661 - Screenwriting is a Poorly Defined Problem
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Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mason. And this is episode 661 of Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, why is screenwriting, both the craft and the profession, so difficult? And why are the people who were really good in school not necessarily good at screenwriting? Nerds. We'll take a look at what's weird about screenwriting and why skills in other areas don't always translate well.

Then it's another round of the three-page challenge where we look at submissions from our listeners and give our honest feedback. And in our bonus segment for premium members, how do you talk about movies and series without spoiling them? We'll offer our tips and tricks and suggestions. We are five episodes away from 666.

Now, Craig, let's talk about this because Drew brought this up. We need to think of something for episode 666, the number of the beast. It's almost going to line up with Halloween. It won't. It won't. It's close-ish. I feel like we should have Meghana on because A, it's spooky season. B...

666, it feels like she would have input. Yeah. I mean, should we focus on like devil and possession movies? That's a great idea, actually. Well, The Exorcist is one of my favorite movies. Let's do it. Yeah, and I am not a horror movie aficionado. I mean, I like a good horror movie, but I'm not somebody that subscribed to Fangoria when I was a kid and saw all those slasher films like the 80s.

So, Drew, you remember the 80s. Oh, yeah. So, John and I would walk into a video store, not Blockbuster, didn't exist yet. Our local video store. Local video store. And there would be a wall, just a solid wall of videotapes of nothing but movies where people slashed each other with blades. And they all had great names like I Dismember Mama. And, you know, there were like 12 prom nights. And I never saw any of them. Wasn't necessarily my thing. But the X-Men.

The Exorcist had a profound impact on me. I do think it's an incredible film and well worth discussing. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. I haven't seen The Exorcist probably since it came out. And honestly, I think most of my experience with The Exorcist has been while my parents were out, I would be watching it on TV and get so scared that I have to change the channel. That's correct. The other film that we should probably take a look at is a movie that, and I'm going to get in so much trouble, but you know, it's too late at this point, right, for me.

is The Omen. Because The Omen came out somewhat contemporaneously with The Exorcist. Clearly inspired by, well, not inspired by, but it existed in part because of The Exorcist. And The Omen is the film that made a big deal about 666. Okay. I think The Omen is an inferior film to The Exorcist. And it would be interesting to kind of compare and contrast. Contrast, sure. There are some wonderful things in The Omen. It's still better than...

Most movies that try and do possession stuff now, but not as good as The Exorcist. The Exorcist also, and we'll get there at episode 666, is a fantastic example of a film that is in a genre where almost every movie is bad and somehow they were great. Yeah. That's fascinating to me. Yeah.

We look at like, you know, there's lots of examples of like, you know, police procedurals or like we got to find the killer movies and then there's Silence of the Lambs, which is just like such a cut above. It's just something else, right? It's just a, and it's not doing anything necessarily overtly different. So it's worth kind of digging into what they do subtly that does make it better. Fantastic.

This discussion of sort of like the video store we used to go to, it's reminding me of a conversation I had this last week with my reps. We were talking about sort of how the business was overall and we're saying like, well, streaming has never come back to sort of what it was before. There's never going to be as many deals as there were. But they're referring back to like,

Oh, but we're now never going to get back to the era of like made-for-home video and sort of like the ability to sort of make a zillion movies because you knew you could make a profit off of them on home video. Unless something happens. Unless something happens. That's the thing. Yeah, I don't think anybody saw home video on the horizon in the 60s, for instance. Maybe some engineers at early Sony and their Betamax experiments, they were thinking, oh, maybe. But I always think of that moment in Men in Black where Tom

Tommy Lee Jones shows Will Smith how the aliens have figured out how to make a tiny CD and then he's going to have to buy the White Album all over again. The entertainment business is really good at figuring out ways to get us to buy the same thing we already own over and over and over. Some new format, some new thing. It's almost inevitable. I mean, we all figured like, oh, streaming, I guess one day would be, we just didn't realize how fast and how...

intense it would be. Yeah. Well, I think we all assumed that, okay, well, this is going to kill home video because you'll just stream stuff. But we didn't realize there'd be a made-for-streaming boom that would sort of change the industry, but then it would contract again and leave a lot of people. There'd be a musical chairs quality of it. Yeah. I mean, we had a bubble. I think that's fair to say. Like, what did Landgraf call peak television, peak TV? Yeah. 600 and some odd, maybe 666. Yeah. It was possibly 666 streaming television series. Yeah.

Well, that's obviously the work of Satan. What it's back down to, I think a lot of people are thinking is some abnormally small number of

I suspect we still have more television shows available now than we did, say, in the 90s. It was networks. Yeah. And some basic cable. In addition to things that were made for streaming, we have things that were made for international audiences, made for global audiences that are available now. So we're watching series that are in English or other languages from other places too. So there's a lot more content still. There is. There's a ton of stuff available.

But yes, the contraction, I think the absolute number of television shows is not something that's going to make anyone feel better if they were employed within that bubble.

I don't think they're going to sit there and go, well, but there's still a few more than there were in the 90s. It's not exactly a relief. Contraction is difficult, even if it follows expansion. So talking with my reps this week, we had dinner, so I've got a sampling of sort of what they're experiencing because you and I, we all have our own experiences and sort of our friends we're talking to, but reps, they're making a bunch of deals all the time. And so I was asking them sort of what's happening and they say, there are a lot of deals being made and like,

pilots are selling and stuff is selling and pitches are selling, but there's not flow. And so there's a lot of one-off things that are happening. And it's busy, but not in a regular way and not in a predictable way. So you can't say, oh, this is how it's building up to this thing. It's like the machine is sort of shuddering. It's trying to figure itself out. Yeah. Which feels accurate. That's right. We have one predominant streaming service that is very successful at what they do, which is obviously Netflix.

There's Apple who don't, I don't think, care necessarily because they have more money than most nations. Right.

There's Amazon, who I think presents their streaming service probably as some kind of loss leader to make money off of their core business. Yeah, but they want to make a lot of movies. They do. But I'm thinking about what your representative said about the flow. Amazon and Apple probably aren't going to create this kind of rhythmic vacuum that you need to fill. So obviously Netflix has that machinery. How Max and Peacock and Disney Plus...

function am I missing one Hulu which is but Hulu is Disney plus Paramount is Peacock no Paramount's Paramount oh they're their own Paramount plus Paramount CBS right of course how could I have possibly confused these um

All of them, I think, are still trying to figure out how much, how frequently. Yeah, what's the right number? What's the right number? What's the right rhythm? So that makes complete sense to me. And on the future side, what I was hearing from them is that Studio X are saying the covers are kind of bare for right now. Like there's not the next thing to put into production. But...

Like summer 2026 is going to be super jam-packed, like every weekend is full, which is great. Sort of good problems to have. The strike. Yeah, exactly. That's bottom line, right? It's going to happen. It's a really interesting thing. When I talk to people, what I often hear is we need stuff, but it's hard for us. This is them talking about their own internal process as buyers. Yeah.

It's not as easy as it used to be to get your bosses to agree to buy something. Absolutely. So you are responsible if you're on a certain level at one of these places. And I talk to people, streamers and everywhere, and they'll say...

I need to get five shows on the air next year. I don't have them. I can't get them to pay for the things I want. Or I can get them to pay an insane amount of money, but only when the algorithm says that it fits their thing.

But I know that we already have those, like we should get. And so it's almost like we have a bunch of people making a lot of food on the street. And we have a bunch of hungry people driving around. And there's somebody next to the hungry people going, no, no, no, just keep going. Or try something else or go somewhere else. So I can see why it's difficult. Yes, the machine is not functioning particularly efficiently right now. It's like a dating app where the algorithm is wrong and like swiping one way or another way. You're not matching up.

Yes. That's actually a great idea for a dating app where if you swipe right or left, it has to go through an intermediary who considers whether or not you've made the right choice. Yeah, I like that. And maybe changes it. Yeah, maybe you designate like a friend who is actually your concierge there. It's like, no, no, no, no, I don't want this. Oh, did you? No, no, or actually you really should give this person a shot. Yeah. It's a bad pick, I know. Yeah. Give him a shot. Yeah. Yeah, I think that that might be nice. Absolutely. Let's get into that.

So you don't do app development, but my company does do app development. And this is my segue into saying that we're actually hiring a new person. So one thing I've learned over doing 12 years of this podcast is our audience are the best, smartest people in the world. And if we need to hire somebody for somebody, this podcast is the first place to start. That's how we found the person who fixed our WordPress plugins, the video game that we're doing.

us through this. So we are hiring a person to do marketing for us for Highland, We Can Read, Bronson Watermarker, Right Emergency Pack, Alpha Birds. And we need somebody who's more of a manager than a creative. It's like somebody who can oversee marketing

Instagram ad campaigns, App Store search optimizations, really be able to tell us what's working and what's not because it's not in our skill set. We need somebody who just does the stuff that we don't do especially well. Where in the world will you find somebody that knows anything about social media optimization? Yeah. SEO? SEO. Yeah. I'm going to guess 89% of our audience is like, I can do that. I'm already doing that. We should stress like, you probably already are doing this. We don't want to like somebody who's like...

I could learn something. It's like, no, we actually have done this. Some experience here. We're pretty flexible on sort of what the position looks like. So it could be part-time or full-time. It could be fully remote. It could be a Los Angeles person. You're probably based in the U.S., but if we could hire you or contract with you overseas, this may be doable.

But crucially, we need somebody who already knows and is in the Mac and iOS ecosystem because that's what we make. And so you need to be part of that sort of space. And you need to know what you're doing here in this. You need to be good. You need to be good. Do a good job. Yeah. So we're going to put up a link in the show notes to a web page that sort of talks through what we're looking for. So if you are that person or you know that person, take a look at that. And if you are the candidate, submit your stuff.

Well, this is exciting. And does the job pay $850,000 a year?

It does not. It pays an amount commensurate to sort of what the job is. That's fair. That sounds fair. We have some follow-up. So last week we talked about Moneyball. Moneyball. It was such a good episode, and everyone completely agreed with everything we said on the show, and there was no feedback whatsoever. Right? No. My inbox has turned into an AM radio call and show. Yeah. That's weird. Sports fans having opinions. Oh, yeah. I get stats on Johnny Damon and his... Johnny Damon. Johnny Damon.

Great. Let's have the Johnny Degman argument. I want to. You were wrong about baseball. So for one thing, there is a clock because now there's a pitch clock. So, okay, let's talk about the pitch clock. So we actually got that note from a, I believe it was a scout with the Tampa Bay Rays organization, which is awesome. Yes. So I sort of stand quasi-corrected. So one of the rules changes that I referred to, I referred to a bunch of rules changes in that episode. One of them, most importantly, is the pitch clock, which makes the game go faster.

That is really, the word clock there, I think would better be described as timer. It's a little bit like the shot clock in basketball. You have a certain amount of time to do something or there is a, in basketball, the foul or turnover or in baseball, it's a strike or it's a ball, depending on which side of the...

But the game itself has no timer. So you can have an at-bat that lasts one pitch long. You can have an at-bat that lasts zero pitches long. If there's a guy at the plate and there's a man on first, there's two outs, and the pitcher picks that guy off first base, inning over, man at home, didn't swing, got no pitches. Or...

You can have an at-bat that lasts 18 pitches, all within the confines of pitch clocks. So yes, there is a small element of a timer, but the game itself...

No one can tell you at the beginning of a baseball game how long that game will last. Everyone can tell you how long a football game will be in terms of game time play or a hockey game or a basketball game. Yeah. And the larger point in terms of being a clock or not being a clock, most sports are kind of frantic. Like there's just a lot of activity suddenly all at once. Yes. And baseball, yes, there are little bursts of activity, but like most of it is very open and people can take their time to do a thing. Absolutely. And innings are...

last as long as they last, and there are nine of them. In football, a series of downs, you can have possession of a football and you keep getting a new first down. That's great. But the clock keeps getting eaten up. Yeah, so unless you're able to stop the clock by doing the thing, yes. Right, and you can stop, but when you stop the clock, there's no more playing, right? Then everybody talks, and then they get back, and then the clock restarts.

So I while that is a good point from the scout that there is now an element of time where you speak no element of time. The only element of time that there used to be in baseball was if there is a visit to the mound. Let's say the pitcher is in trouble or there is a situation that requires discussion. Either the pitching coach or the manager would go out to the mound, bring in the infielders and they would all have a huddle on the mound and chat.

The umpire, at some point, will mosey on over and go, all right, guys, it's enough. We got to get back to playing baseball. When? When he feels like it. Discussion, yeah. Sort of like, it's enough. Yeah. And that's sort of the only thing I remember prior to the pitch clock. All right.

More follow-up. We talked about residuals in 658 and the fact that they are now digitally depositable. ENA writes, while I appreciate the greater efficiency of having residuals be direct deposit, I would like to stand up for the joys of the home-delivered paper residual. It is always a cheery surprise, a bright spot in the day, the flash of green among the mailers, the happy announcement to the household, the ritual chant of big money, big money, big money, and finally the reveal of a quantity which may range wildly, but which is always better than nothing.

Additionally, there's the hopefully fond memories evoked by the source of the residuals, gratitude for the achievements of the WGA in securing these residuals, and sometimes even a sense of abundance in the universe. So until paper cuts or affluence dim our delight in the little green envelopes, this house will never direct deposit our residuals.

I'm completely in agreement with E&A. So I love the green envelopes and I loved opening them and I loved having Mike predict how big a check would be. I would say like, oh, it's from Sony and he would like nail it within like 1%. He was so good at it. And it's great. It just feels like found money. It's a weird carnival skill. I don't deserve this, but it came and it's great. But for the last...

Three years, four years, they've all been going to my business manager anyway, so I haven't seen them. Yeah, I completely salute this person and the love of the green envelope and the excitement of that. No question. You know, partly it's also just a function of age because they started getting green envelopes, I don't know, in 1998, 7? Yeah.

Yeah, after a while, you're like, here's the green envelope again. So here's a proposal. So like the green envelopes are inefficient because those checks get lost and sometimes they did get lost. It's a good reason not to send them to people's houses. But maybe we still do the green envelopes and it's just like inside it says like, this is how much we just direct deposited for you. Then you still get the feel, the joy of it, but you don't have to deal with the check. Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. If they could maybe do that, that would be great. Or maybe, what if there was an email that said the subject header was green envelope? Yeah. And you're like, okay, when I open this email, and then there's like a bunch of text just in case your email program gives you a little, nope, it skips it. And then you open it and you scroll and there's the number. Yeah. That would be fine. A little joy. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? All right. Well, I'm going to propose that to the WGA. Okay. Okay.

more about capitalizing off of a short, which we talked about in episode 658. Yeah, Aaron writes, I want to build on the excellent advice you gave Michael in episode 658, in which he asked what's next after a short film he wrote won an Oscar qualifying award. If he wants to capitalize on the success, I would encourage Michael to write a feature version of his short film. Even if his short wasn't initially meant to be blown out into a feature, there will be something, a theme, a character, what have you, that will make for a compelling feature script. And he already has an award-winning short as a proof of concept.

The first question I'm asked when somebody sees and likes my short is, do you have a feature script? My answer is always yes. And because I always have a draft ready before attending any festival, it's led to my scripts being read by reps and producers. I guarantee the director and or producers are being asked this question, so he should also reach out to them to let them know he's getting started on the feature. So when they're inevitably asked, is there a feature script? They can reply, yes, Michael is working on it right now.

Yeah, if you can. I mean, not every short is expandable into a feature, I imagine. Many, many aren't. But I think it's good advice in general. And even if you can't sort of take this exact concept, something that's in that space feels right because they like the short. They want something that's like that but is a feature. That all tracks and makes a lot of sense. Whiplash. Yeah, 100%. It's the theory of whiplash. Work for Damien Chazelle. Could work for you at home. Yeah. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Totally makes sense.

More on how to be a script coordinator. We've talked a lot on the show about the value of script coordinators. Joshua Gilbert writes,

As such, it occurred to me that if a YouTube video can teach someone to fix their sync, they can learn to script coordinate the same way. So I created a two and a half hour training video in eight sections that gives step-by-step instructions for taking a script from first draft to shooting draft. Wow. Yeah. Well, that's interesting. Two and a half hours? Yeah. There's really two and a half hours of stuff to say? Well, there was two and a half hours of stuff to explain about how to...

Do Roll20. You and I put those ideas together. Roll20 is so complicated. That was extraordinarily efficient. Roll20 is so, especially the old Roll20. I mean, they've streamlined it. It was so, like, un-user friendly. Yeah. Listen, it may be that he's just very patient in his explanations. You know, so Ali Chang, who's our script coordinator on The Last of Us, you know, I walked her through it.

30 minutes. Well, but you're approaching script coordinating from one point of view. You're also a single showrunner who's doing stuff and a single writer. People who are on more complicated shows, I think this probably is more complicated stuff. You're integrating multiple things from different writers. I could see that. There's a little more traffic. I've watched through it too. He leaves no stone unturned. Well, okay. So it's an incredibly thorough... I just... Thank God. I was just hoping that you weren't like, I watch it and...

No, no, okay. If it's super duper thorough, then great. I mean, look, either way, I just like complaining about things. He put it on there for free. It's a free class. One more reason to not go to film school. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, film school doesn't teach you how to be a script writer, though, either. It's one of those just someone shows you. Yeah, but that's one of the jobs that we have. It's a job. It's a job. It's actually a union-covered job. Film school just teaches you the job that no one has to give you. Just why? Anyway. All right. Last bit of follow-up here is from Lori, and she's talking about

Craig, you use this word calculating a lot. Like you need to stop calculating. You actually use it in a script on this book. Yes. And so a little follow up on this. Yeah. She says, what exactly does Craig mean by that? Does he mean that writers shouldn't have a strategy or pursue a set of goals other than writing good screenplays? And if so, how do those good screenplays ever get into the hands of someone who can do something with them? Here's what I mean. Calculating means figuring out how to game the system. What do people want? What does the market want?

If I did this and this and this, then maybe this and this and this. There's so much effort that you can put into that kind of thinking. Everybody knows that if you write a such and such story that they want it. They don't want these unless there's a this in it. So I'm going to do that.

That's calculating. Not calculating is writing something that you love, that you believe in, that is personal to you, that nobody else could do, or that just expresses your unique creative talent, and then putting it out in the world. And then other people work on the calculating part. And in fact, part of our jobs as individual writers in our careers is

is to resist all of their calculations when their calculations go against what is the beating heart of the work. Otherwise, it will turn into crap, which happened to me repeatedly in my career because I didn't understand that part of my job was to defend against their calculation. I thought in a somewhat humble way, all these calculations must have value. These people are paid for these calculations.

And the emperor has no clothes. So it's not about being strategy-less. You write something great, then you're like, okay, I wrote this and I need René Zellweger to be in it. It was designed out of my heart for René Zellweger. I need to get this to René Zellweger somehow. That's not calculation. That's just makes sense. That's creative desire. Saying, I wrote this for René Zellweger, but...

What I'm hearing maybe is that Sabrina Carpenter is looking to do something in a movie like this. So if I just change the age and change the this and make it more Sabrina Carpenter, then get it to the person that I know who knows her friend, then da-da-da. Well, what have you done? Yeah. No offense to Sabrina Carpenter. If you write something for Sabrina Carpenter, truly. Yeah, fantastic. Love that. Yeah.

I know who Sabrina Carpenter is. I was going to say, nicely done. And weirdly, Sabrina Carpenter, Renee Zellweger, Axis, it's kind of clear. There's a vector that connects the two. I actually am proud of what I just did. I really am. Because it would have been a very old guy thing to be like, no, instead I'm going to make it for Reese Witherspoon. Eh, contemporary, it doesn't work. It wouldn't have worked. It would not have been as cogent of a point. I like this. And so,

This discussion of calculating actually ties in very well to our main topic today, which is about screenwriting being a poorly defined problem. And this verbiage I'm taking from this blog post by Adam Mostriani, which is about why smart people aren't happier. I think it also really resonates with last week's episode where we're talking about how we measure and quantify talent.

And so in this blog post, he's talking about how it's not just physical attributes that we try to measure and quantify. We do it with intelligence, too. And so if you Google the smartest people in the world, you're going to find physicists and mathematicians, computer scientists, chess masters. Donald Trump by his own admission. 100%. Yeah. And you're going to do that because if accomplished things that you can point to and say like, oh, it was your intelligence that did that. Right. And you can measure that.

But a couple weeks ago, I went to this event with Hillary Clinton who spoke and like, Jesus, that is a very smart woman. Just a little. Yeah. But her intelligence is not quantifiable in that way. You can't, she didn't like invent a thing. She didn't solve some mathematical problem. She ran the State Department of the United States of America. Not a small thing. No.

But the things that I would say, if I could point to her intelligence, is like, she can take a question and then like pull it into its parts and come up with on the fly this seven minute answer that goes from the personal to the political to everything. It's like,

That's experience, and it's honestly the kind of difference between what we'd say in DNA terms is intelligence and wisdom. She has the ability to take this whole thing and pull it apart. And really what it comes down to, and this is from this blog post, is that we tend to value and aim towards these well-defined problems. And a well-defined problem, he defines in four things, that there is a stable relationship between the variables. And so you can see how everything connects.

There's no disagreement about whether the problems are problems or if they've already been solved. There are clear boundaries. There's a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions. And the problems are repeatable. So the details might change, but the process for solving the problems does not. Science is exactly that. So the scientific method...

And then results needing to be robust, repeatable. Yes. That is what a joy it would be to work in something where you could actually go, the answer to this question is yes. That would be lovely. And so a lot of us, and I said you were as well, Craig, we were good at that, at doing those kind of well-defined problems. And so all standardized tests, the ACTs, the SATs, they were those kind of things. We were rewarded for that. And so we're told we are smart because we're good at these things. But unfortunately, the

career we've chosen to go into does not reward that kind of thinking at all. It does not. Because we're dealing with these sort of really undefinable things. Like, we don't even know sort of what the edges of this is. Like, what do they really want from here? How am I supposed to do this thing? Am I making the right choice to go, should I move to Los Angeles? These are not

questions with single answers. And so many of the questions we get from our listeners are grappling with this. And so when we say, don't be so calculating, I feel like so often we see people trying to take these difficult situations and boil them down to well-defined problems. Yes, because it's comforting. So you probably remember in math class, there was somebody that was sitting next to you who was struggling with a process. Right.

Let's see how to, you know, quadratic equations. Yes. Do you remember the first time like your teacher did the quadratic formula or showed how you discover the quadratic formula? It was like, there's no way you end up with such a messy formula. It's like so ugly. Yeah, and so beautiful. And so beautiful. It works. Yes. But it looks so awful. Well, we are used to science boiling things down to elegance. Yes. E equals MC squared is so absurdly elegant. It seems like a joke. Yes. Most things are not that elegant.

perfect. The Pythagorean theorem is so gorgeously A squared plus B squared equals C squared. But there was always a kid that didn't understand the concepts and would turn to you at some point and go,

Just tell me what to do. Like, okay, so now what do I do? So then, then what do I do? So then, then what do I do? Meaning break this down like I'm a computer coded for me so that I don't have to understand what I'm doing. I just follow steps which are certain and therefore I can't get lost. It's not actually a bad way to teach certain people, certain things that they are struggling to grasp conceptually. However, if they need that, it's probably not really worth it for them because ultimately they're,

They're not actually learning anything. They're merely just obeying steps. Absolutely. So what we have here in our business is a very, there's like an analytic way of doing things and then there's synthesizing things. We have to synthesize stuff. We have to make things out of nothing. And it's art, so it's all objective, subjective at the same time. There are things that just we all agree on and there are things that we cannot agree on and then there are things that we find out most people agree on.

There are things that no one agrees on except 10 years later they do. And nobody can really teach this. What we're taught is how to analyze, which is fair. And what we can test is analysis and memory. There is this concept when we were learning about the SAT analogies, we were taught about this thing called the triangular non-relationship, which is that this and these two things are only related now.

Because they both relate to something else. But they don't directly relate to each other. I think that for people that are good in school and good at SATs and also are good at screenwriting, those two things are not connected to each other. They're connected back to one thing, which is a certain kind of mind. Yeah, absolutely. So let's think through some of the stuff that we're dealing with as screenwriters that are these poorly defined problems and that we're constantly grappling with. So what is this movie about?

This movie I'm writing, what is it about? No, what is it really about? Because we know it's not actually about the thing on the surface. It's actually really about something else. Who is this character? How do I show that to the audience? What does this moment look like from the character's point of view and from all the other characters in that scene's point of view? What do they say next and why?

what is the right title for this movie? Am I using the word being too much? How is this movie I'm writing different from every movie ever made? But how is it similar enough to a genre that people can relate to what the hell it actually is? And then...

completely independent of what's happening on the page the actual career being a screenwriter is like how do i describe this thing to an executive who should i pitch this to should i be focusing on sabrina carpenter or renee zelda yeah when should i send a follow-up email should i send a follow-up email right and i see this with my own daughter and so she's a sophomore now and super smart so good at so many things but she's texting me and like it's not about like

It's about like, what should I put in this box on this form for this internship I'm applying for? Like they ask you like, what is your desired hourly salary? And she says, should I put 15? I'm like, I think 20. There's no answer here. Like, I don't even know what comes out of this. And you're not exactly the dealer too. Yes. I mean, we occasionally get these. I mean, it's funny. Jessica is so independent and so...

much a force of nature. She reminds me so much of me when I was her age. Just all these things that a lot of people consider difficult that she's just like doing. But...

kind of had a little bit of a meltdown over figuring out how to pay the utility bill for her apartment. Yeah. We're on the same thing. We got a bill for power, but it's from the previous tenant. It's like, what do you do? And that's... Actually, as it turns out, nobody likes doing that stuff. Everybody has to learn. I remember there was this great...

Well, it wasn't great. It was kind of stupid, but I still remember because this is one funny bit where Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live played a character maybe only once called Middle-Aged Man. He's like a superhero. And his, he's like, what are your powers? He goes, I can't fly and I don't have super strength, but I can explain what escrow is. And that's kind of like, these are the things that you sort of accrue. And when you are in your 20s, you're like, what do I do with a utility? Yeah.

But those are all learnable things. That list of stuff that you put there. The other one that came to mind was, what is the tone of this? And also, what is tone? Like, what are we even talking about? These things...

are only defined by a kind of strange passion and a confidence that comes from feeling good about it. It is all about feeling. When you look at people who are composing, why that note? Why not this note? Feels wrong, feels right.

This creates, for us, we have no choice but to actually find some kind of genuine feeling. And that feeling then we have to convert into some sort of explanation to either get people to resonate with our same feeling and feel it or get them to hear a rationality that allows them to go along with it. But for everybody else in our business, that area of...

what is it and I'm going to feel it and I know what's wrong and I know what's right allows for so much chicanery, charlatanism, fraud, confidence masquerading as knowledge, just bad faith, baloney, gaslighting,

because it's not science. Because I can't just go, stop. Everything you just said is provably wrong and has been proven wrong. Can't do it. So, of course, we're talking about this in a context of there's now more data than ever and more data kind of being used against us about the choices that we're making. And so as we're pitching to Netflix, they will say like our metrics show that

we need to have, we cannot show a dog in the first three minutes of the show or else, or there's all this stuff. And they can, they have data. They can show that scientifically this is true. But of course, that doesn't have anything to do with the actual feeling of what it is. And so I love to contrast like sort of that development process to the

a film festival where they're buying a film at a film festival. In that case, they're emotionally responding to the thing they saw and it's like, oh, this works for these reasons. We want this movie and we're going to put this on our streamer. And I think our business has shifted very much, especially the feature business, very much in favor of that kind of vibe. In a way, there is more humility on the side of the buyers because they've almost finally admitted they have no idea. Therefore,

Instead of the old method, which is really, if you want to talk about something that's changed in our business, the old method of making movies was have a bunch of writers come in, hear pitches, buy scripts, have 10 things in development that one of them eventually will be worthy of a green light and be made. That's gone away. Now it's more like, hey, we've shown up with a script already, an actor, a director. Everything is here and we also have a budget. Right.

All you have to do now is just flip a lever, but all the components are in place. We basically cook the meal for you. It's a frozen TV dinner. Just put it in the microwave, right? As opposed to...

We would like to cook you a meal. We're going to go gather ingredients. We can discuss if you want chicken or fish, right? And they like that. Yeah. So the episode that Mari Heller was on that you weren't able to come for, we were talking to... Passive aggressive. Yeah, sorry. It was a good episode. I bet. Jeez. We were talking through this new research study that showed that almost none of the movies that are greenlit came out of studio development. Exactly. Which...

was all you and I knew. All we knew was studio development. In fact, the thing that we would complain about in the 90s was studio development and development hell and how we all knew we were going there and getting paid something and then we were just going to be strung out for a while and eventually it probably would just die in the vine like everything else. But we were getting paid during that time, which was important. Important that we were getting paid.

Now, what has gone away is all the money being spread around, but there is a little more certainty. It used to be, if you made a deal, there's a 5% or 10% chance they would make your movie. Now it's sort of like, we're making a deal. It's kind of a green light. I remember the first time this happened to me, it was at Universal, and I think it was maybe Identity Thief, where I came in to pitch the rewrite, because it was a page one rewrite. There was a pre-existing script.

There were two pre-existing strips, I believe. And I came in with Jason Bateman and Scott Stuber. Normally, you would go in a pitch meeting, you would pitch to... You're not like the head of the studio or anything, right? Everyone was in that room. Not just like...

from like Peter Kramer, who's like the president of production, but then Donna Langley also. And then Adam Fogelson? Sure. Is that right? Yeah. The guy that was like the top of it. And I'm like, what the hell is going on? Yeah. And when I walked out, I remember Stuart was like, I was like, why are all those people in a pitch meeting? He goes, that was a green light meeting. The deal is, if we're going to pay you to write this, we're making the movie. Yeah. That blew my mind. And that was the first time I'd ever kind of experienced that where...

That's the deal now. Either no development or make movie. And that, in a way, sort of expresses humility on their end, I think. We don't know. And so if you bring us all this stuff, fine. Yeah. So what can we take from this is that

Listen, I think there's going to be moments where you're going to have this instinct to reduce these difficult problems, these poorly defined problems, and you're going to try to find edges of things that you can clean up and solve. And so I see people doing that with the obsession over like, oh, I need to get rid of all the widows and orphans in my script. Control. Control. You're trying to...

exert control over a thing that fundamentally doesn't want control. And you're going to submit to a bunch of film festivals and screenwriting competitions so you can get scores and so you can be graded the same way you were graded when you were... People love grades. Yeah. I miss them. Listen, I'm... Somebody, it's validation. I'm 30 years out of college, but I miss that validation. Absolutely. It's validation. But when I do see a lot of people...

on social media saying, congratulations to me, I was a semi-finalist and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, that just doesn't, I'm so sorry. It's actually not relevant at all.

Because there's somebody who didn't make it past the first round who has written something much, much better. The people who judge these things don't know either. Nobody in that world knows because the people that are at the highest level of our business also don't know. They are constantly being surprised. Everybody agrees.

That this kind of movie doesn't work until somebody makes one that does. And then they, they all, listen, if there was one genre we knew would not work, it would be to adapt a video game. That was the law. Yeah. That's the thing. And now. Two-bit series. So there you go. And superhero movies were just dead in the water forever. Yeah.

Musicals keep coming and going. I think Wicked is going to bring them back. Westerns disappear. Probably will come back. That's the joke. That's the big joke. So why calculate? Just follow your heart. Absolutely. All right, let's take a look at some...

Pages from our listeners. So for folks who are new here, every once in a while we do a three-page challenge where we invite our listeners to submit three pages from something they've written, generally the first three pages, and we give our honest feedback. So as a reminder, people want us to be reading this stuff. They're soliciting this feedback. So if we're mean at any point or harsh...

They asked for this. That's a weird phrase. They permitted this. They permitted this. We'll say that. Yeah. If you would like to read along on these pages, you can follow the links in the show notes and click through this PDF for those so you can take a look and maybe stop this podcast, read first, and then listen to what we're going to say about them.

Let us start with Flunge. Flunge. By J. Wheeler White. And I apologize if you guys hear page flipping. It's because I like a physical page. That's a physical page. Forgive me. Drew, for folks who are not able to look at the pages, can you give us a quick summary? So in the middle of a fencing match with seven seconds left on the clock, 17-year-old Will Stetson ignores all the onlookers and focuses on his opponent, Alexander. They stare each other down.

We then cut to six months earlier where Will is elbowed in his high school wrestling match and starts punching his opponent in the face. Coach Vargas tries to hold him back, but when his opponent calls him a psycho, Will lunges at him and crashes into the scorer's table.

Later, in a school hallway, Coach Vargas kicks Will off the wrestling team. Will punches the locker. Outside the gym, a Mercedes pulls up in front of Will, driven by Alina, another teenager who is currently very angry. All right. Let's start with this title page. I love this title page. Flunge! Yeah, it's got a nice graphically designed title. Yeah. Negative space, the fence are in the middle. Absolutely. And Craig, do you know what a flunge is? I absolutely do not know what a flunge is. The flying lunge?

A close to a flying lunge is a combination of a fletch and a lunge. And so a fletch is where you're racing up to your opponent, you're running up to the opponent. So actually the illustration in there is actually what a flunge would be. It's a flunge. It's a daring sort of stat board. By the way, flunge is going to be changed. That title is not going to last. No. I'm just going to be honest. But it looks great. But it's fun for now.

Fun for now. Page one opens with time left on clock, seven seconds, score 1414. I think this is crucial information. I like having it here. I'm wondering how it's going to be shown on screen. I don't need it to be shown on screen on the page in a certain way, but I'm just wondering about that. I like that it's 1414 so you know that it's like this

this match has been going on a while, you know that you're sort of near the end of this. This setup reminds me of Challengers, and I don't know how this is all going to be structured, but I feel like we're going to be moving back and forth into this match, which I'm excited to see. So it may not be a true Stewart special where we start at one point and then flash back in time. I think it may go back and forth. This does feel like a Stewart special, though. Well...

It's a Stewart special in the sense that it started a time and we're going to catch up to this? Only because he's a wrestler and then he becomes a fencer. I doubt we're going to go back and forth. I could be wrong. It's also a television show. Oh, a television show. So it's possible. But I agree with you. The setup felt really exciting. First of all, I got excited by fencing because, listen, at this point, just show me something. And fencing is fun. It's swordplay and it's exciting. Yeah.

I had fencing in a movie that didn't shoot, which I was really sad about. Oh, you had a fencing movie? I had a fencing movie. Do you want to sue this guy? Because, John, that's what people do. Yeah, absolutely. I had fencing in my movie. This guy stole your idea. Yeah. Jesus. I will say, if there's a contract lens that plays an important role in this movie, I've won. I've won the lawsuit. You've won the lawsuit. It's an interesting thing. Like, we have a guy, this is how it opens. William Stetson, 17, catches his breath.

He's in a full electric saber kit. I assume that means that he's wired up fencing outfit, fencing mask pulled up a single curl of light hair glued by sweat to his forehead. Just be aware. That's the kind of thing that they're gonna have a meeting about and it's going to probably look stupid. Maybe just say sweaty. Yeah.

His eyes, consumed by a deep, indecipherable fervor, locked with his opponents, Alexander, Sasha, Sue, 18. Now, why do they both have their masks up? Is that a thing that people do? This is exciting to see on page, but just want to think ahead here. And this is J. Wheeler White, which is a fantastic comic book name, by the way. J. Wheeler White is like, he owns a newspaper in Gotham, not in New York. Yeah.

They're just staring at each other. Yeah. But...

If you're staring at somebody and they're staring at you, the two of you are in a staring contest. That just feels a little weird. If you're staring at this guy and he's drinking some Gatorade or doing something and then he turns and sees you and expresses something back, whether it's hatred, jealousy, I'm going to get you, you lost, whatever it is, that creates a moment. But I think here what's happened is they're just staring at each other, which feels a bit odd.

I get that. Again, the reason why I was saying challengers is challengers. Have you seen challengers? I have. Yeah, so challengers is all like stairs across a net between people. It is. So I love it for that. In this first page, fans, teammates, former opponents, uppercase those. Those are other groups of people that we're going to see. Yeah. There's a thing that J. Willard White does where it's a single dash, so a word that's single dash rather than double dash.

it's consistent it's fine it's not what I would do I don't do it either but it doesn't matter I get it it's consistent it's consistent as long as it's consistent it would be nice to know how big I mean it says hundreds of fans so hundreds of people that's another thing you learn when you're making stuff is hundreds of people look like 12 people yeah

Thousands of people look like hundreds of people. That's just... Well, I need a sense of the story. Is this state championships? What is this? That would tell us. Is this an Olympics state championship? Is this a gymnasium? Is this Madison Square Garden? Just give me a general sense of the space I think would be helpful. But what I really enjoyed was...

how this just flung us, flunged us into a different thing. But this is way easier to do on page than it is to do because the problem is match cutting from eyes, especially when there's like a mask, even though it's pulled up, it's going to be sort of visible. Eyes to eyes of a person that's in motion, wrestling, it's just not possible. It's not possible. So there'll be a sound pre-lap, there'll be a thing and then you're just going to cut into it. Exactly. So probably not

And it's exciting to read, but this is something that I actually think is fine. Yeah.

But later you're going to have to fix it. Absolutely. It'll be like a step. It'll be on a foot and a step will go forward and you'll realize you're in a different space. There'll be different ways to get there. Exactly. But I'm loving everything on page one and on page two. I thought the actual descriptions of what goes wrong in the match and sort of how it builds, I believed. And it felt, you know, visceral and spotty. Yes. I think the only thing that I would suggest here for this, because I mean, the point of this wrestling match is Will goes too far.

So he goes too far. He's wrestling a guy and he chokes him in a way that's illegal and ruins stuff. He chokes him and then he starts beating him. And then, yes. Well, because the guy fights back. And so then he fights back again. But it's all precipitated by the fact that he's choking this guy out, which is not legal in high school wrestling or anywhere. That's fine. But what I needed was something leaning into it. I think part of my issue was

It just starts with this guy killing someone. That's what he's doing, basically. And so how did we get to that? How did you even get... If you start leaning on someone's throat, this is just logic stuff, and it's important for tone. You're in high school. You start choking this guy out. Nobody says it. Like, they'll run in there and pull you off. You can't kill somebody.

And why would you think you could? And so the problem is this guy goes too far. I need to see him going too far, not already too far. Something leading into it would have been helpful. Yeah, agreed. Page three. The one thing I want to scratch out here is mic drop. So Vargas, the coach says, you smell like an effing litter box.

mic drop. We don't need the mic drop. He walks off. And at the bottom of page three, we're introduced to Alina Matero, 17, dark hair, clean girl, aesthetic, currently very pissed off. That's all we know about her, but I liked it as the next thing we're seeing. Yeah. So, and I like that she seems rich. I'm guessing that he's not

I don't know what their relationship is, but she seems like she's already heard about the wrestling situation. I was, again, tone. Page three, Vargas, his coach says, we were all watching Stetson, which I think you need to comment there because it seems like we were all watching Stetson. We were all watching Stetson, that's well. And good thing too, or that kid would be in an ambulance right now. Incorrect. They watched him choke that kid out until that kid punched him to get him off of him. They didn't do anything.

And then good thing you don't know him. What did that, like, I don't know him either. And just because he goes to New Trier, I'm guessing that's the school for rich kids. Yeah. Doesn't justify murder. I don't understand. And this is so important. I need to understand why Will was trying to kill this kid or, and quote unquote, why he was suddenly so vicious and so relentless that he would

injure this kid and possibly render him unconscious. Yeah, so thinking about that moment, if you sort of switch it around and Will was the one who felt like he was threatened or he was getting choked and that he was the first person who sort of blew up and it was ambiguous whether the referee should have stepped in or

That could have made sense. This scene is broad for me. This is what happens. The coach goes, you did a dumb thing. And Will says, no, I didn't. And he says, yeah, you did. You're fired. You're off the team. You can't do that. Darn it. Everybody deserves to be a character. Everybody deserves to be interesting. How does this really go down in life? I don't think it's like this. I don't. I think...

There is a possibility that as a coach, you sit down with this kid and there's a scene where he says, just walk me through what happened. Walk me. I want to understand why this happened. And let Will explain and just keep asking questions so that we start to understand, Will, how his mind works, what the real problem was.

And we will think, we'll feel like maybe this coach is sympathetic, understanding, and the coach will listen to him, hear, get to the truth, and then say, so you're off the team. Sorry. Like, based on everything I understand, I appreciate it, I get it. You can't be on a wrestling team. I hear you, and that is a version of the scene. I think there's a way to sort of keep the energy up the way that this scene currently does, but just with a little bit more finesse.

actually that was my problem that the energy was still too hot yes we started with this exciting flinging match and then we go into an equally exciting and violent wrestling match both of which it's feel like at fever pitch tempo and then we get into this quick argument and the movie is going so fast i felt like i it's a television show it's a pilot you can breathe i mean if you look at

So the open, I mean, Breaking Bad, everybody uses as a great example because it is a wonderful pilot episode. It starts with blah. Yeah. And then it's like, it's quiet. There's a description on page three that I did like. Will tries to make himself big, arms out to his side, chest forward, steps to his coach, Vargas sighs. Yeah. That does a lot. It does. And again, it's a tone question. Will seems like an idiot here because he's

You can't actually, you can't big guy your coach. So what are you going to do? Beat him up? Yeah. The coach isn't buying it. But then I sort of feel like why would Will think that the coach would buy it and why is Will doing it? I believe that as a dumb high school character move. To me, dumb high school characters are deferent to coaches that control their fate. Those are the people they don't do this to. Yeah.

Those are the people that they get all sullen with because those are their father figures that they have like daddy issues with. But again, that's part of what I'm saying here to Jay Wheeler-White is the character right now of Will and the character of Vargas is angry coach, angry kid. I think we need to go a bit deeper in that. Even in one page. Yeah.

Great. Again, these are not well-defined problems. No. They're all opinions and sort of how it feels. That's right. Before we move on, Drew, can you tell us a logline for what the actual... For flunge. For flunge. After being kicked off the team for one too many violent outbursts, a high school wrestler reluctantly joins the fencing team to keep his scholarship, unearthing a preternatural talent that may redefine the course of his life, an anime-inspired live-action sports drama series. Great.

I don't know that it's a series. I think it's a movie, but I'm curious. It feels like a movie to me. It feels like a movie to me. I feel like there's a beginning, a middle, and an end. There's a victory. There's a thing. It's a classic. It's like, what was that movie where Matthew Modine is a hockey player and then he becomes an ice skater? Yeah. What was that one called? Look it up. It's such a great idea. He was a hockey player who was like this, undisciplined, got kicked off, whatever personal problems, and gets stuck being a paranoid

up with an ice skater for figure skating. But it's not Matthew McGee. It's somebody who's like Matthew McGee. Oh, it is? Yeah. It's not Matthew McGee? Oh, shoot. Who was that? He sort of looks like Steve Guttenberg, but it's not Steve Guttenberg. We'll find out. That's why we need our search engine optimization person. Hey, can you tell me about a movie where a hockey player then becomes a figure skater? He gets partnered with a woman who's a figure skater?

The movie is The Cutting Edge. It's a romantic comedy from 1992 where a former hockey player teams up with a figure skater. And who were the stars of that movie? The stars of The Cutting Edge are D.B. Sweeney, who plays the former hockey player, and Moira Kelly, who plays the figure skater. D.B. Sweeney! You know...

D.B. Sweeney and Matthew Modine were kind of, my guess is that they bumped into each other at a bunch of auditions back in the day. But what a great idea. Anyway, this reminds me in a way of like, okay, an athlete has to transition from one thing to another. There's actually been quite a few of those. This is not, it's not merely the cutting edge. Although, what a great title for, and D.B. Sweeney.

Well, anyway, yeah, I agree with you. Feels feature? Like, what are we doing in season three, episode seven for this? That's my question, but meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh. Meh.

While Wade tells her wild stories about his recent trip to Mudrid, Callie stares at the bartender, Jade. She's also a cow. They're all cows. They're joined by Astrid, a Highland cow, who makes fun of Wade for making his trip to Europe with his entire personality. They give Astrid a hard time because her new boyfriend is on a reality dating show, Utterly Single. Astrid wants to throw a watch party for the show, and Wade offers to organize it. All right, so this is an animated teleplay, so I'd say it's a pilot for an animated series. Let's get into this. So...

For what it is, it's a good version of what it is, but I also think it's not the pilot episode or it's not the first scene of what this should be because this is a Zootopia kind of situation where these are anthropomorphic animals doing a thing. And while this conversation tracks, it basically feels like it's maybe friends-like, friends-like kind of sitcom, but with a lot of cow puns thrown in. It's probably not the best way into setting up this world for me.

Yes. What I was struck by primarily was how mundane this conversation is. If you took away the fact that they're cows, this is a pretty boring scene, unfortunately, because it's just banter. It's sort of mild banter. It's quippy. I don't believe any of these people. The things that they're saying to each other feels very canned.

sort of Disney television sort of canned conversation. Yeah. It doesn't feel real. I'm not, I have no idea who I'm supposed to be following here. Yeah, I don't know who the central character is and I don't really understand what the relationship is between the three of them. They're just talking. They're just talking about something and there's a lot of page time dedicated to the discussion of where he went to Mudrid and...

And they're like, you've told us already. This is not a good use of the first three pages of anything. Yeah. Because it's just one scene also. It's just like one continuous scene. So there's not a lot of stories happening here. And it says interior bar. Now, these are cows, right? So we're in a cow world. Bulls and cows mingle, dance on two legs. Okay. I don't know how that works. I'm just thinking about physics. Yeah. Like, I guess they're just animated sort of like people, but they're cows. Yeah.

It would be nice if they made that clearer. And swill a large quantity of milk. Callie sits on a bar stool next to Wade. This bar, where is it? Yeah. Like... The scale, I think, is also a little strange. What is the scale? Yeah. What is the decor? What is the music? What is... It says they're dancing. To what? And can you help me...

feel like I understand where I am because all they've done really is this just feels like a scene from the middle of a middle grade sitcom where people are talking, not an introduction to a new world where it's about cows. Yeah, exactly. So here's where I think writing the scene is useful for you. It's like, this might be a chance to say like,

what does it even feel like to have these characters talking to each other? And if you just do this as an exercise, like, let's have a conversation where they're talking, you get some sense of what their voices are. I can't tell you individually what the three different cows' voices are, but you get a sense of sort of what their banter feels like and sort of what the kinds of cow-related jokes and puns you're going to be throwing in here a lot would feel like. So as an exploratory, let's crank out some pages, great. But it's not the first three pages of this. No. If, for instance, you're...

Hero is a cow named Vanessa and Vanessa works at this bar and Vanessa has to go from the kitchen around past the bar on past the dance floor over to cross a few booths, get to somebody it's bottle service or she's bringing them whatever grass tenders and whatever they eat.

And as she's walking by, she's catching snippets of conversation. These things are only valuable as background snippets. I don't buy that we would want to focus our camera and our attention on them because it won't hold our camera and our attention. But what I would understand is, okay, I'm meeting somebody. She's tired. She's cranky. Oh, but she has to be nice to these people. And maybe she knows somebody who's like, oh my God, when are you getting off? We have to get out of here and...

and we need to talk about this thing. Yeah. And she's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, I will, I promise. And then someone's like, hey, blah, blah, blah, give me a blah. Whatever. Just make a scene. This isn't a scene. This is just people. We're just like, blah, talking. Yeah. All that said, there's nothing objectionable or wrong on these pages. Like, everything kind of flows right, and like, it has kind of the Jokoid feeling of like, it feels... You said Jokoid. Jokoid. That's a problem. Yeah. That is a problem. It's a problem, but what I'm saying is like, it's not...

You don't look at these pages and they're like, oh, this is incompetent. It's not that. No. I feel like these brothers, I mean, they're brothers. Yes. They can do this. This just wasn't a very good example of the top of their craft. Yes. I think they need to raise the bar a little bit on themselves because this is...

Yes. It's in the form of. Yes. By the way, when I started, like the very first stuff I wrote was exactly like this. It was exactly like this. It was in the form of, but it wasn't. And that's part of the normal progress. But somebody needs to go, okay, it's in the form of. So that's good news. You actually have internalized rhythm and general, like the idea of how to get information out without reading it off of note cards. But...

Now we have to think bigger and think better and be more creative. And just always ask ourselves, is the job to do like the stuff I've seen or is the job to do something that's better or different or just truer to me that feels like it's something that's came out of me and not an imitation? Yeah. Drew, what was the logline for this?

An ambitious cow and her cattle friends navigate careers and relationships in the cow-centric city of Bovine. Okay, so it's either friends or sex in the city, and there's actually a pretty wide range between the two of those. Then I would love to... I actually don't know the answer to this, but what was the first scene of Friends? What happened? The first scene of Friends is at Central Perk, and Rachel is fleeing from her marriage. She shows up in the wedding dress. Okay, okay.

There you go. That's a scene. That's a scene. There's a situation. It's on. That's not happening here. No, it's not. And it's not enough to say, and they're cows. That's the other thing. You can't just say friends, but they're cows. But what about cows? Look, I've written a movie about sheep, right? And I'm obsessed with the things that make sheep sheep, but also make the individual sheep different from each other. And what can sheep do that we can't and what can't sheep do that we can't.

Why cows? What is that getting me other than, ha ha, they're cows. It's got to be more. And actually, that's something that needs to happen more.

That's almost something that needs to happen in these first three pages, too. That a burden that friends didn't have was, why humans? I need to know why cows. The audience demands a certain amount of world building and rule setting in cow friends that they're not expecting out of a friend's friends. And justification. Yeah. Right? Like, what do we get? Yeah. Because they're cows. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to our final three-page challenge. This is Never Die Alone by Yongjae Lee.

A storm rolls in over a barge on Lake Superior. On the deck, men dig through their cargo of coal and pull out a gaunt young man with a neck tattoo. They chain him to an iron ball and push him overboard. We follow the body down to the bottom where the iron ball crashes through a sunken colonial boat, releasing a glowing sapphire, the eye, which begins to float to the surface. Behind it, we see hundreds of bodies on the lake bed.

In the neighboring Sault Ste. Marie, a shabby car pulls up to a trailer home. Inside, Adam Withers, 17, asks his mom, Sarah, 37, if he can go and hang out with the new girl, Jenny. Sarah's reluctant and sets a curfew for 12. Adam admits he's lost his phone, which upsets Sarah, but she still lets him go. When he's gone, Sarah returns to her phone call and cigarette. He left out the fact that it's the wreck of the administration.

What's this? I love Gordon Lightfoot. Oh, Gordon Lightfoot. One of my favorites of all time. Love Gordon Lightfoot. One of my favorite Canadians. Never met him. This is my neck of the woods. He's a genius though. All right. Let's start with the title page. I'd love to see contact information and a date. Just useful. People can find you. Or at a minimum contact. All right. So I circled a lot of things here and I want to talk just a little bit about

Stuff that got me tripped up on this first page. A barge traversing the Stygian Lake in pouring rain. Stygian. See, I didn't even know how to pronounce that word. It's a thing I've seen and never actually pronounced it aloud. The Stygian depths. Yeah, we don't need the word Stygian. It's dark. It's a bit ornate for this. And also, because you're saying barge, I know it's the River Styx. Like, wait, so are we on a barge of the dead? I didn't know if we were going to shore or away from shore. It's traversing. I didn't know where we were at, which becomes important because it's clear that they're heading away from shore because they're going to dump this body.

Next two sentences. A few men wearing raincoats pace the deck as the barge slows to a stop. Lights from a town dot the horizon. They unfasten a large tarp. Wait, they unfastened? The lights unfastened? So it's the men. And this is one of those little small things where it's like, when we're reaching back, what is this pronoun referring to? Yeah, and in the prior sentence, we have a little bit of an issue here too. So Young J, I think you don't have to use your full vocabulary, which is...

Impressive. So when you say lights from a town dot the horizon, the way I just read that makes sense. But what we read is lights from a town dot the horizon, right?

Town dot. It just doesn't work. Like, you don't need that so much. Lights dot the horizon. Or the distant lights of a town are seen on the horizon if you want. But horizon isn't a great word for night. We don't really see the horizon at night. We just see lights in the distance. We don't know it's the horizon. More importantly, information. Two,

Dig through the coal. You just want to say two, again, what? Two? To dig is not, is a strange one. T-W-O, dig. Two dig through the coal to reveal a face buried within. They extract a gaunt young man from the pile. He bears a neck tattoo, Beloved. Is he already dead or not? Important. That's my problem. I couldn't tell if they were murdering a guy or they were just dumping a corpse.

And I think it's a corpse. I think it's a corpse. I hope it's a corpse. He's least subconscious. He's not protesting. But generally, we don't describe corpses as gaunt young men. Yeah. We say... The body of a gaunt young man. They extract the body of a gaunt... Exactly. It's important information because I just presume they were killing him.

Now, what happens after this is they're going to attach him to the body, to this heavyweight. It's going to sink down. And they're going to follow this down. And in an unlikely way, but in a way that is very elaborate, it's going to crash through a sunken thing and let loose this stuff. It felt like an opening title sequence. It felt very heightened in a way. It's like, okay, is this whole thing super heightened?

Great, if it is. But then the scene after this is not heightened. This is a very plain scene that made me wonder. Well, I've seen this kind of transition before where you see...

something insane happened and then we cut to many years later which I assume this is many years later oh no I thought it was the same time but we don't know so it's end of music cue on page two but then we're in a kitchen so that's the I don't know what time I need to know if this was earlier or later I don't know if this was the 1960s or 70s

When you play the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it sort of implies, when was that, the 70s? 70s. It kind of implies that's the timeline, even though he's not, this body doesn't crash into the Edmund Fitzgerald. He crashes into a early colonial trading vessel. Now, I will say that what happens here is awesome. The problem is it's overwritten. So I got lost in all the words. I'm just going to read it.

The iron ball carries him, the corpse, through the sundered, sundered, wooden hall and into the captain's quarters festooned with the trappings, two things, of a wealthy and worldly trader. The ball crashes into an ornate glass cabinet scattering the antique curiosities within. Among them, a black leather coffer, a lot of people won't know what that is, imprinted with a cross.

As it tumbles through the water, it unlatches. I'm not sure. Yeah, so what is it? Is it the ball that we've been following or is it this coffer? It's probably the coffer, but opens, I think, would be fine there. And the eye drifts free. It's an impossible sapphire. It is not an impossible sapphire. It is a sapphire glowing uncannily in the darkness. Well, I have a problem. Until that thing comes out, how the hell am I seeing any of the rest of this? I'm in the bottom of a lake at night.

Now, you may think like, oh, magic light. But if you then do a light trick here, that's part of the problem, right? Just like, how do we actually do this? But then it says, it, meaning the sapphire, floats toward the surface. As it rises, pull back to reveal hundreds of bodies scattered across the lake bed. That's kind of cool. That's a cool image to see all those bodies. But like, do they move? Does one of them twitch?

Does something happen to make me go, this was worth watching all that? This is actually kind of exciting stuff. Feels very Pirates of the Caribbean or Caribbean, if you will. It's your choice.

but it's overwritten. And so I got, so actually I got lost. Yeah, I got lost too. Now I was missing a cut too at the end of this thing because we're about to go to Sault Ste. Marie night, but it wasn't clear that this was like, they were leaving this, this sequence and sort of going to a new thing. Like I wanted, that's where I thought I needed a transition. Doesn't look, I mean, I,

Looking at it, I think maybe it's not. And that's why I'm so confused because it says exterior Lake Superior night. And then you're right. It goes exterior Sault Ste. Marie night. So maybe it's at the same time. Yeah. But I generally don't think that in the early 2000s, guys on boats who find buried bodies in coal, which is sort of a weird thing to have on a boat in the 2000s, would just dump the body. It feels more like something that happens...

In the 1800s or the... Yeah. Something feels... I'm confused. I'm confused about times, too. I'm confused. We have two scene headers back-to-back that are both exteriors to Saint Marie. Don't do that. Like, you need to... Yeah, that's problematic for everybody. Then we're ultimately getting into this kitchen of a trailer home. We're meeting Adam and Sarah, who's apparently his mother. Yeah.

And they're speaking with a distinctive Yup'er accent. So Yup'er accent for our international listeners is that's the upper peninsula of Michigan. And it is a Finnish-Canadian kind of thing. So it's just imagine sort of like it has a sort of Finnish quality to it. And like the ooze are different. So that's why it's Sue St. Marie? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

That's just wrong. We're just abusing the French language. Sorry, UP. Adam asks, can I go out with Jenny? He's 17 and he's asking a can question, which is sure possible, but I didn't understand the relationship kind of based on this can. He's 17 years old. I'm going out with Jenny. Yeah, thank you. You have a driver's license. What is going on here? Why are you asking your mommy if you can go out? And is she on a sex line? What is she doing? We don't know.

So you're setting up that we should be curious and I actually need to have a little bit more information because at this point, I don't know if she's just like, you know, customer service. I think she's in a meeting as my guest. I like that you were like, well, she's a sex worker on the phone. But well, it's night though. Oh, it's night. Yeah. Well, it's also, there's also a fawn drinking from the lake. Yeah. But we don't know if this is the same night where this body was thrown over or if it's like 20 years later. And also how late at night is this? I don't, I don't. We need this information. Yeah. We know it's before midnight because he has to be back by 12th.

Right. But, oh, yeah, like also 17, I guess, maybe. And he's lost his phone. I don't know. You've lost your phone.

Well, what year is it again? We don't know what year it is. It's an early 2000s Fleetwood trailer home, but it could be an old, is it a brand new 2000? That's right. We don't know what year it is. If, for instance, it was back in the Nokia days. Totally. Yeah, you'd lose your phone and whatever. Doesn't matter much. It doesn't matter. But I need to know. That said, look, Young J, this actually feels like there's something awesome happening here. I love stuff like this.

I love the use of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You've kind of given us moments that feel like they're from the 1800s, moments that feel like they're from the 70s, moments that feel like they're from the 2000s. We don't know what's going on. Pull back on the adjectives. There's just a lot. And maybe if the other things were clearer, they would be more enjoyable. But when you have something awesome happening, let it be awesome. You don't need to put as much ketchup on it.

Agreed. Drew, can you tell us a summary of what happens in this? Never die alone. A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.

The necromancy of Fae. Yeah. Obviously, he's going to become a red wizard. Yes. Listen, necromantic magic is very powerful, as we both know. There's a lot of great spells to use there. A couple of interesting cantrips. Chill touch. Yeah. Told the dad. Told the dad. Yeah. Classics. Classics. Nerd! But I like stuff like this. It's a movie.

It didn't say, but I'm... I like... Look, the idea of a teenager becoming a zombie lord is awesome. Sure. That could be awesome. But who's the villain? How do... You know, we need a little bit more of a sense of like... Just read that again. It said what happens to him after. A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead. Great. And plunges him into a battle for his soul. The last bit is the problem. Plunges him with...

whom yeah that's the most important thing to know from that log line but plunges him to battle with a mysterious visitor for his soul with satan with you know the spirit of his own grandfather whatever it is i just it just that just sounds sort of existential yeah which feels boring yeah but i think this could be cool yeah it could be cool i mean like young j got a good vocabulary yeah give me that

All right, so I want to thank our three entrants into the three-page challenge this week. Brave people. Brave people. And thanks to everyone else who sent in your pages. If you would like to send in your pages, you go to johnaugust.com slash three page, all typed out. And there's a little form there that you read through and say, and click, and then you can attach your PDF to it.

If you're a premium member, we will often send out a little email saying like, hey, we're about to do a three-page challenge and we're looking for things in a certain space. And so that's a benefit if you're a premium member. But we want to thank everyone who applied because you guys are heroes and lets us talk about the actual words on the page. All right, let's do our one cool things.

Craig, my one cool thing is a movie I watched this over the weekend called Strange Darling. And it is terrific. It is written and directed by J.T. Molnar. Everyone says, which is true, that the less you know going into it, the better because it's full of surprises, which is great.

That said, you need to know that it's bloody because if you don't like a bloody movie, you're not going to want to watch that. And also, you'll know from the very start that it's in six chapters, but the chapters are not in order. And what I think is so good about watching this as a screenwriter is you recognize, oh,

oh, that's right, a story is told by the way the audience receives it and the order the audience receives it, not chronologically. And the choice to put the chapters in this order is an incredibly important screenwriting decision and you could not reverse it out of this. The story doesn't work if it's told chronologically. And it's such a great example of

Knowing what your audience is thinking and then being able to subvert those expectations by putting things back. Being intentional. Yeah. That sounds awesome. Intentionality. I also have a movie. Please. My one cool thing. I think it's a A24 movie, possibly, called My Old Ass. Oh, yeah. I think people love it. It's lovely. So it was written and directed by Megan Park.

Canadian. I mean, in my list of Canadians, it's going to be hard, again, to get past Gordon Lightfoot, but she has moved up the list. What I really liked, it's a comedy, but it's like a weepy comedy. It's a coming-of-age story. It's very simple. It is simple, short, and

It's a formula without being a formula, which I love. It follows the stuff about the formula that connects to us on a deep level, which is why the formula became the formula, without just feeling like it's walking along a similar path. It does its own thing. It felt to me...

incredibly current. The way like it was easy for us when we watched Sean Hughes movies in the 80s to go, oh, this older person gets us. He's sort of generally speaking in our world. This felt like that for 20-somethings now. It just felt correct, felt true. So it stars Maisie Stella, who is fantastic.

And she's sort of opposite two people. One is Aubrey Plaza. Iconic. Who was great. And one is this guy, Percy Hines-White, who I wasn't familiar with, but I think he was in Wednesday and I think he was briefly canceled and then got uncanceled.

I thought he was spectacular. And the two of them together, I just thought was just fascinating. Like it was really, really well done. There's a high concept at it that they treat as low concept as possible. It's not, there's no spoiler here. It's in the trailers. This 20, I guess she's 22 or whatever she is in the movie. She's like 19. 19.

it's all the same to me i'm 53 it doesn't matter 19 years old she's about to leave home she lives in canada which took me a while to figure out but maisie is from canada and she takes mushrooms with her friends has a psychedelic experience but the psychedelic experience is merely that her 30-something self her 39 year old self shows up and just has a conversation with her and starts telling her things

And that high concept is played as low concept as possible. It's almost like they saw Looper and went, we could be even less invested in the who cares how this works-ness of it, which I thought was really smart. It was just very beautifully done, well-written, really well-written. Yeah, I love that. And also well-directed. I really appreciate directors who don't make me look at how they're directing so damn much and just let...

the story lead us and just get out of the way. So it's like invisible directing to my favorite kind. That's great. Yeah. That is our show for this week. Scribdance is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Cialelli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask at johnox.com. That's also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnox.com. That's also where you'll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have t-shirts and hoodies. They're great. You'll find them at Cotton Bureau. And you can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Craig, thanks so much. Thank you, John.