197 - How do bad movies get made? (Encore)

11:13John August:Ryan Knighton was fantastic. Ryan Knighton, who listens to the show the day it comes out. So right now he's like, oh yeah, screw you guys.

11:18Craig Mazin:I did that for Ryan Knighton, of course. Of course, and we actually got a tweet back. I don't know if you saw it from Chris O'Dowd. Did you see that?

11:25John August:Yeah, so Chris O'Dowd, but did Chris O'Dowd say that he looked nothing like him or agreed that he did look something like him?

11:31Craig Mazin:He sort of just jumped into the fray in general to point out that somebody had said that Ryan Knighton and Chris O'Dowd were similar sort of from the nose down. And I said, yes, they both have a jaw. And Chris O'Dowd jumped into the fray to say that sometimes he even has two chins.

11:47John August:Oh, that's good. That's an honest, true assessment of sometimes people's physical realities.

11:53Craig Mazin:That was the most John August thing you ever said. If you guys want to know what it's like if you take John August and boil him down to a delicious reduction, it was that sentence.

12:06John August:All right, I'll take it. It was gorgeous. The other thing I'm really known for is segues, like talking about our 200 episodes and really our favorite episodes out of those 200. We asked last week what people's favorite episodes were and we got just a shotgun full of very different answers about what things were the best. But they broke it down into sort of general categories. Some people love the craft episodes, some people love our interviews, some people love when we go deep on one movie. And there were a few other sort of recent hits, which I think you had anticipated that there's a recency bias that people who listen to the show religiously, they're going to think more about the ones they heard more recently than the ones from way back in the day.

12:46John August:But we will put together a list of some of our favorites. And as we hit the 200, we will go through and highlight those as well.

12:53Craig Mazin:I should mention that I did get a text from America's favorite unpronounceable comedian, Mike Birbiglia, who said his vote for favorite episode for listener's guide. Is that what, I don't know, was that, is that what we're calling it? Listener's Guide? Oh, listener's guide. So the conflict episode and the directing episode. He said, conflict episode is a three-peat for me. You should make a YouTube how-to video of it, which I'm just saying no to right now. I'm going to say no, Mike Rebiglia.

13:25John August:Way back in the day, I used to do these YouTube videos where it was like a screencast and I would start with a scene and rewrite the scene and talk through why I was rewriting the scene word by word, sentence by sentence. And people loved them and I said, oh yeah, I'll do more of them but the truth is they're so incredibly exhausting to do that I just don't know if I'll ever get back to doing more of those.

13:44Craig Mazin:I truly love the wonderful isolation tag of podcastio. It's just nice. I don't have to worry about anything. I don't even have to wear clothing if I don't want to.

13:57John August:Yeah, he's been naked most of this time. Well, I'm naked all the time under my clothes. Yeah, sometimes he's smoking. We never quite know what Craig is doing in his office in Pasadena while we're recording the show. Occasionally I'm cleaning fish. Yeah, that does happen. Occasionally the cleaning woman walks by and takes the fish guts away.

14:12Craig Mazin:Correct.

14:13John August:Correct. The only last bit of business before we get to the topic at hand, And One Hit Kill, which is the game we are launching, by the time you listen to this podcast, it very well might have launched. So we're launching, we anticipate, on Tuesday the 12th. And if you are interested in card games or things that smash into other things, you will probably enjoy this card game. So just go to onehitkillgame.com or search Kickstarter for us, because hopefully by the time you're listening to this, we are up there in the world for you to back and pledge. And Craig now is fully converted to the world of crowdfunding.

14:45Craig Mazin:No, no, no, no, no, no. I would love to be included in the we on that, but I am not part of the we. Oh, he's not part of this thing at all. Oh, Lord, no.

14:55John August:I claim zero credit. Yeah, so when I say we, I mean the people who work for me and my side of the company.

15:01Craig Mazin:On the other hand, I also claim zero blame. Yeah, true.

15:04John August:That's a lovely thing about being sort of not involved. Not my fault. Not my fault. Boy, there's a segue softball for you. Not my fault. Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about movies that don't work out. So Nebo Yousefi, who works for me, phrased this question at lunch. Hey, why don't you talk about why they make bad movies? And I was like, well, you know what? We never really framed the conversation around that, but that's a totally valid question. From the mouth of babes. Yes. So let's talk about this issue. And I guess we have to start by defining our terms. What do we even mean by bad? And we could talk about movies that are just genuinely terrible, that get bad critical review, that get bad audits, reviews, or the very low consensus in general that that's a quality movie.

15:52John August:But often we talk about the movies being flops because they just didn't connect at the box office. So when I say bad movie, Craig, which of those kind of categories are you thinking about?

16:01Craig Mazin:I never think about the box office, honestly, because I've seen some wonderful movies that people just didn't go to see at the box office. I've seen some massive box office hits that I just didn't like. Honestly, when I think about a bad movie, and I have a very limited definition. I'll stipulate that up front. I think about a movie that I don't like at all. I just don't like it. It was bad for me. That's sort of the thing on the end. And there are movies that are seemingly bad for everyone.

16:28John August:Yeah, I think that's really, I think what we should probably try to focus on is like the movies that just like, well, that just didn't work. Right. Because there's certainly movies that are tremendously successful that I just can't ever watch and I just don't like and I don't get. But clearly somebody really loved that movie. So you can't sort of definitially say like, oh, that didn't work. But there's many movies that just don't work. And you sometimes scratch your head saying like, how did that movie happen? Today, let's talk through how those movies happen.

16:55Craig Mazin:How do things go wrong? And it's true that sometimes through the lens of time, we will see that things that weren't working actually were working. They just weren't working in the right time.

17:08John August:Yeah.

17:09Craig Mazin:They were ahead of their time. It sounds like a crazy thing to say. It sounds pompous. And sometimes the movies that are ahead of their time are lowbrow culture. Yeah. But they foreshadowed something and they may have been rough around the edges. They may have been startling or shocking. Did you see, by the way, there's this wonderful video out there on the internet about the genius of the first follower. Have you seen this video? No. Tell me this. So it's a guy narrating a simple video of a crowd at some sort of outdoor music festival. And the video is just of this small area of the crowd, mostly people sitting on a lawn.

17:47Craig Mazin:And one guy is dancing like a lunatic all by himself. He's all alone. And he's the kind of person that people would look at and go, wow, what a freak. Yeah. This is the leader. He's the brave leader who does something on his own for the first time. He doesn't care if other people are doing it with him. And after about a minute of this, one dude just comes running it out of nowhere and starts dancing along with that guy and learning his dance and dancing with him. And other people see this. And now like he and the second guy sort of gesturing back at his friends like, come on. And now three or four people come to dance with that guy.

18:25Craig Mazin:Now there's about five people dancing. Then about now people see a group of people dancing. And so a bunch of people are like, oh, yeah, cool. People dancing. I like to be part of a group of people dancing. And within 30 seconds, it goes from two people to five people to 10 people to what seems like everyone, like hundreds of people all doing this. And the point that the guy made was the leader is an interesting person, but it's the first follower who is the bravest and the first follower who is the most important. Sometimes with movies, the leader comes out and gets crushed. Yeah. It's the first follower that kind of reaps the reward.

19:05Craig Mazin:So in time, we may look back at that first crazy guy dancing on the lawn and go, actually, you're good.

19:14John August:Thinking back through my own movies, a movie that I'm not especially happy with is the second Charlie's Angels. And I was at some screening someplace about a completely different movie, and this guy in the audience came up and said, hey, I just want to let you know I really love Full Throttle. I'm like, wow, really? You really love it? I was like, yeah, it was so much of improvement over the first movie. I'm like, you're the only person on earth who thinks that. And he said, he basically was a first follower. He's like, the way it kind of made no sense, and it just kind of kept jumping from thing to thing, I thought it was really avant-garde.

19:43John August:He had his whole theory that that was deliberate in a certain way. And so in some ways I do kind of, I get that. And there might be things you just love about something that is not necessarily the inherent qualities that even creators were attempting to do. But you might love something for a certain reason, and sometimes the movies that are not great end up having a great influence. If you look at some of the Grindhouse classics, you wouldn't say that those are great movies, but they've had a tremendous influence on Tarantino, but also a lot of other filmmakers.

20:13Craig Mazin:That's a great example of the first follower. Tarantino will get knocked around a little bit by some people who say, well, you know, all the great moments that you love in Pulp Fiction have been cribbed from other movies. Yeah, but he's the first follower. He knew to crib those, where other people were just laughing at them because, frankly, a lot of those moments are from movies that are bad. They're just not well done. But he was the first follower.

20:36John August:It was their lack of artistry that made them sort of incredibly exciting.

20:40Craig Mazin:Or maybe they had one wonderful moment and then a lot of junk.

20:44John August:Sometimes that movie could not work because it was ahead of its time. And sometimes a movie just happens to be behind its time. And while you were shooting the movie, like, well, this is really current. and then by the time it comes out, well, this is clumsily outdated. So things involving technology often don't age well and sometimes that aging process happens before they're even out in the movie theaters. Sometimes that's about computer technology, about hackers, about sort of anything related to the internet. The Sandra Bullock movie, The Net, The Web, The Whatever. I remember that coming out.

21:13John August:It's like, oh, wow, this movie is at least six months too late. This is not at all sort of what this world is. the other challenge can be like you were there was a fad and that fad has now passed and now you seem just incredibly laughably out of date because no one is doing the La Mata anymore or skateboarding is not about gleaming the cube anymore there's just reasons why that moment has passed and now you're still trying to hit those notes

21:37Craig Mazin:like if you were say dumb enough to make some sort of compendium spoof movie at the end, long past perhaps the end of that trend

21:48John August:And well, that's just a ridiculously bad idea. No one would do that. No one would ever do that. That would be stupid. But let's talk about those. You know, some movies are just inherently bad ideas. And some, you know, you wouldn't necessarily know that at the time, but there's some movies you'll just look at them as like, well, that was just never going to work. I don't understand why you really thought a movie about talking baloney was going to be the thing that people wanted to see. Or like, you know, a romantic comedy about talking baloney was going to be the thing that people wanted to see.

22:14John August:and yet somehow it made it through all of these levels. Maybe we can dig into sort of why sometimes something that looks on its surface like a bad idea makes it through.

22:25Craig Mazin:Well, it's hard to know that it's a bad idea occasionally. Sometimes you're hit with an idea as a member of the audience, right? You see a trail or you see something and you look at it and you go, that's just an inherently bad idea because I don't even know what it is. For instance, why would I watch a movie about Talking Bologna? but every now and then something comes along like that and everybody just goes yep love that yep that thing i love the talking baloney movie sharknado was like you know now it's granted sharknado is a goof you know but sometimes there are ideas that are such outliers you can't tell if they're an outlier bad or an outlier good yeah they are just off and and you will have to find out if it's off good or off bad.

23:12John August:Yeah, you won't know. And sometimes those ideas get forced into the universe because of, you know, reasons that aren't completely clear from the trailer or from the movie you're actually watching. So sometimes there's an incredibly powerful person behind it, or a group of people behind it, who say like, you know what, we somehow, for some reason, trust that this thing could break through, this thing could work. That could be a really powerful director, it could be a powerful producer, it could be a studio head who says like, no, no, I really think that the world needs a talking baloney movie because it's going to be like the talking dog movies, but people love food and therefore we're just going to do it.

23:46John August:And sometimes a charismatic person or a powerful person can push that movie into existence and hire the people to do it. And that movie now exists, even though it's not a good idea, maybe on a fundamental level.

23:58Craig Mazin:I'll give you an example from my career. I seem to have a lot of them. Very early on, I had a writing partner and we did our first movie. and as that movie was in post or something like that our managers came to us and said look Dimension Films wants to make a movie with Marlon Wayans and we need ideas from Marlon Wayans so come and sit down and just pitch us ideas from Marlon Wayans we said okay and we were very young and you know we had basically written one thing and got paid for it we were trying to make careers as a screenwriter so important person saying important person what's a movie with important person let's go sit and come up with some ideas so we sat there for an afternoon we came up with a bunch of log lines for the kinds of comedies they were making that character-driven Jim Carrey-ish comedies and we came in and we just pitched them all one after another and they picked the weirdest one they just said that one and they all agreed that one and we're making was was that that one

24:55John August:because they could picture the poster what was it that I singled that one out don't know so the

25:01Craig Mazin:idea was a man only has four of his five senses at any given time but the missing one keeps switching so at some point he's blind at some point he's deaf at some point he can't speak at some point he can't feel uh it was a very strange idea but they all just got excited they thought this is exactly what the world needs and we said oh okay and they're like here's a bunch of money go start writing it and and you need to write it now because we're gonna he has a thing on a schedule and we're going to shoot it and we did it and they were like great and then they made it and i but i remember very clearly and then it won an oscar right it didn't it didn't i do remember um i was walking with my uh writing partner greg and we were talking about we had you know gotten paid to do this and we were figuring out how to write the script and we were just discussing it on a walk and then he turned to me he goes you think they'll ever make this and i said never in a million years will they make this this is just a dumb idea well they did make it yeah which and the whole time we were like at some point someone's gonna stop this right and and and the crazy thing is we got to the first test screening and i thought this is where it'll stop and it the test it was through the roof it was a it scored great the audience loved it and i was still like Like, but it's not good.

26:23Craig Mazin:No one's stopping this. And then eventually the audience stopped it. Yeah.

26:29John August:Yeah. I don't think we ever talked about this on this show, but at some point in your career, you must have been pitched or been invited to pitch on Clipped over a Brian Grazer project at Imagine. Of course. So this project, I would kind of love for it to be made at this point because I think almost every screenwriter I've ever met has had this brought up to him or her, which is a project that Brian Grazer initiated and I think some scripts have been written for it and it involves a man who gets a paperclip stuck in his brain or up his nose and it touches his brain. And I think that's the entire premise.

27:02John August:And I think it's gone in a zillion different directions but that's the premise. And so you'll go into one of these general meetings and they'll say, oh, and we also have clipped and we're really excited to make this movie. And we're like, well, tell me about it. It's like a man gets a paperclip stuck up in his brain And it's like, okay. Right. Rob Schneider is a carrot.

27:21Craig Mazin:Yeah. Yeah. And that, there is this thing that happens where powerful people get an idea that they can't let go of.

27:30John August:Yeah.

27:30Craig Mazin:And everybody at some point or another has an idiosyncratic attraction to an idea that few others do. I do. We all do. Totally. But the difference is if you run a big studio that's making a lot of money for another big studio, you get to constantly impose your idiosyncratic obsession on everyone. So when they have these meetings and they say, well, we have something we're really excited about, they're not excited about it. They hate it. They just know that they're bosses. And there have been movies – someone should make a list of these – movies that it's seemingly everyone in the Writers Guild has been hired to work on at some point or another.

28:08Craig Mazin:Like Stretch Armstrong is –

28:09John August:Yeah, yesterday we were talking about Bob the Musical, which I really, I think everyone has worked on.

28:14Craig Mazin:There's a good list of movies that have done nothing but generate dues for the writer's guilt and will never actually get made.

28:23John August:But I think Taylor Lautner at some point got like a big payday for doing Stretch Armstrong, which of course never happened.

28:29Craig Mazin:Stretch Armstrong, at this point, the story, the story that somebody should make is the story of trying to make Stretch Armstrong. the movie will refuse to be made at all times and no matter how close you get it will not be made it's a remarkable story

28:48John August:certainly back to Lord and Miller I think one of the things we need to blame them for whenever we get them on the show is the tremendous success of the Lego movie means that anybody who has any piece of just random IP can genuinely say well look at the Lego movie they had nothing and they made something amazing so So, you know, Stretch Armstrong is at least a character. Right.

29:09Craig Mazin:So then you want to say, actually, no, the Lego movie had Batman.

29:14John August:Yeah. Absolutely true.

29:15Craig Mazin:Yeah, no, the Lego movie had Batman and it had Abraham Lincoln. It had all sorts of cool stuff. But you imagine that Chris and Phil have no idea. When you are involved in the thing that people are copying, you generally aren't the person that knows about it that much. You know, I mean, I got sent a bunch of hangover-y type stuff. but when the hangover was kind of doing its thing everybody was basically like it's hangover but blank it's hangover with this it's hangover that i didn't i was i don't think chris and phil know how much it's lego movie is going on out there yeah which by the way is another reason why bad movies happen because studios tend to play follow the leader so i want to talk about this ip thing

29:59John August:because that becomes an issue as well. Let's say you have a big piece of property. Let's say you're Hasbro and you have a big piece of property and you say, you know what, I think there's a movie here. Look at the Lego movie. I will give you, Studio, the opportunity to make this movie but the clock is ticking. You and I both encountered many situations where they said, listen, we have to make this movie by this time or else we lose the rights to X, Y, or Z. Battleship was apparently that situation by many accounts that they had this title that they really liked. They wanted to make a movie called Battleship and it got rushed to make that movie.

30:37John August:Similar thing happened with Spider-Man. So Sony had the rights to make Spider-Man movies, but they had to keep making Spider-Man movies. If they stopped making them for a period of time, the rights revert back to Marvel. So that's a trap often with IPs that there's a clock attached to it.

30:52Craig Mazin:Yeah, there's this thing in economics called the Concord fallacy. When they were building the Concord, They said, well, it makes sense because we've done the numbers and it's going to cost$700 million to build this plane. But we believe at that cost, we will be able to at least break even. And everybody said, OK. They spent about$300 million and went, all right, actually, it's going to cost$1.4 billion and we're never going to be able to make money on it. And someone said, yeah, but what are we supposed to do? Just stop and just have nothing to show for our$300 million? Of course not. Let's keep going and build it.

31:28John August:And the let's keep going and build it sometimes has paid off incredibly well in the movie business. Classically Titanic, hugely over budget and could have just been a complete whiff and a miss and instead became, for the time, the biggest movie in history. And Cameron beat himself again after that with Avatar. So sometimes those crazy bets really do pay off. Again, another crazy bet was the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Like you're basically betting the entire studio on these three films working and it worked. So sometimes those are good choices. In the case of Battleship, it didn't work out well for most of these people.

32:03Craig Mazin:And that, by the way, is another answer to Nima's question. Why do bad movies happen? Because everybody's hoping that it'll work. And everybody looks at history and goes, well, you know, Fox sold off International on Titanic to Paramount because they were afraid that they had a flop on their hands with Titanic. Well, they shouldn't have done that. Fox also let George Lucas keep merchandising in sequel rights in order to have him put money in on the budget or whatever it worked on on star wars because they were frightened of that project as well well are we going to be brave like star wars and titanic or are we going to be scared you know well the problem is if you act like your movie's a big hit it will come back to bite you if it's not so you you actually can't say ahead of time one way or the other which of the narratives is the appropriate one you might as well cite no narratives.

32:55Craig Mazin:You might as well just admit, you can't predict it. Don't tell me about the outliers on either side. Let's just deal with what we have. But a lot of times people are kind of clinging to

33:07John August:outlier hopes. Well, it's like they're playing poker and they're really hoping they can fill an inside straight. And rarely are they going to be able to fill that inside straight, but the cost of folding is so high. Essentially, you're in for so much. And if you try to just cancel a movie? You can theoretically. We're$20 million in this movie. We still have another eight weeks of shooting. It's going to cost us so much money. We're just going to pull the plug. That's happened, I can think, maybe five times in my Hollywood experience having seen a movie just actually get the plug pulled on it because kind of worse than a flop is just burning a bunch of money and having nothing to show for it.

33:45Craig Mazin:Yeah, this is why gambling is addictive for so many people. It's entirely about the rush of beating the odds. And frankly, the movie business is in part about the rush of beating the odds. The odds are stacked against you to be hired. The odds are stacked against your movie to be greenlit. The odds are stacked against your movie to do well. So when you beat it, you're now chasing that rush all the time. The other thing that studios have to deal with, and this is another reason why bad movies do get made, is they have a pipeline. And the pipeline is this big infrastructure of salaries and offices and materials that exist to put movies out into the world.

34:29Craig Mazin:If you don't have movies to put out in the world, you're paying all those people lots and lots of money for nothing. So they must fill their pipeline. They must make a certain number of movies. And if they don't, they have failed as executives. They failed. It's not, you can't go to your board and say, I actually only found three movies I liked, so we only made three. No, you were tasked to make 15 movies. If you couldn't find the other 13, it's your fault. Much better to say, I made 15 movies. These should have worked. Better to swing more than to take pitches.

35:04John August:Absolutely. So a couple weeks ago, I went and saw a very early cut of a film that a friend of ours is directing. And it was a great early cut. It's going to be a really good movie. but I didn't know anything about the history of the film. So I was like, oh, who's, because it was over at one of the nearby studio lots and I said, oh, who's releasing this? It's like, oh, it's actually this company that they put out their own slate and they're going to release it themselves. I'm like, that is fascinating and that will probably end in tears. I hope it doesn't end in tears but it's so challenging to try to become a new studio because how are you going to hold all those talented people from movie to movie to movie to release this thing?

35:39John August:It's just an incredibly difficult job And that's why I have sympathy for studio executives, because they are trying to make sure that they can keep everyone continuously employed and also still make the best movies at the same time. And those aren't necessarily the perfectly aligning goals.

35:54Craig Mazin:Yeah, that's right. Sometimes when you want something, you have to get into business with somebody and take a bunch of stuff you don't want. Which, of course, ironically, is the same model that the studios then turn around and foist upon the theaters. if you want Avengers you also have to take this stinker yeah well if you want to be in business with Brad Pitt's company or you want to be in business with Scott Rudin or you want to be in business with Neil Moritz you you're hoping that you get you know their big awesome stuff you might also get the other stuff you never know and you might need to take both to kind of make it all work sometimes movies will be made to keep people happy yeah absolutely it keeps your relationship

36:37John August:with a major actor happy. It keeps your relationship with a prolific producer happy. You let this director direct this one film, it hopes that she will also direct this other one. Basically you make a two-for-deal that we will do this one that we don't genuinely believe in and you'll get this other one. Classically, some producers had put films where they basically could say, over the course of my contract, I'm allowed to come to you with a project and you can pass, but then I can still say, uh-uh, you're making it for up to this budget. And that has rarely ended well for the people involved. Yeah.

37:09Craig Mazin:You know, a lot of the, let's say we'll call them privileges that people had are gone. The business has changed in such a way that these perks have disappeared because everybody got burned and because the corporate control has become that much more scrutinizing. the problem with things like put movies where you can say no no you have to make this movie is they have to make it and i've found in my life in all aspects forcing people to do something doesn't work out in any situation even if it's good for them unless they're children um it doesn't work you want people to actually want to do something with you absolutely um so

37:58John August:We were talking before about some bad ideas that become movies, but sometimes you start with a really good idea. And sometimes even in the marketing or deep within that movie, you can see there's a good idea there, but it didn't work. And so let's talk about some of those things that happen to those good ideas that end up resulting in bad movies. So start with the director. Sometimes the wrong director was hired, or a theoretically good director who just made weird choices that did not end up serving the film. And you and I have both been involved in projects where like, wow, with a different director, that could have worked out so much better than it did work out right here.

38:33Craig Mazin:Yeah, this is the eternal lament of the screenwriter, if only for the director. And it's a little unfair in the sense that when the director works out, we go, see, they did what we told them to do in the script. Obvious. And when it doesn't, the director. The truth is that all movies are impacted dramatically by so many of the director's decisions. And when a movie works, you have to give the director an enormous amount of credit. And when a movie fails, you have to give a director an enormous amount of blame. It's a high risk, high reward gig. The mismatch of director and material More often than not Is the thing that sinks a movie They have a vision And the vision is competing With the material They are trying to make a different movie And what happens is everybody else Is hanging on saying Well the reason we hired you in the first place The reason we're spending all this money Is because this feeling we had about a different vision So we'll just keep tugging you this way And the director will keep tugging that way and then you end up with this mush.

39:38John August:Yep, you're somewhere in the middle and that's never where you want to end up. So almost as commonly as the director being the wrong person, it's a star being the wrong person. And it's not hard to think of examples of, that was a great idea for a movie, that was not the person to star in this film. And either that person was miscast in the sense of like, you're making a comedy and that person is just inherently not funny, or you don't fundamentally believe the chemistry between these people that you've put up on screen together. And that is terrible when it happens because you've wasted all of this time and money and energy on something that people just fundamentally don't buy into.

40:18Craig Mazin:Yeah, there's two kinds of miscasting. There's the kind where the director, again, simply doesn't see a problem. They have a vision that is completely incompatible with the material and with the people now that they've placed in the position of performing the parts. The other kind of miscasting is the studio forcing something. I'm not sure which one is more common. I can say this. I remember seeing a poster for the Truman Show before I knew anything about it, and I thought, so that's miscast. Why is Peter Weir making that movie with that guy? It's just miscast. Awesome movie. My favorite Jim Carrey performance by far.

40:59Craig Mazin:Loved it. And it totally worked. Peter Weir is a master of casting, I would argue. His casting instincts are extraordinary. And he's also cast people that I haven't liked in other things, and I've loved them in his movies. But then there are times where you go, well, why is that person in that movie? That just feels like, well, it's a movie star, so it'll work, right? Yeah.

41:19John August:No, it won't. No, it will not. It's a real thing. And a good thought exercise is to imagine some of your favorite films and then imagine who their second choice was in that role. And it's just not fundamentally the same movie. Indiana Jones, classically. It's very hard to imagine that character not being Harrison Ford in the films that we've seen him in. And that doesn't mean that he made the movie. That movie was written and directed with incredible, intense care, but there's something right about him in that spot. and they were very smart in their casting to see him and say, oh, that is the guy who should do that.

41:55John August:But he was not the first choice. He was not the first choice.

41:57Craig Mazin:Wasn't it Tom Selleck? Tom Selleck. Yeah. Yeah, Tom Selleck couldn't do it ultimately because they wouldn't let him out schedule-wise for enough time from Magnum P.I.

42:07John August:Yeah. And, you know, that's just - And Tom Selleck would have been fine. He's a talented actor, certainly, but I don't think, you know, Raiders of the Lost Ark is the iconic movie with him in it.

42:19Craig Mazin:Here's the thing. Who knows? Who knows? We could be wrong. You just don't know. People start with an idea of who the star is, and then the craziest things happen. Jeff Conaway was supposed to be the star of Taxi. Yeah. I mean, he got top billing and everything. It just didn't work out that way. Rob Lowe was supposed to be the star of the West Wing. Yeah. Or West Wing, sorry. And it just didn't work out that way.

42:45John August:Yeah, but that's the luxury of television. is like television, you can go episode by episode and sort of see what's working and you can change along the way. A feature is like a TV show that you shoot exactly one episode of. That's right. And you won't know. And then the cameras will be put away and you will be out there in the world and you won't know. So you won't know if you've made Pretty Woman with Julia Roberts and you've created a huge star or you've made like a really creepy movie about a guy who hires a hooker, but it's trying to be funny.

43:12Craig Mazin:Yeah, it's sort of like the, it's the entertainment version of the nature and nurture situation. Television allows you to nurture something and you can impact it and affect it environmentally and change it as you need to. Movies are entirely about nature. I am putting some DNA together, clapping my hands, walking away. Hope to God I did it right because that's it. It is what it is.

43:37John August:But sometimes you can change things and part of the way you change things is by editing the movie together, showing it to an audience and then making changes based on what the audience tells you. And I think you and I have both encountered suggestions from the audience that the studio will be very excited about, that you know are just the worst ideas imaginable. And sometimes the studio will say yes because they want the audience to be happy and they will make choices that hurt the movie but might bump up the needle a tiny bit.

44:05Craig Mazin:So the idea of chasing a score was, I think, more prominent. It's in a strange way. I see it less and less now. You'd think you'd see it more and more as studios become more corporate. They would adhere more to some kind of empirical evidence-based system of quality rather than trusting instincts. But the score has failed them so many times, so many times, that they are now smart enough, I think, to know score more. How did it play in the room? Let's just feel the room. And then when people talk to us, let's think about why they're saying what they're saying. Because they also have experience where they didn't do what the 25 people in the focus group said, oh, you should totally do this or this or this.

44:52Craig Mazin:They just listened. They heard the movie. They went back. They made the changes that they felt were right, came back to a new audience, and it killed. Yep.

45:02John August:And so I don't want to sort of denigrate all audience testing because it is a crucial part of sort of knowing what movie you actually made and how it plays to audiences. Seth Rogen camp, I know is very well known for putting the video cameras in the theater so they can actually go back to the tape and see, aha, you thought this was funny, but there's actually no laugh. It's huge. It's not actually a joke.

45:20Craig Mazin:You have to, I mean, for comedy, I'm a huge believer in that. I know Todd Phillips does it for all of his movies. I did it, all the movies I did with David Zucker, we did it. because frankly, there's a ton of debate in an editing room about, no, people love that. Now they didn't. Now they didn't. So, all right, let's go to the videotape and then you can watch it. But the other great thing about watching that night vision video of the audience is you can see them getting bored. You can see them leaning forward because they're into it. There are things that they do silently that are informative that you cannot see from the back of their heads.

45:52Craig Mazin:So that stuff, you know, it's really important to see and feel your movie with an audience. and you're right there are opportunities to quote-unquote save a movie but only if the movie is saveable there's a difference between this is a good movie gone wrong and this is a bad movie

46:12John August:another framework i want to look at is sometimes a movie is mismarketed and it's not just that the trailer is wrong or the advertising is wrong but literally this was meant to be a tiny art film and now you're trying to push it out to 2 ,000 screens and it cannot connect with that audience in that way. And I think we've all encountered films that got pushed way beyond where they should have been and they suffered for it. They suffered from that expectation of like, oh, this is meant to be a giant crowd pleaser, but no, it's actually a movie that's going to play really well at a festival and it's never designed to be going so big and so wide.

46:45John August:You've set this weird expectation by opening a certain way. The same thing happens with the images you're showing in your trailers, the images you're showing in your commercials. If you're selling something as a feel-good comedy, but it's actually about suicide, you're going to hit blowback, and that's going to hurt you down the road.

47:02Craig Mazin:Yeah, I feel like there are two oppositional errors that occur with marketing. On the one hand, you have the filmmakers who feel a way about their movie and insist that the marketing reflect it. I made a dark treatise on blah, blah, blah. You're trivializing it with this ridiculous ad. I need you to sell the movie I made and they do and everybody goes nope so that's one kind but the oppositional error to that is the marketing team says you know our testing shows that blah blah and this segment and so forth we're going to sell this movie as a romantic comedy even though it's not and even putting aside the phenomenon of I thought I was getting this but I went to the movie and got that.

47:48Craig Mazin:People don't even go because they smell something wrong from the start. There is a, it seems synthetic. It seems like they're forcing something that isn't right. And these two kinds of errors occur all the time. And it's a discussion that frankly, filmmakers and marketing executives need to have very early or else there's trouble.

48:12John August:You will find that directors and screen readers and creative people on a movie don't enjoy having those early marketing discussions because they feel like marketing is going to try to influence the movie they make. Well, they are. To the degree that marketing is going to try to influence you to make a movie that they can actually market it. And if they don't understand how to market your film, you're going to suffer down the road. So it's eating your broccoli to go in and take that meeting and really talk through what it is you're trying to do and what it's trying to feel like so you can be on something like the same page.

48:47John August:When things work really well, sometimes, this actually happened on Go, they cut a trailer that was actually really good and helped inform us about our movie. It's like, oh, I get what that movie feels like. Actually, a better example was the first Charlie's Angels because we were floundering and we were in a cut and we just didn't know where we were. And then the good folks at Columbia or whatever trailer house they'd used cut a really great trailer for it and got us really excited. It's like, oh, let's make the movie that goes with that trailer. And we knew that we had that movie in there. And that helped provide us some focus.

49:18Craig Mazin:Yeah, there are unfortunately some movies that are wonderful. And they are unsellable in a traditional way. One of my favorite movies is The Princess Bride. It's probably one of everyone's favorite movie. In a world without The Princess Bride, it's hard to sell The Princess Bride. And in fact, they really struggled. The Princess Bride in 1987 opened to$4.5 million, which is not that great. And it ended up making$30 million, which in 1987 just wasn't that great. Now, that, of course, retrospectively has become a beloved classic, and I fear the day that they reboot it. But really hard to sell because ultimately what made The Princess Bride great was that gestalt of the experience.

50:07Craig Mazin:It was one of those movies where you just needed to kind of see it. Another movie that I love is Time Bandits. I think Time Bandits is brilliant. And Terry Gilliam in particular has made a career of unsellable great movies. Yeah, 12 Monkeys. Unsellable, great movie. Baron von Munch has an unsellable, great movie. Time Bandits, unsellable, great movie.

50:28John August:Yeah. Now, I remember seeing Time Bandits in the theater, and I think it was just one of those summer movie series when I was a kid in school. And so I had no idea what it was, but it was just like, wait, this is a movie that exists in the world. It just, it was just so crazy pants. Yeah. I loved it.

50:43Craig Mazin:It was, it was mind blowing to me and it was just so I'll, I still, and I will always for the span of my life, the dwindling span of my life. I will never forget the feeling I had when the dwarves started pushing on that kid's bedroom wall and the wall started moving and became this crazy hallway through time. I just, my little brain went, what? It was an acid trip before acid. It was. I mean, God, Gilliam, what a genius. Yeah.

51:14John August:What a genius. So before we go too deep into the, oh, it's actually a good movie, let's do sort of cycle back through and say like, you know what? Sometimes movies just are bad. And we have to acknowledge that there are movies that are just not good and they flop because they're terrible. And the take home I want everyone to have is that while you were making them, you probably didn't know they were terrible. I would also want everyone to know that it takes just as much work to make a bad movie as a good movie. Like sometimes even more work. Because whatever happened that caused that bad movie to exist in the world was probably really challenging and painful for the people involved.

51:52John August:No one showed up on the first day and said, let's make a terrible movie. They really thought they were making something good. They thought they were swinging for the fences. They thought they were taking a brave dare, a risk that was going to pay off. And it didn't. And so we need to make sure that we don't slam the bad movies so hard that no one tries to take any risks. And I kind of have a worry that what's happening overall as an industry right now is that we are making safer and safer bets. you know, expensive bets, but safer bets on the films that will do okay kind of no matter what. Yeah.

52:24John August:I don't know if you feel the same way.

52:25Craig Mazin:I do. I mean, the fear of the bad movie isn't a fear so much of just losing money. It's a fear of how traumatic the process is in your attempt to save it. When critics say this movie is lazy, that's the stupidest thing any critic can say. The least lazy movies are the bad ones. There is nothing easier than taking a very healthy baby home from the hospital. Well, there's a lot of things easier, but in the world of babies, healthy baby is the easiest baby. The hard baby is the one that's sick because that one is stressful and requires resources and time and anxiety and sometimes cannot be saved.

53:02Craig Mazin:And there's terrible grief and you're working crazy hours through while you're also suffering. And you're thinking to yourself, I'm now working around the clock on something that can only be bad. I'm trying to get it from, oh my God, that's the worst thing ever to merely bad. Yeah.

53:24John August:We've both had conversations where, you know, under the cone of silence, we'd say like, I'm trying to bring this from like a D to a B minus. And you know, there's not an A to be found, but you're just trying to make it up to just a salivable level where you can see the intention behind it. The good moments are highlighted and you've gotten through the bad moments as painlessly as possible.

53:45Craig Mazin:Yeah. There is a misconception among many people that study film because they are consumers of completed products that movies are excreted whole from a mind. This is not at all true ever. All movies are like cars that are being built while you're driving them. All of them. And every good movie is a compendium both of intentional smart choices and unintentional happy accidents. Every bad movie similarly is a compendium of bad choices and bad accidents. And when you're on one of those cars and you know basically now the idea is can we build this enough so that when we crash we don't die? We're just trying to maybe get hurt.

54:32Craig Mazin:it is absolutely brutal so from the studio side of things there is a tendency to give a certain kind of direction to all films in which you're aiming for the middle unfortunately in your desire to avoid negative outcomes you begin to create negative outcomes because pushing things towards the middle definitely can reduce the risk of a bad outlier, but it also reduces the risk of a good outlier.

55:06John August:You look at Pirates of the Caribbean, you look at the choice to let Johnny Depp go in that crazy way with his character, that was a risky thing. And while you were watching it in dailies, you're like, this doesn't make any sense. This is going to end poorly for everyone. And yet it was just fantastic. You look at The Matrix and while you were getting the dailies of The Matrix, you're like, what? What is this? People are just flying around on wires. This makes no sense. Even though you read the script, I'm sure you were watching those dailies come in and saying, I don't know what we're going to do here.

55:40John August:Until you had a trailer or some sort of cut-together piece to show, oh, that's what this feels like, you were panicked, I'm sure.

55:49Craig Mazin:Yeah. Very famously, Disney executives saw the initial dailies from Pirates of the Caribbean and they saw an unrecognizable movie star with gold teeth in his mouth and he was sort of swishing about and they went bananas and essentially what they were told by a very powerful producer was tough. Now that paid off. Later on Johnny they got dailies where Johnny Depp was in white face wearing a dead bird in his head. And they probably looked at each other and said, well, let's not freak out. I mean, the last time we freaked out,

56:24John August:we were totally wrong. We got the same director. We got the same actor. We got a big title. Everything's going to be fine. Well, that's life.

56:31Craig Mazin:You know, that's life. I mean, I guess one argument could be, hey, Goldman's Law is true as ever. No one knows anything. So you might as well not worry about anything and just lean back and hope, right? I mean, I think most people in the movie business think they're playing poker when really they're playing roulette. They think they have some kind of strategic edge, some way of some predictable path to victory. Yep. It's basically a big wheel and a ball is bouncing around. And for a lot of people, there are some filmmakers who seem to defy that. but most filmmakers have had at least one Waterloo.

57:16Yeah, it's going to happen.

57:17John August:Craig, I thought that was a terrific analogy to end it on. So the roulette is the truth behind it. The question of why do bad movies get made? Because it's ultimately kind of random and there's going to be wonderful successes but there's going to be some disasters along the way.

57:34Craig Mazin:There will be disasters along the way.

57:36John August:Alas. Alas. It is time for One Cool Things. My one cool thing is a YouTube video series. So Craig won't watch it because he doesn't like YouTube. Oh, I love YouTube. Oh, okay. But in the start of the program, you said you didn't watch YouTube things. I did. Oh, you said you wouldn't want to make a YouTube thing, I guess. Yeah, no, I don't want to. Yeah, no, never. And I honestly would not want to make something as sophisticated as this thing, but God bless the people who do this. So it's called Crash Course. So John Green, who wrote Fault in Our Stars, is involved with the whole thing and behind it.

58:07John August:Bless you for doing this. But the one I want to point people to, because listeners to our show would be fascinated by this, I hope, is an explanation about copyright exceptions and fair use by Stan Mueller. And it's really well done. It's animated and sort of talks through, you know, in the course of a daily life, you're going to violate copyright so many times. In most cases, no one will ever come after you, but they theoretically could. And so then it talks through what fair use is, the current state of how you can get away with fair use. and it's just a really smart explanation of copyright and fair use.

58:39John August:But the whole series is great and there are things about astronomy and world history and US history so I would highly recommend it and I intend to stick my daughter in front of these videos at some point.

58:49Craig Mazin:That's great. You know, I'm a big copyright nerd so I love that they're doing that and people tend to not understand a lot of that. There's so many misconceptions about how that all works and one of the big misconceptions is that it's binary. Like that is a violation or not a violation. Yeah, but then there are violations that have damages and violations that damage no one. And so at that point, there's really, what's the problem? So there's all sorts of interesting things about that. So great, good recommendation. My one cool thing is maybe a cool thing that may be happening. There is a rumor, and it feels pretty good to me, that at the next E3 convention, that's the big video game convention here in Los Angeles, I believe, There will be a 20 to 30 minute demo behind closed doors of the upcoming game Fallout 4.

59:39Craig Mazin:Did you play the Fallout series, Joe?

59:41John August:I did play the Fallout series. I enjoy it.

59:42Craig Mazin:It's great. So Fallout is from Bethesda, the folks that also do the Elder Scrolls series. And this is basically, they are kind of the same game. Elder Scrolls is a quest-based solo adventuring game that takes place in a epic fantasy setting. and Fallout is a quest-based solo adventuring game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic setting. Basically kind of the same thing. And they're great. If you love stories and narrative, it's really, really addictive and fun and they tend to be huge games that are really well-crafted. And it's time. It feels like it's time. So the release schedule from these two, they sort of alternate between them.

1:00:26Craig Mazin:Elder Scrolls 4 came out in 2006 Fallout 3 came out in 2008 Two years later, Fallout New Vegas Which was a very big expansion pack on Fallout 3 One year later, Elder Scrolls 5 Skyrim Now it's been four years Now, during that four years They did release their multiplayer online Yeah, the Elder Scrolls Online One where Rosson Thurber runs around and kills people Correct, exactly Not right now because he's directing a movie But when he's not directing a movie Rosson runs around killing people in the world of Tamriel. But that's kind of what they've been doing. So I think I'll say that was their kind of two-year thing, because I do believe that came out in 2013-14.

1:01:07John August:But what if they're doing nothing? What if they're just like sitting around just like, you know, vaping this whole time?

1:01:11Craig Mazin:It's possible. I would be super angry. I would just be so, so angry. You owed me a game. Well, you know, it's no, I feel like I, I mean, I remember when I got, when Skyrim came out, and I finally got it in the mail. I sat down, I put the CD in my Xbox, and I went, let's begin. Let's begin. This will be, I get to go away from my planet and go somewhere I would much rather be. And a post-apocalyptic wasteland? That's a telling revealage of Craig's story. Well, in Skyrim, it was a snowy fantasy wasteland strewn with dragons. But yeah, my terrible post-apocalyptic wasteland awaits me. I think it's time.

1:01:55Craig Mazin:I think they're going to be announcing it. I'm hoping that my guess is it'll be probably Christmas or a little after Christmas.

1:02:06John August:It'll be before Christmas if they can possibly do it. The AAA console games, they really do like to sell those for Christmas.

1:02:12Craig Mazin:They try. They definitely try. So with Skyrim, they did release it on November 11th, 2011. What I'm scared of is that they'll go, yeah, that's what we're going to do. So we're just going to basically take another year and a half and I'm going to be sad.

1:02:26John August:So out of our 50 ,000 weekly listeners, I just have a feeling that somebody works at Bethesda. So if you are that person who works at Bethesda and you're like, you know what? I want to whisper something to Craig's ear or invite him to a secret closed demo at E3. I think you should write in to ask a John August and let me forward it to Craig because Craig never checks the email. I can't check the email.

1:02:47Craig Mazin:You don't give me the password.

1:02:48John August:I don't give Craig the password. It would be so dangerous. I only forward him the really nice emails and the really nice email from Bethesda saying, oh, you know what? You should come check out the new thing we're building. Hey, it's like we do have a podcast.

1:03:00Craig Mazin:People listen to us, right? So let me come see this thing.

1:03:04John August:Because Lord knows that game they're making will not be successful without this podcast. No, not without our 50 ,000 listeners.

1:03:10Craig Mazin:It'll never happen.

1:03:12John August:Meanwhile, I'm making a game that you won't even play the demo for yet. Oh, play it. You'll play it. I'm going to send you a link to the Kickstarter page after this so you can see what we did because it turned out really well.

1:03:23Craig Mazin:The thing is, I have this discussion with my son all the time and as I'm having it, I know that I'm just as bad if not worse. I'm like, look, it's better to if you're really into Pokemon video game it would be better for you to actually let's transition to just the cards and stuff so that it's reading and not just video game stuff. But I also I'm guilty.

1:03:43John August:Guilty. Guilty. Craig does read. I see him reading through his Dungeons & Dragons manuals at every session. He loves to read. I do love reading that. He also loves to read your comments on our podcast. So if you would like to leave a comment about this show or any show, the great place to do it is to leave us a review on iTunes because we actually do look at those and those are terrific and they help other people find us. While you're at iTunes, you can download the Script Notes app, which just got updated, so it should not get frozen midway through an episode anymore, which happened to some people, so sorry about that.

1:04:16John August:We also look at the comments on Facebook. And so people left some good suggestions on Facebook for things for our 200th and for USB drives. So thank you for that. The short little bits of nuggets for Craig, you can send to at CL Mason on Twitter. I'm at John August. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedle, as always. It's edited by Matthew Cilelli, who's also busy doing the score for our video for this. So thank you, Matthew, for all your hard work. As we quickly approach our 200th episode, I would ask you who would you love to have be on the show as a guest I can't promise it would happen on the 200th but we talked about our thoughts but if you have thoughts for someone you'd love to see come on the show always let us know those and Craig thank you so much for a fun episode thank you John all right have a great weekend you too bye

1:05:12Thank you.