68 - Talking Austen in Austin (Encore)
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Hey, this is John. Way back in 2012, Craig and I sat down with producer Lindsay Duran at the Austin Film Festival. Now, Lindsay Duran is someone we talk a lot about on Script Notes. Most recently, Christina Hodson mentioned something brilliant Lindsay said about endings, but this is the only episode where we've had a chance to talk with Lindsay one-on-one. As you'll hear, Lindsay is a champion of screenwriters and a model for what a good producer should be. Everything she's talking about feels just as relevant in 2025 as it did in 2012, maybe even more so.

So listen to Lindsay, and then premium members should stick around after the episode where we're back in 2025, and we'll talk about getting the most from your university long after you've graduated. Drew has some concerns and some thoughts, and we'll get down to the bottom of those. So enjoy this trip back to 2012 with Lindsay Duran, and we'll see you at the end of the episode. Enjoy. Hello and welcome. My name is John August. My name is Craig Mazin. And this is Script Notes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today we have a very special guest. Very special. To me. To you. Why is she special to you, Craig? Well, should she say hello first and then I'll tell you why? She can say hello, but we haven't introduced her by name yet. That's true. We'll say hello and then people, let's see if they can guess. Hello. Yeah, no way they would guess. No. It's Lindsay Duran, producer extraordinaire, former head of studio, among other things. And she is special to me because...

Well, I mean, without getting too weird about it, because I don't want it to get mushy, but Lindsay is really, really good at her job. She's one of the few producers out there who really understands what producing is. And sadly, that's a shrinking, dying breed. And particularly the story aspect of producing. For sure. And she knows writers, and she knows good writers.

And I really respect her. And she's one of the few people I've met in Hollywood who know quality and who know talent and who like me. I don't know how else to put it. She's very validating to me. The fact that Lindsay likes me is really validating to me. And she's a terrific person and really smart. And, um,

I think a terrific role model for all producers and a good person for writers to know. And some extra context here. I'm reading out of the Austin Film Festival little bio pamphlet here, but it's helpful if you don't know who Lindsay Duran is. As an executive, she supervised movies like This is Spinal Tap, Ghost, five John Hughes films, two James Bond films. As a producer, her credits include Dead Again, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, and Stranger Than Fiction. Those are some great movies. Pretty stellar stuff. Yeah.

What? Pretty stellar stuff. Pretty stellar stuff, okay. So welcome. And my first time meeting you was I had written a treatment for a little movie called The Nines, which was not the movie The Nines that I ended up shooting many years later. I ended up rewriting it as a short story many years later for Derek Haas's popcorn fiction site. But you were one of the few people I sat down with who was like really excited about it and sort of like, you know, talked to the potential of the movie. So I was like, oh, that's a smart person. I hope to cross paths with again. When was it? You were at UA and you, maybe it was...

Yeah. Yeah, it was, yes, a long time. So, yeah, it was, Go had come out, or Go had at least shot, but maybe it didn't come out, and it was another thing I was thinking about writing to make. And I had read Go, hadn't I? Yeah, most people had read Go, so that was a thing that had gone around, and yeah, it was nice. Cool. Welcome, and so let's talk some. Thank you. What's a good thing we should start talking about, Craig? Okay.

Well, you know, the traditional thing would be how'd you start? But I kind of I like to go out of order. So we're going to get to how you started. But I want to ask you a question that's sort of teeing off of something I hinted at earlier, because a lot of what we do is with this podcast is try and do whatever we can to make screenwriters better, including ourselves, because I think you're a very good producer.

And because I'm sure you are full of thoughts about your fellow producers. Can they hear me blushing? Yes. Okay, good. It's really sensitive, Mike. Am I right? Is there a paucity of, that's a correct word, right? Paucity. Is there a paucity of good-

out there? Are producers, is the current generation of producers not quite where they used to be? And if so, what do we need to do about this for us and for you? Well, to me, the most obvious thing is that studios used to support producers. It used to be...

that if you had any kind of traction at all as a producer, somebody would give you a deal. They would give you an office on the lot. They would give you an assistant. They might even give you money to live on, and they might even give you a little bit of money to develop scripts with. And consequently, you could focus on what your job is supposed to be, which is getting...

a really good script right even if it takes a long time you weren't focused on at least you didn't have to be focused on the start date because as it is right now producers don't get a dime until the movie starts

And therefore, what they have to be most interested in for completely sympathetic reasons like putting food on the table and keeping their kids in a good school and all the things that we want to have money for, they have to be focused on getting the movie made. And I remember one of my very first experiences when I was at Avco Embassy Pictures. I was the junior possible executive at Avco Embassy and I worked on a script there with a producer that we were both very proud of. And he went off to Canada to make the movie.

And the next thing I heard was that the actor who had been cast in it wanted to rewrite the script. When the director refused, he wanted to fire the director. And then I heard that the producer was backing the actor.

And I had so many horrible things to say about that producer. How dare he sell his script down the river that way? The movie was made with another director. They fired the director. They brought in somebody else who listened to the actor. The script was ruined. The movie was never released. And when I saw him the next time, all full of the kind of high-dudgeon that you have when you're at the very bottom of your career. Yes.

He said, how dare you? He said, I was in the middle of a divorce. I had three daughters. My wife, who seemed great when I married her, turned out to be completely crazy. And I was trying to do what fathers hardly ever get to do, which is have sole custody of those three children.

children. The only way I was going to get any kind of custody at all was to have money in the bank. The only way I was going to have money in the bank was to have that movie start shooting. The only way I was going to have that movie start shooting was with that actor, and the only way we'd have that actor was to back him, fire the director, sell out the movie. And I went, oh my gosh, I wonder if this has ever happened before. And now I just see it all the time. When I was running United Artists...

The first thing I began to notice was producers would say, the script is coming in on Friday morning, so we'll send it out to agents on Friday afternoon. And I say, why would you do that? You haven't read it yet.

And they would say, what are you talking about? It was all about the rush. And then somebody would say, you're not going to believe this. I just got a call from CAA and they're saying that, you know, such and such big movie star might be interested in this part. And I would say, well, yeah, except they're completely wrong for the part, right? And they would say...

What? And they would say, but you don't understand. They're saying that they'll get it to this actor for the weekend. I say, you're a movie star. What did you do that? And then I finally said, well, aren't we having this conversation backwards? Aren't I supposed to be the jerk studio head who's trying to ram the big movie star down your throat and you're supposed to be the one standing up for the integrity of the screenplay? But he's not right for the part. That was completely backwards. And I totally understood because they were trying to get to that start date and they thought with the big movie star, of course, they would get there. The other thing is that producers...

They don't tell you if there's a problem. The director could be completely on drugs and they will never tell you because they've got to get to the start date. There's so many things that you want, you rely on producers to do as a studio head. And they are absolutely disincentivized. By the system itself. By the system itself. And of course, they are totally disincentivized from spending a long time developing a screenplay. I even spent like four years.

developing a screenplay. Although what's happened is that in some ways that development process has just shifted the burden onto the writer because a lot of producers now will just have the writer work for free over and over and over and over and over because they only get one shot. They feel like, well, if I turn it in and it's not perfect, then it won't get made. Mm-hmm.

But that wasn't always the case. You used to have a second step, you know. You used to have a second step. And I tried, frankly, to never hand anything into a studio until I thought it was shootable because I didn't want it to go into studio development. I wanted it to go right into it. So I would always meet with writers and say, here's the work I think we should do. It's completely up to you. If you need the money, if you think it's fine the way it is, if you think these notes are bad. Right.

It hardly ever happened that anybody ever said, no, you're right, let's ignore those no's and just hand it in. But it was always their choice. But now it's a whole other thing and really it's terrifying. Do you think it's the strike? Because people keep saying it's the fault of the strike. I don't think it was the strike at all. I think it's structural changes in the industry overall. I think to me it feels like

As giant corporations took over all the studios and all the studios are now aspects of giant corporations, they have reporting structures and they have to be able to show this is what we're doing, this is what's going through. And you have to be able to justify the money we're spending because it's coming out as this. So development is just research and development. And it's hard for them to show that the money that they spent on scripts they didn't shoot was money well spent.

And they don't, it's hard to justify like, well, we now have a relationship with this person after this. That doesn't add up, that doesn't show up on spreadsheets. And risk-taking is not generally rewarded. Risk-taking is rewarded if it's a giant movie that sort of should tick all the boxes, so then we'll spend $300 billion. But it's incredibly hard to make the smaller movie that should...

should be able to work, but it feels like too much of a risk. Everyone's afraid of risking their reputation and their time on the smaller thing. Yeah. And failure. It's a real thing. You know, I think, again, I think like a lot of people, I used to think of people who ran studios as being, you know, totally focused on the bottom line and all that kind of stuff. But when I went to UA...

I was partnered with, you know, MGM was its own studio and UA was its own studio all within the same company. And UA had or MGM had a couple of movies in a row that didn't work. And a lot of people got fired. Like 80 people lost their jobs. So you suddenly realize, oh, it isn't about me money grubbing about my bonus. It's about people literally coming to your office and saying, well, we've got to fire a bunch of people. Who do you want to fire? Because that movie didn't work.

It's the real stuff. And usually they lose their job and you don't lose your job even if you agree and let the movie. So the fear is not... It's not an unadmirable fear. It's not all impersonal and fat cat business stuff. You can... With me it is, but I mean... Yeah, of course. You've always been a terror, but...

Everyone is scared. You can feel the fear. And I don't think the strike was a bit of an accelerant on a fire that was already burning. But the real, to me, was... You used the word accelerant and paucity. And how long has this been going on? Well, I'm going to use... Aline McKenna used electable this morning. So she's way ahead. I like ineluctable. That's my favorite. Ineluctable and electable. Yeah. Yeah, we have both. Well, now we've got both. Yeah, we'll get to them. I'm going to get to uneluctable. Uneluctable. Yeah, like...

Ron Paul is unelectable. But I think what's happened to producers, the squeeze on them is that movie studios slash the output. It's just they don't make... The Writers Guild collects statistics on how many feature films they do the...

credit arbitrations for which are all of them really all the major ones even if there's not an actual fight right it still counts as a thing and they would always land around somewhere between 290 310 final credits a year and then suddenly it went down around the strike to be fair it went down to 200 and it hasn't come back so that's a third gone and and it seems like the third the

They not only have they reduced the amount of movies they make, but they also have lowered the ratio of devolved to make, as you were saying. So now you have fewer and fewer producers. They have no leverage over the studios anymore. The age of the big producer is over. And I, you know, from my perspective, and I guess this is sort of a follow up to the initial question is under the lens of all that and under the pressure of all that on producers. Mm hmm.

Do you feel that the action did were producers ever good at developing material? And are they now? Were they good? Are they now much worse? Or are they always bad? Because there's so few producers that frankly, really do know how to work with a screenwriter, talk to a screenwriter, care about the work and approach it from the script forward.

It's hard to know because a writer might actually know the answer to that question better than I would. I'm a producer. I'm not sure that I know how other producers do their job. I hear about it from writers, but I don't really know. That's true. You never have a chance to like them. Not really. I'm impressed by them. I know, for example, when Sidney Pollack was talking to me about running his company, he talked to a lot of people.

And he told me later after he'd hired me, he said every single one of those people I talked to said, but what I'm really good at is development. Every one of them, no matter what kind of background, they all thought they were the best at that. But a few years ago, actually, I guess while I was still at UA, so it's more than a few years ago.

UCLA started a producers program, and they decided to have a board that was going to consist of studio heads and big producers. And the studio heads were either former producers or about to be producers, maybe sooner than they thought. So here was this big room full of really well-known people. And the head of...

The head of the program said, you know, maybe one of the things we can do today is define what a producer is because it's one of the hardest things to define in the movie business. So she said that towards the beginning. And then later in her talk, she said, and of course, one of the things we tell our producing students is that the most important thing they're going to learn here is how to work with a writer. And somebody said, why would you tell them that?

And what we began to realize was that the room split right down the middle between people who completely agreed with that statement and said that is the basis of a producer's job and the other half of the room who said you can delegate that. You can get some girl to do that. And made big long things about you better know a lot of movie stars' home phone numbers. You better know a lot about foreign distribution. You better know a lot about raising money. You better know a lot about talking to a marketing partner. And they're not wrong.

wrong, but the idea that development can be delegated and they're there for the big stuff. And in the midst of that discussion, I said something like, I consider myself on the set to be the... I think what the phrase was I used, because I heard it back from a lot of people who said, what was that hilarious thing you said? Um...

The guardian of the intentions of the screenplay. That's what I said. That's what I'm there for. If somebody starts changing a script on a set, I want to be there to say, let me tell you why this is the way it was. Let me tell you why this line was here. Or let me tell you why it was set in a big room and not a small room. Let me tell you why this was an interior instead of an exterior. Let me tell you why she was supposed to be above the bridge instead of below the bridge.

There's a reason for that. Then if the director says, no, I like it better this way and we've had the fight, then that's the scene we're going to shoot. But somebody should be there to say, if you cut that line, it's really going to hurt you in the third act. Maybe you didn't realize you were even cutting. Oh, my gosh. A lot of the time I'll go, oh, yeah, you're absolutely right. So I think that's and I cannot tell you how people laughed at that and how laughed derisively, derisively at that. Yeah, I like laughter, but not that kind.

And later, people would literally run into me and say, what was that hilarious thing you said? The guardian or the what of the what? And we're still laughing about that. So for some people, it's a sacred duty of the producer. And the other one, it's like, how silly is that? It's the least important thing. Where's my, yeah, where's Chinese financing? They're not wrong about Chinese financing. They probably don't also know the intention of the script. So they wouldn't know what to guard anyway, even if they took it seriously.

Well, but it comes down to, like, is it realistic to expect all those functions to fall on one person? Is it realistic that the creative producer who is the guardian of the script or sort of the quality control to some degree of the creative vision of the script, is it realistic to assume, like, that person is also going to be excellent at all the other functions, which are really valid functions of a producer, which is how to sort of, you know, browbeat people into, like,

getting the movie started and how to talk the people out of their trailer and how to sort of yell at the marketing department. I mean, those are different functions. I often describe that most movies, even if it's not the person who's going to call the producer, there's different kind of roles you perform. There's like the one person who sits at the monitor and sort of watches to make sure like, okay, this is actually the movie we're trying to make. There's the peacemaker, the one who actually can sort of like deal with all the stuff. And peacemakers also sort of combine with a bodyguard, like the person who's like,

Dick Zanuck, who recently passed away, who I loved, his best function for Tim Burton was he would throw himself in front of any bullet aimed at Tim Burton to protect him from studio craziness. So that's a crucial function. A literal guardian. Yeah, literally. Just a little bit dependent on the screenplay. Yeah, wiry and strong. And then the third person is you need sort of like the maniac. Sometimes you need the person who like, you see this ball, you see this ball, go get this ball. It will knock down all the buildings in the way. Yeah.

And I first encountered this, the first movie I got shot was Go. And luckily we had those three people were actually all producers. And sometimes one's really more of a line producer, one's this, but Paul Rosenberg was the go get this ball. And amazing things could just happen because he would have no shame and would just

who would just knock everything down and like, you know, we could lose all our financing and get all our financing back the next day because he would call everyone to do that. It may not be realistic that one person is always going to be able to do all those roles. Yeah, I think that's true. I mean, I've mostly been able to work on things where there was a sort of straight line. But again, I was able to take the time to make sure that straight line existed. I mean, I said Sensibility is the easiest one to talk about because that was my favorite book.

I looked for 10 years for the right writer. When I met Emma Thompson, she'd never written a screenplay before. But I saw some television skits she'd written in England, and there was the voice that I'd been looking for all that time. It was really funny. It was emotional. The period language stuff was fantastic and really accessible.

And we spent years doing that. Now, Sidney Pollack, I was running his company at the time. He was incredibly great at looking at the script and telling us the American point of view and all that kind of stuff. He'd never read Jane Austen, which was really, really useful. Yeah.

But when we got, you know, Amy Pascal was somebody that I knew and I knew that she actually cared about Jane Austen. So setting it up there as a total straight development deal. There was nothing indie about that movie at all. It was a Columbia development deal. And of course she left. But Gareth Wigdon took over somebody else, you know, who really got it. A gentleman, yeah. And so...

we got to the point where everybody loved the script and then by that time Lisa Henson was running the company and she said, look, go get a director. Here's all I ask for, an interesting announcement. That's all I want. I want you to come back with some English director. Sounds like you're going to go right back into... And that's exactly what I wanted because I didn't want... We'd spent all these years trying to make...

kind of galloping entertainment that was really fun and full-blooded and hilarious, not just, you know, and really made people cry. And the last thing I wanted was to turn it back into a little English movie. So I started meeting with a lot of people, and I kept meeting people who didn't know what movie we were making. They'd never mention it was funny. You know, I would say, what about the humor? And they'd go, what humor? It would go on and on and on. Or they were talking about a completely different movie, and some of them were big and some of them were little. And then I met Ann Lee...

who was a weirdest choice in the world, but who talked immediately about how funny it was and then said, I want this movie to break people's hearts so badly they'll still be recovering from it three weeks later. That's a direct quote. And I went, okay, this is it. This is the guy who wants to make the full... So there was this straight line, even though it was a weird line as it was, it was the right line. And so we had the right studio, the right director for the right script. I was very involved in the cast. You know what I mean? And the marketing people came up with a campaign that had nothing

nothing to do with the movie that we were talking about. It was from the mind of Jane Austen. It was like, no, it's not all these years getting out of the mind of Jane Austen. Why are you doing this? And they went, oh, you know, and saying, this is the kind of, we wanted to feel really, really fun and really entertaining. It was like, oh, okay. So it was that same sensibility, for lack of a better word, all the way through. But

But it was about choosing the right people to begin with. So there wasn't really that much of a need for the hammer and the ball thrower and the yeller and all of that stuff because everybody was trying to do the same thing. But then in that regard, so much of good producing is matchmaking. Yeah. I mean, I feel...

And I haven't worked with many producers. I've been doing it for a long time, but for whatever reason, I've spent a lot of time working with studios directly. And I can't quite figure out why. Producers won't work with you. They literally will not sit in a room with me. We should talk about that later. Yeah, you can explain why. Yeah. But, you know, on Identity Thief, Scott Stuber, match made. It was a lovely thing. He called me up and he said, here's Jason Bateman. I'd like you to meet him. And here's Melissa McCarthy and the three of you get together.

And that really, that's the biggest of all the stuff I'm sure he's done on the movie. I mean, because I'm not there watching him do a lot of the stuff that he does. But that was the biggest thing, was this matchmaking and picking the right people. But even then, I feel like producers, that agency has been taken away from them a little bit. But a lot of times now, producers feel a little bit like the way we feel when you just get an assignment. Here it is. Sometimes we're called and they'll say,

It's these two people in this movie starting now two weeks, fix third act. Right. And you go, oh, okay. Got it. I mean, you've taken away all my choices. So this is a very simple thing. I'm not like a horse on a, you know, on a trail. Yeah. And I feel like that's happening to producers too. Like they don't even have a chance to matchmake. Yeah. No, it really is true. You want ideally to be able to have the time and the blessing to

But I mean, one of the things I noticed right away, and you tell me this is still true, when I had my deal at MGM after, you know, when I became a producer again,

You know, agents call you up and they say, okay, we're going out with a spec this week and we're going to send it to you for MGM and eight other people for all the other studios. And you hand it in, mostly without reading it, is what you're supposed to do. Everybody was like stunned. It was like, what? You're going to read it first and you might say no? Nobody's ever done that before. And I would say, but why would you want me producing your client's script if I haven't even read it and loved it and understood it? And actually, shouldn't we be meeting the writer first?

No, that's not how this works. So there'd be an auction, the script would sell, and then you'd meet the producer who's producing your movie, and it could be someone who's never... And yet, I do understand, when I tried to do it a different way, when I was developing something with a writer, and I said, you know, I think we should handpick our studio. We shouldn't just do one of those auction things. We should say, this is a Columbia picture. Amy Pascal will love this, or whoever it would be. The hard thing was, if you only give it to one studio, nobody will read it. There's no competition. I don't get to screw somebody over.

the weekend and that's a lot of it. Once I understood agents saying, you know, producers call me on Monday whenever they bought something and say, I screwed this weekend. That's part of the fun. That competition really does fuel so much of it that only when things went out to a million places or if they got hold of it, that's when stuff started to happen. So it's

it's a feeding frenzy that actually makes it happen but it seems to me insane to be a writer to meet the producer afterwards the person that you're I mean it's a shotgun wedding yeah it's a complete shotgun wedding and I don't know I don't know a question now you described the sense of sensibility development process and

If you wanted to do that now, how would you do it? Here's another book that you love that you wanted to see made. As a producer, what would you do now in 2012 to try to get it going? I wouldn't do anything differently than what I did then. I mean, that was a public domain book, and it was at a moment when nobody had made a Jane Austen movie in 50 years. So...

it wasn't like anybody was hammering. And I said, where's that Jane Austen project of yours? Yeah. I was able to spend all those years looking for the right question. So you would have found the right writer, but who would, who would have gotten to pay them? Because like you couldn't go to a Columbia right now to try to do, um, um, sense and sensibility. I don't know. I,

I'm not really sure. There's still like the Fox 2000s. There's still like little small slices. Yeah, the Fox 2000. I suppose I could go to Focus Features. And I mean, the idea of doing that as a development deal at a major studio seems less likely, but Amy's still there. And she does make movies every single year that are very, very close to her heart. So I don't think that it would necessarily be impossible. But yeah, I would probably be more focused on Focus. But you described it as Sensibility was a mainstream Columbia Pictures release. And so it wasn't like

everyone's like, it has to take a pay cut to go do it. And I feel like now to try to do anything that's not Transformers 9, they talk like, well, everyone's going to have to take a little pay cut because it's not a big movie. It's a tiny movie. I feel like it's very hard to do that. This is a movie for grownups in any way. It's hard to get the green light, but it's hard to even get the start. Yeah. No, it's true. It really is true. But the thing is, I think what people don't understand is that

People are people. They love movies. I mean, we love to go to the movies. I've really liked the last five movies in a row that I saw. That's pretty great. Think about it. And they all got made and they're all pretty grown-up-y and, you know, some of them are more youth-oriented than others, but I thought they were all good. And everybody felt that they were trying to make a quality movie all the

way along. You don't want to feel like you're beating off people who try to hang on to your quality. But I think there are people at every studio who want to make quality movies, I think, and they want to make sure that they're going to have the right package to do that. How do we fix things? How do we make things better? What are some options? Are we going to get back to those producers who can do that stuff? Do they have to

producers have to get their own money so they can develop things themselves? I don't know. I mean, I wondered for a while if there was a way, because I do understand that it does seem to be the case, or it did seem to be the case, when producers had deals at studios, that you would inevitably make your biggest hit movies and the movies that won the most awards for a studio other than the one

where you had your deal. It was some sort of God's joke on Hollywood that this was always, but it had partly to do with that competition thing. You know, that I remember when I was working at Paramount for Dawn Steele and, you know, the producer on the lot would hand something in and weeks would go by before she would read it. And finally she said to me one day, I don't have to read that. I own that.

What I have to read are the things that I'm competing with the whole town for. That can weigh. And so, you know, somebody said buying something from a producer on your own lawn is like kissing your sister. It's like, where is the excitement in that? That lack of competition actually weirdly ends up that... I mean, when I was at Universal, that's when I started... That's when I decided I wanted to hire Emma to do that. And the head of the studio at the time, I was in his office for something else, and

And he was turning us down because he said, you know, really what I need right now is just straight out commercial movies. I don't need things like this. So as I was leaving the office, I said, so I guess you don't like Jane Austen project. Ha ha ha. I got back to the office and he called and he said, do you really have a Jane Austen project? And I said, yeah. He said, Jane Austen is my favorite movie of author of all time. I said, I would never have known that. He said, what do you have? And I told him and I said, have you ever heard of Emma Thompson? He said, no. And because nobody had at that point. And I said, well, she's got five lines in Henry V and so on.

And he said, you know, she's going to want to be in it.

That's the problem. It's like, you know, we're going to do this whole thing and then she's going to want to star in it. So cut to it. By the time we hand it in, it's like, we're only making this movie if Emma Thompson plays the lead. She's 35 and the character is 19 or whatever it was. But even Emma by that point realized that she'd written it for her own voice. But she said all the way along, this is totally up to the director. If the director wants me, I'll do it. If the director doesn't want me, I won't do it. And Annie said, only if it's Emma Thompson. That's the only way I'll do it. So...

So what was the question? Is there a way to fix this? Is there a way to go back? Okay, so there's that problem where you have a deal at Universal and it gets made at Columbia and it wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it happened all the time with Sidney's movies. We had a deal at Universal making The Firm at Paramount. Then we moved to Paramount and he makes a pit somewhere. It just seems... So I was wondering at one point if there could be a revolving...

fund where every studio puts so much money into a fund that you could get young producers, middle level producers, older producers and let them have an office and an assistant and a little bit of money and then

then teach people how to develop screenplays. There's none of that going on. Who's going to teach them? I would. I would be happy to do that and I'll bet other people would be happy to come all the way to Austin or do you think they'd go to North Hollywood? There was some conversation about could the Writers Guild and Producers Guild get together and set up sort of a certificate program for young development. This is what development is. The sort of best practices and these are things you can focus on how to talk to writers because I worry that

people move up so fast or they sort of come into a culture that's already so toxic that they never learn how things could be, how things used to be, how you could actually not screw people over in one-step situations. There might be some good way to motivate the young generation rising up through to get a little stamp in their book saying they went through this program and got validated. I have to say that one of the things that

works against all of this, works against hope, you know, that's my, because I like to work against hope. That's nice. That I'm always concerned about is that most, Hollywood is very much

about popularity and heat and competition, which is all of that is homogenizing. And what I've always loved about you is that even in the beginning when you would say things like, but I'm the guardian of the intention of the script, and then everyone laughed at you, that you didn't change your mind.

It's very rare. I've always felt alone. You know what I mean? And maybe I don't know if you understand this, but I've always felt alone. There have been so many times in my career where I thought either I'm crazy or all these people around me are wrong. Either way, I'm not changing. I'm just going to stay doing this. Uh-huh.

And I'm going to keep thinking this way because I just feel like that's the way that's important. This is what I value. And I don't value all the other things that people are telling me I should value. God, you're like the hero of how to train your dragon. Always. I've always felt that. Yeah, exactly. Well, also, I do have a fairly lucrative dragon raising business on the side. It's not technically legal. But I do feel like

That's what we're always struggling against, that people coming in as development executives. I read this great article once about where a guy was sort of wondering, why are car salesmen so gross? Why do car salesmen dress that way? Why do car salesmen smell that way with that cologne and have those ties and the ridiculous hair? What is that? So he decided to go undercover and actually get a job as a car salesman. And he said, this is it.

In any group you're in, after three weeks, you just want to fit in. That's it. And suddenly, I kind of wanted to wear a wide tie and have that cologne on because everybody did. And it was just like they were looking at me like, I'm the weirdo. Yeah. And I just don't... I always... I worry that now in development, it is... Everybody's just homogenizing down to, you know... Well, but, I mean, I had lunch with two agents a while ago. It was right after... It was in January. And...

Both of them had gone skiing over the holidays, a man and a woman. And they were talking about skiing and I don't ski, so I was just listening. And then one of them said, or the woman said, you know, I'm so bummed because I'm going to Sundance next week and I hear that the powder is perfect and, you know, I'm not going to get to go skiing. And the guy said, why not?

And she said, because I'm going to Sundance. And he said, so what? And she said, I'm going to the film festival. I'm going to be seeing films all day. And he said, huh, that's funny. When I go to Sundance, I go up to the top of the slopes in the morning. I meet a lot of people. I ski all day. I come down at night. I find somebody like you. I say, what's good? You tell me. I say, who made it? You tell me. I go to the party. I meet him. I find him. I meet him. I schmooze him. I sign him. And the next day, I'm at the top of the mountain again. And I went, oh, my God.

oh my gosh, there are two Hollywoods. There are these distinct Hollywoods. There are the worker bees and the extractor bees. And, you know, and really you can't,

cross over, and you don't really want to cross over. Those guys don't want to be in all the screenings and reading the script three times. And she didn't want to be that guy who was only kind of pretending to have seen the work and signing the people. I can't do what that guy does. He can't do what I do. And I think at a certain point, people will fall into one camp or the other. And I think Hollywood does need both camps. But I do think that for people who are sort of natural worker bees, the ones who actually are going to do the work...

It seems to me there should be a way to say to them, all right, let's teach you how to do the work better. And that it's okay to want to do the work. That it's okay to want to do the work. That it's okay to be a script nerd. Yeah. Because... Well, because somebody has to call somebody and say, what is it? I worked for one studio head once who before any meeting would say, um...

Tell me what we don't like about the script again. Yeah. And that's what I was there for, was to say this, this, this, this, and this. Right. And then they'd be brilliant in the meeting. You'd swear they'd been up all night coming up with those notes. Well, it's broadcast news, right? Yeah. It comes out there. But it really is. And it's like, I couldn't do what that person was doing. That person is, you know, and has no, it isn't that they have no shame. That's what they do.

do. They don't have any time. It isn't even about shame. They don't have time to do what I'm doing. And then add the layer on that all of us are really working together to make a script that really beautiful people can read. You know? I mean, there's so many layers of this that are spectacular and fascinating. I know. It's really, really true. One of Craig's solutions to this condescending or at least

possible way to make some things better would be for studios to look for these are writers we really want to work with these are directors we really want to work with let's get them together and say like you guys we were going to make a deal with you writer A and director A you come to us with a movie you want to make and if we say no we'll say no and you have to come back to us with another one up to like a certain number of tries but just to like

to start the process with, you know, here's people who want to make a movie, have a vision for what a movie is, rather than sort of everything having to be based on the book that went out that week or the spec script or the new toy that can be licensed out to things. But that equation didn't include a producer, and a producer actually feels like an important part. Oh, for sure. I mean, you need an adult in the room. I do. I think that writers and directors...

We are the filmmakers. I think of us combined as the filmmakers and the producer is the producer. They're producing. It's like the CEO of a company. The product of that company is this one movie. If you have those three people working like a team, I just feel, you know, my whole beef is that the way things work typically is that a producer and writer work together for a really long time, get it just the way they want. The studio will say, great, go get a director. They get a director and now it's the producer and the director. Right.

doing another thing and then the writer's just sort of done, you know? No, I don't want that. No, and for instance, when you say I'm on set as the caretaker of the intention, it would be nice if the screenwriter were also on set. Yeah, and sometimes they are. I mean, that's the good thing about when you work with a writer star, then they're definitely there. But I always try to have the writer on set. I mean, Scott Frank was on the set of Dead Again every single day and so, yeah, that is good. But sometimes the writer is just becoming a director and they're off someplace else. I'm a huge, huge...

huge advocate of being on set. I would much rather skip a job, you know, and just stay on set and be there every day. And even if I say one thing in a week that impacts what happens, that's a week well earned to me. The movie lives forever. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And also writing, I remember somebody was saying they were working on something and there was a graveyard. Yeah.

What are we supposed to call it now? Cemetery. It's still called a graveyard. It's still called a graveyard. There's a tasty problem there. And the production designer came to the director and said, what do you want on these graves? And she said, call a writer.

That's writing. Yeah. You know, and I went, yeah, that's exactly right. You want somebody who understands that any words is writing. And actually a lot of production design is writing. What would be in this guy's room is part of who that character is. So funny you say that because...

Everybody feels an ownership of the screenplay when they make a movie. But the funny thing is sometimes there are those little things like, oh, we need like a sign that guides people to the meeting in the movie. And actually no one can write it. It's just simply writing a sentence. I really didn't understand until I worked on Stranger Than Fiction. Finally, somebody said this to me out loud, which is people whose background is in production design and art direction and props...

usually do not have a good grasp of the English language. That's just actually not something they do. It's not their gig. So things are continually misspelled, mispunctuated. And, you know, when you have a movie like Strangers in Fiction that's all about language and you have a fake book

book in it that somebody has to read and somebody has to start turning pages of this big manuscript or you have a notebook that somebody's carrying around that's got, you know, if the conversation goes this way, it's tragedy and it goes this. The word tragedy is misspelled in the close-ups. It really matters. It does matter. It matters in all of the movies. But it's like...

It took me the longest time to understand. I had to look at every single thing or even the readability of, you know, there's a bunch of trucks and we know that our guy is in this truck and they're really going to know that as it says Ace Tomatoes on the side and you get the truck and the sign is this big. You can't possibly see it from the helicopter shot. That's an awful lot of what you do as a producer is run around and say,

You know, the whole point of this is that the handkerchief has to have initials on it because it's going to start out in this person's hands, but it's going to end up on this person's hands an hour from now. And we've got to recognize it. And if you make the initials, well, first of all, you didn't make the initials at all. Okay, so we're going to do something else now. Go make the initials. And they come back and they're this big. No, because the way the shot's going, it's like, who's translating all of that? And sometimes the director is doing, but it's much nicer to be able to just hand the director a situation where they don't have to think about stuff like that.

Yeah, the director is focused on the day's work, as he or she should be, but there's a much bigger story that has to be told. And knowing that 80 pages down the road you need to do that

That's the time where I've been really helpful on the set as a writer because if there's not you, there's not a great producer who actually really knows what's there, it can be really damning. I remember on Go, there was one night we were shooting and your script supervisors, it's a thankless job and some of them are fantastic. But there's one thing she hadn't caught that in doing the close-ups was...

one of the characters had changed the tense on a verb and so as we went around to the other actors close up like it wasn't going to come together like he was answering a question like in a way you couldn't actually answer the question and like you couldn't actually cut those shots together anymore so I'm here to get my context and like running back to set like you know

don't turn around because that doesn't actually, it won't make sense anymore. You can't actually cut that in. And then you feel embarrassed. Like I have a tense and they're like, Oh, the writer with his tense problems. It's just words, man. Yeah, exactly. Like I'm constraining you. It's like, well, I'm constraining you so it can actually make sense. Like if you, if you want to sit in the editing room and like, and see how this doesn't work, we are, we are,

And it's a sad thing and features that so often just aren't there. And we put clues and things into the script and then, you know, it's good that you care. I mean, it really is good that you care. I wrote a script. They were making this movie and there is a scene where somebody shoots a hole through a door and the characters inside, you know, see them through the hole in the door and run.

And they don't exchange any words. And then later on in the movie, they encounter each other again in a public space. And it's tense because you're the guy that shot a hole through my door. And I got a call from the production. The director's like, we got a real problem. You know, I realized there's a huge hole in the script. I'm like, oh, no, what?

Well, when they see each other, they've never seen each other in that moment. How did they even know? Because he sees him when he shoots a hole in the door. No. Yeah. So he didn't shoot it that way. Didn't shoot it that way. But it's there. He goes, really? I'm like, now I'm a little panicked. So I go back and I look. There it is. Sees him. They meet eyes through the hole in the door. But you know, on the day, that's just sides. Yeah. Yeah. You know? And if you don't have somebody there... Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. It's just...

Or even, you know, I mean, this is actually something I was very aware of when working for Sydney was, you know, in the firm, for example, there's a whole sequence that, you know, Tom Cruise and Jean Triplehorn break up, man and wife, and they break up and you sort of see them separately. Oh, no, they don't break up, but she knows that he's cheated on her, but they're still trying to hold their marriage together. And there's a little dinner party or something.

And the costume people brought Jean Triplehorn out and she looked adorable with this cute little hat. And Sidney went, she's trying to hold her marriage together with every muscle in her body. You really think she got up that morning and think, that's the cutest little hat. But this is the only scene where you can put her in that cute little hat. She's trying

trying to hold her marriage together don't you understand and then there's a scene later when when I don't know something even worse what's going on with the marriage and they put her in this cute little pin you know what I mean and they kind of came to me and they said do you think he's

think he's going to be mad because this pin was made for her by the kids who are playing her kids at school you know the ones she teaches and they made this for Jean Triplehorn and she promised she'd wear it in the movie and the only scene she can wear it is this one but I said don't

do you really want to hear what he's going to say to you if you put her in that little those kids can't see the movie anyway yeah pretty much yeah it'll be years before they're allowed to see that movie but I mean that story that's the whole thing the pin is story the hat is story it's all story Todd Phillips the other day he said this is a great definition of directing I really it's like it's perfect I don't want to crochet it on thought if I knew how to crochet I can teach you how did I know yeah

He said, here's what directing is. You wake up, you have 38 fights, you go to sleep. And that's because you feel like all the people that are there, an army of people there to help you make a movie are through no bad intentions, absolutely undermining you every single moment. You turn around and it's just something's absolutely wrong.

I remember Sidney said, why can't they just read my mind? I know. Why can't they just, every one of them, know what's in my head 24 hours a day? Why is that so hard? But then they did. It wasn't even Sidney Pollack.

Maybe we should get one of them. But he would say, it's so clear on the page. You know, just that kind of thing. The cute little hat. How could they not understand about the cute little hat? Well, every department sees the movie through their lens. That's it. You know, the costume department sees, they see moving, clothing moves through frame while there's possibly sound.

It's remarkable. Yeah, exactly. Art director. Director of cinematography. The best department heads I've worked with, though, they really do have a sense of like, this is what you're trying to do in those moments. The challenge is they had that idea and that instinct when they first started the project, but then as a case of wardrobe,

Everyone came in for the fittings and they had to deal with all the politics and body issues and everything else that comes up when you're actually trying to put actors in clothes. And so the Jean Triplehorn situation comes up. We're like, well, that's an adorable, cute hat. Of course she wants to wear that outfit. And she wants to look beautiful. She wants to look beautiful. And everybody, when we were looking at the costume parade, everybody went, oh, that's such a killer. And then they realized that was the only place they can put it in and it's not going to be in the movie because of some story thing. But you see movies like that all the time where you just go...

That person didn't get up that morning and put that on, not in that frame of mind. You just feel it, and you may not be conscious of it, but it contributes to the whole thing. So thinking about story on that deeper level, I think, is really important for a movie to work. I think I want to stress to listeners is that even if you're writing and directing your own movie, sometimes the creative producer's function is even sort of more vital because you're an extra set of eyes to remind you, like, this was the intention. Like, this is what the scene is. Exactly right.

On the nines, I was lucky to have producers who could do that for me because you just get so wrapped up in the thing you're trying to shoot. They can come up and whisper in your ears like, okay, I'm not trying to change what you're trying to do. I just want to remind you that this is going to be, this is what I think we're trying to do here. And maybe this isn't making sense the way you think it's making sense. Yeah, and you want, somebody said to me, he said, here's what I want. I want, after nine takes...

and we really do need to do another scene, I want somebody I can turn to and say, do I have it? Exactly. And you know that if they say, you had it at take five, get going, that you believe them. But you also know they're going to say, no, let me go move the schedule around. Let me see what I can do so we can do that shot at the end of the day tomorrow. Because if it takes seven, this is this scene. You want to get this scene wrong? Yeah.

And I've never heard a better definition of that, of what somebody wants in a producer is somebody who knows the material as well as they do, that they really do trust their opinion at a moment like that when they're exhausted. Yeah. And afraid. And afraid. And they want somebody who isn't going to say, what do you mean? You don't know? You're the director. You call yourself the director and you don't know if you have it. You want somebody who is going to be there, you know, like the father can.

Yeah, you also only have one set of eyes. And so if I'm looking at a shot or I'm watching, like, I'm watching this very specific performance, like here, I have a really hard time with background action and sort of seeing what that is. So I can say, like, please pay attention. If anything's crazy in the frame, tell me because I'm not going to see it. I'm only going to see these people's mouths moving and saying these things. Yeah, it's funny because Sidney was a pilot and he was a left seat pilot. He was like the guy flying the plane. There was a guy who flew for TWA for 25 years who was in the right seat. He was the co-pilot. Yeah.

But a lot of times Sidney would say, come up into the cockpit and look around because you never know when a plane's going to hit us. And I loved flying up there, but he was quite serious. It's like it's never a bad idea to have somebody around, no matter who's down there and what their job is. I'd like somebody sitting here looking around going, there's a

plane heading right towards it. And it's exactly what it was like. I had seen him act out all these because he was the greatest actor in the world. So I'd seen him act out all of these scenes. And, you know, there was a scene where I had this tiny little scene where where Tom Cruise is getting new clothes and Gene Hackman is there, you know, as the older statesman of the business. And I'd seen Sidney Actis out in his office and there was this kind of proud papa look on his face that wasn't there when we were. And I said, you know,

I remember how you did it. And he went, oh, my God, I was looking at Tom. I wasn't thinking. And so he was able to make that correction. And it was the same thing. Being in that cockpit and being there was exactly the same. And he rarely needed it. It was a once in a great while. Everybody has a moment. Because people don't understand. When you're directing, you're watching. There's two actors. Oftentimes you're shooting two cameras at once. So there's two sizes or two angles. And then there's background. And then, frankly, there's the camera itself.

Is the camera moving? Is it moving too fast? Is it moving too slow? Is it in focus, out of focus? Are you on the right thing? Are you supposed to go down with the guy when he drops the thing? There's so many layers and frankly, the attention game starts to fail you. You will miss things for sure. Yeah. Do you trust there next to you? I remember, I think it was on some movie that I was working on and it was about, you know, a working class family and the first day of dailies came in and the director went, look at those sheets. They're pristine. They're out there like out of a luxury hotel. Oh, these,

people who iron their wheelbases. It's like that's the thing that you never think about. And everything else. And it was like, isn't there some way I can go back and do it again? That's a great lesson because no one ever thinks to look at the sheets. Yeah. But you know, it's like, this is why the funny thing is you, hair,

Hair. I mean, really, how many movies have been ruined just by hair? It's just extraordinary. There's a director I know, I won't say what, and I won't say what the film is, but I saw his movie and I said, I think he did a great job. I have to say it because it's just, I don't, because it was a romantic comedy, her hair. And he said, you know, every movie, there are fights you have.

that you think to yourself, okay, I can only go to war this many times with this many things. I'm going to let some of these go. I should not have let that fight go. That was one I...

I took a fall on the shouldn't have because the hair is there in every scene. Yeah. And it's there in the trailer. That's where it's in the TV spots. It's and it dominates the TV. You can't look at anything else. Bad hair, bad hair will kill a movie better than anything else alive. And amazing. Right. And it's amazing. But also even knowing that I still make that mistake. You know what I mean? I don't see you can't see it. There's some there's some.

Anesthesia of the intellect, somebody called it. It all goes away. Part of the consequential. Part of your accommodation. You become accustomed to it. You've seen that hair for three days so it doesn't strike you as strange. That's where that blink thing really meant. I remember when I saw that actor's hair where they sent me a photograph before he started shooting. My first blink moment was, this is all wrong. I thought, it's a period movie. This is what their hair looked like then. What am I supposed to do about that? It just...

really affected the way that movie did because it was not how, you know, it was a good looking guy who'd been a big star in another movie where he looked great and now the hair had been changed and those very same girls who'd loved him weren't interested at all because his hair looked weird. And we probably lost $100 million on that movie just because of the wig.

The hair. The hair. I think we've actually really dug down. I mean, we peeled the layers and finally at the heart of producing is hair. It's hair. It turns out it's hair. I mean, you guys can't see Lindsay here. We're going to put a picture up. Oh, we have to, yeah. I mean, Lindsay has the best hair. So it's actually like...

It's the greatest. It's perfect that it should finally come down to hair. And yet it's the opposite of that, too. Working on Ghost, for example, when I was at Paramount, Demi Moore just walked in with that haircut. How much money did that add to the grosses of that movie? It was the most beautiful haircut. It was one of those haircuts that I just remember suddenly everyone looked like the person. It was like when Jennifer Aniston had the friend's hair and Demi Moore had the ghost hair. It was like a thing. There hasn't been one of those recently.

What was the most recent hair sensation? I don't think there has been. Not like the Jennifer Aniston one and the Demi Moore one. Yeah, and the Meg Ryan one. That one was one for a while. Oh, the Meg Ryan. Yeah, she had a certain kind of shag that everybody wanted. Oh, I remember that. But again, we're talking a pretty long time ago. That was a long time ago. It's not quite the same thing. You need new hair. You need somebody to really get out there and hair it up. And do that kind of stuff. Yeah. Cool. Cool.

Well, this has been a good podcast. We solved Hollywood. Totally. We figured out what's wrong with producing. Exactly. There's nothing wrong with producing. We figured out what's... Yeah. And we talked a little bit about hair. Just a touch. Mostly about hair. Just a touch. Yeah. And I feel like we did make the world better. I think that the great thing about you is really, and I hope that producers listen to this, you set a great example.

You know, just for us as writers, what we want from producers, frankly, when you say what a director wants, they want to be able to turn and say, what we want really is for somebody to make us better. Yeah, thank you. We don't want somebody to say, great job, good for you, A plus, ship it along. And we don't want somebody...

to rip it apart fruitlessly or cynically. Or brutally. And we want producers like you who actually do care about our intention. Yeah, I think that's important. And the idea is make it so good that nobody wants to change it. That's the point. So that's what the goal of the writer-producer relationship is, is that it just sings so beautifully on the page that nobody would even think to say something. See, then if she says stuff like that, you think that's the way producers should be. Now that's a producer. Yeah.

Lindsay Duran. So we need to find somebody, like a really, really rich person to give you a big fund to just

develop movies. Yeah. That would fix some stuff. Is that cool with you? Okay. Yeah. But you can't have any of it. We kind of need it for our movies. That's worse than bad hair. Yeah. That's the bad hair of you. You have it right there. It was like, it was almost right there. It was almost right, but the hair, the hair. Thank you, Lindsay. That was really good. It was great.