcast, “Craig seems to be using the words critic and reviewer interchangeably and I think he’s blurring a useful distinction. To my mind, reviewers write about films the week they come out and are designed to help filmgoers decide whether to see a particular movie. Critics when they’re writing focus more on creative decisions made by filmmakers and the effects they achieve.”

Craig: Yeah, that’s fair.

John: Craig, do you think that’s a useful distinction?

Craig: Yeah. That is fair. I was using them interchangeably and technically that person is correct. There’s a world of film studies, essentially. And so critic in that sense would be analogous to literally critic, which is not a book reviewer. That’s somebody that analyzes literary works, novels, and so forth.

So, yes, that is a fair point to make. I was using them interchangeably. I was talking about reviewers. People who write true film criticism really don’t exhibit any of the flaws that I notice in our reviewing industry.

John: Yeah. And I think I was blurring those two things together as well. The problem I would say is that I have hard time pointing to who are really the film critics left these days. Because what we think about as the places where you would find film criticism, at least in the newspapers, that’s really more reviewing. And so there are times you have the people who are also reviewing movies will do in-depth pieces about a movement or a genre or sort of things that are happening in film. And that really feels like criticism as opposed to reviewing a movie that comes out this week.

Craig: Yeah. Film criticism kind of had a heyday, I think, the sera-sera. Now if you actually look in real film criticism, it has fallen prey to what much of modern literary criticism has fallen prey to. It’s really steeped in identity politics and sort of — it’s all post-modern. And academia is still swooning from Foucault and Derrida. And one day it will figure out how to pull its head out of that quicksand pit and start writing in a way that’s relevant to people outside of academia, I suppose.

But if there are really good, relevant film critics out there that you find interesting to read, we’d love to hear about them.

John: Yeah, please write in.

Heather wrote in and she asked, “My blog was optioned by a cable network.” Congratulations Heather.

Craig: Cool.

John: “They bought certain stories they wanted to turn into a movie. I just received what I believe is called a script outline from the head of programming, and it is awful. When we were negotiating, he told me they wanted my voice, my vibe. Maybe he was just blowing smoke. My question is: would it be presumptuous and rude to offer to write a script outline free of charge for consideration? Or do I just accept that the material is now the network’s and cash the check when the project is complete?”

Craig: Hmm.

John: Tough call.

Craig: Yeah, well, there’s certainly nothing wrong with you trying to write something for them and saying, “Look, wouldn’t this be better?” But they’ve shown you their hand. This is what they want. If they’re giving it to you, maybe they’re giving it to you because they have to give it to you. I don’t know if you have any kind of approval written into your contract. I suspect you don’t. It’s not every day that somebody options or licenses a blog, and you probably didn’t have that much leverage I’m just guessing.

So, it may be that you’re just confronted with the age old lament of the novelist who licenses their book and then sees a terrible movie out of it.

John: I think she should go for it, because I think the money involved is probably pretty low. If you’re burning any bridges they’re not very big bridges, not very good bridges probably. So, I wouldn’t worry about them.

If this really was written by the network executive and not, like, they found a writer who did this, it may very well be that this person was trying to put together a pitch document to sort of show what they thought the movie was. And they’re not really a writer. And so maybe you really could step in and help that be the document that really shows what the potential of the movie is. So, I don’t think you’re risking much by trying. If it’s really that bad, step up.

Craig: That’s a better answer. I like your answer better. I agree.

John: Thanks. But we’ll keep yours just so people can compare and contrast.

Craig: Yeah. Well, I mean they should. They should see what a not-as-good answer sounds like.

John: Good. So, let’s move onto our main topics. This is the WGA election season. So every year we get to pick some new candidates for the Board of Directors. And every two years we also swap out our officers. Correct me when I make mistakes because you know this better than I do.

Craig: I shall.

John: But this is a cycle in which we’re not electing President and Secretary and Treasurer — that kind of stuff. We’re simply electing people to be on the Board of Directors. And it’s not as — I don’t want to say it’s not as crucial of an election, but it’s not as scary of an election, because this won’t be the people who are heading in to right away a new WGA contract.

Craig: Right.

John: So you want people who are going to be good stewards of the Guild, who are going to bring up the other topics that need to be talked about, but you don’t necessarily need your big guns on this one, because this is a building year rather than a fighting year.

Craig: Not exactly. I mean, the thing is even thought it’s what they call an “off election year,” the Board, there are 16 board members. And every year 8 of them are up for election. So, half of them are up for election along with the officers and half aren’t. This is one of those aren’t years, like you said, but they serve for two years. And two years from now I think our deal will be up and in advance, about a year in advance of our deal expiring nominating committees form, policy approach, all that stuff is formed.

I wish I could say that there’s any one year where it actually doesn’t matter. Every year actually kind of does matter if you’re looking at it in that context.

John: I would agree.

So this year I actually had the privilege of being on the nominating committee to help find these candidates. And so we met three different times and did interviews with all of these candidates, so I actually met I think all of these people who are running. And they’re all terrific.

So, I can talk a little bit about the nominating committee. I had the impression that we had to like, you know, give them our stamp of approval. It really was just a “you’re not a crazy person.” That’s basically our whole job was to make sure that no one who’s coming in the door was crazy, and hopefully get some really good people to run.

And so I took it upon myself to convince some people to come in and try, including Jordan Mechner and Barbara Turner, who are both great, great candidates. And I got to listen to what these people thought were concerns that the Guild to do a better job of addressing. We could help them sort of figure out how they might want to present themselves to WGA when they present in their candidate statement in the packet.

So, I thought we’d talk through just who the candidates are and give some quick impressions, if that sounds good to you.

Craig: Let’s do it.

John: I don’t want to pronounce her name wrong. It’s Katherine Fugate?

Craig: It’s Fugate. [pronounced Fu-jay]

John: Is it really Fu-jay?

Craig: Yeah. I think she’s, well, she’s from New Orleans and I think it’s some kind of Cajun/Frenchy kind of name.

John: Well I’m apologizing for mispronouncing her name. It’s so hard when it’s a name you’ve seen a zillion times written down but you’ve never had to say aloud.

Craig: Well you’d never get Fu-jay out of Fugate. Nobody would.

John: No one would. But I had one of those unpronounceable names, too, and it didn’t make it easier that everyone pronounced it wrong, too.

Craig: That’s true. That is true.

John: So Katherine is running again. David Goodman. Kathy Kiernan. David Shore. So these are all people who are currently serving on the board. They were elected in 2010 and they are running again. I have nothing particular to say about them.

Craig: Well, I’ve known Katherine for a long, long time. A very lovely, lovely woman. And I guess Pam is going to be angry with me, because I called her lovely. Sorry. She’s neither lovely nor cute. She’s formidable. [laughs] She’s a formidable, strong woman, and a screenwriter, and Katherine is very empathetic towards other writers as opposed to me. I’m, of course, cranky. She’s probably more…I mean, I hesitate to use really left and right; I mean, there’s generally people who are more moderate and want to try and seek a compromise to advance their goals. There are people that are a little more confrontational with the companies. She’s probably more confrontational than I am which is no surprise, most people are.

But she’s good. And she’s been around awhile. And I think sometimes just having served is valuable in and of itself. It means that you have a certain amount of understanding about what works and what doesn’t work. You’ve tried all the goofy crazy ideas. It’s a very common thing when people enter governance for the first time. They’re like, “Ugh, why don’t these idiots just do A, B, and C.” And then you get into the position and you realize, “Oh, because A is illegal, B is crazy, and C has been tried a million times and didn’t work.” There’s very few like, “Oh, why didn’t we think of that idea” when it comes to union governance. So it’s good to have people that have been around and have some institutional wisdom; so she’s one of them.

David Goodman, very nice guy. Family Guy writer, I think. He is really one of the few unreformed Patric Verrone guys left in there. He is all the way like what I consider to be part of a broken, proven-to-fail philosophy. So, I won’t be voting for him, but he’s a nice guy.

And who was the other one?

John: Kathy Kiernan and David Shore.

Craig: David Shore, I don’t know personally, but I hear great things about him. He is respected by almost everyone. And, I’m sorry, I missed the other name.

John: Kathy Kiernan.

Craig: Oh, Kathy Kiernan. So, Kathy Kiernan is actually a news writer. A lot of people don’t know that the Writers Guild West represents television and screenwriters, but it actually also represents a small amount of news writers, most of whom I think work for KCBS. And a small amount of news radio writers, I believe KNX. So we’re talking really a very small amount of people. Most news writers are represented by the Writers Guild America East. Most news radio people are represented by the East because that’s just the way it worked out.

Kathy’s very nice. Look, because we represent so few news radio writers, I’m always torn. Well, so much of what we do is about the 95% of the membership that we comprise, and not, I don’t know what it is, maybe like 50 news writers, but maybe fewer news radio writers. But, then again, it’s probably not a bad idea to have somebody like that there who is sort of representing the minority. So I think that’s a good thing.

John: That was really what I was looking at as we were interviewing these candidates, and I always have looked at it as I’ve gone through the book and sort of figured out who I was going to be voting for, is to try to get some balance between the different perspectives and what people are going to be able to bring to the table.

One of my big concerns is that feature screenwriters tend to be underrepresented in the Board. And feature screenwriter’s needs are in some ways unique and different than TV writers. It’s just the way, like daytime writer’s needs are unique. And so you want to make sure you have at least somebody on the Board who can bring that perspective, because if you don’t maybe that perspective is going to get overlooked altogether. And so finding the balance there is tricky. But I think we actually have some good candidates across the board for that.

There’s 8 other names here, so I don’t want to sort of go through each one of them because you won’t know a lot of these people.

Craig: I won’t.

John: I did want to single out Jordan Mechner who is a friend of mine who I asked to run. Jordan Mechner is best known as a video game designer. He did the original Prince of Persia. He did Karateka. I’ve worked with him as a screenwriter on a Fox pilot and we worked on Prince of Persia together. He’s fantastic.

And one of the reasons why I really wanted Jordan to run is that he comes from a background of actually owning intellectual property. And so as WGA members, the WGA represents employees. So we represent people who are hired to adapt things, or hired to create stuff for corporations. Jordan is from a world of creating stuff for himself and owning that intellectual property. And I think the way forward is going to be a balance between those entrepreneurial instincts of creating your own stuff, creating your comic books and graphic novels like he’s also done, and all that stuff that you own yourself that you are completely in control of, and working for other people.

And Jordan sort of balances that, and I think he brings some good perspective in sort of that part of the business.

Craig: Yeah. I think, having served on the Board, I will tell you that one of the things that happens pretty quickly is whatever you bring to it that you think qualifies you becomes subsumed a bit by what the tasks are that the union presents to you.

You may have a bunch of things that you think you’re good at or that you want to accomplish. The union says, “Yay, that’s great. But here’s what’s going on right now. And we need you to deal with this.” And so the most valuable trait is intelligence. And Jordan is very, very smart. So, on those grounds alone he’ll have my vote.

John: So here’s my advice to you: This next week you’ll be getting your packet if you’re a WGA member. If you’re not a WGA member you’ve probably fast-forwarded through this because this is not very interesting to you. But as you get your packet, I always like to look through and read the candidate’s statements. I kind of score them, because I’m a scorer. I like to rank them sort of one to ten. And then I look at sort of who’s endorsing them, who else I sort of agree with and sort of why they’re endorsing them, and make my decisions on that.

One of the things we talked about last year when we did this — god, that was a year ago, wasn’t it?

Craig: Yeah.

John: We’ve been doing this podcast a year. — Was that you don’t actually have to vote for 8 empty spots. You don’t have to vote for 8 people. So if there’s 6 people you really want to be in and you don’t really care about the other 2, you’re better off looking for 6.

Craig: That’s right. So that your sixth place guy doesn’t lose to your seventh place guy.

John: Yup.

Craig: That’s called bulleting your votes. You can vote for one person if you want.

John: Yeah. Do it. So, enough on that. This is sort of our big meaty topic and this came up a couple of weeks ago. We said, “We should do a podcast about that,” and let’s do a podcast about that, is how to not be fat. Because screenwriters as a career, as a group, as a cohort, tend to be larger members of the Hollywood community.

Craig: [laughs] You’ve already blown it by saying fat. So you don’t have to think the euphemisms.

John: Yeah, I think we’re fatter. Past euphemisms. But here’s the thing is: I don’t want to say that most screenwriters are fat, because I don’t think that’s really true. Compared to, like, average Midwestern Americans, we’re not fat.

Like, if you took a screenwriter and put him on a plane and he got off in Ohio, he’d be one of the thinner people there.

Craig: Well, for some of them, sure. I mean, in general really what I’ve noticed when I’m around other screenwriters is it’s not so much that we’re an obese lot. I mean, this isn’t like going to a Walmart in Mississippi. It’s that we’re out of shape. We’re out of shape. Some of us are very fat. Some of us are just…

There are screenwriters who are skinny-fat, which is one of my favorite new terms. They’re not probably weight-wise overweight; they just have no muscle tone whatsoever. It’s as if they were sculpted from a goo.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: And it makes sense, because our jobs are completely sedentary. And more than that, I think, they’re very internal. We prize and are rewarded for what goes on in our brain and not at all for what we do with our bodies. Not even one iota. So it’s only natural that taking care of our bodies would drop into second, or third, or fourth place on our list of things to do in a given day.

John: As we dig into this, I do want to stress that I understand how strange it seems to be getting advice on being fit from screenwriters. It’s like asking an actor for financial advice.

Craig: [laughs]

John: But, we’ve both been there. And you were a heavier person.

Craig: Yes.

John: And I’ve managed to maintain relatively good health throughout my career, but it hasn’t always been easy and it hasn’t always been obvious what the best choices were. So, and I see people making bad choices. I get frustrated when I see people sort of reaching for a magic bullet. Like they’ll focus on one thing, like, “If I stop eating canned foods that will change everything because there’s like a chemical in cans that’s really bad for you so you shouldn’t eat canned foods.”

Craig: Oh god.

John: It’s like, yeah, you also shouldn’t eat chocolate donuts for breakfast. People who sort of over-fixate on one little thing and don’t look at the big picture of how not to get giant.

Craig: That’s a very LA phenomenon. Maybe it’s bigger than this. But I have noticed that there is a bizarre and completely misdirected obsession with food. So, I see people who are not in good shape or who are not taking care of themselves, but they become obsessed with trendy nonsense, gluten and so forth.

I mean, there’s a great article: some people legitimately have an issue with gluten. A lot of people just don’t, but they think they do or they say they do. There becomes an obsession with freshness, you know, organic as opposed to inorganic. I guarantee you if all you did all day was eat the “inorganic,” because all foods organic, but “inorganic” fruits and vegetables and lean meats and proteins you would be in better shape than somebody who ate nothing but pure, organic, gluten-free cupcakes, donuts, bread, cake.

John: And a similar situation, too, like vegetarianism or veganism. I was a vegetarian for seven years. I’m not a vegetarian now, but I’m much healthier for not being a vegetarian. And it’s because in fixating on that one thing, like, “Oh, I don’t eat meat, so therefore I can eat everything else,” I made horrible choices. I was eating ice cream rather than chicken, and that was never a good choice.

Craig: It’s just not a great idea. And you can be a very smart vegetarian, there’s no question about it. But we’re getting pretty smart. A funny thing happened about ten years, I would say about ten years ago. The diet industry had always concentrated on a certain way of approaching things and then along came this Atkins guy. And, boy, was he beaten up.

But it turns out he was right.

John: He was largely right.

Craig: He wasn’t completely right in the way maybe he was expressing it. And he got a little cuckoo about it. But the general theory there turned out to be right. So, what we know is in general — I’m not talking even about losing weight. I’m just talking about general, okay, you’re fine, you’re in shape, you’re in a good place. — Generally speaking, eating fewer processed carbohydrates, eating fewer simple carbohydrates, and eating more lean protein, and not being fat-phobic in terms of what you ingest — there are good fats, healthy fats — is a better way to eat than what you and I were taught in the ’70s with the food pyramid, which turns out to just be wrong.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But that doesn’t help you lose weight.

John: For the last 18 months I’ve been doing basically a slow carb diet. I’m a little reluctant to talk about it because it all started with this book I read called The 4-Hour Body by a guy named Tim Ferriss. And Tim Ferriss, he’s, I don’t know, he’s sort of the Ryan Lochte of book writers. And like Ryan Lochte, it’s like, wow Ryan Lochte, you’re a really good swimmer. Congratulations on being a really good swimmer. But I’m not sure I’d want to hang out with him. That’s the same way I kind of feel about Tim Ferriss is that what he’s saying actually works and makes sense, but that doesn’t mean — I’m not vouching for him as like “here is the go to guru that you should trust with everything in your life.”

But the 4-Hour Body, I’ve been on it for 18 months, and it works really, really well. I lost about ten pounds and it’s very easy to maintain. It takes the basic ideas of like an Atkins or a South Beach, which is largely what you’re describing, like you’re cutting out your simple carbohydrates and going for lean proteins. It does that with — it also cuts out dairy and it allows you to sort of have the longer burning carbs like beans so that you actually can stay full.

And it’s been the easiest thing I’ve ever done diet-wise, largely because of one extra exception it makes, is that you have one cheat day a week where you can just blow it out and you can eat anything you possibly would want to eat. And that’s been its savior, because when I’ve done South Beach or other kind of diety things, you just get so angry and crazy and you look at stuff, like I will never be able to eat a brownie again.

And on this it’s like, well, yeah, I can eat a brownie on Saturday. And, in fact, I can eat two brownies on Saturday, but I just won’t eat it the rest of the week. And it’s been a godsend. It’s been really easy. And you don’t have to count calories. You don’t have to worry about anything because you just say, like, “These are the things I can eat. For six days a week these are the things I eat. On the seventh day I rest and I can eat anything.”

Craig: Right. Well it’s important for me to point out that there’s two ways of approaching this depending on what group you’re in. If you are somebody that is trying to be more fit but you’re not obese, then I think there are reasonable approaches that are all essentially the same that are going to be good for you: Increasing your exercise level in some way that doesn’t make you crazy; and shifting gradually away from the simple carb/sugary way of eating to a more Atkins/South Beach/Ferriss kind of way, which is complex carbohydrates, proteins.

I mean, dairy for instance is a great thing to limit because, not so much because of the fat in dairy or the protein in dairy but because of the inevitable sugars that come along with dairy. But, that’s for people who aren’t obese.

For people who are obese I think, in my experience, there is a different approach that is required. And the reason why is we now know that fat makes you fatter. How? Fat cells actually release hormones. And the hormones that fat cells release stimulate your appetite and your hunger. You’re already in a bad place because you are likely eating a kind of sugar-heavy diet. And so your insulin levels are getting goofy and your blood sugar is going down which makes you hungry. That’s going on already. But, on top of that, there is this added level of what the fat that you already have accumulated is doing to your brain.

In order to get to a place where you can have some sort of reasonable diet that works, because here you’re saying, “Okay, I’ll lose ten pounds.” There are people who need to lose 100 pounds. There are people who need to lose 200 pounds. What do you do?

You could do Tim Ferriss for 12 years. It’s not going to do it for you. For those people there are basically two options. There’s surgery. Sorry, there’s two options I see as being reasonable.

John: All right.

Craig: There is surgery. And then there is what they call very low calorie diets, which have been shown to work and, in fact, it’s what I did. And it worked amazingly well. Surgery we all know about. I’m not going to go into it, although I’m not against it. But the very low calorie diet is pretty simple. You’re going to eat something like 850 calories a day, which is not a lot at all. And it is essentially going to comprise nothing more than lean proteins, a very small amount of complex carbohydrate, a very small amount of fruit, and that’s that. And the first week or two is going to be quite miserable. And then your body realizes that it’s got all this fat that it can burn and it burns it amazingly efficiently.

And once your body converts over into this fat-burning mode, because it’s nowhere near the calorie level it needs from food intake, you stop being hungry because you’re essentially eating yourself. And the fat loss is quite rapid. And I will say this: When it comes to losing weight for very heavy people, the only way to really maintain it is to get rid of it completely. Like you’ve got to go all the way. If you’re 300 pounds and you’re 5’11”, you can’t go down to 225 pounds and celebrate. You’re still overweight. The fat is still there playing tricks on your brain.

You’ve got to go down, down to 170, down to 175 or 180, whatever is right for you. And then you can start to…

By the way, at that point then exercise becomes a reality. Don’t tell 300-puond people that they have to go out and exercise. They can’t. You can’t. I mean, what do you weight, 170 pounds?

John: Yeah, exactly.

Craig: Okay. I’m pretty good at this.

So, if I said to you I need you to go out and exercise but for the next week I need you to strap on 130 pounds, for all of your exercise. Weightlifting, there’s 130 pounds on top of your body. Running, jogging, stretching, yoga, everything — 130 pounds. You wouldn’t last a minute. You can’t say to these people exercise. They can’t. No one can.

I mean, well, some people, like Olympic people. But my point is you’ve got to lose the weight to exercise. So when people say, “Well, you know, this guy needs to do a pushup” — you do a pushup with 130 pounds on top of your back. Good luck.

So, my advice is to think about a very low calorie diet. However, you have to do it under a doctor’s supervision.

John: You have to do it under a doctor’s supervision. And you had a doctor supervise when you did this?

Craig: Yes. Because it’s a fairly extreme thing to do. And there are some side effects that they know about. They’re certainly not universal. There’s a percentage, there’s an elevated risk of gallstones when you do something like this. And you have to watch your nutrition. You have take vitamins and you have to make sure that you supplement in that regard. And you need somebody taking your blood essentially every couple of weeks to make sure that something isn’t gong incredibly wrong. But, if you are doing this as part of a physician-monitored program, it’s quite extraordinary. What happens to your body on the outside is impressive. What happens on the inside is even more impressive.

Your blood pressure goes down. Your heart rate goes down. Your bad cholesterol goes down. Your good cholesterol goes up. Your triglycerides go down. Your liver enzymes — because a lot of people don’t know that we store fat and glycogen in our livers — your liver enzymes go down.

I mean, you can essentially create the same state in your liver that alcoholics create through overeating. It’s pretty remarkable. And when you look at our country and all the problems we have, health-wise, you can trace almost every single one of them — the chronic, widespread epidemic ones — back to weight.

John: You wouldn’t have nearly as many people on CPAP machines if weight was lower.

Craig: I mean, you’d have almost no one on CPAP machines. I mean, very few people have congenital throat structural sinus issues that require CPAP machines. Depression. Sleep apnea. Back problems. Joint problems. Anxiety. Sexual dysfunction. I mean, what else? Skin problems. So many of these issues you can track back to just being overweight.

And we, as screenwriters, I think just have to be really aware that our job is sitting and thinking, and that means if you are really overweight it’s time to get extreme about it. And if you’re not really overweight it’s time to exercise.

John: Yeah, so let’s talk about exercise because one of the challenges I think as screenwriters is we’re often working alone. If you haven’t exercised before, if you haven’t been to the gym it’s hard to start going to the gym. And that was the problem I really faced when I first moved out to Los Angeles is that I was going to USC and I knew that, okay, I should probably start working out because it’s the kind of thing a person should do when they’re in their early 20’s. But I didn’t sort of know how to do it.

And so fortunately I had friends who did work out. So I first started working out with my friend André Béraud, who worked out at the USC gym. Then I worked out with my friend Tom Hoffman at the YMCA gym on the west side. And that was crucial. I think working out with somebody was hugely helpful to me.

So, I could go to classes and stuff like that, but if you’re actually lifting weights or doing other stuff, having someone there to show up…it’s like having a writing partner. Having someone who you’re responsible for on a social level, showing up and actually doing the work was hugely helpful.

Later on, you know, as I had some money and my schedule got more busy, I had a real trainer. And that’s like kind of a friend you pay. But it was helpful. And because I knew I was paying for those sessions, I would show up and I would do what the trainer said so I would not get fat, or stay in shape.

Craig: Yeah, look, there are all sorts of ways to approach exercise. And I’m a very — my attitude is it’s all good. All exercise is good, at any level. Walking up the street for ten minutes is good. I will say that, right now, so I’m doing P90X. And P90X is a fairly intense — it’s a very intense program. I’m early on it. And I almost never get to the end of the session. I just fall apart.

But I know then, okay, that’s good. [laughs] If I’ve gotten to the place where I literally am just gasping…

John: You’ve actually done the work.

Craig: …and drenched in sweat. And can’t go any further. I’ve done a hell of a job that day. And so I just presume that it’s going to get easier and better, and that’s the key. When we start exercising there’s a tape that runs in our head. “I’m exercising now for the first time because I’m ugly/fat/slow/weak/lazy. I exercise and it hurts, it’s painful. I’m ungainly/awkward/weak/not very good at it/can’t finish it/not like the people on the tape/not like the people next to me in the gym/not like the people on TV.”

Let me feed that loop back into, “I’m no good/I’m lazy/I’m weak/I’m tired,” da, da, da. That’s the part that you’ve got to just sever. Your fine. You’re exercising. Congrats. You’ve already won. Gold star for you.

Yes, of course you’re going to be weak and ungainly and clumsy and in pain for awhile. And then you won’t be. And you will not be able to get to the won’t be until you get through the will be. Just like writing a script. [laughs] You’ve got to look at it that way. “Okay, page one. Big empty script. Oh god, this is gonna suck for awhile.” But you will get to a place where it’s flowing and it’s easy. And exercise leads to more exercise.

John: Yeah. And I do feel sometimes people in their diet, they try to take too — either they try to go too far and they try to get on something so crazy that they can’t possibly maintain. I see them doing the same kind of things with exercise. Like they haven’t exercised at all and suddenly they’re like, “I’m going to run ten miles today.” And like, well, that’s not going to work out well for anybody.

Craig: That’s right.

John: So that is one of the things you can sort of ease your way into. I mean, as far as diet, just start with breakfast. Just don’t eat a terrible breakfast. Don’t eat Eggo Waffles for breakfast. East scrambled eggs and black beans. That’s what I have for breakfast almost every morning. And everyone is like, “God, don’t you get bored of scrambled eggs and black beans?”

Yeah, well kind of. But it’s breakfast. Who cares? You’re going to be eating the same thing for breakfast most days in your life anyway. So rather than cereal you’re eating scrambled eggs and black beans. It’s fine.

If I’m in New York I’ll go to one of the deli places and have them make an egg white omelet with spinach and mushrooms. It’s good. It’s protein. It fills you up. And I don’t get that crazy hunger two hours later. The same thing with exercise. You’re doing the P90X which is awesome. And if you can keep it up for the time that you’re supposed to be doing it, that’s great. But if a person just wants to start like hiking at Runyon Canyon a couple times a week, that’s going to be a much better and more realistic start.

Craig: For sure. Yeah. Because I’m already kind of in shape. You know, I’ve been going to a trainer for awhile. I know what it means to work out. I know what it means to do pushups. I know what it means to weight train. But when I first started I was fat and I couldn’t do anything.

And right now where I am, it’s funny, because Todd Phillips did P90X. He’s the one that sort of said, “You should do this.” And he showed me a picture and I was like, “Oh my god,” look, because I’ve known the guy for awhile. And you don’t really see what’s going underneath people’s shirts. And he showed me a picture of what he looked like without his shirt on. I’m like, “Geez, look at that.” It’s amazing actually.

So, I started doing it. And every day I would just send him an email and say, “I can’t believe you did this. I can’t believe you did this for 90 days.” But he did do it for 90 days. And the point is he couldn’t, I mean, when he started he couldn’t believe it either. You just have to — so you’re always, you know, it’s like when we talked about Jiro and sushi. You’re not — oh, god, I can’t believe I don’t remember the name of the guy who just won the Decathlon. He’s the most in shape, fit guy in the world; we’re never going to be that guy. There’s always going to be someone more in shape than you, so relax, and just do what you can do.

John: Yeah. Be a better version of who you can be. And I think Todd Phillips is a good example because it’s a guy who doesn’t have to be in great shape. He’s not going to be an athlete. I’m not going to be an athlete. You just want to be in good enough shape so that you’re able to chase your kids around and not be tired walking up a hill.

Craig: Eh, he ain’t chasing kids around, but he’s chasing something around. [laughs]

John: [laughs] You’re always chasing something. I want to live for a really long time.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I don’t want to die. I want to live a super, super long time. I’d love to the singularity but if I don’t make it there I want to at least live to grandkids. And so this is helpful ways to get you closer to that.

Craig: Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t even want to live a long time. I want to live a normal time. I just want the quality of my life to be awesome while I’m here. And it’s very difficult to have a good quality of life when you’re fat and tired and grumpy and depressed. So, to me it’s all about quality as opposed to quantity.

John: Yeah. And one of the things I will stress about sort of the people who go gung-ho into something so hardcore and then — the danger of going so gung-ho into something is that when it doesn’t work, when it fails, you feel like a failure. And it just sets up that whole cycle again. So, making smaller changes that keep stacking up is going to be a better solution for most people.

What you said before about the medical weight loss, that I can see because you have somebody backing you up. You’re on this program. You’re clearly in or you’re out of this program. But for most people I think if you’re trying to lose 10 pounds or 15 pounds that you’ve stacked on in your 30’s, ramping up and sort of changing your life rather than trying to drop them all at once is going to be a better experience.

Craig: Totally. Yeah. Completely.

John: The last thing I want to get to is really a screenwriter problem, and also an editor problem, too. We are people who sit a tremendous amount of time in chairs looking at screens. And the old advice used to be you need to get a better chair. And I strongly suspect now the better advice is don’t get a better chair, just stand up. I think we’re going to keep getting data that show that sitting in chairs for long periods of time is terrible no matter what else you do.

And so screenwriting is one of those things were like, yes, sometimes you really do have to buckle down and maybe sit down and actually type. But when you’re not actually typing, stand up.

And so like I’m recording this podcast standing up. If you’re taking phone calls stand up. You can also just lean on the kitchen counter and do stuff or stick your laptop on the counter. Try to not be down in that chair so much because I think it slows your body down and it changes how your body works.

I’ve noticed I’ve slept much better since I’ve started standing up.

Craig: Yeah. That is good advice. My posture is awful. I do everything wrong in a chair. I slump. I slouch. I curve. And the only thing I can say is then I get up and I walk around and I stretch. But, you know, I should stand more, it’s true.

John: And get a dog. That will also help.

Craig: Yeah. I have a dog. She’s lovely.

John: Yeah, walking dogs is always good. Because it helps you work through second act problems.

Craig: Uh, I still maintain that a shower is the best thing you can do.

John: Showers are good too.

So, hey, are you ready for some One Cool Things?

Craig: Yeah.

John: How about I go first, Craig, because I actually know what mine is?

Craig: Uh-huh.

John: My One Cool Thing this week is the Jambox by Jawbone. And what this is is a really small little Bluetooth speaker. And it actually comes in two sizes. There’s a really small one that’s about the size of, I don’t know, two candy bars. And you can use it for both a speaker and as a speakerphone. I’ve actually never used the speakerphone function, but I find it to be great as travel speakers. And so if I’m in a hotel room in New York City and I want to listen to music, I can play music off my phone and it plays on the Jambox and it sounds actually good.

I used it this last week because I was meeting with a composer and I needed to play a bunch of songs for him. And it’s always like, “Oh, do you play it off your laptop?” It’s like, “No, this actually sounds much better.” So from my phone I can play the songs I wanted to play him and it worked really well.

For the house we ended up getting a bigger one that can plug in or we can sort of stick on the kitchen counter when we want to. And that’s what we listen to podcasts on a lot. And so as you’re cleaning the kitchen you fire it up, you listen to stuff, it sounds really good, and it’s always there when you need it. So I strongly recommend both of these. They’ve worked really great for us.

They’re rechargeable so you don’t have to keep them plugged in. And they’re terrific.

Craig: That sounds good. That will be my Cool Thing for the week, also.

John: Awesome. We’ll get to share.

Craig: I don’t have one.

John: Actually, there are two, there’s a bigger and smaller one, so you can pick which one you want to be your Cool Thing.

Craig: Bigger! Bigger.

John: Bigger. Always better.

And, Craig, I think we are now safely over 100,000, so I think next week will be the big acoustic set.

Craig: Yeah. I got new strings on the way. I’m going to restring my guitar so it sounds nice and bright and pleasant. And I’ve got a little thing so I can actually record the vocals and the guitar on two separate tracks into GarageBand so I can make it all nice and pretty.

John: It’s going to be amazing. So, everything we talked about on the podcast today is going to be on johnaugust.com with this podcast title.

Anything more Craig?

Craig: Mm. No. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to eat a sandwich now. It’s made me hungry.

John: That’s good. I won’t — bread. I’ll eat bread tomorrow. We’re recording this on a Friday. And on Saturday…

Craig: Saturday you go crazy.

John:…I will pig out. But today, no bread.

Craig: No bread. I love it.

John: All right, thanks Craig.

Craig: You got it.