161 - A Cheap Cut of Meat Soaked in Butter (Encore)

23:52We don't want to give up. Just go, well, this part seems hard all of a sudden. I shouldn't just give up on it. I should muscle my way through it. I should grind through it. Yeah, but you shouldn't. It turns out that actually that's the script telling you stop. It's a little bit like when they say in the gym, if it hurts, stop, you know, like the bad hurt. And that's the bad hurt. We always get afraid when we are lost and we don't know where to go. That's a terrible feeling. So when we've been like, well, the only way out of this hedge maze is to push through these hedges. At some point you realize that's not right.

24:24I shouldn't push these hedges, but I actually now don't know where to go. And what you're talking about that's so useful, I think, Aline, is the idea of examining your givens and questioning if they're really given. Right. Because when you give them up, while that may seem radical, it is often easier to make a radical change that puts the wind at your back than to maintain all that is given and write with the wind in your face. Yeah. Yeah. And it's true. It's funny. You know, I think a lot of screenwriters are people who were good students and, you know, handed their papers in on time. And a lot of writers are.

25:01And, you know, I've really noticed that one of the things I had to train myself to do when I became a writer is to feel and not think. And when you're writing, just to feel, how does this feel to be in this movie? And it just didn't feel good. It didn't feel revelatory. It didn't feel interesting. It felt sloggy. And there's an interesting thing that happens as you become more proficient is that you can write sloggy stuff so that it reads okay. but you know in your heart that like, oh, I'm just, I'm just greasing it here. You know, I'm just, I'm just pouring sugar and butter on this thing. There's no, you know, I'm not, there's no nutrition here.

25:38I'm just, you know, the steak is kind of, this is a very cheap cut of steak that I'm now soaking in butter. So it'll have some flavor. And I really had to stop and say like, where's the joy in this? Where's the discovery in this? And that's the thing that takes you beyond just craft, you know, that takes it from just being a table that will hold weight into being something that has dimension and interest in it. And even if it hadn't worked, I think it would have been helpful to me just to see how the characters would talk in these scenes. And I think, you know, John is a proponent of these sort of more game-type approaches.

26:13And I think, you know, if you can have the characters adopt each other's emotional strategies or, you know, change geographically where they are or what they're trying to do, anything, just take the characters for a walk and do something different with them, you have a shot at uncovering a moment like this. The script for me right now, there's two characters who are sort of, they're not handcuffed together literally, but they sort of have to work together to do something. And one of them is able to achieve her goal at a certain point. And that all felt really good. And that scene was really good.

26:48And as I started writing past it, I was like, wow, she has nothing she wants. And I know that there's going to be a thing that she's ultimately going to be on his side, you know, a few scenes later, but there's just going to be this gap of time where, like, she, her movie's over. She's completed. That's the worst. Her quest. And it's the kind of thing which I wouldn't necessarily have noticed on the outline. It's like, it would have felt like, well, we're going for that, and then we're going into his stuff. But then I realized as I was actually writing the scenes, there's moments there where, like, she's just kind of dangling.

27:18And so, why is she still around? And so, it made me sort of go back and think like, well, how can I take away that thing that she thinks she just won? And so how do I let her have that little victory and then be able to take it away? And so it ended up like making the scene much better because there's a reversal within that course of the scene where the thing she thought she had gotten is away again. And so together, they have to go to the next stage and they both still have a goal and they're still at cross purposes, which is certainly, you know, a very useful thing for where I'm at in a story.

27:50Yeah. Well, I have one more suggestion for flipping the script. You know, I think particularly in genre movies, if you look at the call sheet, it's so preponderance of male characters. And I think if you get stuck writing a character that you feel feels stuck or feels familiar, sometimes just changing the gender of the character can really unlock really interesting things. So, you know, the crooked cop is a woman or the baby nurse is a man. And you don't need to call a tremendous amount of attention. It's not about the fact that they have a different gender, but it will inform the storytelling with some because we'll fill in the blanks.

28:30And when I was watching Planet of the Apes, I kept thinking, what if that character that was played by the Zero Dark Thirty Jason guy, if that had been a woman who had been a civil engineer and had lost her spouse and had a child and was trying to just, you know, sometimes when you find that there's blocks of unigender characters, sometimes just changing the gender or the background or the something that you, you know, when it falls out of your brain in a very stock form, sometimes just changing one thing that could be a detail but actually makes the whole thing more interesting is another thing I could suggest to people to make stuff feel fresher to them.

29:13That's exactly why I think that works when you said it falls out of your brain in stock form. When you make yourself, force yourself to go in a direction that is not familiar, it's like your mind doesn't have that soporific thing with all the filled in blanks. Suddenly none of the blanks are filled in. And it's fun to fill them in. Now you're building a person. It's exciting. If you say to me, okay, the villain is an army sergeant who is following orders because he believes that the enemy must be crushed at any cost. I've got like five million movies behind me now. Well, I guess he's got gray hair and he barks orders.

29:51He might have a mustache. He's very grim. It's like it's already, I can't get away from it, you know? Well, you picture that character, but also I think a good way to say it to the next topic is you picture where he is in those moments. You picture sort of what it is to feel like those moments and what is around him. If you stick a different character in those moments, you're maybe going to stick him in some different places, stick her in some different places. And then you're really writing brand new scenes where you have to figure out everything else that's around them. And that's something crucial.

30:21So wait, theme geography is actually where people are in scenes? Yeah. Where they physically are. Where they physically are. Where things and people are in a scene. So you're talking about how you do that? Well, I'm talking about why it's important and how you do it. Okay. Do it. Hit it. Well, it's something that I think we elide generally. No one's asking us to provide them a plot map where everyone's going to stand. On the day, we'll be in a location, in a place that will be designed. The director and the cameraman and the actors will work out where they're standing and how they're moving, but we can do a lot of helping along the way.

30:56there is a of all the things that can happen in a scene that tell the story typically screenwriters think of dialogue that's the first and most obvious tool then there's actions what do the people do are they punching shooting running kissing but there's also space how closer do they how close are they to each other how close are they the thing they want if they're moving towards it or away from it how hard or far do they have to go if they're hiding from somebody how are they hiding? Are they hiding really close to them? Can they hear the other person? All these physical dimensions help us tell the story of the scene in interesting ways.

31:34One thing that I've discovered along the way is that a lot of times we'll do this work in our mind so that we know it makes sense, but we either don't include the detail sufficiently in the scene work, or we do it in a way that is not clear enough. And I am repeatedly surprised how frequently people will read a script and get hung up on geographical issues. They don't understand how somebody could have said something and not be heard by somebody else. They don't understand how somebody could have said something and be heard by someone else. And they will stop. And we don't want that. Well, one thing I would say is that, you know, a mark of a not very proficiently written script will be like, you know, he stands here, he's holding a cup.

32:20He looks in this direction, 20 feet away is this, you know, doing it in language, which is too detailed where you feel like you're reading a continuity and not a script. So I think it's always best to think of those things and translate them into emotional language. So it's like he sees the dog around the corner, he leans towards it. It's so close. It's only three arm lengths away. It's only five steps away. It's, you know, it's, if you can describe it through the lens of the character, how they're experiencing it, as opposed to trying to objectively describe it from the outside, it enhances the reading experience.

32:53Yeah, I mean, you're using your words that can hopefully have both emotional meaning and sort of logical meaning. So like, just out of reach, they're in the distance you can barely make out, give a sense of sort of where people are in space. This thing I'm working on right now, there's one house that's incredibly important to it. and without sort of giving you a floor plan, I want you to at least walk you through some parts of it so you understand how close certain things are and how far certain things are. It's a staircase that's very important. The dining room is sort of close to there. So, you know, sometimes it's as simple as I will use a scene header, a slug line, that is both stairwell slash dining room.

33:29So you know that like from the dining room, you can actually see the stairwell. That's an important thing. So you don't have, you don't make them feel like they're physically separate spaces. you can walk continuously from one to the other. If you hear somebody screaming at the other side of the house, well, we see them reacting to hear the scream and we see them running up the stairs and through that hallway. So we have a sense of how these places connect together. It's also really important when you're describing where people are in space to vary your sizes. So, you know, things go from being a speck on the horizon to, you know, close on the fist opening to, you know, Because you want to vary your sense of scale most often because it will get monotonous if everything feels like it's the same size in every frame.

34:13Well, we've talked about that when we've done transitions. I mean, that was a big, simple transitional device, big to small, small to big. But I think that there is something worth considering when we're creating scenes to ask, just as we ask, how can we allow an actor to convey an emotion without saying a word? How can we create suspense when no one's talking? Suspense is a great example of how to properly use geography to your advantage as a storyteller. When you think about the scene in Jurassic Park where the raptor is moving through the kitchen and the girl is hiding behind the counter. You know, these are the ways that you should ask, what other tools do I have?

34:51Well, I know I have action. I know I have dialogue. I know I have music. And I know I have the camera. But what about space? What about where people are? there's something great about saying okay in a intentional way i want dustin hoppin banging on this big window that's far away right so that here's this girl getting married and he wants to be with her and he's far away but he's banging on this thing so we hear this distant thumping and there he is tiny in that space so that people can get that picture and they understand it because the thing is if you don't spell that out clearly 99 times out of 100 they go oh he's like right there there's like a window that's right there what that's creepy and it's not at all what you meant so i think i've talked about this on the podcast before is that you know in general you're trying to evoke the experience of seeing a movie just with your words on the page and sometimes you can just use little things like right and left and you know there's telling you like what i see in my head is that like the phone is on the right the phone is on the left but sometimes you're just creating a very general space and i there's a scene in big fish in the he goes to make a phone call to tell his mom that his dad has died.

36:03And I saw the scene and was like, wait, that's wrong. And it's just in my head. I've always seen the scene in my head with the phone being on the other side of the bed. It's such a weird thing that it doesn't matter at all, but it completely matters to me. And so the take home from this is that the scene still worked because I had created a space in which there was logic in there. There was geographic logic in there. It didn't matter that it was ultimately on the left or on the right, But it mattered that it was close enough to this space that the emotional connection was still there. The scene ultimately made sense.

36:34It just didn't fit the way I had it in my head. It's interesting because screenplays are a form of concision. They're a form that's organized around concision and brevity. You don't have a lot of space. And I've always thought, pretentiously, that screenplays were more like poems than like novels. And I think a lot of people approach their scripts with too much of a novelistic point of view. almost too much of a complete vision in a way. And you want to have the complete vision, but you want to pluck out just those details that are the most evocative. And the most evocative detail of that Dustin Hoffman scene that you cite is that we're very far away from him and we can't hear him as he bangs on the window.

37:13And so I think training yourself to find the most important detail that really gets across what the scene is trying to do and being concise about it, I really have noticed that, you know, the more I do this in a funny way, the less I, just the less. Well, yeah. The less overall too. I'm much more concise right now than I used to be. Yeah. I try and be very concise with my action description. And the simple rule is, do they need to know this? Do they need to know it? And if they need to know it, then put it in and put it in an interesting way. And if they don't, don't. But part of, I guess what I'm getting at is sometimes I think they don't need to know certain geographical things that they do.

37:55I can't tell you how many times I've shown up on a set and thought, oh man, I should have mentioned this. In my head, it was obvious, but now this, why is this nightclub cavernous? They're so far away from where I want them to go. It's just not intimate anymore. It's not what I wanted. Well, that's why you have to be, you know, it's so true. Sometimes things that are obvious to you, they're just not, they're not self-evident. And, you know, that's why it's a collaborative medium and you're trying to share your vision or how you see it with everyone else. And so if it's really important to you, you have to find a way to make sure it's on the page.

38:35That's why ideally you'd love to be the screenwriter who is involved through the process. So as the director is picking locations and finding stuff, you can be there to say, okay, just so we know the scene that they wrote is meant in a much smaller, more intimate nightclub. And I worry that we're going to lose some of the comedy or the drama or some of the whatever in this by having it be so incredibly spun out. It's so crazy to me that sometimes they're making movies and the person who wrote it is long gone. Yeah. They don't even have their phone number. Of course. You know, you're so 17. you've made so many you've run it so many it's like when we were kids and they would run it through the Ditto machine you've just run so many Dittos on that thing that it just doesn't make any sense anymore Did you call them Dittos or did you call them Mimeos?

39:20We called them Dittos We called them Dittos Yeah I think we had Mimeos because I think that was a New York term And sometimes you get a test and it had been Ditto'd so much that there was like no blue ink on it Yeah Jersey was that's right because when I moved to Jersey it was Ditto but in New York it was Mimeo or Mimeograph and did you guys have the purple ones? Oh, yeah. It smelled so good. Yeah. Fresh off the sink. And it would be wet. You'd snort that wet Mimeo. And if I remember correctly, the one that was in our elementary school office was a hand crank. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

39:49We got to go ditto it. Yeah. Because it was like that purple roll and somebody would just go, oh, my God. Bringing the ditto. I kind of want one now. Right. Because you feel like if civilization collapses. There's ditto machines for sure. For sure there are. because you think about it, if civilization collapses, the printing press is a challenging thing to get made again, but I bet ditto, you could do that more quickly. I'm totally, I'm looking up Mimeo Graph on eBay right now. I think we should all get one. By the way, Craig, Aline brought us presents for our third anniversary. What? So I have mine here.

40:22So do you want me to spoil you what our present is or do you just want to see it yourself? Oh, no what? No, he's going to send it to you and you're going to open it up and you're going to have the thrill of opening it. Great. Thank you, Aline. We are pro-mimeograph. Yes. We are pro-scene geography, but we're also pro-concision. And so the balance here, I was thinking about this anecdote, which could completely be apocryphal. I heard it in relation to a class they teach at Apple University. They talk about Picasso and how Picasso would start by drawing a bull. And his first drawing would be really, really detailed and look like a bull.

40:54And then he would just go through a series of drawings, like less and less and less. What's the essence of it? Yeah, what is the essence of a bull? And so it was a single line. It was like, oh, well, that's a bull. And it really is. And then later in production, they'll be like, does it have a tail? Does it have hooves? What kind of bull? Does it have a tail? I know. And so you may have created this beautiful line of poetry that sort of describes what this thing feels like, but maybe it won't have the detail that actually gets the right location picked or makes people cross the right ways. And it is a real challenge.

41:25Yeah. Man, these mimeographs are pricey. Are they really? What does the mimeograph machine go for? Well, like I'm looking at one that's an antique vintage, but of course, I think that means from the 60s, which is probably the ones that we were looking at. An antique vintage AB Dick. That's the actual name. AB Dick Fluid Duplicator. It's a dick fluid duplicator. Love it. So an antique vintage AB Dick Fluid Duplicator. Is it viscous? I don't know. But it's$277. That feels like a lot. That's a lot. I guess these things are like people must collect these things. But probably most of them were thrown away.

42:01But you had to interact with your teacher's handwriting. That's right. So you knew which teachers had good handwriting. It was like scrawled and badly ditto'd and then you were like, I'm stuck with them. I have no idea what this is. I can't read this dick fluid. Speaking of like options of things that were otherwise lost or destroyed, I'm going to put a link into the show notes. This guy has tried to get all the VHS copies of Jerry Maguire. I may be remembering this completely wrong. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and so basically he's trying to buy all of them. Why? Why is that? Just as an art thing kind of?

42:32Yeah, I read about that. Yeah, and so they were on display. I want to say they were at CineFamily, but it's - It's such a Cameron Crowe thing to do. It's just the perfect choice. It really is. So I really applaud that crazy kind of thing. Why not? Oh, Craig, I just realized that this episode is going to come out on Tuesday morning. Yeah? You know what else is going to come out on Tuesday morning? What? The iPhone 6. jizz no I just started singing jizz in my pants uh yeah no that is viscous mymere got fluid in your pants I just a b dick fluided in my pants uh well I can't I'm so excited well first of all it's not just the iPhone 6 it's everything so there's probably going to be a watch of some or a wearable as the nerds call it and obviously the iPhone 6 and a whole bunch of other god knows what and one more thing uh Very excited.

43:23Do you now, I assume you do this, I do it. I actually sit there and watch the live thing. Yeah, actually, the whole staff's coming in. We're going to watch it live. You guys make popcorn. You're so cute. It's actually our business to make this thing. That's true. I will, God, I will hate myself for making this prediction, but we rebuilt Weekend Read kind of behind the scenes. And so the version that's on your phone right now should theoretically scale up and everything should look perfect on the new iPhones. Lord knows if we're actually correct. The Script Notes app, by the way, which you don't actually make, will probably be a disaster on the new iPhones because we don't make it.

43:58So I hope it works. God, I hope it works. But we won't know until we know. God, I hope I get it. Yeah, I hope I get it too. Speaking of hope and emotions, talk to us about emotional IQ. Wow, that was a good one. I tried. I really, I think over the course of the three years. Yeah, you got really good at it. Aline went back and listened to the very first episode of Script Notes. Tell us about the first episode. What, you mean like today? No, I bought the premium subscription. Oh, thank you, Aline. Which was impossible to figure. I had a little trouble, but I got it. And I went back and listened to the first episode, and the most notable thing about it is you guys are not funny at all.

44:33You're not relaxed. You're very earnest, and you're talking very seriously about things that are interesting to screenwriters. And it's cute. I listened to the first half of the second one, and by then you're starting to get a little bit of the banter going. but I'm a completist so I think I started listening like 60 episodes in or something so I'm looking forward to listening to the first I think the first of things are fascinating to me like if you ever watched like the first oh the pilot of Seinfeld is fascinating that or the first six episodes of The Simpsons where you're like what is this crudely drawn unfunny thing this thing is weird yeah The Simpsons actually has two stars so it has the Tracy Elliman things which are bizarre bizarre it has the real episodes which are Which are very different.

45:17But even then, they were bizarre. They really were. The early one where Penny Marshall plays their murderous babysitter. It's just dark and not that funny. Yeah, it took them a while. All right, I wanted to talk about EQ because, you know, I've really found over the eons that I've been doing this that there are many talented people, we know many talented people who are great at writing, but screenwriting, as you've pointed out many times, is a social endeavor. And it kind of amazes me how many times I find that people are their own worst enemy, myself included. And one of the things that I've learned over time, if I've learned, you know, screenwriting skills, one of the things I've learned is to sort of manage my own feelings and the feelings of people around me and to understand what's happening emotionally, you know, to read the room, as they say, and to understand how you're coming across to other people, what's actually being communicated to you.

46:09And I found that seems to go with writing. There's a lot of laminess, victimness, almost a nihilism. People get to a point where they feel like, you know, you often hear people complaining a lot about other people's success. There's a lot of schadenfreude. And I really have noticed that the most successful people that I know are positive and intuitive and productive. And the way I've come to see it is that everybody has a narrative for their own life. We're all telling a story about ourselves to ourselves every day. And if the story you're telling yourself is executives and producers are stupid and I'm a victim, it's just really hard to get anywhere.

46:52And I just find that so many times when people will come and say, well, this guy was dumb and that guy was an idiot and this guy said something stupid. And I always think like, is that what happened or was the script not very good or were you being obstructionist? And I think being successful in this business is as much about learning those things. And I know it's sort of crude to say that because we want to think it's just based on here what you can get on the page. But you're a vendor and you're somebody who has to do something on a regular basis in social interactions with people. And, you know, I'm not saying I'm not telling people to be charming because that's not what it is.

47:33I think that's sort of a little bit of a misconception that you need to be a networker. I don't really I never understand when people talk about networking. I don't know what that is. but it's about understanding that these other people also want your thing to be good their careers depend on it too and you need to be a participant and a team player and understand that things will be said to you that are maybe not framed in the right way or you'll say things that are controlled by your emotions but you need to learn how to control and I mean I'm sure every business is like this it's just that what we do is so personal and emotional but I find that a lot of screenwriters narratives that they construct for themselves, schmuckify themselves unnecessarily.

48:15Yeah. It's a thing I call schmuckifying. I find that there are, you know, I have been friends with people who they can schmuckify themselves anywhere. They can schmuckify themselves at Denny's. You know, they can, they can be insulted and feel put upon and criticized anywhere. And if you're someone who, who your personal narrative is dumb people are picking on me, you're, that's going to be fed back to you. That comes back in a loop. It's not going to help you advance the cause of your artwork. I mean, what's hard for us is that we should, I think, have all of the emotional squishiness and angst of an artist because that's what we are.

48:56But then we have to stop and say, okay, but down past that, I do have a goal. And my goal is that I want the closest thing to my expression to be seen by as many people as possible. At least that's for many of us in screenwriting. That's what we want. We want as many people as possible to see our movie. And how do I get there? And how will it, and how do I get there without compromising what I want? And that's a dangerous path to walk that we must walk. But there are times when I stop and say, I am allowed to feel put upon. I'm allowed to feel insulted by this. I'm allowed to be angry and frustrated and hurt and sad.

49:32But if I use that to direct what I now say and do immediately next, I'm going to actually get in the way of my own goal, which is going to get my movie made. No one's going to make your movie because you deserve it and you've been really nice and you've tried really hard and you've worked really hard. It's about being excellent. And part of being excellent is listening to other people and being productive and being positive. And I think sometimes there's this, people just lose sight of how to be smart emotionally and that that's, you're trying to get somewhere. You need to learn how to collaborate with people and tell a story which attracts people to you.

50:11Well, it sounds like you're talking about the same kind of emotional intelligence that you have as a writer, the ability to have insight into your characters. You need to have that same kind of insight into yourself and what your motivations are and what the people around you's motivations are. and be able to sort of construct this narrative outside of the script you've written about like how you get this movie made, how this career progresses. I mean, despite by its very nature, your work and you, you have to attract people to you. You have to attract directors. You have to attract buyers. You have to attract actors.

50:43You know, you have to be someone who attracts other people and being sensitive to other people's emotions is a huge part of it. I was lucky enough. I had an amazing, the woman who was my agent for 17 years was a great guide to me in sort of, you know, how to comport myself. And I was quite young. I was 26 when I started with her. And I remember I was working on a project where, you know, the script wasn't very good, but people were also behaving in a way that I thought was making me unhappy. And I just got on the phone with her and I was complaining and complaining and complaining. And she said, okay, so here's what we're going to do.

51:16We're going to hang up the phone and you're going to get over yourself and then you're going to call me tomorrow and we're going to come up with a strategy for how to deal with this. And I was so stung in the moment. And then I thought, God, she's right. I am not currently in a state to make any decisions or any game plan because I am just up my own. Ditto. well and i really i really need to to and i you know what a lot of times you'll be in situations where as craig says you know you bring your little squishy little thing that you made and you're so proud of and you take it to people and they say things which are shocking and hurtful to you because you thought it was great or you thought you were communicating something or it meant a lot to you and you're going to get notes which are going to feel like you've been slammed over the head with a sledgehammer and part of your job as a professional is to take a deep breath and not transmit that to other people and really take in their viewpoints.

52:08And really that's part of what being a good collaborator is and understanding that nobody means to drown your puppy. They're just trying to give you their opinion. And it's really one of the hardest things that I just, now that I've been doing this for a while, I kind of see that the people who make it are not just the best writers. They're the people who are the most emotionally resilient and confident. And I think you can learn that. I really do. I think that's something that you can learn. And it's important to have people in your life who tell you, hey, you know what? I think it's time for you to get over yourself.

52:43Some people, I agree, respond to what we would call tough love, like your agent delivered some tough love. But, you know, this may surprise you. I'm going to stand up a little bit for the squishy folks out there. The emotional pain that we experience is quite real and it can be profound at times and very confusing. And I don't want anyone to think that this is yet another part of their life that deserves shame and that this is more evidence of their weakness because it's not. But I'm not really even talking about that. I'm talking about things where, you know, you're a struggling writer and you get a meeting with someone and they reschedule it seven times.

53:26And instead of being like, you know, talking to the assistant and being like, um, really? So it's, you know, because I am busy and I do. It's just being like going with the flow and being OK with it, even if you then have to hang up and kick the dog. Yeah. Don't hate the player, hate the game. Yeah. Well, I think that that's I think that that's fair. And I do. And also like, you know, when you, things we've talked about, like when you approaching someone that you'd like to work with, don't be creepy. Don't be. You know, some of this, some of the things, like when you say don't be creepy or don't care so much about that.

53:59Some people are creepy and some people I think are just wired to be injustice collectors and that's their vibe. And then if, okay, look, if that's your vibe, if you know you're just like not necessarily the most socially appealing person or that you do get hung up on these things, at least be aware of it. Yeah. And then just say, okay, I'm going to put that in a box of stuff that is naturally me. It's not evil. It's not bad, but it's also not going to help just as there are other parts of my life that don't necessarily help me with my writing. That's not going to help me with my writing. So at least be aware of it because, you know, there are some people out there who are, I mean, I met some writers who are odd.

54:37I mean, really odd and they're brilliant and they do really good work and they're super successful. So I don't, I mean, even talking. That's what I'm saying. Like, I don't mean be charming. I don't mean, you know, have great meeting patter. Some odd people are really have great EQ. They understand, okay, that's how I need to behave. I need to show up early. I need to be prepared. I need to be pleasant. I need to remember the names of everyone here. I need to turn this in on time. I need just, just anything that you would do to be a good business person. And I just feel like we sometimes lose sight of that because we want to be artistes.

55:11And a lot of times when someone's complaining to me about their career, what I'm hearing is they're putting things into the universe that are allowing people to schmuckify them. Let's speak some truth here. I think that the writers who are successful, who are just socially not great, the ones who succeed tend to have partners. And that may be a solution for a lot of these people. If you're a really great writer, but you just can't figure out how to get along with other people, find one person you can get along with and partner up because that may be a way that you can have a career and get movies made that work really well.

55:48In partnerships, there's almost always a sunny one and a not so sunny one. But I too, like Craig, I want to stick out for sort of the weirdos oddballs and the ones who just sort of don't get it because sometimes they make the most brilliant, amazing things. And sometimes if that makes it hard for them to make it in the Hollywood system, I hope they get to make cool movies outside the Hollywood system and sort of do things on their own because I want those movies to exist. And I want them to find somebody who can champion them and recognize their weirdness and their difficulty and help make those movies.

56:21Some great producers can do that. And that's a good thing. But I'm not talking about being weird than I am about like the sort of, we're going to sit around and complain and blame and talk about how dumb the executives are. I don't know. I just think it's so boring. Sometimes that is about blowing off steam. You know, I think that there are, I have met writers and frankly, they, to fit your thesis, they don't really make it or they don't last or they really struggle. Writers who seem far more interested in blaming the world for the difficulties that they're having, but I always feel like they're actually not really blaming the world.

56:56They're just essentially trumping this up because it's easier to do than to admit the truth, which is that they're either scared or they don't know how to do it, or it's just too hard for them to do or they don't even want to do it anymore. But somehow or another, a lot of times, I think what we're hearing is the symptom of some other real problem when people just lose themselves in anger and resentment toward a system that frankly, we all know is not fair. Nobody could possibly wander into Hollywood and go, this is going to be a wonderful meritocracy and everyone's going to be quite lovely and rational.

57:31Now, who told you it was not going to be like this? I mean, that's the thing. It's not like you read a lot of books about how we're all sort of carried around on silk pillows and treated. Yeah, everybody knows. Everybody knows. So when I find somebody who's acting like this is somehow new, I think, you already knew this. This isn't about that. But, you know, then again, I do tend to want to dole out a hug. I was talking to a friend of mine and he had cribbed a phrase from a friend of his. I said, so, you know, how are things going right now? And he goes, well, you know, I'm working on some stuff.

58:02I got a lot of irons in the freezer. That's funny. And I have been handing that out like Halloween cake. I just love, that just really sums up Hollywood. It's got a lot of irons in the freezer. Wow. Again, terrible business. What a fun third anniversary episode. Third anniversary, we've been together for three, what is the third anniversary, John? What is it, paper, wax? Isn't paper the first one? Oh, it's stick fluid. but I remember very clearly Craig, seeing Craig and him being like, John, call me. He wants me to do this thing. I have no idea what it is. I have to get on the phone with him and talk about stuff.

58:43I don't know. I just going to go and see what it is. Like he was mystified. I don't know. I still barely know what a podcast is. You've been on several podcasts. You still have no idea what they are. I'm really sure. Are we live on the air right now? What's happening? Where's John? Where's the antenna? So we, against all odds, our podcast is going really well. So we have about 25 ,000 people listen to us every week, which is nuts. Crazy. And of those 25 ,000, about 800 are premium subscribers who are subscribing to the app. Premium subscribers like Aline Bonson. Me among them. You're paying us$1.99 a month to listen to all the back episodes and occasional bonus episodes.

59:20I'd give you$2.99 a month. Do you? I would. Oh, thank you. I would give you$5.99 a month. Holy cow. I would give you a flat$75 for the year. You can't see it because it's an audio podcast, but she's raising her paddle. She's like, the auction is going out. But it's got to give me that thing where I can listen through, or what is it called? Yeah, so apparently, Craig, apparently the Script Notes app right now, it won't play in the background, so you actually have to have the app open for its play. So you can't check your email. Well, that's no good. No, and I like to, my whole airplane thing is listening to old Script Notes and playing Scrabble at the same time.

59:55So it's a problem. Look into it. We'll fix it. We'll try to fix it for Aline. If we can fix it for Aline, we'll do well. But we have, I just emailed Craig about this because we have 800 premium subscribers. I'm curious whether we could get to 1 ,000 by Christmas. And it seems like we probably could. But if we get to 1 ,000 subscribers, I think you and I, Craig, should do a special bonus episode that's just for subscribers that's absolutely filthy. Yes. Because we attempt to make the normal show fairly clean. I want it. Come on. with your kids. Gotta get in there. No, I mean... Well, a special guest like Aline Ross McKenna.

1:00:29Well, I think Kelly and I could have a do with it. Oh, that's just far too much. Yeah. I mean, we said dirty. We didn't say horrifying. I mean, come on. I mean, listen, the last time John and I and Kelly got together... Eyeballs would melt. I mean, we reduced John to a vegetable. I mean, it was just tragic. It was just tragic. I mean, that was easily the filthiest one we've ever done was the one that you and I did with Kelly. Was that when you played games? Yeah, we played Fiasco. Dude, I don't know. I'm a completist, but that one I was... A lot of people like... Yeah, head scratching. Also, the audio was weird.

1:01:00It was a little bit weird. Oh, my God. John was so much more upset, by the way, Craig, that I just said the audio was weird than I said the show was weird. He would have been much happier if I said, no, the show... The audio was... Perfect. Yeah. Yeah, but the content was terrible. That's what he wanted to hear. I could have told you that that would have been the reaction. Are we on to one cool... No, we're not done yet, Aline. You're not in charge of this podcast. You're not the boss of us. Neither are you. No, I am. Well, I'm second in command. I'm the Gilligan of this boat. You're the writer of this.

1:01:29Yeah, that's right. Enterprise. So if we get to 1 ,000 subscribers, Craig and I promised that we will do a bonus episode that's only for subscribers. So if you'd like to subscribe, go to scriptnotes.net or you can subscribe kind of through the app, but it's kind of frustrating through the app. But anyway, you should subscribe because you get all the back episodes and some bonus stuff too. Yeah. And I'm going to be doing a special Q &A thing at the Writers Guild with Simon Kinberg. Ooh. All of our friends, Simon Kinberg, Yeah. And we'll have the audio for that too. Nice. Great. You should come to that.

1:01:57Love that guy. He's the best. One cool thing, Aline Brosh McKenna. I have one. All right. So Breaking Bad is not on the air anymore. What? True Detective is not on the air. What? You know what has been on the air this year, which is quite good, is The Honorable Woman, which is a TV series. It's on the Sundance channel. Maggie Gyllenhaal is in it. Stephen Ray is in it. It was written and directed by a gentleman named Hugh Blick. Sure. I'm making that up. Something like that. Something British like that. Hugo. Hugo, look it up. John's looking it up. It's so good. It's really, it's a very good thriller.

1:02:36It's about, the title is not great. The title makes it sound like it's a 19th century. It sounds like an Eat Your Spinach show. Yes. It sounds like a 19th century thing where people wear corsets, but it's actually very well done thriller contemporary thriller about uh she's in parliament played by maggie gyllenhaal and she's jewish and she owns a company that has investments in the territories and it's about israeli palestinian relations and it's obviously very relevant right now it's very well done it's very well written i think there are eight episodes we're about six into it it's just really good it's the kind of movie that i feel like hollywood used to it's the kind of story that hollywood used to do kind of on a regular basis and does less frequently.

1:03:19And if you like intelligent thrillers, the one thing I will say is the first 20 minutes of the first episode, we had no idea what was going on. And we kept all, I watched it with my son and we kept saying, who is that? What's going on? But I really loved that about it actually, because it gave us so much credit. What's the name of the guy? Hugo Blick. He's really so talented. It's got such scope, such scale. it's smart and it gives you credit and I highly recommend it. Who is that? What's going on? Who's that one now? Yeah. That you've just described me watching Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones for me the entire second season was me leaning over to my husband and going, who is that?

1:03:57Who is that? Which one is that? Is that the one from before? And he would say, he's the one who wants to take over the kingdom. It's really not healthy. It's about 11 of those. I love Game of Thrones but Game of Thrones, I really don't know the names of most of the characters. I can sort of identify them by general type and sort of like, I think it's a Lannister. There you go. Well, the Lannisters are easy because they're blonde. Yeah, but there were a lot of blondish men of about 43 years old in that second season that were all trying to take over the kingdom. Was that the one from before with the lady?

1:04:34I don't know who these people are. The Honorable Woman, Sundance Channel, Maggie. And it's honorable woman with a U in it. I just looked it up. Oh, of course it is. It's all Brit-like. It's all Brit-like. Unurable, yes. My one cool thing is a follow-up on an earlier one cool thing. So I, early on in the show, I had one cool thing, Untitled Screenplays, which is a Tumblr of like little snippets of screenplays that are like ridiculous. It's sort of deliberately ridiculous. And so the person who created that Tumblr, C.W. O 'Neill, has a whole book, a published book you can buy, called This Movie Will Require Dinosaurs.

1:05:10That's a great title. And so it's available in the world right now. It's a physical book. I actually bought the iBookstore version of it, which is good and fun too. So I would highly recommend people check it out. And there's actually a live reading happening as well. I don't have the dates in front of me, but there'll be a link to that in the show notes as well. Who's that one? Who's that one? Oh, he's with the sword. She's the one with the dragons. Oh, oh, from last time? Mm-hmm, with the boobs and the dragons. My grandmother used to do that stuff. I loved it. I can't keep, my grandmother talked like this.

1:05:48I can't keep up. Such a sweet lady. She wasn't Jewish, though. Oh, my God. She was every amount of Jewish that you could have. Her DNA was 1 ,000 % Jewish. She was the mother of all Jews. So have I, John, have I done Network, the app Network? Have I done this one yet? I don't think you've ever done that. Okay, so my one cool thing, an app called Network. It's free. If you want to get it, it's certainly available for iOS, probably for, can't imagine it's not for Android. Network, N3TWORK, not Twerk as in Miley Cyrus, but Twerk, NetTwerk. And it's a very smart little app. So the theory behind it is there's this ton of really good content publicly available on YouTube and similar sites, but there's no way to curate it.

1:06:38I mean, you can go to YouTube's homepage, but it's sort of useless and a lot of it's ad supported and promoted. And there's just a ton of crap out there. I mean, it's just, and the one thing that networks always did for us was curate. They just would say, okay, well, we at least think this is good. Why don't you check it out? So this app basically sucks up all this video and you just start saying, I am interested in videos about this topic and this topic and this topic. and they just start piping them to you. And as you watch it, you can go, no, don't like this one. Just swipe it away and it's gone.

1:07:10I do like this one. I'll watch it a little longer. And of course, like all Big Brother apps, it's learning. And so it starts to be able to send you things that you might like and you can sort of download them for offline viewing. It's a really cool little app. I haven't used it too much just because I hate watching things, as you know. But for those of you that enjoy watching things and think that you might be missing out on some really cool things out there on the YouTubes and so forth, check out Network. Does your music on your iPod get smarter? Like when you use Shuffle, does it know, like I listen to this song a lot.

1:07:44I tend to listen all the ways through this song. This is a song I like. Because my God, it keeps trying to give me like the most obscure thing in my, it just is insisting on giving it to me. I think it's pure random on Shuffle. I think Shuffle is purely random. I think Genius, if Genius is still part of your thing, is attempting to sort of navigate towards things. But that's why Beats is supposed to be, that's one of the ideas behind the Beats app, is that it's... It knows what you like. It knows what you like, or you're telling what mood you're in, and therefore it's going to sort of put stuff together that's going to fit that mood.

1:08:14Angry. Angry. Always angry. Schmucked. And that's our episode this week. I want to thank Aline Rush McKenna, our wonderful co-host for this. Listen, I'll still be Joan Rivers forever. Thank you very much. Joan Rivers forever. If you have a question for Craig Mazin, you should tweet at him. He is at CL Mazin. I'm at John August. Aline is at nothing because she's not on Twitter. If you have a longer question for any of us, you can write to ask at johnaugust.com. JohnAugust.com is also where you can find the notes for today's episode and for all of our episodes. Transcripts are also there. If you're on iTunes, you should subscribe to the show.

1:08:51Look for script notes and subscribe there. You can also leave us a comment. We love those comments. If you would like to listen to all those back episodes and perhaps be that 1 ,000th subscriber to the premium channel that gets us to our very filthy show, you can do so at scriptnotes.net. There's also an app in the iTunes app store and in the Android app store for listening to it on your phone. So that is our show this week. We'll be back next week. But thank you, Merle. Thanks for having me. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Celine. Bye, Craigie. Bye. Thanks, Craig. Bye.

1:09:29Thank you.