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Scriptnotes Podcast Episode 714 - Three Page Challenge Live in Austin 2025
Episode Overview In this live episode of the Scriptnotes Podcast, hosted by screenwriters John August and Craig Mazin, the duo conducts a "Three Page Challenge" with a group of listeners at St. David's Episcopal Church in Austin. They critique three listener-submitted scripts, discussing elements such as world-building, character specificity, and suspense creation. The episode also includes insights into the release of their new book, "Scriptnotes: A Book About Screenwriting and Things That Are Interesting to Screenwriters."
Key Topics Discussed
Introduction
- John and Craig welcome the audience and acknowledge the bravery of the script submitters.
- Mention of their new book "Scriptnotes" officially released on the day of the episode.
Three Page Challenge
- Purpose of the Challenge: Listeners submit the first three pages of their scripts to receive honest feedback.
- Selection Process: Producer Drew Marquardt reads through submissions and selects scripts that offer interesting discussion points.
- Live Interaction: The session allows for direct dialogue with the writers, enhancing the critique process.
Script Analysis
- Ancient Grains by Michael Warnecke
- Synopsis: A post-apocalyptic scenario where teens cause a barn fire, leading to a blind punishment.
- Feedback:
- Logic Questions: Discussion around the motivation of characters and the believability of their actions.
- Character Development: Emphasized the need for distinct character traits and names to enhance emotional connection.
- World-Building: Suggested more detail on the setting and stakes involved in the characters' actions.
- High North by Teddy Johnson
- Synopsis: A Coast Guard crew discovers an empty cargo ship filled with dead bodies amid an Arctic environment.
- Feedback:
- Tone and Atmosphere: Recognized the effectiveness of creating a suspenseful setting but suggested minimizing dialogue to enhance tension.
- Character Introductions: Importance of giving characters distinct traits even if they are not the protagonists.
- Visual Descriptions: Encouraged more sensory details to immerse readers in the environment.
- Tall Poppies by Becca Hurd
- Synopsis: Features a woman named Teddy conning patrons at a pub in Australia and introduces another character, Zoe, who is a surfer.
- Feedback:
- Character Dynamics: Encouraged clarity on character relationships and goals to heighten audience engagement.
- Pacing and Structure: Suggested improvements in scene transitions and character introductions for a smoother narrative flow.
- Tonal Consistency: Discussed balancing humor and serious themes in the script.
Additional Insights
- Crafting Suspense and Humor: Throughout the discussions, both John and Craig share insights on building suspense and how comedy can coexist with dramatic scenarios.
- Audience Engagement: They answered questions from the audience, addressing topics like the importance of a strong start in scripts and techniques to guide a reader’s attention.
Call to Action John and Craig encourage listeners to purchase their new book as a valuable resource for screenwriters and to engage with the podcast by submitting scripts or questions for future episodes.
Conclusion The live episode successfully blends critical analysis with interactive discussion, showcasing the dynamic between the hosts and the writers, while providing valuable insights into scriptwriting techniques.
Links and Resources
- [Scriptnotes Book](https://scriptnotesbook.com/)
- [Become a Scriptnotes Premium Member](https://scriptnotes.supportingcast.fm/)
- [Podcast on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@ScriptnotesPodcast)
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This markdown serves as a comprehensive summary of the episode, highlighting key discussions, feedback provided to the scriptwriters, and overarching themes related to screenwriting found in the episode.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:28Hello and welcome. My name is John August. did a great job. Anybody who agrees to do this is very brave. Anybody who agrees to do this live in front of a lot of people under the watchful eyes of Jesus is particularly brave. And so I'm like thumbs up to these three. They were very courageous and I hope that we help them as we try. So as always, if you want to read along with these samples, you can pause this and we'll I'll have links in the show notes to the PDF so you can read those PDFs before we get into it. But before you do that, Craig, today, the day the episode drops, the scripted book is out in the world in physical form, in hardcover.
1:08Oh my God. This is it. It is. So apparently Australia is not until January 4th, but the rest of the world gets it today. And the audio book, we'd had Graham Rowett on recently to talk through an audio book. Please, if you have the book and it comes to you, post on Instagram, post on TikTok, tag Script Notes Podcast, and we will repost you. We will hype you up. I will hype you up. If you do so, we can also send you the bonus chapter that we sent to all the pre-orders. If you haven't gotten that yet, Drew can send that to you because I'm just so excited that the book is finally out there in the world.
1:41Yeah, and I got to say, if you waited, I get it. But now you got to actually start thinking about Christmas gifts for your stupid friends. And this is a great Christmas gift for your stupid friends, you know? 100%. You should go to a party and everyone should give each other this big orange book. It just smells like Christmas. I love it. Well, also, if you have parents who can never figure out what to get you, just get yourself the scripted book and give them and bill them. It's$32. Exactly. They'll be thrilled that it's under$5 ,000. They'll be so happy. Absolutely. All the tuition you've saved, it makes it absolutely completely worthwhile.
2:17Bingo. So enjoy this trip back to the Austin Film Festival and our live three-page challenge. For our premium listeners, stick around because we will have some bonus questions from that session where we answered questions from the audience that were actually really good. We had good questions overall at Austin. So enjoy.
3:02Hello and welcome. My name is John August. And my name is Greg Mason. And this is a three-page challenge for Script Notes. So for folks who are not aware, every once in a while we ask our listeners if they would like to send in the first three pages of their screenplay, of their pilot, and we will talk about it on the air. So it's a very brave thing for people to do because we're honest with our criticism. We're not harsh, but we're very honest. I'm a little harsh. You're a little harsh. So Drew, who's our producer, diligently reads through all the entries and picks ones that he thinks will be good to talk about on the air.
3:39So sometimes they're the best, but sometimes they're the things with the most interesting stuff to talk about. So that's really an example of what we have here today because we asked specifically people who are going to be coming to AFF if we could look at the first three pages of their script and a bunch of people sent through their samples, which is really nice. And what's great about doing it here at Austin is that we can bring the person up and actually talk to them about the script they wrote. Which forces us to be even more concerned about being harsh. And yet, I will do it. We'll try to be honest.
4:12So you can find these samples, PDFs, at johnaugust.com. It's the first blog post you're going to see there. and so you can open these up and so you can read along with us as we're looking at these samples because some of what we're talking about is literally how it's laid out on the page. So some stuff is, we're going to be talking story and character and everything else, but it's also what it looks like, what it feels like. And Craig, talk to me about the three-page challenge because the idea of three pages came from stuff you were doing. Yeah, there was a theory that I had that you could probably tell if a script was going to be theoretically good or absolutely never good from reading three pages.
4:50And the truth is, you'll learn a lot in three pages. There are fundamental things that we see people do well, and there are fundamental things that we see people not doing well. If the three pages aren't working in and of themselves, it doesn't mean that it's not fixable. Everything's fixable, and we're all working and constantly revising and doing things and getting better. And this focus that we put on these is kind of the way it works in the business. So this is a good colonoscopy. I mean, the first three pages are really the first impression. And so as we've had guests on the show who are showrunners who are looking to staff a room or producers or agents or managers, we talk to them about, like, well, you get a script, how far are you reading into it?
5:35And some will say, oh, the first 10 pages. But a lot of people will say, like, kind of the first three or four pages, you get a sense of, like, does this person have a voice that's interesting and I want to keep following? They're looking for the excuse to set the script down. and if those first three pages give them that excuse, they might sit the script down. They'll take it. It's been really interesting over the years to see how some of these do grab you. There's this thing that happens where your eyeballs, sometimes words are sticky and your eyeballs stick on them and it's good and sometimes the pages are slippery and your eyes just...
6:07Part of the question is, why do these things happen? I'm also contractually obligated to tell you that we've been doing the show for 14 years. We've come to Austin Film Festival for 11 years. It's the first year we're here to hype up our book. So we have a book coming out December 2nd. The Script Notes book is basically a collection, a compendium of everything we've talked about over the course of 11 years about screenwriting, intercut with chapters from many of the amazing guests we've had on the show. So show of hands, who in this room has already pre-ordered the book? That's a good number. Thank you very much for that.
6:39Thank you, guys. Last night at the live show, I was strongly urging people to pre-order the book. Craig, do you remember the reasons why people need to pre-order the book rather than just getting it on December 2nd? As I recall, what you said is that pre-orders are how bookstores know whether or not they should stock the book, whether libraries know whether they should have the book available for lending, and also in theory, it's how bestseller lists are put together. But you aim much higher than I do. And the reality is that bestseller lists are based on first week sales, but all the pre-orders are counted as the first week sales.
7:13So if we can get a big number for that, it's fantastic. And so our publisher at Crown sent an email saying, a month out, it's looking good. But as we all know, good is... Yeah, as the people who wrote these will find out, good is not great. No, good is not great. So if you're enjoying the Shireness podcast, if you're enjoying what we're doing today, and you want to pre-order the book, we would much appreciate it because it's going to be a good resource for you all the times. We have a podcast you can listen to every week, but this is a podcast in book form, which is good and useful. Let us tackle our first three-page challenge.
7:46Let's dig in. So our first three-page challenge is called Ancient Grains. It's by... Michael Warnicke is how it is. Michael Warnicke. Great. We have a synopsis here. In a barn on a barren field with starving animals, a group of drunk teens accidentally knock over a space heater, burning down a barn, and killing all the animals inside. We then cut to those same teens standing before the town in this village center being reprimanded by a man named Foucher for using quote-unquote ancient machines. As punishment, he sentences the teens to being blinded. As they force the teens to drink a poison, Ruth marches forward and begs Foucher not to blind both of her sons as she'll have no one left to work the farm.
8:24Foucher agrees and forces Ruth to choose which of her children will be blinded. When she finally does, her other son cries in anguish as he's forced to drink the poison. Ruth bitterly thanks Foucher and the weeping parents gather their blinded children. And that's what happens at the first three pages here. Craig, talk to us about this, because this is some sort of post-apocalyptic situation. It seems like we're in the future, but it's old technologies. Yeah, it could be. It could be like some super culty, hyper-Amish sort of thing. So a lot of times we'll get into the granularity of how people have actually written this out.
9:01But I want to start with a big logic question. So in this scenario, teens are kind of partying in a barn and they've got the space heater. Side note, I didn't feel cold. So the space heater didn't feel super motivated. So you want to make sure like if a space heater is important, show that it's cold outside. And then they get caught because they burn the thing down and they get blinded. It seems like they're all very aware, because it surely has happened before, that the punishment for using new machinery is getting blinded. They seem really fine as they're using the space heater. If the punishment for using a space heater is getting blinded, I'd probably just put a coat on.
9:44So the thing is, what do they need to use? And how can we show that it is something that they absolutely needed to use to get to something they really wanted, knowing what the risk was, and then they get caught? That feels stronger to me. And so what I'm excited to have Michael here, because so often we're doing this on the podcast and we really don't have a good sense of what the whole script is or sort of what this is leading to, but we can ask Michael when it comes up, why starting here? What is it about this scenario that is the best way to get into what his story is? Because we don't have a clear sense of what the story is.
10:16We're seeing a mother having to make a terrible choice between her two sons at the end of the three pages. But we, as the reader, don't know, is Ruth really an important character? Is this high official an important character who's going to be coming back? It feels like we're establishing kind of the feel of the world, but I don't have a good sense of quite what the movie is yet. So I'm glad to be able to talk to Michael about this. Well, here's, I mean, the idea that you're going to go down the line of these teenagers and each one of them has to drink this stuff knowing full well that it'll make them blind.
10:48Again, slight logic point, not sure how you can like instantly go blind from drinking something, but let's just say you can. That's terrifying if I weren't asking a lot of questions. so one thing to consider is that this scene maybe happens too soon if you are in a community and you know what the rules are right up front and you also see that weirdly a couple of people are blind like more than you would imagine would be blind in a small group and that's an interesting okay that's curious and then these kids get together and say we're gonna do this and break the rules now i'm invested because i understand the rules and then i see oh the punishment is they made these kids blind.
11:28Okay. But what happens here is there's a lot of stuff that happens really fast. And then on top of it, we have Sophie's Choice occurring. And it's always tricky when you have Sophie's Choice because Sophie's Choice did Sophie's Choice. So when a mother has to choose between two kids, it can feel a little bit familiar in that regard. So this may be a case where what we often prescribe, which is get into it faster, we might want to delay this and get into it slower. I would agree too. Let's focus in on how we're encountering what is here on the page and talk about what's working on the page and what we need to amplify or rearrange to make this work a little bit better.
12:11I think my biggest macro concern of what I was actually seeing on the page is things felt vague. In this second block where we're in this ramshackle barn, There's a group of teens, but they're not differentiated. There's seven of them, but I don't know, what's the split of male and female? Who are they? What are they like? Ultimately, two of these kids are going to become important because they're Ruth's sons, but they're not distinguished in this first scene. We're not following them separately or better. And it's described as they are doing typical teenage things. Well, you've got to be specific here.
12:41We need to see what exactly they're doing and how the space heater fits into all this. So the fact that we don't have any dialogue, We don't have any specific actions for them. We don't have a sense of, well, there's probably not music playing if there's nothing else, but what is actually happening in here feels important because right now it just reads as being very vague. The people in here, they're not even uppercase to let us know that they're someone we need to follow. They don't have names. This is a real challenge. And it's coming off of an establishing shot, which is just showing us that it is bleak and barren.
13:13Fields, even the weeds seem to struggle. We have squarmy cows poking at the jerk for food. And then we're moving into dusk. It's just, we're getting a lot of this kind of vague setup as not being very specific to where we're encountering this story. A lot of things happen very quickly. Normally, efficiency is terrific, but sometimes it can come with a cost. And here I think we do have a cost because we see that the world is barren. There isn't much food. There's a pasture that's blighted. The cows are skinny. When you see skinny cows, you know, yeah, it's trouble. Bad stuff. Then we hear laughter, and we meet all these kids who don't seem to realize that they're living in a world without food and people that can blind them.
13:55So there's this confusion that immediately happens, and then John's absolutely right. For instance, the heater tips over, and a burlap bag catches fire. No one notices. Now, this is exciting. Fire is exciting to shoot on film. But what happens here is that little flicker spreads to surround hay and blossoms. Someone grabs a stable blanket, like a horse blanket. Who is someone? Like someone is not a great term for this. Someone grabs a blanket, tosses it onto flames, but it's already too late. What was everybody else doing? Is there panic? Is there fear? Does somebody freeze? Is somebody trying to be a hero?
14:33Fire, like, do you know how many meetings you have to have if you're going to have fire? Oh my God. So it's got to be worth it. and you've got to figure out exactly where everyone is relative to it. And I think here it just feels a little abrupt. So we're coming off, the barn is going to burn down, this is a dusk, and then we're cutting to village center day. But we're not cutting to, there's not a transition to. This is a big change in where we were versus where we're going to. For the reader, that's where you put a transition line in there. So it could be literally transition to, colon, or cut to.
15:06Just like a sense of like, this was the big panorama we were seeing of the barn burning. probably smash cut to the village the next day or however many days later, and we're up on this stage where this voucher is going through this is the process that's going to happen to these teens. And I guess they're all culpable equally. That's a thing that is also worthy to be a try. I guess because they were all benefiting from the heater. We do talk a lot about transitions and how to use our medium visually to get from one scene to the next. So here's something that you generally want to avoid. We go from this visual, the startled teens watch in horror as fire engulfs the barn.
15:46And then the next thing is, so that's dusk. Then the next thing is day. So the next day, these teens now stand in a row. That's a hard thing to cut from. From those teens to those teens, it's going to be a bit jarring. If you went from those teens to close up of a jug of liquid and people are, you know, we hear like sniffling and we hear, you know, the creek and somebody breathing and then we reveal these kids are now on their knees or something on, then there's a reveal. So you want to always think in terms of big to small, alive to object, loud to quiet. Contrasts are what help us get between places.
16:27Make that cut. And so as we come to this stage where Voucher's going to give this speech, we hear that members of the community, many of whom are weeping, are gathered there. Members of the community, I don't know how many, is it five people? Is it 50 people? I don't have a sense of the scale. And because this is all new to us, we really want to know how large is this group. Because it's going to feel very different if it's 100 people or if it's five people. Next, we're going to meet Ruth, who is the mother of two of these boys. Again, we don't know these boys specifically. We don't know what they're like.
16:57We don't know which one's older, which one's younger. It feels like they should have names. But most crucially, Ruth is going to be doing a lot of talking here, and we don't get anything about her. Sorry, we do get an age. We get 36. But we don't have a sense of what kind of woman she is. Wardrobe, hair, makeup. Yeah. What is she wearing? Is she dirty? Do they have makeup? Is she tired? And what is her, I mean, hair is honestly, it's a huge thing. Like, what is their hair like? Bedraggled, dirty? So all we're going to know about her is that she's a member of this community and she's the boy's mother.
17:25But because we don't know anything about the boys, we don't know anything about Ruth specifically, it's really tough. I guess a question we'll ask Michael when he comes up here is, how important is that we have all the other 17s there also? Because right now there are extras or their featured extras who are going to be drinking this poison and reacting. But it's really about these two boys. And it's like, you know, if they are the instigators, they should be the ones who are taking the punishment there. So one thing that happens here is these other kids are getting blinded and mom, Ruth, is just worried about her two kids.
17:58I think the other people in the community might be like, hey, Ruth, did you not notice that Dylan just got turned blind? I mean, that's my kid. Like, what about my kid? But they're also, they're in a village center. Describe the village. What is in the village? We do not know anything. There is no further description of the village beyond the fact that there's an elevated wood platform where these kids are standing waiting to be blinded. So as we wrap up this analysis here, I do like the idea of quickly getting into a Sophie's Choice. And it is a Sophie's Choice, but if I knew who these two boys were and our first exposure to Ruth is this mother having to make this choice.
18:40That's really compelling if I already got a better sense of what this world is like and who she is in it. So I think we could probably get to here and not many more pages than this, but we're just very rushed to get to where we are right now. Set up. Some good logic questions. Let's ask ourselves truly, how would this go? If you were a kid living in this town and you knew what the deal is, what would lead you to violate the rules, et cetera? And because Michael is actually here, we can ask him these questions. Michael, please come on up. Come on up.
19:11Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for sending in your pages. It's really great to have you here to be able to talk to you about it. Good for another 10 years. Yeah, exactly. You don't have to do that again for another 10 years. So, Michael, we're only reading three pages, but have you written the whole thing and what's actually happening in this world? Yeah, sure. So I've completed a first draft. I'm in the process of doing a rewrite right now. So I chose to open the script with introducing the antagonist and try to establish the rules of this world where they have very harsh rules where human life isn't valued the same way and the punishment's very high.
19:46And so the only person that's really important long term is Foucher. The others are more just kind of stand-ins for the rules of this world. Okay, so now we have a perspective question. So we like to talk about, well, whose perspective is the scene from? If he is the important one, there's also a world where this begins with we meet a guy and he's standing there looking at the ruins of a barn. And he finds what caused it, a heater, and who was here and who was it. And then he goes and we, and then he meets out justice. So we go, oh God, this guy that we, you know, we're sort of identifying with is kind of a nightmare.
20:24Because the perspective here feels like it's mom. So depending on who is important, we have to think about how we want to go in and whose shoulder is the camera over, if that makes sense. That's so helpful to know that this is meant to introduce him as the villain antagonist at the very start because a lot of the choices you're making make so much more sense knowing that now. The reason why the teens are sort of non-discriminate, we sort of don't care and individualize them is because they're not the focus. The challenge is, reading through these pages, it looked like the camera was aimed at them rather than sort of the voucher who is the person you really want to be exploring here.
21:06So Craig's suggestion is a good way to do it where we're really kind of encountering this world and entering this world from his point of view and sort of him dealing with the aftermath of this rather than sort of the setup of this. So character, I would love to know, does this guy enjoy this? Does he like pouring this liquid down their throats? Is he a sadist? No, he has a perspective that's been informed by his own life where someone very close to him died because of exposure to an old technology that ended up killing his daughter. Okay. But he's also part of a, I don't get into it a lot in the story because I don't want to go off on the rails on this direction, but there's sort of a religious order that's developed where technology is banned and they have a hold of the kind of the power structure.
21:53Got it. So in a circumstance like that, what I want to see is humanity first. So this is a man whose grief has damaged him, and he is trying to keep people safe. He's trying to keep them from dying. When he administers this, people beat their children out of rage. People also hit their children out of this measured eye. This is going to hurt me more than it's going to hurt you. I personally never hit my kids. You don't need to. You just have to have a very stern voice. That said, I would love to see what he's feeling. If he is a father and somebody that had a child and he's doing this to children, does this hurt his soul to do?
22:36And he's just that he has to. These are the questions that I have about him as a person. Villains who are human are always more interesting. And a question we asked about sort of weather and cold and this kind of stuff, where is this set for you? If you were to shoot this tomorrow, where would this be set? The idea is that this takes place maybe 400 or 500 years in the future in rural Wisconsin. That feels right. And again, the dusting of snow or something else like that might also help us there get a sense of the specificity of this place. Because right now it's just reading as kind of post-apocalyptic anywhere.
23:12And so grounding in a place could really help us out. A little something about the apocalypse. one thing that you get to do it's fun when you're doing something apocalyptic is show what's left over that has been grown over abandoned things that used to be valuable to us that mean nothing now Wisconsin, a lot of farms tons of farms maybe in 400, 500 years most of them have fallen apart burnt down, whatever but then I kind of want to see that but I also sort of want to see like you know, in the distance there's a mobile sign. A water tower. There was something, right? Water tower. The world has not been scraped clean.
23:59It just stopped. And when things stop nobody really goes around cleaning it up. Vehicles, planes, all that good stuff. So think about the opportunities that you have there. Michael, thank you so much for sending me to the chat. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Graham. Thank you. I mean, that wasn't too bad. I mean, I'm not, I think it wasn't too bad. He's probably like, Jesus. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Sorry, I'm in the church. Lightning bolts come down. The next script we're going to be talking about is High North by Teddy Johnson. Teddy, raise your hand if you're out here. There you go, Teddy. Thank you very much for sending this through.
24:40Here is what's happening in these three pages. A black cargo ship drifts in the ice of the Arctic Circle. A Coast Guard ship attempts to make contact with the cargo ship, but when there's no answer, Captain Alamos and three other officers board the dark and seemingly empty cargo ship. Inside, they find dozens of dead bodies, all frostbitten black and decomposing. One shackled corpse holding a stuffed polar bear startles the men when it springs to life and screams at them while begging them not to take us back before an officer knocks them out with a flashlight. When he does, hundreds more corpses are discovered.
Read the full transcript
25:15The next sequence begins with a montage of news footage on unrest over skyrocketing energy costs. And that's where we're at, at the bottom of three pages. Okay. I love a good scary thing set in an Arctic area. I love the Arctic setting. I'll say cover page looks great. The only thing I would ask for is a date. A date on a cover page is just a thing you kind of look for and to see how recent it is. everything else here flawless and great. And you can always lie about the date. Yeah, you just lie about it. Make it more recent. Craig, talk to us about your exposure here. And really, we should talk about what kind of scene this is because it's very classically a setup.
25:54It's a cold open. This is a good old-fashioned cold open. And the job really is, how do I do this scene in a way that hasn't been done before? I'm not sure this gets to that. It is somewhat following the formula, but it does the formula fairly well. A couple of things that sort of stopped me as I was going through. There's lots of good visuals here. But sometimes people are talking when they wouldn't normally talk. I think there's just a lot of extra dialogue we don't need. It's scarier when it's quieter. And generally when people work together, they don't need to talk unless it's important. Especially in a situation like this, which is pretty grim.
26:30They get into this room and there's this big reveal, which is the big reveal. Dead bodies, dozen or so. Men, all ages, ethnicities, flora wash in a grayish slurry. Now, grayish slurry is capitalized. It's the Arctic, everything's frozen. Yeah, so why is it not frozen? Why is it a slurry? That may be important. It might be, but then I want to know more about the grayish slurry. I want them to note that nobody seems to care about the liquid that's not frozen. If it is frozen, I still want them to, if it's important to me, it should be important to them. They're looking good. Agreed. Yeah. And then a guy trips over a corpse, which is actually kind of awesome.
27:07I love that. Yeah. And we should say that you hear a thump, bump. We hear a thump before this. And we're... So we get a little jump scare. Love it. Great. And then the captain looks at him and goes, we good? And the guy says, yeah, fine. And then he looks at something else and goes, the hell is this? If one of your underlings trips over a corpse and you turn back and you see that, you're just like glaring. And he's like, you know, sorry. You don't need, because it's undermining the vibe you want to get. I got pretty confused. I'm curious to see what you thought about this. When they get to a teenager and he's gripping a polar bear in his fist and they're all like, hmm.
27:48And Captain Alamo says, call the medic, though I doubt, well, as if to say, maybe this kid's alive. And then, blah, the kid's alive. Yeah. And part of your reason for your confusion is he's identified as a teen, but then the dialogue is for Shackled Man. Shackled Man. And so I was thinking, wait, is this the same person? I'm looking for teen in the dialogue. Yeah, it seemed to me like jump scare wise, we all know it's coming, but I think that they would just be like, wow, this is sad. We're going to have to report this mundane sort of stuff. And one of them, you know, touches the polar bear and then the guy, but the, again, the dialogue felt a little bit, I don't know, low stakes kind of talking.
28:26Yeah. As if you weren't in a room full of frozen bodies. Yeah. That's totally really what I want to see if we can achieve here, but the scenario was fun. But yeah, you're reading through the three pages and you get what this setup is. I understood why I saw that, that it was setting this thing up. And then as we get to the news footage, I was like, okay, this is all going to be related. I can see how these two things can plausibly fit together. Let's talk about the very opening here. Right now we're starting with a super, 157 miles north of the Arctic Circle. A black cargo ship drifts amid cracked tapestry of ice.
28:59But then in the next block, it's unusual, flat, no bridge, no flag, listing on its side. That belongs up with the description of the ship in that first section. Because right now it's after Captain Alamos, so you think it's part of his description because it's really what he's seeing. But I'm saying his, I have no idea if Captain Alamos is a man or is a woman. I have no idea what the age is. Yes, this is probably a disposable character, but give us something to anchor ourselves. Casting people have to cast somebody. They're like, help. Help us. Help us, desperately. So that's why giving him or her a first name and just some sense of what kind of person this is, is a godsend.
29:37And it helps everybody in production, but also just a reader that forms some image in our head. Is it Sam Neill that I'm looking at? And also USS Healy, what kind of boat is that? I don't know. We don't know. So these are things we'll want to know so we get a sense of what kind of space we're in for this. And as we get, so we're going from the big ship onto a small craft navigating the ice-strewn waters. Tell us how this feels. Give me a line to sort of put me in this space because I don't know how cold this is. I don't know what this is actually really like. I don't know how close are we to them.
30:12So if it doesn't give me, like, are we on, you know, is it a motorized boat? So are we looking at the outrigger? Are we looking at an oar? Are we looking at this guy's face shivering? I want to feel all that because it's such an evocative idea, this boat clacking its way through these chunks of ice that are floating in water. I think you're absolutely right, by the way, to get the description of the boat together, and then I would actually put the super after that. I would agree. Let us look at some stuff, wonder where we are, and then you give us 157 miles north of the Arctic Circle. On page two, I'm also feeling, things are just feeling a little too empty.
30:49Yes, this is kind of, it's a little bit of a sock scene. and we can kind of fill in some details ourselves, but give us a little bit more about what the inside of the ship feels like. What does it sound like? If the boat is listing, because you've said it's sloping, that's a great detail. So it's the whole thing is accanted so you're having to walk up slopes. That could be cool. You hear it creaking as ice banging against it. All these things are suspenseful and will create the mood you probably are looking for here. The officer trips on a corpse. That is a guy who is singled out and he needs to be uppercase because he's going to be saying a line or at least needs to be singled out as a person who's useful.
31:29Tell us something about him or her so we get some sense of what the dynamic is. Yeah. There's also, and this is a choice, the shackled man slash teen yells in French. Now, if the idea is that the people he's speaking French to don't speak French and it doesn't seem like they do, they seem like Americans, it might be better to just put this in French. so that we understand that they don't understand. Because you're not going to be subtitling it, right? Because it's not, it's more like, he's alive is the point. And later we'll find out what he said. And either choice could work. You could subtitle it, but if it is subtitled, then I'd say put it in subtitle so we know what the intention is behind that.
32:10It's hard to subtitle a jump scare moment. It's really hard. So it feels like what's scary is that this guy is suddenly alive and he's curiously speaking French and he's holding a polar bear. all good mysteries, so might as well just keep them mysterious. But we don't have to leave it as mystery because we have Teddy right here. Teddy, come on up. Let's talk about this. Teddy, tell us about this script. Is the whole thing written? Is it just these three pages? What have you written of this? This has been through a few drafts. It's all written. The main reason I thought I'd toss this into the mix here was because this opening is kind of brand new, and it was based on notes I got from a random blacklist reviewer and also a friend of mine who occasionally reads my stuff.
32:52And they both had a similar note about the previous opening, which was actually just the news montage thing. But then later on, 10-11 pages in, they mentioned this ghost ship that's disappeared in the Arctic. And they were like, that seems kind of cool. Why don't you play with that? So I played with that. And that's what you're looking at. Great. And that's good advice. I think opening with a ghost ship almost always works. 50 % of the time works 100 % of the time. Of the characters we meet in this opening, are any of them important? This is just setting up the world, correct? This is all set up.
33:24We never see any of these people. Well, that's not technically true, but none of these people is the antagonist or the protagonist. That all comes on page four. Are we guessing the tone right? To me, this feels like a scary world-threatening thing is happening. Is that correct? Yeah, I guess the vibe here, I think the idea is sort of like, this is like a dated comp, but like Three Days of the Condor, kind of paranoid government conspiracy thriller. That's kind of what we're aiming at. And I realize that sort of the ghost ship jump scare thing might seem a little bit too much. Too much horror movie, yeah.
33:58Yeah, but that's not a horror movie. This is like, like I said, I know that's a good day to come, but that's kind of the vibe we're looking for. I can see that completely. Yeah, this feels like the sort of thing that Tony Scott would have done an incredible job with. Exactly, yes. Yeah, rest in peace. As you were sitting in the audience and were talking through your pages. How much did you hate it? How much are you? Oh my God, I'm so angry. Did they make sense? Were we misreading things you were intending to do? No, you keyed in on, I would say, three or four things that I've also gone back and forth on.
34:27For example, the kid versus the shackled man. We're obviously going to discover, why is there a ghost ship with a bunch of people shackled in the middle of the Arctic Circle? That's kind of the big mystery we're going to resolve. I don't know why I changed. I went back and forth on the person who wakes up and does the jump scare thing, like why is it a boy? There's a reason why there's like all these different ages of men in this ship and all different ethnicities and I think that was a place where I was just going fast and like again it was like the second time I wrote this opening and I think I got caught off on like the consistency there.
34:58But I also this is like a personal thing but I just try to like write very spare and so I like Captain Alamos like not describe, I see why you would want to describe Captain Alamos, give it like an adjective something, but also like I just want to move fast through the first thing and like I want to underline, I really liked that it was moving quickly. And there were times where I felt like you could have even moved a little more quickly. Because as they're circling the boat and there's a ladder bolt to the side, I don't even need the ladder bolt on the side as long as I see them climbing off the ladder onto the deck.
35:29You could probably do some things even a little bit faster than that. Because as an audience and as readers, we have a sense of what you're doing and that this is compelling quickly and we want to get on that boat. I think you did a really good job. I mean, this should be sort of spare. And it doesn't take many words to go, she's 40, weathered, tired, cold. That's it. It's barely anything. It just helps us fill it in. Because honestly, what in my head, he turned into like, you know, the boat guy from Tintin with the beard and the corny? That's what he was in my head. He literally was Captain whatever his name was.
36:04Yeah, Captain Haddock, which is not what you wanted. No, that's not the vibe. Speaking of consistency, tell us about this grayish slurry yeah so again like have gone back and forth on like do we like draw more attention to that or not but what that grayish slurry is is hyper relevant to the ultimate story and again one of the things that I'm trying to do over the course of the script is just build an incredible sense of like mystery that builds like a huge reveal and so I didn't want to go into that too much yeah because like at this point but but but this is all it says flora wash in a grayish slurry.
36:40No one comments on it, which means no one's looking at it, which means the camera's, but if he walks in and we hear squish and he looks down and he's confused because in this room of ice and everything, there's this stuff that isn't solid, that is weird and melted. And then he moves on. I'm like, okay, well that's relevant. But otherwise, it just it's just going to be a grayish slurry no one will notice. Yeah. I live in fear of like more than two lines of description of narrative? I just do not. I'm going to give you a Catherine Bigelow script where it's like 12 lines in a row. Absolutely. So a thing we often talk about in free page challenges is how things feel on the page.
37:20It's how much white space there is on the page. And I'll say in these pages, it's very spare and the paragraphs are short. It invites you to read down the page and actually read every word on the page. But you can break things up a little bit more. The extra few words or sentences we're asking in a few places, I really don't think we'll slowly read and we'll just anchor people, make them feel like, oh, I'm glad I read that because I understand this moment, this visual better. You can always, three lines, you can start worrying after three. Yeah, absolutely. Two is a little severe. I appreciate the permission.
37:52Yeah, yeah, I'm wrong with that. Permission granted. Teddy, so this is, you've written a couple drafts of this script. How many other scripts have you written? This is like the third or fourth feature script I've written. And has it gotten easier or harder with each script? I don't know that it ever gets easier. I think I just am more comfortable with just like, I don't know, messing stuff up and iterating and trying and just going like, you go a little bit faster because you know, that's all. But I wouldn't say it's easier. You just fail faster. That's a crucial thing Teddy has learned. Nicely done.
38:24Describe my career. Thank you. Thank you, Teddy. All right. Zeroing in on number three. Number three. Number three. All right, number three is Tall Poppies by Becca Hurd. A woman named Teddy sits at a pub in Sydney, Australia during a rowdy Australian football game. She buys a pub-branded T-shirt and, pretending to be an employee, tells a group of customers they need one of their cars moved. The customers are too wrapped up in the football game, so she offers to move the car for them. Teddy takes the man's keys and drives off and away. We are then acquainted with the Oceanside town of Edith Beach, where Zoe, in her early 30s, Indian, Australian, and muscular, surfs with her dog, Rosie, on the front of her surfboard.
39:08We then see Zoe working at her food truck. And that's what we've accomplished in three pages of Tall Poppies. It's a fun cover page. A fun cover page. Let's hold it to show the audience because they may not be able to see it on their spot. I'm not sure they're going to be able to see that either. So it has a nice typeface for Tall Poppies, which is good and so distinctive. There's a gun shooting a flower. It says Pilot, written by Becca Hurd. It's good for us to know that this is a pilot, not a feature. And it has her email address, which is perfect. It has the date. I love everything on this coverage.
39:39Yeah, no, it's grabby. And also, the other stuff is like, oh, it has to be all courier. No, it doesn't. It all looks great. We don't care. Nobody cares. So, I really enjoyed this. And what I particularly enjoyed was that I was confused until I got it, which was great. Now, there are a couple of things that early, I probably was not good confusion. Interior, the Waddle Seed Hotel, Sydney night. Now, when I think of the interior of a hotel, I don't think of a rowdy bar full of sports watching. So here is, having just come back from Sydney, Australia, hotel means bar, and it's confusing in Sydney, but it's actually true.
40:17This would be a problem because we're not in Sydney. You're going to have to do a little bit of tailoring there, just for Americans so that they don't. But honestly, if we scratch out the word hotel, the waddle scene, we would get it as a bar. We would get it. And here she is, small, unassuming, and she's alone, which is terrific. And the first thing we see is that she's not really there. We're looking at a woman with her eyes closed and we're hearing beautiful violin, and then as we pull out, we realize she's in this bedlam and she's in her own head. This is very evocative, and I can do it. If I had to direct this, I could direct it.
40:53I know what to do. So that's super helpful, and I love the way the sound comes in. I have really one question. I honestly have one question, and that is, her plan relies on something that I'm not sure is a reliable thing, even like much, because she's like, hey, can you move your car? I mean, I think a lot of people would be like, okay. It's a little bit of a stretch to think, hey, they're going to give me their keys and let me move the car for them. I bought it. I feel like Teddy was making, it was a reach, but also felt like I was impressed by her and then she pulled it off. I bought it at the course of this movie.
41:32There's sort of refrigerated logic like, wait, would he actually do that? But it worked for me in the moment really well. One thing, I liked how this all started. On the page, this all reads really well. There's a good variation of paragraph sizes. One thing I would ask though, here's how we're starting. We're in close on Teddy, eyes closed. All we hear is beautiful violin. as we zoom out, we see that she sits at a pub high top. Two paragraphs later, we're saying, Teddy is small, unassuming she wears a cast on her left hand. That's information that goes back up in that top part so we can see that, because it's not new information when we're seeing that there.
42:04So then as we're, you're saying zooming out, it's really pulling out or whatever you want to say here. Teddy's not given an age. I'd love an age. Tell us an age. I mean, even bloke with a mullet gets an age. Yeah, see? And all we hear is beautiful violin. Well, what violin doing what? Ah, yes. Yeah, so like beautiful violin music, beautiful classical violin music, something that's telling us specifically what it is that we're hearing. Because I really like everything that's happening here. I just want it to be a little brighter here. The other thing I did notice is that we're doing her pronoun a lot with actually not using her name.
42:39And so look at the cases where you're saying she and see if there's some cases where you want to put Teddy back in there. So it's just top of our mind who this is that we're talking about. I believed most of the guys with the football game. I believed the sort of sports bar space. The main guy we're talking to, his name is Mace, M-A-S-E. I was wondering whether we're going to meet him again. We might meet him again, but I didn't know at the moment whether he was important or not. This is more of a question for you because we can't ask you because he's given sort of individual thing rather than just being placeholder person.
43:12He's given an actual character name. Yeah. So, yeah, if there was any way for us to see her making a choice as to which person to prey upon. Now, she's sort of going for a car first, I think, instead of a person that also is a little tricky. Because if she's like, hey, who has this? And somebody who's just not that drunk is like, I do. Okay, well, now what do you do? So there's just still a little bit of, I just want to think through the con artist logic. Because con artists, I'm not suggesting, but somebody who's committing con artistry, they're always in control. They always are one step ahead.
43:44They're the magicians who have the backup plan in case you pick the wrong card. So I just want to get that feeling. And then when we shift away, well, good news is I wanted to stay with her, so that's always good. But we get to this other place, then it's connected through with her drive, and we meet an entirely different person who has a dog on her surfboard. And this was adorable. So we meet this cool person. She's got a dog on her surfboard. She's surfing. This is cool. A little bit earlier, an old man pulls his lazy dog along the sidewalk. That's two dogs right in a row, and I kind of want to keep my dog special.
44:21And then after we see her surfing with her dog, she's in the counter of her food truck. That was a little bit of a gear grind for me. It was a gear grind for me, too. So part of it is that we see Teddy driving away. So this is night as she's driving away, and then we're coming to dusk. There's not a transition put here between these two things, but I think our natural assumption is we're going to keep following Teddy and we're going to see Teddy the next day but instead we're meeting a whole new character doing a whole new thing which can absolutely work but it was just a weird vibe for me I couldn't tell who I was supposed to be following I keep expecting Teddy has to meet this new character Rosie very soon I'm sure she will and so it's only three pages they may already know each other you like the dog on the surfboard the dog on the surfboard felt a little Disney for me well I guess my question is and we'll find out can dogs do that?
45:10I'm sure dogs do that. Because if a dog can do it, then you can do it. If they can do it, then it'll look like it's doing it. You're going to have to find a dog that can actually do it. I think maybe all we really needed here was to see her getting out of the water. He's going, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da, and she's dragging her surfboard, and the next thing we see is a food truck, and she's walking up and unlocking it. And then the next thing is, and so we go, okay, that's her job. She goes there. That's her thing. It's her truck. The last thing I want to talk about is at the end of the bar sequence, the bottle seed, the last line she says is, I'll sort you boys some free ones when I get back.
45:51And I was like, I wanted to cut that line and then you pay it off where later on this guy is like, she could have some free ones. Okay. If you want to hold on that line, great. It does work. But if you could cut that line and find a different way for this guy Mace to be asking, like, hey, this girl has my keys, whereas the blonde girl with my keys, like, which blonde girl would be another way to do it? Because I think you can have a better out of that first scene without that extra line. Yeah, it's a little bit tricky because we know that she won. And so I guess the thing is, do we even care about this drunk guy finding out that he got swindled?
46:25He got swindled. Yeah. Unless he matters. He may matter. That's the thing, he may matter. Let's ask Becca. Becca, could you please come up? Come on. All right, so tell us. about tall poppies. What do we got here? So this is sort of an Australian nod to Thelma and Louise, but gayer. Good, why not? Gayer. So it's two women who don't currently know each other. Okay. They meet each other in the pilot and then incidentally they kill a man together. Sure. Who is a, he's a bikey. He's in a bikey gang. and they end up going on the run together and they have bikies after them. They both are running from their past, so their past is chasing them as well and they start to fall in love with each other as they fall into a heroin empire.
47:17Oh, and it's poppies. And so that's tall poppies. That's the tall poppy, yeah. And tall poppy syndrome. So folks who don't know, tall poppy syndrome is a down-under situation where they cut you down if you get too big. If you get too successful, they cut you down. Rebel Wilson was on and we were talking about tall poppy syndrome. Well, this is all really fun. Tonally, when I said that the dog on the surfboard fell Disney to it, is it comedic? What is the thing you're going for? Is it cute? My tonal comp would be Killing Eve. So it's a 60-minute crime drama, but there's some comedy in there, yeah.
47:54Okay, so now that I know what's going on, when you have a movie and there's some great ones, it's funny, for whatever reason and the first thing that came to mind after you described the Thelma and Louise and all the rest of it was White Men Can't Jump, where you meet two people and one of them hasn't dealt with the other one yet, but they're gonna. And then there's this, like the joining of con artists or just people on the run, falling in love, bromances or romances, right? But when you do meet that second person, so much of what that scene has to be is, this is a different person than that person because you want the contrast.
48:32You want to go from somebody impeccably neat to somebody who's a slob. It doesn't have to be that broad, but your choice of what to do next does have to feel like, oh, these two people, I would like to see what happens if they get stuck together for a bit, if that makes sense. Yeah, okay. So the woman she's going on the run with ultimately is this other... Zoe. Yes. So we don't have an extra page to sort of get to know her better, but tell us more about her and what their interaction is because last night on Stripe Runs Live, we were talking about relationships. Different characters need different things about a relationship.
49:06What is the nature of their relationship? So Zoe is actually Laws. This is an alias. She comes from a criminal family. They are the biggest legal growers of poppies in Australia. Australia actually does grow a lot of poppies, but they also have an underground heroin industry as well. So she's trying to get away from her family, so she's changed her name and is just in this beach town, kind of nomadic life, surfing. And Teddy is running away from an abusive relationship. Okay, now here's what I get. Teddy has no problem doing something that's criminal. She's actually rather good at it. And it's not a violent thing, so we kind of love her for it.
49:48Now, Zoe is running from a criminal past. What I kind of want in some way or another is to meet somebody who is very definitely not breaking the law. because she knows that she would get in trouble. She doesn't want to get back on her radar. How you imply that, there's a thousand ways. And I don't know if you agree with this, but the surfing itself only tells us that she surfs and that her dog is awesome. But it's not telling me any little tiny thing about her that may make me go, oh, these two might not like each other, or these two might be, we were talking about Planes, Trains, Anonymous, Steve Martin and John Candy, an odd couple of some sort.
50:32So if you could, and you're good, you're a good writer, you laid these out great, you could see it, you could hear it, I love the way you sound, there were transitions. So the good news is you can do it. This is what we do when we can do it. Just do it. Becca, a question for you, is Mace going to come back? He's not. He's not going to come back. So you understand the note that it feels like he's a more important character than he is because he's given a name and because he's given a recall scene. so giving him a generic descriptor would probably help. My one question actually for that is because I have another character refer to him, like, oy me, she's talking to you.
51:08Yes. Do you have to use the name? You kind of don't. In a situation like this, what you can do is you can say, you know, mullet bloke and then whatever, what is that? Mustache. Undercut bloke, you know, like just two different haircuts. And the fact that one of them says the other one's name doesn't really matter. So, but this was great. I mean, very, you could just, it was just cinematic. Like, I was watching it, and I was having fun, so really good, and... Rebecca, I was talking to you at the opening night party, and so you have, we did this here, but you actually had a script that was also here in competition?
51:42Yes, and I found out today that it won. Congratulations. I saw that happen. Yeah. Yeah, she's not lying. I was there. and so what was that script? that's not this script that we read, it's a different thing that is not this script, no that's a feature called The Other Side of 25 and it's about a young standout comic in Chicago who becomes the surrogate for her older sister well I'm not surprised, you can do this keep doing it it's going well, congratulations I was happy to see you win I was happy to see you here with these three pages Ducca, thank you so much Thank you. We have a little boilerplate here.
52:26So, Script Notes, all Script Notes, is produced by Drew Marquardt, who's here. Drew is the person who reads all these three-page challenges. Drew Marquardt, you're the best.
52:36This show will ultimately be edited by Matthew Shilleli, who's our incredible editor. We want to thank Emily Locke and everyone here at Austin Film Festival. This has been a fantastic festival this year. Thank you to our room sponsors, all our volunteers. Incredible. Who here in this room is a Script Notes premium subscriber? Oh, we've got some hands here. Oh, thank you, guys. Every week we do an episode for everyone in the whole wide world. We also do a bonus segment for our premium members. And so thank you for the premium members because they just keep the lights on. And a final check. Who in this room has ordered the Script Notes book?
53:06All right. I need to sell those books. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. Thank you,
53:21guys.
53:31The End
From the publisher
John and Craig gather a congregation of writers in St. David's Episcopal Church for a live round of the Three Page Challenge. They look at three listener-submitted scripts to offer them their honest feedback, face-to-face.
They offer suggestions on world building in the apocalypse, making military characters specific, building mystery and suspense, and crafting con-artist logic.
In our bonus segment for premium members, we answer questions from our audience on how to know if a script looks correct, what we want to see in the first three pages, using actor names in character descriptions, what comedy requires, and how to direct a reader's attention on the page.
Links:
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections! ANCIENT GRAINS by Michael Warnecke, HIGH NORTH by Teddy Johnson, TALL POPPIES by Becca Hurd
- Austin Film Festival
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- Outro by Mathew Chilelli (send us yours!)
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You can download the episode here.